THE GERMAN IDEALISTS
FICHTE, SCHELLING, HEGEL, SCHOPENHAUER, HERBART.
The Critical Philosophy won its first success in Germany less as a new
epistemology than as what, in fact, its author meant it to be, a
rehabilitation of religious belief. The limits of Reason had been drawn so
closely only to make room for Faith. But the current of Rationalism was
running too strongly to be so summarily stopped; and so with Kant's ablest
successors faith is altogether abandoned, while the claims of reason are
pushed relentlessly through. Among these more logical thinkers the first is
J. G. Fichte (1762-1814). In him--for the third time in modern history, for
the first and last time in Germany--the hero as philosopher finds a worthy
representative. Born in Silesia, like Kant of humble parentage, and bred in
circumstances of more oppressive poverty, he also received a severely
religious and moral training as a preparation for the pastoral office. The
bounty of an aristocratic patron gave him an excellent public-school
education; but as a university student, first at Jena and then at Leipzig,
he had to earn a scanty living by private tuition, finally abandoning his
destined career to accept a post in a Swiss family at Zurich. There, as the
result of an attachment in which the love was nearly all on the lady's
side, he became engaged to a niece of the poet Klopstock, and after a long
delay, caused by money {102} difficulties, was enabled to marry her. In the
meantime he had become a convert to Kant's philosophy, winning the
admiration of the old master himself by a _Critique of all Revelation_,
written in four weeks. Published anonymously by an oversight, it was
generally attributed to Kant himself, and, on the real authorship becoming
known, won for Fichte an extraordinary Professorate of Philosophy at Jena,
where his success as a lecturer and writer gave him for a time the
leadership in German speculation (1794-1799). An untoward incident brought
this stage of his career to an end. Writing in a philosophical review, he
defined God as "the moral order of the universe." Dr. Temple long
afterwards used much the same phrase when Bishop of Exeter, finding it,
presumably, compatible with official Theism; but such was not the
impression created in Saxony. A cry of atheism arose, much to the disgust
of Fichte, whose position would have been better described as pantheistic.
But what incensed him most was the suspicion of an attempt to interfere
with the liberty of academic teaching. With his usual impetuosity he talked
about resigning his chair--with a hint that others would follow his
example--were the authorities at Weimar to permit such an outrage. Goethe,
who was then Minister, observed that no Government could allow itself to be
threatened, and Fichte was at once relieved of his post. Settling at
Berlin, he became Professor of Philosophy in the new University founded
after the French conquest of Prussia, having previously done much to revive
the national spirit by his _Addresses to the German Nation_ (1807-1808).
These were in appearance the programme of a new educational Utopia; but
their real purpose was so evident that the speaker lived in daily
expectation of being summoned {103} before a French court-martial and shot.
Unlike his countrymen, Goethe, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, Fichte passionately
resented the Napoleonic despotism, throwing himself heart and soul into the
great uprising by which it was finally overthrown. Although his wish to
accompany the victorious army as field preacher could not be gratified, the
campaign of 1813 still claimed him as one of its victims. After nursing his
heroic wife to recovery from a hospital fever caught in attendance on the
sick and wounded at Berlin, he took the infection from her and died early
in 1814, soon after hearing that Bluecher had crossed the Rhine.
G. H. Lewes, in a well-known story, has made himself and his readers merry
over a German savant who undertakes to evolve the idea of a camel out of
the depths of his moral consciousness. The phrase is commonly quoted as
"inner consciousness," but this takes away its whole point. For the
original satirist, who, I think, was not Lewes, but Heine, had in view the
philosophy of Fichte. It need hardly be said that German savants are as
careful observers and diligent collectors of facts as any others; and
Fichte in particular trusted solely to experience for the knowledge of
natural phenomena. But even as regards his general philosophy the place it
gives to morality has been misconceived even by his closest students. With
him goodwill really plays a less important part than with Kant, being not
an end in itself, but a means towards an end. And what that end is his
teaching makes quite clear.
