German philosophy has a religious spirit, but its alliance with
Christianity has always been equivocal and external. Even in the
speculations of Leibniz, concerned as he was about orthodoxy, there was
a spirit of independence and absolutism which was rationalistic, not to
say heathen. The principle of sufficient reason, for instance, demands
that God and nature shall explain their existence and behaviour to us,
as timid parents explain their behaviour to their censorious children.
By rendering everything necessary, even the acts of God, it takes the
place of God and makes him superfluous. Such frigid optimism as this
principle involves, besides being fatalistic, is deeply discouraging to
that hope of deliverance which is the soul of Christianity: for if this
is the best world possible, how poor must be that realm of possible
worlds where everything is tainted, and there is no heaven! The theory,
too, that each soul contains the seeds of its whole experience and
suffices for its own infinite development, destroys the meaning of
creation, revelation, miracles, sin, grace, and [Pg 105] charity. Thus
without intending it, even the obsequious but incredibly intelligent
Leibniz undermined all the doctrines of Christianity in the act of
thinking them afresh, and insinuated into them a sort of magic heathen
individualism.
Kant, Fichte, and Hegel were less punctilious in their theology, but
they still intended to be or to seem Christians. They felt that what
made the sanctity of traditional religion and its moral force could
be recovered in a purer form in their systems. This feeling of theirs
was not unwarranted; at least, many religious minds, after the first
shock of losing their realistic faith, have seen in transcendentalism
a means, and perhaps the only safe means, of still maintaining a sort
of Christianity which shall not claim any longer to be a miraculous or
exceptional revelation, but only a fair enough poetic symbol for the
principles found in all moral life. That he who loses his life shall
save it, for instance, is a maxim much prized and much glossed by
Hegelians. They lend it a meaning of their own, which might, indeed,
be said to be the opposite of what the Gospel meant; for there the
believer is urged to discard the very world with which Hegel asks him
to identify himself. The idea is that if you surrender your private
interests to those of your profession, science, or country, you become
thereby a good and important person, and [Pg 106] unintentionally a
happy one. You will then feel that the world shares your thoughts and
renders them perpetual, while you, being absorbed in ideal pursuits,
forget your private miseries and mortality.
In this sort of moral psychology there is evidently some truth; but the
"law of experience" which it points to is but a loose and ambiguous
law, which disguises more facts than it expresses. Honest minds will
rebel against the suggestion that when you outgrow a desire you have
fulfilled it; and they will detect the furtive irony in bidding you
live hard in order not to feel the vanity of living. To drown sorrow
in work, and to forget private failures in public interests, is
certainly possible, but it is only drugging yourself with hurry and
routine, which may not be more advantageous to others than it really
is to yourself. Impersonal or "ideal" aims are not necessarily less
delusive or "higher" than personal ones; in fact there is far more
likelihood that they are conventional humbug. This pathological hygiene
of idealism, which always stops at some uncriticised impulse, thinks it
secures health when perhaps it has only increased the dose of illusion.
Nevertheless transcendentalism has this important element in common
with Christianity and with the other Hebraic religions, that it regards
human interests as the core of the universe and God as the [Pg 107]
God of man, who disposes all things for man's benefit. In its eyes
the sphere of providence and moral life is bounded by the history
of a part of Europe and Asia for a few thousand years. So long as
transcendentalism is taken to imply some such philosophy of history it
can compound its differences with liberal Christianity, since they are
at one in the cardinal point of their faith, which is the apotheosis of
the human spirit.
Yet this human egotism, which comforts so many minds, offends others,
in their way no less religious. Of course, those who believe in the
infinity of the universe, be they mystics or naturalists, smile at
such pettiness and fatuity. But even among transcendentalists, some
are repelled; for the dominion which they attribute to their ego
is a dominion over appearances only; they do not pretend that the
grammar of the human intellect can lay down the law for the world at
large. At the same time, in their own house they wish to keep their
freedom. That prescribed evolution and that reversible optimism of
the absolute transcendentalists are repulsive to them; they resent
that such a precise and distasteful career should be imposed on their
transcendental individuality, and should swallow it up. It is these
rebels that have carried romanticism and German philosophy into its
last phase. They have broken at [Pg 108] last with Christianity and at
the same time with the theological and cosmic transcendentalism that
was its treacherous ally, and hoped to be its heir.
The transcendentalism of Schopenhauer, sweeping as it was in its
way, retained the modest and agnostic character it had had in Kant:
he proclaimed that the world was his idea, but meant only (what is
undeniable) that his _idea_ of the world was his idea. The egotistical
doctrine that the whole universe is but the image of it created by the
mind disappeared altogether in his system. The so-called Will which
he still placed behind everything was no longer his own will evolving
experience out of nothing; it was a fanciful name for whatever force
or substance might lie behind experience, animating all its objects,
determining their inherent life, and constituting them facts collateral
with himself. If his metaphysics remained idealistic, it was on
account of his romantic habit of assimilating the life of nature to
that of man, as hasty introspection reveals it; so that the universe
is described in moral and poetical terms rather than in the terms of
science.
The consequences of this change were important. The Will became
infinite in what Hegel called the evil sense, that is, in the true one.
