In France and in England the first quarter of the last century was far from being productive of great thinkers or great thoughts in the sphere of philosophy. De Biran (1766-1824), in several important respects the forerunner of modern psychology, after revolting from his earlier complacent acceptance of the vagaries of Condillac and Cabanis, made the discovery that the "immediate consciousness of self-activity is the primitive and fundamental principle of human cognition." Meantime it was only a little group of Academicians who were being introduced, in a somewhat superficial way, to the thoughts of the Scottish and the German idealistic Schools by Royer-Collard, Jouffroy, Cousin, and others. A more independent and characteristic movement was that inaugurated by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who, having felt the marked influence of Saint-Simon when he was only a boy of twenty, in a letter to his friend Valat, in the year 1824, declares: "I shall devote my whole life and all my powers to the founding of positive philosophy." In spite of the impossibility of harmonizing with this point of view the vague and mystical elements which characterize the later thought of Comte, or with its carrying into effect the not altogether intelligent recognition of the synthetic activity of the mind (tout se réduit toujours à lier) and certain hints as to "first principles;" and in spite of the small positive contribution to philosophy which Comtism could claim to have made; it has in a way represented the value of two ideas. These are (1) the necessity for philosophy of studying the actual historical forces which have been at work and which are displayed in the facts of history; and (2) the determination not to go by mere unsupported speculation beyond experience in order to discover knowable Reality. There is, however, a kind of subtle irony in the fact that the word "Positivism" should have come to stand so largely for negative conclusions, in the very spheres of philosophy, morals, and religion where affirmative conclusions are so much desired and sought.
That philosophy in Great Britain was in a nearly complete condition of decadence during the first half or three quarters of the nineteenth century was the combined testimony of writers from such different points of view as Carlyle, Sir William Hamilton, and John Stuart Mill. And yet these very names are also witnesses to the fact that this decadence was not quite complete. In the first quarter of the century Coleridge, although he had failed, on account of weakness both of mind and of character, in his attempt to reconcile religion to the thought of his own age, on the basis of the Kantian distinction between reason and the intellect, had sowed certain seed-thoughts which became fertile in the soil of minds more vigorous, logical, and practical than his own. This was, perhaps, especially true in America, where inquirers after truth were seeking for something more satisfactory than the French skepticism of the revolutionary and following period. Carlyle's mocking sarcasm was also not without wholesome effect.
But it was Sir William Hamilton and John Stuart Mill whose thoughts exercised a more powerful formative influence over the minds of the younger men. The one was the flower of the Scottish Realism, the other of the movement started by Bentham and the elder Mill.
That the Scottish Realism should end by such a combination with the skepticism of the critical philosophy as is implied in Hamilton's law of the relativity of all knowledge, is one of the most curious and interesting turns in the history of modern philosophy. And when this law was so interpreted by Dean Mansel in its application to the fundamental cognitions of religion as to lay the foundations upon which the most imposing structure of agnosticism was built by Herbert Spencer, surely the entire swing around the circle, from Kant to Kant again, has been made complete. The attempt of Hamilton failed, as every similar attempt must always fail. Neither speculative philosophy nor religious faith is satisfied with an abstract conception, about the correlate of which in Reality nothing is known or ever can be known. But every important attempt of this sort serves the double purpose of stimulating other efforts to reconstruct the answer to the problem of philosophy, on a basis of positive experience of an enlarged type; and also of acting as a real, if only temporary practical support to certain value-judgments which the faiths of morality, art, and religion both implicate and, in a measure, validate.
