observation is the final one; that henceforth we are to continue
straight on till, by the path of physiology, we arrive at absolute
truth; that idealism is dead and gone for ever, and materialism of a
refined type holds the future in its hand. The triumphs of the
scientific method in the natural world are wonderful. The law of
evolution has its lap full of promise. But one who has studied at all
the history of human thought; who has seen philosophies crowned and
discrowned, sceptred and outcast; who has followed the changing fortunes
of opposing schools, and witnessed the alternate victories and defeats
that threatened, each in its turn, to decide the fate of philosophy,
will be slow to believe that the final conflict has been fought, or is
to be, for hundreds of years to come. The principles of the
"Sensational" philosophy have, within the last half century, been
revived and restated with great power by Mill, Bain, Spencer, Taine, and
other leaders of speculative opinion both in England and Europe. Recent
discoveries and generalizations in physical science have lent
countenance to them. The investigations in physiology and biology, the
researches in the regions of natural history, the revelations of
chemistry, have all combined to confirm their truth. Psychology, in the
hands of its latest masters, has worked successfully in their interest.
The thinness, shallowness and dry technicality of the original school
have given place to a rich and varied exposition of the facts of organic
life in its origin, development and results. The original form of the
Sensational philosophy as it prevailed in Europe is described by Mill as
"the shallowest set of doctrines which perhaps, were ever passed off
upon a cultivated age as a complete psychological system; a system which
affected to resolve all the phenomena of the human mind into sensation,
by a process which essentially consisted in merely _calling_ all states
of mind, however heterogeneous, by that name; a philosophy now
acknowledged to consist solely of a set of verbal generalizations,
explaining nothing, distinguishing nothing, leading to nothing." The
"Sensational" philosophy is now presented as the philosophy of
"experience." Its occupation is to resolve into results of experience
and processes of organic life the _a priori_ conceptions that have been
accepted as simple and primitive data of consciousness, by the Ideal
philosophy. Mill was one of the first to undertake this from the
psychological side, analyzing the processes of reason, and making
account of the contents of the mind. Lewes, Spencer, Tyndall have
approached the same problem from the side of organization. In the first
edition of the Logic, Mill clearly indicated the ground he took in the
controversy between the two schools; in the last edition, he defined his
position more clearly, against Whewell, and in agreement with Bain.
In the article on Coleridge, published in the _London and Westminister
Review_, March, 1840, and republished in the second volume of
"Dissertations and Discussions," Mill declares explicitly, that in his
judgment, the truth on the much-debated question between the two
philosophies lies with the school of Locke and Bentham:
"The nature of laws and things in themselves, or the hidden causes
of the phenomena which are the objects of experience, appear to us
radically inaccessible to the human faculties. We see no ground for
believing that any thing can be the object of our knowledge except
our experience, and what can be inferred from our experience by the
analogies of experience itself; nor that there is any idea, feeling
or power in the human mind, which, in order to account for it,
requires that its origin should be referred to any other source. We
are, therefore, at issue with Coleridge on the central idea of his
philosophy; and we find no need of, and no use for, the peculiar
technical terminology which he and his masters, the Germans, have
introduced into philosophy, for the double purpose of giving
logical precision to doctrines which we do not admit, and of
marking a relation between those abstract doctrines and many
concrete experimental truths, which this language, in our judgment,
serves not to elucidate, but to disguise and obscure."
In the examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, he still more
emphatically expressed his dissent from Schelling, Cousin, and every
school of idealism, rejecting the doctrine of intuitive knowledge;
taking the eternal ground from beneath the ideas of the Infinite and
Absolute; sharply questioning the well-conceded interpretations of
consciousness; resolving the "first principles" into mental habits; and
even going so far as to doubt whether twice two necessarily made
four.[3]
[3] Vol. 1, page 89, 90.
The system of Spencer and other expositors of the doctrine of evolution
is, in its general features and its ultimate tendency, too familiar to
be stated. Its hostility to the intuitive philosophy must be obvious
even to unpractised minds. The atomic theory of the constitution of
matter, which, in one or another form, is accepted by the majority of
scientific men, gives ominous prediction of disaster to every scheme
that is built on the necessary truths of pure reason.
