CHAPTER XIV.

TRANSITION TO HEGEL.

Thus far Schelling (aetat. 25) had gone in 1800. Two sides of

philosophy had been alternately presented as complementary to each

other; and now the task lay before him to publish the System itself

which formed the basis of those complementary views. To that task

Schelling set himself in 1801 (in his Journal for Speculative Physics):

but the _Darstellung meines Systems_ remained a torso. The Absolute

was abruptly 'shot from the pistol': but little followed save a

restatement in new terms of the Philosophy of Nature. Meanwhile Hegel,

who had inherited some little means by his father's death, began to

think that the hour had struck for his entrance into the literary and

philosophical arena, and wrote in the end of 1800 to Schelling asking

his aid in finding a suitable place and desirable surroundings from

which to launch himself into action. What answer or advice he received

is unknown: at any rate in the early days of 1801 he took up his

quarters at Jena, and in the autumn he gave his first lectures at the

University. Gossip suggested that Schelling, left alone (since Fichte's

departure) to sustain the onset of respectability and orthodoxy upon

the extravagances of the new Transcendentalism, had summoned his

countryman and old friend to bear a part in the fray. And the rumour

seemed to receive corroboration. The two friends issued conjointly

a _Critical Journal of Philosophy,_ which ran through two years. So

closely were the two editors associated that in one article it seems as

if the younger had supplied his more fluent pen to expound the ideas of

his senior.

The influence of Hegel is to be seen in the _Bruno_, _or on the Divine

and Natural Principle of Things_, published in 1802. It is a dialogue,

in form closely modelled after the _Timaeus_ of Plato, dealing with the

old theme of the relation of art (poesy) and philosophy, and with the

eternal creation of the universe. It presents philosophy as a higher

than Art; for while Art achieves only an individual truth and beauty,

philosophy cognises truth and beauty in its essence and actuality

(_an und für sich_). Philosophy itself Bruno (the chief speaker of

the dialogue) does not profess to set forth, but 'only the ground and

soil on which it must be built up and carried out': and that soil

is 'the Idea of something in which all antitheses are not so much

combined, as rather one, and not so much superseded, as rather not at

all parted,'--'a unity, in which unity and antithesis, the self-similar

with the dissimilar, are one[1].' From such a standpoint it is not

wonderful that 'in the finite understanding (_Verstand,_) compared with

the supreme Idea and the way in which all things are in it, everything

seems reversed, and as if standing on its head, exactly like the things

we see mirrored on the surface of water[2].'

This supreme Unity is essentially a trinity: an Eternal, embracing

infinite and finite; an eternal and invisible father of all things,

who, never issuing forth from his eternity, comprehends infinite and

finite in one and the same act of divine knowledge. The infinite,

again, is the Spirit, who is the unity of all things; while the finite,

though potentially equal to the infinite[3], is by its own will a God

suffering and made subject to the conditions of time[4]. This trinity

in unity (which is the Absolute) is by logic--a mere science of

understanding--rent asunder: and the one Subject-object of philosophy

becomes for reflection and understanding the three independent objects

which such a 'logical' philosophy calls respectively the Soul (erewhile

the infinite), the world (once the finite), and God (the eternal

unity). 'Opposing and separating the world of intelligence from the

world of nature, men have learned to see nature outside God, and God

outside nature, and withdrawing nature from the holy necessity, have

subordinated it to the unholy which they name mechanical, while by the

same act they have made the ideal world the scene of a lawless liberty.

At the same time as they defined nature as a merely passive entity,

they supposed they had gained the right of defining God, whom they

elevated above nature, as pure activity, utter "actuosity," as if the

one of these concepts did not stand and fall with the other, and none

had truth by itself[5].'

The problem therefore of philosophy is on one hand to 'find the

expression for an activity which is as reposeful as the deepest repose,

for a rest which is as active as the highest activity[6].' On the

other hand; 'to find the point of unity is not the greatest thing, but

from it also to develop its opposite, this is the proper and deepest

secret of art[7].' The world as it first presents itself labours under

a radical antithesis: it offers a double face, body and soul, finite

and infinite. But to an absolute philosophy, or that high idealism

which sees all things in the light of the Eternal, the two sides are

not so separate as they first appeared. Each is also the whole and

one, but under a phase, a '_Differenz_' a preponderating aspect which

disguises the essential identity of both. Behind mind, as it were,

looms body: through body shines mind. The ideal is but a co-aspect with

the real. The difference of nature and spirit presupposes and leads

back to the indifference of the Absolute One. 'Wherever in a thing soul

and body are equated, in that thing is an imprint of the Idea, and as

the Idea in the Absolute is also itself being and essence, so in that

thing, its copy, the form is also the substance and the substance the

form[8].'

'Thus,' so Bruno concludes, 'we shall, first in the absolute equality

of essence and form, know how both finite and infinite stream forth

from its heart, and how the one is necessarily and for ever with the

other, and comprehend how that simple ray, which issues from the

Absolute and is the very Absolute, appears parted into difference and

indifference, finite and infinite. We shall precisely define the mode

of parting and of unity for each point of the universe, and prosecute

the universe to that place where that absolute point of unity appears

parted into two relative unities. We shall recognise in the one the

source whence springs the real and naturals world; in the other, of

the ideal and divine world. With the former we shall celebrate the

incarnation of God from all eternity; with the latter the necessary

deification of man. And while we move freely and without resistance up

and down on this spiritual ladder, we shall, now, as we descend, see

the unity of the divine and natural principle parted, now, as we ascend

and again dissolve everything into one, see nature in God and God in

nature[9].' Such was the programme which Schelling offered. Hegel

accepting it,--or perhaps helping to frame it--made two not unimportant

changes. He attempted in his _Phenomenology_ to lead up step by step

to, and so warrant, that strange position of idealism u which claims to

be the image of the Absolute. He tried in his _Logic_ to give for this

point of view a systematic basis and a filling out of the bare Idea of

a Unity, neither objective nor subjective, neither form nor substance,

neither real nor ideal, but including and absorbing these. He tried, in

short, to trace in the Absolute itself the inherent difference which

issued in two different worlds, and to show its unity and identity

there.

A _System_ of philosophy, and a philosophy of the _Absolute!_ The

project to the sober judgment of common sense stands self-condemned,

palpably beyond the tether of humanity. For if there be anything agreed

upon, it is that the knowledge of finite beings like us can never be

more than a--comparatively poor--collection of fragments, and can

never reach to that which--and such is the supposed character of the

Absolute--is utterly un-related, rank non-relativity. But in the first

place, let us not be the slaves of words, and let us not be terrified

by unfamiliar terms. After all, a System is only our old friend the

unity of knowledge, and the Absolute is not something let quite loose,

but the consummation and inter-connexion of all ties. It is no doubt

an audacious enterprise to set forth on the quest of the unity of

knowledge, and the completion of all definition and characterisation.

But, on the other hand, it may perhaps claim to be more truly modest

than the self-complacent modesty of its critics. For ordinary belief

and knowledge rest upon presuppositions which they dare not or will

not subject to revision. They too are sure that things on the whole,

or that the system of things, or that nature and history, are a realm

of uniformity, subject to unvarying law, in thorough interdependence.

They are good enough, occasionally, to urge that they hold these

beliefs on the warranty of experience, and not as, what they are

pleased to call, intuitions, _a priori_ ideas, and what not. But to

base a truth on experience is a loose manner of talking: not one whit

better than the alleged Indian foundation of the earth on the elephant,

and the elephant erected on the tortoise. For by Experience it means

experiences; and these rest one upon another, one upon another, till

at length, if this be all that holds them together, the last hangs

unsupported, (and with its superincumbent load), ready to drop in the

abyss of Nought.

This 'transcendental,' 'absolutist,' '_a priori_' philosophy, which

stands so strange and menacing on the threshold of the nineteenth

century, is after all only, as Kant sometimes called it, an essay

to comprehend and see the true measures and dimensions of this

much-quoted Experience. All knowledge rests _in_ (not _on_) the unity

of Experience. All the several experiences rest in the totality

of one experience,--ultimate, all-embracing, absolute, infinite,

unconditioned; universal and yet individual, necessary and yet

free,--eternal, and yet filling all the nooks of time,--ideal, and yet

the mother of all reality,--unextended, and yet spread through the

spaces of the universe. Call it, if you like, the experience of the

race, but remember that that apparently more realistic and scientific

phrase connotes neither more nor less (if rightly understood) than

normal, ideal, universal, infinite, absolute experience. This is the

Unconditioned, which is the basis and the builder of all conditions:

the Absolute, which is the home and the parent of all relations.

Experience is no doubt yours and mine, but it is also much more than

either yours or mine. He who builds on and in Experience, builds on

and in the Absolute, in _the_ System--a system which is not merely

_his._ In his every utterance he claims to speak as the mouth-piece of

the Absolute, the Unconditioned; his words expect and require assent,

belief, acceptance;--they are candidates (not necessarily, or always

successful) for the rank of universal and necessary truth: they are

dogmatic assertions, and even in their humblest tones, none the less

infected with the fervour of certainty. For, indeed, otherwise, it

would be a shame and an insult to let them cross the lips.

It is the aim of the Absolute _a priori_ philosophy to raise this

certainty to truth: or, as one may rather say, to reduce this certainty

to its kernel of truth. It seeks to determine the limits--not _of_ this

absolute and basic experience (for it has no external limits)--but

_in_ this experience: the anatomy and physiology of the Absolute,--the

correlations and inclusions, the distinctions and syntheses in the

unconditioned field. It examines the _foundation_ of all knowledge.

But--if this be the phrase--we must be on our guard against a

misapprehension of its terms. The foundations are also knowledge:

they are _in_ all knowledge and experience, its synthetic link and

its analytic distinctions. We must not shrink from paradoxes in

expression. The house of knowledge, the world of experience, is as

self-centred and self-sustaining, and even more so, than the planetary

system. It is a totality in which each part hangs upon and helps to

hold up the others, but which needs no external help, resting and yet

moving, self-poised and free.

We may be spared, therefore, verbal criticism on the Absolute and

Unconditioned. The Absolute, and Infinite, and Eternal is no mere

negation:--the only pure negation is NOT, and even that has a flaw in

its claim. It is perfectly true--and it can only be babes and sucklings

that need to be reminded of the fact--that none of us realises and

attains the _ne plus ultra_ of knowledge and that all our systems

have their day,--have their day and cease to be. 'The coasts of the

Happy Isles of philosophy where we would fain arrive are covered only

with fragments of shattered ships, and we behold no intact vessel in

their bays[10].' So too the whole earth is full of graves; and yet

humanity lives on, charged with the attainments of the past and full

of the promise of the future. Let us by all means be critical and

not dogmatic: let us never entirely forget that each utterance, each

science, each system of ours falls short of what it wanted to be,

and for a moment at least thought it was. But let us not carry our

critical abstinence into dogmatic non-intervention: or, if so, let us

silently accept the great renunciation of all utterance henceforth.

