PRAGMATISM AND ANGLO-HEGELIAN RATIONALISM
The form of Anglo-German Rationalism or Intellectualism which I shall
venture to select for the purposes of consideration from the point
of view of Pragmatism and Humanism is the first volume of the recent
_Gifford Lectures_ of Dr. Bernard Bosanquet, who has long been regarded
by the philosophical public of Great Britain as one of the most
characteristic members of a certain section of our Neo-Hegelian school.
I shall first give the barest outline of the argument and contentions
of “The Principle of Individuality and Value,” and then venture upon
some paragraphs of what shall seem to me to be relevant criticism.
Dr. Bosanquet’s initial position is a conception of philosophy, and
its task which is for him and his book final and all-determining.
To him Philosophy is (as it is to some extent to Hegel) “logic” or
“the spirit of totality.” It is “essentially of the concrete and the
whole,” as Science is of the “abstract and the part.” Although the
best thing in life is not necessarily “philosophy,” philosophy in
this sense of “logic” is the clue to “reality and value and freedom,”
the key to everything, in short, that we can, or that we should, or
that we actually do desire and need. It [philosophy] is “a rendering
in coherent thought of what lies at the heart of actual life and
love.” His next step is to indicate “the sort of things,” or the sort
of “experiences,” or the sort of “facts” that philosophy needs as its
material, if it would accomplish its task as “universal logic.” This he
does (1) negatively, by the rejection of any form of “immediateness,”
or “simple apprehension,” such as the “solid fact,” the “sense of
being,” or the “unshareable self” of which we sometimes seem to
hear, or such as the “naïve ideas” of “compensating justice,”[326]
“ethics[327] which treats the individual as isolated” and
“teleology”[328] as “guidance by finite minds,” as the data (or as part
of the data) of philosophy; and (2) positively, by declaring that his
subject-matter throughout will be “the principle of ‘individuality,’
of ‘self-completeness,’ as the clue to reality.” This “individuality”
or “self-completeness” is then set forth in a quasi-Platonic manner as
the “universal,” the real “universal” being (he insists) the “concrete
universal,” the “whole,” that is to say, “the logical system of
connected members,” that is to him the “ideal of all thought.” We must
think of this “individuality,” therefore, either as “a living world,
complete and acting out of itself, a positive, self-moulding cosmos,”
or “as a definite _striving of the universe_”[!][329]
The next question (so far as our partial purposes are concerned) that
Dr. Bosanquet asks is, “What help do we get from the notion of a
‘mind’ which ‘purposes’ or ‘desires’ things in appreciating the work
of factors in the universe, or of the universe as [_ex-hypothesi_]
self-directing and self-experiencing whole?” The answer is spread
over several chapters, and is practically this, that although there
is undoubtedly a “teleology” in the universe (in the shape of the
“conjunctions and results of the co-operation of men,” or of “the
harmony of geological and biological evolution”), and although “minds
such as ours play a part in the work of direction, we cannot judge of
this work in question in any human manner.” The real test of teleology
or value is “wholeness,” “completeness,” “individuality” [the topic
of the book], and it is made quite clear that it is the “Absolute”
who is “real” and “individual” _and not we_. We are, indeed, in our
lives “_carried to the Absolute without a break_,”[330] and our
nature “_is only in process of being communicated to us_.”[331] “We
should not think of ourselves after the pattern of separate things
or personalities in the legal sense, nor even as selves in the sense
of isolation and exclusion of others.” “Individuality” being this
“logical self-completeness,” there can be only one “Individual,” and
this one Individual is the one criterion of “value,” or “reality,”
or “existence,” “importance” and “_reality_ [!]” being sides of
the one “characteristic” [_i.e._ “thinkableness” as a whole]. Dr.
Bosanquet confesses in his seventh chapter that this idea of his of
“individuality,” or “reality,” is essentially the Greek idea that it
is only the “whole nature” of things that gives them their reality or
value.
We are then assured, towards the close of this remarkable book, that
“freedom” (the one thing that we mortals value as the greatest of all
“goods”) is “_the inherent effort of mind considered as a [!] world_,
and that the ”Absolute“ [the ”universal” of logic, Plato’s “Idea”] is
the “high-water mark of our effort,” and that each “self” is “more
like _a rising and a falling tide_ than an isolated pillar with a
fixed circumference.” The great fact of the book, the fact upon which
its accomplished author rests when he talks in his Preface of his
belief, “that in the main the work [of philosophy] has been done,” is
the daily “transmutation of experience according to the level of the
mind’s energy and self-completeness,” the continued and the continuous
“self-interpretation [of ‘experience’] through the fundamental
principle of individuality.”
