Prodigality

“ But, again, prodigality is only one of several particulars wherein the modes and the means of the supposed divine intelligence differ from those of its human counterpart. Comparative anatomists can point to organic structures which are far from being theoretically perfect: even the mind of man in these cases, notwithstanding its confessed deficiencies in respect both of cognitive and cogitative powers, is competent to suggest improvements to an intelligence supposed to be omniscient and all-wise! ”

“ He needs a guide: what can be this guide, if not the law of development, the immanent logic of humanity itself? Holding the thread of ideas with one hand, and, on the other, that of history, I must have penetrated the intimate thought of society; I became a prophet, without ceasing to be a philosopher.
So here I am commencing, under the title of Creation of Order in Humanity, a new series of studies, the most abstruse that can engage human intelligence, but, in the situation in which I found myself, absolutely indispensable. ”

“ But it is a psychological fact none the less true, and one to which the philosophers have paid too little attention, that habit, like a second nature, has the power of fixing in the mind new categorical forms derived from the appearances which impress us, and by them usually stripped of objective reality, but whose influence over our judgments is no less predetermining than that of the original categories. Hence we reason by the ETERNAL and ABSOLUTE laws of our mind, and at the same time by the secondary rules, ordinarily faulty, which are suggested to us by imperfect observation. ”

“ Time has hitherto served as a sort of criterion for society. Thus, the primitive men—having observed that they were not all equal in strength, beauty, and labor—judged, and rightly, that certain ones among them were called by nature to the performance of simple and common functions; but they concluded, and this is where their error lay, that these same individuals of duller intellect, more restricted genius, and weaker personality, were predestined to serve the others ”

“ If the nature of our reals is the diversity found at a stage below relations, how are we to dispose of the mass of relational appearance? For that exists, and existing it must somehow qualify the world, a world the reality of which is discovered only at a level other than its own. ”

“ In so doing, the Prodigal himself has been conceived, not as of a naturally brutish and depraved disposition,--a view taken by many commentators, with apparently little knowledge of human nature, and no recollection of their own youthful impulses,--but rather as a buoyant, restless youth, tired of the monotony of home, and anxious to see what lay [293] beyond the narrow confines of his father's farm, going forth in the confidence of his own simplicity and ardor, and led gradually away into follies and sins which at the outset would have been as distasteful as they were strange to him. ”

“ You may urge, indeed, that without distinction no difference is left; but, for all that, the differences will not disappear into the distinction. They must come to it, more or less, and they cannot wholly be made by it. I still insist that for thought what is not relative is nothing. But I urge, on the other hand, that nothings cannot be related, and that to turn qualities in relation into mere relations is impossible. ”

“ If we pass now from physical nature to the moral world, we still find ourselves subject to the same deceptions of appearance, to the same influences of spontaneity and habit. But the distinguishing feature of this second division of our knowledge is, on the one hand, the good or the evil which we derive from our opinions; and, on the other, the obstinacy with which we defend the prejudice which is tormenting and killing us. ”

“ When he speaks of morals and the family, he seems at times like the patriarchs of the Bible. His command of language is complete, and he never fails to avail himself of it. Now and then a coarse word, a few personalities, too bitter and quite unjust or injurious, will have to be suppressed in printing; time, however, as it passes away, permits many things and renders them inoffensive. Am I right in saying that Proudhon's correspondence, always substantial, will one day be the most accessible and attractive portion of his works? ”

“ But this perplexed attribution was precisely that which the doctrine intended to avoid. We must therefore deny any relation of our appearances to the Thing. But, if so, other troubles vex us. Either our Thing has qualities, or it has not. If it has them, then within itself the same puzzles break out which we intended to leave behind,—to make a prey of phenomena and to rest contented with their ruin. So we must correct ourselves and assert that the Thing is unqualified. But, if so, we are destroyed with no less certainty. For a Thing without qualities is clearly not real. ”

“ But who does not see that these talents and capacities, owing to their infinite variety, give rise to an infinite variety of wills, and that the character, the inclinations, and—if I may venture to use the expression—the form of the ego, are necessarily changed; so that in the order of liberty, as in the order of intelligence, there are as many types as individuals, as many characters as heads, whose tastes, fancies, and propensities, being modified by dissimilar ideas, must necessarily conflict? ”

“ He had then been to her only a Prodigal who had squandered his substance, tried to feed his soul on the swinish husks of Doubt, and returning to his father's house unrepentant, had been admitted yet remained rejected: a Prodigal not of the flesh and the world but of the spirit and the Lord. But what has ever interested the heart of woman as a prodigal of some kind? ”

“ We have shown, on the other hand, that the nature of man is not harmoniously and synthetically constituted, but formed by an agglomeration of the potentialities specialized in each creature,—a circumstance which, in revealing to us the principle of the disorders committed by human liberty, has finished the demonstration of the non- divinity of our race. ”

“ But thought, nevertheless, can desire them, because its content has them already in an incomplete form. And in desire for the completion of what one has there is no contradiction. Here is the solution of our difficulty.
The relational form is a compromise on which thought stands, and which it developes. It is an attempt to unite differences which have broken out of the felt totality. [9] Differences forced together by an underlying identity, and a compromise between the plurality and the unity—this is the essence of relation. ”

