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

by Unknown

In addition to these more general but somewhat vague evaluations of the progress of philosophy during the nineteenth century, we are certainly called upon to face the question whether, after all, any advance has been made toward the more satisfactory solution of the definite problems which the Kantian criticism left unsolved. To this question I believe an affirmative answer may be given in accordance with the facts of history. It will be remembered that the first of these problems was the epistemological. Certainly no little improvement has been made in the psychology of cognition. We can no longer repeat the mistakes of Kant, either with respect to the uncritical assumptions he makes regarding the origin of knowledge in the so-called "faculties" of the human mind or regarding the analysis of those faculties and their interdependent relations. It is not the Scottish philosophy alone which has led to the conclusion that, in the word of the late Professor Adamson, "What are called acts or states of consciousness are not rightly conceived of as having for their objects their own modes of existence as ways in which a subject is modified." And in the larger manner both science and philosophy, in their negations and their affirmations, and even in their points of view, have better grounds for the faith of human reason in its power progressively to master the knowledge of Reality than was the case a hundred years ago. Nor has the skepticism of the same era, whether by shallow scoffing at repeated failures, or by pious sighs over the limitations of human reason, or by critical analysis of the cognitive faculties "according to well-established principles," succeeded in limiting our speculative pretensions to the sphere of possible experience,—in the Kantian meaning both of "principles" and of "experience." But what both science and philosophy are compelled to agree upon as a common underlying principle is this: The proof of the most fundamental presuppositions, as well as of the latest more scientifically established conclusions, of both science and philosophy, is the assistance they afford in the satisfactory explanation of the totality of racial experience.

In the evolution of the ontological problem, as compared with the form in which it was left by the critical philosophy, the past century has also made some notable advances. To deny this would be to discredit the development of human knowledge so far as to say that we know no more about what nature is, and man is, than was known a hundred years ago. To say this, however, would not be to speak truth of fact. And here we may not unnaturally grow somewhat impatient with that metaphysical fallacy which places an impassable gulf between Reality and Experience. No reality is, of course, cognizable or believable by man which does not somehow show its presence in his total experience. But no growth of experience is possible without involving increase of knowledge representing Reality. For Reality is no absent and dead, or statical, Ding-an-Sich. Cognition itself is a commerce of realities. And are there not plain signs that the more thoughtful men of science are becoming less averse to the recognition of the truth of ontological philosophy; namely, that the deeper meaning of their own studies is grasped only when they recognize that they are ever face to face with what they call Energy and we call Will, and with what they call laws and we call Mind as significant of the progressive realization of immanent ideas. This Ultimate Reality is so profound that neither science nor philosophy will ever sound all its depths, and so comprehensive as more than to justify all the categories of both.

Probably, on the whole, there has been less progress made toward a satisfactory solution of the problems offered by the value-judgments of ethics and religion, in the form in which these problems were left by the critical philosophy. The century has illustrated the truth of Falckenberg's statement: "In periods which have given birth to a skeptical philosophy, one never looks in vain for the complementary phenomenon of mysticism." Twice during the century the so-called "faith-philosophy," or philosophy of feeling, has been borne to the front, to raise a bulwark against the advancing hosts of agnostics—occasioned in the first period by the negations of the Kantian criticism, and in the second by the positive conclusions of the physical and biological sciences. This form of protesting against the neglect or disparagement of important factors which belong to man's æsthetical, ethical, and religious experience, is reasonable and must be heard. But the extravagances with which these neglected factors have been posited and appraised, to the neglect of the more definitively scientific and strictly logical, is to be deplored. The great work before the philosophy of the present age is the reconciliation of the historical and scientific conceptions of the Universe with the legitimate sentiments and ideals of art, morality, and religion. But surely neither rationalism nor "faith-philosophy" is justified in pouring out the living child with the muddy water of the bath.

