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[Illustration: GIORDANO BRUNO.
From the Statue in the Campo dei Fiori, Rome.]
HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY
by
A. W. BENN,
Author of "The History of English Rationalism in the
Nineteenth Century," Etc.
[Illustration: GIORDANO BRUNO.
From the Statue in the Campo dei Fiori, Rome.]
[ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED]
London:
Watts & Co.,
17 Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, E.C.
1912
Printed by Watts and Co.,
Johnson's Court, Fleet Street,
London, E.C.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. PAGE
THE PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE 1
CHAPTER II.
THE METAPHYSICIANS 31
CHAPTER III.
THE THEORISTS OF KNOWLEDGE 65
CHAPTER IV.
THE GERMAN IDEALISTS 101
CHAPTER V.
THE HUMANISTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 124
BIBLIOGRAPHY 149
INDEX 153
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
GIORDANO BRUNO _Frontispiece_
PAGE
FRANCIS BACON 13
RENE DESCARTES 34
BENEDICTUS SPINOZA 47
DAVID HUME 78
IMMANUEL KANT 86
G. W. F. HEGEL 111
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 117
AUGUSTE COMTE 128
HERBERT SPENCER 138
{1}
CHAPTER I.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE
For a thousand years after the schools of Athens were closed by Justinian
philosophy made no real advance; no essentially new ideas about the
constitution of nature, the workings of mind, or the ends of life were put
forward. It would be false to say that during this period no progress was
made. The civilisation of the Roman Empire was extended far beyond its
ancient frontiers; and, although much ground was lost in Asia and Africa,
more than the equivalent was gained in Northern Europe. Within Europe also
the gradual abolition of slavery and the increasing dignity of peaceful
labour gave a wider diffusion to culture, combined with a larger sense of
human fellowship than any but the best minds of Greece and Rome had felt.
Whether the status of women was really raised may be doubted; but the ideas
and sentiments of women began to exercise an influence on social
intercourse unknown before. And the arts of war and peace were in some ways
almost revolutionised.
This remarkable phenomenon of movement in everything except ideas has been
explained by the influence of Christianity, or rather of Catholicism. There
is truth in the contention, but it is not the whole truth. The Church
entered into a heritage that she did not create; she defined and
accentuated tendencies that {2} long before her advent had secretly been at
work. In the West that diffusion of civilisation which is her historic
boast had been begun and carried far by the Rome whence her very name is
taken. In the East the title of orthodox by which the Greek Church is
distinguished betrays the presence of that Greek thought which moulded her
dogmas into logical shape. What is more, the very idea of right belief as a
vital and saving thing came to Christianity from Platonism, accompanied by
the persuasion that wrong belief was immoral and its promulgation a crime
to be visited by the penalty of death.
Ecclesiastical intolerance has been made responsible for the speculative
stagnation of the Middle Ages, and it has been explained as an effect of
the belief in the future punishment of heresy by eternal torments. But in
truth the persecuting spirit was responsible for the dogma, not the dogma
for persecution. And we must look for the underlying cause of the whole
evil in the premature union of metaphysics with religion and morality first
effected by Plato, or rather by the genius of Athens working through Plato.
Indeed, on a closer examination we shall find that the slowing-down of
speculation had begun long before the advent of Christianity, and coincides
with the establishment of its headquarters at Athens, where also the first
permanent schools of philosophy were established. These schools were
distinctly religious in their character; and none was so set against
innovation as that of Epicurus, falsely supposed to have been a home of
freethought. In the last Greek system of philosophy, Neo-Platonism,
theology reigned supreme; and during the two and a-half centuries of its
existence no real advance on the teaching of Plotinus was made. {3}
Neo-Platonism when first constituted had incorporated a large Aristotelian
element, the expulsion of which had been accomplished by its last great
master, Proclus; and Christendom took over metaphysics under what seemed a
Platonic form--the more welcome as Plato passed for giving its creeds the
independent support of pure reason. This support extended beyond a future
life and went down to the deepest mysteries of revealed faith. For,
according to the Platonic doctrine of ideas, it was quite in order that
there should be a divine unity existing independently of the three divine
persons composing it; that the idea of humanity should be combined with one
of these persons; and that the same idea, being both one with and distinct
from Adam, should involve all mankind in the guilt of his transgression.
Thus the Church started with a strong prejudice in favour of Plato which
continued to operate for many centuries, although the first great
schoolman, John Scotus Eriugena (810-877), incurred a condemnation for
heresy by adopting the pantheistic metaphysics of Neo-Platonism.
As the Platonic doctrine of ideas came to life again in the realism, as it
was called, of scholastic philosophy, so the conflicting view of his old
opponent Aristotle was revived under the form of conceptualism. According
to this theory the genera and species of the objective world correspond to
real and permanent distinctions in the nature of things; but, apart from
the conceptions by which they are represented in the intellect of God and
man, those distinctions have no separate existence. Aristotle's philosophy
was first brought into Europe by the Mohammedan conquerors of Spain, which
became an important centre of learning in the earlier Middle Ages. Not a
few Christian scholars went there to {4} study. Latin translations were
made from Arabic versions of Aristotle, and in this way his doctrines
became more widely known to the lecture-rooms of the Catholic world. But
their derivation from infidel sources roused a prejudice against them,
still further heightened by the circumstance that an Arabian commentator,
Averroes, had interpreted the theology of the _Metaphysics_ in a
pantheistic sense. And on any sincere reading Aristotle denied the soul's
immortality which Plato had upheld. Accordingly, all through the twelfth
century Platonism still dominated religious thought, and even so late as
the early thirteenth century the study of Aristotle was still condemned by
the Church.
