Fichte called Locke the worst of philosophers, but it was ungrateful
of him, seeing that his own philosophy was founded on one of Locke's
errors. It was Locke who first thought of looking into his own breast
to find there the genuine properties of gold and of an apple; and it
is clear that nothing but lack of consecutiveness and courage kept
him from finding the whole universe in the same generous receptacle.
This method of looking for reality in one's own breast, when practised
with due consecutiveness and courage by the Germans, became the
transcendental method; but it must be admitted that the German breast
was no longer that anatomical region which Locke had intended to probe,
but a purely metaphysical point of departure, a migratory ego that
could be here, there, and everywhere at once, being present at any
point from which thought or volition might be taken to radiate. It was
no longer so easy to entrap as the soul of Locke, which he asserted
travelled with him in his coach from London to Oxford. But the practice
of [Pg 33] looking for all things within one's own breast, in the
subtler sense of searching for them in one's memory and experience,
begat in time the whole romantic and subjective school of philosophy.
Leibniz, the first of German philosophers, although an enemy of Locke's
sensualism and of his slackness in logic, was even more explicit in
assigning a mental seat to all sensible objects. The soul, he said,
had no windows and, he might have added, no doors; no light could
come to it from without; and it could not exert any transitive force
or make any difference beyond its own insulated chamber. It was a
_camera obscura_, with a universe painted on its impenetrable walls.
The changes which went on in it were like those in a dream, due to the
charge of pent-up energies and fecundities within it; for the Creator
had wound it up at the creation like a clock, destined to go for ever,
striking infinite hours, with ever richer chimes.
Here, in miniature, with a clearness and beauty never afterwards
equalled, we have the nature and movement of the transcendental self
set forth before us: a closed circle of experience, admitting of no
relations with anything beyond, but infinite in its own potential
developments, and guided by an inner force, according to an innate
unconscious plan. All duties, all principles of interpretation, all
data, all [Pg 34] visioned objects, operated within this single life,
diversifying its field of view, and testifying to its secret endowment.
Nevertheless, the later idealists, ungrateful to Locke for their
first principle, were ungrateful also to Leibniz for their ultimate
conception, anticipated by him in all its completeness. There
were reasons, of course, for this ingratitude. Leibniz, like the
transcendentalists, had supposed that the objects of sense, as
experience reveals them, were begotten out of the latent nature of the
soul; but he had also conceived that there were many souls, as many as
atoms in the physical world, and that the images arising in each were
signs of the presence and actual condition of its companions. Thus
perception, while yielding directly only an idea, as in a dream, was
indirectly symbolic of an outer reality, like a dream significant and
capable of interpretation. And being an undaunted rationalist, Leibniz
assumed that the sooth-sayer capable of reading this dream was reason,
and that whatever reason conceived to be right and necessary actually
must be true in the great outer world.
It was at this point that Kant deviated into his radical
subjectification of knowledge. His mind had been more open than that
of Leibniz to the influences of English psychology, it had stewed
longer in its [Pg 35] own juice, and he could not help asking how, if
the senses could reveal only ideas of sense, reason was ever able to
reveal anything but ideas of reason. Those inferences about the vast
world outside, which Leibniz had allowed his spirits to make in their
solitary confinement, were reduced by the more scrupulous Kant to
scribblings upon their prison walls. These scribblings he officially
termed the ideas of pure--that is, of unsupported--reason;
but in his private capacity he gently continued to agree with Leibniz
and to believe them true.
There was no anomaly, according to Kant, in this situation. An idea
might by chance be the image of a reality, but we could never know that
it was. For the proof would have to be supplied by a further idea, and
would terminate in that. The hypothesis and the corroboration would
alike be mental, since experience was of ideas and could envisage
nothing but the vicissitudes of the mind.
