The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

In other countries during the earlier decades of the century a similar movement of thought is discernible, though it was not carried out anywhere with the same philosophical thoroughness as in Germany. In France the organic idea did not find any very powerful representative till the time of Comte, and even in his expression of it there is a certain ambiguity. In his well-known law of development, indeed, he seems to reproduce the individualistic doctrine of the eighteenth century, and to deny the reality of the universal, both in its theological and its philosophical form. But already in the last volume of his Positive Philosophy, when he begins to deal with human society, he maintains that “the individual man is an abstraction, and that there is nothing real but humanity”; and in his Positive Politics he treats this unity of mankind as not only real, but divine. In that work, moreover, he makes another step. Rejecting at once the obstructions of the individualists and those of the socialists, he rises to the conception of a social organism, which gives play to the competitive energy of individuals, and yet binds them together in its own more comprehensive life. In England, before the close of the eighteenth century, the same spirit had found a representative in Burke, who rejected entirely the idea of a social contract, and maintained that the State is based on an unconscious reason of society, which is far wiser than the conscious reason of even the wisest individuals. In general, however, the spiritualistic movement of the earlier part of the century took, among the English-speaking people, rather a poetic and literary than a philosophical form. And the imperfect attempts of Coleridge to transplant German ideas into England—attempts followed up with signal energy by Frederic Denison Maurice—hardly constitute an exception to this rule. In this connection, also, as one who partly grasped the organic idea of social life and its development, but who gave it a somewhat imperfect and even contradictory expression, I may mention a later writer, Thomas Carlyle, whose imaginative genius and moral enthusiasm did much to breathe a new life into history. Though not a philosopher in any technical sense, he was, like his friend Emerson, a vehicle of philosophical ideas, and he contributed greatly to scatter the seed of idealism upon British soil. His Calvinistic pessimism, indeed, makes a curious contrast with the fearless optimism of the new country which is characteristic of Emerson; but whether great men are to be regarded as “heroes to be worshipped,” according to the teaching of the one, or as “representative men,” who are to be followed because they express what all are thinking, according to the ideas of the other, we are led, in both cases, to a deeper view of the solidarity of human society and of its spiritual basis.

IV

It is difficult to determine more than approximately the beginning of special movements of thought; for the different nations of the civilized world are not exactly contemporaneous in their development, and in each nation there are always individuals who lag behind the time or hasten on before it. But, speaking generally, we may say that as early as the fourth decade of the century a certain reaction had set in against the conclusions of idealistic philosophy, and especially against the organic idea of human life; and a tendency was even shown to revert, so far as possible, to the methods and ideas of the eighteenth century. The reasons for this change are various. In Germany the succession of great philosophers had come to an end, and their followers were smaller men, who were inclined too much to repeat the formulas, but had little of the creative power, of their predecessors. More attention, therefore, began to be paid to the protests of writers like Herbart and Schopenhauer, who, even in the hour of its triumph, had criticised and attacked the prevailing philosophy. Again, the physical sciences were advancing by “leaps and bounds,” and there was a growing inclination to believe in the universal validity of the mechanical methods of explanation to which they owed their success, and even in those sociological and historical studies to which the idealistic philosophy had given so great an impetus. The progress of empirical research and the increase of the materials of knowledge caused much of the work of Hegel and his followers to seem inadequate, if not entirely to set it aside. Even in Germany, where the new ideas had taken a distinctly philosophical shape, they seemed to lose their hold in the controversies that attended the breaking up of the Hegelian school; and in other countries, where they never found such a systematic expression, they were even less able to resist the attack now made upon them. Furthermore, as I have already indicated, writers of an idealistic tendency, in their recoil from the enlightenment, had devoted themselves so much to an appreciation of institutions derived from the past that they seemed to have no eyes for the defects of these institutions, and to confuse evolution with restoration.