System we all presuppose in our words and deeds, and should be much

hurt if our defect in it were seriously alleged: the Absolute we all

rest in, though amid so many self-imposed and other distractions we

feel and see it not. The philosopher proposes for his task--or rather

the philosopher is one on whom this task forces itself as for him the

one thing inevitable--to determine what is that system and what that

Absolute, or, if the phrase be preferred, the philosopher traces to its

unity, and retraces into its differences that Experience--that felt,

known, and willed synthesis of Reality,--that realised ideal world--on

which and in which we live and move. He does not make the system, nor

does he set up the Absolute. He only tries to discover the system, and

to construe the Absolute.

It may be said that the best of philosophers can do no more than

give us _a_ System and _an_ Absolute. Undoubtedly that is so. Each

philosophy is from one point of view a strictly individualist

performance. It is not, in one way, _the_ Absolute truth, which it

promises or hopes to disclose. The truth is seen through one being's

eyes; and his 'measure,' as Protagoras might have said, is upon it. Yet

it is still _the_ Absolute, as seen through those eyes; it is still

in a marvellous measure that truth, that absolute truth, 'which the

actual generations garble.' For both the artist and the philosopher,

if they create, only re-create or imitate; if they are makers, they

are still more seers: and their power of 'imitation' and of 'vision'

rests on their capacity to de-individualise themselves of their

eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, and to bring out only that in them

which is the common truth of all essential thought and vision. In

proportion as they purge themselves of this _evil_ subjectivity are

they true artists and philosophers. They are both--and so, too, is

the religious genius--idealists: but the test of the value of their

idealism is its power of including and synthetising reality. That is

their verification: that, and not their concord with this or that

opinion, this or that theory of individuals or of groups. Not that the

views either of groups or individuals are unimportant. But often they

are but frozen lumps in the stream, temporary islands which have lost

their fluidity, and which imagine themselves continental and permanent.

Truth, then, reasoned truth, harmonious experience, absolute system,

is the theme of philosophy. Or, in Hegelian language, its theme is

the Truth, and that Truth, God. Not alum, an aggregate, or even what

is ordinarily styled a system, of truths: but the one and yet diverse

pulse of truth, which beats through all: the supreme point of view in

which all the parts and differences, occasionally standing out as if

independent, sink into their due relation and are seen in their right

proportion.

[Footnote 1: Schelling, iv. 231, 235, 236.]

[Footnote 2: Ibid. 244.]

[Footnote 3: 'In things thou seest nought but the misplaced images of

that absolute unity; and even in knowledge, so far as it is a relative

unity, thou seest nought but an image--only drawn amiss in another

direction--of that absolute cognition, in which being is as little

determined by thought as thought by being.']

[Footnote 4: Schelling, iv. 252. See further, iv. 327: 'The pure

subject, that absolute knowledge, the absolute Ego, the form of all

forms, is the only-begotten Son of the Absolute, equally eternal with

him, not diverse from his Essence, but one with it.']

[Footnote 5: Schelling, iv. 306. Cp. for actuosity, notes in vol. ii.

396. Spinoza, Cogit. Met. ii. 11, speaks of the actuosa essentia of

God.]

[Footnote 6: Schelling, iv. 305.]

[Footnote 7: Ibid. iv. 328.]

[Footnote 8: Ibid. iv. 306.]

[Footnote 9: Schelling, iv. 328.]

[Footnote 10: Hegel, Werke, i. 166.]

PROLEGOMENA

BOOK II

_IN THE PORCHES OF PHILOSOPHY_

CHAPTER XV.

THE TWO AGES OF REASON.

The eighteenth century--it has been often said--was a rationalising,

unhistorical, age: and, in contrast, the nineteenth has been declared

to be _par excellence_ the founder and the patron of the historical

method. In the one, the tendency governing the main movement of

European civilisation was towards cosmopolitan and universal

enlightenment. A common ideal, and, because common, necessarily rather

general and abstract, perhaps even somewhat vulgarly utilitarian,

pervaded Western Europe, and threw its influence for good and evil

on literature and art, on religion and polity. It grew out of a

revulsion, in many ways natural, from the religious extravagances

of the century-and-a-half preceding, which had led prudent thinkers

to reduce religion to a 'reasonable' minimum, and to reject all

things that savoured of or suggested enthusiasm, fanaticism, and

superstition. In politics the same one type or system of government

and laws was aimed at, more or less, in all advancing states. National

peculiarities and patriotism were looked at askance, as unworthy of

the free 'humanity' which was set forward as the end of all training.

To simplify, to level, to render intelligible, and self-consistent was

the task of enlightenment in dealing with all institutions. To remove

all anomalies and inequalities, to give security for liberty and to

facilitate the right to pursue happiness[1], was the chief watchword

of this movement. Its questions were--Is religion, Is art and science,

Is political organisation, a source of happiness? Are poetry, and a

belief in divine things, and abstruse knowledge, upon the whole for

human advantage and benefit? Only such civilisation can be justified

as, taken all in all, is a blessing; if not (cried some) we may as well

cling to the happiness of the barbarian.

That these are important questions, and that the purposes

above-mentioned are in many ways good, is clear. But before we can

answer the questions, or decide as to the feasibility of the aims,

there are some things to be brought and to be kept in view. And these

things were not as a rule brought and kept in view. It was assumed that

the standard of adjudication was found in the averagely educated and

generally cultured individual among the class of more or less 'advanced

thinkers' who asked the questions and set up the aims. That class,

already denationalised by function, forming a commonwealth or rather a

friendly fraternity throughout the capitals of Europe, had cut itself

off from the narrower and the deeper sympathies of the national life.

Forming a sort of mean or middle stratum in the social organisation,

they tended to ignore or despise equally the depths below them and

the heights above. They took themselves as the types of humanity, and

what _their_ understandings found acceptable they dubbed rational: all

else was a survival from the ages of darkness. They forgot utterly

that they were only a part, a class, a member in the social body:

and that they could only be and do what they were and did, because

what they were not and did not do was otherwise supplied. It takes

all sorts of people to make a world: but each class--and the order of

literature and intelligence is no exception--tends to set itself up as

the corner-stone (if not something more) of the social edifice. What is

more: in such a loose aggregate as the intelligent upper-middle class,

the individual tends more and more to count as something, detached and

by himself, to be an equal and free unit of judgment and choice, to be

emancipated from all the bonds which hold in close affinity members

of a group whose functions are unlike each other's, and yet decidedly

complementary. Such a class, again--though there are of course

conspicuous exceptions--is, by the stress of special interests, removed

from direct contact with nature and reality, and lives what in the main

may be styled an artificial life.

When such a class asked what were the benefits of art or religion,

it thought first of itself; and it looked upon art and religion--and

the same would be true of philosophy and science, or of political

sanctions--as _merely_ objective and outward entities, foreign to the

individual, yet by some mechanical influences brought into connexion

with him,--as one might apply to him a drug or a viand. But clearly

to a person of practical aims, bent on conveying information and

enlightenment, bent on making all men as like each other as possible

in the medium range of cultivation which he thinks desirable, the

utility of some of these things is questionable and limited. It is

only a little modicum of religion, of art and of science, which can be

justified by its obvious pleasure-giving power; and it is easy to point

the thesis against enthusiasm in these regions, by reference to the

disastrous wars fanned by religion, to the license that has followed

the steps of art, and to the lives wasted in the zeal for increasing

knowledge. In his ideal of human life such a practical reformer

will tend to suppress all that bears too clear a trace of natural,

infra-rational, non-intelligent kindred,--all that ties us too closely

to mother earth and universal nature.

But if this was the dominant tone of the literary teachers who had

chief audience from the public ear, there was no lack of dissentient

voices who appealed to nature, who loved the past, who set sentiment

and imagination above intellect, and who never bowed the knee to

the great idols of enlightened middle-class utilitarianism. Even

in the leaders of the enlightening host--amongst the chiefs of the

_Aufklärung_--there is a breadth and a depth of human interest which

sets them far above their average followers, and which should prevent

us from joining without discrimination in the depreciatory judgments

so often passed on the eighteenth century. The pioneers in the great

emancipatory movement of modern times should not be allowed to suffer

from the exaggerations and haste of their more vulgar imitators--still

less refused the meed of gratitude we owe them. But when their ideas

were violently translated into reality, when the levelling, unshackling

process was set at work by vulgar hands, the shortcomings of their

theories were made to show even greater than they were: and inevitable

reaction set in. Even the revolutionist himself has come to admit that

fraternity at that time came badly off in comparison with liberty and

equality[2]. But these drawbacks were accentuated when the cosmopolitan

reform-movement, by its haste and intolerance, awakened the spirit

of national jealousy. The deeper instincts of life rose in protest

against the supposed superiority of intellect: the heart claimed its

rights against the head: the man of nature and feeling was roused up to

meet the man of reasoning and criticism. The spirit of war evoked those

energies of human nature--some of them not its least valuable--which

had slumbered in times of easy-going peace. The days of adversity and

humiliation taught men that the march of literary culture is not the

all-in-all of life and history.

It was made apparent, practically at least, that intelligence, with

its hard and fast formulae, its logical principles, its keen analysis,

was not deep enough or wide enough to justify its claim to the august

title of reason. To be reasonable implies a more comprehensive,

patient, many-sided observation than is necessary to prove the claim

to mere intelligence. To be intelligent is to seize the right means

to execute a given or accepted end--it is to be quick and correct in

the practice of life, to carry out in detail what has been determined

on in general. Understanding plays upon the surface of life and deals

with the momentary case: and its greatest praise is to be fleet in

the application of principles, apt to detect the point on which to

direct action, correct in its estimate of means to ends. Clearsighted,

prudent, and direct, it is the supreme virtue in a given sphere: but

the sphere must be given, and its end constituted in the measured round

of practical life, its system complete: or, understanding is bewildered

before a hopeless puzzle. Understanding is--the improvident cynic might

say--a certain animal-like sagacity--(such cynical philosophers were

perhaps Hobbes and Schopenhauer[3])--a mere power of carrying out a

given rule in a new but similar case, and of doing so, perhaps, through

a long chain of intermediate links and means.

But there are more things in heaven and earth than are heard of in

the philosophy of the logical intellect. The _subtilitas naturae_[4]

far surpasses the refinements of the practical intellect: and if the

latter is ever to overcome or be equal to the former, it must, so to

speak, wait patiently upon it, as a handmaiden upon the hands of her

mistress. Such a trained and disciplined intellect which has conquered

nature by obedience is what the philosophers at the beginning of this

century called _reason_[5]. It is in life as much as in our mind. It

comes not by self-assertion, by the attempt to force our ends and

views on nature, but by feeling and thinking ourselves in and along

with nature. Or, briefly, it breaks down the middle wall of partition

by which man had treated nature as a mere world of _objects_--things

to be used and to minister to his pleasure--but always alien to him,

always mere matter to be manipulated _ab extra._ Yet even to get full

use and enjoyment out of a thing it is well to be in closer community

with it, and on terms of friendly acquaintance. The function of this

fuller reason cannot be performed without something analogous to

sympathy and imagination. Sympathy, which realises the inner unity

of the so-called 'thing' with ourselves: imagination, which sets it

in the full circumstances of those relationships which the practical

intelligence is inclined to abstract from and to neglect. Yet only

something _analogous_ to sympathy and imagination: if, as may well be

the case, we attach to these terms any association of irregular or mere

emotional operation. The imagination in question is the 'scientific'

imagination--the power of wide large vision which sets the object fully

in reality, and is not content with a mere name or abstract face of a

fact--a name which represents a fact no doubt, but represents it, as

many such 'agents' or deputies do, in a hard and wooden spirit. The

sympathy in question is the transcending of the antithesis between

subjective and objective; not a fantastic or fortuitous choice of one

or a few out of many on whom to lavish locked-up stores of affection,

but the full recognition of unity as pervading differences, and

reducing them to no more than aspects in correlation.

