Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. IV, No. 19, Dec 1851

In Prussia vigorous preparations are made for anticipated difficulties in France in the spring of 1852, after the Presidential election. The troops of all the German states are to be put on a full war establishment, and to be ready for immediate action early in the spring. The western fortresses have received orders to be in readiness for war.

A general Congress has been held of representatives from the several German states, to make some common arrangement for the management of the electric telegraph. They have agreed that all messages shall be forwarded without interruption, that a common scale of charges shall be adopted, and that the receipts shall go into a common fund, to be distributed among the several states in proportion to the number of miles of telegraphic communication running through them.

The German Diet has resolved that the annexation of the Prussian Polish provinces to the confederation two years ago, was illegal and void. It has also determined to take into consideration the claims of the Ritter party in Hanover, to have the abolition of their nobility privileges revoked. This abolition was effected during the recent revolutions, but it was done in a perfectly legal manner.

The Emperor of Austria, not long since, wrote a letter to Prince Schwartzenberg, stating that the Ministry would henceforth be responsible to him alone, and that he would answer for the government. This declaration, that the government was hereafter to be absolute, excited deep feeling throughout the country, and it was supposed that it might lead to a political crisis. On the 11th of October, however, the Ministers took the oath of obedience to the Emperor, under this new definition of their powers and responsibilities. The Emperor recently visited Lombardy, where he had a very cold reception.

In Spain changes have been made in the administration of the island of Cuba. A Colonial Council has been created, which is to have charge of all affairs relating to the colonial possessions, except such as are specially directed by other Ministers. The Captain-general of each colony is to conduct its affairs under the direction of the Council. It is said that the Spanish Government intends to relax its customs regulations in favor of England.

From India and the East late intelligence has been received. The Indian frontier continued undisturbed: the troops suffered greatly from sickness. There had been an outbreak in Malabar, which caused great loss of life. The rebellion in China still goes on, but details of its progress are lacking.

Editor's Table

Time and Space – what are they? Do they belong to the world without, or to the world within, or to some mysterious and inseparable union of both departments of being? We hope the reader will be under no alarm from such a beginning, or entertain any fear of being treated to a dish of indigestible metaphysics. The terms we have placed at the head of our Editor's Table, as suggestive of appropriate thoughts for the closing month of the year, are, indeed, the deepest in philosophy. In all ages have they been the watchwords of the schools. Aristotle failed in the attempt to measure them. Kant acknowledged his inability to fathom the profundity of their significance. And yet there are none, perhaps, that enter more into the musings of that common philosophy which is for all minds, for all ages, and for all conditions in life. Who has not thought on the enigma of time and space, each baffling every effort the mind may make for its pure and perfect conception without some aid from the notion of its inseparable correlative? Where is the man, or child even, who has not been drawn to some contemplation of that wondrous stream on whose bosom we are sailing, but of which we can conceive neither origin nor outlet; that mysterious river ever sweeping us along as by some irresistible outward force, and yet seeming to be so strangely affected by the internal condition of each soul that is voyaging upon its current – at one time the scenery upon its banks gliding by with a placid swiftness that arrests the attention even of the least reflective – at another, the mind recalled from a reverie which has seemingly carried us onward many a league from the last remembered observation of our mental longitude, but only to discover, with surprise, that the objects on either shore have hardly receded a perceptible distance in the perspective of our spiritual panorama. We have passed the equinoctial line, and are under fair sail for the enchanted kingdom of Candaya, when, like Don Quixotte and Sancho on the smooth-flowing Ebro, we start up to find the rocks and trees, and all the familiar features of the same old "real world" yet full in sight, and that we have scarcely drifted a stone's throw from the point of our departure. It is astonishing to what a distance the mental wanderings may extend in the briefest periods. The idea was never better expressed than by a pious old deacon, who used most feelingly to lament this sin of wandering thoughts in the midst of holy services. Between the first and fourth lines of a hymn, he would say, the soul may rove to the very ends of the earth. The fixed outward measure arresting the attention by its marked commencement and its closing cadence, presented the extent of such subjective excursions in their most startling light. Childhood, too, furnishes vivid illustrations of the same psychological phenomena – childhood, that musing introspective period, which, on some accounts, may be regarded as the most metaphysical portion of human life. Who has not some reminiscences of this kind belonging to his boyish existence? How in health the morning has seemed to burst upon him in apparent simultaneousness with the moment when his head first dropped upon the pillow, and he has wondered to think how mysteriously he had leaped the interval which unerring outward indications had compelled him to assign to the measured continuity of his existence! How has he, on the other hand, in sickness, marked the unvaried ticking of the clock through the long dark night, and fancied that the slow-pacing hours would never flee away. His one sense and thought of pain, had arrested the current of his being, and even the outer world seemed to stand still, as though in sympathy with the suspended movement of his own inner life. In experiences such as these, the mind of the child has been brought directly upon the deepest problem in psychology. He has been on the shore of the great mystery, and Kant, and Fichte, and Coleridge could go no farther, except, it may be, to show how utterly unfathomable for our present faculties, the mystery is. Philosophy comes back ever to the same unexplained position. She can not conceive of mind as existing out of time and space, and she can not well conceive of time and space as wholly separate from the idea of successive thought, or, in other words, a perceiving and measuring mind.

