Naturalism is not of to-day or of yesterday, but is very ancient,—as old,
indeed, as philosophy,—as old as human thought and doubt. Indeed, we may
say that it almost invariably played its part whenever man began to
reflect on the whence and the how of the actual world around him. In the
philosophical systems of Leucippus and Democritus and Epicurus it lies
fully developed before us. It persisted as a latent and silently dreaded
antagonist, even in times when “orthodox” anti-naturalistic and
super-naturalistic systems were the officially prevailing ones, and were
to all appearance generally adhered to. So in the more modern systems of
materialism and positivism, in the _Système de la nature_ and in the
theory of _l’homme machine_, in the materialistic reactions from the
idealistic nature-speculations of Schelling and Hegel, in the discussions
of materialism in the past century, in the naturalistic writings of
Moleschott, Czolbe, Vogt, Büchner, and Haeckel, and in the still dominant
naturalistic tendency and mood which acquired new form and deep-rooted
individuality through Darwinism,—in all these we find naturalism, not
indeed originating as something new, but simply blossoming afresh with
increased strength. The antiquity of Naturalism is no reproach, and no
reason for regarding it as a matter long since settled; it rather
indicates that Naturalism is not a chance phenomenon, but an inevitable
growth. The favourite method of treating it as though it were the outcome
of modern scepticism, malice, or obduracy, is just as absurd as if the
“naturalists” were to treat the convictions of their opponents as the
result of incredible narrow-mindedness, priestly deception, senility, or
calcification of the brain-cells. And as naturalism is of ancient origin
so also do its different historical phases and forms resemble each other
in their methods, aims, and arguments, as well as in the moods,
sympathies, and antipathies which accompany them. Even in its most highly
developed form we can see that it did not spring originally from a
completed and unified principle, but was primarily criticism of and
opposition to other views.
What is Distinctive in the Naturalistic Outlook.
At first tentative, but becoming ever more distinctly conscious of its
real motive, Naturalism has always arisen in opposition to what we may
call “supernatural” propositions, whether these be the naïve mythological
explanations of world-phenomena found in primitive religions, or the
supernatural popular metaphysics which usually accompanies the higher
forms. It is actuated at the same time by one of the most admirable
impulses in human nature,—the impulse to explain and understand,—and to
explain, if possible, through simple, familiar, and ordinary causes. The
sane human understanding sees all about it the domain of everyday and
familiar phenomena. It is quite at home in this domain; everything seems
to it well-known, clear, transparent, and easily understood; it finds in
it intelligible causes and certain laws which govern phenomena, as well as
a constant association of cause and effect. Here everything can be
individually controlled and examined, and everything “happens naturally.”
Things govern themselves. Nothing unexpected, nothing that has not its
obvious causes, nothing mysterious or miraculous happens here. Sharply
contrasted with this stands the region of the apparently inexplicable, the
supernatural, with all its influences and operations, and results. To the
religious interpretation in its naïve, pious, or superstitious forms of
expression, this region of the supernatural seems to encroach broadly and
deeply on the domain of the everyday world. But with the awakening of
criticism and reflection, and the deepening of investigation into things,
it retreats farther and farther, it surrenders piece after piece to the
other realm of thought, and this arises doubt and suspicion. With these
there soon awakens a profound conviction that a similar mode of causal
connection binds all things together, a glimmering of the uniformity and
necessity embracing, comprehending, and ultimately explaining all things.
And these presentiments, in themselves at first quite childishly and
almost mythologically conceived, may still be, even when they first arise,
and while they are still only vaguely formulated, anticipations of later
more definite scientific conceptions. Such a beginning of naturalistic
consciousness may remain quite naïve and go no farther than a silent but
persistent protest. It makes free use of such familiar expressions as
“everything comes about of itself”; “everything happens by natural means”;
“it is all ‘nature’ or ‘evolution.’ ” But from the primitive naturalistic
outlook there may arise reconstructions of nature and cosmic speculations
on a large scale, expanding into naturalistic systems of the most manifold
kinds, beginning with those of the Ionic philosophers and coming down to
those of the most recent times. Their watchwords remain the same, though
in an altered dialect: “nature and natural phenomena,” the denial of
“dualism,” the upholding of the one principle “monism,” the
all-sufficiency of nature, and the absence of any intervening influences
from without or beyond nature. Rapidly and of necessity this last item
becomes transformed into a “denial of teleology”: nature knows neither
will nor purpose, it has only to do with conditions and results. With
these it deals and through them it works. Even in the most elementary
naturalistic idea, that “everything happens of itself,” there lurks that
aversion to purpose which characterises all naturalistic systems.
