THIRD ATTITUDE OF THOUGHT TO OBJECTIVITY.
_Immediate or Intuitive Knowledge._
61.] If we are to believe the Critical philosophy, thought is
subjective, and its ultimate and invincible mode is _abstract
universality_ or formal identity. Thought is thus set in opposition
to Truth, which is no abstraction, but concrete universality. In this
highest mode of thought, which is entitled Reason, the Categories
are left out of account.--The extreme theory on the opposite side
holds thought to be an act of the _particular_ only, and on that
ground declares it incapable of apprehending the Truth. This is the
Intuitional theory.
62.] According to this theory, thinking, a private and particular
operation, has its whole scope and product in the Categories. But,
these Categories, as arrested by the understanding, are limited
vehicles of thought, forms of the conditioned, of the dependent
and derivative. A thought limited to these modes has no sense of
the Infinite and the True, and cannot bridge over the gulf that
separates it from them. (This stricture refers to the proofs of God's
existence.) These inadequate modes or categories are also spoken of as
_notions_: and to get a notion of an object therefore can only mean,
in this language, to grasp it under the form of being conditioned and
derivative. Consequently, if the object in question be the True, the
Infinite, the Unconditioned, we change it by our notions into a finite
and conditioned; whereby, instead of apprehending the truth by thought,
we have perverted it into untruth.
Such is the one simple line of argument advanced for the thesis that
the knowledge of God and of truth must be immediate, or intuitive. At
an earlier period all sort of anthropomorphic conceptions, as they
are termed, were banished from God, as being finite and therefore
unworthy of the infinite; and in this way God had been reduced to
a tolerably blank being. But in those days the thought-forms were
in general not supposed to come under the head of anthropomorphism.
Thought was believed rather to strip finitude from the conceptions of
the Absolute,--in agreement with the above-mentioned conviction of all
ages, that reflection is the only road to truth. But now, at length,
even the thought-forms are pronounced anthropomorphic, and thought
itself is described as a mere faculty of finitisation.
Jacobi has stated this charge most distinctly in the seventh supplement
to his Letters on Spinoza,--borrowing his line of argument from the
works of Spinoza himself, and applying it as a weapon against knowledge
in general. In his attack knowledge is taken to mean knowledge of
the finite only, a process of thought from one condition in a series
to another, each of which is at once conditioning and conditioned.
According to such a view, to explain and to get the notion of
anything, is the same as to show it to be derived from something else.
Whatever such knowledge embraces, consequently, is partial, dependent
and finite, while the infinite or true, _i.e._ God, lies outside
of the mechanical inter-connexion to which knowledge is said to be
confined.--It is important to observe that, while Kant makes the finite
nature of the Categories consist mainly in the formal circumstance
that they are subjective, Jacobi discusses the Categories in their
own proper character, and pronounces them to be in their very import
finite. What Jacobi chiefly had before his eyes, when he thus described
science, was the brilliant successes of the physical or 'exact'
sciences in ascertaining natural forces and laws. It is certainly not
on the finite ground occupied by these sciences that we can expect to
meet the in-dwelling presence of the infinite. Lalande was right when
he said he had swept the whole heaven with his glass, and seen no God.
(See note to § 60.) In the field of physical science, the universal,
which is the final result of analysis, is only the indeterminate
aggregate,--of the external finite,--in one word, Matter: and Jacobi
well perceived that there was no other issue obtainable in the way of a
mere advance from one explanatory clause or law to another.
63.] All the while the doctrine that truth exists for the mind was so
strongly maintained by Jacobi, that Reason alone is declared to be that
by which man lives. This Reason is the knowledge of God. But, seeing
that derivative knowledge is restricted to the compass of finite facts,
Reason is knowledge underivative, or Faith.
