It is too late now to “abuse the eighteenth century,” which had its good and evil, like other periods. It is commonly conceived as the era of individualism and analysis, the era of logical enlightenment and sceptical criticism; and, again, as the era of liberation from groundless superstitions and fictitious claims of authority; the era in which mankind seemed for the first time to throw off the weight of the past and to enter without fear upon the enjoyment of their earthly heritage. The science of Newton had given the last blow to the astronomy that made the earth the centre of the universe. It had undermined and discredited the simple theology that explained the whole material world as a cosmos arranged for the supply of human needs. At the same time, the progress of biology was bringing man to a consciousness that as a physical being he is only primus inter pares in the animal kingdom, and the decay of religious belief was making him realize his finitude, the limits of his natural existence, as, perhaps, he had never done before, at least never since the beginning of the Christian era. Earth seemed to be disconnected from heaven, and the human race thrown upon its own resources. By the new enlightenment all powers, ecclesiastical or political, were stripped of the mysterious sanctity that had once invested them. “The nimbus was taken away from the heads of the gods and rulers of the world.” Every authority that claimed man’s homage was weighed in the scales of the understanding, and, so weighed, every such authority was found wanting. The State had come to be regarded as only a collection of individuals who had agreed to live together under a ruler deriving all his claims from their consent, and invested with no divine right to their allegiance. The Church was no longer a sacred institution governed by priests who held their commission directly from God, but only a sort of spiritual police agency, an ally of the State in the restraint of vice and crime, or, at best, in Protestant countries, a society for mutual improvement. Men were “free and equal,” each standing face to face with his fellows, admitting no superiority or superstition of hero-worship in regard to any one of them. And the Deity, if his existence were not denied, tended to become a mere “Supreme Being,” who was removed to such a distance from mankind that he could hardly be reached by their reverence, still less by their love.
At the same time, the influences which, in one point of view, seemed to limit and narrow human existence, in another point of view tended to liberate and enlarge it. If they excluded the idea of the infinite from man’s life, they emancipated him from many degrading superstitions, which in an earlier age had held him “all his lifetime subject to bondage.” And as the pressure from above was lightened the individual seemed to become master of himself and of his destiny. If the king could no longer say, “L’Etat c’est moi,” the rights of the subject were vindicated; if the authority of the Church was weakened, the bonds of free inquiry were broken; if imagination ceased to fill men with the awe and wonder of higher powers, the way was opened up for scientific and industrial development; if God was regarded as unknowable, “the proper study of mankind was man,” and that study could now be pursued without fear or hinderance. Poetry and religion might be impoverished, the sense of the binding force of social relations might be weakened, but interest in the bettering of man’s earthly condition was awakened, and with it came a new desire for justice to all, a new intolerance of human suffering, and a new demand that the lot of the class “which is most numerous and poor” should be made less wretched and insecure, and, towards the end of the century, a new turn was given to its leading thought, for an effort was made to discover in the nature of the individual himself the equivalent of those universal powers which the enlightenment had banished from the external world and from the life of society. Rousseau carried individualism to an extreme point, at which it became its own correction, and taught men to find within their own souls the infinite which they could no longer discover without. Rejecting in the first instance all social conventions as unjust limitations of the natural man, and adopting the prevailing theory of the time, that the State is only the product of a contract between independent persons, he yet discovered in the individual thus liberated from all external pressure a “common reason,” and “a general will,” which could reorganize his life and bind him to his fellow-men and to God. This great idea, which appears in Rousseau rather as a stroke of insight, an intuition of genius—lifting him above his first thoughts and insensibly changing their meaning—was grasped by Kant as the principle of a new philosophy and worked out in a comprehensive system that dealt with all the great problems of thought and life. Kant, indeed, seemed, like Rousseau, to begin on the plane of eighteenth-century individualism, but, influenced as he was by the philosophy of Leibnitz, he from the first conceived the individual as in himself universal; or, to speak more exactly, as having a universal principle realized in him. Thus, though in one aspect of his being man is a finite object among other objects, confined within limits of space and time, and forming only a link in the chain of natural causation, in another aspect of it, as a conscious self, he is emancipated from all these limitations. For—such is Kant’s argument—a knowing subject, for whom the whole finite world, including his own finite existence, is an object of