It is a natural illusion that makes us think of each century as
exhibiting the continuous development of one tendency of mind through
a series of stages whose differences are only of secondary importance,
and, on the other hand, to regard the steps from one century to another
as corresponding to some marked transition of thought, as if the world
had been suddenly precipitated into a new sphere of existence. For
some purposes a rough generalization of this kind, that breaks at
stated intervals the continuity of time, may, perhaps, be convenient.
When, however, we begin to look at things more closely, we discover
that it is impossible thus to cut through the historical connection of
events, as it were, “with a hatchet.” We discover, for example, that
the characteristics of the eighteenth century were strongly marked
only in one period of it; and that what we call the spirit of the
nineteenth century was born some time before the year 1800, and has
never quite prevailed over other tendencies. At the same time, there is
an important difference indicated by these two loosely used names, and
as it is always easier to define things by contrast, it may help us to
make our subject more definite to consider what they mean.
I
It is too late now to “abuse the eighteenth century,” which had its
good and evil, like other periods. It is commonly conceived as the
era of individualism and analysis, the era of logical enlightenment
and sceptical criticism; and, again, as the era of liberation from
groundless superstitions and fictitious claims of authority; the era
in which mankind seemed for the first time to throw off the weight
of the past and to enter without fear upon the enjoyment of their
earthly heritage. The science of Newton had given the last blow to
the astronomy that made the earth the centre of the universe. It had
undermined and discredited the simple theology that explained the
whole material world as a cosmos arranged for the supply of human
needs. At the same time, the progress of biology was bringing man to a
consciousness that as a physical being he is only _primus inter pares_
in the animal kingdom, and the decay of religious belief was making him
realize his finitude, the limits of his natural existence, as, perhaps,
he had never done before, at least never since the beginning of the
Christian era. Earth seemed to be disconnected from heaven, and the
human race thrown upon its own resources. By the new enlightenment all
powers, ecclesiastical or political, were stripped of the mysterious
sanctity that had once invested them. “The nimbus was taken away from
the heads of the gods and rulers of the world.” Every authority that
claimed man’s homage was weighed in the scales of the understanding,
and, so weighed, every such authority was found wanting. The State had
come to be regarded as only a collection of individuals who had agreed
to live together under a ruler deriving all his claims from their
consent, and invested with no divine right to their allegiance. The
Church was no longer a sacred institution governed by priests who held
their commission directly from God, but only a sort of spiritual police
agency, an ally of the State in the restraint of vice and crime, or,
at best, in Protestant countries, a society for mutual improvement.
Men were “free and equal,” each standing face to face with his
fellows, admitting no superiority or superstition of hero-worship in
regard to any one of them. And the Deity, if his existence were not
denied, tended to become a mere “Supreme Being,” who was removed to
such a distance from mankind that he could hardly be reached by their
reverence, still less by their love.
At the same time, the influences which, in one point of view, seemed to
limit and narrow human existence, in another point of view tended to
liberate and enlarge it. If they excluded the idea of the infinite from
man’s life, they emancipated him from many degrading superstitions,
which in an earlier age had held him “all his lifetime subject to
bondage.” And as the pressure from above was lightened the individual
seemed to become master of himself and of his destiny. If the king
could no longer say, “_L’Etat c’est moi_,” the rights of the subject
were vindicated; if the authority of the Church was weakened, the bonds
of free inquiry were broken; if imagination ceased to fill men with the
awe and wonder of higher powers, the way was opened up for scientific
and industrial development; if God was regarded as unknowable, “the
proper study of mankind was man,” and that study could now be pursued
without fear or hinderance. Poetry and religion might be impoverished,
the sense of the binding force of social relations might be weakened,
but interest in the bettering of man’s earthly condition was awakened,
and with it came a new desire for justice to all, a new intolerance
of human suffering, and a new demand that the lot of the class “which
