Meantime, in view of all these considerations, we cannot avoid making the reflection that it is surely something of an anomaly in philosophy that a thinker’s “study” doubts about his actions and about some of the main instinctive beliefs of mankind (in which he himself shares) should have come to be regarded—as they have been by Rationalism—as considerations of a greater importance than the actions, and the beliefs, and the realities, of which they are the expression. Far be it from the writer to suggest that the suspension of judgment and the refraining from activity,[188] in the absence of adequate reason and motive, are not, and have not been of the greatest value to mankind in the matter of the development of the higher faculties and the higher ideals of the mind. There may well be, however, for Pragmatism, or for any philosophy that can work it out satisfactorily, in the free, creative, activity of man, in the duty that lies upon us all of carrying on our lives to the highest expression, a reason and a truth that must be estimated at their logical worth along with the many other reasons and truths of which we are pleased to think as the truth of things.
Short, however, of a more genuine attempt on the part of Pragmatism than anything it has as yet given us in this connexion to justify this higher reason and truth that are embodied in our consciousness of ourselves as persons, as rational agents, all its mere “practicalism” and all its “instrumentalism” are but the workaday and the utilitarian philosophy of which we have already complained in its earlier and cruder professions.[189]
After some attention, then, to the matter of the outstanding critical defects of Pragmatism, in its preliminary and cruder forms, we shall again return to our topic of the relatively new subject-matter it has been endeavouring to place before philosophy in its insistence upon the importance of action, and upon the need of a “dynamic,” instead of an intellectualistic and “spectator-like” theory of human personality.
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IV
PHILOSOPHY AND THE ACTIVITY-EXPERIENCE
[In an article upon the above title in the International Journal of Ethics, p. 1898, I attempted to deal with some aspects of the problem that I have just raised in the preceding chapter. I venture to append here some of the statements that I made then upon the importance of action and the “activity-experience” to the philosophy of to-day. I am inclined to regard them (although I have not looked at them until the present moment of passing this book through the press) as a kind of anticipation and confirmation of many of my present pages. Part of my excuse, however, for inserting them here is a hope that these references and suggestions may possibly be of service to the general reader. The extracts follow as they were printed.]
I. It requires no very profound acquaintance with the trend of the literature of general and specialized philosophy of the last twenty-five years to detect a decidedly practical turn in the recent speculative tendencies of philosophy and philosophers. The older conception of philosophy or metaphysics as an attempt to state (more or less systematically) the value of the world for thought is being slowly modified, if not altogether disappearing, into the attempt to explain or to grasp the significance of the world from the stand-point of the moral and social activity of man. The philosophical student must be to some extent conscious of the difference in respect of both tone and subject-matter between such books as Stirling’s Secret of Hegel, E. Caird’s Critical Philosophy of Kant (the first editions of both works), Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics, and the most recent essays and books of Professors A. Seth[190] and James[191] and Ward[192] and Sidgwick[193] and Baldwin,[194] and of Mr. Bosanquet[195] and the late Mr. Nettleship,[196] and between—to turn to Germany—the writings of Erdmann and Kuno Fischer and Zeller and F. A. Lange, and those of Gizycki, Paulsen, Windelband, Eucken, Hartmann, Deussen, Simmel, and—in France—between the writings of Renouvier and Pillon and Ravaisson, the “Neo-Kantianism” of the Critique Philosophique (1872–1877), and those of Fouillée, Weber (of Strassburg), Séailles, Dunan, and others, and of general writers like de Vogüé, Desjardins, and Brunetière, and of social philosophers like Bouglé, Tarde, Izoulet, and so on. The change of venue in these writers alone, not to speak of the change of the interest of the educated world from such books as Huxley’s Hume and Renan’s L’Avenir de la Science and Du Bois Reymond’s Die Sieben Welträthsel, and Tyndall’s Belfast Address, to the writings of Herbert Spencer (the Sociology and the general essays on social evolution), Kidd, Nordau, Nietzsche, Mr. Crozier (his important History of Civilization), and Demolins,[197] and the predominance of investigations into general biology and comparative psychology and sociology over merely logical and conceptual philosophy seem to afford us some warrant for trying to think of what might be called a newer or ethical idealism, an idealism of the will, an idealism of life, in contradistinction to the older or intellectual (epistemological, Neo-Kantian) idealism, the idealism of the intellect. Professor A. Seth,[198] in his recent volume on Man’s Place in the Cosmos, suggests that Mr. Bradley’s treatise on Appearance and Reality has closed the period of the absorption or assimilation of Kanto-Hegelian principles by the English mind. And there is ample evidence in contemporary