History of Modern Philosophy, by Alfred 1

History of Modern Philosophy, by Alfred

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Title: History of Modern Philosophy

Author: Alfred William Benn

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History of Modern Philosophy, by Alfred 2

Transcriber's note:

Page numbers in curly braces (example: {25}) have been included in the text to enable the reader to use the
index.

A few typographical errors have been corrected; they are listed at the end of the text.

[Illustration: GIORDANO BRUNO.

From the Statue in the Campo dei Fiori, Rome.]

HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

by

A. W. BENN,

Author of "The History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century," Etc.

[Illustration: GIORDANO BRUNO.

From the Statue in the Campo dei Fiori, Rome.]

[ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED]

London: Watts & Co., 17 Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, E.C. 1912

Printed by Watts and Co., Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, London, E.C.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. 3

CHAPTER I.
PAGE THE PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE 1
CHAPTER II. 4

CHAPTER II.
THE METAPHYSICIANS 31
CHAPTER III. 5

CHAPTER III.
THE THEORISTS OF KNOWLEDGE 65
CHAPTER IV. 6

CHAPTER IV.
THE GERMAN IDEALISTS 101
CHAPTER V. 7

CHAPTER V.
THE HUMANISTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 124

BIBLIOGRAPHY 149

INDEX 153

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

GIORDANO BRUNO Frontispiece

PAGE FRANCIS BACON 13

RENÉ DESCARTES 34

BENEDICTUS SPINOZA 47

DAVID HUME 78

IMMANUEL KANT 86

G. W. F. HEGEL 111

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 117

AUGUSTE COMTE 128

HERBERT SPENCER 138

{1}
CHAPTER I. 8

CHAPTER I.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE

For a thousand years after the schools of Athens were closed by Justinian philosophy made no real advance;
no essentially new ideas about the constitution of nature, the workings of mind, or the ends of life were put
forward. It would be false to say that during this period no progress was made. The civilisation of the Roman
Empire was extended far beyond its ancient frontiers; and, although much ground was lost in Asia and Africa,
more than the equivalent was gained in Northern Europe. Within Europe also the gradual abolition of slavery
and the increasing dignity of peaceful labour gave a wider diffusion to culture, combined with a larger sense
of human fellowship than any but the best minds of Greece and Rome had felt. Whether the status of women
was really raised may be doubted; but the ideas and sentiments of women began to exercise an influence on
social intercourse unknown before. And the arts of war and peace were in some ways almost revolutionised.

This remarkable phenomenon of movement in everything except ideas has been explained by the influence of
Christianity, or rather of Catholicism. There is truth in the contention, but it is not the whole truth. The Church
entered into a heritage that she did not create; she defined and accentuated tendencies that {2} long before her
advent had secretly been at work. In the West that diffusion of civilisation which is her historic boast had been
begun and carried far by the Rome whence her very name is taken. In the East the title of orthodox by which
the Greek Church is distinguished betrays the presence of that Greek thought which moulded her dogmas into
logical shape. What is more, the very idea of right belief as a vital and saving thing came to Christianity from
Platonism, accompanied by the persuasion that wrong belief was immoral and its promulgation a crime to be
visited by the penalty of death.

Ecclesiastical intolerance has been made responsible for the speculative stagnation of the Middle Ages, and it
has been explained as an effect of the belief in the future punishment of heresy by eternal torments. But in
truth the persecuting spirit was responsible for the dogma, not the dogma for persecution. And we must look
for the underlying cause of the whole evil in the premature union of metaphysics with religion and morality
first effected by Plato, or rather by the genius of Athens working through Plato. Indeed, on a closer
examination we shall find that the slowing-down of speculation had begun long before the advent of
Christianity, and coincides with the establishment of its headquarters at Athens, where also the first permanent
schools of philosophy were established. These schools were distinctly religious in their character; and none
was so set against innovation as that of Epicurus, falsely supposed to have been a home of freethought. In the
last Greek system of philosophy, Neo-Platonism, theology reigned supreme; and during the two and a-half
centuries of its existence no real advance on the teaching of Plotinus was made. {3}

Neo-Platonism when first constituted had incorporated a large Aristotelian element, the expulsion of which
had been accomplished by its last great master, Proclus; and Christendom took over metaphysics under what
seemed a Platonic form--the more welcome as Plato passed for giving its creeds the independent support of
pure reason. This support extended beyond a future life and went down to the deepest mysteries of revealed
faith. For, according to the Platonic doctrine of ideas, it was quite in order that there should be a divine unity
existing independently of the three divine persons composing it; that the idea of humanity should be combined
with one of these persons; and that the same idea, being both one with and distinct from Adam, should involve
all mankind in the guilt of his transgression. Thus the Church started with a strong prejudice in favour of Plato
which continued to operate for many centuries, although the first great schoolman, John Scotus Eriugena
(810-877), incurred a condemnation for heresy by adopting the pantheistic metaphysics of Neo-Platonism.

As the Platonic doctrine of ideas came to life again in the realism, as it was called, of scholastic philosophy,
so the conflicting view of his old opponent Aristotle was revived under the form of conceptualism. According
to this theory the genera and species of the objective world correspond to real and permanent distinctions in
the nature of things; but, apart from the conceptions by which they are represented in the intellect of God and
man, those distinctions have no separate existence. Aristotle's philosophy was first brought into Europe by the
CHAPTER I. 9
Mohammedan conquerors of Spain, which became an important centre of learning in the earlier Middle Ages.
Not a few Christian scholars went there to {4} study. Latin translations were made from Arabic versions of
Aristotle, and in this way his doctrines became more widely known to the lecture-rooms of the Catholic
world. But their derivation from infidel sources roused a prejudice against them, still further heightened by the
circumstance that an Arabian commentator, Averroes, had interpreted the theology of the Metaphysics in a
pantheistic sense. And on any sincere reading Aristotle denied the soul's immortality which Plato had upheld.
Accordingly, all through the twelfth century Platonism still dominated religious thought, and even so late as
the early thirteenth century the study of Aristotle was still condemned by the Church.

Nevertheless a great revolution was already in progress. As a result of the capture of Constantinople by the
Crusaders in A.D. 1204 the Greek manuscripts of Aristotle's writings were brought to Paris, and at a
subsequent period they were translated into Latin under the direction of St. Thomas Aquinas, the ablest of the
schoolmen, who so manipulated the Peripatetic philosophy as to convert it from a battering-ram into a buttress
of Catholic theology--a position still officially assigned to it at the present day. Aristotelianism, however, did
not reign without a rival even in the later Middle Ages. Aquinas was a Dominican; and the jealousy of the
competing Franciscan Order found expression in maintaining a certain tradition of Platonism, represented in
different ways by Roger Bacon (1214-1294) and by Duns Scotus (1265-1308). In this connection we have to
note the extraordinary fertility of the British islands in eminent thinkers during the Middle Ages. Besides the
two last mentioned there is Eriugena ("born in Ireland"), John of Salisbury {5} (1115-1180), the first
Humanist, William of Ockham, and Wycliffe, the first reformer--making six in all, a larger contribution than
any other region of Europe, or indeed all the rest of Europe put together, has made to the stars of
Scholasticism. This advantage is probably not due to any inherent genius for philosophy in the inhabitants of
these islands, but to their relative immunity from war and to the political liberty that cannot but have been
favourable to independent thought. Five out of the six were more or less inclined to Platonism, and their
idealist or mystical tendencies were sometimes associated with the same practicality that distinguished their
master. The sixth, commonly called Occam (died about 1349), is famous as the champion of
Nominalism--that is, of the doctrine that genera and species have no real existence either in nature or in mind;
there are only individuals more or less resembling one another. He is the author of the famous saying--the sole
legacy of Scholasticism to common thought: "Entities ought not to be gratuitously multiplied" (entia non sunt
præter necessitatem multiplicanda).

The capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders had led to Aristotle's triumph in the thirteenth century. Two
hundred years later the conquering Ottoman advance on the same city was the immediate cause of his
overthrow. For the Byzantine scholars who fled for help and refuge to Italy brought with them the manuscripts
of Plato and Plotinus, and these soon became known to Western Europe through the Latin translations of
Marsilio Ficino. On its literary side the Platonic revival fell in admirably with the Humanism to which the
Schoolmen had long been intensely distasteful. And the religious movement that preceded {6} Luther's
Reformation found a welcome ally in Neo-Platonic mysticism. At the same time the invention of printing, by
opening the world of books to non-academic readers, vastly widened the possibilities of independent thought.
And the Reformation, by discrediting the scholastic theology in Northern Europe, dealt another blow at the
system with which it had been associated by Aquinas.

It has been supposed that the discovery of America and the circumnavigation of the globe contributed also to
the impending philosophical revolution. But the true theory of the earth's figure formed the very foundation of
Aristotle's cosmology, and was as well known to Dante as to ourselves. Made by a fervent Catholic, acting
under the patronage of the Catholic queen par excellence, the discovery of Columbus increased the prestige of
Catholicism by opening a new world to its missions and adding to the wealth of its supporters in the Old
World.

The decisive blow to medieval ideas came from another quarter--from the Copernican astronomy. What the
true theory of the earth's motion meant for philosophy has not always been rightly understood. It seems to be
commonly supposed that the heliocentric system excited hostility because it degraded the earth from her
CHAPTER I. 10
proud position as centre of the universe. But the reverse is true. According to Aristotle and his scholastic
followers, the centre of the universe is the lowest and least honourable, the circumference the highest and
most distinguished position in it. And that is why earth, as the vilest of the four elements, tends to the centre;
while fire, being the most precious, flies upward. Again, the incorruptible æther of which the heavens are
composed shows its eternal character {7} by moving for ever round in a circle of which God, as Prime Mover,
occupies the outermost verge. And this metaphysical topography is faithfully followed by Dante, who even
improves on it by placing the worst criminals (that is, the rebels and traitors--Satan, with Judas and Brutus and
Cassius) in the eternal ice at the very centre of the earth. Such fancies were incompatible with the new
astronomy. No longer cold and dead, our earth might henceforth take her place among the stars, animated like
them--if animated they were--and suggesting by analogy that they too supported teeming multitudes of
reasonable inhabitants.

But the transposition of values did not end here. Aristotle's whole philosophy had been based on a radical
antithesis between the sublunary and the superlunary spheres--the world of growth, decay, vicissitude, and the
world of everlasting realities. In the sublunary sphere, also, it distinguished sharply between the Forms of
things, which were eternal, and the Matter on which they were imposed, an intangible, evanescent thing
related to Form as Possibility to Actuality. We know that these two convenient categories are logically
independent of the false cosmology that may or may not have suggested their world-wide application. But the
immediate effect of having it denied, or even doubted, was greatly to exalt the credit of Matter or Power at the
expense of Form or Act.

The first to draw these revolutionary inferences from the Copernican theory was Giordano Bruno
(1548-1600). Born at Nola, a south Italian city not far from Naples, Bruno entered the Dominican Order
before the age of fifteen, and on that occasion exchanged his baptismal name of Filippo for that by which he
has ever since been known. Here he became acquainted with the {8} whole of ancient and medieval
philosophy, besides the Copernican astronomy, then not yet condemned by the Church. At the early age of
eighteen he first came into collision with the authorities; and at twenty-eight (1576) [McIntyre, pp. 9-10] he
openly questioned the chief characteristic dogmas of Catholicism, was menaced with an action for heresy, and
fled from the convent. The pursuit must have been rather perfunctory, for Bruno found himself free to spend
two years wandering from one Italian city to another, earning a precarious livelihood by tuition and
authorship. Leaving Italy at last, rather from a desire to push his fortunes abroad than from any fear of
molestation, and finding France too hot to hold him, he tried Geneva for a little while, but, on being given to
understand that he could only stay on the condition of embracing Calvinism, returned to France, where he
lived first for two years as Professor of Philosophy at Toulouse, and three more in a somewhat less official
position at Paris. Thence, in the train of the French ambassador, he passed to England, where his two years'
sojourn seems to have been the happiest and most fruitful period of his restless career. It was cut short by his
chief's return to Paris. But the philosopher's fearless advocacy of Copernicanism made that bigoted capital
impossible. The truth, however, seems to be that Bruno never could hit it off with anyone or any society; and
the next five years, spent in trying to make himself acceptable at one German university after another, are a
record of hopeless failure. Finally, in an evil hour, he goes to Venice at the invitation of a young noble,
Mocenigo, who, in revenge for disappointed expectations, betrays him to the Inquisition. Questioned about his
heresies, Bruno showed perfect willingness to accept all the theological dogmas that {9} he had formerly
denied. Whether he withdrew his retractation on being transferred from a Venetian to a Roman prison does
not appear, as the Roman depositions are not forthcoming. Neither is it clear why so long a delay as six years
(1594-1600) was granted to the philosopher when such short work was made of other heretics. It seems most
probable that Bruno, while pliant enough on questions of religious belief, remained inflexible in maintaining
the infinity of inhabited worlds. When the final condemnation was read out, he told the judges that he heard it
with less fear than they felt in pronouncing it. In the customary euphemistic terms they had sent him to death
by fire. At the stake, when the crucifix was held up to him, he turned away his eyes--with what thoughts we
cannot tell. There is a monument to the heroic thinker at Nola, and another in the Campo dei Fiori on the spot
where he suffered at Rome, raised against the strongest protests of the ecclesiastical authorities.
CHAPTER I. 11
The Greek-Italian philosophers--the Pythagoreans and Parmenides--had introduced the idea of finiteness or
Limitation as a necessary condition of reality and perfection into thought. From them it passed over to Plato
and Aristotle, who made it dominant in the schools. Epicurus and Lucretius had, indeed, carried on the older
Ionian tradition of infinite atoms and infinite worlds dispersed through infinite space; but their philosophy was
practically atheistic, and the Church condemned it as both heretical and false. Probably the discovery of the
earth's globular shape had first suggested the idea of a finite universe to Parmenides; at any rate, the discovery
of the earth's motion suggested the idea of an infinite universe to his Greek-souled Italian successor; or rather
it was {10} the break-up of Aristotle's spherical world by Copernicanism that threw Bruno back--as he gives
us himself to understand--on the older Ionian cosmologies, with their assumption of infinite space and infinite
worlds. In this reference Bruno went far beyond Copernicus, and even Kepler; for both had assumed, in
deference to current opinion, that the fixed stars were equidistant from the solar system, and formed a single
sphere enclosing it on all sides. He, on the contrary, anticipated modern astronomy in conceiving the stars as
so many suns dispersed without assignable limits through space, and each surrounded by inhabited planets.

Infinite space had been closely associated by Democritus and Epicurus with infinite atoms; and the next great
step taken by Bruno was to rehabilitate atomism as a necessary concept of modern science. He figured the
atoms as very minute spheres of solid earthy matter, forming by their combinations the framework of visible
bodies. But their combinations are by no means fortuitous, as Democritus had impiously supposed; nor do
they move through an absolute void. All space is filled with an ocean of liquid æther, which is no other than
the quintessence of which Aristotle's celestial spheres were composed. Only in Bruno's system it takes the
place of that First Matter which is the extreme antithesis of the disembodied Form personified in the Prime
Mover, God. And here we come to that reversal of cosmic values brought about by the reversal of the
relations between the earth and sun which Copernicus had effected. The primordial Matter, so far from
passively receiving the Forms imposed on it from without, has an infinite capacity for evolving Forms from
its own bosom; and, so far {11} from being unspiritual, is itself the universal spirit, the creative and animating
soul of the world. The First Matter, Form, Energy, Life, and Reason are identified with Nature, Nature with
the Universe, and the Universe with God.

So far all is clear, if not convincing. It is otherwise with the theory of Monads. This is only expounded in
Bruno's Latin works, for the most part ill-written and hopelessly obscure. It seems possible that by the monads
Bruno sometimes means the infinitesimal parts into which the æther of space may conceivably be divided.
Each of these possesses consciousness, and therefore may be considered as reflecting and representing the
whole universe. A number of monads, or rather a continuous portion of the æther surrounding and
interpenetrating a group of atoms, endows them with the forms and qualities of elementary bodies, ascending
gradually through vegetal and animal organisations to human beings. But the animating process does not stop
with man. The earth, with the other planets, the sun, and all the stars, are also monads on the largest scale,
with reasonable souls, just as Aristotle thought. In fact, the old mythology whence he derived the idea repeats
itself in his great enemy Bruno.

Beyond and above all these partial unities is the Monas Monadum--the supreme unity, the infinite God who is
the soul of the infinite universe. Doubtless there is here a reminiscence of the Neo-Platonic One, the ineffable
Absolute, beyond all existence, yet endowed with the infinite power whence all existence proceeds. Bruno had
learned from Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa--a Copernican before Copernicus--to recognise the principle of
Heracleitus that opposites are one; and in this instance he applies it with brilliant audacity; for every
infinitesimal {12} part of the space-filling æther is no less the soul of the universe than the Monad of Monads
itself. And both agree in being non-existent in the sense of being transfinite, since there can be no sum of
infinity and no animated mathematical points.

From Anaximander to Plotinus there is hardly a great Greek thinker whose influence cannot be traced in the
system of Giordano Bruno. And while he represents the philosophical Renaissance in this eminent degree, he
heads the two lines of speculation which, separately or combined, run through the whole history of modern
metaphysics--the monistic, and what is now called the pluralistic tendency. With none, except, perhaps, with
CHAPTER I. 12

Hegel, have the two been perfectly balanced; and in Bruno himself the leaning is distinctly towards plurality,
his Supreme Monad being a mere survival from the Neo-Platonic One.

FRANCIS BACON.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was by profession a lawyer, by taste a scientific inquirer, by character a seeker
after wealth and power, by natural genius an immortal master of words. He began life as the friend, adviser,
and client of Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of Essex. When that unfortunate courtier, in disregard of his
warnings, rushed into a treasonable enterprise, Bacon appeared as one of the most zealous of the counsel for
the prosecution. Strictly speaking, this may have been his duty as a loyal subject of the Queen; it was hardly
his duty, even on the Queen's commission, after Essex's execution, to assist in the composition of a pamphlet
blackening the memory of his former friend and patron. In the next reign Bacon paid assiduous court to James
and his favourites. {13}

[Illustration: FRANCIS BACON.

(Copyright B. P. C.)]

{14} When the first of these, Somerset, fell and was tried on a charge of murder, he conducted the
prosecution, and, finding the evidence insufficient, suggested to James that the prisoner should be entrapped
into a confession by dangling a false promise of forgiveness before his eyes. Bacon owed his final exaltation
to Buckingham, and as Lord Keeper allowed himself to be made the tool of that bad man for the perversion of
justice. A suit was brought before him by a young man against a fraudulent trustee (his own uncle) for the
restitution of a sum of money. Bacon gave sentence for the plaintiff. Buckingham then intervened with a
demand that the case should be retried. "Upon this Bacon saw the parties privately, and, annulling all the
deliberate decisions of the Court, compelled the youth to assent to the ceasing of all proceedings, and to
accept" a smaller sum than he was entitled to (E. A. Abbott). On another occasion he exercised his judicial
authority in a way that did not square with Buckingham's wishes, but quite legitimately and without any
consciousness of giving offence; whereupon the insolent favourite addressed him in a letter filled with
outrageous abuse, to which Bacon replied in terms of abject submission. This meanness had its reward, for in
1618 the philosopher became Lord Chancellor.

After a three years' tenure Bacon was flung from his high position by a charge of judicial corruption, to the
truth of every count in which he confessed. The question is very complicated, obscure, and much
controverted, not admitting of discussion within the limits here assigned. On the subject of Bacon's
truthfulness, however, a word must be said. The Chancellor admitted having taken presents from suitors, but
{15} denied having ever let his judgments be influenced thereby; and his word seems to be generally accepted
as a sufficient exoneration. But its value may be doubted in view of two statements quoted by Dean Church.
Of these "one was made in the House of Commons by Sir George Hastings, a member of the House, who had
been the channel of Awbry's gift [made to the Chancellor pendente lite], that when he had told Bacon that if
questioned he must admit it, Bacon's answer was: 'George, if you do so, I must deny it, upon my
honour--upon my oath.' The other was that he had given an opinion in favour of some claim of the Masters in
Chancery, for which he received £1,200, and with which he said that all the judges agreed--an assertion which
all the judges denied. Of these charges there is no contradiction." The denial of Bacon that he ever allowed his
judgments to be influenced by bribes, and his assertion that he was the justest judge since his own father,
cannot, then, count for much. As to the plea that the justice of his sentences was never challenged, who was to
challenge it? The successful suitor would hold his tongue; and the unsuccessful suitor could hardly be
expected to complete his own ruin by going to law again on the strength of the Chancellor's condemnation.

Bacon, at any rate, knew quite well that to take presents before judgment was wrong and criminal, as his
answer to Egerton sufficiently shows--an answer which also fully disposes of the plea that to take such
presents was the common custom of the age. Moreover, had such been the common custom, Bacon might
CHAPTER I. 13
have taken his trial and pleaded it as a sufficient apology or extenuation for his own conduct. This would have
been a somewhat more dignified course {16} than the one he actually pursued, which was to plead guilty to
all the charges, throwing himself on the mercy of the Lords. It has been suggested that he did this at the desire
of his powerful patrons, whose malpractices might have been brought to light by a public investigation. As his
punishment was immediately remitted, some arrangement with the King and Buckingham seems probable.
But for an innocent man to have saved himself by a false acknowledgment of guilt would, as Macaulay shows,
have been still more infamous than to take bribes.

The desperate efforts of some apologists to whitewash Bacon are apparently due to a very exaggerated
estimate of his services to mankind. Other critics give themselves the pleasure of painting what has been
called a Rembrandt portrait, with noon on the forehead and night at the heart. And a third class argue from a
rotten morality to a rotten intelligence. In fact, Bacon as little deserves to be called the wisest and greatest as
the meanest of mankind. He really loved humanity, and tried hard to serve it, devoting a truly philosophical
intellect to that end. The service was to consist in an immense extension of man's power over nature, to be
obtained by a complete knowledge of her secrets; and this knowledge he hoped to win by reforming the
methods of scientific investigation. Unfortunately, intellect alone proved unequal to that mighty task. Bacon
passes, and not without good grounds, for a great upholder of the principle that truth can only be learned by
experience. But his philosophy starts by setting that principle at defiance. He who took all knowledge for his
province omitted from his survey the rather important subject of knowledge itself, its limits and its laws. Had
his attention {17} been drawn that way, the very first requisite, on empirical principles, would have been to
take stock of the leading truths already ascertained. But the enormous vanity of the amateur reformer seems to
have persuaded him that these amounted to little or nothing. The later Renaissance was an age of intense
scientific activity, conditioned, in the first instance, by a revival of Greek learning. Already before the middle
of the sixteenth century great advance had been made in algebra, trigonometry, astronomy, mineralogy,
botany, anatomy, and physiology. Before the publication of the Novum Organum Napier had invented
logarithms, Galileo was reconstituting physics, Gilbert had created the science of magnetism, and Harvey had
discovered the circulation of the blood. These were facts that Bacon took no pains to study; he either ignores
or slights or denies the work done by his illustrious predecessors and contemporaries. That he rejected the
Copernican theory with scorn is an exaggeration; but he never accepted it, notwithstanding arguments that the
best astronomers of his time found convincing; and the longer he lived the more unfavourable became his
opinion of its merits. And it is certain that Tycho Brahe's wonderful mass of observations, with the splendid
generalisations based on them by Kepler, are never mentioned in his writings. Now what really ruined
Aristotelianism was the heliocentric astronomy, as Bruno perfectly saw; and ignorance of this left Bacon after
all in the bonds of medieval philosophy.

We have seen in studying Bruno that the very soul of Aristotle's system was his distinction between form and
matter, and this distinction Bacon accepted without examination from scholasticism. The purpose of his {18}
life was to ascertain by what combination of forms each particular body was constituted, and then, by
artificially superinducing them on some portion of matter, to call the desired substance into existence. His
celebrated inductive method was devised as a means to that end. To discover the forms "we are instructed first
to draw up exhaustive tables of the phenomena and forms under investigation, and then to exclude from our
list any 'form' which does not invariably co-exist with the phenomenon of which the form is sought. For
example, if we are trying to discover the form of heat it will not do to adduce 'celestial nature'; for, though the
sun's light is hot, that of the moon is cold. After a series of such exclusions, Bacon believed that a single form
would finally remain to be the invariable cause of the phenomenon investigated, and of nothing else" (F. C. S.
Schiller).

