PRINCIPAL FAIRBAIRN’S LECTURES.
The lectures of Principal A. M. Fairbairn, of England, on the Chautauqua platform last summer, were a valuable contribution to contemporary philosophy. Their subject is Modern Philosophy in its specifically English form. Starting with Locke, and passing along through the ideas of Berkeley, Hume, the Mills, Comte, and Herbert Spenser, the learned and brilliant lecturer gave us a history of modern speculation respecting the problem, “How is knowledge possible? What are its conditions? How does man come by it?” We have lately read over again these lectures in the careful reports made for the Assembly Herald; and we believe we shall render our readers a service by calling their attention to the importance of them and reminding those who have not files of them that they are on sale at this office. There is a very remarkable unity in the empirical philosophy which is associated with the names we have just given, and this unity was developed with rare skill by Principal Fairbairn. John Locke, the English founder of the school, formulated and determined the problem of philosophy for the English and the French peoples; and though each of them was original after his kind, Berkeley, Hume, the Mills, Comte and Herbert Spenser have worked upon lines which Locke laid down. Locke asked himself, how do ideas come into the mind? and answered his question by saying, there are no ideas in the mind until the senses have conveyed them in. In other terms, he undertook to disperse as a metaphysical mist the “innate ideas” in which philosophy believed when he began to write. In varying forms, the notion that there is nothing in the mind except what the senses have put there remains the creed of the empirical philosophy. The criticism of Principal Fairbairn upon the successive statements of the doctrine that the outer world is prior, and creates the inner world, is very keen and accurate. Locke was fond of saying that the mind was like a clean table, to which the senses brought ideas. Our critic asks: “Did you ever find a table that could grasp the significance of what was graved on it?” and adds, “It is the power to read the writing and weave it into a connected and reasonable and rational whole, which is the very thing to be explained. It is not how nature through the senses comes to me, but how I through the senses read nature.” And one of his strong and luminous statements is, that “Ideas can not get into the mind unless there is a mind to get into.”
The purpose of the critic throughout these lectures was to establish the priority of thought by disposing one by one of the various attempts to post-fix mind to matter. The attempts successively made to attach mind, ideas, thought, conscience, and philosophy to the tail of the material kite, all tended, of course, to skepticism. As a theologian Dr. Fairbairn was instinctively drawn to the task of reversing this order so as to attach matter as a tail to the kite of the spiritual world. No matter how plausibly stated, the theory that our knowledge and our minds are a result of material energy reduces any possible God to the status of a product of nature. If in reasoning about ourselves we shall finally conclude that our inner totality is simply and only a product of the external world, we shall be forced to conclude that all thought in the universe is of like origin. The skeptical result is inevitable. Whatever view we take of substance in nature we are compelled to decide whether or not it is so moulded as to express the thoughts of an infinite God. If we so believe we shall find it easy to explain how thought in us finds a cosmos in nature. If the infinite mind reveals his thought in the order and harmony of the external world, the fact easily explains why we find order and harmony there. It is not necessary to reduce the external world to a phantasmagoria of the mind in order to vindicate a place for God. Rather the most subtle and dangerous of skepticisms may lie in the teaching that innate ideas construct the harmonies of nature. Berkeley said we are reading God’s thoughts in the visible world; and hegelianism, to which Principal Fairbairn evidently leans, dispenses with matter while filling the universe with thought. It is equally easy to give matter reality as a plastic thing on which God writes his thoughts so that we may read them. This question of the reality of substance may very properly be the next one to command the attention of philosophy. But it must be remembered that the science which resolves matter into motion and force conspires with the philosophy which makes matter merely the expression of divine ideas.
But we do not wish to make our readers heads ache with philosophy; only to suggest to those who are interested in it that these lectures will afford them valuable instruction. At their close on the Chautauqua platform, Chancellor Vincent expressed in happy terms the admiration of thousands who heard these lectures for their vigor and eloquence. He said: “Principal Fairbairn, in behalf of Chautauqua I desire to say a very few words. We are glad that you came. We are sorry that you must go. You have commanded our admiration by the elegance, clearness and force of your diction, but preëminently by the vigor and freshness of your thought. You stand before us a great ‘phenomenon.’ [Applause.] For we have been accustomed to vigorous thought read from manuscript, we have been accustomed to vigorous thought put into memory and recited with accuracy, but this living, present, compact, vigorous thinking on one’s feet, that has held us spell-bound, is a very remarkable occurrence at Chautauqua.” [Applause.]