Hence Number, so far from being the derivative of Time and Space,

founds, at the bottom, in the self-definition and social recognition of

intelligent beings, and so finds _a priori_ a valid expression in Time

and in Space, as well as in every other primitive and spontaneous form

in which intelligence utters itself. The Pythagorean doctrine of the

rank of Number in the scale of realities is only one remove from the

truth: though the numbers are indeed not the Prime Beings, they do enter

into the essential nature of the Prime Beings; are, so to speak, the

organ of their definite reality and identity, and for that reason go

forward into the entire defining procedure by which these intelligences

organize their world of experiences. And the popular impression that

Time and Space are derivatives from Number, is in one aspect the truth,

rather than the doctrine of Kant is; for though they are not mere

generalizations and abstractions from numbered dates and durations,

places and extents, they do exist as relating-principles which minds

simply _put_, as the conditions _of perceptive experiences_; which by

the nature of intelligence they must number in order to have and to

master; while Number itself, the contrast of One and Many, enters into

the very being of minds, and therefore still holds in Time and in Space,

which are the organs, or _media_, not of the whole being of the mind,

but only of that region of it constituted by sensation,--the material,

the disjunct, the empirical. Besides, the logical priority of Number is

implied in the fact that minds in putting Time and Space _a priori_ must

count them as two, since they discriminate them with complete clearness,

so that it is impossible to work up Space out of Time (as Berkeley and

Stuart Mill so adroitly, but so vainly, attempted to do), or Time out of

Space (as Hegel, with so little adroitness and such patent failure,

attempted to do). No; there Time and Space stand, fixed and

inconfusable, incapable of mutual transmutation, and thus the ground of

an abiding difference between the inner or psychic sense-world and the

outer or physical, between the subjective and the (sensibly) objective.

By means of them, the world of minds discerns and bounds securely

between the privacy of each and the publicity, the life "out of doors,"

which is common to all; between the cohering isolation of the individual

and the communicating action of the society. Indeed, as from this

attained point of view we can now clearly see, the real ground of the

difference between Time and Space, and hence between subjective

perception and the objective existence of physical things, is in the

fact that a mind, in _being_ such,--in its very act of

self-definition,--correlates itself with a _society_ of minds, and so,

to fulfill its nature, in so far as this includes a world of

experiences, must form its experience socially as well as privately, and

hence will put forth a condition of sensuous communication, as well as a

condition of inner sensation. Thus the dualization of the sense-world

into inner and outer, psychic and physical, subjective and objective,

rests at last on the intrinsically social nature of conscious being;

rests on the twofold structure, logically dichotomous, of the

self-defining act; and we get the explanation, from the nature of

intelligence as such, why the Sense-Forms are necessarily two, and only

two. It is no accident that we experience all things sensible in Time or

in Space, or in both together; it is the natural expression of our

primally intelligent being, concerned as that is, directly and only,

with our self and its logically necessary complement, the other selves;

and so the natural order, in its two discriminated but complemental

portions, the inner and the outer, is founded in that moral order which

is given in the fundamental act of our intelligence. It is this resting

of Space upon our veritable Objects, the Other Subjects, that imparts to

it its externalizing quality, so that things in it are referred to the

testing of all minds, not to ours only, and are reckoned external

because measured by that which is alone indeed other than we.

In this way we may burst the restricting limit which so much of

philosophy, and so much more of ordinary opinion, has drawn about our

mental powers in view of this contrast Time and Space, especially with

reference to the One and the Many, and to the persuasion that plural

distinctions, at any rate, cannot belong in the region of absolute

reality. Ordinary opinion either inclines to support a philosophy that

is skeptical of either Unity or Plurality being pertinent beyond Time

and Space, and thus to hold by agnosticism, or, if it affects

affirmative metaphysics, tends to prefer monism to pluralism, when the

number-category is carried up into immutable regions: to represent the

absolutely real as One, somehow seems less contradictory of the "fitness

of things" than to represent it as Many; moreover, carrying the Many

into that supreme region, by implying the belonging there of mortals

such as we, seems shocking to customary piety, and full of extravagant

presumption. Still, nothing short of this can really satisfy our deep

demand for a moral order, a personal responsibility, nay, an adequate

logical fulfillment of our conception of a self as an _intelligence_;

while the clarification which a rational pluralism supplies for such

ingrained puzzles in the theory of knowledge as that of the source and

finality of the contrast Time and Space, to mention no others, should

afford a strong corroborative evidence in its behalf. And, as already

said, this view enables us to pass the limit which Time and Space are so

often supposed to put, hopelessly, upon our concepts of the ideal grade,

the springs of all our aspiration. To these, then, we may now pass.

* * * * *

We reach them through the doorways of the Necessary _vs._ the

Contingent, the Unconditioned _vs._ the Conditioned, the Infinite _vs._

the Finite, the Absolute _vs._ the Relative; and we recognize them as

our profoundest foundation-concepts, alone deserving, as Kant so

pertinently said, the name of IDEAS,--the Soul, the World, and God.

Associated with them are what we may call our three Forms of the

Ideal,--the True, the Beautiful, the Good. These Ideas and their

affiliated ideals have the highest directive and settling function in

the organization of philosophy; they determine its schools and its

history, by forming the centre of all its controlling problems; they

prescribe its great subdivisions, breaking it up into Metaphysics,

Æsthetics, and Ethics, and Metaphysics, again, into Psychology

Cosmology, and Ontology,--or Theology in the classic sense, which, in

the modern sense, becomes the Philosophy of Religion; they call into

existence, as essential preparatory and auxiliary disciplines, Logic and

the Theory of Knowledge, or Epistemology. They thus provide the true

distinctions between philosophy and the sciences of experience, and

present these sciences as the carrying out, upon experiential details,

of the methodological principles which philosophy alone can supply;

hence they lead us to view all the sciences as in fact the applied

branches, the completing organs of philosophy, instead of its hostile

competitors.

As for the controlling questions which they start, these are such as

follow: Are the ideals but bare ideals, serving only to cast "a light

that never was, on land or sea?"--are the Ideas only bare ideas, without

any objective being of their own, without any footing in the real,

serving only to enhance the dull facts of experience with auroral

illusions? The philosophic thinker answers affirmatively, or with

complete skeptical dubiety, or with a convinced and uplifting negative,

according to his less or greater penetration into the real meaning of

these deepest concepts, and depending on his view into the nature and

thought-effect of the Necessary and the Contingent, the Unconditioned

and the Conditioned, the Infinite and the Finite, the Absolute and the

Relative.

And what, now, are the accurate, the adequate meanings of the three

Ideas?--what _does_ our profoundest thought intend by the Soul, by the

World, by God? We know how Kant construed them, in consequence of the

course by which he came critically (as he supposed) upon them,--as

respectively the paramount Subject of experiences; the paramount Object

of experiences, or the Causal Unity of the possible series of sensible

objects; and the complete Totality of Conditions for experience and its

objects, itself therefore the Unconditioned. It is worth our notice,

that especially by his construing the idea of God in this way, thus

rehabilitating the classical and scholastic conception of God as the Sum

of all Realities, he laid the foundation for that very transfiguration

of mysticism, that idealistic monism, which he himself repudiated, but

which his three noted successors in their several ways so ardently

accepted, and which has since so pervaded the philosophic world. But

suppose Kant's alleged critical analysis of the three Ideas and their

logical basis is in fact far from critical, far from "exactly

discriminative,"--and I believe there is the clearest warrant for

declaring that it is,--then the assumed "undeniable critical basis" for

idealistic monism will be dislodged, and it will be open to us to

interpret the Ideas with accuracy and consistency--an interpretation

which may prove to establish, not at all any monism, but a rational

pluralism. And this will also reveal to us, I think, that our prevalent

construing of the Unconditioned and the Conditioned, the Necessary and

the Contingent, the Infinite and the Finite, the Absolute and the

Relative, suffers from an equal inaccuracy of analysis, and precisely

for this reason gives a plausible but in fact untrustworthy support to

the monistic interpretation of God, and Soul, and World; or, as Hegel

and his chief adherents prefer to name them, God, Mind, and Nature. If

the Kantian analysis stands, then it seems to follow, clearly enough,

that God is the Inclusive Unit which at once embraces Mind and Nature,

Soul and World, expresses itself in them, and imparts to them their

meaning; and the plain dictate then is, that Kant's personal prejudice,

and the personal prejudices of others like him, in favor of a

transcendent God, must give way to that conception of the Divine, as

immanent and inclusive, which is alone consistent with its being indeed

the Totality of Conditions,--the Necessary Postulate, and the Sufficient

Reason, for both Subject and Object.

But will Kant's analysis stand? Have we not here another of his few but

fatal slips,--like his doctrine of the dependence of Number upon Time

and Space, and its consequent subjection to them? It surely seems so. If

the veritable postulate of categorical syllogizing be, as Kant thinks it

is, merely the Subject, the self as experiencer of presented phenomena,

in contrast to the Object, the causally united sum of possible

phenomena; and if the true postulate of conditional syllogizing is this

cosmic Object, as contrasted with the correlate Subject, then it would

seem we cannot avoid certain pertinent questions. Is such a postulate

Subject any fit and adequate account of the whole Self, of the Soul?--is

there not a vital difference between this subject-self and the Self as

Person?--does not Kant himself imply so, in his doctrine of the primacy

of the Practical Reason? Again: Is not the World, as explained in Kant's

analysis, and as afterwards made by him the solution of the Cosmological

Antinomies, simply the supplemental factor necessarily correlate to the

subjective aspect of the conscious life, and reduced from its uncritical

rôle of thing-in-itself to the intelligible subordination required by

Kant's theory of Transcendental Idealism?--and can this be any adequate

account of the Idea that is to stand in sufficing contrast to the whole

Self, the Person?--what less than the Society of Persons can meet the

World-Idea for that? Further: If with Kant we take the World to mean no

more than this object-factor in self-consciousness, must not the Soul,

the total Self, from which, according to Kant's Transcendental Idealism,

both Space and Time issue, supplying the basis for the immutable

contrast between the experiencing subject and the really experienced

objects,--must not this _whole_ Self be the real meaning of the

"Totality of Conditions, itself unconditioned," which comes into view as

simply the postulate of disjunctive syllogizing? How in the world can

disjunctive syllogizing, the confessed act of the _I_-thinking

intelligence, really postulate anything as Totality of Conditions, in

any other sense than the total of conditions for such syllogizing?--namely,

the conditioning _I_ that organizes and does the reasoning? There is

surely no warrant for calling this total, which simply transcends and

conditions the subject and the object of sensible experiences, by any

loftier name than that which Kant had already given it in the Deduction

of the Categories, when he designated it the "originally synthetic unity

of apperception (self-consciousness)," or "the _I_-thinking (_das

ich-denke_) that must accompany all my mental presentations,"--that is

to say, the whole Self, or thinking Person, idealistically interpreted.

