One passage in Goethe’s essay on the Pentateuch, appended to the West-Oestlicher Divan, is worth noting here as illustrating the ability of genius to cherish and propagate historical fallacies. It runs: “The peculiar, unique, and deepest theme of the history of the world and man, to which all others are subordinate, is always the conflict of belief and unbelief. All epochs in which belief rules, under whatever form, are illustrious, inspiriting, and fruitful for that time and the future. All epochs, on the other hand, in which unbelief, in whatever form, secures a miserable victory, even though for a moment they may flaunt it proudly, disappear for posterity, because no man willingly troubles himself with knowledge of the unfruitful” (first ed. pp. 424–25). Goethe goes on to speak of the four latter books of Moses as occupied with the theme of unbelief, and of the first as occupied with belief. Thus his formula was based, to begin with, on purely fabulous history, into the nature of which his poetic faculty gave him no true insight. (See his idyllic recast of the patriarchal history in Th. I, B. iv of the Wahrheit und Dichtung.) Applied to real history, his formula has no validity save on a definition which implies either an equivoque or an argument in a circle. If it refer, in the natural sense, to epochs in which any given religion is widely rejected and assailed, it is palpably false. The Renaissance and Goethe’s own century were ages of such unbelief; and they remain much more deeply interesting than the Ages of Faith. St. Peter’s at Rome is the work of a reputedly unbelieving pope. If on the other hand his formula be meant to apply to belief in the sense of energy and enthusiasm, it is still fallacious. The crusades were manifestations of energy and enthusiasm; but they were profoundly “unfruitful,” and they are not deeply interesting. The only sense in which Goethe’s formula could stand would be one in which it is recognized that all vigorous intellectual life stands for “belief”—that is to say, that Lucretius and Voltaire, Paine and d’Holbach, stand for “belief” when confidently attacking beliefs. The formula is thus true only in a strained and non-natural sense; whereas it is sure to be read and to be believed, by thoughtless admirers, in its natural and false sense, though the whole history of Byzantium and modern Islam is a history of stagnant and unfruitful belief, and that of modern Europe a history of fruitful doubt, disbelief, and denial, involving new affirmations. Goethe’s own mind on the subject was in a state of verbalizing confusion, the result or expression of his temperamental aversion to clear analytical thought (“Above all,” he boasts, “I never thought about thinking”) and his habit of poetic allegory and apriorism. “Logic was invincibly repugnant to him” (Lewes, Life of Goethe, 3rd ed. p. 38). The mosaic of his thinking is sufficiently indicated in Lewes’s sympathetically confused account (id. pp. 523–27). Where he himself doubted and denied current creeds, as in his work in natural science, he was most fruitful[222] (though he was not always right—e.g., his polemic against Newton’s theory of colour); and the permanently interesting teaching of his Faust is precisely that which artistically utters the doubt through which he passed to a pantheistic Naturalism.
20. No less certain is the unbelief of Schiller (1759–1805), whom Hagenbach even takes as “the representative of the rationalism of his age.” In his juvenile Robbers, indeed, he makes his worst villains freethinkers; and in the preface he stoutly champions religion against all assailants; but hardly ever after that piece does he give a favourable portrait of a priest.[223] He himself soon joined the Aufklärung; and all his æsthetic appreciation of Christianity never carried him beyond the position that it virtually had the tendency (Anlage) to the highest and noblest, though that was in general tastelessly and repulsively represented by Christians. He added that in a certain sense it is the only æsthetic religion, whence it is that it gives such pleasure to the feminine nature, and that only among women is it to be met with in a tolerable form.[224] Like Goethe, he sought to reduce the Biblical supernatural to the plane of possibility,[225] in the manner of the liberal theologians of the period; and like him he often writes as a deist,[226] though professedly for a time a Kantist. On the other hand, he does not hesitate to say that a healthy nature (which Goethe had said needed no morality, no Natur-recht,[227] and no political metaphysic) required neither deity nor immortality to sustain it.[228]
