79i IS©© 169 2 OJortteU Ittiocraitg Sibtacg atljara, JJem f orft BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 ';,'^T'' .''*^^' ■*l\m OEcrri'^r^^— r :^.e x > N'-^J ' ^0Q 1Q 6Cft lp Cornell University Library B791 .R88 1892 Spirit of modern philosophy : an essay r olin 3 1924 032 323 101 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924032323101 To'ifD ^^e-) ^oolLcf bp ^am^ Eopce* THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY. A Critique on the Bases of Conduct and of Faith. i2mo, gilt top, $2.00. CALIFORNIA. In American Commonwealths Series. With Map. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25. THE FEUD OF OAKFIELd CREEK. A Novel of California. i6mo, $1.25 ; paper, 50 cents. THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY, i Vol. 8vo, ^2.50. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. Boston and New York, THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY IJV THE FORM OF LECTURES BY JOSIAH ROYCE, Ph.D. PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY ^^b^^^w'i^ w^^^^S^A 1 ^^ r^^ft- W"'"jE'S^R?Slffi>- 1 tJi?,litoPK3Ji»Ei»Wg: BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY \Z Copyright, 1892, By JOSIAH ROYCE. All rights reserved. ^hh The mverside Press, Camlridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & CO. .1,1 H Ki ))()>. • 'I If Ki}i VIMl) Y yi h Vi 1-i i . I TO MY FRIEND iJlarp ©rap SStarlr ^orr I GRATEFULLY DEDICATE THIS BOOK AS A TOKEN OF AFFECTION AND VENERATION IN RECOGNITION OF THE WISE COUNSEL THAT SUGGESTpD ITS PREPARATION AND OF THE THOUGHTFUL ADVICE THAT ACCOMPANIED AND AIDED ITS GROWTH ¥ vi PREFACE. tures. Still other opportunities to present all or part of the same material to various audiences caused me to get considerable critical aid. I then resolved to give the whole discussion a final form. This volume contains, therefore, an essay, in the shape of a series of lectures, and with a twofold object. On the one hand my essay deals not so much with the minuter details as with the connections, the linkages, the general growth, of modern philosophical thought since the seventeenth century. On the other hand my purpose is constructive as well as expository. I have my own philosophical creed, — a growing and still ele- mentary one, indeed ; and this creed has been strongly suggested to me by what I know of the progress and outcome of modern thought. What I have seen I delight to try to suggest. And the book is the product of my delight, and the embodiment of my efforts at suggestion. On the other hand, these studies are not mere frag- ments, but are bound together by a single principal idea, this idea being the one that seems to me to embody the true spirit of modern philosophy, — the doctrine concern- ing the world which, amidst all our vast ignorance of nature and of destiny, we still have a right to call, in its main and simple outlines, a sure possession of human thought. What this doctrine is I have already had occa- sion to suggest in the more positive chapters of my book called " The Religious Aspect of Philosophy." To the arguments of that work, particularly to the chapters therein entitled "The Possibility of Error" and "The Eeligious Insight" (the first containing a metaphysical discussion of the proof of the main thesis of Objective Idealism, the other a general sketch of certain conse- PREFACE. vii quences of this thesis), I must refer such readers as may- desire a fuller acquaintance with some matters of funda- mental importance which the present study, in view of its limitations, will leave more or less incomplete. But these lectures have their own unity, are intended to be under- stood by themselves, represent, I hope, a considerable advance in the organization of the philosophical doctrine which was set forth in the former book, and meanwhile have the decided advantage which the historical fashion of philosophizing always possesses as against the dialec- tical fashion. Our common dependence upon the history of thought for all our reflective undertakings is unquestionable. Our best originality, if we ever get any originality, must spring from this very dependence. Doctrines of genu- inely revolutionary significance are rare indeed in the history of speculation, and they ought to be so. Of lesser surprises, of marvels, of beautifully novel insights, all the greater highways of speculation are full ; and yet most of the marvels are only such in so far as they are set off upon a very large background of the histori- cally familiar. Only a very few times in the history of thought is the continuity of the evolution distinctly broken. The novelties are elsewhere only relative, and get their very value from the fact that they are so. For us to-day, after so many centuries of philosophy, the necessity of keeping in mind our relation to earlier thought is peculiarly pressing, and the neglect (or mis- understanding) of those historical relations is peculiarly disastrous. Mere eclecticism in philosophy is of course worthless. But to condemn the past, as full of error and delusion, and then to set forth what we imagine to be our viii PREFACE. own fundamentally significant and wholly new methods in philosophy, is a procedure that in general can have but one ending. We, then, but unwittingly transplant old growths to new soil, seeing not how old the growths are, and considering only the newness of the garden that we have planned. But the new soil is of necessity lacking in the ancient wealth and depth, and the transplanted doc- trines take little root. Synthesis and critical re-organi- zation of the truths furnished us by the past, in the light of present science, is not mere eclecticism, and leaves ample room for healthy originality. On the other hand, it is so easy to feel a train of philosophical thought to be wholly new, merely because we have eagerly thought it out, and have been all the while unaware of our actual philosophical environment and atmosphere. And yet this subjective sensation of originality, — to what unnecessary cares, to what disappointments may it not in the end lead us ! Such misadventures, I, for my part, am minded to avoid by remaining fully aware of my historical relations. ' Faithfulness to history is the beginning of creative wis- dom. I love the latter, and want to get it. To that end, however, I cultivate the former. The present philosophical situation in this country seems to be peculiarly favorable to such efEorts. Two philosophical branches are especially prospering to-day in our Universities, the study of Empirical Psychology, and the study of the History of Philosophy. I believe for my own part that these two pursuits ought to flourish and will flourish together, and that they will lead to very important constructive work. I see no just opposition of spirit between them. PEKFAC7,. ix A student of philosophy, who Is also occasionally a critic of his living fellow-students, is of necessity glad to have applied to his own work the same tests that he would apply to the work of others, and severer tests, too, than he would have wit to apply. Where grave errors of schol- arship or profound misunderstandings of my historical relations mar my work, I desire to have the fact pointed out with the utmost definiteness of speech. For I bring no gold with me unless some portion of my work can bear the test of the most fiery trial. Let the dross suffer. I shall never regret the loss of it, nor feel aggrieved at the flames. I distinguish very easily between a student's person and his teaching. Let the man be respected accord- ing as he has meant well, and has labored with sincere devotion. I myself have never had occasion to criticise any philosophical writer of whom this could not be sin- cerely said. But let the teaching be tried wholly without mercy, whether meant well or not. Were we, indeed, as negative critics in philosophy, assuming the right to be judges of the hearts and of the inner and personal merits of our living philosophical opponents instead of estimat- ing, as we do in such cases, their published work, I, for my part, remembering my own weakness and personal unworthiness, should be the first to echo, just as even now I do in the presence of God and man, the words of my departed friend, whose verses entitled "The Fool's Prayer " I have quoted in my closing lecture. But the criticism of the public deeds of scholarship, offered in the pubHc service, is wholly independent of our personal fond- ness for a man, and involves no desire for other than intellectual contest with him. Therefore, such criticism, X ■'REFACE. whenever its wholly objective motive is understood) does well to be merciless. It is perhaps tedious, I am sure that I vrish it were quite needless, to set forth here such obvious truisms as these. Most readers, indeed, will have them already in mind. For such they are not intended. However severe or kindly our critics, it is all the while true that a book must be judged by what it undertakes, and that this essay must, of course, have and confess the defects of its qualities. I have tried, accordingly, throughout my text, to avoid raising false expectations. The reader will, indeed, find here many things that at the outset he does not expect. I hope that some of these things wiU be a pleasing surprise to him. But in no case will he either expect or find technical completeness. To be sure, the later papers are more elaborate than the ear- lier ones ; partly because I have added to my text many passages which were not read at all in my original lec- tures ; partly because I have expected my hearers and readers to grow a little in reflective patience as they be- came used to the argument. I may add a few special observations on various of the individual lectures. The traditional beginning of the story of modern thought with the Cartesian cogito ergo sum I have not employed, because it is almost universal in the text-books, and because, meanwhile, in its usual context, it produces, despite its literal accuracy, a very misleading impression. The seventeenth century was not on the whole a period of subjectivism, but the very re- verse. Descartes was himself best known to his contem- poraries, not for his theory of knowledge, but for his physical and metaphysical system. Of the philosophical PREFACE. xi Absolutism of the century Spinoza is meanwhile the best, because the extremest representative. Interested as I here am in the broad outlines and not in the details, I have, therefore, chosen to illustrate the general attitude of the time towards the deepest problems of the spirit by this extreme but still typical case of Spinoza, and to leave the rest to a brief general sketch. lu the superficial glance over the period from Spinoza to Kant I have omitted Leibnitz altogether, and I feel this to be the most serious error of mere omission in my whole . book. Yet the defect proved to be inevitable, in view of my space and time limitations. With the lecture on Kant begins a more careful study of doctrine. The modern Kant-philology has here been of indispensable service to me, so far as I have been able to foUow it. Yet I have tried to write my own personal impression of Kant himself as plainly as I could. To Professors Vaihinger and Benno Erdmann every student of Kant owes a debt which, as I hope, I have not obscured for my readers by my playful remarks on pages 104-105. In the later historical lectures I have been unable to make sufficient acknowledgement of numerous literary obliga- tions. I feel such most of all to Julian Schmidt, to Pro- fessor Haym, to Dr. Hutchinson Stirling, to Professors Windelband, Falckenberg, and J. E. Erdmann, to Pro- fessor Edward Caird, and to Principal Caird. Of foot- notes I have been permitted by my plan to make only very scanty use. In case of my exposition of Hegel I have felt it needful to show by rather more frequent notes, as well as by appendix C, that between my very nntechnical phraseology and Hegel's elaborate processes there is a pretty deliberately planned relation, which the XU PREFACE. professional student can verify. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, very readily lends himself to the method of these lectures, and footnotes could in his case, although unwiUingiy, be wholly spared. Both the Hegel and the Schopenhauer papers have appeared in the " Atlantic Monthly." Both are here considerably enlarged. That the modern philosophical doctrine of Evolution, in its wholeness is, historically speaking, an outcome, and not a very remote one, of the Romantic movement, is an obvious observation for a student of the history of thought ; and yet I am not aware that this observation has hitherto been frequently made in a form easily accessible to Eng- lish readers. So important and doubtless permanent an acquisition of modern thought as is the theory of evolu- lution deserves to be itself understood as a product of a genuine and continuous growth, and not as a special crea- tion of Mr. Spencer, or as the result of any single cata^ strophic change such as even the appearance of Darwin's wonderful "Origin of Species." These things played their great part ; but the historical motives of the whole movement were very deep-lying and manifold. Two of my constructive papers in Part II, the tenth and the twelfth of the series of lectures, have been entirely rewritten, and have never been read at all as lectures in their present form. In the eleventh lecture, on Idealism, and elsewhere throughout my book I have given promi- nence to the strictly " metaphysical " rather than to what is technically called the " epistemological " meaning of the word idealism itself. The technical reader is familiar with the numerous meanings which this well-known word has come to possess. In its "epistemological" sense idealism involves a theory of the nature of our human PREFACE. xin knowledge ; and various decidedly different theories are called by this name in view of one common feature, namely, the stress that they lay upon the " subjectivity " of a larger or smaller portion of what pretends to be our knowledge of things. In this sense Kant's theory of the subjectivity of space and time was called by himself a " Transcendental Idealism." But in its " metaphysical " sense, idealism is a theory as to the nature of the real world, however we may come to know that nature. Falek- enberg, in his " Geschiohte der neueren Philosophic," p. 476, defines one very prominent form of metaphysical idealism as the " belief in a spiritual principle at the basis of the world, without the reduction of the physical world to a mere illusion." In this sense, as he goes on to say, namely in the sense " that matter is an expression (^Pro- duldi) of the world-spirit, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and their allies are together nan^ed the idealistic school." As Vaihinger has well remarked, in his admirable essay on Kant's " Widerlegung des Idealismus " (p. 95), it is the metaphysical and not the epistemological meaning of the term " idealism " that has been customary in the literature since Hegel. This fact every well-informed student will have in mind when'sver he uses the word without express definition. The problems of the theory of knowledge exist of course in some form for every serious philosopher. The analyses suggested by the various forms of " epistemolo- gical " idealism will have, moreover, permanent value for the investigator of our knowledge. Every "metaphysi- cal " idealism will have been affected in one way or an- other by such analyses. But to imagine that a " meta. physical " idealist is as such a person whose principles con- xiv PEEFACE. sistently involve the doubt or denial of the existence of everything and every one excepting his own finite self, is an old and trivial misunderstanding, unworthy of an his- torical student. A metaphysical idealist veill of course deal with the problem of the relation of knowledge and its object, and wUl try to get at the nature of the real world by means of a solution of this very problem. How he may do this I have tried to show in the proper place. None the less, a doctrine remains, in the meta- physical sense, idealistic, if it maintains that the world is, in its wholeness, and in all of its real constituent parts, a world of mind or of spirit. The opposite of an idealist, in this sense, is one who maintains the ulti- mate existence of wholly unspiritual realities at the basis of experience and as the genuine truth of the world — such unspiritual realities for instance as an absolute "Unknowable," or, again, as what Hobbes meant by " Body." The " epistemological " problem, that is, the question as to how we " transcend " the " subjective " in our knowledge, exists at the outset of philosophy, in pre- cisely the same sense for metaphysical realists and for their opponents, the metaphysical idealists. Whether and how they are to solve this problem depends upon their seriousness of philosophical reflection, as well as upon what the true solution may turn out to be. My own view is that only the metaphysical idealist is in possession of a successful solution for the epistemological problem (see text, page 382). These last remarks are meant mainly for the technical reader, to whom, also, appendices B and C are exclusively addressed. But Lecture XII, on « The World of Description and PREFACE. XV the World of Appreciation," attempts a statement of cer- tain general speculations in a form which I feel to have its own degree of relative novelty, despite the fact that the problems are of the oldest, and that the paper is only one effort more to define a " double-aspect " theory of the relations of the physical and the moral and esthetic worlds. I hope that the argument of this paper will be on the whole accessible to every reader. Despite the rapid flight there taken through a very wide region, what I present may have for some fellow-students a genuine and not wholly momentary suggestiveness. My thanks are due for the constant stimulation and frequent kindly criticism received from my colleagues Professors Palmer and James. In previous publications I have more than once had occasion to acknowledge their aid, without which all my work would have been impossi- ble. To repeat such acknowledgment is only to confess that the debt to my elder colleagues is as enduring as is my wish to make some return. Dr. Benjamin Eand, Assistant of the Philosophical De- partment at Harvard, is responsible for the careful ind'sx. JOSIAH EOYCE. Cambkidsb, Massachusetts, Jan. 1, 1892. CONTENTS. I. General Intkoduction' 1 PAKT I. STUDIES OF THESTKERS AND PROBLEMS. , n. The Periods op Modern Philosophy ; Chakacteristios OP the First Period ; Ilujstration by means of THE Religious Aspect of Spinozism ... ... 27 , III. The Rediscovery of the Inner Life ; From Spinoza to ■"Iant 68 IV. Kant 101 V. FiCHTE 135 , VI. The Romantic School in Philosophy - . 164 VII. Hegel 190 VIII. Schopenhaxteb 228 IX. The Rise of the Doctrine of Evolution ...... 265 PART II. SUGGESTIONS OF DOCTRINE. X. Nature and Evolution; The Outer World and its Paradox 311 XI. Reality and Idealism; The Inner World and its Meaning 341 XII. Physical Law and Freedom; The World of Descrip- tion AND the World of Appreciation 381 XIII. Optimism, Pessimism and the Moral Order ..... 435 Appendix A. Syllabus of the Lectures 473 Appendix B. On Kant's Transcendental Deduction of THE Categories 483 Appendix C. The Hegelian Theory of Universals . . 492 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. LECTURE I. J GENEEAL INTRODUCTION. In the following course of lectures I shall try to sug- gest, in a fashion suited to the general student, something about the men, the problems, and the issues that seem to me most interesting in a limited, but highly representative portion of the history of modern philosophy. I under- take this work with a keen sense of the limitations of my time and my powers. I plead as excuse only my desire to interest some of my fellow-students in the great con- cerns of philosophy. I. The assumption upon which these lectures are based is one that I may as well set forth at the very begin- ning. It is the assumption that Philosophy, in the proper sense of the term, is not a presumptuous effort to explain the mysteries of the world by means of any superhuman insight or extraordinary cunning, but has its origin and value in an attempt to give a reasonable account of our own personal attitude towards the more serious business of life. You philosophize when you reflect critically upon what you are actually doing in your world. What you are doing is of course, in the first place, living. And life involves passions, faiths, doubts, and courage. The crit- ical inquiry into what all these things mean and im- ply is philosophy. We have our faith in life ; we want 2 THE SPIRIT OF MODEEN PHILOSOPHY, reflectively to estimate this faith. We feel ourselves in a world of law and of significance. Yet why we feel this homelike sense of the reality and the worth of our world is a matter for criticism. Such a criticism of life, made elaborate and thorough-going, is a philosophy. If this assumption of mine be well-founded, it follows that healthy philosophizing, or thorough-going self-criti- cism, is a very human and natural business, in which you are all occasionally, if not frequently engaged, and for which you will therefore from the start have a certain sympathy. Whether we will it or no, we aU of us do philosophize. The difference between the temperament which loves technical philosophy and the temperament which can make nothing of so-called metaphysics is rather one of degree than of kind. The moral order, the evUs of life, the authority of conscience, the intentions of God, how often have I not heard them discussed, and with a wise and critical skepticism, too, by men who sel- dom looked into books. The professional student of phi- losophy does, as his constant business, precisely what all other people do at moments. In the life of non-meta- physical people, reflection on destiny and the deepest truths of life occupies much the same place as music occupies in the lives of appreciative, but much distracted amateurs. The constant student of philosophy is merely the professional musician of reflective thought. He daily plays his scales in the form of what the scoffers caU " chopping logic." He takes, in short, a delight in the technical subtleties of his art which makes his enthusiasm often incomprehensible to less devoted analysts of life. But his love for speculation is merely their own natural taste somewhat specialized. He is a sort of miser, secretly hoarding up the treasures of reflection which other people wear as the occasional ornaments of intercourse, or use as a part of the heavier coinage of conversation. If, as non- professional philosophers, you confine your reflections to GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 3 moments, the result is perhaps a serious talk with a friend, or nothing more noteworthy than an occasional hour of meditation, a dreamy glance of wonder, as it were, at this whole great and deep universe before you, with its countless worlds and its wayward hearts. Such chance heart searchings, such momentary communings with the universal, such ungrown germs of reflection, would under other circumstances develop into systems of philosophy. If you let them pass from your attention you soon forget them, and may then even fancy that you have small fond- ness for metaphysics. But, none the less, all intelligent people, even including the haters of metaphysics, are despite themselves occasionally metaphysicians. II. All this, however, by way of mere opening suggestion. What you wish to know further, through this introduc- tory lecture, is, how this natural tendency to reflect criti- cally upon life leads men to frame elaborate systems of philosophy, why it is that these systems have been so numerous and so varied in the past, and whether or no it seems to be true, as many hold, that the outcome of all this long and arduous labor of the philosophers has so far been nothing but doubtful speculation and hopeless variety of opinion. I suppose that a student who knows little as yet of the details of philosophic study feels as his greatest difficulty, when he approaches the topic for the first time, the confusing variety of the doctrines of the philosophers, joined as it is with the elaborateness and the obscurity that seem so characteristic of technical speculation. So much labor, you say, and all thus far in vain ! For if the thinkers really aimed to bring to pass an agreement amongst enlightened persons about the great truths that are to be at the basis of human life, how sadly, you will say, they seemed to have failed! How monstrous on the one hand their toils ! Hegel's eighteen 4 THE SPIRIT OF MODEEN PHILOSOPHY. volumes of published books and of posthumously edite lecture notes are but a specimen of what such men have produced. A prominent English philosopher was flip- pantly accused, a few years since, in a gay and irrespon- sible volume of reminiscences, of having been the wiiter of books that, as the scofdng author in substance said, "fill several yards on the shelves of our libraries." The prominent philosopher indignantly responded, in a letter addressed to a literary weekly. "His critic," said he, " was recklessly inaccurate." As a fact his own collected works, set side by side on a shelf, cover a little less than two feet ! How vast the toil, then, and on the other hand, to what end? A distinguished German student of the history of philosophy, Friedrich Albert Lange, upon one occasion, wrote these words : " Once for all we must defi- nitely set aside the claim of the metaphysicians, of what- ever school and tendency, that their deductions are such as forbid any possible strife, or that if you only first thor- oughly come into possession of every detail of some system six fat volumes long, then, and not till then, you will rec- ognize with wonder how each and every individual conclu- sion was sound and clear." Does not this assertion of Lange's, this definitive setting aside of the claim of the metaphysicians, seem warranted by the facts ? What one of these systems, six fat volumes long, has ever satisfied in its entirety any one but the master who wrote it, and the least original and thoughtful of his pupils ? What so pathetic, then, in this history of scholarly production, as this voluminous and systematic unpersuasiveness of the philosophers ? They aimed, each one in his own private way, at the absolute, and so, if they failed, they must, you will think, have failed utterly. Each one raised, all alone, his own temple to his own god, declared that he, the first of men, possessed the long-sought truth, and under- took to initiate the world into his own mysteries. Hence it is that so many temples lie in ruins and so many images GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 5 of false gods are shattered to fragments. I put the case thus strongly against the philosophers, because I am anxious to have you comprehend from the start how we are to face this significant preliminary difficulty of our topic. It may be true that the philosophers deal with life, and that, too, after a fashion known and occasionally tried by all of us. But is not their dealing founded upon vain pretense ? How much better, you may say, to live nobly than to inquire thus learnedly and ineffectually into the mysteries of life ? As the " Imitation of Christ " so skillfully states the case against philosophy, speaking indeed from the point of view of simple faith, but using words that doubters, too, can understand, " What doth it profit thee to enter into deep discussion concerning the Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility, and be thus displeas- ing to the Trinity ? For verily it is not deep words that make a man holy and upright. I had rather feel contri- tion than be skillful in the definition thereof." And again, " Tell me now where are all those masters and teachers, whom thou knewest well, when they were yet with you, and flourished in learning ? Their stalls are now filled by others, who perhaps never have one thought concerning them. Whilst they lived they seemed to be ■somewhat, but now no one speaks of them. Oh, how quickly passeth the glory of the world away ! Would that their life and knowledge had agreed together ! For then would they have read and inquired unto good pur- pose." Or once again, and this time in the well-known words of Fitzgerald's " Omar Khayyam " stanzas : — " Why all the Saints and Sages who disouased Of the two worlds so learnedly are thrust Like foolish prophets forth. Their words to Scorn Are scattered, and their mouths are stopt with dust." Well, if such is the somewhat portentous case against philosophy, what can we say for philosophy? I answer first, that the irony of fate treats all human enterprises in 8 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. courage, of our devotion ; but the alliance is not always one intended directly by the spirit of curious inquiry itself. A singular craft of our nature links the most theoretical sorts of inquiry by unexpected ties with men's daily business. One plays with silk and glass and amber, with kites that one flies beneath thunder clouds, with frogs' legs and with acids. The play is a mere expression of a curiosity that former centuries might have called idle. But the result of this play recreates an industrial world. And so it is everywhere with our deeper curiosity. There is a sense in which it is aU superfluous. Its immediate results seem but vanity. One could surely live without them ; yet for the future, and for the spiritual life of man- kind, these results are destined to become of vast import. Without this cunning contrivance of our busy brains, with their tireless curiosity and their unpractical wonder- ings, what could even sound instinct and the enduring heart have done to create the world of the civilized man ? Of all sorts of curiosity one of the most human and the most singular is the reflective curiosity whose highest expression is philosophy itself. This form of curiosity scrutinizes our own lives, our deepest instincts, our most characteristic responses to the world in which we live, our typical " reflex actions." It tries to bring us to a self- consciousness as to our temperaments. Our tempera- ments, our instincts, are in one sense fatal. We cannot directly alter them. What philosophy does is to find them out, to bring them to the light, to speak in words the very essence of them. And so the historical office of the greatest philosophers has always been to reword, as it were, the meaning and the form of the most significant life, temperaments, and instincts of their own age. As man is social, as no man lives alone, as your temperament is simply the sum total of your social " reflex actions," is just your typical bearing towards your fellows, the great philosopher, in reflecting on his own deepest instincts and GENEEAL INTRODUCTION. 9 faiths, inevitably describes, in the terms of his system, the characteristic attitude of his age and people. So, for in- stance, Plato and Aristotle, taken together, express for us, in their philosophical writings, the essence of the highest Greek faith and life. The Greek love of the beautiful and reverence for the state, the Greek union of intellec- tual freedom with conventional bondage to the forms of politics and of religion, the whole Greek attitude towards the universe, in so far as the Athens of that age could embody it, are made articulate in enduring form in the speculations of these representative men. They con- sciously interpret this Hellenic life, — they do also more : they criticise it. Plato especially is in some of his work a fairly destructive analyst of his nation's faith. And yet it is just this faith, incorporated as it was into his own temperament, bred into his every fibre, that he must needs somehow express in his doctrine. And now per- haps you may already see why there is of necessity no- thing absolute, nothing final, about much that a Plato himself may have looked upon as absolute and as final in his work. Greek life was not all of human life ; Greek life was doomed to pass away ; Greek instincts and limi- tations could not be eternal. The crystal heavens that the Grreek saw above him were indeed doomed to be rolled up like a scroll, and the elements of his life were certain to pass away in fervent heat. But then, into all nobler future humanity, Greek life was certain to enter, as a factor, as a part of its civilized instincts, as an ennobling passion in its artistic production, as a moment of its spir- ituality. And therefore, too, Plato's philosophy, doomed in one sense not to be absolute or final, has its part, as a fact, in your own reflection to-day, and would have its part in the absolute philosophical estimate of the highest human life if ever we attained that estimate. If philoso- phy criticises, estimates, and to that end rewords life, if the great philosopher expresses in his system the most 10 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHr. characteristic faiths and passions of his age, then indeed the limitation of the age will be in a sense the limitation of the philosophy ; and with the life whose temperament it reflectively embodied the philosophy will pass away. It will pass away, but it will not be lost. A future hu- manity will, if civilization healthily progresses, inherit the old kingdom, and reembody the truly essential and immor- tal soul of its old life. This new humanity, including in itself the spirit of the old, will need something, at least, of the old philosophy to express in reflective fashion its own attitude towards the universe. This something that it needs of the old philosophy may not be that which the philosopher had himself imagined to be his most absolute possession. Like the statesman, he will have builded better than he knew. As Caesar's Roman empire had for its destiny not to exclude the Germans, as Cajsar had driven out Ariovistus, but to civilize and to Christianize them, and finally to pass in great part over to their keep- ing, so Plato's philosophy had for its office to suggest thoughts that Christianity afterwards made the common treasure of the very humanity that his mind would have regarded as hopelessly barbarian. No, the philosopher's work is not lost when, in one sense, his system seems to have been refuted by death, and when time seems to have scattered to scorn the words of his dust-filled mouth. His immediate end may have been unattained ; but thou- sands of years may not be long enough to develop for humanity the full significance of his reflective thought. Insight, this curious scrutiny of ours into the truth, keeps here, as you will see, its immediately unpractical, its ultimately significant character. There is indeed a sense in which life has no need of the philosopher. He does not invent life, nor does he lead in its race ; he follows after ; he looks on ; he is no prophet to inspire men ; he has a certain air of the playful about him. Plato, in a famous passage, makes sport of the men of the GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 11 world, who are driven by business, who are oppressed by the law courts, whose only amusement is evil gossip about their neighbors. The philosopher, on the contrary, ac- cording to Plato, has infinite leisure, and accordingly thinks of the infinite, but does not know who his next neighbor is, and never dreams of the law courts, or of finishing his business at any fixed hour. His life is a sort of artistic game ; his are not the passions of the world ; his is the reflection that comprehends the world. The Thracian servant maids laugh at him, as the one in the story laughed at Thales, because he stares at the heavens, and hence occasionally falls into wells. But what is he in the sight of the gods, and what are the servant maids ? When they are some day asked to look into the heavens, and to answer concerning the truth, what scorn will not be their lot ? After some such fashion does Plato seek to glorify the contemplative separation from the pettiness of life which shall give to the philosopher his freedom. And yet, as we know, this freedom, this sublime playfulness, of even a Plato, does not suggest the real justification of his work. This game of reflection is like all the rest of our insight, indirectly valuable because from it all there is a return to life possible, and in case of a great thinker like Plato, certain to occur. The coming humanity shall learn from the critic who, standing indeed outside of life, embodied in his reflection the meaning of it. Thus far, then, my thought has been simply this. Humanity depends, for its spirituality and its whole civili- zation, upon faiths and passions that are iji the first place instinctive, inarticulate, and in part unconscious. The philosopher tries to formulate and to criticise these in- stincts. What he does will always have a two-fold limi- tation. It will, on the one hand, be criticism from the point of view of a single man, of a single age, of a single group of ideals, as Plato or Aristotle embodied the faith of but one great age of Greek life, and did that from a 12 THE SPIRIT OF iMODERN PHILOSOPHY. somewhat private and personal point of view. This first necessary limitation of the philosopher's work makes his system less absolute, less truthful, less final than he had meant it to be. Another humanity will have a new faith, a new temperament, and in so far will need a new phi- losophy. Only the final and absolute humanity, only the ultimate and perfect civilization, would possess, were such a civilization possible on earth, the final and absolute philosophy. But this limitation, as we J^ave seen, while it dooms a philosopher to one kind of defeat, does n't deprive his work of worth. His philosophy is capable of becoming and remaining just as permanently significant as is his civilization and its temperament ; his reflective work win enter into future thought in just the same fash- ion as the deeper passions of his age will beget the spirit- ual temper of those who are to come after. There remains as second limitation, so we have seen, the always seemingly unfruitful critical attitude of the philosopher. He speculates, but does not prophesy ; he criticises, but does not create. Yet this limitation he shares with all theory, with all insight ; and the limita- tion is itself only partial and in great measure illusory. Criticism means self -consciousness, and self-consciousness means renewed activitj' on a higher plane. The reflective play of one age becomes the passion of another. Plato creates Utopias, and the Christian faith of Europe after- wards gives them meaning. Contemplation gives birth to future conduct, and so the philosopher also becomes, in his own fashion, a world-builder. ♦» IV. But now, having said so much for the philosopher, I may venture to say yet more, that if his work is not lost in so far as it enters into the life of the humanity which comes after him, there is yet another and a deeper sense in which his labor is not in vain. For truth is once for GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 13 all manifold, and especially is the truth about man's rela- tion to the universe manifold. The most fleeting pas- sion, if so be it is only deep and humane, may reveal to us some aspect of truth which no other moment of life can fully express. I know how difficult it is to compre- hend that seemingly opposing assertions about the world may, in a deeper sense, turn out to be equally true. I must leave to later discussions a fuUer illustration of how, for instance, the optimist, who declares this world to be divine and good, and the pessimist, who finds in our finite world everywhere struggle and sorrow, and who calls it all evil, may be, and in fact are, alike right, each in his own sense ; or of how the constructive idealist, who de- clares all reality to be the expression of divine ideals, and the materialist, who sees in nature only matter in motion and law absolute, may be but viewing the same truth from different sides. All this, I say, will be touched upon hereafter. What I here want to suggest is that the truth about this world is certainly so manifold, so paradoxical, so capable of equally truthful and yet seemingly opposed descriptions, as to forbid us to declare a philosopher wrong in his doctrine merely because we find it easy to make plausible a doctrine that at first sight appears to conflict with his own. Young thinkers always find refu- tation easy, and old doctrines not hard to transcend ; and yet what if the soul of the old doctrines should be true just because the new doctrines seemingly oppose, but actually complete them ? Our reflective insights, in fol- lowing our life, will find now this, now that aspect of things prominent. "What if aU the aspects should con- tain truth ? What if our failure thus far to find and to state the absolute philosophy were due to the fact, not that all the philosophies thus far have been essentially false, but that the truth is so wealthy as to need not only these, but yet other and future expressions to exhaust its treasury ? I speak thus far tentatively and vaguely. I 14 THE SPIRIT OF MODER ( PHILOSOPHY. must illustrate a little, although at best I can thus far only suggest. Some people have a fashion of recording their reflective moments just as they happen to come. If such persons chance to be poets, the form of the record is often the thoughtful lyric. And the thoughtful lyric poem usually possesses the very quality which made Aristotle call poetry a " more philosophical " portrayal of human life than history. It is indeed marvelous how metaphysical a great poem of passion almost always is. The passion of the moment makes its own universe, flashes back like a jewel the light of the far-off sun of truth, but colors this reflected light with its own mysterious glow. " You are, you shall be mine," cries the strong emotion to the earth and to the whole choir of heaven, and the briefest poem may contain a sort of philosophic scheme of the entire creation. The scheme is sometimes as false as the passion portrayed is transient ; but it is also often as true as the passion is deep, and whoever has once seen how variously and yet how significantly the moods expressed in great poems interpret both our life and the reality of which our life forms part, will not be likely to find that philosophical systems are vain merely because the phi- losophers, like the poets, differ. In fact the reason why there is as yet no one final philosophy may be very • closely allied to the reason why there is no final and complete poem. Life is throughout a complicated thing ; the truth of the spirit remains an inexhaustible treasure house of experience ; and hence no individual experi- ence, whether it be the momentary insight of genius recorded in the lyric poem, or the patient accumulation of years of professional plodding through the problems of philosophy, will ever fuUy tell all the secrets which life has to reveal. It is for just this reason, so I now suggest, that when you study philosophy, you have to be tolerant, receptive, GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 15 willing to look at the world from many sides, fearless as to the examination of what seem to be even dangerous doctrines, patient in listening to views that look even ab- horrent to common sense. It is useless to expect a simple and easy account of so paradoxical an affair as this our universe and our life. When you first look into philoso- phy you are puzzled and perhaps frightened by those manifold opinions of the philosophers of which we have thus far had so much to say. " If they, who have thought so deeply, differ so much," you say, " then what hope is there that the truth can ever be known ? " But if you examine further you find that this variety, better studied, is on its more human side largely an expression of the liveliness and individuality of the spiritual temperaments of strong men. The truth is not in this case "in the middle." The truth is rather " the whole." Let me speak at once in the terminology of a special philosophical doctrine, and say that the world spirit chose these men as his voices, — these men and others like them, and that in fact he did so because he had all these things to voice. Pardon this fashion of speech ; I shall try to make it clearer hereafter. Their experience then, let me say, is, in its apparently confusing variety, not so much a seeing of one dead reality from many places, but rather a critical rewording of fragments of the one life which it is the des- tiny of man to possess and to comprehend. These war- ring musicians strike mutually discordant tones. But let each sing his song by himself, and the whole group of Meistersanger shall discourse to you most excellent music. For grant that the philosophers are all in fact expressing not dead truth, but the essence of human life, then be- cause this life is many-sided, the individual expressions cannot perfectly agree. It is the union of many such insights that will be the one true view of life. Or again, using the bolder phrases, let us say that all these thinkers are trying to comprehend a little of the life of the one 16 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. World Spirit who Kves and moves in all things. Then surely this life, which in our world needs both the ante- lopes and the tigers to embody its endless vigor, that life which the frost and cold, the ice and snow, do bless and magnify, is not a life which any one experience can ex- haust. AH the philosophers are needed, not merely to make jarring assertions about it, but to give us embodi- ments now of this, now of that fragment of its wealth and its eternity. And in saying this I don't counsel you in your study of philosophy merely to jumble together aU sorts of sayings of this thinker and of that, and then to declare, as makers of eclectic essays and of books of ex- tracts love to say, " This is all somehow great and true." What I mean is that, apart from the private whims and the non-essential accidents of each great philosopher, his doctrine will contain for the critical student an element of permanent truth about life, a truth which in its isola- tion may indeed contradict the view of his equally worthy co-workers, but which, in union, in synthesis, in vital con- nection with its very bitterest opposing doctrines, may turn out to be an organic portion of the genuine treasure of humanity. Nobody hates more than I do mere eclec- ticism, mere piecing together of this fragment and that for the bare love of producing fraudulent monuments of philosophic art. But the fact is that, frauds aside, the god-like form of truth exists for us men, as it were, in statuesque but scattered remnants of the once perfect marble. Through the whole ruined world, made desolate by the Turks of prejudice and delusion, the philosophers wander, finding here and there one of these bits of the eternal and genuine form of the goddess. Thoiigh I hate fraudulent restorations of a divine antiquity, still I know that, notwithstanding all, these fragments do somehow belong together, and that the real truth is no one of the J bits, but is, the whole goddess. What we who love phi- losophy long for is no piece-work, but that matchless whole itself. GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 17 The kind of philosophical breadth of view for which 1 am now pleading is not, I assure you, the same as mere vagueness, merely lazy toleration, of all sorts of conflict- ing opinions. Nobody is more aware than I am that the errors and false theories of the philosophers are facts as real as are the manifold expressions which they give to truth. I am not pleading for inexactness or undecisive- ness of thought. What I am really pleading for, as you will see in the sequel, is a form of philosophic reflection that leads to a very definite and positive theory of the universe itself, the theory, namely, which I have just sug- gested, a theory not at all mystical in its methods, nor yet, in its results, really opposed to the postulates of science, or to the deeper meaning at the heart of common sense. This theory is that the whole universe, including the physical world also, is essentially one live thing, a mind, one great Spirit, infinitely wealthier in his experiences than we are, but for that very reason to be comprehended by us only in terms of our own wealthiest experience. I don't assume the existence of such a life in the universe because I want to be vague or to seem imaginative. The whole matter appears to me, as you will hereafter see, to be one of exact thought. The result, whatever it shall be, must be reached in strict accord with the actual facts of experience and the actual assumptions of human science. The truth, whenever we get it, must be as hard and fast as it is manifold. But the point is that if the universe is a live thing, a spiritual reality, we, in progressing to- wards a comprehension of its nature, must needs first comprehend our own life. And in doing this we shall pass through all sorts of conflicting moods, theories, doc- trines ; and these doctrines, in the midst of their conflict and variety, wiU express, in fragmentary ways, aspects of the final doctrine, so that, as I said, the truth wiU be the wholes 18 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Thus far I have spoken of the various opinions and of the general human significance of the philosophers. I called attention, also, a little while since, to the appa- rently unpractical attitude that they assume towards life. In this connection I have already suggested that their criticism of life has often its destructive side. In these present days, when philosophy is frequently so negative, it is precisely this destructive, this skeptically critical character of philosophy, that to the minds of many con- stitutes its best-known character, and its most obvious danger. It is not mine to defend recent philosophy from the charge of being often cruelly critical. To many of us it might, indeed, in pity be said : " Mayest thou never know what thou art." I have myself more than once felt the pang, as I have studied philosophy, of finding out to my sorrow what I am. I have, therefore, many times lamented that philosophy is indeed often so sternly and so negatively critical of many things that our hearts have loved and prized. If any one fears the pangs of self-con- sciousness, it is not my office to counsel him to get it. But I must, indeed, point out here that when a wise phi- losophy is destructive, the true fault lies not with the critic who finds the wound in our faith, but with the faith that has secretly nursed its own wounds in unconscious- ness. Philosophy, in the true sense of that word, never destroys an ideal that is worth preserving. Coming to consciousness of yourself can only bring to light weakness in case the weakness already exists in you. If you fear, I say, the pang of such a discovery, — and, as I can assure you, the pang is often keen, — then do not try philosophy. For the rest, however, this relation of philosophy to posi- tive faith is one whereof I may speak in yet a very few words before I leave it. Let me point out in what sense philosophy is critical, but in what sense also it can hope to be constructive. GENERAL INTEODUCTION. 