The use of the name God in this connection, where Kant is in fact only

seeking the roots of the three orders of the syllogism _when reasoning

has by supposition been restricted to the subject-matter of experience_,

is assuredly without warrant; yes, without excuse. In fact, it is

because Kant sees that the third Idea, as reached through his analysis,

is intrinsically immanent,--resident in the self that syllogizes

disjunctively, and, because so resident, incapable of passing the bounds

of possible experience,--while he also sees that the idea of God should

mean a Being transcendent of every other thinker, himself a distinct

individual consciousness, though not an empirically limited one,--it is,

I say, precisely because he sees all this, that he pronounces the Idea,

though named with the name of God, utterly without pertinence to

indicate God's existence, and so enters upon that part of his

Transcendental Dialectic which is, in chief, directed to exposing the

transcendental illusion involved in the celebrated Ontological Proof.

Consistently, Kant in this famous analytic of the syllogism should be

talking, not of the Soul, the World, and God, but of the Subject (as

uniting-principle of its sense-_perceptions_), the Object (as

uniting-principle of all possible sense-_percepts_), and the Self (the

whole _I_ presiding over experience in both its aspects, as these are

discriminated in Time and Space). By what rational title--even granting

for the sake of argument that they are the genuine postulates of

categorical and of conditional syllogizing--can this Subject and this

Object, these correlate factors in the Self, rank as Ideas with the Idea

of their conditioning Whole--the Self, that in its still unaltered

identity fulfills, in Practical Reason, the high rôle of Person? If

_this_ no more than meets the standard of Idea, how can _they_ meet it?

How can two somethings, neither of which is the Totality of Conditions,

and both of which are therefore in fact conditioned, deserve the same

title with that which is intrinsically the Totality of Conditions, and,

as such, unconditioned? To call the conditioned and the unconditioned

alike Ideas is a confounding of dignities that Pure Reason should not

tolerate, whether the procedure be read as a leveling down or a leveling

up. Distributing the titles conferred by Pure Reason in this democratic

fashion reminds us too much, unhappily for Kant, of the Cartesian

performances with Substance; whereby God, mind, and matter became alike

"substances," though only God could in truth be said to "require nothing

for his existence save himself," while mind and matter, though

absolutely dependent on God, and derivative from him, were still to be

called substances in the "modified" and Pickwickian sense of being

underived from each other.

But if Kant's naming his third syllogistic postulate the Idea of God is

inconsequent upon his analysis; or if, when the analysis is made

consequent by taking the third Idea to mean the whole Self, the first

and second postulates sink in conceptual rank, so that they cannot with

any pertinence be called Ideas, unless we are willing to keep the same

name when its meaning must be changed _in genere_,--a procedure that can

only encumber philosophy instead of clearing its way,--these

difficulties do not close the account; we shall find other curious

things in this noted passage, upon which part of the characteristic

outcome of Kant's philosophizing so much depends. Besides the misnaming

of the third Idea, we have already had to question, in view of the path

by which he reaches it, the fitness of his calling the first by the

title of the Soul; and likewise, though for other and higher reasons, of

his calling the second by the name of the World. In fact, it comes home

to us that all of the Ideas are, in one way or another, misnomers;

Kant's whole procedure with them, in fine, has already appeared inexact,

inconsistent, and therefore uncritical. But now we shall become aware of

certain other inconsistencies. In coming to the Subject, as the

postulate of categorical syllogizing, Kant, you remember, does so by the

path of the relation Subject and Predicate, arguing that the chain of

categorical prosyllogisms has for its limiting concept and logical motor

the notion of an absolute subject that cannot be a predicate; and as no

subject of a judgment can of itself give assurance of fulfilling this

condition, he concludes this motor-limit of judgment-subjects to be

identical with the Subject as thinker, upon whom, at the last, all

judgments depend, and who, therefore, and who alone, can never be a

predicate merely. In similar fashion, he finds as the motor-limit of the

series of conditional prosyllogisms, which is governed by the relation

Cause and Effect, the notion of an absolute cause--a cause, that is,

incapable of being an effect; and this, as undiscoverable in the chain

of phenomenal causes, which are all in turn effects, he concludes is a

pure Idea, the reason's native conception of a necessary linkage among

all changes in Space, or of a Cosmic Unity among physical phenomena. In

both conceptions, then, whether of the unity of the Subject or of the

World, we seem to have a case of the unconditioned, as each, surely, is

a totality of conditions: the one, for all possible syllogisms by

Subject and Predicate; the other, for all possible syllogisms from Cause

and Effect. Until it can be shown that the syllogisms of the first sort

and the syllogisms of the second are both conditioned by the system of

disjunctive syllogisms, so that the Idea alleged to be the totality of

conditions for this system becomes the conditioning principle for both

the others, there appears to be no ground for contrasting the totality

of conditions presented in it with those presented in the others, as if

it were the absolute Totality of all Conditions, while the two others

are only "relative totalities,"--which would be as much as to say they

were only pseudo-totalities, both being conditioned instead of being

unconditioned. But there seems to be no evidence, not even an

indication, that disjunctive reasoning conditions categorical or

conditional--that it constitutes the whole kingdom, in which the other

two orders of reasoning form dependent provinces, or that for final

validation these must appeal to the disjunctive series and the Idea that

controls it. On the contrary, any such relation seems disproved by the

fact that the three types of syllogism apply alike in all

subject-matter, psychic or physical, subjective or objective, concerning

the Self or concerning the World,--yes, concerning other Selves or even

concerning God; whereas, if the relation were a fact, it would require

that only disjunctive reasoning can deal with the Unconditioned, and

that conditional must confine itself to cosmic material, while

categorical pertains only to the things of inner sense.

Such considerations cannot but shake our confidence in the inquisition

to which Kant has submitted the Ideas of Reason, both as regards what

they really mean and how they are to be correlated. At all events, the

analysis of logical procedure and connection on which his account of

them is based is full of the confusions and oversights that have now

been pointed out, and justifies us in saying that his case is not

established. Hence we are not bound to follow when his three successors,

or their later adherents, proceed in acceptance of his results, and

advance into various forms of idealism, all of the monistic type, as if

the general relation between the three Ideas had been demonstrably

settled by Kant in the monist sense, despite his not knowing this, and

that all we have to do is to disregard his recorded protests, and render

his results consistent, and our idealism "absolute," by casting out from

his doctrine the distinction between the Theoretical and the Practical

Reason, with the "primacy" of the latter, through making an end of his

assumed world of _Dinge an sich_, or "things in themselves." This

movement, I repeat, we are not bound to follow: a rectification of view

as to the meaning of the three Ideas becomes possible as soon as we are

freed from Kant's entangled method of discovering and defining them; and

when this rectification is effected, we shall find that the question

between monism and rational or harmonic pluralism is at least open, to

say no more. Nay, we are not to forget that by the results of our

analysis of the concepts One and Many, Time and Space, and the real

relation between them, plural metaphysics has already won a precedence

in this contest.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

BY GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD

[George Trumbull Ladd, Professor of Philosophy, Yale

University. b. January 19, 1842, Painesville, Ohio. B.A.

Western Reserve College, 1864; B.D. Andover Theological

Seminary, 1869; D.D. Western Reserve, 1879; M.A. Yale, 1881;

LL.D. Western Reserve, 1895; LL.D. Princeton, 1896.

Decorated with the 3d Degree of the Order of the Rising Sun

of Japan, 1899; Pastor, Edinburg, Ohio, 1869-71; _ibid._,

Milwaukee, Wis., 1871-79; Professor of Philosophy, Bowdoin

College, 1879-81; _ibid._, Yale University, 1881--;

Lecturer, Harvard, Tokio, Bombay, etc., 1885--, Member

American Psychological Association, American Society of

Naturalists, American Philosophical Association, American

Oriental Society, Imperial Educational Society of Japan,

Connecticut Academy. Author of _Elements of Physiological

Psychology_; _Philosophy of Knowledge_; _Philosophy of

Mind_; _A Theory of Reality_; and many other noted

scientific works and papers.]

The history of man's critical and reflective thought upon the more

ultimate problems of nature and of his own life has, indeed, its period

of quickened progress, relative stagnation, and apparent decline. Great

thinkers are born and die, "schools of philosophy," so-called, arise,

flourish, and become discredited; and tendencies of various

characteristics mark the national or more general Zeitgeist of the

particular centuries. And always, a certain deep undercurrent, or

powerful stream of the rational evolution of humanity, flows silently

onward. But these periods of philosophical development do not correspond

to those which have been marked off for man by the rhythmic motion of

the heavenly bodies, or by himself for purposes of greater convenience

in practical affairs. The proposal, therefore, to treat any century of

philosophical development as though it could be taken out of, and

considered apart from, this constant unfolding of man's rational life

is, of necessity, doomed to failure. And, indeed, the nineteenth century

is no exception to the general truth.

There is, however, one important and historical fact which makes more

definite, and more feasible, the attempt to present in outline the

history of the philosophical development of the nineteenth century. This

fact is the death of Immanuel Kant, February 12, 1804. In a very unusual

way this event marks the close of the development of philosophy in the

eighteenth century. In a yet more unusual way the same event defines the

beginning of the philosophical development of the nineteenth century.

The proposal is, therefore, not artificial, but in accordance with the

truth of history, if we consider the problems, movements, results, and

present condition of this development, so far as the fulfillment of our

general purpose is concerned, in the light of the critical philosophy of

Kant. This purpose may then be further defined in the following way: to

trace the history of the evolution of critical and reflective thought

over the more ultimate problems of Nature and of human life, in the

Western World during the last hundred years, and from the standpoint of

the conclusions, both negative and positive, which are best embodied in

the works of the philosopher of Königsberg. This purpose we shall try to

fulfill in these four divisions of our theme: (1) A statement of the

problems of philosophy as they were given over to the nineteenth century

by the Kantian Critique; (2) a brief description of the lines of

movement along which the attempts at the improved solution of these

problems have proceeded, and of the principal influences contributing to

these attempts; (3) a summary of the principal results of these

movements--the items, so to say, of progress in philosophy which may be

credited to the last century; and finally, (4) a survey of the present

state of these problems as they are now to be handed down by the

nineteenth to the twentieth century. Truly an immensely difficult, if

not an impossible task, is involved in this purpose!

I. The problems which the critical philosophy undertook definitively to

solve may be divided into three classes. The first is the

epistemological problem, or the problem offered by human knowledge--its

essential nature, its fixed limitations, if such there be, and its

ontological validity. It was this problem which Kant brought to the

front in such a manner that certain subsequent writers on philosophy

have claimed it to be, not only the primary and most important branch of

philosophical discipline, but to comprise the sum-total of what human

reflection and critical thought can successfully compass. "We call

philosophy self-knowledge," says one of these writers. "The theory of

knowledge is the true _prima philosophia_," says another. Kant himself

regarded it as the most imperative demand of reason to establish a

science that shall "determine _a priori_ the possibility, the

principles, and the extent of all cognitions." The burden of the

epistemological problem has pressed heavily upon the thought of the

nineteenth century; the different attitudes toward this problem, and its

different alleged solutions, have been most influential factors in

determining the philosophical discussions, divisions, schools, and

permanent or transitory achievements of the century.