21. The critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) may be said to represent most comprehensively the outcome in German intelligence of the higher freethought of the age, insofar as its results could be at all widely assimilated. In its most truly critical part, the analytic treatment of previous theistic systems in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he is fundamentally anti-theological; the effect of the argument being to negate all previously current proofs of the existence and cognizableness of a “supreme power” or deity. Already the metaphysics of the Leibnitz-Wolff school were discredited;[229] and so far Kant could count on a fair hearing for a system which rejected that of the schools. Certainly he meant his book to be an antidote to the prevailing religious credulity. “Henceforth there were to be no more dreams of ghost-seers, metaphysicians, and enthusiasts.”[230] On his own part, however, no doubt in sympathy with the attitude of many of his readers, there followed a species of intuitional reaction. In his short essay What is Freethinking?[231] (1784) he defines Aufklärung or freethinking as “the advance of men from their self-imputed minority”; and “minority” as the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. “Sapere aude; dare to use thine own understanding,” he declares to be the motto of freethought: and he dwells on the laziness of spirit which keeps men in the state of minority, letting others do their thinking for them as the doctor prescribes their medicine. In this spirit he justifies the movement of rational criticism while insisting, justly enough, that men have still far to go ere they can reason soundly in all things. If, he observes, “we ask whether we live in an enlightened (aufgeklärt) age the answer is, No, but in an age of enlightening (aufklärung).” There is still great lack of capacity among men in general to think for themselves, free of leading-strings. “Only slowly can a community (Publikum) attain to freethinking.” But he repeats that “the age is the age of aufklärung, the age of Frederick the Great”: and he pays a high tribute to the king who repudiated even the arrogant pretence of “toleration,” and alone among monarchs said to his subjects, “Reason as you will; only obey!”
But the element of apprehension gained ground in the aging freethinker. In 1787 appeared the second edition of the Critique, with a preface avowing sympathy with religious as against freethinking tendencies; and in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) he makes an almost avowedly unscientific attempt to restore the reign of theism on a basis of a mere emotional and ethical necessity assumed to exist in human nature—a necessity which he never even attempts to demonstrate. With the magic wand of the Practical Reason, as Heine has it, he reanimated the corpse of theism, which the Theoretic Reason had slain.[232] In this adjustment he was perhaps consciously copying Rousseau, who had greatly influenced him,[233] and whose theism is an avowedly subjectivist predication. But the same attitude to the problem had been substantially adopted by Lessing;[234] and indeed the process is at bottom identical with that of the quasi-skeptics, Pascal, Huet, Berkeley, and the rest, who at once impugn and employ the rational process, reasoning that reason is not reasonable. Kant did but set up the “practical” against the “pure” reason, as other theists before him had set up faith against science, or the “heart” against the “head,” and as theists to-day exalt the “will” against “knowledge,” the emotional nature against the logical. It is tolerably clear that Kant’s motive at this stage was an unphilosophic fear that Naturalism would work moral harm[235]—a fear shared by him with the mass of the average minds of his age.
The same motive and purpose are clearly at work in his treatise on Religion within the bounds of Pure [i.e. Mere] Reason (1792–1794), where, while insisting on the purely ethical and rational character of true religion, he painfully elaborates reasons for continuing to use the Bible (concerning which he contends that, in view of its practically “godly” contents, no one can deny the possibility of its being held as a revelation) as “the basis of ecclesiastical instruction” no less than a means of swaying the populace.[236] Miracles, he in effect avows, are not true; still, there must be no carping criticism of the miracle stories, which serve a good end. There is to be no persecution; but there is to be no such open disputation as would provoke it.[237] Again and again, with a visible uneasiness, the writer returns to the thesis that even “revealed” religion cannot do without sacred books which are partly untrue.[238] The doctrine of the Trinity he laboriously metamorphosed, as so many had done before him, and as Coleridge and Hegel did after him, into a formula of three modes or aspects of the moral deity[239] which his ethical purpose required. And all this divagation from the plain path of Truth is justified in the interest of Goodness.
All the while the book is from beginning to end profoundly divided against itself. It indicates disbelief in every one of the standing Christian dogmas—Creation, Fall, Salvation, Miracles, and the supernatural basis of morals. The first paragraph of the preface insists that morality is founded on the free reason, and that it needs no religion to aid it. Again and again this note is sounded. “The pure religious faith is that alone which can serve as basis for a universal Church; because it is a pure reason-faith, in which everyone can participate.”[240] But without the slightest attempt at justification there is thrown in the formula that “no religion is thinkable without belief in a future life.”[241] Thus heaven and hell[242] and Bible and church are arbitrarily imposed on the “pure religion” for the comfort of unbelieving clergymen and the moralizing of life. Error is to cast out error, and evil, evil.
