by which individuals attached themselves to a chieftain. Thus early was
marked out the fidelity or loyalty, _Treue_, which is uniquely
Germanic--although some warlike tribes among our Indians carried the
system still further. I can allow myself but one more example of the way
in which the philosophic sophistication of history has worked. No
historian can be unconscious of the extent to which European culture has
been genuinely European--the extent to which it derives itself from a
common heritage of the ancient world and the extent to which
intermixtures and borrowings of culture have gone on ever since. As to
Germany, however, these obvious facts have to be accommodated to the
doctrine of an original racial deposit steadily evolving from within.
The method is simple. As respects Germany, these cultural borrowings and
crosses represent the intrinsic universality of its genius. Through this
universality, the German spirit finds itself at home everywhere.
Consequently, it consciously appropriates and assimilates what other
peoples have produced by a kind of blind unconscious instinct. Thus it
was German thought which revealed the truth of Hellenic culture, and
rescued essential Christianity from its Romanized petrifaction. The
principle of Reason which French enlightenment laid hold of only in its
negative and destructive aspect, the German spirit grasped in its
positive and constructive form. Shakespeare happened to be born in
England, but only the Germans have apprehended him in his spiritual
universality so that he is now more his own than he is England's--and so
on. But with respect to other peoples, similar borrowings reveal only
their lack of inner and essential selfhood. While Luther is universal
because he is German, Shakespeare is universal because he is not
English.
I have intimated that Fichte's actual influence was limited. But his
basic ideas of the State and of history were absorbed in the philosophy
of Hegel, and Hegel for a considerable period absolutely dominated
German thinking. To set forth the ground principles of his "absolute
idealism" would be only to repeat what has already been said. Its chief
difference, aside from Hegel's encyclopedic knowledge, his greater
concrete historic interest and his more conservative temperament, is his
bottomless scorn for an Idea, an Absolute, which merely ought to be and
which is only going to be realized after a period of time. "The Actual
is the Rational and the Rational _is_ the Actual"--and the actual means
the actuating force and movement of things. It is customary to call him
an Idealist. In one sense of much abused terms, he is the greatest
realist known to philosophy. He might be called a Brutalist. In the
inquiry Bourdon carried on in Germany a few years ago (published under
the title of the "German Enigma"), he records a conversation with a
German who deplores the tendency of the Germans to forsake the solid
bone of things in behalf of a romantic shadow. As against this he
appeals to the realistic sense of Hegel, who, "in opposition to the
idealism which had lifted Germany on wings, arrayed and marshaled the
maxims of an unflinching realism. He had formulae for the justification
of facts whatever they might be. That which _is_, he would say, is
reason realized. And what did he teach? That the hour has sounded for
the third act in the drama of humanity, and that the German opportunity
is not far off. . . . I could show you throughout the nineteenth century
the torrent of political and social ideas which had their source here."
I have said that the essential points of the Fichtean philosophy of
history were taken up into the Hegelian system. This assimilation
involved, however, a rectification of an inconsistency between the
earlier and the later moral theories of Fichte. In his earlier ethical
writings, emphasis fell upon conscious moral personality--upon the
deliberate identification by the individual will of its career and
destiny with the purpose of the Absolute. In his later patriotic
philosophy, he asserts that the organized nation is the channel by
which a finite ego acquires moral personality, since the nation alone
transmits to individuals the generic principle of God working in
humanity. At the same time he appeals to the resolute will and
consciously chosen self-sacrifice of individuals to overthrow the enemy
and re-establish the Prussian state. When Hegel writes that victory has
been obtained, the war of Independence has been successfully waged. The
necessity of emphasizing individual self-assertion had given way to the
need of subordinating the individual to the established state in order
to check the disintegrating tendencies of liberalism.
Haym has said that Hegel's "Philosophy of Law" had for its task the
exhibition as the perfect work of Absolute Reason up to date of the
"practical and political condition existing in Prussia in 1821." This
was meant as a hostile attack. But Hegel himself should have been the
last to object. With his scorn for an Ideal so impotent that its
realization must depend upon the effort of private selves, an Absolute
so inconsequential that it must wait upon the accidents of future time
for manifestation, he sticks in politics more than elsewhere to the
conviction that the actual _is_ the rational. "The task of philosophy is
to comprehend that which is, for that which is, is Reason." Alleged
philosophies which try to tell what the State should be or even what a
state ought in the future to come to be, are idle fantasies. Such
attempts come too late. Human wisdom is like "the bird of Minerva which
takes its flight only at the close of day."[110:A] It comes, after the
issue, to acknowledge what has happened. "The State is the rational in
itself and for itself. Its substantial unity is an absolute end in
itself. To it belongs supreme right in respect to individuals whose
first duty is--just to be members of the State." . . . The State "is the
absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence,
truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State." It is
a commonplace of idealistic theism that nature is a manifestation of
God. But Hegel says that nature is only an externalized, unconscious and
so incomplete expression. The State has more, not less, objective
reality than physical nature, for it is a realization of Absolute
spirit in the realm of consciousness. The doctrine presents an extreme
form of the idea, not of the divine right of kings, but of the divine
right of States. "The march of God in history is the cause of the
existence of states; their foundation is the power of reason realizing
itself as will. Every state, whatever it be, participates in the divine
essence. The State is not the work of human art; only Reason could
produce it." The State is God on earth.