is most numerous and poor” should be made less wretched and insecure,
and, towards the end of the century, a new turn was given to its
leading thought, for an effort was made to discover in the nature of
the individual himself the equivalent of those universal powers which
the enlightenment had banished from the external world and from the
life of society. Rousseau carried individualism to an extreme point,
at which it became its own correction, and taught men to find _within_
their own souls the infinite which they could no longer discover
_without_. Rejecting in the first instance all social conventions as
unjust limitations of the natural man, and adopting the prevailing
theory of the time, that the State is only the product of a contract
between independent persons, he yet discovered in the individual thus
liberated from all external pressure a “common reason,” and “a general
will,” which could reorganize his life and bind him to his fellow-men
and to God. This great idea, which appears in Rousseau rather as a
stroke of insight, an intuition of genius—lifting him above his
first thoughts and insensibly changing their meaning—was grasped
by Kant as the principle of a new philosophy and worked out in a
comprehensive system that dealt with all the great problems of thought
and life. Kant, indeed, seemed, like Rousseau, to begin on the plane
of eighteenth-century individualism, but, influenced as he was by the
philosophy of Leibnitz, he from the first conceived the individual as
in himself universal; or, to speak more exactly, as having a universal
principle realized in him. Thus, though in one aspect of his being man
is a finite object among other objects, confined within limits of space
and time, and forming only a link in the chain of natural causation,
in another aspect of it, as a conscious self, he is emancipated
from all these limitations. For—such is Kant’s argument—a knowing
subject, for whom the whole finite world, including his own finite
existence, is an object of knowledge, cannot himself be comprehended
in that world or limited by any of its conditions. As there can be no
world of objects except for a self, it is impossible that such a self
should be merely one of these objects. Thus, as knowing, or capable
of knowing, all things, man cannot be identified with any of them;
or if, from one point of view, as an individual, he is so identified,
yet he has within him a universal principle that carries him beyond
the limits of his individuality. And this contrast shows itself also
in his practical life. For if as an object he appears to be but an
animal organism, moved by the impressions of pleasure and pain which
he receives from other objects, yet in his inner moral life man is
revealed to himself as a self-determining subject, emancipated from all
sensuous motives and from the necessity of nature which they bring with
them, and conscious of subordination only to the law of duty, which is
the law of his own reason. And that law, in spite of every pressure of
circumstance from without, and of every impulse of passion from within,
he knows that he ought to obey, and therefore he knows that he _can_
obey it. Thus, in Kant’s theory, the two extreme views of humanity, as
natural and as spiritual, as limited to a finite individuality, hemmed
in by necessities on every side, and yet as possessing a universal
capacity of knowing, and an absolute power of self-determination,
these two views are presented in sharp antithesis, and at the same
time held together as different aspects of one life. In fact, we have
here, as it were, compressed into a nutshell, the result of the whole
history of eighteenth-century individualism, which began by depressing
man and ended by exalting him; which, with one of its voices, seemed
to reduce him to the level of an animal, a mere part of the partial
world, a transitory phenomenal existence among other phenomena; and
then, with its other voice, proceeded to recognize him as a member of
the intelligible world, a “spectator of all time and existence,” and
gifted with the absolute freedom of a will which could be determined
by nothing but itself. “The solitary,” says Aristotle, “must be either
a god or a beast,” and the eighteenth century, in its conception of
the individual, seemed to oscillate between the one and the other
till Kant, awaking to the impossibility of omitting either aspect of
his being, demanded that he should be conceived as both at once. Kant
thus set the problem of the future; and if he did not solve it, he
at least showed the futility of any narrow or one-sided solution and
the direction in which an adequate solution could alone be sought. In
short, Kant asked the question to which the nineteenth century, in all
its philosophical reflection, has been striving to find an answer.
For in philosophy, as in other departments of knowledge, the work of
the nineteenth century has been one of mediation and reconciliation.
