The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
_Hinc ilia lachrymae._ This is why a question apparently of pure science
turns out practically so full of inward heartburning and mutual
reviling. Neither theology nor science is competent to the philosophic
recognition of man's associated destiny, and hence have neither of them
the secret of those perturbations which ever and anon gloom our
political atmosphere and shut out to the eye of sensuous thought the
entire future of the race. Philosophy alone possesses this secret,
because it alone perceives that all our political, civil, and even
domestic broils grow out of this identical warfare between men's
religions and scientific convictions,--have no other source than that
persistent insubmission which the interests of force, as represented by
priesthoods and governments, are under to the interests of freedom,
represented by society. Philosophy mediates between the religious and
secular thought of mankind, by making the sphere of God's universal
action identical with that of man's organic necessities, and the sphere
of His specific action identical with that of man's moral freedom: so
harmonizing the two in one subject. Philosophy alone, in short, is
competent to the future of human destiny, because it alone adjusts the
relation of morals to physics, alone adjusts the specific interests
avouched by religion with the universal interests avouched by science.
And its competence is owing to this fact exclusively, that it alone
apprehends or appreciates the distinctively social destiny of man, a
destiny in which the interests of the most intense and exquisite freedom
or individuality are bound up with the interests of the most imperious
necessity or community,--or, what is the same thing, which presents
every man no longer in subjective or moral, but only in objective or
aesthetic, contrast with his kind, that so the general harmony may be
inflamed by the widest partial diversity. Thus philosophy bids society
recognise itself at once as God's perfect work on earth,--bids it rise
to instant self-consciousness as the real Divine substance which Church
and State have only feebly typified, and put on all Divine strength and
peace as its rightful breastplate and ornament. For if all these
fleeting phenomenal discords among men, upon which our existing
civilization proceeds, claim no longer an absolute, but only a relative
Divine sanction, a sanction in relation to the interests of human
society exclusively, what remains for society to do but to organize
itself afresh upon an eternal basis, that is, upon the acknowledgment of
a force in man infinitely transcending his moral force, because it
forever unites instead of disjoining him with God, being the force of
spontaneous or productive action?
_An Address on the Limits of Education, read before the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology_, November 16th, 1865. By JACOB BIGELOW, M. D.
Boston: E. P. Dutton & Co.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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