IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY
The causes which we have named, religious and æsthetic, as well as
purely speculative, led to such a revision of philosophical principles
in Germany as took place in no other land. The new idealistic
philosophy, as it took shape primarily at the hands of Kant, completed
the dissolution of the old rationalism. It laid the foundation for the
speculative thought of the western world for the century which was to
come. The answers which æstheticism and pietism gave to rationalism were
incomplete. They consisted largely in calling attention to that which
rationalism had overlooked. Kant's idealism, however, met the
intellectual movement on its own grounds. It triumphed over it with its
own weapons. The others set feeling over against thought. He taught men
a new method in thinking. The others put emotion over against reason. He
criticised in drastic fashion the use which had been made of reason. He
inquired into the nature of reason. He vindicated the reasonableness of
some truths which men had indeed felt to be indefeasibly true, but which
they had not been able to establish by reasoning.
KANT
Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, possibly of remoter
Scottish ancestry. His father was a saddler, as Melanchthon's had been
an armourer and Wolff's a tanner. His native city with its university
was the scene of his whole life and labour. He was never outside of
Prussia except for a brief interval when Königsberg belonged to Russia.
He was a German professor of the old style. Studying, teaching, writing
books, these were his whole existence. He was the fourth of nine
children of a devoted pietist household. Two of his sisters served in
the houses of friends. The consistorial-rath opened the way to the
university. An uncle aided him to publish his first books. His earlier
interest was in the natural sciences. He was slow in coming to
promotion. Only after 1770 was he full professor of logic and
metaphysics. In 1781 he published the first of the books upon which
rests his world-wide fame. Nevertheless, he lived to see the triumph of
his philosophy in most of the German universities. His subjects are
abstruse, his style involved. It never occurred to him to make the
treatment of his themes easier by use of the imagination. He had but a
modicum of that quality. He was hostile to the pride of intellect often
manifested by petty rationalists. He was almost equally hostile to
excessive enthusiasm in religion. The note of his life, apart from his
intellectual power, was his ethical seriousness. He was in conflict with
ecclesiastical personages and out of sympathy with much of institutional
religion. None the less, he was in his own way one of the most religious
of men. His brief conflict with Wöllner's government was the only
instance in which his peace and public honour were disturbed. He never
married. He died in Königsberg in 1804. He had been for ten years so
much enfeebled that his death was a merciful release.
Kant used the word 'critique' so often that his philosophy has been
called the 'critical philosophy.' The word therefore needs an
explanation. Kant himself distinguished two types of philosophy, which
he called the dogmatic and critical types. The essence of a dogmatic
philosophy is that it makes belief to rest upon knowledge. Its endeavour
is to demonstrate that which is believed. It brings out as its foil the
characteristically sceptical philosophy. This esteems that the proofs
advanced in the interest of belief are inadequate. The belief itself is
therefore an illusion. The essence of a critical philosophy, on the
other hand, consists in this, that it makes a distinction between the
functions of knowing and believing. It distinguishes between the
perception of that which is in accordance with natural law and the
understanding of the moral meaning of things.[3] Kant thus uses his word
critique in accordance with the strict etymological meaning of the root.
He seeks to make a clear separation between the provinces of belief and
knowledge, and thus to find an adjustment of their claims. Of an object
of belief we may indeed say that we know it. Yet we must make clear to
ourselves that we know it in a different sense from that in which we
know physical fact. Faith, since it does not spring from the pure
reason, cannot indeed, as the old dogmatisms, both philosophical and
theological, have united in asserting, be demonstrated by the reason.
Equally it cannot, as scepticism has declared, be overthrown by the pure
reason.
The ancient positive dogmatism had been the idealistic philosophy of
Plato and Aristotle. The old negative dogmatism had been the materialism
of the Epicureans. To Plato the world was the realisation of ideas.
Ideas, spiritual entities, were the counterparts and necessary
antecedents of the natural objects and actual facts of life. To the
Epicureans, on the other hand, there are only material bodies and
natural laws. There are no ideas or purposes. In the footsteps of the
former moved all the scholastics of the Middle Age, and again, even
Locke and Leibnitz in their so-called 'natural theology.' In the
footsteps of the latter moved the men who had made materialism and
scepticism to be the dominant philosophy of France in the latter half of
the eighteenth century. The aim of Kant was to resolve this age-long
contradiction. Free, unprejudiced investigation of the facts and laws of
the phenomenal world can never touch the foundations of faith. Natural
science can lead in the knowledge only of the realm of the laws of
things. It cannot give us the inner moral sense of those things. To
speak of the purposes of nature as men had done was absurd. Natural
theology, as men had talked of it, was impossible. What science can give
is a knowledge of the facts about us in the world, of the growth of the
cosmos, of the development of life, of the course of history, all viewed
as necessary sequences of cause and effect.
[Footnote 3: Paulsen, _Kant_, a. 2.]
On the other hand, with the idealists, Kant is fully persuaded that
there is a meaning in things and that we can know it. There is a sense
in life. With immediate certainty we set moral good as the absolute aim
in life. This is done, however, not through the pure reason or by
scientific thinking, but primarily through the will, or as Kant prefers
to call it, the practical reason. What is meant by the practical reason
is the intelligence, the will and the affections operating together;
that is to say, the whole man and not merely his intellect, directed to
those problems upon which, in sympathy and moral reaction, the whole man
must be directed and upon which the pure reason, the mere faculty of
ratiocination, does not adequately operate. In the practical reason the
will is the central thing. The will is that faculty of man to which
moral magnitudes appeal. It is with moral magnitudes that the will is
primarily concerned. The pure reason may operate without the will and
the affections. The will, as a source of knowledge, never works without
the intelligence and the affections. But it is the will which alone
judges according to the predicates good and evil. The pure reason judges
according to the predicates true and false. It is the practical reason
which ventures the credence that moral worth is the supreme worth in
life. It then confirms this ventured credence in a manifold experience
that yields a certainty with which no certainty of objects given in the
senses is for a moment to be compared. We know that which we have
believed. We know it as well as that two and two make four. Still we do
not know it in the same way. Nor can we bring knowledge of it to others
save through an act of freedom on their part, which is parallel to the
original act of freedom on our own part.
How can these two modes of thought stand related the one to the other?
Kant's answer is that they correspond to the distinction between two
worlds, the world of sense and the transcendental or supersensible
world. The pure and the practical reason are the faculties of man for
dealing with these two worlds respectively, the phenomenal and the
noumenal. The world which is the object of scientific investigation is
not the actuality itself. This is true in spite of the fact that to the
common man the material and sensible is always, as he would say, the
real. On the contrary, in Kant's opinion the material world is only the
presentation to our senses of something deeper, of which our senses are
no judge. The reality lies behind this sensible presentation and
appearance. The world of religious belief is the world of this
transcendent reality. The spirit of man, which is not pure reason only,
but moral will as well, recognises itself also as part of this reality.
It expresses the essence of that mysterious reality in terms of its own
essence. Its own essence as free spirit is the highest aspect of reality
of which it is aware. It may be unconscious of the symbolic nature of
its language in describing that which is higher than anything which we
know, by the highest which we do know. Yet, granting that, and supposing
that it is not a contradiction to attempt a description of the
transcendent at all, there is no description which carries us so far.
