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But the fool has never lived; life, said Bichat, is the totality of the functions; his past has endured no more organization than his future has; he never understood it; he can make no use of it; so he deifies it, and burns the flying moment like a joss-stick before the wooden image in which he has caricatured all its sweet and beneficent capabilities; as if it were likely that one moment of his existence could be of any more weight than another.
The universal Idea exists thus as the substantial totality of things on the one side, and as the abstract essence of free volition on the other. This reflection of the mind on itself is individual self-consciousness the polar-opposite of the Idea in its general form and therefore existing in absolute limitation.
Not only is time required for the mere process of collecting data, of assorting and testing the numerous statements, always imperfect and often conflicting, which form the material for history, but a certain and not very short interval must be permitted to elapse during which men's brains and feelings may return to normal conditions, and permit the various incidents which have exalted or depressed them to be seen in their totality, as well as in their true relative importance.
Here we feel only a vivid aspiration to produce in us this harmony of which we had in the other case the consciousness and reality; to make of ourselves a single and same totality; to realize in ourselves the idea of humanity as a complete expression.
Gall, however, has shewn, by induction from a vast number of actual cases, that there is a part of the brain devoted to perception, and that even this is subdivided into portions which are respectively dedicated to the reception of different sets of ideas, as those of form, size, colour, weight, objects in their totality, events in their progress or occurrence, time, musical sounds, &c.
An invisible thread unwinds itself throughout all time, across this immense diversity, and presents to us as a definite result, a continual progress in the development of which man is the term, of which the four classes of vertebrates are intermediate forms, and the totality of invertebrate animals the constant accessory accompaniment."
The slightest suspicion of pluralism, the minutest wiggle of independence of any one of its parts from the control of the totality, would ruin it. Absolute unity brooks no degrees as well might you claim absolute purity for a glass of water because it contains but a single little cholera-germ.
The nature of Man as Man is no mere common measure of these particular natures, but is rather what I may call their organised totality, the many-sided nature which includes, explains, and even justifies them all. What perfection may mean when we predicate the term of our common nature, we cannot even imagine.
For the possibility of the conditioned presupposes the totality of its conditions, but not of its consequences. Consequently, this conception is not a transcendental idea and it is with these alone that we are at present occupied.
This "totality" is neither good nor bad, but made up indifferently of all manner of components, and according to Pantheism all of them the evil as much as the good are necessary to the perfection of the whole. Thus the pantheist's god has no moral complexion, and such a god is of no use to us. So far as religion is concerned, he or it might just as well be non-existent as non-moral.
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