What has been said of sympathy and imagination, as the allies and ministers of reason, might be extended and applied to humour, to wit, to irony. These also it may be said—and with the same qualifications—are essential to a philosopher in the highest sense. The humour, viz., which strides over the barriers set up by institution and convention between the high and the humble, and sees man's superficial distinctions overpowered by a half-grim, half-jubilant Ananke,—which notes how human proposal is overcome, not without grace, by divine and natural disposal, how the deep inner identity in all estates breaks triumphantly through the fences of custom and deliberate intention. The wit, which upsets the hardened fixity of classes and groups, flits from one to another, shows glimpses of affinity between remote provinces of idea, and all this, without laboured and artificial search for analogies, though to the slower-following practical mind, hampered by its solid limits, these leaps from province to province seem paradoxical and whimsical. The irony, which notes the tragicomedy of life under its apparent regularity of prose,—which detects the vanity of all efforts to check the flux of vitality and make the volatile permanent; which contrasts the apparent with the real, the obviously and officiously meant with the truly desired and willed, and shows how diplomatically-close design is dissipated in a jest, or the soul bent on many years of enjoyment is plunged into torment. Thus, in a way, imagination, sympathy, wit, humour, irony and paradox are elements that go to the making of a philosopher: but in the serenity of reasoned wisdom they lose their frolicsome and fantastic mood, and fill their minor place with sober cheer. Wedded to the lord of wisdom, the Muse of poesy and wit loses her sprightly laugh and her dancing step, becoming a subdued, yet gracious matron, who, with her offspring, sheds gleams of brightness and warmth and colour in the somewhat austere household. Yet still the free maiden of poesy, in the open fields where the shadow of reflective thought has not yet fallen, has the greater charm; and a certain jealousy not unfrequently reigns between the married sister and the virgin yet untamed.
But though poetry and the allied arts of words were very helpful to philosophy—witness the services which, though in widely different ways, Goethe and Schiller rendered to the higher thinking of Germany—even more stimulative and fruitful was the research into nature and history. Nature and history: but they lie closer together than the conjunction suggests. It is true that in recent times we have been forcibly taught to separate civil from natural history, if we have not even been further taught that the latter is an improper application of the term. But when Aristotle said that 'Poetry is more philosophical than History' he was probably not restricting his remark to the story of nations and states; even as when Bacon set history as the field of memory beside the fields of imagination and reasoning, he was not solely referring to the records of the human past. The distinction between natural and civil history is no doubt for practical education a distinction of supreme importance. But it is so, because in this scholastic phase the conception of both, under these comprehensive names, was superficial and abstract. Natural history meant only the classificatory description of animals, plants, and minerals: civil history the tale composed to string together the succession of human actions on the public and national field of life.
We have seen in an earlier chapter the advances which Lessing, Kant, and above all Herder, made in this direction[6]. Emphasising in their several ways the great dictum of Spinoza that human passions, and the whole scheme of human life, are res naturales, quae communes naturae leges sequuntur, they gave to history a higher, more philosophical, more scientific scope than what the name used to connote. Neither in Spinoza himself, nor in these his followers, did this insistence on the unity of nature at all lead them to neglect the difference—almost equivalent, it may be said, in the end to an Imperium in imperio—by which rational man marks himself off to a special kindred with the divine[7]. We have seen too what Schelling did to show that history, if in one aspect it be the product of free human volitions, is, in another and as he thought a superior aspect, the realm subject to a divine or natural necessity. The whole tendency of this epoch of thought—the tendency which entitles it above all to the name of speculative—is its impulse to over-ride this distinction between Nature and History; to over-ride it, however, not in the sense of simply ignoring or denying it, but of carrying it up into a unity which would do justice to both, without exclusively favouring either, and hardly without clipping both of any extravagant claims. The distinction remains,—no longer an abrupt division, but now tempered and mellowed by the presence of a paramount unity. Nature now has a real history: no longer a mere factitious aggregate of classified facts, it is the phenomenon of a 'latent process,' due to a 'latent schematism,' and a 'form' or principle of organisation. Classification does not cease: but it ceases to be an end in itself, and becomes only subordinate or auxiliary to a higher scientific end. The main theme is to construe the complete cycle of life-change and the complete organisation of life-state from the evidence pieced out and put together from the various orders, classes, and species of living creatures. And on the other side the mere tale or narrative of history, with its gossip of personalities, and its accidents of war and intrigue, tends to become insignificant in the presence of the great popular life, in its deep and subtle connexion with agencies of nature hitherto unsurmised, in its dependence upon necessities and uniformities which envelope or rather permeate and constitute the human will. It is not indeed that the force of great personalities has come to be treated as a quantity we may neglect. The force of the great leader, of the genius, of the hero, is not less admirable to the wise philosophical historian to-day than it ever was to his story-telling predecessor. But he flatters himself that he understands better, and can better take account of, the conditions which make the genius and the hero possible. Achilles still counts for more than a thousand common soldiers, and Homer himself is not merely the composite image by which a long tradition has fused into a dim pictorial unity the countless bards who sang for ages on the isles of Greece and the coasts of Ionia. Yet we feel sure that Achilles did what he did, because of the race he sprang from, the inspiration he felt around him, the companionship in body and spirit of his peers. We feel that the hero derives his strength from earth and air, from the spiritual and material substance in which he draws his breath. True, we cannot explain him, as if he and his heroisms were a mere product of mathematical and mechanical forces. But where we once recognise that behind the single visible deed and agent there is a spiritual nature—an underlying agency—which, unperceived, keeps the hearth-fire of public life burning in the celestial temple of Vesta, we can at least see that though genius is a marvel and a mystery, yet it is according to law, and no mere will-o'-the-wisp.
