MADAME DE STAËL’S ACCOUNT OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE.
| The Morning Chronicle.] | [Feb. 3, 1814. |
The most interesting part of Madame De Staël’s very ingenious and elegant work on Germany is undoubtedly (to literary readers) that in which she has sketched with so much intelligence and grace, the present state of opinions with respect to philosophy and taste in that country. I have not yet seen any satisfactory abstract of her reasonings on either of these subjects. The article in The Edinburgh Review touches but lightly and incidentally on them, from the variety and pressure of other topics of a more lively and general interest. I shall attempt to supply this deficiency, and at the same time to offer some farther thoughts on each subject. The two points on which I wish to enlarge are the view which Madame De Staël takes of German poetry, as contrasted with the French, and secondly of the spirit and principles of the German philosophy, that of Professor Kant, as opposed to the French system of philosophy which is not indeed peculiar to them as a nation, but common to the age. I shall begin with the last first, not only because it is perhaps the most important, but because I think that as the English were the first to propagate the latter system (for the French have only adopted it from us, carrying its practical and popular application farther), we ought not to be the last to disclaim and explode it. It may not be uninteresting as a branch of national literature, to take a general view of the rise and progress of their philosophy, before we come to examine Madame De Staël’s account of the system which Kant has opposed to it, and to shew in what that system is well-founded, and where it fails.
According to the prevailing system,—I mean the material or modern philosophy, as it has been called, all thought is to be resolved into sensation, all morality into the love of pleasure, and all action into mechanical impulse. These three propositions taken together, embrace almost every question relating to the human mind, and in their different ramifications and intersections form a net, not unlike that used by the enchanters of old, which, whosoever has once thrown over him, will find all farther efforts vain, and his attempts to reason freely on any subject in which his own nature is concerned, baffled and confounded in every direction.
This system, which first rose at the suggestion of Lord Bacon, on the ruins of the school-philosophy, has been gradually growing up to its present height ever since, from a wrong interpretation of the word experience, confining it to a knowledge of things without us; whereas it in fact includes all knowledge, relating to objects either within or out of the mind, of which we have any direct and positive evidence. We only know that we ourselves exist, the most certain of all truths, from the experience of what passes within ourselves. Strictly speaking, all other facts of which we are not immediately conscious, are such in a secondary and subordinate sense only. Physical experience is indeed the foundation and the test of that part of philosophy which relates to physical objects: farther, physical analogy is the only rule by which we can extend and apply our immediate knowledge, or infer the effects to be produced by the different objects around us. But to say that physical experiment is either the test, or source, or guide of that other part of philosophy which relates to our internal perceptions, that we are to look in external nature for the form, the substance, the colour, the very life and being of whatever exists in our minds, or that we can only infer the laws which regulate the phenomena of the mind from those which regulate the phenomena of matter, is to confound two things entirely distinct. Our knowledge of mental phenomena from consciousness, reflection, or observation of their correspondent signs in others is the true basis of metaphysical inquiry, as the knowledge of facts, commonly so called, is the only solid basis of natural philosophy. To assert that the operations of the mind and the operations of matter are in reality the same, so that we should always regard the one as symbols or exponents of the other, is to assume the very point in dispute, not only without any evidence, but in defiance of every appearance to the contrary.
Lord Bacon was undoubtedly a great man, indeed one of the greatest that have adorned this or any other country. He was a man of a clear and active spirit, of a most fertile genius, of vast designs, of general knowledge, and of profound wisdom. He united the powers of imagination and understanding in a greater degree than almost any other writer. He was one of the most remarkable instances of those men, who, by the rare privilege of their nature, are at once poets and philosophers, and see equally in both worlds—the individual and sensible, and the abstracted and intelligible forms of things. The Schoolmen and their followers attended to nothing but names, to essences and species, to laboured analyses and artificial deductions. They seem to have alike disregarded all kinds of experience, whether relating to external objects, or to the observation of our own internal feelings. From the imperfect state of knowledge, they had not a sufficient number of facts to guide them in their experimental researches; and intoxicated with the novelty of their vain distinctions, learnt by rote, they were tempted to despise the clearest and most obvious suggestions of their own minds. Subtle, restless, and self-sufficient, they thought that truth was only made to be disputed about, and existed no where but in their demonstrations and syllogisms. Hence arose their ‘logomachies’—their everlasting word-fights, their sharp debates, their captious, bootless controversies. As Lord Bacon expresses it, ‘they were made fierce with dark keeping,’ signifying that their angry and unintelligible contests with one another were owing to their not having any distinct objects to engage their attention. They built altogether on their own whims and fancies; and, buoyed up by their specific levity, they mounted in their airy