Abstraction, such as withdrawal of the mind from worldly affairs, is condemned by this philosophy: you must glut the brain and heart with everything that exists. An even worse abstraction, for a philosopher, is to detach the object from the subject, and believe it to exist independently. But what is abstraction? Can attention ever render things more discrete than they are in their own nature? Suppose I abstract a coin from another man's pocket: it is easily proved by Hegel's logic that such an abstraction is a mere appearance. Coins cannot exist as coins except as pocketed and owned; at the same time they imply an essential tendency to pass into the pockets of other men: for a coin that could not issue from the pocket would be a coin in name only, and not in function. When it actually passes from one man's pocket into another's, this circumstance, far from justifying us in thinking the coin a separable thing, shows that all men's pockets (when not empty and therefore, in function, not pockets at all) are intrinsically related and, in a higher sense, one and the same purse. Therefore, we may conclude, it was not the sly transference of the coin from my neighbour's pocket into mine that was the wrongful abstraction, but only the false supposition that if the coin was his it was not, by right of eminent domain, mine also. A man, in so far as he is the possessor of coins, is simply a pocket, and all pockets, in so far as there is transferable coin, in them, are one pocket together. In this way we avoid false abstraction by proving that everything is abstract.
Nor is this all; for strange as it may seem, Hegel appeals also to one type of religious people, and seems to them to lift religious faith triumphantly above all possible assaults of fact or of science. Are not all facts mere ideas? And must not all ideas be bred in the mind according to its own free principles of life and effort? Is not all this semblance of externality in things a blessed foil to spiritual activity? Does not this universal mutation pay loud homage to eternal law? Things go by threes: that is the reason why they exist and why they move, and the sovereign good to be attained by their motion. If every truth turns out to be a lie, every lie is a part of some higher truth; if everything becomes unreal, because it passes into something else, this other thing inherits its reality; and if we look at things as a whole instead of seriatim, and spread out our moving film into a panorama, we perceive that everything has implied everything else from the beginning, and formed a part of it; So that only from the point of view of ignorance is anything earlier, or better, or truer than anything else. Here, in the All, we have rest from our labours.
In this way even the slaves of the world at last learn to overcome the world; but it is too late. This All, even if it were open to human survey, would have no value: it defeats each of its constituent lives and is itself responsive to no living desire. The indistinction which the vague idea of it produces in the mind may be soothing to the weary; but better than mystical relief at the end would have been moral freedom in the beginning. That a different life will supersede mine is nothing against my happiness; that time is swallowing me up is nothing against my appropriate eternity. How vain the crabbed hand of the miser stringing his pearls and never looking at them, counting the drops that trickle into his cup and never emptying it, never feeling the intoxication of living now, of telling the truth frankly, and of being happy here I If the devil laughs at me because I am mortal, I laugh at him for imagining that death can trouble me, or any other free spirit, so long as I live, or after I am dead.
[48]
THE PROGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY
This war will kill the belief in progress, and it was high time. Progress is often a fact: granted a definite end to be achieved, we may sometimes observe a continuous approach towards achieving it, as for instance towards cutting off a leg neatly when it has been smashed; and such progress is to be desired in all human arts. But belief in progress, like belief in fate or in the number three, is a sheer superstition, a mad notion that because some idea—here the idea of continuous change for the better—has been realized somewhere, that idea was a power which realized itself there fatally, and which must be secretly realizing itself everywhere else, even where the facts contradict it. Nor is belief in progress identical with belief in Providence, or even compatible with it. Providence would not have begun wrong in order to correct itself; and in works which are essentially progressive, like a story, the beginning is not worse than the end, if the artist is competent.
