It is difficult to determine more than approximately the beginning
of special movements of thought; for the different nations of the
civilized world are not exactly contemporaneous in their development,
and in each nation there are always individuals who lag behind the time
or hasten on before it. But, speaking generally, we may say that as
early as the fourth decade of the century a certain reaction had set
in against the conclusions of idealistic philosophy, and especially
against the organic idea of human life; and a tendency was even
shown to revert, so far as possible, to the methods and ideas of the
eighteenth century. The reasons for this change are various. In Germany
the succession of great philosophers had come to an end, and their
followers were smaller men, who were inclined too much to repeat the
formulas, but had little of the creative power, of their predecessors.
More attention, therefore, began to be paid to the protests of writers
like Herbart and Schopenhauer, who, even in the hour of its triumph,
had criticised and attacked the prevailing philosophy. Again, the
physical sciences were advancing by “leaps and bounds,” and there was
a growing inclination to believe in the universal validity of the
mechanical methods of explanation to which _they_ owed their success,
and even in those sociological and historical studies to which the
idealistic philosophy had given so great an impetus. The progress of
empirical research and the increase of the materials of knowledge
caused much of the work of Hegel and his followers to seem inadequate,
if not entirely to set it aside. Even in Germany, where the new ideas
had taken a distinctly philosophical shape, they seemed to lose
their hold in the controversies that attended the breaking up of the
Hegelian school; and in other countries, where they never found such a
systematic expression, they were even less able to resist the attack
now made upon them. Furthermore, as I have already indicated, writers
of an idealistic tendency, in their recoil from the enlightenment, had
devoted themselves so much to an appreciation of institutions derived
from the past that they seemed to have no eyes for the defects of these
institutions, and to confuse evolution with restoration.
The general result of all these influences was, then, to discredit
philosophy and exalt science, so far as might be, into its place.
Either the abstract methods of the physical sciences were proclaimed
as adequate for the discovery of all truth, or, if this was seen to
be impossible, agnosticism was professed in regard to all subjects
to which these methods could not be applied. Even the phenomena of
life were supposed to be capable of explanation by the action and
reaction of the parts or elements of the physical organism, and Huxley
looked forward to the time when man with all his spiritual endowments
should be shown to be only the “cunningest of nature’s clocks.” The
new science of psychophysics, which arose in Germany and has been
cultivated with so much zeal by Wundt and others in all civilized
countries, seemed to carry the method of physics into the investigation
of mind, and some of its students were ready to maintain that it
was the only psychology that deserved the name of science. Darwin’s
great work on the _Origin of Species_, in so far as it set aside the
idea of special creation and referred the “purposiveness” of organic
structures to a process in which the external environment, and not any
inward power of self-adaptation, was the controlling factor, seemed
to bring a new reinforcement to the same way of thinking. And he and
his followers were not slow to apply the theory of natural selection
to the life of man, as well as to that of plants and animals. Finally,
the historical studies, which were now cultivated with an energy to an
extent hitherto unexampled, and immensely extended the knowledge of the
process whereby the present has grown out of the past, were invaded
by a similar spirit; and the historical method was maintained to be a
solvent which could disintegrate all metaphysical conceptions of ethics
or politics or even of theology. The account of the genesis of any
idea was regarded as reducing its claims to the level of the elements
or rudiments out of which it had sprung, and thus as enabling the
scientific historian to explain, or explain away, the spiritual by the
natural in all human life and experience. All things appeared again to
be pointing towards a system of thought which would resolve ethics and
psychology into physiology, and physiology into chemistry and physics.