Kant's first critics put their finger on the weak point of his system, the
thing in itself. So, assuming it to be discarded, Fichte set to work on new
lines, the lines of pure idealism. But, though an idealist, he is not, any
more than Berkeley, a solipsist. The celebrated {104} antithesis of the ego
and the non-ego dates from him, and strikes the keynote of his whole
system. It might be thought that, as compared with the old realism, this
was a distinction without a difference. But that is not so; for, according
to Fichte, the non-ego is subjective in its origin, and that is where he
departs widely from Berkeley's theological idealism. Not that I create the
not-myself; I _assume_ it as the condition of my self-consciousness--a
remarkable feat of logic, but after all not more wonderful than that space
and time should result from the activity of the outer and inner senses.
This figment of my imagination is anyhow solid enough to beget a new
feeling of resistance and recoil, throwing the self back on itself, and
bringing with it the interpretation of that external impact by the category
of causation, of its own activity as substance, and of the whole deal
between the ego and the non-ego as interaction or reciprocity. In this way
the first triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is obtained; and from
this, by a vast expenditure of ingenuity, the whole array of Kant's forms,
categories, and faculties is evolved as a coherent system of scientific
thought in obedience to a single principle--the self-realisation of the
ego, alternatively admitting and transcending a limit to its activity.
It will be easily understood that this self-realising ego is neither
Fichte's nor anyone else's self, but a universal principle, fundamentally
the same in all. One is reminded of Descartes's self-thinking thought by
which the reality of the universe was guaranteed; but between the two there
is this vast difference, that the Frenchman's ego resembles a box
containing a variety of independent ideas, to be separately handled and
examined; the German's is a box enclosing a coiled-up spring by {105} the
expansion of which all the wheels of the philosophical machine are made go
round. From the action of the not-self on the self results the whole of
nature as we conceive it; from the reaction of the self on the not-self,
the whole mentality and morality of man--morality being understood to
include the domestic, social, political, educational, and industrial
organisation of life. The final cause, the impelling ideal of existence, is
the self-realisation of the ego, the entire absorption into its personal
energy of the non-ego, of nature, to be effected by perfect knowledge of
how the physical universe is constituted issuing in perfect subjugation of
its forces to the human will. But such a realisation of the Absolute Ego
would mean its annihilation, for, as we have seen, the antithesis between
objective and subjective is the very condition of consciousness that
without which it could neither begin nor continue to exist. Therefore the
process must go on for ever, and this necessity guarantees the eternal
duration of the human race--not, as Kant had dreamed, of the individual
soul, since for Fichte the Categorical Imperative demands a consummation
widely different from that combination of virtue with happiness which had
satisfied his master. And the agency by which it is being effected through
infinite time is not a personal God, but that moral order of the world
which Fichte regarded as the only true object of religious feeling. As for
human immortality, he seems to have first accepted, but afterwards rejected
it in favour of a mystical union with the divine.
It has been said that morality was not with Fichte what it had been with
Kant--the highest good. Nevertheless, as a means towards the final
synthesis, morality interested him intensely, and his best work has been
{106} done in ethics. As a condition of self-realisation the primal ego
becomes personified in a multitude of free individualities. Just as in
Stoicism, each individual is conceived as having a special office to
perform in the world-process, and the State exists--ideally speaking--in
order to guarantee the necessary independence of all its citizens. For this
purpose everyone must have the right to work and the right to a living
wage. Thus Fichte appears as the first theorist of State Socialism in the
history of German thought. Probably the example of the Greek Stoics with
their communistic utopias acting on a kindred spirit, rather than any
prophetic vision of the coming century, is to be credited for this
remarkable anticipation.
SCHELLING.
German philosophy is prolific of self-contradictions; and so far the most
flagrant example has been offered by Fichte's _Theory of Knowledge_,
starting as it does with the idea of an impersonal ego, developing through
a process in which this selfless self demands its own negation at every
step, and determined by the prospect of a catastrophe that would be the
annihilation of consciousness itself. In fact, there seemed no need to wait
until time had run out; the self, or, as it was now called, the subject,
had absorbed all reality, only to find that the material universe,
reconstituted as the object of knowledge, was an indispensable condition of
its existence. And meanwhile the physical sciences, more particularly those
concerned with inorganic nature, were entering on a series of triumphs
unparalleled since the days of Newton. Philosophy must come to terms with
these or cease to exist.