19 Of course philosophy, as thus far described, is sure to begin at once, if it can, with inquiries into the largest and most significant instincts, the deepest faiths of humanity. These, when it discovers them, it wiU. single out and criti- cise. Hence, indeed, the philosophers are always talking of such problems as duty and God. Hence they inquire how we can come to know whether there is any external world at all, and, if so, whether this world is to be treated as dead matter, or as live mind. Hence they are curious to study our ideas of natural law, of moral freedom, of time, of space, of causation, of self. They pry into the concerns of faith as if these were theirs by divine right. They are not only prying, they are on one side of their activity merciless, skeptical, paradoxical, inconsiderate. They don't ask, it would seem, how dear your faith is to you ; they analyze it, as they would the reflex action of a starfish, or the behavior of a pigeon ; and then they try to estimate faith objectively, as an editor looks critically at a love-sonnet which somebody has sent him (a sonnet written with the author's heart's blood), and weighs it coolly and cruelly before he will consent to find it avail- able. Even so the philosopher has his standard of the availability of human faiths. You have to satisfy this with your creed before he will approve you. All this sometimes seems cynical, just as the editor's coolness may become provoking. But then, as you know, the editor, with all his apparent cruelty, is a man of sympathy and of more than negative aims. He has to consider what he calls availability, because he has his critical public to please. And the philosopher — he, too, has to be critical and to seem cruel, because he also has a public to please with his estimate ; and his chosen public ought to be no less than the absolute judge, the world spirit himself, in whose eyes the philosopher can find favor only if he be able to sift the truth from the error. That is why he is rigid. Nothing but an absolute critical standard ought to satisfy 20 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. him, because lie wants nothing short of the truth itself. He will fail to get it, but then, as I have said, we all of us fail more or less in some career or other ; and the meta- physician, with his one talent of critical estimate, must do what he can. Yet I hasten to correct this seemingly too lifeless a picture of the philosopher's cruel analysis of passion, by a reference to the thoughts upon which I have already dwelt. From the often disheartening difficulties and in- completeness of the human search for absolute truth, we who read philosophy continually find ourselves returning, hand to hand with the author himself, to the world of the concrete passions which he criticises. We find this world at each return more fair and yet more serious, because we know it better. The sacred tears that were shed in it are none the less sacred because we have been trying to find out from the critic what they meant. Their mystery, long pried into, becomes even the dearer for that. The criticised passions become like old letters, treasured up by a lover after his dear friend's death, — often read and re- read, until the reader has looked at every curve to know why it was traced in just this way. He has found out, or not, — still the search was consoling. So, too, we have analyzed our long past life ; and now the more confidently may we henceforth live in the new life before us. "We have criticised, so much the more cheerfully may we en- joy. I once saw something of a pair of literary lovers, friends of mine, who, being a trifle reflective, were prone to amuse themselves by affecting to treat each other's pro- ductions with a certain editorial coldness and severity of critical estimate. They wrote poems to each other, sup- pressing or changing of course the names, and then each, wholly ignoring whom this poem might be intended to mean, used to pick the other's work to pieces with an air of gentle and pathetic disdain. "Here the sentiment somehow failed to justify its object, being expressed un- GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 21 musically. There the experiment was a clever one, but the lines were such as a dispassionate observer (like either of us who should happen not to be the author) could not approve, might even smile at." These people never pre- cisely quarreled, to my knowledge, at least over their lit- erary criticism. I was not able to make out altogether why they did this sort of thing, but, so far as I could dis- cover, they both liked it, and were the better lovers for it. I conjecture that their delight must have resembled the kind of joy that philosophical students take in analyzing life. Let me admit frankly : it is indeed the joy, if you like, of playing cat and mouse with your dearest other self. It is even somewhat like the joy, if so you choose toi declare, which infants take in that primitive form of hide and seek that is suited to their months. " Where is my trutji, my life, my faith, my temperament ? " says the phi- los6pher. ^nd if, some volumes further on in the expo- sitic«t.of his system, he says, " Oh ! there it is," the healthy babies will be on his side in declaring that such reflections are not wholly without their rational value. But why do I thus apparently degrade speculation by again deliberately comparing it with a game ? Because, I answer, in one sense, all consciousness is a game, a series of longings and of reflections which it is easy to call superfluous if wit- nessed from without. The justification of consciousness is the having of it. And this magnificent play of the , spirit with itself, this infantile love of rewinning its own wealth ever anew through deliberate loss, through seek- ing, and through joyous recognition, what is this, indeed, but the pastime of the divine life itself ? We enter into the world of the spirit just when even the tragedy of life becomes for our sight as much a divine game as a divine tragedy, when we know that the world is not only serious, terrible, cruel, but is also a world where a certain grim humor of the gods is at home ; when we see in it a world, too, where a serene and childlike confidence is justified, a 22 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. world where courage is in place as well as reverence, and sport as well as seriousness ; where, above all,the genius of reflection, expressing at once vast experience of life and a certain infantile cheerfulness or even sportiveness of mood, rightfully lets itself loose in the freest form, now assum- ing a stern and critical air, now demurely analyzing, as if there were nothing else to do, now prying into men's hearts like a roguish boy playing with precious jewels, now pretending that all faith is dead, now serenely de- monstrating unexpected truths, and, last of all, plunging back again into life with the shout of them that triumph. YI. It now behooves me, in conclusion, to say something of the relation of a course of lectures like the one herewith begun to the technicalities of philosophical study. There is a great deal in every noteworthy metaphysical treatise which can be grasped only by special study. I shall make little attempt to transgress into this more technical field during these lectures. I must, indeed, discuss topics which only a rare kindliness on your part can make clearly comprehensible, for they are, once for aU, serious and diffi- cult, but I do not understand it to be the purpose of our present discourse to give what in the University would be called an Introduction to the literature of metaphysics proper. The only question that can arise about such a proceeding as I here propose is, of course, a question as to whether it is worth while to separate the general con- sideration of philosophical tendencies from a more minute study of the works of the philosophers. Such a question only the outcome can decide. I am aware that it is hard to be historically accurate in what I have to say without being much more specific than I shall have time to be. I must warn you at the outset that a full and fair under- standing of any great thinker demands a knowledge, both of the history of thought in general, and of his own period GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 23 in particular, which it is very hard, even for the profes- sional student, after years of study, to attain. All frag- mentary views, meanwhile, have something of the mislead- ing about them. Yet, on the other hand, the necessary imperfections of a partial expression of the truth never ought to discourage us from expressing all the truth that we can. The purpose of the subsequent lectures wiU in any case be sufficiently accomplished, if they bring you nearer to the throbbing heart of this intense modern speculative interest, so that you shall better know that warm blood flows in philosophic veins. For the rest, I confess to you that, although I myself often take a certain personal delight in the mere subtle- ties of speculation, although I also enjoy at times that miserliness which makes the professional student hoard up the jewels of reflection for the sake of gloating oyer their mere hardness and glitter, I flnd always that when I come to think of the thing fairly, there is, after all, no beauty in a metaphysical system, which does not spring from its value as a record of a spiritual experience. I love the variety of the philosophers, as I love the variety of the thoughtful looks which light up earnest young faces. I love all these because they express passion, won- der, truth. But alas for me if ever I have for profes- sional reasons to study a book behind whose technical subtleties I can catch no glimpse of the manly heart of its author. His conclusions may be sound. I shall then hate him only the more for that. Error may be dull if it chooses ; but there is no artistic blasphemy equal to so placing the harp of truth as to make it sound harsh and wooden when you strike it fairly. Philosophical books I have read, with whose doctrines, as doctrines, I have even been forced in great measure to agree ; and yet, so life- less, so bloodless, were their authors, so reptilian were the cold and slowly writhing sentences in which their thought was expressed, that I have laid down such volumes with a 24 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. sense of disgrace and rebellion, " bitterly ashamed," as a friend of mine has expressed the same feeling in my hear- ing, " bitterly ashamed to find myself living in a universe whose truth could possibly be made so inefficacious and uninteresting." To be sure, in saying all this I am far from desiring to make technical metaphysics easy, for the study is a laborious one ; and there are many topics in logic, in the theory of the sciences, and in ethics, to whose comprehension there is no royal road. But then, once your eyes opened, and you will indeed find subjects that at first seemed dry and inhuman full of life and even sf pas- sion ; as, for instance, few sciences are in their elemen- tary truths more enticing to the initiated, more coy and baffling to the reflective philosophical student, in fact, more romantic, than is the Differential Calculus. But if such matters lie far beyond our present field, I mention them only to show that even the hardest and least popu- lar reflective researches are to be justified, in the long run, by their bearings upon life. PART I. STUDIES OF THINKEES AND PROBLEMS, LECTURE n. THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY; CHARACTERIS- TICS OF THE FIRST PERIOD ; ILLUSTRATION BT MEANS OF THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF SPINOZISM. Our general purpose in these lectures has now been defined. As we pass to the study of certain representa- tive modern thinkers and problems, the difference between our method and that of a text-book, or of a regular course of academic lectures on the history of modern thought, must be well borne in mind. We wish to select certain tendencies especially characteristic of the spirit of modern philosophy. We shall therefore lay most stress upon what happened in the culminating period of modern thought, — that from Kant to Schopenhauer, — and upon the problems that seem to me most permanent and signifi- cant in that period itself. In earlier periods our method will be one of the briefest sketching. Later we shall become more specific. Of no thinker before Kant shaR we give any extended account. Several thinkers of first rank, such as Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, we shall barely mention or wholly ignore. Always, even where we are fullest in statement, we shall select those aspects of the thinker in question that concern our own undertak- ing. What this undertaking will lead to will not become manifest until, in the second part of our course, we have suggested in outline a certain philosophical creed to which I wish to direct your attention. It is in vain that one seeks, in the history of thought, to choose any perfectly satisfactory place of beginning for 28 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. the purpose of a course of lectures like this. Always one must run a risk of producing the illusion in your minds that the point where he chances to begin is somehow pecu- liarly significant as a beginning. But always, of course, if you should ever hereafter come to look deeper, you would find this point of beginning very arbitrary, and what im- mediately preceded it vastly important .for the true under- standing of the whole matter. My beginning, therefore, as I must warn you, will be indeed very arbitrary, just as my methods will have to be very different from those of a text-book. I. As to the general scope of our course, modern philoso- phy, our topic in what follows, is as wealthy and complex-*' an evolution in its way as is the life which it depicts. What we caU modern thought, in these matters, is a very recent affair, dating back only to the seventeenth cen- tury. Since then, however, philosophy has lived through several great periods, which for our purpose we may re- duce to three. The first period was one of what we may call natural- ism, pure and simple. It belongs almost wholly to the seventeenth century. The philosophy of this first age lived in a world where two things seemed clear : first, that nature is fuU of facts which conform fatally to exact and irreversible law, and second, that man lives best under a strong, a benevolently despotic civil government. The philosophers of this time had left off contemplating the heaven of mediseval piety, and were disposed to deify nature. They adored the rigidity of geometrical meth- ods ; they loved the study of the new physical science, which had begun with Galileo. Man they conceived as a mechanism. Human emotions, even the loftiest, they delighted in explaining by very simple and funda- mental natural passfens. There is often something mer- ciless and cynical about their analysis of many things THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 29 sacred in human life. They are cold, formal, systematic, at least as to the outward shape of their doctrines. At heart, however, they are not without a deep piety of their own. The nature which they deify has its magnificent dignity. It is no respgcter of our sentimentalities ; but it does embody a certain awful justice. You would pray to it in vain ; but you may interrogate it fearlessly, for it hides no charmed and magical secrets in its breast which an unlucky word might render dangerous to the inquirer. It notices no insult; it blasts no curious questioner for his irreverence. This nature is a wise nature. Her best children are those who labor most patiently to comprehend her laws. The weak she crushes ; but the thoughtful she honors. She knows no miracles ; but her laws are an in- exhaustible treasure house of resources to the knowing. In fact, knowledge of such laws is the chief end of man's life. God is n't any longer what he had often seemed in more clerical ages, — a God that hides himself from the natural and unassisted intellect of man. He showed him- self of old to the Greek geometers, to Euclid, to Archi- medes. In these days of the seventeenth century he unveils new mysteries to the students of physics. In the world of such a ruler, fear is out of place ; you may even doubt if you will. The incredulous are no longer public enemies ; they are merely the learners. Descartes, a rep- resentative thinker of the century, and the one from whom our period is often dated, begins his reflection by doubt- ing everything. As for the method of escaping from doubt, that consists in the use of reason and in the study of the facts of experience ; nothing else serves. Revela- tion you treat with such respect as pohtical and social considerations require ; but for philosophy, in this age of the seventeenth century, the supernatural has only a sec- ondary interest, if it has any interest at all. Religious conformity is a matter of policy ; a noisy atheist would be, of course, a cause of scandal, and might even bring 30 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. philosophy into discredit. Besides, almost every serious philosopher of this our first period believes in God as in some sense the source of nature. It is, however, not well to tell the unlearned too much about what sort of God you believe in. The unlearned are gross, still dread witches, carry amulets, know nothing of geometry ; best be cautious of speech to them. Philosophy makes no propaganda, appeals to philosophers, lets faith alone. Besides, loyalty to the state counsels some measure of religious conformity. Hobbes, the great Englishman, himself a speculative materialist, and, as I fancy, the most well-knit and Tiighly organized thinker in the whole history of English philosophy, was clear that whatever a man's opinion might be, it was his duty to submit all matters of religious conformity to the judgment of the state. " I submit," he says in effect somewhere, " to the Church of England, because that is the church ordained for me by the will of my sovereign, the king of England." And this confession of Hobbes involves no hypocrisy. It is the frankest confession in the world. His conformity is openly a conformity to civil laws. Philosophy and reli- gion are once for all separated. It is a matter of acci- dent whether the philosopher has or has not a traditional creed left him by his philosophy. His thought is no longer the handmaid of his faith, as had generally been the case with the thinkers of the Middle Ages. But as for his faith itself, social and political considerations must decide how and in what way he shall give evidence of it to his fellows. His very loyalty, his good citizenship, his frank benevolence, counsel prudence of speech. And here appears again another side of the philosophy of this first period. It is a loyal philosophy, a philosophy of good citizenship ; it has a great respect for the highest political interests of man ; it studies jurisprudence, state- craft, international law, natural justice ; it founds its loy- alty, indeed, upon reason, makes little of the divine right THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY, 31 of kings, loves to declare all men equal, despises tradi- tion in social matters, throws contempt on the mere cus- toms of mankind, looks for the sanction of law in the eternal and just order of the world, in short seeks most distinctly not in the clouds, but here upon earth, for an abiding city. Hence, it generally opposes clerical inter- ference in political matters ; it gives to the kingdom of God a naturalistic interpretation, takes no interest in the jeweled walls and the pearl gates of a scriptural new Jerusalem, but undertakes to build a terrestrial one of its own on a geometrical plan of modern devising, a city not without foundations, but very sober as to ornamenta- tion. Better a rational constitution than golden streets. Does this first period of modern philosophy, thus very rudely outlined as to its most general interests, seem to some of you dishearteningly uuspiritual? Then reflect, it surely has not pleased God to save his people by an- archy ; and these who in this recent century, in the age when science first grew lusty in its young strength, and when the sanctions of medisevalism were already partly obsolete, spoke the word for the freedom of human reason, and the reasonableness of good order, served the spiritual necessities of mankind no whit the less because they told only part of the truth. What they bequeathed to us was a faith in sober realities, a reverence for the dignity /of / the world of law, a love of lucidity, for which we cannoli thank them too much. As to their deification of nature, it was surely the beginning of modern wisdom, an insight that whatever God is, he is not far from every one of us, a turning away from the mere gazing up into heaven after a distant and ascended divine ruler, a sense that if the spirit is indeed poured out on earth, you have a right to look upon the simplest facts as containing it. These men may be cold ; for my part I find a clearness about the snowy mountain summits amongst which they live, which goes far to compensate for the hardness of the out- 32 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. lines of their world. That they, too, have a genuine and lofty piety to i^roclaim to us, I shall try to exemplify in the case of Spinoza. For nature, also, has its divine side ; the hard, clear outlines of the mountains stand out, after all, against the heavens of God. He who reflects upon our human love of clear reason and of sound order reflects npon certain of the deepest, though surely not upon the hottest, passions of man. And Spinoza, as we shall find, knew how to give to this eternal order of nature a mys- tical and almost romantic glamor. Under the gently glowing evening twilight of his peaceful reflection, these mountain peaks, if we may yet again strain our figure, gleam with an almost ghostly dignity, and seem no longer sharp or cruel. Spinoza, like other mystical souls, knows of a peace which the world of sense can neither give nor take away. This peace he finds in an absorbing contem- plation of the divine order as eternal and necessary. It is of the nature of reason, he says, to regard all things under the form of eternity. So regarded, even this pas- sionate, struggling life of ours seems an apparition of the changeless. God is everywhere. The wise man asks no happy fortune ; his unalterable fortune it is to love God with the same love wherewith God loves himself. But the second age of modern philosophy, rejecting this sublime indifference to the concerns of the individual human being, turned curiously back to the study of the wondrous inner world of man's soul. To deify nature is not enough. Man is the most interesting thing in nature, and he is not yet deified ; nor can he be until we have won a true knowledge of his wayward heart. He may be a part of nature's mechanism, or he may not ; still, if he be a mechanism, he is that most paradoxical of things, a knowing mechanism. His knowledge itself, what it is, •how it comes about, whence he gets it, how it grows, what it signifies, how it can be defended against skepticism, what it implies, both as to moral truth and as to theoreti- THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY, 33 cal truth, — these problems are foremost in the interests of the second period of modern thought, whose beginnings we can see in Locke, and whoge culmination was in the philosophic movement that expressed itself, towards the close of the eighteenth century, in Kant's " Critique of Pure Eeason." The early thinkers of this period, Locke, the early English moralists, Leibnitz, belong in part to the first period, as is always likely to be the case in such orderly evolutions. Gradually, attention is tui-ned more and more from the outer world to the mind of man. The first period had been one of naturalism ; the second is one of a sort of new humanism. In the first half of the eighteenth century this humanism developed the works of the great classical representatives of English ethics, as well as the idealism of Berkeley. Reflection is now more an inner study, an analysis of the mind, than an exami- nation of the business of physical science. Human reason is still the trusted instrument, but it soon turns its criti- cism upon itself. It distinguishes prejudices from axi- oms, fears dogmatism, scrutinizes the evidences of faith, suspects, or at best has consciously to defend, even the apparently irresistible authority of conscience, and so comes at length, in the person of the greatest of the Brit- ish eighteenth century thinkers, David Hume, to a ques- tioning even of its own capacity to know truth, a doubt- ing attitude which brings philosophy into a sharp and admitted opposition to common sense. At this point, however, a new interest begins in Europe. If the age' was already disposed to self-analysis, Rousseau, with his paradoxes and his even pathological love of limitless self- scrutiny, introduced into this man-loving period a senti- mental tendency, from which, erelong, came a revival of passion, of poetry, and of enthusiasm, whose influence we shall never outgrow. Contemporaneous with this influ- ence was the appearance of the modern romance in its early forms. Not much later came the " Storm and 34 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Stress " period of German literature, and by the time this had run its course, the French Revolution, overthrowing all the mechanical restraints of civilization, demonstrated afresh to the world's outer sense the central importance of passion in the whole life of humanity. The philosophy of Kant, developing in the quiet soli- tudes of his professorial studies at Kbnigsberg, in far eastern Prussia, reflected with a most wonderful ingenuity the essential interests of the time when all this transfor- mation was preparing. In 1781, he published his " Cri- tique of Pure Reason," nearly, if not quite, the most important philosophical treatise ever written. The essen- tial doctrine of this book is the thought that man's nature is the real creator of man's world. It is n't the external world, as such, that is the deepest truth for us at all ; it is the inner structure of the human spirit which merely expresses itself in the visible nature about us. The inter- est of Kant's presentation of this paradoxical thought lay not so much in the originality of the conception, for philosophers never invent fundamental beliefs, and this idea of Kant's iFas ol3 "as 'deeper spiritual faith itself; but rather in the cool, reflective, mercilessly critical in- genuity with which he carries it out. Issued several years before the French Revolution, the book seems a sort of deliberate justification of the proud consciousness of man's own absolute rights with which, in that mighty struggle, the human spirit rose against aU external re- straints, and declared, as we in America had already showed men how to do, that the true world for humanity is the world which the freeman makes, and that the genu- uinely natural order is one which is not external until reason decrees that it shall exist. And herewith begins what I have ventured to call in its wholeness the third period of modern philosophy, a period not yet ended. The great thoughts of Kant ruled the philosophic reflection of the next fifty years after the THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 85 appearance of the " Critique," with what extravagancies and with what excellencies of result we shall in a meas- ure see hereafter. There is a sense in which this doc- trine of Kant's is the very soul of all our modern life, not, I repeat, as if the philosopher had invented it, but because once for all this is the essentially humane view of., reality. You can easif^ make wild and romantic misuse of it. But when rightly interpreted, Kant's world, where the inner reason is lord over the outer sense, will prove to be as hard and fast a world of fact, of law, and of eter- nal majesty, as ever the seventeenth century had con- ceived. At all events, whether we will it or no, in this universe of Kant's philosophy we all stiU live. But the outcome of these fifty years of post-Kantian speculation was, after all, an unfinished organization of philosophic thought. The undertaking was too vast for one generation. After a period of speculative quiescence, a period when attention was directed away from philoso- phy by other human concerns, this, our third period of modern thought, has come to see a revival of philosophic activity, a revival in the midst of which we now live. To the legacy of Kant has been added the wealth of prob- lems offered to us by recent advances in natural science and in the study of the history of humanity. The doc- trine of evolution, itself no novelty in opinion, has re- ceived a wholly unlooked-for empirical formulation and confirmation. The sciences have grown until no one can even remotely hope to overlook their whole field. In con- sequence, however, external nature has once more gained for us an imposing authority which makes us in many ways sympathize afresh with the pure naturalism of the seventeenth century. Man we once more see to be, not merely the sentimental rebel and creative hero of Eous- seau and the romanticists, not merely the organ of the world-forming reason of the Kantian schools, but also, and just as truly, the mechanism which the seventeenth 36 tSe spirit of modern philosophy. century declared him to be. How can he be both these things, that is, both natural and spiritual ? How can he have sprung from an animal ancestry, yes, ultimately from dead matter, and yet be the embodiment, the organ of the absolute reason ? How can he at once be part of the spirit whose live thinking dreams out this whole frame of things, and yet he himself the slave of the very order of nature which this dream creates ? How can he, this mere me- chanism, this creature of nerves, this mortal thing whose brain secretes thought, be also, as Kant made him, the very source of the laws of nature themselves ? How com- prehend this paradox? Well, I answer, after all, it is the ancient paradox of the double nature of man. It would be unpardonably absurd even to mention such a strange problem, were it not so real, so pertinacious, so every day a matter, were it not absolutely forced on us afresh by every new word of modern science, as by every old word of the devotional books. And this problem, I insist, is now in the forefront of speculation as it never was before : in what sense, with what prospect of solu- tion, with what beauty of statement, with what depth of significance, with what manifold illustration in facts, with what passionate longing of inquiry, I should be glad, in- deed, if I could hope to express in the subsequent lectures of this course. And so, for the first, our rude sketch is before us. How much I desire to suggest its signifi- cance, let one brief illustration suffice to show ere I go further. There is a certain earlier and idealistic drama of Ibsen's which the current public interest in that remarkable poet seems still disposed to neglect altogether. I mean the drama entitled "Emperor and Galilean." In' this play the author introduces the apostate Emperor Julian, struggling to replace the kingdom whose authority is not of this world, by an imperial power whose aims and sanctions shall be earthly, naturalistic, human, and whose THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 87 ideals shall not look beyond any man's sepulchre. When the power of the romantic apostate is already on the wane, he converses, in one scene, with his confidential ad- viser, the heathen seer and mystic, Maximos. The em- peror is by this time weary of the strife, fearful of the end. " "Will the Galilean conquer ? " he cries. And he calls upon Maximos, as reader of portents, to prophesy. Who shall win, he says, in this struggle ? Is the king- dom that is from above to destroy the kingdom of this earth ? Or will the legions and the natural order be able to withstand the unearthly power of this wondrous and unseen world of spiritual influences ? Maximos answers darkly. Neither can succeed, he declares. Both powers, both kingdoms, the earthly and the unearthly, shall fall. That is fate. " But what, then, shall take their place ? " cries Julian. " Who is, then, the right ruler? " " He," answers Maximos, " in whom both Emperor and Galilean " shall be joined. There is to come, he prophesies, the third realm, neither of earth alone, nor yet of heaven alone, — " God-Ctesar, Caesar-God, Caesar in the kingdom of the Spirit, God in the realm of the flesh." " This, Julian," declares Maximos, " is the third realm, for in it alone can be fulfilled the word, ' Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's.' " For only in such a realm, runs the thought of Maximos, will the earthly and the supernatural, once wholly in unity, cease to have conflicting and irreconcilable claims. Fate, holds Maximos, will yet bring this thing to pass, but not, indeed, in these times of Julian. I do not feel these words of Ibsen's to be more than merely suggestive. I do not pretend to find in them any- thing final. But I cannot do better, as I try to give here some faint notion of the vast historical process whereof all this reflective philosophy forms so subordinate a part, than to point out that the third realm, of which Ibsen 80 mystically speaks, the realm where a rigid order of 88 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. nature shall be one with the most miraculously significant divine truth, where Caesar shall become a spiritual, and God an earthly ruler, is precisely the realm which not so much our philosophy, but our age, whose echo this phi- losophy is, is even now seeking to comprehend, and with prophetic voice to proclaim. n. Let us return to our first period. A long course of lectures would be needed to give you any full account of its significance. Let me dwell a moment once more upon three things of importance concerning its representative thinkers. As to the first matter : I have already suggested that philosophy, in those days of the seventeenth century, was much influenced by the example of physical science. The modern method of what is called induction, that is, the method of finding the laws of nature from a careful collection and study of facts, won its first great triumphs in the work of Galileo and of his contemporaries and immediate successors in physical science. The Galilean method of studying nature was for that age one of won- derful novelty and fruitfulness. Galileo, as you know, in- troduced the fashion of making exact experiments under artificially simplified physical conditions. Such experi- ments showed in intelligible form how natural things really behave. Nature, as you see her in gross, is too complex for our simple minds. She hides her secrets from our untrained reason, by revealing them all at once. Experi- ment separates out particular groups of facts, and exam- ines them alone. Thus experiment aids the weakness of .our reason, in its effort to find nature reasonable. Ex- periment so stands for a sort of cross-questioning of nature. The answers to our questions show us the ration- ality of things. But Galileo did not make such experi- ments at random. He thought out well what questions to THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 39 ask nature. That is, by acute observation of what one might cal] the general trend of things in some part of nature, Galileo made exact and mathematically stateable hypotheses as to the true laws at work. So he did, for instance, in case of the facts about falling bodies, and in case of the facts about bodies rolling down inclines. When he had made his scientific guess, his hypothesis, he applied, if necessary, mathematics to this guess, and com- puted what ought to happen, if it were true, in certain definite cases, such as an experiment could artificially bring to pass. Then, and not till then, he tested the hy- pothesis by the experiment itself. He asked nature, " Is it so and so with you, as my hypothesis demands, in this special case, that it shall be ? " If nature, questioned through experiment, responded " Yes," then the hypothe- sis was verified, and the law was regarded as in its own proper measure established. Thus reason triumphed over brute fact. The brilliant successes of this Galilean method during his own and the following generations were, as I have said, immensely impressive to that whole century. Nature had at last been made to answer multitudinous sharp ques- tions. And the noteworthy thing w;as that her answers were so exact, and that her laws, when you found them, were so rigid, so capable of mathematical precision of statement, so general. Mechanical science, thus early and very rapidly progressing, soon suggested of itself the \ thought that nature was all one vast mechanism. The philosophers, with their love of grand generalizations, easily seized upon this idea. They tried to expound it, to reflect upon it, to defend it, to develop its meaning. Just imagine it for a moment : could one only seize upon the genuine and all-embracing hypothesis, could one but guess by good luck at the one absolute law of laws, as Galileo had guessed at the law of the falling bodies ! Would not one then have an hypothesis whereof every 40 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. fact of physical nature would be a caSe, a verification, an experimental justification ? Such a law, if you found it, — would it not be mechanical, like Galileo's special laws ? So, at least, the centiflydeclared. But there was the other side to this idea, a side which suggests my second point. If this was so, if these exact laws, which so perfectly an- swer the demands of our reason, are true of things, then is n't this world about us one that dear thinking, exact ' definition, is especially fitted to comprehend ? Previous ages had found the world mysterious, and had appealed to faith, which reason could only supplement. This new age is sure of reason, makes it lord, reveres it as the one revealer of mysteries, and as capable of discovering absolute truth. But this once more brings me yet a step k further, namely, to my third point. Clear thinking about ( nature needs a good model. Galileo and all the other men of the new time had such a model before them in the geometrical science that had come down from the Greeks. The hypotheses that Galileo made were of a sort long since known in geometry, namely, mathematically exact statements, from which sharp conclusions could be drawn for verification or refutation. He showed how to apply such hypotheses to nature, namely, by means of crucial ex- periments. But the idea of the clearly thought hypothesis was old. Very well, then, Galileo's successes suggested that geometry is indeed the model science, that nature, being reasonable, geometrizes, so to speak, throughout all her world of things, so that if you could once get her laws in mind, as Euclid got his axioms, then all the facts of nature down to the least would become as clear, as cer- tain, as demonstrable to you as Euclid's theorems are to the student of mathematics. Such a notion it is which is the common property of the seventeenth century. It was the presupposition of that time, the cold but deep passion of exact rationality, upon which the philosophers reflected, and in terms of which they taught. Hence it was that they loved mathematical methods in philosophy. THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 41 These three ideas, then, that nature is a mechanism, that human reason is competent to grasp the truth of nature, and that, since nature's truth is essentially mathe- matical, geometry is the model science, whose precision and necessity philosophy, too, must imitate, — these are the ideas of our first period. Descartes shares them with Hobbes. The widest divergence of opinion does not ex- clude them anywhere, in the representative men of that day. Human nature also is interpreted in terms of them. But how, you may ask, can such an age as this grasp the whole breadth and depth of the deeper passions of humanity ? Man is n't merely a computer, nor yet a geometer. He estimates, he appreciates his world ; he does n't merely long to describe it in mathematical terms ; he has religious interests, too ; and what have Galilean physics and Euclidean geometry to say of these ? Well, I have already observed that our seventeenth century knew of such a thing as a philosophical religion, and my illus- tration of that fact is the man who was in many respects the deepest speculator of that whole age, namely, Spinoza, to whom I may now pass. in. Every one has heard something of the marvelous and lonely Jewish philosopher, who, separated from the world of European cultivation by his race, and from his own people by his heresy, devoted himself to peaceful and fear- less reflection, and