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THE

ANDOVER REVIEW:

A RELIGIOUS AND THEOLOGICAL MONTHLY.

VOL. XII.-NOVEMBER, 1889.-No. LXXI.

WHAT IS REALITY?

PART V. FROM THE MICROCOSM TO THE UNIVERSE.

FOR illustration's sake, let us suppose a mariner of ancient times to have been carried, by stress of weather, to a remote land, which had once been the home of a cultivated but now extinct people; and further, that in this deserted land he has discovered various objects, the uses of which are not at once apparent. One of these is a globe. To his mind, dreaming still of the earth as a vast extended plain, this seems nothing more than a toy. But his curiosity is aroused by the oddity of its ornamentation; and all at once it occurs to him that parts of it have a resemblance to the mental picture of land and sea that he, as a navigator, has formed for himself.

Further examination discloses additional coincidences. But after a time the resemblances are exhausted, and there remains much that exceeds and much also that contradicts his experience. In view of this, three suppositions occur to him. It may be that the resemblances are purely accidental, and that his own fancy has helped them out, making them appear to be more important than they actually are. Or, secondly, it may be that the decorator knew something of the surface of the earth, and that having amused himself with this knowledge as far as it went, he extended his sketch in a purely imaginative way. Or, thirdly, perhaps the maker of the globe knew, not simply as much, but much more than its present possessor; and, perhaps, therefore, this seeming toy may be treated as a reliable model of the earth. As this last hypothesis is the only one that can lead to anyCopyright, 1889, by HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & Co.

thing, we will suppose not simply that our navigator commits himself to it, but that he devotes his life to the verification of it. His limited means admit of his doing this only in a very imperfect and partial way. He cannot circumnavigate the globe; but he treasures every bit of knowledge he can get: he collects the accounts given by other navigators and compares them with his own experience; he brings together all the vague guesses of astronomers and philosophers about the shape of the earth; and thus, by putting this and that together, he arrives at a settled conviction that his hypothesis is correct, though there are many things about it that he can neither verify nor understand. He is obliged, we will say, to end his days without being able to form any satisfactory conjecture as to how it is possible that the earth should exist as a sphere. But, for all that, his unwavering faith in his model has guided him truly, and enabled him to reach satisfactory and valuable results in many directions.

Now, when a philosopher makes the hypothesis that the little world of which man is the centre is a true and reliable guide to a conception of the relations sustained by the universe to its centre, he acts upon the same principle as our supposed navigator.

Let us imagine a philosopher who has become as deeply imbued with the realistic prejudices of the present age as the old-time navigator was with the geographical prejudices of his. He has, we will say, given himself wholly to the study of science. He has followed with enthusiasm its progressive conquests. He has been completely won over to its method, as he has traced the steps by which one principle after another has been, first, guessed at, then proximately verified, then simplified, then adopted into a larger generalization. He sees, moreover, that by faithful adherence to its methods, science has obtained such a grasp on the working principles of the world that it has accurately prophesied events while they were still far away in the future. In view of all these achievements he is filled not only with a profound respect for these methods, but also with a feeling of restful confidence in the results to which they lead. Here, he assures himself, is something certain, something proved, something real. In this I have a foundation on which to build a philosophy.

There is nothing to interrupt this impression of finality, this feeling of perfect satisfaction, so long as his attention is confined solely to the agreements of science. But there comes a reaction. For, as a philosopher, he must find a meaning in the world; and somehow, the meaning has wonderfully faded out of that which

formerly was replete with significance. Turn wheresoe'er he may, by night or day, the things which he has seen he now can see no more. Intelligence, purpose, morality, have become shadows and illusions. He can find no foundation in his philosophy for poetry or for religion. He lives in a world of atoms and forces. Units of mass and units of motion, in an endless round of action and reaction, chase each other through his imagination. If he concentrates his attention upon the atom for the determination of the secret of being, he seems to himself like one shut up in an absolutely dark cell. Or, if he tries to contemplate the world as the outcome of an aggregate of homogeneous units in motion, he is revealed to himself as the intelligent centre of an unintelligent universe. He has a boundless prospect, but it is that of an illimitable desert. As a philosopher, again, he demands efficiency. There is nothing in all this unintelligent, undifferentiated immensity for a world of variety and order to rise from. All the efforts of philosophers to deduce the forms and qualities of concrete things from homogeneous atoms and forces are seen to have been as ineffectual as the dreams of perpetual motion.

He reflects, further, that the great object of philosophy is to discover a concept that shall be all-comprehensive, to grasp a central principle which shall enable us to think of the universe as a great organic whole. But in his world of atoms and forces he finds no such principle. Whence, he asks himself, comes this conviction that the world is a unity, that it has a central, controlling principle? and whence the craving of philosophy to apprehend the totality of things after such a fashion? Must it not be possible to trace this conviction and this craving to some experience, some actually known whole, dependent upon an efficient central principle, like that demanded for the universe? Such a principle if it exists in experience ought to be found at the other extreme of the scale of being from that in which science has landed him. Yet he cannot find it in the camp of idealism; for this philosophy is as clearly the product of abstraction as the one he has had to abandon. He is looking for the antithesis of all abstractions. Nothing less than the fullest, most highly-organized form of existence can serve his philosophic need.

In this strait, an old-time word occurs to him - the microcosm. Not the ego, in the seclusion of self-consciousness, — but man the soul and body, man the centre of a little world of which he is the life, the light, and the creator. May not this afford the clew that he is seeking? In this little world he finds the most complete