This series of ideas was perhaps that which gave to Kant's philosophy
its immediate and immense effect upon the minds of men wearied with the
endless strife and insoluble contradiction of the dogmatic and sceptical
spirits. We may disagree with much else in the Kantian system. Even here
we may say that we have not two reasons, but only two functionings of
one. We have not two worlds. The philosophical myth of two worlds has no
better standing than the religious myth of two worlds. We have two
characteristic aspects of one and the same world. These perfectly
interpenetrate the one the other, if we may help ourselves with the
language of space. Each is everywhere present. Furthermore, these
actions of reason and aspects of world shade into one another by
imperceptible degrees. Almost all functionings of reason have something
of the qualities of both. However, when all is said, it was of greatest
worth to have had these two opposite poles of thought brought clearly to
mind. The dogmatists, in the interest of faith, were resisting at every
step the progress of the sciences, feeling that that progress was
inimical to faith. The devotees of science were saying that its
processes were of universal validity, its conclusions irresistible, the
gradual dissolution of faith was certain. Kant made plain that neither
party had the right to such conclusions. Each was attempting to apply
the processes appropriate to one form of rational activity within the
sphere which belonged to the other. Nothing but confusion could result.
The religious man has no reason to be jealous of the advance of the
sciences. The interests of faith itself are furthered by such
investigation. Illusions as to fact which have been mistakenly
identified with faith are thus done away. Nevertheless, its own eternal
right is assured to faith. With it lies the interpretation of the facts
of nature and of history, whatever those facts may be found to be. With
the practical reason is the interpretation of these facts according to
their moral worth, a worth of which the pure reason knows nothing and
scientific investigation reveals nothing.
Here was a deliverance not unlike that which the Reformation had
brought. The mingling of Aristotelianism and religion in the scholastic
theology Luther had assailed. Instead of assent to human dogmas Luther
had the immediate assurance of the heart that God was on his side. And
what is that but a judgment of the practical reason, the response of the
heart in man to the spiritual universe? It is given in experience. It is
not mediated by argument. It cannot be destroyed by syllogism. It needs
no confirmation from science. It is capable of combination with any of
the changing interpretations which science may put upon the outward
universe. The Reformation had, however, not held fast to its great
truth. It had gone back to the old scholastic position. It had rested
faith in an essentially rationalistic manner upon supposed facts in
nature and alleged events of history in connection with the revelation.
It had thus jeopardised the whole content of faith, should these
supposed facts of nature or events in history be at any time disproved.
Men had made faith to rest upon statements of Scripture, alleging such
and such acts and events. They did not recognise these as the naïve and
childlike assumptions concerning nature and history which the authors of
Scripture would naturally have. When, therefore, these statements began
with the progress of the sciences to be disproved, the defenders of the
faith presented always the feeble spectacle of being driven from one
form of evidence to another, as the old were in turn destroyed. The
assumption was rife at the end of the eighteenth century that
Christianity was discredited in the minds of all free and reasonable
men. Its tenets were incompatible with that which enlightened men
infallibly knew to be true. It could be no long time until the
hollowness and sham would be patent to all. Even the interested and the
ignorant would be compelled to give it up. Of course, the invincibly
devout in every nation felt of instinct that this was not true. They
felt that there is an inexpugnable truth of religion. Still that was
merely an intuition of their hearts. They were right. But they were
unable to prove that they were right, or even to get a hearing with many
of the cultivated of their age. To Kant we owe the debt, that he put an
end to this state of things. He made the real evidence for religion that
of the moral sense, of the nonscience and hearts of men themselves. The
real ground of religious conviction is the religious experience. He thus
set free both science and religion from an embarrassment under which
both laboured, and by which both had been injured.
Kant parted company with the empirical philosophy which had held that
all knowledge arises from without, comes from experienced sensations, is
essentially perception. This theory had not been able to explain the
fact that human experience always conforms to certain laws. On the other
hand, the philosophy of so-called innate ideas had sought to derive all
knowledge from the constitution of the mind itself. It left out of
consideration the dependence of the mind upon experience. It tended to
confound the creations of its own speculation with reality, or rather,
to claim correspondence with fact for statements which had no warrant in
experience. There was no limit to which this speculative process might
not be pushed. By this process the medieval theologians, with all
gravity, propounded the most absurd speculations concerning nature. By
this process men made the most astonishing declarations upon the basis,
as they supposed, of revelation. They made allegations concerning
history and the religious experience which the most rudimentary
knowledge of history or reflection upon consciousness proved to be quite
contrary to fact.
Both empiricism and the theory of innate ideas had agreed in regarding
all knowledge as something given, from without or from within. The
knowing mind was only a passive recipient of impressions thus imparted
to it. It was as wax under the stylus, _tabula rasa_, clean paper
waiting to be written upon. Kant departed from this radically. He
declared that all cognition rests upon the union of the mind's activity
with its receptivity. The material of thought, or at least some of the
materials of thought, must be given us in the multiformity of our
perceptions, through what we call experience from the outer world. On
the other hand, the formation of this material into knowledge is the
work of the activity of our own minds. Knowledge is the result of the
systematising of experience and of reflection upon it. This activity of
the mind takes place always in accordance with the mind's own laws. Kant
held them to the absolute dependence of knowledge upon material applied
in experience. He compared himself to Copernicus who had taught men that
they themselves revolved around a central fact of the universe. They had
supposed that the facts revolved about them. The central fact of the
intellectual world is experience. This experience seems to be given us
in the forms of time and space and cause. These are merely forms of the
mind's own activity. It is not possible for us to know 'the thing in
itself,' the _Ding an sich_ in Kant's phrase, which is the external
factor in any sensation or perception. We cannot distinguish that
external factor from the contribution to it, as it stands in our
perception, which our own minds have made. If we cannot do that even for
ourselves, how much less can we do it for others! It is the subject, the
thinking being who says 'I,' which, by means of its characteristic and
necessary active processes, in the perception of things under the forms
of time and space, converts the chaotic material of knowledge into a
regular and ordered world of reasoned experience. In this sense the
understanding itself imposes laws, if not upon nature, yet, at least,
upon nature as we can ever know it. There is thus in Kant's philosophy a
sceptical aspect. Knowledge is limited to phenomena. We cannot by pure
reason know anything of the world which lies beyond experience. This
thought had been put forth by Locke and Berkeley, and by Hume also, in a
different way. But with Kant this scepticism was not the gist of his
philosophy. It was urged rather as the basis of the unconditioned
character which he proposed to assert for the practical reason. Kant's
scepticism is therefore very different from that of Hume. It does not
militate against the profoundest religious conviction. Yet it prepared
the way for some of the just claims of modern agnosticism.
According to Kant, it is as much the province of the practical reason to
lay down laws for action as it is the province of pure reason to
determine the conditions of thought, though the practical reason can
define only the form of action which shall be in the spirit of duty. It
cannot present duty to us as an object of desire. Desire can be only a
form of self-love. In the end it reckons with the advantage of having
done one's duty. It thus becomes selfish and degraded. The
identification of duty and interest was particularly offensive to Kant.
He was at war with every form of hedonism. To do one's duty because one
expects to reap advantage is not to have done one's duty. The doing of
duty in this spirit simply resolves itself into a subtler and more
pervasive form of selfishness. He castigates the popular presentation of
religion as fostering this same fault. On the other hand, there is a
trait of rigorism in Kant, a survival of the ancient dualism, which was
not altogether consistent with the implications of his own philosophy.