Nevertheless a great revolution was already in progress. As a result of the
capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in A.D. 1204 the Greek
manuscripts of Aristotle's writings were brought to Paris, and at a
subsequent period they were translated into Latin under the direction of
St. Thomas Aquinas, the ablest of the schoolmen, who so manipulated the
Peripatetic philosophy as to convert it from a battering-ram into a
buttress of Catholic theology--a position still officially assigned to it
at the present day. Aristotelianism, however, did not reign without a rival
even in the later Middle Ages. Aquinas was a Dominican; and the jealousy of
the competing Franciscan Order found expression in maintaining a certain
tradition of Platonism, represented in different ways by Roger Bacon
(1214-1294) and by Duns Scotus (1265-1308). In this connection we have to
note the extraordinary fertility of the British islands in eminent thinkers
during the Middle Ages. Besides the two last mentioned there is Eriugena
("born in Ireland"), John of Salisbury {5} (1115-1180), the first Humanist,
William of Ockham, and Wycliffe, the first reformer--making six in all, a
larger contribution than any other region of Europe, or indeed all the rest
of Europe put together, has made to the stars of Scholasticism. This
advantage is probably not due to any inherent genius for philosophy in the
inhabitants of these islands, but to their relative immunity from war and
to the political liberty that cannot but have been favourable to
independent thought. Five out of the six were more or less inclined to
Platonism, and their idealist or mystical tendencies were sometimes
associated with the same practicality that distinguished their master. The
sixth, commonly called Occam (died about 1349), is famous as the champion
of Nominalism--that is, of the doctrine that genera and species have no
real existence either in nature or in mind; there are only individuals more
or less resembling one another. He is the author of the famous saying--the
sole legacy of Scholasticism to common thought: "Entities ought not to be
gratuitously multiplied" (entia non sunt praeter necessitatem
multiplicanda).
The capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders had led to Aristotle's
triumph in the thirteenth century. Two hundred years later the conquering
Ottoman advance on the same city was the immediate cause of his overthrow.
For the Byzantine scholars who fled for help and refuge to Italy brought
with them the manuscripts of Plato and Plotinus, and these soon became
known to Western Europe through the Latin translations of Marsilio Ficino.
On its literary side the Platonic revival fell in admirably with the
Humanism to which the Schoolmen had long been intensely distasteful. And
the religious movement that preceded {6} Luther's Reformation found a
welcome ally in Neo-Platonic mysticism. At the same time the invention of
printing, by opening the world of books to non-academic readers, vastly
widened the possibilities of independent thought. And the Reformation, by
discrediting the scholastic theology in Northern Europe, dealt another blow
at the system with which it had been associated by Aquinas.
It has been supposed that the discovery of America and the circumnavigation
of the globe contributed also to the impending philosophical revolution.
But the true theory of the earth's figure formed the very foundation of
Aristotle's cosmology, and was as well known to Dante as to ourselves. Made
by a fervent Catholic, acting under the patronage of the Catholic queen
_par excellence_, the discovery of Columbus increased the prestige of
Catholicism by opening a new world to its missions and adding to the wealth
of its supporters in the Old World.
The decisive blow to medieval ideas came from another quarter--from the
Copernican astronomy. What the true theory of the earth's motion meant for
philosophy has not always been rightly understood. It seems to be commonly
supposed that the heliocentric system excited hostility because it degraded
the earth from her proud position as centre of the universe. But the
reverse is true. According to Aristotle and his scholastic followers, the
centre of the universe is the lowest and least honourable, the
circumference the highest and most distinguished position in it. And that
is why earth, as the vilest of the four elements, tends to the centre;
while fire, being the most precious, flies upward. Again, the incorruptible
aether of which the heavens are composed shows its eternal character {7} by
moving for ever round in a circle of which God, as Prime Mover, occupies
the outermost verge. And this metaphysical topography is faithfully
followed by Dante, who even improves on it by placing the worst criminals
(that is, the rebels and traitors--Satan, with Judas and Brutus and
Cassius) in the eternal ice at the very centre of the earth. Such fancies
were incompatible with the new astronomy. No longer cold and dead, our
earth might henceforth take her place among the stars, animated like
them--if animated they were--and suggesting by analogy that they too
supported teeming multitudes of reasonable inhabitants.
But the transposition of values did not end here. Aristotle's whole
philosophy had been based on a radical antithesis between the sublunary and
the superlunary spheres--the world of growth, decay, vicissitude, and the
world of everlasting realities. In the sublunary sphere, also, it
distinguished sharply between the Forms of things, which were eternal, and
the Matter on which they were imposed, an intangible, evanescent thing
related to Form as Possibility to Actuality. We know that these two
convenient categories are logically independent of the false cosmology that
may or may not have suggested their world-wide application. But the
immediate effect of having it denied, or even doubted, was greatly to exalt
the credit of Matter or Power at the expense of Form or Act.