[110:A] Marx said of the historic schools of politics, law and
economics that to them, as Jehovah to Moses on Mt. Sinai, the
divine showed but its posterior side.
His depreciation of the individual as an individual appears in every
theme of his Philosophy of Right and History. At first sight, his theory
of great world heroes seems inconsistent with his disregard of
individuals. While the morality of most men consists simply in
assimilating into their own habits the customs already found in the
institutions about them, great men initiate new historic epochs. They
derive "their purposes and their calling not from the calm regular
course of things sanctioned by the existing order, but from a concealed
fount, from that inner spirit hidden beneath the surface, which,
striking the outer world as a shell, bursts it to pieces." The heroes
are thus the exception which proves the rule. They are world characters;
while they seem to be seeking personal interests they are really acting
as organs of a universal will, of God in his further march. In his
identification with the Absolute, the world-hero can have but one aim to
which "he is devoted regardless of all else. Such men may even treat
other great and sacred interests inconsiderately. . . . But so mighty a
form must trample down many an innocent flower--crush to pieces many an
object in its path." We are not surprised to see that Alexander, Caesar
and Napoleon are the characters he prefers to cite. One can only regret
that he died before his contemplative piety could behold Bismarck.
A large part of the intellectual machinery by which Hegel overcame the
remnants of individualism found in prior philosophy came from the idea
of organic development which had been active in German thought since the
time of Herder. In his chief work ("Ideas for a Philosophy of the
History of Humanity"), written in the closing decades of the eighteenth
century, Herder holds that history is a progressive education of
humanity. This idea, had from Lessing, is combined with the idea of
Leibniz that change is evolution, by means of an internal force, of
powers originally implicit in existence, and with the idea of Spinoza of
an all-comprehensive substance. This idea of organic growth was then
applied to language, literature and institutions. It soon obtained
reinforcement from the rising science of biology. Long before the days
of Darwin or Spencer, the idea of evolution had been a commonplace of
German thought with respect to everything concerning the history of
humanity. The notion was set in sharp antithesis to the conception of
"making" or manufacturing institutions and constitutions, which was
treated as one of the fallacies of the French philosophy of the
Enlightenment. A combination of this notion of universal organic growth
with the technique of prior idealism may fairly be said to have
determined Hegel's whole philosophy. While Leibniz and Herder had
emphasized the notion of harmony as an essential factor of the working
of organic forces, Hegel took from Fichte the notion of a unity or
synthesis arrived at by "positing," and overcoming an opposite. Struggle
for existence (or realization) was thus an "organic" part of German
thinking long before the teaching of Darwin, who, in fact, is usually
treated by German writers as giving a rather superficial empirical
expression to an idea which they had already grasped in its universal
speculative form. It is characteristic of the extent in which Hegel
thought in terms of struggle and overcoming that after stating why it
was as yet impossible to include the Americas in his philosophy of
history, and after saying that in the future the burden of world history
will reveal itself there, he surmises that it may take the form of a
"contest" between North and South America. No philosopher has ever
thought so consistently and so wholly in terms of strife and overcoming
as Hegel. When he says the "world history is the world judgment" he
means judgment in the sense of assize, and judgment as victory of one
and defeat of another--victory being the final proof that the world
spirit has now passed from one nation to take up its residence in
another. To be defeated in a way which causes the nation to take a
secondary position among nations is a sign that divine judgment has been
passed upon it. When a recent German writer argues that for Germany to
surrender any territory which it has conquered during the present war
would be sacrilegious, since it would be to refuse to acknowledge the
workings of God in human history, he speaks quite in the Hegelian vein.
