The German people, according to Fichte and Hegel, are called by the
plan of Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the
universe.
A little consideration of this belief will perhaps lead us more surely
to the heart of German philosophy than would the usual laborious
approach to it through what is called the theory of knowledge. This
theory of knowledge is a tangle of equivocations; but even if it were
correct it would be something technical, and the technical side of
a great philosophy, interesting as it may be in itself, hardly ever
determines its essential views. These essential views are derived
rather from instincts or traditions which the technique of the system
is designed to defend; or, at least, they decide how that technique
shall be applied and interpreted.
The moment we hear Fichte and Hegel mentioning a providential plan of
the world, we gather that in their view the history of things is not
infinite and endlessly various, but has a closed plot like a drama in
which one nation (the very one to which these [Pg 22] philosophers
belong) has the central place and the chief rôle: and we perceive at
once that theirs is a revealed philosophy. It is the heir of Judaism.
It could never have been formed by free observation of life and
nature, like the philosophy of Greece or of the Renaissance. It is
Protestant theology rationalised. The element of religious faith, in
the Protestant sense of the word faith, is essential to it. About the
witness of tradition, even about the witness of the senses, it may be
as sceptical as it likes. It may reduce nature and God to figments
of the mind; but throughout its criticism of all matters of fact it
will remain deeply persuaded that the questioning and striving spirit
within is indefeasible and divine. It will never reduce all things,
including the mind, to loose and intractable appearances, as might a
free idealism. It will employ its scepticism to turn all things into
ideas, in order to chain them the more tightly to the moral interests
of the thinker. These moral interests, human and pathetic as they may
seem to the outsider, it will exalt immeasurably, pronouncing them to
be groundless and immutable; and it will never tolerate the suspicion
that all things might not minister to them.
From the same tenet of Fichte and Hegel we may also learn that in
the plan of the world, as this revealed philosophy conceives it, the
principal figures [Pg 23] are not individuals, like the Creator, the
Redeemer, and one's own soul, but nations and institutions. It is of
the essence of Protestantism and of German philosophy that religion
should gradually drop its supernatural personages and comforting
private hopes and be absorbed in the duty of living manfully and
conscientiously the conventional life of this world.
Not the whole life of the world, however, since gay religions and many
other gay things are excluded, or admitted only as childish toys.
Positive religion, in fact, disappears, as well as the frivolous sort
of worldliness, and there remains only a consecrated worldliness that
is deliberate and imposed as a duty.
Just as in pantheism God is naturalised into a cosmic force, so in
German philosophy the Biblical piety of the earlier Protestants is
secularised into social and patriotic zeal.
German philosophy has inherited from Protestantism its earnestness and
pious intention; also a tendency to retain, for whatever changed views
it may put forward, the names of former beliefs. God, freedom, and
immortality, for instance, may eventually be transformed into their
opposites, since the oracle of faith is internal; but their names may
be kept, together with a feeling that what will now bear those names
is much more satisfying than what they originally stood for. If it
should seem that [Pg 24] God came nearest to us, and dwelt within us,
in the form of vital energy, if freedom should turn out really to mean
personality, if immortality, in the end, should prove identical with
the endlessness of human progress, and if these new thoughts should
satisfy and encourage us as the evanescent ideas of God, freedom, and
immortality satisfied and encouraged our fathers, why should we not
use these consecrated names for our new conceptions, and thus indicate
the continuity of religion amid the flux of science? This expedient is
not always hypocritical. It was quite candid in men like Spinoza and
Emerson, whose attachment to positive religion had insensibly given,
way to a half-mystical, half-intellectual satisfaction with the natural
world, as their eloquent imagination conceived it. But whether candid
or disingenuous, this habit has the advantage of oiling the wheels of
progress with a sacred unction. In facilitating change it blurs the
consciousness of change, and leads people to associate with their new
opinions sentiments which are logically incompatible with them. The
attachment of many tender-minded people to German philosophy is due to
this circumstance, for German philosophy is not tender.
