WE have spoken of the evidences of the æsthetic being found in the mysterious depths of human personality, pre-existent to the individual understanding (which is a growth in time); and that, without there were this æsthetic being, underlying all _individual_ consciousness, there would be no standard of human virtue or art.
This æsthetic person has also (previous to the development of the understanding, which makes the synthesis of himself and nature) an impulsive force, instinct with the desire to change his conditions. Man does not appear in the world merely as sensibility to enjoyment and suffering; but as veritable force, as well, whose action must produce an effect either orderly or disorderly.
The material universe is composed of forces, limiting in a measure personal force. All material forces are uniform and necessary and correlative in their action, which is impressed upon them from without themselves. Man alone is self-active, and may clash with the other forces to his own pain, and he will often do so, until by knowledge of them he can harmonize with them, and make them his own instrumentality to satisfy his æsthetic nature. We call this self-activity of man, which is in such vital union with his sensibility, the human will, and it makes the personal life of every one to learn this self-activity of his, in its differences from and relations to all other forces, as he can only do perfectly by keeping in intellectual and sympathetic social relation with other æsthetic persons. In every individual case, he finds himself in these relations with fellow-beings who have more or less of the knowledge he has not; and some of them have all the responsibility of his actions until he has begun to know himself in discrimination from the material universe and its fixed relations and laws, which serve as a fulcrum for his own effective action among them. The one central unity whose æsthetic being and will are inclusive of himself and fellow-beings as subject, on the one hand, and of the material universe as object, on the other, is God.
The absoluteness of man as a force, is no less certain because he is finite and not omnipotent. God is the omnipotent maker of the material universe, but man is not absolutely made; he is a cause, that is, _created to make_, if we may credit the ancient prophet, whose hymn of creation is the most wonderful expression of human genius, unless it be surpassed by the proem of St. John's Gospel, which is a correspondent poem, with God for its theme instead of man and nature.