What has been said of sympathy and imagination, as the allies and

ministers of reason, might be extended and applied to humour,

to wit, to irony. These also it may be said--and with the same

qualifications--are essential to a philosopher in the highest

sense. The humour, viz., which strides over the barriers set up by

institution and convention between the high and the humble, and

sees man's superficial distinctions overpowered by a half-grim,

half-jubilant _Ananke_,--which notes how human proposal is overcome,

not without grace, by divine and natural disposal, how the deep inner

identity in all estates breaks triumphantly through the fences of

custom and deliberate intention. The wit, which upsets the hardened

fixity of classes and groups, flits from one to another, shows

glimpses of affinity between remote provinces of idea, and all this,

without laboured and artificial search for analogies, though to the

slower-following practical mind, hampered by its solid limits, these

leaps from province to province seem paradoxical and whimsical.

The irony, which notes the tragicomedy of life under its apparent

regularity of prose,--which detects the vanity of all efforts to check

the flux of vitality and make the volatile permanent; which contrasts

the apparent with the real, the obviously and officiously meant with

the truly desired and willed, and shows how diplomatically-close design

is dissipated in a jest, or the soul bent on many years of enjoyment

is plunged into torment. Thus, in a way, imagination, sympathy, wit,

humour, irony and paradox are elements that go to the making of a

philosopher: but in the serenity of reasoned wisdom they lose their

frolicsome and fantastic mood, and fill their minor place with sober

cheer. Wedded to the lord of wisdom, the Muse of poesy and wit loses

her sprightly laugh and her dancing step, becoming a subdued, yet

gracious matron, who, with her offspring, sheds gleams of brightness

and warmth and colour in the somewhat austere household. Yet still the

free maiden of poesy, in the open fields where the shadow of reflective

thought has not yet fallen, has the greater charm; and a certain

jealousy not unfrequently reigns between the married sister and the

virgin yet untamed.

But though poetry and the allied arts of words were very helpful to

philosophy--witness the services which, though in widely different

ways, Goethe and Schiller rendered to the higher thinking of

Germany--even more stimulative and fruitful was the research into

nature and history. Nature _and_ history: but they lie closer together

than the conjunction suggests. It is true that in recent times we have

been forcibly taught to separate civil from natural history, if we have

not even been further taught that the latter is an improper application

of the term. But when Aristotle said that 'Poetry is more philosophical

than History' he was probably not restricting his remark to the story

of nations and states; even as when Bacon set history as the field

of memory beside the fields of imagination and reasoning, he was not

solely referring to the records of the human past. The distinction

between natural and civil history is no doubt for practical education

a distinction of supreme importance. But it is so, because in this

scholastic phase the conception of both, under these comprehensive

names, was superficial and abstract. Natural history meant only the

classificatory description of animals, plants, and minerals: civil

history the tale composed to string together the succession of human

actions on the public and national field of life.

We have seen in an earlier chapter the advances which Lessing, Kant,

and above all Herder, made in this direction[6]. Emphasising in their

several ways the great dictum of Spinoza that human passions, and the

whole scheme of human life, are _res naturales, quae communes naturae

leges sequuntur_, they gave to history a higher, more philosophical,

more scientific scope than what the name used to connote. Neither in

Spinoza himself, nor in these his followers, did this insistence on

the unity of nature at all lead them to neglect the difference--almost

equivalent, it may be said, in the end to an _Imperium in imperio_--by

which rational man marks himself off to a special kindred with the

divine[7]. We have seen too what Schelling did to show that history, if

in one aspect it be the product of free human volitions, is, in another

and as he thought a superior aspect, the realm subject to a divine or

natural necessity. The whole tendency of this epoch of thought--the

tendency which entitles it above all to the name of speculative--is its

impulse to over-ride this distinction between Nature and History; to

over-ride it, however, not in the sense of simply ignoring or denying

it, but of carrying it up into a unity which would do justice to both,

without exclusively favouring either, and hardly without clipping

both of any extravagant claims. The distinction remains,--no longer

an abrupt division, but now tempered and mellowed by the presence of

a paramount unity. Nature now has a real history: no longer a mere

factitious aggregate of classified facts, it is the phenomenon of

a 'latent process,' due to a 'latent schematism,' and a 'form' or

principle of organisation. Classification does not cease: but it ceases

to be an end in itself, and becomes only subordinate or auxiliary to a

higher scientific end. The main theme is to construe the complete cycle

of life-change and the complete organisation of life-state from the

evidence pieced out and put together from the various orders, classes,

and species of living creatures. And on the other side the mere tale

or narrative of history, with its gossip of personalities, and its

accidents of war and intrigue, tends to become insignificant in the

presence of the great popular life, in its deep and subtle connexion

with agencies of nature hitherto unsurmised, in its dependence upon

necessities and uniformities which envelope or rather permeate and

constitute the human will. It is not indeed that the force of great

personalities has come to be treated as a quantity we may neglect. The

force of the great leader, of the genius, of the hero, is not less

admirable to the wise philosophical historian to-day than it ever was

to his story-telling predecessor. But he flatters himself that he

understands better, and can better take account of, the conditions

which make the genius and the hero possible. Achilles still counts for

more than a thousand common soldiers, and Homer himself is not merely

the composite image by which a long tradition has fused into a dim

pictorial unity the countless bards who sang for ages on the isles of

Greece and the coasts of Ionia. Yet we feel sure that Achilles did

what he did, because of the race he sprang from, the inspiration he

felt around him, the companionship in body and spirit of his peers. We

feel that the hero derives his strength from earth and air, from the

spiritual and material substance in which he draws his breath. True,

we cannot explain him, as if he and his heroisms were a mere product

of mathematical and mechanical forces. But where we once recognise

that behind the single visible deed and agent there is a spiritual

nature--an underlying agency--which, unperceived, keeps the hearth-fire

of public life burning in the celestial temple of Vesta, we can at

least see that though genius is a marvel and a mystery, yet it is

according to law, and no mere will-o'-the-wisp.

But when we say that the actions and sayings even of the foremost

individuals are to be comprehended only in the light of universal

forces and laws, there is an error which is only too ready to

substitute itself for the truth. It soon appears for example that,

among the general causes which control the development of civilisation

and the acts of individuals, the economical condition is of great and

prominent effect. And, above all, it is easily measurable, and subject

to palpable standards (such as statistics of exports and imports,

&c.). It was natural therefore that a school of historico-social

philosophers should arise who maintained that the economical state of

a given society was the fundamental principle or form of its life,

of which all other phases of its civilisation, religious, aesthetic,

&c., were only variable dependent functions. This view, which comes

out in the socialist theory of Marx, is clearly the exaggeration or

abstract statement of a partial truth into a pseudo-complete theory.

The truth is one which found expression as early as Plato. It is this:

that in the economical system of a society we find the first and

somewhat external or mechanical suggestion of the organism to which

the state is yet to grow. In the economic law of reciprocity there is

a 'certain faint image' of the principle of social organisation or

political life. But when we go beyond, and interpret this first phase

to mean the original foundation, we are stating a figment which has a

plausibility only when by the economic state we mean a great deal more

than abstractly economic facts include. And this again arises because

it is really impossible to carry out thoroughly the abstraction of one

aspect of social life from the others. There are no purely economic

facts which are independent of other social influences,--of ideals, e.

g. moral or aesthetic,--ideals which nobody would call economic, though

they never quite part company from economical conditions.

So again there is occasionally a tendency to magnify the influence of

what in the narrowest sense may be termed political systems. Forms

of government, and titles of sovereignty are regarded as forces to

which individuals--even the highest--must bow. But here again the

exaggeration of a principle need not tempt us to rush with Tom Paine

into the opposite extravagance that government and state-power are

superfluities, or quasi-ornamental additions to a social fabric, which

can do without them and, like other beasts of low organisation, can,

when shorn of them, reproduce them with ease. And thus though we may

dissent from the view that laws and constitutions are omnipotent, we

may admit that in them the central unity and controlling principle of

social life finds its dominant expression in great outlines. We shall

not agree with him who said 'Let who will make the laws of a nation

if I may make its ballads': because we know that the nation will in

the end have the chief voice in determining what are to be its ballads

no less than its laws. We shall not quite accept the dictum that the

intellectual class which formulates ideas and sets up programmes of

ideals gives the real lead to the process of civilisation; for we shall

remember that real ideas are not formed by individuals, but are the

slow work of concrete experience in the so-called inorganic masses,

finding at length utterance through the lips of those appointed to that

end by the natural and divine order. Yet we shall, on the other hand,

see that the high things of the world are dependent on the lowly: that

a song-maker is sometimes not less potent than a legislature: that

pecuniary conditions are effective in the sanctuaries of religion and

the high places of art: and that the noblest ideas of great thinkers

draw their strength and life through roots that run unseen through very

humble ground.

_La Raison_, says Leibniz, _est l'enchainement des vérités._[8] Truth

linked into truth, and so made truer: truth, with which all things

harmonise and nothing cries dissent: truth, which is neither the

prerogative of the mere _demos_, nor of the intellectual aristocracy,

but of that rarer unity which, when they can exercise several and

mutually-tendered self-abnegation, is the real spirit of both: truth,

thus conceived, is that king of life, that sun of Reason which lighteth

every man. Truth--to use again the language of Leibniz,--which is not

merely the aggregate of monads,--but the monad of monads, their mutual

penetration and corrective completion, in that Idea-reality where they

retain their individuality, but retain it in the fullness and fruition

of the absolute which each essentially or implicitly is. This kingdom

of suffering and yet triumphant truth is the true age of Reason--not

outwardly-critical, individualistically-reforming, mere intellectual

and abstract intelligence,--but intelligence, charged with emotion,

full of reverence, reverent above all to the majesty of that divinity

which, much disguised, and weather-beaten, like Glaucus of the sea,

resides in common and natural humanity. This is the Reason of German

idealism at the commencement of the century. To the clear-cut dogmas of

the abstract intellect it savours of mysticism. If it is friendly to

distinctions and constantly makes them, it is the pronounced enemy of

hard and fast separations. Begin where you like, the reason of things,

if you allow it to work, carries you round till you also see identity

where you only saw difference, or effects where you only looked for

causes. You begin, as the inductive logician, with the belief that

the process is from the known to the unknown. You start with your

basis of fact, as you called it. The nemesis of things forces you

to admit that your facts were partly fictions which waited for the

unknown to give them a truer and fuller reality. You talk at first of

induction, as if it were a single and simple process, which out of

facts builds up generalities and uniformities. You learn as you go on

that the only induction that operates, except in cases which have been

artificially simplified by supposing half the task done before you

apply your experimental methods, is an induction of which the major

part is deductive, and where your conclusion will be recurrently made

your premiss. Your induction only works on the basis of a hypothesis,

and must itself be linked in the 'concatenation of truths,'--a

concatenation which is also a criticism and a correction.

