It is a natural illusion that makes us think of each century as exhibiting the continuous development of one tendency of mind through a series of stages whose differences are only of secondary importance, and, on the other hand, to regard the steps from one century to another as corresponding to some marked transition of thought, as if the world had been suddenly precipitated into a new sphere of existence. For some purposes a rough generalization of this kind, that breaks at stated intervals the continuity of time, may, perhaps, be convenient. When, however, we begin to look at things more closely, we discover that it is impossible thus to cut through the historical connection of events, as it were, “with a hatchet.” We discover, for example, that the characteristics of the eighteenth century were strongly marked only in one period of it; and that what we call the spirit of the nineteenth century was born some time before the year 1800, and has never quite prevailed over other tendencies. At the same time, there is an important difference indicated by these two loosely used names, and as it is always easier to define things by contrast, it may help us to make our subject more definite to consider what they mean.
I
It is too late now to “abuse the eighteenth century,” which had its good and evil, like other periods. It is commonly conceived as the era of individualism and analysis, the era of logical enlightenment and sceptical criticism; and, again, as the era of liberation from groundless superstitions and fictitious claims of authority; the era in which mankind seemed for the first time to throw off the weight of the past and to enter without fear upon the enjoyment of their earthly heritage. The science of Newton had given the last blow to the astronomy that made the earth the centre of the universe. It had undermined and discredited the simple theology that explained the whole material world as a cosmos arranged for the supply of human needs. At the same time, the progress of biology was bringing man to a consciousness that as a physical being he is only primus inter pares in the animal kingdom, and the decay of religious belief was making him realize his finitude, the limits of his natural existence, as, perhaps, he had never done before, at least never since the beginning of the Christian era. Earth seemed to be disconnected from heaven, and the human race thrown upon its own resources. By the new enlightenment all powers, ecclesiastical or political, were stripped of the mysterious sanctity that had once invested them. “The nimbus was taken away from the heads of the gods and rulers of the world.” Every authority that claimed man’s homage was weighed in the scales of the understanding, and, so weighed, every such authority was found wanting. The State had come to be regarded as only a collection of individuals who had agreed to live together under a ruler deriving all his claims from their consent, and invested with no divine right to their allegiance. The Church was no longer a sacred institution governed by priests who held their commission directly from God, but only a sort of spiritual police agency, an ally of the State in the restraint of vice and crime, or, at best, in Protestant countries, a society for mutual improvement. Men were “free and equal,” each standing face to face with his fellows, admitting no superiority or superstition of hero-worship in regard to any one of them. And the Deity, if his existence were not denied, tended to become a mere “Supreme Being,” who was removed to such a distance from mankind that he could hardly be reached by their reverence, still less by their love.
At the same time, the influences which, in one point of view, seemed to limit and narrow human existence, in another point of view tended to liberate and enlarge it. If they excluded the idea of the infinite from man’s life, they emancipated him from many degrading superstitions, which in an earlier age had held him “all his lifetime subject to bondage.” And as the pressure from above was lightened the individual seemed to become master of himself and of his destiny. If the king could no longer say, “L’Etat c’est moi,” the rights of the subject were vindicated; if the authority of the Church was weakened, the bonds of free inquiry were broken; if imagination ceased to fill men with the awe and wonder of higher powers, the way was opened up for scientific and industrial development; if God was regarded as unknowable, “the proper study of mankind was man,” and that study could now be pursued without fear or hinderance. Poetry and religion might be impoverished, the sense of the binding force of social relations might be weakened, but interest in the bettering of man’s earthly condition was awakened, and with it came a new desire for justice to all, a new intolerance of human suffering, and a new demand that the lot of the class “which is most numerous and poor” should be made less wretched and insecure, and, towards the end of the century, a new turn was given to its leading thought, for an effort was made to discover in the nature of the individual himself the equivalent of those universal powers which the enlightenment had banished from the external world and from the life of society. Rousseau carried individualism to an extreme point, at which it became its own correction, and taught men to find within their own souls the infinite which they could no longer discover without. Rejecting in the first instance all social conventions as unjust limitations of the natural man, and adopting the prevailing theory of the time, that the State is only the product of a contract between independent persons, he yet discovered in the individual thus liberated from all external pressure a “common reason,” and “a general will,” which could reorganize his life and bind him to his fellow-men and to God. This great idea, which appears in Rousseau rather as a stroke of insight, an intuition of genius—lifting him above his first thoughts and insensibly changing their meaning—was grasped by Kant as the principle of a new philosophy and worked out in a comprehensive system that dealt with all the great problems of thought and life. Kant, indeed, seemed, like Rousseau, to begin on the plane of eighteenth-century