The process of Kant’s adjustment of his philosophy to social needs as he regarded them is to be understood by following the chronology and the vogue of his writings. The first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason “excited little attention” (Stuckenberg, Life of Kant, p. 368); but in 1787 appeared the second and modified edition, with a new preface, clearly written with a propitiatory eye to the orthodox reaction. “All at once the work now became popular, and the praise was as loud and as fulsome as at first the silence had been profound. The literature of the day began to teem with Kantian ideas, with discussions of the new philosophy, and with the praises of its author.... High officials in Berlin would lay aside the weighty affairs of State to consider the Kritik, and among them were found warm admirers of the work and its author.” Id. p. 369. Cp. Heine, Rel. und Phil. in Deutschland, B. iii—Werke, iii, 75, 82.
This popularity becomes intelligible in the light of the new edition and its preface. To say nothing of the alterations in the text, pronounced by Schopenhauer to be cowardly accommodations (as to which question see Adamson, as cited, and Stuckenberg, p. 461, note 94), Kant writes in the preface that he had been “obliged to destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith”; and, again, that “only through criticism can the roots be cut of materialism, fatalism, atheism, freethinking unbelief (freigeisterischen Unglauben), fanaticism and superstition, which may become universally injurious; also of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous rather to the Schools, and can hardly reach the general public.” (Meiklejohn mistranslates: “which are universally injurious”—Bohn ed. p. xxxvii.) This passage virtually puts the popular religion and all philosophies save Kant’s own on one level of moral dubiety. It is, however, distinctly uncandid as regards the “freethinking unbelief,” for Kant himself was certainly an unbeliever in Christian miracles and dogmas.
His readiness to make an appeal to prejudice appears again in the second edition of the Critique when he asks: “Whence does the freethinker derive his knowledge that there is, for instance, no Supreme Being?” (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Transc. Methodenlehre, 1 H. 2 Absch. ed. Kirchmann, 1879, p. 587; Bohn tr. p. 458.) He had just before professed to be dealing with denial of the “existence of God”—a proposition of no significance whatever unless “God” be defined. He now without warning substitutes the still more undefined expression “Supreme Being” for “God,” thus imputing a proposition probably never sustained with clear verbal purpose by any human being. Either, then, Kant’s own proposition was the entirely vacuous one that nobody can demonstrate the impossibility of an alleged undefined existence, or he was virtually asserting that no one can disprove any alleged supernatural existence—spirit, demon, Moloch, Krishna, Bel, Siva, Aphrodite, or Isis and Osiris. In the latter case he would be absolutely stultifying his own claim to cut the roots of “superstition” and “fanaticism” as well as of freethinking and materialism; for, if the freethinker cannot disprove Jehovah, neither can the Kantist disprove Allah and Satan; and Kant had no basis for denying, as he did with Spinoza, the existence of ghosts or spirits. From this dilemma Kant’s argument cannot be delivered. And as he finally introduces deity as a psychologically and morally necessary regulative idea, howbeit indemonstrable, he leaves every species of superstition exactly where it stood before—every superstition being practically held, as against “freethinking unbelief,” on just such a tenure.
If he could thus react against freethinking before 1789, he must needs carry the reaction further after the outbreak of the French Revolution; and his Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1792–1794) is a systematic effort to draw the teeth of the Aufklärung, modified only by his resentment of the tyranny of the political authority towards himself. Concerning the age-long opposition between rationalism (Verstandesaufklärung) and intuitionism or emotionalism (Gefühlsphilosophie), it is claimed by modern transcendentalists that Kant, or Herder, or another, has effected a solution on a plane higher than either. (E.g. Kronenberg, Herder’s Philosophie, 1889, p. 6.) The true solution certainly must account for both points of view—no very difficult matter; but no solution is really attained by either of these writers. Kant alternately stood at the two positions; and his unhistorical mind did not seek to unify them in a study of human evolution. For popular purposes he let pass the assumption that a cosmic emotion is a clue to the nature of the cosmos, as the water-finder’s hazel-twig is said to point to the whereabouts of water. Herder, recognisant of evolution, would not follow out any rational analysis.