CHAPTER IX. THE ACQUISITIVE POWERS. I. The Senses and the Supersensuous. WHAT are very generally called the Intellectual Powers I call the Acquisitive Powers, because among them is a power which is more and higher than the Intellect; which at all events it is wise for us to distinguish from the Intellectual, as that phrase is ordinarily used. 1. The Senses. There are five of these: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Some philosophers have, indeed, undertaken to show that all the senses are only refined and subtle forms of the sense of touch: invisible ether striking the eye, waves of air striking the tympanum of the ear, fragrant emissions touching the delicate nerve of the nose, and subtle qualities in the food coming in contact with the nerves of the palate. But for all practical purposes the old distinction between the five senses may be accepted as satisfactory. Nor do these five senses require any explanation. We are all measurably familiar with them and their exercise. 2. The Sensuous Faculties. With these senses are connected sensuous faculties which receive and appropriate and appreciate the various facts brought to the knowledge of the mind by the senses. We not only perceive the outer world, we appreciate qualities in it which the senses themselves know nothing of. Thus a man on horseback emerges from a forest upon the top of a high hill, and both look off upon the prospect of the valley below. The same picture is impressed on the retina of both beast and man, but the same emotion and intellectual life is not awakened in both. There are in the rider faculties which perceive in the beauty of the view that which is unperceived and unperceivable by the horse. Men are said to have or to lack an ear for music; the ear itself is struck by the same sound waves, and the same impression is made on the auditory nerve of both, but the one receives what the other does not and cannot receive. So two men may look at the same picture, and see it with equal distinctness, but the one who has an eye for art will perceive in it much which the other, who has no eye for art, fails to perceive. I shall not enter into any elaborate analysis of the sensuous faculties, nor into the discussion which has been waged concerning them. It is enough for my purpose in this treatise to point out the more evident ones. These are time, space, weight, color, and tune. The powers which recognize these qualities or realities are peculiarly human. Their recognition is very dim, if it exists at all, in the brute creation; it is very clear and absolutely necessary in man. We are compelled to think of all events as occurring in time, and having a certain time relation to each other, as being past, present, or future, as occurring before or after. We are compelled, too, to think of them as occurring in space, and as having certain relations of locality to each other, as being above or below, on this side or that, in this locality or another locality. Whether time and space are intuitive perceptions, or laws of thought binding upon us which compel us to think of things in these relations, or results of observation and experience, it is not necessary for us here to inquire. In point of fact the recognition of both time and space are absolutely universal; the power of recognizing them exists, however its existence may be explained. The same thing must be said of weight, number, color, and time. We have the power of aiscriminating substances not merely by their form, that is, the space they occupy, but also by their weight or tendency to fall toward the center of the earth. We have a power of recognizing numbers, of perceiving the difference between one and more, of knowing the relations between these various numbers, and of working out of that power of perception the whole science of numbers in all its branches. We have the power of distinguishing colors, and appreciating what we call beauty of color, that is, the combinations of color which tend to produce pleasure through the eye on the mind. We perceive in certain combinations of sounds an effect which we call musical. Moreover, these powers differ very greatly in different men, and seem capable of still further analysis. In tune there are a variety of effects which seem to differ in kind as well as in degree, and the capability to produce or to enjoy these different effects, respectively produce different schools in music, each having its own peculiar and characteristic appreciation. To these should be added the faculty of language, a faculty quite peculiar to man, and differing very widely in different races and in different individuals of the same race. 3. The Supersensuous Faculty. We have arrived at a parting of the ways. That there is any supersensuous faculty much of modern philosophy positively denies; the existence of such a faculty still more of modern philosophy ignores. All forms of modern skepticism have a common philosophical foundation. Their philosophy denies that we can know any thing except that which we learn through the senses directly, or through conclusions deduced from the senses. We know that there is a sun because we see it; we know approximately its weight and its distance from the earth, because by long processes of reasoning we reach conclusions on those subjects from phenomena which we do see. What we do not thus see, or hear, or touch, or taste, or smell, or thus conclude from what we have seen, or heard, or touched, or tasted, or smelled, is said to belong to the unknown and unknowable. This is the basis of modern skepticism. It is the basis, too, of much of modern theology. It is the secret of the "scientific method." By this method we conclude the existence of an invisible God from the phenomena of life ex actly as we conclude the existence of an invisible ether from the phenomena of light. But the God thus deduced is like the ether, only an hypothesis. It is quite legitimate to offer a new hypothesis; and the scientist will be as ready to accept one hypothesis as another, provided it accounts for the pheThis philosophy, pursued to its legitimate and logical conclusion, issues in the denial that man is a religious being; or possesses a spiritual nature; or is any thing more than a highly organized and developed animal. nomena. Over against this philosophy of human nature I set here the doctrine that man possesses a supersensuous faculty.* By a supersensuous faculty I mean a power to see the invisible and hear the inaudible; a sixth sense; a spiritual perception; a capacity to take direct and immediate cognition of a world lying wholly without the dominion of the senses. A man hopelessly blind might well conclude that there is such a phenomenon as color from the testimony of his friends. A man wholly deaf might well conclude that there was a phenomenon of sound from merely observing its effects on others. But the phenomena of sight are directly and immediately perceived by the eye; they are not ordinarily derived from observation made only by the ear. So I suppose the facts or phenomena of the spiritual life are directly and immediately perceived by the spiritual sense; they are not derived from observation made by the other senses. The spirit has its eye and its ear. This power in art and literature is called the imagination, fancy, ideality; its productions are called creations. In religion it is called faith. There is no better definition of it than that afforded by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."† That is, it is the faculty or power which gives us *Not as though it were in any sense a new doctrine; it is older than Plato, and has never been without its representatives and advocates in philosophical thought. + Hebrews xi, 1. knowledge of the invisible realities of life. Religion does not depend upon a "scientific method." God is not an hypothesis. He is known directly and immediately by spiritual contact, spiritual perception. This power of direct perception of a world beyond the senses is seen in all great inventors. It is the prophetic faculty, and the secret of all progress. Morse sees the telegraph wires carrying his messages over a continent before a pole has been set in the ground. Stephenson sees England covered with a net-work of railway before a rail has been laid. The architect sees his cathedral in the mind before a stone is put to rest in its bed of mortar. In all these and kindred cases the invisible is seen before it becomes visible; the supersensuous sense perceives it before it can be made apparent to the slower appreciation of the senses. It is the power which underlies all art, literature, oratory. To imitate whether a greensward or a silk dress is not art; as to declaim whether Marco Bozzaris or Hamlet is not oratory. Art is essentially creative. It brings out of the invisible world invisible realities, and so presents them that the dull eyes and ears of the unspiritual can perceive them. The artist sees his picture before he paints it, and if he be a true artist always sees a nobler picture than he paints. He copies from an invisible canvas. The author sees the truth which he endeavors, always with imperfection, to express; and beneath his dead. body of a book there beats a living soul which looks out through its pages as the soul looks out through the eyes into the windows of another soul. This living soul he sees and knows just as clearly before as after he has given it a body. The orator, more dimly but as truly, sees the truth which he endeavors to carry away captive from its shadowy land, and his power over his audience lies in his power to interpret to their senses and through their senses what he had before seen and grasped by his supersensuous faculty, his spiritual perception, his faith-power. These invisible realities thus |