Knowledge, Faith, Thought, Intuition are the categories that we meet
with on this line of reflection. These terms, as presumably familiar to
every one, are only too frequently subjected to an arbitrary use, under
no better guidance than the conceptions and distinctions of psychology,
without any investigation into their nature and notion, which is the
main question after all. Thus, we often find knowledge contrasted with
faith, and faith at the same time explained to be an underivative
or intuitive knowledge:--so that it must be at least some sort of
knowledge. And, besides, it is unquestionably a fact of experience,
firstly, that what we believe is in our consciousness,---which implies
that we _know about it;_ and secondly, that this belief is a certainty
in our consciousness,--which implies that we _know it._ Again, and
especially, we find thought opposed to immediate knowledge and faith,
and, in particular, to intuition. But if this intuition be qualified
as intellectual, we must really mean intuition which thinks, unless,
in a question about the nature of God, we are willing to interpret
intellect to mean images and representations of imagination. The word
faith or belief, in the dialect of this system, comes to be employed
even with reference to common objects that are present to the senses.
We believe, says Jacobi, that we have a body,--we believe in the
existence of the things of sense. But if we are speaking of faith in
the True and Eternal, and saying that God is given and revealed to us
in immediate knowledge OF intuition, we are concerned not with the
things of sense, but with objects special to our thinking mind, with
truths of inherently universal significance. And when the individual
'I,' or in other words personality, is under discussion--not the 'I' of
experience, or a single private person--above all, when the personality
of God is before us, we are speaking of personality unalloyed,--of a
personality in its own nature universal. Such personality is a thought,
and falls within the province of thought only. More than this. Pure and
simple intuition is completely the same as pure and simple thought.
Intuition and belief, in the first instance, denote the definite
conceptions we attach to these words in our ordinary employment of
them: and to this extent they differ from thought in certain points
which nearly every one can understand. But here they are taken in a
higher sense, and must be interpreted to mean a belief in God, or an
intellectual intuition of God; in short, we must put aside all that
especially distinguishes thought on the one side from belief and
intuition on the other. How belief and intuition, when transferred to
these higher regions, differ from thought, it is impossible for any one
to say. And yet, such are the barren distinctions of words, with which
men fancy that they assert an important truth: even while the formulae
they maintain are identical with those which they impugn.
The term _Faith_ brings with it the special advantage of suggesting
the faith of the Christian religion; it seems to include Christian
faith, or perhaps even to coincide with it; and thus the Philosophy of
Faith has a thoroughly orthodox and Christian look, on the strength of
which it takes the liberty of uttering its arbitrary dicta with greater
pretension and authority. But we must not let ourselves be deceived by
the semblance surreptitiously secured by a merely verbal similarity.
The two things are radically distinct. Firstly, the Christian faith
comprises in it an authority of the Church: but the faith of Jacobi's
philosophy has no other authority than that of a personal revelation.
And, secondly, the Christian faith is a copious body of objective
truth, a system of knowledge and doctrine: while the scope of the
philosophic faith is so utterly indefinite, that, while it has room for
the faith of the Christian, it equally admits a belief in the divinity
of the Dalai-lama, the ox, or the monkey,--thus, so far as it goes,
narrowing Deity down to its simplest terms, a 'Supreme Being.' Faith
itself, taken in this professedly philosophical sense, is nothing but
the sapless abstract of immediate knowledge,--a purely formal category
applicable to very different facts; and it ought never to be confused
or identified with the spiritual fulness of Christian faith, whether we
look at that faith in the heart of the believer and the in-dwelling of
the Holy Spirit, or in the system of theological doctrine.
With what is here called faith or immediate knowledge must also be
identified inspiration, the heart's revelations, the truths implanted
in man by nature, and also in particular, healthy reason or Common
Sense, as it is called. All these forms agree in adopting as their
leading principle the immediacy, or self-evident way, in which a fact
or body of truths is presented in consciousness.
84.] This immediate knowledge consists in knowing that the Infinite,
the Eternal, the God which is in our idea, really _is_: or, it asserts
that in our consciousness there is immediately and inseparably bound up
with this idea the certainty of its actual being.