The task of reconciliation was first attempted by {107} F. W. J. Schelling
(1775-1854), a Suabian, and the first South German who made a name in pure
philosophy. Educated at the University of Tuebingen, at an early age he
covered an encyclopaedic range of studies and began authorship at nineteen,
gaining a professorship at Jena four years later. Wandering about from one
university to another, and putting forward new opinions as often as he
changed his residence, the young adventurer ceased to publish after 1813,
and remained silent till in 1841 he came forward at Berlin as the champion
of a reactionary current, practically renouncing the naturalistic pantheism
by which his early reputation had been made. But he utterly failed in the
attempt, which was finally abandoned in the fifth year from its inception.
Lewes, who saw Schelling in his old age, describes him as remarkably like
Socrates; his admirers called him a modern Plato; but he had nothing of the
deep moral earnestness that characterised either, nor indeed was morality
needed for the work that he actually did. This, to use the phrase of his
fellow-student Hegel, consisted in raising philosophy to its absolute
standpoint, in passing from the subjective moralism of the eighteenth
century to the all-comprehensive systematisation of the nineteenth.
Schelling began as a disciple of Fichte, but he came simultaneously under
the influence of Spinoza, whose fame had been incessantly spreading through
the last generation in Germany, with some reinforcement from the revived
name of Bruno. Their teaching served to make the latent pantheism of Fichte
more explicit, while the great contemporary discoveries gave a new interest
to the study of nature, which Fichte, unlike Kant, had put in the
background, strictly subordinating it to the moral service of man. Had he
cared to evolve {108} the idea of a camel from his moral consciousness, the
operation would not have demanded several years, but only a few minutes'
thought. As thus: the moral development of humanity needed the co-operation
of such a race as the Semites. To form their character a long residence in
the Arabian deserts was needed. But for such nomads an auxiliary animal
would be needed with long legs and neck, a stomach for storing water, hump,
etc.--Q. E. D. Schelling also began by explaining the material world as a
preparation for the spiritual; only he did not employ the method of
teleological adaptation, but a method of rather fanciful analogy. As the
evolution of self-conscious reason had proceeded by a triple movement of
thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, so a parallel process had to be
discovered in the advance towards a consciousness supposed to be exhibited
in organic and inorganic nature.
The fundamental idea of natural philosophy is polarity--opposite forces
combining to neutralise one another and then parting to be reunited at a
higher stage of evolution. Thus attraction and repulsion--represented as
space and time--by their synthesis compose matter; magnetism and
electricity produce chemical affinity; life results from a triad of
inorganic forces; in life itself productivity and irritability give birth
to sensibility. The order of the terms made little, if any, difference.
When long afterwards iron was magnetised by the electric current, Schelling
claimed for himself the credit of anticipating this discovery, although he
had placed magnetism before electricity.
The next step was to construct a philosophy of history. This, with much
else, is included under the name of _A System of Transcendental Idealism_
(1800) in the most finished of Schelling's literary compositions. {109}
History, according to the view here unfolded, is the gradual
self-revelation of God, or the Absolute, in whom Nature and Spirit are
united and identified, who never is nor can be, but always is to be.
Meanwhile the supreme ideal is not that ever-increasing mastery of nature
by man which Fichte contemplated, but their reconciliation as achieved by
Art. For just as natural philosophy carried an element of consciousness
into the material universe, so aestheticism recognises a corresponding
element of unconscious creation in the supreme works of artistic genius
where spirit reaches its highest and best. Here Schelling appears as the
philosopher of Romanticism, a movement that characterised German thought
from 1795 to 1805, and is known to ourselves by the faded and feeble image
of it exhibited in a certain section of English society nearly a century
later. Beginning with a more cultivated intelligence of Hellenic antiquity,
this movement rapidly grew into a new appreciation of medieval culture,
falsely supposed to have given more scope to individuality than modern
civilisation, and then into a search for ever-varying sources of excitement
or distraction in the whole history, art, and literature of past or present
times, religion being at last singled out as the vitalising principle of
all.
