THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT
KANT AND AFTER.--With Kant the hey-day of rationalism terminated. He had
put an end to the superficial psychology upon which it rested. For the
rationalists, the life of the mind had consisted in _intellectual
ideas_; but a more careful analysis indicated the presence of
deeper-lying elements, which had hitherto been disregarded; there
existed other important constituents besides the intellectual.
Kant's criticism of "pure reason" did much to discredit the old view;
and by founding his philosophy upon the non-intellectual "moral
consciousness," he heightened the prestige of feeling as against reason
(in the narrow and limited sense of that word).
Thus Kant is not undeservedly called the father of a philosophy which
succeeded him, and which was based upon the idea of the supremacy of
feeling. But, at the same time, that title is more accurate as an
estimate of another philosopher of rather different characteristics.
ROUSSEAU.--Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a man of unique genius
whose figure occupies a prominent position not only in the annals of
philosophy, but in social, political, and literary history. Even more
than Voltaire was he responsible for sowing seeds of thought which bore
fruit in the events of the Revolution. And indeed, it is as the author
of the notorious _Contrat Social_ that he is most widely known.
ROUSSEAU'S "SENSIBILITY."--Rousseau was one of those philosophers whose
character is the formative element which gives shape to their doctrines.
His was a profoundly emotional temperament. He left behind him an
invaluable document which lays bare all the psychological sources of his
philosophy. The _Confessions_ reveal to us a man highly sensitive and
morbidly introspective, the slave of unreasoning impulses and passions.
In the eyes of some short-sighted persons, these first-hand revelations
will obscure or cast doubt upon the capacity and genius of the man, for
they do little to prejudice opinion in his favour.
HE DEFIES THE ZEITGEIST.--Rousseau's profound originality lies in his
having dared to dispute a dogma to which the prestige of an axiom then
attached. He endeavoured to undermine the popular faith in scientific
and philosophic culture. He went right back to Pascal, who, a century
before, had raised the question as to the value of scientific knowledge
for personal life, by proclaiming "The whole of philosophy is not worth
an hour's study."
Rousseau's first philosophical work was occasioned by the offer of a
prize on the part of a provincial academy for a thesis on the problem
"Whether the restoration of the sciences and arts has contributed to
purify manners?" "The question pierced Rousseau's soul like a flash of
lightning." He felt (he tells us) that he saw a new world, and felt a
new man; he saw no longer the world of culture, of science, of
philosophy (which he felt to be as artificial as it was ineffective and
vain), but the _real_ world of personality, of living feeling, of the
inner life. It flashed upon him that it was the primitive and elementary
feelings, the great and simple relations of life, which gave to
existence its value. The rest was superficial and irrelevant.
ROUSSEAU AND RELIGION.--The intellectualist is ever the aristocrat.[25]
Voltaire and the philosophers of the "enlightenment" spoke of the
unenlightened multitude as _la canaille_. Its beliefs were
superstitions. Rousseau knew that the things which men have in common
are more vital than those in which they differ, and the primitive
instincts of the race which we all share, are the most important part of
our nature.
Among these primitive instincts, indomitable and irrepressible, is the
instinct of religion. Thus Rousseau transferred the religious problem
from the sphere of external observation and explanation of the world (to
which the rationalists had promoted or degraded it), back to inner
personal feeling. This marked an epoch in the philosophy of religion.
Moreover, Rousseau was able to write in a convincing fashion of
religion, because (and here he differed from the intellectuals of his
day) he had personal experience of what it meant. Hence wherever he
alludes to religion his language has the ring of sincerity; it is always
spontaneous, and sometimes it is passionate and poetic. His religious
experience took the form of nature-mysticism, undogmatic (because
non-intellectualist), but rich and deep:
"I can find no more worthy adoration of God than the silent admiration
which the contemplation of His works begets in us, and which cannot be
expressed by any prescribed acts.... In my room I pray seldomer and
more coldly; but the sight of a beautiful landscape moves me, I cannot
tell why. I once read of a certain bishop, who, when visiting in his
diocese, encountered an old woman whose only prayers consisted in a sigh
'Oh!' The bishop said to her, 'Good mother, always pray like that; your
prayer is worth more than ours.' My prayer is of that kind."[26]
Here we have one form of the religious spirit; for the mystic it is
always true that "there is neither speech nor language." The mystic and
the dogmatist stand at opposite poles, for dogmatism is always an
attempt at definition even when that which is to be defined is
indefinable; and here is to be found the common denominator between Kant
and Rousseau. The former, by his analysis of reason, discredited
dogmatism: the latter, by his apotheosis of feeling, contributed towards
the same result.
ROMANTICISM IN GERMANY.--This strong movement of feeling, created on the
one hand by Kant's _Critique_, and by the mysticism of Rousseau, took
different forms in the two countries to which these two philosophers
belonged. In France the new philosophy became the hot-bed of
revolutionary ideas; whereas in Germany it found vent in a ferment of
speculative systems, and in an outcrop of artistic production. It
produced the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and the prose
and poetry of Goethe and Schiller.