To seek to controvert these maxims of immediate knowledge is the last
thing philosophers would think of. They may rather find occasion for
self-gratulation when these ancient doctrines, expressing as they
do the general tenor of philosophic teaching, have, even in this
unphilosophical fashion, become to some extent universal convictions
of the age. The true marvel rather is that any one could suppose that
these principles were opposed to philosophy,--the maxims, viz., that
whatever is held to be true is immanent in the mind, and that there
is truth for the mind (§ 63). From a formal point of view, there is a
peculiar interest in the maxim that the being of God is immediately and
inseparably bound up with the thought of God, that objectivity is bound
up with the subjectivity which the thought originally presents. Not
content with that, the philosophy of immediate knowledge goes so far in
its one-sided view, as to affirm that the attribute of existence, even
in perception, is quite as inseparably connected with the conception
we have of our own bodies and of external things, as it is with the
thought of God. Now it is the endeavour of philosophy to _prove_ such
a unity, to show that it lies in the very nature of thought and
subjectivity, to be inseparable from being and objectivity. In these
circumstances therefore, philosophy, whatever estimate may be formed of
the character of these proofs, must in any case be glad to see it shown
and maintained that its maxims are facts of consciousness, and thus
in harmony with experience. The difference between philosophy and the
asseverations of immediate knowledge rather centres in the exclusive
attitude which immediate knowledge adopts, when it sets itself up
against philosophy.
And yet it was as a self-evident or immediate truth that the 'Cogito,
ergo sum,' of Descartes, the maxim on which may be said to hinge the
whole interest of Modern Philosophy, was first stated by its author.
The man who calls this a syllogism, must know little more about a
syllogism than that the word 'Ergo' occurs in it. Where shall we look
for the middle term? And a middle term is a much more essential point
of a syllogism than the word 'Ergo.' If we try to justify the name, by
calling the combination of ideas in Descartes an 'immediate' syllogism,
this superfluous variety of syllogism is a mere name for an utterly
unmediated synthesis of distinct terms of thought. That being so, the
synthesis of being with our ideas, as stated in the maxim of immediate
knowledge, has no more and no less claim to the title of syllogism than
the axiom of Descartes has. From Hotho's 'Dissertation on the Cartesian
Philosophy' (published 1826), I borrow the quotation in which Descartes
himself distinctly declares that the maxim 'Cogito, ergo sum,' is no
syllogism. The passages are Respons. ad II Object.: De Methodo IV:
Ep. I. 118. From the first passage I quote the words more immediately
to the point. Descartes says: 'That we are thinking beings is "_prima
quaedam notio quae ex nullo syllogismo concluditur_"' (a certain
primary notion, which is deduced from no syllogism); and goes on:
_'neque cum quis dicit; Ego cogito, ergo sum sive existo, existentiam
ex cogitatione per syllogismum deducit.'_ (Nor, when one says, I think,
therefore I am or exist, does he deduce existence from thought by means
of a syllogism.) Descartes knew what it implied in a syllogism, and
so he adds that, in order to make the maxim admit of a deduction by
syllogism, we should have to add the major premiss: _'Illud omne quod
cogitat, est sive existit.'_ (Everything which thinks, is or exists.)
Of course, he remarks, this major premiss itself has to be deduced from
the original statement.
The language of Descartes on the maxim that the 'I' which _thinks_ must
also at the same time _be,_ his saying that this connexion is given and
implied in the simple perception of consciousness,--that this connexion
is the absolute first, the principle, the most certain and evident of
all things, so that no scepticism can be conceived so monstrous as not
to admit it:--all this language is so vivid and distinct, that the
modern statements of Jacobi and others on this immediate connexion can
only pass for needless repetitions.
65.] The theory of which we are speaking is not satisfied when it has
shown that mediate knowledge taken separately is an adequate vehicle
of truth. Its distinctive doctrine is that immediate knowledge alone,
to the total exclusion of mediation, can possess a content which is
true. This exclusiveness is enough to show that the theory is a relapse
into the metaphysical understanding, with its pass-words 'Either--or.'
