cataleptic rigidity, its exclusive area of common good, and its
unfructified and irresponsible reason. The city-state was a superficial
layer of cultured citizens, cultured through a participation in affairs
made possible by relief from economic pursuits, superimposed upon
the dense mass of serfs, artizans, and laborers. For this division,
moral philosophy made itself spiritual sponsor, and thus took it up
into its own being. Plato wrestled valiantly with the class problem;
but his outcome was the necessity of decisive demarcation, after
education, of the masses in whom reason was asleep and appetite much
awake, from the few who were fit to rule because alertly wise. The most
generously imaginative soul of all philosophy could not far outrun the
institutional practices of his people and his times. This might have
warned his successors of the danger of deserting the sober path of a
critical discernment of the better and the worse within contemporary
life for the more exciting adventure of a final determination of
absolute good and evil. It might have taught the probability that some
brute residuum or unrationalized social habit would be erected into an
apotheosis of pure reason. But the lesson was not learned. Aristotle
promptly yielded to the besetting sin of all philosophers, the
idealization of the existent: he declared that the class distinctions
of superiority and inferiority as between man and woman, master and
slave, liberal-minded and base mechanic, exist and are justified by
nature--a nature which aims at embodied reason.
What, finally, is this Nature to which the philosophy of society and
the individual so bound itself? It is the nature which figures in
Greek customs and myth; the nature resplendent and adorned which
confronts us in Greek poetry and art: the animism of savage man purged
of grossness and generalized by unerring esthetic taste into beauty
and system. The myths had told of the loves and hates, the caprices
and desertions of the gods, and behind them all, inevitable Fate.
Philosophy translated these tales into formulæ of the brute fluctuation
of rapacious change held in bounds by the final and supreme end: the
rational good. The animism of the popular mind died to reappear as
cosmology.
Repeatedly in this course we have heard of sciences which began as
parts of philosophy and which gradually won their independence. Another
statement of the same history is that both science and philosophy began
in subjection to mythological animism. Both began with acceptance of
a nature whose irregularities displayed the meaningless variability
of foolish wants held within the limits of order and uniformity by an
underlying movement toward a final and stable purpose. And when the
sciences gradually assumed the task of reducing irregular caprice to
regular conjunction, philosophy bravely took upon itself the task of
substantiating, under the caption of a spiritual view of the universe,
the animistic survival. Doubtless Socrates brought philosophy to earth;
but his injunction to man to know himself was incredibly compromised
in its execution by the fact that later philosophers submerged man in
the world to which philosophy was brought: a world which was the heavy
and sunken center of hierarchic heavens located in their purity and
refinement as remotely as possible from the gross and muddy vesture of
earth.
The various limitations of Greek custom, its hostile indifference to
all outside the narrow city-state, its assumption of fixed divisions of
wise and blind among men, its inability socially to utilize science,
its subordination of human intention to cosmic aim--all of these
things were worked into moral theory. Philosophy had no active hand in
producing the condition of barbarism in Europe from the fifth to the
fifteenth centuries. By an unwitting irony which would have shocked
none so much as the lucid moralists of Athens, their philosophic
idealization, under captions of Nature and Reason, of the inherent
limitations of Athenian society and Greek science, furnished the
intellectual tools for defining, standardizing, and justifying all
the fundamental clefts and antagonisms of feudalism. When practical
conditions are not frozen in men’s imagination into crystalline truths,
they are naturally fluid. They come and go. But when intelligence fixes
fluctuating circumstances into final ideals, petrifaction is likely to
occur; and philosophy gratuitously took upon itself the responsibility
for justifying the worst defects of barbarian Europe by showing their
necessary connection with divine reason.
The division of mankind into the two camps of the redeemed and the
condemned had not needed philosophy to produce it. But the Greek
cleavage of men into separate kinds on the basis of their position
within or without the city-state was used to rationalize this harsh
intolerance. The hierarchic organization of feudalism, within church
and state, of those possessed of sacred rule and those whose sole
excellence was obedience, did not require moral theory to generate
or explain it. But it took philosophy to furnish the intellectual
tools by which such chance episodes were emblazoned upon the cosmic
heavens as a grandiose spiritual achievement. No; it is all too easy
to explain bitter intolerance and desire for domination. Stubborn as
they are, it was only when Greek moral theory had put underneath them
the distinction between the irrational and the rational, between divine
truth and good and corrupt and weak human appetite, that intolerance
on system and earthly domination for the sake of eternal excellence
were philosophically sanctioned. The health and welfare of the body and
the securing for all of a sure and a prosperous livelihood were not
matters for which medieval conditions fostered care in any case. But
moral philosophy was prevailed upon to damn the body on principle,
and to relegate to insignificance as merely mundane and temporal the
problem of a just industrial order. Circumstances of the times bore
with sufficient hardness upon successful scientific investigation; but
philosophy added the conviction that in any case truth is so supernal
that it must be supernaturally revealed, and so important that it must
be authoritatively imparted and enforced. Intelligence was diverted
from the critical consideration of the natural sources and social
consequences of better and worse into the channel of metaphysical
subtleties and systems, acceptance of which was made essential
to participation in the social order and in rational excellence.
