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It is a singular fact that, at a time when allegory was the characteristic literary form, it was yet so impossible even for the finer spirits to follow a train of thought clearly and consistently, that it was only when a mind passed beyond the limitations of its own age, and assumed a position sub specie aeternitatis, that it was able to free itself from the prevalent confusion of the imaginary and the real, the word and the idea, and to perceive that success in allegory depends, not on the chaotic intermingling of the attributes of the type and the thing typified, but on so representing the one as to suggest and illuminate the other.
He views these things, as the old phrase puts it, "sub specie aeternitatis", from the outlook of eternity. Right and wrong do not meet at infinity. There is no higher synthesis that can make them one and the same thing. Everything with Jesus is Theocentric, and until God changes there will be no very great change in right and wrong.
But they may be advised to go again and more often than is now the fashion to the writings of those men who found for their own time, a real significance, who could formulate a saving doctrine, and who could give to literature what it chiefly lacks to-day, a core of ethical conviction and a view of man in his world sub specie aeternitatis.
That which has been the typical contribution of the religious perceptions in the past, namely, the comprehensive vision of life and the world and time sub specie aeternitatis is here abandoned. Eternity is unreal or empty; we never heard the music of the spheres. We are facing at this moment a disintegrating age. Here is a prime reason for it.
Hence, just as Spinoza saw everything sub specie aeternitatis, we may very well have a tendency to see many things sub specie novi. New things, astonishingly new things, in every imaginable department of life have been witnessed by men who saw the opening years of the century, and fin-de-siècle as we are, the capacities of man are apparently as inexhaustible as ever.
That the one dream, seen sub specie aeternitatis, is any more empty and fatuous than the other, would be very difficult to prove. The sentimental imagination of the eighteenth century was fond of dwelling upon the loneliness of the princely station.
In a sense, then, he was a man with the limitations of his place and time, as, in truth, was Shakspere. But the study of literature instructs us that it is exactly those who most vitally grasp and voice their own land and period, who are apt to give a comprehensive view of humanity at large; to present man sub specie aeternitatis.
It was aiming at a state of things under which the joys and pains, the teaching and the risks of true possession, were to be for ever shut off from the poor human will, which yet, according to him, could never do without them, if man was to be man. So that he saw it all sub specie aeternitatis, as a matter not of economic theory, but rather of religion.
If we could behold the drama of existence sub specie aeternitatis, we might be able to understand how Divine omniscience can co-exist with human freedom; as it is, we can only say, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for us it is high, and we cannot attain unto it." We know that we cannot know.
In attributing to the fixed stars only the most perfect motion that which is on the same spot or circulating around the same he might perhaps have said that to 'the spectator of all time and all existence, to borrow once more his own grand expression, or viewed, in the language of Spinoza, 'sub specie aeternitatis, they were still at rest, but appeared to move in order to teach men the periods of time.
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