In the epistemological problem as offered by the Kantian philosophy of

cognition there is involved the subordinate but highly important

question as to the proper method of philosophy. Is the method of

criticism, as that method was employed in the three Critiques of Kant,

the exclusive, the sole appropriate and productive way of advancing

human philosophical thought? I do not think that the experience of the

nineteenth century warrants an affirmative answer to this question of

method. This experience has certainly, however, resulted in

demonstrating the need of a more thorough, consistent, and fundamental

use of the critical method than that in which it was employed by Kant.

And this improved use of the critical method has induced a more profound

study of the psychology of cognition, and of the historical development

of philosophy in the branch of epistemology. More especially, however,

it has led to the reinstatement of the value-judgments, as means of

cognition, in their right relations of harmony with the judgments of

fact and of law.

The second of the greater problems which the critical philosophy of the

eighteenth handed on to the nineteenth century is the ontological

problem. This problem, even far more than the epistemological, has

excited the intensest interest, and called for the profoundest thought,

of reflective minds during the last hundred years. This problem engages

in the inquiry as to what Reality is; for to define philosophy from the

ontological point of view renders it "the rational science of reality;"

or, at least, "the science of the supreme and most important realities."

In spite of the fact that the period immediately following the

conclusion of the Kantian criticism was the age when the people were

singing

"_Da die Metaphysik vor Kurzem unbeerbt abging,_

_Werden die Dinge an sich jetzo sub hasta verkauft,_"

the cultivation of the ontological problem, and the growth of systematic

metaphysics in the nineteenth century, had never previously been

surpassed. In spite of, or rather because of, the fact that Kant left

the ancient body of metaphysics so dismembered and discredited, and his

own ontological structure, in such hopeless confusion, all the several

buildings both of Idealism and of Realism either rose quickly or were

erected upon the foundations made bare by the critical philosophy.

But especially unsatisfactory to the thought of the first quarter of the

nineteenth century was the Kantian position with reference to the

problem in which, after all, both the few who cultivate philosophy and

the multitude who share in its fruits are always most truly interested;

and this is the ethico-religious problem. In the judgment of the

generation which followed him, Kant had achieved for those who accepted

his points of view, his method of philosophizing, and his results, much

greater success in "removing knowledge" than in "finding room for

faith." For he seemed to have left the positive truths of Ethics so

involved in the negative positions of his critique of knowledge as

greatly to endanger them; and to have entangled the conceptions of

religion with those of morality in a manner to throw doubt upon them

both.

The breach between the human cognitive faculties and the ontological

doctrines and conceptions on which morality and religion had been

supposed to rest firmly, the elaborately argued distrust and skepticism

which had been aimed against the ability of human reason to reach

reality, and the consequent danger which threatened the most precious

judgments of worth and the ontological value of ethical and æsthetical

sentiments, could not remain unnoticed, or fail to promote ceaseless and

earnest efforts to heal it. The hitherto accepted solutions of the

problems of cognition, of being, and of man's ethico-religious

experience, could not survive the critical philosophy. But the solutions

which the critical philosophy itself offered could not fail to excite

opposition and to stimulate further criticism. Moreover, certain factors

in human nature, certain interests in human social life, and certain

needs of humanity, not fully recognized and indeed scarcely noticed by

criticism, could not fail to revive and to enforce their ancient,

perennial, and valid claims.

In a word, Kant left the main problems of philosophy involved in

numerous contradictions. The result of his penetrating but excessive

analysis was unwarrantably to contrast sense with understanding; to

divide reason as constitutive from reason as regulative; to divorce the

moral law from our concrete experience of the results of good and bad

conduct, true morality from many of the noblest desires and sentiments,

and to set in opposition phenomena and noumena, order and freedom,

knowledge and faith, science and religion. Now the highest aim of

philosophy is reconciliation. What wonder, then, that the beginning of

the last century felt the stimulus of the unreconciled condition of the

problems of philosophy at the end of the preceding century! The

greatest, most stimulating inheritance of the philosophy of the

nineteenth century from the philosophy of the eighteenth century was the

"post-Kantian problems."

II. The lines of the movement of philosophical thought and the principal

contributory influences which belong to the nineteenth century may be

roughly divided into two classes; namely, (1) those which tended in the

direction of carrying to the utmost extreme the negative and destructive

criticism of Kant, and (2) those which, either mainly favoring or mainly

antagonizing the conclusions of the Kantian criticism, endeavored to

place the positive answer to all three of these great problems of

philosophy upon more comprehensive, scientifically defensible, and

permanently sure foundations. The one class so far completed the attempt

to remove the knowledge at which philosophy aims as, by the end of the

first half of the century, to have left no rational ground for any kind

of faith. The other class had not, even by the end of the second half of

the century, as yet agreed upon any one scheme for harmonizing the

various theories of knowledge, of reality, and of the ground of morality

and religion. There appeared, however,--especially during the last two

decades of the century,--certain signs of convergence upon positions, to

occupy which is favorable for agreement upon such a scheme, and which

now promise a new constructive era for philosophy. The terminus of the

destructive movement has been reached in our present-day positivism and

philosophical skepticism. For this movement there would appear to be no

more beyond in the same direction. The terminus of the other movement

can only be somewhat dimly descried. It may perhaps be predicted with a

reasonable degree of confidence as some form of ontological Idealism (if

we may use such a phrase) that shall be at once more thoroughly grounded

in man's total experience, as interpreted by modern science, and also

more satisfactory to human ethical, æsthetical, and religious ideals,

than any form of systematic philosophy has hitherto been. But to say

even this much is perhaps unduly to anticipate.

If we attempt to fathom and estimate the force of the various streams of

influence which have shaped the history of the philosophical development

of the nineteenth century, I think there can be no doubt that the

profoundest and the most powerful is the one influence which must be

recognized and reckoned with in all the centuries. This influence is

humanity's undying interest in its moral, civil, and religious ideals,

and in the civil and religious institutions which give a faithful but

temporary expression to these ideals. In the long run, every fragmentary

or systematic attempt at the solution of the problem of philosophy must

sustain the test of an ability to contribute something of value to the

realization of these ideals. The test which the past century has

proposed for its own thinkers, and for its various schools of

philosophy, is by far the severest which has ever been proposed. For the

most part unostentatiously and in large measure silently, the thoughtful

few and the comparatively thoughtless multitude have been contributing,

either destructively or constructively, to the effort at satisfaction

for the rising spiritual life of man. And if in some vague but

impressive manner we speak of this thirst for spiritual satisfaction as

characteristic of any period of human history, we may say, I believe,

that it has been peculiarly characteristic and especially powerful as an

influence during the last hundred years. The opinions, sentiments, and

ideals which shape the development of the institutions of the church and

state, and the freer activities of the same opinions, sentiments, and

ideals, have been in this century, as they have been in every century,

the principal factors in determining the character of its philosophical

development.

But a more definite and visible kind of influence has constantly

proceeded from the centres of the higher education. The

universities--especially of Germany, next, perhaps of Scotland, but also

of England and the United States, and even in less degree of France and

Italy--have both fostered and shaped the evolution of critical and

reflective thought, and of its product as philosophy. In Germany during

the eighteenth century the greater universities had been emancipating

themselves from the stricter forms of political and court favoritism and

of ecclesiastical protection and control. This emancipation had already

operated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it continued

more and more to operate throughout this century, for participation in

that free thought whose spirit is absolutely essential to the

flourishing of true philosophy. All the other colleges and universities

can scarcely repay the debt which modern philosophy owes to the

universities of Germany. The institutions of the higher education which

are moulded after this spirit, and which have a generous share of this

spirit, have everywhere been _schools of thought_ as well as schools of

learning and research. Without the increasing numbers and growing

encouragement of such centres for the cultivation of the discipline of

critical and reflective thinking, it is difficult to conjecture how much

the philosophical development of the nineteenth century would have lost.

_Libertas docendi_ and _Academische Freiheit_--without these philosophy

has one of its wings fatally wounded or severely clipped.

Not all the philosophy of the last century, however, was born and

developed in academical centres and under academical influences. In

Germany, Great Britain, and France, the various so-called "Academies" or

other unacademical associations of men of scientific interests and

attainments--notably, the Berlin Academy, which has been called "the

seat of an anti-scholastic popular philosophy"--were during the first

half of the nineteenth century contributing by their conspicuous

failures as well as by their less conspicuous successes, important

factors to the constructive new thought of the latter half of the

nineteenth century. In general, although these men decried system and

were themselves inadequately prepared to treat the problems of

philosophy, whether from the historical or the speculative and critical

point of view, they cannot be wholly neglected in estimating its

development. Clever reasoning, and witty and epigrammatic writing on

scientific or other allied subjects, cannot indeed be called

_philosophy_ in the stricter meaning of the word. But this so-called

"popular philosophy" has greatly helped in a way to free thought from

its too close bondage to scholastic tradition. And even the despite of

philosophy, and sneering references to its "barrenness," which formerly

characterized the meetings and the writings of this class of its

critics, but which now are happily much less frequent, have been on the

whole both a valuable check and a stimulus to her devotees. He would be

too narrow and sour a disciple of scholastic metaphysics and systematic

philosophy, who, because of the levity or scorning of "outsiders,"

should refuse them all credit. Indeed, the lesson of the close of the

nineteenth century may well enough be the motto for the beginning of the

twentieth century: _In philosophy--since to philosophize is natural and

inevitable for all rational beings--there really are no outsiders._

In this connection it is most interesting to notice how men of the type

just referred to, were at the end of the eighteenth century found

grouped around such thinkers as Mendelssohn, Lessing, F.

Nicolai,--representing a somewhat decided reaction from the French

realism to the German idealism. The work of the Academicians in the

criticism of Kant was carried forward by Jacobi, who, at the time of his

death, was the pensioned president of the Academy at Munich. Some of

these same critics of the Kantian philosophy showed a rather decided

preference for the "commonsense" philosophy of the Scottish School.

But both inside and outside of the Universities and Academies the

scientific spirit and acquisitions of the nineteenth century have most

profoundly, and on the whole favorably, affected the development of its

philosophy. In the wider meaning of the word, "science,"--the meaning,

namely, in which science = _Wissenschaft_,--philosophy aims to be

scientific; and science can never be indifferent to philosophy. In their

common aim at a rational and unitary system of principles, which shall

explain and give its due significance to the totality of human

experience, science and philosophy can never remain long in antagonism;

they ought never even temporarily to be divided in interests, or in the

spirit which leads each generously to recognize the importance of the

other. The early part of the last century was, indeed, too much under

the influence of that almost exclusively speculative _Natur-philosophie_,

of which Schelling and Hegel were the most prominent exponents. On the

other hand, the conception of nature as a vast interconnected and

unitary system of a rational order, unfolding itself in accordance with

teleological principles,--however manifold and obscure,--is a noble

conception and not destined to pass away.

On the continent--at least in France, where it had attained its highest

development--the scientific spirit was, at the close of the eighteenth

century, on the whole opposed to systematization. The impulse to both

science and philosophy during both the eighteenth and the nineteenth

centuries, over the entire continent of Europe, was chiefly due to the

epoch-making work of that greatest of all titles in the modern

scientific development of the Western World, the _Principia_ of Newton.