Such phenomena present themselves in our most ordinary existence. Let a man be in the habit of tracing back his roving thoughts, until he connects them with the last remembered link from which the wandering reverie commenced, and he will be amazed to find how long a time may in a few moments have passed through the mind. The minute hand has barely changed its position, and not only images and thoughts, but hopes, and fears, and moral states have been called out, which, under other circumstances, might have occupied an outward period extending it in almost any assignable ratio. Indeed it is impossible to assign any limit here. As far as our moral life is measured by actual spiritual exercise, a man may sin as much in a minute as, at another time, in a day. He may have had, in the same brief interval, a heaven of love and joy, which, in a different inward condition of the spirit, months and years would hardly have sufficed to realize.

Such cases are familiar to all reflective minds. Even as they take place in ordinary health, they may well produce the conviction, that there are mysteries enough for our study in our most common experience, without resorting to mesmerism or spiritual rappings. It is, however, in sickness, that such phenomena assume their most startling aspect, and furnish subjects of the most serious thought. The apparent decay of the mind in connection with that of the body – the apparent injuries the one sustains from the maladies of the other, have furnished arguments for the infidel, and painful doubts for the unwilling skeptic. But there is another aspect to facts of this kind. They sometimes show themselves in a way which must be more startling to the materialist than to the believer. They furnish evidence that the present body, instead of being essential to the spirit's highest exercises, is only its temporary regulator, intended for a period to limit its powers, by keeping them in enchained harmony with that outer world of nature in which the human spirit is to receive its first intellectual and moral training. If it does not originate the law of successive thought, it governs and measures its movement. Through the dark closet to which it confines the soul, images and ideas are made to pass, one by one, in orderly march; and while the body is in health, and does not sleep, and holds steady intercourse with the world around us, it performs this restraining and regulative office with some good degree of uniformity. Viewed merely in reference to its own inner machinery, the clock may have any kind or degree of movement. It may perform the apparent revolutions of days and years, in seconds and fragments of seconds. But attach to it a pendulum of a proper length, and its rates are immediately adjusted to the steady course of external nature. The new regulative power is determined by the mass and gravity of the earth. It is what the diurnal rotation causes it to be. The latter, again, is linked with the annual revolution, and this, again, with some far-off millennial, or millio-millennial, cycle of the sun, and so on, until the little time-piece on our Editor's Table, is in harmony with the magnus annus, the great cosmical year, the one all-embracing time of the universe. The regulative action of the body upon the soul, although far less uniform, presents a fair analogy. In ordinary health, the measured flow of thought and feeling will bear some relation to the circulation of the blood, the course of respiration, and those general cycles of the body, or human micro-cosmos, which have acquired and preserved a steady rate of movement. It is true that there are times, even in health, when the thoughts burst from this regulative control, imparting their own impetus to the nervous fluid, giving a hurried agitation to the quick-panting breath, and sending the blood in maddened velocity through the heart and veins. But it is in sickness that such a breaking away from the ordinary check becomes most striking. The pendulum removed, or the spring broken, how rapidly spin round the whizzing wheels by which objective time is measured. And so of our spiritual state. In that harmony between the inward and the outward, in which health consists, we are insensible to the presence of the regulative power. In the slightest sicknesses we feel the dragging chain, and time moves slow, and sometimes almost stops. It is in this crisis of severe disease that a deeper change takes place. Some link is snapped; and then how inconceivably rapid may be, and sometimes is, the course of thought. Now the long-buried past comes up, and moves before us, not in slow succession, but in that swift array which would seem to place it altogether upon the canvas. At other times, the soul goes out into a self-created future; a dream it may be called, but having, as far as the spirit is concerned, no less of authentic moral and intellectual interest on that account. Suppose even the whole physical world to be all a dream. What then? No article of moral truth would be in the least changed; joy and suffering, right and wrong, would be no less real. Might they not be regarded as even the more tremendously real, from the very fact that they would be, in that case, the only realities in the universe? Nothing here is really gained by any play upon that most indefinable of all terms – reality. If that is real which most deeply affects us, and enters most intimately into our conscious being, then in a most real sense may it be affirmed, that years sometimes pass in the crisis of a fever, and that a life-time – an intellectual and a moral life-time – may be lived in what, to spectators, may have seemed to have been but a moment of syncope, or of returning sensibility to outward things. Such facts should startle us. They give us a glimpse of those fearful energies which even now the spirit possesses, and which may exhibit themselves with a thousand-fold more power, when all the balance-wheels and regulating pendulums shall have been taken off, and the soul left to develop that higher law of its being which now remains, in a great degree, suspended and inert, like the chemist's latent heat and light.