Now it is quite obvious that according to many of the considerations
that have been put forward as true in the foregoing chapters, this
philosophy of Dr. Bosanquet’s which treats the “concept,” or the
“universal” as an end in itself (as the _one answer_ to all possible
demands for a “teleology”) and as an “individual,” “_a perfected and
self-perfecting [!] individual_,” can be regarded as but another
instance of the abstract Rationalism against which Pragmatism and
Humanism have entered their protests. It is untrue, therefore, to the
real facts of knowledge and the real facts of human nature. It will be
sufficient to state that the considerations of which we are thinking
are (in the main) the positions that have been taken in respect
of such things as: (1) the claim that a true metaphysic must serve
not merely as an intellectual “system” but as a “dynamic,” and as a
“motive” for action and achievement; (2) the fact of the “instrumental”
character of thought and of ideas, and of all systems (of science or
of philosophy or of politics) that fail to include as part of their
data the various ideals of mankind; (3) the idea that all truth and
all thought imply a belief in the existence of objects and persons
independent of the mere mental states or activities of the thinking
individual, and that belief rather than knowledge is, and always has
been, man’s fundamental and working estimate of reality; (4) the fact
that our human actions and re-actions upon reality are a part of what
we mean by “reality,” and that these actions and re-actions of ours
are real and not imaginary; (5) the attitude in general of Pragmatism
to Rationalism; (6) the various concessions that have been made by
representative rationalists to the pragmatist movement.
Dr. Bosanquet’s theory of reality has already impressed some of
his most competent critics as utterly inadequate as a motive or an
incentive to the efforts and endeavours of men as we know them in
history and in actual life, and we shall immediately return to this
topic. And although there are many signs in his Lectures that he is
himself quite aware of the probability of such an impression, his
book proceeds upon the even tenor of its way, following wherever his
argument may lead him, irrespective entirely of the truth contained
in the facts and the positions we have just recounted and reaffirmed.
It lends itself, therefore, only too naturally to our present use
of it as a highly instructive presentation of many, or most, of the
tendencies of Rationalism and Intellectualism, against which Pragmatism
and Humanism would fain protest. At the same time there is in it, as we
hope to show, a fundamental element[332] of truth and of fact without
which there could be no Pragmatism and no Humanism, and indeed no
philosophy at all.
A broad, pervading inconsistency[333] in “Individuality and Value”
which militates somewhat seriously against the idea of its being
regarded as a tenable philosophy, is the obvious one between the
position (1) that true reality is necessarily individual, and the
position (2) that reality is to be found in the “universal” (or the
“concept”) of logic.[334] It would, however, perhaps be unfair to
expect Dr. Bosanquet to effect a harmony between these two positions
that Aristotle (who held them both) was himself very largely unable to
do. There is, in other words, a standing and a lasting contradiction
between any and all philosophy which holds that it is _reason_ [or
_logic_] _alone that attains to truth_ and reality, and the apparently
natural and inevitable tendency of the human mind [it is represented
in Dr. Bosanquet’s own procedure] to seek after “reality” in the
“individual” thing, or person, or being, and in the perfecting of
“individuality” in God (or in a kingdom of perfected individuals).
The positive errors, however, which we would venture to refer to as
even more fatal to Dr. Bosanquet’s book than any of its incidental
inconsistencies are those connected with the following pieces of
procedure on his part: (1) his manifest tendency to treat the
“universal” as if it were an entity on its own account with a sort of
development and “value” and “culmination” of its own;[335] (2) his
tendency to talk and think as if a “characteristic” or a “predicate”
(_i.e._ the “characteristic” or “quality” that some experiencing being
or some thinker attributes to reality) could be treated as anything
at all _apart from the action and the reaction of this “experient”_
(or “thinker”) _conceived as an agent_; (3) the tendency to talk of
“minds”[336] _rather than persons_, as “purposing” and “desiring”
things; (4) his tendency to talk as if “teleology” were “wholeness”;
(5) his tendency to regard (somewhat in the manner of Spinoza) “selves”
and “persons” as like “rising and falling tides,” and of the self as a
“world of content”[337] engaged in certain “transformations”; and (6)
his tendency to think and speak _as if demonstration_ [“mediation” is
perhaps his favourite way of thinking of the logical process] _were an
end in itself, as if we lived to think, instead of thinking to live_.
