ANTICIPATORY SKETCH OF THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY.
The psychology of the Greeks has to all appearance given the mere
intellect an undue pre-eminence, if it has not even treated it as man's
essential self. Whether the appearance is altogether sound might be
a profitable inquiry for those who most criticise it. At any rate, a
later psychology has taught us to regard man as at once a cognitive, an
emotional, and a volitional being. It has arrived at this conclusion as
it looked at the division that parted off the systems of science from
the sphere of conduct and social life, and both from the inner life of
sentiment, of love, admiration and reverence. And the inference was
justifiable, in the same way as Plato's when, as he surveyed the triple
sphere into which the outward world of his contemporary society was
divided, he concluded a triplicity of the soul. If it was justifiable,
it was also, as in his case, somewhat misleading. In the outward
manifestation, where the letters are posted up on a gigantic scale,
one tends to forget that they only spell one word. Their difference
and distance seem increased, and we fail to note that, though there
are three aspects, yet there is only one power or soul, which exhibits
itself under one or other of the three tones or modes. In the actual
human being, cognition is always of some emotional interest and always
leads up to some practical result. From different points of view one or
other is occasionally declared to be primary and original; the others
derivative and secondary. At any rate we may say that in the ordinary
human being who is still in the garden of preparation and has not yet
stepped forth on one of the separate routes of life, his knowledge, his
emotional and his active life are in a tolerable harmony, and that each
in its little development is constantly followed by the other.
But with the outward differentiation an inward went hand in hand. In
some cases the intellectual or scientific, in others the emotional, in
others the active faculties became predominant. Human nature in order
to attain all its completeness had first of all, as it were, to lose
its life in order to gain it. The individual had to sacrifice part of
his all-sided development in order that he might gain it again, and
in a larger measure, through the medium of society. This process is
the process of civilisation: the long and, as it often seems, weary
road by which man can only realise himself by self-sacrifice: can only
reach unity through the way of diversity, and must die to live. It is a
process in which it is but too easy to notice only one stage and speak
of it as if it were the whole. It is possible sometimes to identify
civilisation with the material increase in the means of producing
enjoyment, or with the progress of scientific teaching as to the laws
of those material phenomena on which material civilisation is largely
dependent. It is possible sometimes to take as its test the stores of
artistic works, and the extension of a lively and delicate love of all
that is beautiful and tasteful. One may identify it with a high-toned
moral life, and with an orderly social system. Or one may maintain that
the real civilisation of a country presupposes a lofty conception and
reverent attitude to the supreme source of all that is good, and true,
and beautiful.
The question is important as bearing on the relation of philosophy to
the special sciences. Philosophy is sometimes identified with the sum
of sciences: sometimes with their complete unification. Philosophy,
says a modern, is knowledge completely unified. It is of course to some
extent a question of words in what sense a term is to be defined. And
no one will dispute that the scientific element is in point of form the
most conspicuous aspect of philosophy. Yet if we look at the historical
use of the term, one or two considerations suggest themselves.
Philosophy, said an ancient, is the knowledge of things human and
divine. Again and again, it has claimed for its task to be a guide and
chart of human life--to reveal the form of good and of beauty. But to
do this, it must be more than a mere science, or than a mere system
of the sciences. Again, it has been urged by modern critics that Kant
at last discovered for philosophy her true province--the study of the
conditions and principles of human knowledge. But though epistemology
is all-important, the science of knowledge is not identical with
philosophy: nor did Kant himself think it was. Rather his view is on
the whole in accord with what he has called the 'world's (as opposed
to the scholar's) conception of philosophy[1],' as the science of the
bearing of all ascertainable truths on the essential aims of human
reason--_teleologia humanae rationis_,--in accord, too, with the
world's conception of the philosopher as no mere logician, but the
legislator of human reason.
This, it need hardly be added, is the conception of philosophy which
is implicitly the basis of Hegel's use. Let us hear Schelling. 'A
philosophy which in its principle is not already religion is no true
philosophy[2].'
Or again, as to the place of Ethics: 'Morality is Godlike disposition,
an uplifting above the influence of the concrete into the realm of the
utterly universal. Philosophy is a like elevation, and for that reason
intimately one with morality, not through subordination, but through
essential and inner likeness[3].' But, again, it has more than once
been felt that philosophy is kindred with Art. It has been said--not
as a compliment--that philosophy is only a form of gratifying the
aesthetic instincts. Schopenhauer has suggested--as a novelty--that
the true way to philosophy was not by science, but through Art. And
Schelling before him had--while asserting the inner identity of the
two--even gone so far as to assert[4] that 'Art is the sole, true and
eternal organon as well as the ostensible evidence of philosophy.'