died early, not without leaving an im- mortal treatise behind him. And every one must have no- ticed how singularly varied is the view of Spinoza that one gets from those who know him more or less superficially. In his own age he was denounced as atheist, profane per- son, monster. Long afterwards, however, his works were re-discovered, greedily read, admired by great poets like Goethe, and by ardent and even romantic philosophers like Schelling; and now he has become an authority 42 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. for all students of philosophy, a necessary part of the knowledge of every one who would comprehend modern thought. This great thinker himself was, to be sure, no universal genius in philosophy. His doctrine, compared with those that have come since, is comparatively simple, clear cut, crystalline in its hardness and isolation, and yet, how many-sided even this crystal, how varied the impressions that it has produced on those who have seen it in different lights ! Judging by some of the commen- tators of Spinoza, you would regard him as merely a lover of mathematical clearness and coldness of statement, as a believer in the hard and fast, eternal, but purely natural order of things. Others, on the contrary, have called him, in a phrase that has been too often repeated, " a God- intoxicated man," so that, far from being an atheist, it was the existence of nature that he in truth denied. Others have named him a mystic, a seer, a prophet ; have taken, as the young Goethe took, an almost sentimental interest in him ; have found his doctrine poetical and romantic. Others still have prized in him the gentle humility of life. He won, as we learn, not only the respect of certain great men in his own time (who knew him mainly from afar and by letter), but also the love of the few homely and obscure people with whom he daily and personally asso- ciated ; and this has led one of his eulogizers, Ernst Eenan, to remind us enthusiastically that " nothing is worth so much as the judgment of the little ones, for it is almost always the judgment of God." What, then, was Spinoza ? The cold and merciless mathematical thinker, the remorseless fatalist that some caU him ; or the romantic and poetic soul, the mystic, the seer ; or, finally, the saint of gracious and gentle life that others find him ? In fact, Spinoza had something of all these traits in his character and in his thought. Were I expounding his system in full I should make you feel this fact. It is already a satisfaction to be able to say that THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 43 tlie least wealthy of the systems which we are to consider expressed so wide an experience of life, reflected upon so varied a group of human attitudes in the presence of the divine order. But stiU it is not for the purpose of a panegyric of Spinoza that I now ask your attention to him. His personal character cannot detain us very long. Nor yet, on the other hand, can we give much time to ex- amining the technical details of his system. It was in- deed a many-sided doctrine, and in some of its aspects highly problematic. Its sources, its growth, and its mean- ing have in recent times been the topic of elaborate researches, of which I can give you no fair notion here. I shall dwell upon but a single aspect of the whole, and this is the religious aspect; for Spinoza had a religion. There is, then, this one thing in his teaching that I wish to illustrate, and, if possible, to explain. This is the deep piety which in Spinoza's mind is not only consistent with the belief in a rigid, mechanical order of nature, but which is even involved, according to him, in the very expression of such a doctrine concerning nature. Had Spinoza been any one but himself, he would have been a materialist, a cynic, and, indeed, the cold and merciless thinker that many, misled by one-sided views, have declared him to be. Because he was a man of profound character, he looked upon the whole order of things, and said, " While it is necessary, while it is rigid, while it is in one sense merciless, it is also divine, and the value of our knowledge of this order is that thereby we are led to a love of God, to a peace which the world can- not give or take away." It is surely the office of philosophic reflection to bring out the deeper problems of our nature. And nowhere else can one find a more significant problem than this, that he who looks upon the world solely with the eye of reason finds himself, when once possessed of Spinoza's wisdom, forced to adore. Listen, then, in Spinoza's case, to the 44 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. tale of tlie religious experience of a great heretic, whom many men used to denounce as atheist. The external facts of Spinoza's life, so far as they con- cern us, must, be very briefly summarized. A colony of Spanish and Portuguese Jews, refugees from persecution, was, in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, resident in Amsterdam, in the enjoyment of the freedom of the Dutch republic. A son of a poor family, mem- bers of this Jewish community, Spinoza was born in the year 1632. He was early distinguished as a studious boy for his learning in the mediaeval literature of the Jews ; he was an enthusiastic reader of Talmudic interpreters and commentators ; but he was also not without a wide curios- ity that led him to the study of the learned language of the day, namely, Latin, and to an early acquaintance with thought that lay far beyond the circle of the intolerant interests of his fellows. These studies of profane learn- ing led to suspicions of his orthodoxy, and a series of events followed of which we have only extremely untrust- worthy accounts from two of his early biographers. What happened we do not precisely know. Report says that companions and fellow-students of Spinoza, having drawn from him heretical views concerning the interpre- tation of the Scriptures, revealed the facts to the authori- ties of the synagogue; and that Spinoza was called to account, and was urged in more ways than one, namely, by bribes as well as by threats, to abandon his heresy or to remain silent. The affair, whatever it was, seems to haV'e extended over several years ; it ended in the excommuni- cation of Spinoza, in the year 1656. Thenceforth he was alone and free. To most other men this loneliness would have meant destruction. Even for Spinoza it led to cer- tain defects of thought and expression which are not with- out significance for his system as a whole. Spinoza had thenceforth no reason to appeal in the least to the preju- dices and learning of his former co-religionists. He THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 45 seems rather anxious in all his philosophical writings to say little of his relation to Jewish philosophy, and con- siderable difference of opinion exists among competent inquirers as to the actual relation between his own phi- losophical doctrines and those which, from time to time, had been put in form by Jewish mediaeval writers. At all events, however, he was rather a man of his time than a Jew. His system has a closer connection with that of Descartes and with those of other prominent European thinkers than with any Jewish doctrines. One of his books, indeed, has a special relation to the studies of his early youth. It is a book on freedom of opinion, called the " Theologico-Political Tractate." The essence of the doctrine is that both the formation and the expression of opinion should be entirely unhindered by legal interfer- ence. In the course of the book, Spinoza enters upon an elaborate historical criticism of the Old Testament litera- ture, and, in many respects, curiously suggests analogies to the results of modern critical study of the Bible. But in all his other writings Spinoza is simply the speculative thinker. His life in his exclusion from the Jewish com- munity IS as simple and uneventful as ever the experience of a philosopher has been. It is, in fact, the peculiar - privilege of the philosopher to live in a certain separation ' from human responsibility, which leaves him free to criti- cise the life that no longer enchains him. It is at once his privilege and his danger, for freedom from the bond- age of life may easily mean disorganization or morbidness of life. Spinoza, however, was not only forced to live apart from the world, but was able to win spiritual health in his isolation ; and the result of such separation from the passions of humanity shows itself aU the more plainly in a power of dispassionate criticism which is the very life of philosophy. One limitation remains, however, especially noteworthy in Spinoza's case. His form of iso- lation renders him a poor critic of the deeper social rela- 46 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. tionships. In fact, had Spinoza lived in an age of great poetical production, this dispassionate loneliness of expe- rience would have rendered him much less competent than he was to reword the meaning of his time. But in an age of investigation he was enabled to be a model critic, for the interest of humanity then lay in comprehending the natural order of things, and one does not need a rich experience of social life to give expression to the inner meaning of an undertaking like this. IV. If one turns, however, from the thinker himself to his thought, it is next necessary for us to see what drove Spinoza to his patient and life-long business of reflection upon so dry and apparently lifeless a thing as the mathe- matical and rigid laws of external nature. And here meets us the most noteworthy fact of all about our phi- losopher. I have already said that the outcome of Spi- noza's reflection is an adoration, an immovably peaceful reverence, for God's eternal order. What I have not yet said is, that the longing for such an object of adoration is the beginning as well as the end of his whole work. Spinoza has left us, in an essay on " The Improvement of the Understanding," a sort of confession of the course of thinking which led him to his final faith. This confession brings us at once upon ground that is familiar to every one who knows well the religious passion of humanity. The higher religious consciousness has its origin in the human heart in two interests. One is the interest of the moral being in finding some authority that may guide him in the conduct of his life. The other is the interest of the baffled and disappointed soul in coming into the pres- ence of some external truth, some reality that is perfect, that lacks our weakness, that is victorious even though we fail, that is good even though we are worthless. I must pause a moment to define and illustrate these two inter- THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 47 ests. They are both of them well known to all of you, whether you have succeeded in satisfying either of them or not. What you do not always see, until you reflect, is that they are really two interests, that they are often very hard to reconcile, that they lead you by two very different roads to faith, and are likely to lead to two sharply con- trasted sorts of faith. Spinoza, I am going to show you, had one of these interests very deeply, the other hardly at all. The religious interest of the first sort, I say, seeks an authoritative guide. If it finds one in some conceived deity, it rejoices. This deity is, in this case, above all a moral one. He directs me, and I follow. My delight, if I am devout, is then in the " law of the Lord.'' The law may be a ceremonial one ; then I build altars, offer sacrifices, hold solemn feasts. Or again, his law may be a law of righteousness of heart and life ; then, commanded by God, sure that he knows the right way and has shown it, I order my life as weU as I can according to this righteousness. I become just, merciful, charitable, strenu- ous. I don't ask so much who the Lord is, as what his will is. I may philosophize, but in that case my philoso- phy will be principally a moral philosophy. The subtle- ties of theology, the origin of evil, the nature of the divine plan, will concern me little. God wants me to work ; he asks service of me, not comprehension. As for the evils of life, I see that they are mostly the just pun- ishment of my sins ; I endure hardness as a good soldier. I know meanwhile that my will is free, that I can serve' the law of God if I want to, that there is one who does not serve this law, to wit, the devil, and that I must fight this devil and all his works wherever I see them. My philosophy consists in clear thinking about my duty ; my faith is an assurance that the right will somehow conquer ; my love is for all who desire God's kingdom to come ; my hope is for the victory that is near at hand, and for the 48 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. word, " Well done, good and faithful servant ! " The crown of life is beyond, the sword is in hand, the Lord directs the fight, and, best of all, he needs me to help him against the mighty, — needs me, for he says so. In fact his saying so is just what constitutes his law and my moral comfort. If he did not need me, my life would be vain ; in his need is my consolation. The world thus viewed is so simple, so directly present to you, so majestic, so inspiring I Love the Lord, love all his friends, and hate Satan. What could be plainer ? Here, you see, is the fine and sinewy religion of St. Christopher. The Lord is the strongest, fight on his side. He grants you a place in his service, how great is this reward ! This love of him and of his servants, how perfect and plain a doctrine ! " Love-making, how simple a matter ! No depths to explore, No heights in a life to ascend ! No disheartening before, No affrighting hereafter, — Love now will be love evermore." And true love will be the fulfilling of the law, — love of the good, warfare with ill. Here, then, says the active soul, is peace at length, the only true peace, — the peace of endless service, the rest of a glorious activity, the joy of life amongst the sons of God. After this fashion, then, the religion of duty meets the first of the two interests which I have been distinguishing. You all well know what religious faiths express this intere.st. Were I just now a practical teacher, I should leave you to enjoy the thrill of this sort of energetic devotion, and should not trouble you with the critical observation that there is quite another sort of religious interest in the world, which is not only very different from the "foi-egoing, but which is, in the first place aiid naturally, opposed thereto. Yet this other interest, this second source of religion, does exist in the human heart, and gives birth to some of the deepest forms of piety. I am here, not as a practical teacher, but as an observer of life, and it is THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 49 my duty, therefore, to call your attention to the variety of these two great interests, and then to show you that Spinoza's religious interest, profound, saintly, mystical as it was, belongs to the second sort. Life has its wounds as well as its weapons. Your moral hero occasionally sees not only thp discomfiture of Satan, but also the warm blood of his own mortal veins oozing forth as well. Or again, he finds himself an out- cast, as Spinoza was, who knows no army that wiU accept him, and who hears all human voices call him traitor. And then, indeed, he knows an experience that even the weaklings may aspire to share. He knows, namely, what it is to feel faint and sick at heart, and to see his own worthlessness. Then it occurs to him that perhaps the divine order, if haply it does really exist, may possibly need just his right arm a little less than he had thought. The idea is so commonplace a suggestion, after all. What more natural ? thinks the injured soul. Here I am, a mere writhing worm, ein truher Gast auf der dunkelen Erde, alone in infinite space, and I pretended to ask for guidance as to my petty conduct ! I pretended that the divine order needed just me ! Why did I pretend this ? Because of my pride, was it not ? I called this sort of thing piety, and then kindly offered my services to God, on the ground that he could do worse than to accept them, and with the observation that the rolls of his army were, before my accession, noteworthily incomplete. This, I called religion ; and now, what happens ? Fate moves on its own way ; I am wounded, cast down, weak, worthless. All his billows are gone over me. My righteousness, what worth was it in his sight ? Shall mortal man be just before God ? After all, if there is a moral order, is it not complete unto itself ? Did God wait all the eter- nities jintil I was ripened before He should triumph? Either he exists not at all, — and then, how shall I create him ? — or he exists, and then from eternity to eternity 60 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. he has triumphed. His holiness I cannot create. Let me, if haply I may, see it, worship it, enjoy it as wondering, contemplative, adoring, helpless onlooker, consoled, if at all, by the knowledge that thougli I fail and am lost, he is from everlasting to everlasting. I do not fear to seem unmindful of the dignity of the genuine religious consciousness when I thus present to you the curious and, in fact, paradoxical opposition be- tween its two typical moods and their interests. The affair is so vital and familiar an experience that nobody can have failed to pass through this change of mood or to come close upon the problem involved in it. For our- selves, as critics of life, we have just now only to look on while this second form of the religious consciousness develops itself before our eyes into the form in which it becomes immediately characteristic of Spinoza. The problem involved is, as a general philosophical question, one that will concern us much later on in our course, when I shall ask how we are really to solve, if at all, the paradoxical opposition between the active and the submis- sive forms of piety. For the time being I shall simply let the helpless mood of the defeated soul find its own form of religious faith. This form is the one embodied in many kinds of what is called mystical religion. For- give me if I dwell upon it a little. The digression will in the end aid us to comprehend Spinoza. This second mood, you have seen, began just now with a somewhat cynical despair, which looked at first sight rather unheroie, not to say immoral. Well, relatively U7i- moral this form of the religious consciousness remains to the end. It is not its office to inspire the warriors so much as to comfort the downcast and to succor the wounded. The honors and consolations of a noble office it has not to offer you. It finds you despairing, and it teaches you to despise even your despair, and to rejoice even in your fail- ure. After aU, look about you, and see what you have THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 51 learned. Is not the lesson of your defeat the lesson of the universal vanity of every individual undertaking of man ? And what more comforting than this lesson, if only you become wise enough to see that above aU these fail- ures of ours there is the strong and divine order that never strives or is weary, but that is eternally fresh in the youth of its perfection ? If you can but once see that God reigns, you will also see, says this mood, not only that mortals must fail, but that they deserve to fail, so idle is their trust in themselves, so sinful is their pride, so weak is everything in which they put their hope. If you want further illustration of this mood, you might, if you choose, take up that permanently charming record of experience, the old and thoroughly orthodox devotional book called " Imitation of Christ," and let it put into words this new feeling. Spinoza, very probably, never read this book, but, I call your special attention to it, we shall find him saying much the same thing, nur mit ein Bischen andern Worten. The burden of the " Imita- tion " is the old story of human defeat. Who could say worse things of life than these ? " How can the life of man be loved, seeing that it hath so many bitter things, that it is subjected to so many calamities and miseries ? How can it be even called life when it produces so many deaths and plagues ? " "I resolve that I will act bravely, but when a little temptation cometh, immediately I am in a great strait. Wonderfully small sometimes is the mat- ter whence a grievous temptation cometh, and whilst I imagine myself safe for a little space, when I am not con- sidering, I find myself often almost overcome by a little puff of wind." " Thou shalt lamentably fall away, if thou set a value upon any worldly thing." " To-day thou con- fest thy sins, and to-morrow thou committest again the sins thou didst confess." " What canst thou see any- where which can continue long under the sun ? Thou beUevest, perchance, that thou shalt be satisfied, but thou 52 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. wilt never be able to attain unto this. If tbou shouldst see all things before thee at once, what would it be but a vain vision ? " " Trust not thy feeling, for that which is now will be quickly changed into somewhat else." In brief, then, to sum up this whole pessimism of the devout author of the " Imitation," we, and all finite things about us, are utterly vain, and so, not only is our life a plague, but it ought to be a plague ; its miseries, its sins, its fail- ures, are not only inevitable, but they are somehow justi- fi.ed by our fatal worthlessness. Yet consider how just this pessimism about the finite is used, in the " Imitation," to produce and to sustain that exalted rapture in the contem- plation of the eternal which makes the " Imitation " so curiously consoling a book. The marvel of this contrast between the utter corruption of the finite and the glory of God, the singular effect of it all upon the reader, is one of the most marvelous psychological puzzles about this fasci- nating and, I may even add, dangerous work of genius. Herein lies the wiliness of that melancholy and yet in- spiring old work : it condemns your vanities until you are fairly ashamed of having even once tried to be ac- tively righteous with this weak will and this worthless nature of yours. The sword of your moral heroism turns to rust, and your whole warlike harness fairly rots away into nothingness as you read. Life is dust and ashes. Death, yes, annihilation, would be a relief to your hope- less self-condemnation. And yet, above all, glittering in the icy glories of its eternal frost, rises before you the sacred mountain of God's unapproachable grandeur. You look upwards to that, and lo ! like a shadow every trace of your misery has vanished. " When a man cometh to this, that he seeketh comfort from no created being, then doth he perfectly begin to enjoy God ; then also wiU he be well contented with whatsoever shall happen to him. He committeth himself altogether and with full trust unto God, who is all in all to him, to whom nothing perisheth THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 53 or dieth, but all things live to iim and obey his word without delay." " Let therefore nothing which thou doest seem to thee great ; let nothing be grand, nothing of value or beauty, nothing worthy of honor, nothing lofty, no- thing praiseworthy or desirable, save what is eternal. Let the eternal truth please thee above all things ; let thine own great vileness displease thee continually." Thus, then, as all readers of the " Imitation " know, the author, turning steadfastly from the finite, comes at last to a new life of contemplative freedom, a life where indeed positive action, service of the Lord with a sense that the Lord needs one, has small place, but where once more something called love inspires afresh the heart. This " love " of the " Imitation " is no longer the naive, child- like, warmly vital love of the optimistic warrior who in this world cheerfully serves God, like a St. Christopher, because God is the strongest. This new sort of love is a mystical adoration. It produces acts, but they are done in a dream-like sort of somnambulistic ecstasy ; they are the acts of one hypnotized, so to speak, by a long look heavenwards. Strength this love has, but it is the strength of gazing ; movement it has, but it is an anaes- thetic, unconscious sort of movement. " Love feeleth no burden, reckoneth not labors." This ansesthesia is not the willing work of the faithful servant so much as an incident of the rapturous wandering of one lost in God. " Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger, nothing loftier, nothing broader, nothing pleasanter, nothing fuller or better in heaven or earth ; for love was born of God and cannot rest save in God, above all created things. He who loveth, flyeth, runneth, and is glad ; he is free and not hindered ; he giveth all things for all things, and hath all things in all things, because he resteth in One who is high above all, from whom every good floweth and proceedeth. He looketh not for gifts, but turneth himself to the Giver above all good things. . . . Love is 54 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. watchful, and whilst sleeping still keeps watch; though fatigued it is not weary, though pressed it is not forced, though alarmed it is not terrified ; but like the living flame and the burning torch, it breaketh forth ou high, and securely triumpheth. If a man loveth, he knoweth what this voice crieth. For the ardent affection of the sonl is a great clamor in the ears of God, and it saith. My God, my Beloved! Thou art all mine, and I am all thine." V. I have dwelt upon the expressions of this kind of reli- gious interest as we find them in such orthodox books as the "Imitation," because I want to remind you of the peculiarities of the well-known mood of the mystics, in order to make the attitude of Spinoza, the heretic, more easily comprehensible. Spinoza's religious concern, I insist, is of this latter sort. He is n't a man of action ; his heroism, such as it is, is the heroism of contemplation. He is not always, let me tell you, in his religious mood ; and when he is not, he appears as a cynical observer of the vanity of mortal passions. But as religious thinker, he is no cynic. Unswervingly he turns from the world of finite hopes and joys ; patiently he renounces every sort of worldly comfort ; even the virtue that he seeks is not the virtue of the active man. There is one good thing, and that is the Infinite ; there is one wisdom, and that is to know God ; there is one sort of true love, and that is the submissive love of the saintly onlooker, who in the solitude of refiection sees everywhere an aU-pervading i law, an aU-conquering truth, a supreme and irresistible perfection. Sin is merely foolishness ; insight is the only virtue ; evil is nothing positive, but merely the depriva- tion of good ; there is nothing to lament in human affairs, except the foolishness itself of every lamentation. The wise man transcends lamentation, ceases to love finite things, ceases therefore to long and to be weary, ceases THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 55 to strive and to grow faint, offers no foolish service to God as a gift of his own, but possesses his own soul in knowing God, and therefore enters into the divine free- dom, by reason of a clear vision of the supreme and neces- sary laws of the eternal world. This, then, is the essence of Spinoza's religion. He begias his essay on the " Improvement of the Understand- ing " with words that we now are prepared to comprehend. This essay and the fifth part of the ethics show us Spi- noza's religious attitude and experience, elsewhere much veiled in his works. " After experience had taught me," says the essay, " that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile, seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else, whether there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness." Here is the starting-point. Life for Spinoza is in the ordinary world a vain life, because, for the first, it is our thinking that makes the things about us good or bad to us, and not any real value of the things themselves, whilst the transiency, the uncertainty of these finite things brings it about that, if we put our trust in them, they will erelong disappoint us. Eapidly, from this beginning, Spinoza rehearses the familiar tale of the emptiness of the life of sense and worldliness, the same tale that all the mystics repeat. The reader, who has never felt this experience of Spinoza and of the other mystics, always feels indeed as if such seeming pessimism must be largely mere sour-heartedness, or else as if the expression of it must be pure cant. But after all, in the world of spirit- ual experiences, this, too, is a valuable one to pass through and to record. Whoever has not sometime fully felt what 56 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. it is to have his whole world of finite ambitions and affec- tions through and through poisoned, will indeed not easily comprehend the gentle disdain with which Spinoza, in this essay, lightly brushes aside pleasure, wealth, fame, as equally and utterly worthless. We know, indeed, little of Spinoza's private life, but if we should judge from his words we should say that as exile he has felt just this bit- terness, and has conquered it, so that when he talks of vanity he knows whereof he speaks. People who have never walked in the gloomy outlying wastes of spii-itual darkness have never had the chance to find just the sort of divine light which he finally discovered there. These mystics, too, have their wealth of experience ; don't doubt their sincerity because they tell a strange tale. Don't doubt it even if, like Spinoza, they join with their mysticism other traits of the wonderftd Jewish character, — shrewd cynicism, for instance. When they call plea- sure and wealth and fame all dust and ashes, they possibly know whereof they speak, at least as far as concerns them-' selves alone. Spinoza, at any rate, twice in his life, re- fused, if his biographers are right, the offered chance to attain a competency. He declined these chances because, once for all, worldly means would prove an entanglement to him. He preferred his handicraft, and earned his liv- ing by polishing lenses. Steadfastly, moreover, as we know, he refused opportunities to get a popular fame, and even to make a worthily great name. The chief instance is his refusal of the professorship which the Elector Pala- tine offered him in 1673 at Heidelberg, under promise of complete freedom of teaching, and with the obvious chance of an European reputation. So Spinoza did not merely call the finite world names, as many do ; he meant his word, and he kept it. He was no sentimentalist, no emo- tional mystic. He was cool-headed, a lover of formulas and of mathematics ; but still he was none the less a true mystic. THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 67 Well, he finds the finite vain, because you have to pur- sue it, and then it deceives you, corrupts you, degrades you, and in the end fails you, being but a fleeting shadow after all. " I thus perceived," he says, " that I was in a state of great peril, and I compelled myself to seek with all my strength for a remedy, however uncertain it might be, as a sick man struggling with a deadly disease, when he sees that death wiU surely be upon him unless a remedy be found, is compelled to seek such a remedy with all his strength, inasmuch as his whole hope lies therein. All the objects pursued by the multitude not only bring no remedy that tends to preserve our being, but even act as hindrances, causing the death not seldom of those who possess them, and always of those who are possessed by them." " AU these evils," he continues, " seem to have arisen from the fact that our happiness or unhappiness has been made the mere creature of the thing that we happen to be loving. When a thing is not loved, no strife arises about it ,' there is no pang if it perishes, no envy if another bears it away, no fear, no hate ; yes, in a word, no tumult of soul. These things all come from loving that which perishes, such as the objects of which I have spoken. But love towards a thing eternal feasts the mind with joy alone, nor hath sadness any part therein. Hence this is to be prized above all, and to be sought for with all our might. I have used the words not at random, — ' If only I could be thorough in my seeking ; ' for I found that though I already saw all this in mind, I could not yet lay aside avarice and pleasure and ambition. Yet one thing I found, that as long as I was revolving these thoughts, so long those desires were always behind my back, whilst I strenuously sought the new light; and herein I found great comfort, for I saw that my disease was not beyond hope of physic. And although at first such times were rare, and endured but for a little space, yet as more and more the true good lighted up my mind, such times came quicker and endured longer." 58 THE SPIBIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. VI. : 'This, then, the beginning of Spinoza's Pilgrim's Pro- gress. But now for what distinguishes him from other mystics, and makes him a philosopher, not a mere ex- horter. He has his religious passion, he must reflect upon it. The passion any one might have who had passed through the dark experience of which we spoke a moment since. The philosopher must justify his faith. And how hard to justify such a faith it would seem in this cold and severe seventeenth century. It was an age, you remem- ber, when everything held to be at all occult was banished from the thoughts of the wise, and when clear thinking alone was believed in, when man, too, was held to be a mechanism, a curiously complicated natural machine, when Hobbes, greatest amongst the English speculative think- ers of the age — a writer much read by Spinoza — could declare that the word " spirit " was a meaningless sound, and that nothing exists but bodies and movements. How defend a mystical religious faith at such a moment? Spinoza's defense is so ingenious, so profound, so simple, as to give us one of the most noteworthy and dramatic systems ever constructed. Once more I assure you that I here expound only one aspect of his thought. I ignore his peculiar methods ; I ignore his technicalities ; I give you but the kernel of his doctrine concerning religious truth. Technicalities aside, this doctrine is essentially founded upon what Spinoza regards as the axiom that everything in the world must be either explained by its own nature, or by some higher natureV-' You explain a thing when you comprehend why it must he what it is. Thus, for instance, in geometry you know that all the diameters of any one circle must be precisely equal, and you know that this is so, because you see why it must be so.^ The diam- * See Eth. I. Axioms i. and ii. '^ See examples in the Tractat. de Emendat. Int. under the head of rules for definition. THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 59 eters are all drawn in the circle and through the centre of it, and the circle has a certain nature, a structure, a make, a build, whereby, for instance, you distinguish it from an oval or a square. This build, this make of the circle, it is that forces the diameters to be equal. They can't help being equal, being drawn through the centre of a curve which has no elongation, no bulge outwards in one direc= tion more than another, but which is evenly curved all around. The nature of the circle, then, at once forces the diameters to be equal, — pins them down to equality, hems in any rebellious diameter that should try to stretch out farther than the others, — and also explains to the reason of a geometer just why this result follows. My example is extremely dry and simple, but it will serve to show what Spinoza is thinking of. He says now, as some- thing self-evident, that anything in the world which does n't directly contain its own explanation must be a part of some larger nature of things which does explain it, and which, accordingly, forces it to be just what it is. For instance, to use my own illustration, if two mountains had precisely the same height, as the diameters of a cir- cle have precisely the same length, we should surely have to suppose something in the nature of the physical uni- verse which forced just these two mountains to have the same height. But, even so, as things actually are, we must suppose that whatever is or happens, in case it is not a self-evident and necessary thing, must have its explanation in some higher and larger nature of things. Thus, once more, you yourself are either what you are by virtue of your own self-evident and self-made nature, or else, as is the view of Spinoza, you are forced to be what you are by the causes that have produced you, and that have brought you here. Cause and explanation mean for Spinoza the same thing. He knows only rigidly math- ematical necessity. Yet more, not only you, but every act, every thought of yours, each quiver of your eyelashes, 60 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHr. each least shadow of feeling in your mind, must be just as much a result of the nature of things as your existence itself. Nothing comes by chance ; everything must be what it is. Could you see the world at oue glance, " under the form of eternity," you would see everything as a necessary result of the whole nature of things. It would be as plain to you that you must now have this quiver of eyelash or this shade of feeling ; it would be klso as plain to you why you must have these seemingly accidental ex- periences, as it is plain to the geometer why the evenly curved circle must forbid its diameters to be unequal. It is of the nature of reason to view things as necessary, as explicable, as results either of their own nature, or, if this is n't the case, then of the higher nature of things whereof they form a part. From this axiom, Spinoza proceeds, by a very short but thorny road, to the thought that, if this is so, there must be some one highest nature of things, which explains aU reality. That such highest nature exists, he regards as self-evident. The self-explaining must, of course, explain, and so make sure, its own existence. Spinoza shows by devices which I cannot here foUow that there couldn't be numerous self - explained and separate natures of things.^ The world is one, and so all the things in it must be parts of one self-evident, self-producing order, one nature. Spinoza conceives this order, describes its self-explaining and all-producing character, as well as he can, and then gives it a name elsewhere well known to philosophers, but used by him in his own sense. He calls the supreme nature of things the universal " Substance " of all the world. In it are we all ; it makes us what we are ; it does what its own nature determines ; it explains itself and all of us ; it is n't produced, it produces ; it is uncreate, supreme, overruling, omnipresent, absolute, ' Eth. I. prop. v. ; prop. viii. sohol. ii. ; props, xi. and xiv. ; Epist. zxzIt. (Hague edition). THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 61 rational, irreversible, unchangeable, the law of laws, the nature of natures ; and we — we, with all our acts, thoughts, feelings, life, relations, experiences — are just the result of it, the consequences of it, as the diameters are results of the nature of a circle. Feel, hoi^e, desire, choose, strive, as you will, all is in you because this uni- versal " substance " makes you what you are, forces you into this place in the nature of things, rules you as the higher truth rules the lower, as the wheel rules the spoke, as the storm rules the raindrop, as the tide rules the wavelet, as autumn rules the dead leaves, as the snow- drift rules the fallen snowflake ; and this substance is what Spinoza calls God. If you ask what sort of thing this substance is, the first answer is, it is something eternal ; and that means, not that it lasts a good while, but that no possible tem- poral view of it could exhaust its nature. ^ All things that happen result from the one substance. This surely means that what happens now and what happened mil- lions of years ago are, for the substance, equally present and necessary results. To illustrate once more in my own way : A spider creeping back and forth across a circle could, if she were geometrically disposed, measure out in temporal succession first this diameter and then that. Crawling first over one diameter, she would say, " I now find this so long." Afterwards examining another diame- ter, she would say, " It has now happened that what I have just measured proves to be precisely as long as what I measured some time since, and no longer." The toil of such a spider might last many hours, and be full of such successive measurements, each marked by a spun thread of web. But the true circle itself within which the web was spun, the circle in actual space as the geometer knows it, would its nature be thus a mere series of events, a mere succession of spun threads?^ No, the true circle ' Eth. I. def. viii. and Explicaiio. '' This illustration will easily be recognized as an effort at a para- 62 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. would be timeless, a truth founded in the nature of space, outlasting, preceding, determining all the weary web-spin- ning of this time-worn spider. Even so we, spinning our web of experience in all its dreary complication in the midst of the eternal nature of the world-embracing sub- stance, imagine that our lives somehow contain true nov- elty, discover for the substance what it never knew before, invent new forms of being. We fancy our past wholly past, and our future whoUy unmade. We think that where we have as yet spun no web there is nothing, and that what we long ago spun has vanished, broken by the winds of time, into nothingness. It is not so. For the eternal substance there is no before and after ; all truth is truth. " Far and forgot to me is near," it says. In the unvarying precision of its mathematical universe, aU is ■ eternally written. " Not all your piety nor wit Can lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your tears wash out one word of it." What will be for endless ages, what has been since time began, is in the one substance completely present, as in one scroll may be written the joys and sorrows of many lives, as one earth contains the dead of countless genera- tions, as one space enfolds all the limitless wealth of figured curves and of bodily forms. This substance, then, this eternal, is Spinoza's God. In describing it I have used terms, comparisons, and illustra- tions largely my own. I hope that I have been true to the spirit of Spinoza's thought. Eemember, then, of the substance that it is absolutely infinite and self-deter- mined ; that it exists completely and once for all ; that all the events of the world follow from it as the nature phrase of Eth. II. prop. viii. coroll. and schol., a passage where, as in the illustration above used, one finds presented, but not solved, the whole problem of the true relation of finite and infinite, temporal and eternal. THE PEKIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 63 of the diameter follows from the nature of the circle, and that as for yourself, it enfolds, overpowers, determines, produces both you and your destiny, as the storm em- braces the raindrop, and as the nature of a number deter- mines the value of its factors. Yet now you will ask one question more. This substance, so awful in its fatal per- fection, is it, you will say, something living and intelligent that I can revere, or is it something dead, a mere blind force ? Spinoza answers this question in a very original way. The substance, he says, must have infinitely numer- ous ways of expressing itself, each complete, rounded, seK-determined. It is like an infinite sacred scripture, translated into endlessly numerous tongues, but complete in each tongue. Of these self-expressions of the sub- stance, we mortals know only two. One is the material world, — Spinoza calls it body or bodily substance. The other is the inner world of thoughtV — Spinoza calls it thinking substance, or mind. These two worlds, Spinoza holds, are equally real, equally revelations of the one absolute truth, equally divine, equally full of God, equally expressions of the supreme order. But, for the rest, they are, as they exist here about us, mutually independent. The substance expresses itself in matter ; very well, then, all material nature is full of rigid and mathematical law : body moves body ; line determines line in space ; every- thing, including this bodily frame of ours, is an expres- sion of the extended or corporeal aspect or attribute of the substance. In stars and in clouds, in dust and in animals, in figures and in their geometrical properties, the eternal writes its nature, as in a vast hieroglyphic. Equally, however, the substance writes itself in the events and the laws of mental life.' And that it does so, the very existence of our own minds proves. Thought pro- duces thought, just as body moves body, while on the other hand it is inconceivable that mind should act on body, or body explain mind. And so these two orders, 64 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. mental and corporeal, are precisely parallel. For neither belongs to, or is part of, or is explained by, the other. Both, then, must be equally and independently expres- sions of God the substance. Hence, as each of the two orders expresses God's nature, each must be as omnipres- ent as the other. Wherever there is a body, God, says Spinoza, has a thought corresponding to that body. All nature is fuU of thought. Nothing exists but has its own mind, just as you have your mind. The more perfect body has, indeed, the more perfect mind ; a crowbar is n't as thoughtful as a man, because in the simplicity of its metallic hardness it finds less food for thought.