As Dr. Schiller observes, this method of exclusions is not new; nor, indeed, does Bacon claim to have
originated it; at least he observes in his Novum Organum that it had been already employed by Plato to a
certain extent for the purpose of discussing definitions and ideas. And elsewhere he praises Plato as "a man
(and one that surveyed all things from a lofty cliff) for having discerned in his doctrine of Ideas that Forms
were the true object of knowledge; howsoever he lost the fruit of this most true opinion by considering and
CHAPTER I. 14
trying to apprehend Forms as absolutely abstracted from matter, whence it came that he turned aside to
theological speculations." Bacon must have known that this reproach does not apply to Aristotle; as, indeed,
the very schoolmen knew that he did not--except in the single case of God--give Forms a separate {19}
existence. But, probably from jealousy, he specially hated Aristotle, and in this particular instance the
Stagirite more particularly excited his hostility by identifying Forms with Final Causes. These Bacon rather
contemptuously handed over to the sole cognisance of theology as consecrated virgins bearing no fruit. As a
point of scientific method this condemnation of teleology is quite unjustified even in the eyes of inquirers who
reject the theological argument from design. To a Darwinian, purpose means survival value, and the parts of
an organism are so many utilities evolved in the action and reaction between living beings and their
environment. But Bacon disliked any theory tending to glorify the existing arrangements of nature as perfect
and unalterable achievements, for the good reason that it threatened to discountenance his own scheme for
practically creating the world over again with exclusive reference to the good of humanity. Thus in his Utopia,
the New Atlantis, there are artificial mines, producing artificial metals, plants raised without seeds,
contrivances for turning one tree or plant into another, for prolonging the lives of animals after the removal of
particular organs, for making "a number of kinds of serpents, worms, flies, fishes of putrefaction; whereof
some are advanced to be perfect creatures like beasts or birds"; with flying-machines, submarines, and
perpetual motions--in short, a general anticipation of Jules Verne and Mr. H. G. Wells.

Such dreams, however, do not entitle Bacon to be regarded as a true prophet of modern science and modern
mechanical inventions. In themselves his ideas do not go beyond the magic of the Middle Ages, or rather of
all ages. The original thing was his {20} Method; and this Method, considered as a means for surprising the
secrets of nature, we know to be completely chimerical, because there are no such Forms as he imagined, to
be enucleated by induction, with or without the Method of Exclusion. The truth is that the inductive method
which he borrowed from Socrates and Plato was originally created by Athenian philosophy for the humanistic
studies of law, morality, æsthetics, and psychology. Physical science, on the other hand, should be
approached, as the Greeks rightly felt, through the door of mathematics, an instrument of whose potency the
great Chancellor notoriously had no conception. Thus his prodigious powers would have been much more
usefully devoted to moral philosophy. As it is, the Essays alone remain to show what great things he might
have done by limiting himself to the subjects with which they deal. The famous logical and physical treatises,
the Novum Organum and the De Augmentis, notwithstanding their wealth and splendour of language, are to us
at the present day less living than the fragments of early Greek thought, than most of Plato, than much of
Aristotle, than Atomism as expounded by Lucretius.

Macaulay rests his claim of the highest place among philosophers for Bacon not on his inductive theory, to
which the historian rightly denies any novelty, but on the new purpose and direction that the search for
knowledge is assumed to have received from his teaching. On this view the whole of modern science has been
created by the desire to convert nature into an instrument for the satisfaction of human wants--an ambition
dating from the publication of the Novum Organum. The claim will not stand, for two reasons. The first is that
the great movement of modern science {21} began at least half a century before Bacon's birth, growing
rapidly during his life, but without his knowledge, and continuing its course without being perceptibly
accelerated by his intervention ever since. The one man of science who most commonly passes for his disciple
is Robert Boyle (1627-1691). But Boyle did not read the Novum Organum before he was thirty, whereas,
residing at Florence before fifteen, he received a powerful stimulus from the study of Galileo. And his
chemistry was based on the atomic theory which Bacon rejected.

The second reason for not accepting Macaulay's claim is that in modern Europe no less than in ancient Greece
the great advances in science have only been made by those who loved knowledge for its own sake, or, if the
expression be preferred, simply for the gratification of their intellectual curiosity. No doubt their discoveries
have added enormously to the utilities of life; but such advantages have been gained on the sole condition of
not making them the primary end in view. The labours of Bacon's own contemporaries, Kepler and Gilbert,
have led to the navigation of the sea by lunar distances, and to the various industrial applications of
electro-magnetism; but they were undertaken without a dream of these remote results. And in our own day the
CHAPTER I. 15
greatest of scientific triumphs, which is the theory of evolution, was neither worked out with any hope of
material benefits to mankind nor has it offered any prospect of them as yet. The same may be said of modern
sidereal astronomy. From the humanist point of view it would not be easy to justify the enormous expenditure
of energy, money, and time that this science has absorbed. The schoolmen have been much ridiculed for
discussing the question how {22} many angels could dance on the point of a needle; but as a purely
speculative problem it surely merits as much attention as the total number of the stars, the rates of their
velocities, or the law of their distribution through space. A schoolman might even have urged in justification
of his curiosity that some of us might feel a reasonable curiosity about the exact size--if size they have--of
beings with whom we hope to associate one day; whereas by the confession of the astronomers themselves
neither we nor our descendants can ever hope to verify by direct measurement the precarious guesses of their
science in this branch of celestial statics and dynamics.

THOMAS HOBBES.

It has been shown that one momentous effect of the Copernican astronomy, as interpreted by Giordano Bruno,
was to reverse the relative importance ascribed in Aristotle's philosophy to the two great categories of Power
and Act, giving to Power a value and dignity of which it had been stripped by the judgment of Plato and
Aristotle. Even Epicurus, when he rehabilitated infinite space, had been careful as a moralist to urge the
expediency of placing a close limitation on human desires, denouncing the excesses of avarice and ambition
more mildly but not less decisively than the contemporary Stoic school. Thus Lucretius describes his master
as travelling beyond the flaming walls of the world only that he may bring us back a knowledge of the fixed
barrier set by the very laws of existence to our aspirations and hopes.

The classic revival of the Renaissance did not bring back the Greek spirit of moderation. On the contrary, the
new world, the new astronomy, the new monarchy, {23} and the new religion combined to create such a sense
of Power, in contradistinction to Act, as the world had never before known. For us this new feeling has
received its most triumphant artistic expression from Shakespeare and Milton, for France from Rabelais, for
Italy from Ariosto and Michelangelo. In philosophy Bacon strikes the same note when he values knowledge
as a source of power--knowledge which for Greek philosophy meant rather a lesson in self-restraint. And this
idea receives a further development from Bacon's chief successor in English philosophy, Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679), in whose system love of power figures as the very essence of human nature, the self-conscious
manifestation of that Motion which is the real substance of the physical world.

Hobbes was a precocious child, and received a good school training; but the five years he spent at Oxford
added nothing to his information, and a continental tour with the young heir of the Cavendishes had no other
effect than to convince him of the general contempt into which the scholasticism still taught at Oxford had
fallen. On returning to England, he began his studies over again in the Cavendish library, acquiring a thorough
familiarity with the classic literature of Greece and Rome, a deep hatred (imbibed through Thucydides) of
democracy, and a genuinely antique theory that the State should be supreme in religious no less than in civil
matters. Amid these studies Hobbes occasionally enjoyed the society of Bacon, then spending his last years in
the retirement of Gorhambury. As secretary and Latin translator he proved serviceable to the ex-Chancellor,
but remained quite unaffected by his inductive and experimental philosophy. Indeed, the determining impulse
of his {24} speculative activity came from the opposite quarter. Going abroad once more as travelling tutor, at
the age of forty, he chanced on a copy of Euclid in a gentleman's library lying open at the famous
Forty-Seventh Proposition. His first impulse was to reject the theorem as impossible; but, on going backwards
from proposition to proposition, he laid down the book not only convinced, but "in love with geometry."

Beginning so late in life, his ulterior studies led Hobbes into the belief that he had squared the circle, besides
the far more pernicious error of applying the deductive method of geometry to the solution of political
problems. Could he and Bacon have exchanged philosophies, the brilliant faculties of each might have been
employed to better purpose. The categories of Form and Matter, combined with the logic of elimination and
tentative generalisation, would have found a fitting field for their application in the familiar facts of human
CHAPTER I. 16
nature. But those facts refused to be treated as so many wheels, pulleys, and cords in a machine for crushing
the life out of society and transmitting the will of a single despot unresisted through its whole extent; for such
is a faithful picture of what a well-governed community, as Hobbes conceived it, ought to be. During his
second residence abroad he had become acquainted with the physical philosophy of Galileo--the theory that
regards every change in the external or phenomenal world as a mere rearrangement of matter and motion,
matter being an aggregate of independent molecules held together by mechanical pressure and impact. The
component parts of this aggregate become known to us by the impressions their movements produce on our
senses, traces of which {25} are preserved in memory, and subsequently recalled by association. Language
consists of signs conventionally affixed to such images; only the signs, standing as they do for all objects of a
certain sort, have a universal value, not possessed by the original sensations, through which reasoning
becomes possible. Hobbes had evidently fallen in love with algebra as well as with geometry; and it is on the
type of algebraic reasoning--in other words, on the type of rigorous deduction--that his logic is constructed.
And such a view of the way in which knowledge advances seemed amply justified by the scientific triumphs
of his age. But his principle that all motion originates in antecedent motion, although plausible in itself and
occasionally revived by ingenious speculators, has not been verified by modern science. Gravitation,
cohesion, and chemical affinity have, so far, to be accepted as facts not resoluble into more general facts.
Hobbes died before the great discoveries of Newton which first turned away men's minds from the purely
mechanical interpretation of energy.

That mechanical interpretation led our philosopher to reject Aristotle's notion of sociality as an essentially
human characteristic. To him this seemed a mere occult quality, the substitution of a word for an explanation.
The counter-view put forth in his great work, Leviathan, is commonly called atomistic. But it would be gross
flattery to compare the ultimate elements of society, as Hobbes conceived them, to the molecules of modern
science, which attract as well as repel each other; or even with the Democritean atoms, which are at least
neutral. According to him, the tendency to self-preservation, shared by men with all other beings, takes the
form of an insatiable appetite {26} for power, leading each individual to pursue his own aggrandisement at
the cost of any loss or suffering to the rest. And he tries to prove the permanence of this impulse by referring
to the precautions against robbery taken by householders and travellers. Aristotle had much more justly
mentioned the kindnesses shown to travellers as a proof of how widely goodwill is diffused. Our countryman,
with all his acuteness, strangely ignores the necessity as a matter of prudence of going armed and locking the
door at night, even if the robbers only amounted to one in a thousand of the population. Modern researches
have shown that there are very primitive societies where the assumed war of all against each is unknown,
predatory conflicts being a mark of more advanced civilisation, and the cause rather than the effect of
anti-social impulses.

Granting an original state of anarchy and internecine hostility, there is, according to Hobbes, only one way out
of it, which is a joint resolution of the whole community to surrender their rights of individual sovereignty
into the hands of one man, who thenceforth becomes absolute ruler of the State, with authority to defend its
citizens against mutual aggressions, and the whole community against attacks from a foreign Power. This
agreement constitutes the famous Social Contract, of which so much was to be heard during the next century
and a-half. It holds as between the citizens themselves, but not between the subjects and their sovereign, for
that would be admitting a responsibility which there is no power to enforce. And anyone refusing to obey the
sovereign justly forfeits his life; for he thereby returns to the State of Nature, where any man that likes may
kill his neighbour if he can.

All this theory of an original institution of the State {27} by contract impresses a modern reader as utterly
unhistorical. But its value, if any, does not depend on its historical truth. Even if the remote ancestors of the
seventeenth-century Europeans had surrendered all their individual rights, with certain trifling exceptions, into
the hands of an autocrat, no sophistry could show that their mutual engagements were binding on the subjects
of Charles I. and Louis XIV. And it is really on expediency, understood in the largest sense, that the claims of
the New Monarchy are based by Hobbes. What he maintains is that nothing short of a despotic government
exercised by one man can save society from relapsing into chaos. But even under this amended form the
CHAPTER I. 17
theory remains amenable to historical criticism. Had Hobbes pursued his studies beyond Thucydides, he
would have found that other polities besides the Athenian democracy broke down at the hour of trial. Above
all, Roman Imperialism, which seems to have been his ideal, failed to secure its subjects either against internal
disorder or against foreign invasion.

Democracy, however, was not the sole or the worst enemy dreaded by the author of Leviathan as a competitor
with his "mortal god." In the frontispiece of that work the deified monarch who holds the sword erect with his
right hand grasps the crozier with his left, thus typifying the union of the spiritual and temporal powers in the
same person. The publicists of the Italian Renaissance, with their classical ideals, had, indeed, been as
anti-papal as the Protestants; and the political disorders fomented by the agents of the Catholic reaction during
the last hundred years had given Hobbes an additional reason for perpetuating their point of view. Meanwhile
another menace to {28} public order had presented itself from an opposite quarter. Calvinism had created a
new spiritual power based on the free individual interpretation of Scripture, in close alliance with the alleged
rights of conscience and with the spirit of republican liberty. Each creed in turn had attacked the Stuart
monarchy, and the second had just effected its overthrow. Therefore, to save the State it was necessary that
religious creeds, no less than codes of conduct, should be dictated by the secular authority, enslaving men's
minds as well as their bodies.

By the dialectic irony of the speculative movement, this attempt to fetter opinion was turned into an
instrument for its more complete emancipation. In order to discredit the pretensions of the religious zealots,
Hobbes made a series of attacks on the foundations of their faith, mostly by way of suggestion and
innuendo--no more being possible under the conditions then obtaining---but with such effect that, according to
Macaulay, "for many years the Leviathan was the gospel of cold-blooded and hard-headed unbelievers." That
one who made religious belief a matter to be fixed by legislation could be in any sense a Christian seems most
unlikely. He professed, with what sincerity we know not, to regard the existence of God as something only a
fool could deny. But his philosophy from beginning to end forms a rigorously-thought-out system of
materialism which any atheist, if otherwise it satisfied him, might without inconsistency accept.

On the meeting of the Long Parliament, Hobbes again left England for the Continent, where he remained for
eleven years. But his principles were no more to the taste of the exiled royalists than of {29} their opponents.
He therefore returned once more to England, made his submission to the Parliament, and spent the rest of his
days, practically unmolested by either party, under the Commonwealth and the Restoration until his death in
1679 at the age of ninety-one.

It may be said of Hobbes, as of Bacon, that the intellect at work is so amazing and the mass of literary
performance so imposing that the illusions of historians about the value of their contributions to the progress
of thought are excusable. Nevertheless, it cannot be too distinctly stated that the current or academic estimate
of these great men as having effected a revolution in physical and moral science is wrong. They stand as much
apart from the true line of evolution as do the gigantic saurians of a remote geological period whose remains
excite our wonder in museums of natural history. Their systems proved as futile as the monarchies of Philip II.
and of Louis XIV. Bacon's dreams are no more related to the coming victories of science than Raleigh's El
Dorado was to the future colonial empire of Britain. Hobbes had better fortune than Strafford, in so far as he
kept his head on his shoulders; but the logic of his absolutism shrivelled up under the sun of English liberty
like the great Minister's policy of Thorough.

The theory of a Social Contract is a speculative idea of the highest practical importance. But the idea of
contract as the foundation of morals goes back to Epicurus, and it is assumed in a more developed form by
Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity. Its potency as a revolutionary instrument comes from the reinterpretations of
Locke and Rousseau, which run directly counter to the assumptions of the Leviathan. {30}

Hobbes shares with Bacon the belief that all knowledge comes from experience, besides making it clearer
than his predecessor that experience of the world comes through external sense alone. Here also there can be
CHAPTER I. 18
no claim to originality, for more than one school of Greek philosophy had said the same. As an element of
subsequent thought, more importance belongs to the idea of Power, which was to receive its full development
from Spinoza; but only in association with other ideas derived from the philosopher whom we have next to
examine, the founder of modern metaphysics, Descartes.

*****

{31}
CHAPTER II. 19

CHAPTER II.
THE METAPHYSICIANS

DESCARTES, MALEBRANCHE, SPINOZA, LEIBNIZ.

René Descartes (1596-1650) was a Frenchman, born in Touraine, and belonging by family to the inferior
nobility. Educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, he early acquired a distaste for the scholastic philosophy,
or at least for its details; the theology of scholasticism, as we shall see, left a deep impression on him through
life. On leaving college he took up mathematics, varied by a short plunge into the dissipations of Paris. Some
years of military service as a volunteer with the Catholic armies at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War
enabled him to travel and see the world. Returning to Paris, he resumed his studies, but found them seriously
interrupted by the tactless bores who, as we know from Molière's amusing comedy Les Fâcheux, long
continued to infest French society. To escape their assiduities Descartes, who prized solitude before all things,
fled the country. The inheritance of an independent income enabled the philosopher to live where he liked;
and Holland became, with a few interruptions, his chosen residence for the next twenty years (1629-49). Even
here frequent changes of residence and occasional concealment of his address were necessary in order to elude
the visits of importunate admirers. With all his unsociability there seems to have {32} been something
singularly magnetic about the personality of Descartes; yet he only fell in with one congenial spirit, the
Princess Elizabeth, daughter of the unfortunate Winter King and granddaughter of our James I. Possessing to
the fullest extent the intellectual brilliancy and the incomparable charm of the Stuart family, this great lady
impressed the lonely thinker as the only person who ever understood his philosophy.

Another royal friendship brought his career to an untimely end. Queen Christina of Sweden, the gifted and
restless daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, heard of Descartes, and invited him to her Court. On his arrival she
sent for the pilot who had brought the illustrious stranger to Stockholm and questioned him about his
passenger. "Madame," he replied, "it is not a man whom I conducted to your Majesty, but a demi-god. He
taught me more in three weeks of the science of seamanship and of winds and navigation than I had learned in
the sixty years I had been at sea" (Miss E. S. Haldane's Life of René Descartes). The Queen fully came up to
the expectations of her visitor, in whose eyes she had no fault but an unfortunate tendency to waste her time
on learning Greek. Besides her other merits, she possessed "a sweetness and goodness which made men
devoted to her service." It soon appeared that, as with others of the same rank, this was only the veneer of a
heartless selfishness. Christina, who was an early riser, required his attendance in her library to give her
lessons in philosophy at five o'clock in the morning. Descartes was by habit a very late riser. Besides, he had
not even a lodging in the royal palace, but was staying at the French Embassy, and in going there "had to pass
over a long bridge which was always bitterly cold." The cold {33} killed him. He had arrived at Stockholm in
October, and meant to leave in January; but remained at the urgent request of the Queen, who, however, made
no change in the hour of their interviews, although that winter was one of the severest on record. At the
beginning of February, 1650, he fell ill and died of inflammation of the lungs on the 11th, in the fifty-fourth
year of his age.

Descartes had the physical courage which Hobbes lacked; but he seems, like Bacon, to have been a moral
coward. The most striking instance of this is that, on hearing of Galileo's condemnation for teaching the
heliocentric astronomy, he withheld from publication and had even thoughts of destroying a work of his own
in which the same doctrine was maintained. This was at a time when he was living in a country where there
could be no question of personal danger from the Inquisition. But something of the same weakness shows
itself in his running away from France to escape those intrusions on his studious retirement which one would
think might have been checked by letting it be known with sufficient firmness that his hours could not be
wasted on idle conversation. And we have seen how at last his life was lost for no better reason than the dread
of giving offence to Queen Christina.
CHAPTER II. 20

It seems strange that a character so unheroic should figure among the great emancipators of human thought. In
fact, Descartes's services to liberty have been much exaggerated. His intellectual fame rests on three
foundations. Of these the most indubitable is the creation of analytical geometry, the starting-point of modern
mathematics. The value of his contributions to physics has been much disputed; but, on the whole, expert
opinion seems to have decided that what was new in them was not true, and what was true was not new.
However, the place we must assign Descartes in the history of philosophy can only be determined by our
opinion of his metaphysics.

{34}

[Illustration: RENÉ DESCARTES.]

{35} As a philosopher Descartes has, to begin with, the merit of exemplary clearness. The fault is not with
him if we cannot tell what he thought and how he came to think it. The classic Discourse on Method (1637)
relates his mental history in a style of almost touching simplicity. It appears that from an early age truth had
been his paramount object, not as with Bacon and Hobbes for its utility, but for its own sake. In search of this
ideal he read widely, but without finding what he wanted. The great and famous works of literature might
entertain or dazzle; they could not convince. The philosophers professed to teach truth; their endless disputes
showed that they had not found it. Mathematics, on the other hand, presented a pleasing picture of
demonstrated certainty, but a certainty that seemed to be prized only as a sure foundation for the mechanical
arts. Wearily throwing his books aside, the young man then applied himself to the great book of life, mingling
with all sorts and conditions of men to hear what they had to say about the prime interests of existence. But
the same vanity and vexation of spirit followed him here. Men were no more agreed among themselves than
were the authorities of his college days. The truths of religion seemed, indeed, to offer a safe refuge; but they
were an exception that proved the rule; being, as Descartes observes, a supernatural revelation, not the natural
knowledge that he wanted.

The conflict of authorities had at least one good result, which was to discredit the very notion of {36}
authority, thus throwing the inquirer back on his own reason as the sole remaining resource. And as
mathematics seemed, so far, to be the only satisfactory science, the most reasonable course was to give a
wider extension and application to the methods of algebra and geometry. Four fundamental rules were thus
obtained: (1) To admit nothing as true that was not evidently so; (2) to analyse every problem into as many
distinct questions as the nature of the subject required; (3) to ascend gradually from the simplest to the most
complex subjects; and (4) to be sure that his enumerations and surveys were so exhaustive and complete as to
let no essential element of the question escape.

The rules as they stand are ill-arranged, vague, and imperfect. The last should come first and the first last. The
notions of simplicity, complexity, and truth are neither illustrated nor defined. And no pains are taken to
discriminate judgments from concepts. It may be said that the method worked well; at least Descartes tells us
that with the help of his rules he made rapid progress in the solution of mathematical problems. We may
believe in his success without admitting that an inferior genius could have achieved the same results by the
same means. The real point is to ascertain whether the method, whatever its utility in mathematics, could be
advantageously applied to metaphysics. And the answer seems to be that as manipulated by its author the new
system led to nothing but hopeless fallacies.

After reserving a provisional assent to the customs of the country where he happens to be residing and to the
creed of the Roman Church, Descartes begins by calling in question the whole mass of beliefs he has {37}
hitherto accepted, including the reality of the external world. But the very act of doubt implies the existence of
the doubter himself. I think, therefore I am. It has been supposed that the initial affirmation of this self-evident
principle implies that Descartes identified Being with Thought. He did no such thing. No more is meant, to
begin with, than that, whatever else is or is not, I the thinker certainly am. This is no great discovery; the
interesting thing is to find out what it implies. A good deal according to Descartes. First he infers that, since
CHAPTER II. 21
the act of thinking assures him of his existence, therefore he is a substance the whole essence of which
consists in thought, which is independent of place and of any material object--in short, an immaterial soul,
entirely distinct from the body, easier to know, and capable of existing without it. Here the confusion of
conception with judgment is apparent, and it leads to a confusion of our thoughts about reality with the
realities themselves. And Descartes carries this loose reasoning a step further by going on to argue that, as the
certainty of his own existence has no other guarantee than the clearness with which it is inferred from the fact
of his thinking, it must therefore be a safe rule to conclude that whatever things we conceive very clearly and
distinctly are all true.

In his other great philosophical work, the Meditations, Descartes sets out at greater length, but with less
clearness, his arguments for the immateriality of the soul. Here it is fully admitted that, besides thinking,
self-consciousness covers the functions of perceiving, feeling, desiring, and willing; nor does it seem to be
pretended that these experiences are reducible to forms of thought. But it is claimed that they depend on {38}
thought in the sense that without thought one would not be aware of their existence; whereas it can easily be
conceived without them. A little more introspection would show that the second part of the assertion is not
true; for there is no thought without words, and no words, however inaudibly articulated, without a number of
tactual and muscular sensations, nor even without a series of distinct volitions.

Another noticeable point is that, so far from obeying the methodical rule to proceed from the simple to the
complex, Descartes does just the contrary. Starting with the whole complex content of consciousness, he
works down by a series of arbitrary rejections to what, according to him, is the simple fact of immaterial
thought. Let us see how it fares with his attempt to reconstruct knowledge on that elementary basis.