“ Now that for working purposes we treat, and do well to treat, some relations as external merely I do not deny, and that, of course, is not the question at issue here. That question is in short whether this distinction of internal and external is absolute or is but relative, and whether in the end and in principle a mere external relation is possible and forced on us by the facts. And except as a subordinate view I submit that the latter thesis is untenable. ”

“ And, passing from this to conscious life, we are called on still for further uses and fresh applications of our standard. In the will of the individual, or of the community, so far as adequately carried out and expressing itself in outward fact, we have a new claim to harmonious and self-included reality. And we have to consider in each case the consistency, together with the range and area, of the principle, and the degree up to which it has mastered and passed into existence. ”

“ For every where the one fabrication is more comprehensive than that which is multiplied. And the more causal of divine natures energize prior to their own offspring, and together with them constitute the progeny that proceed from them. ”

“ Why, in a very real, practical world like this one, where a man's failure to pass his exams was sure to call forth from his progenitor letters such as his pocket at this moment contained, conduct one's self as if existing in a world of lambs and purling streams and shepherdesses? ”

“ The true form of human society cannot be determined until the following question has been solved:—
Property not being our natural condition, how did it gain a foothold? Why has the social instinct, so trustworthy among the animals, erred in the case of man? Why is man, who was born for society, not yet associated?
I have said that human society is complex in its nature. Though this expression is inaccurate, the fact to which it refers is none the less true; namely, the classification of talents and capacities. ”

“ What your progeny will not do for any considerations of ethics or economy, to save his sisters' olfactories or the atmosphere of the family altar,—that he does unflinchingly at one word from the stroke-oar or the commodore. ”

“ The reals therefore cannot be self-existent, and, if self-existent, yet taken as the world they would end in inconsistency. For the relations, because they exist, must somehow qualify the world. The relations then must externally qualify the sole and self-contained reality, and that seems self-contradictory or meaningless. [3] And if it is urged that a plurality of independent beings may be unintelligible, but that after all some unintelligible facts must be affirmed—the answer is obvious. ”

“ Of what consequence to you, reader, is my obscure individuality? I live, like you, in a century in which reason submits only to fact and to evidence. My name, like yours, is Truth-seeker. [1] My mission is written in these words of the law: Speak without hatred and without fear; tell that which thou knowest! The work of our race is to build the temple of science, and this science includes man and Nature. Now, truth reveals itself to all; to-day to Newton and Pascal, tomorrow to the herdsman in the valley and the journeyman in the shop. Each one contributes his stone to the edifice; ”

“ Similarly in the department of morals, two factors must be recognized as determining conduct: 1. Those qualities of character belonging by inheritance to the organized structure of body and brain. 2. Those influences which grow out of the social environment, which are constantly modifying the inherited nature, and building up a corresponding character. In my proposition, then, to found a city in which any given degree of morality, within certain limits, may be secured, these limits are understood to depend on the laws of inherited character ”

“ And this formal will is now seen to be the true expression for all the foregoing characteristics, of universality, freedom, and autonomy. In formality we see they are all one. I am autonomous only because I am free, free only because I am universal, universal only because not particular, and not particular only when formal. ”

“ For myself I am convinced that no such relations exist. There is no identity or likeness possible except in a whole, and every such whole must qualify and be qualified by its terms. And, where the whole is different, the terms that qualify it and contribute to it must so far be different, and so far therefore by becoming elements in a fresh unity the terms must be altered. They are altered so far only, but still they are altered. You may take by abstraction a quality A, B, or C, and that abstract quality may throughout remain unchanged. ”

“ Of all these hypotheses it may be observed, That the testimony of the senses is not a criterion, because the senses, relating us only to phenomena, furnish us with no ideas; that intuition needs external confirmation or objective certainty; that evidence requires proof, and argument verification; that universal reason has been wrong many a time; that language serves equally well to express the true or the false; that morality, like all the rest, needs demonstration and rule ”

“ You can never, we may argue, find qualities without relations. Whenever you take them so, they are made so, and continue so, by an operation which itself implies relation. Their plurality gets for us all its meaning through relations; and to suppose it otherwise in reality is wholly indefensible. ”

“ And so, in a word, the whole sum and substance of all I know about my progenitors, male and female, is, that they were always a sober-minded, conscientious, hard-working race, with a way and a will of their own, and a habit of seeing for themselves, and judging for themselves, and taking the consequences. ”

“ If the diversities were complementary aspects of a process of connection and distinction, the process not being external to the elements or again a foreign compulsion of the intellect, but itself the intellect’s own proprius motus, the case would be altered. Each aspect would of itself be a transition to the other aspect, a transition intrinsic and natural at once to itself and to the intellect. ”

“ The values of most objects are at first fixed for us by instinct or they are suggested by the ethos and mores of our groups—family, society, national religions, and "reign under the appearance of habitual self-suggested tendencies." The self is constituted accordingly. Collisions with other selves, conflicts between group valuations and standards and individual impulses or desires, failure of old standards as applied to new situations, bring about a more conscious definition of purposes. The agent identifies himself with these purposes, and values objects with reference to them. ”

“ But I infer therefrom that, if Providence placed the first human beings in a condition of equality, it was an indication of its desires, a model that it wished them to realize in other forms; just as the religious sentiment, which it planted in their hearts, has developed and manifested itself in various ways. ”

“ One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these?—men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men, who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. ”