"It was the age of 'beautiful souls' and of 'noble hearts'; men believed
themselves capable of the highest things; the immediate needs of the
heart were set over against reason ... under many successive forms
Romanticism prevailed in literature, effecting the re-birth of human
fancy after the long labour of intellect."[27]
THE GOAL OF PHILOSOPHY.--Philosophic young Germany had set itself an
ambitious programme. Kant, indeed, had cleared the ground for them, but
his warnings that an eagle cannot soar beyond the atmosphere which
supports it, were disregarded.
The philosophy of Kant himself was felt by the successors to be lacking
in the _idea of totality_--in the conception of a whole. His division of
existence into Appearance and Reality seemed to indicate a certain lack
of finish in his philosophy; and they set themselves to explore the root
of reality which to Kant seemed undiscoverable, but in which the
sensuous and super-sensuous worlds are united, and from which they have
emerged. This task became and remained the grand problem of philosophy
for a whole generation of thinkers. All externality, isolation, and
division were to disappear, all existence must be shown to be but
degrees and phases of the one infinite reality. Spinoza's work had to be
done again in the light of increased psychological knowledge.
FICHTE.--Of the thinkers who addressed themselves to this ambitious
task, only two need be considered here; and these are chosen because
they attacked the problem from different directions.
In the first place, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who had been the
first to lay down the programme of thought with explicitness, realised
and admitted that the task which philosophy had set itself was beyond
the powers of any logical train of thought. The "higher unity" of
existence, the demonstration of which was the goal of philosophy,
could be reached only by a process of intellectual intuition,[28]
it must be guessed or divined; for it presents itself (and this is
a characteristically "Romanticist" idea) to the human mind in the
immediacy of feeling, and not by discursive thought.
It was of the essence of Fichte's philosophy, as it had been of
Spinoza's, that a point may be attained where the mind feels itself to
be at one with the truly real, and only when this point is reached--i.e.
_sub specie aeternitatis_, will it arrive at and retain the conviction
of the universal order and unity of existence. From this standpoint, and
from this alone, does it become possible to grasp "the meaning of those
dualities and contrasts which we find around and in us, the differences
of self and not-self, of mind and matter, of subject and object, of
appearance and reality, of truth and semblance."
HEGEL.--It has been said, perhaps with justice, that "philosophy is the
finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct." The remark
might seem, at least in the eyes of some, to be particularly applicable
to the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Not because
his arguments are bad, but because he attempted to establish by strict
logic the conclusions which Fichte sought to reach by means of
intuition, and which perhaps are only attainable by that method. Hegel
attempted to climb, by a strict process of reasoning, to the position
from which the Fichtean landscape might spread itself below as a
logical whole: he claimed to be a reasoner as well as a seer. And
thereby he may be said to have furnished "the programme of thought for a
certain class of intellects which will never die out."
Thus Hegel was something of a hybrid, and may be described as a
rationalistic-romanticist. Nor are his arguments the easiest to
understand. "The only thing that is certain," writes a commentator
who stands at an opposite philosophical pole, "is that whatever you
may say of his procedure, some one will accuse you of misunderstanding
it. I make no claim to understanding it; I treat it merely
impressionistically."[29] And this is all we can do here.
HEGEL'S METHOD.--Hegel proceeds by means of what he calls the
_Dialectical Method_. He understands by "dialectic" (1) a property of
all our _thoughts_ in virtue of which, each particular thought
necessarily passes over into another; and also (2) a property of
_things_, in virtue of which every particular thing necessarily belongs
to, or is related to, all other things. A thing "by itself" is nothing.
Hence a similarity or parallelism between the _method of thought_ and
the _nature of things_. Logic is of the nature of things. The way in
which thought reaches truth is also the way in which things exist. Hegel
expressed this in his well-known saying "the real is the rational, and
the rational is the real." Perhaps more poetically or obscurely the same
proposition is expressed by declaring: "When we think existence,
existence thinks in us," and "The pulse of existence itself beats in our
thinking."
Hegel's logic may, in fact, be described as an attempt to conceive the
movement of thought as being at the same time the law of the universe.
Logic (to repeat what we said before) is of the nature of things:
reality is rational, and what is rational is real.
Thus logic for Hegel did not mean (as it meant for Kant) the forms or
laws of thought: it signified the very core of reality. For all that
Kant knew, reality might or might not be rational: all he asserted was
that the human mind rationalised reality (or parts of it). For Hegel,
logic or reason was the living and moving spirit of the world. The
essence of reality and the essence of thought were one. The absolute
reality was spirit.[30]
HEGELIANISM.--Hegel's philosophy may be described as an attempt to reach
the standpoint of religious mysticism by means of purely rational
processes. It is the finding of rational grounds for supra-rational
intuitions. The attempt is laudable, and, in the eyes of many, it was
successful. And, as we shall see, Hegelianism had an important future,
especially in England; nor, as a system of thought, is it yet extinct.