But the philosophers of the experimental school are by no means in
accord among themselves, on a matter so cardinal as the relation of mind
to organization. In the latest edition of the Logic, Mill repeats the
language used in the first:[4]
"That every mental state has a nervous state for its immediate
antecedent, though extremely probable, cannot hitherto be said to
be proved, in the conclusive manner in which this can be proved of
sensations; and even were it certain, yet every one must admit that
we are wholly ignorant of the characteristics of these nervous
states; we know not, and have no means of knowing, in what respect
one of them differs from another.... The successions, therefore,
which obtain among mental phenomena, do not admit of being deduced
from the physiological laws of our nervous organization." "It must
by no means be forgotten that the laws of mind may be derivative
laws resulting from laws of animal life, and that their truth,
therefore, may ultimately depend on physical conditions; and the
influence of physiological states or physiological changes in
altering or counter-acting the mental successions, is one of the
most important departments of psychological study. But on the other
hand, to reject the resource of psychological analysis, and
construct the theory of mind solely on such data as physiology
affords at present, seems to me as great an error in principle,
and an even more serious one in practice. Imperfect as is the
science of mind, I do not scruple to affirm that it is in a
considerably more advanced state than the portion of physiology
which corresponds with it; and to discard the former for the latter
appears to me to be an infringement of the true canons of inductive
philosophy."
[4] Logic, p. 591. Amer. Edition.
In a previous chapter[5] Mill had said:
"I am far from pretending that it may not be capable of proof, or
that it is not an important addition to our knowledge, if proved,
that certain motions in the particles of bodies are the
_conditions_ of the production of heat or light; that certain
assignable physical modifications of the nerves may be the
conditions, not only of our sensations and emotions, but even of
our thoughts; that certain mechanical and chemical conditions may,
in the order of nature, be sufficient to determine to action the
physiological laws of life. All I insist upon, in common with every
thinker who entertains any clear idea of the logic of science, is,
that it shall not be supposed that by proving these things, one
step would be made toward a real explanation of heat, light, or
sensation; or that the generic peculiarity of those phenomena can
be in the least degree evaded by any such discoveries, however well
established. Let it be shown, for instance, that the most complex
series of physical causes and effects succeed one another in the
eye and in the brain, to produce a sense of color; rays falling on
the eye, refracted, converging, crossing one another, making an
inverted image on the retina; and after this a motion--let it be a
vibration, or a rush of nervous fluid, or whatever else you are
pleased to suppose, along the optic nerve--a propagation of this
motion to the brain itself, and as many more different motions as
you choose; still, at the end of these motions there is something
which is not motion, there is a feeling or sensation of color. The
mode in which any one of the motions produces the next, may
possibly be susceptible of explanation by some general law of
motion; but the mode in which the last motion produces the
sensation of color cannot be explained by any motion; it is the law
of color, which is, and must always remain a peculiar thing. Where
our consciousness recognizes between two phenomena an inherent
distinction; where we are sensible of a difference, which is not
merely of degree; and feel that no adding one of the phenomena to
itself will produce the other; any theory which attempts to bring
either under the laws of the other must be false."
[5] Logic, p. 548. Amer. Edition.
To precisely the same effect, DuBois Reymond, in an address to the
Congress of German Naturalists given in Leipsic:
"It is absolutely and forever inconceivable that a number of
carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen atoms, should be otherwise
than indifferent to their own position and motion, past, present,
or future. It is utterly inconceivable how consciousness should
result from their joint action."
The position of John Tyndall is well understood. It was avowed in 1860
in the _Saturday Review_; again in his address to the Mathematical and
Physical Section of the British Association in 1868, wherein he declared
that
"The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding
facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a thought and
a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously, we
do not possess the organ, nor, apparently, any rudiment of the
organ, which would enable us to pass by a process of reasoning from
the one phenomenon to the other. They appear together, but we do
not know why."
