Having now come to the end of our brief and very incomplete review of
the problems of philosophy, it will be well to consider, in conclusion,
what is the value of philosophy and why it ought to be studied. It is
the more necessary to consider this question, in view of the fact that
many men, under the influence of science or of practical affairs, are
inclined to doubt whether philosophy is anything better than innocent
but useless trifling, hair-splitting distinctions, and controversies on
matters concerning which knowledge is impossible.
This view of philosophy appears to result, partly from a wrong
conception of the ends of life, partly from a wrong conception of the
kind of goods which philosophy strives to achieve. Physical science,
through the medium of inventions, is useful to innumerable people who
are wholly ignorant of it; thus the study of physical science is to
be recommended, not only, or primarily, because of the effect on the
student, but rather because of the effect on mankind in general. Thus
utility does not belong to philosophy. If the study of philosophy has
any value at all for others than students of philosophy, it must be only
indirectly, through its effects upon the lives of those who study it.
It is in these effects, therefore, if anywhere, that the value of
philosophy must be primarily sought.
But further, if we are not to fail in our endeavour to determine the
value of philosophy, we must first free our minds from the prejudices
of what are wrongly called 'practical' men. The 'practical' man, as
this word is often used, is one who recognizes only material needs, who
realizes that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the
necessity of providing food for the mind. If all men were well off, if
poverty and disease had been reduced to their lowest possible point,
there would still remain much to be done to produce a valuable society;
and even in the existing world the goods of the mind are at least as
important as the goods of the body. It is exclusively among the goods of
the mind that the value of philosophy is to be found; and only those who
are not indifferent to these goods can be persuaded that the study of
philosophy is not a waste of time.
Philosophy, like all other studies, aims primarily at knowledge. The
knowledge it aims at is the kind of knowledge which gives unity and
system to the body of the sciences, and the kind which results from a
critical examination of the grounds of our convictions, prejudices, and
beliefs. But it cannot be maintained that philosophy has had any very
great measure of success in its attempts to provide definite answers to
its questions. If you ask a mathematician, a mineralogist, a historian,
or any other man of learning, what definite body of truths has been
ascertained by his science, his answer will last as long as you are
willing to listen. But if you put the same question to a philosopher, he
will, if he is candid, have to confess that his study has not achieved
positive results such as have been achieved by other sciences. It is
true that this is partly accounted for by the fact that, as soon as
definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject
ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science. The
whole study of the heavens, which now belongs to astronomy, was once
included in philosophy; Newton's great work was called 'the mathematical
principles of natural philosophy'. Similarly, the study of the human
mind, which was a part of philosophy, has now been separated from
philosophy and has become the science of psychology. Thus, to a great
extent, the uncertainty of philosophy is more apparent than real: those
questions which are already capable of definite answers are placed in
the sciences, while those only to which, at present, no definite answer
can be given, remain to form the residue which is called philosophy.
This is, however, only a part of the truth concerning the uncertainty of
philosophy. There are many questions--and among them those that are of
the profoundest interest to our spiritual life--which, so far as we
can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers
become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the
universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse
of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving
hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on
a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good
and evil of importance to the universe or only to man? Such questions
are asked by philosophy, and variously answered by various philosophers.
But it would seem that, whether answers be otherwise discoverable or
not, the answers suggested by philosophy are none of them demonstrably
true. Yet, however slight may be the hope of discovering an answer, it
is part of the business of philosophy to continue the consideration of
such questions, to make us aware of their importance, to examine all the
approaches to them, and to keep alive that speculative interest in the
universe which is apt to be killed by confining ourselves to definitely
ascertainable knowledge.
Many philosophers, it is true, have held that philosophy could establish
the truth of certain answers to such fundamental questions. They have
supposed that what is of most importance in religious beliefs could be
proved by strict demonstration to be true. In order to judge of such
attempts, it is necessary to take a survey of human knowledge, and to
form an opinion as to its methods and its limitations. On such a subject
it would be unwise to pronounce dogmatically; but if the investigations
of our previous chapters have not led us astray, we shall be compelled
to renounce the hope of finding philosophical proofs of religious
beliefs. We cannot, therefore, include as part of the value of
philosophy any definite set of answers to such questions. Hence, once
more, the value of philosophy must not depend upon any supposed body of
definitely ascertainable knowledge to be acquired by those who study it.
The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very
uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through
life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the
habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which
have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his
deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite,
finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar
possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to
philosophize, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening
chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which
only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to
tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it
raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts
and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our
feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our
knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant
dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of
liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing
familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.