IV. The attempt to survey the present situation of philosophy, and to predict its immediate future, is embarrassed by the fact that we are all immersed in it, are a part of its spirit and present form. But if nearness has its embarrassments, it has also its benefits. Those who are amidst the tides of life may know better, in a way, how these tides are tending and what is their present strength, than do those who survey them from distant, cool, and exalted heights. "Für jeden einzelnen bildet der Vater und der Sohn eine greifbare Kette von Lebensereignungen und Erfahrungen." The very intensely vital and formative but unformed condition of systematic philosophy—its protoplasmic character—contains promises of a new life. If we may believe the view of Hegel that the systematizing of the thought of any age marks the time when the peculiar living thought of that age is passing into a period of decay, we may certainly claim for our present age the prospect of a prolonged vitality.

The nineteenth century has left us with a vast widening of the horizon,—outward into space, backward in time, inward toward the secrets of life, and downward into the depths of Reality. With this there has been an increase in the profundity of the conviction of the spiritual unity of the race. In the consideration of all of its problems in the immediate future and in the coming century—so far as we can see forward into this century—philosophy will have to reckon with certain marked characteristics of the human spirit which form at the same time inspiring stimuli and limiting conditions of its endeavors and achievements. Chief among these are the greater and more firmly established principles of the positive sciences, and the prevalence of the historical spirit and method in the investigation of all manner of problems. These influences have given shape to the conception which, although it is as yet by no means in its final or even in thoroughly self-consistent form, is destined powerfully to affect our philosophical as well as our scientific theories. This conception is that of Development. But philosophy, considered as the product of critical and reflective thinking over the more ultimate problems of nature and of human life, is itself a development. And it is now, more than ever before, a development interdependently connected with all the other great developments.

Philosophy, in order to adapt itself to the spirit of the age, must welcome and cultivate the freest critical inquiry into its own methods and results, and must cheerfully submit itself to the demand for evidences which has its roots in the common and essential experience of the race. Moreover, the growth of the spirit of democracy, which, on the one hand, is distinctly unfavorable to any system of philosophy whose tenets and formulas seem to have only an academic validity or a merely esoteric value, and which, on the other hand, requires for its satisfaction a more tenable, helpful, and universally applicable theory of life and reality, cannot fail, in my judgment, to influence favorably the development of philosophy. In the union of the speculative and the practical; in the harmonizing of the interests of the positive sciences, with their judgments of fact and law, and the interests of art, morality, and religion, with their value-judgments and ideals; in the synthesis of the truths of Realism and Idealism, as they have existed hitherto and now exist in separateness or antagonism; in a union that is not accomplished by a shallow eclecticism, but by a sincere attempt to base philosophy upon the totality of human experience;—in such a union as this must we look for the real progress of philosophy in the coming century.