[Footnote 1: 'We hold,' says the American Declaration of Independence

(1776), 'these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created

equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable

rights: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of

happiness,' &c.]

[Footnote 2: Louis Blanc, _History of the Revolution_, vol. i.]

[Footnote 3: Hobbes, _Leviathan_, Part I. chaps. 2 and 3; and

elsewhere. Schopenhauer, _Welt als Wille_, Book I. § 6.]

[Footnote 4: Bacon, _Novum Organum_, i. 10.]

[Footnote 5: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 400.]

[Footnote 6: See Chapter XII.]

[Footnote 7: Cf. _Ethica,_ iv. 37, Schol. I. contrasting _rerum

externarum communis constitutio_ with _ipsa hominis natura, in se sola

considerata._]

[Footnote 8: See the _Discours préliminaire_ to the _Theodicee_.]

CHAPTER XVI.

THE NEW IDEALISM.

This new idealism which conjures by the name of Reason is a different

thing from the pseudo-idealism of Jacobi, as it is from the

'rationalism,' so-called, of the mere intellectualist. Its ideal is not

a desperate refuge from the hard and bitter reality, only to be reached

by the plunge of faith,--which seems rather the leap of despair: not

a _mere_ other-world,--always _other_, longed for, presaged, beheld

in dreamy vision, but unperceived by the clear light of intelligence:

clutched at, but elusive of every effort. It is not won by turning

the back on reality and flying on the wings of morning faith to the

better land and the presence of the divine: but by persistence in

unfolding, expanding, adjusting, re-combining, and fortifying those

partial glimpses of the unseen which occur in every vision of the seen.

It is true the ideal is, in a way, always an other world: but not a

_mere_ other world; it is another, and yet not another, but the same,

seen, if you like to say, transfigured, idealised. But idealisation,

if so applied, means not an addition here and a subtraction there

made in reality, from some source outside--from some indeterminable

Whence (Whence indeed should such additions come?). It does not mean

a correction of faults and failures in the real, at the will of an

artist who is dissatisfied with his subject-model and would mend it

out of other faces and forms stored up in memory or sketch-book.

This idealism does not in that sense idealise (so as to falsify). It

means complete reality; absolute, systematic, unconditioned reality:

nowhere fragmentary, nowhere referring outside, but completing itself

in all its members. It means--to quote the Hegelian term--seeing all

things in the Idea--their notion (or ideality), i. e. their unifying

'grip,' reflecting itself in their objectivity, and their reality

completing itself in art, religion, and philosophy to that ideal which

to the non-artistic, non-religious, non-philosophic mood is only dimly

suggested and partially supposed. Still less is it an idealism which,

as popularly understood, turns reality and historic fact into _mere_

ideas.

But, as perhaps may have been apparent, to call this way of thought

idealism need not keep us from acknowledging that the same philosophy

is also realism. If it insists, so to say, on the idealism of--what

we sometimes call material--nature, it no less insists on the realism

of--what is supposed immaterial--mind. The mental or spiritual world

loses its unsubstantial intangibleness, its mere supposedness, its

'ideal' or _merely_-ideal character. To the older, and we may say

vulgar, view the mind or soul was a mere 'thought,' something of

which all that could be seen were certain acts or phenomena. It was

a _mere idea_, which one could pretty well get on without--so long

as he kept, as the phrase was, to the phenomena--phenomena without

reality. How vague and aery again was the subject-matter of morals! A

few virtues and vices, confessedly general descriptive titles, a talk

about will and conscience,--all of them merely several predicates of an

unknown, spoken of, postulated, but unproducible. Compared with this

mere supposedness the spiritual world in Schelling and Hegel acquires

the reality of a quasi-organism (really supra-organic), growing

and constituting itself, and making room in it for a host of human

relationships. The abstract faculties of mind get reality (not indeed

sensible): the intangible notions of morals become almost palpable: the

kingdom of mind becomes a real pendant to the kingdom of nature. And,

on the other hand, the kingdom of nature gets its ideality recognised:

its unity and continuity made effective in an Idea which embraces,

co-ordinated and systematised, its disparate and unconnected portions.

This new Idealism, if it led men back from the historical world to

nature, was yet hardly in all respects a pupil of Rousseau. Not 'Back

from civilisation and artificiality to nature and the freedom of the

woodland,' was its cry: but rather 'Remember that man always rests

on and grows out of nature, always has his ideals made directly or

indirectly visible in physical (sensible) structures; and that, when

culture turns away from sense and nature to some supposed higher, it is

really entering on a path which leads to abysses,' Its voice, in fact,

was much like the longing expressed in Schiller's _Gods of Greece;_

it wished man more godlike and the divine more human. But instead of

backward,--its motto was forward: or back to nature, only to resume the

true starting-point, and retreat from a path of civilisation whose end

is perdition. Man also was nature[1]--if he is never _mere_ nature, i.

e. the nature unexalted to its truth--but he brought to expression,

and might bring to ever clearer and fuller expression, a something

which was in infra-human nature, but which nature elsewhere had

failed adequately to present. Thus the relation of Man to Nature was

apparently twofold. On one hand, the physical world was essentially a

world of reason and intelligence--though of intelligence petrified[2].

So far Hegel agreed with Schelling. But, on the other hand (and here

Hegel took up the great paradox of Fichte), man's place in the universe

is to fulfil the promise and implication of Nature to the full reality

of Spirit, to fulfil it by law and morality; but (here he completes

Fichte by the help of Schelling) also in higher measure, by art,

religion, and science. The world of intelligence and reason which man

constructs as an ethical, artistic, and religious being, is the full

truth of the natural world,--the higher meaning, and fuller, more

consistent, and complete reality of the sensible: and it is so, because

the lord of Nature is one with the lord of the human soul. The new way

of philosophy therefore, if it could be ever charged with saying that

the so-called real things of ordinary life were only ideas, or mental

images, meant that, as taken by the unthinking or imperfectly thinking

perception, they were something of which all that could be said was to

describe their relations to something else, of which in turn the same

remark might be made; so that--as far as they went--reality was never

with us, but only an assurance (soon to be proved vain) that it was

next door[3]. On the contrary--in _its_ use of the term Idea--what this

idealism asserted rather was that the objects of Nature in their _prima

facie_ apprehension were not yet an Idea: if, i.e., an Idea is a mental

or spiritual reality which explains and completes itself, instead of

sending us on endless fool's errands elsewhere--, is a concept which

is exactly adequate to reality, and has gathered in it the power of

reality.

The new idealism is not subversive of realism, but includes it and

makes it the reality it professed to be. It may therefore, as Schelling

proposed[4], be called an ideal-realism, or a real-idealism. If any

body likes, he may even, if he is no Greek scholar, call it Monism;

but in that case he had better begin by admitting to himself that any

Monism, which can stand its ground and serve for an explanation of the

universe, will not exclude Dualism. All is indeed one life, one being,

one thought; but a life, a being, a thought, which only exists as it

opposes itself within itself, sets itself apart from itself, projects

its meaning and relations outwards and upwards, and yet retains and

carries out the power of reuniting itself. The Absolute may be called

One: but it is also the All; it is a One which makes and overcomes

difference: it is, and it essentially is, in the antithesis of Nature

and Spirit, Object and Subject, Matter and Mind; but under and over the

antithesis it is fundamental and completed unity. Monism, literally

understood, is absurd--for it ignores, what cannot be ignored, the

many: and Dualism, which is offered sometimes as a competitive scheme,

is not much better; unless we understand the Dualism to be no fixed

bisection, but an ever-appearing and ever-superseded antithesis which

is the witness to the power and the freedom of the One,--which is not

alone, but One and All, One in All, and All in One.

The central or cardinal point of Idealism is its refusal to be kept

standing at a fixed disruption between Subject and Object, between

Spirit and Nature. Its _Idea_ is the identity or unity (not without the

difference) of both. In its purely logical or epistemological aspect

one can easily see that, as Schopenhauer was so fond of repeating,

There is no Object without a Subject and no Subject without an

Object[5]. The difficulty arises in remembering these excellent truisms

when one of the correlatives is out of sight, and the other seems

to be independent and to come before us with a title to recognition

apparently all its own. When the Subject figures as the individual

consciousness, encased, it may perhaps be added, in an individual body,

and the Object as a thing apparently out there in a world beyond all

by itself, then the lapse from this rudimentary idealism becomes easy.

In the practice of life and business, each of us, self-conscious and

autonomous _subject_ as he may be, comes to rank in the estimate of

others, and ere long to some extent in his own, as also a part of the

aggregate of objects. All reality and substance seem as it were to

slide over into the object-side. The conscious subject counts as a mere

onlooker or the passive spectator of a performance that goes on in an

outside field of event,--yet that outside is his own object-mind; his

mind counts as a mere idea, or rather as a succession of ideas, i. e.

of mental pictures with a certain meaning in them. A little step more

and the very subject-mind itself is turned into an object. There stands

indeed--according to the ordinary introspective psychology--as it

were in one corner, or at one loop-hole of vision, a mind looking on,

observing and criticising another thing which is also called a mind;

but the mind observing can only reflect or register, and the mind which

is observed is very much thing-like, apparently acted upon by other

things, and acting upon them in turn. This object-mind, a real among

other reals, in relations of cause and effect with them, does not,

if we can trust the _words_ of those who tell about it, see itself,

but lies open to the inspection of this other mind, represented by the

psychological observer, who is good enough to report to us something

of its blind and dark estate. Its re-actions, he informs us, exhibit a

remarkable peculiarity. They are equivalent to states of consciousness:

and even to acts of will and knowledge. As when a violin is touched in

certain ways by the bow, you get a musical note, so when certain agents

come in contact with this peculiar real, they elicit a re-action,

termed sense or idea.