But when we say that the actions and sayings even of the foremost individuals are to be comprehended only in the light of universal forces and laws, there is an error which is only too ready to substitute itself for the truth. It soon appears for example that, among the general causes which control the development of civilisation and the acts of individuals, the economical condition is of great and prominent effect. And, above all, it is easily measurable, and subject to palpable standards (such as statistics of exports and imports, &c.). It was natural therefore that a school of historico-social philosophers should arise who maintained that the economical state of a given society was the fundamental principle or form of its life, of which all other phases of its civilisation, religious, aesthetic, &c., were only variable dependent functions. This view, which comes out in the socialist theory of Marx, is clearly the exaggeration or abstract statement of a partial truth into a pseudo-complete theory. The truth is one which found expression as early as Plato. It is this: that in the economical system of a society we find the first and somewhat external or mechanical suggestion of the organism to which the state is yet to grow. In the economic law of reciprocity there is a 'certain faint image' of the principle of social organisation or political life. But when we go beyond, and interpret this first phase to mean the original foundation, we are stating a figment which has a plausibility only when by the economic state we mean a great deal more than abstractly economic facts include. And this again arises because it is really impossible to carry out thoroughly the abstraction of one aspect of social life from the others. There are no purely economic facts which are independent of other social influences,—of ideals, e. g. moral or aesthetic,—ideals which nobody would call economic, though they never quite part company from economical conditions.
So again there is occasionally a tendency to magnify the influence of what in the narrowest sense may be termed political systems. Forms of government, and titles of sovereignty are regarded as forces to which individuals—even the highest—must bow. But here again the exaggeration of a principle need not tempt us to rush with Tom Paine into the opposite extravagance that government and state-power are superfluities, or quasi-ornamental additions to a social fabric, which can do without them and, like other beasts of low organisation, can, when shorn of them, reproduce them with ease. And thus though we may dissent from the view that laws and constitutions are omnipotent, we may admit that in them the central unity and controlling principle of social life finds its dominant expression in great outlines. We shall not agree with him who said 'Let who will make the laws of a nation if I may make its ballads': because we know that the nation will in the end have the chief voice in determining what are to be its ballads no less than its laws. We shall not quite accept the dictum that the intellectual class which formulates ideas and sets up programmes of ideals gives the real lead to the process of civilisation; for we shall remember that real ideas are not formed by individuals, but are the slow work of concrete experience in the so-called inorganic masses, finding at length utterance through the lips of those appointed to that end by the natural and divine order. Yet we shall, on the other hand, see that the high things of the world are dependent on the lowly: that a song-maker is sometimes not less potent than a legislature: that pecuniary conditions are effective in the sanctuaries of religion and the high places of art: and that the noblest ideas of great thinkers draw their strength and life through roots that run unseen through very humble ground.
La Raison, says Leibniz, est l'enchainement des vérités.[8] Truth linked into truth, and so made truer: truth, with which all things harmonise and nothing cries dissent: truth, which is neither the prerogative of the mere demos, nor of the intellectual aristocracy, but of that rarer unity which, when they can exercise several and mutually-tendered self-abnegation, is the real spirit of both: truth, thus conceived, is that king of life, that sun of Reason which lighteth every man. Truth—to use again the language of Leibniz,—which is not merely the aggregate of monads,—but the monad of monads, their mutual penetration and corrective completion, in that Idea-reality where they retain their individuality, but retain it in the fullness and fruition of the absolute which each essentially or implicitly is. This kingdom of suffering and yet triumphant truth is the true age of Reason—not outwardly-critical, individualistically-reforming, mere intellectual and abstract intelligence,—but intelligence, charged with emotion, full of reverence, reverent above all to the majesty of that divinity which, much disguised, and weather-beaten, like Glaucus of the sea, resides in common and natural humanity. This is the Reason of German idealism at the commencement of the century. To the clear-cut dogmas of the abstract intellect it savours of mysticism. If it is friendly to distinctions and constantly makes them, it is the pronounced enemy of hard and fast separations. Begin where you like, the reason of things, if you allow it to work, carries you round till you also see identity where you only saw difference, or effects where you only looked for causes. You begin, as the inductive logician, with the belief that the process is from the known to the unknown. You start with your basis of fact, as you called it. The nemesis of things forces you to admit that your facts were partly fictions which waited for the unknown to give them a truer and fuller reality. You talk at first of induction, as if it were a single and simple process, which out of facts builds up generalities and uniformities. You learn as you go on that the only induction that operates, except in cases which have been artificially simplified by supposing half the task done before you apply your experimental methods, is an induction of which the major part is deductive, and where your conclusion will be recurrently made your premiss. Your induction only works on the basis of a hypothesis, and must itself be linked in the 'concatenation of truths,'—a concatenation which is also a criticism and a correction.
[1] 'We hold,' says the American Declaration of Independence (1776), 'these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' &c.
[2] Louis Blanc, History of the Revolution, vol. i.
[3] Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I. chaps. 2 and 3; and elsewhere. Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille, Book I. § 6.