Returning to his postulate of universal doubt, our philosopher argues from this to an imperfection in his
nature, and thence to the idea of a perfect being. The reasoning is most slipshod; for, even admitting that
knowledge is preferable to ignorance--which has not been proved--it does not follow that the dogmatist is
more perfect than the doubter. Indeed, one might infer the contrary from Descartes's having passed with
progressive reflection from the one stage to the other. Overlooking the paralogism, let us grant that he has the
idea of a perfect being, and go on to the question of how he came to possess it. One might suggest that the
consciousness of perfect self-knowledge, combined with the wish to know more of other subjects, would be
sufficient to create an ideal of omniscience, and, proceeding in like manner from a comparison of wants with
their satisfactions, to enlarge this ideal into the {39} notion of infinite perfection all round. Descartes,
however, is not really out for truth--at least, not in metaphysics; he is out for a justification of what the Jesuits
had taught him at La Flèche, and no Jesuit casuistry could be more sophistical than the logic he finds good
enough for the purpose. To argue, as he does, that the idea of a perfect being, in his mind, can be explained
only by its proceeding from such a being as its creator is already sufficiently audacious. But this feat is far
surpassed by his famous ontological proof of Theism. A triangle, he tells us, need not necessarily exist; but,
assuming there to be one, its three angles must be equal to two right angles. With God, on the other hand, to
be conceived is to be; for, existence being a perfection, it follows, from the idea of a perfect Being, that he
must exist. The answer is more clear and distinct than any of Descartes's demonstrations. Perfection is
affirmed of existing or of imaginary subjects, but existence is not a perfection in itself.

A third argument for Theism remains to be considered. Descartes asks how he came to exist. Not by his own
act; for on that hypothesis he would have given himself all the perfections that now he lacks; nor from any
other imperfect cause, for that would be to repeat the difficulty, not to solve it. Besides, the simple
continuance of his existence from moment to moment needs an explanation. For time consists of an infinity of
parts, none depending in any way on the others; so that my having been a little while ago is no reason why I
should be now, unless there is some power by which I am created anew. Here we must observe that Descartes
is playing fast and loose with the law of causation. By what he calls the light of nature--in other words, the
light of Greek {40} philosophy--things can no more pass into nothing than they can come out of it. Moreover,
the difficulty is the same for my supposed Creator as for myself. We are told that thought is a necessary
perfection of the divine nature. But thinking implies time; therefore God also exists from moment to moment.
CHAPTER II. 22
How, then, can he recover his being any more than we can? The answer, of course, would be: because he is
perfect, and perfection involves existence. Thus the argument from causation throws us back on the so-called
ontological argument, whose futility has already been shown.

This very idea of perfection involves us in fresh difficulties with the law of causation. A perfect Being might
be expected to make perfect creatures--which by hypothesis we are not. Descartes quite sees this, and only
escapes by a verbal quibble. Our imperfections, he says, come from the share that Nothingness has in our
nature. Once allow so much to the creative power of zero, and God seems to be a rather gratuitous postulate.

After proving to his own satisfaction the existence of the soul and of God, Descartes returns to the
starting-point of his whole inquiry--that is, the reality of the material world and of its laws. And now his
theology supplies him with a short and easy method for getting rid of the sceptical doubts that had troubled
him at first. He has a clear and distinct idea of his own body and of other bodies surrounding it on all sides as
extended substances communicating movements to one another. And he has a tendency to accept whatever is
clearly and distinctly conceived by him as true. But to suppose that God created that tendency with the
intention of deceiving him would argue a want of veracity in the divine nature incompatible with its {41}
perfection. Such reasoning obviously ignores the alternative that God might be deceiving us for our good. Or
rather what we call truth might not be an insight into the nature of things in themselves, but a correct
judgment of antecedents and consequents. Our consciousness would then be a vast sensori-motor machinery
adjusted to secure the maintenance and perfection of life.

Descartes, as a mathematician, places the essence of Matter or Body in extension. Here he agrees with another
mathematical philosopher, Plato, who says the same in his Timæus. So far the coincidence might be
accidental; but when we find that the Frenchman, like the Greek, conceives his materialised space as being
originally divided into triangular bodies, the evidence of unacknowledged borrowing seems irresistible--the
more so that Huyghens mentions this as customary with Descartes.

The great author of the Method and the Meditations--for, after every critical deduction, his greatness as a
thinker remains undoubted--contributed nothing to ethics. Here he is content to reaffirm the general
conclusions of Greek philosophy, the necessary superiority of mind to matter, of the soul to the body, of spirit
to sense. He accepts free-will from Aristotle without any attempt to reconcile it with the rigid determinism of
his own mechanical naturalism. At the same time there is a remarkable anticipation of modern psychology in
his doctrine of intellectual assent as an act of the will. When our judgments go beyond what is guaranteed by a
clear and distinct perception of their truth there is a possibility of error, and then the error is our own fault, the
precipitate conclusion having been a voluntary act. Thus human free-will intervenes to clear God of all {42}
responsibility for our delusions as well as for our crimes.

MALEBRANCHE.

Pascal, we are told, could not forgive Descartes for limiting God's action on the world to the "initial fillip" by
which the process of evolution was started. Nevertheless, Pascal's friends, the Jansenists, were content to
adopt Cartesianism as their religious philosophy, and his epigram certainly does not apply to the next
distinguished Cartesian, Arnold Geulincx (1625-1669), a Fleming of Antwerp. Unfortunate in his life, this
eminent teacher has of all original thinkers received the least credit for his services to metaphysics from
posterity, being, outside a small circle of students, still utterly unknown to fame. Geulincx is the author of a
theory called Occasionalism. Descartes had represented mind, which he identified with Thought, and matter,
which he identified with Extension, as two antithetical substances with not a note in common. Nevertheless,
he supposed that communications between them took place through a part of the brain called the pineal body.
Geulincx cut through even this narrow isthmus, denying the possibility of any machinery for transmitting
sensible images from the material world to our consciousness, or volitions from the mind to the limbs. How,
then, were the facts to be explained? According to him, by the intervention of God. When the so-called organs
of sense are acted on by vibrations from the external world, or when a particular movement is willed by the
CHAPTER II. 23

mind, the corresponding mental and material modifications are miraculously produced by the exercise of his
omnipotence; and it is because these events occur on occasion of signals of which they {43} are not the
effects but the consequents that the theory has received the name of Occasionalism.

The theory, as Geulincx formulated it, seems at first sight simply grotesque; and from a religious point of
view it has the additional drawback of making God the immediate executor of every crime committed by man.
Nevertheless, it is merely the logical application of a principle subsequently admitted by profound thinkers of
the most opposing schools--namely, that consciousness cannot produce or transmit energy, combined with the
belief in a God who does not exist for nothing. Even past the middle of the nineteenth century many English
and French naturalists were persuaded that animal species to the number of 300,000 represented as many
distinct creative acts; and at least one astronomer, who was also a philosopher, declared that the ultimate
atoms of matter, running up to an immeasurably higher figure, "bore the stamp of the manufactured article."

The capture of Cartesianism by theology was completed by Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715). This
accomplished writer and thinker, dedicated by physical infirmity to a contemplative life, entered the Oratory
at an early age, and remained in it until his death. Coming across a copy of Descartes's Treatise on Man at
twenty-six, he at once became a convert to the new philosophy, and devoted the next ten years to its exclusive
study. At the end of that period he published his masterpiece, On the Investigation of Truth (De la Recherche
de la Vérité, 1674), which at once won him an enormous reputation. It was followed by other works of less
importance. The legend that Malebranche's end was hastened by an argument with Berkeley has been
disproved. {44}

Without acknowledging the obligation, Malebranche accepts the conclusions of Geulincx to the extent of
denying the possibility of any communication between mind and matter. Indeed, he goes further, and denies
that one portion of matter can act on another. But his real advance on Occasionalism lies in the question:
How, then, can we know the laws of the material universe, or even that there is such a thing as matter at all?
Once more God intervenes to solve the difficulty, but after a fashion much less crude than the miraculous
apparatus of Geulincx. Introspection assures us that we are thinking things, and that our minds are stored with
ideas, including the idea of God the all-perfect Being, and the idea of Extension with all the mathematical and
physical truths logically deducible therefrom. We did not make this idea, therefore it comes from God, was in
God's mind before it was in ours. Following Plotinus, Malebranche calls this idea intelligible Extension. It is
the archetype of our material world. The same is true of all other clear and distinct ideas; they are, as
Platonism teaches, of divine origin. But is it necessary to suppose that the ideal contents of each separate soul
were placed in it at birth by the Creator? Surely the law of parsimony forbids. It is a simpler and easier
explanation to suppose that the divine archetypal ideas alone exists, and that we apprehend them by a mystical
communion with the divine consciousness; that, in short, we see all things in God. And in order to make this
vision possible we must, as the Apostle says, live, move, and have our being in God. As a mathematician
would say, God must be the locus, the place of souls.

There is unquestionably something grandiose about this theory, which, however, has the defect in orthodox
{45} opinion of logically leading to the Pantheism, held in abhorrence by Malebranche, of his greater
contemporary Spinoza. And it is a suggestive circumstance that the very similar philosophy of the Eternal
Consciousness held by our countryman T. H. Green has been shown by the criticism of Henry Sidgwick to
exclude the personality of God.

SPINOZA.

With the philosopher whom I have just named we come for the first time in modern history to a figure
recalling in its sustained equality of intellectual and moral excellence the most heroic figures of Hellenic
thought. Giordano Bruno we may, indeed, pronounce, like Lucan or Cranmer, "by his death approved," but his
submission at Venice has to be set against his martyrdom at Rome; and if there is nothing very censurable in
his career as a wandering teacher, there is also nothing worthy of any particular respect. Differences of
CHAPTER II. 24
environment and heredity may no doubt be invoked to account for the difference of character; and in the
philosophy about to be considered the determining influence of such causes for the first time finds due
recognition; but on the same principle our ethical judgments also are determined by the very constitution of
things.

Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), born at Amsterdam, belonged to a family of Portuguese Jews, exiled on
account of their Hebrew faith, in which also he was brought up. Soon after reaching manhood he fell away
from the synagogue, preferring to share in the religious exercises of certain latitudinarian Christian sects.
Spies were set to report his conversation, which soon supplied evidence of sufficiently heterodox opinions.
{46} A sentence of formal excommunication followed; but modern research has discredited the story of an
attempt to assassinate him made by an emissary of the synagogue. After successfully resisting the claim of his
sister and his brother-in-law to shut out the apostate from his share of the paternal inheritance, Spinoza
surrendered the disputed property, but henceforth broke off all communication with his family. Subsequently
he refused an offer of 2,000 florins, made by a wealthy friend and admirer, Simon de Vries, as also a proposal
from the same friend to leave him his whole fortune, insisting that it should go to the legal heir, Simon's
brother Isaac. The latter, on succeeding, wished to settle an annual pension of 500 florins on Spinoza, but the
philosopher would accept no more than 300. Books were his only luxury, material wants being supplied by
polishing glass lenses, an art in which he attained considerable proficiency. But it was an unhealthy
occupation, and probably contributed to his death by consumption.

Democracy was then and long afterwards associated with fanaticism and intolerance rather than with
free-thought in religion. The liberal party in Dutch politics was the aristocratic party. Spinoza sympathised
with its leader, John de Witt; he wept bitter tears over the great statesman's murder; and only the urgent
remonstrances of his friends, who knew what danger would be incurred by such a step, prevented him from
placarding the walls of the Hague, where he then resided, with an address reproaching the infuriated people
for their crime.

{47}

[Illustration: Reproduced (by permission) from Spinoza's Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being, by
Professor A. Wolf (A. & C. Black).]

{48}

In 1673 the enlightened ruler of the Palatinate, a brother of Descartes's Princess Elizabeth, offered Spinoza a
professorship at Heidelberg, with full liberty to teach his philosophy. But the pantheistic recluse wisely
refused it. Even at the present day such teaching as his would meet with little mercy at Berlin, Cambridge, or
Edinburgh. As it was, we have reason to believe that even in free Holland only a premature death saved him
from a prosecution for blasphemy, and his great work the Ethica could not with safety be published during his
lifetime. It appeared anonymously among his posthumous works in November, 1677, without the name of the
true place of publication on the title-page.

Spinoza was for his time no less daring as a Biblical critic than as a metaphysician. His celebrated Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus has for its primary purpose to vindicate the freedom of scientific thought against
ecclesiastical interference. And this he does by drawing a trenchant line of demarcation between the
respective offices of religion and of philosophy. The business of the one is to form the character and to purify
the heart, of the other to guide and inform the intellect. When religion undertakes to teach scientific truth the
very ends for which it exists are defeated. When theological dogmatism gains control of the Churches the
worst passions are developed under its influence. Instead of becoming lowly and charitable, men become
disturbers of public order, grasping intriguers, bitter and censorious persecutors. The claims of theology to
dictate our intellectual beliefs are not only mischievous, but totally invalid. They rest on the authority of the
Bible as a revelation of God's will. But no such supernatural revelation ever was or could be given. Such
CHAPTER II. 25
violation of the order of nature as the miracles recorded in Scripture history would be impossible. And the
narratives recording them are discredited by {49} the criticism which shows that various books of the Old
Testament were not written by the men whose names they bear, but long after their time. As a Hebrew scholar
Spinoza discusses the Jewish Scriptures in some detail, showing in particular that the Pentateuch is of a later
date than Moses. His limited knowledge of Greek is offered as a reason for not handling the New Testament
with equal freedom; but some contradictions are indicated as disallowing the infallibility claimed for it. At the
same time the perfection of Christ's character is fully acknowledged and accepted as a moral revelation of
God.

Spinoza shared to the fullest extent, and even went beyond, Descartes's ambition to reconstruct philosophy on
a mathematical basis. The idea may have come to him from the French thinker, but it is actually of much older
origin, being derived from Plato, the leading spirit of the Renaissance, as Aristotle had been the oracle of the
later Middle Ages. Now Plato's ideal had been to construct a philosophy transcending the assumptions--or, as
he calls them, the hypotheses--of geometry as much as those assumptions transcend the demonstrations of
geometry; and this also was the ideal of Spinoza. Descartes had been content to accept from tradition his
ultimate realities, Thought, Extension, and God, without showing that they must necessarily exist; for his
proof of God's existence starts from an idea in the human mind, while Thought and Extension are not deduced
at all.

To appreciate the work of the Hebrew philosopher, of the lonely muser, bred in the religion of Jahveh--a name
traditionally interpreted as the very expression of absolute self-existence--we must conceive him as starting
with a question deeper even than the Cartesian {50} doubt, asking not How can I know what is? but Why
should there be anything whatever? And the answer, divested of scholastic terminology, is: Because it is
inconceivable that there should be nothing, and if there is anything there must be everything. This universe of
things, which must also be everlasting, Spinoza calls God.

The philosophy or religion--for it is both--which identifies God with the totality of existence was of long
standing in Greece, and had been elaborated in systematic detail by the Stoics. It has been known for the last
two centuries under the name of Pantheism, a word of Greek etymology, but not a creation of the Greeks
themselves, and, indeed, of more modern date than Spinoza. Historians always speak of him as a Pantheist,
and there is no reason to think that he would have objected to the designation had it been current during his
lifetime. But there are important points of distinction between him and those who preceded or followed him in
the same speculative direction. The Stoics differed from him in being materialists. To them reality and
corporeality were convertible terms. It seems likely that Hobbes and his contemporary, the atomist Gassendi,
were of the same opinion, although they did not say it in so many words. But Descartes was a strong
spiritualist; and Spinoza followed the master's lead so far, at any rate, as to give Thought at least equal reality
with matter, which he also identified with Extension. It has been seen what difficulties were created by the
radical Cartesian antithesis between Thought and Extension, or--to call them by their more familiar
names--mind and body, when taken together with the intimate association shown by experience to obtain
between them; and also how {51} Geulincx and Malebranche were led on by the very spirit of philosophy
itself almost to submerge the two disparate substances in the all-absorbing agency of God. The obvious
course, then, for Spinoza, being unfettered by the obligations of any Christian creed, was to take the last
remaining step, to resolve the dualism of Thought and Extension into the unity of the divine substance.

In fact, the Hebrew philosopher does this, declaring boldly that Thought and Extension are one and the same
thing--which thing is God, the only true reality of which they are merely appearances. And, so far, he has had
many followers who strive to harmonise the opposition of what we now call subject and object in the
synthesis of the All-One. But he goes beyond this, expanding the conception of God--or the Absolute--to a
degree undreamed of by any religion or philosophy formulated before or after his time. God, Spinoza tells us,
is "a Substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses his absolute and eternal essence." But
of these attributes two alone, Thought and Extension, are known to us at present, so that our ignorance
infinitely exceeds our knowledge of reality. His extant writings do not explain by what process he mounted to
CHAPTER II. 26
this, the most dizzy height of speculation ever attained by man; but, in the absence of definite information,
some guiding considerations suggest themselves as probable.

Bruno, whom Spinoza is held, on strong grounds, to have read, identified God with the supreme unifying
principle of a universe extending through infinite space. Descartes, on the other hand, conceived God as a
thinking rather than as an extended substance. But his school tended, as we saw, to conceive God as mediating
{52} between mind and body in a way that suggested their real union through his power. Furthermore, the
habit common to all Cartesians of regarding geometrical reasoning as the most perfect form of thought
inevitably led to the conception of thought as accompanying space wherever it went--in fact, as stretching like
it to infinity. Again, from the Cartesian point of view, that Extension which is the very essence of the material
world, while it covers space, is more than mere space; it includes not only co-existence, but succession or
time--that is, scientifically speaking, the eternal sequence of physical causes; or, theologically speaking, the
creative activity of God. And reason or thought had also since Aristotle been more or less identified with the
law of universal causation no less than with the laws of geometry.

Thus, then, the ground was prepared for Spinoza, as a pantheistic monist, to conceive God under the two
attributes of Extension and Thought, each in its own way disclosing his essence as no other than infinite
Power. But why should God have, or consist of, two attributes and no more? There is a good reason why we
should know only those two. It is that we are ourselves modes of Thought united to modes of Extension, of
which our thoughts are the revealing ideas. But it would be gross anthropomorphism to impose the limitations
of our knowledge on the infinite being of God, manifested through those very attributes as unlimited Power.
The infinite of co-existence, which is space, the infinite of causal procession, which is time, suggest an
infinity of unimaginable but not inconceivable attributes of which the one divine substance consists. And here
at last we get the explanation of why there should be such things as Thought and Extension at all. They are
there simply because everything is. If I grant {53} anything--and I must, at least, grant myself--I grant
existence, which, having nothing outside itself, must fill up all the possibilities of being which only exclude
the self-contradictory from their domain. Thus, the philosophy of Spinoza neither obliges him to believe in the
monsters of mythology nor in the miracles of Scripture, nor in the dogmas of Catholic theology, nor even in
free-will; nor, again, would it oblige him to reject by anticipation the marvels of modern science. For,
according to him, the impossibility of really incredible things could be deduced with the certainty of
mathematical demonstration from the law of contradiction itself.

Hegel has given the name of acosmism, or negation of the world, to this form of pantheism, interpreting it as a
doctrine that absorbs all concrete reality and individuality in the absolute unity of the divine essence. No
misconception could be more complete. Differentiation is the very soul of Spinoza's system. It is, indeed,
more open to the charge of excessive dispersion than of excessive centralisation. Power, which is God's
essence, means no more than the realisation through all eternity of all possibilities of existence, with no end or
aim but just the process of infinite production itself. There is, indeed, a nominal identification between the
material processes of Extension and the ideal processes of Thought. But this amounts to no more than a
re-statement in abstract terms of the empirical truth that there is a close connection between body and mind.
Like the double-aspect theory, the parallelistic theory, the materialistic theory, the theory of interaction, and
the theory of more or less complete reciprocal independence, it is a mere verbalism, telling us nothing that we
did not know before. Or, if there {54} is more, it consists of the very questionable assumption that body and
mind must come in somewhere to fill up what would otherwise be blank possibilities of existence. And this,
like other metaphysical assumptions, is an illegitimate generalisation from experience. The ideas of space and
time as filled-up continua supply the model on which the whole universe must be constructed. Like them, it
must be infinite and eternal, but, so to speak, at a higher power; as in them, every part must be determined by
the position of all other parts, with the determination put at a logical instead of at a descriptive value;
corresponding to their infinitely varied differentiation of position and quantity, there must be an infinite
differentiation of concrete content; and, finally, the laws of the universe must be demonstrable by the same à
priori mathematical method that has been so successfully applied to continuous quantity.
CHAPTER II. 27
The geometrical form into which Spinoza has thrown his philosophy unfortunately restricts the number of
readers--always rather small--that it might otherwise attract. People feel themselves mystified, wearied, and
cheated by the appearance, without the reality, of logical demonstration; and the repulsion is aggravated by
the barbarous scholasticism with which--unlike Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes--he peppers his pages. Yet, like
the Greek philosophers, he is much more modern, more on the true line of developing thought than they are.
But to get at the true kernel of his teaching we must, like Goethe, disregard the logical husks in which it is
wrapped up. And, as it happens, Spinoza has greatly facilitated this operation by printing his most interesting
and suggestive discussions in the form of Scholia, Explanations, and Appendices. Even {55} these are not
easy reading; but, to quote his own pathetic words, "If the way of salvation lay ready to hand, and could be
found without great toil, would it be neglected by nearly everyone? But all glorious things are as difficult as
they are rare."

Some of his expositors have called Spinoza a mystic; and his philosophy has been traced, in part at least, to
the mystical pantheism of certain medieval Jews. In my opinion this is a mistake; and I will now proceed to
show that the phrases on which it rests are open to an interpretation more consistent with the rational
foundations of the whole system.

The things that have done most to fasten the character of a mystic on Spinoza are his identification of virtue
with the knowledge and love of God, and his theory--so suggestive of Christian theology at its highest
flight--that God loves himself with an infinite love. That, like Plato and Matthew Arnold, he should value
religion as a means of popular moralisation might seem natural enough; but not, except from a mystical
motive, that he should apparently value morality merely as a help to the religious life. On examination,
however, it appears that the beatific vision of this pantheist offers no experience going beyond the limits of
nature and reason. Since God and the universe are one, to know God is to know that we are, body and soul,
necessary modes of the two attributes, Extension and Thought, by which the infinite Power which is the
essence of the universe expresses itself for us. To love God is to recognise our own vitality as a portion of that
power, welcoming it with grateful joy as a gift from the universe whence we come. And to say that God loves
himself with an infinite love is merely to say that the attribute of Thought eternally divides itself among an
infinity of {56} thinking beings, through whose activity the universe keeps up a delighted consciousness of
itself.

Spinoza declares by the very name of his great work that for him the philosophical problem is essentially a
problem of ethics, being, indeed, no other than the old question, first started by Plato, how to reconcile
disinterestedness with self-interest; and his metaphysical system is really an elaborate mechanism for proving
that, on the profoundest interpretation, their claims coincide. His great contemporary, Hobbes, had taught that
the fundamental impulse of human nature is the will for power; and Spinoza accepts this idea to the fullest
extent in proclaiming Power to be the very stuff of which we and all other things are made. But he parts
company with the English philosopher in his theory of what it means. On his view it is an utter illusion to
suppose that to gratify such passions as pride, avarice, vanity, and lust is to acquire or exercise power. For
strength means freedom, self-determination; and no man can be free whose happiness depends on a fortuitous
combination of external circumstances, or on the consent of other persons whose desires are such as to set up
a conflict between his gratification and theirs. Real power means self-realisation, the exercise of that faculty
which is most purely human--that is to say, of Thought under the form of reason.

In pleading for the subordination of the self-seeking desires to reason Spinoza repeats the lessons of moral
philosophy in all ages and countries since its first independent constitution. In connecting the interests of
morality with the interests of science as such, he follows the tradition of Athenian thought. In interpreting
pantheism as an ethical enthusiasm of the universe he returns to the creed of Stoicism, and {57} strikes the
keynote of Wordsworth's loftiest poetry. In fixing each man's place in nature as one among the infinite
individuations of divine power he repeats another Stoic idea--with this difference, however, that among the
Stoics it was intimately associated with their teleology, with the doctrine that everything in nature has a
function without whose performance the universe would not be complete; whereas Spinoza, following Bacon
CHAPTER II. 28
and Descartes, utterly abjures final causes as an anthropomorphism, an intrusion of human interests into a
universe whose sole perfection is to exhaust the possibilities of existence. And herein lies his justification of
evil which the Stoics could only defend on aesthetic grounds as enhancing the beauty of moral heroism by
contrast and conflict. "If I am asked," he says, "why God did not create all men of such a character as to be
guided by reason alone, my answer is because he had materials enough to create all things from the highest to
the lowest degree of perfection." Perfection with him meaning reality, this account of evil--and of error
also--points to the theory of degrees of reality, revived and elaborated in our own time by Mr. F. H. Bradley,
involving a correlative theory of illusion. Now, the idea of illusion, although older than Plato, was first
applied on a great scale in Plato's philosophy, of whose influence on seventeenth-century thought this is not
the only example. We shall find it to some extent countervailed by a revived Aristotelian current in the work
of the metaphysician who now remains to be considered.

