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IN proposing a series of articles on the moral uses of things, particularly the dark things of the world, I assume the reality of final causes without argument. Our pantheistic literature, and many of our late philosophers, it is well known, disallow final causes altogether, treating them, in fact with disrespect, as being only feeble and fond conceits that have amused the fancy of religious people heretofore, but are now to be dismissed. I do not write for such. But what we all see with our eyes I think I have some right to assume, namely, that this whole flame of being is bedded in Mind. Matter itself is not more evident than the mind that shapes it, fills it, and holds it in training for its uses. Philosophy itself, call it positive or by any other name, is possible only in the fact, that the world is cognate with mind and cast in the molds of intelligence.
And then, as it belongs inherently to mind that it must have it's ends, the All-Present mind must have reference to ends, and the whole system of causes must at bottom be, exactly as we see it to be, a system of final causes. That the philosophers discard them ought, accordingly, to cost us no concern, for they have a wondrously copious ability to assert themselves; which they have kept on doing and will, rolling in their tidal sweep of conviction from every point of time, and all structural things, and organic workings of the creation.
Speculation can as well keep out the sea.
The dark things of which I am to speak are such, in general, as have some relation more or less perceptible to, or connection with Moral Evil, which is, in fact, the the night-side of the creation. All the enigmas and lowering difficulties we meet are shadows from this; for it is to meet the conditions and prepare the discipline of this, that so many rough, unseemly kinds of furniture are required. Pursuing the logical method, I ought, therefore, to begin with an introductory chapter on moral evil itself, or, at least, on the uses of that probational training of liberty that involves so great peril, and the certainty of such unspeakable disaster. But I prefer, on the whole, not to observe the logical method, lest, by seeming to be engaged in the heavy work of a treatise, I make all the subjects heavy and dry in proportion. They have each an interest more fresh and peculiar when taken by itself. I propose to call them up, therefore, in a perfectly miscellaneous way, taking the lighter and less troublesome, and the darker and more difficult--those which lie in nature and its appointments, those which lie in the fortunes of individual and social experience, and those which relate to the scheme of Providence-without regard to order, and as mere convenience may direct. In this way I propose, for the present article, a subject not generally felt to be at all dark or difficult, and only just over the line, when it is more closely and thoughtfully considered, namely, Night and Sleep.
I put the two together because they are so closely related, one being a fact of external nature, provided for in the astronomic appointments of nature, the other being a corresponding appointment of our psychological system itself, only somewhat more absolute than the other. For, within the polar circles, the astronomic night is continuous for six long months, while the psychological necessities of sleep maintain their period unchanged, and the human populations are obliged to seize a night about once in twenty-four hours, when no such night is provided by the diurnal revolutions. In which we see that our human body and mind have a night appointment in them, more unvarying and fixed than the planetary night itself. So that if we raise the question whether our psychologic nature is timed by the planetary order, or the planetary order timed to :fit our psychologic nature, we are thrown upon the latter supposition, by the fact that our sleep has reasons more absolute and more inherent than the reasons even of the astronomic order itself. Still the night we have without, and the night we inherently want, are really coincident, in all the more habitable parts of the earth.
But if the question be, why it is, either that any such institution of night is appointed, or any such want as sleep prescribed, we encounter some difficulty. As regards the former, it is no sufficient answer to say that the revolution of the earth, turning it away just half the time from the sun, creates a night by astronomic necessity; for the astronomic system might, perhaps, have been differently organized, or so as to maintain a perpetual day; every habitable orb, for example, having for its sun a vast concave orb shining perpetually round it, and creating neither night, nor shadow, nor region of polar cold. As regards the latter, too, the want of rest and sleep, it does not appear that our body and mind might not both have been so organized as to be capable of perpetual action, without either exhaustion or weariness. And since we are put here, not for rest, but for action, by that only winning the required character, and becoming what is given us to be, why are we not made capable of sleepless activity. If our errand here is the trial and training of our liberty, we are neither being tried nor trained, when our very liberty itself is sunk in a state of unconsciousness. Such a state wants relativity, we might say, to the errand on which we are sent, and the time thus occupied is lost time. And when the creation puts out its lights and commands us away into a state of oblivion, what is that oblivion but a state in which we are to drop, and even forget, our errand?
Besides, there will appear to many to be something fearful and forbidding in the expression of darkness. Children are commonly afraid of the dark, and even Holy Scripture makes the state of "outer darkness" an image of all that is most terrible in God's retributions. And what shall we say of that mental and bodily state in which the senses are shut up, and reason itself gone out, and nothing left of a nature so high in dignity but a mere palpitating clod 1 What do we say of one who habitually drowns his higher nature in a similar condition of stupefaction by the excesses of intemperance 1 And if this be a crime, as it is by the general consent of mankind, is it not remarkable that half the world's population is, all the while, laid prostrate and senseless, by a soporific planned for, in the economy both of heaven and of their own bodies?