Singularly enough, Fichte accepted the _Transcendental Idealism_ as an
orthodox exposition of his own philosophy. But its composition seems to
have given Schelling the consciousness of his own independence. Soon
afterwards he defined the new position as a philosophy of Identity or of
Indifference. Nature and Spirit, like Spinoza's Thought and Extension, were
all the same and all one--that is to say, in their totality or in the
Absolute. For, considered as appearances, {110} they might present
quantitative differences determined by the varying preponderance of the
objective or of the subjective side. In this way Schelling found himself
able to repeat his fanciful construction of the forces and forms of nature
in successive triads under new names. The essential departure from Fichte,
who repudiated the Philosophy of Identity with undisguised contempt, was
that it practically repudiated the idea of an eternal progress in man's
ever-growing mastery of nature. But, in spite of all disclaimers, the
master silently followed his former disciple's evolution in the direction
of a pantheistic monism. His later writings represent God no longer as the
moral order of the world, but, like Spinoza, as the world's eternal Being,
of which man's knowledge is the reflected image. Finally, both philosophers
accepted the Christian doctrines of the Fall, the Incarnation, and the
Trinity as mythical symbols of an eternal process in which God, after
becoming alienated from himself in the material universe, returns to
himself in man's consciousness of identity with the Absolute. Instead of
the rather abrupt method of position, negation, and re-affirmation known as
Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis, we have here the more fluid process of a
spiral movement, departing from and returning to itself. And this was to be
the very mainspring of the system that next comes up for consideration.
HEGEL.
{111}
[Illustration: Hegel
(_Copyright B. P. C._)]
{112} G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), in the opinion of some good judges
Germany's greatest philosopher, was, like Schelling, a Suabian, and
intimately associated with his younger contemporary, first at Tuebingen and
afterwards at Jena, where the two friends jointly conducted a philosophical
review. But they gradually drifted apart. Hegel was not a romanticist, but
a classic; not a naturalist, but a humanist. Largely influenced by Greek
thought and Greek literature, for which he continued to be an enthusiast
through life, he readily accepted, as against Kant and Fichte, the change
from a purely subjective to an objective point of view. But, although he
gave some attention to physical science, Hegel was less interested in it
than his colleague, with whose crude and fanciful metaphysics he also
failed to sympathise. With the publication of Hegel's first important work,
the _Phenomenology of Mind_ (1807), things came to a breach; for its
preface amounts to a declaration of war against the philosophy of
Romanticism. Schelling himself is not named; but there is no mistaking the
object of certain picturesque references to "exploding the Absolute on us,"
and "the darkness in which every cow is black." Next year Hegel became what
we should call headmaster of a public school at Nuremberg, filling that
post for eight years, during which his greatest work, the _System of
Logic_, in three volumes, was composed and published. He then obtained a
chair of philosophy at Heidelberg, passing thence to Berlin in 1818, where
he taught until his death by cholera in 1831. David Strauss, who saw the
revered teacher a few days before the fatal seizure, describes him first as
he appeared in the lecture-room, "looking ever so old, bent and coughing";
then in his home, "looking ten years younger, with clear blue eyes, and
showing the most beautiful white teeth when he smiled." He had published a
summary of his whole system, under the name of an _Encyclopaedia of the
Philosophical Sciences_, in 1817, and a _Philosophy of Law_--which is
really a treatise on Government--in 1821. His {113} sympathies were with
bureaucratic absolutism in a modernised form, with Napoleon against the
German patriots, with the restored Prussian Government against the new
Liberalism, with English Toryism against the Whigs of the Reform Bill, and
finally with the admirers of war against the friends of peace.
Hegel's collected works, published after his death, fill over twenty
good-sized volumes. Besides the treatises already mentioned, they include
his _Lectures on the History of Philosophy_, the _Philosophy of History_,
the _Philosophy of Religion_, _Aesthetics_, etc., made up with much
literary skill from the Professor's own notes and from the reports of his
hearers. The most permanently valuable of these is the _Aesthetics_; but
any student desirous of getting a notion of Hegelianism at first hand had
better begin with the _Philosophy of History_, of which there is a good and
cheap English translation in one of Bohn's Libraries. Some general points
of view serving to connect the system with its predecessors are all that
room can be found for here.
