one word being given will suggest most of what is immediately
consecutive, you evade the most irksome of the penalties annexed to
the first breaking ground in a new language: you evade the necessity
of hunting up and down a dictionary. Your own memory, and the
inevitable suggestions of the context, furnish a dictionary _pro hac
vice_. And afterwards, upon advancing to other books, where you are
obliged to forego such aids, and to swim without corks, you find
yourself already in possession of the particles for expressing
addition, succession, exception, inference--in short, of all the forms
by which transition or connection is effected (_if_, _but_, _and_,
_therefore_, _however_, _notwithstanding_), together with all those
adverbs for modifying or restraining the extent of a subject or a
predicate, which in all languages alike compose the essential
frame-work or _extra-linear_ machinery of human thought. The
filling-up--the _matter_ (in a scholastic sense)--may differ
infinitely; but the _form_, the periphery, the determining moulds
into which this matter is fused--all this is the same for ever: and so
wonderfully limited in its extent is this frame-work, so narrow and
rapidly revolving is the clock-work of connections among human
thoughts, that a dozen pages of almost any book suffice to exhaust all
the [Greek: epea pteroenta][20] which express them. To have mastered
these [Greek: epea pteroenta] is in effect to have mastered
seven-tenths, at the least, of any language; and the benefit of using
a New Testament, or the familiar parts of an Old Testament, in this
preliminary drill, is, that your own memory is thus made to operate as
a perpetual dictionary or nomenclator. I have heard Mr. Southey say
that, by carrying in his pocket a Dutch, Swedish, or other Testament,
on occasion of a long journey performed in '_muggy_' weather, and in
the inside of some venerable 'old heavy'--such as used to bestow their
tediousness upon our respectable fathers some thirty or forty years
ago--he had more than once turned to so valuable an account the
doziness or the dulness of his fellow-travellers, that whereas he had
'booked' himself at the coach-office utterly [Greek: analphabêtos],
unacquainted with the first rudiments of the given language, he had
made his parting bows to his coach brethren (secretly returning thanks
to them for their stupidity), in a condition for grappling with any
common book in that dialect. One of the polyglot Old or New Testaments
published by Bagster, would be a perfect Encyclopædia, or
_Panorganon_, for such a scheme of coach discipline, upon dull roads
and in dull company. As respects the German language in particular, I
shall give one caution from my own experience, to the self-instructor:
it is a caution which applies to the German language exclusively, or
to that more than to any other, because the embarrassment which it is
meant to meet, grows out of a defect of taste characteristic of the
German mind. It is this: elsewhere, you would naturally, as a
beginner, resort to _prose_ authors, since the license and audacity of
poetic thinking, and the large freedom of a poetic treatment, cannot
fail to superadd difficulties of individual creation to the general
difficulties of a strange dialect. But this rule, good for every other
case, is _not_ good for the literature of Germany. Difficulties there
certainly are, and perhaps in more than the usual proportion, from the
German peculiarities of poetic treatment; but even these are
overbalanced in the result, by the single advantage of being limited
in the extent by the metre, or (as it may happen) by the particular
stanza. To German poetry there is a known, fixed, calculable limit.
Infinity, absolute infinity, is impracticable in any German metre.
Not so with German prose. Style, in any sense, is an inconceivable
idea to a German intellect. Take the word in the limited sense of what
the Greeks called [Greek: Synthesis onomatôn]--_i. e._ the
construction of sentences--I affirm that a German (unless it were here
and there a Lessing) cannot admit such an idea. Books there are in
German, and, in other respects, very good books too, which consist of
one or two enormous sentences. A German sentence describes an arch
between the rising and the setting sun. Take Kant for illustration: he
has actually been complimented by the cloud-spinner, Frederic
Schlegel, who is now in Hades, as a most original artist in the matter
of style. 'Original' Heaven knows he was! His idea of a sentence was
as follows:--We have all seen, or read of, an old family coach, and
the process of packing it for a journey to London some seventy or
eighty years ago. Night and day, for a week at least, sate the
housekeeper, the lady's maid, the butler, the gentleman's gentleman,
&c., packing the huge ark in all its recesses, its 'imperials,' its
'wills,' its 'Salisbury boots,' its 'sword-cases,' its front pockets,
side pockets, rear pockets, its 'hammer-cloth cellars' (which a lady
explains to me as a corruption from _hamper-cloth_, as originally a
cloth for hiding a hamper, stored with _viaticum_), until all the uses
and needs of man, and of human life, savage or civilised, were met
with separate provision by the infinite chaos. Pretty nearly upon the
model of such an old family coach packing, did Kant institute and
pursue the packing and stuffing of one of his regular sentences.
