Let this trilogy of existence, attribute and relation, be clearly before the mind, and the position that the positive philosophy bears to all others becomes at once luminous enough. There is no existence apart from attributes, no attributes but through relations, no relations but to other existences. To exemplify: a stone is heavy, hard, colored, perhaps bitter to the taste. Now, says the idealist, this weight, this hardness, this color, this bitterness, these are not the stone, they are merely its properties or attributes, and the stone itself is some substance behind them all, to which they adhere and which we cannot detect with our senses; further, he might add, if a moderate in his school, these attributes are independently existent, the bitterness is there when we are not tasting it, and the attribute of color, though there be no light. All this the materialist denies. To him, the attributes and nothing else constitute the stone, and these attributes have no existence apart from their relations to other objects. The bitterness exists only in relation to the organs of taste, and the color to the organs of sight, and the weight to other bodies of matter. Nothing, in short, can be said to exist to us that is not cognizable by our senses. But, objects some one, there may be an existence which is not to us, which is as much beyond our ken as color is beyond the conception of the born blind. The expression was used advisedly: no such existence can become the subject of rational language. “Does not all knowledge predicate a knower, consequently a relation of the subject to the the observer? Such a relation is an attribute. Without it, knowledge is inconceivable. Neither God nor man can raise himself above the knowledge furnished by these relations to his organs of apprehension.”
A disagreeable sequence to this logic will not fail to occur to every one. If all knowledge comes from the organs of sense, then differently formed organs must furnish very different and contradictory knowledge, and one is as likely to be correct as another. The radiate animal, who sees the world through a cornea alone, must have quite another notion of light, color, and relative size, from the spider whose eye is provided with lenses and a vitreous humor. Consonantly with the theory, each of these probably opposing views is equally true. This ugly dilemma is foreseen by our author, for he grants that “the knowledge of the insect, its knowledge of the action of the outer world, is altogether a different one from that of man,” but he avoids the ultimate result of this reasoning.
To sum up the views of this school: matter is eternal, force is eternal, but each is impossible without the other; what bears any relation to our senses we either know or can know; what does not, it is absurd to discuss; the highest thought is but the physical elaboration of sensations, or, to use the expression of Carl Vogt, “thought is a secretion of the brain as urine is of the kidneys. Without phosphorus there is no thought.” “And so,” concludes Moleschott, “only when thought is based on fact, only when the reason is granted no sphere of action but the historical which arises from observation, when the perception is at the same time thought, and the understanding sees with consciousness, does the contradiction between Philosophy and Science disappear.”
This, then, is the last word of materialism, this the solution it now offers us of the great problem of Life. We enter no further into its views, for all collateral questions concerning the origin of the ideas of the true, the good and the beautiful, the vital force, and the spiritual life, depend directly on the question we have above mentioned. Let the reader turn back precisely a century to the Système de la Nature, so long a boasted bulwark of the rationalistic school, and judge for himself what advance, if any, materialism has made in fortifying this, the most vital point of her structure. Let him ask himself anew whether the criticism of Hume on the law of cause and effect can in any way be met except after the example of Kant, by the assumption of the absolute idea, and we have little doubt what conclusion he will arrive at in reference to that system which, while it boasts to offer the only method of discovering truth, starts with the flat denial of all truth other than relative.
LETTERS ON FAUST.
By H. C. Brockmeyer.
I.
Dear H.—Yours of a recent date, requesting an epistolary criticism of “Goethe’s Faust,” has come to hand, and I hasten to assure you of a compliance of some sort. I say a compliance of some sort, for I cannot promise you a criticism. This, it seems to me, would be both too little and too much; too little if understood in the ordinary sense, as meaning a mere statement of the relation existing between the work and myself; too much if interpreted as pledging an expression of a work of the creative imagination, as a totality, in the terms of the understanding, and submitting the result to the canons of art.
The former procedure, usually called criticism, reduced to its simplest forms, amounts to this: that I, the critic, report to you, that I was amused or bored, flattered or satirized, elevated or degraded, humanized or brutalized, enlightened or mystified, pleased or displeased, by the work under consideration; and—since it depends quite as much upon my own humor, native ability, and culture acquired, which set of adjectives I may be able to report, as it does upon the work—I cannot perceive what earthly profit such a labor could be to you. For that which is clear to you may be dark to me; hence, if I report that a given work is a “perfect riddle to me,” you will only smile at my simplicity. Again, that which amuses me may bore you, for I notice that even at the theatre, some will yawn with ennui while others thrill with delight, and applaud the play. Now, if each of these should tell you how he liked the performance, the one would say “excellent,” and the other “miserable,” and you be none the wiser. To expect, therefore, that I intend to enter upon a labor of this kind, is to expect too little.
Besides, such an undertaking seems to me not without its peculiar danger; for it may happen that the work measures or criticises the critic, instead of the latter the former. If, for example, I should tell you that the integral and differential calculus is all fog to me—mystifies me completely—you would conclude my knowledge of mathematics to be rather imperfect, and thus use my own report of that work as a sounding-lead to ascertain the depth of my attainment. Nay, you might even go further, and regard the work as a kind of Doomsday Book, on the title page of which I had “written myself down an ass.” Now, as I am not ambitious of a memorial of this kind, especially when there is no probability that the pages in contemplation—Goethe’s Faust—will perish any sooner than the veritable Doomsday Book itself, I request you, as a special favor, not to understand of me that I propose engaging in any undertaking of this sort.[[16]]
Nor are you to expect an inquiry into the quantity or quality of the author’s food, drink or raiment. For the present infantile state of analytic science refuses all aid in tracing such primary elements, so to speak, in the composition of the poem before us; and hence such an investigation would lead, at best, to very secondary and remote conclusions. Nor shall we be permitted to explore the likes and dislikes of the poet, in that fine volume of scandal, for the kindred reason that neither crucible, reagent nor retort are at hand which can be of the remotest service.