As compared with Kant, Hegel is distinguished above all by his complete
abjuration of the agnostic standpoint in epistemology. "The universe is
penetrable to thought": an unknowable thing in itself does not exist.
Indeed, the intelligible reality of things is just what we know best; the
unaccountable residuum, if any, lurks in the details of their appearance.
So also in Greek philosophy Hegel holds that the truth was not in the ideal
world of Plato, but in the self-realising Forms of Aristotle. As against
Fichte, Hegel will not allow that the reconciliation of the subjective with
the objective is an infinitely "far-off divine event"; on the contrary, it
is a process being continually realised by ourselves and all about us. In
his homely expression, the very {114} animals as they eat turn their food
into consciousness, in utter disregard of prejudice. But Fichte's
condemnation of Schelling's Indifferentism is quite right. _The Absolute is
Mind_. Nature exists only as the lower stage, whence Spirit emerges to
contradict, to confront, and to explain her as the necessary preparation
for his supreme self-assertion. And Fichte was right in working out his
system by the dialectical method of contradiction and solution, as against
the dogmatism that summarily decrees the Absolute, without taking the
trouble to reason it out, in imitation of the plan pursued by the universe
in becoming conscious of itself.
The most portentous thing about Hegel's philosophy is this notion of the
world's having, so to speak, argued itself into existence. To rationalise
the sum of being, to explain, without assumptions, why there should be
anything, and then why it should be as we know it, had been a problem
suggested by Plato and solved rather summarily by Spinoza's challenge to
conceive Infinite Power as non-existing. Hegel is more patient and
ingenious; but, after all, his superiority merely consists in spinning the
web of arbitrary dialectic so fine that we can hardly see the thread. The
root-idea is to identify, or rather to confuse, causal evolution with
logic. The chain of causes and effects that constitutes the universe is
made out to be one with the series of reasons and consequents by which the
conclusion is demonstrated. As usual, the equation is effected by a
transference of terms from each side to the other. The categories and
processes of logic are credited with a life and movement that belongs only
to the human reasoner operating with them. And the moving, interacting
masses of which the material universe consists are represented as parties
to a dialectical {115} discussion in which one denies what the other
asserts until it is discovered, on lifting the argument to a higher plane,
that after all they are agreed. Nor is this all. The world as we know it is
composed of co-existent elements grouped together or distinguished
according to their resemblances and differences as so many natural kinds;
and of successive events linked together as causes and effects. But while
there is no general law of coexistence except such as may be derived from
the collocation of the previously existing elements whence they are
derived, there _is_ a law of causal succession--namely, this, that the
quantities of mass and energy involved are conserved without loss or gain
through all time. Now, Hegel's way of rationalising or, in plainer words,
accounting for the coexistent elements and their qualities, is to bring
them under a supposed law of complementary opposition, revived from
Heracleitus, according to which everything necessarily involves the
existence, both in thought and reality, of its contradictory. And the same
principle is applied to causal succession--a proceeding which would be
fatal to the scientific law of conservation.
There is another way of rationalising experience--namely, the theological
hypothesis of a supreme intelligence by which the world was created and is
governed with a view to the attainment of some ultimate good. And there is
a sort of teleology in Hegel evidently inspired by his religious education.
But the two do not mean the same thing. For he places conscious reason not
at the beginning but at the end of evolution. The rationality of things is
immanent, not transcendent. Purposes somehow work retrospectively so as to
determine the course of events towards a good end. That end is
self-consciousness--not yours or mine, but the {116} world-spirit's
consciousness and possession of itself. And this is reached in four ways:
in Art by intuition, in Religion by representation, in Philosophy by
conception, in History and Politics by the realisation of righteousness
through the agency of the modern State.
Hegel looked on this world and this life of ours as the only world and the
only life. When Heine pointed to the starry skies he told the young poet
that the stars were a brilliant leprosy on the face of the heavens, and met
the appeal for future compensation with the sarcastic observation: "So you
expect a trinkgeld for nursing your sick mother and for not poisoning your
brother!"