The first to draw these revolutionary inferences from the Copernican theory
was Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). Born at Nola, a south Italian city not far
from Naples, Bruno entered the Dominican Order before the age of fifteen,
and on that occasion exchanged his baptismal name of Filippo for that by
which he has ever since been known. Here he became acquainted with the {8}
whole of ancient and medieval philosophy, besides the Copernican astronomy,
then not yet condemned by the Church. At the early age of eighteen he first
came into collision with the authorities; and at twenty-eight (1576)
[McIntyre, pp. 9-10] he openly questioned the chief characteristic dogmas
of Catholicism, was menaced with an action for heresy, and fled from the
convent. The pursuit must have been rather perfunctory, for Bruno found
himself free to spend two years wandering from one Italian city to another,
earning a precarious livelihood by tuition and authorship. Leaving Italy at
last, rather from a desire to push his fortunes abroad than from any fear
of molestation, and finding France too hot to hold him, he tried Geneva for
a little while, but, on being given to understand that he could only stay
on the condition of embracing Calvinism, returned to France, where he lived
first for two years as Professor of Philosophy at Toulouse, and three more
in a somewhat less official position at Paris. Thence, in the train of the
French ambassador, he passed to England, where his two years' sojourn seems
to have been the happiest and most fruitful period of his restless career.
It was cut short by his chief's return to Paris. But the philosopher's
fearless advocacy of Copernicanism made that bigoted capital impossible.
The truth, however, seems to be that Bruno never could hit it off with
anyone or any society; and the next five years, spent in trying to make
himself acceptable at one German university after another, are a record of
hopeless failure. Finally, in an evil hour, he goes to Venice at the
invitation of a young noble, Mocenigo, who, in revenge for disappointed
expectations, betrays him to the Inquisition. Questioned about his
heresies, Bruno showed perfect willingness to accept all the theological
dogmas that {9} he had formerly denied. Whether he withdrew his
retractation on being transferred from a Venetian to a Roman prison does
not appear, as the Roman depositions are not forthcoming. Neither is it
clear why so long a delay as six years (1594-1600) was granted to the
philosopher when such short work was made of other heretics. It seems most
probable that Bruno, while pliant enough on questions of religious belief,
remained inflexible in maintaining the infinity of inhabited worlds. When
the final condemnation was read out, he told the judges that he heard it
with less fear than they felt in pronouncing it. In the customary
euphemistic terms they had sent him to death by fire. At the stake, when
the crucifix was held up to him, he turned away his eyes--with what
thoughts we cannot tell. There is a monument to the heroic thinker at Nola,
and another in the Campo dei Fiori on the spot where he suffered at Rome,
raised against the strongest protests of the ecclesiastical authorities.
The Greek-Italian philosophers--the Pythagoreans and Parmenides--had
introduced the idea of finiteness or Limitation as a necessary condition of
reality and perfection into thought. From them it passed over to Plato and
Aristotle, who made it dominant in the schools. Epicurus and Lucretius had,
indeed, carried on the older Ionian tradition of infinite atoms and
infinite worlds dispersed through infinite space; but their philosophy was
practically atheistic, and the Church condemned it as both heretical and
false. Probably the discovery of the earth's globular shape had first
suggested the idea of a finite universe to Parmenides; at any rate, the
discovery of the earth's motion suggested the idea of an infinite universe
to his Greek-souled Italian successor; or rather it was {10} the break-up
of Aristotle's spherical world by Copernicanism that threw Bruno back--as
he gives us himself to understand--on the older Ionian cosmologies, with
their assumption of infinite space and infinite worlds. In this reference
Bruno went far beyond Copernicus, and even Kepler; for both had assumed, in
deference to current opinion, that the fixed stars were equidistant from
the solar system, and formed a single sphere enclosing it on all sides. He,
on the contrary, anticipated modern astronomy in conceiving the stars as so
many suns dispersed without assignable limits through space, and each
surrounded by inhabited planets.
Infinite space had been closely associated by Democritus and Epicurus with
infinite atoms; and the next great step taken by Bruno was to rehabilitate
atomism as a necessary concept of modern science. He figured the atoms as
very minute spheres of solid earthy matter, forming by their combinations
the framework of visible bodies. But their combinations are by no means
fortuitous, as Democritus had impiously supposed; nor do they move through
an absolute void. All space is filled with an ocean of liquid aether, which
is no other than the quintessence of which Aristotle's celestial spheres
were composed. Only in Bruno's system it takes the place of that First
Matter which is the extreme antithesis of the disembodied Form personified
in the Prime Mover, God. And here we come to that reversal of cosmic values
brought about by the reversal of the relations between the earth and sun
which Copernicus had effected. The primordial Matter, so far from passively
receiving the Forms imposed on it from without, has an infinite capacity
for evolving Forms from its own bosom; and, so far {11} from being
unspiritual, is itself the universal spirit, the creative and animating
soul of the world. The First Matter, Form, Energy, Life, and Reason are
identified with Nature, Nature with the Universe, and the Universe with
God.