knowledge, cannot himself be comprehended in that world or limited by any of its conditions. As there can be no world of objects except for a self, it is impossible that such a self should be merely one of these objects. Thus, as knowing, or capable of knowing, all things, man cannot be identified with any of them; or if, from one point of view, as an individual, he is so identified, yet he has within him a universal principle that carries him beyond the limits of his individuality. And this contrast shows itself also in his practical life. For if as an object he appears to be but an animal organism, moved by the impressions of pleasure and pain which he receives from other objects, yet in his inner moral life man is revealed to himself as a self-determining subject, emancipated from all sensuous motives and from the necessity of nature which they bring with them, and conscious of subordination only to the law of duty, which is the law of his own reason. And that law, in spite of every pressure of circumstance from without, and of every impulse of passion from within, he knows that he ought to obey, and therefore he knows that he can obey it. Thus, in Kant’s theory, the two extreme views of humanity, as natural and as spiritual, as limited to a finite individuality, hemmed in by necessities on every side, and yet as possessing a universal capacity of knowing, and an absolute power of self-determination, these two views are presented in sharp antithesis, and at the same time held together as different aspects of one life. In fact, we have here, as it were, compressed into a nutshell, the result of the whole history of eighteenth-century individualism, which began by depressing man and ended by exalting him; which, with one of its voices, seemed to reduce him to the level of an animal, a mere part of the partial world, a transitory phenomenal existence among other phenomena; and then, with its other voice, proceeded to recognize him as a member of the intelligible world, a “spectator of all time and existence,” and gifted with the absolute freedom of a will which could be determined by nothing but itself. “The solitary,” says Aristotle, “must be either a god or a beast,” and the eighteenth century, in its conception of the individual, seemed to oscillate between the one and the other till Kant, awaking to the impossibility of omitting either aspect of his being, demanded that he should be conceived as both at once. Kant thus set the problem of the future; and if he did not solve it, he at least showed the futility of any narrow or one-sided solution and the direction in which an adequate solution could alone be sought. In short, Kant asked the question to which the nineteenth century, in all its philosophical reflection, has been striving to find an answer.
For in philosophy, as in other departments of knowledge, the work of the nineteenth century has been one of mediation and reconciliation. It has been an endeavor to break down the sharp antithesis of philosophical and scientific theories that was characteristic of an earlier time. In the writings of the greatest thinkers, the oppositions of materialism and spiritualism, of sensationalism and idealism, of empiricism and a priori speculation, of individualism and socialism, all the great oppositions of theoretical and practical philosophy, which formerly were held to be absolute and irreconcilable, have been modified, restated, reduced to the relative antagonism of the different aspects of one truth. The great controversies of the past have thus passed into a new phase, in which absolute statements pro and con have become, as it were, antiquated; and the question is no longer whether a particular doctrine or its opposite is true, but what are the elements of truth and error in each of them, and how we can attain to a comprehensive view of things, in which justice is done to both. And if it be asked, what are the principles or ideas that have suggested this reconciling work, and have been the guides of the greatest scientific or philosophic writers in attempting to achieve it, I think the answer must be that they are the idea of organic unity, and, as implied in that, the idea of development. Goethe and Hegel, in Germany; Comte, in France; Darwin and Spencer, in England, are writers who almost span the whole range of difference in modern thought; but they, and a multitude of others in every department of study, have been inspired by the ideas of organism and development. And they have all used them somewhat in the same way to turn the edge of the old controversial weapons, or to lift thought above the “yes” and “no” of opposing dogmatisms. It is true that the definitions or interpretations of the ideas of organism and development given by these writers are very different, and often, indeed, so sharply opposed that they seem to bring back the old controversies in a new form. But this does not alter the significance of the general fact; for, in the first place, the use of an idea by any writer is by no means always limited by his own interpretation of it; and, in the second place, the true interpretation of the idea is that which contains the secret of its power and prevalence, and it must in the long run gain the victory over all other interpretations of it. We may, therefore, fairly say that these ideas have been the marked ideas of the century, the conscious or unconscious stimulus of its best thought; and that they have been working, and are working still, in the direction of a deeper and more comprehensive irenicon between the different tendencies of the human mind than has been attained in any previous stage of the history of philosophy.
