Schelling's answer, or
suggestion of answer, is (and very valuable and important, as far as
it goes,) that the same general and particular intelligence, passion,
even the standards of right and wrong, which exist in a conscious
and formulated state in man, exist in an unconscious state, or in
perceptible analogies, throughout the entire universe of external
Nature, in all its objects large or small, and all its movements and
processes--thus making the impalpable human mind, and concrete nature,
notwithstanding their duality and separation, convertible, and in
centrality and essence one. But G. F. Hegel's fuller statement of the
matter probably remains the last best word that has been said upon it,
up to date. Substantially adopting the scheme just epitomized, he so
carries it out and fortifies it and merges everything in it, with
certain serious gaps now for the first time fill'd, that it becomes a
coherent metaphysical system, and substantial answer (as far as there
can be any answer) to the foregoing question--a system which, while I
distinctly admit that the brain of the future may add to, revise, and
even entirely reconstruct, at any rate beams forth to-day, in its
entirety, illuminating the thought of the universe, and satisfying the
mystery thereof to the human mind, with a more consoling scientific
assurance than any yet.
According to Hegel the whole earth, (an old nucleus-thought, as in the
Vedas, and no doubt before, but never hitherto brought so absolutely
to the front, fully surcharged with modern scientism and facts, and
made the sole entrance to each and all,) with its infinite variety,
the past, the surroundings of to-day, or what may happen in the
future, the contrarieties of material with spiritual, and of natural
with artificial, are all, to the eye of the _ensemblist_, but
necessary sides and unfoldings, different steps or links, in the
endless process of Creative thought, which, amid numberless apparent
failures and contradictions, is held together by central and
never-broken unity--not contradictions or failures at all, but
radiations of one consistent and eternal purpose; the whole mass
of everything steadily, unerringly tending and flowing toward the
permanent _utile_ and _morale_, as rivers to oceans.
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