Although the phenomenon of nationalism was very recent when Hegel wrote,
indeed practically contemporary with his own day, he writes in
nationalistic terms the entire history of humanity. The State is the
Individual of history: it is to history what a given man is to
biography. History gives us the progressive realization or evolution of
the Absolute, moving from one National Individual to another. It is law,
the universal, which makes the State a State, for law is reason, not as
mere subjective reflection, but in its manifestation as supreme over and
in particulars. On this account, Hegel's statement that the fundamental
principle of history is the progressive realization of freedom does not
mean what an uninstructed English reader would naturally take it to
mean. Freedom is always understood in terms of Reason. Its expression in
history means that Thought has progressively become conscious of itself;
that is, has made itself its own object. Freedom is the _consciousness_
of freedom. Liberty of action has little to do with it. Obviously it is
only in the German idealistic system--particularly in the system of
Hegel himself--that this has fully taken place. Meantime, when citizens
of a state (especially of the state in which this philosophic insight
has been achieved) take the laws of their state as their own ends and
motives of action, they attain the best possible substitute for a reason
which is its own object. They appropriate as their own personal reason
the objective and absolute Reason embodied perforce in law and custom.
After this detour, we are led back to the fact that the Germans possess
the greatest freedom yet attained by humanity, for the Prussian
political organization most fully exemplifies Law, or the Universal,
organizing under and within itself all particular arrangements of social
and personal life. Some other peoples--particularly the Latin--have
thought they could _make_ constitutions, or at least that the form of
their constitution was a matter of choice. But this is merely setting up
the private conceit of individuals against the work of Absolute Reason,
and thus marks the disintegration of a state rather than its existence.
Other peoples have tried to found the government on the consent of the
governed, unwitting of the fact that it is the government, the
_specific_ realization of Reason, which makes a state out of what is
otherwise an anarchic mass of individuals. Other peoples have made a
parliament or representative body the essential thing in government; in
philosophic reality this is only a consultative body, having as its main
function communication between classes (which are indispensable to an
"organic" state) and the real government. The chief function of
parliament is to give the opinion of the social classes an opportunity
to feel it is being considered and to enable the real government to take
advantage of whatever wisdom may chance to be expressed. Hegel seems
quite prophetic when he says: "By virtue of this participation
subjective liberty and conceit, with their general opinion, can show
themselves palpably efficacious and enjoy the satisfaction of feeling
themselves to count for something." Finally, the State becomes wholly
and completely an organized Individual only in its external relations,
its relations to other states. As his philosophy of history ignores the
past in seizing upon the national state as the unit and focus of
history, so it ignores all future possibility of a genuinely
international federation to which isolated nationalism shall be
subordinated. Bernhardi writes wholly in the Hegelian sense when he says
that to expand the idea of the State into the idea of humanity is a
Utopian error, for it would exclude the essential principle of life,
struggle.
Philosophical justification of war follows inevitably from a philosophy
of history composed in nationalistic terms. History is the movement, the
march of God on earth through time. Only one nation at a time can be the
latest and hence the fullest realization of God. The movement of God in
history is thus particularly manifest in those changes by which unique
place passes from one nation to another. War is the signally visible
occurrence of such a flight of the divine spirit in its onward movement.
The idea that friendly intercourse among all the peoples of the earth is
a legitimate aim of human effort is in basic contradiction of such a
philosophy. War is explicit realization of "dialectic," of the negation
by which a higher synthesis of reason is assured. It effectively
displays the "irony of the divine Idea." It is to national life what the
winds are to the sea, "preserving mankind from the corruption
engendered by immobility." War is the most effective preacher of the
vanity of all merely finite interests; it puts an end to that selfish
egoism of the individual by which he would claim his life and his
property as his own or as his family's. International law is not
properly law; it expresses simply certain usages which are accepted so
long as they do not come into conflict with the purpose of a state--a
purpose which always gives the supreme law of national life.
Particularly against the absolute right of the "present bearer of the
world spirit, the spirits of the other nations are absolutely without
right. The latter, just like the nations whose epochs have passed, count
no longer in universal history." Since they are already passed over from
the standpoint of the divine idea, war can do no more than exhibit the
fact that their day has come and gone. World history is the world's
judgment seat.
For a period Hegelian thought was almost supreme in Germany. Then its
rule passed away almost as rapidly as it had been achieved. After
various shiftings, the trend of philosophic thought was definitely "Back
to Kant." Kant's greater sobriety, the sharp distinction he drew
between the realm of phenomena and science and the ideal noumenal world,
commended him after the unbridled pretensions of Hegelian absolutism.
For more than a generation Hegel was spoken of with almost universal
contempt. Nevertheless his ideas, loosed from the technical apparatus
with which he surrounded them, persisted. Upon the historical
disciplines his influence was peculiarly deep and abiding. He fixed the
ideas of Fichte and fastened them together with the pin of evolution.
Since his day, histories of philosophy, or religion, or institutions
have all been treated as developments through necessary stages of an
inner implicit idea or purpose according to an indwelling law. And the
idea of a peculiar mission and destiny of German history has lost
nothing in the operation. Expressions which a bewildered world has
sought since the beginning of the war to explain through the influence
of a Darwinian struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, or
through the influence of a Nietzschean philosophy of power, have their
roots in the classic idealistic philosophy culminating in Hegel.