German historians have justly extolled the ingenuity, the subtlety, the
originality, the systematising power--unequalled since Aristotle--and the
enormous knowledge of their country's chief idealist. But this, after all,
amounts to no more than claiming for Hegel that much of what he said is
true and that much is new. The vital question is whether what is new is
also true--and this is more than they seem prepared to maintain.
SCHOPENHAUER.
The leaders of the party known in the fourth and fifth decades of the last
century as Young Germany, among whom Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was the
most brilliant and famous, were more or less associated with the Hegelian
school. They were, however, what Hegel was not, political revolutionists
with a tendency to Socialism; while their religious rationalism, unlike
his, was openly proclaimed. The temporary collapse in 1849 of the movement
they initiated brought discredit on idealism as represented by Germany's
classic philosophers, which also had been seriously damaged by the luminous
criticism of Trendelenburg, the neo-Aristotelian professor at Berlin
(1802-1872).
{117}
[Illustration: SCHOPENHAUER]
{118} At this crisis attention was drawn to the long-neglected writings of
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), which then attained a vogue that they
never since have lost. The son of a Hamburg banker and of a literary lady
whose novels enjoyed some reputation in their day, he was placed from the
beginning in a position of greater material and social independence than
usually falls to the lot of German thinkers; and to this, combined with the
fact that he failed entirely as a university teacher, it is partly due that
he wrote about philosophy not like a pedant, but like a man of the world.
At the same time the German professors, resenting the intrusion of an
outsider on their privileged domain, were strong enough to prevent the
reading public from ever hearing of Schopenhauer's existence until an
article in the _Westminster Review_ (April, 1853) astonished Germany by the
revelation that she possessed a thinker whom the man in the street could
understand.
Schopenhauer found his earliest teachers of philosophy in Plato and Kant.
He then attended Fichte's lectures at Berlin. At some uncertain
date--probably soon after taking his doctor's degree in 1813--at the
suggestion of an Orientalist he took up the study of the Vedanta system.
All these various influences converged to impress him with the belief that
the things of sense are a delusive appearance under which a fundamental
reality lies concealed. According to Hegel, the reality is reason; but the
Romanticists, with Schelling at their head, never accepted his conclusion,
thinking of the absolute rather as a blind, unconscious substance; still
less could it please {119} Schopenhauer, who sought for the supreme good
under the form of happiness conceived as pleasure unalloyed by pain. A
gloomy and desponding temperament combined, as in the case of Byron and
Rousseau, with passionately sensuous instincts and anti-social habits,
debarred him from attaining it. The loss of a large part of his private
fortune, and the world's refusal to recognise his genius, completed what
natural temperament had begun; and it only remained for the philosophy of
the Upanishads to give a theoretic sanction to the resulting state of mind
by teaching that all existence is in itself an evil--a position which
placed him in still more thoroughgoing antagonism to Hegel.
It will be remembered that Kant's criticism had denied the human mind all
knowledge of things in themselves, and that the post-Kantian systems had
been so many efforts to get at the Absolute in its despite. But none had
stated the question at issue so clearly as Schopenhauer put it, or answered
it in such luminous terms. Like theirs, his solution is idealist; but the
idealism is constructed on new lines. If we know nothing else, we know
ourselves; only it has to be ascertained what exactly we are. Hegel said
that the essence of consciousness is reason, and that reason is the very
stuff of which the world is made. No, replies Schopenhauer, that is a
one-sided scholastic view. Much the most important part of ourselves is
_not_ reason, but that very unreasonable thing called will--that aimless,
hopeless, infinite, insatiable craving which is the source of all our
activity and of all our misery as well. _This_ is the thing-in-itself, the
timeless, inextended entity behind all phenomena, come to the consciousness
of itself, but also of its utter futility, in man. {120}
The cosmic will presents itself to us objectively under the form of the
great natural forces--gravitation, heat, light, electricity, chemical
affinity, etc.; then as the organising power of life in vegetables and
animals; finally as human self-consciousness and sociability. These,
Schopenhauer says, are what is really meant by the Platonic ideas, and they
figure in his philosophy as first differentiations of the primordial will,
coming between its absolute unity and the individualised objects and events
that fill all space and time. It is the function of architecture, plastic
art, painting, and poetry to give each of these dynamic ideas, singly or in
combination, its adequate interpretation for the aesthetic sense. One art
alone brings us a direct revelation of the real world, and that is music.
