The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

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.