The general result of all these influences was, then, to discredit philosophy and exalt science, so far as might be, into its place. Either the abstract methods of the physical sciences were proclaimed as adequate for the discovery of all truth, or, if this was seen to be impossible, agnosticism was professed in regard to all subjects to which these methods could not be applied. Even the phenomena of life were supposed to be capable of explanation by the action and reaction of the parts or elements of the physical organism, and Huxley looked forward to the time when man with all his spiritual endowments should be shown to be only the “cunningest of nature’s clocks.” The new science of psychophysics, which arose in Germany and has been cultivated with so much zeal by Wundt and others in all civilized countries, seemed to carry the method of physics into the investigation of mind, and some of its students were ready to maintain that it was the only psychology that deserved the name of science. Darwin’s great work on the Origin of Species, in so far as it set aside the idea of special creation and referred the “purposiveness” of organic structures to a process in which the external environment, and not any inward power of self-adaptation, was the controlling factor, seemed to bring a new reinforcement to the same way of thinking. And he and his followers were not slow to apply the theory of natural selection to the life of man, as well as to that of plants and animals. Finally, the historical studies, which were now cultivated with an energy to an extent hitherto unexampled, and immensely extended the knowledge of the process whereby the present has grown out of the past, were invaded by a similar spirit; and the historical method was maintained to be a solvent which could disintegrate all metaphysical conceptions of ethics or politics or even of theology. The account of the genesis of any idea was regarded as reducing its claims to the level of the elements or rudiments out of which it had sprung, and thus as enabling the scientific historian to explain, or explain away, the spiritual by the natural in all human life and experience. All things appeared again to be pointing towards a system of thought which would resolve ethics and psychology into physiology, and physiology into chemistry and physics.

At the same time the victory of this tendency was always more apparent than real. In the first place, “out of the eater came forth meat”—that very advance of the special sciences, which in its earlier stages had tended to throw all speculative thought into the shade, in the long run caused the need of philosophy to be again felt. In particular, the study of development in the organic world, which had received so great a stimulus from the work of Darwin, could not be carried on without the aid of higher conceptions than were required for the guidance of the physicist. The hypothesis of natural selection might expel the idea of design in the cruder form of a special creation of every distinct species; and the emphasis which it had laid upon the outward conditions of growth might seem unfavorable to the higher conception of an immanent teleology of the organism, but it was confessed by its author to be an incomplete theory of development, and Darwin himself, when he turned his attention to the evolution of man, found it necessary to supplement it by what might be called the converse theory of sexual selection; thus adding a principle of co-operation to his first principle of competition. And Mr. Spencer, who defined growth as a process of integration and differentiation, little as he might himself intend it, was really putting into popular language the Hegelian idea of evolution—an idea which necessarily involved the conception of a self-determined end. Evolutionists might cling, as they still cling, to the belief that, though constantly and necessarily speaking of purpose, they could eliminate it from the result of their investigations by the hypothesis of Darwin, or, subsequently, of Weissmann; but their discussions, especially when they were extended to the historical development of man, could not but reawaken the great controversy whether in the ultimate explanation of things it is more reasonable to “level up,” or to “level down,” to explain the higher by the lower, or the lower by the higher. That both explanations are necessary, nay, that no teleology can be of much worth which does not presuppose a thorough inquiry into the causal connections of particular phenomena, was admitted by all modern idealists. But they began to press the question whether the unity of the whole is not prior to its distribution into parts, and does not govern their relations with each other; and, in particular, whether it is possible in the case of organic beings, and especially of organic beings possessed of consciousness and self-consciousness, to be satisfied with a mode of explanation that treats them as mere collections of material elements which act and react externally upon each other. Whatever its value as a provisional hypothesis, can such a mode of explanation be finally regarded as adequate for the explanation of the nature of the world as a whole, or, indeed, of any one existence in it, that has even a relative independence or separate being of its own?

