Johannes Volkelt continues his review of Wilhelm Wundt’s “System of
Philosophy.” Prof. C. Schaarschmidt criticises Fouillée’s view of a
future metaphysics as based upon experience, from the Kantian standpoint.
Dr. E. König explains with sufficient strength the futility of Varnbüler
in his bold attempt of refuting Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” and Dr.
Paul Natorp, the editor, devotes an article to Prof. Clemens Baeumker’s
book “Das Problem der Materie in der Griechischen Philosophie,” in
which the author sets forth that the problem of matter is not a limited
problem, but the sum total of all those questions which have reference to
the existence of some cause of sensory phenomena which in its nature is
different from consciousness. The problems of psycho-physics and of the
theory of cognition are modern and were unknown to the ancients. Their
standpoint remained throughout that of realism. A résumé of the views of
Greek philosophers from Thales down to the New Platonists follows.
The leading article is devoted to Goethe’s relation to Spinoza and his
philosophical world-conception.
Goethe’s philosophical and religious opinions are naturally of the
greatest interest, because Goethe, the child of nature in the highest
sense of the word, represents a genius not such as our great contemporary
Cesare Lombroso conceives him to be, i. e. a species of the abnormal
man and a kind of insane person, but such as genius is conceived by the
layman, i. e. an abnormally normal man, a man whose excellencies lie in
a rare harmony of highly developed perfections—not in eccentricities.
Goethe’s eccentricities were not worse or more extended than those of
average people, but he had more sense, more humor, more depth, and more
spirit. Well, Goethe as a son of man and as a type of an unusually
perfect man was a poet, a philosopher, a scientist, an historian, an
artist, a man of the world, and a man of practical life, all in one, and
the opinions of this man in the religio-philosophical field show at least
that they accord with man as a child of nature.
Goethe’s philosophical views were strongly influenced by Spinoza yet not
so as if Spinoza had impressed his view upon Goethe. Goethe happened to
read Spinoza’s “Ethics” while still immature in mind and felt himself
powerfully attracted by the spirit of the book. “What I may have read out
of or into that work,” he writes, “I could give no account. Yet I found
a pacification of my passions. A great and free vista upon the sensual
and moral world seemed to open before my eyes. That strange sentence ‘_He
who loves God must not demand of God to love him in return_,’ with all
its premises and conclusions filled all my thoughts. To be unselfish in
everything and most so in love and friendship was my highest delight, my
maxim, my practice, so that the bold expression of later years ‘If I love
thee, it is none of thy business’ came right from my heart. In addition
to this, it must be recognised that the most intimate combinations result
from contraries. The all-pervading calmness of Spinoza contrasted with
my excited aspirations, his mathematical method was a counterpart of
my poetical thoughts and habits.” In Spinoza’s doctrine of necessity
Goethe found comfort concerning man’s dependence upon the outer world
which caused him so much pain. It is probable that the famous sentence
of the liberation from passions through a clear comprehension of them
was very sympathetic to Goethe, for it is a characteristic feature of
his poetry that they were confessions as well as liberations of all that
moved and disturbed him. As soon as Goethe was able to give to himself
a clear account concerning that which had affected his soul and as soon
as he could give a poetical form to it so that it became something
independent and outside of him, he gained, in the sense of Spinoza’s
doctrine of liberation from passions, the peace and liberty of his soul.
Yet Spinoza’s doctrine of necessity was a metaphysical conception.
Goethe transferred it into the domains of practical ethics, thus giving
rise to his idea of resignation. Goethe writes in the beginning of the
sixteenth book of “Wahrheit und Dichtung”: “Our physical as well as our
social life, customs, habits, worldly wisdom, philosophy, religion, even
many incidental events, everything demands of us that we should resign
ourselves. So many things which most intrinsically belong to us we are
not allowed to develop. That of the outer world which we want as a
complement of our nature is taken away and many things which are foreign
to us and disagreeable are thrown upon us. We are deprived of everything
that we have with difficulty acquired, of everything that is friendly and
before we fully comprehend it we find ourselves obliged _to surrender
our very personality_, first piecemeal and finally in its entirety.”
Professor Schneege says that Goethe’s practice of resignation gave him
solace when he felt low-spirited concerning the limits of human willing
and wishing and hoping, and his resignation was as a matter of principle
a total resignation. A partial resignation leads to the pessimistic
outcry “All is vanity,” yet the total resignation affords an inner peace
and produces that “air of peace,” _die Friedensluft_ as Goethe calls it,
which surrounds us when reading Spinoza.