To distinguish in this manner between mental passivity and activity is

natural and right. The basis of all consciousness and mental activity

is an original division, a 'judgment' or dijudication of self from

self. But, once the dijudication made for such ends, it is a mistake

to forget its initiation and lose sight entirely of the fact that

the observing mind is also the active, and that the object-self is

not merely in relation to the subject-self, but in a higher unity is

identifiable therewith. Still the thing is done, habitually done. We

all profess this faith of ordinary realism in our first reflections

upon ourselves. And the effect of the oblivion is that we seek

elsewhere for the initial activity, which we have abstracted from and

lost sight of. The receptive passive mind,--called subject still, but

now become a subject in the sense of the anatomist,--has to be set in

motion, to be impinged upon or impressed. The psychical event which you

_call_ knowledge, and which no doubt _means_ knowledge,--the mental

'state' which you observe--or, it may even, if your authority is a

particularly obstinate and _intransigcant_ realist, be the molecular

change in brain cells,--requires an antecedent event to account for

it. The origin of the movement which issued in the given psychical

or molecular change is sought in a self-subsistent thing which _out

there_ gives rise to a series of movements which _in here_ result

in a sensation. Or, a thing somehow produces an attenuated image of

itself in the brain, or in the mind; for, in this mythological tale

of psychical occurrence, accuracy is unattainable, and one must not

seek to be too precise. In any case the relationship between thing

and idea is conceived after the analogy of the nexus of cause and

effect, or original and copy; and the verbal imagination of the

analogical reasoner is satisfied. What Hegel, after Schelling, teaches,

on the other side, is that the process of sense-impression and the

manipulations to which it is subjected by intellect presuppose, for

their existence and their objective truth, a Reason which is the unity

of subject and object, an original identity uniting knowledge to being.

But the same defect of unphilosophic consciousness has another

phase which philosophy has to remember. Popular language speaks of

_things_,--of things here and things there, which act upon each other

and upon the so-called mind: i. e. on this imagined and supposed

passive mind. For things, a more 'scientific' conception has been

substituted--that of _forces_; which, whether attached to atoms or not,

are asserted to be the real sources of the change and event which fill

the world of our experience. And as, according to some psychologists,

the mind is only a vacant ground or space with more or less narrow

limits of room, on which the entities called ideas are for that reason

forced into more or less close relationships, without any nearer or

more essential tie; so, too, the mind is apt to be treated by others

only as a battle-field or wrestling-ground of opposing forces. Here

the atom-forces, as in the other case the atom-ideas, are, it is

assumed, merely and purely independent: and yet such is the force of

a limited environment--shall we say, in more popular language, the

force of space and time?--that they must meet with one another, must,

as it were, form associations, connexions, relationships. Great,

verily, is the force of juxtaposition. Space and time, because they are

essentially limiting, correlating, defining, weld links which the great

prophet of this empirical school has not scrupled to call insoluble,

ineradicable, inseparable. Space and time, says his great successor,

are infinite. But they are infinite only in the sense that they can

never be exhausted: they are everywhere, and for ever: but as real they

are only here and now. Time can precede time, and space fade away into

remoter space: but every space and every time is finite, defining,

limiting, relative, and synthetic. And, if we look closer, space and

time may come to seem the visible, ghostly, abstract outline--on one

hand stiffening and bodying-out the ideal synthesis of thought and

intelligence, on the other, faintly reproducing or fore-casting the

real synthesis of organisation and living nature.

In saying this we give the reasonable interpretation of

'association':--so far at least as association is supposed to be

brought about by juxtaposition in time and space. Time and space, as

Kant might say, give the schema--the sensible and visible reflex of the

eternal and universal thought-relation: they are _a priori_ because

they are in the physical world the _primitive_, the first phase and the

lowest manifestation of that unity which as we know it in nature and

mind always blends with sense, or displays itself in sensible forms.

They are the first stamp of reality, of real Nature: with them we are

in Nature, but it is an abstract shadowy nature. They mark the ascent

(which only from the mere logician's standpoint shall we call the

descent) of the abstract (pure) idea into the element of multiplicity,

of opposition, of life and consciousness. In the psychical and

intellectual world, again, as it rises to more perfect ideality (as it

elicits more _meaning_ from crude _fact_) they lose their prominence;

they sink into the powers of memory and imagination, which build up

past and future into the unity of the ever present, until in their

consummation they leave as their residual product the abstract element

of pure thought: a thought which claims the attributes of universality

and eternity, which claims, i. e., to merge or submerge in it all space

and all time[6].

It is evident therefore that if an associationist theory, like that of

Hume, proposes to explain the actual field of mental life by elements

given in it, and by no other, it can only do so on certain assumptions,

which may be summed up in the proposition that the mind--the real

mental space and time even (and not its supposed 'image')--is at once

subjective and objective, at once real and ideal, at once the field

of operation, the force which directs operations, and the mind which

is aware of itself and its acts. To say, as Hume appears to do, that

an unintermittent long-established custom breeds _in us_ certain

irresistible and essential habits of thought, can only refer to an

unexplained and unnoticed duplication of the self. There is here, one

self, which is only a bundle of fragments, of ideas intrinsically

separate and only incidentally connected by outside pressure, which

enter into ties, peradventure necessary or indissoluble, though not

due to inner affinity. And there is another self which is a self-same

unity, dividing and growing, or assimilating, acted upon but only

because it solicits action, and in a way controlling the process going

on within it. The difficulty for the investigator is to realise that

these two selves are one. No amount of ingenuity will ever succeed in

honestly showing unity to be the mere resultant--even should it be

a fictitious or phenomenal unity--of the collisions and fortuitous

attachments or detachments of different and independent reals. The

reals which behave in such a way as to engender unities, to cause

syntheses, are reals in a mind; and the mind must not merely, as it

were, flow around them, but have them fluid members of itself. If they

are reals, they are ideal-reals. You must begin with an ideal-unity

which is also a real-unity, in which variety can play and by which it

is controlled.

'Forces,' no less than 'things,' are terms of thought, names of reality

indeed, but inadequate because due to an abstraction and leaving

their correlatives out of sight--names of momentary elements seized

in the flux, and made with more or less success to indicate 'moments'

and 'factors' or 'aspects' in the total sum and power of reality.

Explanation by permanent and separate forces labours under the same

disadvantages as that by things. Science, grown more self-critical,

begins to see that in forces, &c., it has names and formulae which

are not the full reality, but only useful (_if_ useful) abstractions.

Neither things nor forces, though called real, are so in the full

sense. Hume said,--and said not untruly, though with some relish of

paradox,--that we never had any real impression or idea of power

and force. The statement should be taken along with another that

what we mistake for power in things is only our own want of power to

overcome a suggested association, or to break a customary train of

ideas. Lotze, again, has remarked that the supposed consciousness of

power exerted in voluntary movement is confused with a feeling of

work done, or inertia overcome. Whatever may be the truth about the

psychological experience, there can be no doubt for the epistemologist

that the so-called perception of force is an interpretation of one

aspect of experience which, with a certain amount of arbitrary arrest

and simplification, renders it intelligible and real by means of an

antithesis and correlation. Force in fact only exists, or arises, in

relation or opposition to a counter-force: action and re-action are

always equal and opposite, says the mathematical formula. Two forces

are as little independent as an up and a down, or as a west and a

north; force solicits force, and force only _is_ in so far as it is

solicited. The soliciting can only solicit because it is solicited.

In other words, it is not enough to say that the forces which thus

confront each other are correlatives. The relationship must be carried

up a stage higher: the forces themselves get their pseudo-real

character, only so long as they are kept apart forcibly or by inertia.

Carry out their implications: and they re-unite (not however to the

loss of all distinction) in a higher idea, an intelligible unity which,

by its division and return to unity, makes possible and real their

contention. It is this carrying-out of implications to their explicit

truth which is at the root of Schopenhauer's playing fast and loose

with the distinction between force and will. But with him the two terms

are taken up vague and indefinite, in the haze of popular conception or

want of conception, and are without effort or justification identified:

whereas in Hegel, there is, on the lowest estimate, an _attempt_ made

to trace the somewhat intricate steps which mediate the metamorphosis.

The new idealism thus maintains the organic and even supra-organic

nature of thought and being. The world of experience, when taken in its

reality and fullness, is an organism which lives and knows and wills,

and which is life, action, knowledge; its own means and its own end.

The subject acting, living, knowing is action, knowledge, life. In the

ordinary organism there is a subject of functions, a being in relation

to an inorganic world. In the world-organism (if the inadequate name

is still to be retained) there is no outside world, no inorganic

or extra-organic thing. In the world-organism the organ and its

environment is combined in one, re-united: the plant or animal is not

without its place, and its place is not without plant or animal. They

are not merely in correlation, but essentially and actually one. _Quid

prosunt leges sine moribus?_ asks the moralist: but in the Absolute or

the supra-organic Idea, law and morality are not apart: the necessity

is also freedom: the law is not severed from its phenomenon. Such an

organism which is life, thinking, will, is what Hegel calls the Idea:

an organism which is completely organic, with no mere matter: and that

Idea is the foundation of his Idealism. Conceived under its conditions,

the forces which are sometimes represented as struggling with each

other on the field of man's life, are no longer independent; still less

completely separable forces. They are the inner division by which the

spirit re-establishes and makes secure its unity: their antagonisms

are the breath of life. And they have their relations in their common

service, building up one life. They form a certain hierarchy of

organisation; in which however the higher or more developed does not

merely supervene upon the cruder, but in a way supersedes it, and yet

contrives to retain its worth and its real truth.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Spinoza's remark on Body, _Eth._ III. pr. 2 Schol.:

'Etenim quod corpus possit, nemo hucusque determinavit; hoc est neminem

hucusque experientia docuit quid corpus ex solis legibus naturae

quatenus corporea tantum consideratur possit agere,' &c.]

[Footnote 2: See vol. ii, notes and illustrations, p. 392.]

[Footnote 3: Schopenhauers well-known description of this recurrent

throwing back of the responsibility of reality on something else is

here suggested ('World as Will and Idea,' § 17).]

[Footnote 4: See p. 157 (chap. xiii).]

[Footnote 5: _Satz vom Grunde,_ § 16: _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung:

Ergänzungen._ Cap. i.]

[Footnote 6: See later, chapter xxvi.]

CHAPTER XVII.

METHODS, ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL.

When modern philosophy took its first steps, it was disdainful and

depreciatory to the past, both Medieval and Old-Greek. Bacon and

Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza,--be their other differences what they

may--all echo the same disparagement. Like Wordsworth's _Rob Roy_, they

cry--

'What need of books?

Burn all the statutes and their shelves.

We'll show that we can help to frame

A world of other stuff.'

On this iconoclastic age supervenes the attempt of Leibniz to combine

in one all that was good in the new corpuscular philosophy with

all that was precious in the old Platonic idealism as expanded by

Aristotle. So, at the later philosophic crisis towards the close of

the eighteenth century, the somewhat destructive and revolutionary

tendencies of Kant and Fichte lead up by a natural revulsion and

complement to the reconstructive systems of Schelling and Hegel. In

them the conservative instinct comes to supplement the defects of

the radical go-ahead. Instead of tossing the past away to the winds,

and crying out _Écrasez l'infâme_,--instead of throwing medievalism

behind, breaking all the restrictions on individual liberty which

feudal Europe had created to secure and safeguard the communities that

housed its early freedom, the new spirit of the time saw that the

problems of modern life were not solved by merely throwing overboard

as encumbrances and refuse all checks and forms. On the contrary, the

reflective mind saw that forms and checks so-called there must be, and

that the art of statesmanship, though it could not entirely consist in

copying the old, had still to work in some way after the analogy of the

old methods: i. e. to do under new circumstances what would solve the

same requisites, as the old constitution had done for its time. The

change is well illustrated by the attitude towards state organisation

shown by William von Humboldt at different epochs of his life.

