SEEING AND BEING. IN a certain union of contradictories Hegel imagined he had found the key that would unlock the philosophic riddle of the world, and his contention jumps with many things in our experience of thought and life. I remember to have read a sermon a good while ago that maintained the arithmetical thesis, "Twice one is one." It was an assertion of the double unity of life, which finds its largest illustration in the unity of mind and matter in the eternal substance of the world. That we see what we are is a thesis fundamental to idealism, and has many interesting and important illustrations on the planes of moral and religious life. But, however true it is,— and that it has in it abundant and impressive truth I have no shadow of doubt, thanks to life's double unity,— the converse of this proposition is, or contains, another phase of truth worthy of our consideration. We are what we see. It is on this side of the shield that I should like to have you look with me this morning in the main, but not until we have attended somewhat to the other. It It may be that the other is the more important. As a statement of our relations to the physical universe, I should say that it could easily be pushed too far, that it has frequently been pushed too far by philosophical idealists. has been pushed so far that logically it has left the individual alone,- himself his world, his God, his everything,all these the Brocken Spectre of himself upon the void. But no for each phenomenon there is a noumenon, a background of reality. It is remote enough, incomprehensible and inviolable enough, to take away all terror from the bug bear of materialism which has of late so scared the theologians, whose ancient stock made it a household pet. The witty answer to the question, "What is matter?" "Never mind," has little philosophic truth. Matter, as ordinarily apprehended, is more largely mind than it is anything else. What we are conscious of is certain affections or conditions of our minds; not of the not-me, which determines these affections and conditions. Nature is plastic to our sensibility. We have no reason to believe that there is anything in nature resembling our sensations. There are non-resembling signs of certain vibrations impinging on the eye or ear or nose or cuticle. When Emerson says, "The part our organization plays in our sensations is too large," he is treasonable to his own philosophy. How can it be too large? Why should we care whether the subject or the object contributes more to the sensation? Why should we say that we are cheated with illusion, if the subject— the organism contributes more. The joint result is the reality. Why should we deduct from the beauty of the sunset "the rounding, co-ordinating, pictorial powers of the eye"? "If eyes were made for seeing, Then beauty is its own excuse for being," by whatever art the magic is produced. But it is not "all in your eye." I doubt not that "the rounding, co-ordinating, pictorial powers" of our eyes at Chesterfield one recent summer were as good as ever; and yet we didn't have one glorious sunset the whole summer long, while the next following we had a dozen or a score. Idealism goes too far, it becomes insane and idiotic when it finds the total order of the world to be only an order of our apprehensions. Such a conclusion is the negation of all science. You will not convince the Agassizs and Darwins, the Newtons and the Herschels, that they have not discovered an order in the external world. This does not come or go with human sensibility and understanding. These are the mirrors upon which its beautiful reflections fall. The object is the sleeping beauty: the subject is the fairy prince who wakes her with a kiss. How beautiful is the awakening! But the kiss is given in the dark. We cannot imagine what nature would be without our sensibility. We know there would be no beautiful reflection of the mountain in the lake, the trees in the still stream. We know that there would be no sound of woods or waters. What would there be? Ah, that we cannot say! But that we see what we are is a proposition that has still a world of truth in it when idealism has so far relented from its worst extravagance as to allow that there is an objective order and reality corresponding to the order of the mind. But this fascinating riddle may easily detain us over-long. There is a practical idealism to which the most stubborn opponents of the philosophical variety must heartily assent. However large or small the contribution of our physical and mental organism to our vision of the world, the contribution of our individual intelligence and character is immeasurably great, so great that it is only in a very superficial and almost nominal sense that all men can be said to live in the same world, to see the same earth and skies and men and women. It is the mind, the character behind the sensuous perception, that makes the world one thing to one man and to another something wonderfully different. It was not that Shakspere's eyes and ears were so different from other men's that the world presented to him such a solemn and majestical, such a wonderful and beautiful appearance. To what man before Shelley had the skylark made such music as it made for him! To what man before Keats had the nightingale made the song he heard! Field mice and daisies were not scarce in Scotland before Burns's day, nor water-fowl and blue gentians in Western Massachusetts before Bryant took his thoughtful walks abroad. The difference between the poet's world and that of any ordinary dullish mortal is not greater than that between a Newton's, a Lyell's, or a Darwin's and theirs who have never been instructed in their mysteries of the earth and sky. "He that doth look on glass, On it may rest his eye; Or, if he chooseth, through it pass, It is no matter of choice whether one will have the vulgar or the scientific vision of the world; but the difference between the two is hardly less than that between a day of all-enshrouding mist and one of all-revealing clarity. For one it is an aggregation of mere facts. For the other it is a harmony of majestic laws, of beautiful relations, of wonderful co-ordinations. Not only intellectually, but also morally, we see as we are. The moral nature of the individual, even his conduct for the hour, is a medium that affects his vision of the world for better or for worse to an incalculable degree. The inward disposition is more definite than the outward fact. Do I speak of things of which you have no knowledge? Have you never found out for yourselves what awful truth there is in them? Then are you indeed most happy. But you cannot all have been so fortunate. Some of you, I know, have sometimes been abroad with Nature only to miss her usual charm, only to feel her sunlight searching out your fault, her grass and flowers turning to burning clay and cinders underneath your aimless feet, her beauty smiting you as with a mace, and all because you have brought with you a selfish, soiled, or unforgiving heart. And, when you have done your best to make amends, how quick has Nature been, like a fond mother, who has not willingly repulsed her child, to take you back again! If such is the operation of some baser mood, how much more spoiling to our apprehension of the world about us is a habit of ignoble living! "Who shall dwell in thy tabernacle, and who ascend unto thy holy hill? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his eyes unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully." And it is not only in the natural world that we see as we With the human world it is the same. Men of base motives find base motives everywhere. There is nothing are. harder than for the average politician to imagine any one as doing anything from any other motive than his own selfish greed of place and power. "They all do it" is his miserable excuse. It is not true of God alone, it is also true of man, that to the pure he will show himself pure. But in no province of men's thoughts has the principle I am enforcing larger application than in the theological and religious. "The Ethiop's God has Ethiop's lips, Black cheeks and woolly hair; And the Grecian's God has a Grecian face, As keen-eyed, cold, and fair." That is the smallest part of the whole story. The morality of the gods reflects the morality of men. The Hebrew Jehovah was a very cruel, treacherous, and immoral god, until the Hebrew people, having bettered their own morals somewhat, put him upon his honor. The compassionate Father in heaven to whom Jesus lifted up his gentle heart in perfect confidence was but the bright reflection of his own compassion with all sorrowing and sinful folk. Yes, we see as we are. But, however startling may be the paradox, the converse of this proposition has an important, if not equal illustration. There is action and reaction. In that seeking for adjustment which resumes the course of biological development from the polyp to the hero and the saint there is mutual reaction of the organism and environment. In the doctrine of evolution there is no chapter of more exquisite and fascinating beauty than that which exhibits the matter of "protective resemblance," the approximation of insects and animals in their forms and colors to the forms and colors of their habitual environment. What twig-like insects we have seen; what plumage, as if patched with leaf and sun; what grasshoppers and spiders on the seashore rocks that seem to have made their clothes or armor from the lichens among which they live! Here is not only fact, but parable. Not only insects and animals, but men and women, are what they see, take on the forms and colors of their so |