One of Goethe’s maxims is quite Spinozistic. Goethe says (_Max. und Refl.
Abth._ v.): “He who declares himself to be free will feel himself at once
dependent but he who dares to declare himself dependent, feels himself
free.”
Goethe rejected the idea of a personal and transcendent Deity which was
urged so strongly upon him by Lavater. Rejecting Lavater’s view, he says
(_Wahrh. und Dicht._ xiv.): “I assured him in accord with my Realism
which is inborn as well as acquired that since it had pleased God and
Nature to make me as I am, I must remain so.” The expression “God and
Nature” savors strongly of Spinoza’s “Deus sive natura.”
According to Eckermann (_Gesp. m. G._ ii, p. 169) Holbach’s _Systéme de
la nature_ had also made a strong impression upon Goethe. Nevertheless
he was dissatisfied with the spirit of French materialism. He says: “How
empty and hollow is this sad atheistic twilight, in which the earth with
all its forms and the heaven with all its stars disappear. Matter only is
said to exist, being in motion from eternity to eternity, thus producing
to the right and to the left without further ado all the innumerable
phenomena of being.” Goethe’s view of “God and nature,” did not deny the
Deity as such, but identified both in the sense of Spinoza. In this sense
Goethe interpreted the sentence: _Qui deum amat conari not potest, ut
Deus ipsum contra amet—si homo id conaretur, cuperet ergo ut Deus quem
amat, non esset Deus_. The latter idea, “if a man wished that God should
love him in return, he would wish that God be not God” is a corollary
only to the impersonal conception of Spinoza’s non-anthropomorphised
Deity. We cannot and we must not think of God as a human being who like
a monarch makes favorites of those who are faithful not so much to the
divine laws of ethics but to God personally.
Goethe agreed in his views of Spinoza with Herder, who in a letter
to Jacobi writes: “The πρὼτον ψεῦδος, my dear Jacobi, in all
anti-spinozistic systems is that God is supposed to be the great _ens
entium_, the cause of all phenomena, a cypher, an abstract idea which we
have formulated. However, that is not so according to Spinoza; God is to
him the most real and active unity which says to itself ‘I am that I am,
and shall be in all the changes of my phenomena that which I shall be.’
What you mean, my dear fellows, by an existence outside of the world,
I do not understand. If God does not exist in the world, and indeed,
everywhere unlimited in his totality and entirety, he does not exist at
all. The limitation of personality does not belong to the infinite being,
since a person originates with us by limitation as a kind of _modus_ or
as an aggregate of beings whose activity is endowed with the illusion of
unity.” A modification of Spinoza’s view consists in the recognition of
the creative activity which Herder attributes to God. In another letter
to Jacobi, Herder writes: “You wish God in the shape of man like a friend
who thinks of you. Consider that in that case he must think humanly of
you. If he is partial to you he will be partial against others. Explain
to me why you need him to be human. He speaks to you, he affects you
through all noble men who are his organs and most so through his organ
of organs, the core of his spiritual creation, his only begotten. I must
confess that this philosophy makes me exceedingly happy. Goethe has read
Spinoza since your departure and it is a test case to me that he has
conceived him exactly as I do.”
Herder was a clergyman and he held the highest position of his church,
being Superintendent General. Would the protestant state churches of
to-day either in England or in Germany have room for a man like Herder?
Goethe concurred with Herder, that the idea of an extramundane Deity has
no sense, an outside God is powerless and an immanent God alone is a
reality. He puts in the mouth of Faust the following lines:
“The God that in my breast is owned
Can deeply stir the inner sources.
The God above my powers enthroned
He cannot change external forces.”
_Faust I, Scene 4, Tr. Bayard Taylor._
Spinoza makes a difference between _natura naturans_ and _natura
naturata_. A similar contrast is made by Goethe in the following lines
which are found among the _Zahme Xenien_, Part vii.
“Life dwells in each celestial body
And on its self-selected roads
It likes to travel with the others.
There are in our earth’s deep abodes
The forces, shrouded now in night
And rising up again to light
If with eternal repetition
Some circles infinitely roam,
If thousand stones in strong construction
Together build life’s glorious dome,
Then through all things is pleasure thrilling,
The great, the little, both are blessed,
_Yet all this yearning, all this striving_
_In God the Lord, is eternal rest_.”[26]
According to Schneege, Goethe was an agnostic. Faust says:
“Mysterious even in open day
Nature retains her veil, despite our clamors.