In illustration of such a view, we might refer to recorded facts having every mark of authenticity. They come to as from all ages. There is the strange story which Plutarch gives us of the trance of Thespesius, and of the immense series of wonders he witnessed during the short period of apparent death. Strikingly similar to this is that remarkable account of Rev. William Tennent which must be familiar to most of our readers. Something analogous is reported of that strange inner life to which we lately called attention in the account of Rachel Baker. To the same effect the story, told by Addison, we think, of the Dervise and his Magic Water, possessed of such wondrous properties, that the moment between the plunging and the withdrawing of the head, became, subjectively, a life-time filled with events of most absorbing interest. But that may be called an Oriental romance. Another instance we would relate from our own personal acquaintance with the one who was himself the subject of a similar supercorporeal and supersensual action of the spirit. He was a man bearing a high reputation for piety and integrity. It was at the close of a day devoted to sacred services of an unusually solemn kind that he related to us what, in the familiar language of certain denominations of Christians, might be called his religious experience. It was, indeed, of no ordinary nature, and there was one part, especially, which made no ordinary impression on our memory. We can only, in the most rapid manner, touch upon the main facts, as they bear upon the thoughts we have been presenting. In the crisis of a violent typhus fever, during a period which could not have occupied, at the utmost, more than half an hour, a subjective life was lived, extending not merely to hours and days, but through long years of varied and most thrilling experience. He had traveled to foreign lands, and encountered every species of adventure. He had amassed wealth and lost it. He had formed new social bonds with their natural accompaniments of joy and grief. He had committed crimes and suffered for them. He had been in exile, cast out, and homeless. He had been in battle and in shipwreck. He had been sick and recovered. And, finally, he had died, and gone to judgment, and received the condemnation of the lost. Ages had passed in outer darkness, during all which the exercises of the soul were as active, and as distinct, and as coherently arranged, as at any period of his existence. At length a fairly perceptible beam of light, coming seemingly from an immense distance, steals faintly into his prison-house. Nearer, and nearer still, it comes, although years and years are occupied with its slow, yet steady approach. But it does increase. Fuller, and clearer, and higher, grows the light of hope, until all around him, and above him, is filled with the benign glory of its presence. He dares once more look upward, and as he does so, he beholds beaming upon him the countenance of his watching friend, bending over him with the announcement that the crisis is past, and that coolness is once more returning to his burning frame. Only a prolonged dream, it might perhaps be said. But dreams in general run parallel with the movement of outward time, or if they do go beyond it, it is never by any such enormously magnified excess. But besides the apparent length of such a trance, there was also this striking and essential difference. Dreams may be more or less vivid; but all possess this common character, that in the waking state we immediately recognize them as dreams; and this not merely by way of inference from our changed condition, but because, in themselves, they possess that unmistakably subjective, or dream-like aspect, we can never separate from their outward contemplation. They almost immediately put on the dress of dreams. The air of reality, so fresh on our first awakening, begins straightway to gather a shade about it. As they grow dimmer and dimmer, the very effort at recalling only drives them farther off, and renders them more indistinct, just as certain optical delusions ever melt away from the gaze that is directed most steadily toward them. Thus the phantoms of our sleep dissolve rapidly "into thin air." As we strive to hold fast their features in the memory, they vanish farther and farther from the view, until we can just discern their pale, ghostly forms receding, in the distance, through the "gate of horn" into the land of irrecoverable oblivion. This characteristic of ordinary dreaming has ever furnished the ground of a favorite comparison both in sacred and classical poetry – "Like a vision of the night" – "As a dream when one awaketh" – "Like a morning dream" —