Its central conception is that which, in one shape or another, will
never cease to appeal to mankind--that existence is, at bottom,
spiritual in character--that spirit is the only ultimate reality.
That Hegelianism provides a rational basis for a spiritual religion is
obvious enough; nor is it necessary to indicate the possibilities of
linking up the Christian doctrine of the Logos with a philosophy for
which Reason was the very core and ground of existence. Hegel may indeed
be said to have laid the foundation of Christian theology afresh; or
rather to have restored what was best in the old theology, and given it
the prestige of modernity.
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY.--In fact, for Hegel as for all rationalists
whose attitude is also religious, religion and philosophy were two forms
of the same thing. Religion contains philosophic truths under the form
of imagination: philosophy contains religious truth under the form of
reason. The difference is one of form only, not of content. This had not
been the view of Rousseau, nor is it the deepest view; and it was not
the view of a thinker of the Romantic school who did more than any
individual among his predecessors to bring the religious problem to the
point where it now stands.
SCHLEIERMACHER.--While the sun of Romanticism was at its zenith, the
spirit of Kant's critical philosophy was kept alive by a thinker of as
deep spiritual and intellectual insight as Hegel himself.
Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher (1768-1834) brought the religious
problem down from those altitudes to which Romanticist metaphysics had
raised it, to what Kant had called "the fertile bathos of experience."
He approached religion from the side of inner experience, the point of
view of psychology. The profound insight of Kant had already shown that
this was the direction on which future thought would travel, by tracing
back the religious problem to a _personal need_ more clearly and
penetratingly than ever before--a need set up by the incongruity of the
real and the ideal.
HIS VIEW OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS.--Just as Rousseau, owing to his own
religious experience, was in a better position to attack the religious
problem than the philosophers of the "enlightenment," so Schleiermacher
had the advantage of some Romanticists. As a boy, he had been put to
school with the Moravians, and throughout his own life he never ceased
to declare that the years spent among them had been of vital importance
to the development of his views. In 1801 he writes:
"My way of thinking has indeed no other foundation than my own peculiar
character, my inborn mysticism, my education as it has been determined
from within."
And his own experience of religion established in him the conviction
that the innermost life of men must be lived in feeling, and that this
alone can bring man into immediate relation to the highest. His
acceptance of Kant's criticism of reason led him to understand that
intellectual concepts, in the religious sphere, (i.e. dogmas) must
always be of secondary importance: _experience_ comes first. And his
profound originality lies just here, and it is just here that
Schleiermacher stands out as the forerunner of the modern view. He it
was who first made it evident that religious ideas derive their validity
from that inner experience which they are an attempt to describe. If a
dogma is an expression of an experience felt by man in his innermost
life, it is a _valid_ dogma, even if philosophic criticism hesitates to
sanction it.[31]
WHAT IS RELIGION?--The distance of this position from that of the
eighteenth century intellectualism which regarded religion either as a
form of philosophy or of superstition, is obvious. Schleiermacher
attacks two intellectualist prejudices in particular: (1) That according
to which religion is conceived of primarily as a doctrine (either
revealed, or grounded on reason), and (2) That which regards religion as
merely a means towards morality.
Religion, according to Schleiermacher, has an existence independent of
(though, no doubt, associated with) philosophy, superstition, or
morality. Its essence consists neither in speculation nor in action, but
in a certain type of feeling, of inner experience. Schleiermacher
characterised this particular type of feeling as _a feeling of
dependence_: the immediate consciousness that everything finite exists
in and through the infinite, everything temporal in and through the
eternal.
That Schleiermacher should have described the specifically religious
feeling in this particular way is comparatively irrelevant so far as our
present purpose is concerned. The point of importance is that he was the
first to recognise the _independence_ of religion, to see in it a
legitimate and natural form of human activity, which exists, not for the
sake of knowledge or of morality, but for its own sake, and on its own
account.
Here, though Hegel took a different view, Schleiermacher is one in
spirit with the Romantic school; indeed, he may be said to have drawn
the logical conclusions of Romanticism. The independence and originality
of religion is the necessary consequence of a philosophy which set
itself against the unbalanced intellectualism of the "enlightenment."
The permanent significance of Romanticism lies here: That it discredited
once for all the notion that there is only one road to reality--that of
logic. It is not only philosophy, but religion and art that remove the
veil which hides the supra-sensible world from us. And to close our eyes
to the facts of religious experience, or to attempt to discredit them by
the application of irrelevant terms such as "superstition," is not only
to display ourselves as philistines, but also to forsake the highest
traditions of science--veneration for experience, and the realms of
fact.