ourselves the epoch when philosophy was still consciously, and not
simply by implication, human, when reflective thought had not developed
its own technique of method, and was in no danger of being caught in
its own machinery--the time of Socrates. What does the assertion of
Socrates that an unexamined life is not one fit to be led by man; what
does his injunction “Know thyself” mean? It means that the corporate
motives and guarantees of conduct are breaking down. We have got away
from the time when the individual could both regulate and justify his
course of life by reference to the ideals incarnate in the habits of
the community of which he is a member. The time of direct and therefore
unconscious union with corporate life, finding therein stimuli, codes,
and values, has departed. The development of industry and commerce, of
war and politics, has brought face to face communities with different
aims and diverse habits; the development of myth and animism into crude
but genuine scientific observation and imagination has transformed
the physical widening of the horizon, brought about by commerce
and intercourse, into an intellectual and moral expansion. The old
supports fail precisely at the time when they are most needed--before
a widening and more complex scene of action. Where, then, shall the
agent of action turn? The “Know thyself” of Socrates is the reply to
the practical problem which confronted Athens in his day. Investigation
into the true ends and worths of human life, sifting and testing of all
competing ends, the discovery of a method which should validate the
genuine and dismiss the spurious, had henceforth to do for man what
consolidated and incorporate custom had hitherto presented as a free
and precious gift.
With Socrates the question is as direct and practical as the question
of making one’s living or of governing the state; it is indeed the
same question put in its general form. It is a question that the flute
player, the cobbler, and the politician must face no more and no less
than the reflective philosopher. The question is addressed by Socrates
to every individual and to every group with which he comes in contact.
Because the question is practical it is individual and direct. It is a
question which every one must face and answer for himself, just as in
the Protestant scheme every individual must face and solve for himself
the question of his final destiny.
Yet the very attitude of Socrates carried with it the elements of its
own destruction. Socrates could only raise the question, or rather
demand of every individual that he raise it for himself. Of the answer
he declared himself to be as ignorant as was any one. The result
could be only a shifting of the center of interest. If the question is
so all-important, and yet the wisest of all men must confess that he
only knows his own ignorance as to its answer, the inevitable point
of further consideration is the discovery of a method which shall
enable the question to be answered. This is the significance of Plato.
The problem is the absolutely inevitable outgrowth of the Socratic
position; and yet it carried with it just as inevitably the separation
of philosopher from shoemaker and statesman, and the relegation of
theory to a position remote for the time being from conduct.
If the Socratic command, “Know thyself,” runs against the dead wall of
inability to conduct this knowledge, some one must take upon himself
the discovery of how the requisite knowledge may be obtained. A new
profession is born, that of the thinker. At this time the means,
the discovery of how the aims and worths of the self may be known
and measured, becomes, for this class, an end in itself. Theory is
ultimately to be applied to practice; but in the meantime the theory
must be worked out as theory or else no application. This represents
the peculiar equilibrium and the peculiar point of contradiction in
the Platonic system. All philosophy is simply for the sake of the
organization and regulation of social life; and yet the philosophers
must be a class by themselves, working out their peculiar problems
with their own particular tools.
With Aristotle the attempted balance failed. Social life is
disintegrating beyond the point of hope of a successful reorganization,
and thinking is becoming a fascinating pursuit for its own sake. The
world of practice is now the world of compromise and of adjustment.
It is relative to partial aims and finite agents. The sphere of
absolute and enduring truth and value can be reached only in and
through thought. The one who acts compromises himself with the animal
desire that inspires his action and with the alien material that forms
its stuff. In two short generations the divorce of philosophy from
life, the isolation of reflective theory from practical conduct, has
completed itself. So great is the irony of history that this sudden and
effective outcome was the result of the attempt to make thought the
instrument of action, and action the manifestation of truth reached by
thinking.
But this statement must not be taken too literally. It is impossible
that men should really separate their ideas from their acts. If we
look ahead a few centuries we find that the philosophy of Plato and
Aristotle has accomplished, in an indirect and unconscious way,
what perhaps it could never have effected by the more immediate and
practical method of Socrates. Philosophy became an organ of vision,
an instrument of interpretation; it furnished the medium through which
the world was seen and the course of life estimated. Philosophy died
as philosophy, to rise as the set and bent of the human mind. Through
a thousand and devious and roundabout channels, the thoughts of the
philosophers filtered through the strata of human consciousness and
conduct. Through the teachings of grammarians, rhetoricians, and a
variety of educational schools, they were spread in diluted form
through the whole Roman Empire and were again precipitated in the
common forms of speech. Through the earnestness of the moral propaganda
of the Stoics they became the working rules of life for the more
strenuous and earnest spirits. Through the speculations of the Sceptics
and Epicureans they became the chief reliance and consolation of a
large number of highly cultured individuals amid social turmoil and
political disintegration. All these influences and many more finally
summed themselves up in the two great media through which Greek
philosophy finally fixed the intellectual horizon of man, determined
the values of its perspective, and meted out the boundaries and
divisions of the scene of human action.