Tenuesque recessit in auras —

Par levibus ventis, volucrique simillima somno.

But these visions of the trance, are, in this respect, of a different, as well as deeper, nature. The subject of our narrative most solemnly averred that the scenes and feelings of this strange experience were ever after not only real in appearance, but the most vividly real of any part of his remembered existence. They never passed away into the place and form of dreams. He knew they were subjective, but only from outward testimony, and for some time even this was hardly sufficient to prevent the deep impression exhibiting itself in his speech and intercourse with the world to which he had returned. To his deeper consciousness they ever seemed realities, ever to form a part of his most veritable being. Our common dreams are more closely connected with the outer world, and the nearest sphere of sensation. They are generally suggested by obscurely felt bodily impressions. They belong to a state semi-conscious of the presence of things around us. But the others come from a deeper source. They are not

Such stuff as dreams are made of —

But belong to the more interior workings of the spirit, when disease has released it, either wholly or partially, from the restrictive outward influence. Still, whatever may be our theory of explanation, the thought we would set forth remains equally impressive. Such facts as these show the amazing power of the soul in respect to time. They teach us that in respect to our spiritual, as well as our material organization, we are indeed "most fearfully and wonderfully made." They startle us with the supposition that, in another state of existence, time may be mainly, if not wholly what the spiritual action causes it to appear. We have heard of well-attested cases, in which the whole past, even to its most minute events, has flashed before the soul, in the dying moments, or during some brief period of imminent danger arousing the spirit to a preternatural energy. If there be truth in such experiences, then no former exercise or emotion of the soul is ever lost. They belong to us still, just as much as our present thought, or our present sensation, and at some period may start up again to sleep no more, causing us actually to realize that conception of Boethius which now appears only a scholastic subtlety —a whole life ever in one, carrying with it a consciousness of its whole abiding presence in every moment of its existence —tota simul et interminabilis vitæ possessio. But we may give the thought a more plain and practical turn. Even now, it may be said, what we have lived forms still a part of our being. However it may stand in respect to outward time, it is never past to us. We are too much in the habit of regarding ourselves only in reference to what may seem our present moral state. We need the corrective power of the idea that we are, not simply what we may now appear to be, but all we ever have been, and that such we must forever be, unless in the psychology and theology of a higher dispensation there is some mode of separating us from our former selves. Now the soul is broken and dispersed. Then will it come together, and as in the poetic imagination of the resurrection of the body, bone meets its fellow-bone, and dust hastens to join once more in living organization with its kindred dust, so in the soul's anastasis will all the lost and scattered thoughts come home again to their spiritual abode, and from the chaos of the past will stand forth forever one fixed and changeless being, the discordant and deformed result of a false and evil life, or a glorious organization in harmony with all that is fair and good in the universe.