This philosophy afforded, as we have seen, the basis for a monistic view
of the universe. But to his mind the natural inclinations of man are
opposed to good conscience and sound reason. He had contempt for the
shallow optimism of his time, according to which the nature of man was
all good, and needed only to be allowed to run its natural course to
produce highest ethical results. He does not seem to have penetrated to
the root of Rousseau's fallacy, the double sense in which he constantly
used the words 'nature' and 'natural.' Otherwise, Kant would have been
able to repudiate the preposterous doctrine of Rousseau, without himself
falling back upon the doctrine of the radical evil of human nature. In
this doctrine he is practically at one with the popular teaching of his
own pietistic background, and with Calvinism as it prevailed with many
of the religiously-minded of his day. In its extreme statements the
latter reminds one of the pagan and oriental dualisms which so long ran
parallel to the development of Christian thought and so profoundly
influenced it.
Kant's system is not at one with itself at this point. According to him
the natural inclinations of men are such as to produce a never-ending
struggle between duty and desire. To desire to do a thing made him
suspicious that he was not actuated by the pure spirit of duty in doing
it. The sense in which man may be in his nature both a child of God,
and, at the same time, part of the great complex of nature, was not yet
clear either to Kant or to his opponents. His pessimism was a reflection
of his moral seriousness. Yet it failed to reckon with that which is yet
a glorious fact. One of the chief results of doing one's duty is the
gradual escape from the desire to do the contrary. It is the gradual
fostering by us, the ultimate dominance in us, of the desire to do that
duty. Even to have seen one's duty is the dawning in us of this high
desire. In the lowest man there is indeed the superficial desire to
indulge his passions. There is also the latent longing to be conformed
to the good. There is the sense that he fulfils himself then only when
he is obedient to the good. One of the great facts of spiritual
experience is this gradual, or even sudden, inversion of standard within
us. We do really cease to desire the things which are against right
reason and conscience. We come to desire the good, even if it shall cost
us pain and sacrifice to do it. Paul could write: 'When I would do good,
evil is present with me.' But, in the vividness of his identification of
his willing self with his better self against his sinning self, he could
also write: 'So then it is no more I that do the sin.' _Das radicale
Böse_ of human nature is less radical than Kant supposed, and 'the
categorical imperative' of duty less externally categorical than he
alleged. Still it is the great merit of Kant's philosophy to have
brought out with all possible emphasis, not merely as against the
optimism of the shallow, but as against the hedonism of soberer people,
that our life is a conflict between inclination and duty. The claims of
duty are the higher ones. They are mandatory, absolute. We do our duty
whether or not we superficially desire to do it. We do our duty whether
or not we foresee advantage in having done it. We should do it if we
foresaw with clearness disadvantage. We should find our satisfaction in
having done it, even at the cost of all our other satisfactions. There
is a must which is over and above all our desires. This is what Kant
really means by the categorical imperative. Nevertheless, his statement
comes in conflict with the principle of freedom, which is one of the
most fundamental in his system. The phrases above used only eddy about
the one point which is to be held fast. There may be that in the
universe which destroys the man who does not conform to it, but in the
last analysis he is self-destroyed, that is, he chooses not to conform.
If he is saved, it is because he chooses thus to conform. Man would be
then most truly man in resisting that which would merely overpower him,
even if it were goodness. Of course, there can be no goodness which
overpowers. There can be no goodness which is not willed. Nothing can be
a motive except through awakening our desire. That which one desires is
never wholly external to oneself.
According to Kant, morality becomes religion when that which the former
shows to be the end of man is conceived also to be the end of the
supreme law-giver, God. Religion is the recognition of our duties as
divine commands. The distinction between revealed and natural religion
is stated thus: In the former we know a thing to be a divine command
before we recognise it as our duty. In the latter we know it to be our
duty before we recognise it as a divine command. Religion may be both
natural and revealed. Its tenets may be such that man can be conceived
as arriving at them by unaided reason. But he would thus have arrived at
them at a later period in the evolution of the race. Hence revelation
might be salutary or even necessary for certain times and places without
being essential at all times or, for that matter, a permanent guarantee
of the truth of religion. There is nothing here which is new or original
with Kant. This line of reasoning was one by which men since Lessing had
helped themselves over certain difficulties. It is cited only to show
how Kant, too, failed to transcend his age in some matters, although he
so splendidly transcended it in others.
The orthodox had immemorially asserted that revelation imparted
information not otherwise attainable, or not then attainable. The
rationalists here allege the same. Kant is held fast in this view.
Assuredly what revelation imparts is not information of any sort
whatsoever, not even information concerning God. What revelation imparts
is God himself, through the will and the affection, the practical
reason. Revelation is experience, not instruction. The revealers are
those who have experienced God, Jesus the foremost among them. They have
experienced God, whom then they have manifested as best they could, but
far more significantly in what they were than in what they said. There
is surely the gravest exaggeration of what is statutory and external in
that which Kant says of the relation of ethics and religion. How can we
know that to be a command of God, which does not commend itself in our
own heart and conscience? The traditionalist would have said, by
documents miraculously confirmed. It was not in consonance with his
noblest ideas for Kant to say that. On the other hand, that which I
perceive to be my duty I, as religious man, feel to be a command of God,
whether or not a mandate of God to that effect can be adduced. Whether
an alleged revelation from God inculcates such a truth or duty may be
incidental. In a sense it is accidental. The content of all historic
revelation is conditioned in the circumstances of the man to whom the
revelation is addressed. It is clear that the whole matter of revelation
is thus apprehended by Kant with more externality than we should have
believed. His thought is still essentially archaic and dualistic. He is,
therefore, now and then upon the point of denying that such a thing as
revelation is possible. The very idea of revelation, in this form, does
violence to his fundamental principle of the autonomy of the human
reason and will. At many points in his reflection it is transparently
clear that nothing can ever come to a man, or be given forth by him,
which is not creatively shaped by himself. As regards revelation,
however, Kant never frankly took that step. The implications of his own
system would have led him to that step. They led to an idea of
revelation which was psychologically in harmony with the assumptions of
his system, and historically could be conceived as taking place without
the interjection of the miraculous in the ordinary sense. If the divine
revelation is to be thought as taking place within the human spirit, and
in consonance with the laws of all other experience, then the human
spirit must itself be conceived as standing in such relation to the
divine that the eternal reason may express and reveal itself in the
regular course of the mind's own activity. Then the manifold moral and
religious ideals of mankind in all history must take their place as
integral factors also in the progress of the divine revelation.
When we come to the more specific topics of his religious teaching,
freedom, immortality, God, Kant is prompt to assert that these cannot be
objects of theoretical knowledge. Insoluble contradictions arise
whenever a proof of them is attempted. If an object of faith could be
demonstrated it would cease to be an object of faith. It would have been
brought down out of the transcendental world. Were God to us an object
among other objects, he would cease to be a God. Were the soul a
demonstrable object like any other object, it would cease to be the
transcendental aspect of ourselves. Kant makes short work of the
so-called proofs for the existence of God which had done duty in the
scholastic theology. With subtilty, sometimes also with bitter irony, he
shows that they one and all assume that which they set out to prove.