Kant still remains the philosopher of Germany. The division of life
between the world of sense and of mechanism and the world of the
supersensible and purpose, the world of necessity and the world of
freedom, is more congenial than a complete monism. The attempts of his
successors to bridge the gap and set up a wholly unified philosophy
failed, historically speaking. But, nevertheless, they contributed an
indispensable ingredient to the contemporary German spirit; they helped
people the Kantian void of the supersensible with the substantial
figures of the State and its Historical Evolution and Mission. Kant
bequeathed to the world an intellect devoted to the congenial task of
discovering causal law in external nature, and an inner intuition which,
in spite of its sublimity, had nothing to look at except the bare form
of an empty law of duty. Kant was kept busy in proving the existence of
this supernal but empty region. Consequently he was not troubled by
being obliged to engage in the unremunerative task of spending his time
gazing into a blank void. His successors were not so fortunate. The
existence of this ideal realm in which reason, purpose and freedom are
one was axiomatic to them; they could no longer busy themselves with
proving its existence. Some of them, called the Romanticists, filled it
with visions, more or less poetic, which frankly drew their substance
from an imagination inflamed by emotional aspiration in revolt at the
limitations of outward action. Others, called the idealistic
philosophers, filled in the void, dark because of excess of light, with
less ghostly forms of Law and the unfolding in History of Absolute Value
and Purpose. The two worlds of Kant were too far away from each other.
The later idealistic world constructions crumbled; but their debris
supplied material with which to fill in the middle regions between the
Kantian worlds of sense and of reason. This, I repeat, is their lasting
contribution to present German culture. Where Kantianism has not
received a filling in from the philosophy of history and the State, it
has remained in Germany, as elsewhere, a critique of the methodology of
science; its importance has been professional rather than human.
* * * * *
In the first lecture we set out with the suggestion of an inquiry into
the influence of general ideas upon practical affairs, upon those
larger practical affairs called politics. We appear to have concluded
with a conviction that (in the instance before us at least) politics has
rather been the controlling factor in the formation of philosophic ideas
and in deciding their vogue. Yet we are well within limits when we say
that ideas which were evoked in correspondence with concrete social
conditions served to articulate and consolidate the latter. Even if we
went so far as to say that reigning philosophies simply reflect as in a
mirror contemporary social struggles, we should have to add that seeing
one's self in a mirror is a definite practical aid in carrying on one's
undertaking to its completion.
When what a people sees in its intellectual looking glass is its own
organization and its own historic evolution as an organic instrument of
the accomplishment of an Absolute Will and Law, the articulating and
consolidating efficacy of the reflection is immensely intensified.
Outside of Germany, the career of the German idealistic philosophy has
been mainly professional and literary. It has exercised considerable
influence upon the teaching of philosophy in France, England and this
country. Beyond professorial circles, its influence has been
considerable in theological directions. Without doubt, it has modulated
for many persons the transition from a supernatural to a spiritual
religion; it has enabled them to give up historical and miraculous
elements as indifferent accretions and to retain the moral substance and
emotional values of Christianity. But the Germans are quite right in
feeling that only in Germany is this form of idealistic thinking both
indigenous and widely applied.
A crisis like the present forces upon thoughtful persons a consideration
of the value for the general aims of civilization of a philosophy of the
_a priori_, the Absolute, and of their immanent evolution through the
medium of an experience which as just experience is only a superficial
and negligible vehicle of transcendent Laws and Ends. It forces a
consideration of what type of general ideas is available for the
articulation and guidance of our own life in case we find ourselves
looking upon the present world scene as an _a priori_ and an
absolutistic philosophy gone into bankruptcy.
In Europe, speaking generally, "Americanism" is a synonym for crude
empiricism and a materialistic utilitarianism. It is no part of my
present task to try to show how largely this accusation is due to
misunderstanding. It is simpler to inquire how far the charge points to
the problem which American life, and therefore philosophy in America,
must meet. It is difficult to see how any _a priori_ philosophy, or any
systematic absolutism, is to get a footing among us, at least beyond
narrow and professorial circles. Psychologists talk about learning by
the method of trial and error or success. Our social organization
commits us to this philosophy of life. Our working principle is to try:
to find out by trying, and to measure the worth of the ideas and
theories tried by the success with which they meet the test of
application in practice. Concrete consequences rather than _a priori_
rules supply our guiding principles. Hegel found it "superficial and
absurd to regard as objects of choice" social constitutions; to him
"they were necessary structures in the path of development." To us they
are the cumulative result of a multitude of daily and ever-renewed
choices.