Everything that could ever be needed in the way of explanation,
illustration, restraint, inference, by-clause, or indirect comment,
was to be crammed, according to this German philosopher's taste, into
the front pockets, side pockets, or rear pockets, of the one original
sentence. Hence it is that a sentence will last in reading whilst a
man
'Might reap an acre of his neighbour's corn.'
Nor is this any peculiarity of Kant's. It is common to the whole
family of prose writers of Germany, unless when they happen to have
studied French models, who cultivate the opposite extreme. As a
caution, therefore, practically applied to this particular anomaly in
German prose-writing, I advise all beginners to choose between two
classes of composition--ballad poetry, or comedy--as their earliest
school of exercise; ballad poetry, because the form of the stanza
(usually a quatrain) prescribes a very narrow range to the sentences;
comedy, because the form of dialogue, and the imitation of daily life
in its ordinary tone of conversation, and the spirit of comedy
naturally suggesting a brisk interchange of speech, all tend to short
sentences. These rules I soon drew from my own experience and
observation. And the one sole purpose towards which I either sought or
wished for aid, respected the pronunciation; not so much for attaining
a just one (which I was satisfied could not be realised out of
Germany, or, at least, out of a daily intercourse with Germans) as for
preventing the formation, unawares, of a radically false one. The
guttural and palatine sounds of the _ch_, and some other German
peculiarities, cannot be acquired without constant practice. But the
false Westphalian or Jewish pronunciation of the vowels, diphthongs,
&c., may easily be forestalled, though the true delicacy of Meissen
should happen to be missed. Thus much guidance I purchased, with a
very few guineas, from my young Dresden tutor, who was most anxious
for permission to extend his assistance; but this I would not hear of:
and, in the spirit of fierce (perhaps foolish) independence, which
governed most of my actions at that time of life, I did all the rest
for myself.
'It was a banner broad unfurl'd,
The picture of that western world.'
These, or words like these, in which Wordsworth conveys the sudden
apocalypse, as by an apparition, to an ardent and sympathising spirit,
of the stupendous world of America, rising, at once, like an
exhalation, with all its shadowy forests, its endless savannas, and
its pomp of solitary waters--well and truly might I have applied to my
first launching upon that vast billowy ocean of the German literature.
As a past literature, as a literature of inheritance and tradition,
the German was nothing. Ancestral titles it had none; or none
comparable to those of England, Spain, or even Italy; and there, also,
it resembled America, as contrasted with the ancient world of Asia,
Europe, and North Africa.[21] But, if its inheritance were nothing,
its prospects, and the scale of its present development, were in the
amplest style of American grandeur. _Ten thousand_ new books, we are
assured by Menzel, an author of high reputation--a _literal
myriad_--is considerably below the number annually poured from all
quarters of Germany, into the vast reservoir of Leipsic; spawn
infinite, no doubt, of crazy dotage, of dreaming imbecility, of
wickedness, of frenzy, through every phasis of Babylonian confusion;
yet, also, teeming and heaving with life and the instincts of
truth--of truth hunting and chasing in the broad daylight, or of truth
groping in the chambers of darkness; sometimes seen as it displays its
cornucopia of tropical fruitage; sometimes heard dimly, and in
promise, working its way through diamond mines. Not the tropics, not
the ocean, not life itself, is such a type of variety, of infinite
forms, or of creative power, as the German literature, in its recent
motions (say for the last twenty years), gathering, like the Danube, a
fresh volume of power at every stage of its advance. A banner it was,
indeed, to me of miraculous promise, and suddenly unfurled. It seemed,
in those days, an El Dorado as true and undeceiving as it was
evidently inexhaustible. And the central object in this interminable
wilderness of what then seemed imperishable bloom and verdure--the
very tree of knowledge in the midst of this Eden--was the new or
transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
[Footnote 20: [Greek: Epea pteroenta], literally _winged words_. To
explain the use and origin of this phrase to non-classical readers, it
must be understood that, originally, it was used by Homer to express
the few, rapid, and significant words which conveyed some hasty order,
counsel, or notice, suited to any sudden occasion or emergency: _e.
g._ 'To him flying from the field the hero addressed these winged
words--"Stop, coward, or I will transfix thee with my spear."' But by
Horne Tooke, the phrase was adopted on the title-page of his
_Diversions of Purley_, as a pleasant symbolic expression for all the
non-significant particles, the _articuli_ or joints of language, which
in his well-known theory are resolved into abbreviations or
compendious forms (and therefore rapid, flying, _winged_ forms),
substituted for significant forms of greater length. Thus, _if_ is a
non-significant particle, but it is an abbreviated form of an
imperative in the second person--substituted for gif, or give, or
grant the case--put the case that. All other particles are shown by
Horne Tooke to be equally shorthand (or _winged_) substitutions.]