^ But, all the same, the meanest of God's creatures has some sort of thought attached to it, not indeed produced or affected in any wise by the corporeal nature of this thing, but simply parallel thereto ; an expression, in cogitative or sentient terms, of the nature of the facts here present. Well, this thought is just as real an expression of the divine nature as is matter. There is just as much neces- sity, connection, completeness, mutual interdependence, rationality, eternity, in mind as in body. Of God's thought your thought is a part, just as your body is a part of the embodied substance. His thinking nature produces your ideas, as his corporeal nature produces your nerves. There is, however, no real influence of body over mind, or the reverse. The two are just parallel. The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and con- nection of things. Just so far as .your bodily life extends, so far and no further, in the mental world, extends your thought. You make nothing by your thinking but your own thoughts ; but as your body is a part of nature, so also is your mind a part of the infinite mind. " I declare," says Spinoza, in a letter to a friend, " I declare the human mind to be a part of nature, namely, because I hold that 1 The illustration is my own. The thought is that of Eth. II. prop. xiii. and the scholium thereto. THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 65 in nature there exists an infinite power of thinking, which power, so far as it is infinite, contains ideally the whole of nature, in such wise that its thoughts proceed in the same fashion as nature herself, being, in fact, the ideal mirror thereof.^ Hence follows that I hold the human mind to be simply this same power (of divine thought), not so far as it is infinite and perceives the whole of nature, but as far as it perceives alone the human body ; and thus I hold our human mind to be part of this infi- nite intellect." VII. I have thus led you a tedious way through this thorny path of Spinoza's thought. I have had no hope to make their connections all clear ; I shall be content if you bear in mind this as the outcome : our rea,son perceives the world to be one being, whose law is everywhere and eter- nally expressed. Only this eternal point of view shows us the truth. But if we are rational, we can assume such an eternal point of view, can see God everywhere, and can so enter, not merely with mystical longings, but with a clear insight into an immediate communion with the Lord of all being. And this Lord, he is indeed the author of matter. The earth, the sea, yes, the very geometrical figTires themselves write his truth in inanimate outward forms. But meanwhile (and herein lies the hope of our mystical religion) this substance, this deity, possesses and of its nature determines also and equally an infinite mind, of whose supreme perfection our minds are fragments. We are thus not only the sons of God ; so far as we are wise our lives are hid in God, we are in Him, of Him ; we recognize this indwelling, we lose our finiteness in Him, we become filled with the peace which the eternal brings ; we calm the thirst of our helpless finite passion by entering consciously into his eternal self-possession ^ Nimirum ejus ideatum, the corrected reading of the Hague edi- tion of Van Vloten and Land. See Epist. xxxii. p. 130. 66 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. and freedom. For the true mind, like the true natural order, knows nothing of the bondage of time, thinks of no before and after, has no fortune, dreads nothing, la/- ments nothing ; but enjoys its own endlessness, its own completeness, has all things in all things, and so cries, like the lover of the " Imitation," "My Beloved, I am all thine, and thou art all mine." In the fifth part of Spinoza's " Ethics," his own descrip- tion of the wise man's love of God closes his wonderful exposition. This love is superior to fortune, renounces aU hopes and escapes aU fears, feeds alone on the thought that God's mind is the only mind, loves God with a frag- ment of " that very love wherewith God loves himself." The wise man thus wanders on earth in whatever state you wiU, — poor, an outcast, weak, near to bodily death ; but " his meditation is not of death, but of life ; " of the eternal life whereof he is a part, and has ever been and ever will be a part. You may bound him in a nut-shell, but be counts himself king of infinite space ; and rightly, for the bad dreams of this phantom life have ceased to trouble him. " His blessedness," says Spinoza, " is not the reward of his virtue, but his virtue itself. He re- joices therein, not because he has controlled his lusts ; con- trariwise, because he rejoices therein, the lusts of the finite have no power over him." "Thus appears how potent, then, is the wise man, and how much he surpasses the igno- rant man, who is driven only by his lusts. For the igno- rant man is not only distracted in various ways by exter- nal causes, without ever gaining true acquiescence of mind, but moreover lives, as it were, unwitting of him- self and of God and of things, and, as soon as he ceases to suffer, ceases also to be. Whereas the wise man, in so far as he is regarded as such, is scarcely at aU disturbed in spirit, but being conscious of himself and of God and of things, by a certain eternal necessity, never ceases to be, but always possesses true acquiescence of his spirit. THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 67 K the way which I have pointed out as leading to this result seems exceedingly hard, it may, nevertheless, be discovered. Needs must it be hard since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected ? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare." With these words closes the book of Spinoza's expe- rience. LECTUKE in. THE BEDISCOVEBT OP THE INNER LIFE: FEOM SPINOZA TO KANT. In the lecture of to-day, as I must frankly assure you at tlie outset, our path lies for the most part in far less inspiring regions than those into which, at the last time, Spinoza guided us. You are well acquainted with a fact of life to which I may as well call your attention forthwith, the fact, namely, that certain stages of growing intelligence, and even of growing spiritual knowledge, are marked by an inevitable, and, at first sight, lamentable decline, in apparent depth and vitality of spiritual experience. The greatest concerns of our lives are, in such stages of our growth, somehow for a while hidden, even forgotten. We become more knowing, more clever, more critical, more wary, more skeptical, but we seemingly do not grow more profound or more reverent. We find in the world much that engages our curious attention ; we find little that is sublime. Our world becomes clearer ; a brilliant, hard, mid-morning light shines upon everything ; but this light does not seem to us any longer divine. The deeper beauty of the universe fades out; only facts and pro- blems are left. Such a stage in human experience is represented, in great part, by the philosophical thinkers who flourish between the time of Spinoza's death, in 1677, and the appearance of Kant's chief philosophical work, " The Cri- tique of Pure Reason," in 1781. It is the period which THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 69 has he&\ especially associated, in historical tradition, with the eigh'ieenth century, so that when one speaks of the spirit of the eighteenth century, he is likely to be refer- ring to this skeptical and critical mood, to this hard, mid- morning light of the bare understanding, beneath which most of these thinkers of our period saw all their world lying. When I undertake to describe such a time, I therefore feel in its spirit a strong contrast to that curious but profound sort of piety which we were describing in the last lecture in the case of Spinoza. Spinoza, indeed, was in respect of his piety a man of marked limitations. His world had but one sublime feature in it, one element of religious significance, namely, the perfection of the divine substance. But then this one element was enough, from his point of view, to insure an elevated and un- troubled repose of faith and love, which justified us in drawing a parallel between his religious consciousness and that of the author of the "Imitation of Christ." This sort of piety almost disappears from the popular philos- ophy of the early eighteenth century. What the people of that time want is more light and fewer unproved as- sumptions. As against the earlier seventeenth -century thinkers, who, as you remember, also abhorred the occult, and trusted in reason, the thinkers of this new age are char- acterized by the fact that on the whole they have a great and increasing suspicion of even that rigid mathematical method of research itself upon which men like Spinoza had relied. In other words, whereas the men of the middle of the seventeenth century had trusted to reason alone, the men of the subsequent period began, first hesi- tatingly, and then more and more seriously, to distrust even human reason itself. After all, can you spin a world, as Spinoza did, out of a few axioms ? Can you permanently revere a divine order that is perhaps the mere creature of the assumptions with which your system 70 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. happened to start? The men of the new age %re not ready to answer " Yes " to such questions. They must re- flect, they must peer into reason itself. They nust ask, Whence arise these axioms, how come we by our knowledge, of what account are our mathematical demonstrations, and of what, after all, does our limited human nature permit us to be sure ? Once started upon this career, the thought of the time is driven more and more, as we have already said, to the study of human nature, as opposed to the ex- clusive study of the physical universe. The whole range of human passion, so far as the eighteenth century knew about it, is criticised, but for a good while in a cautious, analytical, cruelly scrutinizing way, as if it were all some- thing suspicious, misleading, superstitious. The coldness of the seventeenth century is still in the air ; but Spi- noza's sense of sublimity is gone. Spinoza himself, you remember, had altogether rejected, as occult, everything miraculous, marvelous, extra-natural. Not the thunder or the earthquake or the fire could for him contain God ; God was in the still small voice that the wise man alone heard. Now the popular philosophy of the eighteenth century more and more approached a position which unconsciously agreed with Spinoza's in a number of respects. It cor- dially recognized, for instance, that the earthquake, say the great Lisbon earthquake of 1758, was a fearful thing, but that God was very certainly not in that earthquake. It could readily make out the same thing concerning any amount of thunder, fire, or wind that you might produce for inspection. But it went one step further than Spi- noza's wise man, and was forced to observe, that, after con- siderable scrutiny, it had as yet been able to detect in the world of reason and experience no still, small voice what- soever. That at least, as I say, was the outcome of a considerable portion of the thought of the time. It was indeed not the outcome of aU the thinking of this age. In Leibnitz, who was a younger contemporary of Spinoza, and THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 71 who flourished in the closing decades of the seventeenth century, and at the beginning of the new period, philo- sophical theology found an expositor of the greatest specu- lative ingenuity and of the most positive tendency. Later, in the ever-fascinating Bishop Berkeley, not merely theo- logical doctrine, but a profoundly spiritual idealism got voice. In Rousseau, a new era of sentimental piety found its beginning, and all this movement led erelong to Kant himself. But for the moment I am speaking of tenden- cies in a most general way, and this negative, this cautious, skeptical attitude, is the one most observable in the phi- losophy of our period. Those of us who look to philosophy for positive expe- riences, rather than for technical instruction, will at first sight regard such a period as this with some natural indifference. The skeptic is not always an interesting person ; but then, you must remember, as skeptic he does n't want to be interesting. He only wishes to be honest. He is meanwhile not only to be tolerated; he is also indispensable. Philosophical thought that has never been skeptical is sure not to be deep. The soul that never has doubted does not know whether it believes ; and at all events the thinker who has not dwelt long in doubt has no rights to high rank as a reflective person. In fact, a studyi of history shows that if there is anything that human thought and cultivation have to be deeply thankful for, it is an occasional but truly great and fearless age of doubt. You may rightly say that doubt has no value in itself. Its value is in what it leads to. But then consider what ages of doubt have led to. Such an age in Greece pro- duced that father of every humane sort of philosophizing, Socrates. The same age nourished with doubts the di- vine thought of Plato. Another and yet sterner age of doubt brought about the beginnings of Christian thought, prepared the Roman empire for the new faith, and saved 72 THE SPIRIT OP MODERN PHILOSOPHY. the world from being ruined by the multitudinous fanati- cal rivals of Christianity. Yet a third great age of doubt began, at the Renaissance, the history of modern literature, and made the way plain for whatever was soundest about the Reformation. And a fourth age of doubt, the one under our consideration in this present lecture, proved more fruitful for good to humanity than a half dozen centuries of faith had done at another time. For, as we shall see, this eighteenth-century doubting drove thinkers from the study of nature to the study first of human reason, then of human conscience, then of all the human heart and soul, and meanwhUe cleared the way for those triumphs of the spirit over great evils which have taken place from the moment of the French Revolution until now. Despise not doubting ; it is often the best service thinking men can render to their age. Condemn it not ; it is often the truest piety. And when I say this I do not meat! merely to repeat cant phrases. I speak with reason. [ Doubt is never the proper end of thinking, but it is a good beginning. The wealth of truth which our life, our age, our civilization, our religion, our own hearts may contain, is not quite our property until we have won it. And we can win it only when we have first doubted the superficial forms in which at the outset it presents itself to our apprehension. Every true lover has in the beginning of his love grave doubts of his beloved's affection for him. And such doubts often take on bitter and even cynical forms in his soul in the various bad quarters of an hour that fall to his lot. Doubt, however, is not the foe, but the very inspirer of his love. It means that the be- loved is yet to be won. It means that the simple warmth of his aspiration is n't enough, and that, if the beloved is worth winning, she is worth wooing through doubt and uncertainty for a good while. Moreover, it is not the fashion of the beloved, in the typical case, to be especially forward in quelling such doubts, by making clear her atti- THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 73 tude too soon. If it were, love-making might be a simpler affair, but would not be so significant an experience as it is. Doubt is the cloud that is needed as a background for love's rainbow. Even so it is, however, in the world of abstracter thought. The more serious faiths of humanity can only be won, if at all, by virtue of much doubting. The divine truth is essentially coy. You woo her, you toil for her, you reflect upon her by night and by day, you search through books, study nature, make experiments, dissect brains, hold learned disputations, take counsel of the wise ; in fine, you prepare your own ripest thought, and lay it before your heavenly mistress when you have done your best. Will she be pleased ? Will she reward you with a glance of approval ? Will she say. Thou hast weU spoken concerning me ? Who can teU. ? Her eyes have their own beautiful fashion of looking far off when you want them to be turned upon you ; and, after all, perhaps she prefers other suitors for her favor. The knowledge that she is of sufficiently exalted dignity to be indifferent to you, if she chooses, is what constitutes the mood known as philosophical skepticism. You see that, in sound- hearted thinkers, it is like the true lover's doubt whether his unwon mistress regards him kindly or no. It is not, then, a deadening and weakening mood ; it is the very soul of philosophical earnestness. Meanwhile, in describing the skepticism of our period I am far from wishing to trouble you with its endlessly varied technical subtleties. These lectures are throughout selective, and they sacrifice numberless intrinsically im- portant aspects of our various subjects, in order to be able to seize upon a few significant features, and to hold these up to your view. I cannot warn you too much that there is no chance of completeness of treatment anywhere in the course of our brief work together. I spared you, in the last lecture, whole cargoes of problems which are consigned to every special student of Spinoza. I shall omit in this 74 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. every mention of innumerable significant features in the philosophy of our present period. All this is a matter of course. I remind you of it only to excuse au immediate and somewhat dry statement of the few features of this eighteenth-century skepticism to which I intend to con- fine myself in what follows. II. There are certain philosophic problems of which you are sure, sooner or later, to have heard something in general literature, and for which the time from Spinoza to Kant is at least partially responsible. I want to set forth a little of the growth of these problems, never forgetting, I hope, that they interest us here in their human rather than in their technical aspects, and that we are above all con- cerned in them as leading to Kant himself, and to those who came after him. And my selection is as follows : — You have all heard about the controversy as to whether man's knowledge of more significant truth is innate, or whether it comes to him from without, through his senses ; or, otherwise, as to whether the mind at birth is a tabula rasa, a blank white piece of innocent paper, upon which experience writes whatever it will, or whether the soul is endowed from the start with certain inborn ration- al possessions, — a divine law, for instance, written on the tablets of the heart, a divine wisdom about number and space, registered in some imperishable form in our very structures. You may have met with more or less elabo- rate arguments upon this topic. I do not know whether it has ever had more than the interest of a curious problem to many of us. I do know that in many styles of treat- ment it must appear as a sort of hackneyed debating-club question, an apparently excellent one of its sort, but a rather dry bone of contention, after all. But you now know that philosophic research is no affaii of the debating clubs, but a struggle of humanity to make THE BEDISCOVEEY OF THE INNER LIFE. 75 its own deepest interests articulate, and therefore you will not expect me to deal with this question after the forensic fashion. What I want to do is this : — I want to suggest summarily the origin of the contro- versy about the innate ideas, and to show you what inter- est first led men to the question. Then, I want to indicate the value of the controversy as bringing about that study of man's inner life which, at the close of the century, bore fruit in the great Komantic movement itself. Fi-, naUy, I want to narrate how the problems erelong took form, what skeptical outcome the discussion, upon one side, seemed to have, and what solution, what re-winning of the great spiritual faiths of humanity, it suggested on the other. In this way I shall try to prepare you for that stupendous revolution of philosophic thought which is associated with the name of Kant. For the first, then, as to the origin of the controversy about the innate ideas. I shall not go back farther in the history of thought than to Descartes, 1596-1650, a predecessor of Spinoza, and the man whose name usually begins the lists of modern philosophers proper, as they are set forth in the text-books of the history of philosophy. Had I been engaged in technical teaching, it would have been my duty, in the last lecture, to describe the highly interesting relation in which Spinoza's doctrine stands to that of his predecessor. As it is, I have so far passed Descartes over. At present I must mention, in a word, one or two features of his doctrine. Descartes had early become dissatisfied with the scholastic philosophy which he had learned at Jesuit hands, and decided to think out a system for himself. He began his reasoning by a formal philosophical doubt about everything that could conceivably be doubted, and then proceeded to examine whether any unassailable certainty was still left him. He found such an absolutely unassailable assurance in his own existence as a thinking being, and accordingly began 76 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. his positive doctrine with the famous principle, " Cogito, ergo sum, " " I think, and so I exist. " He proceeded from this beginning to prove the existence of God, and then the existence of two so-called substances, mind and matter, as comprising the whole world of which we mortals know anything. The laws of matter he found to be those of mathematics, and of the elementary physics of his time. Of mind he also studied the constitution as well as he could, and the result appeared in several elaborate works. Now the principle on which Descartes proceeded through- out his investigations was this: "My own existence is the standard assurance of ray thought. I know that / at least am. But surely, if, on examining some principle, say an axiom in geometry, I perceive that it is as plain to me, as clear, as distinct, as is my own existence, then indeed it must be as certain a truth as my existence." This, I say, was his way of procedure, whenever he was puzzled about a principle. " Is it as clear to me as my own existence ; or can I somehow make it as clear and dis- tinct ? Well, then, it is true. Is it less clear ? Then I must examine it stiU further, or lay it aside as doubtful." By this fashion of procedure, which Descartes regarded as the typically rational one, he managed to collect after a time a very goodly stock of sure and clear principles. Others have n't always found them aU as clear and sure as did Descartes, but that concerns us not now. Well, Descartes had a name, or in fact a brace of names, for these principles of his. He called them " eternal truths," and he also called them " innate " ideas or truths. We know them because it is of the nature of our reason to know them. We know them whenever we come to look at them squarely, whether we ever saw them in this light before or not. That 2 + 2 = 4, that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other, these are examples of such truths. They are as clear to me as that I myself exist. They are clear to me because my reason makes them so, and that is THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 77 the sort of reason I have. They are innate in me. I don't see them with my bodily eyes. I just know them, be- cause I do know them, and I know them also to be eternal. Innate truths then, for Descartes, are of this sort. He is n't so much interested in finding out how so many truths could be innate in one poor little human soul all at once, as he is interested in singling them out and writ- ing down bookfuls of them. The seventeenth century, you remember, was not much interested in man him- self, but was very much interested in eternal truth. Hence Descartes makes light of the problem how all this thought-stuff could somehow be innate in a soul with- out the poor soul's ever even guessing the fact until it had studied philosophy. Yet of course if one becomes strongly interested in human nature for its own sake, this problem which Descartes ignored must come to the front. The true interest of this problem, then, lies in the fact that by reflecting upon it philosophers have been led to some of the deepest undertakings of modern thought. For the moment it comes up as a question of mere idle curiosity. As such, however, the question was rather tauntingly suggested to Descartes himself by certain of his opponents. " How can so many ideas be innate ? " they said. " Observe, children don't know these truths of yours, and could n't even grasp them. Much less could infants. And yet you call them innate." Descartes, thus chal- lenged, replied curtly, but not unskillfuUy. They may be innate, he said (in substance), as predispositions, which in infants have n't yet grown to conscious rank. The thing is simple enough. In certain families, so Descartes fur- ther explains (I do not quote his words but give their sense), good-breeding and the gout are innate. Yet of course, as he implies, the children of such families have to be instructed in deportment, and the infants just learn- ing to walk seem happily quite free from gout. Even so, geometry is innate in us, but it does n't come to our 78 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. consciousness without much trouble. With the taunting questions put to Descartes, and his example about the heredity of good-breeding and the gout, the question of the innate ideas enters modern philosophy. It was later to grow much more important. ni. In Locke's famous " Essay on the Human Understand- ing," published in 1689-90, the investigation may be said to have been fairly opened. Locke was born in the same year as Spinoza. Had he died when Spinoza died, the English thinker would never have been heard of in the history of thought. In Locke's patient devotion to a detailed inves- tigation, we find a quality that reminds us of the most marked characteristic of another great Englishman, the scientific hero of our own day, Darwin. Locke was early busy with philosophy, natural science, and medicine. Later, he was for a short time abroad, in diplomatic ser- vice, and then lived long as the intimate friend of Lord Anthony Ashley, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury, whose political fortunes he followed. His whole life was a min- gling of study, private teaching, writing and practical poli- tics. His character is thoroughly English. There is that typical clearness in seizing and developing his own chief ideas, and that manly, almost classically finished stubbornness as against all foreign, mystical, and especially Continental ideas, which usually mark the elder English thinkers. Give Locke a profound problem like that of the Lreedom of the will, and he flounders helplessly. Ask him to look at things from a novel point of view, and he cannot imagine what fancy you can be dreaming of. But leave him to himself, and he shows you within his own range a fine, sensible, wholesome man at work, a thorough man, who has seen the world of business as well as the world of study, and who believes in business-like meth- ods in his philosophy. His style, to be sure, is endlessly THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 79 diffuse, yet without being precisely wearisome, because, after all, it is itseK the diiifuseness of a man of business, whose accounts cover many and various transactions, and who has to set down all the items. Nobody can fail to respect Locke, unless, to be sure, his work is employed as a text-book for classes that are too immature to grapple with him. It has too frequently been thus abused, to the great injury of the excellent man's popular fame. Locke made, as everybody knows, short work of all in- nate ideas. He found none. Infants, with their rattles, show no sign of being aware that things which are equal to the same things are equal to each other. Locke him- self, to be sure, is a poor expert concerning infants, as is evident from many things that he says about them, in the course of his book, but as to this matter he is not only confident but right. As for the hereditary predispositions, similar to good-breeding and the gout, Locke in one or two passages recognizes that there may, indeed must be, such things. But he does not see of what service they -could be in forming knowledge, were it not for our senses. What interests us most in Locke, however, is not this 'negative part of his argument, but bis general view of theJ nature, powers and scope of human reason, a view whicH introduces a whole century of research into man's inner life. In the preface to his Essay, Locke describes to us the history of his book. " Were it fit," he says, ad- dressing the reader, " to trouble thee with the history of this essay, I should teU thee that five or six friends meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand by the difficulties that rose on every side. Af- ter we had awhile puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course, and that before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see 80 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with. This I proposed to the company, who all readily assented ; and thereupon it was agreed that this should be our first inquiry. Some hasty and undigested thoughts on a subject I had never before considered, which I set down against our next meeting, gave the first en- trance into this discourse ; which, having been thus begun by chance, was continued by entreaty ; written by incoher- ent parcels ; and, after long intervals of neglect, resumed again, as my humor or occasions permitted, and at last, in a retirement, where an attendance on my health gave me leisure, it was brought into that order thou now seest it." In this modest way Locke introduces a book whose historical value lies precisely in this insistence upon the importance of knowing our own understandings, as a pre- liminary to every sort of research. And how great this historical value of the book ! Locke and his five or six friends fall to discussing, in club fashion, certain unnamed problems. They find themselves in a quandary. Locke proposes that they go back on their own track a little and study the structure and powers of the understanding itself. He himself begins the analysis, the entreaty of his friends leads him to continue the research. The result is a big book, sensible, many-sided, influential. It arouses a great controversy, and herefrom springs, first the philosophic movement from Locke through Leibnitz, through the won- derful Berkeley, through the ingenious, fearless, and doubting Hume, to Kant himself, and European thought is transformed. Meanwhile, from the same root grow other inquiries into the mind of man. The great English moralists of the eighteenth century, a stately row, Shaftes- bury, Hutcheson, Butler, Adam Smith, and Hume once more, set forth the mysteries of the moral consciousness. The general public is aroused. A subjective, a humane mode of inquiry becomes everywhere prominent. Much of aU this is cold and skeptical in tone. In France it gives THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 81 US the encyclopedists, such as Diderot. But the same movement also gives us Rousseau. The modern novel, too, that great analyst of the mind and the heart of every man, takes its rise. I think I am not wrong; in attribut- ing the novel largely to that interest in analysis for which Locke stood. Yonder mere outer nature is no longer everything. And erelong, lo ! almost before they know it, the nations of Europe themselves are once more plunged into the very midst of the great problems of the spirit. For at length the inquiry loses its negative and skeptical air altogether. The world glows afresh. Pas- sion, brought by all this out of its hiding-places, grows hot ; men have once more found something to die for ; and what they learn to die for in the revolutionary period is the inner life. They die for the freedom of the subject ; for the sacred rights of humanity ; for the destruction of inhuman and despotic restraints. They make, indeed, vast blunders in all this, behead an innocent queen, set up a new despotjMerelyiMcause.his^ule is n't traditional, -die amid the snows of Russia for a bare whim, in short sin atro- ciously, but meanwhile they cleanse Europe of a whole dead world of irrationalisms ; they glorify the human na- ture that can endure and suffer so much for the sake of coming to possess itself ; they create our modern world. And all this, I say, because they had rediscovered the inner life. / Do I seem to exaggerate the significance of the mere 'thinker and his work? I assure you that I do not. My idea of the mission of the philosopher is, I insist, a very moderate one. As I have several times said, h e does n' t create the pas sions of m enj.hgjaake8 no new ideal s. His on^miigion-is-ta-direcfcjthe-attpnt.inn nf maTi t.n t.TiA pag— sions and ideals which they already_pQssess. He doubts, aiiatyzesTpries into this^nd that ; and men say. How dry, how repellent, how unpractical, how remote from life. But, after all, he is prying into the secret places of the S'2 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. lightning of Jove ; for these thoughts and passions upon which he reflects move the world. He says to his time : This and this hast thou, — this sense of the rights of man, a sword of the spirit, fashioned to slay tyrants ; — this love of liberty, an ideal banner bequeathed thee by a sacred past to cherish, as the soldiers of old cherished the stand- ard beneath which they conquered the world. Such things he says always, to be sure, in his own technical way, and for a time nobody finds it out at all or even reads his books. But at length discussion begins to spread, the word of wisdom flies from one book to another, and finally the people hear. They look at the sword and at the ban- ner. No philosopher made these. They are simply hu- manity's own treasures. The philosopher had the sole service of calling attention to them, because, in the course of his critical research, he found them. But the redis- covery, how great its significance ! I suppose that you have frequently heard it said that the philosophers had much to do with making the French Revolution, and you have wondered how this was. You may also have won- dered how this was consistent with our view that philoso- phers are the mere critics of life. I show you the solution. The critic creates nothing, he only points out. But his pointing may show you powers that were indeed always there, and that were even effective, but that, once afresh seen, suggest to active passion a thousand devices whereby the world is revolutionized. We return to Locke. By an inquiry of the sort which he has described to us, he had sought to comprehend the nature and the limits of our understanding. He had, as we saw, decided that innate ideas cannot do anything for know- ledge. And the force of this notion of Locke's really was that, according to him, it is useless to assume, as the basis of our human reason, anything occult, mysterious, opaque, hidden away in the recesses of the mind. The real cause of Locke's hatred of innate ideas is his horror of anything THE BEDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 83 mystical. If thought is not to be clear, what shall be clear ? Hence, if you pretend to have any knowledge, you must be prepared to tell where it comes from. It won't do to appeal, as Descartes did, to a certain impression of the clearness and distinctness of your ideas. Their origin wiU decide their value. And what is this origin ? Locke puts the question plainly, at the beginning of the second book of his Essay, and answers it in a general way. I quote the whole passage : — " Let us, then, suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas ; how comes it to be furnished ? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety ? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge ? To this I answer, in one word. From Experience ; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our ob- servation, employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with aU the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge from whence all the ideas we have or can naturally have do spring." " First," he continues, " our senses, conversant about particular sen- sible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct per- ceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them ; and thus we come by those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bit- ter, sweet, and aU those which we call sensible qualities ; which when I say that the senses convey into the mind, I mean, that they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions. This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the understand- ing, I call Sensation. " Secondly, the other fountain, from which experience 84 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. fumisheth the understanding with ideas, is the perception of the operations of our mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got ; which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the under- standing with another set of ideas, which could not be had from things without; and such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own minds. . . . This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself ; and though it be not sense, . . . yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other sensation, so I call this Reflection, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself. . . . These two, I say, namely, external material things, as the objects of sensation, and the operations of our own minds within, as the objects of reflection, are to me the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings." So much, then, for Locke's notion of how we come by knowledge. I quote him at this length, because his view was of such critical importance in what followed in all European thought. You will ask at once. What sort of a real world did Locke manage to make out of this material of bare sensa- tions and reflections? We see, touch, smell, taste this our world, and then we reflectively observe of ourselves that we are doubting, willing, hoping, loving, hating, think- ing, and thus we get all our knowledge. That is all the mind we have. That is the human understanding. Such at least is Locke's view. But what does it aU come to ? Is the result a materialism pure and simple, or is it a skep- ticism ? Not so. Locke was an Englishman ; he saw, heard, smelt, tasted, what his feUow-countrymen also did ; and he reflected iipon all this after much their fashion. His world, therefore, is the world of the liberal English thinker of his day. He believes in matter and its laws, THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 85 in God also, and in revelation, in duty and in the human rights of the British freeman, and in the Essay he tries to show how just such things can be known to us through bare seeing, hearing, tasting, and the rest, coupled with reflection upon what we are doing. There is nothing revolutionary about Locke's own view of his world, great as was the revolution that he prepared. By touch we learn that there are substances about us, solid, space-oc- cupying, numerous, movable. By aU our senses we learn that these substances have many curious properties, how or why brought about, we cannot discover. Sugar is sweet ; gold is yellow ; various drugs have specific effects in curing diseases ; water flows ; iron is rigid ; every sub- stance is as God wills it to be. These things are so, because we find them so. Meanwhile, being reflective Englishmen, we can't help observing that all these things require God to create them what they are, because, as one sees, things always have adequate causes; and our minds, too, being realities, must have been made by a thinker. Moreover, a fair study of the evidence of reve- lation wiU convince any reasonable person of the essential truths of the Christian religion, and that is enough. You will not find this world of Locke an exciting one. But remember, after aU, what it is that he has done for us. He has tried hard to remove every mystery from the nature of human reason. Because innate ideas, the eternal truths of Descartes, were mysterious, he has thrown them over- board. Experience it is that writes everything on the blank tablet of the mind. But thus viewing things, Locke has only given us a new mystery. Can experience, mere smelling, tasting, seeing, together with bare reflection, do all this for us, — give us God, religion, reality, our whole English world ? Then surely what a marvelous treasure- house is this experience itself ! Surely ages will be needed to comprehend it. Locke cannot have finished it off thus in one essay. 86 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. And indeed he Las not done so. His book is the mere beginning both of the psychology of experience, and of discussions about the nature and limit of consciousness. The truly important argument over Locke's problems was opened by Leibnitz, the great Continental thinker, whose views I must entirely pass over, vastly important as they are, and that the less unwillingly just now because his answer to Locke, written about 1700, was not pub- lished until many years after his own death. I must, how- ever, ask you to examine the next step forward in English philosophical reflection, the one taken by the admirable and fascinating Berkeley. IV. The world that Locke found with his senses is at once too poor and too much encumbered for Berkeley's young enthusiasm. Berkeley is a born child of Plato, a lineal descendant of a race whose origin is never very far off, and is divine. Men of Berkeley's type are born to see God face to face ; and when they see him, they do so without fear, without mystical trembling, without being driven to dark and lofty speech.- They take the whole thing as a matter of course. They tell you of it frankly, gently, simply, and with a beautiful childlike surprise that your eyes are not always as open as their own. Meanwhile, they are true philosophers, keen in dialectic, skiUful in the thrust and parry of debate, a little loqua- cious, but never wearisome. Of the physical world they know comparatively little, but what they know they love very much. A very few lines of philosophical research they pursue eagerly, minutely, fruitfully ; concerning others they can make nothing but the most superficial remarks. They produce books young, and with marvel- ous facility. They have a full-fledged system ready by the time they are twenty-five. They will write an immortal work, as it were, over night. They are, for the rest, through THE KEDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 87 and through poetical. Each one of their essays will be as crisp and delicate as a good sonnet. Yet what they lack is elaboration, wiliness, and architectural massiveness of research. They take after Plato, their father, as to grace and ingenuity. His life-long patience and mature pro- ductiveness they never reach. The world finds them par- adoxical; refutes them again and again with a certain Philistine ferocity ; makes naught of them in hundreds of 1, learned volumes ; but returns ever afresh to the hopeless'' task of keeping them permanently naught. In the heaven of reflection, amongst the philosophical angels who con- template the beatific vision of the divine essence, such spirits occupy neither the place of the archangels, nor of those who speed o'er land and sea, nor yet of those who only stand and wait. Their office is a less serious one. They cast glances now and then at this inspiring aspect or at that of the divine essence, sing quite their own song in its praise, find little in most of the other angels that can entertain them, and spend their time for the most part in gentle private musings, many of which (for so Berkeley's own portrait suggests to me) they apparently find far too pretty to be uttered at all. We admire them, we may even love them ; yet no one would call them precisely heroes of contemplation. They themselves shed no tears, but they also begin no revolutions, are apostles of no world-wide movements. Berkeley's grandly simple accomplishment, as yoii^ know, lay in his observation that in the world of the senses, i in the world of experience, as Locke knew it, there was properly no such thing as material substance discoverable at all. The world of sense-experience, said Berkeley, is a world of ideas. I have an idea, say of this fruit. It is a complex idea. The fruit is round, soft, pleasant, to the taste, orange-colored, and the rest. But then, as you see, all these things that I know about the fruit are just my ideas. Were I in the dark, the fruit would have no color. 