philosophical literature to show that even the very men who have, with the help of Stirling and Green and Caird and Bradley and Wallace, “absorbed and assimilated” the principles of critical idealism are now bent upon applying these principles to the solution of concrete problems of art and life and conduct. Two things alone would constitute a difference between the philosophy of the last few years and that of the preceding generation: An attempt (strongly[199] accentuated at the present moment) to include elements of feeling and will in our final consciousness of reality, and a tendency (inevitable since Comte and Hegel’s Philosophy of History) to extend the philosophical synthesis of the merely “external,” or physical, universe so as to make it include the world of man’s action and the world that is now glibly called the “social organism.”[200] A good deal of the epistemological and metaphysical philosophy of this century has been merely cosmological, and at best psychological and individualistic. The philosophy of the present is, necessarily, to a large extent, sociological and collectivistic and historical. Renan once prophesied that this would be so. And many other men perceived the same fact and acted upon their perception of it—Goethe and Victor Hugo and Carlyle, for example.
To be sure, any attempt to draw lines of novel and absolute separation between writers of to-day and their immediate predecessors would be absurd and impossible, just as would be the attempt to force men who are still living and thinking and developing, into Procrustean beds of system and nomenclature. The history of the philosophy of the last half of this century constitutes a development as continuous and as logical as the philosophy of any similar period of years wherein men have thought persistently and truly upon the problems of life and mind. There were in the ’sixties men like Ulrici and Lotze (Renouvier, too, to some extent) who divined the limitations of a merely intellectual philosophy, and who saw clearly that the only way to effect a reconciliation between philosophy and science would be to apply philosophy itself to the problems of the life and thought of the time, just as we find, in 1893, Dr. Edward Caird writing, in his Essays on Literature and Philosophy, that “philosophy, in face of the increasing complexity of modern life, has a harder task laid upon it than ever was laid upon it before. It must emerge from the region of abstract principles and show itself able to deal with the manifold results of empirical science, giving to each of them its proper place and value.” Professor Campbell Fraser, while welcoming and sympathetically referring to (in his books upon Berkeley and Locke) the elements of positive value in English and German idealism, has throughout his life contended for the idea (expressed with greatest definiteness in his Gifford Lectures on The Philosophy of Theism) that “in man, as a self-conscious and self-determining agent,” is to be found the “best key we possess to the solution of the ultimate problem of the universe”; while Professor Sidgwick, by virtue of his captivating and ingenious pertinacity in confining philosophical speculation to the lines of the traditional English empiricism, and in keeping it free from the ensnaring subtleties of system and methodology, has exercised a healthful and corrective influence against the extremes alike of transcendentalism and naturalism. And it would be rash to maintain that all the younger men in philosophy show an intention to act upon the idea (expressed by Wundt, for instance, in his Ethik) that a metaphysic should build upon the facts of the moral life of man; although we find a “Neo-Hegelian” like Professor Mackenzie[201] saying that “even the wealth of our inner life depends rather on the width of our objective interests than on the intensity of our self-contemplation”; and an expounder of the ethics of dialectic evolution like Professor Muirhead quoting[202] with approval the thought expressed by George Eliot in the words, “The great world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the struggle of the affections seeking a justification for love and hope”; and a careful psychologist like Mr. Stout[203] deliberately penning the words,[204] “Our existence as conscious beings is essentially an activity, and activity is a process which, by its very nature, is directed towards an end, and can neither exist nor be conceived apart from this end.” There are, doubtless, many philosophers of to-day who are convinced that philosophy is purely an intellectual matter, and can never be anything else than an attempt to analyze the world for thought—an attempt to state its value in the terms of thought. Against all these and many similar considerations it would be idle to set up a hard and fast codification or characterization of the work of the philosophy or philosophers of to-day. Still, the world will accord the name of philosopher to any man—Renan, for example, or Spencer or Huxley or Nordau or Nietzsche—who comes before it with views upon the universe and humanity that may, for any conceivable reason, be regarded as fundamental. And on this showing of things, as well as from many indications in the work of those who are philosophers by profession, it may be said that the predominating note of the newer philosophy is its openness to the facts of the volitional and emotional and moral and social aspects of man’s life, as things that take us further along the path of truth than the mere categories of thought and their manipulation by metaphysic and epistemology.
