Indeed, we may now doubt whether Immanent Idealism signifies a type of life at all; whether it is not simply a compromise between a religious shaping of life and a life turned towards sense experience; a via media, which as merely transitional is only able to maintain itself for a time. The historical experience of the Modern Age seems to show that the latter hypothesis is the true one. At the beginning of the epoch Religion stood in secure supremacy and the divine acted on man from a sovereignty that was supreme over the world. Then the divine came ever closer to the world that it might spread itself over it and permeate it, till finally there was no longer any separation, and God and world blended together in a single whole. At first this seemed a pure and a great gain: the divine put off all rigid sovereignty and spoke to us immediately out of the whole extent of life; the world was related, through the power of the divine, to an inner whole and, illuminated by it, received a transfigured appearance. And yet this solution was only apparent; it contained an inner contradiction, which ultimately was bound to break forth with a power of destruction. The divine had developed its power and its depth in opposition to the world; will it retain that power and that depth if the opposition ceases; will not the renunciation of supremacy, the fusion with things, rob it of all distinctive content? As a matter of fact, with this increase in proximity and extension, the divine fades and dissolves more and more; ever less power proceeds from it: and so the world is ever less transformed and elevated by it; its transfiguring light is dissipated and its inner relations are broken. From being a life-penetrating power Pantheism becomes more and more a vague disposition; indeed, an empty phrase. The living whole, which in the beginning raised things to itself, has finally become a mere abstraction which cannot hold its ground before vigorous thought. Thus, with an immanent dialectic, such as historical life often enough shows, the movement, since it strove for breadth, has been destroyed in its life-giving root; it has abandoned the basis from which it derived its truth and power. Immanent Idealism shows itself to be one great contradiction; a fascinating illusion, which, instead of reality, presents us with mere appearance.
Of course, Immanent Idealism is not finally refuted by such doubts and difficulties; it puts forward demands which need to be satisfied in some way; it contains truths which in some manner must be acknowledged. What would become of human life if it should abandon its striving forwards to the whole; its spiritual penetration of the world; its advance in greatness and breadth; its joyous and vigorous nature; the excellence of its disposition? But the indispensable truth that is involved in Immanent Idealism must be brought into wider relations, and thus made clear and modified, so that it may be more secure and more fruitful in its effect. Meanwhile, we see that here also we are in complete uncertainty; that which was intended to give a firm support, and to point out a clear course to our life, has itself become a difficult problem.
(b) THE NEWER SYSTEMS
No attack from without and no relaxation from within could have brought the older systems of life into the state of chaos which we actually find them to be in, if the experience of sense had not become far more to man and had not given him far more to do than in earlier times. Hitherto genuine spiritual life seemed to be able to unfold itself only in energetic detachment from the world of sense; it reduced this world to a subordinate sphere which received its position and value only from a transcendent order; thus, all tarrying with the things of sense seemed to be a sign of a lower disposition, a falling from the heights of human life.
This view has been radically altered by the course of the Modern Age. When the invisible world became uncertain to man and the life directed towards it shadowy, an intense thirst for reality, for a life out of the abundance and truth of things, arose, and only the visible world seemed to promise satisfaction. This world had been seen previously in a particular light which is now felt to be artificial and distorting; if this light fails and the world can unfold itself unaffected, it shows a far richer content, far firmer relations, far greater tasks. All this is more especially because the world no longer appears to be something finished, but as still in process and as capable of a thorough-going elevation; because great possibilities which human power is able to awaken still lie dormant in it. In diverse directions sense experience advances far beyond the older form; Natural Science analyses the visible world into its single components and makes it penetrable to our thought, and at the same time technical skill wins power over its forces. In the political and social sphere men find new tasks not only in regard to isolated questions, but throughout the whole of its organisation, and great hopes of an essential elevation of life are raised. The individual also appears more powerful and richer, in that the decay of traditional ties gives him complete freedom for his development. Even if, in the struggle for the control of life, these movements in many ways fall into contradiction one with another, still, in the first place they unite in advancing the world of sense in man’s estimation, in fixing his love and his work there, and in also making men more and more disinclined to consider the life-systems rooted in the invisible. Sense experience presents itself ever more decidedly as something which can tolerate neither partner nor rival; the life directed towards it loses more and more the nature of being an opponent, which it hitherto had, and it undertakes to shape our whole existence characteristically in positive achievement and also to satisfy the spiritual needs of man completely. All this signifies an entire reversal of the order of life; for, since the world which formerly had seemed secondary now becomes predominant, indeed exclusive, all standards and values are changed, and the old possession appears also as a new gain. It is true that the new mode of thought misses the advantages which a long tradition gave to the old: but in place of this, it has the charm of searching and finding for itself, the joy of first discovery and successful exertion; here an infinite horizon is disclosed; before the research and effort of man lies an open way. Endeavour derives particular power and confidence from the conviction that the new is nothing else than the old and genuine, but hitherto misunderstood, nature: it is a return of life to itself, to its plain and pure truth, which permits us to expect a new world epoch. And so mankind, exalted in mind and with cheerful courage, enters upon the course which promises so much.
