[[18]] "I pursue a form which my pen does not find—the bud of an idea which would be the rose."
CHAPTER III
THE EVOLUTION OF PHILOSOPHY
Bello—Hostos—The influence of England—Positivism—The influence of Spencer and Fouillée—The sociologists.
The democracies of America have not created new systems of philosophy; they have rather contributed, with Emerson and William James in the United States, to propound the old problems in a new light. Politics and history have been the occupation of intelligent men. To pure speculation they have preferred the patient study of the past, and the impassioned analysis of the conflicts of the day.
Yet they adopted European theories from the earliest years of the Republic: those of the French ideologists, Cabanis and Laromiguière were the predominant influences in some schools, while the influence of England extended from Central America to Chili. With that influence went a moderate utilitarianism, a bold analysis of the doctrines of political and economic liberty. England contributed to the liberty of America in Montevideo as in Colombia; with the English gold which the revolutionaries received the English philosophic radicalism entered the country. Jurists and politicians profited by its lessons, and certain of the thinkers of America freed themselves from the shackles of the peripatetic school under the influence of the Scottish philosophers. Thus Ventura Martin and José-Joaquin de Mora in Chili and Alcorta in the Argentine. With Andrès Bello, poet and legislator, philosopher and philologist, these doctrines acquired a great importance. His Philosophy of the Understanding was inspired by Reid and Hamilton. In England he had known James Mill, and some of his ideas upon the inductive method and causality recall the doctrines of John Stuart Mill, the son of James. Bello was especially noted for the vigour of his logic and his analysis of the phenomena of consciousness, his penetrating psychology, and his positivism, which caused him to disdain anything in the nature of metaphysics. His conservative spirit accepted the Catholic dogmas, while his critical faculty was checked by them; what his implacable analysis destroyed his religious temperament reconstructed. He believed in perception, liberty, and the reality of the external world, and in a first cause; he transformed grammar by his psychological analysis, and by his positivism civil law and the law of nations. His excessive critical faculty sometimes ran to super-fine abstraction, to an intellectual algebra. Bello passed from ideology to positivism, from Destutt de Tracy to Stuart; Mill, by way of the Scottish philosophers. His admirable grammatical and juridical efforts may be attributed to his mastery of English analysis and realism.
After Bello, the most remarkable of South American philosophers was Eugenio de Hostos, who was born in 1839. He did not merely expound European ideas; he had his own system, which he developed in a series of remarkable works; he was a moralist rather than a metaphysician, and whether in San Domingo or Lima or Santiago he never ceased his endeavours to reform education and the law. Problems, social and moral, gave him no rest; he sought to found a new morality and sociology.
Hostos might be called an optimistic rationalist. He believed in an ideal world. Science, according to him, is an efficacious agent of virtue. He thought it possible to discipline the will by teaching what is true. Good is not a metaphysical entity nor duty an imperative; the two together constitute a "natural order." A profound harmony exists between man and the world he lives in, and the moral law is merely the revelation in the consciousness of the geometry of things. For Hostos the world was just, logical, and full of reason; an internal law, lex insita, was manifested in the sidereal harmonies as in virtuous actions.
The moral ideal is therefore merely the adaptation of conduct to the inevitable and harmonious relations of things. Does not this optimism recall the morality of Spencer, the rigorous ethics of Spinoza, and the thought of Cournot, that "the philosophical basis of morality is the idea of conformity to the universal order"?