So far all is clear, if not convincing. It is otherwise with the theory of
Monads. This is only expounded in Bruno's Latin works, for the most part
ill-written and hopelessly obscure. It seems possible that by the monads
Bruno sometimes means the infinitesimal parts into which the aether of
space may conceivably be divided. Each of these possesses consciousness,
and therefore may be considered as reflecting and representing the whole
universe. A number of monads, or rather a continuous portion of the aether
surrounding and interpenetrating a group of atoms, endows them with the
forms and qualities of elementary bodies, ascending gradually through
vegetal and animal organisations to human beings. But the animating process
does not stop with man. The earth, with the other planets, the sun, and all
the stars, are also monads on the largest scale, with reasonable souls,
just as Aristotle thought. In fact, the old mythology whence he derived the
idea repeats itself in his great enemy Bruno.
Beyond and above all these partial unities is the Monas Monadum--the
supreme unity, the infinite God who is the soul of the infinite universe.
Doubtless there is here a reminiscence of the Neo-Platonic One, the
ineffable Absolute, beyond all existence, yet endowed with the infinite
power whence all existence proceeds. Bruno had learned from Cardinal
Nicolas of Cusa--a Copernican before Copernicus--to recognise the principle
of Heracleitus that opposites are one; and in this instance he applies it
with brilliant audacity; for every infinitesimal {12} part of the
space-filling aether is no less the soul of the universe than the Monad of
Monads itself. And both agree in being non-existent in the sense of being
transfinite, since there can be no sum of infinity and no animated
mathematical points.
From Anaximander to Plotinus there is hardly a great Greek thinker whose
influence cannot be traced in the system of Giordano Bruno. And while he
represents the philosophical Renaissance in this eminent degree, he heads
the two lines of speculation which, separately or combined, run through the
whole history of modern metaphysics--the monistic, and what is now called
the pluralistic tendency. With none, except, perhaps, with Hegel, have the
two been perfectly balanced; and in Bruno himself the leaning is distinctly
towards plurality, his Supreme Monad being a mere survival from the
Neo-Platonic One.
FRANCIS BACON.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was by profession a lawyer, by taste a scientific
inquirer, by character a seeker after wealth and power, by natural genius
an immortal master of words. He began life as the friend, adviser, and
client of Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of Essex. When that unfortunate
courtier, in disregard of his warnings, rushed into a treasonable
enterprise, Bacon appeared as one of the most zealous of the counsel for
the prosecution. Strictly speaking, this may have been his duty as a loyal
subject of the Queen; it was hardly his duty, even on the Queen's
commission, after Essex's execution, to assist in the composition of a
pamphlet blackening the memory of his former friend and patron. In the next
reign Bacon paid assiduous court to James and his favourites. {13}
[Illustration: FRANCIS BACON.
(_Copyright B. P. C._)]
{14} When the first of these, Somerset, fell and was tried on a charge of
murder, he conducted the prosecution, and, finding the evidence
insufficient, suggested to James that the prisoner should be entrapped into
a confession by dangling a false promise of forgiveness before his eyes.
Bacon owed his final exaltation to Buckingham, and as Lord Keeper allowed
himself to be made the tool of that bad man for the perversion of justice.
A suit was brought before him by a young man against a fraudulent trustee
(his own uncle) for the restitution of a sum of money. Bacon gave sentence
for the plaintiff. Buckingham then intervened with a demand that the case
should be retried. "Upon this Bacon saw the parties privately, and,
annulling all the deliberate decisions of the Court, compelled the youth to
assent to the ceasing of all proceedings, and to accept" a smaller sum than
he was entitled to (E. A. Abbott). On another occasion he exercised his
judicial authority in a way that did not square with Buckingham's wishes,
but quite legitimately and without any consciousness of giving offence;
whereupon the insolent favourite addressed him in a letter filled with
outrageous abuse, to which Bacon replied in terms of abject submission.
This meanness had its reward, for in 1618 the philosopher became Lord
Chancellor.
After a three years' tenure Bacon was flung from his high position by a
charge of judicial corruption, to the truth of every count in which he
confessed. The question is very complicated, obscure, and much
controverted, not admitting of discussion within the limits here assigned.
On the subject of Bacon's truthfulness, however, a word must be said. The
Chancellor admitted having taken presents from suitors, but {15} denied
having ever let his judgments be influenced thereby; and his word seems to
be generally accepted as a sufficient exoneration. But its value may be
doubted in view of two statements quoted by Dean Church. Of these "one was
made in the House of Commons by Sir George Hastings, a member of the House,
who had been the channel of Awbry's gift [made to the Chancellor _pendente
lite_], that when he had told Bacon that if questioned he must admit it,
Bacon's answer was: 'George, if you do so, I must deny it, upon my
honour--upon my oath.' The other was that he had given an opinion in favour
of some claim of the Masters in Chancery, for which he received L1,200, and
with which he said that all the judges agreed--an assertion which all the
judges denied. Of these charges there is no contradiction." The denial of
Bacon that he ever allowed his judgments to be influenced by bribes, and
his assertion that he was the justest judge since his own father, cannot,
then, count for much. As to the plea that the justice of his sentences was
never challenged, who was to challenge it? The successful suitor would hold
his tongue; and the unsuccessful suitor could hardly be expected to
complete his own ruin by going to law again on the strength of the
Chancellor's condemnation.
