although we may not perceive it, we are most truly working out a purpose whose infinitude excels our power of thought, the extent, the method, and the result of which we cannot fathom. Though, therefore, man seems to be the thing in which the whole world centres, with respect to final causes, so that if he were away all other things would stray and fluctuate, without end or intention, or become perfectly disjointed and out of frame," it is also somewhat more than a seeming, that man was formed and placed as he is, was endowed with that autonomous will, whichæstuat infelix angusto limite mundi," and will not be restrained in its far-reaching force-was put in subjection to instincts, habits, and the law-governed processes of the reason, that by his life he might irradiate, and gladden, and glorify the world, and shed back on the omnipotent Source of his being the delightful joy-throb which the fulfilment of a purpose preordained in the eternal council-chamber of heaven may excite. Let us clearly difference to our own minds the ideas of divine purpose and human duty; let us look upon them as co-ordinate and correlative, but wholly divested of causative agency upon each other, and recognize life as an heritage on which the feurent-indicative of our responsibility-of intelligent obedience is continually chargeable. To look thus on life will greaten and broaden the character, will ennoble and elevate the soul, and quicken and excite the whole being to spread the rich, varied, and potent influences of dutiful activity throughout the vast theatre of the moral universe. All change belongs to the domain of science, except intellectual change and its results. Intellectual change creates history. In thought-originated change there are two operative principles, viz., passion and reason. Passion is subject to the impulses and the impressions of circumstance; it aims at immediate gratification, and moves most violently under the strongest presentacting influences. Reason is reflective, calm, considerate, and subdued; it aims at the discovery or the recognition of the true, the right-Duty. It is the tendency of passion to hurry the mind on to rapid and instantaneous activity, and obedience to her imperious suggestions, while it is the province of reason to retard that activization. Both have as their direct object the progress and the good of man; but the former is impulsive, inconsiderate, rash, spontaneous; the latter cautious, slow, and reflective. The one hastens to pluck the unripe fruit of gratification, the other stays the hasty hand. The one is always before the other. The one resists the velocity, the other the inertia, of its antagonist, and human activity is a resultant of the conjoint, though it may not necessarily be the co-operative, energy of both. The collective results of all these contestations are history. Did man uniformly act from the suggestions of the reason, his thoughts and doings would have the relation of sequence and consequence-his conduct would be, in all circumstances, divinable; i. e., history would be science. Passion is capricious, mobile, indeterminable, and hence the result of any combination of reason and passion is incapable of being definitely calculable. They may coincide in force and direction, may oppose each other, or may mutually yield; but the indefiniteness of the ratios in which they are compounded prevent the possibility of certain calculation. So long as man yields himself up to the impulses made upon him by circumstance, he is powerless as the rank weed rotting on the ocean wave, while driven by the wind and tossed, to develop his true personal being. To all that entices his activity he irresistibly abandons himself. The flux and reflux of phenomena, the currents and the disturbances of passing things, are the regulators of all his transitions and changes. He is a pilotless vessel on the tide of affairs. When, however, reason seizes the helm, guides the ongoings of the conscious being, and opposes the half-yielding soul in its desire to swim with the stream of phenomenal inducement, the personal power becomes manifest and realized. This constant fatiguing contest between the wish-or, let us rather say, the semi-unconscious tendency to yield to the allurements presented to the passions, and the necessity of exciting the will to direct, to govern, and to exert the capacities of man in accordance with the deductions of the reasoning faculty, is true life. The world, with all its varying changes, exerts on the passion-led mind a dispersive mobility, by which its energies are wasted; but reason exerts a concentrative, enduring, efficient surveillance over all the exertions of the personality, and constrains them to adopt the means best fitted for working out the purposes of being. This coexistence and co-activity, simultaneous and successive, of being and of circumstance, passion, and reason, constitutes the means by which humanity grows, progresses, and becomes self-charactered-manifests, in fact, the variously evolved phases of social existence. Life, then, may be regarded as circumstance-surrounded, organized, sensitive, self-conscious, and self-developing being. Man is differentiated from all the other existences in the universe by the capacity for self-development. Development implies a purpose in process of fulfilment, and life is, in reality, a purpose-governed, circumstance-moved self-development. Human development is governed by a twofold purpose (1) individual or self-originated, and (2) divine. The individual purpose is conditioned-(a) by the powers or capacities with which each person has been endowed; (b) by the circumstances which act upon these powers; (c) by the sense of duty entertained; (d) by the power and the culture of the reason and the will. The divine purpose is conditioned to us-(a) by the invariable conjunction of duty and delight, greatness and glory; (b) by the 1 eternal consequences of each act; (c) by the overruling providence of the Most High. By what other supernal conditions life may be conditioned we cannot now, and may perhaps never, know this, at least, we may certainly infer, that life, multi-conditioned as it is, is no chance-given gift, but that it is the chosen agency by which the Deity works out his divinest plans, and that manifestation of his real glory, in which are seen the surest premonitions of that onflowing eternity to which all human life hastens. "The theory of life" which we have placed before our readers combines and harmonizes, as we think, the conflict of opinions regarding "the freedom of the human will," and that neces sarianism held to be essentially involved in the belief in the divine providential oversight and overrule of all. It represents man as an independent being, possessing the power of selfcontrol-stimulable by the passions, governable by the reasoncapable of existing, at separable moments of life, in either of the three following states (1) feeling, (2) intelligence, (3) action, or in any combination of these states. It shows that the loftiest direct object of moral being is duty; of intelligent being, truth. It looks upon