In opposition to all this it may be affirmed firstly that every
“conception” of the human mind is but the more or less clear
consciousness of a _disposition to activity_, and is representative,
not so much of the “features” of objects which might appear to be
their “characteristics” from a purely theoretical point of view, as of
the different ways in which objects have seemed to men to subserve
the needs of their souls and bodies. The study of the development of
the “concept” in connexion with the facts of memory and with the slow
evolution of language, and with the “socialized percepts” of daily life
will all tend to confirm this position. The phenomena of religion,
for example, and all the main concepts of all the religions are to be
studied _not merely as intellectual phenomena_, as solutions of some of
the many difficulties of modern Agnosticism, or of modern Rationalism,
or of modern Criticism, but as an expressive of the _modes of behaviour
of human beings_ (with all their needs and all their ideals) towards
the universe in which they find themselves, and towards the various
beings, seen and unseen, which this universe symbolises to them. These
phenomena and these conceptions are unintelligible, in short, apart
from the various activities and cults and social practices and social
experiences and what not, with which they have dealt from first to last.
Then it is literally impossible to separate in the manner of Dr.
Bosanquet the “predicate” of thought from the active relations
sustained by things towards each other, or towards the human beings who
seek to interpret these active relations for any or for all “purposes,”
Dr. Bosanquet’s idea, however, of the relation of “mind” to “matter,”
to use these _symbols_ for the nonce (for they are but such), is in
the main purely “representational”[338] or intellectualistic.[339] To
him “mind” seems to reflect either a “bodily content” or some other
kind of “content”[340] that seems to exist for a “spectator” of the
world, or for the “Absolute,” _rather than for the man himself as an
agent_, who of course _uses_ his memories of himself, or his “ideal” of
himself, _for renewed effort and activity_. One of the most important
consequences of this unduly intellectualistic view of mind is that Dr.
Bosanquet seems (both theoretically and practically) unable to see the
place of “mind,” as “purpose,” in ordinary life,[341] or of the place
of mind in evolution,[342] giving us in his difficult but important
chapter on the “relation of mind and body” a version of things that
approaches only too perilously close to Parallelism or Dualism, or
even to Materialism.[343] And along with this quasi-“representational”
or “copy-like” theory of mind there are to be associated his
representational and intellectualistic views of the “self”[344] and
the “universal”[345] and “spirit.”[346]
There are, doubtless, hints in Dr. Bosanquet’s pages of a more
“dynamic” view of mind or of a deeper view[347] than this merely
“representational” view, but they are not developed or worked into the
main portion of his argument, which they would doubtless very largely
transform. This is greatly to be regretted, for we remember that even
Hegel seemed to notice the splitting-up of the real for our human
purposes which takes place in the ordinary judgment. And of course, as
we have noticed, all “purpose” is practical and theoretical at one and
the same time.
Then, thirdly, it is persons, and not “minds,” who desire and purpose
things, “mind” being a concept invented by the spectator of activity
in a person other than himself, which (from the analogy of his own
conscious activity and experience) he believes to be purposive.[348]
Dr. Bosanquet’s use, too, of the expression “mind” invariably
leaves out of the range of consideration the phenomena of desire
and volition--intelligible, both of them, only by reference to an
end that is to be understood from within, and not from outside of
the personality, from the point of view of the mere spectator. The
phenomena of desire and volition are just as integral ingredients of
our lives as persons as are our cognitive states.
Fourthly, it is doubtful whether the treatment of teleology as
“wholeness” (or its sublimation in “Individuality and Value” into
“wholeness”) is much of an explanation of this difficult topic, or
indeed whether it is any explanation at all. Dr. Bosanquet, in fact,
confesses that teleology is a conception which “_loses its distinctive
meaning_ as we deepen its philosophical interpretation, and that it has
very little meaning when applied to the universe as a whole” [a thing
that is apparent to any Kantian student]. “It is impossible seriously,”
he says, “to treat a mind _which is the universe_[!] as a workman of
limited resources, aiming at some things and obliged to accept others
as means to these.” And it is equally impossible, he holds, to apply
“to the universe” the distinction of “what is purpose for its own sake
and what is not so.” In fact, Dr. Bosanquet’s treatment of teleology is
thus mainly negative, as including not only this rejection[349] of the
notion in reference to the “universe as a whole,” but its rejection,
too, in reference to the purposes of our human life;[350] although he
admits (as of course he must) that the conception of end or purpose
is drawn from some of the features (“the simplest features,” he says)
of our “finite life,” or “finite consciousness.” If the notion were
“to be retained at all,” he says, “it could only be a name for some
principle which would help to tell us what has _value quite independent
of being or not being, the purpose of some mind_.”[351] Now, of course,
according to the Pragmatism and Humanism that we have been considering
in this book, no intelligent person could take any conceivable interest
in such a useless fancy as a teleology of this kind. Thus teleology is
really blotted out altogether of existence in this volume, and with its
disappearance there must go also the notion of any value that might be
intelligibly associated with the idea of the attainment of purposes or
ends by the human beings with whom we are acquainted in our ordinary
daily life.