Musical compositions have the power to express not any mere ideal
embodiment of the underlying will, but the will itself in all its majesty
and unending tragic despair.
Schopenhauer's theory of knowledge is given in the essay by which he
obtained his doctor's degree, _On the Four-fold Root of the Sufficient
Reason_. Notwithstanding this rather alarming title, it is a singularly
clear and readable work. The standpoint is a simplification of Kant's
_Critique_. The objects of consciousness offer themselves to the thinking,
acting subject as grouped presentations in which there is "nothing sudden,
nothing single." (1) When a new object appears to us, it must have a cause,
physical, physiological, or psychological; and this we call the reason why
it becomes. (2) Objects are referred to concepts of more or less
generality, according to the logical rules of definition, classification,
and inference; that is the reason of their being known. (3) Objects are
mathematically determined by their position relatively to {121} other
objects in space and time; that is the reason of their being. (4) Practical
objects or ends of action are determined by motives; the motive is the
reason why one thing rather than another is done.
The last "sufficient reason" takes us to ethics. Schopenhauer agrees with
Kant in holding that actions considered as phenomena are strictly
determined by motives, so much so that a complete knowledge of a man's
character and environment would enable us to predict his whole course of
conduct through life. Nevertheless, each man, as a timeless subject, is and
knows himself to be free. To reconcile these apparently conflicting
positions we must accept Plato's theory that each individual's whole fate
has been determined by an ante-natal or transcendental choice for which he
always continues responsible. Nevertheless, cases of religious "conversion"
and the like prove that the eternal reality of the Will occasionally
asserts itself in radical transformations of character and conduct.
In ethics Schopenhauer distinguishes between two ideals which may be called
"relative" and "absolute" good. Relative good agrees with the standard of
what in England is known as Universalistic Hedonism--the greatest pleasure
combined with the least pain for all sensitive beings, each agent counting
for no more than one. Personally passionate, selfish, and brutal,
Schopenhauer still had a righteous abhorrence of cruelty to animals;
whereas Kant had no such feeling. But positive happiness is a delusion, and
no humanity can appreciably diminish the amount of pain produced by vital
competition--recognised by our philosopher before Darwin--in the world.
Therefore Buddhism is right, and the higher morality bids us extirpate the
{122} will-to-live altogether by ascetic practices and meditation on the
universal vanity of things. Suicide is not allowed, for while annihilating
the intelligence it would not exclude some fresh incarnation of the will.
And the last dying wish of Schopenhauer was that the end of this life might
be the end of all living for him.
HERBART.
J. F. Herbart (1776-1841) occupies a peculiar position among German
idealists. Like the others, he distinguishes between reality and
appearance; and, like Schopenhauer in particular, he altogether rejects
Hegel's identification of reality with reason. But, alone among
post-Kantian metaphysicians, he is a pluralist. According to him,
things-in-themselves, the eternal existents underlying all phenomena, are
not one, but many. So far his philosophy is a return to the pre-Kantian
system of Wolf and Leibniz; but whereas the monads of Leibniz were credited
with an inward principle of evolution carrying them for ever onward through
an infinite series of progressive changes, Herbart pushes his metaphysical
logic to the length of denying all change and all movement to the eternal
entities of which reality is made up.
Herbart is entitled to the credit--whatever it may be worth--of devising a
system unlike every other in history; for while Hegel has a predecessor in
Heracleitus, his rival combines the Eleatic immobilism with a pluralism
that is all his own. It is not, however, on these paradoxes that his
reputation rests, but on more solid services as a psychologist and an
educationalist. Without any acquaintance, as would seem, with the work
doing in Britain, Herbart discarded the old faculty psychology, conceiving
mentality as made up {123} of "presentations," among which a constant
competition for the field of consciousness is going on; and it is to this
view that such terms as "inhibition" and "threshold of consciousness" are
due. And the enormous prominence now given to the idea of value in ethics
may be traced back to the teaching of a thinker whom he greatly influenced,
F. E. Beneke (1798-1854).
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