Philosophy bound the once erect form of human endeavor and progress to
the chariot wheels of cosmology and theology.
Since the Renaissance, moral philosophy has repeatedly reverted to
the Greek ideal of natural excellence realized in social life, under
the fostering care of intelligence in action. The return, however,
has taken place under the influence of democratic polity, commercial
expansion, and scientific reorganization. It has been a liberation
more than a reversion. This combined return and emancipation, having
transformed our practice of life in the last four centuries, will not
be content till it has written itself clear in our theory of that
practice. Whether the consequent revolution in moral philosophy be
termed pragmatism or be given the happier title of the applied and
experimental habit of mind is of little account. What is of moment is
that intelligence has descended from its lonely isolation at the remote
edge of things, whence it operated as unmoved mover and ultimate good,
to take its seat in the moving affairs of men. Theory may therefore
become responsible to the practices that have generated it; the good be
connected with nature, but with nature naturally, not metaphysically,
conceived, and social life be cherished in behalf of its own immediate
possibilities, not on the ground of its remote connections with a
cosmic reason and an absolute end.
There is a notion, more familiar than correct, that Greek thought
sacrificed the individual to the state. None has ever known better
than the Greek that the individual comes to himself and to his own
only in association with others. But Greek thought subjected, as we
have seen, both state and individual to an external cosmic order; and
thereby it inevitably restricted the free use in doubt, inquiry, and
experimentation, of the human intelligence. The _anima libera_, the
free mind of the sixteenth century, of Galileo and his successors, was
the counterpart of the disintegration of cosmology and its animistic
teleology. The lecturer on political economy reminded us that his
subject began, in the Middle Ages, as a branch of ethics, though,
as he hastened to show, it soon got into better association. Well,
the same company was once kept by all the sciences, mathematical and
physical as well as social. According to all accounts it was the
integrity of the number one and the rectitude of the square that
attracted the attention of Pythagoras to arithmetic and geometry as
promising fields of study. Astronomy was the projected picture book of
a cosmic object lesson in morals, Dante’s transcript of which is none
the less literal because poetic. If physics alone remained outside the
moral fold, while noble essences redeemed chemistry, occult forces
blessed physiology, and the immaterial soul exalted psychology, physics
is the exception that proves the rule: matter was so inherently immoral
that no high-minded science would demean itself by contact with it.
If we do not join with many in lamenting the stripping from nature
of those idealistic properties in which animism survived, if we do
not mourn the secession of the sciences from ethics, it is because
the abandonment by intelligence of a fixed and static moral end was
the necessary precondition of a free and progressive science of both
things and morals; because the emancipation of the sciences from ready
made, remote, and abstract values was necessary to make the sciences
available for creating and maintaining more and specific values here
and now. The divine comedy of modern medicine and hygiene is one of
the human epics yet to be written; but when composed it may prove no
unworthy companion of the medieval epic of other worldly beatific
visions. The great ideas of the eighteenth century, that expansive
epoch of moral perception which ranks in illumination and fervor
along with classic Greek thought, the great ideas of the indefinitely
continuous progress of humanity and of the power and significance of
freed intelligence, were borne by a single mother--experimental inquiry.
The growth of industry and commerce is at once cause and effect of
the growth in science. Democritus and other ancients conceived the
mechanical theory of the universe. The notion was not only blank and
repellent, because it ignored the rich social material which Plato and
Aristotle had organized into their rival idealistic views; but it was
scientifically sterile, a piece of dialectics. Contempt for machines as
the accouterments of despised mechanics kept the mechanical conception
aloof from these specific and controllable experiences which alone
could fructify it. This conception, then, like the idealistic, was
translated into a speculative cosmology and thrown like a vast net
around the universe at large, as if to keep it from coming to pieces.