individualism, but, influenced as he was by the philosophy of Leibnitz, he from the first conceived the individual as in himself universal; or, to speak more exactly, as having a universal principle realized in him. Thus, though in one aspect of his being man is a finite object among other objects, confined within limits of space and time, and forming only a link in the chain of natural causation, in another aspect of it, as a conscious self, he is emancipated from all these limitations. For—such is Kant’s argument—a knowing subject, for whom the whole finite world, including his own finite existence, is an object of knowledge, cannot himself be comprehended in that world or limited by any of its conditions. As there can be no world of objects except for a self, it is impossible that such a self should be merely one of these objects. Thus, as knowing, or capable of knowing, all things, man cannot be identified with any of them; or if, from one point of view, as an individual, he is so identified, yet he has within him a universal principle that carries him beyond the limits of his individuality. And this contrast shows itself also in his practical life. For if as an object he appears to be but an animal organism, moved by the impressions of pleasure and pain which he receives from other objects, yet in his inner moral life man is revealed to himself as a self-determining subject, emancipated from all sensuous motives and from the necessity of nature which they bring with them, and conscious of subordination only to the law of duty, which is the law of his own reason. And that law, in spite of every pressure of circumstance from without, and of every impulse of passion from within, he knows that he ought to obey, and therefore he knows that he can obey it. Thus, in Kant’s theory, the two extreme views of humanity, as natural and as spiritual, as limited to a finite individuality, hemmed in by necessities on every side, and yet as possessing a universal capacity of knowing, and an absolute power of self-determination, these two views are presented in sharp antithesis, and at the same time held together as different aspects of one life. In fact, we have here, as it were, compressed into a nutshell, the result of the whole history of eighteenth-century individualism, which began by depressing man and ended by exalting him; which, with one of its voices, seemed to reduce him to the level of an animal, a mere part of the partial world, a transitory phenomenal existence among other phenomena; and then, with its other voice, proceeded to recognize him as a member of the intelligible world, a “spectator of all time and existence,” and gifted with the absolute freedom of a will which could be determined by nothing but itself. “The solitary,” says Aristotle, “must be either a god or a beast,” and the eighteenth century, in its conception of the individual, seemed to oscillate between the one and the other till Kant, awaking to the impossibility of omitting either aspect of his being, demanded that he should be conceived as both at once. Kant thus set the problem of the future; and if he did not solve it, he at least showed the futility of any narrow or one-sided solution and the direction in which an adequate solution could alone be sought. In short, Kant asked the question to which the nineteenth century, in all its philosophical reflection, has been striving to find an answer.
For in philosophy, as in other departments of knowledge, the work of the nineteenth century has been one of mediation and reconciliation. It has been an endeavor to break down the sharp antithesis of philosophical and scientific theories that was characteristic of an earlier time. In the writings of the greatest thinkers, the oppositions of materialism and spiritualism, of sensationalism and idealism, of empiricism and a priori speculation, of individualism and socialism, all the great oppositions of theoretical and practical philosophy, which formerly were held to be absolute and irreconcilable, have been modified, restated, reduced to the relative antagonism of the different aspects of one truth. The great controversies of the past have thus passed into a new phase, in which absolute statements pro and con have become, as it were, antiquated; and the question is no longer whether a particular doctrine or its opposite is true, but what are the elements of truth and error in each of them, and how we can attain to a comprehensive view of things, in which justice is done to both. And if it be asked, what are the principles or ideas that have suggested this reconciling work, and have been the guides of the greatest scientific or philosophic writers in attempting to achieve it, I think the answer must be that they are the idea of organic unity, and, as implied in that, the idea of development. Goethe and Hegel, in Germany; Comte, in France; Darwin and Spencer, in England, are writers who almost span the whole range of difference in modern thought; but they, and a multitude of others in every department of study, have been inspired by the ideas of organism and development. And they have all used them somewhat in the same way to turn the edge of the old controversial weapons, or to lift thought above the “yes” and “no” of opposing dogmatisms. It is true that the definitions or interpretations of the ideas of organism and development given by these writers are very different, and often, indeed, so sharply opposed that they seem to bring back the old controversies in a new form. But this does not alter the significance of the general fact; for, in the first place, the use of an idea by any writer is by no means always limited by his own interpretation of it; and, in the second place, the true interpretation of the idea is that which contains the secret of its power and prevalence, and it must in the long run gain the victory over all other interpretations of it. We may, therefore, fairly say that these ideas have been the marked ideas of the century, the conscious or unconscious stimulus of its best thought; and that they have been working, and are working still, in the direction of a deeper and more comprehensive irenicon between the different tendencies of the human mind than has been attained in any previous stage of the history of philosophy.
