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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of Modern Philosophy, by Alfred
+William Benn
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: History of Modern Philosophy
+
+
+Author: Alfred William Benn
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 11, 2010  [eBook #34283]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Steven Gibbs, Keith Edkins, and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
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+      See 34283-h.htm or 34283-h.zip:
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+
+
+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.                                  PAGE
+  THE PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE                  1
+
+  CHAPTER II.
+  THE METAPHYSICIANS                            31
+
+  CHAPTER III.
+  THE THEORISTS OF KNOWLEDGE                    65
+
+  CHAPTER IV.
+  THE GERMAN IDEALISTS                         101
+
+  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.
+
+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 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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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.
+
+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 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. 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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 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.
+
+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.
+
+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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 _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 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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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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+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 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
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+The following changes were made:
+
+Page 38. "passed with progressive reflection": 'progress-sive' on line
+break in original.
+
+Page 57. "only defend on aesthetic grounds": 'grounps' in original.
+
+
+
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+<body>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of Modern Philosophy, by Alfred
+William Benn</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: History of Modern Philosophy</p>
+<p>Author: Alfred William Benn</p>
+<p>Release Date: November 11, 2010  [eBook #34283]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Steven Gibbs, Keith Edkins,<br />
+    and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="10" style="background-color: #ccccff;">
+<tr>
+<td style="width:25%; vertical-align:top">
+Transcriber's note:
+</td>
+<td>
+A few typographical errors have been corrected. They
+appear in the text <span class="correction" title="explanation will pop up">like this</span>, and the
+explanation will appear when the mouse pointer is moved over the marked
+passage.<br /><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="pg" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+  <div class="figcenter" style="width:20%;">
+      <a href="images/frontispiece.jpg"><img style="width:100%" src="images/frontispiece.jpg"
+      alt="Kant" title="Kant" /></a>
+    <span class="sc">Giordano Bruno.</span>
+
+    <p class="cenhead">From the Statue in the Campo dei Fiori, Rome.</p>
+
+    <p class="poem"></p>
+  </div>
+
+<h2>HISTORY OF</h2>
+
+<h1>MODERN</h1>
+
+<h1>PHILOSOPHY</h1>
+
+  <p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h3>A. W. BENN,</h3>
+
+<p class="cenhead">AUTHOR OF "THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH RATIONALISM IN THE<br />
+NINETEENTH CENTURY," ETC.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead">[ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED]</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3><span class="sc">London:</span></h3>
+
+<h2>WATTS &amp; CO.,</h2>
+
+<h3>17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.</h3>
+
+<h3>1912</h3>
+
+<p class="cenhead">PRINTED BY WATTS AND CO.,<br />
+JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET,<br />
+LONDON, E.C.</p>
+
+  <p><br style="clear:both" /></p>
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+<table class="nobctr" summary="Contents" title="Contents">
+<tr><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:center; padding-top:1em;"> CHAPTER I. </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">The Philosophical Renaissance</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:center; padding-top:1em;"> CHAPTER II.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">The Metaphysicians</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page31">31</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:center; padding-top:1em;"> CHAPTER III.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">The Theorists of Knowledge</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page65">65</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:center; padding-top:1em;"> CHAPTER IV.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">The German Idealists</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page101">101</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:center; padding-top:1em;"> CHAPTER V.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">The Humanists of the Nineteenth Century</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page124">124</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">Bibliography</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page149">149</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">Index</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page153">153</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<h3>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h3>
+
+<table class="nobctr" summary="List of Illustrations" title="List of Illustrations">
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">Giordano Bruno</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <i>Frontispiece</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">Francis Bacon</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page13">13</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">René Descartes</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page34">34</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">Benedictus Spinoza</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page47">47</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">David Hume</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page78">78</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">Immanuel Kant</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">G. W. F. Hegel</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page111">111</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">Arthur Schopenhauer</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page117">117</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">Auguste Comte</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page128">128</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="spacsingle"> <span class="sc">Herbert Spencer</span> </td><td class="spacsingle" style="text-align:right;"> <a href="#page138">138</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+  <p><br style="clear:both" /></p>
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<p><!-- Page 1 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page1"></a>{1}</span></p>
+
+<h3><span class="sc">Chapter I.</span></h3>
+
+<h3>THE PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE</h3>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 2 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page2"></a>{2}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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. <!-- Page 3 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page3"></a>{3}</span></p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 Mohammedan
+  conquerors of Spain, which became an important centre of learning in the
+  earlier Middle Ages. Not a few Christian scholars went there to <!-- Page
+  4 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page4"></a>{4}</span>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
+  <i>Metaphysics</i> 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.</p>
+
+  <p>Nevertheless a great revolution was already in progress. As a result
+  of the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in <span
+  class="scac">A.D.</span> 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&mdash;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 <!-- Page 5 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page5"></a>{5}</span>(1115-1180), the first
+  Humanist, William of Ockham, and Wycliffe, the first
+  reformer&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;the sole legacy of
+  Scholasticism to common thought: "Entities ought not to be gratuitously
+  multiplied" (entia non sunt præter necessitatem multiplicanda).</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page
+  6 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page6"></a>{6}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>par excellence</i>, 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.</p>
+
+  <p>The decisive blow to medieval ideas came from another
+  quarter&mdash;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 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 <!-- Page 7 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page7"></a>{7}</span>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&mdash;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&mdash;if animated they
+  were&mdash;and suggesting by analogy that they too supported teeming
+  multitudes of reasonable inhabitants.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 8 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page8"></a>{8}</span>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 <!-- Page 9 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page9"></a>{9}</span>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>The Greek-Italian philosophers&mdash;the Pythagoreans and
+  Parmenides&mdash;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 <!-- Page 10 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page10"></a>{10}</span>the break-up of Aristotle's spherical world
+  by Copernicanism that threw Bruno back&mdash;as he gives us himself to
+  understand&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 11 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page11"></a>{11}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>Beyond and above all these partial unities is the Monas
+  Monadum&mdash;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&mdash;a Copernican before
+  Copernicus&mdash;to recognise the principle of Heracleitus that opposites
+  are one; and in this instance he applies it with brilliant audacity; for
+  every infinitesimal <!-- Page 12 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page12"></a>{12}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;the monistic, and
+  what is now called the pluralistic tendency. With none, except, perhaps,
+  with 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.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Francis Bacon.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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.
+  <!-- Page 13 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page13"></a>{13}</span></p>
+
+  <div class="figcenter" style="width:23%;">
+      <a href="images/p013.jpg"><img style="width:100%" src="images/p013.jpg"
+      alt="Francis Bacon" title="Francis Bacon" /></a>
+    <span class="sc">Francis Bacon.</span>
+
+      <p class="author">(<i>Copyright B. P. C.</i>)</p>
+
+    <p class="poem"></p>
+  </div>
+
+<p><!-- Page 14 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page14"></a>{14}</span></p>
+
+  <p>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.&nbsp;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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
+  <!-- Page 15 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page15"></a>{15}</span>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 <i>pendente lite</i>],
+  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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>Bacon, at any rate, knew quite well that to take presents before
+  judgment was wrong and criminal, as his answer to Egerton sufficiently
+  shows&mdash;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 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 <!-- Page 16 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page16"></a>{16}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 17 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page17"></a>{17}</span>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 <i>Novum
+  Organum</i> 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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
+  <!-- Page 18 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page18"></a>{18}</span>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 <i>the</i> 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 <i>exclusions</i>, Bacon
+  believed that a single form would finally remain to be the invariable
+  cause of the phenomenon investigated, and of nothing else" (F.&nbsp;C.&nbsp;S.