Besides, night is itself the opportunity of crime, and we even speak of crimes in a general way as being deeds of darkness.
"Oh treacherous night!
Thou lendest thy ready vail to every treason,
And teeming mischiefs thrive beneath thy shade."
Incendiaries, thieves, robbers, assassins, go to their deeds under shelter of the night, and even prefer a specially dark night. Adulteries are stolen pleasures of the night. It is in the night that great conspiracies are hatched. ·Where crimes are committed by day, the absconding is commonly by night. And there is still another reason for this crowding of crime into the dark hours, in the fact that the world is then asleep, and the particular victims selected will then be locked in a state of unconsciousness - inobservant as in death itself and passive to whatever wrong will make them its prey. Since the world, then, is made, as we know it to be, for the trial of creatures who will be in wrong, why is it made to cover wrong-doing a full half of the time, and furnish it an opportunity so convenient?
Or, if we must be creatures of sleep, why is it that the law of sleep is not made absolute upon all, so that the bad shall be taken into custody by it, as the innocent and good are made defenseless by it? for then the nights could settle down upon the world as times of truce for all wrong-doing. "When, too, we create a special palace for the night, what is the implication, but that we impeach the care of Providence by proposing to supply one of its considerable defects .ourselves? As if it belonged to us to assume the defense of innocence, now that Providence has taken away its shield! Is there not, also, another deed of darkness, not commonly so named, but thought of with eminent respect, and which, partly for that reason, is, morally speaking, more harmful? I refer to the untimely shows and bewildering dissipations of what is called fashionable society. It is very true that we do not want the whole twelve hours for sleep. And the evening, after the great works of the day are finished, is a time favorable above all others to the genuine pleasures of society. But this is not the way .of those who rule the mode and claim the chief honors of society. It is not the faces and voices of friends, or the lively cheer of intellectual and social play, that meets their idea; they are commonly incapable of any so fine sort of pleasure. They do not so much care to be freshened, as to be in figure. Naturalness they despise, and the more artificially got every thing may be, to make up the desired show, the better. Their time must be taken against nature; for society, they think, would be a tame affair, submitted to the appointments of astronomy. And what so fit time, or time so finely exclusive, is there, as when the common world is stilled in sleep? By the brilliancy of their lights, and by figures floating in dress and glittering in gems, can they not make a show more dazzling than day? Entertainment is the same thing as expense, and a crowd they call society. Their time begins just where the evening ends, and the throng disperses for sleep, when sleep might better end. The young men and women of sixty-for, in this high tier of fashion, it is not permissible to be old-are too bitterly fagged and jaded to sleep, and the really young have their heads too full of excitement. Sleep, at least, is long in coming, and comes more as a fever than as a refreshment. At length, when the dew is dried up and .every bird is wearied with its song, the young frivolity, be it man or woman, rises to begin another day. The brain is sore;
the day is dull or only enlivened by fretfulness. There is no relish for either business or study, and no capacity for it; and where the dissipation is frequent, no habit of order and right industry can survive. Life will become as trivial as it is artificial.
What substitute would have been sought, if no such opportunity of night bad been given, we can not pretend to say; but this we sufficiently know, that no kind of substitute could produce a more wide-spread, practically immense demoralization, in the same high circles of life. It changes, in fact, the general cast of society. There is, besides, no mode of character so heartless and false and cruel, as that of high fashion, or so totally opposite to all the noblest, best ends of living.
Going on from this point, now, to speak of the moral uses of night and sleep, we have it, first of all, to say, as regards the bad opportunities they give, that such opportunities are not bad, but are only made so by the abuses of wrong; for what best thing is there which wrong may not abuse? The very system of moral liberty supposes that wrong is going to have, or at least, make, its opportunities. And since we are all in wrong as being under evil, how shall we be made to understand more impressively what is in all wrong, than "'hen we and society are its victims? We are put in moral society, in fact, to act and be acted upon as in terms of duty~existing alone, no terms of duty would be given-and a great part of the benefit is to be, that we get revelations of wrong, and become so revolted by it as to be turned away ii'om it. And what revelations can be more effective than to see it stealing upon innocence in'deeds of midnight robbery and murder, slowing how cruel and cowardly and detestably mean it is; or to see it crowding society out of heaven's times, and turning it into a pageant of the night, as remote as possible from the sobrieties of reason, and the sweet simplicity of virtue?
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