Against such a general characterization of an age, there is the same objection which Burke indicated when he said that “he could not draw up an indictment against a nation.” We are taking a distant and general view of a period, in which all its inequalities of movement, all the ebb and flow of opinion, are lost sight of, and only one main current of thought is visible. We may get a step nearer to the subject by distinguishing three periods in the century, in which there is a partial difference of tendency. The first period, which we may roughly define as lasting well on into the 30’s, is, in the main, a period of construction, of creative thought, in which the great germinating ideas that distinguished the century are more or less adequately expressed in different countries, and in which they receive a first, somewhat hasty, application to all departments of human knowledge. Idealistic philosophy, which gave the fullest expression to those ideas, seems for a time to carry all before it in Germany; and a similar movement of thought, less definitely reflective or speculative, enriches the literature of other countries. In the next period, lasting until the 70’s, the new ideas do not lose their hold upon men’s minds, but there is a certain critical recoil against them, a tendency to explain them away. The first premature synthesis of idealistic philosophy is attacked by a scepticism, which seems at times as if it would measure back the whole way to the individualistic materialism of an earlier age, or which only avoids that extreme to fall into a scientific agnosticism, at first sight even more hostile to the claims of philosophy. But the lesson of Kant could never be altogether forgotten, nor could the negative or sceptical tendencies of the Critique of Pure Reason be permanently separated from the positive results of his later writings. And the great scientific movement of the time, which at first seemed to draw away all interest from speculative inquiry, tended in the long run, especially by the advance of biological study, to raise metaphysical questions which the methods of science were incapable of answering. Hence, in the latest decades of the century, there has come a revival of interest in philosophy, and especially in the idealistic philosophy of its first years. But if philosophy has revived, it is in a more critical and cautious form, and accompanied by a clear consciousness that the only true idealism is that which is able to absorb and assimilate all the data supplied by empirical investigation, and do justice to all the results of the special sciences. The general movement of thought in the nineteenth century has thus, on the whole, taken an idealistic direction; but there has come with it also a deeper consciousness of the immense difficulty of a comprehensive synthesis; of the inefficacy of any easy monism or optimism, that would pluck the fruit of knowledge before it is ripe; of the infinite labor and patience, the sympathetic appreciation of the opposing views of others, and constant and unsparing criticism of our own, which are needed for the construction of a true philosophy.
II
In a short article like this, it is impossible to give more than a few indications of the way in which this three-fold schema of the history of nineteenth-century philosophy should be filled up. To give any definite impression, the writer must, so to speak, put on the seven-leagued boots of Jack the Giant Killer; in other words, however conscious he may be of the truth that dolus latet in generalibus, he must generalize and be content to mention only a few leading names in illustration of the tendencies of thought of which he speaks.
It is the instinct of each new generation to vindicate its freedom by rebelling against the authority of its predecessors; and when a new idea begins to influence human thought, it usually, on its first appearance, shows that side which is most antagonistic to the spirit of the past. Thus the peculiar nineteenth-century movement begins with a reassertion of the universal as against the individual, which is so emphatic that it looks like a return to Spinozism. Schelling is the most prominent philosophical representative of this tendency. In the works which he wrote about the beginning of the century, he broke away even from the universalized individualism of Fichte, and gave emphatic prominence to the great philosophical commonplace—which had been almost forgotten by the previous age—that there is an identity which is below or above all distinction, and that the universe is one through all its multiplicity, and permanent through all its changes. His maxim—that there are none but quantitative differences in things, and that all these, even the difference of mind and matter, disappear in the “indifference” of the Absolute—was like a declaration of war against the “enlightenment.” It meant that philosophy was no longer content to regard the whole as the sum of the parts, but could look upon the distinction of the parts only as a differentiation of the whole. With Schelling, indeed, this differentiation was in danger of being reduced to a mere appearance and the unity of the Absolute was on the point of vanishing in a bare or abstract identity. But his strong assertion of the unity beneath all difference, of the priority of the universal to all particulars, was perhaps necessary, ere the true conception of the organic unity of the world could be arrived at. And the correction soon came with Hegel, who maintained that the absolute is “not substance, but subject.” For this meant that the absolute is a self-differentiating principle, realizing itself in a world of difference which is no mere appearance, but its own essential manifestation; and again—what is the counterpart