We shall below[352] refer to the fact that this rejection of teleology
and value is one that must be regarded as fatal to ethics or to
Absolutism in the realm of ethics. It requires, too, to be added here
that even the most unprejudiced reading of Dr. Bosanquet’s work must
create in the mind of the reader the conviction that its author is
altogether unfair to the views of those who believe in the existence
of definite manifestations of purpose in human life.[353] He talks as
if those who uphold this idea or this fact are committed either to the
absurd notion that man is “the end of the universe,” or to the equally
absurd notion that “art, thought, society, history, in which mind
begins to transcend its finiteness should be ascribed to the directive
abilities of units in a plurality, precisely apart from the world
content and the underlying solidarity of spirits, the medium through
which all great things are done.”
With a view of bringing our discussion of these striking _Gifford
Lectures_ within the scope of the general subject of this book
the following might be regarded as their leading, fundamental
characteristics to which the most serious kind of exception might well
be taken: (1) its “abstractionism”[354] and its general _injustice to
fact_ due to its initial and persistent “conviction”[355] [strange to
say, this is the very word used by Bosanquet] that the real movement
in things is a “logical” movement; (2) its fallacious conception of
the task of philosophy as mainly the obligation to think the world
“without contradiction”; (3) its obvious tendency in the direction
of the “subjective idealism”[356] that has been the bane of so much
modern philosophy and that is discarded altogether[357] by Pragmatism
and Humanism; (4) its retention of many of the characteristic
polemical[358] faults of Neo-Hegelianism and its manifestation of
a similar spirit of polemical unfairness[359] on the part of their
accomplished author; (5) its implication in several really hopeless
contradictions in addition to the broad contradiction already referred
to; (6) its failure [a common Neo-Hegelian failing] to do justice to
the spirit and (in certain important regards) the letter of Kant; (7)
its essential non-moralism or its apparently anti-ethical character.
As for the first of these charges, the “abstractionism” of
“Individuality and Value,” coming as it does on the top of the general
perversity of the book, is really a very disastrous thing for
philosophy. While we may pardon an enthusiastic literary Frenchman[360]
for saying that, “_The fact is, you see, that a fine book is the
end for which the world was made_,” there is hardly any excuse for
a philosopher like Dr. Bosanquet coming before the world with the
appearance of believing that the richly differentiated universe that
we know only in part, exists for the benefit of the science that he
represents, for the dialectic of the metaphysician, to enable the
“universal” to “become more differentiated” and “more individualized,”
to become “more representative” _of the “whole.”_[361] We might
compare, says Dr. Bosanquet, in a striking and an enthralling[362]
passage, “the Absolute to Dante’s mind as uttered in the _Divine
Comedy_ ... as including in a single, whole poetic experience a
world of space and persons, ... things that, to any ordinary mind,
fall apart.” Now even apart from the highly interesting question
of the manifestly great and far-reaching influence of Dante over
Dr. Bosanquet, and apart, too, from the notable modesty of Dr.
Bosanquet’s confession as to the “imperfect” character of the simile
just reproduced, no one to-day can think of attaching any ultimate
importance to “Dante’s mind” without thinking of the extent to which
this truly great man[363] was under the influence, not only of his
own passions and of the general “problem” of his own life, but of
such specialized influences as, for example (1) the mediaeval dualism
between the City of God and the Empire of the World, (2) Aristotle’s
unfortunate separation of the “intellectual” and the “practical”
virtues, (3) the evil as well as the good of the dogmatic theology of
the fathers of the Church. Goethe is of infinitely more value to us
men of the twentieth century than Dante. And one of the very things
Goethe is most calculated to teach us is precisely this very matter of
the limitations of the cultural ideal of the Middle Ages and of the
entire Renaissance period that succeeded it.[364] We should never,
therefore, think for a moment of taking Dr. Bosanquet’s intellectual
abstractionism about the “universal” literally without thinking at the
same time of its limitations, and of its sources in Plato and in Hegel
and in Neo-Hegelian rationalism, and of remembering with Hegel himself,
“after all, the movement of the notion _is a sort of illusion_.”
Then, secondly, to attempt to think in philosophy or any other science
_merely in accordance with the Principle of “Non-Contradiction”_ will
never[365] take us beyond the few initial positions of fact or of
principle (God, “substance,” pure being, matter, identity, final cause,
freedom, force, the will, the idea a perfect being, or what not) with
which we happen for one reason or another to start in our reflections.
Nor will this procedure account, of course, for these initial
assumptions or facts.
Thirdly, in virtue of its implication in the “solipsism” and the
“representationalism” of Subjective Idealism, Dr. Bosanquet’s
“Absolute” is inferior (both so far as fact and theory are concerned)
to the Pluralism and the possible Theism of Pragmatism and Humanism to
which we have already made partial references.[366]
Fourthly, it is only natural that, on account of these, its many
polemical mannerisms, “Individuality and Value” has already made upon
some of its critics the impression of being a book that refuses to see
things as they are--in the interests of their forced adaptation to the
purposes of a preconceived philosophical theory.