They are theoretically insufficient and practically unnecessary. They
have such high-sounding names--the ontological argument, the
cosmological, the physico-theological--that almost in spite of ourselves
we bring a reverential mood to them. They have been set forth with
solemnity by such redoubtable thinkers that there is something almost
startling in the way that Kant knocks them about. The fact that the
ordinary man among us easily perceives that Kant was right shows only
how the climate of the intellectual world has changed. Freedom,
immortality, God, are not indeed provable. If given at all, they can be
given only in the practical reason. Still they are postulates in the
moral order which makes man the citizen of an intelligible world. There
can be no 'ought' for a being who is necessitated. We can perceive, and
do perceive, that we ought to do a thing. It follows that we can do it.
However, the hindrances to the realisation of the moral ideal are such
that it cannot be realised in a finite time. Hence the postulate of
eternal life for the individual. Finally, reason demands realisation of
a supreme good, both a perfect virtue and a corresponding happiness. Man
is a final end only as a moral subject. There must be One who is not
only a law-giver, but in himself also the realisation of the law of
the moral world.
Kant's moral argument thus steps off the line of the others. It is not a
proof at all in the sense in which they attempted to be proofs. The
existence of God appears as a necessary assumption, if the highest good
and value in the world are to be fulfilled. But the conception and
possibility of realisation of a highest good is itself something which
cannot be concluded with theoretical evidentiality. It is the object of
a belief which in entire freedom is directed to that end. Kant lays
stress upon the fact that among the practical ideas of reason, that of
freedom is the one whose reality admits most nearly of being proved by
the laws of pure reason, as well as in conduct and experience. Upon an
act of freedom, then, belief rests. 'It is the free holding that to be
true, which for the fulfilment of a purpose we find necessary.' Now, as
object of this 'free holding something to be true,' he sets forth the
conception of the highest good in the world, to be realised through
freedom. It is clear that before this argument would prove that a God is
necessary to the realisation of the moral order, it would have to be
shown that there are no adequate forces immanent within society itself
for the establishment and fulfilment of that order. As a matter of fact,
reflexion in the nineteenth century, devoted as it has been to the
evolution of society, has busied itself with hardly anything more than
with the study of those immanent elements which make for morality. It is
therefore not an external guarantor of morals, such as Kant thought,
which is here given. It is the immanent God who is revealed in the
history and life of the race, even as also it is the immanent God who is
revealed in the consciousness of the individual soul. Even the moral
argument, therefore, in the form in which Kant puts it, sounds remote
and strange to us. His reasoning strains and creaks almost as if he were
still trying to do that which he had just declared could not be done.
What remains of significance for us, is this. All the debate about first
causes, absolute beings, and the rest, gives us no God such as our souls
need. If a man is to find the witness for soul, immortality and God at
all, he must find it within himself and in the spiritual history of his
fellows. He must venture, in freedom, the belief in these things, and
find their corroboration in the contribution which they make to the
solution of the mystery of life. One must venture to win them. One must
continue to venture, to keep them. If it were not so, they would not be
objects of faith.
The source of the radical evil in man is an intelligible act of human
freedom not further to be explained. Moral evil is not, as such,
transmitted. Moral qualities are inseparable from the responsibility of
the person who commits the deeds. Yet this radical disposition to evil
is to be changed into a good one, not altogether by a process of moral
reformation. There is such a thing as a fundamental revolution of a
man's habit of thought, a conscious and voluntary transference of a
man's intention to obey, from the superficial and selfish desires which
he has followed, to the deep and spiritual ones which he will henceforth
allow. There is an epoch in a man's life when he makes the transition.
He probably does it under the spell of personal influence, by the power
of example, through the beauty of another personality. To Kant salvation
was character. It was of and in and by character. To no thinker has the
moral participation of a man in the regeneration of his own character
been more certain and necessary than to Kant. Yet, the change in
direction of the will generally comes by an impulse from without. It
comes by the impress of a noble personality. It is sustained by
enthusiasm for that personality. Kant has therefore a perfectly rational
and ethical and vital meaning for the phrase 'new birth.'
For the purpose of this impulse to goodness, nothing is so effective as
the contemplation of an historical example of such surpassing moral
grandeur as that which we behold in Jesus. For this reason we may look
to Jesus as the ideal of goodness presented to us in flesh and blood.
Yet the assertion that Jesus' historical personality altogether
corresponds with the complete and eternal ethical ideal is one which we
have no need to make. We do not possess in our own minds the absolute
ideal with which in that assertion we compare him.
The ethical ideal of the race is still in process of development. Jesus
has been the greatest factor urging forward that development. We
ourselves stand at a certain point in that development. We have the
ideals which we have because we stand at that point at which we do. The
men who come after us will have a worthier ideal than we do. Again, to
say that Jesus in his words and conduct expressed in its totality the
eternal ethical ideal, would make of his life something different from
the real, human life. Every real, human life is lived within certain
actual antitheses which call out certain qualities and do not call out
others. They demand certain reactions and not others. This is the
concrete element without which nothing historical can be conceived. To
say that Jesus lived in entire conformity to the ethical ideal so far as
we are able to conceive it, and within the circumstances which his own
time and place imposed, is the most that we can say. But in any case,
Kant insists, the real object of our religious faith is not the historic
man, but the ideal of humanity well-pleasing to God. Since this ideal is
not of our own creation, but is given us in our super-sensible nature,
it may be conceived as the Son of God come down from heaven.
The turn of this last phrase is an absolutely characteristic one, and
brings out another quality of Kant's mind in dealing with the Christian
doctrines. They are to him but symbols, forms into which a variety of
meanings may be run. He had no great appreciation of the historical
element in doctrine. He had no deep sense of the social element and of
that for which Christian institutions stand. We may illustrate with that
which he says concerning Christ's vicarious sacrifice. Substitution
cannot take place in the moral world. Ethical salvation could not be
conferred through such a substitution, even if this could take place.
Still, the conception of the vicarious suffering of Christ may be taken
as a symbolical expression of the idea that in the pain of
self-discipline, of obedience and patience, the new man in us suffers,
as it were vicariously, for the old. The atonement is a continual
ethical process in the heart of the religious man. It is a grave defect
of Kant's religious philosophy, that it was so absolutely
individualistic. Had he realised more deeply than he did the social
character of religion and the meaning of these doctrines, not alone as
between man and God, but as between man and man, he surely would have
drawn nearer to that interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement
which has come more and more to prevail. This is the solution which
finds in the atonement of Christ the last and most glorious example of a
universal law of human life and history. That law is that no redemptive
good for men is ever secured without the suffering and sacrifice of
those who seek to confer that good upon their fellows. Kant was disposed
to regard the traditional forms of Christian doctrine, not as the old
rationalism had done, as impositions of a priesthood or inherently
absurd. He sought to divest them indeed of that which was speculatively
untrue, though he saw in them only symbols of the great moral truths
which lie at the heart of religion. The historical spirit of the next
fifty years was to teach men a very different way of dealing with these
same doctrines.
* * * * *
Kant had said that the primary condition, fundamental not merely to
knowledge, but to all connected experience, is the knowing,
experiencing, thinking, acting self. It is that which says 'I,' the ego,
the permanent subject. But that is not enough. The knowing self demands
in turn a knowable world. It must have something outside of itself to
which it yet stands related, the object of knowledge. Knowledge is
somehow the combination of those two, the result of their co-operation.