In 1875, reviewing Martineau in the _Popular Science Monthly_ for
December, Tyndall calls attention to these declarations, and quotes
other language of his own to the same purpose:
"You cannot satisfy the understanding in its demand for logical
continuity between molecular processes and the phenomena of
consciousness. This is a rock on which materialism must inevitably
split whenever it pretends to be a complete philosophy of the human
mind."
Mr. John Fiske, a disciple of Herbert Spencer, and an exceedingly able
expositor of the philosophy of which Spencer is the acknowledged chief,
makes assertions equally positive:[6]
"However strict the parallelism may be within the limits of our
experience, between the phenomena of the mind, and the segment of
the circle of motions, the task of transcending or abolishing the
radical antithesis between the phenomena of mind and the phenomena
of matter, must always remain an impracticable task; for, in order
to transcend or abolish this radical antithesis, we must be
prepared to show how a given quantity of molecular motion in nerve
tissue can be transformed into a definable amount of ideation or
feeling. But this, it is quite safe to say, can never be done."
[6] Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. II., p. 442.
There are of course, distinguished names on the other side. The work on
"Intelligence," by Mr. Taine, which Mr. Mill warmly commends as the "the
first serious effort (in France) to supply the want of a better than the
official psychology," cannot be wisely overlooked by any one interested
in this problem. Taine objects to Tyndall's statement of the problem,
declares that by approaching it from another point, it is soluble, and
frankly undertakes to solve it.[7]
[7] On Intelligence, Book III., chap. I.
"When we consider closely any one of our conceptions--that of a
plant, an animal, a mineral--we find that the primitive threads of
which it is woven, are sensations, and sensations only. We have
proof of this already if we recollect that our ideas are only
reviving sensations, that our ideas are nothing more than images
which have become signs, and that thus this elementary tissue
subsists in a more or less disguised form at all stages of our
thought." "It is true that we cannot conceive the two events
otherwise than as irreducible to one another; but that may depend
on the way we conceive them, and not on their actual qualities;
their incompatibility is perhaps rather apparent than real; it
arises on our side and not on theirs."
Mr. George H. Lewes[8] follows closely Taine's line of argument, but
developes it with more system. He too quotes Tyndall, alludes to DuBois
Reymond and makes reference to Mill. Lewes holds it to be a severe
deduction from proven facts "that the neural process and the feeling are
one and the same process viewed under different aspects. Viewed from the
physical or objective side, it is a neural process; viewed from the
psychological or subjective side, it is a sentient process."
[8] Problems of Life and Mind II. pp. 410, 415.
"It is not wonderful that conceptions so dissimilar as those of
Motion and Feeling should seem irreducible to a common term, while
the one is regarded as the symbol of a process in the object, and
the other as the symbol of a process in the subject. But
psychological analysis leads to the conclusion that the objective
process and the subjective process are simply the twofold aspects
of one and the same fact; in the one aspect it is the Felt, in the
other it is the Feeling."
For the remarkable reasonings by which these assertions are justified,
the readers must consult the works quoted. Their novelty renders any but
an extended account of them unfair; and an extended account would be out
of place in a general study like this.
Should the analyses of Taine and Lewes prove successful at last, and be
accepted by the authorities in speculative philosophy, idealism, as a
philosophy, must disappear. The days of metaphysics in the old sense,
will be numbered; the German schools from Kant to Hegel will become
obsolete; Jacobi's doctrine of faith, Fichte's doctrine of the absolute
Ego, Schelling's doctrine of intellectual intuition, will be forgotten;
Cousin's influence will be gone; the fundamental ideas of Transcendental
teachers, French, English, American, will be discredited; and the
beliefs founded on them will fade away. There will, however, be no cause
to apprehend the personal, social, moral or spiritual demoralization
which the "Sensualist" doctrines of the last century were accused of
encouraging. The attitude of the human mind towards the great problems
of destiny has so far altered, the problems themselves have so far
changed their face, that no shock will be felt in the passage from the
philosophy of intuition to that of experience. Questions respecting the
origin, order and regulation of the world, the laws of character, the
constitution of society, the conditions of welfare, the prospects and
relations of the individual, are put in new forms, discussed by new
arguments, and answered by new assurances. The words atheism and
materialism have passed through so many definitions, the conceptions
they stand for have become so completely transformed by the mutations of
thought, that the ancient antipathies are not longer excusable; the
ancient fears are weak. The sanctities that once were set apart in ideal
shrines will be perfectly at home among the demonstrated facts of common
life.