Fifthly, there is certainly a sufficient number of contradictions
in “Individuality and Value” to prevent it from being regarded as
a consistent and a workable (_i.e._ really explanatory) account of
our experience as we actually know it. Of these contradictions we
think the following may well be enumerated here: (1) That between Dr.
Bosanquet’s professed principle of accepting as real only that which is
“mediated” or established by proof, and the arbitrariness he displays
in announcing convictions like the following: “That what really matters
is not the preservation of separate minds as such, but the qualities
and achievement which, as trustees of the universe, they elicit from
the resources assigned them.” (2) The contradiction between his belief
in the conservation of “values” without the conservation of the
existence of the individuals who “elicit” these “values,” or who are,
as he puts it, the “trustees” for the “universe.” (3) That between what
he logically wants (his “concrete individual”) and what he gives us
(an impersonal “system”). (4) The contradiction between the completed
personal life in God (or in a perfected society of individuals) that
most of us (judging from the great religions of the world) want as
human beings, and the impersonal “conceptual” experience of his book.
(5) The contradiction that exists between his intellectualism and
his commendable belief in “great convictions” and “really satisfying
emotions and experiences.” (6) The standing contradiction between his
“solipsistic” view of reality (his reduction of the universe to the
conceptual experience of a single self-perfecting individual), and the
facts of history in support of the idea of the “new,” or the “creative”
character of the contributions of countless individuals and groups of
individuals, to the evolution of the life of the world, or the life
of the infinite number of worlds that make up what we think of as the
universe. (7) The remarkable contradiction between Dr. Bosanquet’s
calm rejection in his argumentation of all “naïve ideas” and his own
naïve or Greek-like faith in reason, in the substantial existence of
the concept or the idea over and above the phenomena and the phenomenal
experiences which it is used to intepret.
Lastly, as for the matter of the _non-moralism or the essentially
anti-ethical character of_ “Individuality and Value,” this is a
characteristic of the book that should, as such, be partly apparent
from what has already been said, in respect of its main argument and
its main contentions, and in respect of the apparent contributions of
Pragmatism and Humanism to philosophy generally. The abstractionism
of the book, and the absence in it of any real provision for the
realities of purpose and of accomplishment (and even of “movement” and
“process” in any real sense of these words), are all obviously against
the interests of ethics and of conduct, as purposive, human action. So,
too, are the findings of the critics that Dr. Bosanquet’s “Absolute” is
not a reality (for, with Professor Taylor and others, man _must_[367]
have an Absolute, or a God, in _whom he can believe as real_) that
inspires to action and to motive on the part of ordinary human beings.
And it is also fatal to the ethical interests of his book that he does
not see with the pragmatists that our human actions and reactions must
be regarded as part of what we mean by “reality.” And so on.
Apart, however, from these and other hostile pre-suppositions the
following would seem to be the chief reasons for pronouncing, as
unsatisfactory, the merely incidental treatment that is accorded in
“Individuality and Value” to ethics and to the ethical life.
(1) It is not “conduct” or the _normative_[368] voluntary actions of
human beings (in a world or society of real human beings) requiring
“justice” and “guidance” and “help” that is discussed in these
Lectures, but abstractions like “desire,” or “ordinary desire,” or
“the selective conations of finite minds,” or “the active form of a
totality of striving” or [worst of all] the “self _as it happens to
be_,” that are discussed there.
(2) Even if conduct, as of course an “organic totality” in its way,
be faced for the nonce in “Individuality and Value,” it is invariably
branded and thought of by Dr. Bosanquet as “naïve morality,”[369] and
it is forthwith promptly transformed and transmuted, in the most open
and unabashed manner in the interests and exigencies of (1) logical
theory, (2) aesthetics and aesthetic products [perhaps Dr. Bosanquet’s
deepest or most emotional interest], and (3) metaphysical theory of a
highly abstract character.
(3) The conception of ethics as a “normative science” and of conduct as
free and autonomous,[370] and as the voluntary affirmation of a norm or
standard or type or ideal, is conspicuous by its absence.
(4) There is really no place either in Dr. Bosanquet’s “concrete
universal” or in his fugitive pages upon ethics for the reality of the
distinction between good and evil (as “willed” in actions or as present
in dispositions and tendencies). Good and evil[371] are for him,
“contents” either for himself as a spectator of man’s actions, or for
the “concrete universal,” or the “whole,” or the completed “individual”
of his too consummate book.
