begin with the reformation, must then occupy ourselves with
systems of philosophy, and only after their completion pass to
the political revolution. . . . Then will appear Kantians, as
little tolerant of piety in the world of deeds as in the world
of ideas, who will mercilessly upturn with sword and axe the
soil of our European life to extirpate the last remnants of
the past. Then will come upon the scene armed Fichteans, whose
fanaticism of will is to be restrained neither by fear nor
self-interest, for they live in the spirit. . . . Most of all
to be feared would be the philosophers of nature,[84:A] were
they actively to mingle. . . . For if the hand of the Kantian
strikes with strong unerring blow; if the Fichtean courageously
defies every danger, since for him danger has in reality no
existence;--the Philosopher of Nature will be terrible in that
he has allied himself with the primitive powers of nature, in
that he can conjure up the demoniac forces of old German
pantheism; and having done so, aroused in him that ancient
Germanic eagerness which combats for the joy of the combat
itself. . . . Smile not at my counsel as at the counsel of a
dreamer. . . . The thought precedes the deed as the lightning
the thunder. . . . The hour will come. As on the steps of an
amphitheater, the nations will group themselves around Germany
to witness the terrible combat."
[84:A] He refers to the followers of Schelling, who
as matter of fact had little vogue. But his words
may not unjustly be transferred to the naturalistic
schools, which have since affected German thought.
In my preoccupation with Heine, I seem to have wandered somewhat from
our immediate topic: the connection of the idealistic philosophy with
the development and organization of the national state of Germany. But
the necessity of the organized State to care for the moral interests of
mankind was an inherent part of Fichte's thought. At first, _what_ state
was a matter of indifference. In fact his sympathies were largely French
and republican. Before Jena, he writes:
"What is the nation for a truly civilized Christian European?
In a general way, Europe itself. More particularly at any time
the State which is at the head of civilization. . . . With this
cosmopolitan sense, we can be tranquil before the vicissitudes
and catastrophes of history."
In 1807 he writes:
"The distinction between Prussia and the rest of Germany is
external, arbitrary and fortuitous. The distinction between
Germany and the rest of Europe is founded in nature."
The seeming gulf between the two ideas is easily bridged. The "Addresses
on the Fundamental Features of the Present Age" had taught that the end
of humanity on earth is the establishment of a kingdom in which all
relations of humanity are determined with freedom or according to
Reason--according to Reason as conceived by the Fichtean formula. In his
"Addresses to the German Nation," in 1807-08, the unique mission of
Germany in the establishment of this kingdom is urged as a motive for
securing national unity and the overthrow of the conqueror. The Germans
are the sole people who recognize the principles of spiritual freedom,
of freedom won by action in accord with reason. Faithfulness to this
mission will "elevate the German name to that of the most glorious among
all the peoples, making this Nation the regenerator and restorer of the
world." He personifies their ancestors speaking to them, and saying: "We
in our time saved Germany from the Roman World Empire." But "yours is
the greater fortune. You may establish once for all the Kingdom of the
Spirit and of Reason, bringing to naught corporeal might as the ruling
thing in the world." And this antithesis of the Germanic and the Roman
principles has become a commonplace in the German imagination. Moreover,
for Germany to win is no selfish gain. It is an advantage to all
nations. "The great promise of a kingdom of right reason and truth on
earth must not become a vain and empty phantom; the present iron age is
but a transition to a better estate." Hence the concluding words: "There
is no middle road: If you sink, so sinks humanity entire with you,
without hope of future restoration."
The premises of the historic syllogism are plain. First, the German
Luther who saved for mankind the principle of spiritual freedom against
Latin externalism; then Kant and Fichte, who wrought out the principle
into a final philosophy of science, morals and the State; as conclusion,
the German nation organized in order to win the world to recognition of
the principle, and thereby to establish the rule of freedom and science
in humanity as a whole. The Germans are patient; they have a long
memory. Ideas produced when Germany was divided and broken were retained
and cherished after it became a unified State of supreme military power,
and one yielding to no other people in industrial and commercial
prosperity. In the grosser sense of the words, Germany has not held that
might makes right. But it has been instructed by a long line of
philosophers that it is the business of ideal right to gather might to
itself in order that it may cease to be merely ideal. The State
represents exactly this incarnation of ideal law and right in effective
might. The military arm is part of this moral embodiment. Let
sentimentalists sing the praises of an ideal to which no actual force
corresponds. Prussian faith in the reality and enforcement among men of
the ideal is of a more solid character. As past history is the record
of the gradual realization in the Germanic State of the divine idea,
future history must uphold and expand what has been accomplished.