People talk glibly of the Historical Method, and what it has done for

us. To hear what is sometimes said it might be supposed that this was

the method that had been always habitual in history, but which in

these latter days had been applied to other topics, and had proved its

value on the new ground by achieving results that had hitherto been

mere desiderata. This however is pretty nearly to reverse the true

state of the case. It was long till history came to have any method

worthy of the name. In most of those who figure as great historians

the object had been to tell a good tale, to keep the thread of events

distinct, to subordinate incidents to the main issue, to portray

personal and public character and its influence on events. History was

practised--we may even say--more as an art than as a science. If it

dealt with causes, it dealt with individual, concrete, living causes,

not with cold, dead abstractions of forces, laws, or tendencies. If it

did not altogether ignore the suggestions of a quest for principles to

be found in Thucydides and Polybius, it was much more enamoured of the

art of Livy and Tacitus, or even of the naïveté of Herodotus. Of such

history who has not felt the power; who has not admired the genius that

reconstructs the men and circumstances of the past, and makes them

live over again their deeds, and again in the end yield the palm to

inevitable fate! But it was not from such history that the historical

method arose.

The historical method was the product of the new conception of nature

and mind in their mutual relations which has been already noted. To

estimate the labours of thinkers towards this view of history would

be an interesting but complex inquiry. Leibniz in particular by

his principles of development, of continuity, of general analogy,

should have made two things for ever clear. And these two results

that might have been supposed secure were, first, that the present

existence (which at first seems to be alone real) is only a narrow

transition line between a past and a future,--a line of points

intersecting a complex movement or development; and secondly, that

all development is of something which is essentially infinite, which

requires nothing external, no fillip from circumstances or from an

external providence, to set it going, but is in itself a synthesis of

active and passive force in a something at least analogous to an Ego.

The first principle is embalmed in Leibniz's maxim: 'The present is

laden with the past, and full of the future': and the second, in the

maxim 'the Monads have no doors or windows.' In virtue of the first,

the existent (of this instant) is only a stage or grade, rooted in

what has been, and insignificant unless in reference to what is to

come. In virtue of the second, all development is from within, and

presupposes therefore that the developing individual includes within

it a great deal which a cursory view would at first sight assume to

be without it, and only accidentally in contact with it. It might

indeed be well to add a third principle--what Leibniz has sometimes

called the Law of Continuity--the law that, as he says, distinct and

noticeable perceptions are the resultants of an infinite number of

insensible or little perceptions. But continuity proper is not this:

continuity proper or identity is a pure idea. The visible or sensible

discontinuity reposes on, and is to be explained by, an invisible or

ideal continuity. Each body, for instance, in nature, appearing to have

a separate existence of its own, is only a stage isolated or insulated

in a continuing process: and that process, binding, as it does, past

to future, is the process of a Mind. _Omne Corpus_, wrote Leibniz in

1671, _est mens momentanea seu carens recordatione._ Every physical

and material object is an intelligence, but an intelligence which

neither looks before nor after, but is limited _for itself_ to the mere

instant: an intelligence which has no history. Yet to the intelligent

observer it has a past,--it has a memory, it bears in it the traces

of its antecedent. Yet to read that book of memory, to decipher the

'insensible perceptions' which are buried beneath the momentary

present, beneath its unspiritual reality, and to knit present with past

and future, is the work of an intelligence, in and to whom the material

discloses its store of meaning, or in whom it is re-spiritualised. In

other words, the presupposition of this historical method is the ideal

continuity of being, transcending and absorbing the differences of time.

But the teaching of Leibniz--even more perhaps than that of

Spinoza--fell on an evil age: if it was not actually choked with

thorns, it found a soil with little depth, and its brief verdure was

soon followed by a fearful withering. Anxious as Leibniz was to commend

his theories to all men,--and not least perhaps to win the suffrages

of some illustrious and intelligent women--he was led to present them

under forms and phrases which were to each correspondent specially

familiar. And the natural consequence was not absent. The forms of

accommodation were what told: they stuck, and the truth they were

meant to convey slipped away: the Leibnitian theory was re-interpreted

into the doctrines it had been meant to supersede. As with Spinoza,

so with Leibniz, a keen apprehension of his meaning came first to the

thinkers on the borderland of literature and philosophy, to Lessing and

Herder, and found an appreciative welcome in the more academic systems

first from Schelling and Hegel. Above all, this theory of 'petites

perceptions' so closely bound up (as was to be expected) with his

mathematical discoveries in the Calculus, is what marks him as having a

finer ear for the secret harmonies and principles of existence than the

coarser organs of popular philosophy could catch up or appreciate.

'In order,' says Leibniz, 'to get a clearer idea of the little

perceptions which we cannot distinguish in the crowd, I am accustomed

to employ the example of the roar or noise of the sea which strikes

us upon the shore. To hear this sound, as we do hear it, we must hear

the parts which compose this total, i. e. the sounds of each wave,

though each of these little sounds only makes itself perceptible in the

confused assemblage of all the others together, (that is to say, in

that same roar,) and would not be noticed if this wave which causes it

were alone. For we must be a little affected by the movement of that

wave, and we must have some perception of each of these sounds, however

small they may be; otherwise we should never have the perception of

a hundred thousand waves, since a hundred thousand zeros would never

make anything.... These little perceptions are of greater efficiency by

their consequences than we suppose. It is they which form that _Je ne

sais quoi_, those tastes, those images of sensible qualities, clear in

the assemblage, but confused in the parts; those impressions made upon

us by surrounding bodies which envelop the infinite, that _nexus_ which

each being has with all the rest of the universe. It may even be said

that in virtue of these little perceptions the present is big with the

future and laden with the past, that everything conspires together: and

that in the least of substances, eyes as piercing as those of God could

read the whole sequel of the things of the universe.

'These insensible perceptions, further, mark and constitute the

same individual, who is characterised by the traces or expressions

which they preserve of the preceding states of that individual, thus

forming the connexion with his present state. These may be known by

a superior spirit, though that individual himself should not feel

them, i. e. though express memory should no longer be there. But these

perceptions also supply the means of rediscovering that memory, at

need, by periodic developments, which may one day happen.... It is

also by these insensible perceptions that I explain that admirable

pre-established harmony of mind and body, and even of all monads or

simple substances,--which takes the place of the impossible influence

of one upon another.... After this, I should add but little if I

said that it is these small perceptions which _determine_ us in many

conjunctures without our thinking of it, and which deceive the vulgar

by the appearance of an _indifference of equilibrium_, as if we were

entirely indifferent whether we turned, e. g., to right or to left.

'I have remarked also that in virtue of insensible variations two

individual things could never be perfectly alike, and that they ought

always to differ more than _numero._ And with this we have done once

for all with the empty tablets of the mind, a soul without thought,

a substance without action, the void of space, the atoms, and even

parcels not actually divided in matter; we have done with pure repose,

entire uniformity in a portion of time, of place or of matter,...

and a thousand other fictions of philosophers which come from their

incomplete notions, fictions which the nature of things does not

suffer, and which our ignorance and the little attention we have for

the insensible lets pass, but which could never be rendered tolerable,

unless we confine them to abstractions of the mind which protests that

it does not deny what it puts aside and considers out of place in any

present consideration. Otherwise, if we took it quite in earnest, to

mean that things which we do not perceive do not exist in the soul or

body, we should fail in philosophy as in politics by neglecting τὀ

μικρόν, insensible steps of progress:--whereas an abstraction is not an

error provided we know that what we put out of sight is still there.'

This was the conception which Bacon had shadowed out, which Leibniz

had presented under many names and with many applications, as the

olive-branch between Plato and Democritus; it now became through

philosophical and extra-philosophic acceptance a current maxim in the

general field of knowledge. Nature assimilated to history, and history

assimilated to nature: freedom built upon necessity, and efficient

causes rounded off, though not entirely merged, in final. It is the

recognition of law, order, causality in the psychical world, yet not

of _mere_ so-called natural law; and therefore without reducing it to

a merely physical and material world. It is in fact the new method

which is inevitable and necessary, as soon as it is manifest that

life, organisation, development is the underlying truth and central

notion of things. You look at the world at first, let us say, as a mere

collection of separate things in varying degrees of juxtaposition:

and all that you think of doing to them, either by way of theory or

practice, is to put them together, to link them closer, or separate

them more widely. You do so from outside by an arranging force; for

they are assumed to be purely passive, waiting to be touched, each set

in its place--from which it can only be moved by a push or a pull.

This is the method of mathematics or mechanics. It shows the dexterity

of the agent or of the expositor: but you feel that it is artificial,

and arbitrary. It is analytic or synthetic--but not auto-analysis

or auto-synthesis. The director of the movement (we may call it

'construction') may no doubt have the real secret: he may work the

things well and fairly, and unite or divide them according to inner

affinities; but we cannot, as matters stand, be sure of this. The

things, in fact, he deals with have been already emptied of all life

and peculiarity of their own: they are alike in quality, only differing

by a more or less,--a difference which at any moment may be altered by

an act of subtraction or addition. No doubt you can build up what are

_called_ systems--compounds of a kind--in this way: but they do not

really hang and grow together; they are only prevented from breaking

up by the absence of any empty place to which the parts may withdraw.

Bit holds up bit; but how all the bits have found themselves so caged

up without exit is a mystery. Absolute neutrality or indifference of

each part to others, and yet absolute equilibrium[1] in the total

composite,--such is the situation.

The chemical method (taking chemistry as a type of the sciences

like optics, electricity, &c.) is a revelation of a different state

of affairs. The elements of things are here seen to be unique and

incomparable; yet in each there is a latent sympathy ready to break out

when the proper occasion arrives. Bring two things together, and their

affinity suddenly, in the proper circumstances, leads to their complete

fusion: a product arises which, when formed, hardly betrays its origin

and composition. In a way this is the converse of the mechanical or

mathematical method. In it was no fusion, no inner mixture: each part

after composition lay beside the other, and their union was only in the

ideas of the onlooker. It was mere juxtaposition still,--though now

closer: an abnormally keen eye would still have been able to descry the

dividing lines and measure the gaps. At least mere mechanical physics

tends so to conceive it. Here, on the contrary, there is union--but

only at the moment of fusion: once that is accomplished, the result is

apparently simple, and bears no suggestion of being a compound. In the

mechanical union the result is exactly equal to the sum of the elements

which go to make it: in the chemical there is something positively new,

something, i. e., of which the premises gave no indication and made no

promise.