Against such a general characterization of an age, there is the same objection which Burke indicated when he said that “he could not draw up an indictment against a nation.” We are taking a distant and general view of a period, in which all its inequalities of movement, all the ebb and flow of opinion, are lost sight of, and only one main current of thought is visible. We may get a step nearer to the subject by distinguishing three periods in the century, in which there is a partial difference of tendency. The first period, which we may roughly define as lasting well on into the 30’s, is, in the main, a period of construction, of creative thought, in which the great germinating ideas that distinguished the century are more or less adequately expressed in different countries, and in which they receive a first, somewhat hasty, application to all departments of human knowledge. Idealistic philosophy, which gave the fullest expression to those ideas, seems for a time to carry all before it in Germany; and a similar movement of thought, less definitely reflective or speculative, enriches the literature of other countries. In the next period, lasting until the 70’s, the new ideas do not lose their hold upon men’s minds, but there is a certain critical recoil against them, a tendency to explain them away. The first premature synthesis of idealistic philosophy is attacked by a scepticism, which seems at times as if it would measure back the whole way to the individualistic materialism of an earlier age, or which only avoids that extreme to fall into a scientific agnosticism, at first sight even more hostile to the claims of philosophy. But the lesson of Kant could never be altogether forgotten, nor could the negative or sceptical tendencies of the Critique of Pure Reason be permanently separated from the positive results of his later writings. And the great scientific movement of the time, which at first seemed to draw away all interest from speculative inquiry, tended in the long run, especially by the advance of biological study, to raise metaphysical questions which the methods of science were incapable of answering. Hence, in the latest decades of the century, there has come a revival of interest in philosophy, and especially in the idealistic philosophy of its first years. But if philosophy has revived, it is in a more critical and cautious form, and accompanied by a clear consciousness that the only true idealism is that which is able to absorb and assimilate all the data supplied by empirical investigation, and do justice to all the results of the special sciences. The general movement of thought in the nineteenth century has thus, on the whole, taken an idealistic direction; but there has come with it also a deeper consciousness of the immense difficulty of a comprehensive synthesis; of the inefficacy of any easy monism or optimism, that would pluck the fruit of knowledge before it is ripe; of the infinite labor and patience, the sympathetic appreciation of the opposing views of others, and constant and unsparing criticism of our own, which are needed for the construction of a true philosophy.
II
In a short article like this, it is impossible to give more than a few indications of the way in which this three-fold schema of the history of nineteenth-century philosophy should be filled up. To give any definite impression, the writer must, so to speak, put on the seven-leagued boots of Jack the Giant Killer; in other words, however conscious he may be of the truth that dolus latet in generalibus, he must generalize and be content to mention only a few leading names in illustration of the tendencies of thought of which he speaks.
It is the instinct of each new generation to vindicate its freedom by rebelling against the authority of its predecessors; and when a new idea begins to influence human thought, it usually, on its first appearance, shows that side which is most antagonistic to the spirit of the past. Thus the peculiar nineteenth-century movement begins with a reassertion of the universal as against the individual, which is so emphatic that it looks like a return to Spinozism. Schelling is the most prominent philosophical representative of this tendency. In the works which he wrote about the beginning of the century, he broke away even from the universalized individualism of Fichte, and gave emphatic prominence to the great philosophical commonplace—which had been almost forgotten by the previous age—that there is an identity which is below or above all distinction, and that the universe is one through all its multiplicity, and permanent through all its changes. His maxim—that there are none but quantitative differences in things, and that all these, even the difference of mind and matter, disappear in the “indifference” of the Absolute—was like a declaration of war against the “enlightenment.” It meant that philosophy was no longer content to regard the whole as the sum of the parts, but could look upon the distinction of the parts only as a differentiation of the whole. With Schelling, indeed, this differentiation was in danger of being reduced to a mere appearance and the unity of the Absolute was on the point of vanishing in a bare or abstract identity. But his strong assertion of the unity beneath all difference, of the priority of the universal to all particulars, was perhaps necessary, ere the true conception of the organic unity of the world could be arrived at. And the correction soon came with Hegel, who maintained that the absolute is “not substance, but subject.” For this meant that the absolute is a self-differentiating principle, realizing itself in a world of difference which is no mere appearance, but its own essential manifestation; and again—what is the counterpart or complementary truth to this—that in the world there are “degrees of reality,” and that “mind is higher in degree than nature.” But these ideas could hardly have been understood until the uncompromising assertion of the absolute unity had been made, and until the subjectivity of the Kantian and Fichtean points of view had once for all been set aside.