Diplomacy is the veiled display of law clothed with force in behalf of
this realization, and war is its overt manifestation. That war demands
self-sacrifice is but the more convincing proof of its profound
morality. It is the final seal of devotion to the extension of the
kingdom of the Absolute on earth.
For the philosophy stands or falls with the conception of an Absolute.
Whether a philosophy of absolutes is theoretically sound or unsound is
none of my present concern. But that philosophical absolutism may be
practically as dangerous as matter of fact political absolutism history
testifies. The situation puts in relief what finally is at issue between
a theory which is pinned to a belief in an Absolute beyond history and
behind experience, and one which is frankly experimental. For any
philosophy which is not consistently experimental will always traffic in
absolutes no matter in how disguised a form. In German political
philosophy, the traffic is without mask.
III
THE GERMANIC PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
The unity of the German people longed for and dreamed of after 1807
became an established fact through the war of 1870 with France. It is
easy to assign symbolic significance to this fact. Ever since the time
of the French Revolution--if not before--German thought has taken shape
in conflict with ideas that were characteristically French and in sharp
and conscious antithesis to them. Rousseau's deification of Nature was
the occasion for the development of the conception of Culture. His
condemnation of science and art as socially corrupting and socially
divisive worked across the Rhine to produce the notion that science and
art are the forces which moralize and unify humanity. The
cosmopolitanism of the French Enlightenment was transformed by German
thinkers into a self-conscious assertion of nationalism. The abstract
Rights of Man of the French Revolution were set in antithesis to the
principle of the rights of the citizen secured to him solely by the
power of the politically organized nation. The deliberate breach of the
revolutionary philosophy with the past, the attempt (foreshadowed in the
philosophy of Descartes) to make a _tabula rasa_ of the fortuitous
assemblage of traditions and institutions which history offers, in order
to substitute a social structure built upon Reason, was envisaged as the
_fons et origo_ of all evil. That history is itself incarnate reason;
that history is infinitely more rational than the formal abstracting and
generalizing reason of individuals; that individual mind becomes
rational only through the absorption and assimilation of the universal
reason embodied in historic institutions and historic development,
became the articles of faith of the German intellectual creed. It is
hardly an exaggeration to say that for almost a century the
characteristic philosophy of Germany has been a philosophy of history
even when not such in apparent form.
Yet the meaning of this appeal to history is lost unless we bear in mind
that the Enlightenment after all transmitted to Germany, from medieval
thought, its foundation principle. The appeal was not from reason to
experience, but from analytic thought (henceforth condemned to be merely
"Understanding"--"_Verstand_") to an absolute and universal Reason
(_Vernunft_) partially revealed in nature and more adequately manifested
in human history as an organic process. Recourse to history was required
because not of any empirical lessons it has to teach, nor yet because
history bequeathes to us stubborn institutions which must be reckoned
with, but because history is the dynamic and evolving realization of
immanent reason. The contrast of the German attitude with that of Edmund
Burke is instructive. The latter had the same profound hostility to
cutting loose from the past. But his objection was not that the past is
an embodiment of transcendent reason, but that its institutions are an
"inheritance" bequeathed to us from the "collected wisdom" of our
forefathers. The continuity of political life centers not about an inner
evolving Idea, but about "our hearths, our sepulchers and our altars."
He has the same suspicion of abstract rights of man. But his appeal is
to experience and to practical consequences. Since "circumstances give
in reality to every principle its distinguishing color and
discriminating effect," there is no soundness in any principle when "it
stands stripped of every relation in all the nakedness and solitude of
metaphysical abstraction."
According to the German view, the English protested because of
interference with empirically established rights and privileges; the
Germans, because they perceived in the Revolution a radical error as to
the nature and work of reason. In point of fact, the Germans never made
that break with tradition, political or religious, of which the French
Revolution is an emphatic symbol. I have already referred to Kant's
disposition to regard church dogmas (of which, as dogmas, he
disapproved) as vehicles of eternal spiritual truths--husks to preserve
an inner grain. All of the great German idealists gave further
expression to this disposition. To Hegel, for example, the substance of
the doctrines of Protestant Christianity is identical with the truths of
absolute philosophy, except that in religion they are expressed in a
form not adequate to their meaning, the form, namely, of imaginative
thought in which most men live. The disposition to philosophize
Christianity is too widely shown in Germany to be dismissed as a
cowardly desire at accommodation with things established. It shows
rather an intellectual piety among a people where freedom of thought and
conscience had been achieved without a violent political upheaval. Hegel
finds that the characteristic weakness of Romance thought was an inner
split, an inability to reconcile the spiritual and absolute essence of
reality with which religion deals with the detailed work of intelligence
in science and politics. The Germans, on the contrary, "were predestined
to be the bearers of the Christian principle and to carry out the Idea
as the absolutely Rational end." They accomplished this, not by a flight
away from the secular world, but by realizing that the Christian
principle is in itself that of the unity of the subjective and the
objective, the spiritual and the worldly. The "spirit finds the goal of
its struggle, its harmony, in that very sphere which it made the object
of its resistance,--it finds that secular pursuits are a spiritual
occupation";--a discovery, surely, which unites simplicity with
comprehensiveness and one which does not lead to criticism of the
secular pursuits carried on. Whatever is to be said of this as
philosophy, it expresses, in a way, the quality of German life and
thought. More than other countries, Germany has had the fortune to
preserve as food for its imaginative life and as emotional sanction the
great ideas of the past. It has carried over their reinforcement into
the pursuit of science and into politics--into the very things which in
other countries, notably in the Latin countries, have been used as
weapons of attack upon tradition.