Apart from its utility in showing unsuspected possibilities, philosophy
has a value--perhaps its chief value--through the greatness of the
objects which it contemplates, and the freedom from narrow and personal
aims resulting from this contemplation. The life of the instinctive
man is shut up within the circle of his private interests: family and
friends may be included, but the outer world is not regarded except
as it may help or hinder what comes within the circle of instinctive
wishes. In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in
comparison with which the philosophic life is calm and free. The private
world of instinctive interests is a small one, set in the midst of a
great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private
world in ruins. Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the
whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a beleagured fortress,
knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is
inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife
between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will. In one
way or another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this
prison and this strife.
One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation. Philosophic
contemplation does not, in its widest survey, divide the universe into
two hostile camps--friends and foes, helpful and hostile, good and
bad--it views the whole impartially. Philosophic contemplation, when it
is unalloyed, does not aim at proving that the rest of the universe is
akin to man. All acquisition of knowledge is an enlargement of the Self,
but this enlargement is best attained when it is not directly sought. It
is obtained when the desire for knowledge is alone operative, by a study
which does not wish in advance that its objects should have this or that
character, but adapts the Self to the characters which it finds in its
objects. This enlargement of Self is not obtained when, taking the Self
as it is, we try to show that the world is so similar to this Self that
knowledge of it is possible without any admission of what seems alien.
The desire to prove this is a form of self-assertion and, like all
self-assertion, it is an obstacle to the growth of Self which it
desires, and of which the Self knows that it is capable. Self-assertion,
in philosophic speculation as elsewhere, views the world as a means to
its own ends; thus it makes the world of less account than Self, and the
Self sets bounds to the greatness of its goods. In contemplation, on
the contrary, we start from the not-Self, and through its greatness the
boundaries of Self are enlarged; through the infinity of the universe
the mind which contemplates it achieves some share in infinity.
For this reason greatness of soul is not fostered by those philosophies
which assimilate the universe to Man. Knowledge is a form of union
of Self and not-Self; like all union, it is impaired by dominion, and
therefore by any attempt to force the universe into conformity with
what we find in ourselves. There is a widespread philosophical tendency
towards the view which tells us that Man is the measure of all things,
that truth is man-made, that space and time and the world of universals
are properties of the mind, and that, if there be anything not created
by the mind, it is unknowable and of no account for us. This view, if
our previous discussions were correct, is untrue; but in addition to
being untrue, it has the effect of robbing philosophic contemplation of
all that gives it value, since it fetters contemplation to Self. What
it calls knowledge is not a union with the not-Self, but a set of
prejudices, habits, and desires, making an impenetrable veil between
us and the world beyond. The man who finds pleasure in such a theory of
knowledge is like the man who never leaves the domestic circle for fear
his word might not be law.
The true philosophic contemplation, on the contrary, finds its
satisfaction in every enlargement of the not-Self, in everything
that magnifies the objects contemplated, and thereby the subject
contemplating. Everything, in contemplation, that is personal or
private, everything that depends upon habit, self-interest, or desire,
distorts the object, and hence impairs the union which the intellect
seeks. By thus making a barrier between subject and object, such
personal and private things become a prison to the intellect. The free
intellect will see as God might see, without a _here_ and _now_,
without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs
and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and
exclusive desire of knowledge--knowledge as impersonal, as purely
contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain. Hence also the free
intellect will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into
which the accidents of private history do not enter, than the knowledge
brought by the senses, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon
an exclusive and personal point of view and a body whose sense-organs
distort as much as they reveal.
The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of
philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom
and impartiality in the world of action and emotion. It will view
its purposes and desires as parts of the whole, with the absence of
insistence that results from seeing them as infinitesimal fragments in
a world of which all the rest is unaffected by any one man's deeds. The
impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth,
is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in
emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only
to those who are judged useful or admirable. Thus contemplation enlarges
not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our
actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not
only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship
of the universe consists man's true freedom, and his liberation from the
thraldom of narrow hopes and fears.
Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy
is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its
questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be
true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because
these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich
our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which
closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the
greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also
is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe
which constitutes its highest good.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The student who wishes to acquire an elementary knowledge of philosophy
will find it both easier and more profitable to read some of the works
of the great philosophers than to attempt to derive an all-round view
from handbooks. The following are specially recommended:
Plato: _Republic_, especially Books VI and VII.
Descartes: _Meditations_.
Spinoza: _Ethics_.
Leibniz: _The Monadology_.
Berkeley: _Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous_.
Hume: _Enquiry concerning Human Understanding_.
Kant: _Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic_.