THE HUMANISTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
The philosophical movement of the nineteenth century, after the collapse of
German idealism, has not been dominated by any single master or any single
direction to anything like the same extent as its predecessors. But if we
are called on to select the dominant note by which all its products have
been more or less coloured and characterised, none more impressive than the
note of Humanism can be named. As applied to the culture of the
Renaissance, humanism meant a tendency to concentrate interest on this
world rather than on the next, using classic literature as the best means
of understanding what man had been and again might be. At the period on
which we are entering human interests again become ascendant; but they
assume the widest possible range, claiming for their dominion the whole of
experience--all that has ever been done or known or imagined or dreamed or
felt. Hegel's inventory, in a sense, embraced all this; but Hegel had a way
of packing his trunk that sometimes crushed the contents out of
recognition, and a way of opening it that few could understand. Besides,
much was left out of the trunk that could ill be spared by mankind.
Aristotle has well said that the soul is in a way everything; and as such
its analysis, under the name of {125} psychology, has entered largely into
the philosophy of the century. Theory of knowledge, together with logic,
has figured copiously in academic courses, with the result of putting what
is actually known before the student in a new and interesting light; but
with the result also of developing so much pedantry and scepticism as to
give many besides dull fools the impression that divine philosophy is both
crabbed and harsh.
THE FRENCH ECLECTICS.
In the two centuries after Descartes France, so great in science, history,
and literature, had produced no original philosopher, although general
ideas derived from English thought were extensively circulated for the
purpose of discrediting the old order in Church and State. When this work
had been done with a thoroughness going far beyond the intention of the
first reformers a reaction set in, and the demand arose for something more
conservative than the so-called sensualism and materialistic atheism of the
pre-revolutionary times. A certain originality and speculative
disinterestedness must be allowed to Maine de Biran (1766-1824), who, some
years after Fichte--but, as would seem, independently of him--referred to
man's voluntary activity as a source of _a priori_ knowledge. A greater
immediate impression was produced by Royer-Collard (1763-1845), who, as
Professor at the Sorbonne in 1811, imported the common-sense spiritualism
of Reid (1710-1796) as an antidote to the then reigning theories of
Condillac (1715-1780), who, improving on Locke, abolished reflection as a
distinct source of our ideas. Then came Victor Cousin (1792-1867), a
brilliant rhetorician, and, after Madame de Stael, the first to popularise
German philosophy in France. As {126} Professor at the Sorbonne in the last
years of the Bourbon monarchy he distinctly taught a pantheistic Absolutism
compounded of Schelling and Hegel; but, whether from conviction or
opportunism, this was silently withdrawn, and a so-called eclectic
philosophy put in its place. According to Cousin, in all countries and all
ages, from ancient India to modern Europe, speculation has developed under
the four contrasted forms of sensualism, idealism, scepticism, and
mysticism. Each is true in what it asserts, false in what it denies, and
the right method is to preserve the positive while rejecting the negative
elements of all four. But neither the master nor his disciples have ever
consistently answered the vital question, what those elements are.
HAMILTON AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CONDITIONED.
Among other valuable contributions to the history of philosophy, Victor
Cousin had lectured very agreeably on the philosophy of Kant, accepting the
master's arguments for the apriorism of space and time, but rejecting his
reduction of them to mere subjective forms as against common sense. He had
not gone into Kant's destructive criticism of all metaphysics, and this was
now to be turned against him by an unexpected assailant. Sir William
Hamilton (1788-1856), afterwards widely celebrated as Professor of Logic
and Metaphysics at Edinburgh, began his philosophical career by an essay on
"The Philosophy of the Conditioned" in the _Edinburgh Review_ for October,
1829, controverting the Absolutism both of Cousin and of his master,
Schelling. The reviewer had acquired some not very accurate knowledge of
Kant in Germany ten years before; and he uses this, with other rather
flimsy {127} erudition, to establish the principle that _to think is to
condition_, and that therefore the Absolute cannot be thought--cannot be
conceived. Hamilton enjoyed the reputation of having read "all that mortal
man had ever written about philosophy"; but this evidently did not include
Hegel, who certainly had performed the feat declared to be impossible.
Thirty years later the philosophy of the conditioned attained a sudden but
transient notoriety, thanks to the use made of it by Hamilton's disciple,
H. L. Mansel, in his Bampton Lectures on _The Limits of Religious Thought_
(1858). The object of these was to prove that, as we know nothing about
Things-in-themselves, nothing told about God in the Bible or the Creeds can
be rejected _a priori_ as incredible. As an apology, the book failed
utterly, its only effect being to prepare public opinion for the
Agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and Huxley.
AUGUSTE COMTE.
