This Universe is not
a Chaos. (If it were, by the way, we should be unable to reason about it
at all.) It stands and is continually renewed upon an ascertained
harmony: and what Plato called "Necessity" is the duty in all things of
obedience to that harmony, the Duty of which Wordsworth sings in his
noble Ode,
_Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And his most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong._
Now the other and only equally important truth in the world is that this
macrocosm of the Universe, with its harmony, cannot be apprehended at
all except as it is focussed upon the eye and intellect of Man, the
microcosm. All "transcendental" philosophy,--all discussions of the
"Absolute," of mind and matter, of "subjective" and "objective"
knowledge, of "ideas" and "phenomena," "flux" and "permanence"--all
"systems" and "schools," down from the earliest to be found in "Ritter
and Preller," through Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, on to Aquinas,
to Abelard, to the great scholastic disputants between Realism and
Nominalism; again on to Bacon, Spinoza, Locke, Comte, Hegel, and yet
again on to James and Bergson--all inevitably work out to this, that the
Universal Harmony is meaningless and nothing to Man save in so far as he
apprehends it, and that he can only apprehend it by reference to some
corresponding harmony within himself.
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