A MODERN "SYMPOSIUM." 



513 



and moral sense is dulled, discolored, depraved." 

 But it is our spiritual deadness that has put us 

 into this physical condition ; and probably it is 

 we who are responsible in a fuller sense than we 

 can realize now for this effect upon us, which 

 must be in the end too for purposes of discipline ; 

 it belongs to our spiritual history and purpose. 

 Moreover, this external world is not so foreign to 

 us as we imagine ; it is spiritual, and between all 

 spirit there is solidarity. 



Mr. Hinton observes (and here I agree with 

 him rather than with Mr. Harrison) that the de- 

 fect and falseness of our knowing must be in the 

 knowing by only part of ourselves. Whereas 

 sense had to be supplemented by intellect, and 

 proved misleading without it, so intellect, even in 

 the region of knowledge, has to be supplemented 

 by moral sense, which is the highest faculty in us. 

 We are at present misled by a false view of the 

 world, based on sense and intellect only. Death 

 is but a hideous illusion of our deadness — 



" Death is the veil which those who lire call life : 

 "We sleep, and it is lifted." 



The true definition of the actual is that which is 

 true for, which satisfies the whole being of hu- 

 manity. We must ask of a doctrine, " Does it an- 

 swer in the moral region ? " if so, it is as true as 

 we can have it with our present knowledge ; but, 

 if the moral experiment fails, it is not true. Con- 

 science has the highest authority about knowledge, 

 as it has about conduct. Now apply this to the 

 negations of positivism, and the belief Comte 

 would substitute for faith in God, and personal 

 immortality. Kant sufficiently proved that these 

 are postulates required by Practical Reason, and 

 on this ground he believed them. I am not blind 

 to the beauty and nobleness of Comte's moral 

 ideal (not without debt to Christ's) as expounded 

 by himself, and here by Mr. Harrison. Still I say, 

 The moral experiment fails. Some of us may seek 

 to benefit the world, and then desire rest. But 

 what of the maimed and broken and aimless lives 

 around us ? What of those we have lost, who 

 were dearer to us than our own selves, full of fair- 



est hope and promise, unaware annihilated in 

 earliest dawn, whose dewy bud yet slept unfold- 

 ed? If they were things, doubtless we might 

 count them as so much manure, in which to grow 

 those still more beautiful though still brief-flow- 

 ering human aloes, which positivism, though 

 knowing nothing but present phenomena, and de- 

 nying God, is able confidently to promise us in 

 some remote future. But alas ! they seemed liv- 

 ing spirits, able to hope for infinite love, progress- 

 ive virtue, the beatific vision of God himself! 

 And they really were — so much manure ! Why, 

 as has already been asked, are such ephemerals 

 worth living for, however many of them there may 

 be, whose lives are as an idle flash in the pan, 

 always promising, yet failing to attain any sub- 

 stantial or enduring good ? What of these ago- 

 nizing women and children, now the victims of Ot- 

 toman blood-madness? What of all the cramped, 

 unlovely, debased, or slow-tortured yet evanes- 

 cent lives of myriads in our great cities ? These 

 cannot have the philosophic aspirations of culture. 

 They have too often none at all. Go proclaim to 

 them this gospel, supplementing it by the warn- 

 ing that in the end there will remain only a huge 

 block of ice in a " wide, gray, lampless, deep, 

 unpeopled world ! " I could believe in the pes- 

 simism of Schopenhauer, not in this jaunty op- 

 timism of Comte. 



Are we then indeed orphans ? Will the tyrant 

 go ever unpunished, the wrong ever unredressed, 

 the poor and helpless remain always trampled and 

 unhappy ? Must the battle of good and evil in 

 ourselves and others hang always trembling in the 

 balance, forever undecided ; or does it all mean 

 nothing more than we see now, and is the glori- 

 ous world but some ghastly illusion of insanity ? 

 When " the fever called living is over at last," is 

 all indeed over ? Thank God that through this 

 Babel of discordant voices modern men can still 

 hear his accents who said, " Come unto me, all 

 ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give 

 you rest." 



— Nineteenth Century. 



33 