or complementary truth to this—that in the world there are “degrees of reality,” and that “mind is higher in degree than nature.” But these ideas could hardly have been understood until the uncompromising assertion of the absolute unity had been made, and until the subjectivity of the Kantian and Fichtean points of view had once for all been set aside. The philosophy of Hegel derives its power from the way in which it strikes what, as I have already said, was the key-note of the nineteenth-century philosophy. In the first place, it is a philosophy of reconciliation, which attempts, through a criticism of the oppositions of philosophical theory, to reach a point of view in which they are all seen to be subordinated to the unity of one principle. His attack upon the “law of contradiction,” as formulated by scholastic logicians, meant simply that absolute distinctions are unmeaning, and that the only real differences are differences within a unity. On this principle he tried to show that all the oppositions of thought and things which have found expression in philosophy are relative oppositions, which find a solution or reconciliation in the life and movement of the whole. Hence he maintained that in all the great controversies that have divided the world, in metaphysics and psychology, in ethics and theology, the combatants have really been co-operators. Both sides, to use the expression of Leibnitz, have been “right in what they affirmed and wrong only in what they denied.” And their conflict has been the means of the evolution of a fuller truth than that which was contained in the doctrine of either party. In the second place, Hegel is guided throughout by the conception of the universe—and, in a sense, of every even relatively independent existence in it—as an organism, every element in which implies the whole, every change in which is a phase of its self-evolution. For his logical doctrine of the “notion” (as Begriff is commonly translated) means simply that we do not see anything truly until we comprehend it as a whole, in which one principle manifests itself through all the difference of the parts and—just through their distinctions and their relations—binds itself into one individual—reality. In this sense, everything just so far as it has an independent individual existence at all is an organism. Lastly, while thus conceiving the universe as organic, Hegel maintained that it is not a natural but a spiritual organism. For the limited scope of a natural organism and its process cannot be regarded as commensurate with a universe, which comprehends all existence, whether classed as organic or inorganic. Only the conscious and self-conscious unity of mind can overreach and overcome such extreme antagonisms, and reduce them all to elements in the realization of its own life. We must, therefore, think of the universe as an organism which includes nature, but manifests its ultimate principle only in the life of man. We may add that in all this Hegel attempted to show that he was only working out in the sphere of speculative thought what Christianity had already expressed for the ordinary consciousness, according to its half-pictorial methods of representation.
While this is the general meaning of Hegelianism, it must be added that Hegel was more successful in formulating these ideas in their logical or metaphysical form than in applying them to the results of the special sciences of nature, which he only knew at second hand; or even to the different provinces of the spiritual life and history of man, which he had studied more thoroughly. In both cases his data were very incomplete, and the scientific interpretation of them had not then been carried far enough to prepare—as, according to Hegel himself, it should prepare—for the final interpretation of philosophy. There is another circumstance to be taken into account, a circumstance which deeply affected Hegel and all the writers of his time. In the slow process of human history the new wine is always at first poured into old bottles, and only when the old bottles burst is an effort made to find new ones that will contain it safely. Hence the development of the new spirit in philosophy seemed often to go hand-in-hand with a movement of restoration in politics and religion which was not easily distinguishable from reaction. Just as the politicians of the time could find for the newly awakened spirit of nationality no other embodiment than the institutions of the ancient rÉgime, and tried to revive the old system destroyed by the Revolution, with only a few repairs and additions, so the great philosophical writers sought generally to reanimate the old scheme of life and thought by means of the new ideas, rather than completely to recast it in accordance with them. Hence, although Hegel’s principle of evolution was as hostile to reaction as to revolution, as hostile to an authoritative system that denied the rights of the individual as to mere individualism, his particular doctrines, both in politics and theology, took a strongly conservative tinge. When we look more closely we see that it is only as restoration is at the same time reformation, as it makes the old forms the expression of a new life, that Hegel could logically defend them. But the form which he gave to his ideas was perplexing; it tended in many minds to identify the principle of development, which means that the future can only spring out of the past and the present, with the defence of the status quo in Church and State; and, on the other hand, to confuse the forces of progress with those of revolution. Thus the mediating, reconciling power of the new doctrine was for a time obscured, and its effect in raising men’s minds above the old levels of controversy was delayed.