But, in the second place, a revival of the idealistic philosophy was made necessary by an obvious weakness which clung to the scientific materialism of the nineteenth century from the very beginning. The Kantian criticism of knowledge, which could not be entirely neglected, had convincingly proved that in our experience objects can be known only in relation to a subject, and matter only in relation to mind. But, if so, how could the latter be explained by the former? Even to those who had not fully understood this doctrine, it became evident that mind is at least co-ordinate with matter, and cannot be treated as a mere “epiphenomenon” of it. Mr. Spencer, therefore, had to take refuge in the strange notion that we are possessed of “two consciousnesses”: the consciousness of ideas within us, and the consciousness of motions without us; and that neither of these can be resolved into the other, though both are the phenomena of an unknowable Absolute. It is in this citadel of ignorance that Huxley tries to intrench himself; but the place was taken before it could be occupied. The self-contradiction of an unknowable Absolute, and the equal though less obvious self-contradiction of a dualistic separation between two aspects of our life—which, as a matter of fact, are never, and logically can never be, divided—could not long be maintained against a criticism armed with the weapons of Kant and his idealistic successors. Already, in the 50’s, the cry “Back to Kant” was raised in Germany, and, not long after, it led in England and America to a renewed study of the German idealistic writers, in which Dr. Hutchison Sterling and the late Professor Green took a leading part. It was soon obvious to every one who had learned the lesson of critical philosophy that the agnostic dualism of Mr. Spencer was due to a fundamental misconception of what is meant by the subjectivity of knowledge. It was pointed out that if we have the consciousness of object and subject only in relation to each other, it is not necessary to seek for the principle of their unity in any Tertium Quid which is neither the one nor the other. That which Mr. Spencer sought in an unknowable Absolute was “in our mouths and in our hearts”; it was to be found in the inseparable unity of experience, in which the inward and the outward are correlative elements. Agnosticism was a sort of spiritual refuge for the destitute constructed by those who had renounced their heritage: who, in other words, had by their abstractions separated the elements of experience from each other, and were thus forced to seek beyond experience for the unity which they had lost. The true remedy for the evil was to give up such abstract ways of thinking and to learn to “think things together”; in other words, to recognize the organic relation of the inner and the outer life, and to explain the parts by the whole, and not the whole by the artificially severed parts.

V

The great distinguishing feature of the last two decades of the century has been a movement of approximation, partly conscious and partly unconscious, between the representatives of science, and particularly of those sciences that deal with special aspects or elements of human life, on the one hand, and the representatives of idealistic philosophy on the other. The reconciling ideas of an earlier time have become better understood and have shown more effectively their power to reconcile. Not that this mediating power had previously been entirely unfelt. Even in the time when philosophy was most discredited in Germany, Lotze, in whom a cautious critical temper was combined with deep moral and religious sympathies, and a practical knowledge of the biological and medical sciences with careful studies of Kant and Hegel, sought to show how an idealistic view of the universe and of human life could be maintained consistently with the fullest recognition of scientific methods and results. And though his system was, on the whole, rather a compromise than a true reconciliation of philosophy and science, yet it has undoubtedly had very great influence in modifying the ideas of the opposing schools of thought and narrowing the ground of controversy between them. Thus the old English empirical psychology, which was represented by the Mills and by Mr. Bain, has gradually widened its scope in the hands of writers like Professor Ward and Mr. Stout, at first probably through the study of Herbart and then by contact with the revived idealistic movement. On the other hand, we may notice how idealistic writers, like Mr. Bradley and Mr. Bosanquet, have tried to absorb every lesson that can be learned from empiricism, and to shun with the utmost care the very suspicion of anything like dogmatism. Mr. Bradley’s denunciations of a “too easy monism” and a philosophy that turns the living world into a “ballet of bloodless categories” are too well known to be more than referred to. Nor is this the place to discuss whether his fear of such a result has not sometimes led him into compromises which are inconsistent with his own fundamental principle that the world must be conceived as an intelligible system. In any case, we may fairly point to his work and to the work of other writers animated by a similar spirit, as showing the growing prevalence of that reconciling spirit which seeks at once to do justice to all the results of empirical inquiry and of the investigations of the special sciences, and yet at the same time to give them a new interpretation in the light of an idealistic philosophy. It is impossible within our limits to illustrate this view of the tendencies of the time by further reference to the recent philosophical literature of England and America, or of Germany and France. Still less can I refer to the numerous books on special departments of inquiry in ethics and theology, in sociology and in history, in which the “ideally organic view of life and the world,” as we may call it, has shown its mediating and reconciling influence. Nor can I do more than refer to the counter current of pessimism, which has found its most distinguished representatives in Hartmann and Nietzsche; the former a man of great wealth of thought and dialectical power, whose philosophy is idealistic in all but its ultimate principle, and is indeed pessimistic only by an exaggeration of the opposition between the conscious and the unconscious working of reason; the latter, hardly a philosopher at all but rather a writer of pungent and suggestive aphorisms, winged with indignant passion against prevalent opinions—aphorisms which always contradict some one, and often contradict each other. From Nietzsche at his best we may receive a useful warning against too easily satisfying ourselves with the commonplaces of idealistic optimism; from Hartmann we may derive very considerable help in estimating the difficulties that have to be met by those who would seek to work out idealistic principles into a systematic view of the world. But, without attempting to enter upon any more detailed criticism of these or other important writers of recent years, I shall devote the space that remains to one general thought as to the present state of controversy, in relation to the fundamental principles of philosophy.