And thus it is really a relapse into the habit of external mediation,
the gist of which consists in clinging to those narrow and one-sided
categories of the finite, which it falsely imagined itself to have left
for ever behind. This point, however, we shall not at present discuss
in detail. An exclusively immediate knowledge is asserted as a fact
only, and in the present Introduction we can only study it from this
external point of view. The real significance of such knowledge will
be explained, when we come to the logical question of the opposition
between mediate and immediate. But it is characteristic of the view
before us to decline to examine the nature of the fact, that is, the
notion of it; for such an examination would itself be a step towards
mediation and even towards knowledge. The genuine discussion on logical
ground, therefore, must be deferred till we come to the proper province
of Logic itself.
The whole of the second part of Logic, the Doctrine of Essential Being,
is a discussion of the intrinsic and self-affirming unity of immediacy
and mediation.
66.] Beyond this point then we need not go: immediate knowledge is
to be accepted as a _fact._ Under these circumstances examination is
directed to the field of experience, to a psychological phenomenon. If
that be so, we need only note, as the commonest of experiences, that
truths, which we well know to be results of complicated and highly
mediated trains of thought, present themselves immediately and without
effort to the mind of any man who is familiar with the subject. The
mathematician, like every one who has mastered a particular science,
meets any problem with ready-made solutions which pre-suppose most
complicated analyses: and every educated man has a number of general
views and maxims which he can muster without trouble, but which
can only have sprung from frequent reflection and long experience.
The facility we attain in any sort of knowledge, art, or technical
expertness, consists in having the particular knowledge or kind of
action present to our mind in any case that occurs, even we may say,
immediate in our very limbs, in an out-going activity. In all these
instances, immediacy of knowledge is so far from excluding mediation,
that the two things are linked together,--immediate knowledge being
actually the product and result of mediated knowledge.
It is no less obvious that immediate _existence_ is bound up with
its mediation. The seed and the parents are immediate and initial
existences in respect of the off-spring which they generate. But the
seed and the parents, though they exist and are therefore immediate,
are yet in their turn generated: and the child, without prejudice to
the mediation of its existence, is immediate, because it _is._ The fact
that I am in Berlin, my immediate presence here, is mediated by my
having made the journey hither.
67.] One thing may be observed with reference to the immediate
knowledge of God, of legal and ethical principles (including under
the head of immediate knowledge, what is otherwise termed Instinct,
Implanted or Innate Ideas, Common Sense, Natural Reason, or whatever
form, in short, we give to the original spontaneity). It is a matter
of general experience that education or development is required to
bring out into consciousness what is therein contained. It was so even
with the Platonic reminiscence; and the Christian rite of baptism,
although a sacrament, involves the additional obligation of a Christian
up-bringing. In short, religion and morals, however much they may be
faith or immediate knowledge, are still on every side conditioned by
the mediating process which is termed development, education, training.
The adherents, no less than the assailants, of the doctrine of Innate
Ideas have been guilty throughout of the like exclusiveness and
narrowness as is here noted. They have drawn a hard and fast line
between the essential and immediate union (as it may be described) of
certain universal principles with the soul, and another union which has
to be brought about in an external fashion, and through the channel of
_given_ objects and conceptions, There is one objection, borrowed from
experience, which was raised against the doctrine of Innate ideas. All
men, it was said, must have these ideas; they must have, for example,
the maxim of contradiction, present in the mind,--they must be aware
of it; for this maxim and others like it were included in the class
of Innate ideas. The objection may be set down to misconception; for
the principles in question, though innate, need not on that account
have the form of ideas or conceptions of something we are aware of.
Still, the objection completely meets and overthrows the crude theory
of immediate knowledge, which expressly maintains its formulae in so
far as they are in consciousness.--Another point calls for notice. We
may suppose it admitted by the intuitive school, that the special case
of religious faith involves supplementing by a Christian or religious
education and development. In that case it is acting capriciously when
it seeks to ignore this admission when speaking about faith, or it
betrays a want of reflection not to know, that, if the necessity of
education be once admitted, mediation is pronounced indispensable.
The reminiscence of ideas spoken of by Plato is equivalent to
saying that ideas implicitly exist in man, instead of being, as
the Sophists assert, a foreign importation into his mind. But to
conceive knowledge as reminiscence does not interfere with, or
set aside as useless, the development of what is implicitly in
man;--which development is another word for mediation. The same
holds good of the innate ideas that we find in Descartes and the
Scotch philosophers. These ideas are only potential in the first
instance, and should be looked at as being a sort of mere capacity
in man.