The brilliant audiences that hung spell-bound on the lips of Victor Cousin
as he unrolled before them the Infinite, the Finite, and the relation
between the two, little knew that France's only great philosopher since
Descartes was working in obscurity among them. Auguste Comte (1798-1857),
the founder of Positivism, belonged to a Catholic and Legitimist family. By
profession a mathematical teacher, he fell early under the influence of the
celebrated St. Simon, a mystical socialist who exercised a powerful
attraction on others besides Comte. The connection lasted four years, when
they quarrelled; indeed Comte's character was such as to make permanent
co-operation with him impossible, except on terms of absolute agreement
with his opinions and submission to his will. At a {128} subsequent period
he obtained some fairly well-paid employment at the Ecole Polytechnique,
but lost it again owing to the injurious terms in which he spoke of his
colleagues. In his later years he lived on a small annuity made up by
contributions from his admirers.
[Illustration: AUGUSTE COMTE.]
{129}
Auguste Comte disliked and despised Plato, altogether preferring Aristotle
to him as a philosopher; but it is fundamentally as a Platonist, not as an
Aristotelian, that he should himself be classed--in this sense, that he
valued knowledge above all as the means towards reconstituting society on
the basis of an ideal life. And this is the first reason why his philosophy
is called positive--to distinguish it as reconstructive from the purely
negative thought of the Revolution. The second reason is to distinguish it
as dealing with real facts from the figments of theology and the
abstractions of metaphysics. Positive science explains natural events
neither by the intervention of supernatural beings nor by the mutual
relations of hypostasised concepts, but by verifiable laws of succession
and resemblance. Turgot was the first to distinguish the theological,
metaphysical, and mechanical interpretations as successive stages of a
historical evolution (1750); Hume was the first to single out the relations
of orderly succession and resemblance as the essential elements of real
knowledge (1739); Comte, with the synthetic genius of the nineteenth
century, first combined these isolated suggestions with a wealth of other
ideas into a vast theory of human progress set out in the fifth and sixth
volumes of his _Philosophie Positive_--the best sketch of universal history
ever written.
The positive sciences fall into two great divisions--the concrete, dealing
with the actual phenomena as presented in space and time; the abstract,
which alone concern philosophy, dealing with their laws. The most important
of the abstract sciences is Sociology, claimed by Comte as his own special
creation. The study of this demands a previous knowledge of biology,
psychology {130} being dismissed as a metaphysical delusion and phrenology
put in its place. The science of life presupposes Chemistry, before which
comes Physics, presupposing Astronomy, and, as the basis of all,
Mathematics, divided into the calculus and geometry. At a later period
Morality was placed as a seventh fundamental science at the head of the
whole hierarchy.
At a first glance some serious flaws reveal themselves in the imposing
logic of this scheme. Astronomy as a concrete science ought to have been
excluded from the series, its admission being apparently due to the
historical circumstance that the most general laws of physics were
ascertained through the study of celestial phenomena. But on the same
ground geology can no longer be excluded, as its records led to the
recognition of the evolution of life; or should evolution be referred to
the concrete sciences of zoology and botany, by parity of reasoning human
progress should be treated as a branch of universal history--which, in
fact, is what Comte makes it in his fifth and sixth volumes. It would have
been better had he also studied social statics on the historical method. As
it is, the volume in which the conditions of social equilibrium are
supposed to be established contains only one chapter on the subject, and
that is very meagre, consisting of some rather superficial observations on
family life and the division of labour. No doubt the matter receives a far
more thorough discussion in the author's later work, _Politique Positive_.
But this merely embodies his own plan of reorganisation for the society of
the future, and therefore should count not as science, but as art.
The Positivist theory of social dynamics is that all {131} branches of
knowledge pass through three successive stages already described as the
theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific. And this advance is
accompanied by a parallel evolution on the governmental side from the
military to the industrial regime, with a revolutionary or transitional
period answering to metaphysical philosophy. To this scheme it might be
objected that the parallelism is merely accidental. A scientific view of
nature and a profound knowledge of her laws is no doubt far more conducive
to industry than a superstitious view; but it is also more favourable to
the successful prosecution of war, which, indeed, always has been an
industry like another. Nor, to judge by modern experience, does it look as
if a government placed in the hands of a country's chief capitalists--which
was what Comte proposed--would be less militant in its general disposition
than the parliamentary governments which he condemns as "metaphysical." In
fact, it is by theologians and metaphysicians that our modern horror of war
has been inspired rather than by scientists.
The great idea of Comte's life, that the positive sciences, philosophically
systematised, are destined to supply the basis of a new religion surpassing
Catholicism in its social efficacy, seems a delusion really inherited from
one of his pet aversions, Plato. It arose from a profound misconception of
what Catholicism had done, and a misconception, equally profound, of the
means by which its priesthood worked. In spite of Comte's denials, the
leverage was got not by appeals to the heart, but by appeals to that future
judgment with which the preaching of righteousness and temperance was
associated by St. Paul, his supposed precursor in religion, as Aristotle
was his precursor in philosophy. {132}
The worship of Humanity, or, as it has been better called, the Service of
Man, is a great and inspiring thought. Only it is not a religion, but a
metaphysical idea, derived by Comte from the philosophers of the eighteenth
century, and by them through imperial Rome from the Humanists and Stoics of
ancient Athens.
