Earthly mystery
therefore is the special sphere of realism. The borderland of the
unknown or the irreducible is its realm. This old residuum, this new
material, is not yet capable of art. Hence, too, realism in this sense
characterizes ages of expansion of knowledge such as ours. The new
information which is the fruit of our wide travel, of our research into
the past, has enlarged the problem of man's life by showing us both
primitive and historical humanity in its changeful phases of progress
working out the beast; and this new interest has been reenforced by the
attention paid, under influences of democracy and philanthropy, to the
lower and baser forms of life in the masses under civilization, which
has been a new revelation of persistent savagery in our midst. Here
realism illustrates its service as a gatherer of knowledge which may
hereafter be reduced to orderliness by idealistic processes, for
idealism is the organizer of all knowledge. But apart from this incoming
of facts, or of laws not yet harmonized in the whole body of law, for
which we may have fair hope that a synthesis will be found, there
remains forever that residuum of which I spoke, which has resisted the
intelligence of man, age after age, from the first throb of feeling,
the first ray of thought; that involuntary evil, that unmerited
suffering, that impotent pain,--the human debris of the social
process,--which is a challenge to the power of God, and a cry to the
heart of man that broods over it in vain, yet cannot choose but hear.
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