These two influences were the development of Christian theology
and moral theory, and the organization of the system of Roman
jurisprudence. There is perhaps no more fascinating chapter in
the history of humanity than the slow and tortuous processes by
which the ideas set in motion by that Athenian citizen who faced
death as serenely as he conversed with a friend, finally became the
intellectually organizing centers of the two great movements that
bridge the span between ancient civilization and modern. As the
personal and immediate force and enthusiasm of the movement initiated
by Jesus began to grow fainter and the commanding influence of his own
personality commenced to dim, the ideas of the world and of life, of
God and of man, elaborated in Greek philosophy, served to transform
moral enthusiasm and personal devotion to the redemption of humanity,
into a splendid and coherent view of the universe; a view that resisted
all disintegrating influences and gathered into itself the permanent
ideas and progressive ideals thus far developed in the history of man.
We have only a faint idea of how this was accomplished, or of the
thoroughness of the work done. We have perhaps even more inadequate
conceptions of the great organizing and centralizing work done by Greek
thought in the political sphere. When the military and administrative
genius of Rome brought the whole world in subjection to itself, the
most pressing of practical problems was to give unity of practical
aim and harmony of working machinery to the vast and confused
mass of local custom and tradition, religious, social, economic,
and intellectual, as well as political. In this juncture the great
administrators and lawyers of Rome seized with avidity upon the
results of the intellectual analysis of social and political relations
elaborated in Greek philosophy. Caring naught for these results in
their reflective and theoretical character, they saw in them the
possible instrument of introducing order into chaos and of transforming
the confused and conflicting medley of practice and opinion into a
harmonious social structure. Roman law, that formed the vertebral
column of civilization for a thousand years, and which articulated the
outer order of life as distinctly as Christianity controlled the inner,
was the outcome.
Thought was once more in unity with action, philosophy had become the
instrument of conduct. Mr. Bosanquet makes the pregnant remark “that
the weakness of medieval science and philosophy are connected rather
with excess of practice than with excess of theory. The subordination
of philosophy to theology is a subordination of science to a formulated
conception of human welfare. Its essence is present, not wherever there
is metaphysics but wherever the spirit of truth is subordinated to any
preconceived practical intent.” (“History of Esthetics,” p. 146.)
Once more the irony of history displays itself. Thought has become
practical, it has become the regulator of individual conduct and
social organization, but at the expense of its own freedom and power.
The defining characteristic of medievalism in state and in church, in
political and spiritual life, is that truth presents itself to the
individual only through the medium of organized authority.
There was a historical necessity on the external as well as the
internal side. We have not the remotest way of imagining what the
outcome would finally have been if, at the time when the intellectual
structure of the Christian church and the legal structure of the
Roman Empire had got themselves thoroughly organized, the barbarians
had not made their inroads and seized upon all this accumulated and
consolidated wealth as their own legitimate prey. But this was what did
happen. As a result, truths originally developed by the freest possible
criticism and investigation became external, and imposed themselves
upon the mass of individuals by the mere weight of authoritative law.
The external, transcendental, and supernatural character of spiritual
truth and of social control during the Middle Ages is naught but
the mirror, in consciousness, of the relation existing between the
eager, greedy, undisciplined horde of barbarians on one side, and the
concentrated achievements of ancient civilization on the other. There
was no way out save that the keen barbarian whet his appetite upon
the rich banquet spread before him. But there was equally no way out
so far as the continuity of civilization was concerned save that the
very fullness and richness of this banquet set limits to the appetite,
and finally, when assimilated and digested, it be transformed into the
flesh and blood, the muscles and sinew of him who sat at the feast.
Thus the barbarian ceased to be a barbarian and a new civilization
arose.
But the time came when the work of absorption was fairly complete.
The northern barbarians had eaten the food and drunk the wine of
Græco-Roman civilization. The authoritative truth embodied in medieval
state and church succeeded, in principle, in disciplining the untrained
masses. Its very success issued its own death warrant. To say that it
had succeeded means that the new people had finally eaten their way
into the heart of the ideas offered them, had got from them what they
wanted, and were henceforth prepared to go their own way and make their
own living. Here a new rhythm of the movement of thought and action
begins to show itself.