+  Schiller).</p>
+
+  <p>As Dr. Schiller observes, this <i>method of exclusions</i> is not new;
+  nor, indeed, does Bacon claim to have originated it; at least he observes
+  in his <i>Novum Organum</i> 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 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&mdash;except in the single case of God&mdash;give Forms a separate
+  <!-- Page 19 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page19"></a>{19}</span>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 <i>New Atlantis</i>, 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&mdash;in short, a
+  general anticipation of Jules Verne and Mr. H.&nbsp;G. Wells.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 20 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page20"></a>{20}</span>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 <i>Essays</i> 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 <i>Novum Organum</i> and the <i>De
+  Augmentis</i>, 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;an ambition
+  dating from the publication of the <i>Novum Organum</i>. The claim will
+  not stand, for two reasons. The first is that the great movement of
+  modern science <!-- Page 21 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page21"></a>{21}</span>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
+  <i>Novum Organum</i> 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 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 <!-- Page 22 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page22"></a>{22}</span>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&mdash;if size they
+  have&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Thomas Hobbes.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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, <!-- Page 23 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page23"></a>{23}</span>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page
+  24 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page24"></a>{24}</span>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."</p>
+
+  <p>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 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&mdash;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 <!-- Page 25 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page25"></a>{25}</span>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&mdash;in
+  other words, on the type of rigorous deduction&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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,
+  <i>Leviathan</i>, 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 <!--
+  Page 26 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page26"></a>{26}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>All this theory of an original institution of the State <!-- Page 27
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page27"></a>{27}</span>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 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.</p>
+
+  <p>Democracy, however, was not the sole or the worst enemy dreaded by the
+  author of <i>Leviathan</i> 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 <!-- Page 28 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page28"></a>{28}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;no more being
+  possible under the conditions then obtaining&mdash;-but with such effect
+  that, according to Macaulay, "for many years the <i>Leviathan</i> 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 29
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page29"></a>{29}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>Ecclesiastical Polity</i>. Its potency as a revolutionary
+  instrument comes from the reinterpretations of Locke and Rousseau, which
+  run directly counter to the assumptions of the <i>Leviathan</i>. <!--
+  Page 30 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page30"></a>{30}</span></p>
+
+  <p>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 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.</p>
+
+  <p><br style="clear:both" /></p>
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<p><!-- Page 31 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page31"></a>{31}</span></p>
+
+<h3><span class="sc">Chapter II.</span></h3>
+
+<h3>THE METAPHYSICIANS</h3>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>Les Fâcheux,</i> 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 <!-- Page 32 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page32"></a>{32}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.&nbsp;S. Haldane's <i>Life of René Descartes</i>). 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 <!-- Page 33 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page33"></a>{33}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 34 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page34"></a>{34}</span></p>
+
+  <div class="figcenter" style="width:21%;">
+      <a href="images/p034.jpg"><img style="width:100%" src="images/p034.jpg"
+      alt="Francis Bacon" title="Francis Bacon" /></a>
+    <span class="sc">René Descartes.</span>
+  </div>
+
+<p><!-- Page 35 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page35"></a>{35}</span></p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>Discourse on Method</i>
+  (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.</p>
+
+  <p>The conflict of authorities had at least one good result, which was to
+  discredit the very notion of <!-- Page 36 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page36"></a>{36}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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
+  <!-- Page 37 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page37"></a>{37}</span>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 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>In his other great philosophical work, the <i>Meditations</i>,
+  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 <!-- Page 38 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page38"></a>{38}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;which has not been
+  proved&mdash;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 <span class="correction" title="Original reads 'progress-sive' on line break."
+  >progressive</span> 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 <!-- Page 39 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page39"></a>{39}</span>notion of infinite perfection all round.
+  Descartes, however, is not really out for truth&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;in other words, the light of Greek <!-- Page 40 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page40"></a>{40}</span>philosophy&mdash;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. 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>After proving to his own satisfaction the existence of the soul and of
+  God, Descartes returns to the starting-point of his whole
+  inquiry&mdash;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 <!-- Page 41
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page41"></a>{41}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>Timæus</i>. 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&mdash;the more so that Huyghens mentions this as customary
+  with Descartes.</p>
+
+  <p>The great author of the <i>Method</i> and the
+  <i>Meditations</i>&mdash;for, after every critical deduction, his
+  greatness as a thinker remains undoubted&mdash;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 <!-- Page 42 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page42"></a>{42}</span>responsibility for our delusions as well as
+  for our crimes.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Malebranche.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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 mind, the
+  corresponding mental and material modifications are miraculously produced
+  by the exercise of his omnipotence; and it is because these events occur
+  <i>on occasion</i> of signals of which they <!-- Page 43 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page43"></a>{43}</span>are not the effects but
+  the consequents that the theory has received the name of
+  Occasionalism.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>Treatise on Man</i> 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,
+  <i>On the Investigation of Truth</i> (<i>De la Recherche de la Vérité,
+  1674</i>), 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. <!-- Page 44
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page44"></a>{44}</span></p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>locus</i>,
+  the place of souls.</p>
+
+  <p>There is unquestionably something grandiose about this theory, which,
+  however, has the defect in orthodox <!-- Page 45 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page45"></a>{45}</span>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.&nbsp;H. Green has been shown by the criticism of Henry Sidgwick
+  to exclude the personality of God.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Spinoza.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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. <!-- Page 46 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page46"></a>{46}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 47 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page47"></a>{47}</span></p>
+
+  <div class="figcenter" style="width:26%;">
+      <a href="images/p047.jpg"><img style="width:100%" src="images/p047.jpg"
+      alt="Spinoza" title="Spinoza" /></a>
+    Reproduced (by permission) from <i>Spinoza's Short Treatise on God,
+    Man, and his Well-being</i>, by Professor A. Wolf (A. &amp; C. Black).
+  </div>
+
+<p><!-- Page 48 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page48"></a>{48}</span></p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>Ethica</i> 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.</p>
+
+  <p>Spinoza was for his time no less daring as a Biblical critic than as a
+  metaphysician. His celebrated <i>Tractatus Theologico-Politicus</i> 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 violation of the order of nature as the miracles
+  recorded in Scripture history would be impossible. And the narratives
+  recording them are discredited by <!-- Page 49 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page49"></a>{49}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;or, as he calls them, the hypotheses&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>To appreciate the work of the Hebrew philosopher, of the lonely muser,
+  bred in the religion of Jahveh&mdash;a name traditionally interpreted as
+  the very expression of absolute self-existence&mdash;we must conceive him
+  as starting with a question deeper even than the Cartesian <!-- Page 50
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page50"></a>{50}</span>doubt, asking
+  not How can I know what is? but Why should there <i>be</i> 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.</p>
+
+  <p>The philosophy or religion&mdash;for it is both&mdash;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&mdash;to call them by their
+  more familiar names&mdash;mind and body, when taken together with the
+  intimate association shown by experience to obtain between them; and also
+  how <!-- Page 51 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page51"></a>{51}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>In fact, the Hebrew philosopher does this, declaring boldly that
+  Thought and Extension are one and the same thing&mdash;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&mdash;or the
+  Absolute&mdash;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 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 52 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page52"></a>{52}</span>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>we</i> 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 <!-- Page 53 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page53"></a>{53}</span>anything&mdash;and I
+  must, at least, grant myself&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 54
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page54"></a>{54}</span>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 <i>continua</i> 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 <i>à priori</i>
+  mathematical method that has been so successfully applied to continuous
+  quantity.</p>
+
+  <p>The geometrical form into which Spinoza has thrown his philosophy
+  unfortunately restricts the number of readers&mdash;always rather
+  small&mdash;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&mdash;unlike Bacon, Hobbes, and
+  Descartes&mdash;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 <!-- Page 55 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page55"></a>{55}</span>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."</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;so suggestive of Christian theology at its
+  highest flight&mdash;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 <!--
+  Page 56 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page56"></a>{56}</span>thinking
+  beings, through whose activity the universe keeps up a delighted
+  consciousness of itself.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;that is to say, of Thought under the form of
+  reason.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 57 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page57"></a>{57}</span>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&mdash;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 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 <span class="correction" title="Original reads 'grounps'."
+  >grounds</span> 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&mdash;and of error also&mdash;points to the theory of degrees of
+  reality, revived and elaborated in our own time by Mr. F.&nbsp;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.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Leibniz.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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. <!-- Page 58 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page58"></a>{58}</span>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&mdash;the most chimerical of
+  all&mdash;to compose the differences between Rome and Protestantism; a
+  fourth&mdash;partly realised long after his time&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 59
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page59"></a>{59}</span>theory of
+  evolution is a special application of his theory of development.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>A single theory of Leibniz has attained more celebrity than any one
+  utterance of any other philosopher; but that fame is due to the undying
+  fire in which it has been enveloped by the mocking irony of Voltaire.
+  <!-- Page 60 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page60"></a>{60}</span>Everything is for the best in the best of
+  all possible worlds. Such is the famous text as a satire on which
+  <i>Candide</i> 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 <i>à priori</i> 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 <!-- Page 61
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page61"></a>{61}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>Phædo,</i> 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 <!-- Page 62
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page62"></a>{62}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, the components of what is known
+  as inorganic matter&mdash;although percipient, are not conscious of their
+  perceptions; in his language they do not <i>apperceive</i>. 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 63
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page63"></a>{63}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>pari passu</i> 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 64 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page64"></a>{64}</span>perceptions, the one
+  constituting our actual and the other our potential knowledge. A more
+  difficult problem is to explain how any particular monad&mdash;Leibniz or
+  another&mdash;can consistently be a monadologist rather than a solipsist
+  believing only in its own existence. Here, as usual, the <i>Deus ex
+  Machina</i> 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&mdash;a universe of
+  monads&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p><br style="clear:both" /></p>
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<p><!-- Page 65 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page65"></a>{65}</span></p>
+
+<h3><span class="sc">Chapter III.</span></h3>
+
+<h3>THE THEORISTS OF KNOWLEDGE</h3>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Locke.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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 <!--
+  Page 66 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page66"></a>{66}</span>entirely
+  devoted to truth and good&mdash;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
+  <i>that</i> 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 <i>Essay Concerning
+  Human Understanding</i>.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;the former because their <!-- Page 67 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page67"></a>{67}</span>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
+  <i>à priori</i>. 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 results
+  were of a decidedly sceptical cast. Indeed, his successors, though not
+  himself, were destined to develop them into what is now called
+  Agnosticism.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 68
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page68"></a>{68}</span>adopt
+  Aristotle's method of experience as against Platonic transcendentalism,
+  and the sceptical relativism of Sextus as against the dogmatism of the
+  schools.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;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 <!-- Page
+  69 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page69"></a>{69}</span>criticism&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 70 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page70"></a>{70}</span>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 <i>he</i> has no retribution to fear, must be even more
+  irresponsible than the atheist.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;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&mdash;or think we perceive&mdash;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 <!-- Page 71 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page71"></a>{71}</span>Cyrenaic school. This something, for aught
+  we know, might have created the world.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>Representative government and the subordination of ecclesiastical to
+  secular authority&mdash;or, better still, their separation&mdash;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. <!-- Page 72 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page72"></a>{72}</span></p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Berkeley.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>New Theory of Vision</i> (1709), was offered.