III
In other countries during the earlier decades of the century a similar movement of thought is discernible, though it was not carried out anywhere with the same philosophical thoroughness as in Germany. In France the organic idea did not find any very powerful representative till the time of Comte, and even in his expression of it there is a certain ambiguity. In his well-known law of development, indeed, he seems to reproduce the individualistic doctrine of the eighteenth century, and to deny the reality of the universal, both in its theological and its philosophical form. But already in the last volume of his Positive Philosophy, when he begins to deal with human society, he maintains that “the individual man is an abstraction, and that there is nothing real but humanity”; and in his Positive Politics he treats this unity of mankind as not only real, but divine. In that work, moreover, he makes another step. Rejecting at once the obstructions of the individualists and those of the socialists, he rises to the conception of a social organism, which gives play to the competitive energy of individuals, and yet binds them together in its own more comprehensive life. In England, before the close of the eighteenth century, the same spirit had found a representative in Burke, who rejected entirely the idea of a social contract, and maintained that the State is based on an unconscious reason of society, which is far wiser than the conscious reason of even the wisest individuals. In general, however, the spiritualistic movement of the earlier part of the century took, among the English-speaking people, rather a poetic and literary than a philosophical form. And the imperfect attempts of Coleridge to transplant German ideas into England—attempts followed up with signal energy by Frederic Denison Maurice—hardly constitute an exception to this rule. In this connection, also, as one who partly grasped the organic idea of social life and its development, but who gave it a somewhat imperfect and even contradictory expression, I may mention a later writer, Thomas Carlyle, whose imaginative genius and moral enthusiasm did much to breathe a new life into history. Though not a philosopher in any technical sense, he was, like his friend Emerson, a vehicle of philosophical ideas, and he contributed greatly to scatter the seed of idealism upon British soil. His Calvinistic pessimism, indeed, makes a curious contrast with the fearless optimism of the new country which is characteristic of Emerson; but whether great men are to be regarded as “heroes to be worshipped,” according to the teaching of the one, or as “representative men,” who are to be followed because they express what all are thinking, according to the ideas of the other, we are led, in both cases, to a deeper view of the solidarity of human society and of its spiritual basis.
IV
It is difficult to determine more than approximately the beginning of special movements of thought; for the different nations of the civilized world are not exactly contemporaneous in their development, and in each nation there are always individuals who lag behind the time or hasten on before it. But, speaking generally, we may say that as early as the fourth decade of the century a certain reaction had set in against the conclusions of idealistic philosophy, and especially against the organic idea of human life; and a tendency was even shown to revert, so far as possible, to the methods and ideas of the eighteenth century. The reasons for this change are various. In Germany the succession of great philosophers had come to an end, and their followers were smaller men, who were inclined too much to repeat the formulas, but had little of the creative power, of their predecessors. More attention, therefore, began to be paid to the protests of writers like Herbart and Schopenhauer, who, even in the hour of its triumph, had criticised and attacked the prevailing philosophy. Again, the physical sciences were advancing by “leaps and bounds,” and there was a growing inclination to believe in the universal validity of the mechanical methods of explanation to which they owed their success, and even in those sociological and historical studies to which the idealistic philosophy had given so great an impetus. The progress of empirical research and the increase of the materials of knowledge caused much of the work of Hegel and his followers to seem inadequate, if not entirely to set it aside. Even in Germany, where the new ideas had taken a distinctly philosophical shape, they seemed to lose their hold in the controversies that attended the breaking up of the Hegelian school; and in other countries, where they never found such a systematic expression, they were even less able to resist the attack now made upon them. Furthermore, as I have already indicated, writers of an idealistic tendency, in their recoil from the enlightenment, had devoted themselves so much to an appreciation of institutions derived from the past that they seemed to have no eyes for the defects of these institutions, and to confuse evolution with restoration.