At the same time the victory of this tendency was always more apparent
than real. In the first place, “out of the eater came forth meat”—that
very advance of the special sciences, which in its earlier stages had
tended to throw all speculative thought into the shade, in the long run
caused the need of philosophy to be again felt. In particular, the
study of development in the organic world, which had received so great
a stimulus from the work of Darwin, could not be carried on without
the aid of higher conceptions than were required for the guidance
of the physicist. The hypothesis of natural selection might expel
the idea of design in the cruder form of a special creation of every
distinct species; and the emphasis which it had laid upon the outward
conditions of growth might seem unfavorable to the higher conception
of an immanent teleology of the organism, but it was confessed by
its author to be an incomplete theory of development, and Darwin
himself, when he turned his attention to the evolution of man, found
it necessary to supplement it by what might be called the converse
theory of sexual selection; thus adding a principle of co-operation
to his first principle of competition. And Mr. Spencer, who defined
growth as a process of integration and differentiation, little as he
might himself intend it, was really putting into popular language the
Hegelian idea of evolution—an idea which necessarily involved the
conception of a self-determined end. Evolutionists might cling, as they
still cling, to the belief that, though constantly and necessarily
speaking of purpose, they could eliminate it from the result of their
investigations by the hypothesis of Darwin, or, subsequently, of
Weissmann; but their discussions, especially when they were extended
to the historical development of man, could not but reawaken the great
controversy whether in the _ultimate_ explanation of things it is more
reasonable to “level up,” or to “level down,” to explain the higher
by the lower, or the lower by the higher. That both explanations are
necessary, nay, that no teleology can be of much worth which does not
presuppose a thorough inquiry into the causal connections of particular
phenomena, was admitted by all modern idealists. But they began to
press the question whether the unity of the whole is not prior to
its distribution into parts, and does not govern their relations with
each other; and, in particular, whether it is possible in the case
of organic beings, and especially of organic beings possessed of
consciousness and self-consciousness, to be satisfied with a mode of
explanation that treats them as mere collections of material elements
which act and react externally upon each other. Whatever its value as
a provisional hypothesis, can such a mode of explanation be finally
regarded as adequate for the explanation of the nature of the world
as a whole, or, indeed, of any one existence in it, that has even a
relative independence or separate being of its own?
But, in the second place, a revival of the idealistic philosophy was
made necessary by an obvious weakness which clung to the scientific
materialism of the nineteenth century from the very beginning. The
Kantian criticism of knowledge, which could not be entirely neglected,
had convincingly proved that in our experience objects can be known
only in relation to a subject, and matter only in relation to mind.
But, if so, how could the latter be explained by the former? Even
to those who had not fully understood this doctrine, it became
evident that mind is at least co-ordinate with matter, and cannot be
treated as a mere “_epiphenomenon_” of it. Mr. Spencer, therefore,
had to take refuge in the strange notion that we are possessed of
“two consciousnesses”: the consciousness of ideas within us, and the
consciousness of motions without us; and that neither of these can be
resolved into the other, though both are the phenomena of an unknowable
Absolute. It is in this citadel of ignorance that Huxley tries to
intrench himself; but the place was taken before it could be occupied.
The self-contradiction of an unknowable Absolute, and the equal though
less obvious self-contradiction of a dualistic separation between
two aspects of our life—which, as a matter of fact, are never,
and logically can never be, divided—could not long be maintained
against a criticism armed with the weapons of Kant and his idealistic
successors. Already, in the 50’s, the cry “Back to Kant” was raised
in Germany, and, not long after, it led in England and America to a
renewed study of the German idealistic writers, in which Dr. Hutchison
Sterling and the late Professor Green took a leading part. It was soon
obvious to every one who had learned the lesson of critical philosophy
that the agnostic dualism of Mr. Spencer was due to a fundamental
misconception of what is meant by the subjectivity of knowledge. It was
pointed out that if we have the consciousness of object and subject
only in relation to each other, it is not necessary to seek for the
principle of their unity in any _Tertium Quid_ which is neither the
one nor the other. That which Mr. Spencer sought in an unknowable
Absolute was “in our mouths and in our hearts”; it was to be found
in the inseparable unity of experience, in which the inward and the
outward are correlative elements. Agnosticism was a sort of spiritual
refuge for the destitute constructed by those who had renounced their
heritage: who, in other words, had by their abstractions separated the
elements of experience from each other, and were thus forced to seek
beyond experience for the unity which they had lost. The true remedy
for the evil was to give up such abstract ways of thinking and to learn
to “think things together”; in other words, to recognize the organic
relation of the inner and the outer life, and to explain the parts by
the whole, and not the whole by the artificially severed parts.