disputations in endless flights and circles, clamouring like birds of prey, till they equally lost sight of truth and nature. This great man, therefore, intended an essential service to philosophy, in wishing to recall the attention to facts and experience which had been almost entirely neglected; and thus, by incorporating the abstract with the concrete, and general reasoning with individual observation, to give to our conclusions that solidity and firmness which they must otherwise always want. He did nothing but insist on the necessity of experience, more particularly in natural science; and from the wider field that is open to it there, as well as the prodigious success it has met with, this latter application of the word, in which it is tantamount to physical experiment, has so far engrossed the whole of our attention, that mind has, for a good while past, been in some danger of being overlaid by matter. We run from one error into another, and as we were wrong at first, so in altering our course, we have passed into the opposite extreme. We despised experience altogether before: now we would have nothing but experience, and that of the grossest kind. We have, it is true, gained much by not consulting the suggestions of our own minds in questions where they inform us of nothing, namely, on the particular laws and phenomena of the material world; and we have hastily concluded (reversing the rule) that the best way to arrive at the knowledge of ourselves also, was to lay aside the dictates of our own consciousness, thoughts, and feelings, as deceitful and insufficient guides, though they are the only means by which we can obtain the least light upon the subject. We seem to have resigned the natural use of our understandings, and to have given up our own existence as a nonentity. We look for our thoughts and the distinguishing properties of our minds in some image of them in matter as we look to see our faces in a glass. We no longer decide physical problems by logical dilemmas, but we decide questions of logic by the evidence of the senses. Instead of putting our reason and invention to the rack indifferently on all questions, whether we have any previous knowledge of them or not, we have adopted the easier method of suspending the use of our faculties altogether, and settling tedious controversies by means of ‘four champions fierce—hot, cold, moist and dry,’ who with a few more of the retainers and hangers on of matter determine all questions relating to the nature of man and the limits of the human understanding very learnedly. But the laws by which we think, feel, and act, we must discover in the mind itself, or not at all.
This original bias in favour of mechanical reasoning and physical analogy was confirmed by the powerful aid of Hobbes, who was, indeed, the father of the modern philosophy. His strong mind and body appear to have resisted all impressions, but those which were derived from the downright blows of matter: all his ideas seemed to lie like substances in his brain: what was not a solid, tangible, distinct, palpable object, was to him nothing. The external image pressed so close upon his mind that it destroyed the power of consciousness, and left no room for attention to any thing but itself. He was by nature a materialist. Locke assisted greatly in giving popularity to the same scheme, as well by espousing the chief of Hobbes’s metaphysical principles as by the doubtful resistance which he made to the rest. And it has been perfected and has received its last polish and roundness in the hands of some French philosophers, as Condillac and others.
The modern metaphysical system assumes as its basis that the operations of the intellect are only a continuation of the impulses existing in matter; or that all the thoughts and conceptions of the mind are nothing more than various modifications of the original impressions of things on a being endued with sensation or simple perception. This system considers ideas merely as they are caused by outward impressions acting on the organs of sense, and excludes the understanding as a distinct faculty or power from all share in its own operations.
The following is a summary of the general principles of this philosophy as they are expressly laid down by Hobbes, and by the latest writers of the French school.
1. That our ideas are copies of the impressions made by external objects on the senses.
2. That as nothing exists out of the mind but matter and motion, so it is itself with all its operations nothing but matter and motion.
3. That thoughts are single, or that we can think of only one object at a time.
4. That we have no general nor abstract ideas.
5. That the only principle of connection between one thought and another is association, or their previous connection in sense.
6. That reason and understanding depend entirely on the mechanism of language.
7 and 8. That the sense of pleasure and pain is the sole spring of action, and self-interest the source and centre of all our affections.
9. That the mind acts from a mechanical or physical necessity, over which it has no controul, and consequently is not a moral or accountable agent.—The manner of reasoning upon this last question is the only circumstance of importance in which Hobbes differs decidedly from modern writers.
10. That there is no difference in the natural capacities of men, the mind being originally passive to all impressions alike, and becoming whatever it is from circumstances.
Except the first, all of these positions are either denied or doubtfully admitted by Mr. Locke. It is, however, his admission of the first principle, which has opened a door directly or indirectly to all the rest. The system of Kant is a formal and elaborate antithesis to that which bears the name of Locke, and it is built on ‘the sublime restriction (as Madame de Staël expresses it) added by Leibnitz to the well-known axiom nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu—NISI INTELLECTUS IPSE.’
It is in the manner of proving this restriction, and of explaining this word, the intellect, that the whole question depends, and to this I shall devote another letter.
An English Metaphysician.