[Footnote 21: It has been rather too much forgotten, that Africa, from
the northern margin of Bilidulgerid and the Great Desert,
southwards--everywhere, in short, beyond Egypt, Cyrene, and the modern
Barbary States--belongs, as much as America, to the New World--the
world unknown to the ancients.]
I have described the gorgeousness of my expectations in those early
days of my prelusive acquaintance with German literature. I have a
little lingered in painting that glad aurora of my first pilgrimage to
the fountains of the Rhine and of the Danube, in order adequately to
shadow out the gloom and blight which soon afterwards settled upon the
hopes of that golden dawn. In Kant, I had been taught to believe,
were the keys of a new and a creative philosophy. Either '_ejus
ductu_,' or '_ejus auspiciis_'--that is, either directly under his
guidance, or indirectly under any influence remotely derived from his
principles--I looked confidingly to see the great vistas and avenues
of truth laid open to the philosophic inquirer. Alas! all was a dream.
Six weeks' study was sufficient to close my hopes in that quarter for
ever. The philosophy of Kant--so famous, so commanding in Germany,
from about the period of the French Revolution--already, in 1805, I
had found to be a philosophy of destruction, and scarcely, in any one
chapter, so much as _tending_ to a philosophy of reconstruction. It
destroys by wholesale, and it substitutes nothing. Perhaps, in the
whole history of man, it is an unexampled case, that such a scheme of
speculation--which offers nothing seducing to human aspirations,
nothing splendid to the human imagination, nothing even positive and
affirmative to the human understanding--should have been able to found
an interest so broad and deep among thirty-five millions of cultivated
men. The English reader who supposes this interest to have been
confined to academic bowers, or the halls of philosophic societies, is
most inadequately alive to the case. Sects, heresies, schisms, by
hundreds, have arisen out of this philosophy--many thousands of books
have been written by way of teaching it, discussing it, extending it,
opposing it. And yet it is a fact, that all its doctrines are
negative--teaching, in no case, what we _are_, but simply what we are
_not_ to believe--and that all its truths are barren. Such being its
unpopular character, I cannot but imagine that the German people have
received it with so much ardour, from profound incomprehension of its
meaning, and utter blindness to its drift--a solution which may seem
extravagant, but is not so; for, even amongst those who have expressly
commented on this philosophy, not one of the many hundreds whom I have
myself read, but has retracted from every attempt to explain its dark
places. In these dark places lies, indeed, the secret of its
attraction. Were light poured into them, it would be seen that they
are _culs-de-sac_, passages that lead to nothing; but, so long as they
continue dark, it is not known whither they lead, how far, in what
direction, and whether, in fact, they may not issue into paths
connected directly with the positive and the infinite. Were it known
that upon every path a barrier faces you insurmountable to human
steps--like the barriers which fence in the Abyssinian valley of
Rasselas--the popularity of this philosophy would expire at once; for
no popular interest can long be sustained by speculations which, in
every aspect, are known to be essentially negative and essentially
finite. Man's nature has something of infinity within itself, which
requires a corresponding infinity in its objects. We are told, indeed,
by Mr. Bulwer, that the Kantian system has ceased to be of any
authority in Germany--that it is defunct, in fact--and that we have
first begun to import it into England, after its root had withered, or
begun to wither, in its native soil. But Mr. Bulwer is mistaken. The
philosophy has never withered in Germany. It cannot even be said that
its fortunes have retrograded: they have oscillated: accidents of
taste and ability in particular professors, or caprices of fashion,
have given a momentary fluctuation to this or that new form of
Kantianism,--an ascendency, for a period, to various, and, in some
respects, conflicting, modifications of the transcendental system; but
all alike have derived their power mediately from Kant. No weapons,
even if employed as hostile weapons, are now forged in any armoury but
that of Kant; and, to repeat a Roman figure which I used above, all
the modern polemic tactics of what is called metaphysics, are trained
and made to move either _ejus ductu_ or _ejus auspiciis_. Not one of
the new systems affects to call back the Leibnitzian philosophy, the
Cartesian, or any other of earlier or later date, as adequate to the
purposes of the intellect in this day, or as capable of yielding even
a sufficient terminology. Let this last fact decide the question of