J. S. MILL.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was, like Comte, a Platonist in the sense of
valuing knowledge chiefly as an instrument of social reform. He was indeed
bred up by his father, James Mill (1773-1836), and by Jeremy Bentham as a
prophet of the new Utilitarianism as Comte was, to some extent, trained by
St. Simon to substitute a new order for that which the Revolution had
destroyed. Mill, however, had been educated on the lines of Greek liberty
rather than in the tradition of Roman authority; while both were largely
affected by the Romanticism current in their youth. The worship of women,
revived from the age of chivalry, entered into the romantic movement; and
it may be mentioned in this connection that Mill calls Mrs. Taylor, the
lady with whom he fell in love at twenty-four and married eighteen years
later, "the inspirer and in part the author of all" that was best in his
writings; while Comte refers his religious conversion to Madame Clotilde de
Vaux, the object of his adoration in middle life. It seems probable,
however, from the little we know of Mrs. Taylor--whom Carlyle credits with
"the keenest insight and the royallest volition"--that her influence was
the reverse of Clotilde's. If anything, she attached Mill still more firmly
to the cause of pure reason.
It has been mentioned how Kant's metaphysical {133} agnosticism was played
out by Hamilton against Cousin. A little later Whewell, the Cambridge
historian of physical science, imported Kant's theory of necessary truth in
opposition to the empiricism of popular English thought, and Kant's
Categorical Imperative in still more express contradiction to Bentham's
utilitarian morality. Now Mill, educated as he had been on the
associationist psychology and in the central line of the English
epistemological tradition, rejected the German apriorism as false in
itself, while more particularly hating it as, in his opinion, a dangerous
enemy to all social progress. For to him what people called their
intuitions, whether theoretic or practical, were merely the time-honoured
prejudices in which they had been brought up, and the contradictory of
which they could not conceive. Comte similarly interpreted the metaphysical
stage of thought as the erection into immutable principles of certain
abstract ideas whose value--if they had any--was merely relative and
provisional. Mill, with his knowledge of history, might have remembered
that past thought, beginning with Plato, shows no such connection between
intuitionism and immobility or reaction, while such experientialists as
Hobbes and Hume have been political Tories. But in his own time the _a
priori_ philosophy went hand in hand with conservatism in Church and State,
so he set himself to explode it in his _System of Logic_ (1843).
Mill's _Logic_, the most important English contribution to philosophy since
Hume, is based on Hume's theory of knowledge, amended and supplemented by
some German and French ideas. It is conceded to Kant that mathematical
truths are synthetic, not analytic. It is not contained in the idea of two
and {134} two that they make four, nor in the idea of two straight lines
that they cannot enclose a space. Such propositions are real additions to
our knowledge; but it is only experience that justifies us in accepting
them. What constitutes their peculiar certainty is that they can be
verified by trial on imagined numbers and lines, without reference to
external objects. But by what right we generalise from mental experience to
all experience Mill does not explain. Hume's analysis of causation into
antecedence and sequence of phenomena is accepted by Mill as it was
accepted by Kant; but the law that every change must have a cause is
affirmed, in adhesion to Dr. Thomas Brown (1778-1820), with more
distinctness than by Hume. As Laplace put it, the whole present state of
the universe is a product of its whole preceding state. But we only know
this truth by experience; and we can conceive a state of things where
phenomena succeed one another by a different law or without any law at all.
Mill himself was ready to believe that causation did not obtain at some
very remote point of space; though what difference remoteness could make,
except we suppose it to be causal--which would be a reassertion of the
law--he does not explain; nor yet what warrant we have for assuming that
causation holds through all time, or at any future moment of time.
Next to the law of universal causation inductive science rests on the
doctrine of natural kinds. The material universe is known to consist of a
number of substances--namely, the chemical elements and their combinations,
so constituted that a certain set of characteristic properties are
invariably associated with an indefinite number of other properties. Thus,
if in a strange country a certain mineral answers the usual {135} tests for
arsenic, we know that a given dose of it will destroy life; and we are
equally certain that if the spectroscopic examination of a new star shows
the characteristic lines of iron, a metal possessing all the properties of
iron as we find it in our mines is present in that distant luminary.
According to Mill, we are justified in drawing that sweeping inference on
the strength of a single well-authenticated observation, because we know by
innumerable observations on terrestrial substances that natural kinds
possessing such index qualities do exist, whereas there is not a single
instance of a substance possessing those qualities without the rest.