If, on the other hand, the school to which Spencer, Fiske and Tyndall
belong is right, the science of mind will recover its old dignity,
though under new conditions. Nobody has spoken more plainly against the
intuitive philosophy, than Mill. No one probably is further from it than
Tyndall, though he responds in sentiment to the eloquent affirmations of
Martineau, and quotes Emerson enthusiastically, as "a profoundly
religious man who is really and entirely undaunted by the discoveries
of science, past, present or prospective; one by whom scientific
conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms and warmer
hues of an ideal world." Under the influences of the new psychology,
dogmatic idealism will probably be deprived of its sceptre and sway. The
claim to intuitive knowledge of definite truths of any order whatsoever
will be abandoned, as untenable on scientific or philosophical grounds;
but imagination, which, as Emerson says, "respects the cause,"--"the
vision of an inspired soul reading arguments and affirmations in all
nature of that which it is driven to say;" emotion, which contains all
the possibilities of feeling and hope; the moral sentiment, which
affirms principles with imperative authority; these remain, and claim
their right to create ideal worlds of which the natural world is image
and symbol. The Transcendentalism which concedes to all mankind
spiritual faculties by virtue whereof divine entities are seen in
definite shape--the personal God--the city of the heavenly
Jerusalem--will be superseded by the poetic idealism that is the cheer
and inspiration of poetic minds, animating them with fine visions, and
gladdening them with unfading, though vague, anticipations.
The Transcendental doctrine has been exposed to most deadly assault on
the ethical side. The theory of moral intuition, which held that "every
man is, according to the cautious statement of James Walker, born with a
moral faculty, or the elements of a moral faculty, which, on being
developed, creates in him the idea of a right and a wrong in human
conduct; which summons him before the tribunal of his own soul for
judgment on the rectitude of his purposes; which grows up into an
habitual sense of personal responsibility, and thus prepares him, as his
views are enlarged, to comprehend the moral government of God, and to
feel his own responsibility to God as a moral governor,"--has fallen
into general disrepute; and in its place a persuasion is abroad, that,
in the language of Grote, "the universal and essential tendencies of the
moral sense, admit of being most satisfactorily deduced from other
elementary principles of our nature." It is now a widely accepted belief
among conservative thinkers, that "conscience" is not a faculty, or an
element, existing here in germ, there in maturity; but is the result of
social experience. Moderate Transcendentalists conceded the necessity of
_educating_ conscience, which still implied the existence of a
conscience or moral sense to be educated. It is now contended that
conscience itself is a product of education, a deposit left in the
crucible of experiment, a habit formed by the usage of mankind. The
justification of this view has gone so far, that it seems likely to
become the recognized account of this matter; but in course of
substantiating this doctrine, a new foundation for ethical feeling and
judgment is laid, which is as immovable as the transcendental "facts of
consciousness." The moral sentiments are represented as resting on the
entire past of the race, on reefs of fact built up by the lives of
millions of men, from the bottom of the deep of humanity. The finest
moral sensibility caps the peak of the world's effort at
self-adjustment, as the white, unsullied snow rests on the summit of
the Jungfrau. The intuition is referred to in another genesis, but it is
equally clear and equally certain. The difference of origin creates no
difference of character. Moral distinctions are precisely the same for
idealists and sensationalists. Here at least, the transcendentalist and
his adversary can dwell in amity together.
IX.
THE SEER.