(5) Like nearly all forms of Absolutism (Hegelianism, Neo-Hegelianism,
Spinozism, Hobbism) Dr. Bosanquet’s ethics (or the vestigial ethics
with which he leaves us) comes perilously near to what is known as
Determinism[372] or Fatalism or even Materialism.
As for the first of the preceding five points, it is perfectly evident
that any discussion of the various psychological phenomena that are
doubtless involved in conduct can be regarded as but a preliminary step
to the discussion of the real problems of ethics--that of the actions
and habits and standards of persons who are the subjects of rights
and duties and who affirm certain actions to be right, and certain
other actions to be wrong. The point, however, about Dr. Bosanquet’s
psychological abstractionism, especially when it rises to the height
of writing as if the “self” as the “active form of a totality of
striving,” or the “self as it happens to be,” were the same thing
as the “personal self” with which we alone are mainly concerned in
ethics, is that it is but another instance of the old “spectator”[373]
fallacy that we have already found to underlie his whole treatment
of the “self” and of “purpose” and of “striving.” Such a philosophy,
or point of view, is quite foreign to ethics, because it is only in
the ethical life that we think of ourselves as “persons,” as beings
playing a part, as actors or players upon the great stage of life. By
not facing the ethical life directly, from within, instead of from
without, Dr. Bosanquet has entirely failed to understand it. And if he
had attempted this internal consideration of “personality,” his whole
metaphysic of “individuality” and of the great society of beings who
inhabit (or who may be thought of as inhabiting) this universe, would
have been very different from what it is.
Then as for the second and third points, it is surely evident from the
footnotes that have been appended in connexion with the matter of his
transformation of the facts of ethics in the interests of other things
like logic, and aesthetics, and metaphysics, that there is indeed,
in Bosanquet, no recognition of what must be called the genuine, or
independent reality of the moral life, or of the moral ideal as a
force in human nature. And as for the fourth point, students of modern
ethics are naturally by this time perfectly familiar with the tendency
of Rationalism to make evil action and the “evil self” simply the
affirmation of a “logically incoherent” point of view. It exists in an
English writer like Wollaston[374] as well as in a German philosopher
like Hegel. This tendency is indeed a piece of sophistry and illusion
because the distinction between good and evil, and the distinction
between right and wrong (perhaps the better and the more crucial
formulation of the two--for us moderns at least) is unintelligible
apart from the fact or the idea of the existence of moral agents, who
make (in their volition, and in the judgments that accompany or precede
their volitions) a “norm,” or rule, or line between the ethically
permissible and the ethically unpermissible. The rationalism that makes
these distinctions merely a matter of “logic,” overlooks the fact that
in actual life men must be warded off from wrong-doing (and they are
in many cases actually so warded off by their consciences and by other
things, like the love of home, or the love of honour, or the love of
God) by something stronger than the mere idea of a possible theoretical
mistake.
As for the fifth point of the Determinism or the Necessitarianism that
hangs like a sword of Damocles over the entire ethic of Dr. Bosanquet,
the nature of this should be perfectly apparent from many of the
statements and considerations that have been brought forward as typical
of his entire line of thought. He teaches a “passivism”[375] and an
“intellectualism” that are just as pronounced and just as essential to
his thought as they are to the great system of his master, Hegel, in
whose ambitious philosophy of spirit man’s whole destiny is unfolded
without the possibility of his playing himself any appreciable part in
the impersonal, dialectic movement in which it is made to consist.
It is now necessary to speak definitely and outspokenly of the
element of supreme truth and value in Dr. Bosanquet’s unique book,
of the positive contribution it makes to philosophy and to natural
theology.[376] This is, in a word, its tribute to the permanent element
of truth and reality in the idealistic philosophy. And he testifies
to this in his _“belief” that in the main the work of philosophy has
been done_, and “that what is now needed is to recall and concentrate
the modern mind from its distraction rather than to invent wholly new
theoretic conceptions.” This declaration is of itself a position of
considerable importance, however widely one is obliged to differ from
its author as to what exactly it is that has already been demonstrated
and accomplished “in philosophy.” If there has really been “nothing
done” in philosophy since the time of Socrates, if philosophy is
to-day no true antithesis of, and corrective to science, then there
is possible neither Pragmatism, nor Humanism, nor any other, possibly
more fundamental, philosophy. There can, as Dr. Bosanquet puts it,
“indeed be _no progress if no definite ground is ever to be recognized
as gained_.” This then is the first thing of transcendent importance
in “Individuality and Value,” its insistance upon the fundamentally
different estimate of reality given by philosophy in distinction
from science and its merely hypothetical treatment of reality. This
“difference” is, of course, but natural, seeing that to philosophy
there are no things or phenomena without minds, or persons or beings to
whom they appear as things and phenomena.