The beauty and the torment of Protestantism is that it opens the door
so wide to what lies beyond it. This progressive quality it has fully
transmitted [Pg 25] to all the systems of German philosophy. Not that
each of them, like the earlier Protestant sects, does not think itself
true and final; but in spite of itself it suggests some next thing. We
must expect, therefore, that the more conservative elements in each
system should provoke protests in the next generation; and it is hard
to say whether such inconstancy is a weakness, or is simply loyalty
to the principle of progress. Kant was a puritan; he revered the rule
of right as something immutable and holy, perhaps never obeyed in the
world. Fichte was somewhat freer in his Calvinism; the rule of right
was the moving power in all life and nature, though it might have been
betrayed by a doomed and self-seeking generation. Hegel was a very free
and superior Lutheran; he saw that the divine will was necessarily and
continuously realised in this world, though we might not recognise the
fact in our petty moral judgments. Schopenhauer, speaking again for
this human judgment, revolted against that cruel optimism, and was
an indignant atheist; and finally, in Nietzsche, this atheism became
exultant; he thought it the part of a man to abet the movement of
things, however calamitous, in order to appropriate its wild force and
be for a moment the very crest of its wave.
Protestantism was not a reformation by accident, [Pg 26] because it
happened to find the church corrupt; it is a reformation essentially,
in that every individual must reinterpret the Bible and the practices
of the church in his own spirit. If he accepted them without renewing
them in the light of his personal religious experience, he would never
have what Protestantism thinks living religion. German philosophy has
inherited this characteristic; it is not a cumulative science that
can be transmitted ready made. It is essentially a reform, a revision
of traditional knowledge, which each neophyte must make for himself,
under pain of rendering only lip-service to transcendental truth,
and remaining at heart unregenerate. His chief business is to be
converted; he must refute for himself the natural views with which he
and all other men have begun life. And still these views--like
the temptations of Satan--inevitably form themselves afresh
in each generation, and even in the philosopher, between one spell
of introspective thought and another, so that he always has to
recapitulate his saving arguments from the beginning. Each new idealist
in each of his books, often in every lecture and every chapter, must
run back to refute again the same homely opponents--materialism,
naturalism, dualism, or whatever he may call them. Dead as each day
he declares these foes to be, he has to fight them again in his own
soul on the morrow. [Pg 27] Hence his continual preoccupation lest he
fall away, or lest the world should forget him. To preserve his freedom
and his idealism he must daily conquer them anew. This philosophy is
secondary, critical, sophistical; it has a perennial quarrel with
inevitable opinions.
Protestantism, in spite of its personal status, wished to revert
to primitive Christianity. In this desire it was guided partly
by a conventional faith in the Scriptures, and partly by a deep
sympathy with experimental religion. German religion and philosophy
are homesick: they wish to be quite primitive once more. And they
actually remain primitive in spirit, spontaneous and tentative, even
in the midst of the most cumbrous erudition, as a composition of
Dürer's, where flesh, fish, and fowl crowd every corner, still remains
primitive, puzzled, and oppressed. Such a naïve but overloaded mind
is lost in admiration of its own depth and richness; yet, in fact, it
is rather helpless and immature; it has not learned to select what
suffices, or to be satisfied with what is best.
Faith for the Germans must be a primitive and groundless assurance,
not knowledge credibly transmitted by others whose experience may
have been greater than our own. Even philosophy is not conceived as a
reasonable adjustment to what may have [Pg 28] been discovered to be
the constitution of the world; it is in the first instance a criticism,
to dissolve that reputed knowledge, and then, when primitive innocence
is happily restored, it is a wager or demand made beyond all evidence,
and in contempt of all evidence, in obedience to an innate impulse.
