The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

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.