Geology has created difficulties in the interpretation of certain parts of the Scriptures; but these are more than balanced by a most important aid, which in another respect, it is rendering to the cause of faith. The former are fast giving way before that sound interpretation of the primeval record which was maintained by some of the most learned and pious in the Church, centuries before the new science was ever dreamed of. The latter is gathering strength from every fresh discovery. We refer to the proof geology is furnishing of the late origin of the human race, and of the absolute necessity of ascribing it to a supernatural cause. While there has been an ascending scale of orders, every new order has commenced with the most mature specimens. The subsequent history has been ever one of degeneracy, until a higher power came to the aid of exhausted nature, and made another step of real progress in the supernatural organization of a superior type. The largest fishes, the most powerful reptiles, were first in the periods of their respective families. And thus it went on until the introduction of the human species. An attenuating series of physical and hyper-physical powers forms the only theory which, on the fair Baconian induction, will account for the phenomena presented. There are scientific as well as theological bigots, and both are equally puzzled to explain the facts on either set of principles to the exclusion of the other. It is chiefly, however, in regard to man that the argument acquires its great importance; as bearing directly on that first article, and fundamental support of all faith – the veritable existence of the supernatural. This is not the same with faith in the Scriptures, and yet is most intimately connected with it. With the utter rejection of the latter, must soon go all available belief in a personal deity or a personal future state; and so, on the contrary, whatever in science shuts up the soul to a clear belief in the supernatural, even in its most remote aspect, is so much gained, ultimately, for the cause of the written oracles. And this is just what geology is now doing. She proves, beyond doubt, the late introduction of man upon the earth, and thus compels us to admit the most supernatural of all known events within a period comparatively very near to our own. The fact that, after a very few thousand years, the light of history is quenched in total darkness, presenting no farther trace of man or human things, goes far to prove his prior non-existence. But it might, perhaps, be maintained, that of former generations, only the merest fragments had, from time to time, survived the wreck of physical convulsions, in which all outward memoranda of their older existence had wholly perished. Such memorials, it is true, might have departed from the surface, but then geology must have found them. She has dug up abundant remains of types and orders, which, from their position in the strata, she is compelled to assign to a period anterior to that of man. There would have been no lack of zeal on the part of some of her votaries. More than once, on the supposed discovery of some old bone in a wrong place (to which it had been carried by some ordinary disturbance of the deposits), have they rejoiced thereat, "like one who findeth great spoil." But the evidence is now beyond all impeachment. Remains of every other type have been discovered. The relative periods of their different deposits have been ascertained. No stone, we may literally say it, has been left unturned; and yet, not a single joint or splinter of a human bone has been found to reward the search. The argument from this is of immense importance. The essence of all skepticism will be found, on analysis, to consist in a secret distrust of the very existence of any thing supernatural – a latent doubt whether, after all, every thing may not be nature, and nature every thing. Unnatural as it may seem, there are those who actually take delight in such a view. It hides from the consciousness a secret, yet real antipathy to the thought of a personal God, and the moral power of such an idea. Whatever disturbs this feeling excites alarm, lest all the foundations of unbelief (if we may use the word of a thing which has no foundations) should be rendered insecure by the bare possibility of such direct interference. Hence the moral power of well attested miracles, although it has been denied, even by religious writers, that there is any such moral power. It is the felt presence of a near personal Deity. It is the startling thought of the Great Life of the universe coming very nigh to us, and revealing the latent skepticism of men's souls. Although greatly transcending, it is like the effect produced by those operations of nature that startle us by their instantaneous exhibition of resistless power, and which no amount of science can prevent our regarding with reverence, or religious awe. With all our knowledge of physical laws, no man, we venture to say it, is wholly an atheist, or even a consistent naturalist, when the earth is heaving, or the lightning bolts are striking thick and fast around him.