rictly universal as addressed only to public ends. If
the former hypothesis be true, then sense rightfully controls reason,
and everything _is_ exactly what it _appears_. If the latter hypothesis
be true, then sense rightfully serves reason, and nothing is as it
appears to be, namely, absolute and independent of everything else, but
simply phenomenal and relative to everything else. It is evident to a
glance that a controversy so eminently scientific could never have gone
to the unwholesome lengths which it has reached in our day, unless there
were something in it more than meets the eye: unless, for example, the
interests of morality, which is the only recognized bond of our existing
societies, were at stake. For if one and the same law binds all Nature,
then plant and animal and man have one and the same destiny, so far as
their nature goes. If, for example, the plant as one form of natural
existence, and the animal as another form, are what they severally are,
by no means absolutely, or in themselves, but only by relation to all
other plants and animals, then man, who is only a higher, that is, a
moral, or evil absolutely or in himself, but only relatively to all
other men. And if we allow morality only this relative force,--if the
good man is not good absolutely or in himself, nor the evil man evil
absolutely or in himself,--why, then our existing civilization, which is
built upon such absoluteness, has a fictitious basis, and must fall to
the ground.

_Hinc ilia lachrymae._ This is why a question apparently of pure science
turns out practically so full of inward heartburning and mutual
reviling. Neither theology nor science is competent to the philosophic
recognition of man's associated destiny, and hence have neither of them
the secret of those perturbations which ever and anon gloom our
political atmosphere and shut out to the eye of sensuous thought the
entire future of the race. Philosophy alone possesses this secret,
because it alone perceives that all our political, civil, and even
domestic broils grow out of this identical warfare between men's
religions and scientific convictions,--have no other source than that
persistent insubmission which the interests of force, as represented by
priesthoods and governments, are under to the interests of freedom,
represented by society. Philosophy mediates between the religious and
secular thought of mankind, by making the sphere of God's universal
action identical with