The general result of all these influences was, then, to discredit philosophy and exalt science, so far as might be, into its place. Either the abstract methods of the physical sciences were proclaimed as adequate for the discovery of all truth, or, if this was seen to be impossible, agnosticism was professed in regard to all subjects to which these methods could not be applied. Even the phenomena of life were supposed to be capable of explanation by the action and reaction of the parts or elements of the physical organism, and Huxley looked forward to the time when man with all his spiritual endowments should be shown to be only the “cunningest of nature’s clocks.” The new science of psychophysics, which arose in Germany and has been cultivated with so much zeal by Wundt and others in all civilized countries, seemed to carry the method of physics into the investigation of mind, and some of its students were ready to maintain that it was the only psychology that deserved the name of science. Darwin’s great work on the Origin of Species, in so far as it set aside the idea of special creation and referred the “purposiveness” of organic structures to a process in which the external environment, and not any inward power of self-adaptation, was the controlling factor, seemed to bring a new reinforcement to the same way of thinking. And he and his followers were not slow to apply the theory of natural selection to the life of man, as well as to that of plants and animals. Finally, the historical studies, which were now cultivated with an energy to an extent hitherto unexampled, and immensely extended the knowledge of the process whereby the present has grown out of the past, were invaded by a similar spirit; and the historical method was maintained to be a solvent which could disintegrate all metaphysical conceptions of ethics or politics or even of theology. The account of the genesis of any idea was regarded as reducing its claims to the level of the elements or rudiments out of which it had sprung, and thus as enabling the scientific historian to explain, or explain away, the spiritual by the natural in all human life and experience. All things appeared again to be pointing towards a system of thought which would resolve ethics and psychology into physiology, and physiology into chemistry and physics.
At the same time the victory of this tendency was always more apparent than real. In the first place, “out of the eater came forth meat”—that very advance of the special sciences, which in its earlier stages had tended to throw all speculative thought into the shade, in the long run caused the need of philosophy to be again felt. In particular, the study of development in the organic world, which had received so great a stimulus from the work of Darwin, could not be carried on without the aid of higher conceptions than were required for the guidance of the physicist. The hypothesis of natural selection might expel the idea of design in the cruder form of a special creation of every distinct species; and the emphasis which it had laid upon the outward conditions of growth might seem unfavorable to the higher conception of an immanent teleology of the organism, but it was confessed by its author to be an incomplete theory of development, and Darwin himself, when he turned his attention to the evolution of man, found it necessary to supplement it by what might be called the converse theory of sexual selection; thus adding a principle of co-operation to his first principle of competition. And Mr. Spencer, who defined growth as a process of integration and differentiation, little as he might himself intend it, was really putting into popular language the Hegelian idea of evolution—an idea which necessarily involved the conception of a self-determined end. Evolutionists might cling, as they still cling, to the belief that, though constantly and necessarily speaking of purpose, they could eliminate it from the result of their investigations by the hypothesis of Darwin, or, subsequently, of Weissmann; but their discussions, especially when they were extended to the historical development of man, could not but reawaken the great controversy whether in the ultimate explanation of things it is more reasonable to “level up,” or to “level down,” to explain the higher by the lower, or the lower by the higher. That both explanations are necessary, nay, that no teleology can be of much worth which does not presuppose a thorough inquiry into the causal connections of particular phenomena, was admitted by all modern idealists. But they began to press the question whether the unity of the whole is not prior to its distribution into parts, and does not govern their relations with each other; and, in particular, whether it is possible in the case of organic beings, and especially of organic beings possessed of consciousness and self-consciousness, to be satisfied with a mode of explanation that treats them as mere collections of material elements which act and react externally upon each other. Whatever its value as a provisional hypothesis, can such a mode of explanation be finally regarded as adequate for the explanation of the nature of the world as a whole, or, indeed, of any one existence in it, that has even a relative independence or separate being of its own?
But, in the second place, a revival of the idealistic philosophy was made necessary by an obvious weakness which clung to the scientific materialism of the nineteenth century from the very beginning. The Kantian criticism of knowledge, which could not be entirely neglected, had convincingly proved that in our experience objects can be known only in relation to a subject, and matter only in relation to mind. But, if so, how could the latter be explained by the former? Even to those who had not fully understood this doctrine, it became evident that mind is at least co-ordinate with matter, and cannot be treated as a mere “epiphenomenon” of it. Mr. Spencer, therefore, had to take refuge in the strange notion that we are possessed of “two consciousnesses”: the consciousness of ideas within us, and the consciousness of motions without us; and that neither of these can be resolved into the other, though both are the phenomena of an unknowable Absolute. It is in this citadel of ignorance that Huxley tries to intrench himself; but the place was taken before it could be occupied. The self-contradiction of an unknowable Absolute, and the equal though less obvious self-contradiction of a dualistic separation between two aspects of our life—which, as a matter of fact, are never, and logically can never be, divided—could not long be maintained against a criticism armed with the weapons of Kant and his idealistic successors. Already, in the 50’s, the cry “Back to Kant” was raised in Germany, and, not long after, it led in England and America to a renewed study of the German idealistic writers, in which Dr. Hutchison Sterling and the late Professor Green took a leading part. It was soon obvious to every one who had learned the lesson of critical philosophy that the agnostic dualism of Mr. Spencer was due to a fundamental misconception of what is meant by the subjectivity of knowledge. It was pointed out that if we have the consciousness of object and subject only in relation to each other, it is not necessary to seek for the principle of their unity in any Tertium Quid which is neither the one nor the other. That which Mr. Spencer sought in an unknowable Absolute was “in our mouths and in our hearts”; it was to be found in the inseparable unity of experience, in which the inward and the outward are correlative elements. Agnosticism was a sort of spiritual refuge for the destitute constructed by those who had renounced their heritage: who, in other words, had by their abstractions separated the elements of experience from each other, and were thus forced to seek beyond experience for the unity which they had lost. The true remedy for the evil was to give up such abstract ways of thinking and to learn to “think things together”; in other words, to recognize the organic relation of the inner and the outer life, and to explain the parts by the whole, and not the whole by the artificially severed parts.