LEIBNIZ.

G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716), son of a professor at the University of Leipzig, is marked by some of the
distinguishing intellectual characters of the German genius. {58} Far more truly than Francis Bacon, this man
took all knowledge for his province. At once a mathematician, a physicist, a historian, a metaphysician, and a
diplomatist, he went to the bottom of whatever subject he touched, and enriched all his multifarious studies
with new views or with new facts. And as with other great countrymen of his, the final end of all this curiosity
and interest was to combine and reconcile. One of his ambitions was to create a universal language of
philosophy, by whose means its problems were to be made a matter of mathematical demonstration; another
to harmonise ancient with modern speculation; a third--the most chimerical of all--to compose the differences
between Rome and Protestantism; a fourth--partly realised long after his time--to unite the German Calvinists
with the Lutherans. In politics he tried, with equal unsuccess, to build up a Confederation of the Rhine as a
barrier against Louis XIV., and to divert the ambition of Louis himself from encroachments on his neighbours
to the conquest of Egypt.

It seems probable that no intellect of equal power was ever applied in modern times to the service of
philosophy. And this power is demonstrated, not, as with other metaphysicians, by constructions of more or
less contestable value, however dazzling the ingenuity they may display, but by contributions of the first order
to positive science. It is now agreed that Leibniz discovered the differential calculus independently of
Newton; and, what is more, that the formulation by which alone it has been made available for fruitful
application was his exclusive invention. In physics he is a pioneer of the conservation of energy. In geology
he starts the theory that our planet began as a glowing molten mass derived from the sun; and the modern
{59} theory of evolution is a special application of his theory of development.

Intellect alone, however, does not make a great philosopher; character also is required; and Leibniz's character
was quite unworthy of his genius. Ambitious and avaricious, a courtier and a time-server, he neither made
truth for its own sake a paramount object, nor would he keep on terms with those who cherished a nobler
ideal. After cultivating Spinoza's acquaintance, he joined in the cry of obloquy raised after his death, and was
mean enough to stir up religious prejudice against Newton's theory of gravitation. Of the calamity that
embittered his closing days we may say with confidence that it could not possibly have befallen Spinoza. On
the accession of the Elector of Hanover to the English crown as George I., Leibniz sought for an invitation to
the Court of St. James. Apparently the prince had not found him very satisfactory as a State official, and had
reason to believe that Leibniz would have liked to exchange his office of historiographer at Hanover for a
better appointment at Vienna. Greatness in other departments could not recommend one whom he knew only
as a negligent and perhaps unfaithful servant to the favour of such an illiterate master. Anyhow, the English
appointment was withheld, and the worn-out encyclopædist succumbed to disease and vexation combined.
The only mourner at his funeral was his secretary, Eckhardt, who hastened to solicit the reversion of the
offices left vacant by his chief's decease.

A single theory of Leibniz has attained more celebrity than any one utterance of any other philosopher; but
CHAPTER II. 29
that fame is due to the undying fire in which it has been enveloped by the mocking irony of Voltaire. {60}
Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Such is the famous text as a satire on which
Candide was composed. Yet whatever value Voltaire's objections to optimism may possess tells nearly as
much against Voltaire himself as against his unfortunate butt. For, after all, believing as he did in a God who
combined omnipotence with perfect goodness he could not any more than Leibniz evade the obligation of
reconciling the divine character with the divine work. On à priori grounds the German philosopher seems to
have an incontrovertible case. A perfect Being must have made the best possible world. The only question is
what we mean by goodness and by possibility. Spinoza had solved the problem by identifying goodness with
existence. It is enough that the things we call evil are possible; the infinite Power of nature would be a
self-contradiction were they not realised. Leibniz rejects the pantheistic position in terms, but nearly admits it
in practice. Evil for him means imperfection, and if God made a world at all it was bound to be imperfect. The
next step was to call pain an imperfection, which suggests a serious logical deficiency in the optimist; for,
although in certain circumstances the production of pain argues imperfection in the operator, we are not
entitled to argue that wherever there is pain there must be imperfection. Another plea is the necessity of pain
as a punishment for crime, or, more generally, as a result of moral freedom. Such an argument is only open to
the believers in free-will. A world of free and responsible agents, they urge, is infinitely more valuable than a
world of automata; and it is not too dearly purchased even at the cost of such suffering as we witness. The
argument is not very convincing; for liberty of choice {61} in a painless world is quite conceivable. But, be it
a good or bad argument, although it might appeal to Voltaire, who believed in free-will, it could not decently
be used by Leibniz, who was a determinist of the strictest type. To make this clear we must now turn to his
metaphysical system.

Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza, disagreeing widely on other subjects, were agreed in discountenancing the
study of final causes: Bacon, apparently, from dislike of the idea that the perfect adaptation of all things to the
service of man rendered superfluous any efforts to make them more serviceable still; Descartes from his
devotion to the mathematical method which was more applicable to a system of mechanical causation;
Spinoza for the same reason, and also from his disbelief in a personal God. Leibniz, on the contrary, felt
deeply impressed by a famous passage in Plato's Phædo, where Socrates, opposing the philosophy of
teleology to the philosophy of mechanism, desiderates an explanation of nature as designed with a view to the
highest good. But Leibniz did not go so far as Plato. Mediating between the two methods, he taught that all is
done for the best, but also that all is done through an unbroken series of efficient causes. At the same time,
these causes are only material in appearance; in reality they are spiritual beings. There is no such thing as dead
matter; the universe consists of living forces all through. The general idea of force probably came from that
infinite Power of which, according to Spinoza, the whole universe is at once the product and the expression;
or it may have been suggested by Plato's incidental identification of Being with Action. But Leibniz found his
type of force in human personality, which, following the lead of Aristotle {62} rather than of Plato, he
conceived as an Entelechy, or realised Actuality, and a First Substance. After years of anxious reflection he
chose the far happier name of Monad, a term originally coined by Bruno, but not, as would appear, directly
borrowed from him by the German metaphysician.

According to Leibniz, the monads or ultimate elements of existence are constituted by the two essential
properties of psychic life, perception and appetency. In this connection two points have to be made clear.
What he calls bare monads--i.e., the components of what is known as inorganic matter--although percipient,
are not conscious of their perceptions; in his language they do not apperceive. And he endeavours to prove
that such a mentality is possible by a reference to our own experience. We hear the roaring of waves on the
seashore, but we do not hear the sound made by the falling of each particle of water. And yet we certainly
must perceive it in some way or other, since the total volume of sound is made up of those inaudible impacts.
He overlooks the conceivable alternative that the immediate antecedent of our auditory sensations is a cerebral
disturbance, and that this must attain a certain volume in order to produce an effect on our consciousness. The
other point is that the appetency of a monad does not mean an active impulse, but a search for more and more
perceptions, a continuous widening of its cognitive range. In short, each monad is a little Leibniz for ever
increasing the sum of its knowledge.
CHAPTER II. 30
At no stage does that knowledge come from experience. The monad has no windows, no communication of
any kind with the external world. But each reflects the whole universe, knowing what it knows by {63} mere
introspection. And each reflects all the others at a different angle, the angles varying from one another by
infinitesimal degrees, so that in their totality they form a continuous series of differentiated individuals. And
the same law of infinitesimal differentiation is observed by the series of progressive changes through which
the monads are ever passing, so that they keep exact step, the continuity of existence being unbroken in the
order of succession as in the order of co-existence. Evidently there is no place for free-will in such a system;
and that Leibniz, with his relentless fatalism, should not only admit the eternal punishment of predestined
sinners, but even defend it as morally appropriate, obliges us to condemn his theology as utterly irrational or
utterly insincere.

In this system animal and human souls are conceived as monads of superior rank occupying a central and
commanding position among a multitude of inferior monads constituting what we call their bodies, and
changing pari passu with them, the correspondence of their respective states being, according to Leibniz, of
such a peculiarly intimate character that the phenomena of sensation and volition seem to result from a causal
reaction instead of from a mechanical adjustment such as we can imagine to exist between two clocks so
constructed and set as to strike the same hour at the same time. This theory of the relations between body and
soul is known to philosophy as the system of pre-established harmony.

It may be asked how every monad can possibly reflect every other monad when we do not know what is
passing in our own bodies, still less what is passing all over the universe. The answer consists in a convenient
distinction between clear and confused {64} perceptions, the one constituting our actual and the other our
potential knowledge. A more difficult problem is to explain how any particular monad--Leibniz or
another--can consistently be a monadologist rather than a solipsist believing only in its own existence. Here,
as usual, the Deus ex Machina comes in. Following Descartes, I think of God as a perfect Being whose idea
involves his existence, with, of course, the power, will, and wisdom to create the best possible world--a
universe of monads--which, again, by its perfect mutual adjustments, proves that there is a God. A more
serious, and indeed absolutely insuperable, objection arises from the definition of the monads as nothing but
mutually reflecting entities. For even an infinity of little mirrors with nothing but each other to reflect must at
once collapse into absolute vacuity. And with their disappearance their creator also disappears. God, the
supreme monad, we are told, has only clear perceptions; but the clearness is of no avail when he has nothing
to perceive but an absolute blank. Leibniz rejected the objectivity of time and space; yet the hollow infinity of
those blank forms seems, in his philosophy, to have reached the consciousness of itself.

*****

{65}
CHAPTER III. 31

CHAPTER III.
THE THEORISTS OF KNOWLEDGE

LOCKE, BERKELEY, HUME, KANT.

Epistemology, or theory of knowledge, did not begin in modern times. Among the Greeks it goes back, at
least, to Empedocles, and figures largely in the programmes of the later schools. And Descartes's universal
doubt seems to give the question, How can we be sure of anything? a foremost place in speculation. But the
singular assurance with which the Cartesian metaphysicians presented their adventurous hypotheses as
demonstrated certainties showed that with them the test of truth meant whatever told for that which, on other
grounds, they believed to be true. In reality, the thing they called reason was hardly more than a covert appeal
to authority, a suggestion that the duty of philosophy was to reconcile old beliefs with new. And the last great
dogmatist, Leibniz, was the one who practised this method of uncritical assumption to the utmost extent.

LOCKE.

It is the peculiar glory of John Locke (1632-1704) to have resumed that method of doubt which Descartes had
attempted, but which his dogmatic prepossessions had falsified almost at the first start. This illustrious thinker
is memorable not only for his services to speculation, but for the example of a genuinely philosophic life {66}
entirely devoted to truth and good--a character in which personal sweetness, simplicity, and charm were
combined with strenuous, disinterested, and fearless devotion to the service of the State. Locke was a Whig
when Whiggism meant advanced Liberalism in religion and politics, and when that often meant a choice
between exile and death. Thus, after the fall of his patron, Lord Shaftesbury, the philosopher had to take
refuge in Holland, remaining there for some years, lying hid even there for some time to escape an extradition
order for which the Government of James II. had applied. It was in Holland that he wrote the Essay
Concerning Human Understanding.

This revolutionist in thought was no solitary recluse, but, in the best sense, a thorough man of the world.
Educated at Westminster and Christ Church, he had, in the German poet's phrase, the supreme happiness of
combining the seriousness of an enthusiast with the sagacity of a statesman, so that great statesmen recognised
him as one of themselves. With the triumph of the Whig cause at a time when diplomacy demanded the
utmost tact and skill, it was proposed to send Locke as Ambassador to the Court of Brandenburg, and, as that
would not have suited his sober habits, to the Court of Vienna. Weak health obliging him to decline this also,
he received office in the Ministry at home, taking a department where business talents were eminently
required. In that capacity he bore a leading part in the restoration of the coinage, besides inspiring the
Toleration Act and the Act for Unlicensed Printing. Even the wisest men make mistakes; and it must be
noticed with regret that Locke's theory of toleration excluded Roman Catholics on the one side and atheists on
the other--the former because their {67} creed made persecution a duty, the latter because their want of a
creed left them no sanction for any duties whatever. To say that Locke had not our experience does not excuse
him, for in both cases the expediency of toleration can be proved à priori. Romanists must be expected to
suppress a heresy whose spokesman declares that when he has the power he will suppress their Church; and, if
atheists are without moral principle, they will propagate, under cover of orthodoxy, negations that they are not
allowed openly to profess.

Locke was brought up by a Puritan father; and, although in after life he wandered far from its doctrinal
standards, he no doubt always retained a sense of that close connection between religion and morality which
Puritanism implies. Telling about the train of thought that started his great Essay, he refers it to a conversation
between himself and some friends, in which they "found themselves quickly at a stand by the difficulties that
rose on every side;" and, according to an intimate friend of his, the discussion turned "on the principles of
morality and revealed religion." It then occurred to him that they should first ascertain "what objects their
understandings were or were not fitted to deal with." And the mottoes prefixed to the essay prove that the
CHAPTER III. 32

results were of a decidedly sceptical cast. Indeed, his successors, though not himself, were destined to develop
them into what is now called Agnosticism.

We have further to note that, while his Continental rivals were mathematicians, our English philosopher never
went deeply into mathematics, but was by calling a physician. In this he resembles Aristotle and Sextus
Empiricus among the Greeks; and so it is quite in order that, with the same sort of training, he should {68}
adopt Aristotle's method of experience as against Platonic transcendentalism, and the sceptical relativism of
Sextus as against the dogmatism of the schools.

Locke begins his essay with a vigorous polemic against the doctrine of Innate Ideas. The word "idea," as he
uses it, is ambiguous, serving to denote perceptions, notions, and propositions; but this confusion is of no
practical importance, his object being to show that all our knowledge originates in experience; whereas the
reigning belief was that at least the first principles of knowledge had a more authoritative, if not a mystical,
source. Hobbes had been beforehand with him in deriving every kind of knowledge from experience, but had
been content to assume his case; whereas Locke supports his by a formidable array of proofs. The gist of his
argument is that intellectual and moral principles supposed to be recognised by all mankind from their infancy
are admitted only by some, and by those only as the result of teaching.

As we saw, the whole inquiry began with questions about religion and morality; and it is precisely in
reference to the alleged universality and innateness of the belief in God and the moral law that Locke is most
successful. And the more modern anthropology teaches us about primitive man, the stronger becomes the case
against the transcendental side in the controversy. Where his analysis breaks down is in dealing with the
difficult and important ideas of Space, Time, Substance, and Causality--with the fatal result that such
questions as, How is experience itself possible? or, How from a partial experience can we draw universal and
necessary conclusions? find no place in his theory of knowledge. Of course, his contemporaries are open to
the same {69} criticism--nor, indeed, had the time come even for the statement of such problems. Meanwhile,
the facility with which the founder of epistemology accepts fallacies whence Spinoza had already found his
way out shows how little he was master of his means. According to Locke, it is "a certain and evident truth
that there is an eternal, most powerful, and most knowing being, which whether anyone will please to call
God it matters not." On examination the proof appears to involve two unproved assumptions. The first is that
nothing can begin to exist without a cause. The second is that effects must resemble their causes. And from
these it is inferred that an all-powerful being must have existed from all eternity. The alternative is overlooked
that a succession of more limited beings would answer the purpose equally well, while it would also be more
consistent with our experience. But a far more fatal objection to Locke's theism results from his second
assumption. This, although not explicitly stated, is involved in the assertion that for knowledge such as we
possess to originate from things without knowledge is impossible. For, on the same principle, matter must
have been made by something material, pain by something that is pained, and evil by something that is evil. It
would not even be going too far to say that by this logic I myself must have existed from all eternity; for to
say that I was created by a not-myself would be to say that something may come from nothing.

We have seen how Locke refused toleration to atheists on the ground that their denial of a divine lawgiver and
judge destroys the basis of morality. He did not, like Spinoza, believe that morality is of the nature of things.
For him it is constituted by the will of God. Possibly, if pressed, he might have explained {70} that what
atheism denies is not the rule of right, but the sanction of that rule, the fear of supernatural retribution. Yet
being, like Spinoza and Leibniz, a determinist, he should have seen that a creator who sets in motion the train
of causes and effects necessarily resulting in what we call good or bad human actions has the same
responsibility for those actions as if he had committed them himself. To reward one of his passive agents and
to punish another would be grossly unjust and at the same time perfectly useless. But how do we know that he
will, on any theory of volition, reward the good and punish the bad? "Because we have his word for it." And
how do we know that he will keep his word? "Because he is all-good." But that, on Locke's principles, is pure
assumption; and God, being quite sure that he has no retribution to fear, must be even more irresponsible than
the atheist.
CHAPTER III. 33
The principle that nothing can come from nothing, so far from proving theism, leads logically either to
pantheism or to a much more thorough monadism than the system of Leibniz. And, metaphysics apart, it
conflicts with a leading doctrine of the essay--that is the fundamental distinction between the primary and the
secondary qualities of matter. We think of bodies as in themselves extended, resisting and mobile, but not in
themselves as coloured, sonorous, odorous, hot, cold, or sapid. They cause our special sensations, but cause
them by an unknown power. Again we perceive--or think we perceive--both primary and secondary qualities
in close union as properties of a single object, and this object in which they jointly inhere is called a
substance. And to the question, What is substance? Locke admits that he has no answer except something we
know not what. He has returned to the agnostic standpoint of the {71} Cyrenaic school. This something, for
aught we know, might have created the world.

Continental historians regard the whole rationalistic movement of the eighteenth century, or what in Germany
is called the Enlightenment (Aufklärung), as having been started by Locke. But the sort of arguments that he
adduces for the existence of a God prove that in theology at least his rationalism had rather narrow limits.
Both his theism and his acceptance of Christianity on the evidence of prophecy and miracles show no advance
on medieval logic. In this respect Spinoza and Bayle (1622-1709) were far more in line with the modern
movement. Still, assuming scripture as an authoritative revelation, Locke shows that, rationally interpreted, it
yields much less support to dogmatic orthodoxy than English Churchmen supposed. And whatever may have
been the letter of his religious teaching, there can be little doubt that the English Deists, Toland, Shaftesbury,
and Anthony Collins, represented its true spirit more faithfully than the philosopher himself.

Representative government and the subordination of ecclesiastical to secular authority--or, better still, their
separation--are both good things in themselves and favourable conditions to the life of reason. Another
condition is that children should be trained to exercise their intelligence instead of relying blindly on
authority. In these respects also Locke's writings acted powerfully on the public opinion of the next century,
especially through the agency of French writers; France, as Macaulay justly claims, being the interpreter
between England and the world. Our present business, however, is not with the diffusion but the development
of thought, and to trace this we must return to British philosophy. {72}

BERKELEY.

George Berkeley (1684-1753) was born and educated in Ireland. The fact is of no racial or national
importance, but interests us as accounting for his having received a better training in philosophy than at that
time was possible in England. For the study of Locke, then proscribed at Oxford, had already been introduced
into Dublin when Berkeley was an undergraduate there; and it was as a critical advance on Locke that his first
publication, the New Theory of Vision (1709), was offered. Next year came the epoch-making Principles of
Human Knowledge, followed in 1713 by the more popular Dialogues. At twenty-nine his work was done, and
although he lived forty years longer, rising to be a Bishop in the Irish Church, after projecting a Christian
Utopia for the civilisation of the North American Indians that never came to anything, and practising "every
virtue under heaven," he made no other permanent contribution to thought.

Berkeley is at once a theorist of knowledge and a metaphysician, combining, in a way, the method of Locke
with the method of Descartes and his successors. The popular notion of his philosophy is that it resolved the
external world into a dream, or at least into something that has no existence outside our minds. But this is an
utter misconception, against which Berkeley constantly protested. His quarrel was not with common sense,
but with the theorists of perception. To understand this we must return for a moment to Locke's teaching. It
will be remembered in what a tangle of difficulties the essay had left its author. Matter had two sets of
qualities, primary and secondary, the one belonging to things in themselves, the other existing only {73} in
our minds; yet both somehow combined in real substances independent of us, but acting on our senses.
Substance as such is an unknown and unknowable postulate; nevertheless, we know that it was created by
God, of whom our knowledge is, if anything, inconveniently extensive. Now Berkeley, to find his way out of
these perplexities, begins by attacking the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. For this
CHAPTER III. 34
purpose his Theory of Vision was written. It proves--or attempts to prove--that extension is not a real attribute
of things in themselves, but an intellectual construction, or what Locke would have called an "idea of
reflection." Till then people had thought that its objectivity was firmly established by the concurrent testimony
of two senses, sight and touch. Berkeley shows, on the contrary, that visible and tangible extension are not the
same thing, that the sensations--or, as he calls them, the ideas--of sight and touch are two different languages
whose words we learn by experience to interpret in terms of each other without their being necessarily
connected. A man born blind would not at first sight know how to interpret the visual signs of distance,
direction, and magnitude; he would have to learn them by experience. These, in fact, are ideal relations only
existing in the mind; and so we have no right to oppose mind as inextended to an extended or an external
world.

Having thus cleared the ground, our young idealist proceeds in his next and greatest work, Of the Principles of
Human Knowledge, to attack the problem from another side. The world of objects revealed through sensation
and reflection is clearly no illusion, no creation of our own. We find it there, changing, when it changes,
without or even very much against our will. {74} What, then, is its origin and nature? Locke's view, which is
the common view, tells us that it consists of material bodies, some animated and some not. And matter, the
supposed substance of body, is made known to us by impressions on our organs of sense. But when we try to
think of matter apart from these sensible qualities and the relations between them it vanishes into an empty
abstraction. Now, according to Berkeley there are no abstract ideas--i.e., no thoughts unassociated with some
mental image besides a mere word; and Matter or inanimate substance would be such an idea, therefore it
does not exist. There is nothing but mind and its contents--what we call states of consciousness, what Locke
and Berkeley called ideas. Whence, then, come the objects of our consciousness, and whither do they go when
we cease to perceive them? At this point the new metaphysical system intervenes. Berkeley says that all things
subsist in the consciousness of God, and by their subsistence his existence is proved. The direct apprehension
of a reality that is not ourselves only becomes possible through what would be called in modern language a
subjective participation in the divine consciousness, more feebly reflected, as would seem, in the memories,
imaginations, and reasonings of our finite minds.

In pursuing these wonderful speculations Berkeley deviated widely from the direct line of English philosophy,
and it is difficult not to believe that the deflection was determined by the influence of Malebranche, especially
when we find that the writings of the Oratorian Father were included in his college studies. Moreover, a
parallel line of idealistic development derived from the same source was evolving itself at {75} the same time
in English thought. John Norris (1657-1711), a correspondent of the Platonist Henry More, an opponent of
Locke, and a disciple of Malebranche, had himself found an enthusiastic admirer in Arthur Collier
(1680-1732), whose Clavis Universalis professed to be "a demonstration of the non-existence or impossibility
of an external world" (1713). Both Norris and Collier, like Malebranche and Berkeley, were Churchmen; but
so strong was the drift towards idealism that Leibniz, a layman and a man of science, contributed by his
Monadology to the same current. Malebranche neither was nor could he be a complete idealist in the sense of
denying the reality of matter; for the dogma of transubstantiation bound him, as a Catholic, to its acceptance,
while Berkeley, Collier, and Leibniz, as Protestants, were under no such obligation. His idealism agreed more
nearly with the Neo-Platonic doctrine of Archetypes in the divine Reason among which Matter was one. On
the other hand, Berkeley probably borrowed from him the notion of a direct contact with God, the difference
being that with the Cartesian it is conceived as an objective vision, with Locke's disciple as (if the expression
may be permitted) a subjective con-consciousness. Leibniz, again, while abolishing Matter, retains an external
world composed indeed of spirits and so far immaterial, but existing independently of God.