+  Next year came the epoch-making <i>Principles of Human Knowledge</i>,
+  followed in 1713 by the more popular <i>Dialogues</i>. 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 73 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page73"></a>{73}</span>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 purpose his <i>Theory of
+  Vision</i> was written. It proves&mdash;or attempts to prove&mdash;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&mdash;or, as he calls them, the
+  ideas&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>Having thus cleared the ground, our young idealist proceeds in his
+  next and greatest work, <i>Of the Principles of Human Knowledge</i>, 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. <!-- Page 74 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page74"></a>{74}</span>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&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page
+  75 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page75"></a>{75}</span>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 <i>Clavis Universalis</i> professed to be "a
+  demonstration of the <i>non-existence or impossibility of an external
+  world</i>" (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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 76 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page76"></a>{76}</span>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 kettle would&mdash;a popular proverb to
+  the contrary notwithstanding&mdash;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"&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, 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 <i>vera causa</i>. Why, then, should
+  the perception of any other mind, however exalted, have that effect?</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 77 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page77"></a>{77}</span>sensation, thought, feeling, and volition?
+  Simply one of those abstract ideas whose existence Berkeley himself
+  denied.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Hume.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>Treatise on Human Nature</i>, 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&mdash;the inimitable charm, Kant calls
+  it&mdash;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 <i>History of
+  England</i>, which proved a source of fame and profit. A profound
+  historical scholar, J.&nbsp;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 <!-- Page 78 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page78"></a>{78}</span><span class="figright" style="width:18%;"><a
+  href="images/p078.jpg"><img style="width:100%" src="images/p078.jpg"
+  alt="David Hume" title="David Hume" /></a><span class="sc">David
+  Hume.</span></span> 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 <!-- Page 79 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page79"></a>{79}</span>also that in private life Hume's character
+  was entirely admirable&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 ideas&mdash;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&mdash;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 <!-- Page 80 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page80"></a>{80}</span>succeed each other with an inconceivable
+  rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement." "There is properly
+  no <i>simplicity</i> in it [the self] at one time, nor <i>identity</i> 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 81 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page81"></a>{81}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>à priori</i>. 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 <i>à priori</i> 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.</p>
+
+  <p>It is possible to accept Hume's theory in principle <!-- Page 82
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page82"></a>{82}</span>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 from one
+  molecule to another&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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:&mdash; <!-- Page 83
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page83"></a>{83}</span></p>
+
+  <div class="poem">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>This above all,&mdash;to thine own self be true;</p>
+      <p>And it must follow, as the night the day,</p>
+      <p>Thou canst not then be false to any man.</p>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;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, <!-- Page 84 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page84"></a>{84}</span>the idea of production has been quoted as
+  vitally distinguishing true causation from invariable sequence. But
+  various myths, of which the story of &OElig;dipus 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 85 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page85"></a>{85}</span>the vulgar and the theologians, he remained
+  what would now be called a materialist.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Kant.</b></p>
+
+  <p>The English philosophy of experience and the Continental philosophy of
+  <i>à priori</i> 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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!"&mdash;a touching and beautiful tribute
+  to the illustrious German, whose lofty, pure, and luminous spirit it was
+  uniquely fitted to characterise.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 86 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page86"></a>{86}</span></p>
+
+  <div class="figcenter" style="width:23%;">
+      <a href="images/p086.jpg"><img style="width:100%" src="images/p086.jpg"
+      alt="Kant" title="Kant" /></a>
+    <span class="sc">Kant.</span>
+
+      <p class="author">(<i>Copyright B. P. C.</i>)</p>
+
+    <p class="poem"></p>
+  </div>
+
+<p><!-- Page 87 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page87"></a>{87}</span></p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;what was not science&mdash;the direct
+  fiat of omnipotence.</p>
+
+  <p>Kant offered a brilliant solution of the problem in his <i>Natural
+  History of the Heavens</i> (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"&mdash;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 <!-- Page 88 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page88"></a>{88}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 may happen without a cause does not involve a
+  logical contradiction; and at that time he believed nothing to be known
+  <i>à priori</i> 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 89 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page89"></a>{89}</span>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 <i>à posteriori</i>; for the law of universal gravitation is
+  known only by experience. But there are also synthetic judgments <i>à
+  priori</i>; 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&mdash;that is to say,
+  the whole of mathematical science.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;at any rate, in
+  the sense of not coming by supernatural communication, as Malebranche and
+  Berkeley thought&mdash;he puts the famous question, How are synthetic
+  judgments <i>à priori</i> 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&mdash;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
+  <!-- Page 90 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page90"></a>{90}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 91
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page91"></a>{91}</span>of common sense,
+  against the reduction of these apparently fundamental elements to purely
+  subjective forms. They would ask, with the German critic 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&mdash;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&mdash;possibly differing in important respects from
+  ours&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 92
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page92"></a>{92}</span>reasoning in a
+  circle. If he appeals&mdash;as in consistency he ought&mdash;to another
+  order of subjectivity as the sanction of his first transcendental
+  argument, such reasoning involves the regress to infinity.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>The Sensible
+  and the Intelligible World</i> 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
+  <i>Elements</i> or even for Newton's <i>Principia</i>?</p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>this</i>
+  subjectivity were the true source of that peculiar certainty belonging to
+  synthetic judgments <i>à priori</i>? 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.</p>
+
+  <p>Eleven years after the inaugural dissertation Kant <!-- Page 93
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page93"></a>{93}</span>published his
+  most important contribution to philosophy, <i>The Critique of Pure
+  Reason</i> (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.</p>
+
+  <p>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
+  <i>The Critique of Pure Reason</i> 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
+  <i>not</i> cracked; the shell slips from between the grappling surfaces
+  long before they meet.</p>
+
+  <p>We have seen how Kant interpreted every judgment as a synthesis of
+  subject and predicate. Now, whether the synthesis be <i>à priori</i> or
+  <i>à posteriori</i>, 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&mdash;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 <!-- Page 94 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page94"></a>{94}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote class="b1n">
+
+  <p>(i.) Quantity.</p>
+
+  <p>Unity, Plurality, Totality.</p>
+
+  <p>(ii.) Quality.</p>
+
+  <p>Reality, Negation, Limitation.</p>
+
+  <p>(iii.) Relation.</p>
+
+  <p>Substance and Accident; Cause and Effect; Action and Reaction
+  (Reciprocity).</p>
+
+  <p>(iv.) Modality.</p>
+
+  <p>Possibility and Impossibility; Existence and Non-Existence; Necessity
+  and Contingency.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 95 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page95"></a>{95}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>The sequence of an effect to its cause has only a verbal resemblance
+  to the sequence of a logical consequent to 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 <!-- Page 96
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page96"></a>{96}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, of proving its
+  apriority&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>In his criticism of Pure Reason, properly so called&mdash;that is, of
+  inferences made by human faculty with <!-- Page 97 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page97"></a>{97}</span>regard to questions
+  transcending all experience&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 98 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page98"></a>{98}</span>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 <i>summum
+  bonum</i> 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&mdash;"the liberty of each, bounded only by the equal
+  liberty of all."</p>
+
+  <p>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 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, <!-- Page 99
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page99"></a>{99}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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
+  <i>Critique</i>, 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&mdash;in other words, what we now call Agnosticism&mdash;may not
+  be final, but it still remains to be dealt with. (iii.) The possibility
+  of reducing <i>à priori</i> 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 <!-- Page
+  100 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page100"></a>{100}</span>shown&mdash;what Hume did not
+  see&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>We have now to trace, within the limits prescribed by the nature of
+  this work, the development of philosophy under Kant's German
+  successors.</p>
+
+  <p><br style="clear:both" /></p>
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<p><!-- Page 101 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page101"></a>{101}</span></p>
+
+<h3><span class="sc">Chapter IV.</span></h3>
+
+<h3>THE GERMAN IDEALISTS</h3>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Herbart.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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.&nbsp;G. Fichte (1762-1814). In him&mdash;for the third time in
+  modern history, for the first and last time in Germany&mdash;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 <!-- Page
+  102 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page102"></a>{102}</span>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 <i>Critique of all
+  Revelation</i>, 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&mdash;with a hint that others would follow his example&mdash;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 <i>Addresses to the German Nation</i>
+  (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 <!-- Page 103 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page103"></a>{103}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 104
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page104"></a>{104}</span>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 <i>assume</i> it as the condition of my