That which she doth not willingly display,
Cannot be wrenched from her with levers, screws and hammers.”
_I, 1. Tr. Bayard Taylor._
This quotation however expresses Faust’s despair and not Goethe’s
philosophical view. It is true that Goethe has made a few utterances
which savor of agnosticism, but most of them are expressive of the idea
that we can never be through with our wisdom; every new solution proposes
new problems.
“_Will mich jedoch des Worts nicht schämen:_
_Wir tasten ewig an Problemen._”
_Zahme Xenien_, vii.
[Will not be ashamed of the confession:
We are dealing with problems without intercession.]
How little Goethe was in accord with the view of modern agnosticism
or phenomenalism, that we know the outside of nature only and not her
inside, can be learned from his opposition to Haller’s famous lines:
“Nature’s Within from mortal mind
Must ever lie concealed.
Thrice blessed e’en he, to whom she has
Her outer shell revealed.”
In answer to the agnostic sentiment of the famous naturalist, Goethe
answered with the following verses (quoted in the translation given in
“Fundamental Problems,” p. 142):
“_Nature’s ‘within’ from mortal mind_”
Philistine, sayest thou,
“_Must ever lie concealed?_”
To me, my friend, and to my kind
Repeat this not. We trow
Where’er we are that we
Within must always be.
“_Thrice blessed e’en he to whom she has_
_Her outer shell revealed?_”
This saying sixty years I heard
Repeated o’er and o’er,
And in my soul I cursed the word,
Yet secretly I swore.
Some thousand thousand times or more
Unto myself I witness bore:
Gladly gives Nature all her store,
She knows not kernel, knows not shell,
For she is all in one.
But thou,
Examine thou thine own self well
whether thou art kernel or art shell.
We ought to bear in mind that Goethe was no philosopher in the strict
sense of the word and did not attempt to have a system that should
be free from contradictions. So we read in one place: “Man is not
born to solve the problem of the world, but to seek for the limit
of the incomprehensible and then to remain within the limits of the
comprehensible,” and in another place “Man must hold fast to the belief
that what seems incomprehensible is comprehensible, for otherwise he
would cease to investigate.”
The idea of evolution was the basis of Goethe’s idea of immortality. Here
also he remains in accord with Herder who had proposed in his “Ideas for
a Philosophy of the History of Mankind” his views of the development
of beings by degrees. Goethe wrote from Rome (See “Herder’s Nachlass,”
ed. Düntzer, Frankfort, 1756, i, p. 17.): “How much I enjoy Herder’s
‘Ideas,’ I can scarcely express. Since I expect no Messiah, this [viz.
the prospect of further evolution] is to me the dearest Gospel.”
Goethe’s idea of the soul is not clearly worked out in its philosophical
aspect. He speaks of souls as of monads and believes in a migration
of the soul. “I am sure,” Goethe said to Falk, “I have been here some
thousand times and expect to come again some thousand times.”
Goethe was very decided in practical and ethical respects. Goethe
deviated from Spinoza by introducing a strong trait of individualism into
Spinoza’s cosmism.
“_Zweck sein selbst ist jegliches Thier._”[27]
[Every creature has its purpose in itself.]
And man is the last product of constantly higher evolving Nature—_das
letzte Product der sich immer steigernden Natur_. Nature’s intention
according to Goethe’s view is to produce constantly more perfect
creatures. He says: “Imagine Nature standing as a gamester before the
roulette table constantly shouting _au double_. With all she has won
through all the phases of her activity she continues to play on into
infinity. Stone, plant, animal, everything is risked in such hazarding
ventures again and again, and who can tell whether man himself is not but
a venture for a higher aim.” Death was to Goethe no destruction but a
dissolution. A destruction or annihilation appeared as an impossibility
to him. And his idea of immortality was not one of existence after
death but of a continued activity. In the year 1825 Goethe declared to
Chancellor von Müller (“Gespräche m.d. Kanzler von Müller,” p. 99), that
he should not know what to do with an immortality in which he would not
find new tasks to do and new difficulties to conquer. (Heidelberg: Georg
Weiss.)
κρς.
ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE. Vol. II.
No. 4.