V
The great distinguishing feature of the last two decades of the century has been a movement of approximation, partly conscious and partly unconscious, between the representatives of science, and particularly of those sciences that deal with special aspects or elements of human life, on the one hand, and the representatives of idealistic philosophy on the other. The reconciling ideas of an earlier time have become better understood and have shown more effectively their power to reconcile. Not that this mediating power had previously been entirely unfelt. Even in the time when philosophy was most discredited in Germany, Lotze, in whom a cautious critical temper was combined with deep moral and religious sympathies, and a practical knowledge of the biological and medical sciences with careful studies of Kant and Hegel, sought to show how an idealistic view of the universe and of human life could be maintained consistently with the fullest recognition of scientific methods and results. And though his system was, on the whole, rather a compromise than a true reconciliation of philosophy and science, yet it has undoubtedly had very great influence in modifying the ideas of the opposing schools of thought and narrowing the ground of controversy between them. Thus the old English empirical psychology, which was represented by the Mills and by Mr. Bain, has gradually widened its scope in the hands of writers like Professor Ward and Mr. Stout, at first probably through the study of Herbart and then by contact with the revived idealistic movement. On the other hand, we may notice how idealistic writers, like Mr. Bradley and Mr. Bosanquet, have tried to absorb every lesson that can be learned from empiricism, and to shun with the utmost care the very suspicion of anything like dogmatism. Mr. Bradley’s denunciations of a “too easy monism” and a philosophy that turns the living world into a “ballet of bloodless categories” are too well known to be more than referred to. Nor is this the place to discuss whether his fear of such a result has not sometimes led him into compromises which are inconsistent with his own fundamental principle that the world must be conceived as an intelligible system. In any case, we may fairly point to his work and to the work of other writers animated by a similar spirit, as showing the growing prevalence of that reconciling spirit which seeks at once to do justice to all the results of empirical inquiry and of the investigations of the special sciences, and yet at the same time to give them a new interpretation in the light of an idealistic philosophy. It is impossible within our limits to illustrate this view of the tendencies of the time by further reference to the recent philosophical literature of England and America, or of Germany and France. Still less can I refer to the numerous books on special departments of inquiry in ethics and theology, in sociology and in history, in which the “ideally organic view of life and the world,” as we may call it, has shown its mediating and reconciling influence. Nor can I do more than refer to the counter current of pessimism, which has found its most distinguished representatives in Hartmann and Nietzsche; the former a man of great wealth of thought and dialectical power, whose philosophy is idealistic in all but its ultimate principle, and is indeed pessimistic only by an exaggeration of the opposition between the conscious and the unconscious working of reason; the latter, hardly a philosopher at all but rather a writer of pungent and suggestive aphorisms, winged with indignant passion against prevalent opinions—aphorisms which always contradict some one, and often contradict each other. From Nietzsche at his best we may receive a useful warning against too easily satisfying ourselves with the commonplaces of idealistic optimism; from Hartmann we may derive very considerable help in estimating the difficulties that have to be met by those who would seek to work out idealistic principles into a systematic view of the world. But, without attempting to enter upon any more detailed criticism of these or other important writers of recent years, I shall devote the space that remains to one general thought as to the present state of controversy, in relation to the fundamental principles of philosophy.
