[2] Hegel's Briefe, ii. 349.

[3] J. Volkelt, Vorträge zur Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart (München 1892): F. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie (Berlin 1892).

[4] E. v. Hartmann, Kritische Wanderungen, p. 74.


CHAPTER III.

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY AND HEGEL.

Although we need not take too seriously Hegel's remark (vol. ii. p. 13) on the English conception of philosophy, it may be admitted that, by the dominant school of English thought, philosophy, taken in the wide sense it has predominantly born abroad, was, not so very long ago, all but entirely ignored. Causes of various kinds had turned the energy of the English mind into other directions, not less essential to the common welfare. Practical needs and an established social system helped—to bind down studies to definite and particular objects, and to exclude what seemed vague and general investigations with no immediate bearing on the business of life. Hence philosophy in England could hardly exist except when it was reduced to the level of a special branch of science, or when it could be used as a receptacle for the principles and methods common to all the sciences. The general term was often used to denote the wisdom of this world, or the practical exhibition of self-control in life and action. For those researches, which are directed to the objects once considered proper to philosophy, the more definite and characteristic term came to be Mental and Moral Science.

The old name was in certain circles restricted to denote the vague and irregular speculations of those thinkers, who either lived before the rise of exact science, or who acted in defiance of its precepts and its example. One large and influential class of English thinkers inclined to sweep philosophy altogether away, as equivalent to metaphysics and obsolete forms of error; and upon the empty site thus obtained they sought to construct a psychological theory of mind, or they tried to arrange and codify those general remarks upon the general procedure of the sciences which are known under the name of Inductive Logic. A smaller, but not less vigorous, school of philosophy looked upon their business as an extension and rounding off of science into a complete unification of knowledge. The first is illustrated by the names of J. S. Mill and Mr. Bain: the second is the doctrine of Mr. Herbert Spencer.

The encyclopaedic aggregate of biological, psychological, ethical and social investigation which Mr. Spencer pursues, under the general guidance of the formula of evolution by differentiation and integration, still proceeds on its course: but though its popularity—as such popularity goes—is vast and more than national, it does not and probably cannot find many imitators. Very differently stand matters with the movement in psychology and logic. Here the initiative has led to divergent and unexpected developments. Psychology, which at first was partly an ampler and a more progressive logic, a theory of the origin and nature of knowledge, partly a propaedeutic to the more technical logic and ethics, and pursued in a loosely introspective way, has gravitated more and more towards its experimental and physiological side, with occasional velleities to assume the abstractly-mathematical character of a psycho-physical science. Logic, on the other hand, has also changed its scope. Not content to be a mere tool of the sciences or a mere criterion for the estimation of evidence, it has in one direction grown into a systematic effort to become an epistemology—a system of the first principles of knowledge and reality—a metaphysic of science; and in another it has sought to realise the meaning of those old forms of inference which the logicians of half a century ago were inclined to pooh-pooh as obsolete. Most remarkable—and most novel of all—is the vast increase of interest and research in the problems of ethics and v of what is called the philosophy of religion—subjects which at that date were literally burning questions, apt to scorch the fingers of those who touched them. In all of this, but especially marked in some leading thinkers, the ruling feature is the critical—the sceptical, i. e. the eager, watchful, but self-restrained—attitude towards its themes. Ever driving on to find a deeper unity than shows on the surface, and to get at principles, the modern thinker—and in this we see the permanent and almost overwhelming influence of Kant upon him—recoils from the dogmatism of system, at the very moment it seems to be within his grasp.