88.] In the case of these experiences the appeal turns upon something
that shows itself bound up with immediate consciousness. Even if
this combination be in the first instance taken as an external and
empirical connexion, still, even for empirical observation, the fact
of its being constant shows it to be essential and inseparable. But,
again, if this immediate consciousness, as exhibited in experience,
be taken separately, so far as it is a consciousness of God and
the divine nature, the state of mind which it implies is generally
described as an exaltation above the finite, above the senses, and
above the instinctive desires and affections of the natural heart:
which exaltation passes over into, and terminates in, faith in God and
a divine order. It is apparent, therefore, that, though faith may be an
immediate knowledge and certainty, it equally implies the interposition
of this process as its antecedent and condition.
It has been already observed, that the so-called proofs of the being
of God, which start from finite being, give an expression to this
exaltation. In that light they are no inventions of an over-subtle
reflection, but the necessary and native channel in which the movement
of mind runs: though it may be that, in their ordinary form, these
proofs have not their correct and adequate expression.
69.] It is the passage (§ 64) from the subjective Idea to being which
forms the main concern of the doctrine of immediate knowledge. A
primary and self-evident inter-connexion is declared to exist between
our Idea and being. Yet precisely this central point of transition,
utterly irrespective of any connexions which show in experience,
clearly involves a mediation. And the mediation is of no imperfect or
unreal kind, where the mediation takes place with and through something
external, but one comprehending both antecedent and conclusion.
70.] For, what this theory asserts is that truth lies neither in the
Idea as a merely subjective thought, nor in mere being on its own
account;--that mere being _per se,_ a being that is not of the Idea,
is the sensible finite being of the world. Now all this only affirms,
without demonstration, that the Idea has truth only by means of being,
and being has truth only by means of the Idea. The maxim of immediate
knowledge rejects an indefinite empty immediacy (and such is abstract
being, or pure unity taken by itself), and affirms in its stead the
unity of the Idea with being. And it acts rightly in so doing. But it
is stupid not to see that the unity of distinct terms or modes is not
merely a purely immediate unity, _i.e._ unity empty and indeterminate,
but that--with equal emphasis--the one term is shown to have truth only
as mediated through the other;--or, if the phrase be preferred, that
either term is only mediated with truth through the other. That the
quality of mediation is involved in the very immediacy of intuition
is thus exhibited as a fact, against which understanding, conformably
to the fundamental maxim of immediate knowledge that the evidence of
consciousness is infallible, can have nothing to object. It is only
ordinary abstract understanding which takes the terms of mediation and
immediacy, each by itself absolutely, to represent an inflexible line
of distinction, and thus draws upon its own head the hopeless task of
reconciling them. The difficulty, as we have shown, has no existence in
the fact, and it vanishes in the speculative notion.
71.] The one-sidedness of the intuitional school has certain
characteristics attending upon it, which we shall proceed to point out
in their main features, now that we have discussed the fundamental
principle. The _first_ of these corollaries is as follows. Since the
criterion of truth is found, not in the nature of the content, but in
the mere fact of consciousness, every alleged truth has no other basis
than subjective certitude and the assertion that we discover a certain
fact in our consciousness. What I discover in my consciousness is thus
exaggerated into a fact of the consciousness of all, and even passed
off for the very nature of consciousness.
Among the so-called proofs of the existence of God, there used to stand
the _consensus gentium,_ to which appeal is made as early as Cicero.