Bacon, at any rate, knew quite well that to take presents before judgment
was wrong and criminal, as his answer to Egerton sufficiently shows--an
answer which also fully disposes of the plea that to take such presents was
the common custom of the age. Moreover, had such been the common custom,
Bacon might have taken his trial and pleaded it as a sufficient apology or
extenuation for his own conduct. This would have been a somewhat more
dignified course {16} than the one he actually pursued, which was to plead
guilty to all the charges, throwing himself on the mercy of the Lords. It
has been suggested that he did this at the desire of his powerful patrons,
whose malpractices might have been brought to light by a public
investigation. As his punishment was immediately remitted, some arrangement
with the King and Buckingham seems probable. But for an innocent man to
have saved himself by a false acknowledgment of guilt would, as Macaulay
shows, have been still more infamous than to take bribes.
The desperate efforts of some apologists to whitewash Bacon are apparently
due to a very exaggerated estimate of his services to mankind. Other
critics give themselves the pleasure of painting what has been called a
Rembrandt portrait, with noon on the forehead and night at the heart. And a
third class argue from a rotten morality to a rotten intelligence. In fact,
Bacon as little deserves to be called the wisest and greatest as the
meanest of mankind. He really loved humanity, and tried hard to serve it,
devoting a truly philosophical intellect to that end. The service was to
consist in an immense extension of man's power over nature, to be obtained
by a complete knowledge of her secrets; and this knowledge he hoped to win
by reforming the methods of scientific investigation. Unfortunately,
intellect alone proved unequal to that mighty task. Bacon passes, and not
without good grounds, for a great upholder of the principle that truth can
only be learned by experience. But his philosophy starts by setting that
principle at defiance. He who took all knowledge for his province omitted
from his survey the rather important subject of knowledge itself, its
limits and its laws. Had his attention {17} been drawn that way, the very
first requisite, on empirical principles, would have been to take stock of
the leading truths already ascertained. But the enormous vanity of the
amateur reformer seems to have persuaded him that these amounted to little
or nothing. The later Renaissance was an age of intense scientific
activity, conditioned, in the first instance, by a revival of Greek
learning. Already before the middle of the sixteenth century great advance
had been made in algebra, trigonometry, astronomy, mineralogy, botany,
anatomy, and physiology. Before the publication of the _Novum Organum_
Napier had invented logarithms, Galileo was reconstituting physics, Gilbert
had created the science of magnetism, and Harvey had discovered the
circulation of the blood. These were facts that Bacon took no pains to
study; he either ignores or slights or denies the work done by his
illustrious predecessors and contemporaries. That he rejected the
Copernican theory with scorn is an exaggeration; but he never accepted it,
notwithstanding arguments that the best astronomers of his time found
convincing; and the longer he lived the more unfavourable became his
opinion of its merits. And it is certain that Tycho Brahe's wonderful mass
of observations, with the splendid generalisations based on them by Kepler,
are never mentioned in his writings. Now what really ruined Aristotelianism
was the heliocentric astronomy, as Bruno perfectly saw; and ignorance of
this left Bacon after all in the bonds of medieval philosophy.
We have seen in studying Bruno that the very soul of Aristotle's system was
his distinction between form and matter, and this distinction Bacon
accepted without examination from scholasticism. The purpose of his {18}
life was to ascertain by what combination of forms each particular body was
constituted, and then, by artificially superinducing them on some portion
of matter, to call the desired substance into existence. His celebrated
inductive method was devised as a means to that end. To discover the forms
"we are instructed first to draw up exhaustive tables of the phenomena and
forms under investigation, and then to exclude from our list any 'form'
which does not invariably co-exist with the phenomenon of which _the_ form
is sought. For example, if we are trying to discover the form of heat it
will not do to adduce 'celestial nature'; for, though the sun's light is
hot, that of the moon is cold. After a series of such _exclusions_, Bacon
believed that a single form would finally remain to be the invariable cause
of the phenomenon investigated, and of nothing else" (F. C. S. Schiller).
As Dr. Schiller observes, this _method of exclusions_ is not new; nor,
indeed, does Bacon claim to have originated it; at least he observes in his
_Novum Organum_ that it had been already employed by Plato to a certain
extent for the purpose of discussing definitions and ideas. And elsewhere
he praises Plato as "a man (and one that surveyed all things from a lofty
cliff) for having discerned in his doctrine of Ideas that Forms were the
true object of knowledge; howsoever he lost the fruit of this most true
opinion by considering and trying to apprehend Forms as absolutely
abstracted from matter, whence it came that he turned aside to theological
speculations." Bacon must have known that this reproach does not apply to
Aristotle; as, indeed, the very schoolmen knew that he did not--except in
the single case of God--give Forms a separate {19} existence. But, probably
from jealousy, he specially hated Aristotle, and in this particular
instance the Stagirite more particularly excited his hostility by
identifying Forms with Final Causes. These Bacon rather contemptuously
handed over to the sole cognisance of theology as consecrated virgins
bearing no fruit. As a point of scientific method this condemnation of
teleology is quite unjustified even in the eyes of inquirers who reject the
theological argument from design. To a Darwinian, purpose means survival
value, and the parts of an organism are so many utilities evolved in the
action and reaction between living beings and their environment. But Bacon
disliked any theory tending to glorify the existing arrangements of nature
as perfect and unalterable achievements, for the good reason that it
threatened to discountenance his own scheme for practically creating the
world over again with exclusive reference to the good of humanity. Thus in
his Utopia, the _New Atlantis_, there are artificial mines, producing
artificial metals, plants raised without seeds, contrivances for turning
one tree or plant into another, for prolonging the lives of animals after
the removal of particular organs, for making "a number of kinds of
serpents, worms, flies, fishes of putrefaction; whereof some are advanced
to be perfect creatures like beasts or birds"; with flying-machines,
submarines, and perpetual motions--in short, a general anticipation of
Jules Verne and Mr. H. G. Wells.