The philosophy of Hegel derives its power from the way in which it strikes what, as I have already said, was the key-note of the nineteenth-century philosophy. In the first place, it is a philosophy of reconciliation, which attempts, through a criticism of the oppositions of philosophical theory, to reach a point of view in which they are all seen to be subordinated to the unity of one principle. His attack upon the “law of contradiction,” as formulated by scholastic logicians, meant simply that absolute distinctions are unmeaning, and that the only real differences are differences within a unity. On this principle he tried to show that all the oppositions of thought and things which have found expression in philosophy are relative oppositions, which find a solution or reconciliation in the life and movement of the whole. Hence he maintained that in all the great controversies that have divided the world, in metaphysics and psychology, in ethics and theology, the combatants have really been co-operators. Both sides, to use the expression of Leibnitz, have been “right in what they affirmed and wrong only in what they denied.” And their conflict has been the means of the evolution of a fuller truth than that which was contained in the doctrine of either party. In the second place, Hegel is guided throughout by the conception of the universe—and, in a sense, of every even relatively independent existence in it—as an organism, every element in which implies the whole, every change in which is a phase of its self-evolution. For his logical doctrine of the “notion” (as Begriff is commonly translated) means simply that we do not see anything truly until we comprehend it as a whole, in which one principle manifests itself through all the difference of the parts and—just through their distinctions and their relations—binds itself into one individual—reality. In this sense, everything just so far as it has an independent individual existence at all is an organism. Lastly, while thus conceiving the universe as organic, Hegel maintained that it is not a natural but a spiritual organism. For the limited scope of a natural organism and its process cannot be regarded as commensurate with a universe, which comprehends all existence, whether classed as organic or inorganic. Only the conscious and self-conscious unity of mind can overreach and overcome such extreme antagonisms, and reduce them all to elements in the realization of its own life. We must, therefore, think of the universe as an organism which includes nature, but manifests its ultimate principle only in the life of man. We may add that in all this Hegel attempted to show that he was only working out in the sphere of speculative thought what Christianity had already expressed for the ordinary consciousness, according to its half-pictorial methods of representation.
While this is the general meaning of Hegelianism, it must be added that Hegel was more successful in formulating these ideas in their logical or metaphysical form than in applying them to the results of the special sciences of nature, which he only knew at second hand; or even to the different provinces of the spiritual life and history of man, which he had studied more thoroughly. In both cases his data were very incomplete, and the scientific interpretation of them had not then been carried far enough to prepare—as, according to Hegel himself, it should prepare—for the final interpretation of philosophy. There is another circumstance to be taken into account, a circumstance which deeply affected Hegel and all the writers of his time. In the slow process of human history the new wine is always at first poured into old bottles, and only when the old bottles burst is an effort made to find new ones that will contain it safely. Hence the development of the new spirit in philosophy seemed often to go hand-in-hand with a movement of restoration in politics and religion which was not easily distinguishable from reaction. Just as the politicians of the time could find for the newly awakened spirit of nationality no other embodiment than the institutions of the ancient régime, and tried to revive the old system destroyed by the Revolution, with only a few repairs and additions, so the great philosophical writers sought generally to reanimate the old scheme of life and thought by means of the new ideas, rather than completely to recast it in accordance with them. Hence, although Hegel’s principle of evolution was as hostile to reaction as to revolution, as hostile to an authoritative system that denied the rights of the individual as to mere individualism, his particular doctrines, both in politics and theology, took a strongly conservative tinge. When we look more closely we see that it is only as restoration is at the same time reformation, as it makes the old forms the expression of a new life, that Hegel could logically defend them. But the form which he gave to his ideas was perplexing; it tended in many minds to identify the principle of development, which means that the future can only spring out of the past and the present, with the defence of the status quo in Church and State; and, on the other hand, to confuse the forces of progress with those of revolution. Thus the mediating, reconciling power of the new doctrine was for a time obscured, and its effect in raising men’s minds above the old levels of controversy was delayed.