All these systems involve the negation of two fundamental scientific principles. The first is that every change
must be explained by reference to an antecedent change to which it bears a strict quantitative relation. The
second is that no particular change can be referred to another change as its necessary antecedent unless it can
be shown by experience that a precisely similar {76} couple of changes are, in fact, always so connected. Let
me illustrate these principles by an example. I leave a kettle full of cold water on the fire, and on returning
after a sufficient interval of time I find the water boiling. Had I stayed by the fire and watched the process, my
CHAPTER III. 35
kettle would--a popular proverb to the contrary notwithstanding--have certainly boiled as soon, but also no
sooner for being helped by my consciousness. The essential thing is that energy of combustion in the fire
should be turned into energy of boiling in the water. Now, what is Berkeley's interpretation of the facts? Fire,
kettle, water, and ebullition are what in his writings are called "ideas"--i.e., phenomena occasionally in my
mind, but always in God's mind. And according to this view the necessary antecedent to the boiling of the
water is not the fire's burning, but God's consciousness of its burning, his perception being the essence of the
operation. But it is proved by experience that neither my perception nor anyone else's ever made a single drop
of water boil. In other words, perception is not in this instance a vera causa. Why, then, should the perception
of any other mind, however exalted, have that effect?

Nor is this all. How does Berkeley know that God exists? Because, he says, to exist is to be perceived, and
therefore for the universe to exist implies a universal Percipient. But he got the idea of God from other men,
who certainly did not come by it as a generalisation from their perceptions; they got it by generalising from
their voluntary actions, which do produce the changes that perception cannot produce. It will be said that
volitions and the feelings that prompt them exist only in consciousness. In whose consciousness? In that of a
spirit. And what is spirit apart from {77} sensation, thought, feeling, and volition? Simply one of those
abstract ideas whose existence Berkeley himself denied.

HUME.

The next step in the evolution of English thought was to consist in a return to Locke's method, involving a
complete breach with seventeenth-century Platonism, and with the Continental metaphysics that it had
inspired. This decisive movement was effected by one in whom German criticism has recognised the greatest
of all British philosophers. David Hume (1711-1776) was born and bred at Edinburgh, which also seems to
have been through life his favourite residence. But his great work, the Treatise on Human Nature, was written
during a stay in France, between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-six. Thus his precocity was even greater
than Berkeley's. Indeed, such maturity of thought so early reached is without a parallel in history. But Hume's
style had not then acquired the perfection--the inimitable charm, Kant calls it--of his later writings; and,
whether for this or for other reasons, the book, in his own words, "fell dead-born from the press." In middle
life the office of librarian of the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh gave him access to the materials for his
History of England, which proved a source of fame and profit. A profound historical scholar, J. S. Brewer,
tells us that Hume "possessed in a pre-eminent degree some of the highest excellences of a historian." Other
historians have treated their subjects philosophically; he furnishes the sole instance of a great speculative
genius who has also produced a historical masterpiece of the first order. But morally it is a blot on his fame. It
is sad that a philosopher should have deliberately perverted the truth, that one who has {78} [Illustration:
DAVID HUME.] performed priceless services to freedom of thought should have made himself the apologist
of clericalising absolutism, and, still more, that a master of English played this part to some extent through
hatred of the great English people engendered by disappointed literary ambition. It may be mentioned,
however, as a possible extenuation that towards the middle of the eighteenth century the highest English
ability had thrown itself, with few exceptions, on the Tory side. It must be mentioned {79} also that in private
life Hume's character was entirely admirable--cheerful, generous, and gentle, without a frailty and without a
stain. His opinions were unpopular; but his life offered no handle for obloquy, although his studious
retirement was more than once exchanged for the responsibilities of political office, and the freedom from
pedantry so conspicuous in his writings bears witness to habits of well-bred social intercourse.

Hume's philosophy is best understood when we consider it as, in the first place, a criticism of Berkeley, just as
Berkeley's had been a criticism of Locke. It will be remembered that the founder of subjective idealism
discarded the notion of material substance as an "abstract idea," an unintelligible figment devoid of any
sensuous or imaginative content. The only true substances are the subjects of what we call experience
communicating through sensation with God, the infinite spirit whose eternal consciousness is reality itself.
Hume applied the same tests to spiritual substance, and found that it equally disappeared under his
introspective analysis. He begins by dividing the contents of consciousness into two classes, impressions and
CHAPTER III. 36
ideas--the second being copies of the first, and distinguished from them by their relative faintness. Now, from
these perceptions (which he called thoughts) Descartes had passed by an immediate inference to the ego or
self, which he affirms as the primary fact of consciousness, using it as a basis for sundry other conclusions.
But Hume stops him at once, and will not grant the existence of the metaphysical self--that is, a simple and
continued substance, as distinguished from particular states of consciousness. We are, he declares, "nothing
but a bundle of different perceptions, which {80} succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are
in a perpetual flux and movement." "There is properly no simplicity in it [the self] at one time, nor identity in
different [times]; whatever natural propensity we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity." So much
being assumed, Berkeley's whole argument for a new theology founded on subjective idealism is bound to
collapse, as also is the argument for natural immortality derived from the supposed simplicity and identity of
the thinking substance.

Modern critics have rightly insisted, as against Hume, that isolated perceptions without a self are abstractions
not less unintelligible than a self without perceptions. But the metaphysical argument for human immortality
has not benefited by this more concrete interpretation of epistemology; and probably Hume was really more
interested in destroying this than in maintaining the sceptical paradox which does not recur in his later
writings.

A word must be added about Hume's division of perceptions into impressions and ideas. The point left out of
sight in this analysis is that impressions of sense habitually find their reflexes not in revived sensations, but in
expressions, in motor reactions which, with human beings, mostly take the form of words uttered or thought.
These, no doubt, are associated to some small extent with revived sensations; but they are more commonly
grouped with other words, with movements of the limbs, and with actions on the material or human
environment of the percipient. Such expressions are incomparably easier to revive in memory, imagination, or
expectation than the impressions that originally excited them; and, indeed, it is in connection with them that
such revivals of sensation {81} as we actually experience take place. And it is probable that to this active side
of our consciousness that we may trace those associative processes which Hume studies next in his analysis of
human knowledge.

Putting aside principles of doubtful or secondary value, the relations between states of consciousness that first
offer themselves to view are, according to Hume, Co-existence and Succession (united under the name of
Contiguity), Resemblance, and Causation. It is with the account he gives of this last category that his name is
inseparably associated, for from it all subsequent speculation has taken rise. Yet primarily he seems to have
had no other object in view than to simplify the laws of knowledge by resolving one of them into a particular
case of another, and thus reducing his three categories to two. The relation of cause and effect, he tells us, is
no more than a certain relation between antecedent and consequent in time where the sequence is so habitual
as to establish in our minds a custom of expecting the one whenever the other occurs. The sequence is not
necessary, for one can think, without any self-contradiction, of a change which has not been preceded by
another change; nor is it, like the truths of geometry, something that can be known à priori. Without
experience no one could tell that bread will nourish a man and not nourish a lion, nor even predict how a
billiard-ball will behave when another ball strikes it. Should it be objected that the à priori knowledge of a
general principle need not involve an equal knowledge of nature's operations in particular cases, Hume would
doubtless reply by saying that there is no abstract idea of causation apart from its concrete exemplifications.

It is possible to accept Hume's theory in principle {82} without pledging oneself to all his incidental
contentions. Causation, as a general law, may be known only by experience, whether we can or cannot think
of it as a pure abstraction. And we may interpret it in terms of unconditional antecedence and consequence,
while discarding his apparent assumption of an inscrutable connection between the two; a mysterious
necessity for the production of the one by the other, for which it is felt that a reason exists, but for which our
reason cannot account. It is inconceivable that our knowledge of any given sequence could be increased,
except by the disclosure of intermediate sequences, making their continuity, in space and time, more absolute
than we had before perceived, until the whole process has been resolved into a transference of momentum
CHAPTER III. 37

from one molecule to another--a change for which, according to Hume, no reason can be given. Nor, on his
principles, would it help us to explain such transferences by bringing them under the law of the Conservation
of Energy. For, although this would be a great triumph for science, his philosophy demands a reason why the
quantity of energy should remain unalterable for ever.

It is a mistake, shared by Hume with his opponents, to suppose that the common sense of mankind ever saw
more than invariable sequence in the relation of cause and effect, or ever interpolated a mysterious power
between them. In the famous verse, "Let there be light, and there was light," it is the instantaneity of
succession, not the interpolation of any exerted effort, that so impresses the imagination. And when
Shakespeare wants to illustrate logical compulsion in conduct, his reference is to an instance of invariable
succession:-- {83}

This above all,--to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be
false to any man.

Indeed, I think it will be found on examination that when we associate the idea of power, or of necessity, with
causal sequences, it is not in connection with a case of causation here and now, but rather in reference to
similar effects that may be expected from the same cause elsewhere or at another time. And that "custom," by
which Hume seeks to explain our belief in the "power" of the cause to produce its effect as well as the
"necessity" of the connection between them, rather acts negatively by eliminating all other antecedents as
possible causes than positively by setting up a habit of thinking about a particular antecedent and consequent
at the same time. And that is why a burnt child needs no repetition of the experiment to be convinced that
contact with fire was the cause of its pain. The very novelty of the experiment was enough to eliminate any
explanation other than that of contact with the flame.

The child, as it grows older, may learn to speak of the fire as having a power to burn. But that merely means,
"if I touch it, it will burn me--or light paper if I hold the paper to it." Power, in fact, is incomplete causation,
the presence of every condition but that one which, in Aristotelian phrase, turns potency into act. And it is in
contradistinction to that idea of possibility that the idea of necessary connection comes in. When all the
elements of the causal antecedent are combined the effect necessarily supervenes. Furthermore, the causal
antecedent is thought of as necessary in contrast with the contingency of other antecedents whose connection
with the effect is merely accidental. Finally, {84} the idea of production has been quoted as vitally
distinguishing true causation from invariable sequence. But various myths, of which the story of Oedipus is
the best known, show that primitive folk regard day and night as alternately producing one another, just as
Polonius quotes their sequence as a type of logical necessity.

Hume professed himself a Deist, but probably with no more seriousness than when he, or when Gibbon, called
Christianity "our religion." At any rate, his philosophy destroys every argument for the existence of a Creator
advanced in his own or in the preceding century. Nor need his particular theory of causation be invoked for
the purpose. The most telling attack is on the argument from design. The apparent adaptation of means to ends
in living organisms is quoted as evidence of their having been planned by a conscious intelligence. But,
answers Hume, such an intelligence would itself exhibit marks of design, and so on for ever. Why not, then,
stop at the animal organism as an ultimate fact? It was Shelley's unlucky demand for a solution of this
difficulty that led to his expulsion from Oxford.

It has been shown how the new analysis of mind cut the ground from under Berkeley's theism, and from under
the metaphysical argument for human immortality. By denying the substantiality of the ego it also confirmed
the necessitarianism of Spinoza. Hume seemed to think he could abate the unpopularity of this doctrine by
interpreting the constant motivation of human actions as a mere relation of antecedence and consequence. But
the decisive point was that he assimilated sequences in conscious behaviour to the unconscious sequences in
physical events. Thus, for {85} the vulgar and the theologians, he remained what would now be called a
materialist.
CHAPTER III. 38

KANT.

The English philosophy of experience and the Continental philosophy of à priori spiritualism, after their brief
convergence in the metaphysics of Berkeley, parted company once more, the empirical tradition being
henceforth represented, not only by Hume, but in a more or less anti-Christian and much more superficial
form by Voltaire, Rousseau, and the French Encyclopædists; while the Leibnizian philosophy was
systematised and taught in Germany by Wolf, and a dull but useful sort of modernised Aristotelianism was set
up under the name of "common sense" by Thomas Reid (1710-1796) and his school in the Scottish
Universities.

The extraordinary genius who was to re-combine the parted currents in a speculative movement of
unexampled volume, velocity, and depth showed nothing of the precocity that had distinguished Berkeley and
Hume. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the son of a saddler of Scottish extraction, was born at Königsberg in
Prussia, where he spent his whole life, holding a chair at the University from 1770 to 1797. It is related that on
the day of his death a small bright cloud was seen sailing alone across the clear blue sky, of such a remarkable
appearance that a crowd assembled on the bridge to watch it. One of them, a common soldier, exclaimed,
"That is Kant's soul going to heaven!"--a touching and beautiful tribute to the illustrious German, whose lofty,
pure, and luminous spirit it was uniquely fitted to characterise.

{86}

[Illustration: KANT.

(Copyright B. P. C.)

{87} Kant grew up among the Pietists, a school which played much the same part in Germany that the
Methodists and the Evangelicals played in England; indeed, it was from them that John Wesley received his
final inspiration. The Königsberg student came in time to discard their theology while retaining the stern
Puritan morality with which it was wedded, and even, Rationalist as he became, some of their mystical
religiosity. What drew him away to philosophy seems to have been first the study of classical philology and
then physical science, especially as presented to him in Newton's works. And so the young man's first
ambition, after settling down as a University teacher at Königsberg, was to extend the Newtonian method still
further by explaining, on mechanical principles, the origin and constitution of that celestial system whose
movements Newton had reduced to law, but whose beginning he had left unaccounted for except by--what
was not science--the direct fiat of omnipotence.

Kant offered a brilliant solution of the problem in his Natural History of the Heavens (1755), a work
embodying the celebrated nebular hypothesis rediscovered forty years later by Laplace. It has been well
observed that great philosophers are mostly, if not always, what at Oxford and Cambridge would be called
"double-firsts"--that is, apart from their philosophy, they have done first-class work in some special line of
investigation, as Descartes by creating analytical geometry, Spinoza by applying Biblical criticisms to
theology, Leibniz by discovering the differential calculus, Locke by his theory of constitutional government,
Berkeley by his theory of vision, Hume by his contributions to history and political economy. Kant's
cosmogony may have been premature and mistaken in its details; but his idea of the heavenly bodies as having
originated from the condensation of diffused gaseous matter still holds its {88} ground; and although the more
general idea of natural evolution as opposed to supernatural creation is not modern but Greek, to have revived
and reapplied it on so great a scale is a service of extraordinary merit.

The next great event in Kant's intellectual career is his rejection of Continental apriorism in metaphysics for
the empiricism of the English school, especially as regards the idea of causation. For a few years (1762-1765)
Kant accepts Hume's theory that there is nothing in any succession of events or in change generally to prove
on grounds of pure reason that there must be more in it than a customary sequence. To believe that anything
CHAPTER III. 39
may happen without a cause does not involve a logical contradiction; and at that time he believed nothing to
be known à priori except that the denial of which involves such a contradiction. But on reconsidering the
basis of mathematical truth it seemed to him to be something other than the logical laws of Identity and
Contradiction. When we say that seven and five are twelve we put something into the predicate that was not
affirmed in the subject, and also when we say that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
Yet the second proposition is as certain as the first, and both are certain in the highest degree, more certain
than anything learned from experience, and needing no experience to confirm them.

So much being admitted, we have to recognise a fundamental division of judgments into two classes, analytic
and synthetic. Judgments in which the predicate adds nothing to the subject are analytic. When we affirm all
matter to be extended, that is an instance of the former, for here we are only making more explicit what was
already contained in the notion of matter. On the other hand, when we affirm that all matter is heavy, that is an
{89} instance of the latter or synthetic class, for we can think of matter without thinking that it has weight.
Furthermore, this is not only a synthetic judgment, but it is a synthetic judgment à posteriori; for the law of
universal gravitation is known only by experience. But there are also synthetic judgments à priori; for, as we
have just seen, the fundamental truths of arithmetic and geometry belong to this class, as do also by
consequence all the propositions logically deduced from these--that is to say, the whole of mathematical
science.

Up to this point Kant would have carried the whole Cartesian school, and, more generally, all the modern
Platonists, along with him; while he would have given the English empiricists and their French disciples a
rather hard nut to crack. For they would have had to choose between admitting that mathematics was a mass
of identical propositions or explaining, in the face of Hume's criticism, what claims to absolute certainty its
truths, any more than the Law of Causation, possess. Now, the great philosophical genius of Kant is shown by
nothing more than by this, that he did not stop here. Recognising to the same extent as Locke and Hume that
all knowledge comes from experience--at any rate, in the sense of not coming by supernatural communication,
as Malebranche and Berkeley thought--he puts the famous question, How are synthetic judgments à priori
possible? Or, as it might be paradoxically expressed, How come we to know with the most certainty the things
that we have not been taught by experience? The answer is, that we know them by the most intimate
experience of all--the underlying consciousness that we have made them what they are. Our minds are no
mere passive recipients, in which a mass of sensations, poured in from some external {90} source, are then
arranged after an order equally originated from without; there is a principle of spontaneity in our own
subjectivity by which the objective order of nature is created. What Kant calls the Matter of knowledge is
given from without, the Form from within. And this process begins with the imposition of the two great
fundamental Forms, Space and Time, on the raw material of sensation by our minds.

By space and time Kant does not mean the abstract ideas of coexistence and succession; nor does he call them,
as some critics used incorrectly to suppose, forms of thought, but forms of intuition. We do not build them up
with the help of muscular or other feelings, but are conscious of them in a way not admitting of any further
analysis. The parts of space, no doubt, are coexistent, but they are also connected and continuous; more than
this, positions in space do not admit of mutual substitution; the right hand and left hand glove are perfectly
symmetrical, but the one cannot be superimposed on the other. Besides, all particular spaces are contained in
universal space, not as particular conceptions are contained in a general conception, but as parts of that which
extends to infinity, and where each has an individual place of its own, repeating all the characters of space in
general except its illimitable extension. And the same is true of time, with this further distinction from abstract
succession, that succession may be reversed; whereas the order of past, present, and future is irreversibly
maintained.

The contemporary school of Reid in Scotland, and the subsequent Eclectic school of Victor Cousin in France,
would agree with Kant in maintaining that sensuous experience will not account for our knowledge of space
and time. But they would protest, in the name {91} of common sense, against the reduction of these
apparently fundamental elements to purely subjective forms. They would ask, with the German critic
CHAPTER III. 40
Trendelenburg, Why cannot space and time be known intuitively and yet really exist? Kant furnishes no direct
answer to the question, but he has suggested one in another connection. Mathematical truth is concerned with
spatial and temporal relations, and for that truth to be above suspicion and exception we must assume that the
objects with which it deals are wholly within our grasp--that our knowledge of them is exhaustive. But there
could be no such assurance on the supposition that, besides the space and time of our sensuous experience,
another space and time existed independently of our consciousness as attributes of things in
themselves--possibly differing in important respects from ours--as, for example, a finite, or a non-continuous,
or a four-dimensional space, and a time with a circular instead of a progressive movement.

This easy assumption that reality accommodates itself to our intellectual convenience, instead of our being
obliged to accommodate our theories of knowledge to reality, runs through and vitiates the whole of Kant's
philosophy. But, taking the narrower ground of logical consistency, one hardly sees how his principles can
hold together. We are told that the subjectivity of space and time is not presented as a plausible hypothesis,
but as a certain and indubitable truth, for in no other way can mathematical certainty be explained. The claim
is questionable, but let it be granted. Immediately a fresh difficulty starts up. What is the source of our
certainty that space and time are subjective forms of intuition? If the answer is, because that assumption
guarantees the certainty of mathematics, then Kant is {92} reasoning in a circle. If he appeals--as in
consistency he ought--to another order of subjectivity as the sanction of his first transcendental argument,
such reasoning involves the regress to infinity.

Again, on Kant's theory, time is the form of intuition for the inner sense. So when we become conscious of
mental events we know them only as phenomena; we remain ignorant of what mind is in itself. But before the
publication in 1770 of Kant's inaugural dissertation on The Sensible and the Intelligible World every one,
plain men and philosophers alike, believed that the consciousness of our successive thoughts and feelings was
the very type of reality itself; and they held this belief with a higher degree of assurance than that given to the
axioms of geometry. By what right, then, are we asked to give up the greater for the less, to surrender our
self-assurance as a ransom for Euclid's Elements or even for Newton's Principia?

Once more, surely mathematics is concerned not with space and time as such, but with their artificial
delimitations as points, lines, figures, numbers, moments, etc. And it may be granted that these are purely
subjective in the sense of being imposed by our imagination (with the aid of sensible signs) on the external
world. What if this subjectivity were the true source of that peculiar certainty belonging to synthetic
judgments à priori? True, Kant counts in our judgments about the infinity and eternity of space and time with
other accepted characteristics of theirs as intuitive certainties. But there are thinkers who find the negation of
such properties not inconceivable, so that they cannot be adduced as evidence of a priority, still less of
subjectivity.

Eleven years after the inaugural dissertation Kant {93} published his most important contribution to
philosophy, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Pure Reason means the faculty by which ideas are obtained
independently of all experience, and the critic's object is to ascertain how far such ideas are valid. As a
preliminary to that inquiry the question is also mooted, How is experience possible? It is answered by a
critique of the understanding or faculty of conception; and as conception implies perception, this again is
prefaced by a section in which Kant's theory of space and time is repeated and reinforced.

It will be remembered that what started the whole of the new criticism was Hume's sceptical analysis of
Causation; and the central interest of The Critique of Pure Reason lies in the effort to reconstitute the causal
law in the light of the new theory of knowledge; but so enormous is the mass of technicalities piled up for this
purpose as largely to conceal it from view, and, on its disclosure, to give the idea of a gigantic machine set in
motion to crack a nut. And the nut after all is not cracked; the shell slips from between the grappling surfaces
long before they meet.

We have seen how Kant interpreted every judgment as a synthesis of subject and predicate. Now, whether the
CHAPTER III. 41
synthesis be à priori or à posteriori, a study of the forms of judgment as enumerated in the common logic
shows that there are four, and only four, ways in which it can be effected. All judgments fall under the
following classes: Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Modality--terms whose meaning will be presently
explained. And each of these again is tripartite. We may say (i.) that one A is B, or that some A's are B, or that
all A's are B; (ii.) that A is B, that A is not B, that not all A's are B; (iii.) that A is B, that A {94} is B if C is
D, that A is either B, C, or D; or (iv.) that A may be B, that A is B, or that A must be B. The reason why there
are four and only four classes is that judgment has to do with the subject in reference to the predicate, which
gives Quantity; with the predicate in reference to the subject, which gives Quality; with the connection
between the two, which gives Relation; and with the synthesis between them in reference to our knowledge of
it, which gives Modality.

Now, according to Kant, that there should be so many kinds of judgment and no more implies that our
understanding contributes a formal element to the constitution of all knowledge, consisting of four combining
principles, without which experience would be impossible. He calls these Categories, and they are enumerated
in the following table:--

(i.) Quantity.

Unity, Plurality, Totality.

(ii.) Quality.

Reality, Negation, Limitation.

(iii.) Relation.

Substance and Accident; Cause and Effect; Action and Reaction (Reciprocity).

(iv.) Modality.

Possibility and Impossibility; Existence and Non-Existence; Necessity and Contingency.

A study of the Categories suggests some rather obvious criticisms on the Critical Philosophy itself. (i.) The
first two terms in each triad evidently form an antithetical couple, of which the third term is the synthesis.
Here we have the first germ of a disease by which the systems of Kant's successors were much more seriously
infected. In the table it is shown by {95} the intrusion of Limitation, a wholly superfluous adjunct to Reality
and Negation; in the conversion of Reciprocity into a wholly fictitious synthesis of Substantiality with
Causation; and in the complete absurdity of making Necessity a combination of Possibility with Existence.
(ii.) Innate ideas, after they had been exploded by Locke, are reintroduced into philosophy by a sufficiently
transparent piece of legerdemain. For assuming that the human intelligence possesses a power of organising
and drilling the sensuous appearances which without its control would appear only as a disorderly mob, it by
no means follows that they must thereby be referred to an extraphenomenal principle. But such a principle is
plainly implied by the category of Substance. Used in a scholastic sense, it does not mean the sensuous
attributes of a thing taken altogether, but something that underlies and supports them. And Kant himself
seems to take his category in that significance. For he claims to deduce from it the law of the indestructibility
of matter; as if I could not say snow is white without committing myself to the assertion that the ultimate
particles of snow have existed and will exist for ever. (iii.) The substitution of Causation for logical sequence,
as implicated in the hypothetical judgment of Relation, is perfectly scandalous; and still more scandalous is
substitution of Reciprocity or Action and Reaction for Disjunction. The last points require to be examined a
little more in detail.

The sequence of an effect to its cause has only a verbal resemblance to the sequence of a logical consequent to
CHAPTER III. 42
its reason. We declare categorically that every change has a cause which precedes it. Logical sequence is, on
the other hand, as the very name of the {96} judgment shows, hypothetical, and may possibly not represent
any actual occurrence, besides being, what causation is not, independent of time. A particular case of
causation may be hypothetical in respect to our belief that it actually occurred; never the law of causation
itself as a general truth. And the same distinction applies with even greater force to the alleged connection
between a logical disjunction and a physical reaction. When I say A is either B or C, but not both, there is
only this much resemblance, that both cases involve the ideas of equality and of opposition. From the
admission that A is not B, I infer that it is C, or, contrariwise, from the admission that it is B, I infer that it is
not C, and in both instances with the same certainty; but this does not prove that the earth attracts the moon as
much as the moon attracts the earth, only in opposite directions; nor yet that in certain instances all the heat
lost by one body is gained by another.

