Those who
distinguish man into two parts, and give the higher qualities to the
soul and the sensual to the body, assume that all who reject their
distinction abolish the soul, and with it abolish all that is not
sensual. Yet every genuine scientific thinker believes in the existence
of love and reverence as he believes in any other facts, and is likely
to set just as high a value upon them as his opponent. He believes
equally with his opponent, that to cultivate the higher emotions, man
must habitually attach himself to objects outside the narrow sphere of
his own personal experience. The difference is that whereas one set of
thinkers would tell us to fix our affections on a state entirely
disparate from that in which we are actually placed, the other would
concentrate them upon objects which form part of the series of events
amongst which we are moving. Which is the more likely to stimulate our
best feelings? We must reply by asking whether the vastness or the
distinctness of a prospect has the greater effect upon the imagination.
Does a man take the greater interest in a future which he can definitely
interpret to himself, or upon one which is admittedly so inconceivable
that it is wrong to dwell upon it, but which allows of indefinite
expansion? Putting aside our own personal interest, do we care more for
the fate of our grandchildren whom we shall never see, or for the
condition of spiritual beings the conditions of whose existence are
utterly unintelligible to us? If sacrifice of our lower pleasures be
demanded, should we be more willing to make them in order that a coming
generation may be emancipated from war and pauperism, or in order that
some indefinite and indefinable change may be worked in a world utterly
inscrutable to our imaginations? The man who has learned to transfer his
aspirations from the next world to this, to look forward to the
diminution of disease and vice here, rather than to the annihilation of
all physical conditions, has, it is hardly rash to assert, gained more
in the distinctness of his aims than he has lost (if, indeed, he has
lost any thing) in their elevation.
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