Heart of Man eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 230 pages of information about Heart of Man.

Heart of Man eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 230 pages of information about Heart of Man.
and more what it is—­a savage conception.  But recognizing the great place of mind in modern science, and its growing illumination of our earthly system, I am not disposed to discredit its earliest results in art and morals.  I find in this penetration of the order of the world within us our most certain truth; and as our bodies exist only by virtue of sharing in the general order of nature, so, I believe, our souls have being only by sharing in this order of the inward, the spiritual world.

What, then, is this order?  We do not merely contemplate it:  we are immersed in it, it is vital in us, it is that wherein we live and move and have our being, ever more and more in proportion as the soul’s life outvalues the body in our experience.  It is necessary to expand our conception of it.  Hitherto it has been presented only as an order of truth appealing to the intellect:  but the intellect is only one function of the soul, and thinkers are the merest fraction of mankind.  We know this order not only as truth, but as righteousness; we know that certain choices end in enlarging and invigorating our faculties, and other choices in their enfeeblement and extinction; and the race adds, acting under the profound motive of self-preservation, that it is a duty to do the one thing and avoid the other, and stores up this doctrine in conscience.  We know this order again under the aspect of joy, for joy attends some choices, and sorrow others; and again under the aspect of beauty, for certain choices result in beauty and others in deformity.  What I maintain is that this order exists under four aspects, and may be learned in any of them—­as an order of truth in the reason, as an order of virtue in the will, as an order of joy in the emotions, as an order of beauty in the senses.  It is the same order, the same body of law, operating in each case; it is the vital force of our fourfold life,—­it has one unity in the intellect, the will, the emotions, the senses,—­is equal to the whole nature of man, and responds to him and sustains him on every side.  A lover of beauty in whom conscience is feeble cannot wander if he follow beauty; nor a cold thinker err, though without a moral sense, if he accept truth; nor a just man, nor a seeker after pure joy merely, if they act according to knowledge each in his sphere.  The course of action that increases life may be selected because it is reasonable, or joyful, or beautiful, or right; and therefore one may say fearlessly, choose the things that are beautiful, the things that are joyful, the things that are reasonable, the things that are right, and all else shall be added unto you.  The binding force in this order is what literature, ideal literature, most brings out and emphasizes in its generalizations, that causal union which has hitherto been spoken of in the region of plot only; but it exists in every aspect of this order, and literature universalizes experience in all these realms, in the provinces of beauty and passion no less than in those of virtue and knowledge, and its method is the same in all.

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Project Gutenberg
Heart of Man from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.