Kant had learned this much from Hume, that causation is essentially a relation of antecedence and
consequence in time; and apparently his way of "categorising" the relation--i.e., of proving its apriority--is to
represent it as the logical form of reason and consequent masquerading, so to speak, under the intuitional
time-form. Yet he frequently speaks of our senses as being affected by things in themselves, implying that the
resulting sensations are somehow caused by those otherwise unknown entities. But since things in themselves
do not, according to Kant, exist in space and time, they cannot be causally related to phenomena or to
anything else.

In his criticism of Pure Reason, properly so called--that is, of inferences made by human faculty with {97}
regard to questions transcending all experience--Kant shows that of such things nothing can be known. The
ideality of time and space once taken as proved, this amount of agnosticism seems to follow as a matter of
course. It is idle to speculate about the possible extent or duration of a universe that cannot be described in
terms of coexistence and succession. For each of us at the dissolution of our bodily organism time itself, and
therefore existence as alone we conceive it, comes to an end. The law of causation, applying as it does to
phenomena alone, offers no evidence for the existence of a God who transcends phenomena. Kant, however,
is not satisfied with such a simple and summary procedure as this. He tries to show, with most unnecessary
pedantry, that the conditional synthesis of the Understanding inevitably leads thought on to the unconditional
synthesis of the Reason only to find itself lost in a hopeless welter of paralogisms and self-contradictions.

At this stage we are handed over to the guidance of what Kant calls the Practical Reason. This faculty gives a
synthesis for conduct, as Pure Reason gave a synthesis for intelligence. All reason demands uniformity, order,
law; only what in theory is recognised as true has in practice to be imposed as right. In this way Kant arrives
at his formula of absolute morality: Act so that the principle of thy conduct may be the law for all rational
beings. He calls this the Categorical Imperative, as distinguished from such hypothetical imperatives as: Act
this way if you wish to be happy either here or hereafter; or, act as public opinion tells you. Moreover, the
motive, as distinguished from the end of moral action, should not be calculating self-interest nor uncalculating
impulse, but simply desire to fulfil the law as such. Previous moralists had set up {98} the greatest happiness
of the greatest number as the end of action, and such an aim does not lie far from Kant's philosophy; but they
could think of no better motive for pursuing it than self-love or a rather undefined social instinct; and their
summum bonum would take the happiness of irrational animals into account, while Kant absolutely
subordinates the interests of these to human good. A further coincidence between the Utilitarian and the
Kantian ethics is that in the latter also the happiness of others, not their perfection, should be the end and aim
of each. Finally, the philosophy of Pure Reason adopts from contemporary French thought as the governing
idea of political organisation what was long to be a principle of English Utilitarianism--"the liberty of each,
bounded only by the equal liberty of all."

Nevertheless, the old postulate of a necessary connection between virtue and individual happiness reappears
in Kant's ethical theory, and leads to the construction of a new religious philosophy. His critique had left no
place for the old theology, nor yet for that doctrine of free-will so dear to most theologians. Its whole object
had been to vindicate against Hume the necessity and universality of causation. Human actions then must, like
CHAPTER III. 43
all other phenomena, form an unbroken chain of antecedents and consequents. Nor does Kant conceal his
conviction that, with sufficient knowledge and powers of calculation, a man's whole future conduct might be
foretold. Nevertheless, under the eighteenth-century idea of man as naturally the creature of passion or
self-interest, he claims for us, as moral agents, the power of choosing to obey duty in preference to either. And
this freedom is supposed to be made conceivable by the subjectivity of time and causation, outside of which,
{99} as a thing in itself, stands the moral will. That morality, whether as action or mere intention, involves
succession in time is utterly ignored. Nor is this all. Assuming without warrant that the moral law demands an
ultimate coincidence between happiness and virtue, made impossible in this life by human weakness, Kant
argues that there must be an unending future life to secure time enough for working out a problem whose
solution is infinitely remote. And, finally, there must be an omnipotent moral God to provide facilities for
undertaking that somewhat gratuitous Psyche's task. Before Kant moral theology had argued that the Judge of
all the world must do right, apportioning happiness to desert. It was reserved for him to argue, conversely, that
for right to be done such a Judge must exist, and that therefore he does exist.

In appreciating the services of Kant to philosophy we must guard ourselves against being influenced by the
extravagant panegyrics of his countrymen, whose passion for square circles he so generously gratifies. Still,
after every deduction for mere Laputian pedantry has been made, the balance of fruitful suggestion remains
vast. (i.) The antithesis of object and subject, although not counted among the categories of his Critique, has
remained a prime category of thought ever since. (ii.) The idea of a necessary limit to human knowledge,
given by the very theory of that knowledge, as distinguished from the Scepticism of the Greeks--in other
words, what we now call Agnosticism--may not be final, but it still remains to be dealt with. (iii.) The
possibility of reducing à priori knowledge to a form of unconscious experience has put an end to dogmatic
metaphysics. (iv.) The problems of Time and Space have taken a central place in speculation; it has been
{100} shown--what Hume did not see--that Causation has the certainty of a mathematical axiom; and it has
been made highly probable that all these difficulties may find their solution in a larger interpretation of
experience. (v.) Morality has been definitely dissociated from the appeal to selfish interests, whether in this
life or in another.

We have now to trace, within the limits prescribed by the nature of this work, the development of philosophy
under Kant's German successors.

*****

{101}
CHAPTER IV. 44

CHAPTER IV.
THE GERMAN IDEALISTS

FICHTE, SCHELLING, HEGEL, SCHOPENHAUER, HERBART.

The Critical Philosophy won its first success in Germany less as a new epistemology than as what, in fact, its
author meant it to be, a rehabilitation of religious belief. The limits of Reason had been drawn so closely only
to make room for Faith. But the current of Rationalism was running too strongly to be so summarily stopped;
and so with Kant's ablest successors faith is altogether abandoned, while the claims of reason are pushed
relentlessly through. Among these more logical thinkers the first is J. G. Fichte (1762-1814). In him--for the
third time in modern history, for the first and last time in Germany--the hero as philosopher finds a worthy
representative. Born in Silesia, like Kant of humble parentage, and bred in circumstances of more oppressive
poverty, he also received a severely religious and moral training as a preparation for the pastoral office. The
bounty of an aristocratic patron gave him an excellent public-school education; but as a university student,
first at Jena and then at Leipzig, he had to earn a scanty living by private tuition, finally abandoning his
destined career to accept a post in a Swiss family at Zurich. There, as the result of an attachment in which the
love was nearly all on the lady's side, he became engaged to a niece of the poet Klopstock, and after a long
delay, caused by money {102} difficulties, was enabled to marry her. In the meantime he had become a
convert to Kant's philosophy, winning the admiration of the old master himself by a Critique of all Revelation,
written in four weeks. Published anonymously by an oversight, it was generally attributed to Kant himself,
and, on the real authorship becoming known, won for Fichte an extraordinary Professorate of Philosophy at
Jena, where his success as a lecturer and writer gave him for a time the leadership in German speculation
(1794-1799). An untoward incident brought this stage of his career to an end. Writing in a philosophical
review, he defined God as "the moral order of the universe." Dr. Temple long afterwards used much the same
phrase when Bishop of Exeter, finding it, presumably, compatible with official Theism; but such was not the
impression created in Saxony. A cry of atheism arose, much to the disgust of Fichte, whose position would
have been better described as pantheistic. But what incensed him most was the suspicion of an attempt to
interfere with the liberty of academic teaching. With his usual impetuosity he talked about resigning his
chair--with a hint that others would follow his example--were the authorities at Weimar to permit such an
outrage. Goethe, who was then Minister, observed that no Government could allow itself to be threatened, and
Fichte was at once relieved of his post. Settling at Berlin, he became Professor of Philosophy in the new
University founded after the French conquest of Prussia, having previously done much to revive the national
spirit by his Addresses to the German Nation (1807-1808). These were in appearance the programme of a new
educational Utopia; but their real purpose was so evident that the speaker lived in daily expectation of being
summoned {103} before a French court-martial and shot. Unlike his countrymen, Goethe, Hegel, and
Schopenhauer, Fichte passionately resented the Napoleonic despotism, throwing himself heart and soul into
the great uprising by which it was finally overthrown. Although his wish to accompany the victorious army as
field preacher could not be gratified, the campaign of 1813 still claimed him as one of its victims. After
nursing his heroic wife to recovery from a hospital fever caught in attendance on the sick and wounded at
Berlin, he took the infection from her and died early in 1814, soon after hearing that Blücher had crossed the
Rhine.

G. H. Lewes, in a well-known story, has made himself and his readers merry over a German savant who
undertakes to evolve the idea of a camel out of the depths of his moral consciousness. The phrase is
commonly quoted as "inner consciousness," but this takes away its whole point. For the original satirist, who,
I think, was not Lewes, but Heine, had in view the philosophy of Fichte. It need hardly be said that German
savants are as careful observers and diligent collectors of facts as any others; and Fichte in particular trusted
solely to experience for the knowledge of natural phenomena. But even as regards his general philosophy the
place it gives to morality has been misconceived even by his closest students. With him goodwill really plays
a less important part than with Kant, being not an end in itself, but a means towards an end. And what that end
is his teaching makes quite clear.
CHAPTER IV. 45
Kant's first critics put their finger on the weak point of his system, the thing in itself. So, assuming it to be
discarded, Fichte set to work on new lines, the lines of pure idealism. But, though an idealist, he is not, any
more than Berkeley, a solipsist. The celebrated {104} antithesis of the ego and the non-ego dates from him,
and strikes the keynote of his whole system. It might be thought that, as compared with the old realism, this
was a distinction without a difference. But that is not so; for, according to Fichte, the non-ego is subjective in
its origin, and that is where he departs widely from Berkeley's theological idealism. Not that I create the
not-myself; I assume it as the condition of my self-consciousness--a remarkable feat of logic, but after all not
more wonderful than that space and time should result from the activity of the outer and inner senses. This
figment of my imagination is anyhow solid enough to beget a new feeling of resistance and recoil, throwing
the self back on itself, and bringing with it the interpretation of that external impact by the category of
causation, of its own activity as substance, and of the whole deal between the ego and the non-ego as
interaction or reciprocity. In this way the first triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is obtained; and from
this, by a vast expenditure of ingenuity, the whole array of Kant's forms, categories, and faculties is evolved
as a coherent system of scientific thought in obedience to a single principle--the self-realisation of the ego,
alternatively admitting and transcending a limit to its activity.

It will be easily understood that this self-realising ego is neither Fichte's nor anyone else's self, but a universal
principle, fundamentally the same in all. One is reminded of Descartes's self-thinking thought by which the
reality of the universe was guaranteed; but between the two there is this vast difference, that the Frenchman's
ego resembles a box containing a variety of independent ideas, to be separately handled and examined; the
German's is a box enclosing a coiled-up spring by {105} the expansion of which all the wheels of the
philosophical machine are made go round. From the action of the not-self on the self results the whole of
nature as we conceive it; from the reaction of the self on the not-self, the whole mentality and morality of
man--morality being understood to include the domestic, social, political, educational, and industrial
organisation of life. The final cause, the impelling ideal of existence, is the self-realisation of the ego, the
entire absorption into its personal energy of the non-ego, of nature, to be effected by perfect knowledge of
how the physical universe is constituted issuing in perfect subjugation of its forces to the human will. But
such a realisation of the Absolute Ego would mean its annihilation, for, as we have seen, the antithesis
between objective and subjective is the very condition of consciousness that without which it could neither
begin nor continue to exist. Therefore the process must go on for ever, and this necessity guarantees the
eternal duration of the human race--not, as Kant had dreamed, of the individual soul, since for Fichte the
Categorical Imperative demands a consummation widely different from that combination of virtue with
happiness which had satisfied his master. And the agency by which it is being effected through infinite time is
not a personal God, but that moral order of the world which Fichte regarded as the only true object of
religious feeling. As for human immortality, he seems to have first accepted, but afterwards rejected it in
favour of a mystical union with the divine.

It has been said that morality was not with Fichte what it had been with Kant--the highest good. Nevertheless,
as a means towards the final synthesis, morality interested him intensely, and his best work has been {106}
done in ethics. As a condition of self-realisation the primal ego becomes personified in a multitude of free
individualities. Just as in Stoicism, each individual is conceived as having a special office to perform in the
world-process, and the State exists--ideally speaking--in order to guarantee the necessary independence of all
its citizens. For this purpose everyone must have the right to work and the right to a living wage. Thus Fichte
appears as the first theorist of State Socialism in the history of German thought. Probably the example of the
Greek Stoics with their communistic utopias acting on a kindred spirit, rather than any prophetic vision of the
coming century, is to be credited for this remarkable anticipation.

SCHELLING.

German philosophy is prolific of self-contradictions; and so far the most flagrant example has been offered by
Fichte's Theory of Knowledge, starting as it does with the idea of an impersonal ego, developing through a
process in which this selfless self demands its own negation at every step, and determined by the prospect of a
CHAPTER IV. 46
catastrophe that would be the annihilation of consciousness itself. In fact, there seemed no need to wait until
time had run out; the self, or, as it was now called, the subject, had absorbed all reality, only to find that the
material universe, reconstituted as the object of knowledge, was an indispensable condition of its existence.
And meanwhile the physical sciences, more particularly those concerned with inorganic nature, were entering
on a series of triumphs unparalleled since the days of Newton. Philosophy must come to terms with these or
cease to exist.

The task of reconciliation was first attempted by {107} F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854), a Suabian, and the
first South German who made a name in pure philosophy. Educated at the University of Tübingen, at an early
age he covered an encyclopædic range of studies and began authorship at nineteen, gaining a professorship at
Jena four years later. Wandering about from one university to another, and putting forward new opinions as
often as he changed his residence, the young adventurer ceased to publish after 1813, and remained silent till
in 1841 he came forward at Berlin as the champion of a reactionary current, practically renouncing the
naturalistic pantheism by which his early reputation had been made. But he utterly failed in the attempt, which
was finally abandoned in the fifth year from its inception. Lewes, who saw Schelling in his old age, describes
him as remarkably like Socrates; his admirers called him a modern Plato; but he had nothing of the deep
moral earnestness that characterised either, nor indeed was morality needed for the work that he actually did.
This, to use the phrase of his fellow-student Hegel, consisted in raising philosophy to its absolute standpoint,
in passing from the subjective moralism of the eighteenth century to the all-comprehensive systematisation of
the nineteenth.

Schelling began as a disciple of Fichte, but he came simultaneously under the influence of Spinoza, whose
fame had been incessantly spreading through the last generation in Germany, with some reinforcement from
the revived name of Bruno. Their teaching served to make the latent pantheism of Fichte more explicit, while
the great contemporary discoveries gave a new interest to the study of nature, which Fichte, unlike Kant, had
put in the background, strictly subordinating it to the moral service of man. Had he cared to evolve {108} the
idea of a camel from his moral consciousness, the operation would not have demanded several years, but only
a few minutes' thought. As thus: the moral development of humanity needed the co-operation of such a race as
the Semites. To form their character a long residence in the Arabian deserts was needed. But for such nomads
an auxiliary animal would be needed with long legs and neck, a stomach for storing water, hump, etc.--Q. E.
D. Schelling also began by explaining the material world as a preparation for the spiritual; only he did not
employ the method of teleological adaptation, but a method of rather fanciful analogy. As the evolution of
self-conscious reason had proceeded by a triple movement of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, so a parallel
process had to be discovered in the advance towards a consciousness supposed to be exhibited in organic and
inorganic nature.

The fundamental idea of natural philosophy is polarity--opposite forces combining to neutralise one another
and then parting to be reunited at a higher stage of evolution. Thus attraction and repulsion--represented as
space and time--by their synthesis compose matter; magnetism and electricity produce chemical affinity; life
results from a triad of inorganic forces; in life itself productivity and irritability give birth to sensibility. The
order of the terms made little, if any, difference. When long afterwards iron was magnetised by the electric
current, Schelling claimed for himself the credit of anticipating this discovery, although he had placed
magnetism before electricity.

The next step was to construct a philosophy of history. This, with much else, is included under the name of A
System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) in the most finished of Schelling's literary compositions. {109}
History, according to the view here unfolded, is the gradual self-revelation of God, or the Absolute, in whom
Nature and Spirit are united and identified, who never is nor can be, but always is to be. Meanwhile the
supreme ideal is not that ever-increasing mastery of nature by man which Fichte contemplated, but their
reconciliation as achieved by Art. For just as natural philosophy carried an element of consciousness into the
material universe, so æstheticism recognises a corresponding element of unconscious creation in the supreme
works of artistic genius where spirit reaches its highest and best. Here Schelling appears as the philosopher of
CHAPTER IV. 47
Romanticism, a movement that characterised German thought from 1795 to 1805, and is known to ourselves
by the faded and feeble image of it exhibited in a certain section of English society nearly a century later.
Beginning with a more cultivated intelligence of Hellenic antiquity, this movement rapidly grew into a new
appreciation of medieval culture, falsely supposed to have given more scope to individuality than modern
civilisation, and then into a search for ever-varying sources of excitement or distraction in the whole history,
art, and literature of past or present times, religion being at last singled out as the vitalising principle of all.

Singularly enough, Fichte accepted the Transcendental Idealism as an orthodox exposition of his own
philosophy. But its composition seems to have given Schelling the consciousness of his own independence.
Soon afterwards he defined the new position as a philosophy of Identity or of Indifference. Nature and Spirit,
like Spinoza's Thought and Extension, were all the same and all one--that is to say, in their totality or in the
Absolute. For, considered as appearances, {110} they might present quantitative differences determined by
the varying preponderance of the objective or of the subjective side. In this way Schelling found himself able
to repeat his fanciful construction of the forces and forms of nature in successive triads under new names. The
essential departure from Fichte, who repudiated the Philosophy of Identity with undisguised contempt, was
that it practically repudiated the idea of an eternal progress in man's ever-growing mastery of nature. But, in
spite of all disclaimers, the master silently followed his former disciple's evolution in the direction of a
pantheistic monism. His later writings represent God no longer as the moral order of the world, but, like
Spinoza, as the world's eternal Being, of which man's knowledge is the reflected image. Finally, both
philosophers accepted the Christian doctrines of the Fall, the Incarnation, and the Trinity as mythical symbols
of an eternal process in which God, after becoming alienated from himself in the material universe, returns to
himself in man's consciousness of identity with the Absolute. Instead of the rather abrupt method of position,
negation, and re-affirmation known as Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis, we have here the more fluid process
of a spiral movement, departing from and returning to itself. And this was to be the very mainspring of the
system that next comes up for consideration.

HEGEL.

{111}

[Illustration: Hegel

(Copyright B. P. C.)]

{112} G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), in the opinion of some good judges Germany's greatest philosopher, was,
like Schelling, a Suabian, and intimately associated with his younger contemporary, first at Tübingen and
afterwards at Jena, where the two friends jointly conducted a philosophical review. But they gradually drifted
apart. Hegel was not a romanticist, but a classic; not a naturalist, but a humanist. Largely influenced by Greek
thought and Greek literature, for which he continued to be an enthusiast through life, he readily accepted, as
against Kant and Fichte, the change from a purely subjective to an objective point of view. But, although he
gave some attention to physical science, Hegel was less interested in it than his colleague, with whose crude
and fanciful metaphysics he also failed to sympathise. With the publication of Hegel's first important work,
the Phenomenology of Mind (1807), things came to a breach; for its preface amounts to a declaration of war
against the philosophy of Romanticism. Schelling himself is not named; but there is no mistaking the object of
certain picturesque references to "exploding the Absolute on us," and "the darkness in which every cow is
black." Next year Hegel became what we should call headmaster of a public school at Nuremberg, filling that
post for eight years, during which his greatest work, the System of Logic, in three volumes, was composed and
published. He then obtained a chair of philosophy at Heidelberg, passing thence to Berlin in 1818, where he
taught until his death by cholera in 1831. David Strauss, who saw the revered teacher a few days before the
fatal seizure, describes him first as he appeared in the lecture-room, "looking ever so old, bent and coughing";
then in his home, "looking ten years younger, with clear blue eyes, and showing the most beautiful white teeth
when he smiled." He had published a summary of his whole system, under the name of an Encyclopædia of
CHAPTER IV. 48
the Philosophical Sciences, in 1817, and a Philosophy of Law--which is really a treatise on Government--in
1821. His {113} sympathies were with bureaucratic absolutism in a modernised form, with Napoleon against
the German patriots, with the restored Prussian Government against the new Liberalism, with English
Toryism against the Whigs of the Reform Bill, and finally with the admirers of war against the friends of
peace.

Hegel's collected works, published after his death, fill over twenty good-sized volumes. Besides the treatises
already mentioned, they include his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the Philosophy of History, the
Philosophy of Religion, Æsthetics, etc., made up with much literary skill from the Professor's own notes and
from the reports of his hearers. The most permanently valuable of these is the Æsthetics; but any student
desirous of getting a notion of Hegelianism at first hand had better begin with the Philosophy of History, of
which there is a good and cheap English translation in one of Bohn's Libraries. Some general points of view
serving to connect the system with its predecessors are all that room can be found for here.

As compared with Kant, Hegel is distinguished above all by his complete abjuration of the agnostic standpoint
in epistemology. "The universe is penetrable to thought": an unknowable thing in itself does not exist. Indeed,
the intelligible reality of things is just what we know best; the unaccountable residuum, if any, lurks in the
details of their appearance. So also in Greek philosophy Hegel holds that the truth was not in the ideal world
of Plato, but in the self-realising Forms of Aristotle. As against Fichte, Hegel will not allow that the
reconciliation of the subjective with the objective is an infinitely "far-off divine event"; on the contrary, it is a
process being continually realised by ourselves and all about us. In his homely expression, the very {114}
animals as they eat turn their food into consciousness, in utter disregard of prejudice. But Fichte's
condemnation of Schelling's Indifferentism is quite right. The Absolute is Mind. Nature exists only as the
lower stage, whence Spirit emerges to contradict, to confront, and to explain her as the necessary preparation
for his supreme self-assertion. And Fichte was right in working out his system by the dialectical method of
contradiction and solution, as against the dogmatism that summarily decrees the Absolute, without taking the
trouble to reason it out, in imitation of the plan pursued by the universe in becoming conscious of itself.

The most portentous thing about Hegel's philosophy is this notion of the world's having, so to speak, argued
itself into existence. To rationalise the sum of being, to explain, without assumptions, why there should be
anything, and then why it should be as we know it, had been a problem suggested by Plato and solved rather
summarily by Spinoza's challenge to conceive Infinite Power as non-existing. Hegel is more patient and
ingenious; but, after all, his superiority merely consists in spinning the web of arbitrary dialectic so fine that
we can hardly see the thread. The root-idea is to identify, or rather to confuse, causal evolution with logic. The
chain of causes and effects that constitutes the universe is made out to be one with the series of reasons and
consequents by which the conclusion is demonstrated. As usual, the equation is effected by a transference of
terms from each side to the other. The categories and processes of logic are credited with a life and movement
that belongs only to the human reasoner operating with them. And the moving, interacting masses of which
the material universe consists are represented as parties to a dialectical {115} discussion in which one denies
what the other asserts until it is discovered, on lifting the argument to a higher plane, that after all they are
agreed. Nor is this all. The world as we know it is composed of co-existent elements grouped together or
distinguished according to their resemblances and differences as so many natural kinds; and of successive
events linked together as causes and effects. But while there is no general law of coexistence except such as
may be derived from the collocation of the previously existing elements whence they are derived, there is a
law of causal succession--namely, this, that the quantities of mass and energy involved are conserved without
loss or gain through all time. Now, Hegel's way of rationalising or, in plainer words, accounting for the
coexistent elements and their qualities, is to bring them under a supposed law of complementary opposition,
revived from Heracleitus, according to which everything necessarily involves the existence, both in thought
and reality, of its contradictory. And the same principle is applied to causal succession--a proceeding which
would be fatal to the scientific law of conservation.