It was no longer possible to speak of a plan of creation, nor of a
dramatic progress in history, with its beginning in [Pg 109] Eden and
its end in Berlin. Life was seen to radiate, as it really does, from an
elementary form into all sorts of disparate and incomparable growths,
capable of endless diversity. No limit, no forced co-operation, no
stereotyped method was imputed to life. The pocket universe of Hegel
opened out to the stars, so hateful to that philosopher. Man lost his
importance and at the same time the insufferable burden of his false
pretensions. In Schopenhauer frankness returned, and with frankness
clearness. Yet he could not quite reconcile man to his actual place in
nature. A deep prejudice still intervened.
Both Christianity and romanticism had accustomed people to disregard
the intrinsic value of things. Things ought to be useful for salvation,
or symbols of other greater but unknown things: it was not to be
expected that they should be simply good in themselves. This life was
to be justified, if justified at all, only as servile work or tedious
business may be justified, not as health or artistic expression justify
themselves. Unless some external and ulterior end could be achieved
by living, it was thought that life would be vanity. Remove now the
expectation of a millennium or of a paradise in the sky, and it may
seem that all serious value has disappeared from our earthly existence.
Yet this feeling is only a temporary after-image of a particular
education.
[Pg 110] The romantic poets, through pride, restlessness, and longing
for vague impossible things, came to the same conclusion that the
church had reached through censoriousness and hope. To be always
dissatisfied seemed to that Faust-like age a mark of loftiness. To
be dissatisfied is, indeed, a healthy and promising thing, when what
troubles us can be set right; but the romantic mind despises such
incidental improvements which far from freeing the wild egotistical
soul would rather fatten and harness it. It is beneath the romantic
pessimist to remember that people, in all ages, sometimes achieve what
they have set their hearts on, and that if human will and conduct
were better disciplined, this contentment would be more frequent and
more massive. On the contrary, he asserts that willing is always and
everywhere abortive.
How can he persuade himself of something so evidently false? By that
mystical misinterpretation of human nature which is perhaps the core
of romanticism. He imagines that what is desired is not: this or
that--food, children, victory, knowledge, or some other specific
goal of a human instinct--but an abstract and perpetual happiness
behind all these alternating interests. Of course an abstract and
perpetual happiness is impossible, not merely because events are
sure to disturb any equilibrium we may think we have established in
our lives, but for the [Pg 111] far more fundamental reason that we
have no abstract and perpetual instinct to satisfy. The desire for
self-preservation or power or union with God is no more perpetual or
comprehensive than any other: it is commonly when we are in straits
that we become aware of such objects, and to achieve them, or imagine
we achieve them, will give us only a momentary satisfaction, like any
other success. A highest good to be obtained apart from each and every
specific interest is more than unattainable; it is unthinkable. The
romanticist, chasing wilfully that _ignis fatuus_, naturally finds his
life arduous and disappointing. But he might have learned from Plato or
any sound moralist, if his genius could allow him to learn anything,
that the highest good of man is the sum and harmony of those specific
goods upon which his nature is directed. But because the romantic will
was unteachable, all will was declared to be foolish.
Schopenhauer was led into his pessimism also by the spirit of
opposition; his righteous wrath was aroused by the sardonic and
inhuman optimism of Hegel, the arguments for which were so cogent, so
Calvinistic, and so irrelevant that they would have lost none of their
force if they had been proposed in hell. The best possible world and
the worst possible world are, indeed, identical for that philosophy.
Schopenhauer needed to change nothing in the [Pg 112] description of
life, as the other idealists conceived it, in order to prove that life
was a tragedy; for they were as romantic as himself and as far from
feeling the intrinsic value of happiness, and the possibility of real
progress. Real progress has little to do with perpetual evolution.
It occurs only in certain places and times, when nature or art comes
to the assistance of some definite interest already embodied, as the
interest in security and mutual confidence, knowledge, or the fine arts
is already embodied in mankind. Schopenhauer was not insensible to
these achievements; he felt by instinct the infinity and luxuriance of
the moral world. It was in part this secret sympathy with nature that
alienated him from Christianity and from transcendental metaphysics.
But because natural goods cannot be desired or possessed for ever,
he thought their value was cancelled, even for those who desired and
possessed them. The leaven of romanticism was still at work, forbidding
him to recognise a natural order, with which a vital harmony might be
established. The ground of life, the Will in all things, was something
lurid and tempestuous, itself a psychological chaos. The alternative to
theism in the mind of Schopenhauer was not naturalism but anarchy.
This romantic travesty of life and this conception of metaphysical
anarchy were inherited by Nietzsche [Pg 113] and regarded by him as
the last word of philosophy. But he made the breach with Christianity
still wider. The grief of Schopenhauer in the presence of such a world,
his desperate and exotic remedy--the denial of the will--and
his love of contemplation were all evidences of a mind still half
Christian: his pessimism itself was so much homage to the faith he
had lost. Such backward glances were not for the impetuous Nietzsche,
who felt he was a prophet of the future, and really was one. Romantic
anarchy delighted him; and he crowned it with a rakish optimism, as
with the red cap of Liberty. He was in hearty sympathy with absolute
Will; he praised it even for being vain and maleficent, if it was only
proud enough to praise itself.
[Pg 114] CHAPTER XI