What true progress is, and how it is usually qualified by all sorts of backsliding and by incompatible movements in contrary directions, is well illustrated by the history of philosophy. There has been progress in it; if we start with the first birth of intelligence and assume that the end pursued is to understand the world, the progress has been immense. We do not understand the world yet; but we have formed many hypotheses about it corroborated by experience, we are in possession of many arts which involve true knowledge, and we have collated and criticized—especially during the last century—a great number of speculations which, though unverified or unverifiable, reveal the problems and the possibilities in the case; so that I think a philosopher in our day has no excuse for being so utterly deceived in various important matters as the best philosophers formerly were through no fault of theirs, because they were misled by a local tradition, and inevitably cut off from the traditions of other ages and races. Nevertheless the progress of philosophy has not been of such a sort that the latest philosophers are the best: it is quite the other way. Philosophy in this respect is like poetry. There is progress in that new poets arise with new gifts, and the fund of transmitted poetry is enriched; but Homer, the first poet amongst the Greeks, was also the best, and so Dante in Italy, and Shakespeare in England. When a civilization and a language take shape they have a wonderful vitality, and their first-fruits are some love-child, some incomparable creature in whom the whole genius of the young race bursts forth uncontaminated and untrammelled. What follows is more valuable in this respect or in that; it renders fitly the partial feelings and varying fashions of a long decadence; but nothing, so long as that language and that tradition last, can ever equal their first exuberance. Philosophy is not so tightly bound as poetry is to language and to local inspiration, but it has largely shared the same vicissitudes; and in each school of philosophy only the inventors and founders are of any consequence; the rest are hacks. Moreover, if we take each school as a whole, and compare it with the others, I think we may repeat the same observation: the first are the best. Those following have made very real improvements; they have discovered truths and methods before unknown; but instead of adding these (as they might have done) to the essential wisdom of their predecessors, they have proceeded like poets, each a new-born child in a magic world, abandoned to his fancy and his personal experience. Bent on some specific reform or wrapped up in some favourite notion, they have denied the obvious because other people had pointed it out; and the later we come down in the history of philosophy the less important philosophy becomes, and the less true in fundamental matters.
Suppose I arrange the works of the essential philosophers—leaving out secondary and transitional systems—in a bookcase of four shelves; on the top shelf (out of reach, since I can't read the language) I will place the Indians; on the next the Greek naturalists; and to remedy the unfortunate paucity of their remains, I will add here those free inquirers of the renaissance, leading to Spinoza, who after two thousand years picked up the thread of scientific speculation; and besides, all modern science: so that this shelf will run over into a whole library of what is not ordinarily called philosophy. On the third shelf I will put Platonism, including Aristotle, the Fathers, the Scholastics, and all honestly Christian theology; and on the last, modern or subjective philosophy in its entirety. I will leave lying on the table, as of doubtful destination, the works of my contemporaries. There is much life in some of them. I like their water-colour sketches of self-consciousness, their rebellious egotisms, their fervid reforms of phraseology, their peep-holes through which some very small part of things may be seen very clearly: they have lively wits, but they seem to me like children playing blind-man's-buff; they are keenly excited at not knowing where they are. They are really here, in the common natural world, where there is nothing in particular to threaten or to allure them; and they have only to remove their philosophical bandages in order to perceive it.
What sort of a world this is—I will not say in itself, but in respect to us—can be perceived almost at once by any candid spirit, and the Indians readily perceived it. They saw that substance is infinite, out of scale with our sensuous images and (except in the little vortex that makes us up) out of sympathy with our endeavours; and that spirit in us nevertheless can hold its own, because salvation lies in finding joy in the truth, not in rendering fortune propitious, by some miracle, to our animal interests. The spirit is at home in the infinite, and morally independent of all the accidents of existence: nothing that nature can produce outruns its potential scope, its desire to know the truth; and its disinterestedness renders it free, free especially from any concern about its own existence. It does not deem it the part of piety to deny the fugitive, impotent, and fantastic nature of human life. It knows that the thoughts of man and his works, however great or delightful when measured by the human scale, are but the faintest shimmer on the surface of being. On the ruin of humanistic illusions (such as make up the religious philosophy of the West) it knows how to establish a tender morality and a sublime religion.