In mathematics and the physical sciences, during the early third or half

of the last century, Great Britain also has a roll of distinguished

names which compares most favorably with that of either France or

Germany. But in England, France, and the United States, during the whole

century, science has lacked the breadth and philosophic spirit which it

had in Germany during the first three quarters of this period. During

all that time the German man of science was, as a rule, a scholar, an

investigator, a teacher, _and a philosopher_. Science and philosophy

thrived better, however, in Scotland than elsewhere outside of Germany,

so far as their relations in interdependence were concerned. Into the

Scottish universities Playfair introduced some of the continental

suggestions toward the end of the eighteenth century, so that there was

less of exclusiveness and unfriendly rivalry between science and

philosophy; and both profited thereby. In the United States, during the

first half or more of the century, so dominant were the theological and

practical interests and influences that there was little free

development of either science or philosophy,--if we interpret the one as

the equivalent of _Wissenschaft_ and understand the other in the

stricter meaning of the word.

The history of the development of the scientific spirit and of the

achievements of the particular sciences is not the theme of this paper.

To trace in detail, or even in its large outlines, the reciprocal

influence of science and philosophy during the past hundred years, would

itself require far more than the space allotted to me. It must suffice

to say that the various advances in the efforts of the particular

sciences to enlarge and to define the conceptions and principles

employed to portray the Being of the World in its totality, have

somewhat steadily grown more and more completely metaphysical, and more

and more of positive importance for the reconstruction of systematic

philosophy. The latter has not simply been disciplined by science,

compelled to improve its method, and to examine all its previous claims.

But philosophy has also been greatly enriched by science with respect to

its material awaiting synthesis, and it has been not a little profited

by the unsuccessful attempts of the current scientific theories to give

themselves a truly satisfactory account of that Ultimate Reality which,

to understand the better, is no unworthy aim of their combined efforts.

During the nineteenth century science has seen many important additions

to that Ideal of Nature and her processes, to form which in a unitary

and harmonizing but comprehensive way is the philosophical goal of

science. The gross mechanical conception of nature which prevailed in

the earlier part of the eighteenth century has long since been

abandoned, as quite inadequate to our experience with her facts, forces,

and laws. The kinetic view, which began with Huygens, Euler, and Ampère,

and which was so amplified by Lord Kelvin and Clerk-Maxwell in England,

and by Helmholtz and others in Germany, on account of its success in

explaining the phenomena of light, of gases, etc., very naturally led to

the attempt to develop a kinetic theory, a doctrine of energetics, which

should explain all phenomena. But the conception of "that which moves,"

the experience of important and persistent qualitative _differentiae_,

and the need of assuming ends and purposes served by the movement, are

troublesome obstacles in the way of giving such a completeness to this

theory of the Being of the World. Yet again the amazing success which

the theory of evolution has shown in explaining the phenomena with which

the various biological sciences concern themselves, has lent favor

during the latter half of the century to the vitalistic and genetic view

of nature. For all our most elaborate and advanced kinetic theories seem

utterly to fail us as explanatory when we, through the higher powers of

the microscope, stand wondering and face to face with the evolution of a

single living cell. But from such a view of the essential Being of the

World as evolution suggests to the psycho-physical theory of nature is

not an impassable gulf. And thus, under its growing wealth of knowledge,

science may be leading up to an Ideal of the Ultimate Reality, in which

philosophy will gratefully and gladly coincide. At any rate, the modern

conception of nature and the modern conception of God are not so far

apart from each other, as either of these conceptions is now removed

from the conceptions covered by the same terms, some centuries gone by.

There is one of the positive sciences, however, with which the

development of philosophy during the last century has been particularly

allied. This science is psychology. To speak of its history is not the

theme of this paper. But it should be noted in passing how the

development of psychology has brought into connection with the physical

and biological sciences the development of philosophy. This union,

whether it be for better or for worse,--and, on the whole, I believe it

to be for better rather than for worse,--has been in a very special way

the result of the last century. In tracing its details we should have to

speak of the dependence of certain branches of psychology on physiology,

and upon Sir Charles Bell's discovery of the difference between the

sensory and the motor nerves. This discovery was the contribution of the

beginning of the century to an entire line of discoveries, which have

ended at the close of the century with putting the localization of

cerebral function upon a firm experimental basis. Of scarcely less

importance has been the cellular theory as applied (1838) by Matthias

Schleiden, a pupil of Fries in philosophy, to plants, and by Theodor

Schwann about the same time to animal organisms. To these must be added

the researches of Johannes Müller (1801-1858), the great biologist, a

listener to Hegel's lectures, whose law of _specific energies_ brings

him into connection with psychology and, through psychology, to

philosophy. Even more true is this of Helmholtz, whose _Lehre von den

Tonempfindungen_ (1862) and _Physiologische Optik_ (1867) placed him in

even closer, though still mediate, relations to philosophy. But perhaps

especially Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887), whose researches in

psycho-physics laid the foundations of whatever, either as psychology or

as philosophy, goes under this name; and whether the doctrine have

reference to the relation of man's mind and body, or to the wider

relations of spirit and matter.

In my judgment it cannot be affirmed that the attempts of the latter

half of the nineteenth century to develop an experimental science of

psychology in independence of philosophical criticism and metaphysical

assumption, or the claims of this science to have thrown any wholly new

light upon the statement, or upon the solution of philosophical

problems, have been largely successful. But certain more definitely

psychological questions have been to a commendable degree better

analyzed and elucidated; the new experimental methods, where confined

within their legitimate sphere, have been amply justified; and certain

_quasi_-metaphysical views respecting the nature of the human mind, and

even, if you will, the nature of the Spirit in general--have been placed

in a more favorable and scientifically engaging attitude toward

speculative philosophy. This seems to me to be especially true with

respect to two problems in which both empirical psychology and

philosophy have a common and profound interest. These are (1) the

complex synthesis of mental functions involved in every act of true

cognition, together with the bearing which the psychology of cognition

has upon epistemological problems; and (2) the yet more complex and

profound analysis, from the psychological point of view, of what it is

to be a self-conscious and self-determining Will, a true Self, together

with the bearing which the psychology of selfhood has upon all the

problems of ethics, æsthetics, and religion.

The more obvious and easily traceable influences which have operated to

incite and direct the philosophical development of the nineteenth

century are, of course, dependent upon the teachings and writings of

philosophers, and the schools of philosophy which they have founded. To

speak of these influences even in outline would be to write a manual of

the history of philosophy during that hundred of years, which has been

of all others by far the most fruitful in material results, whatever

estimate may be put upon the separate or combined values of the

individual thinkers and their so-called schools. No fewer than seven or

eight relatively independent or partially antagonistic movements, which

may be traced back either directly or more indirectly to the critical

philosophy, and to the form in which the problems of philosophy were

left by Kant, sprung up during the century. In Germany chiefly, there

arose the Faith-philosophy, the Romantic School, and Rational Idealism;

in France, Eclecticism and Positivism (if, indeed, the latter can be

called _a_ philosophy); in Scotland, a naïve and crude form of Realism,

which served well for the time as an antagonist of a skeptical idealism,

but which itself contributed to an improved form of Idealism; and in the

United States, or rather in New England, a peculiar kind of

Transcendentalism of the sentimental type. But all these movements of

thought, and others lying somewhere midway between, in a pair composed

of any two, together with a steadfast remainder of almost every sort of

Dogmatism, and all degrees and kinds of Skepticism, have been intermixed

and contending with one another, in all these countries. Such has been

the varied, undefinable, and yet intensely stimulating and interesting

character of the development of systematic and scholastic philosophy,

during the nineteenth century.

The early opposition to Kant in Germany was, in the main, twofold:--both

to his peculiar extreme analysis with its philosophical conclusions, and

also to all systematic as distinguished from a more popular and literary

form of philosophizing. Toward the close of the eighteenth century a

group of men had been writing upon philosophical questions in a spirit

and method quite foreign to that held in respect by the critical

philosophy. It is not wholly without significance that Lessing, whose

aim had been to use common sense and literary skill in clearing up

obscure ideas and improving and illumining the life of man, died in the

very year of the appearance of Kant's _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_. Of

this class of men an historian dealing with this period has said, "There

is hardly one who does not quote somewhere or other Pope's saying, 'The

proper study of mankind is man.'" To this class belong Hamann

(1730-1788), the inspirer of Herder and Jacobi. The former, who was

essentially a poet and a friend of Goethe, controverted Kant with regard

to his doctrine of reason, his antithesis between the individual and the

race, and his schism between things as empirically known and the known

unity in the Ground of their being and becoming. Herder's path to truth

was highly colored with flowers of rhetoric; but the promise was that he

would lead men back to the heavenly city. Jacobi, too, with due

allowance made for the injury wrought by his divorce of the two

philosophies,--that of faith and that of science,--and his excessive

estimate of the value-judgments which repose in the mist of a

feeling-faith, added something of worth by way of exposing the

barrenness of the Kantian doctrine of an unknowable "Thing-in-itself."

From men like Fr. Schlegel (1772-1829), whose valid protest against the

sharp separation of speculative philosophy from the æsthetical, social,

and ethical life, assumed the "standpoint of irony," little real result

in the discovery of truth could be expected. But Schleiermacher

(1768-1834), in spite of that mixture of unfused elements which has made

his philosophy "a rendezvous for the most diverse systems," contributed

valuable factors to the century's philosophical development, both of a

negative and of a positive character. This thinker was peculiarly

fortunate in the enrichment of the conception of experience as

warranting a justifiable confidence in the ontological value of ethical,

æsthetical, and religious sentiment and ideas; but he was most

unfortunate in reviving and perpetuating the unjustifiable Kantian

distinction between cognition and faith in the field of experience. On

the whole, therefore, the Faith-philosophy and the Romantic School can

easily be said to have contributed more than a negative and modifying

influence to the development of the philosophy of the nineteenth

century. Its more modern revival toward the close of the same century,

and its continued hold upon certain minds of the present day, are

evidences of the positive but partial truth which its tenets, however

vaguely and unsystematically, continue to maintain in an æsthetically

and practically attractive way.

The admirers of Kant strove earnestly and with varied success to remedy

the defects of his system. Among the earlier, less celebrated and yet

important members of this group, were K. G. Reinhold (1758-1823), and

Maimon (died, 1800). The former, like Descartes, in that he was educated

by the Jesuits, began the attempt, after rejecting some of the arbitrary

distinctions of Kant and his barren and self-contradictory

"Thing-in-itself," to unify the critical philosophy by reducing it to

some one principle. The latter really transcended Kant in his

philosophical skepticism, and anticipated the Hamiltonian form of the

so-called principle of relativity. Fries (1773-1843), and Hermes

(1775-1831)--the latter of whom saw in empirical psychology the only

true propædeutic to philosophy--should be mentioned in this connection.

In the same group was another, both mathematician and philosopher, who

strove more successfully than others of this group to accept the

critical standpoint of Kant and yet to transcend his negative

conclusions with regard to a theory of knowledge. I refer to Bolzano

(Prague, 1781-1848), who stands in the same line of succession with

Fries and Hermes, and whose works on the _Science of Religion_ (4 vols.