Just now there seem to be two somewhat heterogeneous and not altogether well-defined tendencies toward the reconstruction of systematic philosophy, both of which are powerful and represent real truths conquered by ages of intellectual industry and conflict. These two, however, need to be internally harmonized, in order to obtain a satisfactory statement of the development of the last century. They may be called the evolutionary and the idealistic. The one tendency lays emphasis on mechanism, the other on spirit. Yet it is most interesting to notice how many of the early workmen in the investigation of the principle of the conservation and correlation of energy took their point of departure from distinctly teleological and spiritual conceptions. "I was led," said Colding,—to take an extreme case,—at the Natural Science Congress at Innsbruck, 1869, "to the idea of the constancy of national forces by the religious conception of life." And even Moleschott, in his Autobiography, posthumously published, declares: "I myself was well aware that the whole conception might be converted; for since all matter is a bearer of force, endowed with force or penetrated with spirit, it would be just as correct to call it a spiritualistic conception." On the other hand, the modern, better instructed Idealism is much inclined, both from the psychological and from the more purely philosophical points of view, to regard with duly profound respect all the facts and laws of that mechanism of Reality, which certainly is not merely the dependent construction of the human mind functioning according to a constitution that excludes it from Reality, but is rather the ever increasingly more trustworthy revealer of Reality. This tendency to a union of the claims of both Realism and Idealism is profoundly influencing the solution of each one of these problems which the Kantian criticism left to the philosophy of the nineteenth century. In respect of the epistemological problem, philosophy—as I have already said—is not likely again to repeat the mistakes either of Kant or of the dogmatism which his criticism so effectually overthrew. It was a wise remark of the physician Johann Benjamin Erhard, in a letter dated May 19, 1794, à propos of Fichte: "The philosophy which proceeds from a single fundamental principle, and pretends to deduce everything from it, is and always will remain a piece of artificial sophistry: only that philosophy which ascends to the highest principle and exhibits everything else in perfect harmony with it, is the true one." This at least ought—one would say—to have been made clear by the century of discussion over the epistemological problem, since Kant. You cannot deduce the Idea from the Reality, or the Reality from the Idea. The problem of knowledge is not, as Fichte held in the form of a fundamental assumption, an alternative of this sort. The Idea and Reality are, the rather already there, and to be recognized as in a living unity, in every cognitive experience. Psychology is constantly adding something toward the problem of cognition as a problem in synthesis; and is then in a way contributing to the better scientific understanding of the philosophical postulate which is the confidence of human reason in its ability, by the harmonious use of all its powers, progressively to reach a better and fuller knowledge of Reality.

The ontological problem will necessarily always remain the unsolved, in the sense of the very incompletely solved problem of philosophy. But as long as human experience develops, and as long as philosophy bestows upon experience the earnest and candid efforts of reflecting minds, the solution of the ontological problem will be approached, but never fully reached. That Being of the World which Kant, in the negative and critical part of his work, left as an X, unknown and unknowable, the last century has filled with a new and far richer content than it ever had before. Especially has this century changed the conception of the Unity of the Universe in such manner that it can never return again to its ancient form. On the one hand, this Unity cannot be made comprehensible in terms of any one scientific or philosophical principle or law. Science and philosophy are both moving farther and farther away from the hope of comprehending the variety and infinite manifoldness of the Absolute in terms of any one side or aspect of man's complex experience. But, on the other hand, the confidence in this essential Unity is not diminished, but is the rather confirmed. As humanity itself develops, as the Selfhood of man grows in the experience of the world which is its own environment, and of the world within which it is its own true Self, humanity may reasonably hope to win an increased, and increasingly valid, cognition of the Being of the World as the Absolute Self.

Closely connected, and in a way essentially identical with the ontological problem, is that of the origin, validity, and rational value of the ideas of humanity. May it not be said that the nineteenth century transfers to the twentieth an increased interest in and a heightened appreciation of the so-called practical problems of philosophy. Science and philosophy certainly ought to combine—and are they not ready to combine?—in the effort to secure a more nearly satisfactory understanding and solution of the problems afforded by the æsthetical, ethical, and religious sentiments and ideals of the race. To philosophy this combination means that it shall be more fruitful than ever before in promoting the uplift and betterment of mankind. The fulfillment of the practical mission of philosophy involves the application of its conceptions and principles to education, politics, morals, as a matter of law and of custom, and to religion as matter both of rational faith and of the conduct of life.

How, then, can this brief and imperfect sketch of the outline of the development of philosophy in the nineteenth century better come to a close than by words of encouragement and of exhortation as well. There are, in my judgment, the plainest signs that the somewhat too destructive and even nihilistic tendencies of the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century have reached their limit; that the strife of science and philosophy, and of both with religion, is lessening, and is being rapidly displaced by the spirit of mutual fairness and reciprocal helpfulness; and that reasonable hopes of a new and a splendid era of reconstruction in philosophy may be entertained. For I cannot agree with the dictum of a recent writer on the subject, that "the sciences are coming less and less to admit of a synthesis, and not at all of a synthetic philosopher."