CONCORD SCHOOL

Dr. M'Cosh, President of Andover College, U.S., recently delivered a lecture at Concord to an audience composed largely of sceptics. The lecture was remarkable for the eclectic spirit pervading it, and especially for the acceptance in the main of the "grand ideas" associated with the name of Emerson. Coming from a Presbyterian divine, who has hitherto been regarded as the champion of orthodoxy, and one of the ablest defenders of it against rationalism, scepticism and even Emersonian transcendentalism, this address will excite a good deal of attention in religious circles.
 "For myself," he said, "I believe with Plato, and, I may add, with the Concord school, that there is a grand and, indeed, a divine idea in the mind, formed after the image of God and pervading all nature ; but I wish that idea in the mind carefully examined and its form or law exactly determined, and it is for inductive science, and not speculation, to tell us what are the laws and types which represent it in nature. I hold, with Aristotle, that there are formal and final, as well as material and efficient causes in nature, but it is for a careful induction to determine the relations of these, and to show how matter and force are made to work for order and ends. I am as sure as Descartes was that there is in the mind a germ of the idea of the infinite and the perfect, but I take my own way of showing what is the nature of these ideas, so as to keep us from drawing extravagant inferences from them. I see, as Leibnitz did, a pre-established harmony in nature, but it consists mainly not in things acting independently of each other, but in things being made to act on each other. I attach as much importance to experience as Locke did, but I maintain that observation shows us principles in the mind prior to all experience. I allow to Kant his forms and his categories and his ideas, but their nature is to be discovered by induction, when it will be found that they do not superinduce qualities or things, but simply enable us to perceive what is in things. I believe, with Schelling, in intuition, looking at realities. I am constrained to hold with Hegel that there is an Absolute, but I believe that our knowledge is finite, implying an infinite, and that this doctrine can be so enunciated as to issue in pantheism. I reject with the school of Concord a sensationalism which derives all our ideas from the senses, and a materialism which developes mind out of molecules; but I am anxious that the physiology of the nerves and brain should aid us in finding out the operation of the laws of the mind. I turn away in scorn from the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, but I believe they have done good by calling attention to the existence of evil, to remove which is an end worthy of the labors and suffering of the Son of God. I believe with Herbert Spencer in a vast unknown, above, beneath and around us, but I rejoice in the light shining in the darkness. With all unsophisticated men, I see a power above nature in nature, but I reject the doctrine of 'gods many and lords many,' as held by the majority of nations. I am willing to accept the whole body of grand ideas which the Concord school has been holding before the eyes of the Americans for the past age ; but it is because I believe they have a place in the mind, and I am not always willing to take them in the form in which they have been put. I receive with gratitude the whole casket of gems which Emerson has left us as a rich inheritance, but before they can constitute a philosophy they must be cut and set, and they will require a skilful hand to adjust them, and, if they are cut, it must be as carefully as diamonds are, and then only to show forth more fully their true form and beauty."


Leader (Melbourne, Vic. : 1862 - 1918, 1935), Saturday 16 December 1882, page 35