The _consensus gentium_ is a weighty authority, and the transition is
easy and natural, from the circumstance that a certain fact is found
in the consciousness of every one, to the conclusion that it is a
necessary element in the very nature of consciousness. In this category
of general agreement there was latent the deep-rooted perception, which
does not escape even the least cultivated mind, that the consciousness
of the individual is at the same time particular and accidental. Yet
unless we examine the nature of this consciousness itself, stripping
it of its particular and accidental elements and, by the toilsome
operation of reflection, disclosing the universal in its entirety and
purity, it is only a _unanimous_ agreement upon a given point that can
authorize a decent presumption that that point is part of the very
nature of consciousness. Of course, if thought insists on seeing the
necessity of what is presented as a fact of general occurrence, the
_consensus gentium_ is certainly not sufficient. Yet even granting the
universality of the fact to be a satisfactory proof, it has been found
impossible to establish the belief in God on such an argument, because
experience shows that there are individuals and nations without any
such faith.[1] But there can be nothing shorter and more convenient
than to have the bare assertion to make, that we discover a fact in
our consciousness, and are certain that it is true: and to declare
that this certainty, instead of proceeding from our particular mental
constitution only, belongs to the very nature of the mind.
72.] A _second_ corollary which results from holding immediacy of
consciousness to be the criterion of truth is that all superstition
or idolatry is allowed to be truth, and that an apology is prepared
for any contents of the will, however wrong and immoral. It is because
he believes in them, and not from the reasoning and syllogism of
what is termed mediate knowledge, that the Hindoo finds God in the
cow, the monkey, the Brahmin, or the Lama. But the natural desires
and affections spontaneously carry and deposit their interests in
consciousness, where also immoral aims make themselves naturally at
home: the good or bad character would thus express the _definite being_
of the will, which would be known, and that most immediately, in the
interests and aims.
73.] _Thirdly_ and lastly, the immediate consciousness of God goes no
further than to tell us _that_ He is: to tell us _what_ He is, would be
an act of cognition, involving mediation. So that God as an object of
religion is expressly narrowed down to the indeterminate supersensible,
God in general: and the significance of religion is reduced to a
minimum.
If it were really needful to win back and secure the bare belief that
there is a God, or even to create it, we might well wonder at the
poverty of the age which can see a gain in the merest pittance of
religious consciousness, and which in its church has sunk so low as to
worship at the altar that stood in Athens long ago, dedicated to the
'Unknown God.'
74.] We have still briefly to indicate the general nature of the
form of immediacy. For it is the essential one-sidedness of the
category, which makes whatever comes under it one sided and, for
that reason, finite. And, first, it makes the universal no better
than an abstraction external to the particulars, and God a being
without determinate quality. But God can only be called a spirit
when He is known to be at once the beginning and end, as well as
the mean, in the process of mediation. Without this unification of
elements He is neither concrete, nor living, nor a spirit. Thus the
knowledge of God as a spirit necessarily implies mediation. The form
of immediacy, secondly, invests the particular with the character of
independent or self-centred being. But such predicates contradict the
very essence of the particular,--which is to be referred to something
else outside. They thus invest the finite with the character of an
absolute. But, besides, the form of immediacy is altogether abstract:
it has no preference for one set of contents more than another,
but is equally susceptible of all: it may as well sanction what is
idolatrous and immoral as the reverse. Only when we discern that the
content,--the particular, is not self-subsistent, but derivative from
something else, are its finitude and untruth shown in their proper
light. Such discernment, where the content we discern carries with
it the ground of its dependent nature, is a knowledge which involves
mediation. The only content which can be held to be the truth is one
not mediated with something else, not limited by other things: or,
otherwise expressed, it is one mediated by itself, where mediation and
immediate reference-to-self coincide. The understanding that fancies
it has got clear of finite knowledge, the identity of the analytical
metaphysicians and the old 'rationalists,' abruptly takes again as
principle and criterion of truth that immediacy which, as an abstract
reference-to-self, is the same as abstract identity. Abstract thought
(the scientific form used by 'reflective' metaphysic) and abstract
intuition (the form used by immediate knowledge) are one and the same.
The stereotyped opposition between the form of immediacy and that
of mediation gives to the former a halfness and inadequacy, that
affects every content which is brought under it. Immediacy means,
upon the whole, an abstract reference-to-self, that is, an abstract
identity or abstract universality. Accordingly the essential and
real universal, when taken merely in its immediacy, is a mere
abstract universal; and from this point of view God is conceived
as a being altogether without determinate quality. To call God
spirit is in that case only a phrase: for the consciousness and
self-consciousness, which spirit implies, are impossible without a
distinguishing of it from itself and from something else, _i.e._
without mediation.