Kant's vitality. _Qui bene distinguit bene docet._ This is an old
adage. Now, he who imposes new names upon all the acts, the functions,
and the objects of the philosophic understanding, must be presumed to
have distinguished most sharply, and to have ascertained with most
precision, their general relations--_so long as his terminology
continues to be adopted_. This test, applied to Kant, will show that
his spirit yet survives in Germany. Frederic Schlegel, it is true,
twenty years ago, in his lectures upon literature, assures us that
even the disciples of the great philosopher have agreed to abandon his
philosophic nomenclature. But the German philosophic literature, since
that date, tells another tale. Mr. Bulwer is, therefore, wrong; and,
without going to Germany, looking only to France, he will see cause to
revise his sentence. Cousin--the philosophic Cousin, the only great
name in philosophy for modern France--familiar as he is with North
Germany, can hardly be presumed unacquainted with a fact so striking,
if it _were_ a fact, as the extinction of a system once so
triumphantly supreme as that of Kant; and yet Mr. Bulwer, admiring
Cousin as he does, cannot but have noticed his efforts to naturalise
Kant in France. Meantime, if it were even true that transcendentalism
had lost its hold of the public mind in Germany, _primâ facie_, this
would prove little more than the fickleness of that public which must
have been wrong in one of the two cases--either when adopting the
system, or when rejecting it. Whatever there may be of truth and value
in the system, will remain unimpeached by such caprices, whether of an
individual or of a great nation; and England would still be in the
right to import the philosophy, however late in the day, if it were
true even (which I doubt greatly) that she _is_ importing it.
Both truth and value there certainly _is_ in one part of the Kantian
philosophy; and that part is its foundation. I had intended, at this
point, to introduce an outline of the transcendental philosophy--not,
perhaps, as entering by logical claim of right into any biographical
sketch, but as a very allowable digression in the record of that man's
life to whom, in the way of hope and of profound disappointment, it
had been so memorable an object. For two or three years before I
mastered the language of Kant,[22] it had been a pole-star to my
hopes, and _in hypothesi_ agreeably to the uncertain plans of
uncertain knowledge, the luminous guide to my future life--as a life
dedicated and set apart to philosophy. Such it was some years _before_
I knew it: for, at least ten long years _after_ I came into a
condition of valueing its true pretensions and measuring its
capacities, this same philosophy shed the gloom of something like
misanthropy upon my views and estimates of human nature; for man was
an abject animal, if the limitations which Kant assigned to the
motions of his speculative reason were as absolute and hopeless as,
under _his_ scheme of the understanding and _his_ genesis of its
powers, too evidently they were. I belonged to a reptile race, if the
wings by which we had sometimes _seemed_ to mount, and the buoyancy
which had _seemed_ to support our flight, were indeed the fantastic
delusions which he represented them. Such, and so deep and so abiding
in its influence upon my life, having been the influence of this
German philosophy, according to all logic of proportions, in selecting
the objects of my notice, I might be excused for setting before the
reader, in its full array, the analysis of its capital sections.
However, in any memorial of a life which professes to keep in view
(though but as a secondary purpose) any regard to popular taste, the
logic of proportions must bend, after all, to the law of the
occasion--to the proprieties of time and place. For the present,
therefore, I shall restrict myself to the few sentences in which it
may be proper to gratify the curiosity of _some_ readers, the two or
three in a hundred, as to the peculiar distinctions of this
philosophy. Even to these two or three out of each hundred, I shall
not venture to ascribe a larger curiosity than with respect to the
most general 'whereabouts' of its position--from what point it
starts--whence and from what aspect it surveys the ground--and by what
links from this starting-point it contrives to connect itself with the
main objects of philosophic inquiry.
[Footnote 22: I might have mastered the philosophy of Kant, without
waiting for the German language, in which all his capital works are
written; for there is a Latin version of the whole, by Born, and a
most admirable digest of the cardinal work (admirable for its fidelity
and the skill by which that fidelity is attained), in the same
language, by Rhiseldek, a Danish professor. But this fact, such was
the slight knowledge of all things connected with Kant in England, I
did not learn for some years.]