+  self-consciousness&mdash;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&mdash;the self-realisation of the ego,
+  alternatively admitting and transcending a limit to its activity.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page
+  105 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page105"></a>{105}</span>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>It has been said that morality was not with Fichte what it had been
+  with Kant&mdash;the highest good. Nevertheless, as a means towards the
+  final synthesis, morality interested him intensely, and his best work has
+  been <!-- Page 106 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page106"></a>{106}</span>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&mdash;ideally speaking&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Schelling.</b></p>
+
+  <p>German philosophy is prolific of self-contradictions; and so far the
+  most flagrant example has been offered by Fichte's <i>Theory of
+  Knowledge</i>, 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 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.</p>
+
+  <p>The task of reconciliation was first attempted by <!-- Page 107
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page107"></a>{107}</span>F.&nbsp;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 108 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page108"></a>{108}</span>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.&mdash;Q.&nbsp;E.&nbsp;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.</p>
+
+  <p>The fundamental idea of natural philosophy is polarity&mdash;opposite
+  forces combining to neutralise one another and then parting to be
+  reunited at a higher stage of evolution. Thus attraction and
+  repulsion&mdash;represented as space and time&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>The next step was to construct a philosophy of history. This, with
+  much else, is included under the name of <i>A System of Transcendental
+  Idealism</i> (1800) in the most finished of Schelling's literary
+  compositions. <!-- Page 109 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page109"></a>{109}</span>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 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.</p>
+
+  <p>Singularly enough, Fichte accepted the <i>Transcendental Idealism</i>
+  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&mdash;that is to say, in their
+  totality or in the Absolute. For, considered as appearances, <!-- Page
+  110 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page110"></a>{110}</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Hegel.</b></p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 111 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page111"></a>{111}</span></p>
+
+  <div class="figcenter" style="width:23%;">
+      <a href="images/p111.jpg"><img style="width:100%" src="images/p111.jpg"
+      alt="Hegel" title="Hegel" /></a>
+    Hegel
+
+      <p class="author">(<i>Copyright B. P. C.</i>)</p>
+
+    <p class="poem"></p>
+  </div>
+
+<p><!-- Page 112 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page112"></a>{112}</span></p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>Phenomenology of Mind</i> (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 <i>System of Logic</i>, 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 <i>Encyclopædia of the Philosophical
+  Sciences</i>, in 1817, and a <i>Philosophy of Law</i>&mdash;which is
+  really a treatise on Government&mdash;in 1821. His <!-- Page 113 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page113"></a>{113}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>Hegel's collected works, published after his death, fill over twenty
+  good-sized volumes. Besides the treatises already mentioned, they include
+  his <i>Lectures on the History of Philosophy</i>, the <i>Philosophy of
+  History</i>, the <i>Philosophy of Religion</i>, <i>Æsthetics</i>, 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
+  <i>Æsthetics</i>; but any student desirous of getting a notion of
+  Hegelianism at first hand had better begin with the <i>Philosophy of
+  History</i>, 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 114 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page114"></a>{114}</span>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. <i>The Absolute is
+  Mind</i>. 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 115 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page115"></a>{115}</span>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 <i>is</i> a law of
+  causal succession&mdash;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&mdash;a proceeding which would be fatal to
+  the scientific law of conservation.</p>
+
+  <p>There is another way of rationalising experience&mdash;namely, the
+  theological hypothesis of a supreme intelligence 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&mdash;not yours or mine, but the
+  <!-- Page 116 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page116"></a>{116}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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!"</p>
+
+  <p>German historians have justly extolled the ingenuity, the subtlety,
+  the originality, the systematising power&mdash;unequalled since
+  Aristotle&mdash;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&mdash;and this is more than
+  they seem prepared to maintain.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Schopenhauer.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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).</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 117 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page117"></a>{117}</span></p>
+
+  <div class="figcenter" style="width:23%;">
+      <a href="images/p117.jpg"><img style="width:100%" src="images/p117.jpg"
+      alt="Schopenhauer" title="Schopenhauer" /></a>
+    <span class="sc">Schopenhauer</span>
+  </div>
+
+<p><!-- Page 118 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page118"></a>{118}</span></p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>Westminster Review</i> (April, 1853)
+  astonished Germany by the revelation that she possessed a thinker whom
+  the man in the street could understand.</p>
+
+  <p>Schopenhauer found his earliest teachers of philosophy in Plato and
+  Kant. He then attended Fichte's lectures at Berlin. At some uncertain
+  date&mdash;probably soon after taking his doctor's degree in
+  1813&mdash;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 <!-- Page 119
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page119"></a>{119}</span>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 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&mdash;a position which placed him in still more
+  thoroughgoing antagonism to Hegel.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>not</i> reason, but that very
+  unreasonable thing called will&mdash;that aimless, hopeless, infinite,
+  insatiable craving which is the source of all our activity and of all our
+  misery as well. <i>This</i> 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. <!-- Page 120 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page120"></a>{120}</span></p>
+
+  <p>The cosmic will presents itself to us objectively under the form of
+  the great natural forces&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>Schopenhauer's theory of knowledge is given in the essay by which he
+  obtained his doctor's degree, <i>On the Four-fold Root of the Sufficient
+  Reason</i>. Notwithstanding this rather alarming title, it is a
+  singularly clear and readable work. The standpoint is a simplification of
+  Kant's <i>Critique</i>. 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
+  <!-- Page 121 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page121"></a>{121}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;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&mdash;recognised by our philosopher before
+  Darwin&mdash;in the world. Therefore Buddhism is right, and the higher
+  morality bids us extirpate the <!-- Page 122 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page122"></a>{122}</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Herbart.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>Herbart is entitled to the credit&mdash;whatever it may be
+  worth&mdash;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 <!-- Page 123 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page123"></a>{123}</span>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.&nbsp;E. Beneke (1798-1854).</p>
+
+  <p><br style="clear:both" /></p>
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<p><!-- Page 124 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page124"></a>{124}</span></p>
+
+<h3><span class="sc">Chapter V.</span></h3>
+
+<h3>THE HUMANISTS OF THE NINETEENTH
+CENTURY</h3>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>Aristotle has well said that the soul is in a way everything; and as
+  such its analysis, under the name of <!-- Page 125 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page125"></a>{125}</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>The French Eclectics.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;but, as would seem,
+  independently of him&mdash;referred to man's voluntary activity as a
+  source of <i>à priori</i> 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 <!-- Page 126 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page126"></a>{126}</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Hamilton and the Philosophy of the Conditioned.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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 <i>Edinburgh Review</i> 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 <!-- Page 127 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page127"></a>{127}</span>erudition, to establish
+  the principle that <i>to think is to condition</i>, and that therefore
+  the Absolute cannot be thought&mdash;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.&nbsp;L.
+  Mansel, in his Bampton Lectures on <i>The Limits of Religious Thought</i>
+  (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 <i>à priori</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Auguste Comte.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 128 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page128"></a>{128}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <div class="figcenter" style="width:20%;">
+      <a href="images/p128.jpg"><img style="width:100%" src="images/p128.jpg"
+      alt="Auguste Comte" title="Auguste Comte" /></a>
+    <span class="sc">Auguste Comte.</span>
+  </div>
+
+<p><!-- Page 129 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page129"></a>{129}</span></p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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
+  <i>Philosophie Positive</i>&mdash;the best sketch of universal history
+  ever written.</p>
+
+  <p>The positive sciences fall into two great divisions&mdash;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 <!-- Page 130 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page130"></a>{130}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>At a first glance some serious flaws reveal themselves in the imposing
+  logic of this scheme. Astronomy as a 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&mdash;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, <i>Politique Positive</i>. 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.</p>
+
+  <p>The Positivist theory of social dynamics is that all <!-- Page 131
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page131"></a>{131}</span>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&mdash;which was what Comte proposed&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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. <!--
+  Page 132 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page132"></a>{132}</span></p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>J. S. Mill.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;whom Carlyle credits with "the keenest insight and the
+  royallest volition"&mdash;that her influence was the reverse of
+  Clotilde's. If anything, she attached Mill still more firmly to the cause
+  of pure reason.</p>
+
+  <p>It has been mentioned how Kant's metaphysical <!-- Page 133 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page133"></a>{133}</span>agnosticism was played
+  out by Hamilton against 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&mdash;if they had any&mdash;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 <i>à priori</i> philosophy went hand in hand with
+  conservatism in Church and State, so he set himself to explode it in his
+  <i>System of Logic</i> (1843).</p>
+
+  <p>Mill's <i>Logic</i>, 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 <!-- Page 134 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page134"></a>{134}</span>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&mdash;which
+  would be a reassertion of the law&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;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 <!-- Page 135 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page135"></a>{135}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>In morals Mill may be considered the creator of what Henry Sidgwick,
+  in his <i>Methods of Ethics</i> (1874), called Universalistic Hedonism.