1834) and his _Science of Knowledge_ (4 vols. 1837) are noteworthy

contributions to epistemological doctrine. In the latter we have

developed at great length the important thought that the illative

character of propositional judgments implies an objective relation; and

that in all truths the subject-idea must be objective. In the work on

religion there is found as thoroughly dispassionate and rational a

defense of Catholic doctrine as exists anywhere in philosophical

literature. The limited influence of these works, due in part to their

bulk and their technical character, is on the whole, I think, sincerely

to be regretted.

It was, however, chiefly that remarkable series of philosophers which

may be grouped under the rubric of a "rational Idealism," who filled so

full and made so rich the philosophical life of Germany during the first

half of the last century; whose philosophical thoughts and systems have

spread over the entire Western World, and who are most potent influences

in shaping the development of philosophy down to the present hour. Of

these we need do little more than that we can do--mention their names.

At their head, in time, stands Fichte, who--although Kant is reported to

have complained of this disciple because he lied about him so

much--really divined a truth which seems to be hovering in the clouds

above the master's head, but which, if the critical philosophy truly

meant to teach it, needed helpful deliverance in order to appear in

perfectly clear light. Fichte, although he divined this truth, did not,

however, free it from internal confusion and self-contradiction. It _is_

his truth, nevertheless, that in the Self, as a self-positing and

self-determining activity, must somehow be found the Ground of all

experience and of all Reality.

The important note which Schelling sounded was the demand that

philosophy should recognize "Nature" as belonging to the sphere of

Reality, and as requiring a measure of reflective thought which should

in some sort put it on equal terms with the Ego, for the construction of

our conception of the Being of the World. To Schelling it seemed

impossible to deduce, as Fichte had done, all the rich concrete

development of the world of things from the subjective needs and

constitutional forms of functioning which belong to the finite Self.

And, indeed, the doctrine which limits the origin, existence, and value

of all that is known about this sphere of experience to these needs, and

which finds the sufficient account of all experience with nature in

these forms of functioning, must always seem inadequate and even

grotesque in the sight of the natural sciences. Both Nature and Spirit,

thought Schelling, must be allowed to claim actual existence and equally

real value; while at the same time philosophy must reconcile the seeming

opposition of their claims and unite them in an harmonious and

self-explanatory way. In some common substratum, in which, to adopt

Hegel's sarcastic criticism, as in the darkness of the night "all cows

are black,"--that is in the Absolute, as an Identical Basis of

Differences,--the reconciliation was to be accomplished.

But the constructive idealistic movement, in which Fichte and Schelling

bore so important a part, could not be satisfied with the positions

reached by either of these two philosophers. Neither the physical and

psychological sciences, nor the speculative interests of religion,

ethics, art, and social life, permitted this movement to stop at this

point. In all the subsequent developments of philosophy during the first

half or three quarters of the nineteenth century, undoubtedly the

influence of Hegel was greatest of all individual thinkers. His _motif_

and plan are revealed in his letter of November 2, 1800, to Schelling,

namely, to transform what had hitherto been an ideal into a thoroughly

elaborate system. And in spite of his obvious obscurities of thought and

style, there is real ground for his claim to be the champion of the

common consciousness. It is undoubtedly in Hegel's _Phänomenologie des

Geistes_ (1807), that the distinctive features of the philosophy of the

first half of the last century most clearly define themselves. The

forces of reflection now abandon the abstract analytic method and

positions of the Kantian Critique, and concentrate themselves upon the

study of man's spiritual life as an historical evolution, in a more

concrete, face-to-face manner. Two important and, in the main, valid

assumptions underlie and guide this reflective study: (1) The Ultimate

Reality, or principle of all realities, is Mind or Spirit, which is to

be recognized and known in its essence, not by analysis into its formal

elements (the categories), but as a living development; (2) those formal

elements, or categories to which Kant gave validity merely as

constitutional forms of the functioning of the human understanding,

represent, the rather, the essential structure of Reality.

In spite of these true thoughts, fault was justly found by the

particular sciences with both the speculative method of Hegel, which

consists in the smooth, harmonious, and systematic arrangement of

conceptions in logical or ideal relations to one another; and also with

the result, which reduces the Being of the World to terms of thought and

dialectical processes merely, and neglects or overlooks the other

aspects of racial experience. Therefore, the idealistic movement could

not remain satisfied with the Hegelian dialectic. Especially did both

the religious and the philosophical party revolt against the important

thought underlying Hegel's philosophy of religion; namely, that "the

more philosophy approximates to a complete development, the more it

exhibits the same need, the same interest, and the same content, as

religion itself." This, as they interpreted it, meant the absorption of

religion in philosophy.

Next after Hegel, among the great names of this period, stand the names

of Herbart and Schopenhauer. The former contributes in an important way

to the proper conception of the task and the method of philosophy, and

influences greatly the development of psychology, both as a science that

is pedagogic to philosophy, and as laying the basis for pedagogical

principles and practice. But Herbart commits again the ancient fallacy,

under the spell of which so much of the Kantian criticism was bound; and

which identifies contradictions that belong to the imperfect or illusory

conceptions of individual thinkers with insoluble antinomies inherent in

reason itself. In spite of the little worth and misleading character of

his view of perception, and the quite complete inadequacy of the method

by which, at a single leap, he reaches the one all-explanatory principle

of his philosophy, Schopenhauer made a most important contribution to

the reflective thought of the century. It is true, as Kuno Fischer has

said, that it seems to have occurred to Schopenhauer only twenty-five

years after he had propounded his theory, that will, as it appears in

consciousness, is as truly phenomenal as is intellect. It is also true

that his theory of knowledge and his conception of Reality, as measured

by their power to satisfy and explain our total experience, are

inflicted with irreconcilable contradictions. Neither can we accord firm

confidence or high praise to the "Way of Salvation" which somehow Will

can attain to follow by æsthetic contemplation and ascetic self-denial.

Yet the philosophy of Schopenhauer rightly insists upon our Idealistic

construction of Reality having regard to aspects of experience which his

predecessors had quite too much neglected; and even its spiteful and

exaggerated reminders of the facts which contradict the tendency of all

Idealism to construct a smooth, regular, and altogether pleasing

conception of the Being of the World, have been of great benefit to the

development of the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In estimating the thoughts and the products of modern Idealism we ought

not to forget the larger multitude of thoughtful men, both in Germany

and elsewhere, who have contributed toward shaping the course of

reflection in the attempt to answer the problems which the critical

philosophy left to the nineteenth century. It is a singular comment upon

the caprices of fame that, in philosophy as in science, politics, and

art, some of those who have really reasoned most soundly and acutely, if

not also effectively upon these problems, are little known even by name

in the history of the philosophical development of the century. Among

the earlier members of this group, did space permit, we should wish to

mention Berger, Solger, Steffens, and others, who strove to reconcile

the positions of a subjective idealism with a realistic but pantheistic

conception of the Being of the World. There are others, who like Weisse,

I. H. Fichte, C. P. Fischer, and Braniss, more or less bitterly or

moderately and reasonably, opposed the method and the conclusions of the

Hegelian dialectic. Still another group earned for themselves the

supposedly opprobrious but decidedly vague title of "Dualists," by

rejecting what they conceived to be the pantheism of Hegel. Still

others, like Fries and Beneke and their successors, strove to parallel

philosophy with the particular sciences by grounding it in an empirical

but scientific psychology; and thus they instituted a line of closely

connected development, to which reference has already been made.

Hegel himself believed that he had permanently effected that

reconciliation of the orthodox creed with the cognition of Ultimate

Reality at which his dialectic aimed. In all such attempts at

reconciliation three great questions are chiefly concerned: (1) the

Being of God; (2) the nature of man; (3) the actual and the ideally

satisfactory relations between the two. But, as might have been

expected, a period of wild, irregular, and confused contention met the

attempt to establish this claim. In this conflict of more or less noisy

and popular as well as of thoughtful and scholastic philosophy,

Hegelians of various degrees of fidelity, anti-Hegelians of various

degrees of hostility, and ultra-Hegelians of various degrees of

eccentricity, all took a valiant and conspicuous part. We cannot follow

its history; but we can learn its lesson. Polemical philosophy, as

distinguished from quiet, reflective, and critical but constructive

philosophy involves a most uneconomical use of mental force. Yet out of

this period of conflict, and in a measure as its result, there came a

period of improved relations between science and philosophy and between

philosophy and theology, which was the dawn, toward the close of the

nineteenth century, of that better illumined day into the middle of

which we hope that we are proceeding.

Before leaving this idealistic movement in Germany, and elsewhere as

influenced largely by German philosophy, one other name deserves

mention. This name is that of Lotze, who combined elements from many

previous thinkers with those derived from his own studies and

thoughts,--the conceptions of mechanism as applied to physical

existences and to psychical life, with the search for some monistic

Principle that shall satisfy the æsthetical and ethical, as well as the

scientific demands of the human mind. This variety of interests and of

culture led to the result of his making important contributions to

psychology, logic, metaphysics, and æsthetics. If we find his system of

thinking--as I think we must--lacking in certain important elements of

consistency and obscured in places by doubts as to his real meaning,

this does not prevent us from assigning to Lotze a position which, for

versatility of interests, genial quality of reflection and criticism,

suggestiveness of thought and charm of style, is second to no other in

the history of nineteenth century philosophical development.

In France and in England the first quarter of the last century was far

from being productive of great thinkers or great thoughts in the sphere

of philosophy. De Biran (1766-1824), in several important respects the

forerunner of modern psychology, after revolting from his earlier

complacent acceptance of the vagaries of Condillac and Cabanis, made the

discovery that the "immediate consciousness of self-activity is the

primitive and fundamental principle of human cognition." Meantime it was

only a little group of Academicians who were being introduced, in a

somewhat superficial way, to the thoughts of the Scottish and the German

idealistic Schools by Royer-Collard, Jouffroy, Cousin, and others. A

more independent and characteristic movement was that inaugurated by

Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who, having felt the marked influence of

Saint-Simon when he was only a boy of twenty, in a letter to his friend

Valat, in the year 1824, declares: "I shall devote my whole life and all

my powers to the founding of positive philosophy." In spite of the

impossibility of harmonizing with this point of view the vague and

mystical elements which characterize the later thought of Comte, or with

its carrying into effect the not altogether intelligent recognition of

the synthetic activity of the mind (_tout se réduit toujours à lier_)

and certain hints as to "first principles;" and in spite of the small

positive contribution to philosophy which Comtism could claim to have

made; it has in a way represented the value of two ideas. These are (1)

the necessity for philosophy of studying the actual historical forces

which have been at work and which are displayed in the facts of history;

and (2) the determination not to go by mere unsupported speculation

beyond experience in order to discover knowable Reality. There is,

however, a kind of subtle irony in the fact that the word "Positivism"

should have come to stand so largely for _negative_ conclusions, in the

very spheres of philosophy, morals, and religion where _affirmative_

conclusions are so much desired and sought.