Political development tells a somewhat similar tale. The painful
transition from feudalism to the modern era was, for the most part,
accomplished recently in Germany, and accomplished under the guidance of
established political authorities instead of by revolt against them.
Under their supervision, and mainly at their initiative, Germany has
passed in less than a century to the regime of modern capitalistic
competitive enterprise, moderated by the State, out of the dominion of
those local and guild restrictions which so long held economic activity
in corporate bonds. The governing powers themselves secured to members
of the State what seems, at least to Germans, to be a satisfying degree
of political freedom. Along with this absence of internal disturbance
and revolution, we must put the fact that every step in the development
of Germany as a unified political power has been effected by war with
some of the neighbors by which it is hemmed in. There stands the
unfolding sequence: 1815 (not to go back to Frederick the Great), 1864,
1866, 1870. And the significant thing about these wars is not that
external territory was annexed as their consequence, but the rebound of
external struggle upon the achieving of internal unity. No wonder the
German imagination has been impressed with the idea of an organic
evolution from within, which takes the form of a unity achieved through
conflict and the conquest of an opposing principle.
Such scattering comments as these prove nothing. But they suggest why
German thought has been peculiarly sensitive to the idea of historic
continuity; why it has been prone to seek for an original implicit
essence which has progressively unfolded itself in a single development.
It would take much more than an hour to give even a superficial account
of the growth of the historical sciences and historic methods of Germany
during the first half of the eighteenth century. It would involve an
account of the creation of philology, and the philological methods which
go by the name of higher criticism; of their extension to archeology; of
the historic schools of jurisprudence and political economy, as well as
of the ways in which such men as Niebuhr, Mommsen and Ranke remade the
methods of studying the past. I can only say here that Germany developed
such an effective historical technique that even mediocre men achieved
respectable results; and, much more significantly, that when Taine made
the remark (quoted earlier) that we owe to the Germany of the half
century before 1830 all our distinctively modern ideas, his remarks
apply above all to the disciplines concerned with the historical
development of mankind.
The bases of this philosophy are already before us. Even in Kant we find
the idea of a single continuous development of humanity, as a progress
from a reign of natural instinct to a final freedom won through
adherence to the law of reason. Fichte sketched the stages already
traversed on this road and located the point at which mankind now
stands. In his later writings, the significance of history as the
realization of the absolute purpose is increasingly emphasized. History
is the continuous life of a divine Ego by which it realizes in fact what
it is in idea or destiny. Its phases are successive stages in the
founding of the Kingdom of God on earth. It and it only is the
revelation of the Absolute. Along with this growing deification of
history is the increased significance attached to nationalism in general
and the German nation in particular. The State is the concrete
individual interposed between generic humanity and particular beings. In
his words, the national folk is the channel of divine life as it pours
into particular finite human beings. He says:
"While cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose
of the existence of humanity be actually realized in humanity,
patriotism is the will that this end be first realized in the
particular nation to which we ourselves belong, and that this
achievement _thence_ spread over the entire race."
Since the State is an organ of divinity, patriotism is religion. As the
Germans are the only truly religious people, they alone are truly
capable of patriotism. Other peoples are products of external causes;
they have no self-formed Self, but only an acquired self due to general
convention. In Germany there is a self which is self-wrought and
self-owned. The very fact that Germany for centuries has had no external
unity proves that its selfhood is metaphysical, not a gift of
circumstance. This conception of the German mission has been combined
with a kind of anthropological metaphysics which has become the rage in
Germany. The Germans alone of all existing European nations are a pure
race. They alone have preserved unalloyed the original divine deposit.