75.] It was impossible for us to criticise this, the third attitude,
which thought has been made to take towards objective truth, in any
other mode than what is naturally indicated and admitted in the
doctrine itself. The theory asserts that immediate knowledge is a
fact. It has been shown to be untrue in fact to say that there is an
immediate knowledge, a knowledge without mediation either by means of
something else or in itself. It has also been explained to be false
in fact to say that thought advances through finite and conditioned
categories only, which are always mediated by a something else, and to
forget that in the very act of mediation the mediation itself vanishes.
And to show that, in point of fact, there is a knowledge which advances
neither by unmixed immediacy nor by unmixed mediation, we can point to
the example of Logic and the whole of philosophy.
76.] If we view the maxims of immediate knowledge in connexion with the
uncritical metaphysic of the past from which we started, we shall learn
from the comparison the reactionary nature of the school of Jacobi. His
doctrine is a return to the modern starting-point of this metaphysic
in the Cartesian philosophy. Both Jacobi and Descartes maintain the
following three points:
(1) The simple inseparability of the thought and being of the
thinker. '_Cogito, ergo sum_' is the same doctrine as that the being,
reality, and existence of the 'Ego' is immediately revealed to me
in consciousness. (Descartes, in fact, is careful to state that by
thought he means consciousness in general. Princip. Phil. I. 9.) This
inseparability is the absolutely first and most certain knowledge, not
mediated or demonstrated.
(2) The inseparability of existence from the conception of God: the
former is necessarily implied in the latter, or the conception never
can be without the attribute of existence, which is thus necessary and
eternal.[2]
(3) The immediate consciousness of the existence of external things.
By this nothing more is meant than sense-consciousness. To have such
a thing is the slightest of all cognitions: and the only thing worth
knowing about it is that such immediate knowledge of the being of
things external is error and delusion, that the sensible world as such
is altogether void of truth; that the being of these external things is
accidental and passes away as a show; and that their very nature is to
have only an existence which is separable from their essence and notion.
77.] There is however a distinction between the two points of view:
(1) The Cartesian philosophy, from these unproved postulates, which
it assumes to be unprovable, proceeds to wider and wider details of
knowledge, and thus gave rise to the sciences of modern times. The
modern theory (of Jacobi), on the contrary, (§ 62) has come to what is
intrinsically a most important conclusion that cognition, proceeding
as it must by finite mediations, can know only the finite, and never
embody the truth; and would fain have the consciousness of God go no
further than the aforesaid very abstract belief that God _is_.[3]
(2) The modern doctrine on the one hand makes no change in the
Cartesian method of the usual scientific knowledge, and conducts on
the same plan the experimental and finite sciences that have sprung
from it. But, on the other hand, when it comes to the science which
has infinity for its scope, it throws aside that method, and thus,
as it knows no other, it rejects all methods. It abandons itself to
wild vagaries of imagination and assertion, to a moral priggishness
and sentimental arrogance, or to a reckless dogmatising and lust
of argument, which is loudest against philosophy and philosophic
doctrines. Philosophy of course tolerates no mere assertions or
conceits, and checks the free play of argumentative see-saw.
78.] We must then reject the opposition between an independent
immediacy in the contents or facts of consciousness and an equally
independent mediation, supposed incompatible with the former. The
incompatibility is a mere assumption, an arbitrary assertion. All other
assumptions and postulates must in like manner be left behind at the
entrance to philosophy, whether they are derived from the intellect or
the imagination. For philosophy is the science, in which every such
proposition must first be scrutinised and its meaning and oppositions
be ascertained.
Scepticism, made a negative science and systematically applied to all
forms of knowledge, might seem a suitable introduction, as pointing out
the nullity of such assumptions. But a sceptical introduction would
be not only an ungrateful but also a useless course; and that because
Dialectic, as we shall soon make appear, is itself an essential element
of affirmative science. Scepticism, besides, could only get hold of
the finite forms as they were suggested by experience, taking them
as given, instead of deducing them scientifically. To require such
a scepticism accomplished is the same as to insist on science being
preceded by universal doubt, or a total absence of presupposition.