That philosophy in Great Britain was in a nearly complete condition of

decadence during the first half or three quarters of the nineteenth

century was the combined testimony of writers from such different points

of view as Carlyle, Sir William Hamilton, and John Stuart Mill. And yet

these very names are also witnesses to the fact that this decadence was

not quite complete. In the first quarter of the century Coleridge,

although he had failed, on account of weakness both of mind and of

character, in his attempt to reconcile religion to the thought of his

own age, on the basis of the Kantian distinction between reason and the

intellect, had sowed certain seed-thoughts which became fertile in the

soil of minds more vigorous, logical, and practical than his own. This

was, perhaps, especially true in America, where inquirers after truth

were seeking for something more satisfactory than the French skepticism

of the revolutionary and following period. Carlyle's mocking sarcasm was

also not without wholesome effect.

But it was Sir William Hamilton and John Stuart Mill whose thoughts

exercised a more powerful formative influence over the minds of the

younger men. The one was the flower of the Scottish Realism, the other

of the movement started by Bentham and the elder Mill.

That the Scottish Realism should end by such a combination with the

skepticism of the critical philosophy as is implied in Hamilton's law of

the relativity of all knowledge, is one of the most curious and

interesting turns in the history of modern philosophy. And when this law

was so interpreted by Dean Mansel in its application to the fundamental

cognitions of religion as to lay the foundations upon which the most

imposing structure of agnosticism was built by Herbert Spencer, surely

the entire swing around the circle, from Kant to Kant again, has been

made complete. The attempt of Hamilton failed, as every similar attempt

must always fail. Neither speculative philosophy nor religious faith is

satisfied with an abstract conception, about the correlate of which in

Reality nothing is known or ever can be known. But every important

attempt of this sort serves the double purpose of stimulating other

efforts to reconstruct the answer to the problem of philosophy, on a

basis of positive experience of an enlarged type; and also of acting as

a real, if only temporary practical support to certain value-judgments

which the faiths of morality, art, and religion both implicate and, in a

measure, validate.

The influence of John Stuart Mill, as it was exerted not only in his

conduct of life while a servant of the East India Company, but also in

his writings on Logic, Politics, and Philosophy, was, on the whole, a

valuable contribution to his generation. In the additions which he made

to the Utilitarianism of Bentham we have done, I believe, all that ever

can be done in defense of this principle of ethics. And his posthumous

confessions of faith in the ontological value of certain great

conceptions of religion are the more valuable because of the nature of

the man, and of the experience which is their source. Perhaps the most

permanent contribution which Mill made to the development of philosophy

proper, outside of the sphere of logic, ethics, and politics, was his

vigorous polemical criticism of Hamilton's claim for the necessity of

faith in an "Unconditioned" whose conception is "only a fasciculus of

negations of the Conditioned in its opposite extremes, and bound

together merely by the aid of language and their common character of

incomprehensibility."

The history of the development of philosophy in America during the

nineteenth century, as during the preceding century, has been

characterized in the main by three principal tendencies. These may be

called the theological, the social, and the eclectic. From the beginning

down to the present time the religious influence and the interest in

political and social problems have been dominant. And yet withal, the

student of these problems in the atmosphere of this country likes, in a

way, to do his own thinking and to make his own choices of the thoughts

that seem to him true and best fitted for the best form of life. In

spite of the fact that the different streams of European thought have

flowed in upon us somewhat freely, there has been comparatively little

either of the adherence to schools of European philosophy or of the

attempt to develop a national school. Doubtless the influence of English

and Scottish thinking upon the academical circles of America was

greatest for more than one hundred and fifty years after the gift in

1714 by Governor Yale of a copy of Locke's Essay to the college which

bore his name,--and especially upon the reflections and published works

of Jonathan Edwards touching the fundamental problems of epistemology,

ethics, and religion. During the early part of this century these views

awakened antagonism from such writers as Dana, Whedon, Hazard, Nathaniel

Taylor, Jeremiah Day, Henry P. Tappan, and other opponents of the

Edwardean theology, and also from such advocates of so-called

"free-thinking," as had derived their _motifs_ and their views from

English deistical writers like Shaftesbury, or from the skepticism of

Hume.

A more definite philosophical movement, however, which had established

itself somewhat firmly in scholastic centres by the year 1825, and which

maintained itself for more than half a century, went back to the arrival

in this country of John Witherspoon, in 1768, to be the president of

Princeton, bringing with him a library of three hundred books. It was

the appeal of the Scottish School to the "plain man's consciousness" and

to so-called "common sense," which was relied upon to controvert all

forms of philosophy which seemed to threaten the foundations of religion

and of the ethics of politics and sociology. But even during this

period, which was characterized by relatively little independent

thinking in scholastic circles, a more pronounced productivity was shown

by such writers as Francis Wayland, and others; but, perhaps, especially

by Laurens P. Hickok, whose works on psychology and cosmology deserve

especial recognition: while in psychology, as related to philosophical

problems, the principal names of this period are undoubtedly the

presidents of Yale and Princeton,--Noah Porter and James McCosh,--both

of whom (but especially the former) had their views modified by the more

scientific psychology of Europe and the profounder thinking of Germany.

It was Germany's influence, however, both directly and indirectly

through Coleridge and a few other English writers, that caused a ferment

of impressions and ideas which, in their effort to work themselves

clear, resulted in what is known as New England "Transcendentalism." In

America this movement can scarcely be called definitely philosophical;

much less can it be said to have resulted in a system, or even in a

school, of philosophy. It must also be said to have been "inspired but

not borrowed" from abroad. Its principal, if not sole, literary survival

is to be found in the works of Emerson. As expounded by him, it is not

precisely Pantheism--certainly not a consistent and critical development

of the pantheistic theory of the Being of the World; it is, rather, a

vague, poetical, and pantheistical Idealism of a decidedly mystical

type.

The introduction of German philosophy proper, in its nature form, and

essential being, to the few interested seriously in critical and

reflective thinking upon the ultimate problems of nature and of human

life, began with the founding of the _Journal of Speculative

Philosophy_, in 1867, under the direction of William T. Harris, then

Superintendent of Schools in this city.

With the work of Darwin, and his predecessors and successors, there

began a mighty movement of thought which, although it is primarily

scientific and more definitely available in biological science, has

already exercised, and is doubtless destined to exercise in the future,

an enormous influence upon philosophy. Indeed, we are already in the

midst of the preliminary confusions and contentions, but most fruitful

considerations and discoveries belonging to a so-called philosophy of

evolution.

This development has, in the sphere of systematic philosophy, reached

its highest expression in the voluminous works produced through the

latter half of the nineteenth century by Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose

recent death seems to mark the close of the period we have under

consideration. The metaphysical assumptions and ontological value of the

system of Spencer, as he wished it to be understood and interpreted,

have perhaps, though not unnaturally, been quite too much submerged in

the more obvious expressions of its agnostic positivism. In its

psychology, however, the assumption of "some underlying substance in

contrast to all changing forms," distinguishes it from a pure positivism

in a very radical way. But more especially in philosophy, the

metaphysical postulate of a mysterious Unity of Force that somehow

manages to reveal itself, and the law of its operations, to the

developed cognition of the nineteenth century philosopher, however much

it seems to involve the system in internal contradictions, certainly

forbids that we should identify it with the positivism of Auguste Comte.

In our judgment, however, it is in his ethical good sense and integrity

of judgment,--a good sense and integrity which commits to ethics rather

than to sociology the task of determining the highest type of human

life,--and in basing the conditions for the prevalence and the

development of the highest type of life upon ethical principles and upon

the adherence to ethical ideas, that Herbert Spencer will be found most

clearly entitled to a lasting honor.

III. The third number of our difficult tasks is to summarize the

principal results, to inventory the net profits, as it were, of the

development of philosophy during the nineteenth century. This task is

made the more difficult by the heterogeneous nature and as yet

unclassified condition of the development. With the quickening and

diversifying of all kinds and means of intercourse, there has come the

breaking down of national schools and idiosyncrasies of method and of

thought. In philosophy, Germany, France, Great Britain, and indeed,

Italy, have come to intermingle their streams of influence; and from all

these countries these streams have been flowing in upon America. In

psychology, especially, as well as in all the other sciences, but also

to some degree in philosophy, returning streams of influence from

America have, during the last decade or two, been felt in Europe itself.

It must also be admitted that the attempts at a reconstruction of

systematic philosophy which have followed the rapid disintegration of

the Hegelian system, and the enormous accumulations of new material due

to the extension of historical studies and of the particular

sciences,--including especially the so-called "new psychology,"--have

not as yet been fruitful of large results. In philosophy, as in art,

politics, and even scientific theory, the spirit and the opportunity of

the time are more favorable to the gathering of material and to the

projecting of a bewildering variety of new opinions, or old opinions put

forth under new names, than to that candid, patient, and prolonged

reflection and balancing of judgment which a worthy system-building

inexorably requires. The age of breaking up the old, without

assimilating the new, has not yet passed away. And whatever is new,

startling, large, even monstrous, has in many quarters the seeming

preference, in philosophy's building as in other architecture. To the

confusion which reigns even in scholastic circles, contributions have

been arriving from the outside, from philosophers like Nietzsche, and

from men great in literature like Tolstoi. Nor has the matter been

helped by the more recent extreme developments of positivism and

skepticism, which often enough, without any consciousness of their

origin and without the respect for morality and religion which Kant

always evinced, really go back to the critical philosophy.

In spite of all this, however, the last two decades or more have shown

certain hopeful tendencies and notable achievements, looking toward the

reconstruction of systematic philosophy. In this attempt to bring order

out of confusion, to enable calm, prolonged, and reflective thinking to

build into its structure the riches of the new material which the

evolution of the race has secured, a place of honor ought to be given to

France, where so much has been done of late to blend with clearness of

style and independence of thought that calm reflective and critical

judgment which looks all sides of human experience sympathetically but

bravely in the face. In psychology Ribot, and in philosophy, Fouillée,

Renouvier, Secrétan, and others, deserve grateful recognition. No friend

of philosophy can, I think, fail to recognize the probable benefits to

be derived from that movement with which such names as Mach and Ostwald

in Germany are connected, and which is sounding the call to the men of

science to clear up the really distressing obscurity and confusion which

has so long clung to their fundamental conceptions; and to examine anew

the significance of their assumptions, with a view to the construction

of a new and improved doctrine of the Being of the World. And if to

these names we add those of the numerous distinguished investigators of

psychology as pedagogic to philosophy, and, in philosophy, of Deussen,

Eucken, von Hartmann, Riehl, Wundt, and others, we may well affirm that

new light will continue to break forth from that country which so

powerfully aroused the whole Western World at the end of the eighteenth

and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In Great Britain the name and

works of Thomas Hill Green have influenced the attempts at a

reconstruction of systematic philosophy in a manner to satisfy at one

and the same time both the facts and laws of science and the æsthetical,

ethical, and religious ideals of the age, in a very considerable degree.

And in this attempt, both as it expresses itself in theoretical

psychology and in the various branches of philosophical discipline,

writers like Bradley, Fraser, Flint, Hodgson, Seth, Stout, Ward, and

others, have taken a conspicuous part. Nor are there wanting in Holland,

Italy, and even in Sweden and Russia, thinkers equally worthy of

recognition, and recognized, in however limited and unworthy fashion, in

their own land. The names of those in America who have labored most

faithfully, and succeeded best, in this enormous task of reconstructing

philosophy in a systematic way, and upon a basis of history and of

modern science, I do not need to mention; they are known, or they surely

ought to be known, to us all.