A naturalism which has arisen and grown in this manner has in itself
nothing to do with concrete and exact knowledge of nature. It may comprise
a large number of ideas which are sharply opposed to “science,” and which
may be in themselves mythological, or poetical, or even mystical. For what
“nature” itself really is fundamentally, how it moves, unfolds, or impels,
how things actually happen “naturally,” this naturalism has never
attempted to think out. Indeed, naturalism of this type, though it opposes
“dualism,” does not by any means usually intend to set itself against
religion. On the contrary, in its later developments, it may take it up
into itself in the form of an apotheosis and a worship of nature. Almost
invariably naturalism which begins thus develops, not into atheism, but
into pantheism. It is true that all is nature and happens naturally. But
nature itself, as Thales said, is “full of gods,” instinct with divine
life. It is the all-living which, unwearied and inexhaustible, brings
forth form after form and pours out its fulness. It is Giordano Bruno’s
“Cause, Principle, and Unity,” in endless beauty and overpowering
magnificence, and it is Goethe’s “Great Goddess,” herself the object of
the utmost admiration, reverence, and devotion. This mood may readily pass
over into a kind of worship of God and belief in Him, “God” being regarded
as the soul and mind, the “Logos” of Heraclitus and the Stoics, the inner
meaning and reason of this all-living nature. And thus naturalism in its
last stages may sometimes be quite devout, and may assure us that it is
compelled to deny only the transcendental and not the immanent God, the
Divine being enthroned above the world, but not the living God dwelling
within it. And ever anew Goethe’s verse is quoted:
What God would _outwardly_ alone control,
And on His finger whirl the mighty Whole?
He loves the _inner_ world to move, to view
Nature in Him, Himself in nature too,
So that what in Him works, and is, and lives,
The measure of His strength, His spirit gives.
The True Naturalism.
But naturalism becomes fundamentally different when it ceases to remain at
the level of naïve or fancifully conceived ideas of “nature” and “natural
occurrences,” when, instead of poetry or religious sentiments, it
incorporates something else, namely, exact natural science and the idea of
a mathematical-mechanical calculability in the whole system of nature.
“Nature” and “happening naturally”, as used by the naïve intelligence, are
half animistic ideas and modes of expression, which import into nature, or
leave in it, life and soul, impulse, and a kind of will. And that
speculative form of naturalism which tends to become religious develops
this fault to its utmost. But a “nature” like this is not at all a
possible subject for natural science and exact methods, not a subject for
experiment, calculation, and fixed laws, for precise interpretation, or
for interpretation on simple rational principles. Instead of the naïve,
poetical, and half mystical conceptions of nature we must have a really
scientific one, so that, so to speak, the supernatural may be eliminated
from nature, and the apparently irrational rationalised; that is, so that
all its phenomena may be traced back to simple, unequivocal, and easily
understood processes, the actual why and how of all things perceived, and
thus, it may be, understood; so that, in short, everything may be seen to
come about “by natural means.”
There is obviously one domain and order of processes in nature which
exactly fulfils those requirements, and is really in the fullest sense
“natural,” that is, quite easily understood, quite rational, quite
amenable to computation and measurement, quite rigidly subordinate to laws
which can be formulated. These are the processes of physics and chemistry,
and in a still higher degree those of movement in general, the processes
of mechanics in short. And to bring into this domain and subordinate to
its laws everything that occurs in nature, all becoming, and passing away,
and changing, all development, growth, nutrition, reproduction, the origin
of the individual and of the species, of animals and of man, of the living
and the not living, even of sensation and perception, impulse, desire and
instinct, will and thought—this alone would really be to show that things
“happen naturally,” that is, to explain everything in terms of natural
causes. And the conviction that this can be done is the only true
naturalism.