There is another way of rationalising experience--namely, the theological hypothesis of a supreme intelligence
CHAPTER IV. 49
by which the world was created and is governed with a view to the attainment of some ultimate good. And
there is a sort of teleology in Hegel evidently inspired by his religious education. But the two do not mean the
same thing. For he places conscious reason not at the beginning but at the end of evolution. The rationality of
things is immanent, not transcendent. Purposes somehow work retrospectively so as to determine the course
of events towards a good end. That end is self-consciousness--not yours or mine, but the {116} world-spirit's
consciousness and possession of itself. And this is reached in four ways: in Art by intuition, in Religion by
representation, in Philosophy by conception, in History and Politics by the realisation of righteousness
through the agency of the modern State.

Hegel looked on this world and this life of ours as the only world and the only life. When Heine pointed to the
starry skies he told the young poet that the stars were a brilliant leprosy on the face of the heavens, and met
the appeal for future compensation with the sarcastic observation: "So you expect a trinkgeld for nursing your
sick mother and for not poisoning your brother!"

German historians have justly extolled the ingenuity, the subtlety, the originality, the systematising
power--unequalled since Aristotle--and the enormous knowledge of their country's chief idealist. But this,
after all, amounts to no more than claiming for Hegel that much of what he said is true and that much is new.
The vital question is whether what is new is also true--and this is more than they seem prepared to maintain.

SCHOPENHAUER.

The leaders of the party known in the fourth and fifth decades of the last century as Young Germany, among
whom Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was the most brilliant and famous, were more or less associated with the
Hegelian school. They were, however, what Hegel was not, political revolutionists with a tendency to
Socialism; while their religious rationalism, unlike his, was openly proclaimed. The temporary collapse in
1849 of the movement they initiated brought discredit on idealism as represented by Germany's classic
philosophers, which also had been seriously damaged by the luminous criticism of Trendelenburg, the
neo-Aristotelian professor at Berlin (1802-1872).

{117}

[Illustration: SCHOPENHAUER]

{118} At this crisis attention was drawn to the long-neglected writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860),
which then attained a vogue that they never since have lost. The son of a Hamburg banker and of a literary
lady whose novels enjoyed some reputation in their day, he was placed from the beginning in a position of
greater material and social independence than usually falls to the lot of German thinkers; and to this,
combined with the fact that he failed entirely as a university teacher, it is partly due that he wrote about
philosophy not like a pedant, but like a man of the world. At the same time the German professors, resenting
the intrusion of an outsider on their privileged domain, were strong enough to prevent the reading public from
ever hearing of Schopenhauer's existence until an article in the Westminster Review (April, 1853) astonished
Germany by the revelation that she possessed a thinker whom the man in the street could understand.

Schopenhauer found his earliest teachers of philosophy in Plato and Kant. He then attended Fichte's lectures at
Berlin. At some uncertain date--probably soon after taking his doctor's degree in 1813--at the suggestion of an
Orientalist he took up the study of the Vedanta system. All these various influences converged to impress him
with the belief that the things of sense are a delusive appearance under which a fundamental reality lies
concealed. According to Hegel, the reality is reason; but the Romanticists, with Schelling at their head, never
accepted his conclusion, thinking of the absolute rather as a blind, unconscious substance; still less could it
please {119} Schopenhauer, who sought for the supreme good under the form of happiness conceived as
pleasure unalloyed by pain. A gloomy and desponding temperament combined, as in the case of Byron and
Rousseau, with passionately sensuous instincts and anti-social habits, debarred him from attaining it. The loss
CHAPTER IV. 50
of a large part of his private fortune, and the world's refusal to recognise his genius, completed what natural
temperament had begun; and it only remained for the philosophy of the Upanishads to give a theoretic
sanction to the resulting state of mind by teaching that all existence is in itself an evil--a position which placed
him in still more thoroughgoing antagonism to Hegel.

It will be remembered that Kant's criticism had denied the human mind all knowledge of things in themselves,
and that the post-Kantian systems had been so many efforts to get at the Absolute in its despite. But none had
stated the question at issue so clearly as Schopenhauer put it, or answered it in such luminous terms. Like
theirs, his solution is idealist; but the idealism is constructed on new lines. If we know nothing else, we know
ourselves; only it has to be ascertained what exactly we are. Hegel said that the essence of consciousness is
reason, and that reason is the very stuff of which the world is made. No, replies Schopenhauer, that is a
one-sided scholastic view. Much the most important part of ourselves is not reason, but that very unreasonable
thing called will--that aimless, hopeless, infinite, insatiable craving which is the source of all our activity and
of all our misery as well. This is the thing-in-itself, the timeless, inextended entity behind all phenomena,
come to the consciousness of itself, but also of its utter futility, in man. {120}

The cosmic will presents itself to us objectively under the form of the great natural forces--gravitation, heat,
light, electricity, chemical affinity, etc.; then as the organising power of life in vegetables and animals; finally
as human self-consciousness and sociability. These, Schopenhauer says, are what is really meant by the
Platonic ideas, and they figure in his philosophy as first differentiations of the primordial will, coming
between its absolute unity and the individualised objects and events that fill all space and time. It is the
function of architecture, plastic art, painting, and poetry to give each of these dynamic ideas, singly or in
combination, its adequate interpretation for the æsthetic sense. One art alone brings us a direct revelation of
the real world, and that is music. Musical compositions have the power to express not any mere ideal
embodiment of the underlying will, but the will itself in all its majesty and unending tragic despair.

Schopenhauer's theory of knowledge is given in the essay by which he obtained his doctor's degree, On the
Four-fold Root of the Sufficient Reason. Notwithstanding this rather alarming title, it is a singularly clear and
readable work. The standpoint is a simplification of Kant's Critique. The objects of consciousness offer
themselves to the thinking, acting subject as grouped presentations in which there is "nothing sudden, nothing
single." (1) When a new object appears to us, it must have a cause, physical, physiological, or psychological;
and this we call the reason why it becomes. (2) Objects are referred to concepts of more or less generality,
according to the logical rules of definition, classification, and inference; that is the reason of their being
known. (3) Objects are mathematically determined by their position relatively to {121} other objects in space
and time; that is the reason of their being. (4) Practical objects or ends of action are determined by motives;
the motive is the reason why one thing rather than another is done.

The last "sufficient reason" takes us to ethics. Schopenhauer agrees with Kant in holding that actions
considered as phenomena are strictly determined by motives, so much so that a complete knowledge of a
man's character and environment would enable us to predict his whole course of conduct through life.
Nevertheless, each man, as a timeless subject, is and knows himself to be free. To reconcile these apparently
conflicting positions we must accept Plato's theory that each individual's whole fate has been determined by
an ante-natal or transcendental choice for which he always continues responsible. Nevertheless, cases of
religious "conversion" and the like prove that the eternal reality of the Will occasionally asserts itself in
radical transformations of character and conduct.

In ethics Schopenhauer distinguishes between two ideals which may be called "relative" and "absolute" good.
Relative good agrees with the standard of what in England is known as Universalistic Hedonism--the greatest
pleasure combined with the least pain for all sensitive beings, each agent counting for no more than one.
Personally passionate, selfish, and brutal, Schopenhauer still had a righteous abhorrence of cruelty to animals;
whereas Kant had no such feeling. But positive happiness is a delusion, and no humanity can appreciably
diminish the amount of pain produced by vital competition--recognised by our philosopher before Darwin--in
CHAPTER IV. 51
the world. Therefore Buddhism is right, and the higher morality bids us extirpate the {122} will-to-live
altogether by ascetic practices and meditation on the universal vanity of things. Suicide is not allowed, for
while annihilating the intelligence it would not exclude some fresh incarnation of the will. And the last dying
wish of Schopenhauer was that the end of this life might be the end of all living for him.

HERBART.

J. F. Herbart (1776-1841) occupies a peculiar position among German idealists. Like the others, he
distinguishes between reality and appearance; and, like Schopenhauer in particular, he altogether rejects
Hegel's identification of reality with reason. But, alone among post-Kantian metaphysicians, he is a pluralist.
According to him, things-in-themselves, the eternal existents underlying all phenomena, are not one, but
many. So far his philosophy is a return to the pre-Kantian system of Wolf and Leibniz; but whereas the
monads of Leibniz were credited with an inward principle of evolution carrying them for ever onward through
an infinite series of progressive changes, Herbart pushes his metaphysical logic to the length of denying all
change and all movement to the eternal entities of which reality is made up.

Herbart is entitled to the credit--whatever it may be worth--of devising a system unlike every other in history;
for while Hegel has a predecessor in Heracleitus, his rival combines the Eleatic immobilism with a pluralism
that is all his own. It is not, however, on these paradoxes that his reputation rests, but on more solid services
as a psychologist and an educationalist. Without any acquaintance, as would seem, with the work doing in
Britain, Herbart discarded the old faculty psychology, conceiving mentality as made up {123} of
"presentations," among which a constant competition for the field of consciousness is going on; and it is to
this view that such terms as "inhibition" and "threshold of consciousness" are due. And the enormous
prominence now given to the idea of value in ethics may be traced back to the teaching of a thinker whom he
greatly influenced, F. E. Beneke (1798-1854).

*****

{124}
CHAPTER V. 52

CHAPTER V.
THE HUMANISTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The philosophical movement of the nineteenth century, after the collapse of German idealism, has not been
dominated by any single master or any single direction to anything like the same extent as its predecessors.
But if we are called on to select the dominant note by which all its products have been more or less coloured
and characterised, none more impressive than the note of Humanism can be named. As applied to the culture
of the Renaissance, humanism meant a tendency to concentrate interest on this world rather than on the next,
using classic literature as the best means of understanding what man had been and again might be. At the
period on which we are entering human interests again become ascendant; but they assume the widest possible
range, claiming for their dominion the whole of experience--all that has ever been done or known or imagined
or dreamed or felt. Hegel's inventory, in a sense, embraced all this; but Hegel had a way of packing his trunk
that sometimes crushed the contents out of recognition, and a way of opening it that few could understand.
Besides, much was left out of the trunk that could ill be spared by mankind.

Aristotle has well said that the soul is in a way everything; and as such its analysis, under the name of {125}
psychology, has entered largely into the philosophy of the century. Theory of knowledge, together with logic,
has figured copiously in academic courses, with the result of putting what is actually known before the student
in a new and interesting light; but with the result also of developing so much pedantry and scepticism as to
give many besides dull fools the impression that divine philosophy is both crabbed and harsh.

THE FRENCH ECLECTICS.

In the two centuries after Descartes France, so great in science, history, and literature, had produced no
original philosopher, although general ideas derived from English thought were extensively circulated for the
purpose of discrediting the old order in Church and State. When this work had been done with a thoroughness
going far beyond the intention of the first reformers a reaction set in, and the demand arose for something
more conservative than the so-called sensualism and materialistic atheism of the pre-revolutionary times. A
certain originality and speculative disinterestedness must be allowed to Maine de Biran (1766-1824), who,
some years after Fichte--but, as would seem, independently of him--referred to man's voluntary activity as a
source of à priori knowledge. A greater immediate impression was produced by Royer-Collard (1763-1845),
who, as Professor at the Sorbonne in 1811, imported the common-sense spiritualism of Reid (1710-1796) as
an antidote to the then reigning theories of Condillac (1715-1780), who, improving on Locke, abolished
reflection as a distinct source of our ideas. Then came Victor Cousin (1792-1867), a brilliant rhetorician, and,
after Madame de Staël, the first to popularise German philosophy in France. As {126} Professor at the
Sorbonne in the last years of the Bourbon monarchy he distinctly taught a pantheistic Absolutism
compounded of Schelling and Hegel; but, whether from conviction or opportunism, this was silently
withdrawn, and a so-called eclectic philosophy put in its place. According to Cousin, in all countries and all
ages, from ancient India to modern Europe, speculation has developed under the four contrasted forms of
sensualism, idealism, scepticism, and mysticism. Each is true in what it asserts, false in what it denies, and the
right method is to preserve the positive while rejecting the negative elements of all four. But neither the
master nor his disciples have ever consistently answered the vital question, what those elements are.

HAMILTON AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CONDITIONED.

Among other valuable contributions to the history of philosophy, Victor Cousin had lectured very agreeably
on the philosophy of Kant, accepting the master's arguments for the apriorism of space and time, but rejecting
his reduction of them to mere subjective forms as against common sense. He had not gone into Kant's
destructive criticism of all metaphysics, and this was now to be turned against him by an unexpected assailant.
Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856), afterwards widely celebrated as Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at
Edinburgh, began his philosophical career by an essay on "The Philosophy of the Conditioned" in the
CHAPTER V. 53
Edinburgh Review for October, 1829, controverting the Absolutism both of Cousin and of his master,
Schelling. The reviewer had acquired some not very accurate knowledge of Kant in Germany ten years
before; and he uses this, with other rather flimsy {127} erudition, to establish the principle that to think is to
condition, and that therefore the Absolute cannot be thought--cannot be conceived. Hamilton enjoyed the
reputation of having read "all that mortal man had ever written about philosophy"; but this evidently did not
include Hegel, who certainly had performed the feat declared to be impossible. Thirty years later the
philosophy of the conditioned attained a sudden but transient notoriety, thanks to the use made of it by
Hamilton's disciple, H. L. Mansel, in his Bampton Lectures on The Limits of Religious Thought (1858). The
object of these was to prove that, as we know nothing about Things-in-themselves, nothing told about God in
the Bible or the Creeds can be rejected à priori as incredible. As an apology, the book failed utterly, its only
effect being to prepare public opinion for the Agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and Huxley.

AUGUSTE COMTE.

The brilliant audiences that hung spell-bound on the lips of Victor Cousin as he unrolled before them the
Infinite, the Finite, and the relation between the two, little knew that France's only great philosopher since
Descartes was working in obscurity among them. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the founder of Positivism,
belonged to a Catholic and Legitimist family. By profession a mathematical teacher, he fell early under the
influence of the celebrated St. Simon, a mystical socialist who exercised a powerful attraction on others
besides Comte. The connection lasted four years, when they quarrelled; indeed Comte's character was such as
to make permanent co-operation with him impossible, except on terms of absolute agreement with his
opinions and submission to his will. At a {128} subsequent period he obtained some fairly well-paid
employment at the École Polytechnique, but lost it again owing to the injurious terms in which he spoke of his
colleagues. In his later years he lived on a small annuity made up by contributions from his admirers.

[Illustration: AUGUSTE COMTE.]

{129}

Auguste Comte disliked and despised Plato, altogether preferring Aristotle to him as a philosopher; but it is
fundamentally as a Platonist, not as an Aristotelian, that he should himself be classed--in this sense, that he
valued knowledge above all as the means towards reconstituting society on the basis of an ideal life. And this
is the first reason why his philosophy is called positive--to distinguish it as reconstructive from the purely
negative thought of the Revolution. The second reason is to distinguish it as dealing with real facts from the
figments of theology and the abstractions of metaphysics. Positive science explains natural events neither by
the intervention of supernatural beings nor by the mutual relations of hypostasised concepts, but by verifiable
laws of succession and resemblance. Turgot was the first to distinguish the theological, metaphysical, and
mechanical interpretations as successive stages of a historical evolution (1750); Hume was the first to single
out the relations of orderly succession and resemblance as the essential elements of real knowledge (1739);
Comte, with the synthetic genius of the nineteenth century, first combined these isolated suggestions with a
wealth of other ideas into a vast theory of human progress set out in the fifth and sixth volumes of his
Philosophie Positive--the best sketch of universal history ever written.

The positive sciences fall into two great divisions--the concrete, dealing with the actual phenomena as
presented in space and time; the abstract, which alone concern philosophy, dealing with their laws. The most
important of the abstract sciences is Sociology, claimed by Comte as his own special creation. The study of
this demands a previous knowledge of biology, psychology {130} being dismissed as a metaphysical delusion
and phrenology put in its place. The science of life presupposes Chemistry, before which comes Physics,
presupposing Astronomy, and, as the basis of all, Mathematics, divided into the calculus and geometry. At a
later period Morality was placed as a seventh fundamental science at the head of the whole hierarchy.

At a first glance some serious flaws reveal themselves in the imposing logic of this scheme. Astronomy as a
CHAPTER V. 54
concrete science ought to have been excluded from the series, its admission being apparently due to the
historical circumstance that the most general laws of physics were ascertained through the study of celestial
phenomena. But on the same ground geology can no longer be excluded, as its records led to the recognition
of the evolution of life; or should evolution be referred to the concrete sciences of zoology and botany, by
parity of reasoning human progress should be treated as a branch of universal history--which, in fact, is what
Comte makes it in his fifth and sixth volumes. It would have been better had he also studied social statics on
the historical method. As it is, the volume in which the conditions of social equilibrium are supposed to be
established contains only one chapter on the subject, and that is very meagre, consisting of some rather
superficial observations on family life and the division of labour. No doubt the matter receives a far more
thorough discussion in the author's later work, Politique Positive. But this merely embodies his own plan of
reorganisation for the society of the future, and therefore should count not as science, but as art.

The Positivist theory of social dynamics is that all {131} branches of knowledge pass through three
successive stages already described as the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific. And this advance
is accompanied by a parallel evolution on the governmental side from the military to the industrial régime,
with a revolutionary or transitional period answering to metaphysical philosophy. To this scheme it might be
objected that the parallelism is merely accidental. A scientific view of nature and a profound knowledge of her
laws is no doubt far more conducive to industry than a superstitious view; but it is also more favourable to the
successful prosecution of war, which, indeed, always has been an industry like another. Nor, to judge by
modern experience, does it look as if a government placed in the hands of a country's chief capitalists--which
was what Comte proposed--would be less militant in its general disposition than the parliamentary
governments which he condemns as "metaphysical." In fact, it is by theologians and metaphysicians that our
modern horror of war has been inspired rather than by scientists.

The great idea of Comte's life, that the positive sciences, philosophically systematised, are destined to supply
the basis of a new religion surpassing Catholicism in its social efficacy, seems a delusion really inherited from
one of his pet aversions, Plato. It arose from a profound misconception of what Catholicism had done, and a
misconception, equally profound, of the means by which its priesthood worked. In spite of Comte's denials,
the leverage was got not by appeals to the heart, but by appeals to that future judgment with which the
preaching of righteousness and temperance was associated by St. Paul, his supposed precursor in religion, as
Aristotle was his precursor in philosophy. {132}

The worship of Humanity, or, as it has been better called, the Service of Man, is a great and inspiring thought.
Only it is not a religion, but a metaphysical idea, derived by Comte from the philosophers of the eighteenth
century, and by them through imperial Rome from the Humanists and Stoics of ancient Athens.

J. S. MILL.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was, like Comte, a Platonist in the sense of valuing knowledge chiefly as an
instrument of social reform. He was indeed bred up by his father, James Mill (1773-1836), and by Jeremy
Bentham as a prophet of the new Utilitarianism as Comte was, to some extent, trained by St. Simon to
substitute a new order for that which the Revolution had destroyed. Mill, however, had been educated on the
lines of Greek liberty rather than in the tradition of Roman authority; while both were largely affected by the
Romanticism current in their youth. The worship of women, revived from the age of chivalry, entered into the
romantic movement; and it may be mentioned in this connection that Mill calls Mrs. Taylor, the lady with
whom he fell in love at twenty-four and married eighteen years later, "the inspirer and in part the author of
all" that was best in his writings; while Comte refers his religious conversion to Madame Clotilde de Vaux,
the object of his adoration in middle life. It seems probable, however, from the little we know of Mrs.
Taylor--whom Carlyle credits with "the keenest insight and the royallest volition"--that her influence was the
reverse of Clotilde's. If anything, she attached Mill still more firmly to the cause of pure reason.

It has been mentioned how Kant's metaphysical {133} agnosticism was played out by Hamilton against
CHAPTER V. 55
Cousin. A little later Whewell, the Cambridge historian of physical science, imported Kant's theory of
necessary truth in opposition to the empiricism of popular English thought, and Kant's Categorical Imperative
in still more express contradiction to Bentham's utilitarian morality. Now Mill, educated as he had been on the
associationist psychology and in the central line of the English epistemological tradition, rejected the German
apriorism as false in itself, while more particularly hating it as, in his opinion, a dangerous enemy to all social
progress. For to him what people called their intuitions, whether theoretic or practical, were merely the
time-honoured prejudices in which they had been brought up, and the contradictory of which they could not
conceive. Comte similarly interpreted the metaphysical stage of thought as the erection into immutable
principles of certain abstract ideas whose value--if they had any--was merely relative and provisional. Mill,
with his knowledge of history, might have remembered that past thought, beginning with Plato, shows no such
connection between intuitionism and immobility or reaction, while such experientialists as Hobbes and Hume
have been political Tories. But in his own time the à priori philosophy went hand in hand with conservatism
in Church and State, so he set himself to explode it in his System of Logic (1843).

Mill's Logic, the most important English contribution to philosophy since Hume, is based on Hume's theory of
knowledge, amended and supplemented by some German and French ideas. It is conceded to Kant that
mathematical truths are synthetic, not analytic. It is not contained in the idea of two and {134} two that they
make four, nor in the idea of two straight lines that they cannot enclose a space. Such propositions are real
additions to our knowledge; but it is only experience that justifies us in accepting them. What constitutes their
peculiar certainty is that they can be verified by trial on imagined numbers and lines, without reference to
external objects. But by what right we generalise from mental experience to all experience Mill does not
explain. Hume's analysis of causation into antecedence and sequence of phenomena is accepted by Mill as it
was accepted by Kant; but the law that every change must have a cause is affirmed, in adhesion to Dr. Thomas
Brown (1778-1820), with more distinctness than by Hume. As Laplace put it, the whole present state of the
universe is a product of its whole preceding state. But we only know this truth by experience; and we can
conceive a state of things where phenomena succeed one another by a different law or without any law at all.
Mill himself was ready to believe that causation did not obtain at some very remote point of space; though
what difference remoteness could make, except we suppose it to be causal--which would be a reassertion of
the law--he does not explain; nor yet what warrant we have for assuming that causation holds through all time,
or at any future moment of time.

Next to the law of universal causation inductive science rests on the doctrine of natural kinds. The material
universe is known to consist of a number of substances--namely, the chemical elements and their
combinations, so constituted that a certain set of characteristic properties are invariably associated with an
indefinite number of other properties. Thus, if in a strange country a certain mineral answers the usual {135}
tests for arsenic, we know that a given dose of it will destroy life; and we are equally certain that if the
spectroscopic examination of a new star shows the characteristic lines of iron, a metal possessing all the
properties of iron as we find it in our mines is present in that distant luminary. According to Mill, we are
justified in drawing that sweeping inference on the strength of a single well-authenticated observation,
because we know by innumerable observations on terrestrial substances that natural kinds possessing such
index qualities do exist, whereas there is not a single instance of a substance possessing those qualities
without the rest.

For Mill, as for Hume, reality means states of consciousness and the relations between them. Matter he
defines as a permanent possibility of sensation; mind as a permanent possibility of thought and feeling. But
the latter definition is admittedly not satisfactory. For a stream of thoughts and feelings which is proved by
memory to have the consciousness of itself seems to be something more than a mere stream. All explanations
must end in an ultimate inexplicability. God may be conceived as a series of thoughts and feelings prolonged
through eternity; and it is a logically defensible hypothesis that the order of nature was designed by such a
being, although the amount of suffering endured by living creatures excludes the notion of a Creator at once
beneficent and omnipotent. And if the Darwinian theory were established, the case for a designing intelligence
would collapse. Personally Mill believed neither in a God nor in a future life.
CHAPTER V. 56
In morals Mill may be considered the creator of what Henry Sidgwick, in his Methods of Ethics (1874), called
Universalistic Hedonism. The English moralists of the {136} eighteenth century had set up the greatest
happiness of the greatest number as the ideal end of action; but they did not hold that each individual could be
expected to pursue anything but his own happiness; the object of Bentham (1748-1832) being to make the two
coincide. Kant showed that the rule of right excluded any such accommodation, and a crisis in his own life led
Mill to adopt the same conclusion. Afterwards he rather confused the issues by distinguishing between higher
and lower pleasures, leaving experts to decide which were the pleasures to be preferred. The universalistic
standard settles the question summarily by estimating pleasures according to their social utility.

Mill fully sympathised with Comte's demand for social reorganisation as a means towards the moral end. But,
with his English and Protestant traditions, he had no faith in the creation of a new spiritual power with an
elaborate religious code and ritual as the best machinery for the purpose. In his opinion, the claims of the
individual to extended liberty of thought and action, not their restriction, were what first needed attention.
Second to this--if second at all--came the necessity for reforming representative government on the lines of an
enlarged franchise and a readjusted electoral system with plural suffrage determined by merit, votes for
women, and a contrivance for giving minorities a weight proportioned to their numbers. The problem of
poverty was to be dealt with by restrictions on the increase of population and on the amount of inheritable
property, the maximum of which ought not to exceed a modest competence.