Of course, it is usual, as a concession to the weaker brethren,
to assume that experience, in the end, will seem to satisfy these
demands, and that we shall win our bets and our wars; but the point of
principle, borrowed by German philosophy from Protestantism, is that
the authority of faith is intrinsic and absolute, while any external
corroboration of it is problematical and not essential to the rightness
of the assumptions that faith makes. In this we have a fundamental
characteristic of the school. Carried (as it seldom is) to its logical
conclusion, it leads to the ultra-romantic and ultra-idealistic
doctrine that the very notion of truth or fact is a fiction of, the
will, invented to satisfy our desire for some fixed point of reference
in thought. In this doctrine we may see the culmination of the
Protestant rebellion against mediation in religion, against external
authority, and against dogma.
The Protestant precept to search the Scriptures, and the sense
that every man must settle the highest questions for himself, have
contributed to the zeal [Pg 29] with which science and scholarship
have been pursued in Germany. In no other country has so large, so
industrious, and (amid its rude polemics) so co-operative a set of
professors devoted itself to all sorts of learning. But as the original
motive was to save one's soul, an apologetic and scholastic manner
has often survived: the issue is prejudged and egotism has appeared
even in science. For favourable as Protestantism is to investigation
and learning, it is almost incompatible with clearness of thought and
fundamental freedom of attitude. If the controlling purpose is not
political or religious, it is at least "philosophical," that is to say,
arbitrary.
We must remember that the greater part of the "facts" on which theories
are based are reported or inferred facts_--all_ in the historical
sciences, since the documents and sources must first be pronounced
genuine or spurious by the philosophical critic. Here presumptions and
private methods of inference determine what shall be admitted for a
fact, to say nothing of the interpretation to be given to it. Hence a
piece of Biblical or Homeric criticism, a history of Rome or of Germany
often becomes a little system of egotistical philosophy, posited and
defended with all the parental zeal and all the increasing conviction
with which a prophet defends his supernatural inspirations.
[Pg 30] The distinction between Mary and Martha is not a German
distinction: in Germany the rapt idealist is busy about many things,
so that his action is apt to be heady and his contemplation perturbed.
Only the principle is expected to be spiritual, the illustrations must
all be material and mundane. There is no paradox in German idealism
turning to material science, commerce, and war for a fresh field
of operation. No degeneracy is implied in such an extension of its
vocation, especially when the other ideals of the state--pure
learning, art, social organisation--are pursued at the same time
with an equal ardour. The test of a genuine German idealist is that he
should forget and sink his private happiness in whatever service the
state may set him to do.
In view of this political fidelity the changing opinions of men are all
indifferent to true religion. It is not a question of _correctness_ in
opinion or conduct, since for the idealist there can be no external
standard of truth, existence, or excellence on which such correctness
could depend. Ideas are so much real experience and have no further
subject-matter. Thought is simply more or less rich, elaborate, or
vehement, like a musical composition, and more or less consistent
with itself. It is all a question of depth and fulness of experience,
obtained by hacking one's way through this visionary and bewitched [Pg
31] existence, the secret purpose of which is to serve the self in its
development. In this philosophy imagination that is sustained is called
knowledge, illusion that is coherent is called truth, and will that is
systematic is called virtue.
Evidently the only sanction or vindication that such a belief will
look for is the determination to reassert it. Religion is here its own
heaven, and faith the only proof of its own truth. What is harmonised
in the end is not the experience through which people have actually
passed but only the echoes of that experience chiming in the mystic
ear. Memory too can play the egotist. Subjectivism can rule even within
the subject and can make him substitute his idea of himself, in his
most self-satisfied moment, for the poor desultory self that he has
actually been.
The German philosophers have carried on Protestantism beyond itself.
They have separated the two ingredients mingled in traditional
religions. One of these ingredients--the vital faith or self-trust
of the animal will--they have retained. The other--the lessons of
experience--they have rejected. To which element the name of religion
should still be given, if it is given to either, is a matter of
indifference.
The important thing is that, call it religion or irreligion, we should
know what we are clinging to.
[Pg 32] CHAPTER III