METHODS, ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL.
When modern philosophy took its first steps, it was disdainful and depreciatory to the past, both Medieval and Old-Greek. Bacon and Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza,—be their other differences what they may—all echo the same disparagement. Like Wordsworth's Rob Roy, they cry—
'What need of books?
Burn all the statutes and their shelves.
We'll show that we can help to frame
A world of other stuff.'
On this iconoclastic age supervenes the attempt of Leibniz to combine in one all that was good in the new corpuscular philosophy with all that was precious in the old Platonic idealism as expanded by Aristotle. So, at the later philosophic crisis towards the close of the eighteenth century, the somewhat destructive and revolutionary tendencies of Kant and Fichte lead up by a natural revulsion and complement to the reconstructive systems of Schelling and Hegel. In them the conservative instinct comes to supplement the defects of the radical go-ahead. Instead of tossing the past away to the winds, and crying out Écrasez l'infâme,—instead of throwing medievalism behind, breaking all the restrictions on individual liberty which feudal Europe had created to secure and safeguard the communities that housed its early freedom, the new spirit of the time saw that the problems of modern life were not solved by merely throwing overboard as encumbrances and refuse all checks and forms. On the contrary, the reflective mind saw that forms and checks so-called there must be, and that the art of statesmanship, though it could not entirely consist in copying the old, had still to work in some way after the analogy of the old methods: i. e. to do under new circumstances what would solve the same requisites, as the old constitution had done for its time. The change is well illustrated by the attitude towards state organisation shown by William von Humboldt at different epochs of his life.
People talk glibly of the Historical Method, and what it has done for us. To hear what is sometimes said it might be supposed that this was the method that had been always habitual in history, but which in these latter days had been applied to other topics, and had proved its value on the new ground by achieving results that had hitherto been mere desiderata. This however is pretty nearly to reverse the true state of the case. It was long till history came to have any method worthy of the name. In most of those who figure as great historians the object had been to tell a good tale, to keep the thread of events distinct, to subordinate incidents to the main issue, to portray personal and public character and its influence on events. History was practised—we may even say—more as an art than as a science. If it dealt with causes, it dealt with individual, concrete, living causes, not with cold, dead abstractions of forces, laws, or tendencies. If it did not altogether ignore the suggestions of a quest for principles to be found in Thucydides and Polybius, it was much more enamoured of the art of Livy and Tacitus, or even of the naïveté of Herodotus. Of such history who has not felt the power; who has not admired the genius that reconstructs the men and circumstances of the past, and makes them live over again their deeds, and again in the end yield the palm to inevitable fate! But it was not from such history that the historical method arose.
The historical method was the product of the new conception of nature and mind in their mutual relations which has been already noted. To estimate the labours of thinkers towards this view of history would be an interesting but complex inquiry. Leibniz in particular by his principles of development, of continuity, of general analogy, should have made two things for ever clear. And these two results that might have been supposed secure were, first, that the present existence (which at first seems to be alone real) is only a narrow transition line between a past and a future,—a line of points intersecting a complex movement or development; and secondly, that all development is of something which is essentially infinite, which requires nothing external, no fillip from circumstances or from an external providence, to set it going, but is in itself a synthesis of active and passive force in a something at least analogous to an Ego. The first principle is embalmed in Leibniz's maxim: 'The present is laden with the past, and full of the future': and the second, in the maxim 'the Monads have no doors or windows.' In virtue of the first, the existent (of this instant) is only a stage or grade, rooted in what has been, and insignificant unless in reference to what is to come. In virtue of the second, all development is from within, and presupposes therefore that the developing individual includes within it a great deal which a cursory view would at first sight assume to be without it, and only accidentally in contact with it. It might indeed be well to add a third principle—what Leibniz has sometimes called the Law of Continuity—the law that, as he says, distinct and noticeable perceptions are the resultants of an infinite number of insensible or little perceptions. But continuity proper is not this: continuity proper or identity is a pure idea. The visible or sensible discontinuity reposes on, and is to be explained by, an invisible or ideal continuity. Each body, for instance, in nature, appearing to have a separate existence of its own, is only a stage isolated or insulated in a continuing process: and that process, binding, as it does, past to future, is the process of a Mind. Omne Corpus, wrote Leibniz in 1671, est mens momentanea seu carens recordatione. Every physical and material object is an intelligence, but an intelligence which neither looks before nor after, but is limited for itself to the mere instant: an intelligence which has no history. Yet to the intelligent observer it has a past,—it has a memory, it bears in it the traces of its antecedent. Yet to read that book of memory, to decipher the 'insensible perceptions' which are buried beneath the momentary present, beneath its unspiritual reality, and to knit present with past and future, is the work of an intelligence, in and to whom the material discloses its store of meaning, or in whom it is re-spiritualised. In other words, the presupposition of this historical method is the ideal continuity of being, transcending and absorbing the differences of time.
