It is unnecessary to point out how the spread of this conviction increased political individualism, or how it accelerated the willingness of men to question received ideas in science and philosophy—to think and observe and experiment for themselves. Religious individualism served to supply a much needed sanction to initiative and independence of thought in all spheres, even when religious movements officially were opposed to such freedom when carried beyond a limited point. The greatest influence of Protestantism was, however, in developing the idea of the personality of every human being as an end in himself. When human beings were regarded as capable of direct relationship with God, without the intermediary of any organization like the Church, and the drama of sin, redemption and salvation was something enacted within the innermost soul of individuals rather than in the species of which the individual was a subordinate part, a fatal blow was struck at all doctrines which taught the subordination of personality—a blow which had many political reverberations in promoting democracy. For when in religion the idea of the intrinsic worth of every soul as such was proclaimed, it was difficult to keep the idea from spilling over, so to say, into secular relationships.
The absurdity is obvious of trying in a few paragraphs to summarize movements in industry, politics and religion whose influence is still far from exhausted and about which hundreds and thousands of volumes have been written. But I shall count upon your forbearance to recall that these matters are alluded to only in order to suggest some of the forces that operated to mark out the channels in which new ideas ran. First, there is the transfer of interest from the eternal and universal to what is changing and specific, concrete—a movement that showed itself practically in carrying over of attention and thought from another world to this, from the supernaturalism characteristic of the Middle Ages to delight in natural science, natural activity and natural intercourse. Secondly, there is the gradual decay of the authority of fixed institutions and class distinctions and relations, and a growing belief in the power of individual minds, guided by methods of observation, experiment and reflection, to attain the truths needed for the guidance of life. The operations and results of natural inquiry gained in prestige and power at the expense of principles dictated from high authority.
Consequently principles and alleged truths are judged more and more by criteria of their origin in experience and their consequences of weal and woe in experience, and less by criteria of sublime origin from beyond everyday experience and independent of fruits in experience. It is no longer enough for a principle to be elevated, noble, universal and hallowed by time. It must present its birth certificate, it must show under just what conditions of human experience it was generated, and it must justify itself by its works, present and potential. Such is the inner meaning of the modern appeal to experience as an ultimate criterion of value and validity. In the third place, great store is set upon the idea of progress. The future rather than the past dominates the imagination. The Golden Age lies ahead of us not behind us. Everywhere new possibilities beckon and arouse courage and effort. The great French thinkers of the later eighteenth century borrowed this idea from Bacon and developed it into the doctrine of the indefinite perfectibility of mankind on earth. Man is capable, if he will but exercise the required courage, intelligence and effort, of shaping his own fate. Physical conditions offer no insurmountable barriers. In the fourth place, the patient and experimental study of nature, bearing fruit in inventions which control nature and subdue her forces to social uses, is the method by which progress is made. Knowledge is power and knowledge is achieved by sending the mind to school to nature to learn her processes of change.
In this lecture as in the previous one, I can hardly close better than by reference to the new responsibilities imposed upon philosophy and the new opportunities opened to it. Upon the whole, the greatest effect of these changes up to date has been to substitute an Idealism based on epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, for the Idealism based on the metaphysics of classic antiquity.
Earlier modern philosophy (even though unconsciously to itself) had the problem of reconciling the traditional theory of the rational and ideal basis, stuff and end of the universe with the new interest in individual mind and the new confidence in its capacities. It was in a dilemma. On the one hand, it had no intention of losing itself in a materialism which subordinated man to physical existence and mind to matter—especially just at the moment when in actual affairs man and mind were beginning to achieve genuine rule over nature. On the other hand, the conception that the world as it stood was an embodiment of a fixed and comprehensive Mind or Reason was uncongenial to those whose main concern was with the deficiencies of the world and with an attempt to remedy them. The effect of the objective theological idealism that had developed out of classic metaphysical idealism was to make the mind submissive and acquiescent. The new individualism chafed under the restrictions imposed upon it by the notion of a universal reason which had once and for all shaped nature and destiny.
In breaking away from antique and medieval thought, accordingly, early modern thought continued the older tradition of a Reason that creates and constitutes the world, but combined it with the notion that this Reason operates through the human mind, individual or collective. This is the common note of idealism sounded by all the philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whether belonging to the British school of Locke, Berkeley and Hume or the Continental school of Descartes. In Kant as everybody knows the two strains came together; and the theme of the formation of the knowable world by means of a thought that operated exclusively through the human knower became explicit. Idealism ceased to be metaphysical and cosmic in order to become epistemological and personal.
It is evident that this development represents merely a transitional stage. It tried, after all, to put the new wine in the old bottles. It did not achieve a free and unbiased formulation of the meaning of the power to direct nature's forces through knowledge—that is, purposeful, experimental action acting to reshape beliefs and institutions. The ancient tradition was still strong enough to project itself unconsciously into men's ways of thinking, and to hamper and compromise the expression of the really modern forces and aims. Essential philosophic reconstruction represents an attempt to state these causes and results in a way freed from incompatible inherited factors. It will regard intelligence not as the original shaper and final cause of things, but as the purposeful energetic re-shaper of those phases of nature and life that obstruct social well-being. It esteems the individual not as an exaggeratedly self-sufficient Ego which by some magic creates the world, but as the agent who is responsible through initiative, inventiveness and intelligently directed labor for re-creating the world, transforming it into an instrument and possession of intelligence.
The train of ideas represented by the Baconian Knowledge is Power thus failed in getting an emancipated and independent expression. These become hopelessly entangled in standpoints and prepossessions that embodied a social, political and scientific tradition with which they were completely incompatible. The obscurity, the confusion of modern philosophy is the product of this attempt to combine two things which cannot possibly be combined either logically or morally. Philosophic reconstruction for the present is thus the endeavor to undo the entanglement and to permit the Baconian aspirations to come to a free and unhindered expression. In succeeding lectures we shall consider the needed reconstruction as it affects certain classic philosophic antitheses, like those of experience and reason, the real and the ideal. But first we shall have to consider the modifying effect exercised upon philosophy by that changed conception of nature, animate and inanimate, which we owe to the progress of science.