In attempting to summarize the gains of philosophy during the last

hundred years, we should remind ourselves that progress in philosophy

does not consist in the final settlement, and so in the "solving" of any

of its great problems. Indeed, the relations of philosophy to its

grounds in experience, and the nature of its method and of its ideal,

are such that its progress can never be expected to put an end to

itself. But the content of the total experience of humanity has been

greatly enriched during the last century; and the critical and

reflective thought of trained minds has been led toward a more profound

and comprehensive theory of Reality, and toward a doctrine of values

that shall be more available for the improvement of man's political,

social, and religious life.

In view of this truth respecting the limitations of systematic

philosophy, I think we may hold that certain negative results, which are

customarily adduced as unfavorable to the claims of philosophical

progress, are really signs of improvement during the latter half of the

nineteenth century. One is an increased spirit of reserve and caution,

and an increased modesty of claims. This result is perhaps significant

of riper wisdom and more trustworthy maturity. Kant believed himself to

have established for philosophy a system of apodeictic conclusions,

which were as completely forever to have displaced the old dogmatism as

Copernicus had displaced the Ptolemaic astronomy. But the steady

pressure of historical and scientific studies has made it increasingly

difficult for any sane thinker to claim for any system of thinking such

demonstrable validity. May we not hope that the students of the

particular sciences, to whom philosophy owes so much of its enforced

sanity and sane modesty, will themselves soon share freely of the

philosophic spirit with regard to their own metaphysics and ethical and

religious standpoints, touching the Ultimate Reality? Even when the

recoil from the overweening self-satisfaction and crass complacency of

the earlier part of the last century takes the form of melancholy, or of

acute sadness, or even of a mild despair of philosophy, I am not sure

that the last state of that man is not better than the first.

In connection with this improvement in spirit, we may also note an

improvement in the method of philosophy. The purely speculative method,

with its intensely interesting but indefensible disregard of concrete

facts, and of the conclusions of the particular sciences, is no longer

in favor even among the most ardent devotees and advocates of the

superiority of philosophy to those sciences. At the same time,

philosophy may quite properly continue to maintain its position of

independent critic, as well as of docile pupil, toward the particular

sciences.

In the same connection must be mentioned the hopeful fact that the last

two or three decades have shown a decided improvement in the relations

of philosophy toward the positive sciences. There are plain signs of

late that the attitude of antagonism, or of neglect, which prevailed so

largely during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century,

is to be replaced by one of friendship and mutual helpfulness. And,

indeed, science and philosophy cannot long or greatly flourish without

reciprocal aid, if by science we mean a true _Wissenschaft_ and if we

also mean to base philosophy upon our total experience. For science and

philosophy are really engaged upon the same task,--to _understand and to

appreciate the totality of man's_ _experience_. They, therefore, have

essential and permanent relations of dependence for material, for

inspiration and correction, and for other forms of helpfulness. While,

then, their respective spheres have been more clearly delimited during

the last century, their interdependence has been more forcefully

exhibited. Both of them have been developing a systematic exposition of

the universe. Both of them desire to enlarge and deepen the conception

of the Being of the World, as made known to the totality of human

experience, in its Unity of nature and significance. We cannot believe

that the end of the nineteenth century would sustain the charge which

Fontenelle made in the closing years of the seventeenth century:

"_L'Académie des Sciences ne prend la nature que par petites

parcelles_." Science itself now bids us regard the Universe as a

dynamical Unity, teleologically conceived, because in a process of

evolution under the control of immanent ideas. Philosophy assumes the

same point of view, rather at the beginning than at the end of defining

its purpose; and so feels a certain glad leap at its heart-strings, and

an impulse to hold out the hand to science, when it hears such an

utterance as that of Poincaré: _Ce n'est pas le méchanisme le vrai, le

seul but; c'est l'unité_.

Shall we not say, then, that this double-faced but wholly true lesson

has been learned: namely, that the so-called philosophy of nature has no

sound foundation and no safeguard against vagaries of every sort, unless

it follows the lead of the positive sciences of nature; but that the

sciences themselves can never afford a full satisfaction to the

legitimate aspirations of human reason unless they, too, contribute to

the philosophy of nature--writ large and conceived of as a real-ideal

Unity.

That nature, as known and knowable by man, is a great artist, and that

man's æsthetical consciousness may be trusted as having a certain

ontological value, is the postulate properly derived from the

considerations advanced in the latest, and in some respects the most

satisfactory, of the three Critiques of Kant. The ideal way of looking

at natural phenomena which so delighted the mind of Goethe has now been

placed on broad and sound foundations by the fruitful industries of many

workmen,--such as Karl Ernst von Baer and Charles Darwin,--whose

morphological and evolutionary conceptions of the universe have

transformed the current conceptions of cosmic processes. But the world

of physical and natural phenomena has thereby been rendered not less,

but more, of a Cosmos, an orderly totality.

In addition to these more general but somewhat vague evaluations of the

progress of philosophy during the nineteenth century, we are certainly

called upon to face the question whether, after all, any advance has

been made toward the more satisfactory solution of the definite problems

which the Kantian criticism left unsolved. To this question I believe an

affirmative answer may be given in accordance with the facts of history.

It will be remembered that the first of these problems was the

epistemological. Certainly no little improvement has been made in the

psychology of cognition. We can no longer repeat the mistakes of Kant,

either with respect to the uncritical assumptions he makes regarding the

origin of knowledge in the so-called "faculties" of the human mind or

regarding the analysis of those faculties and their interdependent

relations. It is not the Scottish philosophy alone which has led to the

conclusion that, in the word of the late Professor Adamson, "What are

called acts or states of consciousness are _not_ rightly conceived of as

having for their objects their own modes of existence as ways in which a

subject is modified." And in the larger manner both science and

philosophy, in their negations and their affirmations, and even in their

points of view, have better grounds for the faith of human reason in its

power progressively to master the knowledge of Reality than was the case

a hundred years ago. Nor has the skepticism of the same era, whether by

shallow scoffing at repeated failures, or by pious sighs over the

limitations of human reason, or by critical analysis of the cognitive

faculties "according to well-established principles," succeeded in

limiting our speculative pretensions to the sphere of possible

experience,--in the Kantian meaning both of "principles" and of

"experience." But what both science and philosophy are compelled to

agree upon as a common underlying principle is this: The proof of the

most fundamental presuppositions, as well as of the latest more

scientifically established conclusions, of both science and philosophy,

is the assistance they afford in the satisfactory explanation of the

totality of racial experience.

In the evolution of the ontological problem, as compared with the form

in which it was left by the critical philosophy, the past century has

also made some notable advances. To deny this would be to discredit the

development of human knowledge so far as to say that we know no more

about what nature is, and man is, than was known a hundred years ago. To

say this, however, would not be to speak truth of fact. And here we may

not unnaturally grow somewhat impatient with that metaphysical fallacy

which places an impassable gulf between Reality and Experience. No

reality is, of course, cognizable or believable by man which does not

somehow show its presence in his total experience. But no growth of

experience is possible without involving increase of knowledge

representing Reality. For Reality is no absent and dead, or statical,

Ding-an-Sich. Cognition itself is a commerce of realities. And are there

not plain signs that the more thoughtful men of science are becoming

less averse to the recognition of the truth of ontological philosophy;

namely, that the deeper meaning of their own studies is grasped only

when they recognize that they are ever face to face with what they call

Energy and we call Will, and with what they call laws and we call Mind

as significant of the progressive realization of immanent ideas. This

Ultimate Reality is so profound that neither science nor philosophy will

ever sound all its depths, and so comprehensive as more than to justify

all the categories of both.

Probably, on the whole, there has been less progress made toward a

satisfactory solution of the problems offered by the value-judgments of

ethics and religion, in the form in which these problems were left by

the critical philosophy. The century has illustrated the truth of

Falckenberg's statement: "In periods which have given birth to a

skeptical philosophy, one never looks in vain for the complementary

phenomenon of mysticism." Twice during the century the so-called

"faith-philosophy," or philosophy of feeling, has been borne to the

front, to raise a bulwark against the advancing hosts of

agnostics--occasioned in the first period by the negations of the

Kantian criticism, and in the second by the positive conclusions of the

physical and biological sciences. This form of protesting against the

neglect or disparagement of important factors which belong to man's

æsthetical, ethical, and religious experience, is reasonable and must be

heard. But the extravagances with which these neglected factors have

been posited and appraised, to the neglect of the more definitively

scientific and strictly logical, is to be deplored. The great work

before the philosophy of the present age is the reconciliation of the

historical and scientific conceptions of the Universe with the

legitimate sentiments and ideals of art, morality, and religion. But

surely neither rationalism nor "faith-philosophy" is justified in

pouring out the living child with the muddy water of the bath.

IV. The attempt to survey the present situation of philosophy, and to

predict its immediate future, is embarrassed by the fact that we are all

immersed in it, are a part of its spirit and present form. But if

nearness has its embarrassments, it has also its benefits. Those who are

amidst the tides of life may know better, in a way, how these tides are

tending and what is their present strength, than do those who survey

them from distant, cool, and exalted heights. "_Für jeden einzelnen

bildet der Vater und der Sohn eine greifbare Kette von Lebensereignungen

und Erfahrungen._" The very intensely vital and formative but unformed

condition of systematic philosophy--its protoplasmic character--contains

promises of a new life. If we may believe the view of Hegel that the

systematizing of the thought of any age marks the time when the peculiar

living thought of that age is passing into a period of decay, we may

certainly claim for our present age the prospect of a prolonged

vitality.

The nineteenth century has left us with a vast widening of the

horizon,--outward into space, backward in time, inward toward the

secrets of life, and downward into the depths of Reality. With this

there has been an increase in the profundity of the conviction of the

spiritual unity of the race. In the consideration of all of its problems

in the immediate future and in the coming century--so far as we can see

forward into this century--philosophy will have to reckon with certain

marked characteristics of the human spirit which form at the same time

inspiring stimuli and limiting conditions of its endeavors and

achievements. Chief among these are the greater and more firmly

established principles of the positive sciences, and the prevalence of

the historical spirit and method in the investigation of all manner of

problems. These influences have given shape to the conception which,

although it is as yet by no means in its final or even in thoroughly

self-consistent form, is destined powerfully to affect our philosophical

as well as our scientific theories. This conception is that of

Development. But philosophy, considered as the product of critical and

reflective thinking over the more ultimate problems of nature and of

human life, is itself a development. And it is now, more than ever

before, a development interdependently connected with all the other

great developments.