A discerning German writer, Herman Grimm, closes a volume of fifteen
essays, with one on Ralph Waldo Emerson, written in 1861, approved in
1874. The essay is interesting, apart from its literary merit, as giving
the impression made by Mr. Emerson on a foreigner to whom his reputation
was unknown, and a man of culture to whom books and opinions rarely
brought surprise. He saw a volume of the "Essays" lying on the table of
an American acquaintance, looked into it, and was surprised that, being
tolerably well practised in reading English, he understood next to
nothing of the contents. He asked about the author, and, learning that
he was highly esteemed in his own country, he opened the book again,
read further, and was so much struck by passages here and there, that he
borrowed it, carried it home, took down Webster's dictionary, and began
reading in earnest. The extraordinary construction of the sentences, the
apparent absence of logical continuity, the unexpected turns of thought,
the use of original words, embarrassed him at first; but soon he
discovered the secret and felt the charms. The man had fresh thoughts,
employed a living speech, was a genuine person. The book was bought,
read and re-read, "and now every time I take it up, I seem to take it up
for the first time."
The power that the richest genius has in Shakspeare, Rafael, Goethe,
Beethoven, to reconcile the soul to life, to give joy for heaviness, to
dissipate fears, to transfigure care and toil, to convert lead into
gold, and lift the veil that conceals the forms of hope, Grimm ascribes
in the highest measure to Emerson.
"As I read, all seems old and familiar as if it was my own
well-worn thought; all seems new as if it never occurred to me
before. I found myself depending on the book and was provoked with
myself for it. How could I be so captured and enthralled; so
fascinated and bewitched? The writer was but a man like any other;
yet, on taking up the volume again, the spell was renewed--I felt
the pure air; the old weather-beaten motives recovered their tone."
To him Emerson seemed to stand on the ground of simple fact, which he
accepted in all sincerity.
"He regards the world in its immediate aspect, with fresh vision;
the thing done or occurring before him opens the way to serene
heights. The living have precedence of the dead. Even the living of
to-day of the Greeks of yesterday, nobly as the latter thought,
moulded, chiselled, sang. For me was the breath of life, for me the
rapture of spring, for me love and desire, for me the secret of
wisdom and power."... "Emerson fills me with courage and
confidence. He has read and observed, but he betrays no sign of
toil. He presents familiar facts, but he places them in new lights
and combinations. From every object the lines run straight out,
connecting it with the central point of life. What I had hardly
dared to think, it was so bold, he brings forth as quietly as if it
was the most familiar commonplace. He is a perfect swimmer on the
ocean of modern existence. He dreads no tempest, for he is sure
that calm will follow it; he does not hate, contradict, or dispute,
for he understands men and loves them. I look on with wonder to see
how the hurly-burly of modern life subsides, and the elements
gently betake themselves to their allotted places. Had I found but
a single passage in his writings that was an exception to this
rule, I should begin to suspect my judgment, and should say no
further word; but long acquaintance confirms my opinion. As I think
of this man, I have understood the devotion of pupils who would
share any fate with their master, because his genius banished doubt
and imparted life to all things."
Grimm tells us that one day he found Emerson's Essays in the hands of a
lady to whom he had recommended them without effect. She had made a
thousand excuses; had declared herself quite satisfied with Goethe, who
had all that Emerson could possibly have, and a great deal more; had
expressed doubts whether, even if Emerson were all that his admirers
represented, it was worth while to make a study of him. Besides, she had
read in the book, and found only commonplace thoughts which had come to
herself, and which she considered not of sufficient importance to
express. So Emerson was neglected.
"On this occasion she made him the subject of conversation. She had
felt that he was something remarkable. She had come upon sentences,
many times, that opened the darkest recesses of thought. I listened
quietly, but made no response. Not long afterwards she poured out
to me her astonished admiration in such earnest and impassioned
strain, that she made me feel as if I was the novice and she the
apostle."
This experience was repeated again and again, and Grimm had the
satisfaction of seeing the indifferent kindle, the adverse turn, the
objectors yield. The praise was not universal indeed; there were
stubborn dissentients who did not confess the charm, and declared that
the enthusiasm was infatuation. Such remained unconverted. It was
discovered that Emerson came to his own only, though his own were a
large and increasing company.