CHAPTER XXIX.
THE SEARCH FOR A FIRST PRINCIPLE.
If there be one thing which, more than another, distinguishes Modern Philosophers from the Ancient Philosophy of Athens, it is the desire to discover a First Principle of certainty, a handle by which they may get hold of and set in due order the perplexed mass of reality. They find themselves born to an inheritance of tradition, a mass of belief and lore which overwhelms where it does not support. The long watches of the Middle Ages had been a time of preparation—even if the 'cerebration' had been somewhat unconscious. The mind had been by discipline trained to freedom. As it worked amid the material and tried to order it and defend it, the intellect grew to recognise its lordship over the load of authority. Overt revolts indeed against coercion by decrees and by canons of dogma had never been wanting even in the quietest of the so-called 'ages of faith.' But it is not in the loudest outcry or the most rampant dissent that progress shows its most effective course. The 'catholic' and 'orthodox' tradition equally bears witness to a movement to emancipation, to self-centred intelligence. Such an emancipation however cannot be complete and self-realised without a sharp and painful wrench at the moment of mental birth. The great word of disruption, of self-assertion, of defiance to the past and to the dominant, must be said: and, as human beings are constituted, it will be said in a tone of acerbity for which neither the revolutionist nor the reactionary are severally alone responsible.
Thus to hear the brave words and the bold defiance hurled out by the thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one might fancy they, like Archimedes, sought a supernal vantage-ground from which they could move the world. Yet, unlike the material earth, the intellectual globe is a burden we each carry with us,—which we find upon us when—if ever—we begin to shake ourselves out of the slothful unconsciousness of our merely vegetative life. For though we all carry it, we do not all feel its weight. In some individuals and in some ages there is so accurate a proportion between the inner power and the outer pressure that the load of belief and custom is but a well-fitting garb, almost a second nature. To others there is a felt disproportion, a sense of superincumbent clothes and uncongenial, unnatural trappings. Out of such struggles to be free, grow, occasionally, philosophers, and reformers. To the former the burden is the burden of the unintelligible: to the latter the burden of the unbearable and intolerable. To the philosopher the removal of the burden consists in such a re-adjustment of the intellectual world that it shall be no longer a foreign thing, but bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. But, to re-adjust and to re-organise, one must stand back from the objective: one must cast it forth, and look about for a clue to an exit from the maze of confusion. The given and subsistent is put on probation: not rejected, but for the moment declined: not denied, but asked to present its credentials.[1] This is the ἐποχή of the sceptical schools of later Greece; the invitation to doubt addressed by Descartes to his own soul. It is the protest against that vulgar precipitancy which in primitive and modern credulity is ready to give itself away to any doctrine which has the voice and the garb of outward authority. Or is it the assertion! of the royal and inalienable sovereignty of the Subjectivity to be certain of whatever claims to be objective and true: the assertion that what is true must be seen and experienced to be true. Or it is, in another way, the principle of Socrates: that the beginning of knowledge, the first step in the way of wisdom, is to know that you know nothing—to realise the absolute supremacy of self-consciousness.
It is in short the same demand as Augustine's. There is indeed a wide gulf of temperament and circumstances dividing the bishop of Hippo from the mathematician Descartes and the rationalist Spinoza. But in the cry for the knowledge of 'God and my Soul' as the first, the indispensable, the sole knowledge: as the one knowledge which binds the finite and the infinite together,—the knowledge on which turns the truth of science, and the reality of experience, the great thinkers of these diverse ages are at one.[2] They turn their backs upon the external that they may find rest in the truly internal, on the inner certainty, which is not a mere subjective but a very objective also: not a mere anima mea, but in close unity therewith Deus meus. This is perhaps more explicit in Spinoza, in some points, than in Descartes, and in many respects more decisively put by Augustine than by either. But this is what is really meant by the initial concentration of suspense: this is what is sought when a Principle is sought. Nothing short of this unity of subjective and objective in an Absolute—we may say—Ego, is a principle.
But 'principles' like other terms are sometimes lightly taken; and can be in the plural—just as in lower levels of religion and society there can be gods many and lords many. Nor in a way wrongly. For, as has been before pointed out, a principle is the unity of beginning and end: it is only caught hold of by approaching from different directions: it loses its life and power when cut off from the many organs by which it distributes itself so as to grasp reality. If it be essentially one, it is not a bare unit: it cannot, without injury, be reduced to utter simplicity, and accepted in the shape of a single term. And yet this is what almost inevitably happens to every so-called principle.
Like a deus ex machina, or a trick of the trade, it is applied to unloose every knot, and to clear any difficulties that arise. But a principle of this stamp possesses no intimate connexion or organic solidarity with the theory which it helps to prop. It is always at hand as a ready-made schema or heading, and can be attached to the most incongruous orders of fact. Thus in the works of Aristotle, the principle of 'End' or 'Activity' has sometimes seemed to be applied to whatever subject comes forward, and like a hereditary official vestment to suit all its wearers equally well or equally ill. What is true 'on the whole' is not always true 'of each': the καθόλον never quite equals the καθ' ἔκαστον. The modern principle of Utility is equally flexible in its application to the problems of moral and social life. It costs no trouble to pronounce the magic word, and even 'such as are of weaker capacity' may make something out of such a formula. But an abstract formula, which is equally applicable to everything, is not particularly applicable to anything. While it seems to save trouble, and is so plain as to be almost tautological (as when the worth of a thing or act is explained to mean its utility), it really suggests fresh questions in every case, and multiplies the difficulty. Having an outward adaptability to every kind of fact, the principle has no true sympathy with any: it becomes a mere form, which we use as we do a measuring-rod, moving it along from one thing to another. We are always reverting to first principles as our last principles also. Even Aristotle, when he remarked that an object had to be criticised from its own principles and not from general formulae, saw through the fallacy of this style of argument.
This is like asking for bread and getting a stone. The philosopher, who ought to take us through the shut chambers of the world, merely hands us a key at the gate, telling us that it will unlock every door, and then the insides will speak for themselves. But we would have our philosopher do a little more than this. Not being ourselves omniscient, we should be glad of a guide-book at the least, and perhaps even of the services of an interpreter to explain some peculiarities, some startling phenomena, and sights even more unpleasant than those which appalled the spouse of the notorious Bluebeard. Or, dropping metaphor, we wish the formula to be applied systematically and thoroughly. When that is done the formula loses its abstractness; it gains those necessary amplifications and qualifications, as we call them, without which no theory explains much or gives much information. And thus, instead of fancying that our initial formula contains the truth in a nutshell, we shall find that it is only one step to be taken on the way to truth, and that its narrow statement sinks more and more into insignificance, as its amplified theory gains in significance.