In short (to put it in our own form, or summing
up,) that thinker or analyzer or overlooker who by an inscrutable
combination of train'd wisdom and natural intuition most fully accepts
in perfect faith the moral unity and sanity of the creative scheme, in
history, science, and all life and time, present and future, is
both the truest cosmical devotee or religioso, and the profoundest
philosopher. While he who, by the spell of himself and his
circumstance, sees darkness and despair in the sum of the workings of
God's providence, and who, in that, denies or prevaricates, is, no
matter how much piety plays on his lips, the most radical sinner and
infidel.
I am the more assured in recounting Hegel a little freely here,[17]
not only for offsetting the Carlylean letter and spirit-cutting it
out all and several from the very roots, and below the roots--but to
counterpoise, since the late death and deserv'd apotheosis of Darwin,
the tenets of the evolutionists. Unspeakably precious as those are to
biology, and henceforth indispensable to a right aim and estimate in
study, they neither comprise or explain everything--and the last word
or whisper still remains to be breathed, after the utmost of those
claims, floating high and forever above them all, and above technical
metaphysics. While the contributions which German Kant and Fichte and
Schelling and Hegel have bequeath'd to humanity--and which English
Darwin has also in his field--are indispensable to the erudition of
America's future, I should say that in all of them, and the best of
them, when compared with the lightning flashes and flights of the old
prophets and _exaltes_, the spiritual poets and poetry of all lands,
(as in the Hebrew Bible,) there seems to be, nay certainly is,
something lacking--something cold, a failure to satisfy the deepest
emotions of the soul--a want of living glow, fondness, warmth, which
the old _exaltes_ and poets supply, and which the keenest modern
philosophers so far do not.
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