Immanuel Kant was originally a dogmatist in the school of Leibnitz and
Wolf; that is, according to his trisection of all philosophy into
dogmatic, sceptical, and critical, he was, upon all questions,
disposed to a strong _affirmative_ creed, without courting any
particular examination into the grounds of this creed, or into its
assailable points. From this slumber, as it is called by himself, he
was suddenly aroused by the Humian doctrine of cause and effect. This
celebrated essay on the nature of necessary connection--so thoroughly
misapprehended at the date of its first publication to the world by
its _soi-disant_ opponents, Oswald, Beattie, &c., and so imperfectly
comprehended since then by various _soi-disant_ defenders--became in
effect the 'occasional cause' (in the phrase of the logicians) of the
entire subsequent philosophic scheme of Kant--every section of which
arose upon the accidental opening made to analogical trains of
thought, by this memorable effort of scepticism, applied by Hume to
one capital phenomenon among the necessities of the human
understanding. What is the nature of Hume's scepticism as applied to
this phenomenon? What is the main thesis of his celebrated essay on
cause and effect? For few, indeed, are they who really know anything
about it. If a man really understands it, a very few words will avail
to explain the _nodus_. Let us try. It is a necessity of the _human_
understanding (very probably not a necessity of a higher order of
intelligences) to connect its experiences by means of the idea of
_cause_ and its correlate, _effect_: and when Beattie, Oswald, Reid,
&c. were exhausting themselves in proofs of the indispensableness of
this idea, they were fighting with shadows; for no man had ever
questioned the practical necessity for such an idea to the coherency
of human thinking. Not the practical necessity, but the internal
consistency of this notion, and the original right to such a notion,
was the point of inquisition. For, attend, courteous reader, and three
separate propositions will set before your eyes the difficulty. _First
Prop._, which, for the sake of greater precision, permit me to throw
into Latin:--_Non datur aliquid_ [A] _quo posito ponitur aliud_ [B] _à
priori_; that is, in other words, You cannot lay your hands upon that
one object or phenomenon [A] in the whole circle of natural
existences, which, being assumed, will entitle you to assume _à
priori_, any other object whatsoever [B] as succeeding it. You could
not, I say, of any object or phenomenon whatever, assume this
succession _à priori_--that is, _previously to experience_. _Second
Prop._ But, if the succession of B to A be made known to you, not _à
priori_ (by the involution of B in the idea of A), but by experience,
then you cannot ascribe _necessity_ to the succession: the connection
between them is not necessary but contingent. For the very widest
experience--an experience which should stretch over all ages, from
the beginning to the end of time--can never establish a _nexus_ having
the least approximation to necessity; no more than a rope of sand
could gain the cohesion of adamant, by repeating its links through a
billion of successions. _Prop. Third._ Hence (_i. e._ from the two
preceding propositions), it appears that no instance or case of
_nexus_ that ever can have been offered to the notice of any human
understanding, has in it, or, by possibility, could have had anything
of necessity. Had the _nexus_ been necessary, you would have seen it
beforehand; whereas, by Prop. I. _Non datur aliquid, quo posito
ponitur aliud à priori._ This being so, now comes the startling fact,
that the notion of a _cause_ includes the notion of necessity. For, if
A (the cause) be connected with B (the effect) only in a casual or
accidental way, you do not feel warranted in calling it a cause. If
heat applied to ice (A) were sometimes followed by a tendency to
liquefaction (B) and sometimes not, you would not consider A connected
with B as a cause, but only as some variable accompaniment of the true
and unknown cause, which might allowably be present or be absent.
This, then, is the startling and mysterious phenomenon of the human
understanding--that, in a certain notion, which is indispensable to
the coherency of our whole experience, indispensable to the
establishing any _nexus_ between the different parts and successions
of our whole train of notices, we include an accessary notion of
necessity, which yet has no justification or warrant, no assignable
derivation from any known or possible case of human experience. We
have one idea at least--viz. the idea of causation--which transcends
our possible experience by one important element, the element of
_necessity_, that never can have been derived from the only source of
ideas recognised by the philosophy of this day. A Lockian never can
find his way out of this dilemma. The experience (whether it be the
experience of sensation or the experience of reflection) which he
adopts for his master-key, never will unlock this case; for the sum
total of human experience, collected from all ages, can avail only to
tell us what _is_, but never what _must be_. The idea of necessity is
absolutely transcendant to experience, _per se_, and must be derived
from some other source. From what source? Could Hume tell us? No: he,
who had started the game so acutely (for with every allowance for the
detection made in Thomas Aquinas, of the original suggestion, as
recorded in the _Biographia Literaria_ of Coleridge, we must still
allow great merit of a secondary kind to Hume for his modern revival
and restatement of the doctrine), this same acute philosopher broke
down confessedly in his attempt to hunt the game down. His solution is
worthless.