The beginning of this change in the swing of thought and action forms
the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern times. It is the
epoch of the Renaissance. The individual comes to a new birth and
asserts his own individuality and demands his own rights in the way
of feeling, doing, and knowing for himself. Science, art, religion,
political life, must all be made over on the basis of recognizing the
claims of the individual.
Pardon me these commonplaces, but they are necessary to the course of
the argument. By historic fallacy we often suppose, or imagine that
we suppose, that the individual had been present as a possible center
of action all through the Middle Ages, but through some external
and arbitrary interference had been weighted down by political and
intellectual despotism. All this inverts the true order of the case.
The very possibility of the individual making such unlimited demands
for himself, claiming to be the legitimate center of all action and
standard for all organization, was dependent, as I have already
indicated, upon the intervening medievalism. Save as having passed
through this period of tremendous discipline, and having gradually
worked over into his own habits and purposes the truths embodied in
the church and state that controlled his conduct, the individual could
be only a source of disorder and a disturber of civilization. The very
maintenance of the spiritual welfare of mankind was bound up in the
extent to which the claim of truth and reality to be universal and
objective, far above all individual feeling and thought, could make
itself valid. The logical realism and universalism of scholastic
philosophy simply reflect the actual subjection of the individual to
that associated and corporate life which, in conserving the past,
provided the principle of control.
But the eager, hungry barbarian was there, implicated in this
universalism. He must be active in receiving and in absorbing the
truth authoritatively doled out to him. Even the most rigid forms of
medieval Christianity could not avoid postulating the individual will
as having a certain initiative with reference to its own salvation. The
impulses, the appetite, the instinct of the individual were all assumed
in medieval morals, religion, and politics. The imagined medieval
tyranny took them for granted as completely as does the modern herald
of liberty and equality. But the medieval civilization knew that the
time had not come when these appetites and impulses could be trusted to
work themselves out. They must be controlled by the incorporate truths
inherited from Athens and Rome.
The very logic of the relationship, however, required that the time
come when the individual makes his own the objective and universal
truths. He is now the incorporation of truth. He now has the control as
well as the stimulus of action within himself. He is the standard and
the end, as well as the initiator and the effective force of execution.
Just because the authoritative truth of medievalism has succeeded, has
fulfilled its function, the individual can begin to assert himself.
Contrast this critical period, finding its expression equally in
the art of the Renaissance, the revival of learning, the Protestant
Reformation, and political democracy, with Athens in the time of
Socrates. Then individuals felt their own social life disintegrated,
dissolving under their very feet. The problem was how the value of that
social life was to be maintained against the external and internal
forces that were threatening it. The problem was on the side neither
of the individual nor of progress; save as the individual was seen
to be an intervening instrument in the reconstruction of the social
unity. But with the individual of the fourteenth century, it was not
his own intimate community life which was slipping away from him. It
was an alien and remote life which had finally become his own; which
had passed over into his own inner being. The problem was not how a
unity of social life should be conserved, but what the individual
should do with the wealth of resources of which he found himself the
rightful heir and administrator. The problem looked out upon the
future, not back to the past. It was how to create a new order, both
of modes of individual conduct and forms of social life that should
be the appropriate manifestations of the vigorous and richly endowed
individual.
Hence the conception of progress as a ruling idea; the conception of
the individual as the source and standard of rights; and the problem
of knowledge, were all born together. Given the freed individual, who
feels called upon to create a new heaven and a new earth, and who
feels himself gifted with the power to perform the task to which he is
called:--and the demand for science, for a method of discovering and
verifying truth, becomes imperious. The individual is henceforth to
supply control, law, and not simply stimulation and initiation. What
does this mean but that instead of any longer receiving or assimilating
truth, he is now to search for and create it? Having no longer the
truth imposed by authority to rely upon, there is no resource save
to secure the authority of truth. The possibility of getting at and
utilizing this truth becomes therefore the underlying and conditioning
problem of modern life. Strange as it may sound, the question which
was formulated by Kant as that of the possibility of knowledge, is the
fundamental political problem of modern life.
Science and metaphysics or philosophy, though seeming often to be at
war, with their respective adherents often throwing jibes and slurs
at each other, are really the most intimate allies. The philosophic
movement is simply the coming to consciousness of this claim of the
individual to be able to discover and verify truth for himself,
and thereby not only to direct his own conduct, but to become an
influential and decisive factor in the organization of life itself.
