Ever since the revival of the study of Kant, the main conflict in
philosophy has ceased to lie between materialism and idealism.
It has rather become a conflict between those who take up some
position analogous to that of Kant and those who seek to carry out
the idealistic principle to all its consequences. For the essential
characteristic of Kant’s position lay in his sharp division between
the spheres of knowledge and of faith—between a knowledge which was
confined to phenomena and their connection in experience, and a faith
of practical reason, which reached beyond experience to apprehend that
which is noumenally real. Even the agnosticism of Mr. Spencer might
be regarded as a modification of the Kantian point of view, in so far
as his denial of the possibility of knowing the absolute is based on
Mansel’s version of the Kantian antinomies; while his description of
the “vague consciousness” of the absolute which he bids us worship may
be regarded as representing that faith which, in Kant’s view, enables
us to pierce the veil of the phenomena and grasp the ultimate reality
of things. And in the latter part of the century there has been a
continual germination of similar theories, theories agreeing with the
Kantian philosophy at least in making some kind of dualistic division
between the sphere of clearly defined knowledge and the sphere of ideal
or spiritual faith, and also in confining the former to phenomena
while the latter is held to be capable of rising in some way from the
phenomenal to the real. One of the earliest fruits of the Neo-Kantian
movement in Germany was Lange’s _History of Materialism_, which
insisted on the strictest interpretation of the lesson of the _Critique
of Pure Reason_, that scientific knowledge is confined to the empirical
and phenomenal, but which maintained also the chartered freedom of
imagination to feed our hopes with the idea of a world not realized,
or realizable, under the conditions of finite experience. And, with
a different aim, but in a similar spirit, Ritschl, borrowing some of
his weapons from Lotze, sought to take away from philosophy the right
to investigate the spiritual truths of religion, and maintained that
such truths were given in a kind of intuition of faith which is above
criticism and which some of his followers identify, like Kant, with
the demands or postulates of the moral consciousness. Other writers,
following Schopenhauer, have sought to emancipate the will from the
intelligence and to give it an independent power of estimating values.
The great effort to bring science and philosophy together—which, as
we have seen, has characterized the later years of the century—has
itself naturally given rise to many such dualistic compromises, of
which Lotze’s philosophy was among the earliest. And it is partly to
Lotze’s influence that we owe the tendency, visible in some of the most
important recent contributions to philosophy, to regard our actual
experience as having an intuitive completeness which is beyond all
analysis, while reflective thought on the other hand is conceived as
having a purely analytic and discursive operation, which can grasp only
the severed fragments of the given reality and connect them externally
to each other, but which can never restore the organic whole again.
Here, too, we seem by another way to be landed in the same conclusion,
viz., that we are perpetually poised between an ideal which we cannot
verify, but which yet is held to be our only vision of reality, and a
definite result of knowledge, which only gives us what is abstract and
phenomenal. Yet it is difficult to understand how such an organic idea
of the universe can exist except for the thinking intelligence, and how
the thought that grasps it can be separated from the discursive thought
by which the different elements of reality are brought into relation.
How, indeed, can there be any thought which is not both discursive and
intuitive at once, any thought which connects the parts without resting
upon the unity of the whole to which they belong?
All these different compromises are really different forms of the
Kantian dualism, but they supply convenient cities of refuge for those
who are unwilling to admit that faith is but implicit reason, and
that it is always possible to translate its intuitions of truth into
explicit logic. There is much excuse, indeed, in many cases for such
unwillingness when we consider how often reason has presented itself
as purely a critical or dissolving power, and how often abstract
theories which grasp only one aspect of things have been set forth as
complete explanations of religion or morality or some other of the
higher interests of life. It has always to be kept in view that it
is in something like immediate perception that truth is given in the
first instance, and that philosophy, therefore, must always be in a
sense toiling after the intuitions of faith. Yet, on the other hand,
to hold that there is anywhere an abstract division between the two is
to hold that faith is essentially irrational; it is to exalt it above
reason in a way that inevitably leads in the end to its being depressed
below reason. If, however, this view can be maintained it must lead in
the long run to the rejection of all dualistic compromises. And there
are already many who hold that after the unstable equilibrium of the
Kantian theory has been shaken there is no secure standing-ground for
philosophy short of a thorough-going idealism. Yet even they have
learned by experience how dangerous it is to snatch prematurely at the
readiest idealistic interpretation of facts; and they are aware how
easy it is to fall into a simple optimistic theory, which slurs over
difficulties instead of solving them. They know that if Hegel or any
one ever pretended, or could reasonably be interpreted as pretending,
to construe the universe _a priori_, the pretence was futile, and
that a true and valuable idealism can be reached only through the
interpretation of the data of experience by the special sciences, and
the reinterpretation of the results of these sciences by philosophy.
They hold, in short, that if the well-known saying of Hegel is to
be taken for truth, both of its clauses must be equally emphasized,
and that no philosophy can safely maintain that “what is rational is
actual” which has not gone through all the effort that is necessary to
prove that “what is actual is rational.”