Medieval Ecclesiasticism
With the death of Boetius (Vol. 4, p. 116), in 524 A.D., and with the closing of the philosophical schools in Athens five years later, intellectual darkness settled over Europe and hung there for centuries. When in the Middle Ages, the speculative sciences once again attracted men’s minds, Christianity had already impressed its mark. Scholasticism (Vol. 24, p. 346) as a system began with the teaching of Scotus Erigena (Vol. 9, p. 742) at the end of the 9th century, and culminated three centuries later with Albertus Magnus (Vol. 1, p. 504), with his greater disciple Thomas Aquinas (Vol. 2, p. 250), whose ideas have animated orthodox philosophic thought in the Catholic Church to this day, and with Meister Eckhart (Vol. 8, p. 886), the first of the great speculative mystics (see Mysticism, Vol. 19, p. 123).
Modern Ideas
With the Reformation an assertion of independence made itself heard. Man’s relation to man assumed an importance comparable to that of his relation to God; and the first steps on the path which was to lead to the rationalism of the French Encyclopaedists and of the English Utilitarians were taken by Albericus Gentilis (Vol. 11, p. 603), and Hugo Grotius (Vol. 12, p. 621). In England, Francis Bacon (Vol. 3, p. 135) was independently working out the same problems. In philosophy his position was that of a humanist. The remarkable success of Grotius’s treatise De Jure Belli et Pacis brought his views of natural right into great prominence, and suggested such questions as: “What is man’s ultimate reason for obeying laws? Wherein exactly does their agreement with his rational and social nature exist? How far and in what sense is his nature really social?” The answers which Hobbes (Vol. 13, p. 545), who was considerably influenced by Bacon, gave to these fundamental questions in his Leviathan marked the starting point of independent ethical inquiry in England. |The Utilitarians| From this time on the drift of thought in England, though of course often profoundly affected by the speculations of continental philosophers, mainly ran in utilitarian channels; and the succession of ideas may be traced through Locke (Vol. 16, p. 844), whose influence on the French Encyclopaedists was far reaching, Hume (Vol. 13, p. 876), Jeremy Bentham (Vol. 3, p. 747) with his famous principle of the “greatest happiness for the greatest number,” J. S. Mill (Vol. 18, p. 454), and Herbert Spencer (Vol. 24, p. 634), with his philosophy of the “unknowable.”
Back to Dreams
Meanwhile, on the continent of Europe, Descartes (Vol. 7, p. 79), in the Discourse of Method, had stated his famous proposition “Cogito, ergo sum,” and had laid down those fundamental dogmas of logic, metaphysics, and physics, from which started the subsequent inquiries of Locke, Leibnitz (Vol. 16, p. 385), and Newton (Vol. 19, p. 583). But Cartesianism (Vol. 5, p. 414), as Dr. Caird points out in the Britannica, includes not only the work of Descartes, but also that of Malebranche (Vol. 17, p. 486) and of Spinoza (Vol. 25, p. 687), who, from very different points of view, developed the Cartesian theories, the former saturated with the study of Augustine, the latter with that of Jewish philosophy.
The Rights of Man
There follows a group of men whose speculations left a deep mark on the course of events in Europe and America: Voltaire (Vol. 28, p. 199), Montesquieu (Vol. 18, p. 775), Jean Jacques Rousseau (Vol. 23, p. 775), and Denis Diderot (Vol. 8, p. 204). The antiecclesiastical animus which informed the writings of the first, the Esprit des Lois of the second, the Contrat Social of the third, and the famous encyclopaedia of the last, had political results, but their influence on metaphysical inquiry was practically nil.
Transcendentalism
Outstanding, of course, in the 18th century was the influence of Immanuel Kant (Vol. 15, p. 662), who summed up the teachings of Leibnitz and Hume, carried them to their logical issues, and immensely extended them. In fact, Kant and his disciple Fichte (Vol. 10, p. 313), as Prof. Case shows in the article Metaphysics (Vol. 18, p. 231), “became the most potent philosophic influences on European thought in the 19th century, because their emphasis was on man.” They made man believe in himself and in his mission. They fostered liberty and reform, and even radicalism. They almost avenged man on the astronomers, who had shown that the world is not made for earth, and therefore not for man. Kant half asserted, and Fichte wholly, that Nature is man’s own construction. The Kritik and the Wissenschaftslehre belonged to the revolutionary epoch of the “Rights of Man,” and produced as great a revolution in thought as the French Revolution did in fact. Instead of the old belief that God made the world for man, philosophers began to fall into the pleasing dream “I am everything, and everything is I”—and even “I am God.” The term Transcendentalism (Vol. 27, p. 172) has been specially applied to the philosophy of Kant and his successors, which is based on the view that true knowledge is intuitive, or supernatural. The famous Transcendental Club founded, 1836, by Emerson (Vol. 9, p. 332) and others in New England, was not “transcendental” in the Kantian sense; its main theme was regeneration, a revolt from theological formalism, and a wider literary outlook; see also Brook Farm (Vol. 4, p. 645), Thoreau (Vol. 26, p. 877), A. Bronson Alcott (Vol. 1, p. 528), and Margaret Fuller (Vol. 11, p. 295).