88 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Do I refuse to bite it, the taste of it remains a bare pos^- bility, not a fact. And so as to all the other properties of the fruit. All these exist for me in so far as I have ideas of them. Have I no idea of a thing, then it exists not for me. This is Berkeley's fundamental thought, but he does not leave it in such absolute and crude simplicity as this. His deeper significance lies in the fact that he carries out in a new field an analysis of our inner life, namely, of a portion of the process of knowledge. His grandly sim- ple idea, here applied, leads to very engaging results ; but they are results which no other philosopher would be likely to accept without at once carrying them further than did Berkeley. The young student of Trinity College early became fascinated with the problem of the theory of vision. We seem to see objects about us in a space of three dimensions. These objects look solid, move about, stand in space relations to one another. But now, after all, how can we possibly see distance ? Distance runs directly outward from my eyes ; my eyes are at the surface of my body, and a distant object is not ; my eyes are affected where they are, and, for the rest, not the distance of the opposite wall as such affects me, but the wall in so far as rays of light come from it. All this even Locke's man of plain sense has to admit. How, then, if distance it- self is not one of my visual sensations, if distance is n't itself color or light, how can I still see distance ? For all that I see is after all not even the object, but only the color and light of the object. This is Berkeley's pro- blem about vision. His answer was early this : I don't reaUy see distance. What I see is something about the color or shape of the distant object, or better still about the feelings that accompany in me the act of sight, — something which is to me a sign of distance. A distant orange is n't as big as a near one. That is one sign of dis- tance then, namely, the size for me of my idea of a patch of color which I see when I look at the orange. Again, THE EEDISCOVEKY OF THE INNER LIFE. 89 very distant objects, such as mountains, are known to be distant because they look to me blue. In short, to sum up, my apparent seeing of distance is n't any direct seeing of distance at all. It is a reading of the language of sight, as this is exhibited to my eyes by the colors and forms of things. A certain look of things, a certain group of signs, which I have learned, by long experience, to interpret, teUs me how far off these things about me are. Distance is n't known directly. It is read as we read a language, read by interpreting the signs of the sense of sight. And as with distance, so with solidity. I don't really see things as solid. The solid things don't wander in through my eyes to my soul. But there are signs of solidity about the look of the things, signs that you learn to copy when you learn to draw in perspective, and to imitate the relief of objects ; these signs are the language of the sense of sight. You learn, when you come to comprehend this language, that if a thing looks in a certain way, has a certain relief of colors, a certain perspective arrangement of its outlines, that then, I say, it will feel solid if you go up to it and touch it. Infants don't know aU this until they have learned to read the language of vision. Hence they don't see things as solid for a good while, don't judge distances . accurately, have no eye for a space of three dimensions. Seeing, then, is reading, is interpreting a world-Ian- . guage, is anticipating how things wiU feel to your touch by virtue of the signs given by the color, light, relief, per- spective, of things. Such is Berkeley's view, and as far as it goes, it is obviously true. But he is not content to leave his thought here. He goes further. What is all my life of experience, my seeing, feeling, touching, mov- ing about, examining my world? Isn't it from first to last a learning to. read the language of things ? Is n't it a learning to anticipate one thing by virtue of the signs that are given of its presence by another ? Yes, all experi. 90 THE SPIEIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. ence is after all learning to read. And this reading, what is it ? It is merely rightly and rationally putting together the ideas which my world gives me. These ideas come in certain orders, follow certain laws. I learn these laws, and thus I read my world. I have one idea, say the glow of a fire. It suggests to me another idea, namely, that in case I go near the fire I shall feel warm. AU experience, then, is a learning how my ideas ought to go together ; it is a learning that upon one idea another will follow under certain circumstances. What, then, is this world of my experience ? Is it anything but the world of ideas and of their laws ? What existence has my world for me apart, from my ideas of it? What existence can any world have apart from the thought of some thinker for whom it exists? Whose language, then, am I reading in this world before me ? Whose ideas are these that experience impresses upon me? Are they not God's ideas? Is it not his language that I read in nature? Is not all my life a talking with God ? " Some truths there are," says Berkeley, " so near and obvious to the mind, that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, to wit, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence withi out mind ; that their being is, to be perceived or laiown ; that consequently so long as they are not actually per- ceived by me, or do not exist in my mind, or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit." - This is Berkeley's interpretation and extension of Locke's thought. I don't ask you to accept or to reject it, I only ask you to see once more how it holds together. Let us review it. My experience is a learning to read my world. What is my world? Merely the sum total of my ideas, of my thoughts, feelings, sights, sounds, colors, THE EEDISCOVEBY OF THE INNER LIFE. 91 tastes. I read these when one of them becomes sign to me of another, when the idea of a glow tells me of the yet unfelt warmth that a fire will arouse in me if I approach it, when the ideas of forms and shadows warn me how a solid thing wiU feel if I touch it. Mj;^ideas„and their* laws, this is all my reality. But then surely I am not the . only existence there is. No, indeed. The things about me are indeed only my ideas ; but I am not the author of these ideas. This language of experience, those signs of the senses, which I decipher — I did not produce them. Who writes, then, this language? Who forces on my mind the succession of my ideas? Who spreads out the scroll of those experiences before me which in their totality constitute the choir of heaven and the furniture of earth ? Berkeley responds readily. The sources of ' my ideas are two : my feUow-beings, who speak to me with the natural voice, and God, who talks to me in the / language of the sense. " When," says Berkeley, " I deny sensible things an existence out of the mind, I do not mean my mind in particular, but aU minds. Now it is plain they have an existence exterior to my mind, , since I find them by experience to be independent of/ it. There is some other mind wherein they exist, dur-j ing the intervals between the time of my perceiving them, as likewise they did before my birth, and would do after my supposed annihilation. And as the saiqe is true with j - regard to all other finite created spirits, it necessarily fesl- lows, there is an orrmipiiesewt — etex2ial__mind, which^ knows and comprehends aU things, and exhibits them to our view in such a manner, and according to such rules, as He himself hath ordained, and are by us termed the Here is the famous idealism of Berkeley., Never was philosophical idealism more simply stated, v Nowhere is there a better introduction to a doctrine at once paradoxi- cal and plausible, namely, the idealistic scheme of things, 92 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. than in Berkeley's early essays. They are favorites — these essays — of all young students of philosophy. As you read them, unprepared, you first say, How wild a paradox I How absurdly opposed to common sense I Then you read further and say, How plausible this Berke- ley is ! How charming his style 1 How clear he makes his paradoxes 1 Perhaps, after all, they are n't paradoxes, but mere rewordings of what we all mean. He knows a real world of facts, too. Nobody is surer of the truths of experience, nobody is firmer in his convictions of an outer reality, than Berkeley. Only this outer reality — what is it but God directly talking to us, directly impress- ling upon us these ideas of the " choir of heaven and fur- niture of earth ? " In sense, in experience, we have God. He is in matter. Matter, in fact, is a part of his own self : it is his manifested will, his plan for our education, his voice speaking to us, warning, instructing, guiding, amusing, disciplining, blessing us, with a series of orderly and significant experiences. Well, I say, as you read further, the beauty of Berkeley's statement impresses you, you are half persuaded that you might come to believe this ; and lo ! suddenly, as you read, you do believe it, if only for an hour, and then, in a curious fashion, the whole thing comes to look almost commonplace. It is so obvious, you say, this notion that we only know our own ideas, so obvious that it was hardly worth while to write it down. After all, everybody believes that ! As for the notion of God talking to us, through all our senses, that is very pretty and poetical, but is there anything very novel about the notion ? It is the old design argument over again. So I say, your mood alters as you read Berkeley. The value of his doctrine, for our present purposes, lies in its , place in this history of the rediscovery of the inner life which we are following in this lecture. Of the truth of Berkeley's doctrine I have just now nothing to say. I am THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 93 simply narrating to you Berkeley's experience of spiritual things. And His experience was this : that our conscious- ness of outer reality is a more subtle and complex thing than the previous age had suspected, so that the real world must be very different from the assumed substantial and mathematical world of the seventeenth century, and so that our inner life of sense and of reason needs yet a new and a deeper analysis. Everything in this whole period makes, you see, for the study of this inner life. It is no matter whether you are a philosopher, and write essays on the " Principles of Human Knowledge," or whether you are a heroine in an eighteenth-century novel, and write sentimental letters to a friend ; you are" part of the same movement. The spirit is dissatisfied with the mathemati- cal order, and feels friendless among the eternities of the seventeenth-century thought. The spirit wants to be at home with itself, well-friended in the comprehension of its inner processes. It loves to be confidential in its heart outpourings, keen in its analysis, humane in its attitude towards life. And to be part of this new process is Berke- ley's significance. V. But now, if you are to enjoy the inner life, you must bear also its burdens and its doubts. To become sure of 1 yourself, you must first doubt yourself. And this doubt, this skepticism, which self-analysis always involves, who could express it better than the great Scotchman, David Hume ? Hume is, I think, next to Hobbes, the greatest of British speculative thinkers, Berkeley occupying the third place in order of rank. I cannot undertake to describe to you in this place the real historical signifi- cance of Hume, his subtlety, his fearlessness, his fine analysis of certain of the deepest problems, his place as the inspirer of Kant's thought, his whole value as meta- physical teacher of his time. What you wiU see in him is merely the merciless skeptic, and, in this superficial 94 THE SPIRIT OF MODEHN PHILOSOPHY. sketch of the rediscovery of the inner consciousness, I I don't ask you to see more. Hume accepted Locke's 'belief that reason is merely the recorder of experience. He carries out this view to its remotest consequences. Our minds consist, as he says, of impressions and ideas. By impressions he means the experiences of sense ; by ideas he means the remembered copies of these experi- ences. You see, feel, smell, taste ; and you remember having seen, felt, tasted or smelt. That is all. You have no other luiowledge. Upon some of your ideas, namely those of quantity and number, you can reason, and can even discover novel and necessary truth about them. This is owing to the peculiarity of these ideas and of the impressions on which they are founded. For these ideas, also, even all the subtleties of mathematical science, are faded and blurred impressions of sense. And, as it chances, on just these faded impressions you can reason. But Berkeley was wrong in thinking that you can by searching find out God, or anything else supersensual. Science concerns matters of fact, as the senses give them, and ends with these. With this general view in mind, let us examine, in Hume's fashion, certain of the most familiar conceptions of human reason. Hume is afraid of nothing, not even of the presumptions at the basis of physical science. Matters of fact he respects, but not universal principles. " There are," says Hume, " no ideas . . . more obscure than those of power, force, or necessary connection." Let us look a little more closely at these ideas. Let us clear them up if we can. How useful they seem. How much we hear in exact science about something called the law of causation, which says that there is a necessary connec- tion between causes and effects, that given natural condi- tions have a "power" to bring to pass certain results, that the forces of nature Tnust work as they do. Well, apply to such sublime and far-reaching ideas, — just such THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 95 ideas, you will remember, as seemed to Spinoza so signifi- cant, — apply to them Hume's simple criterion. Ideas, in order to have a good basis, must, Hume declares, stand for matters of fact, given to us in the senses. " It is impossible for us to thinh of anything which we have not antecedently yeZi, either by our external or internal senses." " By what invention, then," says Hume, " can we throw light " upon ideas that, being simple, stiU pretend to be authoritative, "and render them altogether precise and determinate to our intellectual view ? " Answer : " Pro- duce the impressions or original sentiments from which the ideas are copied." These impressions will " admit of no ambiguity." So, then, let us produce the original im- pression from which the idea of caiisation, of necessary connection, or of power is derived. You 'say that in nature there is and must be necessity. Very well, let us ask ourselves afresh the questions that we asked of Locke. Did you ever see necessity? Did you ever hear or touch causation ? Did you ever taste or smell necessary connec- tion? Name us the original impression -whence comes your idea. " When," says Hume, " we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in any single instance, to dis- cover any power or necessary connection, any quality which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only find that the one does actually in fact follow the other. The im- pulse of one biUiard ball is attended with motion in the second. That is the whole that appears to the outward senses." " In reality, there is no part of matter that does ever by its sensible qualities discover any power or energy, or give us ground to imagine that it could produce any- thing," until we have found out by experience what hap- pens in consequence of its presence. Thus outer sense gives us facts, but no necessary laws, no true causation, no real connection of events. 96 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. We must, then, get our idea of power, of necessary con- nection, from within. And so, in fact, many have thought that we do. If in outer nature I am only impressed by matters of fact about billiard balls and other such things, and if there I never learn of causation, do I not, per- chance, directly feel my own true power, my own causal efficacy, my own will, making acts result in a necessary way from my purposes ? No, answers Hume. If I ex- amine carefully I find that my own deeds also are merely matters of fact, with nothing causally efficacious about my own conscious nature to make them obviously necessary. After all, " is there any principle in nature more myste- rious than the union of soul with body ? " " Were we empowered," adds Hume, " to remove mountains, or con- trol the planets in their orbit, this extensive authority would not be more extraordinary, or more beyond our comprehension," than is the bare matter of fact that we now can control our bodies by our wiU. In inner expe- rience, then, just as in outer, we get no direct impression of how causes produce effects. We only see that things do often happen in regular ways. In experience, then, " all events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another ; but we can never observe any tie be- tween them. They seem conjoined, but never connected. But as we can have no idea of anything which never ap- peared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be, that we have no idea of connection or power at all, and that these words are abso- lutely without any meaning." From this seeming conclu- sion, Hume makes, indeed, an escape, but one that is, in fact, not less skeptical than his result as first reached. The true original of our idea of power, and so of causa- tion, he says, is simply this, that "after a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried, by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe that it will exist." "The first time a THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 97 man saw the communication of motion by impulse, as by the shock of the two billiard balls, he could not pronounce that the one event was connected, but only that it was conjoined, with the other. After he has observed several instances of this nature, he then pronounces them to be connected. What alteration has happened to give rise to this new idea of connection ? Nothing but that now he feels these two events to be connected in his imagination." Custom, then, mere habit of mind, is the origin of the idea of causation. We see no necessity in the world. We only/ee^ it there, because that is our habit of mind, our fashion of mentally regarding an often-repeated expe- rience of similar successions. y The importance of all this skepticism lies, as you of course see, in its removal from our fact-world of just the principles that the seventeenth century had found so in- spiring. " It is of the nature of reason," Spinoza had said, " to regard things as necessary." Upon that rock he had built his faith. His wisdom had reposed secure in God, in whom were all things, just because God's nature was the highest form of necessity, the law of laws. And now comes Hume, and calls this " nature of reason " a mere feeling, founded on habit, a product of our imagi-i nation, no matter of fact at all. What becomes, then, of Spinoza's divine order ? Has philosophy fallen by its own hands ? Is the eternal in which we had trusted really, after all, but the mass of the flying and discon- nected impressions of sense ? All crumbles at the touch of this criticism of Hume's. All becomes but the aggregate of the disconnected sense-impressions. Nay, if we find the Holy Grail itself, it, too, will fade and crumble into dust. Hume is aware of some such result. He skillfully and playfully veils the extreme consequences at times by the arts of his beautiful dialectic. But he none the less rejoices in it, with all the fine joy of the merciless foe of delusions : — matters of fact, relations of ideas, — these 98 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. are all that his doctrine leaves us. " When," he once says, " we run through libraries, persuaded of these prin- ciples, what havoc must we make ? If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school' metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reason- ing concerning quantity or number f No. Does it con- tain any exjierhnental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence ? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." VI. Hume represents thus, indeed, the extreme of purely philosophical skepticism in the eighteenth century. Others, to be sure, outside of the ranks of the philoso- phers, went further in many ways, and were rebels or scoffers in their own fashion, far more aggressive than his. But Hume's thought is in its result as fruitful as in its content it is negative. The spirit, you see, has become anxious to know its own nature. After aU, can we live by merely assuming the innate ideas? Can even Spi- noza's wisdom save us from doubt? And yet this doubt does n't mean mere waywardness. It means longing for self-consciousness. And in the last third of the century this longing took, as we shall next time learn, new and positive forms. The inner life, to be sure, has appeared so far as a very capricious thing, after all. Study it by mere analysis of its experiences, as Hume did, and in this its capriciousness it will seem to shrivel to nothing under your hands. Where you expected it to be wealthiest, it turns out to be poorest. It is mere sense, mere feeling, mere sophistry and illusion. But is this the end ? No, it is rather but the beginning of a new and a higher philosophy. The spirit is more than mere experience. Locke's account of the inner life is only half the truth. And what the other half is, Kant and his successors shall teach us. The age of poetry and of history — of a new THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 99 natural science, also, yes, even this our own century — shall take up afresh the task that Hume rejected as im- possible. The revolutionary period shall first rediscover passion, shall produce Goethe's " Faust," and shall regen- erate Europe. Historical research, reviving, shall prove to the spirit the significance of his own earthly past. Science, entering upon new realms, shall formulate the idea of cosmical evolution. No longer Spinoza's world,/ but a changing, a glowingly passionate and. tragic world,! of moral endeavor, of strife, of growth, and of freedom,! shall be conceived by men ; and meanwhile, in Kant and 1 in his sucbessors, as we shaU find, a more fitting philoso- phy wiU arise to formulate with all of Hume's keen dia^ lectio, with all of Locke's love of human nature, and stiU with all of Spinoza's reverence for an absplute rationality in things, something of the significance of our modern life. Remember, however, finally, that if the skepticism of the eighteenth century is to be gotten rid of, this will only be by transcending it, living through and beyond it, not by neglecting or by simply refuting it, from without. Phi- losophical insight, however partial, is never to be refuted. You can transcend, it,, you can make it part of a larger life, but it always remains as such a part. The genuine spirit includes all that was true and earnest in the doubt- ing spirit. The only way to get rid of a philosophic doubt, in its discouraging aspect, is to see that, such as it is, it already implies a larger truth. The great spirit says to us, like Emerson's " Brahma," — " They reckon ill who leave me out ; When me they fly, I am the wings ; I am the doubter and the doubt." And this, namely, the inevitableness and the true spir- ituality of genuine doubting, is the- great lesson that the eighteenth century, in its transition to Kant, teaches us. It is a lesson well to be remembered in our own day, 100 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. when, notwithstanding the vast accomplishments of recent research, there is a sense in which we, too, live in a world of doubt, but live there only that we may learn to con- quer and possess it, all its doubts and its certainties, all its truth. In doubt we come to see our illusion ; the phantoms of the night of thought vanish; but the new light comes. The old world dies, but only to rise again to the immortality of a higher existence. The spirit de- stroys its former creations, shatters its idols, and laments their loss. . But, as in " Faust," the chorus still sings : — " Thou hast it destroyed, The beautiful world, With powerful fist : In ruin 't is hurled. By the blow of a demigod shattered 1 The scattered Fragments into the Void we carry, Deploring The beauty perished beyond restoring. Mightier For the children of men, Brightlier ; Build it again, ; In thine own bosom build it anew ! Bid the new career Commence, ' With clearer sense, ; And the new songs of cheer Be sung thereto 1 " Such a building anew of the lost universe in the bosom of the human spirit, it was the mission of Kant to begin. LECTURE rV. KANT. We saw in the last lecture how the self-analysis of the eighteenth century inevitably tended towards the redis- covery of passion, and finally towards the great revolu- tionary movement, in life and in literature, with which the century closed. But we also found that the same Lockean tendency was boimd to produce a philosophical skepticism whereof Hume was our chief example. Hume stated the essence of Locke's theory with an almost brutal simplicity of formulation. We know, he said, impressions, which come to us through sense, and ideas, which are the copies of impressions. About some ideas we can reason. These form the subject-matter of our only demonstrative science, mathematics. AE our other science concerns matters of fact, that is, recorded impressions of our expe- rience, with such rational observations as we can make upon them. Does the inner life pretend to more than this, to more than a knowledge of impressions and ideas, — then what is this pretense but sophistry- and illusion ? The inner life, under this merciless analysis, shrivels up, as it were, into a mere series of chance experiences. The sacred faiths of humanity, do they record seen and felt matters of fact ? The moral law, is it more than a feeling in the mind of the sympathetic subject ? Hume is indeed merciless ; but his mercilessness is, after all, the clear in- sight of a reflective man. Bare experience of the Lockean sort does indeed contain no such supreme rationality as earlier thinkers had found there. What Hume showed 102 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. was that unless there is more in experience than Locke's view permitted it to contain, the hope of any transcendent knowledge or faith for humanity is indeed gone. That Hume showed this is his great merit, for hereby he led the way to Kant. I. When I mention the name of Kant, who forms our special topic to-day, I introduce to you one whose thought arouses more suggestions in the mind of a philosophical student than cluster about any other modern thinker. One despairs of telling you all or any great part of what Kant has meant to one in the course of a number of years of metaphysical study ; but let me still try to suggest a little of Kant's place in such a line of work. One hears of Kant early in one's life as a student of philosophy. He is said to be hard, perhaps a little dangerous (a thing which of course attracts one hugely !). He is said to be also certainly typical of German speculation, and always worthy of one's efiEorts if one means to philosophize at all. Perhaps one, therefore, first tries him in translation, with a sense that, even if one's German is not yet free, some- thing must already be done to win him. The " Critique of Pure Reason," how attractive the name I How wise one wiU be after criticising the pure reason through the reading of five or six hundred pages of close print 1 There is an old translation of Kant, in Bohn's Library, by a certain Meiklejohn. One begins with that. The English is heavy, not to say shocking ; but the first effect of the reading is soon a splendid sense of power, a feeling of the exhaustiveness of the treatment, of the skill and subtlety and fearlessness of this Kant. What seems to be a good deal of the book — not the chief part, indeed — one can even fairly grasp at the first reading. In fact, so persuasive, to certain minds, is the general external appearance of Kant's method of work, that there are stu- dents who, on their first S'uperficial acquaintance with KANT. 103 him, really fancy that they have actually comprehended the whole thing at one stroke. I myself have heard this feeling expressed by diligent young readers, who have assured me, after their first trial of the "Critique," that, as they supposedjjt must be that they had somehow failed to understand Kant, for whereas people said he was hard, they themselves had n't found anything very difficult in the book at all. To their great alarm, as it were, they had n't even been puzzled. Yet when such persons come to read Kant a second time, I fear that they usually find themselves considerably puzzled ; or rather, I should say that I hope so. Puzzle is a sensation that soon comes, when one begins to examine Kant more cautiously and worthily. The first superficial joy in his power, in his skill, in his subtlety, in his fearlessness, fades away. One sees his actual doctrine looming afar off, a mountain yet to be climbed. On nearer approach, one finds the moun- tain well wooded ; and the woods have thick underbrush. The paths lose themselves in the dark valleys, leading this way and that, with most contradictory windings. Kant is a pedantic creature after all, one says. He loves hard words. He takes a mass of them, — as one of his critics fiercely says, he takes a mass of Latin terms ending in tion, and translates them into so many equiva- lent vernacular terms, ending in the German in heit and heit, and he calls this sort of thing philosophy ! Getting such things through the medium of an English transla- tion does n't improve them. One begins to anathematize the poor translator, Meiklejohn, in fear lest one should blaspheme instead the sacred name of the immortal Kant. One finally concludes that this is a book full of great insights and of noble passages, but that the real connec- tions are n't to be made out until one shall have fought the good fight in German. And so one drops the subject until one's German shall be free. That happy time comes. One has first read Schopen. 104 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. hauer, whose German, to use a comparison of Jean Paul Richter's, is as limpid as a mountain lake that lies be- neath gloomy cliffs, under a clear and frosty sky. One has even plunged down the tumultuous streams of Fichte's eloquence, where the frail bark of a student's understand- ing is indeed occasionally rather near to destruction, but whence a man still usually escapes with his wits. Now it is time to return to Kant. One hereupon falls upon the " Critique " with new zest, and finds that, as reading goes in a studious but rather busy and distracted life, one can at length read the book through in about three years, and can feel that thereafter he might do well to begin and read it again. After doing so, one lays it aside for a spell, and so returns afresh, from year to year, for a longer or shorter season, to the fascinating but baffling task. In Germany, where there has been a revival of interest in Kant, during the past twenty years, reading the " Cri- tique " has come to take rank, so to speak, as one of the liberal professions. There are learned men who, in all appearance, do nothing else. The habit is dangerously fascinating. The Kant devotee never knows when to stop. When I studied in Germany as a young college graduate, some fifteen years ago, it was my fortune to meet one of the most learned and many-sided of the new philosophical doctors of the day, who was just then pre- paring for a docentship. He was a man who promised, as one might say, almost everything ; who wrote and pub- lished essays of remarkable breadth and skill, and who was especially noticeable for his wide range of work. Some years later, it unhappily occurred to him to begin printing a commentary on Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason." He planned the commentary for completion 1n four volumes octavo. Of these four he published, jiot " long afterwards, the first, a volume of several hundred' large pages, wherein he deals — with Kant's introdtid: tory chapter. Since then my former acquaintance is lost KANT. 105 The final volumes of the commentary have never ap- peared, although he has now been at work upon them more than ten years. How many volumes will really be needed to complete the task, only the " destroyer of de- lights and terminator of felicities," whom the Arabian Nights' tales always love to mention as they close, to wit, Death himself, can ever determine. The thorough student of Kant is, so to speak, a Tannhauser, close shut in his Venusberg. You hunt for him fruitlesssly in aU the outer world. Worse than Tannhauser he is, for you can never get him out. Pilgi'ims' choruses chant, and waiting Eliza- beths mourn for him, in vain. As for me, I, as you per- ceive, am no reader of Kant, in the strict sense, at all. I won a doctor's degree, years since, in part by writing a course of lectures upon the "Critique." I have since come to see that those lectures were founded upon a seri- ous, I might say an entire, misinterpretation of Kant's meaning. Since then I have repented, as you also ob- serve, of this misinterpretation, and, as I might add, of several others. I love still to lecture to my college classes on Kant. I think that possibly I know a little about him. But then, after all, Kant, you see, is Kant ; and the Lord made him, and many other wondrous works be- sides ; and it takes time to find such things out. You will understand therefore, at once, that I can have no intention of making clear, within the limits of a single lectiu-e, a doctrine so subtle and involved as this. But then the justification of my undertaking in these lectures IS wholly that I attempt, not to describe the philosophers and their opinions as the monuments of technical skill and of exhaustive research which they are, but to set forth to you something of the temperament which they embody. Kant shall be for us a character in a story, an attitude towards the spiritual concerns of humanity. As such you want to know him ; as such only can I attempt here to describe him. 106 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHT. II. The man Kant is an old subject for literary portraiture. It is hard to say anything in the least new about him. He was born in 1724, in the city of Konigsberg, in the province of East Prussia, and never once in his life trav- eled beyond that province. His family was poor ; his father was of Scotch descent, and was a saddler, and in religion a pietist. Both Kant's parents lived a narrow and glowing religious life, cheerful, harmonious, and, in a worldly sense, dispassionate. At school Kant attracted such attention that a university course of study followed, in Konigsberg, of course, and this led him to an academic career. At the outset of his literary work Kant is a curi- ous mixture of the pedant, the many-sided student, the young man of literary skill, and the independent investi- gator. His earliest essay was in philosophical physics, and was in more senses than one a failure. In 1755, he published, however, a remarkable paper on the " General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens," wherein he anticipated the essential features of the nebular hypothe- sis which Laplace afterwards developed. Up to this time he had been a private tutor. Thenceforth he lec- tured as privat-docent at the university until his appoint- ment as professor in 1770. Promotion, as one sees, was thereabouts slow, and Kant was perhaps at first over- looked by higher officials, whom he never sought to please. During these earlier years he was a man of considerable literary skill, but in philosophy was still under the influence of the reigning dogmatic school. The poet Herder, who heard him as docgnt, speaks very highly of his power in those days as a lecturer. Of Kant in his young prime we have a portrait, showing him at the age of forty-four. More common is the portrait taken much later in life. Both show us the spare, small, insignificant-appearing man. He was of frail health, but KANT. 107 seldom or never ill. His height was barely beyond five feet; as he grew older he became more and more an almost fleshless but very cheerful shadow of a man, all mind and no body, genial, gossiping, a lover of a small but very clever circle of friends, a great reader of books of travel, a passionate student, strange to say, of the man- ners and customs of various and distant lands and peoples, topics upon which he loved to lecture. His bachelor life grew, meanwhile, more and more methodical. As he grew older, thought absorbed him more and more. For more than a decade, namely, from 1770 to 1781, he published very little, and meditated solely his " Critique of Pure Reason," gladly free, as he once says, from the obligation of defending early and hastily written essays in philoso- phy. Now he became indeed an original thinker. His loneliness of thought grew almost oppressive. To his friends he apparently said only a little of the new doc- trine that was forming in his mind. His lectures became less eloquent ; his inner life grew ever deeper, stiller, — not melancholy, but hidden away, involved, problematic. Henceforth, moreover, his style gravely suffers. The genial soul shows itself again and again in the great " Critique," in chance figures, in brilliant but too brief passages. Yet on the whole Kant's writing is henceforth burdened, as it were, with the weight of his whole new world. His sentences groan beneath their treasures. He works beneath the earth, in the mines of humanity's gold.^ Great thoughts glitter in the rich quartz of his medita^ tion, but only with toil and suffering is this gold to be extracted. Erom the first issue of the " Critique " men 1 In a remarkable note, published in Benno Erdmann's edition of Kant's Eeflexionen (vol. ii. p. 6), Kant himself says, of his own style, " Es scheint zwar nichts geschmackswidriger zu sein als die Metaphy- sik, aber die Zierrate die an der Schonheit glanzen, lagen erstlich in dunkeln Griiften, wenigstens sah man sie zuerst duroh die finstere Werkstatt des Kiinstlers." 108 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. complained of Kant's obscurity ; years later Herder la^ mented bitterly the lost instructor of his youth, the man whom he used to be able to comprehend, but of whom now he could make almost nothing, and whose doctrine he sternly opposed. The first impression that the great " Critique " produced was of wonder and of a sort of puiizled dread. Some said, " This man has destroyed all faith. He doubts everything. It is a dangerous book ; it is terrible." Others said, "This is Berkeley's ideal- ism over again." Many said, " Whatever it is, it is quite unreadable." But erelong the thought came home to people that all this was not only novel, but vastly en- lightening. The universities took up the book. The great literary men read it. Schiller himself was in many respects almost revolutionized by it, and by the Kantian works that followed it. The age of the revolution was ripe for it. Young men became fascinated by it, and within twenty-five years the " Critique " had converted a people decidedly unproductive in philosophy into the typi- cally metaphysical nation of Europe, so that, as Jean Paul said, while God had given to the French the land and to the English the sea, he had granted to the Ger- mans the empire of the air. Meanwhile, Kant, gradually wasting away in body, ate his one meal daily, walked over his regular path every afternoon, lectured genially but intricately to his classes, and wrote book after book until some years later than 1790. Old age was now approaching fast. This frail body could not very well endure the coming enemy. Kant grew less productive and more methodical. There is a well-known passage by Heine,^ wherein this daily life of Kant is sketched : — " The life of Immanuel Kant," says Heine, " is hard to describe ; he had indeed neither life nor history in the ^ Quoted, also, by Professor Edward Caird, in his Philosophy oj Immanuel Kant, 2d ed. vol. i. p. 63. KANT. 109 proper sense of the words. He lived an abstract, me- chanical, old -bachelor existence, in a quiet, remote street of Kbnigsberg, an old city at the northeastern boundary of Germany. I do not believe that the great cathedral- clock of that city accomplished its day's work in a less passionate and more regular way than its countryman, Immanuel Kant. Rising from bed, coffee-drinking, writ- ing, lecturing, eating, walking, everything had its fixed time ; and the neighbors knew that it must be exactly half past four when they saw Professor Kant, in his gray coat, with his cane in his hand, step out of his house-door, and move towards the little lime-tree avenue, which is named, after him, the Philosopher's Walk. Eight times he walked up and down that walk at every season of the year, and when the weather was bad, or the gray clouds threatened rain, his servant, old Lampe, was seen anx- iously following him with a large umbrella under his arm, like an image of Providence. " Strang'e contrast between the outer life of the man and his world-destroying thought. Of a truth, if the citi- zens of Konigsberg had had any inkling of the meaning of that thought, they would have shuddered before him as before an executioner. But the good people saw no- thing in him but a professor of philosophy, and when he passed at the appointed hour, they gave him friendly greetings — and set their watches." ! III. To this characterization of Heine's, which has become almost classic, it is hard to add anything besides what every reader of literary gossip also knows, unless one enters into details that would detain us here too long. Still, we must go yet a little farther. This odd and gentle little man was, as you already see, a singular com- bination of the keen-witted analyst and the humane lover of all things human. Give him an old problem, or a 110 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. well-known abstract conception, such as the idea of wis- dom or of justice, and he would quickly show you his analytic skill by mentioning a long series of distinctions, of aspects, of possible ways of defining or of stating the thing, — so long a series, and often so dry, that you would at first be likely to suspect him of genuine pedantry. And yet this seeming pedant — what a lover he is of books of travel, of descriptions of live men, and of con- crete affairs ! He has indeed never traveled beyond his simple and quiet little province ; but yet, as we just saw, he loves to lecture, and with a wide knowledge, too, upou geography and upon anthropology. Physical science also, after the fashions of his day, he knows very fairly. In that early essay he has anticipated Laplace's nebular hypothesis. Moreover, he has published a long paper on the sentiments of the sublime and beautiful. When he speculates, he shows himself as many-sided as he is keen. His systematic plans are vast. When, in his old age, he has published half a dozen important and varied treatises upon different and fundamental departments of philoso- phy, he still laments the fragmentariness of his work, and still promises himself a chance to complete his system by one great book. Before he can do much upon this, old age takes away first his noble powers of mind, and then his life. This life itself had been as beautiful in its sim- ple humanity as it had been rigid in its routine. Kant was above all a good man, strictly honorable, unalterably loyal to his tasks, pleasant and even charming to his few near friends, and in his fashion very deeply pious. As for the form of his piety, you must know what that was before you can be prepared for his reflective doctrines. Some people, including, for instance, Heine himself, have imagined that there were, in Kant's religious life, two or even three distinct periods, — an early period, say, of faith ; then a revolutionary and destructive period, when, in a sort of secret but none the less Titanic rebel- KANT. Ill liousness, this terrible professor revolted against theology, and wrote books that make an end once for all of every positive religious belief ; then, finally, a third period of cowardly, or at all events of weakly timid, withdrawal from conflict, when Kant, the old man, fearing the government, and perhaps taking compassion upon common folk, recon- structed, in an inconsistent fashion, the beliefs that his " Critique of Pure Reason " had shattered, and so taught God, freedom, and immortality, solely for the sake of his own peace. Upon what facts this disgraceful myth about Kant's inconsistency in his old age was founded, I will not pause to explain here. You will soon see in what sense his great "Critique" was destructive. You will also soon see in what sense his later writings were con- structive as to religious faith. I mention, however, the often-repeated tale just to warn you that it is a myth, and that Kant's attitude towards the affairs of the reli- gious consciousness changed very little at any time, and not at all after once the critical doctrine was in his hands. But as to the real form of his piety, it was never akin to Spinoza's mysticism ; it belonged rather to that other, to that active form of the religious consciousness, of which I spoke, by way of contrast, when I was describ- ing Spinoza to you. And yet there was something so simple and direct about Kant's attitude towards divine things that when he talks of God to you, you feel in as direct a relation with one important fact of the eternal world as, in Spinoza's case, you felt in relation to another fact. Spinoza says to you : Look upon the seeming chaos of nature. For sense it is a disheartening whirlwind of vain and fragmentary facts ; yet for reason an infinite law dwells in it. This law is supreme, all-compelling. It is the law of the divine mind, which reveals one attri- bute of God's substance, and of which your mind is a part. In the presence of this infinite majesty are you every moment. Enter consciously into it, and dwell there, 112 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. and to you, as wise man, God's infinite perfection will be present as a religious consolation, and you will be unalter- ably at peace. Of such mystical comfort Kant knows nothing. He hates mysticism with a shrewd and sternly analytical keenness of critical ill-will, suggestive, in his case, of the attitude of the very deliberate and economical old bachelor, who dreads nothing more than falling in love, or than wasting his hoarded energies upon any similar vain and expensive sentimentalities. Mysticism and what he would call lovers' Narrheit are, in Kant's simple and honest mind, closely associated and mercilessly scorned. They are both called by him by his favorite term of reproach. They are Schwarmerei, vain and vague enthusiasm, mere fancy, by gazing fed. Kant, this genial and bloodless old hero of contemplation, wast- ing away in his cheerful asceticism, reverences, as every- body knows, duty and the stars, but has no time for ro- mance. The God whom he worships is indeed stern and majestic, cares not even to have you demonstrate his ex- istence, and eludes the cleverness of your theoretic reason as loftily as he rejects the loverlike importunities of your weak and sentimental moments. He reveals himself, indeed, but to your conscience. Conscience, for the first, shows you the moral law , — shows it as something overwhelmingly rational, absolute, universal, indifferent to your private wishes, independent of your present happiness, sublime as the heavens are, but as directly known to you as is the very existence of your will and of your reason. Conscience shows you this absolute law, and says sternly, unwaveringly, uncompro- misingly, " Do thy duty." And because conscience shows you this, it demands of you that you labor henceforth and forever as if you were an instrument, a minister, of a divine law that moves in all things. It orders you, then, to live as if God were present here all about you in this world of sense. He is not to be seen here, indeed, with KANT. 113 the eye of sense. In vain, for the critical Kant of the days after 1780, does even weak theoretic reason try to prove to our poor wits that he is here. Sense and specu- lation alike fail you. But none the less must you act as if_(iQdjj)ere_ your constant and visible companion, as if the moral law, which you must regard as his only direct revelation, were spoken in your ear by him as by your next friend at this moment. And to know that thus you ought to act, that thus you ought to live, to wit, as if the unsearchable God whom the heavens cannot contain were as familiar to you as your daily walk, as visible to you as the town-clock, — to know this is to do what Kant calls postulating God's existence. It isn't sentimental faith that you have in God. You don't believe in him because you long to, or because life would be blank if you did n't, or because you fear the charge of atheism. You believe in God in one sense and for one reason only, — because a man sure of his duty is sure that the right ought to win, that in the sense-world it does n't win, and that in the univei^se it can win only if God is at the helm, — God as the absolute and all-powerful well-wisher of the whole visible and invisible world-order. This notion of God's existence, a mere hypothesis to your theoretic speculation, is for your active consciousness just in such sense a cer- tainty as you propose to behave as if it were one. For the rest, Kant, in his later years, has no hope of even illustrating anything about God's providence by appealing, as so many do, to our experience of justice in this world, or by any other theoretical means. Kant is no optimist, just as he is no sentimentalist, about the world of experience. The divine justice does n't very ob- viously show itself here below. Kant sees much evil all about him ; condemns, in one passage, the people who find our present life happy ; declares that not one of us would willingly lead his own life over again, if he had the free choice and were not bound by some sort of duty to do 114 THE SPIRIT OF MODKRN PHILOSOPHY. 