Philosophy, therefore, is one of a triad in which the human spirit has
tried to raise itself above its limitations and to become god-like. And
philosophy is the climax; Art the lowest; Religion in the mean. But
this does not mean that Religion supersedes Art, and that Philosophy
supersedes religion; or, if we retain the term 'supersede,' we must add
that the superseded is not left behind and passed aside: it is rather
an integral constituent of what takes its place. Philosophy is true and
adequate only as it has given expression to all that religion had or
aimed at. So, too, Religion is not the destruction of Art: though here
the attitude may often seem to be more obviously negative. A religion
which has no place for art is, again, no true religion. And thus again,
Philosophy becomes a reconciler of Art and Religion: of the visible
ideal and the invisible God. Art, on the other hand, is a foretaste
and a prophecy of religion and philosophy.
But Art, Religion, and Philosophy, again, rest upon, grow out of, and
are the fulfilment of an ethical society-a state of human life where an
ordered commonwealth in outward visibility is animated and sustained by
the spirit of freedom and self-realisation. And that public objective
existence of social humanity in its turn reposes on the will and
intelligence of human beings, of souls which in various relations
of discipline and interaction with their environment have become
free-agents, and have risen to be more than portions of the physical
world, sympathetic with its changes, and become awake to themselves and
their surroundings. Such is the mental or spiritual life as it rises to
full sense of its power, recognises its kindred with the general life,
carries out that kindred in its social organisation, and at length
through the strength social union gives floats boldly in the empyrean
of spiritual life, in art, religion, and philosophy.
But, what about the special relationship of philosophy to the sciences?
Undoubtedly the philosophers of the early years of the century
have used lordly language in reference to the sciences. They have
asserted--from Fichte downwards--that the philosophical construction,
of the universe must justify itself to itself--must be consistent,
continuous, and coherent--and that it had not to wait for experience
to give it confirmation. Even the cautious Kant[5] had gone so far
as to assert that the 'understanding gives us nature'--i. e. as he
explains, _natura formaliter spectata_, viz., the order and regularity
in the phenomena--that it is the source of the laws of nature and
of its formal unity. The so-called proofs of natural laws are only
instances and exemplifications, which no more _prove_ them, than we
prove that 6 x 4 = 24, because 6 yards of cloth at 4s. must be paid
for by 24 shillings. To assert that this instance is no proof, is
not to reject experience--still less to refuse respect to the new
discoveries of science. But it is unquestionably to assert that there
is something prior to the sciences--prior, i. e. in the sense that Kant
speaks of the _a priori,_ something which is fundamental to them, and
constitutes them what they are--something which is assumed as real if
their syntheses (and every scientific truth is a synthesis) are to be
possible. The analysis and exhibition in its organic completeness of
this Kantian _a priori_ is the theme of the Hegelian Logic.
The Philosophy of Nature stands in the Hegelian system between Logic
and Mental or Spiritual Philosophy. Man--intelligent, moral, religious
and artistic man--rests upon the basis of natural existence: he
is the child of the earth, the offspring of natural organisation.
But Nature itself--such is the hypothesis of the system--is only
intelligible as the reflex of that _a priori_ which has been
exhibited in Logic. The whole scheme by which the natural world is
scientifically held together, apprehended by ordinary consciousness
and elaborated by mathematical analysis, presupposes the organism
of the categories--these fundamental habits of thought or form of
conception which are the framework of the existence we know. Yet
Nature never shows this intelligible world--the Idea--in its purity
and entirety. In the half-literal, half-figurative phrases of Hegel,
Nature shows the Idea beside itself, out of its mind, alienated, _non
compos mentis._ 'It is a mad world, my masters,' 'The impotence of
nature_--Ohnmacht der Natur_[6]--is a frequent phrase, by which he
indicates the a-logical, if not illogical, character of the physical
world. Here we come across the negation of mind: chance plays its part:
contingency is everywhere. If you expect that the physical universe
will _display_ unquestioning obedience to the laws of reason and of the
higher logic, you will be disappointed. What you _see_ is fragmentary,
chaotic, irregular. To the bodily sense--even when that sense has been
rendered more penetrating by all the many material and methodical
aids of advanced civilisation--the Idea is in the natural world
presented only in traces, indications, portions, which it requires a
well-prepared mind to descry, still more to unite. Yet at the same
time the indications of that unity are everywhere, and the hypothesis
of the logical scheme or organisation of the Idea is the only theory
which seems fully to correspond with the data. Nature[7], says Hegel,
is the Idea as it shows itself in sense-perception, not as it shows
itself in thought. In thought a clear all-comprehending total; in sense
a baffling fragment. The Idea--the unity of life and knowledge--is
everywhere in nature, but nowhere clearly, or whole, or otherwise
than a glimpse; not a logical scheme or compact theory. Nature is the
sensible in which the intelligible is bound--the reality which is the
vehicle of the ideal. But the ideal treasure is held in rough and
fragile receptacles which half disclose and half conceal the light
within. Nature in short contains, but disguised, the idea, in fainter
and clearer evidences: it is the function of man, by his scientific
intelligence and ethical work, building up a social organisation,
to provide the ground on which the ultimate significance and true
foundation of the world may be deciphered, guessed, or believed, or
imaginatively presented. The verification of the guess or deciphering,
of course, lies in its adequacy to explain and colligate the facts.