The second great thing of “Individuality and Value” is its insistence
upon the need to all philosophy of a recognized grasp of the principle
of “Meaning.”[377] What this instance implies to Dr. Bosanquet is,
that “_at no point in our lives_ [either] as [agents or] thinkers
are we to accept any supposed element of fact or circumstance as
having _any significance_” apart from the great “whole” or the great
“reality,” with which we believe ourselves to be in contact in our
daily experience, when interpreted in the light of our consciousness
of ourselves as persons. In the letter of the book his interpretation
of the great “whole,” or the great reality, of life is by no means
as broad and as deep as the one at which we have just hinted in
attempting to describe his position. But overriding altogether the
mere intellectualism of Dr. Bosanquet’s interpretation, is the fact
of the _dynamic idealism_ for which he virtually stands,[378] in
virtue of the great and the simple effort of his lectures[379] to find
“value” in “our daily experience with its _huge obstinate plurality of
independent facts_.” He would start, as we mentioned (at the beginning
of this chapter), with what he believes to be “the daily transformation
of our experience as verified within what we uncritically take as our
private consciousness, so far as its weakness may permit,” and “as
verified on a larger scale when we think of _such splendid creations as
the State and fine art and religion_,” and when we think, too, of “_the
mode of our participation in them_.” Now again nothing could indeed be
more nobly true (in idea) of the great work of the philosopher than the
proper theory and description of this “daily transformation” of our
lives, out of the life of “sense” and the life of selfishness, into the
spiritual communion[380] that is the essence of all right thinking and
all right living.
But we may go further than all this and signalize one or two things
in Dr. Bosanquet that we venture to construe as a kind of unconscious
testimony, on his part, to the very humanism for which we have been
contending throughout.
The things to which we refer are, firstly, his use of the word
“belief”[381] in speaking of his opinion that the work of philosophy
has in the main been accomplished, and, second, his fine and really
praiseworthy[382] confession that his lectures, whatever they may
have done or may not have done, at least “contain the record of a very
strong conviction.” Dr. Bosanquet’s departure, in the letter of his
argumentation, from the spirit of these declarations only accentuates
what we regard as the regrettable failure and abstractionism of his
whole official (or professed) philosophy.
His use of the word belief[383] shows that it is, after all his
professional homage to “mediation” and to the necessary abstractions
of logic and system, _belief and not knowledge_ that is to him the
final and “working” estimate of truth and of reality. And the same
conclusion follows from the second matter of the confession of which
we have spoken, that his entire argumentation is but the expression of
a strong conviction.[384] It is again, therefore, we would insist a
_spiritual conviction_, and not a conceptual system that is actually
and necessarily the moving force of _his_ entire intellectual activity.
And, we would add to his own face, it is a conviction moreover that
“_works_,” and not a “logical whole” or a mere conceptual ideal, that
he must (as a philosopher) engender in the mind of his average reader
about reality. His “logical whole” and his “individuality as logical
completeness,” “work” with him [Professor Bosanquet] for the reason
that he is primarily an intellectual worker, a worker in the realm of
mind. But reality (as the whole world of human work and human effort
is there to tell us) is more than an intellectual system. And what is
a conviction to him is not necessarily a conviction that works with
the ordinary man, who knows reality better than he does, or who knows
it (like himself) in his desires and in his beliefs rather than in the
terms and conceptions that are the mere tools of the intellect and the
specialist. For, taking his book as a whole, we may say about it that
the dissolution of reality into a conceptual system that is effected
there is at best but another convincing proof of the truth of the
words of the great David Hume,[385] that the understanding, “_when it
acts alone_, and according to its most general principles, _entirely
subverts itself_, and leaves not the slightest degree of evidence in
any proposition, either in philosophy or common life.”
NOTE
It is necessary for me to append a few words as to the possible
connexion between the foregoing criticism of the first volume of Dr.
Bosanquet’s _Gifford Lectures_ and the subject-matter of the second
volume, which appeared while I was preparing the manuscript of this
book for the press. I have been able only to inspect its contents
and to inform myself about the ways in which it has impressed some
of its representative critics. What I have thus learned does not,
in my opinion, make it necessary for me to unsay or to rewrite what
I have said in this chapter. My desire was to indicate the kind
of criticism that the pragmatists and the humanists, as far as I
understand them, would be inclined to make of Absolutism as represented
in the _Principle of Individuality and Value_ as the last significant
Anglo-Hegelian output. This, I think, I have done, and the reader may
be desirably left to himself to settle the question of the relation
of the first of Dr. Bosanquet’s books to its companion volume that
appeared in the following calendar year. I cannot, however, be so
wilfully blind to the existence of this second great “Gifford” book
of his as to appear to ignore the fact, that on its very face and
surface it seems to do many of the things that I have allowed myself
to signalize as things that Absolutism and Anglo-Hegelianism have not
done, or have done but imperfectly. Its very title, _The Value and
Destiny of the Individual_, and the titles of many of its chapters,
and the reception accorded to it in such instructive reviews as
those of Professor Sir Henry Jones and Professor Muirhead (in the
July numbers of the _Hibbert Journal_ and _Mind_ respectively),
are to my mind convincing proof that it is by far the most serious
Anglo-Hegelian attempt of the passing generation to deal with many of
the objections that have been brought against Rationalistic Idealism
by the pragmatists and the voluntarists, by the defenders of faith and
feeling and experience, and (before all these recent people) by many
independent idealist writers of our time in England and elsewhere.
