Mr. Herbert Spencer has published in _The Popular Science Monthly_ for
August, an essay on the Ethics of Kant; a translation of this article
had appeared in the July Number of the _Revue Philosophique_, and it
cannot fail to have been widely noticed. It is to be regretted that
unfamiliarity with the German language and perhaps also with Kant’s
terminology has led Mr. Spencer into errors to which attention is called
in the following discussion.[87]
Mr. Spencer says:
“If, before Kant uttered that often-quoted saying in which,
with the stars of Heaven he coupled the conscience of Man, as
being the two things that excited his awe, he had known more
of Man than he did, he would probably have expressed himself
somewhat otherwise.”
Kant, in his famous dictum that two things excited his admiration, the
starry heaven above him and the conscience within him, contrasted two
kinds of sublimity.[88] The grandeur of the Universe is that of size and
extension, while the conscience of man commands respect for its moral
dignity. The universe is wonderful in its expanse and in its order of
mechanical regularity; the conscience of man is grand, being intelligent
volition that aspires to be in harmony with universal laws.
Mr. Spencer continues:
“Not, indeed, that the conscience of Man is not wonderful
enough, whatever be its supposed genesis; but the wonderfulness
of it is of a different kind according as we assume it to
have been supernaturally given or infer that it has been
naturally evolved. The knowledge of Man in that large sense
which Anthropology expresses, had made, in Kant’s day, but
small advances. The books of travel were relatively few, and
the facts which they contained concerning the human mind as
existing in different races, had not been gathered together and
generalized. In our days, the conscience of Man as inductively
known has none of that universality of presence and unity of
nature which Kant’s saying tacitly assumes.”
Mr. Spencer apparently supposes that Kant believed in a supernatural
origin of the human conscience. This, however, is erroneous.
Mr. Spencer’s error is excusable in consideration of the fact that some
disciples of Kant have fallen into a similar error. Professor Adler, of
New York, who attempts in the Societies for Ethical Culture to carry into
effect the ethics of Pure Reason, maintains that the commandments of the
_ought_ and “the light that shines through them come from beyond, but its
beams are broken as they pass through our terrestrial medium, and the
full light in all its glory we can never see.”
Ethics based on an unknowable power, is mysticism; and mysticism does not
essentially differ from dualism and supernaturalism.
Kant’s reasoning is far from mysticism and from supernaturalism. He
was fully convinced that civilized man with his moral and intellectual
abilities had naturally evolved from the lower state of an animal
existence. We read in his essay, “Presumable Origin of the History
of Mankind” (Muthmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte. Editio
Hartenstein, Vol. IV, p. 321):
“From this conception of the primitive history of mankind it
follows that the departure of man from the paradise represented
to him by his reason as the earliest place of sojourn of his
race, has been nothing else than the transition from the rude
condition of a purely animal existence to the condition of a
human being; a transition from the leading-strings of instinct
to direction by reason, in a word, from the protectorate of
nature to a status of freedom.”
The view that the conscience of man is innate, in the sense of a
non-natural, of a mysterious, or even of a supernatural origin, is
untenable. Those disciples of Kant who entertain such views have
certainly misinterpreted their great master, and the passages adduced by
Mr. Spencer from so many sources are sufficient evidence of the fact that
“there are widely different degrees” [we should rather say kinds] “of
conscience in the different races.” Mr. Spencer continues:
“Had Kant had these and kindred facts before him, his
conception of the human mind, and consequently his ethical
conception, would scarcely have been what they were. Believing,
as he did, that one object of his awe—the stellar Universe—has
been evolved,[89] he might by evidence like the foregoing
have been led to suspect that the other object of his awe—the
human conscience—has been evolved; and has consequently a
real nature unlike its apparent nature.” ... “If, instead of
assuming that conscience is simple because it seems simple to
careless introspection he had entertained the hypothesis that
it is perhaps complex—a consolidated product of multitudinous
experiences received mainly by ancestors and added to by
self—he might have arrived at a consistent system of Ethics.”
...
“In brief, as already implied, had Kant, instead of his
incongruous beliefs that the celestial bodies have had an
evolutionary origin, but that the minds of living beings on
them, or at least on one of them, have had a non-evolutionary
origin, entertained the belief that both have arisen by
Evolution, he would have been saved from the impossibilities of
his Metaphysics, and the untenabilities of his Ethics.”
Mr. Spencer believes that Kant had assumed conscience to be “simple,
because it seems simple to careless introspection.” But there is no
evidence in Kant’s works for this assumption. On the contrary, Kant
reversed the old view of so-called “rational psychology” which considered
conscience as innate and which was based on the error that consciousness
is simple. Des Cartes’s syllogism _cogito ergo sum_ is based on this
idea, which at the same time served as a philosophical evidence for
the indestructibility and immortality of the _ego_. The simplicity of
consciousness had been considered as an axiom, until Kant came and showed
that it was a fallacy, a paralogism of pure reason. Dr. Noah Porter has
written, from an apparently dualistic standpoint, a sketch entitled “The
Ethics of Kant,” in which he says:
“The skepticism and denials of Kant’s speculative theory
in respect to noumena, both material and psychical, had
unfortunately cut him off from the possibility of recognizing
the personal _ego_ as anything more than a logical fiction.”