It is from respect for the lever, the pulley, and the screw that modern
experimental and mathematical mechanics derives itself. Motion, traced
through the workings of a machine, was followed out into natural
events and studied just as motion, not as a poor yet necessary device
for realizing final causes. So studied, it was found to be available
for new machines and new applications, which in creating new ends
also promoted new wants, and thereby stimulated new activities, new
discoveries, and new inventions. The recognition that natural energy
can be systematically applied, through experimental observation, to
the satisfaction and multiplication of concrete wants is doubtless the
greatest single discovery ever imported into the life of man--save
perhaps the discovery of language. Science, borrowing from industry,
repaid the debt with interest, and has made the control of natural
forces for the aims of life so inevitable that for the first time
man is relieved from overhanging fear, with its wolflike scramble to
possess and accumulate, and is freed to consider the more gracious
question of securing to all an ample and liberal life. The industrial
life had been condemned by Greek exaltation of abstract thought and by
Greek contempt for labor, as representing the brute struggle of carnal
appetite for its own satiety. The industrial movement, offspring of
science, restored it to its central position in morals. When Adam Smith
made economic activity the moving spring of man’s unremitting effort,
from the cradle to the grave, to better his own lot, he recorded this
change. And when he made sympathy the central spring in man’s conscious
moral endeavor, he reported the effect which the increasing intercourse
of men, due primarily to commerce, had in breaking down suspicion and
jealousy and in liberating man’s kindlier impulses.
Democracy, the crucial expression of modern life, is not so much an
addition to the scientific and industrial tendencies as it is the
perception of their social or spiritual meaning. Democracy is an
absurdity where faith in the individual as individual is impossible;
and this faith is impossible when intelligence is regarded as a cosmic
power, not an adjustment and application of individual tendencies.
It is also impossible when appetites and desires are conceived to be
the dominant factor in the constitution of most men’s characters, and
when appetite and desire are conceived to be manifestations of the
disorderly and unruly principle of nature. To put the intellectual
center of gravity in the objective cosmos, outside of men’s own
experiments and tests, and then to invite the application of individual
intelligence to the determination of society, is to invite chaos.
To hold that want is mere negative flux and hence requires external
fixation by reason, and then to invite the wants to give free play to
themselves in social construction and intercourse, is to call down
anarchy. Democracy is estimable only through the changed conception of
intelligence, that forms modern science, and of want, that forms modern
industry. It is essentially a changed psychology. The substitution, for
_a priori_ truth and deduction, of fluent doubt and inquiry meant trust
in human nature in the concrete; in individual honesty, curiosity,
and sympathy. The substitution of moving commerce for fixed custom
meant a view of wants as the dynamics of social progress, not as the
pathology of private greed. The nineteenth century indeed turned sour
on that somewhat complacent optimism in which the eighteenth century
rested: the ideas that the intelligent self-love of individuals would
conduce to social cohesion, and competition among individuals usher in
the kingdom of social welfare. But the conception of a social harmony
of interests in which the achievement by each individual of his own
freedom should contribute to a like perfecting of the powers of all,
through a fraternally organized society, is the permanent contribution
of the industrial movement to morals--even though so far it be but the
contribution of a problem.
Intellectually speaking, the centuries since the fourteenth are the
true middle ages. They mark the transitional period of mental habit,
as the so-called medieval period represents the petrifaction, under
changed outward conditions, of Greek ideas. The conscious articulation
of genuinely modern tendencies has yet to come, and till it comes the
ethic of our own life must remain undescribed. But the system of morals
which has come nearest to the reflection of the movements of science,
democracy, and commerce, is doubtless the utilitarian. Scientific,
after the modern mode, it certainly would be. Newton’s influence dyes
deep the moral thought of the eighteenth century. The arrangements of
the solar system had been described in terms of a homogeneous matter
and motion, worked by two opposed and compensating forces: all because
a method of analysis, of generalization by analogy, and of mathematical
deduction back to new empirical details had been followed. The
imagination of the eighteenth century was a Newtonian imagination; and
this no less in social than in physical matters. Hume proclaims that
morals is about to become an experimental science. Just as, almost in
our own day, Mill’s interest in a method for social science led him to
reformulate the logic of experimental inquiry, so all the great men of
the Enlightenment were in search for the organon of morals which should
repeat the physical triumphs of Newton. Bentham notes that physics has
had its Bacon and Newton; that morals has had its Bacon in Helvétius,
but still awaits its Newton; and he leaves us in no doubt that at the
moment of writing he was ready, modestly but firmly, to fill the
waiting niche with its missing figure.
The industrial movement furnished the concrete imagery for this ethical
renovation. The utilitarians borrowed from Adam Smith the notion that
through industrial exchange in a free society the individual pursuing
his own good is led, under the guidance of the “invisible hand,” to
promote the general good more effectually than if he had set out to do
it. This idea was dressed out in the atomistic psychology which Hartley
built out from Locke--and was returned at usurious rates to later
economists.