If you had asked Leibniz what determined the order in which perceptions
came into any mind, he would doubtless have answered that the Creator
did so, or (translating that symbol into its analytic equivalent in his
system) that what did so was the innate destiny or predisposition of
that mind to develop in harmony with the best possible universe. Here
is a very remarkable unconscious principle of [Pg 36] evolution seated
in the spirit and presiding over all its experience. This is precisely
what is meant by a transcendental principle.
This principle, unconscious as it is, sometimes betrays its mighty
workings to consciousness. Besides the incidental multitude of ideas
which it breeds, it makes itself felt in subterranean strains and
rumblings, in the sense of movement and of longing. This darker but
deeper manifestation of the transcendental clock-work Leibniz called
appetition, and under the name of Will it has played a great part
in later German systems. To call it Will is, of course, to speak
improperly and mythologically, for actual willing requires an idea of
what is willed. When we say a man doesn't know what he wants, we mean
that he can will nothing, for lack of a clear idea of his interests
and situation, although he doubtless wants or lacks many specific
things, the absence of which is rendering him unhappy and restless.
These instinctive appetitions for objects of which the mind is ignorant
may, by a figure of speech, be called unconscious Will; a phrase
which would be a contradiction in terms if this word Will (which I
write with a capital letter) were not used metaphorically. From this
metaphor, when its boldness seems to be dulled by use, we may pass
insensibly to giving the name of Will to that whole transcendental
potency [Pg 37] of the soul which, like the mainspring of a watch,
lay coiled up tightly within it from the beginning of time. A man's
transcendental Will can then be called the source of everything that
ever happens to him--his birth, his character, his whole life,
and his death--all that he most detests and most emphatically
does not will, like his nightmares, being an expression of the
original pregnancy of his spirit, and its transcendental principle of
development.
There is but one thing to add touching a point often left by these
philosophers in the most hopeless obscurity. In Leibniz the number
of spirits was infinite: in the later systems they are reduced to
one. This difference seems greater than it is, for when such terms
as Spirit or Will are used metaphorically, standing for unconscious
laws of continuity or development, and when the Will or Spirit present
in me now may be said to have presided over the destinies of my soul
infinite ages before I was born, there seems to be no good reason why
the same Spirit or Will should not preside over all the inhabitants of
the universe at all times, be they gods or humming-birds. Such a Spirit
or Will resembles the notion of Providence, or the law of evolution,
or the pre-established harmony of Leibniz far more than it resembles a
mind. Those philosophers, intent on proving that the Spirit can be only
one, might [Pg 38] have proceeded, therefore, by urging that a Spirit
was at best a formal and abstract law, covering such disparate facts,
that all flesh and fowl, all demons and angels, might just as well be
animated by a single Spirit. As it takes all sorts of things to make a
world, it might take all sorts of things to express a Spirit.
This cool and consciously verbal way of making all one, however, is
not the way of the Germans. No doubt in practice the unity of the
Spirit or Will in their systems amounts to nothing more, yet their
intention and illusion is rather that whenever two things can be called
manifestations of one Spirit in the loosest and most metaphorical
sense of this word they are thereby proved to be data in one spirit in
the most intimate and psychological sense of the same. So that what
really happens to transcendentalists is not that they unite all the
transcendental units of Leibniz into one even looser transcendental
unit, but that they limit the universe to what in Leibniz was one of
an infinite number of parallel careers. Nay, they limit even that one
career to the experience present at one point, that of the most intense
and comprehensive self-consciousness.
The unity they desire and believe in is accordingly an actual and
intense unity. All its elements are to be viewed at once, bound and
merged together by [Pg 39] the simultaneous intuition of all their
relations, and this in a single, unchanging, eternal moment of thought,
or rather of unutterable feeling. The union is, therefore, real,
psychic, mystical, and so close that everything that was to be united
there, by a curious irony, remains outside.
What can lead serious thinkers, we may ask, into such pitfalls
and shams? In this case, a powerful and not unworthy motive. All
transcendentalism takes the point of view of what it calls knowledge;
whenever it mentions anything--matter, God, oneself--it means
not that thing but the idea of it. By knowledge it understands the
image or belief, the fact of cognition. Whatever is thought of exists,
or can exist, in this philosophy, only for thought; yet this thought
is called not illusion but knowledge, because knowledge is what the
thought feels that it is.