For Mill, as for Hume, reality means states of consciousness and the
relations between them. Matter he defines as a permanent possibility of
sensation; mind as a permanent possibility of thought and feeling. But the
latter definition is admittedly not satisfactory. For a stream of thoughts
and feelings which is proved by memory to have the consciousness of itself
seems to be something more than a mere stream. All explanations must end in
an ultimate inexplicability. God may be conceived as a series of thoughts
and feelings prolonged through eternity; and it is a logically defensible
hypothesis that the order of nature was designed by such a being, although
the amount of suffering endured by living creatures excludes the notion of
a Creator at once beneficent and omnipotent. And if the Darwinian theory
were established, the case for a designing intelligence would collapse.
Personally Mill believed neither in a God nor in a future life.
In morals Mill may be considered the creator of what Henry Sidgwick, in his
_Methods of Ethics_ (1874), called Universalistic Hedonism. The English
moralists of the {136} eighteenth century had set up the greatest happiness
of the greatest number as the ideal end of action; but they did not hold
that each individual could be expected to pursue anything but his own
happiness; the object of Bentham (1748-1832) being to make the two
coincide. Kant showed that the rule of right excluded any such
accommodation, and a crisis in his own life led Mill to adopt the same
conclusion. Afterwards he rather confused the issues by distinguishing
between higher and lower pleasures, leaving experts to decide which were
the pleasures to be preferred. The universalistic standard settles the
question summarily by estimating pleasures according to their social
utility.
Mill fully sympathised with Comte's demand for social reorganisation as a
means towards the moral end. But, with his English and Protestant
traditions, he had no faith in the creation of a new spiritual power with
an elaborate religious code and ritual as the best machinery for the
purpose. In his opinion, the claims of the individual to extended liberty
of thought and action, not their restriction, were what first needed
attention. Second to this--if second at all--came the necessity for
reforming representative government on the lines of an enlarged franchise
and a readjusted electoral system with plural suffrage determined by merit,
votes for women, and a contrivance for giving minorities a weight
proportioned to their numbers. The problem of poverty was to be dealt with
by restrictions on the increase of population and on the amount of
inheritable property, the maximum of which ought not to exceed a modest
competence.
Among the noble characters presented by the history of philosophy we may
distinguish between the heroic and the saintly types. To the former in
modern {137} times belong Giordano Bruno, Fichte, and to some extent Comte;
to the latter, Spinoza, Berkeley, and Kant. To the second class we may
surely add John Stuart Mill, whom Gladstone called "the saint of
rationalism," and of whom Auguste Laugel said, "He was not sincere--he was
sincerity itself."
HERBERT SPENCER.
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was the son of a Nonconformist country
schoolmaster, but was educated chiefly by his uncle Thomas, an Evangelical
clergyman of the Church of England. A radical reformer of the old school,
Thomas Spencer seems to have indoctrinated his youthful charge with the
germinal principles afterwards generalised into a whole cosmic philosophy.
He had a passion for justice realised under the form of liberty, individual
responsibility, and self-help. In his opinion, until it was modified by
private misfortunes, everything served everybody right. Beginning as an
economical administrator of the new Poor Law, he at last became an advocate
of its total abolition; and, alone among fifteen thousand clergymen, he was
an active member of the Anti-Corn Law League, besides supporting the
separation of Church and State. At twenty-two Herbert Spencer accepted and
summed up this policy under the form of a general hostility to State
interference with individual liberty, supporting it by a reference to the
reign of Natural Law in all orders of existence. In his first great work,
_Social Statics_, the principle of _laissez-faire_ received its full
systematic development as the restriction of State action to the defence of
liberty against internal and external aggression, the raising of taxes for
any other purpose being unjust, as is also private ownership of {138} land,
which is by nature the common heritage of all. Spencer subsequently came to
abandon land nationalisation, probably from alarm at its socialistic
implications.
[Illustration: HERBERT SPENCER.]
The doctrine of natural law and liberty carried with it for Spencer a
strong repugnance not only to protectionism in politics, but also to
miracles in theology. The profession of journalism brought him into touch
{139} with a freethinking set in London. Whether under their influence, or
Shelley's, or by some spontaneous process, his religious convictions
evaporated by twenty-eight into the agnosticism which thenceforth remained
their permanent expression. There might or not be a First Cause; if there
was, we know nothing about it. At this stage Lyell's attempted refutation
of Lamarck converted Spencer to the belief in man's derivation from some
lower animal by a process of gradual adaptation. Thus the scion of an
educationalist family came to interpret the whole history of life on our
planet as an educative process.
It seemed, however, as if there was one fatal exception to the scheme of
naturalistic optimism. The Rev. Thomas Malthus had originally published his
_Essay on Population_ (1798) as a telling answer to the "infidel" Godwin's
_Political Justice_ (1793), the bolder precursor of _Social Statics_. The
argument was that the tendency of population to outrun the means of
subsistence put human perfectibility out of the question. It had been
suggested by the idealists, Mill among the number, that the difficulty
might be obviated by habitual self-restraint on the part of married people.