The influence of John Stuart Mill, as it was exerted not only in his conduct of life while a servant of the East India Company, but also in his writings on Logic, Politics, and Philosophy, was, on the whole, a valuable contribution to his generation. In the additions which he made to the Utilitarianism of Bentham we have done, I believe, all that ever can be done in defense of this principle of ethics. And his posthumous confessions of faith in the ontological value of certain great conceptions of religion are the more valuable because of the nature of the man, and of the experience which is their source. Perhaps the most permanent contribution which Mill made to the development of philosophy proper, outside of the sphere of logic, ethics, and politics, was his vigorous polemical criticism of Hamilton's claim for the necessity of faith in an "Unconditioned" whose conception is "only a fasciculus of negations of the Conditioned in its opposite extremes, and bound together merely by the aid of language and their common character of incomprehensibility."
The history of the development of philosophy in America during the nineteenth century, as during the preceding century, has been characterized in the main by three principal tendencies. These may be called the theological, the social, and the eclectic. From the beginning down to the present time the religious influence and the interest in political and social problems have been dominant. And yet withal, the student of these problems in the atmosphere of this country likes, in a way, to do his own thinking and to make his own choices of the thoughts that seem to him true and best fitted for the best form of life. In spite of the fact that the different streams of European thought have flowed in upon us somewhat freely, there has been comparatively little either of the adherence to schools of European philosophy or of the attempt to develop a national school. Doubtless the influence of English and Scottish thinking upon the academical circles of America was greatest for more than one hundred and fifty years after the gift in 1714 by Governor Yale of a copy of Locke's Essay to the college which bore his name,—and especially upon the reflections and published works of Jonathan Edwards touching the fundamental problems of epistemology, ethics, and religion. During the early part of this century these views awakened antagonism from such writers as Dana, Whedon, Hazard, Nathaniel Taylor, Jeremiah Day, Henry P. Tappan, and other opponents of the Edwardean theology, and also from such advocates of so-called "free-thinking," as had derived their motifs and their views from English deistical writers like Shaftesbury, or from the skepticism of Hume.
A more definite philosophical movement, however, which had established itself somewhat firmly in scholastic centres by the year 1825, and which maintained itself for more than half a century, went back to the arrival in this country of John Witherspoon, in 1768, to be the president of Princeton, bringing with him a library of three hundred books. It was the appeal of the Scottish School to the "plain man's consciousness" and to so-called "common sense," which was relied upon to controvert all forms of philosophy which seemed to threaten the foundations of religion and of the ethics of politics and sociology. But even during this period, which was characterized by relatively little independent thinking in scholastic circles, a more pronounced productivity was shown by such writers as Francis Wayland, and others; but, perhaps, especially by Laurens P. Hickok, whose works on psychology and cosmology deserve especial recognition: while in psychology, as related to philosophical problems, the principal names of this period are undoubtedly the presidents of Yale and Princeton,—Noah Porter and James McCosh,—both of whom (but especially the former) had their views modified by the more scientific psychology of Europe and the profounder thinking of Germany.
It was Germany's influence, however, both directly and indirectly through Coleridge and a few other English writers, that caused a ferment of impressions and ideas which, in their effort to work themselves clear, resulted in what is known as New England "Transcendentalism." In America this movement can scarcely be called definitely philosophical; much less can it be said to have resulted in a system, or even in a school, of philosophy. It must also be said to have been "inspired but not borrowed" from abroad. Its principal, if not sole, literary survival is to be found in the works of Emerson. As expounded by him, it is not precisely Pantheism—certainly not a consistent and critical development of the pantheistic theory of the Being of the World; it is, rather, a vague, poetical, and pantheistical Idealism of a decidedly mystical type.
The introduction of German philosophy proper, in its nature form, and essential being, to the few interested seriously in critical and reflective thinking upon the ultimate problems of nature and of human life, began with the founding of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, in 1867, under the direction of William T. Harris, then Superintendent of Schools in this city.
With the work of Darwin, and his predecessors and successors, there began a mighty movement of thought which, although it is primarily scientific and more definitely available in biological science, has already exercised, and is doubtless destined to exercise in the future, an enormous influence upon philosophy. Indeed, we are already in the midst of the preliminary confusions and contentions, but most fruitful considerations and discoveries belonging to a so-called philosophy of evolution.