London and Toronto
J. M. Dent & Sons Limited
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons
1916
[Pg 5]
PREFACE
This book is one of the many that the present war has brought forth,
but it is the fruit of a long gestation. During more than twenty years,
while I taught philosophy at Harvard College, I had continual occasion
to read and discuss German metaphysics. From the beginning it wore in
my eyes a rather questionable shape. Under its obscure and fluctuating
tenets I felt something sinister at work, something at once hollow and
aggressive. It seemed a forced method of speculation, producing more
confusion than it found, and calculated chiefly to enable practical
materialists to call themselves idealists and rationalists to remain
theologians. At the same time the fear that its secret might be eluding
me, seeing that by blood and tradition I was perhaps handicapped in the
matter, spurred me to great and prolonged efforts to understand what
confronted me so bewilderingly. I wished to be as clear and just about
it as I could--more clear and just, indeed, than it ever was about
itself.
For the rest, German philosophy was never my chief interest, and I
write frankly as an outsider, with no professorial pretensions; merely
using my common [Pg 6] reason in the presence of claims put forth by
others to a logical authority and a spiritual supremacy which they are
far from possessing.
A reader indoctrinated in the German schools is, therefore, free not
to read further. My object is neither to repeat his familiar arguments
in their usual form, nor to refute them; my object is to describe them
intelligibly and to judge them from the point of view of the layman,
and in his interests. For those who wish to study German philosophy,
the original authors are at hand: all I would give here is the aroma of
German philosophy that has reached my nostrils. If the reader has smelt
something of the kind, so much the better: we shall then understand
each other. The function of history or of criticism is not passively
to reproduce its subject-matter. One real world, with one stout corpus
of German philosophy, is enough. Reflection and description are things
superadded, things which ought to be more winged and more selective
than what they play upon. They are echoes of reality in the sphere
of art, sketches which may achieve all the truth appropriate to them
without belying their creative limitations: for their essence is to be
intellectual symbols, at once indicative and original.
Egotism--subjectivity in thought and wilfulness in
morals--which is the soul of German philosophy, [Pg 7] is
by no means a gratuitous thing. It is a genuine expression of the
pathetic situation in which any animal finds itself upon earth, and
any intelligence in the universe. It is an inevitable and initial
circumstance in life. But like every material accident, it is a thing
to abstract from and to discount as far as possible. The perversity of
the Germans, the childishness and sophistry of their position, lies
only in glorifying what is an inevitable impediment, and in marking
time on an earthly station from which the spirit of man--at least
in spirit--is called to fly.
This glorified and dogged egotism, which a thousand personal and
technical evidences had long revealed to me in German philosophy,
might now, I should think, be evident to the whole world. Not that
the German philosophers are responsible for the war, or for that
recrudescence of corporate fanaticism which prepared it from afar. They
merely shared and justified prophetically that spirit of uncompromising
self-assertion and metaphysical conceit which the German nation is now
reducing to action. It is a terrible thing to have a false religion,
all the more terrible the deeper its sources are in the human soul.
Like many a false religion before it, this which now inspires the
Germans has made a double assault upon mankind, one with the secular
arm, and another by solemn asseverations and sophistries. This
assault, [Pg 8] though its incidental methods may be dubious, has been
bold and honest enough in principle. It has been like those which
all conquerors and all founders of militant religions have made at
intervals against liberty or reason. And the issue will doubtless be
the same. Liberty may be maimed, but not killed; reason may be bent,
but not broken. The dark aggression is to be repelled, if possible, by
force of arms; but failing that, it will be nullified in time by the
indomitable moral resistance which maturer races, richer in wisdom, can
exert successfully against the rude will of the conqueror.
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CONTENTS
I. THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
II. THE PROTESTANT HERITAGE
III. TRANSCENDENTALISM
IV. HINTS OF EGOTISM IN GOETHE
V. SEEDS OF EGOTISM IN KANT
VI. TRANSCENDENTALISM PERFECTED
VII. FICHTE ON THE MISSION OF GERMANY
VIII. THE EGOTISM OF IDEAS
IX. EGOTISM AND SELFISHNESS
X. THE BREACH WITH CHRISTIANITY
XI. NIETZSCHE AND SCHOPENHAUER
XII. THE ETHICS OF NIETZSCHE
XIII. THE SUPERMAN
XIV. HEATHENISM
XV. GERMAN GENIUS
XVI. EGOTISM IN PRACTICE
INDEX