It has been an endeavor to break down the sharp antithesis of
philosophical and scientific theories that was characteristic of an
earlier time. In the writings of the greatest thinkers, the oppositions
of materialism and spiritualism, of sensationalism and idealism, of
empiricism and _a priori_ speculation, of individualism and socialism,
all the great oppositions of theoretical and practical philosophy,
which formerly were held to be absolute and irreconcilable, have
been modified, restated, reduced to the _relative_ antagonism of the
different aspects of one truth. The great controversies of the past
have thus passed into a new phase, in which absolute statements _pro_
and _con_ have become, as it were, antiquated; and the question is
no longer whether a particular doctrine or its opposite is true, but
what are the elements of truth and error in each of them, and how we
can attain to a comprehensive view of things, in which justice is done
to both. And if it be asked, what are the principles or ideas that
have suggested this reconciling work, and have been the guides of the
greatest scientific or philosophic writers in attempting to achieve
it, I think the answer must be that they are _the idea of organic
unity_, and, as implied in that, _the idea of development_. Goethe and
Hegel, in Germany; Comte, in France; Darwin and Spencer, in England,
are writers who almost span the whole range of difference in modern
thought; but they, and a multitude of others in every department of
study, have been inspired by the ideas of organism and development.
And they have all used them somewhat in the same way to turn the edge
of the old controversial weapons, or to lift thought above the “yes”
and “no” of opposing dogmatisms. It is true that the definitions or
interpretations of the ideas of organism and development given by these
writers are very different, and often, indeed, so sharply opposed that
they seem to bring back the old controversies in a new form. But this
does not alter the significance of the general fact; for, in the first
place, the use of an idea by any writer is by no means always limited
by his own interpretation of it; and, in the second place, the true
interpretation of the idea is that which contains the secret of its
power and prevalence, and it must in the long run gain the victory over
all other interpretations of it. We may, therefore, fairly say that
these ideas have been the marked ideas of the century, the conscious
or unconscious stimulus of its best thought; and that they have been
working, and are working still, in the direction of a deeper and more
comprehensive irenicon between the different tendencies of the human
mind than has been attained in any previous stage of the history of
philosophy.
Against such a general characterization of an age, there is the same
objection which Burke indicated when he said that “he could not draw up
an indictment against a nation.” We are taking a distant and general
view of a period, in which all its inequalities of movement, all the
ebb and flow of opinion, are lost sight of, and only one main current
of thought is visible. We may get a step nearer to the subject by
distinguishing three periods in the century, in which there is a
partial difference of tendency. The first period, which we may roughly
define as lasting well on into the 30’s, is, in the main, a period of
construction, of creative thought, in which the great germinating ideas
that distinguished the century are more or less adequately expressed
in different countries, and in which they receive a first, somewhat
hasty, application to all departments of human knowledge. Idealistic
philosophy, which gave the fullest expression to those ideas, seems
for a time to carry all before it in Germany; and a similar movement
of thought, less definitely reflective or speculative, enriches the
literature of other countries. In the next period, lasting until the
70’s, the new ideas do not lose their hold upon men’s minds, but there
is a certain critical recoil against them, a tendency to explain
them away. The first premature synthesis of idealistic philosophy is
attacked by a scepticism, which seems at times as if it would measure
back the whole way to the individualistic materialism of an earlier
age, or which only avoids that extreme to fall into a scientific
agnosticism, at first sight even more hostile to the claims of
philosophy. But the lesson of Kant could never be altogether forgotten,
nor could the negative or sceptical tendencies of the _Critique of Pure
Reason_ be permanently separated from the positive results of his later
writings. And the great scientific movement of the time, which at first
seemed to draw away all interest from speculative inquiry, tended in
the long run, especially by the advance of biological study, to raise
metaphysical questions which the methods of science were incapable of
answering. Hence, in the latest decades of the century, there has come
a revival of interest in philosophy, and especially in the idealistic
philosophy of its first years. But if philosophy has revived, it is
in a more critical and cautious form, and accompanied by a clear
consciousness that the only true idealism is that which is able to
absorb and assimilate all the data supplied by empirical investigation,
and do justice to all the results of the special sciences. The general
movement of thought in the nineteenth century has thus, on the whole,
taken an idealistic direction; but there has come with it also a deeper
consciousness of the immense difficulty of a comprehensive synthesis;
of the inefficacy of any easy monism or optimism, that would pluck
the fruit of knowledge before it is ripe; of the infinite labor and
patience, the sympathetic appreciation of the opposing views of others,
and constant and unsparing criticism of our own, which are needed for
the construction of a true philosophy.