But Spencer, with great ingenuity, made the difficulty its own solution.
The pressure of population on the means of subsistence is the source of all
progress; and of progress not only in discoveries and inventions, but also,
through its increased exercise, in the instrument which effects them--that
is, the human brain. Now, it is a principle of Aristotle's, revived by
modern biology, that individuation is antagonistic to reproduction; and
increasing individuation is the very law of developing life, shown above
all in the growing power of life's chief instrument, which is thought's
organ, the brain. For, as Spencer proceeded {140} to show in his next work,
the _Principles of Psychology_, life means a continuous series of
adjustments of internal to external relations. Therefore the rate of
multiplication must go on falling with the growth of intellectual and moral
power until it only just suffices to balance the loss by death. The next
step was to revive Laplace's nebular hypothesis, and to connect it through
Lyell's uniformitarian geology with Lamarck's developmental biology,
thereby extending the same evolutionary process through the whole history
of the universe.
Nor was this all. Milne-Edwards, by another return to Aristotle, had
pointed to the "physiological division of labour" as a mark of ascending
organic perfection, to which Spencer adds integration of structure as its
obverse side, at the same time extending the world-law, already made
familiar in part through its industrial applications by Adam Smith, to all
orders of social activity. Finally, differentiation and integration were
stretched back from living to lifeless matter, thus bringing astronomy and
geology, which had already entered into the causal series of cosmic
transformations, under one common law of evolution; while at the same time,
seeing it to be generally admitted that inorganic changes originated from
the operation of purely mechanical forces, they suggested that mechanism,
without teleology, could adequately explain organic evolution also.
Finally came the great discovery of Darwin and Wallace, with its extension
of Malthus's law to the whole world of living things. Spencer had just
touched, without grasping, the same idea years before. He now gladly
accepted Natural Selection as supplementing without superseding Lamarck's
theory of spontaneous adaptation. {141}
To complete even in outline the vast sweep of his projected Synthetic
Philosophy two steps more remained for Spencer to take. The law of
evolution had to be brought under the recently-discovered law of the
Conservation of Energy, or, as he called it, the Persistence of Force, and
the whole of unified science had to be reconciled with religion. The first
problem was solved by interpreting evolution as a redistribution of matter
and motion--a process in which, of course, energy is neither lost nor
gained. The second problem was solved by reducing faith and knowledge to
the common denominator of Agnosticism--a method that found more favour with
Positivists (in the wide sense) than with Christian believers.
Herbert Spencer was disappointed to find that people took more interest in
the portico (as he called it in a letter to the present writer)--that is to
say, the metaphysical introduction to his philosophical edifice--than in
its interior. He probably had some suspicion that the portico was mere lath
and plaster, while he felt sure that the columns and architraves behind it
were of granite. The public, however, besides their perennial interest in
religion, might be excused for giving more attention to even a baroque
exterior with some novelty about it than to the formalised eclecticism of
what stood behind it. Unfortunately, they soon found that the alleged
reconciliation was a palpable sham. Religion is nothing if not a
revelation, and an unknowable God is no God at all. Even the pretended
proofs of that poor residual deity involved their author in the transparent
self-contradiction of calling the universe the manifestation of an
Unknowable Power. Then the relations between this Power (such as it was)
and the Energy (or Force) whose conservation (or persistence) was the very
first {142} of First Principles seemed hard to adjust. Either energy is
created, or it is not. In the one case, what becomes of its eternity? in
the other case, what need is there to assume a Power (knowable or not)
behind it? Science will not shrink back before such a phantom, nor will
Religion adore it.
Such faulty building in the portico prepares us for somewhat unsteady
masonry within; and in fact none holds together except what has been
transported bodily from other temples. In the past history of the universe,
considered as a "rearrangement of matter and motion," disintegration and
assimilation play quite as great a part as integration and differentiation.
Such formulas have no advantage over the metaphysical systematisation of
Aristotle, and they give us as little power either to predict or to direct.
Will war be abolished at some future time, or property equalised or
abolished, or morality exalted, or religion superseded? Spencer was ready
with his answer; but the law of evolution could not prove it true.
Nevertheless, his name will long be associated with evolution as a
world-wide process, though neither in the way of original discovery nor of
complete generalisation, and far less of successful application to modern
problems; but rather of diffusion and popularisation, even as other
valuable ideas have been impressed on the public mind by other philosophies
at a vast expense of ingenuity, knowledge, and labour, but not at greater
expense than the eventual gain has been worth.
THE ENGLISH HEGELIANS.