1. The Naturalistic System
The movement towards giving sole attention to the world of sense cannot make sure progress without a more definite decision concerning the main agents and the main direction of work. Different possibilities here offer themselves; three, however, in particular. In reality, these have all evolved, sometimes blending together and strengthening one another, at other times crossing and hindering one another.
None of these movements has displayed more energy and exercised more power than that which makes the sense experience of surrounding nature its basis, and strives to include man’s entire being within this experience. This is Naturalism, which, starting out from the mechanical conception of nature, which has been developed in the Modern Age, applies the ideas thus obtained to everything, and subordinates even the life of the soul to them. The movement originated at the dawn of the seventeenth century, when an independence and autonomy of nature began to be acknowledged. Nature had been covered with a veil of explanation, mainly æsthetic or religious in character, which gave it a colour corresponding to the prevailing disposition, but at the same time excluded the possibility of a scientific comprehension. A comprehension of this kind could only be attained by getting rid of all subjective addition which had been made by man, and by investigating nature purely by itself. Since Descartes and Galileo that has been accomplished, and nature now appears as an immense web of single threads, as a complex of fundamentally mobile, but soulless, elements, whose movements take simple basal forms, while the combination of these elements produces all constructions, even the most complicated. This mighty machinery never points beyond, and as it runs its course solely within itself, so it requires to be understood solely from itself. Everything spiritual is thus eliminated; this realm of fact has no implication of aims, or of a meaning of events.
This new scientific conception of nature had first, with much toil and difficulty, to wrestle with the traditional, naïvely human, representation; this was chiefly a matter of reducing first appearances to their simple elements, and of constructing the world anew from these. By this process, nature at the same time became accessible to the operation of man. For, the technical control of nature presupposes the analytic character of research; only such a research, with its discovery of the single elements and tendencies, places man in a relation of activity towards nature; while in earlier times only an attitude of contemplation had been granted to him. Natural Science thus created a new type of life, a life energetic, masculine, pressing forward unceasingly.
This life, like science itself, in the first place forms a special part of a wider whole. As the expulsion of the soul from nature at first brought about a strengthening of the soul in itself, nature was the less immediately able to govern the whole. The individual of modern times strengthened and asserted himself against nature, and insisted upon a realm of independent inwardness. The contest was a severe one; yet the more nature was seen to extend, on the one hand, to the infinitely great, and, on the other, to the infinitely small, the more fixed relations it showed, so much the more overwhelmingly did it draw man to itself, the more did its conception tend to include the inner aspects of the soul also. The final blow in the struggle was given by the modern theory of descent, since this theory asserts man to be the product solely of natural forces, and maintains that everything which man ascribes to himself as characteristic and distinctive is derived from a gradual development of natural factors. And so nature is exalted as an all-comprehensive world—nature, that is, as represented in the modern mechanistic theory, which is thus transformed into a final theory of the world, a naturalistic metaphysic. The human and spiritual world, which hitherto had been felt to be an independent realm in contrast with nature, appears henceforth as its mere continuation, as something which fits completely into a wider conception of nature.