When this is attempted, or when the understanding in its SYNTHESIS with the personal will, usurps the supremacy of the reason, or affects to supersede the reason, it is then what St. Paul calls the mind of the flesh ([Greek text]), or the wisdom of this world. The result is, that the reason is superfinite; and in this relation, its antagonist is the insubordinate understanding, or mind of the flesh.
IV. Reason, as one with the absolute will (IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE LOGOS, AND THE LOGOS WAS WITH GOD, AND THE LOGOS WAS GOD), and therefore for man the certain representative of the will of God, is above the will of man as an individual will. We have seen in III. that it stands in antagonism to all mere particulars; but here it stands in antagonism to all mere individual interests as so many selves, to the personal will as seeking its objects in the manifestation of itself for itself--sit pro ratione voluntas;--whether this be realised with adjuncts, as in the lust of the flesh, and in the lust of the eye; or without adjuncts, as in the thirst and pride of power, despotism, egoistic ambition. The fourth antagonist, then, of reason, is the lust of the will.
Corollary. Unlike a million of tigers, a million of men is very different from a million times one man. Each man in a numerous society is not only coexistent with, but virtually organised into, the multitude of which he is an integral part. His idem is modified by the alter. And there arise impulses and objects from this SYNTHESIS of the alter et idem, myself and my neighbour. This, again, is strictly analogous to what takes place in the vital organisation of the individual man. The cerebral system of the nerves has its correspondent ANTITHESIS in the abdominal system: but hence arises a SYNTHESIS of the two in the pectoral system as the intermediate, and, like a drawbridge, at once conductor and boundary.
In the latter, as objectised by the former, arise the emotions, the affections, and, in one word, the passions, as distinguished from the cognitions and appetites. Now, the reason has been shown to be superindividual, generally, and therefore not less so when the form of an individualisation subsists in the alter than when it is confined to the idem; not less when the emotions have their conscious or believed object in another, than when their subject is the individual personal self. For though these emotions, affections, attachments, and the like, are the prepared ladder by which the lower nature is taken up into, and made to partake of, the highest room--as we are taught to give a feeling of reality to the higher per medium commune with the lower, and thus gradually to see the reality of the higher (namely, the objects of reason), and finally to know that the latter are indeed, and pre-eminently real, as if you love your earthly parents whom you see, by these means you will learn to love your Heavenly Father who is invisible;--yet this holds good only so far as the reason is the president, and its objects the ultimate aim; and cases may arise in which the Christ as the Logos, or Redemptive Reason, declares, HE THAT LOVES FATHER OR ANOTHER MORE THAN ME, IS NOT WORTHY OF ME; nay, he that can permit his emotions to rise to an equality with the universal reason, is in enmity with that reason.
Here, then, reason appears as the love of God; and its antagonist is the attachment to individuals wherever it exists in diminution of, or in competition with, the love which is reason.