How have we to think of this co-operation? Both Hume and Berkeley had
ended in scepticism as to the reality of knowledge. Hume was in doubt as
to the reality of the subject, Berkeley as to that of the object. Kant
dissented from both. He vindicated the undoubted reality of the
impression which we have concerning a thing. Yet how far that impression
is the reproduction of the thing as it is in itself, we can never
perfectly know. What we have in our minds is not the object. It is a
notion of that object, although we may be assured that we could have no
such notion were there no object. Equally, the notion is what it is
because the subject is what it is. We can never get outside the
processes of our own thought. We cannot know the thing as it is, the
_Ding-an-sich_, in Kant's phrase. We know only that there must be a
'thing in itself.'
FICHTE
Fichte asked, Why? Why must there be a _Ding-an-sich_? Why is not that
also the result of the activity of the ego? Why is not the ego, the
thinking subject, all that is, the creator of the world, according to
the laws of thought? If so much is reduced to idea, why not all? This
was Fichte's rather forced resolution of the old dualism of thought and
thing. It is not the denial of the reality of things, but the assertion
that their ideal element, that part of them which is not mere 'thing,'
the action and subject of the action, is their underlying reality.
According to Kant things exist in a world beyond us. Man has no faculty
by which he can penetrate into that world. Still, the farther we follow
Kant in his analysis the more does the contribution to knowledge from
the side of the mind tend to increase, and the more does the factor in
our impressions from the side of things tend to fade away. This basis of
impression being wholly unknowable is as good as non-existent for us.
Yet it never actually disappears. There would seem to be inevitable a
sort of kernel of matter or prick of sense about which all our thoughts
are generated. Yet this residue is a vanishing quantity. This seemed to
Fichte to be a self-contradiction and a half-way measure. Only two
positions appeared to him thorough-going and consequent. Either one
posits as fundamental the thing itself, matter, independent of any
consciousness of it. So Spinoza had taught. Or else one takes
consciousness, the conscious subject, independent of any matter or thing
as fundamental. This last Fichte claimed to be the real issue of Kant's
thought. He asserts that from the point of view of the thing in itself
we can never explain knowledge. We may be as skilful as possible in
placing one thing behind another in the relation of cause to effect. It
is, however, an unending series. It is like the cosmogony of the Eastern
people which fabled that the earth rests upon the back of an elephant.
The elephant stands upon a tortoise. The question is, upon what does the
tortoise stand? So here, we may say, in the conclusive manner in which
men have always said, that God made the world. Yet sooner or later we
come to the child's question: Who made God? Fichte rightly replied: 'If
God is for us only an object of knowledge, the _Ding-an-sich_ at the end
of the series, there is no escape from the answer that man, the thinker,
in thinking God made him.' All the world, including man, is but the
reflexion, the revelation in forms of the finite, of an unceasing action
of thought of which the ego is the object. Nothing more paradoxical than
this conclusion can be imagined. It seems to make the human subject, the
man myself, the creator of the universe, and the universe only that
which I happen to think it to be.
This interpretation was at first put upon Fichte's reasoning with such
vigour that he was accused of atheism. He was driven from his chair in
Jena. Only after several years was he called to a corresponding post in
Berlin. Later, in his _Vocation of Man_, he brought his thought to
clearness in this form: 'If God be only the object of thought, it
remains true that he is then but the creation of man's thought. God is,
however, to be understood as subject, as the real subject, the
transcendent thinking and knowing subject, indwelling in the world and
making the world what it is, indwelling in us and making us what we are.
We ourselves are subjects only in so far as we are parts of God. We
think and know only in so far as God thinks and knows and acts and lives
in us. The world, including ourselves, is but the reflection of the
thought of God, who thus only has existence. Neither the world nor we
have existence apart from him.'
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born at Rammenau in 1762. His father was a
ribbon weaver. He came of a family distinguished for piety and
uprightness. He studied at Jena, and became an instructor there in 1793.
He was at first a devout disciple of Kant, but gradually separated
himself from his master. There is a humorous tale as to one of his early
books which was, through mistake of the publisher, put forth without the
author's name. For a brief time it was hailed as a work of Kant--his
_Critique of Revelation_. Fichte was a man of high moral enthusiasm,
very uncompromising, unable to put himself in the place of an opponent,
in incessant strife. The great work of his Jena period was his
_Wissenschaftslehre_, 1794. His popular Works, _Die Bestimmung des
Menschen_ and _Anweisung zum seligen Leben_, belong to his Berlin
period. The disasters of 1806 drove him out of Berlin. Amidst the
dangers and discouragements of the next few years he wrote his famous
_Reden an die deutsche Nation_. He drew up the plan for the founding of
the University of Berlin. In 1810 he was called to be rector of the
newly established university. He was, perhaps, the chief adviser of
Frederick William III in the laying of the foundations of the
university, which was surely a notable venture for those trying years.
In the autumn of 1812 and again in 1813, when the hospitals were full of
sick and wounded after the Russian and Leipzig campaigns, Fichte and his
wife were unceasing in their care of the sufferers. He died of fever
contracted in the hospital in January 1814.
According to Fichte, as we have seen, the world of sense is the
reflection of our own inner activity. It exists for us as the sphere and
material of our duty. The moral order only is divine. We, the finite
intelligences, exist only in and through the infinite intelligence. All
our life is thus God's life. We are immortal because he is immortal. Our
consciousness is his consciousness. Our life and moral force is his, the
reflection and manifestation of his being, individuation of the infinite
reason which is everywhere present in the finite. In God we see the
world also in a new light. There is no longer any nature which is
external to ourselves and unrelated to ourselves. There is only God
manifesting himself in nature. Even the evil is only a means to good
and, therefore, only an apparent evil. We are God's immediate
manifestation, being spirit like himself. The world is his mediate
manifestation. The world of dead matter, as men have called it, does not
exist. God is the reality within the forms of nature and within
ourselves, by which alone we have reality. The duty to which a God
outside of ourselves could only command us, becomes a privilege to which
we need no commandment, but to the fulfilment of which, rather, we are
drawn in joy by the forces of our own being. How a man could, even in
the immature stages of these thoughts, have been persecuted for atheism,
it is not easy to see, although we may admit that his earlier forms of
statement were bewildering. When we have his whole thought before us we
should say rather that it borders on acosmic pantheism, for which
everything is God and the world does not exist.
We have no need to follow Fichte farther. Suffice it to say, with
reference to the theory of knowledge, that he had discovered that one
could not stand still with Kant. One must either go back toward the
position of the old empiricism which assumed the reality of the world
exactly as it appeared, or else one must go forward to an idealism more
thorough-going than Kant had planned. Of the two paths which, with all
the vast advance of the natural sciences, the thought of the nineteenth
century might traverse, that of the denial of everything except the
mechanism of nature, and that of the assertion that nature is but the
organ of spirit and is instinct with reason, Fichte chose the latter and
blazed out the path along which all the idealists have followed him. In
reference to the philosophy of religion, we must say that, with all the
extravagance, the pantheism and mysticism of his phrases, Fichte's great
contribution was his breaking down of the old dualism between God and
man which was still fundamental to Kant. It was his assertion of the
unity of man and God and of the life of God in man. This thought has
been appropriated in all of modern theology.