+  The English moralists of the <!-- Page 136 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page136"></a>{136}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;if second at all&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 137 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page137"></a>{137}</span>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&mdash;he was sincerity itself."</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>Herbert Spencer.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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, <i>Social Statics</i>, the
+  principle of <i>laissez-faire</i> 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 <!-- Page 138
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page138"></a>{138}</span>land, which is
+  by nature the common heritage of all. Spencer subsequently came to
+  abandon land nationalisation, probably from alarm at its socialistic
+  implications.</p>
+
+  <div class="figcenter" style="width:17%;">
+      <a href="images/p138.jpg"><img style="width:100%" src="images/p138.jpg"
+      alt="Herbert Spencer" title="Herbert Spencer" /></a>
+    <span class="sc">Herbert Spencer.</span>
+  </div>
+
+  <p>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
+  <!-- Page 139 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page139"></a>{139}</span>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 family came to interpret
+  the whole history of life on our planet as an educative process.</p>
+
+  <p>It seemed, however, as if there was one fatal exception to the scheme
+  of naturalistic optimism. The Rev. Thomas Malthus had originally
+  published his <i>Essay on Population</i> (1798) as a telling answer to
+  the "infidel" Godwin's <i>Political Justice</i> (1793), the bolder
+  precursor of <i>Social Statics</i>. 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&mdash;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 <!-- Page 140 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page140"></a>{140}</span>to show in his next
+  work, the <i>Principles of Psychology</i>, 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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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. <!-- Page 141 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page141"></a>{141}</span></p>
+
+  <p>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&mdash;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&mdash;a method that
+  found more favour with Positivists (in the wide sense) than with
+  Christian believers.</p>
+
+  <p>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)&mdash;that is to say, the metaphysical introduction to his
+  philosophical edifice&mdash;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 very first <!-- Page 142
+  --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page142"></a>{142}</span>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.</p>
+
+  <p>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.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>The English Hegelians.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 143 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page143"></a>{143}</span>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 <i>The Secret of Hegel</i> (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 (<i>b.</i> 1865) in his
+  <i>Gifford Lectures</i> (1903); and all have the advantage over Stirling
+  of writing in a clearer if less picturesque style.</p>
+
+  <p>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.&nbsp;H. Bradley (<i>b.</i>
+  1846)&mdash;perhaps the greatest living English <!-- Page 144 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page144"></a>{144}</span>thinker&mdash;develops
+  in his <i>Appearance and Reality</i> (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.&nbsp;E. McTaggart (<i>b.</i> 1866), teaching as they do a doctrine of
+  developmental personal immortality without a God, show a tendency to
+  combine Hegel with Lotze.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>The German Eclectics.</b></p>
+
+  <p>By general consent the most serious and influential of German
+  systematic thinkers since Hegel is R.&nbsp;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&mdash;or rather of
+  Bruno&mdash;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 of a personal God; but the suspicion of
+  a leaning to Pantheism is not altogether eluded.</p>
+
+  <p>More original and far more uncompromising is the work of Ed. v.
+  Hartmann (1842-1906). Personally he enjoyed the twofold
+  distinction&mdash;whatever it may be worth&mdash;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 <i>Philosophy of the Unconscious</i>. It
+  won immediate popularity, and reached its eleventh edition in 1904.
+  Hartmann adopts, <!-- Page 145 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page145"></a>{145}</span>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 <i>into</i> existence, so conversely the pessimistic
+  universe has to argue itself <i>out of</i> 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&mdash;<i>i.e.</i> the Absolute&mdash;from the unspeakable torments to
+  which he is now condemned by the impossibility of satisfying his
+  will.</p>
+
+  <p>Like Hartmann, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the greatest writer of
+  modern Germany, took his start from <!-- Page 146 --><span
+  class="pagenum"><a name="page146"></a>{146}</span>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+  <p>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 <!-- Page 147 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page147"></a>{147}</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class="cenhead"><b>The Latest Developments.</b></p>
+
+  <p>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 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.</p>
+
+  <p><br style="clear:both" /></p>
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<p><!-- Page 149 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page149"></a>{149}</span></p>
+
+<h3>BIBLIOGRAPHY</h3>
+
+  <p>Kuno Fischer. <i>Geschichte der neuern Philosophie.</i> Nine vols.
+  Fourth ed.; Heidelberg, 1897-1904. (Comes down to Schopenhauer.)</p>
+
+  <p>Erdmann. <i>Geschichte der Philosophie.</i> Vol. ii. Fourth ed.;
+  Berlin, 1896. (Comes down to Lotze; third ed.; trans. by W.&nbsp;S. Hough;
+  London, 1889.)</p>
+
+  <p>Windelband. <i>Geschichte der neuern Philosophie.</i> Two vols. Fifth
+  ed. (Comes down to Herbart and Beneke. There is an English trans. of
+  Windelband's <i>General History of Philosophy</i>, by J.&nbsp;H. Tufts, New
+  York, 1893. In his contribution to the General History of Philosophy in
+  the <i>Kultur der Gegenwart</i>, Berlin, 1909, Windelband includes a
+  brief but useful summary of Pragmatism and Bergson.)</p>
+
+  <p>Levy-Bruhl. <i>History of Modern Philosophy in France.</i> Trans. by
+  Miss Coblence. London, 1890.</p>
+
+  <p>Forsyth, T. M. <i>English Philosophy: A Study of its Methods and
+  General Development.</i> London, 1910. (A. &amp; C. Black.)</p>
+
+  <p>Giordano Bruno. <i>Opere Italiane.</i> Ed. P. Lagarde. Göttingen,
+  1888.</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; <i>Opera latine conscripta.</i> Naples and Florence,
+  1879-91.</p>
+
+  <p>McIntyre, J. L. <i>Life of Giordano Bruno.</i> London, 1903.</p>
+
+  <p>Bacon, Francis. <i>Works and Life.</i> Ed. by Ellis and Spedding.
+  Fourteen vols. 1864-74.&mdash;Works. One vol. Ed. by Ellis, Spedding, and
+  Robertson. (Routledge.)&mdash;<i>Novum Organum.</i> Ed. by T. Fowler.
+  Oxford, 1878.</p>
+
+  <p>Abbott, Edwin. <i>Francis Bacon.</i> London, 1885.</p>
+
+  <p>Church, R. W. <i>Bacon</i> (English Men of Letters). London, 1889.</p>
+
+  <p>Hobbes, Thomas. <i>Works English and Latin.</i> Ed. Sir Wm.
+  Molesworth. Sixteen vols. London, 1839-45.</p>
+
+  <p>Robertson, G. C. <i>Hobbes.</i> London, 1886 (Blackwood's
+  Philosophical Classics).</p>
+
+  <p>Stephen, Sir Leslie. <i>Hobbes.</i> London, 1903 (English Men of
+  Letters).</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; <i>English Thought in the Eighteenth Century.</i>
+  Second ed.; two vols. London, 1881.</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; <i>The English Utilitarians.</i> Three vols. London,
+  1900. <!-- Page 150 --><span class="pagenum"><a
+  name="page150"></a>{150}</span></p>
+
+  <p>Descartes. <i>&OElig;uvres.</i> Ed. V. Cousin. Eleven vols. Paris,
+  1824-1828. A new edition is in course of publication.&mdash;English
+  trans. of the <i>Method and the Meditations</i> in the Scott Library.
+  London, 1901.&mdash;<i>Life</i>, by Elizabeth Haldane. London, 1905.</p>
+
+  <p>Malebranche. <i>&OElig;uvres.</i> Three vols. Ed. Jules Simon. Paris,
+  1871.</p>
+
+  <p>Spinoza. <i>Opera.</i> Ed. Van Vloten and Land. Two vols. The Hague,
+  1882-83.</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; <i>Life and Philosophy.</i> By Sir Fr. Pollock. London,
+  1880; second ed., 1899.</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; <i>A Study of.</i> By James Martineau. London,
+  1883.</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash;<i>'s Ethics, A Study of.</i> By H. H. Joachim. Oxford,
+  1901.</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; Trans. of his principal works. By Elwes in Bohn's
+  Library. Two vols., 1883-86. Also Everyman's Library. (Dent.)</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; <i>Ethics.</i> Trans. by Hale White, revised by Amelia
+  Stirling. London, 1899.</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; <i>Leben und Lehre.</i> Von J. Frendenthal. 1904.</p>
+
+  <p>Leibniz. <i>Philosophische Schriften.</i> Seven vols. Ed. C. J.
+  Gerhardt. Berlin, 1875-90.&mdash;<i>The Philosophy of Leibniz.</i> By
+  Bertrand Russell. Cambridge, 1900.</p>
+
+  <p>Locke, John. <i>Works.</i> Nine vols. London, 1824.</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; <i>Essay Concerning Human Understanding.</i> Two vols.;
+  in Bohn's Library. London, 1877.</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; <i>Life of.</i> By Fox Bourne. Two vols. London,
+  1876.</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; By Thomas Fowler. London, 1880 (English Men of
+  Letters).</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; By Prof. A. C. Fraser; in Blackwood's Phil. Classics.
+  1890.</p>
+
+  <p>Berkeley, George. <i>Works and Life.</i> Ed. A. C. Fraser. Four vols.
+  Oxford, 1871.</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; By Fraser (Philosophical Classics). 1881.</p>
+
+  <p>Hume, David. <i>Philosophical Works.</i> Four vols. Ed. Green and
+  Grose. London, 1874-75.</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; By T. H. Huxley (English Men of Letters). New edition.
+  London, 1894.</p>
+
+  <p>Kant. <i>Werke.</i> Ed. Rosenkranz and Schubert. Twelve vols. 1838-40.