The true method and true conception is that which needs no subsequent
adjustments--no epicycles to make it work--which is no mere hypothesis
useful for subjective arrangement, but issues with uncontrollable force
and self-evidence from the facts.
What Hegel has called the 'impotence of nature,' Schopenhauer has
styled the irrational Will, and it is from that end, so to speak, that
Schopenhauer's philosophy begins. Nature--the basis of all things--the
fundamental prius--is an irresistible and irregular appetite or craving
to be, to do, to live,--but an _appetitus_ or _nisus_ which ascends
from grade to grade--from mere mechanical forces acting in movement up
to the highest form of animal activity. But as this 'Will' or blind
lust of being and instinct of life gets above the inorganic world, and
manifests itself in the animal organism, there emerges a new order of
existence--the intellect, or the ideal world. Seen from the underside,
indeed, all that has appeared now in the animal is a brain and a
nerve-system--a new species of matter. But there is another side to the
Mind which has thus awakened out of the sleep of natural forces. This
intellect is unaware and can never be made aware that it is a child of
nature: it acknowledges no superior, and no beginning or end in time.
Its natal day is infinitely beyond the age when the cosmic process
began its race; before stars gathered their masses of luminosity, and
the earth received the first germs of life. As the genius of Art, it
arrests the toiling struggle of existence to produce new forms and
destroy old ones; it sets free in typical forms of eternal beauty
the great ideas that nature vainly seeks to embody, and as moral and
religious life its aim is to annihilate the craving and the lust for
more and ever more being and to enter in passionless and calm union
with the One-and-All.
Thus it is, if not absurd, at least misleading, to speak of Hegel's
system as Panlogism. Strictly speaking, it is only of the Logic
that this is the proper name: there, unquestionably, reason is all
and in all. Yet to hold that reason is the very life and centre of
things is for philosophy the cardinal article--the postulate which
must inspire her first and last steps and guide her throughout. But
the Logical Idea, if put at the beginning, is at first only put as a
presupposition, which it is the task of human intelligence to work
out and organise. If it be the key which is to explain nature and
render it intelligible, it is a key which has only been gained in the
process--the long process--by which man has risen from his natural
origin--never however parting company with it--to survey and comprehend
himself and his setting. The faculty of 'pure thinking,' which is the
pre-condition of Logical study, is the result of a gradual development
in which animal sense has grown, and metamorphosed, and worked itself
up to be a free intelligence and a good will capable of discerning
and fulfilling the universal and the eternal. Thus in the Logic the
system constructs the pure Idea--the ideal timeless organisation of
thoughts or λόγοι on which all knowledge of reality rests--the diamond
net which suffers nothing to escape its meshes: in the Philosophy of
Nature it tries to put together in unity and continuity the phases
and partial aspects which the physical universe presents in graduated
exemplification of the central truth: and in the Philosophy of Mind it
traces the steps by which a merely natural being becomes the moral and
aesthetic idealist in whom man approaches deity.
It is indeed Hegel's fundamental axiom that actuality is reasonable.
But the actuality is not the appearance--the temporary phases--the
succession of event: it is the appearance rooted in its essence--the
succession concentrated (yet not lost) in its unity. There is room
for much so-called irrationality within these ranges. For, when
human beings pronounce something irrational, they only mean that
their practical intelligence would have adopted other methods to
arrive at certain conclusions. They judge, in fact, by their limited
understandings and not _ex ordine universi._ Hegel's doctrine is after
all only another way of stating the maintenance of the fittest; and
it is liable to the v same misconception by those who employ their
personal aims as the standards of judgment.