Naturalism of this type is fundamentally different in mood and character
from the naïve and poetic form, and is, indeed, in sharp contrast to it.
It is working against the very motives which are most vital to the
latter—namely, reverence for and deification of nature. Where the two
types of naturalism really understand themselves nothing but sharp
antagonism can exist between them. Those on the one side must condemn this
unfeeling and irreverent, cold and mathematical dissection and analysis of
the “Great Goddess” as a sacrilege and outrage. And those on the other
side must utterly reject as romantic the view which is summed up in the
confession: “Ist nicht Kern der Natur Menschen im Herzen?” [Is not the
secret of nature in the human heart?]
Goethe’s Attitude to Naturalism.
The most instructive example we can take is Goethe: his veneration for
nature on the one hand, and on the other his pronounced opposition to the
naturalism both of the materialists and of the mathematicians. Modern
naturalists are fond of seeking repose and mental refreshment in Goethe’s
conception of the world, under the impression that it fits in best and
most closely with their own views. That they do this says much for their
mood and taste, but not quite so much for their powers of discrimination
or for their consistency. It is even more thoughtless than when the
empiricists and sensationalists acclaim as their hero, Spinoza, the
strict, pure rationalist, the despiser of empiricism and of knowledge
acquired through the senses. For to Goethe nature is far from being a
piece of mechanism which can be calculated on and summed up in
mathematical formulæ, an everlasting “perpetuum mobile,” a magnificent
all-powerful machine. In fact, all this and especially the word “machine”
expresses exactly what Goethe’s conception was most directly opposed to.
To him nature is truly the “Goddess,” the great Diana of the Ephesians,
the everlasting Beauty, the artist of genius, ceaselessly inventing and
creating, in floods of Life, in Action’s storm—an infinite ocean, a
restless weaving, a glowing Life. Embracing within herself the highest and
the humblest, she is in all things, throughout all change and
transformation, the same, shadowing forth the most perfect in the
simplest, and in the highest only unfolding what she had already shown in
the lowliest. Therefore Goethe hated all divisions and rubrics, all the
contrasts and boundaries which learned analysis attempts to introduce into
nature. Passionately he seized on Herder’s idea of evolution, and it was
towards establishing it that all his endeavours, botanical, zoological,
morphological and osteological, were directed. He discovered in the human
skull the premaxillary bone which occurs in the upper jaw of all mammals,
and this “keystone to man” gave him, as he himself said, “such joy that
all his bowels moved.” He interpreted the skull as developed from three
modified vertebræ. He sketched a hypothesis of the primitive plant, and
the theory that all the organs of the plant are modifications and
developments of the leaf. He was a friend of Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire,
who defended “l’unité de composition organique” in the forms of nature,
and evolution by gradual stages, and he was the vehement opponent of
Cuvier, who attempted to pick the world to pieces according to strictly
defined architectural plans and rigid classes. And what the inner impulse
to all this was he has summed up in the motto to his “Morphology” from the
verse in Job:
Lo, he goeth by me, and I see him not;
He is transformed, but I perceive him not.
He further declares it in the introductory verse to his Osteology:
Joyfully some years ago,
Zealously my spirit sought
To explore it all, and know
How all nature lived and wrought:
And ’tis ever One in all,
Though in many ways made known;
Small in great, and great in small,
Each in manner of its own.
Ever shifting, yet fast holding;
Near and far, and far and near;
So, with moulding and remoulding,—
To my wonder I am here.
In all this there is absolutely nothing of the characteristic mood and
spirit of “exact” naturalism, with its mechanical and mathematical
categories. It matters little that Goethe, when he thought of evolution,
never had present to his mind the idea of Descent which is characteristic
of “Darwinism,” but rather development in the lofty sense in which it is
worked out in the nature-philosophy of Schelling and of Hegel. The chief
point is, that to him nature was the all-living and ever-living, whose
creating and governing cannot be reduced to prosaic numbers or
mathematical formulæ, but are to be apprehended as a whole by the
perceptions of genius rather than worked out by calculation or in detail.