Among the noble characters presented by the history of philosophy we may distinguish between the heroic
and the saintly types. To the former in modern {137} times belong Giordano Bruno, Fichte, and to some
extent Comte; to the latter, Spinoza, Berkeley, and Kant. To the second class we may surely add John Stuart
Mill, whom Gladstone called "the saint of rationalism," and of whom Auguste Laugel said, "He was not
sincere--he was sincerity itself."

HERBERT SPENCER.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was the son of a Nonconformist country schoolmaster, but was educated chiefly
by his uncle Thomas, an Evangelical clergyman of the Church of England. A radical reformer of the old
school, Thomas Spencer seems to have indoctrinated his youthful charge with the germinal principles
afterwards generalised into a whole cosmic philosophy. He had a passion for justice realised under the form of
liberty, individual responsibility, and self-help. In his opinion, until it was modified by private misfortunes,
everything served everybody right. Beginning as an economical administrator of the new Poor Law, he at last
became an advocate of its total abolition; and, alone among fifteen thousand clergymen, he was an active
member of the Anti-Corn Law League, besides supporting the separation of Church and State. At twenty-two
Herbert Spencer accepted and summed up this policy under the form of a general hostility to State
interference with individual liberty, supporting it by a reference to the reign of Natural Law in all orders of
existence. In his first great work, Social Statics, the principle of laissez-faire received its full systematic
development as the restriction of State action to the defence of liberty against internal and external aggression,
the raising of taxes for any other purpose being unjust, as is also private ownership of {138} land, which is by
nature the common heritage of all. Spencer subsequently came to abandon land nationalisation, probably from
alarm at its socialistic implications.

[Illustration: HERBERT SPENCER.]

The doctrine of natural law and liberty carried with it for Spencer a strong repugnance not only to
protectionism in politics, but also to miracles in theology. The profession of journalism brought him into
touch {139} with a freethinking set in London. Whether under their influence, or Shelley's, or by some
spontaneous process, his religious convictions evaporated by twenty-eight into the agnosticism which
thenceforth remained their permanent expression. There might or not be a First Cause; if there was, we know
nothing about it. At this stage Lyell's attempted refutation of Lamarck converted Spencer to the belief in man's
derivation from some lower animal by a process of gradual adaptation. Thus the scion of an educationalist
CHAPTER V. 57
family came to interpret the whole history of life on our planet as an educative process.

It seemed, however, as if there was one fatal exception to the scheme of naturalistic optimism. The Rev.
Thomas Malthus had originally published his Essay on Population (1798) as a telling answer to the "infidel"
Godwin's Political Justice (1793), the bolder precursor of Social Statics. The argument was that the tendency
of population to outrun the means of subsistence put human perfectibility out of the question. It had been
suggested by the idealists, Mill among the number, that the difficulty might be obviated by habitual
self-restraint on the part of married people. But Spencer, with great ingenuity, made the difficulty its own
solution. The pressure of population on the means of subsistence is the source of all progress; and of progress
not only in discoveries and inventions, but also, through its increased exercise, in the instrument which effects
them--that is, the human brain. Now, it is a principle of Aristotle's, revived by modern biology, that
individuation is antagonistic to reproduction; and increasing individuation is the very law of developing life,
shown above all in the growing power of life's chief instrument, which is thought's organ, the brain. For, as
Spencer proceeded {140} to show in his next work, the Principles of Psychology, life means a continuous
series of adjustments of internal to external relations. Therefore the rate of multiplication must go on falling
with the growth of intellectual and moral power until it only just suffices to balance the loss by death. The
next step was to revive Laplace's nebular hypothesis, and to connect it through Lyell's uniformitarian geology
with Lamarck's developmental biology, thereby extending the same evolutionary process through the whole
history of the universe.

Nor was this all. Milne-Edwards, by another return to Aristotle, had pointed to the "physiological division of
labour" as a mark of ascending organic perfection, to which Spencer adds integration of structure as its
obverse side, at the same time extending the world-law, already made familiar in part through its industrial
applications by Adam Smith, to all orders of social activity. Finally, differentiation and integration were
stretched back from living to lifeless matter, thus bringing astronomy and geology, which had already entered
into the causal series of cosmic transformations, under one common law of evolution; while at the same time,
seeing it to be generally admitted that inorganic changes originated from the operation of purely mechanical
forces, they suggested that mechanism, without teleology, could adequately explain organic evolution also.

Finally came the great discovery of Darwin and Wallace, with its extension of Malthus's law to the whole
world of living things. Spencer had just touched, without grasping, the same idea years before. He now gladly
accepted Natural Selection as supplementing without superseding Lamarck's theory of spontaneous
adaptation. {141}

To complete even in outline the vast sweep of his projected Synthetic Philosophy two steps more remained for
Spencer to take. The law of evolution had to be brought under the recently-discovered law of the Conservation
of Energy, or, as he called it, the Persistence of Force, and the whole of unified science had to be reconciled
with religion. The first problem was solved by interpreting evolution as a redistribution of matter and
motion--a process in which, of course, energy is neither lost nor gained. The second problem was solved by
reducing faith and knowledge to the common denominator of Agnosticism--a method that found more favour
with Positivists (in the wide sense) than with Christian believers.

Herbert Spencer was disappointed to find that people took more interest in the portico (as he called it in a
letter to the present writer)--that is to say, the metaphysical introduction to his philosophical edifice--than in
its interior. He probably had some suspicion that the portico was mere lath and plaster, while he felt sure that
the columns and architraves behind it were of granite. The public, however, besides their perennial interest in
religion, might be excused for giving more attention to even a baroque exterior with some novelty about it
than to the formalised eclecticism of what stood behind it. Unfortunately, they soon found that the alleged
reconciliation was a palpable sham. Religion is nothing if not a revelation, and an unknowable God is no God
at all. Even the pretended proofs of that poor residual deity involved their author in the transparent
self-contradiction of calling the universe the manifestation of an Unknowable Power. Then the relations
between this Power (such as it was) and the Energy (or Force) whose conservation (or persistence) was the
CHAPTER V. 58
very first {142} of First Principles seemed hard to adjust. Either energy is created, or it is not. In the one case,
what becomes of its eternity? in the other case, what need is there to assume a Power (knowable or not)
behind it? Science will not shrink back before such a phantom, nor will Religion adore it.

Such faulty building in the portico prepares us for somewhat unsteady masonry within; and in fact none holds
together except what has been transported bodily from other temples. In the past history of the universe,
considered as a "rearrangement of matter and motion," disintegration and assimilation play quite as great a
part as integration and differentiation. Such formulas have no advantage over the metaphysical
systematisation of Aristotle, and they give us as little power either to predict or to direct. Will war be
abolished at some future time, or property equalised or abolished, or morality exalted, or religion superseded?
Spencer was ready with his answer; but the law of evolution could not prove it true. Nevertheless, his name
will long be associated with evolution as a world-wide process, though neither in the way of original
discovery nor of complete generalisation, and far less of successful application to modern problems; but rather
of diffusion and popularisation, even as other valuable ideas have been impressed on the public mind by other
philosophies at a vast expense of ingenuity, knowledge, and labour, but not at greater expense than the
eventual gain has been worth.

THE ENGLISH HEGELIANS.

Hegel's philosophy first drew attention in England through its supposed connection with Strauss's mythic
theory of the Gospels and Baur's theory of New {143} Testament literature as a product of party conflicts and
compromises in the primitive Church. Rightly interpreted as a system of Pantheism, it was decried and
ridiculed by orthodox theologians in the name of religion and common sense, while cherished by the
advanced Broad Church as a means of symbolising away the creeds they continued to repeat. Then the
triumph of Spencer's Agnosticism in the middle Victorian period (1864-1874) suggested an appeal to a logic
whose object had been to resolve the negations of eighteenth-century enlightenment in the synthesis of a
higher unity. The first pronunciation in this sense was The Secret of Hegel (1865), by Dr. Hutchison Stirling
(1820-1909), a writer of geniality and genius, who, writing from the Hegelian standpoint, tried to represent the
English rationalists of the day as a superficial and retrograde school. It was a bold but unsuccessful attempt to
plant the banner of the Hegelian Right on British soil. By attacking Darwinism Stirling put himself out of
touch with the general movement of thought. Professor William Wallace (1844-1897), John Caird
(1820-1898), and his brother Edward Caird (1835-1908) inclined more or less to the Left, as also does Lord
Haldane (b. 1865) in his Gifford Lectures (1903); and all have the advantage over Stirling of writing in a
clearer if less picturesque style.

T. H. Green (1836-1882) is sometimes quoted as a Hegelian, but his intellectual affinities were rather with
Fichte. According to him, reality is the thought of an Eternal Consciousness, of which personality need not be
predicated, while the endless duration of personal spirits seems to be denied. Another idealist, F. H. Bradley
(b. 1846)--perhaps the greatest living English {144} thinker--develops in his Appearance and Reality (1893) a
metaphysical system which, though Absolutist in form, is, to me at least, in substance practically
indistinguishable from the dogmatic Agnosticism of Herbert Spencer, and even more destructive of the
popular Theism. Finally the writings of Dr. J. E. McTaggart (b. 1866), teaching as they do a doctrine of
developmental personal immortality without a God, show a tendency to combine Hegel with Lotze.

THE GERMAN ECLECTICS.

By general consent the most serious and influential of German systematic thinkers since Hegel is R. H. Lotze
(1817-1881). His philosophy is built up of materials derived in varying proportions from all his German
predecessors, the most distinctive idea being pluralism, probably suggested in the first instance by Herbart,
whom he succeeded as Professor at Göttingen. But Lotze discards the rigid monads of his master for the more
intelligible soul-substances of Leibniz--or rather of Bruno--whose example he also follows in his attempt to
combine pluralism with monism. Very strenuous efforts are made to give the unifying principle the character
CHAPTER V. 59
of a personal God; but the suspicion of a leaning to Pantheism is not altogether eluded.

More original and far more uncompromising is the work of Ed. v. Hartmann (1842-1906). Personally he
enjoyed the twofold distinction--whatever it may be worth--of having served as an officer for a short time in
the Prussian army, and of never having taught in a university. His great work, published at twenty-seven,
appeared under the telling title of the Philosophy of the Unconscious. It won immediate popularity, and
reached its eleventh edition in 1904. Hartmann adopts, {145} with some slight attenuation, Schopenhauer's
pessimism, and his metaphysics with a considerable emendation. In this new version the world is still
conceived as Will and Representation; but whereas for Schopenhauer the intellective side had been
subordinated to the volitional, with Hartmann the two are co-equal and intimately united, together forming
that "Unconscious" which is the new Absolute. In this way Reason again becomes, what it had been with
Hegel, a great cosmic principle; only as the optimistic universe had argued itself into existence, so conversely
the pessimistic universe has to argue itself out of existence. As in the process of developing differentiation, the
volitional and intellective sides draw apart, the Unconscious becomes self-conscious, and thus awakens to the
terrible mistake it committed in willing to be. Thenceforth the whole of evolution is determined by the
master-thought of how not to be. The problem is how to annul the creative Will. And the solution is to divide
it into two halves so opposed that the one shall be the negation and destruction of the other. There will be
then, not indeed a certainty, but an equal chance of definitive self-annihilation and eternal repose. Thus, the
immediate duty for mankind, as also their predestined task, is the furtherance of scientific and industrial
progress as a means towards this consummation, which is likewise their predestined end. A religious
colouring is given to the process by representing it as an inverted Christian scheme in which man figures as
the redeemer of God--i.e. the Absolute--from the unspeakable torments to which he is now condemned by the
impossibility of satisfying his will.

Like Hartmann, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the greatest writer of modern Germany, took his start from
{146} Schopenhauer, but broke with pessimism at an early date, having come to disbelieve in the hedonism
on which it is founded. His restless vanity drove him to improve on Darwinism by interpreting evolution as
the means towards creating what he called the Superman--that is, a race as much superior to us as we are to
the apes. Progress, however, is not to be in the direction of a higher morality, but of greater power--the
Will-to-Power, not the Will-to-Live, being the essence of what is. Later in life Nietzsche revived the Stoic
doctrine that events move, and have moved through all time, in a series of recurring cycles, each being the
exact repetition of its predecessor. It is a worthless idea, and Nietzsche, who had been a Greek professor, must
have known where he got it; but the megalomania to which he eventually succumbed prevented his
recognising the debt. By a merited irony of fate this worshipper of the Napoleonic type will survive only as a
literary moralist in the history of thought.

The modern revolt against metaphysical systemisation, with or without a theological colouring, took in
Germany the form of two distinct philosophical currents. The first is scientific materialism, or, as some of its
advocates prefer to call it, energism. This began about 1850, but boasts two great living representatives, the
biologist Haeckel and the chemist Ostwald. In their practical aims these men are idealists; but their admission
of space and time as objective realities beyond which there is nothing, and their repudiation of agnosticism,
distinguish them from the French and English Positivists. The other and more powerful school is known as
Neo-Kantianism. It numbers numerous adherents in the German universities, and also in those of France and
Italy, representing various {147} shades of opinion united by a common reference to Kant's first Critique,
dissociated from its concessions to deism, as the true starting-point of modern thought.

THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century the interest in philosophy and the ability devoted to its cultivation
have shown no sign of diminution. Two new doctrines in particular have become subjects of world-wide
discussion. I refer to the theory of knowledge called Pragmatism, and to the metaphysics of Professor Henri
Bergson. Both are of so revolutionary, so contentious, and so elusive a character as to preclude any discussion
CHAPTER V. 60

or even outline of the new solutions for old problems which they claim to provide. But I would recommend
the study of both, and especially of Bergson, to all who imagine that the possibilities of speculation are
exhausted, or that we are any nearer finality and agreement than when Heracleitus first glorified war as the
father of all things, and contradiction as the central spring of life.

*****

{149}

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CHAPTER V. 61

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Adamson. Fichte. In Blackwood's Phil. Classics. 1901. {151}

Schelling, F. W. J. Werke. Fourteen vols. Stuttgart, 1856-61.

CHAPTER V. 62

Watson, Prof. J. Schelling's Transcendental Idealism, Chicago, 1882.

Hegel, G. W. F. Werke. Nineteen vols. in twenty-one. Leipzig, 1832-87.

Hegel. By Prof. E. Caird (Philosophical Classics for English Readers.) Edinburgh, 1883. Hegel's Philosophies
of Law, Religion, History, Mind, his History of Philosophy, and the smaller Logic, have been translated into
English.

Schopenhauer. Werke. Six volumes in the Reclam Series. Leipzig, 1892.

Ribot. La Philosophie de Schopenhauer. Ninth ed.; Paris, 1909.

Wallace, Prof. W. Life of Schopenhauer (Great Writers Series). London, 1890.

Whittaker, Thomas. "Schopenhauer," in Philosophies Ancient and Modern. London, 1908.

Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea. Trans. by Haldane and Kemp. Three vols. London, 1884-86.--Essays.
Trans. by Belfort Bax (Bohn's Library). London, 1891.

Schopenhauer. Studies. Consisting of translations by T. Bailey Saunders. Seven vols. London,

1889-96.--Other essays translated by Madame Hillebrand (London, 1889) and by A. B. Ballock (London,
1903)

Herbart, J. F. Werke. Ed. Kehrbach. Fifteen vols. 1887 ff.

Wagner. Vollständige Darstellung d. Lehre Herbarts. 1896.

Hayward, F. H. The Student's Herbart. 1902.

Hamilton, Sir W. Discussions on Philosophy. Second ed. London, 1853.

Comte, Auguste. Cours de Philosophie Positive. Five vols. Paris, 1830-42.--Politique Positive. Four vols.
Paris, 1851-54.

Caird, Edward. The Social Philosophy of Auguste Comte. Glasgow, 1885.

Levy-Bruhl. The Philosophy of Auguste Comte. English trans. London, 1903.

Whewell, Wm. Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. London, 1840.

Mill, J. S. A System of Logic. Two vols. London, 1843.--On Liberty. London, 1859.--Utilitarianism. London,
1863.--Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy. London, 1865.

Whittaker, T. "Comte and Mill," in Philosophies Ancient and Modern. London, 1908.

Spencer, Herbert. First Principles. London, 1862.--Essays. Three vols. London, 1891.--Autobiography.
London, 1904.

Macpherson, Hector. Herbert Spencer. London, 1900. {152}

Green, T. H. Prolegomena to Ethics. Oxford, 1884.

CHAPTER V. 63

Green, T. H. Works. Three vols. London, 1885-1900.

Bradley, F. H. Appearance and Reality. Third ed. London, 1889.

Lotze, H. Mikrocosmus. 1856-64.--System der Philosophie. 1874-79.--English trans. of the Microc. Two vols.
Edinburgh, 1885.--Of the Metaphysics. Two vols. Oxford. 1884.

Jones, Sir Henry. The Philosophy of Lotze. Glasgow, 1895.

Hartmann, Ed. von. Die Philosophie des Unbewussten. 1869. English trans. by W. C. Coupland. Three vols.
London, 1884.

Nietzsche, Fr. Werke. Leipzig, 1895 ff. English trans. in fourteen vols. Edinburgh. (T. N. Foulis.)--D. Halévy,
La Vie de Nietzsche. Paris, 1909.

Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy (Home University Library). London, 1912.

*****

{153}

INDEX

Abbott, E. A., quoted, 14 Agnosticism, 67, 70, 141, 143, 144 Anaximander, 12 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 4
Aristotle, 3, 5, 6, 7, 19, 25, 49, 52, 129, 139, 142 Arnold, Matthew, 55 Athens, 1 f. Atomism, revival of, 10,
21 Averroes, 4

Bacon, Roger, 4 Bacon, Francis, 12 ff., 24, 29, 32, 61 Baur, F. C., 142 Bayle, Pierre, 71 Beneke, F. E., 123
Bergson, Henri, 147 Berkeley, Bishop, 43, 72 ff.; Theory of Vision, 73; Idealism, 73 ff., 89 Boyle, Robert, 21
Bradley, F. H., 57, 143 Brahe, Tycho, 17 Brown, Dr. Thomas, 134 Bruno, Giordano, 7 ff., 22, 45, 51, 107
Byron, 119

Caird, Edward, 143 Caird, John, ib. Calvinism, 28 Catholicism and philosophy, 2 ff. Causation. See Hume,
Kant, Hegel, Mill Christianity. See Catholicism Christina, Queen, 32 f. Church, Dean, quoted, 15 Collier,
Arthur, 75 Collins, Anthony, 71 Columbus, 6 Comte, Auguste, 127 ff.; classification of the sciences, 130;
Politique Positive, ib.; philosophy of history, 131, 133 Condillac, 125 Copernicanism, 6 f. Cousin, Victor, 90

Dante, 6 f. Darwin, Charles, 140 Democritus, 10 Descartes, 30, 31 ff.; on belief, 41, 49, 61, 65, 87 Duns
Scotus, 4

Eclectics, French, 125 f.; German, 144 Ego, the Absolute, 105 Elizabeth, Princess, 32 Empedocles, 65
Epicurus, 9, 22, 29 Epistemology, 65 Eriugena, John Scotus, 3, 4 Ethica, Spinoza's, 48

Fichte, J. G., 101 ff.; his definition of God, 102; as German patriot, 102 f.; his idealism, 103 ff.; ethical
standpoint, 106; later teaching, 110 Ficino, Marsilio, 5 Final causes in modern philosophy, 61; in Plato, ib.
Form and Matter, 10, 18, 24

Galileo, 17, 24 Gassendi, 50 Geulincx, 42, 44, 51 Gilbert, 17, 21 Godwin, William, 139 Goethe, 102, 105
Green, T. H., 143

Haeckel, Ernst, 146 Haldane, Lord, 143 Haldane, Miss E. S., quoted, 32 Hamilton, Sir William, 126 f., 132
Hartmann, Ed. von, 144 f. Harvey, 17 Hegel, G. F. W., 24; on Spinoza, 53, 103, 107, 110 ff.; Phenomenology
CHAPTER V. 64

of Mind, 112; Science of Logic, ib.; Encyclopædia, ib.; Philosophy of Law, ib.; Æsthetics, 113; Philosophy of
History, ib.; his didactic method, 113 ff.; negation of supernatural religion, 116, 118, 124, 126 Hegelians, the
English, 142 ff. Heine, 103, 116 Heracleitus, 11, 147 Herbart, J. F., 122, 144 Hobbes, Thomas, 22 ff., 50, 56,
68 Hooker, Richard, and the Social Contract, 29 Humanism in the nineteenth century, 124 Hume, David, 77
ff.; character as a historian, 77; theory of causation, 81 ff.; attitude towards theism, 84, 89; a precursor of
Comte, 129; and of Mill, 133 ff. Huxley, T. H., 127 Huyghens on Descartes, 41

Induction, Baconian, 20 Innate ideas, 68, 95

John of Salisbury, 4 Justinian, 1

Kant, Immanuel, 85 ff.; his nebular hypothesis, 87; on synthetic and analytic judgments, 87 ff.; on space and
time, 90 ff.; Critique of Pure Reason, 93 ff.; on causation, 95 f.; moral and religious philosophy, 97 ff., 118,
119, 132, 133, 134, 147 Kepler, 10, 17, 21 Klopstock, 101

{154} Lamarck, 139, 140 Laplace, 87 Leibniz, G. W., 57 ff.; optimism, 59 ff.; monadology, 62; determinism,
63; pre-established harmony, ib., 144 Lewes, G. H., 103, 107 Locke, John, 29, 65 ff.; on toleration, 67; his
proof of theism, 69; moral inconsistency, 69 f., 72, 87, 89 Lotze, R. H., 144 Lucretius, 9, 20, 22 Luther, 6
Lyell, Sir Charles, 139

Macaulay on Bacon, 16; on Hobbes, 28, 71 McTaggart, Dr. J. E., 144 Maine de Biran, 125 Malebranche, 42
ff., 51, 74, 89 Malthus, 137 Mansel, H. L., 127 Materialists, German, 146 Mill, J. S., 132 ff.; System of Logic,
133; metaphysics, 135; theology, ib.; ethics, 135 f.; politics, 136; character, 137 Milne-Edwards, 140
Monadism, 11, 70

Napier, 17 Neo-Kantianism, 146 Neo-Platonism, 2 f. Newton, Isaac, 58, 59 Nicolas of Cusa, 11 Nietzsche,
Friedrich, 145 f. Norris, John, 75

Occam, 5 Occasionalism, 42 Ostwald, 146

Pantheism, 45,50 Parmenides, 9 Pascal, 42 Plotinus, 2, 5, 12, 44 Positivism. See Comte Power, idea of, in
Spinoza, 52; how connected with causation, 83 Pragmatism, 147 Proclus, 3 Pythagoreans, 9

Reality, degrees of, 57 Reid, Thomas, 85, 125 Renaissance, scientific activity of the, 17 Rousseau, 29, 119

St. Simon, 127 Schelling, F. W. J., 106 ff.; natural philosophy, 108; Transcendental Idealism, 108 f.;
romanticism, 109; Absolutism, 110, 126 Schiller, F. C. S., quoted, 18 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 103, 118 ff.;
pessimism, 119; metaphysics, 119 ff.; ethics, 121 f., 145 Sextus Empiricus, 67 Shaftesbury, Lord, author of the
Characteristics, 71 Shelley, 139 Sidgwick, Henry, 135 Smith, Adam, 140 Social Contract, 26 Spencer,
Herbert, 127, 137 ff.; Social Statics, 137; Psychology, 140; Synthetic Philosophy, 141; on religion, ib.;
formula of evolution, 142, 144 Spencer, Rev. Thomas, 137 Spinoza, 30, 45 ff.; Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus, 48; not a mystic, 55; ethics, 56 f.; return to Stoicism, 56, 59, 61, 69, 87, 106, 110 Staël,
Madame de, 125 Stirling, Dr. Hutchison, 143 Strauss, David, 112, 142

Taylor, Mrs., and J. S. Mill, 132 Temple, Archbishop, 102 Theism. See Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume,
Kant, Fichte, Mill Timæus, Plato's, 41 Toland, 71 Turgot, 129

Vaux, Clotilde de, and Comte, 132 Voltaire and optimism, 59 Vries, Simon de and Spinoza, 46

Wallace, A. R., 140 Wallace, Prof. William, 143 Whewell, William, 133 Wordsworth, 57 Wycliffe, 5

*****
CHAPTER V. 65

Transcriber's note:

The following changes were made:

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Page 57. "only defend on aesthetic grounds": 'grounps' in original.

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