Hegel's philosophy first drew attention in England through its supposed
connection with Strauss's mythic theory of the Gospels and Baur's theory of
New {143} Testament literature as a product of party conflicts and
compromises in the primitive Church. Rightly interpreted as a system of
Pantheism, it was decried and ridiculed by orthodox theologians in the name
of religion and common sense, while cherished by the advanced Broad Church
as a means of symbolising away the creeds they continued to repeat. Then
the triumph of Spencer's Agnosticism in the middle Victorian period
(1864-1874) suggested an appeal to a logic whose object had been to resolve
the negations of eighteenth-century enlightenment in the synthesis of a
higher unity. The first pronunciation in this sense was _The Secret of
Hegel_ (1865), by Dr. Hutchison Stirling (1820-1909), a writer of geniality
and genius, who, writing from the Hegelian standpoint, tried to represent
the English rationalists of the day as a superficial and retrograde school.
It was a bold but unsuccessful attempt to plant the banner of the Hegelian
Right on British soil. By attacking Darwinism Stirling put himself out of
touch with the general movement of thought. Professor William Wallace
(1844-1897), John Caird (1820-1898), and his brother Edward Caird
(1835-1908) inclined more or less to the Left, as also does Lord Haldane
(_b._ 1865) in his _Gifford Lectures_ (1903); and all have the advantage
over Stirling of writing in a clearer if less picturesque style.
T. H. Green (1836-1882) is sometimes quoted as a Hegelian, but his
intellectual affinities were rather with Fichte. According to him, reality
is the thought of an Eternal Consciousness, of which personality need not
be predicated, while the endless duration of personal spirits seems to be
denied. Another idealist, F. H. Bradley (_b._ 1846)--perhaps the greatest
living English {144} thinker--develops in his _Appearance and Reality_
(1893) a metaphysical system which, though Absolutist in form, is, to me at
least, in substance practically indistinguishable from the dogmatic
Agnosticism of Herbert Spencer, and even more destructive of the popular
Theism. Finally the writings of Dr. J. E. McTaggart (_b._ 1866), teaching
as they do a doctrine of developmental personal immortality without a God,
show a tendency to combine Hegel with Lotze.
THE GERMAN ECLECTICS.
By general consent the most serious and influential of German systematic
thinkers since Hegel is R. H. Lotze (1817-1881). His philosophy is built up
of materials derived in varying proportions from all his German
predecessors, the most distinctive idea being pluralism, probably suggested
in the first instance by Herbart, whom he succeeded as Professor at
Goettingen. But Lotze discards the rigid monads of his master for the more
intelligible soul-substances of Leibniz--or rather of Bruno--whose example
he also follows in his attempt to combine pluralism with monism. Very
strenuous efforts are made to give the unifying principle the character of
a personal God; but the suspicion of a leaning to Pantheism is not
altogether eluded.
More original and far more uncompromising is the work of Ed. v. Hartmann
(1842-1906). Personally he enjoyed the twofold distinction--whatever it may
be worth--of having served as an officer for a short time in the Prussian
army, and of never having taught in a university. His great work, published
at twenty-seven, appeared under the telling title of the _Philosophy of the
Unconscious_. It won immediate popularity, and reached its eleventh edition
in 1904. Hartmann adopts, {145} with some slight attenuation,
Schopenhauer's pessimism, and his metaphysics with a considerable
emendation. In this new version the world is still conceived as Will and
Representation; but whereas for Schopenhauer the intellective side had been
subordinated to the volitional, with Hartmann the two are co-equal and
intimately united, together forming that "Unconscious" which is the new
Absolute. In this way Reason again becomes, what it had been with Hegel, a
great cosmic principle; only as the optimistic universe had argued itself
_into_ existence, so conversely the pessimistic universe has to argue
itself _out of_ existence. As in the process of developing differentiation,
the volitional and intellective sides draw apart, the Unconscious becomes
self-conscious, and thus awakens to the terrible mistake it committed in
willing to be. Thenceforth the whole of evolution is determined by the
master-thought of how not to be. The problem is how to annul the creative
Will. And the solution is to divide it into two halves so opposed that the
one shall be the negation and destruction of the other. There will be then,
not indeed a certainty, but an equal chance of definitive self-annihilation
and eternal repose. Thus, the immediate duty for mankind, as also their
predestined task, is the furtherance of scientific and industrial progress
as a means towards this consummation, which is likewise their predestined
end. A religious colouring is given to the process by representing it as an
inverted Christian scheme in which man figures as the redeemer of
God--_i.e._ the Absolute--from the unspeakable torments to which he is now
condemned by the impossibility of satisfying his will.
Like Hartmann, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the greatest writer of
modern Germany, took his start from {146} Schopenhauer, but broke with
pessimism at an early date, having come to disbelieve in the hedonism on
which it is founded. His restless vanity drove him to improve on Darwinism
by interpreting evolution as the means towards creating what he called the
Superman--that is, a race as much superior to us as we are to the apes.