life as a series of acts, each of which is a welldefined, felt, willed, and reflective effort to bring about some predetermined purpose. It maintains that reason must be immanent in all truly great and noble acts, although in man's opposing and diverse passions the suggestives of thought may be found. It affirms what is, indeed, universally admitted when not referred to any moral teaching-that the operations of the mind, once set in motion, go on in accordance with fixed laws, and evolve, with perfect regularity, their due results. And it enables us to conclude that that state of life is best in which passion is the excitative, and reason the executive, agency; in which the dramatical is governed by the logical, and the active by the intellectual powers of man. The best life is the greatest. To have done life's duties with aggressive and unyielding persistency-to have expanded the rich and manifold spiritual energies with which we have been endowed in the translation of pure thoughts into noble deeds-is true greatness. Life is not logic, but activity; not passive inertion, but struggle and endurance; a reality of toil, and danger, and effort. In fact, the law of life is not so much progression-though, from the popularity of the phrase, we have used it much, and may, perchance, do so again—as ascension. Doch ist es Jedem eingeboren, Dass sein Gefuhl hinauf und vorwürts dringt."* Upward and onward is the true motto of human existence. "Still 'tis our being's inborn tone, To strive for ever up and on."-Goethe's "Faust." "The panting breath and hurrying steps of life" should be expended on gaining the summit of being, by the exertion of that majestic strength with which faith gifts the soul. To live so is to be great. Greatness is twofold, personal and historic. Personal greatness is the performance of the duties of that station in life in which we find or make ourselves a place. Historic greatness consists in carrying forward the purposes of being, in working out the pre-ordinations of which man is the subject. The one is the doing of that which befits our own individual being in any given set of circumstances; the other is the doing of that which befits ourselves and the circumstances. Each individual being is linked to all the past as well as to all the future; the former affects him, the latter he affects. Time, society, and the phenomenal world all operate on us, and we on them. To be one of those to whom, amid all the surging turbulence of change, and chance, and time, the word duty is the highest, holiest, and most effective, is to be personally great; but to be one of those whose word or act affects the ongoings of the world's affairs, and gives the impetus which drives them on along the predestined "groves of change," is to be historically great, is to be one of— "The kings of thought, Who waged contention with their Time's decay, At the day-dawn of an event, the great man is up, girt for toil; he thinks, he works, his thought becomes a fact, and he himself is recognizably great. Clear thought, brave heart, and readiness to do or say whatever is required, these are the characters which mark the world's greatest men, the men that not only make, but are, history. All history is triune-excitement, purpose, accomplishment; agent, activity, result; condition, cause, consequence; and the great man is the central of the three, the creative, the invigorative power which, having changed itself, rests not till it change the world. While giving utterance to such opinions as these, let us guard ourselves from being understood as asserting the divinity of great men. We entertain no such belief. We think that the great man is he whose being has become suffused with the great primal truths of duty, and who, in working these out into act, co-labours with the Deity-unconsciously, it may be, and often is-in the development of his purposes among men. As He has pre-determined not only the purpose, but the pathway of the planets, so as He predestined, not only the supreme, but also the ultimate end of human life; and whoever walks himself, or causes others to walk, in the ascending path along which his divine influences exert themselves, is in very truth a co-worker with God. As He has pre-established the several proportionate harmonies of sound, the proportional atomic co-efficients of matter, and whosoever discovers these ratios, and arranges sounds or atoms, as the case may be, so as to produce new manifestations or phenomena, is aiding the development of the true purposes and uses of nature, so is he who discovers the relations between duty and destiny, and acts himself, or causes others to act, in the manner most likely to produce the consentaneous action of both, i. e., to effect the purposes of both, in their truly pre-arranged unity and harmony." Not only do we dissent from the Carlylese doctrine of the divinity of the great man or hero, as an estimate of humanity by far too high; we also object to the Coleridgean dogma, that "the great use of history is to acquaint us with the nature of man," as by far too low. We look upon history as a revelation of Providence, an incarnation of a divine purpose wrought out by human agencies, a record and detail of the modes by which "the ways of God" have been traversed by human feet. Neither are we quite satisfied with the definition of history given by Cousin, viz., "L'histoire est la manifestation des vues providentielles de Dieu sur l'humanité."* We believe that history is the conjoint result of an overruling purpose in God, wrought out and effectuated by man, by homologating, of his own freewill, this divine purpose as his own. In this point of view life is a purpose-governed gift, of which the performance of duty is the condition; history a pre-ordained series of incidents, whose co-efficients are the Divine will and the human will, whose theatre is space, and whose scene-changer is time; and true greatness the fulfilment of the personal or social duties of life with honesty and ready zeal. The words which we have chosen as the representative to you and to ourselves of the all-suffusing idea of the present series of prelections may perchance require a moment's consideration, if not explanation and defence. Epoch from the Greek ETOX, a resting-place-seems to us peculiarly indicative of that class of events in which one phase of life has its close, and a new manifestation of it takes its rise; and those persons are, in our opinion, justly called Epoch-Men, in whom these changes have their "form and glory," whose names are the landmarks of history, whose efforts are the heritage of men, and whose works bear the impress of progress, truth, and goodness. Not that we wish to be hereby debarred from entering on our lists the names of many whose lives, viewed as a whole, may be far from untarnished and pure. Often, indeed, it may be far otherwise; for though true personal greatness can only result from the honest performance of duty, historic greatness may be acquired by some * “ History is the manifestation of the supervision of God over humanity."— "Cours du Philosophie," Tième Lecon, p. 208. |