Any other way of regarding nature Goethe early and decisively rejected.
And he has embodied his strong protest against it in his “Dichtung und
Wahrheit”:
“How hollow and empty it seemed to us in this melancholy, atheistical
twilight.... Matter, we learnt, has moved from all eternity, and by means
of this movement to right and left and in all directions, it has been
able, unaided, to call forth all the infinite phenomena of existence.”
The book—the “Système de la Nature”—“seemed to us so grey, so Cimmerian,
so deathlike that it was with difficulty we could endure its presence.”
And in a work with remarkable title and contents, “Die Farbenlehre,”
Goethe has summed up his antagonism to the “Mathematicians,” and to their
chief, Newton, the discoverer and founder of the new
mathematical-mechanical view of nature. Yet the mode of looking at things
which is here combated with so much labour, wit, and, in part, injustice,
is precisely that of those who, to this day, swear by the name of Goethe
with so much enthusiasm and so little intelligence
The two Kinds of Naturalism.
But let us return to the two kinds of naturalism we have already
described. Much as they differ from one another in reality, they are very
readily confused and mixed up with one another. And the chief peculiarity
of what masquerades as naturalism among our educated or half-educated
classes to-day lies in the fact that it is a mingling of the two kinds.
Unwittingly, people combine the moods of the one with the reasons and
methods of the other; and having done so they appear to themselves
particularly consistent and harmonious in their thought, and are happy
that they have been able thus to satisfy at once the needs of the
intellect and those of the heart.
On the one hand they stretch the mathematical-mechanical view as far as
possible from below upwards, and even attempt to explain the activities of
life and consciousness as the results of complex reflex mechanisms. And on
the other hand they bring down will soul and instincts into the lowest
stages of existence, and become quite animistic. They wish to be nothing
if not “exact,” and yet they reckon Goethe and Bruno among the greatest
apostles of their faith, and set their verses and sayings as a _credo_ and
motto over their own opinions. In this way there arises a “world
conception” so indiarubber-like and Protean that it is as difficult as it
is unsatisfactory to attempt to come to an understanding with it. If we
attempt to get hold of it by the fringe of poetry and idealism it has
assumed, it promptly retires into its “exact” half. And if we try to limit
ourselves to this, in order to find a basis for discussion, it spreads out
before us all the splendours of a great nature pantheism, including even
the ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful. One thing only it
neglects, and that is, to show where its two very different halves meet,
and what inner bond unites them. Thus if we are to discuss it at all, we
must first of all pick out and arrange all the foreign and mutually
contradictory constituents it has incorporated, then deal with Pantheism
and Animism, and with the problem of the possibility of “the true, the
good, the beautiful” on the naturalistic-empiric basis, and finally there
would remain a readily-grasped residue of naturalism of the second form,
to come to some understanding with which is both necessary and
instructive.
In the following pages we shall confine ourselves entirely to this type,
and we shall not laboriously disentangle it from the bewildering medley of
ideas foreign to it, or attempt to make it consistent; we shall neglect
these, and have regard solely to its clear fundamental principles and
aims. Thus regarded, its horizons are perfectly well-defined. It is
startling in its absolute poverty of ideal content, warmth, and charm, but
impressive and grand in the perseverance and tenacity with which it
adheres to one main point of view throughout. In reality, it is aggressive
to nothing, but cold and indifferent to everything, and for this very
reason is more dangerous than all the excited protests and verdicts of the
enthusiastic type of naturalism, which it is impossible to attack, because
of its lack of definite principles, and which, in the pathetic stress it
lays on worshipping nature, lives only by what it has previously borrowed
from the religious conceptions of the world.
Aim and Method of Naturalism.
The aim and method of the strict type of naturalism may be easily defined.