V
The great distinguishing feature of the last two decades of the century
has been a movement of approximation, partly conscious and partly
unconscious, between the representatives of science, and particularly
of those sciences that deal with special aspects or elements of
human life, on the one hand, and the representatives of idealistic
philosophy on the other. The reconciling ideas of an earlier time
have become better understood and have shown more effectively their
power to reconcile. Not that this mediating power had previously been
entirely unfelt. Even in the time when philosophy was most discredited
in Germany, Lotze, in whom a cautious critical temper was combined
with deep moral and religious sympathies, and a practical knowledge
of the biological and medical sciences with careful studies of Kant
and Hegel, sought to show how an idealistic view of the universe
and of human life could be maintained consistently with the fullest
recognition of scientific methods and results. And though his system
was, on the whole, rather a compromise than a true reconciliation
of philosophy and science, yet it has undoubtedly had very great
influence in modifying the ideas of the opposing schools of thought
and narrowing the ground of controversy between them. Thus the old
English empirical psychology, which was represented by the Mills and
by Mr. Bain, has gradually widened its scope in the hands of writers
like Professor Ward and Mr. Stout, at first probably through the study
of Herbart and then by contact with the revived idealistic movement.
On the other hand, we may notice how idealistic writers, like Mr.
Bradley and Mr. Bosanquet, have tried to absorb every lesson that can
be learned from empiricism, and to shun with the utmost care the very
suspicion of anything like dogmatism. Mr. Bradley’s denunciations of
a “too easy monism” and a philosophy that turns the living world into
a “ballet of bloodless categories” are too well known to be more than
referred to. Nor is this the place to discuss whether his fear of
such a result has not sometimes led him into compromises which are
inconsistent with his own fundamental principle that the world must be
conceived as an intelligible system. In any case, we may fairly point
to his work and to the work of other writers animated by a similar
spirit, as showing the growing prevalence of that reconciling spirit
which seeks at once to do justice to all the results of empirical
inquiry and of the investigations of the special sciences, and yet
at the same time to give them a new interpretation in the light of
an idealistic philosophy. It is impossible within our limits to
illustrate this view of the tendencies of the time by further reference
to the recent philosophical literature of England and America, or of
Germany and France. Still less can I refer to the numerous books on
special departments of inquiry in ethics and theology, in sociology
and in history, in which the “ideally organic view of life and the
world,” as we may call it, has shown its mediating and reconciling
influence. Nor can I do more than refer to the counter current of
pessimism, which has found its most distinguished representatives in
Hartmann and Nietzsche; the former a man of great wealth of thought
and dialectical power, whose philosophy is idealistic in all but its
ultimate principle, and is indeed pessimistic only by an exaggeration
of the opposition between the conscious and the unconscious working of
reason; the latter, hardly a philosopher at all but rather a writer
of pungent and suggestive aphorisms, winged with indignant passion
against prevalent opinions—aphorisms which always contradict some one,
and often contradict each other. From Nietzsche at his best we may
receive a useful warning against too easily satisfying ourselves with
the commonplaces of idealistic optimism; from Hartmann we may derive
very considerable help in estimating the difficulties that have to be
met by those who would seek to work out idealistic principles into a
systematic view of the world. But, without attempting to enter upon any
more detailed criticism of these or other important writers of recent
years, I shall devote the space that remains to one general thought as
to the present state of controversy, in relation to the fundamental
principles of philosophy.