Such dreams, however, do not entitle Bacon to be regarded as a true prophet
of modern science and modern mechanical inventions. In themselves his ideas
do not go beyond the magic of the Middle Ages, or rather of all ages. The
original thing was his {20} Method; and this Method, considered as a means
for surprising the secrets of nature, we know to be completely chimerical,
because there are no such Forms as he imagined, to be enucleated by
induction, with or without the Method of Exclusion. The truth is that the
inductive method which he borrowed from Socrates and Plato was originally
created by Athenian philosophy for the humanistic studies of law, morality,
aesthetics, and psychology. Physical science, on the other hand, should be
approached, as the Greeks rightly felt, through the door of mathematics, an
instrument of whose potency the great Chancellor notoriously had no
conception. Thus his prodigious powers would have been much more usefully
devoted to moral philosophy. As it is, the _Essays_ alone remain to show
what great things he might have done by limiting himself to the subjects
with which they deal. The famous logical and physical treatises, the _Novum
Organum_ and the _De Augmentis_, notwithstanding their wealth and splendour
of language, are to us at the present day less living than the fragments of
early Greek thought, than most of Plato, than much of Aristotle, than
Atomism as expounded by Lucretius.
Macaulay rests his claim of the highest place among philosophers for Bacon
not on his inductive theory, to which the historian rightly denies any
novelty, but on the new purpose and direction that the search for knowledge
is assumed to have received from his teaching. On this view the whole of
modern science has been created by the desire to convert nature into an
instrument for the satisfaction of human wants--an ambition dating from the
publication of the _Novum Organum_. The claim will not stand, for two
reasons. The first is that the great movement of modern science {21} began
at least half a century before Bacon's birth, growing rapidly during his
life, but without his knowledge, and continuing its course without being
perceptibly accelerated by his intervention ever since. The one man of
science who most commonly passes for his disciple is Robert Boyle
(1627-1691). But Boyle did not read the _Novum Organum_ before he was
thirty, whereas, residing at Florence before fifteen, he received a
powerful stimulus from the study of Galileo. And his chemistry was based on
the atomic theory which Bacon rejected.
The second reason for not accepting Macaulay's claim is that in modern
Europe no less than in ancient Greece the great advances in science have
only been made by those who loved knowledge for its own sake, or, if the
expression be preferred, simply for the gratification of their intellectual
curiosity. No doubt their discoveries have added enormously to the
utilities of life; but such advantages have been gained on the sole
condition of not making them the primary end in view. The labours of
Bacon's own contemporaries, Kepler and Gilbert, have led to the navigation
of the sea by lunar distances, and to the various industrial applications
of electro-magnetism; but they were undertaken without a dream of these
remote results. And in our own day the greatest of scientific triumphs,
which is the theory of evolution, was neither worked out with any hope of
material benefits to mankind nor has it offered any prospect of them as
yet. The same may be said of modern sidereal astronomy. From the humanist
point of view it would not be easy to justify the enormous expenditure of
energy, money, and time that this science has absorbed. The schoolmen have
been much ridiculed for discussing the question how {22} many angels could
dance on the point of a needle; but as a purely speculative problem it
surely merits as much attention as the total number of the stars, the rates
of their velocities, or the law of their distribution through space. A
schoolman might even have urged in justification of his curiosity that some
of us might feel a reasonable curiosity about the exact size--if size they
have--of beings with whom we hope to associate one day; whereas by the
confession of the astronomers themselves neither we nor our descendants can
ever hope to verify by direct measurement the precarious guesses of their
science in this branch of celestial statics and dynamics.
THOMAS HOBBES.
It has been shown that one momentous effect of the Copernican astronomy, as
interpreted by Giordano Bruno, was to reverse the relative importance
ascribed in Aristotle's philosophy to the two great categories of Power and
Act, giving to Power a value and dignity of which it had been stripped by
the judgment of Plato and Aristotle. Even Epicurus, when he rehabilitated
infinite space, had been careful as a moralist to urge the expediency of
placing a close limitation on human desires, denouncing the excesses of
avarice and ambition more mildly but not less decisively than the
contemporary Stoic school. Thus Lucretius describes his master as
travelling beyond the flaming walls of the world only that he may bring us
back a knowledge of the fixed barrier set by the very laws of existence to
our aspirations and hopes.