Language is the expression of the national soul, and only the Germans
have kept their native speech in its purity. In like vein, Hegel
attributes the inner disharmony characteristic of Romance peoples to the
fact that they are of mixed Germanic and Latin blood. A purely
artificial cult of race has so flourished in Germany that many social
movements--like anti-Semitism--and some of Germany's political ambitions
cannot be understood apart from the mystic identification of Race,
Culture and the State. In the light of actual science, this is so
mythological that the remark of an American periodical that race means a
number of people reading the same newspapers is sober scientific fact
compared with it.[101:A]
[101:A] Chamberlain, for example, holds that Jesus must have
been of Teutonic birth--a perfect logical conclusion from the
received philosophy of the State and religion. Quite aware
that there is much Slav blood in northern Germany and Romance
blood in southern Germany, he explains that while with other
peoples crossing produces a mongrel race, the potency of the
German blood is such that cross-breeding strengthens it. While
at one time he explains the historic strength of the Jew on
the ground that he has kept his race pure, another place he
allows his indignation at the Jews to lead him to include them
among the most mongrel of all peoples. To one thing he remains
consistent: By the very essence of race, the Semites represent
a metaphysical principle inherently hostile to the grand
Germanic principle. It perhaps seems absurd to dignify the
vagaries of this garrulous writer, but according to all report
the volumes in which such expressions occur, "The Foundations
of the Nineteenth Century," has had august approval and much
vogue.
At the beginning of history Fichte placed an "_Urvolk_." His account of
it seems an attempt to rationalize at one stroke the legends of the
Golden Age, the Biblical account of man before the Fall and Rousseau's
primitive "state of nature." The _Urvolk_ lived in a paradise of
innocence, a paradise without knowledge, labor or art. The philosophy
which demands such a Folk is comparatively simple. Except as a
manifestation of Absolute Reason, humanity could not exist at all. Yet
in the first stage of the manifestation, Reason could not have been
appropriated by the self-conscious effort of man. It existed without
consciousness of itself, for it was given, not, like all true
self-consciousness, won by morally creative struggle. Rational in
substance, in form it was but feeling or instinct. In a sense, all
subsequent history is but a return to this primitive condition. But
"humanity must make the journey on its own feet; by its own strength it
must bring itself back to that state in which it was once without its
own cooperating labor. . . . If humanity does not recreate its own true
being, it has no real life." While philosophy compels us to assume a
Normal People who, by "the mere fact of their existence, without science
and art, found themselves in a state of perfectly developed reason,"
there is no ground for not admitting the existence at the same time of
"timid and rude earth-born savages." Thus the original state of humanity
would have been one of the greatest possible inequality, being divided
between the Normal Folk existing as a manifestation of Reason and the
wild and savage races of barbarism.
In his later period of inflamed patriotism this innocuous speculation
grew a sting. He had determined that the present age--the Europe of the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution--is the age of liberation from
the external authority in which Reason had presented itself in the
second age. Hence it is inherently negative: "an age of absolute
indifference toward the Truth, an age of entire and unrestrained
licentiousness." But the further evolution of the Divine Idea demands a
Folk which has retained the primitive principle of Reason, which may
redeem, therefore, the corrupt and rebellious modes of humanity
elsewhere existing. Since the Germans are this saving remnant, they are
the _Urvolk_, the Normal Nation, of the modern period. From this point
on, idealization of past Germanic history and appeal to the nation to
realize its unique calling by victory over Napoleon blend.
The Fichtean scaffolding tumbled, but these ideas persisted. I doubt if
it is possible to exaggerate the extent to which German history has
been systematically idealized for the last hundred years. Technically
speaking, the Romantic movement may have passed away and an age of
scientific history dawned. Actually the detailed facts have been
depicted by use of the palette of Romanticism. Space permits but one
illustration which would be but a literary curiosity were it not fairly
typical. Tacitus called his account of the northern barbarians
Germania--an unfortunate title in view of later developments. The
characteristics assigned by him to the German tribes are such as any
anthropologist could duplicate from any warlike barbaric tribe. Yet over
and over again these traits (which Tacitus idealized as Cooper, say,
idealized the North American Indian traits) are made the basis of the
philosophic history of the German people. The Germans, for example, had
that psychological experience now known as mana, manitou, tabu, etc.
They identified their gods, in Tacitus' phrase, with "that mystery which
they perceive by experiencing sacred fear." This turns out to be the
germinal deposit of spiritual-mindedness which later showed itself in
Luther and in the peculiar genius of the Germans for religious
experience.
The following words are from no less an authority than Pfleiderer:
"Cannot we recognize in this point that truly German
characteristic of _Innerlichkeit_ which scorns to fix for
sensuous perception the divine something which makes itself
felt in the depths of the sensitive soul, which scorns to drag
down the sublime mystery of the unknowable to the vulgar
distinctness of earthly things? The fact that the Germans
attached but little importance to religious ceremonies accords
with this view."
To others, this sense of mystery is a prophetic anticipation of the
Kantian thing-in-itself.