In its details it will become more distinct as we proceed with our
analysis. Taking it as a whole, we may say that it is an endeavour on a
large scale after consistent simplification and gradual reduction to lower
and lower terms. Since it aims at explaining and understanding everything
according to the axiom _principia non temere esse multiplicanda_
[principles are not to be heedlessly multiplied], explaining, that is,
with the fewest, simplest, and most obvious principles possible, it is
incumbent upon it to attempt to refer all phenomena to a single, uniform
mode of occurrence, which admits of nothing outside of or beyond itself,
and which regulates itself according to its own system of fundamentally
similar causal sequences. It is further incumbent upon it to trace back
this universal mode of occurrence to the simplest and clearest form
possible, and its uniformities to the fewest and most intelligible laws,
that is, ultimately, to laws which can be determined by calculation and
summed up in formulæ. This tracing back is equivalent to an elimination of
all incommensurable causes, of all “final causes,” that is, of ultimate
causes and “purposes” which, in an unaccountable manner, work into the
network of proximate causes and control them, and by thus interrupting
their connectedness, make it difficult to come to a clear understanding of
the “Why?” of things. And this elimination is again a “reduction to
simpler terms,” for it replaces the “teleological” consideration of
purposes, by a purely scientific consideration of causes, which inquires
only into the actual conditions antecedent to certain sequences.
But Being and Becoming include two great realms: that of “Nature” and that
of “Mind,” _i.e._ consciousness and the processes of consciousness. And
two apparently fundamentally different branches of knowledge relate to
these: the natural sciences, and the mental sciences. If a unified and
“natural” explanation is really possible, the beginning and end of all
this “reducing to simpler terms” must be to bridge over the gulf between
these; but this, in the sense of naturalism, necessarily means that the
mental sciences must in some way be reduced to terms of natural science,
and that the phenomena, processes, sequences, and laws of consciousness
must likewise be made “commensurable” with and be linked on to the
apparently simpler and clearer knowledge of “Nature,” and, if possible, be
subordinated to its phenomena and laws, if not indeed derived from them.
As it is impossible to regard consciousness itself as corporeal, or as a
process of movement, naturalism must at least attempt to show that the
phenomena of consciousness are attendant and consequent on corporeal
phenomena, and that, though they themselves never become corporeal, they
are strictly regulated by the laws of the corporeal and physical, and can
be calculated upon and studied in the same way.
But even the domain of the natural itself, as we know it, is by no means
simple and capable of a unified interpretation. Nature, especially in the
realm of organic life, the animal and plant world, appears to be filled
with marvels of purposefulness, with riddles of development and
differentiation, in short with all the mysteries of life. Here most of all
it is necessary to “reduce” the “teleological view” to terms of the purely
causal, and to prove that all the results, even the evolution of the forms
of life, up to their highest expressions and in the minutest details of
their marvellous adaptations, came “of themselves,” that is to say, are
quite intelligible as the results of clearly traceable causes. It is
necessary to reduce the physiological and developmental, and all the other
processes of life, to terms of physical and chemical processes, and thus
to reduce the living to the not living, and to derive the organic from the
forces and substances of inanimate nature.
The process of reduction does not stop even here. For physical and
chemical processes are only really understood when they can be resolved
into the simplest processes of movement in general, when all qualitative
changes can be traced hack to purely quantitative phenomena, when,
finally, in the mechanics of the great masses, as well as of the
infinitely small atoms, everything becomes capable of expression in
mathematical terms.
But naturalism of this kind is by no means pure natural science; it
consciously and deliberately oversteps in speculation the bounds of what
is strictly scientific. In this respect it bears some resemblance to the
nature-philosophy associated with what we called the first type of
naturalism. But its very poverty enables it to have a strictly defined
programme. It knows exactly what it wants, and thus it is possible to
argue with it. The religious conception of the world must come to an
understanding with it, for it is quite obvious that the more indifferent
this naturalism is to everything outside of itself, and the less
aggressive it pretends to be, the more does the picture of the world which
it attempts to draw exert a cramping influence on religion. Where the two
come into contact we shall endeavour to make clear in the following pages.