The classic revival of the Renaissance did not bring back the Greek spirit
of moderation. On the contrary, the new world, the new astronomy, the new
monarchy, {23} and the new religion combined to create such a sense of
Power, in contradistinction to Act, as the world had never before known.
For us this new feeling has received its most triumphant artistic
expression from Shakespeare and Milton, for France from Rabelais, for Italy
from Ariosto and Michelangelo. In philosophy Bacon strikes the same note
when he values knowledge as a source of power--knowledge which for Greek
philosophy meant rather a lesson in self-restraint. And this idea receives
a further development from Bacon's chief successor in English philosophy,
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), in whose system love of power figures as the
very essence of human nature, the self-conscious manifestation of that
Motion which is the real substance of the physical world.
Hobbes was a precocious child, and received a good school training; but the
five years he spent at Oxford added nothing to his information, and a
continental tour with the young heir of the Cavendishes had no other effect
than to convince him of the general contempt into which the scholasticism
still taught at Oxford had fallen. On returning to England, he began his
studies over again in the Cavendish library, acquiring a thorough
familiarity with the classic literature of Greece and Rome, a deep hatred
(imbibed through Thucydides) of democracy, and a genuinely antique theory
that the State should be supreme in religious no less than in civil
matters. Amid these studies Hobbes occasionally enjoyed the society of
Bacon, then spending his last years in the retirement of Gorhambury. As
secretary and Latin translator he proved serviceable to the ex-Chancellor,
but remained quite unaffected by his inductive and experimental philosophy.
Indeed, the determining impulse of his {24} speculative activity came from
the opposite quarter. Going abroad once more as travelling tutor, at the
age of forty, he chanced on a copy of Euclid in a gentleman's library lying
open at the famous Forty-Seventh Proposition. His first impulse was to
reject the theorem as impossible; but, on going backwards from proposition
to proposition, he laid down the book not only convinced, but "in love with
geometry."
Beginning so late in life, his ulterior studies led Hobbes into the belief
that he had squared the circle, besides the far more pernicious error of
applying the deductive method of geometry to the solution of political
problems. Could he and Bacon have exchanged philosophies, the brilliant
faculties of each might have been employed to better purpose. The
categories of Form and Matter, combined with the logic of elimination and
tentative generalisation, would have found a fitting field for their
application in the familiar facts of human nature. But those facts refused
to be treated as so many wheels, pulleys, and cords in a machine for
crushing the life out of society and transmitting the will of a single
despot unresisted through its whole extent; for such is a faithful picture
of what a well-governed community, as Hobbes conceived it, ought to be.
During his second residence abroad he had become acquainted with the
physical philosophy of Galileo--the theory that regards every change in the
external or phenomenal world as a mere rearrangement of matter and motion,
matter being an aggregate of independent molecules held together by
mechanical pressure and impact. The component parts of this aggregate
become known to us by the impressions their movements produce on our
senses, traces of which {25} are preserved in memory, and subsequently
recalled by association. Language consists of signs conventionally affixed
to such images; only the signs, standing as they do for all objects of a
certain sort, have a universal value, not possessed by the original
sensations, through which reasoning becomes possible. Hobbes had evidently
fallen in love with algebra as well as with geometry; and it is on the type
of algebraic reasoning--in other words, on the type of rigorous
deduction--that his logic is constructed. And such a view of the way in
which knowledge advances seemed amply justified by the scientific triumphs
of his age. But his principle that all motion originates in antecedent
motion, although plausible in itself and occasionally revived by ingenious
speculators, has not been verified by modern science. Gravitation,
cohesion, and chemical affinity have, so far, to be accepted as facts not
resoluble into more general facts. Hobbes died before the great discoveries
of Newton which first turned away men's minds from the purely mechanical
interpretation of energy.
That mechanical interpretation led our philosopher to reject Aristotle's
notion of sociality as an essentially human characteristic. To him this
seemed a mere occult quality, the substitution of a word for an
explanation. The counter-view put forth in his great work, _Leviathan_, is
commonly called atomistic. But it would be gross flattery to compare the
ultimate elements of society, as Hobbes conceived them, to the molecules of
modern science, which attract as well as repel each other; or even with the
Democritean atoms, which are at least neutral. According to him, the
tendency to self-preservation, shared by men with all other beings, takes
the form of an insatiable appetite {26} for power, leading each individual
to pursue his own aggrandisement at the cost of any loss or suffering to
the rest. And he tries to prove the permanence of this impulse by referring
to the precautions against robbery taken by householders and travellers.
Aristotle had much more justly mentioned the kindnesses shown to travellers
as a proof of how widely goodwill is diffused. Our countryman, with all his
acuteness, strangely ignores the necessity as a matter of prudence of going
armed and locking the door at night, even if the robbers only amounted to
one in a thousand of the population. Modern researches have shown that
there are very primitive societies where the assumed war of all against
each is unknown, predatory conflicts being a mark of more advanced
civilisation, and the cause rather than the effect of anti-social impulses.