From the great French writers who had sought to justify and promote
democratic individualism, came the conception that, since it is
perverted political institutions which deprave individuals and bring
them into hostility, nation against nation, class against class,
individual against individual, the great political problem is such a
reform of law and legislation, civil and criminal, of administration,
and of education as will force the individual to find his own interests
in pursuits conducing to the welfare of others.
Tremendously effective as a tool of criticism, operative in
abolition and elimination, utilitarianism failed to measure up to
the constructive needs of the time. Its theoretical equalization of
the good of each with that of every other was practically perverted
by its excessive interest in the middle and manufacturing classes.
Its speculative defect of an atomistic psychology combined with this
narrowness of vision to make light of the constructive work that
needs to be done by the state, before all can have, otherwise than in
name, an equal chance to count in the common good. Thus the age-long
subordination of economics to politics was revenged in the submerging
of both politics and ethics in a narrow theory of economic profit; and
utilitarianism, in its orthodox descendants, proffered the disjointed
pieces of a mechanism, with a monotonous reiteration that looked at
aright they form a beautifully harmonious organism.
Prevision, and to some extent experience, of this failure, conjoined
with differing social traditions and ambitions, evoked German idealism,
the transcendental morals of Kant and his successors. German thought
strove to preserve the traditions which bound culture to the past,
while revising these traditions to render them capable of meeting
novel conditions. It found weapons at hand in the conceptions borrowed
by Roman law from Stoic philosophy, and in the conceptions by which
Protestant humanism had re-edited scholastic Catholicism. Grotius had
made the idea of natural law, natural right and obligation, the central
idea of German morals, as thoroughly as Locke had made the individual
desire for liberty and happiness the focus of English and then of
French speculation. Materialized idealism is the happy monstrosity in
which the popular demand for vivid imagery is most easily reconciled
with the equally strong demand for supremacy of moral values; and the
complete idealistic materialism of Stoicism has always given its ideas
a practical influence out of all proportion to their theoretical vogue
as a system. To the Protestant, that is the German, humanist, Natural
Law, the bond of harmonious reason in nature, the spring of social
intercourse among men, the inward light of individual conscience,
united Cicero, St. Paul, and Luther in blessed union; gave a rational,
not superrational basis for morals, and provided room for social
legislation which at the same time could easily be held back from too
ruthless application to dominant class interests.
Kant saw the mass of empirical and hence irrelevant detail that had
found refuge within this liberal and diffusive reason. He saw that the
idea of reason could be made self-consistent only by stripping it naked
of these empirical accretions. He then provided, in his critiques, a
somewhat cumbrous moving van for transferring the resultant pure or
naked reason out of nature and the objective world, and for locating
it in new quarters, with a new stock of goods and new customers. The
new quarters were particular subjects, individuals; the stock of goods
were the forms of perception and the functions of thought by which
empirical flux is woven into durable fabrics; the new customers were a
society of individuals in which all are ends in themselves. There ought
to be an injunction issued that Kant’s saying about Hume’s awakening of
him should not be quoted save in connection with his other saying that
Rousseau brought him to himself, in teaching him that the philosopher
is of less account than the laborer in the fields unless he contributes
to human freedom. But none the less, the new tenant, the universal
reason, and the old homestead, the empirical tumultuous individual,
could not get on together. Reason became a mere voice which, having
nothing in particular to say, said Law, Duty, in general, leaving to
the existing social order of the Prussia of Frederick the Great the
congenial task of declaring just what was obligatory in the concrete.
The marriage of freedom and authority was thus celebrated with the
understanding that sentimental primacy went to the former and practical
control to the latter.
The effort to force a universal reason that had been used to the broad
domains of the cosmos into the cramped confines of individuality
conceived as merely “empirical,” a highly particularized creature of
sense, could have but one result: an explosion. The products of that
explosion constitute the Post-Kantian philosophies. It was the work of
Hegel to attempt to fill in the empty reason of Kant with the concrete
contents of history. The voice sounded like the voice of Aristotle,
Thomas of Aquino, and Spinoza translated into Swabian German; but the
hands were as the hands of Montesquieu, Herder, Condorcet, and the
rising historical school. The outcome was the assertion that history
is reason, and reason is history: the actual is rational, the rational
is the actual. It gave the pleasant appearance (which Hegel did not
strenuously discourage) of being specifically an idealization of the
Prussian nation, and incidentally a systematized apologetic for the
universe at large. But in intellectual and practical effect, it lifted
the idea of process above that of fixed origins and fixed ends, and
presented the social and moral order, as well as the intellectual, as a
scene of becoming, and it located reason somewhere within the struggles
of life.