VI
Ever since the revival of the study of Kant, the main conflict in philosophy has ceased to lie between materialism and idealism. It has rather become a conflict between those who take up some position analogous to that of Kant and those who seek to carry out the idealistic principle to all its consequences. For the essential characteristic of Kant’s position lay in his sharp division between the spheres of knowledge and of faith—between a knowledge which was confined to phenomena and their connection in experience, and a faith of practical reason, which reached beyond experience to apprehend that which is noumenally real. Even the agnosticism of Mr. Spencer might be regarded as a modification of the Kantian point of view, in so far as his denial of the possibility of knowing the absolute is based on Mansel’s version of the Kantian antinomies; while his description of the “vague consciousness” of the absolute which he bids us worship may be regarded as representing that faith which, in Kant’s view, enables us to pierce the veil of the phenomena and grasp the ultimate reality of things. And in the latter part of the century there has been a continual germination of similar theories, theories agreeing with the Kantian philosophy at least in making some kind of dualistic division between the sphere of clearly defined knowledge and the sphere of ideal or spiritual faith, and also in confining the former to phenomena while the latter is held to be capable of rising in some way from the phenomenal to the real. One of the earliest fruits of the Neo-Kantian movement in Germany was Lange’s History of Materialism, which insisted on the strictest interpretation of the lesson of the Critique of Pure Reason, that scientific knowledge is confined to the empirical and phenomenal, but which maintained also the chartered freedom of imagination to feed our hopes with the idea of a world not realized, or realizable, under the conditions of finite experience. And, with a different aim, but in a similar spirit, Ritschl, borrowing some of his weapons from Lotze, sought to take away from philosophy the right to investigate the spiritual truths of religion, and maintained that such truths were given in a kind of intuition of faith which is above criticism and which some of his followers identify, like Kant, with the demands or postulates of the moral consciousness. Other writers, following Schopenhauer, have sought to emancipate the will from the intelligence and to give it an independent power of estimating values. The great effort to bring science and philosophy together—which, as we have seen, has characterized the later years of the century—has itself naturally given rise to many such dualistic compromises, of which Lotze’s philosophy was among the earliest. And it is partly to Lotze’s influence that we owe the tendency, visible in some of the most important recent contributions to philosophy, to regard our actual experience as having an intuitive completeness which is beyond all analysis, while reflective thought on the other hand is conceived as having a purely analytic and discursive operation, which can grasp only the severed fragments of the given reality and connect them externally to each other, but which can never restore the organic whole again. Here, too, we seem by another way to be landed in the same conclusion, viz., that we are perpetually poised between an ideal which we cannot verify, but which yet is held to be our only vision of reality, and a definite result of knowledge, which only gives us what is abstract and phenomenal. Yet it is difficult to understand how such an organic idea of the universe can exist except for the thinking intelligence, and how the thought that grasps it can be separated from the discursive thought by which the different elements of reality are brought into relation. How, indeed, can there be any thought which is not both discursive and intuitive at once, any thought which connects the parts without resting upon the unity of the whole to which they belong?
All these different compromises are really different forms of the Kantian dualism, but they supply convenient cities of refuge for those who are unwilling to admit that faith is but implicit reason, and that it is always possible to translate its intuitions of truth into explicit logic. There is much excuse, indeed, in many cases for such unwillingness when we consider how often reason has presented itself as purely a critical or dissolving power, and how often abstract theories which grasp only one aspect of things have been set forth as complete explanations of religion or morality or some other of the higher interests of life. It has always to be kept in view that it is in something like immediate perception that truth is given in the first instance, and that philosophy, therefore, must always be in a sense toiling after the intuitions of faith. Yet, on the other hand, to hold that there is anywhere an abstract division between the two is to hold that faith is essentially irrational; it is to exalt it above reason in a way that inevitably leads in the end to its being depressed below reason. If, however, this view can be maintained it must lead in the long run to the rejection of all dualistic compromises. And there are already many who hold that after the unstable equilibrium of the Kantian theory has been shaken there is no secure standing-ground for philosophy short of a thorough-going idealism. Yet even they have learned by experience how dangerous it is to snatch prematurely at the readiest idealistic interpretation of facts; and they are aware how easy it is to fall into a simple optimistic theory, which slurs over difficulties instead of solving them. They know that if Hegel or any one ever pretended, or could reasonably be interpreted as pretending, to construe the universe a priori, the pretence was futile, and that a true and valuable idealism can be reached only through the interpretation of the data of experience by the special sciences, and the reinterpretation of the results of these sciences by philosophy. They hold, in short, that if the well-known saying of Hegel is to be taken for truth, both of its clauses must be equally emphasized, and that no philosophy can safely maintain that “what is rational is actual” which has not gone through all the effort that is necessary to prove that “what is actual is rational.”
Edward Caird.
