International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1 / Philosophy and Metaphysics

by Unknown

This development has, in the sphere of systematic philosophy, reached its highest expression in the voluminous works produced through the latter half of the nineteenth century by Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose recent death seems to mark the close of the period we have under consideration. The metaphysical assumptions and ontological value of the system of Spencer, as he wished it to be understood and interpreted, have perhaps, though not unnaturally, been quite too much submerged in the more obvious expressions of its agnostic positivism. In its psychology, however, the assumption of "some underlying substance in contrast to all changing forms," distinguishes it from a pure positivism in a very radical way. But more especially in philosophy, the metaphysical postulate of a mysterious Unity of Force that somehow manages to reveal itself, and the law of its operations, to the developed cognition of the nineteenth century philosopher, however much it seems to involve the system in internal contradictions, certainly forbids that we should identify it with the positivism of Auguste Comte. In our judgment, however, it is in his ethical good sense and integrity of judgment,—a good sense and integrity which commits to ethics rather than to sociology the task of determining the highest type of human life,—and in basing the conditions for the prevalence and the development of the highest type of life upon ethical principles and upon the adherence to ethical ideas, that Herbert Spencer will be found most clearly entitled to a lasting honor.

III. The third number of our difficult tasks is to summarize the principal results, to inventory the net profits, as it were, of the development of philosophy during the nineteenth century. This task is made the more difficult by the heterogeneous nature and as yet unclassified condition of the development. With the quickening and diversifying of all kinds and means of intercourse, there has come the breakingdown of national schools and idiosyncrasies of method and of thought. In philosophy, Germany, France, Great Britain, and indeed, Italy, have come to intermingle their streams of influence; and from all these countries these streams have been flowing in upon America. In psychology, especially, as well as in all the other sciences, but also to some degree in philosophy, returning streams of influence from America have, during the last decade or two, been felt in Europe itself.

It must also be admitted that the attempts at a reconstruction of systematic philosophy which have followed the rapid disintegration of the Hegelian system, and the enormous accumulations of new material due to the extension of historical studies and of the particular sciences,—including especially the so-called "new psychology,"—have not as yet been fruitful of large results. In philosophy, as in art, politics, and even scientific theory, the spirit and the opportunity of the time are more favorable to the gathering of material and to the projecting of a bewildering variety of new opinions, or old opinions put forth under new names, than to that candid, patient, and prolonged reflection and balancing of judgment which a worthy system-building inexorably requires. The age of breaking up the old, without assimilating the new, has not yet passed away. And whatever is new, startling, large, even monstrous, has in many quarters the seeming preference, in philosophy's building as in other architecture. To the confusion which reigns even in scholastic circles, contributions have been arriving from the outside, from philosophers like Nietzsche, and from men great in literature like Tolstoi. Nor has the matter been helped by the more recent extreme developments of positivism and skepticism, which often enough, without any consciousness of their origin and without the respect for morality and religion which Kant always evinced, really go back to the critical philosophy.

In spite of all this, however, the last two decades or more have shown certain hopeful tendencies and notable achievements, looking toward the reconstruction of systematic philosophy. In this attempt to bring order out of confusion, to enable calm, prolonged, and reflective thinking to build into its structure the riches of the new material which the evolution of the race has secured, a place of honor ought to be given to France, where so much has been done of late to blend with clearness of style and independence of thought that calm reflective and critical judgment which looks all sides of human experience sympathetically but bravely in the face. In psychology Ribot, and in philosophy, Fouillée, Renouvier, Secrétan, and others, deserve grateful recognition. No friend of philosophy can, I think, fail to recognize the probable benefits to be derived from that movement with which such names as Mach and Ostwald in Germany are connected, and which is sounding the call to the men of science to clear up the really distressing obscurity and confusion which has so long clung to their fundamental conceptions; and to examine anew the significance of their assumptions, with a view to the construction of a new and improved doctrine of the Being of the World. And if to these names we add those of the numerous distinguished investigators of psychology as pedagogic to philosophy, and, in philosophy, of Deussen, Eucken, von Hartmann, Riehl, Wundt, and others, we may well affirm that new light will continue to break forth from that country which so powerfully aroused the whole Western World at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In Great Britain the name and works of Thomas Hill Green have influenced the attempts at a reconstruction of systematic philosophy in a manner to satisfy at one and the same time both the facts and laws of science and the æsthetical, ethical, and religious ideals of the age, in a very considerable degree. And in this attempt, both as it expresses itself in theoretical psychology and in the various branches of philosophical discipline, writers like Bradley, Fraser, Flint, Hodgson, Seth, Stout, Ward, and others, have taken a conspicuous part. Nor are there wanting in Holland, Italy, and even in Sweden and Russia, thinkers equally worthy of recognition, and recognized, in however limited and unworthy fashion, in their own land. The names of those in America who have labored most faithfully, and succeeded best, in this enormous task of reconstructing philosophy in a systematic way, and upon a basis of history and of modern science, I do not need to mention; they are known, or they surely ought to be known, to us all.

