The conclusion of Max Stirner, that because those idols are false, and the worship of them is cruel and superstitious, therefore we must worship nothing and merely enjoy in a piggish way what we may call our own, is a conclusion that misreads human nature. It overlooks the fact that man lives by the imagination, that the imagination—when not chaotic and futile—is exercised in the arts of life, that the objects of these arts are impersonal, and that to achieve these objects brings us a natural happiness.
The Germans are by nature a good stolid people, and it is curious that their moralists, of every school, are so fantastic and bad. The trouble lies perhaps in this, that they are all precipitate. They have not taken the trouble to decipher human nature, which is an endowment, something many-sided, unconscious, with a margin of variation, and have started instead with the will, which is only an attitude, something casual, conscious, and narrowly absolute. Nor have they learned to respect sufficiently the external conditions under which human nature operates and to which it must conform—God, the material world, the nature and will of other men. Their morality consequently terminates in ideals, casual, conscious, and absolute expressions of the passions, or else expires in a mysticism which renounces all moral judgment. A reasonable morality terminates instead in the arts, by which human ideals and passions are compounded with experience and adapted to the materials they must work in. The immaturity of the German moralists appears in their conception that the good is life, which is what an irrational animal might say: whereas for a rational being the good is only the good part of life, that healthy, stable, wise, kind, and beautiful sort of life which he calls happiness.
[CHAPTER X]
THE BREACH WITH CHRISTIANITY
German philosophy has a religious spirit, but its alliance with Christianity has always been equivocal and external. Even in the speculations of Leibniz, concerned as he was about orthodoxy, there was a spirit of independence and absolutism which was rationalistic, not to say heathen. The principle of sufficient reason, for instance, demands that God and nature shall explain their existence and behaviour to us, as timid parents explain their behaviour to their censorious children. By rendering everything necessary, even the acts of God, it takes the place of God and makes him superfluous. Such frigid optimism as this principle involves, besides being fatalistic, is deeply discouraging to that hope of deliverance which is the soul of Christianity: for if this is the best world possible, how poor must be that realm of possible worlds where everything is tainted, and there is no heaven! The theory, too, that each soul contains the seeds of its whole experience and suffices for its own infinite development, destroys the meaning of creation, revelation, miracles, sin, grace, and charity. Thus without intending it, even the obsequious but incredibly intelligent Leibniz undermined all the doctrines of Christianity in the act of thinking them afresh, and insinuated into them a sort of magic heathen individualism.
Kant, Fichte, and Hegel were less punctilious in their theology, but they still intended to be or to seem Christians. They felt that what made the sanctity of traditional religion and its moral force could be recovered in a purer form in their systems. This feeling of theirs was not unwarranted; at least, many religious minds, after the first shock of losing their realistic faith, have seen in transcendentalism a means, and perhaps the only safe means, of still maintaining a sort of Christianity which shall not claim any longer to be a miraculous or exceptional revelation, but only a fair enough poetic symbol for the principles found in all moral life. That he who loses his life shall save it, for instance, is a maxim much prized and much glossed by Hegelians. They lend it a meaning of their own, which might, indeed, be said to be the opposite of what the Gospel meant; for there the believer is urged to discard the very world with which Hegel asks him to identify himself. The idea is that if you surrender your private interests to those of your profession, science, or country, you become thereby a good and important person, and unintentionally a happy one. You will then feel that the world shares your thoughts and renders them perpetual, while you, being absorbed in ideal pursuits, forget your private miseries and mortality.
In this sort of moral psychology there is evidently some truth; but the "law of experience" which it points to is but a loose and ambiguous law, which disguises more facts than it expresses. Honest minds will rebel against the suggestion that when you outgrow a desire you have fulfilled it; and they will detect the furtive irony in bidding you live hard in order not to feel the vanity of living. To drown sorrow in work, and to forget private failures in public interests, is certainly possible, but it is only drugging yourself with hurry and routine, which may not be more advantageous to others than it really is to yourself. Impersonal or "ideal" aims are not necessarily less delusive or "higher" than personal ones; in fact there is far more likelihood that they are conventional humbug. This pathological hygiene of idealism, which always stops at some uncriticised impulse, thinks it secures health when perhaps it has only increased the dose of illusion.
Nevertheless transcendentalism has this important element in common with Christianity and with the other Hebraic religions, that it regards human interests as the core of the universe and God as the God of man, who disposes all things for man's benefit. In its eyes the sphere of providence and moral life is bounded by the history of a part of Europe and Asia for a few thousand years. So long as transcendentalism is taken to imply some such philosophy of history it can compound its differences with liberal Christianity, since they are at one in the cardinal point of their faith, which is the apotheosis of the human spirit.