VI

Ever since the revival of the study of Kant, the main conflict in philosophy has ceased to lie between materialism and idealism. It has rather become a conflict between those who take up some position analogous to that of Kant and those who seek to carry out the idealistic principle to all its consequences. For the essential characteristic of Kant’s position lay in his sharp division between the spheres of knowledge and of faith—between a knowledge which was confined to phenomena and their connection in experience, and a faith of practical reason, which reached beyond experience to apprehend that which is noumenally real. Even the agnosticism of Mr. Spencer might be regarded as a modification of the Kantian point of view, in so far as his denial of the possibility of knowing the absolute is based on Mansel’s version of the Kantian antinomies; while his description of the “vague consciousness” of the absolute which he bids us worship may be regarded as representing that faith which, in Kant’s view, enables us to pierce the veil of the phenomena and grasp the ultimate reality of things. And in the latter part of the century there has been a continual germination of similar theories, theories agreeing with the Kantian philosophy at least in making some kind of dualistic division between the sphere of clearly defined knowledge and the sphere of ideal or spiritual faith, and also in confining the former to phenomena while the latter is held to be capable of rising in some way from the phenomenal to the real. One of the earliest fruits of the Neo-Kantian movement in Germany was Lange’s History of Materialism, which insisted on the strictest interpretation of the lesson of the Critique of Pure Reason, that scientific knowledge is confined to the empirical and phenomenal, but which maintained also the chartered freedom of imagination to feed our hopes with the idea of a world not realized, or realizable, under the conditions of finite experience. And, with a different aim, but in a similar spirit, Ritschl, borrowing some of his weapons from Lotze, sought to take away from philosophy the right to investigate the spiritual truths of religion, and maintained that such truths were given in a kind of intuition of faith which is above criticism and which some of his followers identify, like Kant, with the demands or postulates of the moral consciousness. Other writers, following Schopenhauer, have sought to emancipate the will from the intelligence and to give it an independent power of estimating values. The great effort to bring science and philosophy together—which, as we have seen, has characterized the later years of the century—has itself naturally given rise to many such dualistic compromises, of which Lotze’s philosophy was among the earliest. And it is partly to Lotze’s influence that we owe the tendency, visible in some of the most important recent contributions to philosophy, to regard our actual experience as having an intuitive completeness which is beyond all analysis, while reflective thought on the other hand is conceived as having a purely analytic and discursive operation, which can grasp only the severed fragments of the given reality and connect them externally to each other, but which can never restore the organic whole again. Here, too, we seem by another way to be landed in the same conclusion, viz., that we are perpetually poised between an ideal which we cannot verify, but which yet is held to be our only vision of reality, and a definite result of knowledge, which only gives us what is abstract and phenomenal. Yet it is difficult to understand how such an organic idea of the universe can exist except for the thinking intelligence, and how the thought that grasps it can be separated from the discursive thought by which the different elements of reality are brought into relation. How, indeed, can there be any thought which is not both discursive and intuitive at once, any thought which connects the parts without resting upon the unity of the whole to which they belong?