Either of these methods,--of these conceptions of existence--works

well in a certain region. But both of them only do their work on a

certain hypothesis, or with a certain abstraction. The mechanical

method supposes that objects are all qualitatively alike, differing

only in quantity or weight: all therefore entirely comparable with

each other, and capable of being substituted for each other in an

equation. Where this assumption holds good, the method of addition and

division, the method of the calculus does its work[2]. The chemical

method works on another assumption,--the assumption of a number of

qualitatively-differenced elements, of elements which also are, so to

speak, set on edge against some, and ready to leap into the arms of

others. If the observer in the first case had the game entirely in his

own hand,--could build up and separate at his pleasure, could determine

results _a priori_: he is here baffled by the unexpected, and can only

wait and watch to learn _a posteriori_ the behaviour of the bodies

possessed of this occult and non-predictable affinity. At the best he

can only formulate what he observes, try to classify it, ascertain

any common principles running through it, any serial recurrences,

or the like: and that is all that chemical philosophy can achieve.

Chemical affinity--the fact that certain elements combine in certain

ways, and refuse to enter into certain alliances--is a great fact:

but to _a priori_ reasoning or abstract syllogising it is an entire

inexplicability, one of the accidents in the universe which must be

reckoned with, but cannot be understood.

It is probably evident that, if we want to get a comprehension of

the life and concrete reality of things, neither of these methods

will quite answer the purpose. With the first alone, if it could be

universally carried out, the universe would be thoroughly explained:

everything would be exactly equivalent to some sum or multiple of

every other: there would be no mystery, nothing unique, and strictly

individual. Given time, we could find a formula for every reality,

and a predicate exactly fitted to any subject. Yet even mathematics

has to confess the existence of irrationals, surds, infinite series,

and the like. For our unities and standards are always arbitrary,

artificial, and one-sided, and fall short of the subtlety of nature.

Even our simpler types of surfaces--the circle and the square--remain

irreducible to each other: and we only avoid the collision by the

remark that practically and with any required amount of exactness

the discrepancy between the two can be adjusted. If we turn to the

chemical method, again, there is a nearer approach to actuality in the

recognition of the presence of something more than mere composition

and juxtaposition. It is not that there is something which is _not_

juxtaposition: but rather it is much _more than mere_ juxtaposition.

There may be degrees of this something more: but it is only to a gross

or abstract view that it is not present at all. Mere cohesion even

shows a unity in things juxta-posed. Mere contact is contagious: it

infects. 'When a violin has been played on frequently by a tyro,' says

G. H. Lewes, 'its tone deteriorates, its molecules become re-arranged,

so that one mode of vibration is more ready than another[3].' 'Toute

impression,' he quotes from Delboeuf, 'laisse une certaine trace

ineffaçable.' So-called chemical composition is only a conspicuous

instance, with peculiarities, of this alteration in state produced

by what, from the mechanical standpoint, are called inner molecular

displacements. But to recognise a fact is one thing: to give its

explanation is another. Yet, on the other hand, to recognise the fact

is to note an important point which had been omitted by the mechanical

construction of things. There the result could hardly be called new:

it was exactly equal to its constituent elements: and the equation was

transparent. And it was transparent because the whole process, analysis

and synthesis, was not a work or process of the observed thing, but

the work of the observing mind: it makes the (artificial) unities,

numbers them, and adds them or subtracts. But with the chemical result,

though it also is equal to its elements, there is something new.

Water, no doubt, is oxygen and hydrogen, but here, at least, there

is no doubt that the _plus_ sign unduly simplifies the relationship,

and rather indicates or represents a nexus than accurately defines

it. And yet, there is nothing in water which was not, in some--shall

we say mysterious?--way, in the oxygen and the hydrogen. Chemical

physics, therefore, brings out clearly, or comparatively clearly,

something which the ordinary and coarser simplicity-loving theory is

obliged and is able to neglect: it realises the virtue that lies in

juxtaposition, and shows that the mere outer change of quantity goes

with a deeper inward and qualitative one. The result does more than

sum up and condense what was spread out in extension and dispersed

in parts before: it brings out or reveals something which previously

was unsurmised. Always, in a liberal interpretation of the maxim, it

is true that _Ex nihilo nihil fit:_ but here, especially, the effect

actually discloses what was--but was latent or unperceived--in the

premises. The maxim, to be fairly treated, must be read backwards as

well as forwards.

But we must go a step further if we wish the full explanation. If the

premises are to be adequate to support the conclusion, they must be

restated in terms which hint at the conclusion--which in a way contain

it, but contain it in potentiality and promise, not in act. This is

the method of development, which is the method that is applicable to

full concrete reality, not like the others to parts abstracted from

or insulated in reality. So long as you deal with these selected

bits of fact--abstracted from their surroundings, subject to strict

observation or strict experiment, you can apply a comparatively simple

and straightforward method. You are dealing with abstracted, mutilated,

prepared fact. You are guided in these cases by the canons of identity

and difference: you add and subtract, or subtract and add; and that

is all. You use what are called the rules of experimental method. But

these canons do not directly apply--except by happy accident--to the

real world, where antecedent and consequents are not separate and

tabulated, as the logical canons, the rules of formal logic, require.

In dealing with this concrete reality, a much more complex method is

needed, a method which has to blend induction with deduction, and

to start from both ends in the series of causation at once. You can

apply observation or experiment, only when the issues have already

been extremely simplified and narrowed down: when the question has

been rendered so definite that it is next-door to the answer, and the

removal of a slight partition-wall will as it were make the two one

clear space. Where observation and experiment are available, indeed, is

where the general outlines and principles of the subject are settled,

where the scheme of reality is defined in large, but a variety of minor

issues still remains to be settled. Unless this general framework is

fixed, neither observation nor experiment, with their canon of identity

and difference, are of any avail. These methods, therefore, only apply

in sciences which are in principle or substantially complete, though

admitting of possibly infinite extension in details and particulars.

Where the science is yet to constitute, i. e. in dealing with the

kinds of real things in their completeness, and not as viewed in

some definite aspect, induction and deduction must go hand in hand

and help each other at every step: and if they, as they must, have

recourse to experiment and observation, it will be at first in a very

unsatisfactory and tentative way.

Such is the way the contrast between the simplicity belonging to an

artificial method dealing with picked instances, and the complexity

that real concrete organic nature demands, presented itself to J. S.

Mill as he advanced in his inquiry. The only complete method for the

investigation of unsophisticated nature, not yet mapped out and defined

in general departments, is the deductive-inductive method in which

induction and deduction separately have a subordinate place,--using

induction in the narrow sense the term has been hitherto allowed to

bear. And that sense, it may be added, is, as in some passages of

Aristotle, little else than a reverse of syllogism, or to speak more

accurately, it is a syllogism which goes up to generals instead of

descending from them. It is like the syllogistic deduction formal and

abstract in character. The (deductive) syllogism assumes the existence

of major premises--of general propositions which in the last resort,

if they are real bases, must be primary and true, or self-evident

facts. But a critic, like Mill, had little difficulty in showing

that a general truth rests upon and presupposes the very particular

conclusions which it is used to establish. Unless every singular is

true, the universal which embraces or unifies them cannot really be

true. Therefore the conclusion is really implied and presupposed in

the principles of its premises. But, unfortunately for the application

and supposed sequel of this not unjust remark, a similar remark may

be made on the ordinary exposition of the inductive method. Induction,

it is said, infers from or on a basis of single facts. But if a single

truth is really, i. e. unconditionally true, it is indistinguishable

from the universal. If it is really true once, it is true for ever.

The assertion of the individual proposition as true, if it can be

supported--(and unless it be true, what basis can it afford for

the general conclusion?)--implies the truth of the universal it is

sometimes used to establish. The inductive logician tells us to build

on singular and definite facts, on truths of definite and individual

experience: but a definite or determinate truth rests upon universality

(indeed is a universal), and cannot be found unless we have already

found the special total or organism of truth in which it forms a part.

Individuals and universals presuppose each other, and do not, as the

first impression leads us to think, stand apart as two unconnected

termini, from either of which, if we happen to be so located, we can

without road or railway make a legitimate passage to the other.

If it be urged, as it may naturally be, that on this showing there is

no solid or 'absolute' starting-point at all, the contention may be

conceded. The only fixed and steady points in knowledge are points

hypothetically fixed,--certified, that is, for the time and in the

circumstances we employ them. But in the open field--or rather in

the wilderness--of knowledge, where the ground of fact is not staked

off, and the unexpected may always turn up, the only test of truth is

the corroboration given by the consilience of paths initiated from

different points: it is only by an undesigned coincidence in the

results of independent operations that you can succeed in orienting

yourself. You begin your road at two ends, and you meet: you locate

or fix your point by drawing its co-ordinates to two direction-lines

taken anyhow at first, and only in formed science diverging at a fixed

angle. And in the absolute your direction-lines cannot be supposed

fixed: you can only gradually adjust them to each other as you

proceed. Intelligence, says Aristotle, is a principle, a beginning;

and intelligence, he says again, supplies beginnings[4]. Science, in

the technical sense, only comes into operation,--or, in other words,

deduction and (in the narrower sense used by Mill, and proceeding by

_pure_ observation and experiment) induction only find a way,--where

beginnings and principles have been set up, where an approximate order

or provisional system has been established. And if logic, in its

stricter sense, is the method of sciences already made and in their

essentials constituted, then logic can be asked to do no more than

to provide a theory of such formal processes. If it traces the path

which leads 'from the known to the unknown,' if it always proceeds on

the hypothesis of a given knowledge, then such induction or deduction

(from certain and approved singular facts, or from certain and approved

general truths) fully satisfies the practical need of the scientific

reasoner. But if Logic be, as it sometimes is, and may very reasonably

be, taken in the wider sense of an epistemology,--a theory of the

nature and origin of knowledge as a whole, and not of mere inference

or syllogism;--if it does not merely ask how we can satisfactorily

get from one piece of knowledge (we are supposed to have) to another

(not yet supposed to be), but how we come to have knowledge at all;

then its problem must go behind the rudiments of vulgar induction and

deduction. It must ask--what, so far as one can see, Mill and his

mere followers have never seriously asked at all--what induction

is, what are its relations with deduction, and what is the place of

either in the process of knowledge. And as the process of knowledge

is the path to reality, it must also ask about the nature of this

goal,--reality and truth. It is all very well for the narrower Logic

to formulate in terms the methods actually employed in sciences: to

state in abstract canons what is there seen in life and action. But

a _Science of Logic_--an epistemology--(and a genuine epistemology

cannot claim to be anything short of an ontology) must face the fact of

science itself--must ask how the ideas of the knower must--or otherwise

they are not knowledge--embrace and contain the reality of the known.

The other and narrower Logic is and will remain a theory of forms of

reasoning-a transcript in fainter terms of the procedure of science in

any given step it takes upward to generals or downward to particulars:

but the logic which deals with knowledge as such, in its systematic

entirety,--the transcendental Logic, in short, must have a real value,

an invincible relation to reality. The formal Logic--the logic of Mill

and Hamilton--must be carried back to its principles, to its first

step: and that first step which will also be the last step, and the

inspiring principle of every intermediate step, is that of Intelligence

(Aristotle's Νοῡς), of which the products or manifestations are λόγοι,

i. e. definite conceptions, categories, formulations of rules and

principles of definite range,--determinations or special types of unity.