+  Two new editions, including the correspondence, are now in course of
+  publication at Berlin. There are English translations of all the
+  principal works.</p>
+
+  <p>&mdash;&mdash; <i>Life and Doctrine.</i> By F. Paulsen; trans. by
+  Creighton and Lefevre. London, 1908.</p>
+
+  <p>Fichte, J. G. <i>Werke.</i> Eleven vols. 1834-46. Trans. of his more
+  popular works by Dr. W. Smith. Two vols. London, 1890.</p>
+
+  <p>Adamson. <i>Fichte.</i> In Blackwood's Phil. Classics. 1901. <!-- Page
+  151 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page151"></a>{151}</span></p>
+
+  <p>Schelling, F. W. J. <i>Werke.</i> Fourteen vols. Stuttgart,
+  1856-61.</p>
+
+  <p>Watson, Prof. J. <i>Schelling's Transcendental Idealism</i>, Chicago,
+  1882.</p>
+
+  <p>Hegel, G. W. F. <i>Werke.</i> Nineteen vols. in twenty-one. Leipzig,
+  1832-87.</p>
+
+  <p>Hegel. By Prof. E. Caird (Philosophical Classics for English Readers.)
+  Edinburgh, 1883. Hegel's Philosophies of <i>Law, Religion, History, Mind,
+  his History of Philosophy</i>, and the smaller <i>Logic</i>, have been
+  translated into English.</p>
+
+  <p>Schopenhauer. <i>Werke.</i> Six volumes in the Reclam Series. Leipzig,
+  1892.</p>
+
+  <p>Ribot. <i>La Philosophie de Schopenhauer.</i> Ninth ed.; Paris,
+  1909.</p>
+
+  <p>Wallace, Prof. W. <i>Life of Schopenhauer</i> (Great Writers Series).
+  London, 1890.</p>
+
+  <p>Whittaker, Thomas. "Schopenhauer," in <i>Philosophies Ancient and
+  Modern</i>. London, 1908.</p>
+
+  <p>Schopenhauer's <i>World as Will and Idea.</i> Trans. by Haldane and
+  Kemp. Three vols. London, 1884-86.&mdash;Essays. Trans. by Belfort Bax
+  (Bohn's Library). London, 1891.</p>
+
+  <p>Schopenhauer. <i>Studies.</i> Consisting of translations by T. Bailey
+  Saunders. Seven vols. London, 1889-96.&mdash;Other essays translated by
+  Madame Hillebrand (London, 1889) and by A. B. Ballock (London, 1903)</p>
+
+  <p>Herbart, J. F. <i>Werke.</i> Ed. Kehrbach. Fifteen vols. 1887
+  <i>ff.</i></p>
+
+  <p>Wagner. <i>Vollständige Darstellung d. Lehre Herbarts.</i> 1896.</p>
+
+  <p>Hayward, F. H. <i>The Student's Herbart.</i> 1902.</p>
+
+  <p>Hamilton, Sir W. <i>Discussions on Philosophy.</i> Second ed. London,
+  1853.</p>
+
+  <p>Comte, Auguste. <i>Cours de Philosophie Positive.</i> Five vols.
+  Paris, 1830-42.&mdash;<i>Politique Positive.</i> Four vols. Paris,
+  1851-54.</p>
+
+  <p>Caird, Edward. <i>The Social Philosophy of Auguste Comte.</i> Glasgow,
+  1885.</p>
+
+  <p>Levy-Bruhl. <i>The Philosophy of Auguste Comte.</i> English trans.
+  London, 1903.</p>
+
+  <p>Whewell, Wm. <i>Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences.</i> London,
+  1840.</p>
+
+  <p>Mill, J. S. <i>A System of Logic.</i> Two vols. London,
+  1843.&mdash;<i>On Liberty.</i> London, 1859.&mdash;<i>Utilitarianism.</i>
+  London, 1863.&mdash;<i>Examination of Sir William Hamilton's
+  Philosophy.</i> London, 1865.</p>
+
+  <p>Whittaker, T. "Comte and Mill," in <i>Philosophies Ancient and
+  Modern.</i> London, 1908.</p>
+
+  <p>Spencer, Herbert. <i>First Principles.</i> London,
+  1862.&mdash;<i>Essays.</i> Three vols. London,
+  1891.&mdash;<i>Autobiography.</i> London, 1904.</p>
+
+  <p>Macpherson, Hector. <i>Herbert Spencer.</i> London, 1900. <!-- Page
+  152 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page152"></a>{152}</span></p>
+
+  <p>Green, T. H. <i>Prolegomena to Ethics.</i> Oxford, 1884.</p>
+
+  <p>Green, T. H. <i>Works.</i> Three vols. London, 1885-1900.</p>
+
+  <p>Bradley, F. H. <i>Appearance and Reality.</i> Third ed. London,
+  1889.</p>
+
+  <p>Lotze, H. <i>Mikrocosmus.</i> 1856-64.&mdash;<i>System der
+  Philosophie.</i> 1874-79.&mdash;English trans. of the <i>Microc.</i> Two
+  vols. Edinburgh, 1885.&mdash;Of the <i>Metaphysics.</i> Two vols. Oxford.
+  1884.</p>
+
+  <p>Jones, Sir Henry. <i>The Philosophy of Lotze.</i> Glasgow, 1895.</p>
+
+  <p>Hartmann, Ed. von. <i>Die Philosophie des Unbewussten.</i> 1869.
+  English trans. by W. C. Coupland. Three vols. London, 1884.</p>
+
+  <p>Nietzsche, Fr. <i>Werke.</i> Leipzig, 1895 <i>ff.</i> English trans.
+  in fourteen vols. Edinburgh. (T.&nbsp;N. Foulis.)&mdash;D. Halévy, <i>La Vie
+  de Nietzsche.</i> Paris, 1909.</p>
+
+  <p>Russell, Bertrand. <i>The Problems of Philosophy</i> (Home University
+  Library). London, 1912.</p>
+
+  <p><br style="clear:both" /></p>
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<p><!-- Page 153 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page153"></a>{153}</span></p>
+
+<h3>INDEX</h3>
+
+  <div class="poem">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Abbott, E. A., quoted, <a href="#page14">14</a></p>
+      <p>Agnosticism, <a href="#page67">67</a>, <a href="#page70">70</a>, <a href="#page141">141</a>, <a href="#page143">143</a>, <a href="#page144">144</a></p>
+      <p>Anaximander, <a href="#page12">12</a></p>
+      <p>Aquinas, St. Thomas, <a href="#page4">4</a></p>
+      <p>Aristotle, <a href="#page3">3</a>, <a href="#page5">5</a>, <a href="#page6">6</a>, <a href="#page7">7</a>, <a href="#page19">19</a>, <a href="#page25">25</a>, <a href="#page49">49</a>, <a href="#page52">52</a>, <a href="#page129">129</a>, <a href="#page139">139</a>, <a href="#page142">142</a></p>
+      <p>Arnold, Matthew, <a href="#page55">55</a></p>
+      <p>Athens, <a href="#page1">1</a> <i>f.</i></p>
+      <p>Atomism, revival of, <a href="#page10">10</a>, <a href="#page21">21</a></p>
+      <p>Averroes, <a href="#page4">4</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Bacon, Roger, <a href="#page4">4</a></p>
+      <p>Bacon, Francis, <a href="#page12">12</a> <i>ff.</i>, <a href="#page24">24</a>, <a href="#page29">29</a>, <a href="#page32">32</a>, <a href="#page61">61</a></p>
+      <p>Baur, F. C., <a href="#page142">142</a></p>
+      <p>Bayle, Pierre, <a href="#page71">71</a></p>
+      <p>Beneke, F. E., <a href="#page123">123</a></p>
+      <p>Bergson, Henri, <a href="#page147">147</a></p>
+      <p>Berkeley, Bishop, <a href="#page43">43</a>, <a href="#page72">72</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>Theory of Vision</i>, <a href="#page73">73</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">Idealism, <a href="#page73">73</a> <i>ff.</i>, <a href="#page89">89</a></p>
+      <p>Boyle, Robert, <a href="#page21">21</a></p>
+      <p>Bradley, F. H., <a href="#page57">57</a>, <a href="#page143">143</a></p>
+      <p>Brahe, Tycho, <a href="#page17">17</a></p>
+      <p>Brown, Dr. Thomas, <a href="#page134">134</a></p>
+      <p>Bruno, Giordano, <a href="#page7">7</a> <i>ff.</i>, <a href="#page22">22</a>, <a href="#page45">45</a>, <a href="#page51">51</a>, <a href="#page107">107</a></p>
+      <p>Byron, <a href="#page119">119</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Caird, Edward, <a href="#page143">143</a></p>
+      <p>Caird, John, <i>ib.</i></p>
+      <p>Calvinism, <a href="#page28">28</a></p>
+      <p>Catholicism and philosophy, <a href="#page2">2</a> <i>ff.</i></p>
+      <p>Causation. <i>See</i> Hume, Kant, Hegel, Mill</p>
+      <p>Christianity. <i>See</i> Catholicism</p>
+      <p>Christina, Queen, <a href="#page32">32</a> <i>f.</i></p>
+      <p>Church, Dean, quoted, <a href="#page15">15</a></p>
+      <p>Collier, Arthur, <a href="#page75">75</a></p>
+      <p>Collins, Anthony, <a href="#page71">71</a></p>
+      <p>Columbus, <a href="#page6">6</a></p>
+      <p>Comte, Auguste, <a href="#page127">127</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">classification of the sciences, <a href="#page130">130</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>Politique Positive</i>, <i>ib.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">philosophy of history, <a href="#page131">131</a>, <a href="#page133">133</a></p>
+      <p>Condillac, <a href="#page125">125</a></p>
+      <p>Copernicanism, <a href="#page6">6</a> <i>f.</i></p>
+      <p>Cousin, Victor, <a href="#page90">90</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Dante, <a href="#page6">6</a> <i>f.</i></p>
+      <p>Darwin, Charles, <a href="#page140">140</a></p>
+      <p>Democritus, <a href="#page10">10</a></p>
+      <p>Descartes, <a href="#page30">30</a>, <a href="#page31">31</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">on belief, <a href="#page41">41</a>, <a href="#page49">49</a>, <a href="#page61">61</a>, <a href="#page65">65</a>, <a href="#page87">87</a></p>
+      <p>Duns Scotus, <a href="#page4">4</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Eclectics, French, <a href="#page125">125</a> <i>f.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">German, <a href="#page144">144</a></p>
+      <p>Ego, the Absolute, <a href="#page105">105</a></p>
+      <p>Elizabeth, Princess, <a href="#page32">32</a></p>
+      <p>Empedocles, <a href="#page65">65</a></p>
+      <p>Epicurus, <a href="#page9">9</a>, <a href="#page22">22</a>, <a href="#page29">29</a></p>
+      <p>Epistemology, <a href="#page65">65</a></p>
+      <p>Eriugena, John Scotus, <a href="#page3">3</a>, <a href="#page4">4</a></p>
+      <p><i>Ethica</i>, Spinoza's, <a href="#page48">48</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Fichte, J. G., <a href="#page101">101</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">his definition of God, <a href="#page102">102</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">as German patriot, <a href="#page102">102</a> <i>f.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">his  idealism, <a href="#page103">103</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">ethical standpoint, <a href="#page106">106</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">later teaching, <a href="#page110">110</a></p>
+      <p>Ficino, Marsilio, <a href="#page5">5</a></p>
+      <p>Final causes in modern philosophy, <a href="#page61">61</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">in Plato, <i>ib.</i></p>
+      <p>Form and Matter, <a href="#page10">10</a>, <a href="#page18">18</a>, <a href="#page24">24</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Galileo, <a href="#page17">17</a>, <a href="#page24">24</a></p>
+      <p>Gassendi, <a href="#page50">50</a></p>
+      <p>Geulincx, <a href="#page42">42</a>, <a href="#page44">44</a>, <a href="#page51">51</a></p>
+      <p>Gilbert, <a href="#page17">17</a>, <a href="#page21">21</a></p>
+      <p>Godwin, William, <a href="#page139">139</a></p>
+      <p>Goethe, <a href="#page102">102</a>, <a href="#page105">105</a></p>
+      <p>Green, T. H., <a href="#page143">143</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Haeckel, Ernst, <a href="#page146">146</a></p>
+      <p>Haldane, Lord, <a href="#page143">143</a></p>
+      <p>Haldane, Miss E. S.,</p>