Granting an original state of anarchy and internecine hostility, there is,
according to Hobbes, only one way out of it, which is a joint resolution of
the whole community to surrender their rights of individual sovereignty
into the hands of one man, who thenceforth becomes absolute ruler of the
State, with authority to defend its citizens against mutual aggressions,
and the whole community against attacks from a foreign Power. This
agreement constitutes the famous Social Contract, of which so much was to
be heard during the next century and a-half. It holds as between the
citizens themselves, but not between the subjects and their sovereign, for
that would be admitting a responsibility which there is no power to
enforce. And anyone refusing to obey the sovereign justly forfeits his
life; for he thereby returns to the State of Nature, where any man that
likes may kill his neighbour if he can.
All this theory of an original institution of the State {27} by contract
impresses a modern reader as utterly unhistorical. But its value, if any,
does not depend on its historical truth. Even if the remote ancestors of
the seventeenth-century Europeans had surrendered all their individual
rights, with certain trifling exceptions, into the hands of an autocrat, no
sophistry could show that their mutual engagements were binding on the
subjects of Charles I. and Louis XIV. And it is really on expediency,
understood in the largest sense, that the claims of the New Monarchy are
based by Hobbes. What he maintains is that nothing short of a despotic
government exercised by one man can save society from relapsing into chaos.
But even under this amended form the theory remains amenable to historical
criticism. Had Hobbes pursued his studies beyond Thucydides, he would have
found that other polities besides the Athenian democracy broke down at the
hour of trial. Above all, Roman Imperialism, which seems to have been his
ideal, failed to secure its subjects either against internal disorder or
against foreign invasion.
Democracy, however, was not the sole or the worst enemy dreaded by the
author of _Leviathan_ as a competitor with his "mortal god." In the
frontispiece of that work the deified monarch who holds the sword erect
with his right hand grasps the crozier with his left, thus typifying the
union of the spiritual and temporal powers in the same person. The
publicists of the Italian Renaissance, with their classical ideals, had,
indeed, been as anti-papal as the Protestants; and the political disorders
fomented by the agents of the Catholic reaction during the last hundred
years had given Hobbes an additional reason for perpetuating their point of
view. Meanwhile another menace to {28} public order had presented itself
from an opposite quarter. Calvinism had created a new spiritual power based
on the free individual interpretation of Scripture, in close alliance with
the alleged rights of conscience and with the spirit of republican liberty.
Each creed in turn had attacked the Stuart monarchy, and the second had
just effected its overthrow. Therefore, to save the State it was necessary
that religious creeds, no less than codes of conduct, should be dictated by
the secular authority, enslaving men's minds as well as their bodies.
By the dialectic irony of the speculative movement, this attempt to fetter
opinion was turned into an instrument for its more complete emancipation.
In order to discredit the pretensions of the religious zealots, Hobbes made
a series of attacks on the foundations of their faith, mostly by way of
suggestion and innuendo--no more being possible under the conditions then
obtaining---but with such effect that, according to Macaulay, "for many
years the _Leviathan_ was the gospel of cold-blooded and hard-headed
unbelievers." That one who made religious belief a matter to be fixed by
legislation could be in any sense a Christian seems most unlikely. He
professed, with what sincerity we know not, to regard the existence of God
as something only a fool could deny. But his philosophy from beginning to
end forms a rigorously-thought-out system of materialism which any atheist,
if otherwise it satisfied him, might without inconsistency accept.
On the meeting of the Long Parliament, Hobbes again left England for the
Continent, where he remained for eleven years. But his principles were no
more to the taste of the exiled royalists than of {29} their opponents. He
therefore returned once more to England, made his submission to the
Parliament, and spent the rest of his days, practically unmolested by
either party, under the Commonwealth and the Restoration until his death in
1679 at the age of ninety-one.
It may be said of Hobbes, as of Bacon, that the intellect at work is so
amazing and the mass of literary performance so imposing that the illusions
of historians about the value of their contributions to the progress of
thought are excusable. Nevertheless, it cannot be too distinctly stated
that the current or academic estimate of these great men as having effected
a revolution in physical and moral science is wrong. They stand as much
apart from the true line of evolution as do the gigantic saurians of a
remote geological period whose remains excite our wonder in museums of
natural history. Their systems proved as futile as the monarchies of Philip
II. and of Louis XIV. Bacon's dreams are no more related to the coming
victories of science than Raleigh's El Dorado was to the future colonial
empire of Britain. Hobbes had better fortune than Strafford, in so far as
he kept his head on his shoulders; but the logic of his absolutism
shrivelled up under the sun of English liberty like the great Minister's
policy of Thorough.
The theory of a Social Contract is a speculative idea of the highest
practical importance. But the idea of contract as the foundation of morals
goes back to Epicurus, and it is assumed in a more developed form by
Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_. Its potency as a revolutionary instrument
comes from the reinterpretations of Locke and Rousseau, which run directly
counter to the assumptions of the _Leviathan_. {30}
Hobbes shares with Bacon the belief that all knowledge comes from
experience, besides making it clearer than his predecessor that experience
of the world comes through external sense alone. Here also there can be no
claim to originality, for more than one school of Greek philosophy had said
the same. As an element of subsequent thought, more importance belongs to
the idea of Power, which was to receive its full development from Spinoza;
but only in association with other ideas derived from the philosopher whom
we have next to examine, the founder of modern metaphysics, Descartes.
* * * * *
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