Mill really faced the problem of method to better effect when he came

to deal with a class of questions in which he was really interested,

and which moreover have for epistemological purposes the advantage of

being as yet unreduced into the rank and file of disciplined science.

These questions are those dealing with man, his mental and moral

nature, and history. Even its advocates or patrons occasionally admit

that there is no accepted idea of what Sociology is or does. Its name

at least expresses a longing towards a unity, or a presentiment that

there is some underlying unity and common method in the group of what

are loosely called the moral, or the historical, or the social and

political sciences. But sociology is, as most people will allow, the

name of a science unrealised--the felt and consciously-apprehended

need of a science, and the dissatisfaction with the existing state of

knowledge in certain departments. And undoubtedly it was with problems

of social science,--problems of politico-economic and socio-ethical or

socio-religious matters, that Mill's interests were mainly engaged.

Like his master in this department, Auguste Comte, he wanted to carry

into the topics which he was chiefly bent upon that 'scientific'

precision which they by pretty general admission lacked, and which

revolutionary movements had shown they greatly needed. But he could

not help seeing that the 'induction' of dynamics and physics was not

exactly the instrument he was in search of. Theory and hypothesis

here demanded a much larger share in the process than in the more

mathematical sciences. Causes and effects in reality here rolled round

into each other, instead of remaining calmly fixed, one set here, and

the other there. Of course even here--i. e. in organic and concrete

sciences--it is possible to introduce observation and experiment,--no

doubt, with greater effort and constraint, but still not altogether

impracticable. But the artificial and mutilative character of such

experimentation is felt here in a way different from its pressure in

other cases. And what is more important, to institute an experiment or

set on foot a scientific observation (and to observe means to _watch_

a definitely restricted natural process with a view to answer some

question about it), presupposes--as we have already seen--a tolerably

definite provisional theory as to the general lie of the country to be

investigated. Only when the country has been reasonably well mapped out

in provinces and provided with some system of roads, can these problems

of detail--questions to be answered Yes or No--be profitably put. And

it is--in some parts of the historical sciences at least--somewhat

premature to put questions requiring a categorical reply. There is

only the vague _malaise_ of felt difficulty to guide us. We do not,

in many cases, know what it is that we want to know; for, it demands

a good deal of wisdom and trained art to put the proper or reasonable

question,--so much so, indeed, that to succeed in formulating your

question fully is equivalent or nearly equivalent to being able to

answer it. The value of observations and experiments--which are ways of

putting nature to the question and it may be to the torture--depends

entirely upon the knowledge and the command of general ideas possessed

by the observer and experimenter. And the same may be said of the

reduced and tabulated conspectuses of the results of many observations

and experiments which are called Statistics. Their value depends on

the truth and breadth of view which presided at their collection and

arrangement[5].

The historical or genetic method is the method of Science in general,

but considered and employed under a limited aspect. And under its

more comprehensive aspect it may be called--though no name is

unimpeachable--the method of development. Now the essence of the idea

of development--as was clearly shown by Leibniz--is the refusal to

admit external interference, and the resolve to let a thing explain

itself by itself. It does not, like the mechanical method, manipulate

the thing from outside--try to add it up out of factors or items

fashioned and fabricated after some external standard. Nor does it,

like the chemical, look at the result as an inexplicable alteration,

due apparently to a mere stroke of combination or disintegration--yet

not obviously reducible to a mere equivalent of its elements. On

the contrary, it recognises in the object a certain independence or

originality, yet also the presence of an immanent law which does not

wait for the outsider to put it together, but constructs itself, as it

were, after a plan of its own. There is in the so-called object, though

we do not at first sight recognise it, the same originative principle

both analytic and synthetic, as we own in thought. The object is--in

a true logic--a process, a self-completing process, and not merely an

object, mechanical, or other object. It changes, grows or decays, while

we observe, unless for brief instants we cut it off from its connexions

and arrest its development. And our observation, if truly scientific,

must be sympathetic with its process of change. It is neither a mere

thing to be explained and construed _ab extra_: nor a mystery of sudden

transformation to be passively accepted; but a growth, a history, to be

sympathetically watched and understood,--understood, because it follows

the same order as the movement of our own thought in the process of

knowledge. _Similia similibus cognoscuntur_[6].

One sometimes hears it asked by paradoxical critics at which end

a history should begin. And to ordinary dogmatic recklessness,

paradoxical the question may well seem. Begin at the beginning, no

doubt, is the vulgar reply; which in this case is understood to

mean from the earliest point in date (that, of course, being easily

ascertained, and a thing known to all men). But,--so Plato long ago

well raised the difficulty which will always confront us,--are we to go

from the beginnings, or towards the beginnings? And it does not quite

solve the question to say that we are to begin with what is known:

for under that word the same difficulty re-appears. Can you really

know one end without the other? To the vulgar partisan of historical

method, its precept means Go to the earlier, if you wish to understand

the meaning, the value, and the elements constitutive of the later and

subsequent. Begin with origins, with the earliest elements, the phases

that first appear; and thus you will get light to see the later as they

really stand. That this is a common interpretation of the historical

method is notorious. To explain _Homo sapiens_, one is told to study

the ape,--the nearest analogue of his lost or missing progenitor: to

understand the contemporary horse, go to eohippus, or hipparion, or

however his early prototype may be at present named and recognised.

And in all this there is a truth--or least a half-truth. But let us

equally recognise the other half of the truth. If past throws light on

present, present throws not less light on past. You propose, let us

say, to write a history of Greece. A wordy philosophy, wise in its own

conceit and in fine phrases, will advise you to approach the subject

without prepossession or prejudice. So far, good. But what is meant

by the absence of prepossession or prejudice? Not a blank openness

to impression, not a mere passivity; but if passivity at all, a wise

passivity: if openness, the openness of the trained judge.

The advice, so often associated with Francis Bacon, to get rid of all

false pre-conceptions, of all _idola,_ is one which it is easy to

mistake in an over-zeal to follow it. That mere negation of prejudices

which we call childish innocence is no match for the craft by which

Nature seeks to keep or disguise her secrets. The free consciousness,

the unbiassed mind, is not the easy result of one great act of

renunciation, but the work of continued self-discipline, self-conquest,

self-realisation. If you are not to impose upon the thing a

pre-conception alien to it, neither must you rashly give yourself away

to the thing, or to the first whims which accident puts upon you as the

thing. What seems a fact or thing is only a candidate for the post of

thing or fact: and its credentials need to be examined, and compared

with other evidences. To detect a fact, therefore, is only possible for

a tried and tested consciousness which by patience and self-mastery has

won the key of interpretation. What Bacon apparently meant--though,

as often happens, in his eagerness to combat a prevailing folly, he

sometimes overshot himself in statement--was to insist on the eternal

wedlock of the mind and things, of things and the mind, as the sole

and sufficient condition for the reality of knowledge and truth. The

mind may not presume to do without things, or things to domineer the

mind;--or the result is a windy and frothy vanity. And the wedlock

is eternal: in his own eloquent words, 'the mind itself is but an

accident to knowledge[7],' and he might have added, so also are things:

for, as he says, 'the truth of being and the truth of knowing is all

one': only in the bond of knowledge are things true and real,--being

otherwise only 'permanent possibilities,' or possibilities barely even

permanent--or not even possibilities. Yet he scarcely realised that

his 'due rejections and exclusions' and negations were a fundamental

_constitutive_ element in those facts of which he habitually emphasises

only the positive side.

He therefore who would understand--or would write--the history of

Greece must really in his studies begin at both ends--both at the

Greece of to-day, and at the Greece of Solon, or what earlier period

may be taken as the start of Greek history. With perhaps the least

qualified dogmatism, one may assert that he will begin with the

Greece of to-day; or if he deals solely with Ancient Greece he will

begin with the full blaze of Hellenic civilisation which still has a

pale reflection in the modern world, and gradually work back to the

beginnings. It is no doubt customary to begin Greek history, say, with

the Homeric Age, and work downwards, as it is customary to begin a

formal treatise on geography with the general features of the earth's

shape and surface. But that beginning represents really the temporarily

accredited and accepted result of a process which, starting from the

other end, has worked backwards to commencements or origins. And the

teacher, in particular, will do well not to imitate too slavishly the

method of the formal treatise. A day may come--or may have come--for

example, for Greek history to start from periods long anterior to the

supposed or traditional date of the wars around the wall of Troy. But

when it does so, it will have done so by more thoroughly ransacking

the Greece of to-day: and so disclosing the secrets of what is termed

pre-historic Greece. Then, conversely, when modern diggings on Greek

soil reveal the features of an earlier than what was erewhile to older

historians its earliest past, the reconstruction of that early people's

life reflects a new light on the directions and the limitations of

its subsequent civilisation. We see better into the reality of Homer,

and even of Demosthenes--into their ideal glory and their historical

limitations, when we explore the cradle in which their race's life was

erst fostered, and the rock out of which they and nature hewed them.

And this is no peculiarity of Greece. The deepest research into the

social institutions which control the England of to-day is the best

propaedeutic for the study of Anglo-Saxon times; and the same is true

_vice versa_.

Nor, again, is the truth of the proposition confined to what we

ordinarily mean by history. The Greek poet has said 'Art had to wait on

and welcome chance, and chance to wait on Art': or as we may paraphrase

it, if every invention and discovery is in a measure a lucky chance,

it is a luck that only falls to the wisely prepared head and hand. The

casual event falls as a germ of new construction or theory only on an

intelligence ready to welcome it,--prepared with its complement in the

spirit of an idea, eager to take shape. The means again, in the arts

and crafts, is not only a means to something else; it is also a means

to its own end, to realise or perfect itself. The rude tool of the

savage, for instance, is not merely a means to supply his wants: it

is also a means towards completing and improving itself, and towards

perfecting itself by constructing an ampler tool, which supersedes it,

because it can do all and more than all the work of the earlier, or

can do it more economically. All progress that deserves the name is

an incessant and continuous revision of a first step: a re-adaptation

of an old instrument: a repeated and unending self-correction. It

is only a partially-true symbol of human advance to speak of it as

a line: unless we add, by another piece of symbolism, that the line

is only the protracted or extended phase in which the form of time

drags out for us the magnified and organised point-nucleus. It is a

truth--which we are only too ready to forget or discount--that the

savage (and he bears with justice both epithets, 'the noble savage,'

and 'the brute barbarian') is not something left happily behind us, in

the onward march of civilisation; but that he is, however much we may

fancy him suppressed and superseded, still present, at least 'ideally'

in the finest products of humanity, and may hap only too likely--as

the Russian is said, when scratched, to betray his original Tartar

breed--to burst put on provocation into a grim reality. The Pullman

car of to-day retains within it for the archaeologically-trained eye

the rudiments of the primitive wain of the primitive nomade: and

the careful study of either end of the scale will not merely throw

a marvellous light on the excellencies or the defects of the other,

but will probably also tend in the impartial observer to moderate the

self-gratulations of modern advance. For it is only those whose view

ranges within narrow limits that are over-impressed by the magnitude of

the advance made in the 'last new thing.'