SCHELLING
It was the meagreness of Fichte's treatment of nature which impelled
Schelling to what he called his outbreak into reality. Nature will not
be dismissed, as simply that which is not I. You cannot say that nature
is only the sphere of my self-realisation. Individuals are in their way
the children of nature. They are this in respect of their souls as much
as of their bodies. Nature was before they were. Nature is, moreover,
not alien to intelligence. On the contrary, it is a treasure-house of
intelligible forms which demand to be treated as such. It appeared to
Schelling, therefore, a truer idealism to work out an intelligible
system of nature, exhibiting its essential oneness with personality.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling was born in 1775 at Leonberg in
Württemberg. His father was a clergyman. He was precocious in his
intellectual development and much spoiled by vanity. Before he was
twenty years old he had published three works upon problems suggested by
Fichte. At twenty-three he was extraordinarius at Jena. He had
apparently a brilliant career before him. He published his _Erster
Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophe_, 1799, and also his _System
des transcendentalen Idealismus_, 1800. Even his short residence at Jena
was troubled by violent conflicts with his colleagues. It was brought to
an end by his marriage with the wife of Augustus von Schlegel, who had
been divorced for the purpose. From 1806 to 1841 he lived in Munich in
retirement. The long-expected books which were to fulfil his early
promise never appeared. Hegel's stricture was just. Schelling had no
taste for the prolonged and intense labour which his brilliant early
works marked out. He died in 1854, having reached the age of
seventy-nine years, of which at least fifty were as melancholy and
fruitless as could well be imagined.
The dominating idea of Schelling's philosophy of nature may be said to
be the exhibition of nature as the progress of intelligence toward
consciousness and personality. Nature is the ego in evolution,
personality in the making. All natural objects are visible analogues and
counterparts of mind. The intelligence which their structure reveals,
men had interpreted as residing in the mind of a maker of the world.
Nature had been spoken of as if it were a watch. God was its great
artificer. No one asserted that its intelligence and power of
development lay within itself. On the contrary, nature is always in the
process of advance from lower, less highly organised and less
intelligible forms, to those which are more highly organised, more
nearly the counterpart of the active intelligence in man himself. The
personality of man had been viewed as standing over against nature, this
last being thought of as static and permanent. On the contrary, the
personality of man, with all of its intelligence and free will, is but
the climax and fulfilment of a long succession of intelligible forms in
nature, passing upward from the inorganic to the organic, from the
unconscious to the conscious, from the non-moral to the moral, as these
are at last seen in man. Of course, it was the life of organic nature
which first suggested this notion to Schelling. An organism is a
self-moving, self-producing whole. It is an idea in process of
self-realisation. What was observed in the organism was then made by
Schelling the root idea of universal nature. Nature is in all its parts
living, self-moving along the lines of its development, productivity and
product both in one. Empirical science may deal with separate products
of nature. It may treat them as objects of analysis and investigation.
It may even take the whole of nature as an object. But nature is not
mere object. Philosophy has to treat of the inner life which moves the
whole of nature as intelligible productivity, as subject, no longer as
object. Personality has slowly arisen out of nature. Nature was going
through this process of self-development before there were any men to
contemplate it. It would go through this process were there no longer
men to contemplate it.
Schelling has here rounded out the theory of absolute idealism which
Fichte had carried through in a one-sided way. He has given us also a
wonderful anticipation of certain modern ideas concerning nature's
preparation for the doctrine of evolution, which was a stroke of genius
in its way. He attempted to arrange the realm of unconscious
intelligences in an ascending series which should bridge the gulf
between the lowest of natural forms and the fully equipped organism in
which self consciousness, with the intellectual, the emotional, and
moral life, at last integrated. Inadequate material and a fondness for
analogies led Schelling into vagaries in following out this scheme.
Nevertheless, it is only in detail that we can look askance at his
attempt. In principle our own conception of the universe is the same. It
is the dynamic view of nature and an application of the principle of
evolution in the widest sense. His errors were those into which a man
was bound to fall who undertook to forestall by a sweep of the
imagination that which has been the result of the detailed and patient
investigation of three generations. What Schelling attempted was to take
nature as we know it and to exhibit it as in reality a function of
intelligence, pointing, through all the gradations of its varied forms,
towards its necessary goal in self-conscious personality. Instead,
therefore, of our having in nature and personality two things which
cannot be brought together, these become members of one great organism
of intelligence of which the immanent God is the source and the
sustaining power. These ideas constitute Schelling's contribution to an
idealistic and, of course, an essentially monistic view of the universe.
The unity of man with God, Fichte had asserted. Schelling set forth the
oneness of God and nature, and again of man and nature. The circle was
complete.
* * * * *
If we have succeeded in conveying a clear idea of the movement of
thought from Kant to Hegel, that idea might be stated thus. There are
but three possible objects which can engage the thought of man. These
are nature and man and God. There is the universe, of which we become
aware through experience from our earliest childhood. Then there is man,
the man given in self-consciousness, primarily the man myself. In this
sense man seems to stand over against nature. Then, as the third
possible object of thought, we have God. Upon the thought of God we
usually come from the point of view of the category of cause. God is the
name which men give to that which lies behind nature and man as the
origin and explanation of both. Plato's chief interest was in man. He
talked much concerning a God who was somehow the speculative postulate
of the spiritual nature in man. Aristotle began a real observation of
nature. But the ancient and, still more, the mediæval study of nature
was dominated by abstract and theological assumptions. These prevented
any real study of that nature in the midst of which man lives, in
reaction against which he develops his powers, and to which, on one
whole side of his nature, he belongs. Even in respect of that which men
reverently took to be thought concerning God, they seem to have been
unaware how much of their material was imaginative and poetic symbolism
drawn from the experience of man. The traditional idea of revelation
proved a disturbing factor. Assuming that revelation gave information
concerning God, and not rather the religious experience of communion
with God himself, men accepted statements of the documents of revelation
as if they had been definitions graciously given from out the realm of
the unseen. In reality, they were but fetches from out the world of the
known into the world of the unknown.
The point of interest is this:--In all possible combinations in which,
throughout the history of thought, these three objects had been set, the
one with the others, they had always remained three objects. There was
no essential relation of the one to the other. They were like the points
of a triangle of which any one stood over against the other two. God
stood over against the man whom he had fashioned, man over against the
God to whom he was responsible. The consequences for theology are
evident. When men wished to describe, for example, Jesus as the Son of
God, they laid emphasis upon every quality which he had, or was supposed
to have, which was not common to him with other men. They lost sight of
that profound interest of religion which has always claimed that, in
some sense, all men are sons of God and Jesus was the son of man. Jesus
was then only truly honoured as divine when every trait of his humanity
was ignored. Similarly, when men spoke of revelation they laid emphasis
upon those particulars in which this supposed method of coming by
information was unlike all other methods. Knowledge derived directly
from God through revelation was in no sense the parallel of knowledge
derived by men in any other way. So also God stood over against nature.
God was indeed declared to have made nature. He had, however, but given
it, so to say, an original impulse. That impulse also it had in some
strange way lost or perverted, so that the world, though it had been
made by God, was not good. For the most part it moved itself, although
God's sovereignty was evidenced in that he could still supervene upon
it, if he chose. The supernatural was the realm of God. Natural and
supernatural were mutually exclusive terms, just as we saw that divine
and human were exclusive terms. So also, on the third side of our
triangle, man stood over against nature. Nature was to primitive men the
realm of caprice, in which they imagined demons, spirits and the like.