+      <p class="i2">quoted, <a href="#page32">32</a></p>
+      <p>Hamilton, Sir William, <a href="#page126">126</a> f., <a href="#page132">132</a></p>
+      <p>Hartmann, Ed. von, <a href="#page144">144</a> f.</p>
+      <p>Harvey, <a href="#page17">17</a></p>
+      <p>Hegel, G. F. W., <a href="#page24">24</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">on Spinoza, <a href="#page53">53</a>, <a href="#page103">103</a>, <a href="#page107">107</a>, <a href="#page110">110</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>Phenomenology of Mind</i>, <a href="#page112">112</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>Science of Logic</i>, <i>ib.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>Encyclopædia</i>, <i>ib.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>Philosophy of Law</i>, <i>ib.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>Æsthetics</i>, <a href="#page113">113</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>Philosophy of History</i>, <i>ib.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">his didactic method, <a href="#page113">113</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">negation of supernatural religion, <a href="#page116">116</a>, <a href="#page118">118</a>, <a href="#page124">124</a>, <a href="#page126">126</a></p>
+      <p>Hegelians, the English, <a href="#page142">142</a> <i>ff.</i></p>
+      <p>Heine, <a href="#page103">103</a>, <a href="#page116">116</a></p>
+      <p>Heracleitus, <a href="#page11">11</a>, <a href="#page147">147</a></p>
+      <p>Herbart, J. F., <a href="#page122">122</a>, <a href="#page144">144</a></p>
+      <p>Hobbes, Thomas, <a href="#page22">22</a> <i>ff.</i>, <a href="#page50">50</a>, <a href="#page56">56</a>, <a href="#page68">68</a></p>
+      <p>Hooker, Richard, and the Social Contract, <a href="#page29">29</a></p>
+      <p>Humanism in the nineteenth century, <a href="#page124">124</a></p>
+      <p>Hume, David, <a href="#page77">77</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">character as a historian, <a href="#page77">77</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">theory of causation, <a href="#page81">81</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">attitude towards theism, <a href="#page84">84</a>, <a href="#page89">89</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">a precursor of Comte, <a href="#page129">129</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">and of Mill, <a href="#page133">133</a> <i>ff.</i></p>
+      <p>Huxley, T. H., <a href="#page127">127</a></p>
+      <p>Huyghens on Descartes, <a href="#page41">41</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Induction, Baconian, <a href="#page20">20</a></p>
+      <p>Innate ideas, <a href="#page68">68</a>, <a href="#page95">95</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>John of Salisbury, <a href="#page4">4</a></p>
+      <p>Justinian, <a href="#page1">1</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Kant, Immanuel, <a href="#page85">85</a> ff.;</p>
+      <p class="i2">his nebular hypothesis, <a href="#page87">87</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">on synthetic and analytic judgments, <a href="#page87">87</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">on space and time, <a href="#page90">90</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>Critique of Pure Reason</i>, <a href="#page93">93</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">on causation, <a href="#page95">95</a> <i>f.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">moral and religious philosophy, <a href="#page97">97</a> ff., <a href="#page118">118</a>, <a href="#page119">119</a>, <a href="#page132">132</a>, <a href="#page133">133</a>, <a href="#page134">134</a>, <a href="#page147">147</a></p>
+      <p>Kepler, <a href="#page10">10</a>, <a href="#page17">17</a>, <a href="#page21">21</a></p>
+      <p>Klopstock, <a href="#page101">101</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+<!-- Page 154 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page154"></a>{154}</span>
+      <p>Lamarck, <a href="#page139">139</a>, <a href="#page140">140</a></p>
+      <p>Laplace, <a href="#page87">87</a></p>
+      <p>Leibniz, G. W., <a href="#page57">57</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">optimism, <a href="#page59">59</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">monadology, <a href="#page62">62</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">determinism, <a href="#page63">63</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">pre-established harmony, <i>ib.</i>, <a href="#page144">144</a></p>
+      <p>Lewes, G. H., <a href="#page103">103</a>, <a href="#page107">107</a></p>
+      <p>Locke, John, <a href="#page29">29</a>, <a href="#page65">65</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">on toleration, <a href="#page67">67</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">his proof of theism, <a href="#page69">69</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">moral inconsistency, <a href="#page69">69</a> <i>f.</i>, <a href="#page72">72</a>, <a href="#page87">87</a>, <a href="#page89">89</a></p>
+      <p>Lotze, R. H., <a href="#page144">144</a></p>
+      <p>Lucretius, <a href="#page9">9</a>, <a href="#page20">20</a>, <a href="#page22">22</a></p>
+      <p>Luther, <a href="#page6">6</a></p>
+      <p>Lyell, Sir Charles, <a href="#page139">139</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Macaulay on Bacon, <a href="#page16">16</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">on Hobbes, <a href="#page28">28</a>, <a href="#page71">71</a></p>
+      <p>McTaggart, Dr. J. E., <a href="#page144">144</a></p>
+      <p>Maine de Biran, <a href="#page125">125</a></p>
+      <p>Malebranche, <a href="#page42">42</a> <i>ff.</i>, <a href="#page51">51</a>, <a href="#page74">74</a>, <a href="#page89">89</a></p>
+      <p>Malthus, <a href="#page137">137</a></p>
+      <p>Mansel, H. L., <a href="#page127">127</a></p>
+      <p>Materialists, German, <a href="#page146">146</a></p>
+      <p>Mill, J. S., <a href="#page132">132</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>System of Logic</i>, <a href="#page133">133</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">metaphysics, <a href="#page135">135</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">theology, <i>ib.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">ethics, <a href="#page135">135</a> <i>f.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">politics, <a href="#page136">136</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">character, <a href="#page137">137</a></p>
+      <p>Milne-Edwards, <a href="#page140">140</a></p>
+      <p>Monadism, <a href="#page11">11</a>, <a href="#page70">70</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Napier, <a href="#page17">17</a></p>
+      <p>Neo-Kantianism, <a href="#page146">146</a></p>
+      <p>Neo-Platonism, <a href="#page2">2</a> f.</p>
+      <p>Newton, Isaac, <a href="#page58">58</a>, <a href="#page59">59</a></p>
+      <p>Nicolas of Cusa, <a href="#page11">11</a></p>
+      <p>Nietzsche, Friedrich, <a href="#page145">145</a> <i>f.</i></p>
+      <p>Norris, John, <a href="#page75">75</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Occam, <a href="#page5">5</a></p>
+      <p>Occasionalism, <a href="#page42">42</a></p>
+      <p>Ostwald, <a href="#page146">146</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Pantheism, <a href="#page45">45</a>,<a href="#page50">50</a></p>
+      <p>Parmenides, <a href="#page9">9</a></p>
+      <p>Pascal, <a href="#page42">42</a></p>
+      <p>Plotinus, <a href="#page2">2</a>, <a href="#page5">5</a>, <a href="#page12">12</a>, <a href="#page44">44</a></p>
+      <p>Positivism. See Comte</p>
+      <p>Power, idea of, in Spinoza, <a href="#page52">52</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">how connected with causation, <a href="#page83">83</a></p>
+      <p>Pragmatism, <a href="#page147">147</a></p>
+      <p>Proclus, <a href="#page3">3</a></p>
+      <p>Pythagoreans, <a href="#page9">9</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Reality, degrees of, <a href="#page57">57</a></p>
+      <p>Reid, Thomas, <a href="#page85">85</a>, <a href="#page125">125</a></p>
+      <p>Renaissance,  scientific activity of the, <a href="#page17">17</a></p>
+      <p>Rousseau, <a href="#page29">29</a>, <a href="#page119">119</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>St. Simon, <a href="#page127">127</a></p>
+      <p>Schelling, F. W. J., <a href="#page106">106</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">natural philosophy, <a href="#page108">108</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>Transcendental Idealism</i>, <a href="#page108">108</a> <i>f.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">romanticism, <a href="#page109">109</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">Absolutism, <a href="#page110">110</a>, <a href="#page126">126</a></p>
+      <p>Schiller, F. C. S., quoted, <a href="#page18">18</a></p>
+      <p>Schopenhauer, Arthur, <a href="#page103">103</a>, <a href="#page118">118</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">pessimism, <a href="#page119">119</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">metaphysics, <a href="#page119">119</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">ethics, <a href="#page121">121</a> <i>f.</i>, <a href="#page145">145</a></p>
+      <p>Sextus Empiricus, <a href="#page67">67</a></p>
+      <p>Shaftesbury, Lord, author of the <i>Characteristics</i>, <a href="#page71">71</a></p>
+      <p>Shelley, <a href="#page139">139</a></p>
+      <p>Sidgwick, Henry, <a href="#page135">135</a></p>
+      <p>Smith, Adam, <a href="#page140">140</a></p>
+      <p>Social Contract, <a href="#page26">26</a></p>
+      <p>Spencer, Herbert, <a href="#page127">127</a>, <a href="#page137">137</a> ff.;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>Social Statics</i>, <a href="#page137">137</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>Psychology</i>, <a href="#page140">140</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>Synthetic Philosophy</i>, <a href="#page141">141</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">on religion, <i>ib.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">formula of evolution, <a href="#page142">142</a>, <a href="#page144">144</a></p>
+      <p>Spencer, Rev. Thomas, <a href="#page137">137</a></p>