II. The Newer Idealism does not dream of questioning the positive work of the Kantian and Neo-Kantian and Neo-Hegelian idealists. It knows only too well that even scientific men like Helmholtz and Du Bois Reymond, that “positive” philosophers like Riehl and Laas and Feuerbach and others have, through the influence of the Kantian philosophy, learned and accepted the fact of there being “ideal” or psychical or “mind-supplied” factors in so-called external reality. There are among the educated men of to-day very few Dr. Johnsons who ridicule the psycho-physical, or the metaphysical, analysis of external reality, who believe in a crass and crude and self-sufficient “matter” utterly devoid of psychical attributes or characteristics. True, Herbert Spencer has written words to the effect that “If the Idealist (Berkeley) is right, then the doctrine of Evolution is a dream”; but then everything in Spencer’s philosophy about an “actuality lying behind appearances” and about our being compelled “to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of some Power by which we are acted upon,” is against the possibility of our believing that, according to that philosophy, an unconscious and non-spiritual “matter” could evolve itself into conscious life and moral experience. The philosophers of to-day have indeed rejoiced to see Kant’s lesson popularized by such various phases and movements of human thought as psychophysical research, art and æsthetic theory, the interest in Buddhism (with its idealistic theory of the knowledge of the senses), and the speculative biology of Weismann and others. That people generally should see that matter is, for many reasons, something more than mere matter, is to the student of Kant a piece of fulfilled prophecy. And by a plea for a return to reality and life and sociability from conceptualism and criticism and speculative individualism no philosophical scholar for one moment contemplates, as even conceivable, an overlooking of the idealistic interpretation of the data of the senses supplied by Locke and Berkeley and Hume, or of the idealistic interpretation of the data of science and understanding supplied by Kant’s “Copernican” discovery. Any real view of the universe must now presuppose the melting down of crass external reality into the phenomena of sense and experience and the transformation of inorganic and organic nature into so many planes or grades of being expressive of the different forms (gravitation, cohesion, vital force, psychic force) in which cosmic energy manifests itself.
Equally little does the Newer Idealism question the legitimacy or the actual positive service of the “dialectic” of Hegel (as Archimedean a leverage to humanity as was the “concept” of Socrates or the “apperception” of Kant) that has shown the world to be a system in which everything is related to everything else, and shown, too, that all ways of looking at reality that stop short of the truths of personality and moral relationship are untrue and inadequate. To use the words of Professor Howison, of California, in the preface to the first edition of Professor Watson’s[205] latest volume (a book that connects the idealism of Glasgow and Oxford with the convictions of the youth of the “Pacific Coast”), the “dominant tone” of the militant and representative philosophy of to-day, is “affirmative and idealistic. The decided majority ... are animated by the conviction that human thought is able to solve the riddle of life positively; to solve it in accord with the ideal hopes and interests of human nature.”