These were antagonistic to men, as also hostile to God. Then, when with
the advance of reflexion these spirits, and equally their counterparts,
the good genii and angels, had all died, nature became the realm of iron
necessity, of regardless law, of all-destroying force, of cruel and
indifferent fate. From this men took refuge in the thought of a
compassionate God, though they could not withdraw themselves or those
whom they loved from the inexorable laws of nature. They could not see
that God always, or even often, intervened on their behalf. It cannot be
denied that these ideas prevail to some extent in the popular theology
at the present moment. Much of our popular religious language is an
inheritance from a time when they universally prevailed. The religious
intuition even of psalmists and prophets opposed many of these notions.
The pure religious intuition of Jesus opposed almost every one of them.
Mystics in every religion have had, at times, insight into an altogether
different scheme of things. The philosophy, however, even of the
learned, would, in the main, have supported the views above described,
from the dawn of reflexion almost to our own time.
It was Kant who first began the resolution of this three-cornered
difficulty. When he pointed out that into the world, as we know it, an
element of spirit goes, that in it an element of the ideal inheres, he
began a movement which has issued in modern monism. He affirmed that
that element from my thought which enters into the world, as I know it,
may be so great that only just a point of matter and a prick of sense
remains. Fichte said: 'Why do we put it all in so perverse a way? Why
reduce the world of matter to just a point? Why is it not taken for what
it is, and yet understood to be all alive with God and we able to think
of it, because we are parts of the great thinker God?' Still Fichte had
busied himself almost wholly with consciousness. Schelling endeavoured
to correct that. Nature lives and moves in God, just as truly in one way
as does man in another. Men arise out of nature. A circle has been drawn
through the points of our triangle. Nature and man are in a new and
deeper sense revelations of God. In fact, supplementing one another,
they constitute the only possible channels for the manifestation of God.
It hardly needs to be said that these thoughts are widely appropriated
in our modern world. These once novel speculations of the kings of
thought have made their way slowly to all strata of society. Remote and
difficult in their first expression in the language of the schools,
their implications are to-day on everybody's lips. It is this unitary
view of the universe which has made difficult the acceptance of a
theology, the understandlng of a religion, which are still largely
phrased in the language of a philosophy to which these ideas did not
belong. There is not an historic creed, there is hardly a greater system
of theology, which is not stated in terms of a philosophy and science
which no longer reign. Men are asking: 'cannot Christianity be so stated
and interpreted that it shall meet the needs of men of the twentieth
century, as truly as it met those of men of the first or of the
sixteenth?' Hegel, the last of this great group of idealistic
philosophers whom we shall name, enthusiastically believed in this new
interpretation of the faith which was profoundly dear to him. He made
important contribution to that interpretation.
HEGEL
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. His father
was in the fiscal service of the King of Württemberg. He studied in
Tübingen. He was heavy and slow of development, in striking contrast
with Schelling. He served as tutor in Bern and Frankfort, and began to
lecture in Jena in 1801. He was much overshadowed by Schelling. The
victory of Napoleon at Jena in 1806 closed the university for a time. In
1818 he was called to Fichte's old chair in Berlin. Never on very good
terms with the Prussian Government, he yet showed his large sympathy
with life in every way. After 1820 a school of philosophical thinkers
began to gather about him. His first great book, his _Phenomenologie des
Geistes_ 1807 (translated, Baillie, London, 1910), was published at the
end of his Jena period. His _Philosophie der Religion_ and _Philosophie
der Geschichte_ were edited after his death. They are mainly in the form
which his notes took between 1823 and 1827. He died during an epidemic
of cholera in Berlin in 1831.
Besides his deep interest in history the most striking feature of
Hegel's preliminary training was his profound study of Christianity. He
might almost be said to have turned to philosophy as a means of
formulating the ideas which he had conceived concerning the development
of the religious consciousness, which seemed to him to have been the
bearer of all human culture. No one could fail to see that the idea of
the relation of God and man, of which we have been speaking, was bound
to make itself felt in the interpretation of the doctrine of the
incarnation and of all the dogmas, like that of the trinity, which are
connected with it. Characteristically, Hegel had pure joy in the
speculative aspects of the problem. If one may speak in all reverence,
and, at the same time, not without a shade of humour, Hegel rejoiced to
find himself able, as he supposed, to rehabilitate the dogma of the
trinity, rationalised in approved fashion. It is as if the dogma had
been a revered form or mould, which was for him indeed emptied of its
original content. He felt bound to fill it anew. Or to speak more
justly, he was really convinced that the new meaning which he poured
into the dogma was the true meaning which the Church Fathers had been
seeking all the while. In the light of two generations of sober dealing,
as historians, with such problems, we can but view his solution in a
manner very different from that which he indulged. He was even disposed
mildly to censure the professional theologians for leaving the defence
of the doctrine of the trinity to the philosophers. There were then, and
have since been, defenders of the doctrine who have thought that Hegel
tendered them great aid. As a matter of fact, despite his own utter
seriousness and reverent desire, his solution was a complete dissolution
of the doctrine and of much else besides. His view would have been
fatal, not merely to that particular form of orthodox thought, but, what
is much more serious, to the religious meaning for which it stood.
Sooner or later men have seen that the whole drift of Hegelianism was to
transform religion into intellectualism. One might say that it was
exactly this which the ancient metaphysicians, in the classic doctrine
of the trinity, had done. They had transformed religion into
metaphysics. The matter would not have been remedied by having a modern
metaphysician do the same thing in another way.
Hegel was weary of Fichte's endless discussion of the ego and
Schelling's of the absolute. It was not the abyss of the unknowable from
which things said to come, or that into which they go, which interested
Hegel. It was their process and progress which we can know. It was that
part of their movement which is observable within actual experience,
with which he was concerned. Now one of the laws of the movement of all
things, he said, is that by which every thought suggests, and every
force tends directly to produce, its opposite. Nothing stands alone.
Everything exists by the balance and friction of opposing tendencies. We
have the universal contrasts of heat and cold, of light and darkness, of
inward and outward, of static and dynamic, of yes and no. There are two
sides to every case, democratic government and absolutism, freedom of
religion and authority, the individualistic and the social principles, a
materialistic and a spiritual interpretation of the universe. Only
things which are dead have ceased to have this tide and alternation.
Christ is for living religion now a man, now God, revelation now
natural, now supernatural. Religion in the eternal conflict between
reason and faith, morals the struggle of good and evil, God now
mysterious and now manifest.
Fichte had said: The essence of the universe is spirit. Hegel said: Yes,
but the true notion of spirit is that of the resolution of
contradiction, of the exhibition of opposites as held together in their
unity. This is the meaning of the trinity. In the trinity we have God
who wills to manifest himself, Jesus in whom he is manifest, and the
spirit common to them both. God's existence is not static, it is
dynamic. It is motion, not rest. God is revealer, recipient, and
revelation all in one. The trinity was for Hegel the central doctrine of
Christianity. Popular orthodoxy had drawn near to the assertion of three
Gods. The revolt, however, in asserting the unity of God, had made of
God a meaningless absolute as foundation of the universe. The orthodox,
in respect to the person of Christ, had always indeed asserted in
laboured way that Jesus was both God and man. Starting from their own
abstract conception of God, and attributing to Jesus the qualities of
that abstraction, they had ended in making of the humanity of Jesus a
perfectly unreal thing. On the other hand, those who had set out from
Jesus's real humanity had been unable to see that he was anything more
than a mere man, as their phrase was. On their own assumption of the
mutual exclusiveness of the conceptions of God and man, they could not
do otherwise.