So too there is reason--there is the Idea--in Nature. But it is
there only for the artist, the religious man, and the philosopher;
and they see it respectively by the eye of genius, by the power of
faith, by the thought of reason. They see it from the standpoint
of the absolute_--sub specie quadam aeternitatis._ It is therefore
a recalcitrant matter in which Nature presents the Idea: or, if
recalcitrant suggests a positive opposition, let us say rather a realm
in which the Idea fails to come out whole and clear, where unity has to
be forced upon and read into the facts. Science, says one writer, is
an ideal construction: it implies an abstraction from irregularities
and inequalities: it smoothes and sublimates the rough and imperfect
material into a more rounded and perfect whole. Its object, which it
terms a reality, is a non-sensible, imperceptible reality: what one
might as well call an ideality, were it not that here again the popular
imagination twists the word into a subjective sense to mean the private
and personal ideas of the student.
But the obvious individual reality never quite in its obviousness
equals the 'golden mediocrity' of the ideal. Its myriad grapes must be
crushed to yield the wine of the spirit.
'It's a lifelong toil till our lump be leavened'
--till the ore be transformed into the fine gold. But the gold is
there, and in the great laboratory of _natura_ _naturans_ is the
principle and agent of its own purification. 'Nature is made better by
no mean, but nature makes that mean'--for nature is spirit in disguise.
It is on this side that a certain analogy of Hegel's and Schelling's
philosophy of nature with the Romantic school comes out. Nature
is felt, as it were, to be spirit-haunted, to give glimpses of a
solidarity, a design, a providentiality, which runs counter to that
general outward indifference in which part seems to have settled beside
part, each utterly indifferent to the other. Romance is the unexpected
coincidence, the sudden jumping together of what seemed set worlds
apart and utterly alien. It was the sense of this Romance which wove
its wild legends of nymph and cobold, of faun and river-god, of imp and
fairy, wielding the powers of the elements and guiding the life of even
the so-called inanimate world. But it is no less the theme of the fairy
tale of science. Even in the austere demonstrations of geometry, and
the constructions of mechanics, the un-looked-for slips upon us with
gipsy tread. Who has not--in his early studies of mathematics--been
fain to marvel at the almost unexpected consilience of property with
property in a figure, suddenly placing in almost 'eery' relief the
conjunction of what was apparently poles asunder? It is not a mere
form of words to speak of beautiful properties of a conic section or
a curve. Custom perhaps has blunted our sense for the symmetries of
celestial dynamics, but they are none the less admirable, because we
are otherwise engrossed. To the first generation of our century the
phenomena of chemistry, magnetism and electricity appealed--as they
have never since done--with a tangible demonstration of that _appetitus
ad invicem,_ that instinct of union Bacon speaks of; and this time in
a higher form than in mere mechanism. Polarity--the bifurcation of
reality into a pair of opposites which yet sought their complement
in each other--eternally dividing only eternally to unite, and thus
only to exist--became a process pressed into general service. Lastly,
what more admirable than that adaptation of the individual to the
environment--and of the environment to the individual--of the organs in
him to his total, and of his total to his organs. One in all and All in
one: one life in perpetual transformation, animals, plants, and earth
and air; one organism, developing in absolute coherence. This was the
vision which the genius of Schelling and his contemporaries saw--the
same vision which, by accumulation of facts and pictorial history,
Darwin and his disciples have impressed in some measure even on the
dullest.
But there is a profound difference between the spirit of a Philosophy
of Nature and the aggregate of the physical sciences. Each science
takes the particular quarry which accident or providence has assigned
to it, and does its best to 'put out' every piece of rock it contains.
But it seldom goes, unless by constraint, and in these days of
specialisation it does so less and less, to examine the neighbouring
excavation, and see if there be any connexion between the strata. Even
within its own domain it is ashamed to put forward too much parade of
system. Its method is often like that of the showman in the travelling
menagerie: 'And now, please pass to the next carriage.' It respects
the compartmental arrangement into which it finds the world broken up,
and often thinks it has deserved well if it has filled the compartment
fuller than before, or succeeded in creating a few sub-compartments
within the old bounds. Even the so-called mental and moral sciences
when they lose their philosophical character tend to imitate these
features. Yet in every science there is an outlook and an outlet,
for whosoever has the will and the power, to emerge from his narrow
domain on the open fields and free prospect into the first fountains
and last great ocean of being. Always, and not least in our own day,
the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist, the psychologist, the
sociologist, and the economist, have made their special field a
platform where they might discourse _de omnibus rebus,_ and become
for the nonce philosophers and metaphysicians. It would be a silly
intolerance and a misconception of the situation to exclaim _Ne sutor
ultra crepidam_. In the organic system of things 'each "moment" even
independent of the whole is the whole; and to see this is to penetrate
to the heart of the thing.' We need hardly go to Hegel to be told that
to know one thing thoroughly well is to know all things. The finite,
which we inertly rest content with, would, if we were in full sympathy
with it, open up its heart and show us the infinite. And yet if the
specialist when he rises from his shoe-making, with a heart full of
the faith that 'there is nothing like leather,' should proclaim his
discovery of it in regions where it was hitherto unsurmised, one may
smile incredulous and be no cynic.