In attempting to summarize the gains of philosophy during the last hundred years, we should remind ourselves that progress in philosophy does not consist in the final settlement, and so in the "solving" of any of its great problems. Indeed, the relations of philosophy to its grounds in experience, and the nature of its method and of its ideal, are such that its progress can never be expected to put an end to itself. But the content of the total experience of humanity has been greatly enriched during the last century; and the critical and reflective thought of trained minds has been led toward a more profound and comprehensive theory of Reality, and toward a doctrine of values that shall be more available for the improvement of man's political, social, and religious life.

In view of this truth respecting the limitations of systematic philosophy, I think we may hold that certain negative results, which are customarily adduced as unfavorable to the claims of philosophical progress, are really signs of improvement during the latter half of the nineteenth century. One is an increased spirit of reserve and caution, and an increased modesty of claims. This result is perhaps significant of riper wisdom and more trustworthy maturity. Kant believed himself to have established for philosophy a system of apodeictic conclusions, which were as completely forever to have displaced the old dogmatism as Copernicus had displaced the Ptolemaic astronomy. But the steady pressure of historical and scientific studies has made it increasingly difficult for any sane thinker to claim for any system of thinking such demonstrable validity. May we not hope that the students of the particular sciences, to whom philosophy owes so much of its enforced sanity and sane modesty, will themselves soon share freely of the philosophic spirit with regard to their own metaphysics and ethical and religious standpoints, touching the Ultimate Reality? Even when the recoil from the overweening self-satisfaction and crass complacency of the earlier part of the last century takes the form of melancholy, or of acute sadness, or even of a mild despair of philosophy, I am not sure that the last state of that man is not better than the first.

In connection with this improvement in spirit, we may also note an improvement in the method of philosophy. The purely speculative method, with its intensely interesting but indefensible disregard of concrete facts, and of the conclusions of the particular sciences, is no longer in favor even among the most ardent devotees and advocates of the superiority of philosophy to those sciences. At the same time, philosophy may quite properly continue to maintain its position of independent critic, as well as of docile pupil, toward the particular sciences.

In the same connection must be mentioned the hopeful fact that the last two or three decades have shown a decided improvement in the relations of philosophy toward the positive sciences. There are plain signs of late that the attitude of antagonism, or of neglect, which prevailed so largely during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, is to be replaced by one of friendship and mutual helpfulness. And, indeed, science and philosophy cannot long or greatly flourish without reciprocal aid, if by science we mean a true Wissenschaft and if we also mean to base philosophy upon our total experience. For science and philosophy are really engaged upon the same task,—to understand and to appreciate the totality of man's experience. They, therefore, have essential and permanent relations of dependence for material, for inspiration and correction, and for other forms of helpfulness. While, then, their respective spheres have been more clearly delimited during the last century, their interdependence has been more forcefully exhibited. Both of them have been developing a systematic exposition of the universe. Both of them desire to enlarge and deepen the conception of the Being of the World, as made known to the totality of human experience, in its Unity of nature and significance. We cannot believe that the end of the nineteenth century would sustain the charge which Fontenelle made in the closing years of the seventeenth century: "L'Académie des Sciences ne prend la nature que par petites parcelles." Science itself now bids us regard the Universe as a dynamical Unity, teleologically conceived, because in a process of evolution under the control of immanent ideas. Philosophy assumes the same point of view, rather at the beginning than at the end of defining its purpose; and so feels a certain glad leap at its heart-strings, and an impulse to hold out the hand to science, when it hears such an utterance as that of Poincaré: Ce n'est pas le méchanisme le vrai, le seul but; c'est l'unité.

Shall we not say, then, that this double-faced but wholly true lesson has been learned: namely, that the so-called philosophy of nature has no sound foundation and no safeguard against vagaries of every sort, unless it follows the lead of the positive sciences of nature; but that the sciences themselves can never afford a full satisfaction to the legitimate aspirations of human reason unless they, too, contribute to the philosophy of nature—writ large and conceived of as a real-ideal Unity.

That nature, as known and knowable by man, is a great artist, and that man's æsthetical consciousness may be trusted as having a certain ontological value, is the postulate properly derived from the considerations advanced in the latest, and in some respects the most satisfactory, of the three Critiques of Kant. The ideal way of looking at natural phenomena which so delighted the mind of Goethe has now been placed on broad and sound foundations by the fruitful industries of many workmen,—such as Karl Ernst von Baer and Charles Darwin,—whose morphological and evolutionary conceptions of the universe have transformed the current conceptions of cosmic processes. But the world of physical and natural phenomena has thereby been rendered not less, but more, of a Cosmos, an orderly totality.