Philosophy, in order to adapt itself to the spirit of the age, must

welcome and cultivate the freest critical inquiry into its own methods

and results, and must cheerfully submit itself to the demand for

evidences which has its roots in the common and essential experience of

the race. Moreover, the growth of the spirit of democracy, which, on the

one hand, is distinctly unfavorable to any system of philosophy whose

tenets and formulas seem to have only an academic validity or a merely

esoteric value, and which, on the other hand, requires for its

satisfaction a more tenable, helpful, and universally applicable theory

of life and reality, cannot fail, in my judgment, to influence favorably

the development of philosophy. In the union of the speculative and the

practical; in the harmonizing of the interests of the positive sciences,

with their judgments of fact and law, and the interests of art,

morality, and religion, with their value-judgments and ideals; in the

synthesis of the truths of Realism and Idealism, as they have existed

hitherto and now exist in separateness or antagonism; in a union that is

not accomplished by a shallow eclecticism, but by a sincere attempt to

base philosophy upon the totality of human experience;--in such a union

as this must we look for the real progress of philosophy in the coming

century.

Just now there seem to be two somewhat heterogeneous and not altogether

well-defined tendencies toward the reconstruction of systematic

philosophy, both of which are powerful and represent real truths

conquered by ages of intellectual industry and conflict. These two,

however, need to be internally harmonized, in order to obtain a

satisfactory statement of the development of the last century. They may

be called the evolutionary and the idealistic. The one tendency lays

emphasis on mechanism, the other on spirit. Yet it is most interesting

to notice how many of the early workmen in the investigation of the

principle of the conservation and correlation of energy took their point

of departure from distinctly teleological and spiritual conceptions. "I

was led," said Colding,--to take an extreme case,--at the Natural

Science Congress at Innsbruck, 1869, "to the idea of the constancy of

national forces by the religious conception of life." And even

Moleschott, in his _Autobiography_, posthumously published, declares: "I

myself was well aware that the whole conception might be converted; for

since all matter is a bearer of force, endowed with force or penetrated

with spirit, it would be just as correct to call it a spiritualistic

conception." On the other hand, the modern, better instructed Idealism

is much inclined, both from the psychological and from the more purely

philosophical points of view, to regard with duly profound respect all

the facts and laws of that mechanism of Reality, which certainly is not

merely the dependent construction of the human mind functioning

according to a constitution that excludes it from Reality, but is rather

the ever increasingly more trustworthy revealer of Reality. This

tendency to a union of the claims of both Realism and Idealism is

profoundly influencing the solution of each one of these problems which

the Kantian criticism left to the philosophy of the nineteenth century.

In respect of the epistemological problem, philosophy--as I have already

said--is not likely again to repeat the mistakes either of Kant or of

the dogmatism which his criticism so effectually overthrew. It was a

wise remark of the physician Johann Benjamin Erhard, in a letter dated

May 19, 1794, _à propos_ of Fichte: "The philosophy which _proceeds_

from a _single_ fundamental principle, and pretends to deduce everything

from it, is and always will remain a piece of artificial sophistry: only

that philosophy which _ascends_ to the highest principle and exhibits

everything else in perfect harmony with it, is the true one." This at

least ought--one would say--to have been made clear by the century of

discussion over the epistemological problem, since Kant. You cannot

_deduce_ the Idea from the Reality, or the Reality from the Idea. The

problem of knowledge is not, as Fichte held in the form of a fundamental

assumption, an alternative of this sort. The Idea _and_ Reality are, the

rather already there, and to be recognized as in a living unity, in

every cognitive experience. Psychology is constantly adding something

toward the problem of cognition as a problem in synthesis; and is then

in a way contributing to the better scientific understanding of the

philosophical postulate which is the confidence of human reason in its

ability, by the harmonious use of all its powers, progressively to reach

a better and fuller knowledge of Reality.

The ontological problem will necessarily always remain the unsolved, in

the sense of the very incompletely solved problem of philosophy. But as

long as human experience develops, and as long as philosophy bestows

upon experience the earnest and candid efforts of reflecting minds, the

solution of the ontological problem will be approached, but never fully

reached. That Being of the World which Kant, in the negative and

critical part of his work, left as an X, unknown and unknowable, the

last century has filled with a new and far richer content than it ever

had before. Especially has this century changed the conception of the

Unity of the Universe in such manner that it can never return again to

its ancient form. On the one hand, this Unity cannot be made

comprehensible in terms of any one scientific or philosophical principle

or law. Science and philosophy are both moving farther and farther away

from the hope of comprehending the variety and infinite manifoldness of

the Absolute in terms of any one side or aspect of man's complex

experience. But, on the other hand, the confidence in this essential

Unity is not diminished, but is the rather confirmed. As humanity itself

develops, as the Selfhood of man grows in the experience of the world

which is its own environment, and of the world within which it is its

own true Self, humanity may reasonably hope to win an increased, and

increasingly valid, cognition of the Being of the World as the Absolute

Self.

Closely connected, and in a way essentially identical with the

ontological problem, is that of the origin, validity, and rational value

of the ideas of humanity. May it not be said that the nineteenth century

transfers to the twentieth an increased interest in and a heightened

appreciation of the so-called practical problems of philosophy. Science

and philosophy certainly ought to combine--and are they not ready to

combine?--in the effort to secure a more nearly satisfactory

understanding and solution of the problems afforded by the æsthetical,

ethical, and religious sentiments and ideals of the race. To philosophy

this combination means that it shall be more fruitful than ever before

in promoting the uplift and betterment of mankind. The fulfillment of

the practical mission of philosophy involves the application of its

conceptions and principles to education, politics, morals, as a matter

of law and of custom, and to religion as matter both of rational faith

and of the conduct of life.

How, then, can this brief and imperfect sketch of the outline of the

development of philosophy in the nineteenth century better come to a

close than by words of encouragement and of exhortation as well. There

are, in my judgment, the plainest signs that the somewhat too

destructive and even nihilistic tendencies of the second and third

quarters of the nineteenth century have reached their limit; that the

strife of science and philosophy, and of both with religion, is

lessening, and is being rapidly displaced by the spirit of mutual

fairness and reciprocal helpfulness; and that reasonable hopes of a new

and a splendid era of reconstruction in philosophy may be entertained.

For I cannot agree with the _dictum_ of a recent writer on the subject,

that "the sciences are coming less and less to admit of a synthesis, and

not at all of a synthetic philosopher."

On the contrary, I hold that, with an increased confidence in the

capacity of human reason to discover and validate the most secret and

profound, as well as the most comprehensive, of truths, philosophy may

well put aside some of its shyness and hesitancy, and may resume more of

that audacity of imagination, sustained by ontological convictions,

which characterized its work during the first half of the nineteenth

century. And if the latter half of the twentieth century does for the

constructions of the first half of the same century, what the latter

half of the nineteenth century did for the first half of that century,

this new criticism will only be to illustrate the way in which the human

spirit makes every form of its progress.

Therefore, a summons of all helpers, in critical but fraternal spirit,

to this work of reconstruction, for which two generations of enormous

advance in the positive sciences has gathered new material, and for the

better accomplishment of which both the successes and the failures of

the philosophy of the nineteenth century have prepared the men of the

twentieth century, is the winsome and imperative voice of the hour.

SECTION A--METAPHYSICS

SECTION A--METAPHYSICS

(_Hall 6, September 21, 10 a. m._)

CHAIRMAN: PROFESSOR A. C. ARMSTRONG, Wesleyan University.

SPEAKERS: PROFESSOR A. E. TAYLOR, McGill University, Montreal.

PROFESSOR ALEXANDER T. ORMOND, Princeton University.

SECRETARY: PROFESSOR A. O. LOVEJOY, Washington University.

The Chairman of the Section, Professor A. C. Armstrong, of Wesleyan

University, in opening the meeting referred to the continued vitality of

metaphysics as shown by its repeated revivals after the many destructive

attacks upon it in the later modern times: he congratulated the Section

on the fact that the principal speakers were scholars who had made

notable contributions to metaphysical theory.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN METAPHYSICS AND THE OTHER SCIENCES

BY PROFESSOR ALFRED EDWARD TAYLOR

[Alfred Edward Taylor, Frothingham Professor of Philosophy,

McGill University, Montreal, Canada. b. Oundle, England,

December 22, 1869. M.A. Oxford. Fellow, Merton College,

Oxford, 1891-98, 1902-; Lecturer in Greek and Philosophy,

Owens College, Manchester, 1896-1903; Assistant Examiner to

University of Wales, 1899-1903; Green Moral Philosophy

Prizeman, Oxford, 1899; Frothingham Professor of Philosophy,

McGill University, 1903-; Member Philosophical Society,

Owens College, American Philosophical Association. Author of

_The Problem of Conduct_; _Elements of Metaphysics_.]

When we seek to determine the place of metaphysics in the general scheme

of human knowledge, we are at once confronted by an initial difficulty

of some magnitude. There seems, in fact, to be no one universally

accepted definition of our study, and even no very general consensus

among its votaries as to the problems with which the metaphysician ought

to concern himself. This difficulty, serious as it is, does not,

however, justify the suspicion that our science is, like alchemy or

astrology, an illusion, and its high-sounding title a mere "idol of the

market-place," one of those _nomina rerum quae non sunt_ against which

the Chancellor Bacon has so eloquently warned mankind. If it is hard to

determine precisely the scope of metaphysics, it is no less difficult to

do the same thing for the undoubtedly legitimate sciences of logic and

mathematics. And in all three cases the absence of definition merely

shows that we are dealing with branches of knowledge which are, so to

say, still in the making. It is not until the first principles of

science are already firmly laid beyond the possibility of cavil that we

must look for general agreement as to its boundary lines, though

excellent work may be done, long before this point has been reached, in

the establishment of individual principles and deduction of consequences

from them. To revert to the parallel cases I have just cited, many

mathematical principles of the highest importance are formulated in the

_Elements_ of Euclid, and many logical principles in the _Organon_ of

Aristotle; yet it is only in our own time that it has become possible to

offer a general definition either of logic or of mathematics, and even

now it would probably be true to say that the majority of logicians and

mathematicians trouble themselves very little about the precise

definition of their respective studies.

The state of our science then compels me to begin this address with a

more or less arbitrary, because provisional, definition of the term

metaphysics, for which I claim no more than that it may serve to

indicate with approximate accuracy the class of problems which I shall

have in view in my subsequent use of the word. By metaphysics, then, I

propose to understand the inquiry which used formerly to be known as

ontology, that is, the investigation into the general character which

belongs to real Being as such, the science, in Aristotelian phraseology,

of onta hê onta. Or, if the term "real" be objected against as

ambiguous, I would suggest as an alternative account the statement that

metaphysics is the inquiry into the general character by which the

content of _true_ assertions is distinguished from that of _false_

assertions. The two definitions here offered will, I think, be found

equivalent when it is borne in mind that what the second of them speaks

of is exclusively the _content_ which is asserted as true in a true

proposition, not the process of true assertion, which, like all other

processes in the highest cerebral centres, falls under the consideration

of the vastly different sciences of psychology and cerebral physiology.

Of the two equivalent forms of statement, the former has perhaps the

advantage of making it most clear that it is ultimately upon the

objective distinction between the reality and the unreality of that

which is asserted for truth, and not upon any psychological peculiarity

in the process of assertion itself that the distinction between true and

untrue rests, while the second may be useful in guarding against

misconceptions that might be suggested by too narrow an interpretation

of the term "reality," such as, _e. g._, the identification of the

"real" with what is revealed by sensuous perception.