+      <p>Spinoza, <a href="#page30">30</a>, <a href="#page45">45</a> <i>ff.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2"><i>Tractatus Theologico-Politicus</i>, <a href="#page48">48</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">not a mystic, <a href="#page55">55</a>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">ethics, <a href="#page56">56</a> <i>f.</i>;</p>
+      <p class="i2">return to Stoicism, <a href="#page56">56</a>, <a href="#page59">59</a>, <a href="#page61">61</a>, <a href="#page69">69</a>, <a href="#page87">87</a>, <a href="#page106">106</a>, <a href="#page110">110</a></p>
+      <p>Staël, Madame de, <a href="#page125">125</a></p>
+      <p>Stirling, Dr. Hutchison, <a href="#page143">143</a></p>
+      <p>Strauss, David, <a href="#page112">112</a>, <a href="#page142">142</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Taylor, Mrs., and J. S. Mill, <a href="#page132">132</a></p>
+      <p>Temple, Archbishop, <a href="#page102">102</a></p>
+      <p>Theism. <i>See</i> Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Mill</p>
+      <p><i>Timæus</i>, Plato's, <a href="#page41">41</a></p>
+      <p>Toland, <a href="#page71">71</a></p>
+      <p>Turgot, <a href="#page129">129</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Vaux, Clotilde de, and Comte, <a href="#page132">132</a></p>
+      <p>Voltaire and optimism, <a href="#page59">59</a></p>
+      <p>Vries, Simon de and Spinoza, <a href="#page46">46</a></p>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <p>Wallace, A. R., <a href="#page140">140</a></p>
+      <p>Wallace, Prof. William, <a href="#page143">143</a></p>
+      <p>Whewell, William, <a href="#page133">133</a></p>
+      <p>Wordsworth, <a href="#page57">57</a></p>
+      <p>Wycliffe, <a href="#page5">5</a></p>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of Modern Philosophy, by Alfred
+William Benn
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: History of Modern Philosophy
+
+
+Author: Alfred William Benn
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 11, 2010  [eBook #34283]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Steven Gibbs, Keith Edkins, and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 34283-h.htm or 34283-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34283/34283-h/34283-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34283/34283-h.zip)
+
+
+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.                                  PAGE
+  THE PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE                  1
+
+  CHAPTER II.
+  THE METAPHYSICIANS                            31
+
+  CHAPTER III.
+  THE THEORISTS OF KNOWLEDGE                    65
+
+  CHAPTER IV.
+  THE GERMAN IDEALISTS                         101
+
+  CHAPTER V.
+  THE HUMANISTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY      124
+
+  BIBLIOGRAPHY                                 149
+
+  INDEX                                        153
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+  GIORDANO BRUNO      _Frontispiece_
+
+                         PAGE
+  FRANCIS BACON           13
+
+  RENE 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.
+
+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 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 praeter 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 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
+aether 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.
+
+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 aether, 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 aether 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 aether
+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 aether 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 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 L1,200, 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 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 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,
+aesthetics, 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+THE METAPHYSICIANS
+
+DESCARTES, MALEBRANCHE, SPINOZA, LEIBNIZ.
+
+Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was a Frenchman, born in Touraine, and belonging
+by family to the inferior nobility. Educated at the Jesuit college of La
+Fleche, 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 Moliere's amusing
+comedy _Les Facheux,_ 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 Rene 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.
+
+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: RENE 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 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 Fleche, 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. 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 _Timaeus_. 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 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 Verite, 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 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 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 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 _a priori_ mathematical method that has
+been so successfully applied to continuous quantity.
+
+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 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
+encyclopaedist 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 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 _a 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
+_Phaedo,_ 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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _a 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 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.
+
+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
+(Aufklaerung), 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 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 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 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 _a 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 _a 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 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.
+
+KANT.
+
+The English philosophy of experience and the Continental philosophy of _a
+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 Encyclopaedists; 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
+Koenigsberg 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 Koenigsberg 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 Koenigsberg, 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 may happen without a cause does not involve a logical
+contradiction; and at that time he believed nothing to be known _a 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 _a posteriori_; for the
+law of universal gravitation is known only by experience. But there are
+also synthetic judgments _a 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 _a 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 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 _a 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 synthesis be _a priori_ or _a 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 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
+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 _a 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.
+
+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 Bluecher 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.
+
+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 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 Tuebingen, at an early age he
+covered an encyclopaedic 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 aestheticism 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 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 Tuebingen 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 _Encyclopaedia of 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_, _Aesthetics_, 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 _Aesthetics_; 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 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 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 aesthetic 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 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.
+
+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 _a 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 Stael, 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 _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 _a 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 Ecole 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 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 regime, 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 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 _a
+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.
+
+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 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 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
+Goettingen. 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 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 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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+1874-75.
+
+---- By T. H. Huxley (English Men of Letters). New edition. London, 1894.
+
+Kant. _Werke._ Ed. Rosenkranz and Schubert. Twelve vols. 1838-40. Two new
+editions, including the correspondence, are now in course of publication at
+Berlin. There are English translations of all the principal works.
+
+---- _Life and Doctrine._ By F. Paulsen; trans. by Creighton and Lefevre.
+London, 1908.
+
+Fichte, J. G. _Werke._ Eleven vols. 1834-46. Trans. of his more popular
+works by Dr. W. Smith. Two vols. London, 1890.
+
+Adamson. _Fichte._ In Blackwood's Phil. Classics. 1901. {151}
+
+Schelling, F. W. J. _Werke._ Fourteen vols. Stuttgart, 1856-61.
+
+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. _Vollstaendige 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.
+
+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. Halevy, _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 of Mind_, 112;
+    _Science of Logic_, _ib._;
+    _Encyclopaedia_, _ib._;
+    _Philosophy of Law_, _ib._;
+    _Aesthetics_, 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
+  Stael, 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
+  _Timaeus_, 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
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+The following changes were made:
+
+Page 38. "passed with progressive reflection": 'progress-sive' on line
+break in original.
+
+Page 57. "only defend on aesthetic grounds": 'grounps' in original.
+
+
+
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