Hegel saw clearly that God can be known to us only in and through
manifestation. We can certainly make no predication as to how God
exists, in himself, as men say, and apart from our knowledge. He exists
for our knowledge only as manifest in nature and man. Man is for Hegel
part of nature and Jesus is the highest point which the nature of God as
manifest in man has reached. In this sense Hegel sometimes even calls
nature the Son of God, and mankind and Jesus are thought of as parts of
this one manifestation of God. If the Scripture asserts, as it seemed to
the framers of the creeds to do, that God manifested himself from before
all worlds in and to a self-conscious personality like his own, Hegel
would answer: But the Scripture is no third source of knowledge, besides
nature and man. Scripture is only the record of God's revelation of
himself in and to men. If these men framed their profoundest thought in
this way, that is only because they lived in an age when men had all
their thoughts of this sort in a form which we can historically trace.
For Platonists and Neoplatonists, such as the makers of the creeds--and
some portions of the Scripture show this influence, as well--the divine,
the ideal, was always thought of as eternal. It always existed as pure
archetype before it ever existed as historic fact. The rabbins had a
speculation to the same effect. The divine which exists must have
pre-existed. Jesus as Son of God could not be thought of by the ancient
world in any terms but these. The divine was static, changelessly
perfect. For the modern man the divinest of all things is the mystery of
growth. The perfect man is not at the beginning, but far down the
immeasurable series of approaches to perfection. The perfection of other
men is the work of still other ages, in which this extraordinary and
inexplicable moral magnitude which Jesus is, has had its influence, and
conferred upon them power to aid them in the fulfilment of God's intent
for themselves, which is like that intent for himself which Jesus has
fulfilled.
Surely enough has been said to show that what we have here is only the
absorption of even the profoundest religious meanings into the vortex of
an all-dissolving metaphysical system. The most obvious meaning of the
phrase 'Son of God,' its moral and spiritual, its real religious
meaning, is dwelt on, here in Hegel, as little as Hegel claimed that the
Nicene trinitarians had dwelt upon it. Nothing marks more clearly the
distance we have travelled since Hegel than does the general recognition
that his attempted solution does not even lie in the right direction. It
is an attempt within the same area as that of the Nicene Council and the
creeds, namely, the metaphysical area. What is at stake is not the
pre-existence or the two natures. Hegel was right in what he said
concerning these. The pre-existence cannot be thought of except as
ideal. The two natures we assert for every man, only not in such a
manner as to destroy unity in the personality. The heart of the dogma is
not in these. It is the oneness of God and man, a moral and spiritual
oneness, oneness in conduct and consciousness, the presence and
realisation of God, who is spirit, in a real man, the divineness of
Jesus, in a sense which sees no meaning any longer in the old debate as
between his divinity and his deity.
In the light of the new theory of the universe which we have reviewed,
it flashes upon us that both defenders and assailants of the doctrine of
the incarnation, in the age-long debate, have proceeded from the
assumption that God and man are opposites. Men contended for the
divineness of Jesus in terms which by definition shut out his true
humanity. They asserted the identity of a real man, a true historic
personage, with an abstract notion of God which had actually been framed
by the denial of all human qualities. Their opponents with a like
helplessness merely reversed the situation. To admit the deity of Jesus
would have been for them, in all candour and clear-sightedness,
absolutely impossible, because the admission would have shut out his
true humanity. On the old definitions we cannot wonder that the struggle
was a bitter one. Each party was on its own terms right. If God is by
definition other than man, and man the opposite of God, then it is not
surprising that the attempt to say that Jesus of Nazareth was both,
remained mysticism to the one and seemed folly to the other.
Now, within the area of the philosophy which begins with Kant this old
antinomy has been resolved. An actual circle of clear relations joins
the points of the old hopeless triangle. Men are men because of God
indwelling in them, working through them. The phrase 'mere man' is seen
to be a mere phrase. To say that the Nazarene, in some way not
genetically to be explained, but which is hidden within the recesses of
his own personality, shows forth in incomparable fulness that relation
of God and man which is the ideal for us all, seems only to be saying
over again what Jesus said when he proclaimed: 'I and My Father are
one.' That Jesus actualised, not absolutely in the sense that he stood
out of relation to history, but still perfectly within his relation to
history, that which in us and for us is potential, the sonship of
God--that seems a very simple and intelligible assertion. It certainly
makes a large part of the debate of ages seem remote from us. It brings
home to us that we live in a new world.
Interesting and fruitful is Hegel's expansion of the idea of redemption
beyond that of the individual to that of the whole humanity, and in
every aspect of its life. In my relation to the world are given my
duties. The renunciation of outward duty makes the inward life barren.
The principle which is to transform the world wears an aspect very
different from that of stoicism, of asceticism or even of the
individualism which has sought soul-salvation. In the midst of
unworthiness and helplessness there springs up the consciousness of
reconciliation. Man, with all his imperfections, becomes aware that he
is the object of the loving purpose of God. Still this redemption of a
man is something which is to be worked out, in the individual life and
on the stage of universal history. The first step beyond the individual
life is that of the Church. It is from within this community of
believers that men, in the rule, receive the impulse to the good. The
community is, in its idea, a society in which the conquest of evil is
already being achieved, where the individual is spared much bitter
conflict and loneliness. Nevertheless, so long as this unity of the life
of man with God is realised in the Church alone there remains a false
and harmful opposition between the Church and the world. Religion is
faced by a hostile power to which its principles have no application.
The world is denounced as unholy. With this stigma cast upon it, it may
be unholy. Yet the retribution falls also upon the Church, in that it
becomes artificial, clerical, pharisaical. The end is never that what
have been called the standards of the Church shall prevail. The end is
that the Church shall be the shrine and centre of an influence by virtue
of which the standard of truth and goodness which naturally belongs to
any relation of life shall prevail. The distinction between religion and
secular life must be abandoned. Nothing is less sacred than a Church set
on its own aggrandisement. The relations of family and of the State, of
business and social life, are to be restored to the divineness which
belongs to them, or rather, the divineness which is inalienable from
them is to be recognised. In the laws and customs of a true State,
Christianity first penetrates with its principles the real world. One
sees how large a portion of these thoughts have been taken up into the
programme of modern social movements. They are the basis of what men
call a social theology. A book like Fremantle's _World as the Subject of
Redemption_ is their thorough-going exposition in the English tongue.
We have no cause to pursue the philosophical movement beyond this point.
Its exponents are not without interest. Especially is this true of
Schopenhauer. But the deposit from their work is for our particular
purpose not great. The wonderful impulse had spent itself. These four
brilliant men stand together, almost as much isolated from the
generation which followed them as from that which went before. The
historian of Christian thought in the nineteenth century cannot
overestimate the significance of their personal interest in religion.