80 ; in short, speaks almost cynically of those earthly joys whereof, with all his cheeriness and his open-heartedness, he tasted so little. The few good things of life are such things as healthy friendships and successful toils, the sober routine of business, of conversation, and of think- ing. And yet even these are all of them only relatively good. The only absolutely good thing in our world is a good will, in a being who does his duty. Thus, then, our sense-world, if coldly cheerful for the brave and resolute, is still no place of rewards ; nor does God's benevolence manifest itself except to the moral consciousness. But there, indeed, in our conscience, despite all the mystery, we know the mind of God. This is what he wants of us, namely, our duty. And that he wants this, and will see to the absolute success of the right, this is the whole con- tent of our moral faith. Such was Kant's piety. It has been much misunder- stood. Especially are people at fault in fancying it a late thing in Kant's life, a product of his old age. He ex- presses substantially the same thoughts as early as 1766, when he is still hoping for theoretical proofs of God's existence. Such proofs, he says, whether we ever get them or no, we do not need. The moral consciousness reveals God in its own way. Early, then, Kant had reached his main assurance. Very late in his career he declares, in one passage, that this assurance is no matter of subtle philosophy at all. " The progress of metaphy- sics in theology is," he observas, " the easiest " [and there- fore the least] " of all " her achievements, and, " although concerned with the remote above sense, is not itself at all recondite, but is as clear to common sense as to the phi- losophers, so much so, in fact, that the thinkers have here to find their way by the very light of common sense, lest they be lost in the mazes of the recondite." Notice here, if you will, at once the novel aspect of Kant's insight, and at the same time the simplicity and KANT. 115 familiarity of the thing. Novel is his insight into the relations of religion and of reason, — novel, namely, just in so far as it is a philosophical insight. The seventeenth century had regarded God as first of all an object of theory, as the demonstrable source and principle of the visible world, and so as a being whose existence we had to accept, as it were, submissively, helplessly, because of the dogmas of reason. To this dogmatic faith in reason, skepticism had later opposed its cruel objections. And now comes Kant, whom a long experience of problems makes skeptical above all men, cautious, critical, re- signed to doubts, a hater of mystical faith, a destroyer of dogmas; and yet he gives us back our faith, not as a dogma, but as an active postulate, as a free spiritual con- struction, as a determination to live in the presence of the unseen and eternal. New are some of his philosophic doubts ; new in an uncommon sense will be his fashions of theorizing in philosophy ; old is his appeal to that courage and that loyalty upon which our very civilization is founded. For, I insist, this notion of Kant's about the spiritual world, this appeal, not to sentiment, but to con- science as the warrant of faith, is it not indeed the very soul of all instinctive civilization? Consider this same fashion of looking not only at the problems about God, but at the affairs of worldly experience. Consider the attitude of a soldier going into battle against a foe whom he knows to be nearly his match in force and arms. He possesses, if he is a brave man, some sort of confidence that he will win. Well, it is much like Kant's faith in God. In what is this confidence founded ? In experience ? No, this bat- tle has n't yet been fought, so that experience is not his guide as to this fight, and, as to the past, any old soldier is likely to know from experience a good deal about defeat, as well as about victory, perhaps even more of lost than of won battles. Does he know, then, that he will win by any rational intuition ? Is it an innate idea in 116 THE SPIEIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. him that he is going to win ? No ; to say so would be mere trifling. Neither intuition nor experience assures him of victory. No merely sentimental faith is this his assurance ; no datum is it of sense. His belief that he will win is identical with his active, manly resolve that he is minded to win, that his teeth are set to win, that this sword is sharpened, that this bayonet has been pointed, that this bullet will soon be winged, with the determination of victory. Each army knows that, other things equal, the force which is thus most minded to win is the force destined to conquer, that here is a case where faith can create its own object, that the unseen victory wiU be fashioned precisely by and for the side which most fully takes hold of that unseen, and which actively creates what it believes in. Well, then, there is in active life this way of vindicating your faith. It is by creating the very idea of the world wherein your faith is to come true. You all know, furthermore, to take an example from everyday life, how it is largely our own choice whether our lives, in certain aspects of them, say in their cares and responsibilities, their routine and their disappoint- ments, are tolerable or not. Evil besets us, pain op- presses us, chagrin or calamity overwhelms us. We cry out bitterly, " Prove to me that such a life is good. Ex- perience does n't show it to be good. And as for faith, as for intuitive trust that it is good, this I have lost. My noble sentiments fade out ; my natural love of life for- sakes me. Is it aU tolerable ? Prove that to me." The answer of the active temperament, the answer which seems so stern to us in our moments of weakness and cowardice, so inspiring to us in our moments of spiritual dignity and courage, is the answer : " Your world is toler- able, yes, is even glorious, if, and only if, you actively make it so. Its spirituality is your own creation, or else is nothing. Awake, arise, be willing, endure, struggle, defy evil, cleave to good, strive, be strenuous, be devoted, throw KANT. 117 into the face of evil and depression your brave cry of ha- tred and of resistance, and then this dark universe of des- tiny will glow with a divine light. Then you wiU com- mune with the eternal. For you have no relations with the eternal world save such as you make for yourself." My illustrations are here inadequate to the full expression of Kant's notion of the postulate, but that is because of the difference of the objects treated. In describing thus the answer of spiritual courage to our despair, I am, as you see, once more stating a mood, an attitude of life. You see aU along the contrast between this way of viewing the deepest truths and the way which Spinoza suggested to us. I am not here con- cerned with the final rights of the controversy. I am only trying to introduce you to Kant's notion of our rela- tion to spiritual truth ; and Kant's piety, Kant's attitude towards religious problems, Kant's notion of faith in God, is in essence this heroic notion. He conceives here, as later in the theoretical part of his philosophy, that truth, so far as we mortals can know it, is neither from innate ideas, nor from our experience. It comes to us because we make it. This determination of ours it is that seizes hold upon God, then, just as the courage of the manly soul makes life good, introduces into life something that is there only for the activity of the hero, finds God because the soul has wrestled for his blessing, and then has found after all that the wrestling is the blessing. God is with us only because we choose to serve our ideal of him as if he were present to our senses. His kingdom exists because we are resolved that, so far as in us lies, it shall come. In this sign we conquer. This is the victory that overcometh the world, not our intuition, not our sentimen- tal faith, but our live, our moral, our creative faith. You see thus more fully how highly common-sense is this core of Kant's doctrine. This is, if you wiU, the wis- dom of modern practical men of high mind everywhere. 118 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY, " I don't know mucli about God himself, or about the world," says such an one, " but I can know something of my own nature, and I propose to behave as if God were now looking at me." Well, Kant took this doctrine of what one might call the higher common sense, and, as we shall also see in his theoretical philosophy, he applied it to everything from geometry to theology. So applied the thing becomes vastly involved, prodigiously technical, the work of a life-time. But the hearty and humane Kant stirred his age so profoundly because in his quiet way he carried, deep in his pious soul, a doctrine of life so simple, so stern, so heroic, and yet so universally manly and sensible, that all modern men were touched by it. This is, indeed, the wonder of Kant, that, born and reared in the midst of pedantry, a mere man of books, a system-maker, a metaphysician, he should stiU express the very heart of the high-minded man of the world. " I am very ignorant of the nature of things," — so far Kant and the man of the world are together ; " but I do know my duty, and I am determined to live as under God's eye," — this is the other, the practically positive side of Kant's doctrine, and, as you see, once more the high-minded man is with Kant. This doctrine, however, means, of course, in the reflective thinker, far more in one sense than it means in the man of the world. It leads him to an exhaustive research into the foundations of human reason, it means decades of philosophical experience, of wander- ing from hypothesis to hypothesis, of criticism, of resigna- tion to the truth, combined with fearless constructive research. And that, again, is why it finally takes in Kant's case so elaborate a form. To this form itself we now proceed. If Kant's reli- gious consciousness underwent little change with years, his theoretical opinions were subjected between 1755, when he entered upon his docentship at the university, and 1781, when he published his " Critique of Pure Reason," KANT. 119 to a course of discipline such as few men have ever borne and lived. In matters of theory, Kant was, after all, by nature a very conservative person. Some men are born rebels, and some men have the reformer's office thrust upon them. Kant was of the latter class. He was as rigidly economical of his faiths as he was of aU his other possessions. He never gave up an idea until his self-crit- icism forced him to do so. Skeptical, I have called him, above all men ; but his skepticism meant at the start mere considerateness, mere thoroughness and honesty of reflec- tion. He had no wish to make his reflections negative. If fortune forced negative results upon him, he could not help that.-^ Against change he, to be sure, never blindly struggled, just as he never hastened towards the revolu- tion that he was destined to bring to pass. Shall I weary you too much if I sketch to you a little of Kant's reflec- tive fortunes? He began, in his youth, where the traditional university philosophy of his time had placed him, with the traditions of the philosophy of the seventeenth century in his mind. The world where he found himself was the world that reason comprehends, where all is to be clear, distinct, log- ical, formal. We know a real world of law, where God reigns, and where everything is rational. The philoso- pher is to make plain the logic of things. But alas for the fixity of this formalism ! Kant is unfortunately more than a mere philosopher. He loves to study science and man. And in the world of science there are so many sur- prising things, so many strange -facts, that logic can't con- ' struct, — yes, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And not mere ^ See the valuable note, No. 3, in Benno Erdmann's Reflexionen Kant's, vol. ii. p. 4, where Kant states very finely his relations to skepticism and to dogmatism. My own immediately following para- graph is an eiiort to summarize the much discussed and rather ob« scure period from 1755 to 1766. 120 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. magic, not only superstition shows you such things, as they were shown to Hamlet, ijt is just science that proves how, amidst aU the longings of our reason for the clear and distinct truth of nature, we are continually in the presence of opaque and ultimate facts, — yes, even of prin- ciples that our pure reason could n't have predicted — such principles, for instance, as the law of gravitation. And as for man, how mysterious and often how illogical is his wayward inner nature. Kant meditates upon these things. Can logic, after all, give you a world ? As Kant thus examines the littleness of our powers, he grows, as it were, an ascetic in the enjoyment of his logic. He is n't so sure that you can spin the world out of reason. He doubts whether the secret of things can ever be made open to even the highest finite intelligence. Perhaps the lesson of philosophy wiU prove to be resignation. At all events the lesson of every failure of reflective thought is sure to be caution. So far Kant went in the first ten years of his univer- sity life as docent. The results of his work were poor. They almost discouraged him. Often he imagined him- self on the very verge of discovering a great and new method of thinking. As often he seemed to be disap- pointed. " I have the fortune," he says, in 1766, " to be a lover of Metaphysics ; but my mistress has shown me few favors so far." In those days, and later, Kant as a student had odd fashions of work. He jotted down numberless notes, chaotic-seeming dead leaves of fallen reflection that lay, as it were, forgotten amidst the dark forest of his secret thought. He eared little for such notes ; he let the dead leaves moulder into the soil, if we may say so, to fertilize it for the coming springtime ; and now, indeed, it was the autumn of his silent meditations. Since his death, Kant's lovers have busily hunted for such of the autumn leaves as did not moulder, and to-day there are Kant archives in the Konigsberg library, and else- KANT. 121 where, where such things are kept and prized. Singular bits of paper they are, these notes ! The poor and thrifty Kant wasted nothing. Here, say, is an old invita- tion to dinner, or to a visit at Herr So and So's country- house. Kant has refolded the letter, and has written, not only on its back, but perchance all about and through its text, such memoranda as that Mr. Charisius Stockheim has paid his fees for the course this term, and that in a capil- lary tube of such a diameter water rises so high. He adds, perhaps, some quoted Latin verses, the title of a book or two, and then a paragraph of metaphysics. Eeal- ity can only be given to us through sensation, but per- ception adds thereto the construction of the idea of quan- tity; then there are, moreover, just three functions of apperception ; but the mind itself gives us the only idea of what synthesis means. Thereupon, perhaps Kant jots down a triangle or two, makes a computation, and lets his note-making degenerate into illegible marks. What one wonders at is the vast numbers of such scraps. Kant never let a thought go by. The margins and interleav- ings of 'his books, especially of his lecture text-books, were also full of such things. So unwearied was Kant. The years fly on and he notes and notes — so fruitlessly, one would think ! He is so faithful to his thoughts, and yet so merciless, — so faithful, for they all go down ; so merci- less, for he takes no pain to give them permanent form or fair shape and organization. Later jottings seem to have forgotten the earlier ones. The children of his re- flection are never spared. He loves them not ; he flies from them to new thoughts. On and on his life of medita- tion grows, so slowly, so patiently, once more just like the forest. What is the meaning, what will be the outcome of this endless bearing and casting down of thoughts ? ■• Yet there is indeed method in it all. About 1768, Kant 1 The illustrations of Kant's notes above are brought together from several places in Beicke's Lose Blatter ous Kant's Nachlass. 122 THE SPIRIT OP MODERN PHILOSOPHY. shows traces of a wholly new fashion of thinking. The world undergoes a change for him, whose significance, at first, he himself can hardly estimate. He observes, in a fresh fashion, and with a novel accent, how all truth about the physical world is dependent upon the truth concern- ing time and space. I reword some of his thoughts about space in my own way. Whatever matter there were in' the outer world, there would in any case have to be space to put the matter in, and so the laws of matter have to conform to the laws of space. Nature must perforce obey geometry ; else could she get no room for her things, and even so with time. The laws of space come first in order. The laws of physics come, as it were, logically later, and must be congruent with the space laws. But space, on the other hand, is not obliged to conform to the laws of matter. Just as the principle that what is done can't be undone, even so the principle that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, or that you can't put the left glove on the right hand, illustrates formal laws of the world, prior in nature to the laws of matter. Moving bodies may fly as they will in accordance with laws of physics. They cannot fly in accordance with any possible law so as to move through the shortest distances and yet not fly in straight lines. The matter of your hands may have what laws or nature it will; nothing could permit the left glove to go on to the right hand but a change in the necessary laws of geometry. Geometrical laws, then, like the laws of time, go together to make nature possible. Know what space and time are, and you will know something about the truths that condition the world's very existence.^ Well, then, what are space and time ? About 1769, it * The importance here given to the well-known essay of 1768 is in agreement so far with Riehl's view (Der Philosophische Kriticismus, vol. i. p. 262). See also Caird, op. cit. vol. i. p. 164. From this point on, I follow partly the views of Beuno Erdmann. KANT. 123 occurred to Kant to observe that both space and time are, when regarded as real things, thoroughly and hopelessly paradoxical, self-contradictory in their nature. Kant was fond in those days ^ of setting over against one another opposing assertions about fundamental truths, and giving a fair chance to both sides in the controversy. He elab- orated this old method of research very carefuUy and in an original fashion, and in consequence he called it by special names of his own choosing. He used it to bring out the paradoxical character that after all lies so deeply imbedded in the very heart of all human thinking. Ap- plying this fashion of analysis to space and time, Kant found that, if you once regard them as realities, as facts existent outside your own mind, you can make diametri- cally opposed assertions about them, and yet prove both of a pair of such assertions to be true. The result so far is puzzling ; but look at it an instant. Of space you can say that it is infinitely divisible, that is, that cut it up as small as you like, the parts will still have size, and so can be cut again, so that you could never reach the end of your cutting. This you can say, and you can prove it too, if, namely, space is a real thing that stays there to be cut, apart from your ideas of it. Equally certain it is, how- ever, in case space is real, and is made up of parts, that then, if you let it in conception crumble away like a heap of sand, to find what in the last analysis it is made of, there must be found somewhere ultimate parts, real space- atoms, which you could reach by this process of ideal analysis, and which you couldn't divide. For if theraas a heap of manifold parts, like a heap of sand, and you conceive it to fall into bits for the sake of analysis, then surely where there are many units th^re must be units. Therefore, if space is a reality, you can prove, thinks Kant, that it is infinitely divisible and that it is n't infi- ^ See the introduction to Benno Eidmann's Refleadanen Kant's zuf Kritisdhen Philosophie, vol. ii. p. 124 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY, nitely divisible. That seems absurd, but what does such an absurd result prove? It proves, so Kant holds, that space is n't real at all, but just an idea of yours, a uni- versal but inner condition of your consciousness of outer objects. This result is revolutionary for him. Space and time, he had already said, are the conditions prior of all physical nature. And now space and time can be thus proved to be unreal outside of our minds. What foUows ? The whole of this seeming outer nature is no outer fact at all. It is a mere phenomenon in us. That doctrine is the first half of Kant's critical philosophy. IV. In 1770, he stated this theory of the subjectivity of time and space, as he called his notion, in a dissertation that he wrote on his assumption of a professor's chair at Konigsberg. In this dissertation he gives yet another proof of his new doctrine. Space and time can't be real, Kant now says, for we know too much about them, know them, not by bare observation, but with a mathematical completeness such as we could n't possess with regard to outer facts, know more than we could have found out if they existed really beyond ourselves. We know, for in- stance, of time and space as they are for our minds, that they are infinite wholes, prior to any of their own parts as well as to the things that exist in them. Furthermore, as you can easily see, space and time don't seem to us to be properties of things, as color and taste are ; nor yet are they separate things of nature. Rather are they just con- ditions of our sense-knowledge of things. So, then, they . can't be real at aU, except as facts of our consciousness, i I Kant therefore cajls space and time forms of perception, ' or sense-forms. Our world seems to be in space and time because it is our own nature to view it as spatial and tem- poral. Space and time appear to us to belong outside us, merely because they are conditions in us of our seeing KANT. 125 and feeling things, forms of our sense. It is with them as with colored spectacles. If one always wore green goggles, all his world would seem green to him. Even so, because we always perceive under these forms of sense, space and time, which are just our forms of per- ceiving things, cannot but seem real to us. In fact they are n't revelations of truth outside us. at all. They are our own fashions of receiving the things that we perceive. It was largely in consequence of this doctrine, which I state now, after aU, in its outcome, rather than in its full proof, that Kant later came to declare that the things themselves outside of us, which arouse our sensations, the things as they are in themselves, since they can't be spa- tial . jior temporal, are in fact utterly unknowable. No- body can prove the least thing about what the real world is. We know first of all only our own sense impressions, which are whatever they happen to be. We know also that there are things beyond us which we view through our sense-forms. But what those things are, how should we ever find out ? We are cut off from them by the illu- sions of sense. We know our seeming world in space and in time. It has law and order in it, such law and order as science finds there. Astronomy is true for the seeming world, although in the absolute world there is no space, and although what the stars and the atoms are is unknow- able. But thus, you see, we have found a limit to science. It can never know things in themselves. And so Kant's \ critical doctrine ultimately came to be one of the neces- i sary limits of all theoretical thought. That, at least, was the idea that Kant in his later works reached. In 1770, he still hoped to find by some d^ice of logic a way to a knowledge of things in them- selves beyond our private and human sense-forms of space and time. But from this hopeful " dogmatic slumber " (as he once calls it) Hume's skepticism finally awoke him in the years immediately following 1772.^ 1 Of several hypotheses current in the literature of the topic I 126 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. V. Hume it was who gave the final touch to Kant's re- flection by his stern assertion that in the world of expe- ' rience facts are only conjoined, and never connected. Im- pressions we know, says Hume, and ideas we know ; but who ever yet saw causation, or experienced necessity? In the world of sense there are facts, but there are no links. You see things happen ; you can't see why they must happen. This criticism of Hume's deeply affected Kant. Kant had already almost given up finding out the nature of outer things by logic. He was ready very soon to give it up altogether. He was content with the narrow limits of our sense-forms ; if only the seeming space-and- time-world, the seeming world which science looks upon and examines, could be shown to have order in it. The astronomer does n't care whether space and time are sense- forms, or whether he knows or not the stars as they are in themselves. What he wants to be sure of is that nature, seeming or real, in show-space or in itself, has discover- able law and order in it, uniformity, causal fixity, genuine reasonableness, about it. Well, Kant wanted to mak# out this thing, too. He thought it over in silence for some years. The result of his reflection was expressed in the great " Critique." And that new result, the second and greater half of his doctrine, was something like the follow- ing : — In so far as the world is seen by us in our sense-forms of space and time, it is bound to appear to us as conform- able to their laws. Nature, then, is forced to obey geome- try, because nature, after all, is just a show-nature, our choose the most probable. Here as before I largely follow Benno Erdmann. The awakening influence of Hume was formerly referred to the years from 1762 to 1766. Professor Paulsen of Berlin first called in question this view, and suggested 1769 as a more likelj date. KANT. 127 own experience, and so conformable to our own funda- mentally geometrical ways of viewing it. Well, even so, when we thinh of natural events, there are certain con- ditions governing our thinking process. And to these conditions the products of our thoughtj^the objects of our experience, must needs conform. ._ For the objects of our experience aren't the things in themselves, but are just our thoughts. If our thought, as a process of com- prehending our experience, is obliged to treat the facts before it as conforming to rational laws, in order to tliiuk of them at all, well, then, the facts of experience, being once for all facts of inner life, wiHrh'ave to conform to law, and that will be. the end of it. To be sure, if we knew by sight the things as they are in themselves, we should indeed have to conform wholly to their ways ; and, as Hume's criticism implied, unless we then saw causa- tion and necessary connection amongst the matters of fact, we could n't be sure of such connections at aU. But, you see, we don't know by sight any things in themselves. We see only the show-world in the sense-forms. Its mat- ters of fact are then just our own matters of fact. In knowing nature we are but learning to know 'ourselves. If it is the fundamental fashion of our thinking to become conscious of objects as orderly, then orderly they wiU be for us. Then our world will have in it not only (conjunc- tion, but connection of facts. OuiV understanding will think the linkages into our show-world. The dutifully bound seeming universe of our experience will obey the law of the inner life, whose thought it is. This obedience wiU control aU things, however remote, in these phantom- forms of space and time, — yes, as it were, will preserve the stars from wrong, and the most ancient heavens through this be fresh and strong. Is such a conception a paradox ? Then look at it once more.^ 1 The immediately following free paraphrase of one central thought of the " deduction " is more fully discussed in Supplement 128 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. A sane man differs from a man with a maniacal flight of ideas, or from a patient in delirium, most in this, that the sane man, at every moment, looks, as it were, out of this moment to his larger self, and links this moment with the past and future, while the other's soul, as Kant would say (although he does not use this, my own illustration); is filled with a Gewuhl von Erscheinungen, with a mass of flighty seemings. The sane man continually collects himself, as we ordinarily express it, binds this to that, and thereby, — and this is Kant's central thought, — thereby sees links in his seeming outer world just be- cause he does collect himself, just because it is of the essence of his sanity to think connections there yonder in his show-world. Kant has a technical name for what I have just named sanity. He himself dpes not use the latter word ; he calls this process and Condition of all ; rational consciousness Transcendental Unity of apperce2> tion. It depends upon and involves self-recognition ; but self-recognition, if you look at it carefully, is indeed seen to include the binding of fact to fact in your experience. If I be I, as I think I be, says the little old woman of the song, the7i will my little dog know me. The poor woman is striving, you remember, to recover the unity of her apperception, of which a sad and recent incident has deprived her. She seeks it, and how? By striving to link fact to fact in her sleepy experience. Well, even so, Kant holds, that if I be I, as I think I be, then will the phenomena of my sense-world in a certain deeper just sense know me, that is, recognize the authority of my thought-forms, or categories. The little woman, then, had, in her way, grasped the idea of that most puzzling part of Kant's " Critique," the so-called transcendental deduction of the categories. For once more, if I am to be at this B. The illustration of the " Unity of Apperception " by the idea ot " sanity " is, I thinlc, justified by many aspects of Kant's phraseology, remote as it is from his own wording. KANT. 129 moment sane, then I must regard myself as much more than this momentary self. I must communicate, as it were, with my past and my future, which are n't now here at all. And in doing this, causation, and the other ideas of connection in nature, are the tools of my understanding. They give to my objects a communicable, a typical, a universal character. By connecting facts in my mind, I I connect my mind in itself. This desk before me, to take ' yet another example, this desk, as a fact in my sense form of space and time, is the product of my natural sanity, which simply makes coherent a mass of feelings, holds together in some sort of unity what I see and touch. In so far as I am a sensible person I say to myself, " All these feelings of mine just at this point of space must somehow belong together. Hereby only can I make an object out of them, having a permanent type that I can recognize again. This object must also somehow cohere with what I have seen before, because I am one self, and my experience must somehow hold together. Therefore I say that the object has substanti9;lity, that it persists in time, that whenever it came into being something pro- duced it as its cause, and so on." Thus, you see, I bring' the table into my world, into the one coherent experience which constitutes my larger self. To my larger self, to my whole actual and possible coherent experience, always I look up ; to this I make my active appeal. The moment is my moment so far only 9s it conforms to the universal and orderly types of my whole self-consciousness. In large part, however, this process of constructively making my world coherent, is, on its theoretical side indeed unconscious, just as the inventions of an artistic mind are often unconsciously made. There is in me a blind application of my forms of thought, a reasonable but not necessarily self-conscious defense of my sanity. Kant calls this busy and half-blind application of the forms of thought to the facts of sense, whereby we make 130 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. everything, from pictures in the firelight to the sublimest constructions of science, whereby we get our great world of tables and people and houses and suns and star-systems (and atoms and laws of nature, — he calls, I say, this busy I inner world-building power of our minds the " constructive 'imagination." It builds solely on the basis of our expe- rienced sensations ; it produces purely in the forms of space and time ; it has as theoretical power nothing to say of God, nor yet of the moral law ; it builds our world as a great genius makes a poem, how, he knows not ; it is involuntary, hidden away in the mind, the servant of our understanding, the minister of the forms of thought ; but it gives us this bright and solid world that is all about us ; and, in the way of theoretical knowledge, we have nothing better than what it gives us. Without continual support from sense, this poetical faculty of ours could do nothing. As sensations, unformed, would be a mere flight of ideas, unreal and insane, so these notions of the understanding, causation, substantiality, and the rest, have no meaning except as applied by our constructive imagination to ren- dering coherent our world of sense. That is just Vhy we do not know at all that these forms of thought apply to the things in themselves. And it is thus that so much the more, when we come to those other objects of pure and constructively voluntary faith, namely, God and the rest, we have a right to trust " the truths that never can be proved." For by this theo- retical doctrine we have shown that nothing hut the clear and unmistakable demands of the moral law, which re- quires of us a submission to an eternally significant order, could ever by any possibility carry us beyond sense. We have no theoretical power whereby we can escape from the prison of the inner life, or from the purely phenome- nal reality, the show-world, which our constructive imagi- nation builds up. Theoretically speaking, our show-world is only the poem which the inner life makes. Hence only KANT. 181 our homage to the absolute Imperative of our practical reason, which categorically demands of us that we act as if we were in an eternal world, — only this, and our free choice to obey, can put us into relations with the unknown beyond sense. The theoretical view of things, this work of art of the inner life, is morally insufficient. Hence we have to postulate God beyond it. Such, then, in sum, is the content of my world. The understanding creates the laws of phenomenal nature, creates them, indeed, not without the most close and constant reference to the facts of sense, creates them, in truth, merely by actively uniting together these facts of sense, but still creates the whole organiza- tion, the coherence, the unity, the sanity, of our world of business, of society, and of science. The stars, too, just because they are our stars, experienced by us, must be orderly, as our understanding is orderly; That you and I see the same world depends merely upon the fact that we all work upon similar ideas «f 'sense with similar powers of understanding. We all have. part, as it were, in the one ideal self of humanity's experience. For us all alike this world is an inner creation. To state the case finally, in a general formula: The unknown things in themselves give us sense experiences. These we first per- ceive in the forms of space and time, because that is our way of perceiving. Then, being coherent creatures, we order this our world of sense according to the laws of causation and the other " categories " which are forms of thought. Thus we all alike get a world, which, while it is in all its sanity and order an inner world, is still for each of us apparently an outer world, — a world of fact, a world of life. The unity of our personality demands the unity of our experience ; this demands that our show- world of nature should conform to the laws of "thought ' and thus causality, necessity, and all the other categories of the understanding are realized in the world through our constructive imagination, which working in the ser- 132 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. vice of the understanding actively puts them into the world. VI. By this marvelously subtle thought Kant at once de- stroys and builds up. The world of Locke's bare expe- rience vanishes. The world of the Cartesian innate ideas is nothing any more. Even for Spinoza's eternal order, as an outward fact, Kant's theory has no place. He de- votes long sections of the " Critique " to an elaborate undermining of every form of speculative dogmatism. As the freeman hates tyrants, so Kant hates submission to an outward and absolute order invented by the pretensions i of a thought that would transcend our limited powers, j And yet he does n't assert all this for the mere sake of "cTestructive skepticism. One certainty remains to him which is indeed absolute enough. It is that certainty of the moral law, which in Kant's system takes the place that the adoration of the eternal order took in Spinoza's doctrine. To the moral law and its consequences, Kant devoted three of the most important of his later works. You know theoretically only that rigid order of the world of show which is indeed enough for empirical science, but which gives you no warrant to talk about things as they are in themselves. But you do know one practical cer- tainty which sends you far beyond sense. You know that you ought to do right, and doing right for Kant is some- thing very simple, rigid, and absolute. There is no com- promise in his case between the moral law and the desires of sense. Inclination and duty are no friends for Kant. To do right, thinks Kant, is to act at any time as you could wish that a whole world full of moral agents should act, to act after a fashion worthy to be made a public and universal law of life. The moral law admits of no excep- tions. It is reasonableness in action. Kant loves to dwell on its simple and awful sublimity. Universality of the method or principle of your conduct is its aim. Abso. KANT, 133 lute truthfulness, absolute respect for the rights and free- dom of every one of your fellow-men, utter devotion to the cause of high-mindedness, of honesty, of justice, of simplicity, of honor, — such' is Kant's ideal, and so far as in him lay he was always true to it. It is a stern and rigid ideal, very rare in philosophy, and even infre4uent in the life of the world ; but it is Kant's ideal. And now he further says : In this show-World of your limitation and ignorance, you are bound to behave thus reasonably and sublimely, and there is necessarily associated with your be- havior a determination to trust faithfully and absolutely that the right, thus acted out, will triumph, and that there is a God who will see that it triumphs. You are moved so to trust in God, because that is simply the wise and honorable thing to do. And this world of yours, as one sees, is not a world of absolute insight, but first of sane and active unification of your personal experience, and then of honorable doing, a world whose highest wis- dom is the service of the ideal that reason conceives. This hasty sketch has now put before you, not Kant's whole doctrine, but something of the fine and manly atti- tude which, amidst all his subtlety and his skepticism, he always maintained. I know not how wearisome this sub- tlety itself has been to you, even in my utterly fragmen- tary suggestion of its quality. The professional student often forgets how these things used to seem to him when he began his work, and wonders now how such long pur- suit of the inner life, even into the recesses of its dimmest and most sacred temples of faith, may appear to those who do not spend their lives in such wanderings. Well, be that all what it may, my duty is done if I have sug- gested to you anything of a doctrine which has created the philosophy of the present century ; and as for the / present obscurity of the whole to you, remember that all/ the rest of these lectures will be of necessity, in one' aspect, an exposition of the consequences of this theory of Kant, so that we shall know it better hereafter. 