But the teaching of Leibniz—even more perhaps than that of Spinoza—fell on an evil age: if it was not actually choked with thorns, it found a soil with little depth, and its brief verdure was soon followed by a fearful withering. Anxious as Leibniz was to commend his theories to all men,—and not least perhaps to win the suffrages of some illustrious and intelligent women—he was led to present them under forms and phrases which were to each correspondent specially familiar. And the natural consequence was not absent. The forms of accommodation were what told: they stuck, and the truth they were meant to convey slipped away: the Leibnitian theory was re-interpreted into the doctrines it had been meant to supersede. As with Spinoza, so with Leibniz, a keen apprehension of his meaning came first to the thinkers on the borderland of literature and philosophy, to Lessing and Herder, and found an appreciative welcome in the more academic systems first from Schelling and Hegel. Above all, this theory of 'petites perceptions' so closely bound up (as was to be expected) with his mathematical discoveries in the Calculus, is what marks him as having a finer ear for the secret harmonies and principles of existence than the coarser organs of popular philosophy could catch up or appreciate.
'In order,' says Leibniz, 'to get a clearer idea of the little perceptions which we cannot distinguish in the crowd, I am accustomed to employ the example of the roar or noise of the sea which strikes us upon the shore. To hear this sound, as we do hear it, we must hear the parts which compose this total, i. e. the sounds of each wave, though each of these little sounds only makes itself perceptible in the confused assemblage of all the others together, (that is to say, in that same roar,) and would not be noticed if this wave which causes it were alone. For we must be a little affected by the movement of that wave, and we must have some perception of each of these sounds, however small they may be; otherwise we should never have the perception of a hundred thousand waves, since a hundred thousand zeros would never make anything.... These little perceptions are of greater efficiency by their consequences than we suppose. It is they which form that Je ne sais quoi, those tastes, those images of sensible qualities, clear in the assemblage, but confused in the parts; those impressions made upon us by surrounding bodies which envelop the infinite, that nexus which each being has with all the rest of the universe. It may even be said that in virtue of these little perceptions the present is big with the future and laden with the past, that everything conspires together: and that in the least of substances, eyes as piercing as those of God could read the whole sequel of the things of the universe.
'These insensible perceptions, further, mark and constitute the same individual, who is characterised by the traces or expressions which they preserve of the preceding states of that individual, thus forming the connexion with his present state. These may be known by a superior spirit, though that individual himself should not feel them, i. e. though express memory should no longer be there. But these perceptions also supply the means of rediscovering that memory, at need, by periodic developments, which may one day happen.... It is also by these insensible perceptions that I explain that admirable pre-established harmony of mind and body, and even of all monads or simple substances,—which takes the place of the impossible influence of one upon another.... After this, I should add but little if I said that it is these small perceptions which determine us in many conjunctures without our thinking of it, and which deceive the vulgar by the appearance of an indifference of equilibrium, as if we were entirely indifferent whether we turned, e. g., to right or to left.
'I have remarked also that in virtue of insensible variations two individual things could never be perfectly alike, and that they ought always to differ more than numero. And with this we have done once for all with the empty tablets of the mind, a soul without thought, a substance without action, the void of space, the atoms, and even parcels not actually divided in matter; we have done with pure repose, entire uniformity in a portion of time, of place or of matter,... and a thousand other fictions of philosophers which come from their incomplete notions, fictions which the nature of things does not suffer, and which our ignorance and the little attention we have for the insensible lets pass, but which could never be rendered tolerable, unless we confine them to abstractions of the mind which protests that it does not deny what it puts aside and considers out of place in any present consideration. Otherwise, if we took it quite in earnest, to mean that things which we do not perceive do not exist in the soul or body, we should fail in philosophy as in politics by neglecting τὀ μικρόν, insensible steps of progress:—whereas an abstraction is not an error provided we know that what we put out of sight is still there.'