Philosophy then keeps open eye and ear--as far as may be no doubt for
the finer shades and delicate details--but essentially for the music
of humanity and the music of the spheres--for the general purpose and
drift of all sciences--from mathematics to sociology--as they help to
make clear the life of nature and further the emancipation of man. It
will seem occasionally to over-emphasise the continuity of science
and to make light of its distinctions: it will seem occasionally more
anxious as to the order than as to the contents of the sciences: it
will remind the sciences of the hypothetical and formal character of
much of their method and some of their principles: and sometimes will
treat as unimportant, results on which the mere scholar or dogmatist
of science lays great weight. From his habit of dealing with the
limitations and mutual implication of principles and conceptions,
the philosopher will often be able--and perhaps only too willing--to
point out cases where the mere specialist has allowed himself to
attribute reality to his abstraction. He will tell the analyst of
the astronomical motions that he must not take the distinction of
centrifugal and centripetal force, into which mechanics disintegrate
the planetary orbit, as if it really meant that the planet was pulled
inward by one force and sent on spinning forward by another[8]. And
the scientist, proud of his mathematics, will resent and laugh at
the philosopher who lets fall a word about the planets moving in
grand independence like 'blessed gods.' The philosopher will hint to
the chemist that his formulae of composition and decomposition of
bodies are, as he uses them, somewhat mythological, picturing water
as atom of oxygen locked up with atom of hydrogen; and the chemist
will go away muttering something about a fool who does not believe
in the well-ascertained chemical truth that water is composed of
these two gases. If the philosopher further hints that it is not the
highest ideal of a chemical science to be content with enumerating
fifty or sixty elements, and detecting their several properties
and affinities[9]; that it would be well to find some principle of
gradation, some unity or law which brought meaning into meaningless
juxtaposition, the mere dogmatist, whose chemistry is his living and
who shrinks from disendowment, will scent a propensity towards the
heresy which sinks all elements in one. And yet, even among chemists,
the instinct for law and unity begins to demand satisfaction.
A still richer store of amazing paradox and perplexing analogies awaits
anyone who will turn over the volume in Hegel's _Werke_ (vii. i) and
select the plums which lie thick in the lecture-notes. He will find
a great deal--and probably more, the less he really knows of any of
the subjects under discussion--that he cannot make head or tail of:
language where he cannot guess whether it should be taken literally or
figuratively. For Hegel seriously insists on the essential unity and
identity of all the compartments of the physical universe; he will not
keep time and space on one level, matter and motion on another, and
senses, suns, plants, passions, all in their proper province. Going
far beyond the theory which supposes that all the complex difference
of organisation has grown up in endless, endless ages from a primitive
indistinctness, so that the gap of time acts as a wall to keep early
and late apart, Hegel insists upon their essential unity to-day. And
that sounds hard--the herald of anarchy, of the collapse of the ordered
polity of the scientific state. It is no doubt probable that Hegel,
like other men, made mistakes; that he over-estimated the supposed
discoveries of the day: that he indulged in false analogies, and that
he was attracted by a daring paradox. All this has nothing to do with
his main thesis: which is, that the natural realm is as it stands an
a-logical realm where reason has gone beside itself, and yet containing
an instrument--man, and that is mind--by which its rationality may be
realised and restored. In that point at least he and Schopenhauer are
at one.
[Footnote 1: Kant's _Kritik d. r. Vernunft_: Methodenl. Architektonik
d. r. Vern.]
[Footnote 2: Schelling's Werke, v. 116.]
[Footnote 3: Ibid. v. 276.]
[Footnote 4: Ibid. iii. 267.]
[Footnote 5: Kant, _Kritik d. r. Vern.,_ Deduction of the Categories,
Sect. III.]
[Footnote 6: _Encyclopaedie_, § 250.]
[Footnote 7: _Encycl._ Sect. 244 (_Logic,_ p. 379).]
[Footnote 8: _Encyclop._ §§ 266, 269; cf. the lecture-note as given
in _Werke_ vii i. p. 97. A large number of paradoxical analogies
from Hegel's _Naturphilosophie_ has been collected by Riehl in his
_Philosophisher Criticismus_, ii. 2, 120.]
[Footnote 9: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. 419.]