134 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. What, then, is our outcome ? We have reached almost the opposite pole of reflection from that which Spinoza's system occupied. Spinoza saw the substance with the eye of an undoubting reason. He was sure, dogmatic, abso- lute in his pretensions ; and being thus too sure of him- self, he lost himself in contemplating the eternal. We bave seen how the study of the inner life drew men away from this confidence of reason, even as far as the skepti- cism of Hume. Now we have seen how Kant, in the midst of this wilderness of skepticism, built once more the fair spiritual world. Strongly contrasted as are these two systems, that of Spinoza and that of Kant, both stand, I think, for moments, for elements, in the higher thought of humanity. Whether any synthesis of the two is possible, we have yet to see. Both are for us, thus far, experiences of humanity, stages of fortune through which man's spirit passes ; and as for Kant's stage, he shows, as you see, how, amidst the ruins of sense and of doubt, the triumphant reason still builds its world of law and of ideal truth, builds because it is minded to do so, builds by virtue of its natural coherence and its moral courage. Kant's thought, then, is, in one aspect, the thought which Tennyson has made so familiar to our time : — " O living will that shalt endure When all that seems shall suffer shook, Kise in the spiritual rock, Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure, " That we may lift from out of dust A voice as unto him that hears, A cry above the conquer'd years To one that with us works, and trust, " With faith that comes of self-control, The truths that never can be proved ; Until we close with all we loved, And all we flow from, soul in soul." LECTUEE V. FICHTE. Now that we have reached and passed for the first time in our study the thinker upon whom, more than upon any other centre, modem thought turns, as upon a fulcrum, I am tempted to pause, at the beginning of this lecture, until I have suggested still more of what Kant means to modern thought. It is not, I suppose, merely historical sketches of the philosophers that you desire from me. You want to get from these philosophers such help as this brief study can suggest towards a comprehension of the spiritual problems of our own day. So, after suggesting at the last lecture what manner of man the historical Kant was, and what was the essence of his doctrine, I shall now try to draw afresh the moral from this part of our story. I. The movement from Spinoza to Kant has taught us a lesson which human thought everywhere has to learn, namely, that deeper truth is too valuable to be won by any short and easy process, and that spiritual history has everywhere a decidedly tragic element. We begin with our world simply, in a childlike faith that nature and God are ours by right of our birth. Our first lesson is that they are both of them at all events far deeper realities than we had supposed. Nature for Spinoza, as for all other great thinkers, is n't the nature that you see with your eyes. It is the nature that you think with your rea- son ; and to think it with your reason you have to go be- hind sense to the law, to the substance of things. Even 136 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. SO, in your relations with God, you have, according to Spinoza, to forsake the naive and joyous trust in life through which you first see him. " When," says Spinoza, " I had learned that all the surroundings of life are vain and futile," — so his pilgrimage began. A long training, he tells us, was needed ere he became at home in those solitudes where he ultimately found God. It was, he de- clares, through a contempt for all the things which the multitude seek that he came to learn the true good, beyond all that they seek, namely, the peace which the world can neither give nor take away. Encouraging to us about Spinoza was, then, that his tale ended joyously, in a wis- dom whereby he was exalted beyond all the phantom world of sense ; but grave and stern about him was his teaching that the way to this wisdom is so toilsome ; " for all things excellent," he says, " are as difficult as they are rare." This lesson, that the true joy of the spirit is indeed j res severa, a stern thing, is stiU further deepened in our ■minds by the struggle of thought in the eighteenth cen- Itury. It was not the mere waywardness of the eighteenth- century thinkers that forbade them to accept as final the guidance of even the intuitive reason to which Spinoza and his fellows had all trusted so implicitly. It was a necessary progress in reflection that drove these men to their scrutiny of the inner life, a scrutiny whose tragedy we found exemplified by Hume's lightly and cheerfully spoken, but weighty and gloomy words, " sophistry and illusion." But this, at all events, still seems to me sure : Whoever has not wandered that Via Dolorosa of the eighteenth century's doubt of both reason and sense alike, will never be able to knock at the door at the end of that way, the door which Kant first of all men found opened to him. It has opened before us now in the last discussion. We have entered, and what do we find ? We find, not what, in the childlike simplicity of our first love FICHTE. 137 of truth we should have desired, a God revealed direct to sense, or a divine order manifest even to our intuitive reason ; but something very different. We read, when we enter the new door, as it were a mysterious writing, pre- pared by unseen and unknown hands, a letter, left for our guidance by a remote and even unknowable guide. The letter contains only the moral law, and the word, " Serve the unseen God as if he were present with you." That is in the first place all. Upon this and this only, according to Kant, our faith must build. For this, as the inner voice now tells us, is the caU that, with all our better na- ture, we are henceforth minded to obey. Our will is the solution. "Work put the diTrine," says the new philoso- phy. " Build anew the lost spiritual world, which skep- ticism shattered ; " such is the command of Kant's prac- tical reason. All this is unquestionably a hard doctrine. It is not what we sought. We sought peace, and the phi- losopher has brought us not peace, but a sword. We sought the joy of God's presence, and Kant has sent us to work out a divine mission in a wilderness far remote from all absolute insight. And yet, stern as this doctrine is, you must feel its courage and its wisdom. After all, here is at least a part of the truth. Life is not an easy thing ; the spiritual life is the hardest of aU lives ; and of all spiritual gifts, next perhaps to charity itself, insight is surely the most difficult to win. As long as these things are so, Kant's doctrine will retain its profound ethical and religious significance. But, you wiU ask, is this, then, wis- dom's last word, " der Weisheit letzter Schluss ? " Well, for my part I do not think so. I warn you indeed that in philosophy, if you will go beyond Kant, you must meet new dangers, and must attempt new and venture- some wandering. But for my part I love to wander, far and long, and I hold that there are indeed heights yet to climb that cleave the heavens far above and beyond this dwelling-place of Kant. If you will go with me, we will try 138 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. also these new adventures ; but meanwhile I want to point out to you, ere we bid farewell to our greatest modern thinker, how there are more senses than one in which henceforth, wherever our feet carry us, his wisdom will go with us and direct us. After all, the spiritual world that Kant bade us build is the modern world ; and Kant is the true hero of aU modern thought. If in one sense it is only by transcending him and even by forgetting some of his limitations that we are to triumph, he is none the less forever our guide. Kant is, if you like, the homely and somewhat incongruous figure, a sort of John Brown of our century of speculative warfare. Derided as a rebel and an enemy of the faith by many of his own time, he dies be- fore the modern conflict is fairly begun, but his soul goes marching on through the whole of it. Or to take another more suggestive, but similarly inadequate comparison, he resembles the hero of the Heroic Symphony, who is dead and buried in the second movement, but who is none the less spiritually and obviously present in the romantic and fairy-like outburst of new life in the scherzo, and the joy- ous apotheosis of the triumphant warriors that, in the fourth movement, crowns the symphony. Both these fig- ures, I grant you, are somewhat imperfect; but still, I insist, in some such sense Kant will henceforth be our com- panion, — the leader who inspires us while we no longer see him at the head, the man whose precise system we no longer hold, but who still is the creator of our thought. I must indeed have failed entirely in my summary of Kant's own theoretical views, in the last lecture, if I did not suggest to you how fuU Kant's cautious and skeptical doctrine is of motives that will lead us beyond him. Ee- member how, for the first, he declared the world of the things in themselves to be wholly inaccessible to our intel- lect, just because the world for our intellect is our own world. The search for accessible truth, thinks Kant, is then the search for one's own personal larger self. Be- FICHTE. 139 cause I am sane, because I have what Kant calls unity of apperception in me, because I need an orderly conscious- ness, therefore it is that the world of sense and of expe- rience has an outwardly visible good order about it. My understanding, working upon sense, gives laws to nature, because if there were no such laws given by my under- standing I should have no true inner experience at all. The show world of experience is the poem of our construc- tive imagination, the product, then, of our deepest nature, of our largest selves. Moreover, even Kant, with all his caution, has to speak of that true self, to which you and I alike appeal, whenever we discourse about the things of space and time, as if it were something that we all shared in, a certain universal self, whose offspring are we all, with our flying moments of sense, our weak efforts at truth, our study of experience, our common trust in understanding. The world that we know is, according to Kant, the world, not of dead outer things, but of human thoughts ; and when we try to get at truth we are trying to find how the world in space and time would seem to the experience of a perfectly sane and rational and far- seeing onlooker ; in other words, we are trying, all of us alike, as we think, to find out the mind of the ideal man. Well, I say, that is the essence of Kant's thought, re- stated in one word. II. And now for a very natural extension of this view. I suggest this extension here first merely as a possible view, then as the one that we shall find history developing. You will think it at first fantastic, but I shall not try as yet to defend or to attack it. I am so far only chronicler. Grant, if you will, the existence of such a universe as Kant describes, a universe of numerous, free, but ignorant moral agents, each naturally engaged in imaginatively building up, with an unconscious but thoughtful art, an inner personal world, in the sense-forms of space and 140 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. time, and through numerous forms of thought, applied to experience by their various constructive imaginations. Each one of these moral agents is bound, by his manhood and by his rationality, to serve an unseen and eternal moral law, and to believe in a divine order that supports this law. Such a universe as this of Kant, viewed as it were from without, suggests irresistibly an interpretation which at first sight may seem as romantic as indemonstra- ble, but which is at all events not excluded by the facts. Let us look at them dispassionately, — these moral agents, blind to absolute truth, but each and all properly destined to be willing servants of an unseen order ; world-creators, meanwhile, each and aU of them, but creators solely of their inner worlds, communing somehow with one another, by virtue of their common rationality, but cut ofE from things in themselves. How does such a state of things appear? Does it not suggest at once a plan of reality which might not yet demonstrably, but just possibly, stand for the true divine order itself? Might not this whole universe of the apparently separate and sense -encom- passed creatures be an organized spiritual community ? — where, like bees working each in his own part of the cell- wax, but all combining to build the honey-laden comb, these creatures, in the very isolation and darkness of each life, labored together for the realization, — yes, I mean it literally, — for the very expressing and constituting of God's life ; a divine life, I repeat, of infinite complexity, whose purposes were so manifold that an endless number of agents might be needed to embody them ; whose ideals were so lofty that only such courage and fidelity and de- votion as finite beings, in this ignorance and isolation, would have opportunity to develop, could serve the stern and noble ends of the divine decrees. Suppose, in a word, that the infinite whole made up of these finite lives were itself the divine life. From such a point of view, which I now suggest only by way of a pure hypothesis, FICHTE. 141 could not this Kantian universe be both interpreted, and, after a fashion, even justified? To be sure, by such an interpretation it would be indeed transformed. In my opening lecture I ventured to suggest to you the doctrine that the universe, despite its seemingly stubborn physical fixity, is a live thing, an infinite spirit. According to Kant, the world of the natural order, in space and in time, cannot be thus alive, simply because, apart from our sense and our constructive imagination, this natural order has no existence. Spinoza's substance, then, would be for Kant a mere mirage ; but now, as you see, the true uni- verse for Kant consists of perceiving moral agents, and of the dim and shadowy things in themselves, and of what the practical reason postulates ; and that is all. If this be so, however, do we care much for those shadowy things in themselves? Perhaps they are n't worth knowing. Perhaps they even do not exist at all. Our inner world does n't contain them. They are no object of natural science. You can't weigh them or measure them, much less see them. Perhaps they are, as Hume would say, "sophistry and illusion." What, then, remains to us? Why, precisely this : the world of the natural order, which, mirage though it be, is the very mirror of our sanity, and is therefore useful enough; this, and the world of our fellow-men, the world of practical and therefore of spirit- ual relationships, the world of live beings, ignorant, but rational like ourselves. With these we live, we act ; we seek to realize through them the moral order ; we respect their rights, we love them, we treat them as God's chil- dren. But see : perhaps, in dealing with them, we touch the divine order itself. Perhaps, to use a more modern phrase, God simply differentiates himself into the forms of aU these live beings, who may be, for all we know, as numerous, and as various in their degrees of loftiness, as the stars and the atoms of physics. Perhaps in the very depths of their finite ignorance he does n't quite lose himi' 142 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. self ; perhaps his transcendent wisdom consists simply in knowing, in establishing, in harmonizing their relation- ships, so that, as Schiller says, " while no one of them is his equal, his own endlessness foams up to him from out this beaker of the infinite world of spirits." Then, indeed, their lonely heroism is his triumph ; their seeming isol£U- tion is simply the manner in which he realizes, through them, the organization of his own life ; their diversity and ignorance are merely his way of expressing the unity in variety, the completeness in differentiation, of his own manifold nature. If so, then God is n't somewhere far off there, outside the world, so that we feel in vain for him amongst the dead and dismal things in themselves. God is in you, just in so far as you are alive and hearty and humane ; in your human relationships, just so far as they are devoted, loyal, organic ; in your very ignorance, in so far as it enables you to be heroic ; in your very finiteness, in so far as it is a condition for your accomplishment of a definite task. God, outside of such a world of finite agents, would rejoice only in his empty infinity ; he would be, as Schiller also said, in the poem from which I have just quoted, — he would be "friendless," he would " suffer lack." To be the God in reality, he would have to enter into finite form, and preserve his infinity merely through the unity, the organization, the conscious spiritual form of liis universe of active creatures. We were wrong then, when we sought him as it were afar off, in the mirage of space and time, or even in the laws of outer nature as Spinoza did. We were even wrong to say, as Kant said : We never take bold of his real self, we only postulate him. The fact is that, in our spiritual life, we already possess him, are flesh of his flesh, are one with him, just in so far as we have vitality, courage, loyalty, wealth, strength, sanity, of wiU and of understanding. We know of him just so much as we are. And we are of him just so much as we are morally worthy to be. FICHTE. 143 This is the interpretation which dawns upon us when we reflect awhile upon Kant's universe. Mystery en- shrouds his world. The curtain of sense is " so thick ! " Sxich darkness is for us beyond it ! We know so little. We have nothing left us but morality ; and that is just a postulate. But no, is this so little, after aU? Suppose that the curtain itself were the picture, that the dark mys- tery lay simply in this, that we have refused to recognize j as divine so much of God's own essence as we ourselves j, possess, and have failed to see how our life, just in so far ' as it is spiritual, is, not a postulating, but a realizing of !' the divine life. Suppose all this to be no mere hypothe- sis, but a certainty. Would it not transform our philo- sophy? Well, I suggest here this transformation, because, as aU idea, it was precisely the transformation of the Kantian doctrine which was the common undertaking of the great post-Kantian German idealists, f'ichte, Schel- ling, and Hegel. Philosophy is fuU of surprises. Just when you think that the road is ended against a dark and impassable wall, the door opens, as it opened to Kant. And just when you think again that Kant's discovery is the end, a new life for the first time begins. This is the new life of modern idealism. It accepts in one sense Kant's result. Yes, it goes further in negation than even he went. He held fast by the things in themselves, whose existence he acknowledged, although he could know nothing about them. The later German idealists say frankly that they care nothing for the things in themselves, and either doubt or deny whether there are any such things at all. Kant, however, paused at the threshold of the show-world. Beyond, he said, dwells, as we must faithfully believe, a God whom we serve, but who is forever the unknown God. The later idealists say : Indeed, the deepest truth is the truth of the manly will to act morally ; but then this wiU itself embodies in each of us a portion of the divine per 144 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. sonality. This is, so to speak, the real presence of God in us, to wit, just as much of our own nature as is holy. Our holiness, if we have any rag of holiness about us, much more if we are filled with heroism and with reasonable service, is, in its own inner quality, divine. As for God, his life is just this eternal sacrifice of his infinity by entering into the rational lives of a world of limited, but moral beings. For in this sacrifice he wins himself. He enjoys his peace, not apart from the world, " Where never creeps a cloud nor moves a wind, Nor ever falls the least white star of snow Nor ever lowest moan of thunder rolls, Nor sound of human sorrow mounts." No, his peace is the peace of triumphing in the midst of our world of agony and of passion, as the tragic poet triumphs even while losing himself in the sufferings of his own creations. God's life is simply all life, and it is not concealed, but revealed by our own lives. God lives in every kindly friendship, in every noble deed, in every well-ordered society, in every united people, in every sound law, in every wise thought. He has no life beyond such rationality. His personality is just this, the com- munion, the intercourse, the organization of all finite per- sons. Here, you see, is in one sense indeed a new notion of personality. A person beyond our whole world, even of morality, was what we had hoped for. The new doc- trine declares that the infinite one pervades the whole finite world of spirits, and simply lives by constituting, by unifying, and by enjoying, this very life of ours and of all I our brethren, the rational beings, wherever and whatever I they may be. Thus indeed we are limited, and may be i even transient embodiments of God's life ; but we our- selves, in so far as we make for unity and for righteous- ness, are in nature one with him. New is the doctrine, I say, namely, as a reflective speculation in modem thought. But in one sense, as these idealists are never weary of FICHTE. 145 pointing out, it is a very old doctrine ; it is the very core of Christian faith. When Paul said to the faithful, " Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God ; " when the fourth Gospel makes the Logos say, " I am the vine, ye are the branches ; " when the whole doctrine of the church rested upon the idea of a God revealed in the flesh ; when even a simpler and more primitive Christian tradition, that of the first synoptic Gospel, represents the final judgment as dependent upon the principle, " Inas- much as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto me ; " when, finally, the deep mysticism of the historical church represented the faithful as actually feeding upon God's very essence and living thereby, — what doctrine was this but the very teaching upon which rests the new philosophy which now undertakes to transform Kant's dark world of faithful and isolated beings into the world of God's own realization and presence? These moral agents of Kant's world are not isolated, for, ignorant as they are, they work together. And what better revelation of a divine order than a world where spirits can com- mune and can work together ? Once more, as you see, the philosopher invents nothing ; he only reflects. In reflection he has cast down the dog- mas of a blind faith ; in reflection he builds anew their rational and eternal significance. So, at least, these Ger- man idealists hold. As for me, I am so far, as I just observed, a mere chronicler. This doctrine, too, may be an imperfect speculation. I am not now defending it, but only expounding it. As expositor I present it now before you. So far we find it as an hypothesis. It needs proof. Perhaps it wiU need further alteration and adjust- ment. At aU events, here is for us a new experience in philosophy, namely, the very, essence of Christianity em- bodied in a speculative theory. 146 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. in. Meanwhile, the form which this doctrine takes in Ger- man thought is one dependent upon the special conditions of a very charming and a very wayward age, the age of German classical and romantic literature. Whether or no you find this sort of speculation in itself satisfactory, you will at all events be interested in watching with me, during the rest of this lecture and during the next, some of the more obvious and immediately human aspects of a time so full of fire, of imagination, of productiveness, of faults, of wanderings, and of glory. But let us proceed at once to the man who first embodied this new idealistic doctrine in a series of writings wherein the spontaneity, the eloquence, the confidence, the complexity, and the fragmentariness of the work done reflect very well the character of this period. I refer to Fichte. Johann Gottlieb Fichte is the first of the great succes- sors of Kant. He was a man three years younger than Schiller, thirteen years younger than Goethe, and thirty- eight years younger than Kant himself. The story of his life is one of ardor, poverty, high aims, briUiant literary success, bitter conflicts, and an untimely death in his country's service. For at the close of his career, during the great war of liberation, in 1813, he and his devoted wife busied themselves in the encouragement of the war- riors and in the care of the wounded. Fichte, as you see, had just passed the age of fifty. His wife, while nursing wounded soldiers, was stricken with typhus fever. She recovered, but the contagion had already passed to Fichte, to whom it proved fatal, in January, 1814. A nobler death, in a more heroic time, was scarcely possible to a professor of philosophy and a patriot. Fichte was spared the pain of seeing the darker years of national stagnation and of illiberalism in Germany, that followed the triumph over Napoleon. And for the rest, his work was in one FICHTE. 147 sense already done. He had influenced younger men who by that time had already transcended him. This work had been, however, manifold and exacting, Fichte had a temperament at once logical and enthusias- tic. The struggle between a keen and subtle intellect and a warm and imaginative emotional nature, had joined it- self with outer hindrances to make his early years event- ful and arduous. The son of a poor weaver, and one of a large family of children, Fichte chanced to attract, while yet a boy, the kindly attention of a nobleman, who adopted him, showed him a little of the great world, and then, suddenly dying, left him a penniless youth, only the more keenly ashamed, under such circumstances, of his poverty. At the university he supported himself by private teaching, was more than once near to despair in his neediness, and at length, after graduation, became a Hofmeister in a Ziirich family. While here, in 1788, he met his future wife, a certain Johanna Rahn, a niece of the poet Klopstock. They were soon betrothed, but were too poor to marry until 1793. Fichte's since published love-letters to his betrothed are described, by those who have read them through (I have not), as somewhat pedantic — the natural product of a mind conscientious, learned, but impulsive, and so far at once flighty and even a little despondent. He is fond of accusing himself of many faults, laments his restlessness and unsteadiness of ideas and plans, knows no guiding star but her love, and wonders what Providence can be meaning with him. Meanwhile, during this period of his betrothal, he changed his position often and traveled much, looking for a permanent occupation, — a project- maker and an unpromising wanderer. In philosophy he was so far a sort of amateur Spinozist, and occupied a position to which he later looked back as one of darkness and of the gaU of bitterness. Suddenly a change came. It was 1790, and he was now twenty-eight years old. 148 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. While in Leipzig he undertook to give a young mau pri- vate lessons in philosophy, and to that end took up for the first time the study of Kant. Very soon he wrote to Fraulein Rahn in an entirely new vein. It is a won- derful philosophy, this of Kant, he asserts. It tames a man's wild imagination ; it gives one " an indescribable elevation above all earthly affairs." " I have obtained from it," he continues, " a nobler ideal. I don't concern myself so much now with outward things ; I am busied within myself. Thence has come to me a peace that I have never before known. In the midst of my perplexing material situation, I have been enjoying the most blessed days of my experience. I mean to devote to this philoso- phy at least some years of my life. It is above aU con- ception a difficult doctrine, and it deserves to be made easier. Its basis, to be sure, is a mass of head-splitting speculations that have no immediate bearing on human life, but the consequences are vastly important to an age which, like ours, is morally corrupt to the very source ; and one would deserve well of his time if he made these consequences luminous to the world. Tell your dear father that he and I used to err in our investigations about the necessity of all man's acts. ... I have found out now that man's will is free, and that not happiness, but worthiness is the end of our being. And I ask your pardon, too, that I used to teach you false doctrine about these things. Henceforth believe your own feeling, even if you can't refute a sophist." One might wonder whether this confession to Johanna Eahn, of the superlative blessedness of days passed out of her company, and alone with the " Critique of Pure Rea- son," might not have made her a trifle jealous of Kant ; but in fact, as she was a person of both maturity and dis- cretion, being four years the senior of Fichte himself, she wrote him that, since after all he appeared unable to earn his living, and since her father's means were now apparently FICHTE. 149 sufficient, he might return to Ziirich and marry her, and then devote himself to philosophy at his leisure. A curi- ous wavering followed in the mind and conduct of Kant's new disciple. He wrote to his brother that Fraulein Kahn was indeed the noblest soul in the world, but that for one thing he himself was a wanderer, an independent creature, and that for the rest something new had just come into his life, which seemed to drive him out to con- quer the whole world afresh. Marriage would clip a man's wings, would imprison him yonder in Switzerland, would perhaps hinder his philosophizing in this wondrous and novel way. He felt restless ; he was even often dis- posed to flee altogether and never write to her again. To Johanna herself, Fichte's letters expressed of course nothing of these rebellious sentiments, and I mention them only to suggest a little of the ferment which in this needy young tutor's soul was then under way. He must do everything, — teach Johanna the new insight, marry, cease this wavering that had made him like a wave of the sea ; and yet, he must also convert the whole world to the Kantian doctrine, in aU its spirituality and earnestness ; he must save his countrymen in this time, of revolution and of corruption ; he must wander, work, think incessantly. One has here, you see, something of the typical erudite German of the story-books, crude and elevated in one — lover, world-stormer, sentimentalist, and cynic, all at the same time. For Fichte, too, was occasion- ally a bit of a cynic. " When I met Johanna," he once writes to his brother, " my heart was empty. I just let her love me. I did n't care much about it." " Dear one," he writes to her in all sincerity, at about the same time, "take me with aU my faults. What a creature I am ! Men have attributed to me fixity of character, but I have always been merely the creature of circumstances. You have the stronger soul. Give fixity to my waverings." ^ 1 The present sketch is dependent largely upon that of Julian 150 ■' THK SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. In this state of mind Fichte journeyed, in the way of business, to accept a tutor's position at Warsaw. He failed there to give satisfaction, because his French pro- nunciation was poor, and on his way back he called upon Kant at Kbnigsberg, in July, 1791. The aged, prudent, and, as you will remember, highly economical philosopher regarded this reverent, fiery, but obviously impecunious young disciple with a certain suspicion, and received his confidences cooUy. The rebuff only heated Fichte the more. He tarried in Konigsberg two months, in order during that time to write, for presentation to Kant, a work on religious philosophy, which, once finished, proved to be so thoroughly in Kant's spirit that, when in the spring of the next year the book was published anonymously, it was very generally hailed by Kant's admirers as a new pro- duction of the master's own genius. Kant himself had to correct this misapprehension, and in doing so named, and now with warm praise, the real author. Thus at one stroke, as it were, Fichte's career was made. He had won the great philosopher's approval and the ear of the public at the same time. Within another year he returned to Ziirich. He was at length famous, and, as his beloved was now, by chance, even more obviously in comfortable circumstances than she had been at the time when she wrote the aforementioned highly practical letter, there was nothing further to hinder his marriage, which took place in October, 1793, and remained to the end a very happy one. In 1794 came the call to the University of Jena, which was then at the centre of the mental life of Germany. IV. Fichte's career has thus been suggested to you through a sketch of its first important crisis. There is the same interesting union of the great, the ardent, the thoughtful, Solimidt, as given in the fifth edition of his Geschichte d. deutschen Literatur seit Lessing's Tod, vol. i. p. 347 sqq. FICHTE. 151 and, if one wants to be frank, of the petty also, in the rest of his life. Accused of atheism in 1799, the heroic, but lamentably indiscreet man replied to an unjust charge in so violent and unhappy a fashion as to make him thenceforth impossible at Jena, so that even the chief patron of liberal culture and free thought in Germany, Goethe's own duke at Weimar, had regretfully, and by Goethe's personal advice, to dismiss him from his chair. Then followed, however, the Berlin career, with its noble ending. Later years, indeed, in some respects mellowed Fichte ; but to the end he was always a fighter, and a man of books as well, with all the faults of both these species, with a temperament whose lofty heroism and true piety could not save it from an appearance of polemical narrowness and furious self-assertion whenever he was in an actual conflict with any man or party. In argument Fichte is, so to speak, all temperament. His dialectic is indeed keen, his analysis is deep and searching, his sense of the unity of all science is profoundly rational ; but deeper than all is the strong sense of his own personality, the love of making articulate his own character, which led him to say with truth, but with a peculiar and individual strength of accent : " What system of philosophy you hold depends wholly upon what manner of man you are." Hence, in all his lengthy and frequently very technical writings, he after all never merely argues ; he appeals to more than your understanding ; he appeals to your honor, to your dignity of soul, to agree with his system. He would not merely convince you; he would convert you from an error which, as he feels, shows in you a defect of character. Goethe used to say that, by way of amuse- ment, he occasionally read Fichte, " just to let myself be abused by him for a little while." Meanwhile, Fichte abused frankly his own early blindness, before Kant came into his soul, with all the ardor of the ransomed convert. What Kant had ransomed him from was Spinozism, and 152 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. the dread bondage of the outer world. What Fichte con- ceived himself to have learned from Kant was therefore this : The rational subject builds its own world, and the dead external world is naught. What Fichte added to Kant, as he went on, was however somewhat elaborate, and constitutes, along with the strictly Kantian elements, his own system, which is almost universally but rather inaptly named " Subjective idealism." Let me state it, too, first in rough outline, then a little more systematically. As everybody knows, Fichte ac- cepted Kant's result in so far as Kant said that space and time are facts only for our consciousness, and that we can't know any things in themselves beyond us. Only Fichte went further. He denied that there can exist any things in themselves beyond consciousness at all. The world that we spiritual beings know, however hard and fast it may seem, however helplessly we ourselves may individually be subjected to 'its facts, is stiU, in the last analysis, there only in so far as we recognize it as there for us. The world, then, is the world that the self makes. So Fiehte's chief principles are these : (1) All philosophy has its source in one primal truth, namely, the truth that living and voluntary selves freely choose to assert them- selves, and so to build up their whole organized world ; (2) The moral law is, in consequence of this, really prior to all other knowledge, and conditions all that we theo- retically know. For as you see, knowing a world is for Fichte making a world, consciously recognizing the truth, acting then in this way or in that. But the law of action, the moral law, thus becomes for Fichte the basis of aU theoretical knowing ; (3) The apparently fatal outer world about us is simply, in Fiehte's bold and stirringly fantastic words, " the stuff, the material (the opportun- ity), for our duty, made manifest to our 'senses (' das ver- sinnlichte Material unserer Pflicht ')." Beyond all this, however, in the fourth place, Fichte went later, when he FICHTE. 153 developed more clearly a doctrine obviously latent and Implied in his earlier works, namely, the doctrine that the universe of the self -asserting and world - creating selves, each of whom sees about him in daily life simply the very stuff and fibre of his moral law made manifest to his senses as an opportunity for his moral work, — that this universe of selves, I say, constitutes the life and embodiment of the one true and Infinite Reason, God's will, which, itself supreme and far above the level of our finite personality, uses even our conscious lives and wills as part of Its own life. This doctrine Fichte himself, In one of his later works (" The Way to the Blessed Life "), identifies with the teaching of the fourth Gospel. Ac- cording to this view, you see, God, In so far as he reveals himself. Is indeed the vine, and we, In so far as we truly live, are the sap-laden and fruitful branches. The only real world Is the world of conscious activity, and so of spiritual relationships, of society, of serious business, of friendship, of love, of law, of national existence, — In a word, of work ; as for matter, that Is the mere show stuff that is needed to embody, to express, to give form, sta- bility, outline, as it were, to our moral work. I may put Fichte's theory of the external world in yet another fashion, thus : In company with another spirit, so Fichte thinks, I can only work In case he and I have a sense world In common. Hence our common devotion, our social enthusiasm, our duty, requires of us all that we try to embody our ideals In the same sense forms. If we succeed, we all see the same houses and streets, the same people moving, the same flags waving. Seeing thus in common, we can work In common. If we did hot find out how to work In common, we should express the vague- ness of our immoral isolation in the separateness of our various sense worlds ; in other words, we should dream or be delirious. I dream when I am not at work. When I am strenuously active I am awake ; and therefore, In so far 154 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY, as I am effectively righteous, I see the same stuff that my fellow-workers see. Matter is thus the mere condition of our common tasks. Each one of us creates it for himseK. We create together and in agreement, in so far as we want to toil for a common purpose. And the rationality of the divine plan secures to us a power thus to create and to work together. Meanwhile, good and bad men, noble and base men, strong and weak men, really do not see precisely the same sense world. The seeming outer world for any man actually varies with his moral percep- tions. The sense world is saner and more orderly for the cultivated man than for the savage, for the good man than for the man absorbed in the pleasure of the moment, for the wise man than for the fool. And thus the doctrine conforms, thinks Fichte, to the actual facts. " The necessity," says the philosopher, " with which the belief in the reality of phenomena forces itself upon us is a moral necessity, the only one that is possible for a moral being ; herein our duty reveals itself." And thus we have, in the barest outline, the famoiis " subjective idealism" of Fichte. One might better call it "ethical idealism " in its extremest expression. So much, then, for my first rough summary. And now what shall we say of this sort of idealism ? A bold, yes, an extravagant doctrine! you wiU say. Kant's things in themselves have gone out of this world of Fichte. Yet somehow we at first scarcely miss them. Kant, to be sure, felt quite out of place in Fichte's fantas- tic universe, and publicly expressed his repentance, ere he died, that he had ever encouraged this young disciple so freely. " Save me from my friends," cried Kant, very sincerely, in a printed note of explanation. The transfor- mation lay of course in Fichte's determination not merely to do away with Kant's things in themselves, but to see at once into the very heart of the moral order, whose supremacy Kant had only postulated. If you now ask FICHTE. 155 me, however, whether, as modern idealist, I myself accept Fichte's statement as the final truth of the doctrine, I respond of course at once that I do not. This is n't the idealism that has, as idealism ought to have, a deep and genuine respect for the natural order and for experience. Fichte's easy disposal of the whole external and natural order is, indeed, not only bold, but quite unwarranted. The modern student of nervous physiology, of the facts of evolution, and of the interdependence of the physical and moral worlds generally, is not likely to find Fichte's " ethical idealism " anywhere near to the last word. More philosophical surprises await us hereafter ; upon newer insights the thought of to-day is based ; and in some, not in all respects, the whole later German ideal- istic movement, which Fichte began, represents to my mind, as you will later see, a circuit to one side of the main stream of modern thought. Only, as we shall learn, from this circuit thought returns enriched. This expe- rience also will have its part in the outcome ; and he who has not once fairly viewed Fichte's universe will see less than he ought to see in the universe of to-day. As an experience, then, as one more of the many ways of looking at truth, I want you to consider this doctrine. Think of Fichte, when you read or hear of him, as one embodiment only of that beautiful, that profoundly wise and instructive, waywardness of German thought and sentiment, which we all know so well to-day in song, in story, and in the drama, as well as in the other arts. It is this same waywardness that has given us " Faust," and Heine's " Buch der Lieder ; " that instantaneously trans- forms the whole universe for us in any song of Schubert's or of Schumann's; that builds worlds and casts them down in .fiery despair in a Wagnerian trilogy. In pre- sence of this waywardness, not, indeed, of the Germany of Bismarck and of the two Williams, but of the now almost dead romantic Germany, whose empire, as Jean 156 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Paul said, was of the air, — in presence of this wayward- ness, the world is once for all plastic, changeable ; a world of divine or of diabolical ideas, but of ideas that are not so much eternal as capricious. Fichte makes this ideal world a moral one. Others, as we shall see, will find this universe of the selves a universe of romance, of senti- mentality, of anything but hard fact. Yet think not that this capricious world utterly lacks truth. The real world, too, once for all flows ; flows and changes throughout its whole existence,' as Heraclitus long ago said ; and pre- ; serves, too, its sacred and permanent logos just by chan- I ging. Well, it is the office of the wayward to note the various aspects of just this change,' this plasticity, this seemingly hopeless variety, under which the eternal truth presents itself to us. In the world of the wayward, no- thing seems fast. View follows view, romantic theory chases romantic theory, until we begin to fear that no- thing is true, and that here, even as in Hume's skeptical world also, if we find the Holy Grail itself, " it, ''too, will fade, and crumble into dust." But, if we watch patiently, we shall see that, from this very wealth of forms, the true form which is present through aU the changes will in some fashion ultimately come to light. Fichte's moral universe, where matter is only our duty made manifest to our senses, and the universe of the romantic school, where all is sentiment, are, after all, fragments of the true faith. That thought is the thread which is to guide us through the labyrinth. The truth is the whole. Even the fantastic has its part therein. V. But let us look a secpnd time and more closely at Fichte's view. The only perfectly clear thing, he says, at the outset of philosophy, is that there is a self. Any self will of course do, but some self one must start with, namely, of course, his own. Now a self asserts, " I am." FICHTE. ,157 It also equally asserts, " Somethmg exists beside me ; there is a not-seK." If you don't believe that this is always asserted, Fichte invites you to try it and see.^ Well, here forthwith is a puzzle. I assert that I exist ; and then I assert that something exists beside me. Now I can of course know myself, it would seem, but how can I get outside myseK to see what is not myself? How come I to guess at the existence of something other than I am ? Fichte's solution is simple. I dorCt guess at it ; nor is it a fact forced upon me from without, in any fash- ion. My true self freely chooses to recognize the exist- ence of something beside myself as a fact. To be sure, I, in my private, empirical, momentary capacity, seem 7iot to choose, but helplessly to find this outer existence. Really, however, it is my own, my deeper self, whose choice is at each moment shown to me. But, then, ob- serve, unless I thus chose to recognize something beyond myself, I should have nothing to do, I should have no- thing to resist, to fight, to win, to love, — in short, to act upon, in any way. The deepest truth, then, is a prac- tical truth. I need something not myself, in order to be active, that is, in order to exist. My very existence is practical; it is self-assertion. I exist, so to speak, by hurling the fact of my existence at another than myself. I limit myself thus, by a foreign somewhat, opaque, ex- ternal, my own opposite ; but my limitation is the free choice of my true self. By thus limiting myself I give myself something to do, and thus win my own very exist- ence. Yet this opposition, upon which my life is based, is an opposition within my deepest nature. I have a foreign world as the theatre of my activity ; I exist only to conquer and win that apparently foreign world to my- J Cf. the noteworthy passage in the Orundlage of 1794, Fichte's , Werke, vol. i. p. 253 : " Dass es ein solehes Setzen gebe [namely, of the Nicht-IcK] kann jeder nur durch seine eigene Erfahrung sioh dar- thun." 158 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. aelf ; I must come to possess it ; I must prove that it is mine. In the process of thus asserting a foreign world, and then actively identifying it as not foreign and exter- nal, but as our own, our life itself consists. This is what is meant by work, by love, by diity. But this process, thinks Fichte, is essentially an endless one. The more of a self I ata, the more of a world out- side me I need, to develop and to express my energies. A busy man needs, and therefore posits, a world full of the objects of his business. Without this asserted world of objects, he, as busy man, would cease to exist ; he would, so to speak, retire from business ; he and his busy world would stagnate together. This, then, is Fichte's central thought : Your outer world, your not-self, is just as large as your own spiritual activity makes it. Fichte tries to show in detail how the various forms of our rec- ognition of outer reality, such as perception, imagination, space, time, causality, and the rest, arise. Into such de- tails I have no time to follow him ; but the essence of his doctrine consists in identifying Kant's theoretical and practical reason, and in saying that all our assertion of a world beyond, of a world of things and of people, merely expresses, in practical form, our assertion of our own wealthy and varied determination to be busy with things and with people. Thus, then, each of us builds his own world. He builds it in part unconsciously ; and therefore he seems to his ordinary thought not to have built it at all, but merely to find it. Each of us sees, at any moment, not only the world that we are now making by this act, but the world that we have made by all our past acts. And hence our whole life is thus consolidated before our eyes ; our world is the world of our conscious and unconscious deeds. Thus we often regard it as our fate, and talk of an external substance, as Spinoza did. In this we are wrong. No activity, no world ; no self, no not-self; no self-assertion, no facts to assert ourselves upon. So, at least, Fichte teaches. FICHTE. 