In the interest of truth and of the thinking public generally, I
append the mere titles of some of the chapters and divisions of Dr.
Bosanquet’s second volume: “The Value of Personal Feeling, and the
Grounds of the Distinctness of Persons,” “The Moulding of Souls,” “The
Miracle of Will,” the “Hazards and Hardships of Finite Selfhood,”
the “Stability and Security of Finite Selfhood,” “The Religious
Consciousness,” “The Destiny of the Finite Self,” “The Gates of the
Future.” There is in all the rich content that is thus indicated,
and in all the high and deep discussion of “the ideas of a lifetime”
that it includes, a veritable mine of philosophical reflection
for the reader who desires to think in a connected, or Hegelian,
manner about things--a mine, too, that is at least indicative of the
wide territory both of fact and of principle upon which pragmatist
philosophy must enter before it can become a true philosophy. I cannot
find, however--this was surely not to be expected in a thinker of Dr.
Bosanquet’s power--that the principles of argumentation that determined
the nature and contents of the earlier volume have undergone any
modification in its success or successor; indeed, what is here offered,
and discovered by the reader and the critics, is but a continuation and
application of the same dialectic principles to “finite beings, that
is, in effect to human souls.” If any one will take upon himself the
task of estimating the success or the non-success of the enterprise
he will travel through a piece of philosophical writing that is as
comprehensive and as coherent, and as elevating in its tone, as
anything that has appeared from the Neo-Hegelian camp. The things that
I chiefly feel and believe about it are, firstly, that its account of
the facts of life and thought are, again, all determined by certain
presuppositions about conceivability and about the principles of
contradiction and negation; secondly, that it is still the same “whole”
of logic that is to it the test of all reality and individuality; and,
thirdly, that it is, again, a great pity that Dr. Bosanquet should not
have acted upon some sort of recognition of the relation of his own
dialectical principles to those of his master Hegel, or to those of
some of his Neo-Hegelian predecessors in England and America. Although
it is almost an impertinence on the part of one who has just made the
acquaintance of this outstanding volume to speak in any detail of its
contents, I can indicate part of my meaning by pointing out that it
is throughout such things as “finite mind,” the “finite mind” that is
“best understood by approaching it from the side of the continuum” [the
“whole”], the “finite mind” that is “shaped by the universe,” that
is “torn between existence and self-transcendence,” “appearance,” an
“externality which is the object of mind,” the “positive principle of
totality or individuality manifesting itself in a number of forms,”
“good” and “evil as attitudes concerning a creature’s whole being,”
“volition” in terms of the “principle that there is for every situation
a larger and more effective point of view than the given”--that are
discussed, and not the real persons who have _what they call_ “minds”
and “volitions” and “attitudes,” and who invent all these principles
and distinctions to describe the world of their experience and the
world of their thoughts. As against him Pragmatism and Humanism
would, I think, both insist that the first reality for all thought
and speculation is not the “logical whole” that underlies, in the
mind of the thinker, the greater number of all his categories and
distinctions, but the life and the lives of the persons in a world of
inter-subjective intercourse, wherein these points of view are used
for different purposes. And I cannot see how Dr. Bosanquet is entitled
to scorn all those who hold to the idea of the reality of the lives of
the persons who are agents and thinkers in this personal realm, which
is for us the highest reality of the universe, as believers in the
“exclusiveness of personality,” although I would certainly agree with
him that our experience, when properly interpreted, carries us beyond
the subjectivism and the individualism of some forms of Pragmatism or
Pluralism. The reader who is anxious to know about the real value of
the Hegelianism upon which Dr. Bosanquet’s philosophy reposes should
consult the work of Croce upon the “living” and the “dead” elements
in Hegel’s System. It has recently been translated into English. Dr.
Bosanquet, like many Hegelians, seems to me to overlook almost entirely
the important elements in the philosophy of Kant--of some of which
I speak of in the next chapter as developed in the spiritualistic
philosophy of Bergson.