§ 8. ULTIMATE PROBLEMS
To a surprising degree, the philosophic disputes of the ages turn upon the same problems; and to an extent that is nothing short of sinister, they resolve themselves for most of the onlookers, if not of the participants, into the question of the maintenance of the popular religion. Thus academic theists in our own day are found resenting the tendency of ancient freethinkers to discredit and disestablish the Gods of Olympus, who for the academics themselves, as for everybody else, are a set of chimeras. Are we to infer that the current academic philosophies, even where constructive, are no better bottomed than the popular credences they seek to shelter? Kant’s ‘critical’ philosophy was by himself soon turned to the account of pulpit religion; Fichte ended in restating the gospels in terms of his pantheistic personal equation; Hegel soon attained to the championship of the Prussian State Church; Lotze has reformulated Christianity to the end of giving it continuance as a creed for the educated. Nietzsche said with substantial truth that the vogue of Kant has been that of a philosopher who enabled theological teachers to put a philosophic face upon a doctrine not otherwise presentable to their students; and the vogue of Berkeley in England has been of a similar kind.
In our own day the fortunes of new treatises in popular philosophy turn upon their adaptability to orthodox sophistics. Our generation has seen in succession (1) the absurd work of the late Professor Drummond on ‘Natural Law in the Spiritual World’ welcomed as turning the tables on ‘science’ by showing that its doctrines are fundamentally at one with those of the faith; (2) the still more absurd work of Mr. Benjamin Kidd on ‘Social Evolution’ hailed as demonstrating by ratiocination that the reasonable course for society is not to reason; and (3) the incomparably subtler books of Mr. Balfour acclaimed (whether or not read) as proving that reason cannot bite on religious opinions, and that we could never enjoy our music and our dinners as we do if we thought of ourselves merely as evolved from animal forms, without somewhere inserting Deity as the sanction and exemplar of our preferences, æsthetic or moral.[14] Always the acclamation tells of a passion somehow to humiliate ‘science,’ to put reason in the wrong, to triumph over ‘negation,’ to show that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy which does not make play with ‘spirit,’ worship, and the supernatural.
The cure, however, is never found to be permanent; and latterly we see the not very accommodating philosophy of M. Bergson grasped at as yielding some kind of weapon wherewith to beat back the advance of the ever-encroaching assailant. Sooth to say, neither the analyses nor the syntheses of M. Bergson are in any way damaging to rationalism, or in any way rationally ancillary to supernaturalism. The anti-rationalists have clutched eagerly at his dictum that reason, considered as a light upon the universe, is a poor thing; and that there is something in us higher than intelligence. Apart from the disparaging form given (gratuitously) to the content of these propositions, there is nothing in them that has not been rationalistically put. That is to say, it is a rationalistic proposition that new truths are reached neither by deduction nor by induction, but by a leap of the judgment, by spontaneous guess or hypothesis. What then?
To say or imply that the guessing faculty is something incomparably higher than intelligence is one of the inconsequences of M. Bergson, whose very acute analysis is apt to play upon special problems without controlling his own dialectic procedure. The sobering fact is that the false hypotheses are reached in the same way as the true, the wrong guesses in the same way as the right, the delusions in the same way as the discoveries. The very theses in science which M. Bergson contemns were reached by the way which he arbitrarily pronounces ‘superior’ to the way of reason. And the court of appeal that determines which is which, is after all just that intelligence or reason which M. Bergson, imitating one of the old methods he has ably helped to discredit, had verbally belittled in merely discriminating its function. No prerogative whatever can thereby be conferred upon either the guessing faculty or the guesser as such. The ‘divining’ faculty is not more divine than another: it is not really more wonderful to catch fish than to cook them; and the gift of establishing hypotheses is as rare as the gift of framing them. When all is said, the self-confidence of the transcendentalist avails for none but himself: as his own craving for countenance shows, his hypothesis must pass muster before reason if it is to persuade.
And for this among other reasons, M. Bergson’s attack upon Spencer and other generalisers in science for their ‘mechanical’ way of conceiving evolution is no blow to ‘science,’ as M. Bergson would probably avow, though he is lax enough to delimit science at times in his dialectic. His own way of stating evolution is only another mode of science. To call ‘science’ superficial is to be so; for the demonstration that any scientific doctrine is inadequate must itself be science or nothing. And here again M. Bergson’s criticism, though searching, is not new, however freshly put. In respect of his sociology in particular, Mr. Spencer has been repeatedly so criticised; and it is here alone that his limitation of method is really serious, inasmuch as it affects his prescriptions. As regards the conception of sub-human evolution, his way of reducing the past to ‘pieces’ of evolution is not only not injurious, it was the only way in which evolution in Nature could well have been realised by men. M. Bergson is all for the ‘creative’ aspect of evolution, the Living Now, the emergence of the latest phenomenon as not merely the result of the one before, but the living manifestation of the whole. But this is simply the instinctive, pre-scientific relation to the problem, returned to and restored, as it had need be, to its place in a scientific schema from which it had been dropped precisely because it led nowhere.
M. Bergson has suffered, probably, from the zeal even of instructed exponents, to say nothing of the acclamations of the amateur; but perhaps even M. Bergson, by reason of his linear mode of advance, misconceives the full significance of his own restatements of perceptual and conceptual fact. His theorem has been represented as vindicating the thesis of Mr. Samuel Butler’s ‘Luck or Cunning’—the thesis, namely, that animal survival and progress are to be conceived in terms of gift or effort rather than of environment; that Lamarckism, once more, is truer than Darwinism. But the argument overlooks the fact that Cunning may be envisaged as Luck; and that Lamarckism without Darwinism halts far worse than Darwinism without Lamarckism. At best, the ‘living’ view of evolution is but a complement of the other, a return from analysis to outcome. Put singly, it is no addition to knowledge.