Strictly speaking, in the resolve that _wills pure thought,_ this
requirement is accomplished by freedom which, abstracting from
everything, grasps its pure abstraction, the simplicity of thought.
[1] In order to judge of the greater or less extent lo which Experience
shows cases of Atheism or of the belief in God, it is all-important
to know if the mere general conception of deity suffices, or if a
more definite knowledge of God is required. The Christian world would
certainly refuse the title of God to the idols of the Hindoos and the
Chinese, to the fetiches of the Africans, and even to the gods of
Greece themselves. If so, a believer in these idols would not be a
believer in God. If it were contended, on the other hand, that such
a belief in idols implies some sort of belief in God, as the species
implies the genus, then idolatry would argue not faith in an idol
merely, but faith in God. The Athenians took an opposite view. The
poets and philosophers who explained Zeus to be a cloud, and maintained
that there was only one God, were treated as atheists at Athens.
The danger in these questions lies in looking at what the mind may make
out of an object, and not what that object actually and explicitly
is. If we fail to note this distinction, the commonest perceptions of
men's senses will be religion: for every such perception, and indeed
every act of mind, implicitly contains the principle which, when it
is purified and developed, rises to religion. But to be capable of
religion is one thing, to have it another. And religion yet implicit is
only a capacity or a possibility.
Thus in modern times, travellers have found tribes (as Captains Ross
and Parry found the Esquimaux) which, as they tell us, have not even
that small modicum of religion possessed by African sorcerers, the
_goëtes_ of Herodotus. On the other hand, an Englishman, who spent the
first months of the last Jubilee at Rome, says, in his account of the
modern Romans, that the common people are bigots, whilst those who can
read and write are atheists to a man.
The charge of Atheism is seldom heard in modern times: principally
because the facts and the requirements of religion are reduced to a
minimum. (See § 73.)
[2] Descartes, Princip. Phil. I. 15: _Magis hoc (ens summe perfectum
existere) credet, si attendat, nullius alterius rei ideam apud
se inveniri, in qua eodem modo necessariam existentiam contineri
animadveriat;--intelliget illam ideam exhibere veram et immutabilem
naturam, quaeque non potest non existere, cum necessaria existentia in
ea contineatur._ (The reader will be more disposed to _believe_ that
there exists a being supremely perfect, if he notes that in the case
of nothing else is there found in him an idea, in which he notices
necessary existence to be contained in the same way. He will see that
that idea exhibits a true and unchangeable nature,--a nature which
_cannot but exist,_ since necessary existence is _contained in it._) A
remark which immediately follows, and which sounds like mediation or
demonstration, does not really prejudice the original principle.
In Spinoza we come upon the same statement that the essence or
abstract conception of God implies existence. The first of Spinoza's
definitions, that of the _Causa Sui_ (or Self-Cause), explains it to
be _cujus essentia involvit existentiam, sive id cujus natura non
potest concipi nisi existens_ (that of which the essence involves
existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as
existing). The inseparability of the notion from being is the main
point and fundamental hypothesis in his system. But what notion is
thus inseparable from being? Not the notion of finite things, for they
are so constituted as to have a contingent and a created existence.
Spinoza's 11th proposition, which follows with a proof that God exists
necessarily, and his 20th, showing that God's existence and his essence
are one and the same, are really superfluous, and the proof is more
in form than in reality. To say, that God is Substance, the only
Substance, and that, as Substance is _Causa Sui,_ God therefore exists
necessarily, is merely stating that God is that of which the notion and
the being are inseparable.
[3] Anselm on the contrary says: _Negligentiae mihi videtur, si
post-quam confirmati sumus in fide, non studemus, quod credimus,
intelligere._ (Methinks it is _carelessness,_ if, after we have been
confirmed in the faith, we do not _exert ourselves to see the meaning
of what we believe._) [Tractat. Cur Deus Homo?] These words of Anselm,
in connexion with the concrete truths of Christian doctrine, offer a
far harder problem for investigation, than is contemplated by this
modern faith.