Modern philosophy is the formulation of this creed, both in general and
in its more specific implications. We often forget that the technical
problem “_how_ knowledge is possible,” also means “how _knowledge_ is
possible”; how, that is, shall the individual be able to back himself
up by truth which has no authority save that of its own intrinsic
truthfulness. Science, on the other hand, is simply this general faith
or creed asserting itself in detail; it is the practical faith at work
engaged in subjugating the foreign territory of ignorance and falsehood
step by step. If the ultimate outcome depends upon this detailed and
concrete work, we must not forget that the earnestness and courage, as
well as the intelligence and clearness with which the task has been
undertaken, have depended largely upon the wider, even if vaguer,
operation of philosophy.
But the student of philosophy knows more than that the problem of
knowledge has been with increasing urgency and definiteness the
persistent and comprehensive problem. So conscious is he of the two
opposed theories regarding the nature of science, that he often forgets
the underlying bond of unity of which we have been speaking. These two
opposing schools are those which we know as the sensationalist and the
intellectualist, the empiricist and the rationalist. Admitting that the
dominance of the question of the possibility and nature of knowledge is
at bottom a fundamental question of practice and of social direction,
is _this_ distinction anything more than the clash of scholastic
opinions, a rivalry of ideas meaningless for conduct?
I think it is. Having made so many sweeping assertions I must venture
one more. Fanciful and forced as it may seem, I would say that the
sensational and empirical schools represent in conscious and reflective
form the continuation of the principle of the northern and barbarian
side of medieval life; while the intellectualist and the rationalist
stand for the conscious elaboration of the principle involved in the
Græco-Roman tradition.
Once more, as I cannot hope to prove, let me expand and illustrate.
The sensationalist has staked himself upon the possibility of
explaining and justifying knowledge by conceiving it as the grouping
and combination of the qualities directly given us in sensation. The
special reasons advanced in support of this position are sufficiently
technical and remote. But the motive which has kept the sensationalist
at work, which animated Hobbes and Locke, Hume and John Stuart Mill,
Voltaire and Diderot, was a human not a scholastic one. It was the
belief that only in sensation do we get any personal contact with
reality, and hence, any genuine guarantee of vital truth. Thought is
pale, and remote from the concrete stuff of knowledge and experience.
It only formulates and duplicates; it only divides and recombines that
fullness of vivid reality got directly and at first hand in sense
experience. Reason, compared with sense, is indirect, emasculate, and
faded.
Moreover, reason and thought in their very generality seem to lie
beyond and outside the individual. In this remoteness, when they claim
any final value, they violate the very first principle of the modern
consciousness. What is the distinguishing characteristic of modern
life, unless it be precisely that the individual shall not simply
get, and reason about, truth in the abstract, but shall make it his
own in the most intimate and personal way? He has not only to know
the truth in the sense of knowing about it, but he must feel it. What
is sensation but the answer to this demand for the most individual
and intimate contact with reality? Show me a sensationalist and I
will show you not only one who believes that he is on the side of
concreteness and definiteness, as against washed-out abstractions and
misty general notions: but also one who believes that he is identified
with the cause of the individual as distinct from that of external
authority. We have only to go to our Locke and our Mill to see that
opposition to the innate and the _a priori_ was felt to be opposition
to the deification of hereditary prejudice and to the reception of
ideas without examination or criticism. Personal contact with reality
through sensation seemed to be the only safeguard from opinions which,
while masquerading in the guise of absolute and eternal truth, were in
reality but the prejudices of the past become so ingrained as to insist
upon being standards of truth and action.
Positively as well as negatively, the sensationalists have felt
themselves to represent the side of progress. In its supposed eternal
character, a general notion stands ready made, fixed forever, without
reference to time, without the possibility of change or diversity.
As distinct from this, the sensation represents the never-failing
eruption of the new. It is the novel, the unexpected, that which
cannot be reasoned out in eternal formula, but must be hit upon in the
ever-changing flow of our experience. It thus represents stimulation,
excitation, momentum onwards. It gives a constant protest against the
assumption of any theory or belief to possess finality; and it supplies
the ever-renewed presentation of material out of which to build up new
objects and new laws.
The sensationalist appears to have a good case. He stands for
vividness and definiteness against abstraction; for the engagement
of the individual in experience as against the remote and general
thought about experience; and for progress and for variety against the
eternal fixed monotony of the concept. But what says the rationalist?
What value has experience, he inquires, if it is simply a chaos of
disintegrated and floating débris? What is the worth of personality and
individuality when they are reduced to crudity of brute feeling and
sheer intensity of impulsive reaction? What is there left in progress
that we should desire it, when it has become a mere unregulated flux of
transitory sensations, coming and going without reasonable motivation
or rational purpose?