Progress, however, is not to be in the direction of a higher morality, but
of greater power--the Will-to-Power, not the Will-to-Live, being the
essence of what is. Later in life Nietzsche revived the Stoic doctrine that
events move, and have moved through all time, in a series of recurring
cycles, each being the exact repetition of its predecessor. It is a
worthless idea, and Nietzsche, who had been a Greek professor, must have
known where he got it; but the megalomania to which he eventually succumbed
prevented his recognising the debt. By a merited irony of fate this
worshipper of the Napoleonic type will survive only as a literary moralist
in the history of thought.
The modern revolt against metaphysical systemisation, with or without a
theological colouring, took in Germany the form of two distinct
philosophical currents. The first is scientific materialism, or, as some of
its advocates prefer to call it, energism. This began about 1850, but
boasts two great living representatives, the biologist Haeckel and the
chemist Ostwald. In their practical aims these men are idealists; but their
admission of space and time as objective realities beyond which there is
nothing, and their repudiation of agnosticism, distinguish them from the
French and English Positivists. The other and more powerful school is known
as Neo-Kantianism. It numbers numerous adherents in the German
universities, and also in those of France and Italy, representing various
{147} shades of opinion united by a common reference to Kant's first
Critique, dissociated from its concessions to deism, as the true
starting-point of modern thought.
THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century the interest in philosophy and
the ability devoted to its cultivation have shown no sign of diminution.
Two new doctrines in particular have become subjects of world-wide
discussion. I refer to the theory of knowledge called Pragmatism, and to
the metaphysics of Professor Henri Bergson. Both are of so revolutionary,
so contentious, and so elusive a character as to preclude any discussion or
even outline of the new solutions for old problems which they claim to
provide. But I would recommend the study of both, and especially of
Bergson, to all who imagine that the possibilities of speculation are
exhausted, or that we are any nearer finality and agreement than when
Heracleitus first glorified war as the father of all things, and
contradiction as the central spring of life.
* * * * *
{149}
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* * * * *
{153}
INDEX
Abbott, E. A., quoted, 14
Agnosticism, 67, 70, 141, 143, 144
Anaximander, 12
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 4
Aristotle, 3, 5, 6, 7, 19, 25, 49, 52, 129, 139, 142
Arnold, Matthew, 55
Athens, 1 _f._
Atomism, revival of, 10, 21
Averroes, 4
Bacon, Roger, 4
Bacon, Francis, 12 _ff._, 24, 29, 32, 61
Baur, F. C., 142
Bayle, Pierre, 71
Beneke, F. E., 123
Bergson, Henri, 147
Berkeley, Bishop, 43, 72 _ff._;
_Theory of Vision_, 73;
Idealism, 73 _ff._, 89
Boyle, Robert, 21
Bradley, F. H., 57, 143
Brahe, Tycho, 17
Brown, Dr. Thomas, 134
Bruno, Giordano, 7 _ff._, 22, 45, 51, 107
Byron, 119
Caird, Edward, 143
Caird, John, _ib._
Calvinism, 28
Catholicism and philosophy, 2 _ff._
Causation. _See_ Hume, Kant, Hegel, Mill
Christianity. _See_ Catholicism
Christina, Queen, 32 _f._
Church, Dean, quoted, 15
Collier, Arthur, 75
Collins, Anthony, 71
Columbus, 6
Comte, Auguste, 127 _ff._;
classification of the sciences, 130;
_Politique Positive_, _ib._;
philosophy of history, 131, 133
Condillac, 125
Copernicanism, 6 _f._
Cousin, Victor, 90
Dante, 6 _f._
Darwin, Charles, 140
Democritus, 10
Descartes, 30, 31 _ff._;
on belief, 41, 49, 61, 65, 87
Duns Scotus, 4
Eclectics, French, 125 _f._;
German, 144
Ego, the Absolute, 105
Elizabeth, Princess, 32
Empedocles, 65
Epicurus, 9, 22, 29
Epistemology, 65
Eriugena, John Scotus, 3, 4
_Ethica_, Spinoza's, 48
Fichte, J. G., 101 _ff._;
his definition of God, 102;
as German patriot, 102 _f._;
his idealism, 103 _ff._;
ethical standpoint, 106;
later teaching, 110
Ficino, Marsilio, 5
Final causes in modern philosophy, 61;
in Plato, _ib._
Form and Matter, 10, 18, 24
Galileo, 17, 24
Gassendi, 50
Geulincx, 42, 44, 51
Gilbert, 17, 21
Godwin, William, 139
Goethe, 102, 105
Green, T. H., 143
Haeckel, Ernst, 146
Haldane, Lord, 143
Haldane, Miss E. S.,
quoted, 32
Hamilton, Sir William, 126 f., 132
Hartmann, Ed. von, 144 f.