Evidently on this principle none of Leibniz's spirits could know any
other, nor could any phase of the same spirit know any other phase.
The unbridgeable chasm of want of experience would cut off knowledge
from everything but its "content," the ideas it has of its objects.
Those fabled external objects would be brought back into my ideas, and
identified with them; my ideas in turn would be drawn in and identified
with the fact that I entertain them and this fact itself would condense
into the [Pg 40] more intimate and present fact that intensely,
vaguely, deeply I feel that I am, or am tending to be, something or
other. My Will or Spirit, the rumble of my unconscious appetitions,
thus absorbs my ideas, my ideas absorb their objects, and these objects
absorb the world, past, present, and future. Earth and heaven, God and
my fellowmen are mere expressions of my Will, and if they were anything
more, I could not now be alive to their presence. My Will is absolute.
With that conclusion transcendentalism is complete.
Is such transcendentalism impossibly sceptical? Is it absurdly
arrogant? Is it wonderfully true?
In so complex a world as this, there is room for a great number of
cross-vistas: when all has been surveyed from one point of view
and in one set of terms, nothing excludes the same reality from
being surveyed from a different centre and expressed in a different
notation. To represent a man, sculpture is apparently exhaustive; yet
it does not exclude painting, or the utterly disparate description
of the man in words; surveys in which there need be no contradiction
in the deliverance, though there is the widest diversity and even
incommensurability in the methods. Each sort of net drawn through
the same sea catches a different sort of fish; and the fishermen may
quarrel about what the sea contained, if each regards his draught as
exhaustive. Yet the sea [Pg 41] contained all their catches, and also
the residue, perhaps infinite, that escaped them all.
Now one net which every intelligent being casts over things is that of
his own apprehension, experience, and interests. He may not reflect
often on his personal principle of selection and arrangement; he
may be so interested in the movements he sees through his glass as
never to notice the curious circular frame, perhaps prismatic, which
his glass imposes on the landscape. Yet among all the properties of
things, the adventitious properties imputed to them in apprehension
are worth noting too; indeed, it chastens and transforms our whole
life if we have once noted them and taken them to heart. Not that this
circumstance implies for a moment what the dizziness of idealists has
inferred, that things exist only as perceived or when we perceive
them. What follows is rather that, besides the things and in the
most interesting contrast to their movement, there is the movement
of our minds in observing them. If, for instance, I happen not to
know the name of my great-grandfather, and am vexed at my ignorance,
I may search the parish records and discover it, together with many
circumstances of his life. This does not prove that my interest in
genealogy created my great-grandfather, as a consistent egotist would
assert; but it does show how my interest was a [Pg 42] nucleus for my
discoveries and for the terms, such as great-grandfather, in which I
express them--for it was no intrinsic property of that worthy man
that he was to become my great-grandfather after his death, or that I
was to discover him.
This vortex which things, as apprehension catches them, seem to form
round each whirling spectator, is the fascinating theme of lyric
poetry, of psychological novels, and of German philosophy. Dominated
as this philosophy is by the transcendental method, it regards views,
and the history and logic of views, as more primitive and important
than the objects which these views have in common. The genial Professor
Paulsen of Berlin (whose pupil I once had the advantage of being) had
a phrase that continually recurred in his lectures: _Man kann sagen_,
as much as to say, Things will yield the following picture, if one
cares to draw it. And he once wrote an article in honour of Kant very
pertinently entitled: _Was uns Kant sein kann_; because no veritable
disciple of Kant accepts what Kant taught as he taught it, but each
rises from the study of the master having irresistibly formed one or
more systems of his own. To take what views we will of things, if
things will barely suffer us to take them, and then to declare that
the things are mere terms in the views we take of them--that is
transcendentalism.
[Pg 43] CHAPTER IV