Harvey, 17
Hegel, G. F. W., 24;
on Spinoza, 53, 103, 107, 110 _ff._;
_Phenomenology of Mind_, 112;
_Science of Logic_, _ib._;
_Encyclopaedia_, _ib._;
_Philosophy of Law_, _ib._;
_Aesthetics_, 113;
_Philosophy of History_, _ib._;
his didactic method, 113 _ff._;
negation of supernatural religion, 116, 118, 124, 126
Hegelians, the English, 142 _ff._
Heine, 103, 116
Heracleitus, 11, 147
Herbart, J. F., 122, 144
Hobbes, Thomas, 22 _ff._, 50, 56, 68
Hooker, Richard, and the Social Contract, 29
Humanism in the nineteenth century, 124
Hume, David, 77 _ff._;
character as a historian, 77;
theory of causation, 81 _ff._;
attitude towards theism, 84, 89;
a precursor of Comte, 129;
and of Mill, 133 _ff._
Huxley, T. H., 127
Huyghens on Descartes, 41
Induction, Baconian, 20
Innate ideas, 68, 95
John of Salisbury, 4
Justinian, 1
Kant, Immanuel, 85 ff.;
his nebular hypothesis, 87;
on synthetic and analytic judgments, 87 _ff._;
on space and time, 90 _ff._;
_Critique of Pure Reason_, 93 _ff._;
on causation, 95 _f._;
moral and religious philosophy, 97 ff., 118, 119, 132, 133, 134, 147
Kepler, 10, 17, 21
Klopstock, 101
{154}
Lamarck, 139, 140
Laplace, 87
Leibniz, G. W., 57 _ff._;
optimism, 59 _ff._;
monadology, 62;
determinism, 63;
pre-established harmony, _ib._, 144
Lewes, G. H., 103, 107
Locke, John, 29, 65 _ff._;
on toleration, 67;
his proof of theism, 69;
moral inconsistency, 69 _f._, 72, 87, 89
Lotze, R. H., 144
Lucretius, 9, 20, 22
Luther, 6
Lyell, Sir Charles, 139
Macaulay on Bacon, 16;
on Hobbes, 28, 71
McTaggart, Dr. J. E., 144
Maine de Biran, 125
Malebranche, 42 _ff._, 51, 74, 89
Malthus, 137
Mansel, H. L., 127
Materialists, German, 146
Mill, J. S., 132 _ff._;
_System of Logic_, 133;
metaphysics, 135;
theology, _ib._;
ethics, 135 _f._;
politics, 136;
character, 137
Milne-Edwards, 140
Monadism, 11, 70
Napier, 17
Neo-Kantianism, 146
Neo-Platonism, 2 f.
Newton, Isaac, 58, 59
Nicolas of Cusa, 11
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 145 _f._
Norris, John, 75
Occam, 5
Occasionalism, 42
Ostwald, 146
Pantheism, 45,50
Parmenides, 9
Pascal, 42
Plotinus, 2, 5, 12, 44
Positivism. See Comte
Power, idea of, in Spinoza, 52;
how connected with causation, 83
Pragmatism, 147
Proclus, 3
Pythagoreans, 9
Reality, degrees of, 57
Reid, Thomas, 85, 125
Renaissance, scientific activity of the, 17
Rousseau, 29, 119
St. Simon, 127
Schelling, F. W. J., 106 _ff._;
natural philosophy, 108;
_Transcendental Idealism_, 108 _f._;
romanticism, 109;
Absolutism, 110, 126
Schiller, F. C. S., quoted, 18
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 103, 118 _ff._;
pessimism, 119;
metaphysics, 119 _ff._;
ethics, 121 _f._, 145
Sextus Empiricus, 67
Shaftesbury, Lord, author of the _Characteristics_, 71
Shelley, 139
Sidgwick, Henry, 135
Smith, Adam, 140
Social Contract, 26
Spencer, Herbert, 127, 137 ff.;
_Social Statics_, 137;
_Psychology_, 140;
_Synthetic Philosophy_, 141;
on religion, _ib._;
formula of evolution, 142, 144
Spencer, Rev. Thomas, 137
Spinoza, 30, 45 _ff._;
_Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, 48;
not a mystic, 55;
ethics, 56 _f._;
return to Stoicism, 56, 59, 61, 69, 87, 106, 110
Stael, Madame de, 125
Stirling, Dr. Hutchison, 143
Strauss, David, 112, 142
Taylor, Mrs., and J. S. Mill, 132
Temple, Archbishop, 102
Theism. _See_ Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Mill
_Timaeus_, Plato's, 41
Toland, 71
Turgot, 129
Vaux, Clotilde de, and Comte, 132
Voltaire and optimism, 59
Vries, Simon de and Spinoza, 46
Wallace, A. R., 140
Wallace, Prof. William, 143
Whewell, William, 133
Wordsworth, 57
Wycliffe, 5
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
The following changes were made:
Page 38. "passed with progressive reflection": 'progress-sive' on line
break in original.
Page 57. "only defend on aesthetic grounds": 'grounps' in original.