159 But, you will say, is not the outcome of all this a sort of solitary self-existence, where each one of us is shut up to his own life ? Has the spiritual world no absolute reality ? Is it, too, the mere dream of our activity ? No, thinks Fichte, not so ; and here comes a part of his doc- trine that was to himself the hardest part. He never made it perfectly clear, although he tried again and again. To you I can only suggest it. When we reflect upon our inner activity we find it, after all, not an individual self- will, but a deep longing for universal life. The true self, therefore (and so far the thing is indeed clear enough), the true self is n't the private person, the individual called Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the impecunious tutor, the waver- ing lover of Johanna Eahn, the professor in Jena, falsely accused of atheism. This true self, thinks Fichte, is some- thing infinite. It needs a whole endless world of life to express itself in. Its moral law could n't be expressed in full on any one planet. Johann Gottlieb may be one of its prophets ; but the heavens could not contain its glory and its eternal business. No one of us ever finally gets at the true Reason which is the whole of him. Each one of us is a partial embodiment, an instrument of the moral law, and our very consciousness tells us that this law is the expression of an infinite world life. The true selfw is the will, which is everywhere present in things. This will is, indeed, the vine, whereof our wills are the branches. Fichte has innumerable ways of trying to tell finally and clearly the story of what the infinite will is and does. It is eternally asserting itself afresh, through countless finite wills. Each one of these finite wills, as moral agent, builds its sense world, and finds, in this sense world, the manifestations of other agents. For all the agents, as ministers of the divine, work together. The moral con- sciousness says to each, " If I am real, so also are these. Work with them ; respect their rights ; honor their free- dom ; join with them to build a higher and freer world 160 THK SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. than any of us now see." In this organization of life, even here on earth, in this kindliness, this honorable con- duct, this social unity, which constitutes our better life, something of the divine wiU is thus realized. But the problem of its complete realization is an endless one. Nowhere, in all the infinity of countless worlds of moral struggle, can the divine wiU be fully realized. As I my- self seek to assert myself aU my life long, but never suc- ceed fully in my task, am always struggling with obsta- cles, casting aside all that I have won, in order to pursue new triumphs, even so the divine will is restless through aU its worlds, and pulses from self to self, from attainment to attainment, in an everlasting search for a complete self-realization. The true God is, therefore, as Fichte holds, existent in our universe as the pulse of its moral order, as the life of lives, the eternal spiritual self-creator, whose work is never done, who rests never, and who is no one individual being anywhere, but who is the live and organic unity of all beings. Even herein, however, thinks Fichte, he finds his highest peace, that in endless toil he shall reassert himself, and shall win the world which is his embodiment. VI. The completest popular statement possible of Fichte's system is given in his own words in his book on the " Vo- cation of Man." This work was first published in 1800, shortly after Fichte left Jena, and was no doubt meant to justify him, in the eyes of the general public, against the charge of atheism. The argument of the work falls into^ three parts, denominated respectively, " Doubt," " Know- ledge," and "Faith." Under the first head Fichte de- scribes the views and problems of his own pre--Kantian period. Under the second head he sets forth the revolu- tion produced in his thought by the influence of Kant. In the third part he explains the conceptions of the moral order and of the infinite will. The style is eloquent, tire- FICHTE. 161 less, too full of explanation and of illustrations ; the work as a whole is profound and inspiring. Let us hear yet a word of Fichte's own from this book, in a fine passage where he appeals direct to this infinite itself. " Supreme and living will," he says, " whom no name names, to thee may I lift up my soul, for thou and I are not parted. Thy voice sounds in me, and mine again in thee ; and all my thoughts, if only they be true, are thought in thee. I comprehend thee not, yet in thee I comprehend myself and the world. . . . Best fitted to know thee is childlike and submissive simplicity. ... I know not what thou art for thyself, . . . and after thousand lives lived through, my spirit will comprehend thee as little as now, in this house of clay. For what I have once won to my compre- hension becomes even thereby finite. . . . Nay, I wish not to know of thee what thou art in thyself. I know thy bearings on my life. . . . Thou producest in me the knowledge of my duty. . . . Thou knowest what I think and will ; . . . thou choosest that my free obedience shall be effective to aU eternity ; . . . thou doest, for thy will is itself Deed. Thou livest and art, for thou dost know, will, and do, and art ever present to my insight ; but what thou ai;t I shall never wholly know through all the eternities." This, you see, is Fichte's theism. The essence of it is, with all the analogies between the two, something very different from Kant's postulating of a God beyond the world of sense. The fact is that, for Fichte, my own ' vocation is the central faet of consciousness. But what my vocation is, is a matter for deeper consideration. And, if I duly consider my vocation, I find that there is a measureless strength of restless wiU about me, which demands an infinity of time in which to work out my vocation, and an infinite business to meet, with its magni- tude, the endlessly significant office that I choose for my- self. Plainly, then, I, the true self, am not the mere self 162 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. of the world of sense, the self who eats and talks, and has this name. It might be truer to say that I, the real, the deeper, the relatively impersonal, or, rather, if you like, the genuinely and essentially personal self, need, and so express myself in, the world of social business. All we human selves are thus one true organic self, in so far as we work together. And this organic self we all of us ex- perience just in so far as we do toil together. But not even this larger self of society can fully express the voca- tion which constitutes me in my true, in my deeper per- sonality. No, my true vocation is endless, is eternal. By it I am linked, not through a mere postulate, but through all my deeper self-consciousness, to the very essence of the divine personality. When I reflect upon this truth, lo ! my earthly existence, in its darkness and limitations, van- ishes from before my eyes. With you I stand in presence of the divinest of mysteries, the communion of all the spirits in the one self whose free act is the very heart's blood of our spiritual being. Nay, must it not, then, thinks Fichte, must not this be true of us ? We are dead, and our life is hid in God. He is the only self. His will is the only wiU ; his self-assertion lives in our every deed and love ; his restlessness trembles in every throb of our hearts ; his joy thrills in every triumph of our cour- age. Well, in this thought, thus eloquently suggested by the restless and unsatisfying Fichte, you have the beginnings of the post-Kantian German idealism. The question, " Who is the true self ? " thus becomes central in thought. Kant had really made it so, when he made all reasonable experience a continual appeal of my momentary to my larger self. Fichte merely universalizes the problem. The world is the poem thus dreamed out by the inner life. Who, then, is the dreamer ? That is the question of the romantic period of German speculation. If you remem- ber this as the central problem in all that is to follow in FICHTE. 163 the two succeeding lectures, you will have In hand the thread that will guide us through this labyrinth of Ger- man speculation. Do not tremble, I beg you, before the mysterious seeming of the region into which we enter. The thread, firmly held, will soon lead us back again to the study of the natural order, back again to the king- dom of modem science, to the region where the facts are indeed stubborn, but where the deepest problems, as the idealists will meanwhile have taught us, must needs be spiritual. To teach, indeed, just this lesson, the spiritu- ality of the stubborn world of outer fact, was the true mission of these idealists, who so often despised facts. LECTURE VI. THE EOMAIfTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHT. FlCHTE, as we have seen, had begun by setting asidp Kant's things in themselves. What, after all, thinks he, is the use of even mentioning such mysteries as the dead things in themselves, whereof you only declare that they are unknowable ? What if they are said to exist ? Un- less we can know them, they are to us as good as nought. But now, for others besides Fichte, Kant's things in them- selves used at that time to be objects of no little sport, — sport which took, of course, a rather heavy and German form, but which was very well warranted by the situation. The things in themselves of Kant's theoretical philosophy, the sources of all our experience, but themselves never experienced, were too dim and distant to seem to a further reflection anything but chimeras. An epigram, usually attributed to Schiller, compared them to useless household furniture, once the pride of that very form of metaphysic which Kant's " Critique " had undertaken to slay. For this old metaphysic had pretended to know them. Now that the pretentious doctrine is dead, what is the use of the abandoned furniture ? ' " Da die Metaphysik vor Kurzem unbeerbt abging Werden die Dinge an sioli morgen suh Jiasta verkauft." * But the house of our philosophy thus once emptied of cumbersome furniture, Fichte had found himself able to * That is, freely translated : — " Notice : The late metaphysic is dead without heirs, and to-morrow All the things in themselves shall under the hammer be sold." THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 165 fill it In his own fashion with the rarest treasures of truth. The real thing in itself, according to Fichte, is the active I, the Ego, the subject of self-consciousness. This each of us knows in his own person. To watch the activity of this great source of our being, to sound the depths of its endless nature, is to come to the true knowledge of God and of things which Spinoza already demanded for the ■wise man, and which Kant sought in vain in the external world. We and our world exist together. Our world is the expression of our character. As a man thinketh, so is he ; but with equal truth, according to Fichte, as a man is, so thinks he. He sees himself in all he sees. And this self that a man sees crystallized in all his world of sense, of society, and of philosophy, is simply his own fashion of conduct, his busy world-building tempera- ment. At the outset of life each personal self says, " I must exist, I will exist." But no one can exist unless he is ready to act. My life, my existence, is in work. I toil for self-consciousness, and without toil no conscious- ness. But once more, also, I can only work if I have a task, something foreign to me, a not-self to influence and finally to conquer. Therefore it is, thinks Fichte, that I stand from the beginning in the presence of a world which seems external. My deeper self unconsciously pro- duces this foreign world, and then bids me win my place therein. The material things yonder are therefore just the products of my unconscious activity. Their office it i^to give me something to do ; they are the outer embodi- ment of my duty ; they are my moral law made manifest to sense. You and I see the same world about us merely because we, as moral beings, need and choose common tasks. And, in a deeper sense, the reason why you and I see the same world is that we are actually fragmentary manifestations of one infinite self, whose ultimate nature we can never fathom, but whose world is through and through a world of common tasks, — a world of a moral order, whereof we are all instruments. 166 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY, I. In the present lecture we have to follow the further story of German idealism as exemplified in the views and experiences of a number of persons who, for lack of a better name, are usually classed together as constituting the German Eomantic School. The peculiar character of our undertaking in this course bids us attend as much as possible to the relations between philosophy and life. , Where, as in the case of the German romantic school, a I group of writers tried to embody a philosophy in a liter- ary movement, and to translate their own lives directly into philosophy, such a phenomenon cannot but be of great service to our purpose. And therefore I shall spend time upon matter that wiU. indeed lack the technicality inseparable from even the most general account of Kant's philosophy, but that will still have its bearing on our gen- eral task. In fact, my discussion will for the time leave the field of technical philosophy almost altogether, and for the rest of this lecture I shall speak of thoughts that will have their more metaphysical bearings shown only in later lectures. I mentioned in the last lecture how Fichte's philosophy is an example of that beautiful waywardness which is everywhere characteristic of the Germany of the classical and romantic periods. For the rest, to particularize con- cerning this waywardness as it shows itself in Fichte, he is, after all, a very arbitrary thinker. His system has vast gaps in it. You in vain seek to get from Fichte, for instance, any precise deduction of how the world of our senses, down to its very details, is an embodiment of the moral law. We, in this age, whose world is so full of material facts, whose science has delved so deeply into physical nature, whose industrial art is so multiform in its inventions, whose whole view of man makes him so dependent for his health, his fortune, and his very reason, THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 167 upon physiological conditions, feel at once the great gulf that divides Fichte's ethical idealism from the world of the natural order. We honor the stern enthusiasm of this idealist, but we find in his system the record of a dis- tinctly individual experience. That he has a hold upon a very genuine truth we ought to recognize ; but we can- not read his fearless and often intolerant essays without becoming aware that it has not pleased God to create any perfectly orthodox Fichtean, save Fichte himself. Many of us will no doubt call ourselves, with Fichte, ethical idealists, since we indeed hold that the world is through and through a moral order ; but his way of showing ho^o it is a moral order will not content us. I, the active being, shall create this sense-world of mine unconsciously, for the sake of having my task, the material of my duty, made manifest to my senses. Very good, but why, then, do I create a world that has a belt of asteroids in it be- tween the orbits of Mans and Jupiter ? What portion of my personal and private duty do the comets, or the jelly- fishes, or the volcanoes, or the mosquitoes, make manifest to my senses ? What part has the Silurian period in the scheme of my moral order ? And of what ethical value to me are the properties of the roots of algebraic equa- tions, or the asymptotes of an hyperbola ? In the world of this moral order, you see, there is a great deal that will not easily submit to my ethical interpretation. But if we say, with Fichte, that the real world is after all not the world of just my private and individual moral order, but the world of God's infinite ethical activity, so much the more is it incumbent upon us to be industrious in our efforts to comprehend the spirituality of the truths of na- ture by means of formulae that are more submissive to facts, more widely sensitive to the varied aspects of real- ity, less impatient of mystery, than were Fichte's impetu- ous undertakings. If God's world is through and through moral, it is also through and through complicated, pro- found and physical. 168 THK SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Well, the story of the romantic school is the story of the enlargement of Fichte's onesidedness through the ap- pearance, in the first place, of other not less arbitrary doctrines, which sought to interpret the whole world in terms of our spiritual interests, but which expressed other interests than those that he made central. And, for the rest, this story is also the tale of the gradual fixing of all such waywardness into the directions that have proved so fruitful in the recent decades of modern research. We are too frequently disposed to fancy that the philosophy of the period of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel is something very remote from the philosophy of our own day. That philosophy, we say, was above all just wayward, fantastic, regardless of the limits of human knowledge, indifferent to science, unwisely imaginative. Nowadays we have changed all that, have abandoned romantic wanderings, have come to respect the facts of science, and to let the mysteries alone. But such a view of our relations to the age of the romantic school is not precisely historical ; and wherein it is not precisely historical I want to make plain to you. Deeper than the contrast between that age and ours is, as we shall soon see, the relationship between the two. Our age, as we shall learn, contains merely what was implicit in the very waywardness of that revolution- ary period. Their youthful enthusiasms, at first vague, wandering, conflicting, took form at length through growth, and produced, in their maturity, our modern doc- trine of evolution, our modern efforts to bring into close relation the natural and the spiritual, our whole modern many-sidedness of interest and experience. The romantic period was the time of bloom and of flowers. Our period, if you will, is, in its matter-of-fact and apparently prosaic realism, the time of the ripened seeds, a time which the warm-hearted usually scorn as a bleak and autumnal pe- riod of dry seed-pods and chilly night airs. But the wise love such ages of ripening and of harvest ; for they know THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 169 ttat a richer growth is erelong to spring from all these barren -seeming seed -kernels of truth. But such meta- phors apart, what I want to insist upon is the essential unity of recent philosophy amidst all its transformations. Properly viewed, the lesson of the most fantastic specula- tions of the later German metaphysic is precisely the les- son which the thought of to-day is trying to express and to utilize. To understand the meaning of contemporary thought, say concerning evolution, apart from a compre- hension of the period from Kant to Hegel, is therefore, indeed, like trying to appreciate the mature and prosaic, but successful man, without some reference to the splendid dreams of his youth. We have never wholly broken with the romantic period. We have only grown older, and pos- sibly a little more saddened ; but those earlier ideals live still in our breasts, only I should be glad if we were bet- ter aware of the fact than sometimes we are. Our immediate task in the coming lectures is thus two- fold. We want first to show how the romantic school, far outdoing the waywardness of Fichte, supplemented his one-sided interpretation of things by other, equally ideal- istic and much more fantastic, interpretations of reality. And, secondly, we want to show how our own more realis- tic age expresses, after all, not so much an abandonment of the true spirit of this idealistic period, as a fixation and a maturing of some of its deepest interests. And now, as to the romantic school itself, what, first of all, is the meaning of the word ? 11. German literature, in its great modern outgrowth, be- gan, as you know, with Lessing's early works, just after the middle of the eighteenth century, and ended with the death of its last prominent representative, Heine, in 1856. But the principal productions of this century of literary activity belong to a very much briefer period. 170 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Lessing was a sort of forerunner of the classical age. Long as was Goethe's literary life, his best years are those between 1770 and Schiller's death in 1805. And to the credit of these thirty -five years may be reckoned much the larger half of the literary and a decidedly large frac- tion of the philosophical work of the whole great century of German mental life. Not only was this most produc- tive period decidedlj' brief, but the geographical limita- tions of the intenser literary interest, at any rate, in view of the fact that Germany had no natural literary capi- tal, are decidedly noteworthy. Two circles, the court at Weimar and the university a few miles distant at Jena, were, between 1775 and 1805, far and away the chief in- fluences in German literature and philosophy. At Wei- mar, Goethe and Schiller were for a time together. In Jena, SchiUer himself taught for some years, while Fichte, ScheUing, and Hegel all began their academic activity there. After 1800, indeed, Berlin became a centre sec- ond in importance only to Weimar, while the university at Jena sadly declined. But not until still later was in- tellectual activity of high rank observable aU over Ger- many from Berlin to Heidelberg, and from Munich to the Ehine. However, as the streams spread they lost their swiftness, and erelong, for the intense life of the great years, there was substituted more and more of that fruit- ful but quiet industry of minute German scholarship, to which we all owe so much. The years from 1770 to 1805, and the circles of Wei- mar, of Jena, and, in a less degree, of Berlin, are there- fore central in importance in the history of German thought. But now, as must be pointed out, even here there are to be specially mentioned, as of most critical sig- nificance, ten years out of these thirty-five. They were the flower of the flower for German life. These were the last ten years of SchiUer's career, when his friendship with Goethe was most intimate, and when also, in addition THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 1n PHILOSOPHY. 171 to the great classical poets, a new generation of ambitious young men began to appear upon the scene. You must remember that, in 1800, Goethe was fifty-one and Schiller forty-one years old ; and at such an age men who have become early famous are certain to find themselves sur- rounded by circles of eager and often envious youth, whose hearts have been set on fire by the example of the elder geniuses, and who themselves are minded to do even better than their betters. So it was with Goethe and Schiller. The young generation already swarmed aU about them in Jena and in Weimar. It was a matter of course, in that day and region, that if you were young, and were anybody at all, you were a genius. The only question was what sort of a genius, in your lordly spiri- tual freedom, you had chosen to be. Tour sorts of geniuses were especially popular, and all four sorts were as plenty as blackberries. There was the romancer of genius, who was plotting to outdo Wilhelm Meister. There was the dramatist of genius, who was disposed to banish Schiller's plays into oblivion, so soon as he himself had learned his trade. There was the critic of genius, who had grasped the meaning and lesson of the literature of the ages, and who was especially fond of contrasting the Greek tragedy with Shakespeare, and of laying down poetical laws for aU future time. And finally there was the philosopher of genius, whose business it was first of aU to transcend Kant, and secondly to transcend everybody else. Best indeed was your lot in case you chose to exemplify in your person all four sorts of genius at once, as, for instance, the young Friedrich Schlegel for a while delighted to do. Your inner experiences were then sim- ply inimitable. In brief, " Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." We may smile a little at all this ferment of ambitious hopes, but we can never be too grateful for what that brief period accomplished for us. It gave us philosophi- 172 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. cal ideas that, fragmentary though they were, will never be forgotten, and it produced some enduring poetry and romance, in addition to what Goethe and Schiller wrote, and of no small merit at that. Now from these circles of the younger geniuses, one especially stands out in inter- esting prominence. It is the circle which delighted to call itself the Romantic School. From its often crude pfforts sprang a movement, the romantic movement in a wider sense, which lasted far on into our own century. It is this romantic movement in the wider sense that has proved the most characteristic outcome of modern German life as it was before 1848. To the romantic movement must be credited the whole wealth of German tales and songs that we love best after the greatest works of Goethe and of SchiUer. The same general movement had its part in nourishing and in inspiring the music of modern Germany from Beethoven to Wagner. In brief, without this movement, German thought and German emotion would have no such meaning as they have for us to-day. But in the narrower sense, the name Romantic School was originally applied only to the little company of young men, all born somewhere between 1765 and 1775, of whom the most prominent were the two Schlegels, Augus- tus and his brother Friedrich, Ludwig Tieck, romancer and dramatist, Novalis (whose real name was Friedrich V. Hardenberg), the philosopher SeheUing, and the theo- logian Schleiermacher. The Schlegels were the critics of the school, and were also men of considerable metaphysi- cal interest. Novalis, who died very young, touches, in his fragmentary remains, upon aU the characteristic inter- ests of the romanticists ; he is philosophical, poetical, crit- ical; but he is everywhere and always the born dreamer. Schelling was intimately associated in a personal sense with all his fellow romanticists. If his intense meta- physical tastes kept him from attempting very seriously either dramas or romances, his early speculations bear THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 173 everywhere the mark of his friendships ; they are the work of a restless and artistic soul, who loved the universe with a sort of tender passion, and whose philosophy is, even in its most technical subtleties, as much the confes- sion of a fiery heart as it is the outcome of a brilliant imagination and a wonderfully skillful wit. I have pre- ferred rather to discuss the philosophy of the romantic school under this name than to confine my title or my survey to ScheUing, the representative philosopher of the little group, because it is here the movement that ex- presses itself in the man, not the man who masters the movement. ScheUing was himself, always, even as phi- losopher, a creature of the moment. His moments were indeed often very great ones and might need each a whole volume to express itself. But ScheUing is not, like Kant, a systematic and long - plotting thinker; nor yet, like Fichte, a man who, after many adventures, is completely overwhelmed and thenceforth possessed by a single idea. No, ScheUing possesses directly the wavering passion of his romantic friends. His kaleidoscopic philosophy, which changed form with each new essay that he pub- lished, was like their whole scheme of life and of art. Trust your genius ; follow your noble heart ; change your doctrine whenever your heart changes,, and change your heart often. Such is the practical creed of the romanti- cists. The world, you see, is after aU the world of the inner life. Kant cut us off from things in themselves ; Fichte showed us that it is the I, the self, that makes the world. Let us accept this lesson. The world is essen- tially what men of genius make it. Let us be men of genius, and make what we choose. We shaU then be as gods, knowing good and evil. Herein, as you see, lies at once the great difference be- , tween the romantic school and Fichte. Fichte had said : The world is the world as self -consciousness builds it ; but the essence of self-consciousness is the moral wiU, the 174 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Avill to act dutifully, steadfastly, nobly, divinely ; and therefore the world is duty solidified to our senses. The romantic spirit says from the very start: The world is indeed the world as self -consciousness builds it ; but the true self is the self that men of genius, poets, construc- tive artists know ; hence the real world is such as to sat- isfy the demands of the man of genius, the artist. Emo- tion, heart-experience, longings, divinations of the soul, are the best instruments for the philosopher. Dream out your world. It is after all but a dream of the inner life, this vast universe about us. The noblest dreamer will be the man to understand it the best. The distinguishing features of this group of young men were then, to sum up, so far, these : they proposed in common to create a new literary movement ; and whilst they were rather speculative metaphysicians than true poets, they were nevertheless rather romancers than soberly constructive philosophers. They therefore suggest rather than complete. Their lesson is of more impor- tance to us than are their systems. At the start, that is, in the years about 1795, they were under the influence of Fichte, but his ethical idealism soon grew too stern for them. They interpreted the world rather in terms of sen- timent and of bold divination than in terms of the moral law. For the rest, external nature interested them, even in their most idealistic moods, more than it had interested Fichte. Of course, the external world is for them too only mind solidified, only a mass of ideas seen from with- out. But they are dissatisfied with Fichte's moral law as a full account of the essence of this outer mirage of our senses. Art, they hold, is as suggestive as morality for the speculative thinker. Nature is therefore a work of unconscious art, a form which the gi-eat Genius of the world gives to his experiences. God is an artist, a poet, who pours out the wealth of his beautiful life in all the world of sense. Of this God, we too are embodiments ; THK ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 175 only we are not blind, as his other works are. We are conscious, and therefore it is that we see in sense-form, in nature, our own ideals crystallized. The more inner experiences we ourselves have, the more feelings, longings, ideas we possess, the more means we shall therefore have of interpreting nature. It is in vain, think these men, that you gather and heap up natural facts, if you have no heart. Only a poet can understand nature, for the true laws of nature are through and through analogous to the laws of the heart. If (so the romanticists would say), if we have ever been in love, then and then only we know why the plants grow towards the sunlight, or the free- swinging needles turn to the pole, or why the planets are loyal to the sun. If we are artistically complete in our inner natures, then we comprehend why the crystals love their regular forms. To understand the difference be- tween organic and inorganic matter, you have again to study first your own inner consciousness, and to examine its various stages, as they lead up from disorganized sen- sations to clear and organic reason. For the forms of matter in the outer world are symbolic, are precisely ana- logous, stage for stage, to these processes of the inner life. In brief, to study nature is to sympathize with nature, to trace the likenesses between the inner life and the mag- nets, the crystals, the solar systems, the living creatures, of the physical world. It is the part of genius to feel such sympathies with things ; it is the part of philosophy to record your sympathies. Artists are often unconscious philosophers, but great philosophers, from this romantic point of view, are never more than consummate artists. Feeling is an indispensable guide to reason. We should ' never know God did we not share his nature in our emo- tions. He is only the many-sided and infinite genius. We appreciate him because we young romanticists are geniuses ourselves. 176 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. III. Such philosophy as this was, of course, capable of innu- merable forms. Let us illustrate more in detail from the work of particular men : Best do they comprehend truth, declares in substance the young Friedrich Schlegel, best do they comprehend truth who have experienced the most moods. The truly philosophical attitude towards life and reality is therefore one of a sort of courageous fickle- ness. Schlegel himself called it the romantic irony, and ; endeavored to found a system upon it. This is his rather '(grotesque attempt to revive the Socratic method and doo- 1 trine. Socrates had founded his whole life as a conversa- tional teacher, who never preached but always asked questions, upon a sort of ironical confession that he was not wise. " This," he used to affirm, "is my only wis- dom, to know that I am an utterly ignorant man." Well, somewhat so, but still with a difference, thinks Schlegel, the romantic genius confesses that marvelous as is his present divination of the truth of things, it is, after all, a quick divination, so to speak, which will away again ere- long, and will give place to some other theory, equally creditable to its clever possessor, equally true, but also equally fickle and therefore false. " The deepest truth known to me is that erelong my present truth will change : " such, thinks Schlegel, is true wisdom. For the world, as you see, is the world for the self, for the inner life, for the heart. And the heart is so strong and lively a thing that it will change frequently. "The world exists for me ; and to-morrow I propose to make a new world : " such is Schlegel's early interpretation of the essence of Fichte's view. But alas, Fichte's ethical idealism, with the moral law left out, is too grotesque in its mutilation to become a coherent doctrine. Friedrich Schlegel gave up this fickleness in later years, went ovei; to the Catholic church, and devoted himself otherwise to THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 177 Oriental studies, wherein he well earned a high and hon- orable rank. His stupendous poetical genius somehow never came to flower, much less to fruit, and remained therefore a secret close locked in his bosom, i He assures us that he possessed it, and no doubt he knew, for in those days, as you are aware, the inner life knew every- thing. Novalis, our second illustration, is a more interesting character. His was a profound and noble nature, but fate forbade him to reach maturity. To his beautiful and baffling fragments the sensitive reader returns ever and anon afresh, perplexed, disappointed, and yet always de- lighted. Novalis never lived to finish anything. His philosophical fragments are after all, however, the best brief compend you could find of the essence of the roman- tic philosophy, in all its spiritual depth and in all its waywardness. For Friedrich Schlegel, in his metaphysi- cal capacity, as you have just seen, I cannot feel any serious respect. He was wayward and he was not deep. But Novalis every one who knows him truly must thor- oughly love. His childlike straightforwardness, his amia- ble plasticity, not to say innocent fickleness of character, his real strength of ideals withal, his sensitiveness to truth, even his very incapacity (so characteristic of his school) to do more than turn chance jewels of truth over and over and hold them up to the light — all these things fascinate us. He is not exactly a great thinker, but of his kind he is so charming. Novalis, or Friedrich von Hardenberg, was born in 1772, the second child of a large and very affectionate family. His childhood was sickly, and until he was nine years old, while he was the object of the kindest care, his mind seemed in no wise extraor- dinary. Then suddenly, after an acute affection, his health bettered, and he appeared to wake, " as if from sleep," as his biographer says. He was now a quick- witted, studious and imaginative boy, a great inventor 178 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. and narrator of fantastic fairy tales, tender-hearted, genial, a lover of mystery. From 1790 to 1793 he attended sev- eral universities, was then nearly attracted into a soldier's life by the excitement of the revolutionary period, but was erelong led into the hardly less exciting hopes and struggles of the new literary and philosophical movement, through an acquaintance with Friedrich Schlegel and with Fichte himself, who was then at the height of his earlier professional successes. In Arnstadt, in Thurin- gia, where Novalis went to learn a more practical profes- sion, in government service, he met and loved a very young girl, Sophie von Kiihn. Her eyes suggested to him the famous hlaue Blume, which in his romance, " Heinrich v. Ofterdingen," he afterwards made the sym- bol of the romantic ideal itself, the mysterious wonder of magic that his hero sees in dream and thenceforth seeks. Readers of Heine's book on the Romantic School will remember this Blue Flower. Sophie was not yet four- teen when Friedrich v. Hardenberg was betrothed to her. They were never married ; and three years later she died, after a long iUness, constantly watched to the end by her devoted lover, to whom by this time the worship of his love had become a religion. Her death was the turning- point of his brief career. His mourning for her took a form worthy of a romantic philosopher. He dated a new sacred era from the day of her death, and kept a diary in accordance with his thus established chronology. The diary, which is unfortunately somewhat brief, is devoted to meditations intended to prepare him to meet her in the life beyond. And as for this meeting, he decides to bring it about in a way which shall express and conform his ardent faith in Fichtean principles. Fichte, namely, has said that our will is the master of the universe. Well, to be sure, suicide, in the ordinary sense, is not the philosopher's way to the other world ; but may not one by sheer force of will so purify himself as to become spirit THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 179 nally fit to live in tlie higher life, and thereupon, not in- deed by any mere fading away, but by one supreme Ent- schluss, one resolution, made for and by his deeper self, simply transfer himself, in a single glorious moment, to the realm of free spirits? Friedrich persuades himself that this is possible, and decides to give himself just one year to prepare his soul for the final act of faith. He will not go to her in weakness, nor through the door of illness or of violence. In the full glow of health, in the ecstasy of a pure love, he will make himself ready, and then he will pass over in one instant to Sophie's side. You may be reminded here of the lover in a song which Schubert's music has rendered so familiar and tear-Qom- pelling. I mean the little romanza called " Kosamunde ; " save, indeed, that das Ende vom Lied, in case of Novalis, is somewhat different. During this time of mourning he planned his wonderful Hymns to the Night, very brief and mystical rhapsodies in Ossianic prose, interspersed with verse. His diary, however, soon complains that it is a little hard to be quite healthy and still to remain wholly unworldly. One has so many temptations to forgetful- ness of lofty ideals. One is, after all, but twenty-six; one loves discussion, friends, philosophy ; one plainly has even a good appetite ; and alas ! this world is so fair, this age in which one lives is so inspiring I Nay, one is not yet quite worthy of the world of free spirits, nor of Sophie. So the days go by ; and when the year of the preparation for the great EntscMuss is done, not Novalis, but Sophie has passed — this time not merely into the world of spirits, but even into the realm of the pure Pla- tonic Ideas themselves. Novalis still worships her glori- fied essence, but as for his noble Fichtean self, it continues to surround itself with the sense-facts of the terrestrial order, and now perceives its duty made manifest to its eyes in the person of one Julie Charpentier ; for to her Novalis is by this time betrothed after the fashion of the visible world. 180 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. I assure you that I do not repeat this very well-known and even rather famous story here either in any spirit of scoffing, or for the sake of a digression. I can far better suggest the inner sense and the essence of this whole ro- mantic idealism, in all its beauty and its waywardness, by such a tale as this of the love of Novalis than by a much longer homily. Here, you see, is the romantic in- terpretation of Fichte's doctrine. You see the spirituality, the tenderness, the perfectly honest sentiment of it all ; and you also see the essential fickleness, the inevitable arbitrariness, of an idealism that has not yet found any truly objective standards. In a less gentle soul than No- valis this arbitrariness would become cynical. Such noble sentiments have, you see, their even ghastly dangers. Is it feeling that guides you in your interpretation of the world ? Are your ideas simply plastic ? Do you make your world solely through your own mind? Alas! as Hegel afterwards said, feeling is the mere soil of the forest of life ; and from the same soil the noblest tree or the hatefulest weed may spring. Suppose the resolution of Novalis had been by chance not only less fickle, but also less noble ; might not his subjective idealism have justified equally well a fierce rebellion against all that humanity justly holds dearest, instead of a mere indiffer- ence to what common sense calls obvious ? In the later history of the romantic movement the fickleness of way- ward idealism did indeed work itself out to the extreme of its painful dialectics, and if you want to know the re- sults, Amadeus Hoffmann's tales of horror, or our own Edgar Poe's gloom, will teU you enough of the story to let you see one of its endings. The Nihilism and the Pessimism of more recent days will give you another out- come of that arbitrary idealism which knows no law. And the lightning of Heine's scorn will show you yet further glimpses of the same lurid world in a fashion that will leave you undecided whether to laugh or to weep. THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY, 181 And yet, all this must not discourage true idealism, and does not discourage it. What I mean is just what I have already repeatedly pointed out : That as arbitrariness in our interpretation of things is the curse of immature ideal- ism, mature idealism will certainly find out how to return to an order as fixed and as supreme as was Spinoza's sub- stance. IV. ScheUing, finally, the prince of the romanticists, is an interesting example of a growth of spirit whereby a great thinker was indeed led from Fichte back to Spinoza. Only to the end, while ScheUing became the firmest of believers in a supreme and substantial order of things, which impresses itself upon our reason from above, and which we are all forced to obey and to accept, his method remains wayward, imaginative, and, with aU his genius, immature. His Spinozism is such as Spinoza could never have pretended to comprehend ; his idealism early became such as to excite first the suspicion, and finally the vio- lent condemnation of Fichte ; and his whole work is such as only a great genius could have begun, and only a romanticist could have left in the chaos wherein, after a very long life, he finally left it. Even our brief glance at Schelling's character must take into account the remarkable woman whose counsel and affection made a great part of his most productive years possible. I doubt whether ScheUing, even as phi- losopher, can be well understood apart from Caroline. She herself was the idol of the whole romantic circle. Her maiden name was Michaelis : she was twelve years the senior of ScheUing. When ScheUing first met her, himself then early in his twenties, she was already married a second time, and to Augustus Schlegel. Her daughter , by her first marriage, Auguste Bohmer, died in 1800, aged seventeen. As Schlegel, during the closing years of the century, lived in Berlin, and CaroliiiC in Jena, their 182 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. marriage, although friendly, was not precisely the first interest of either member of the wedded pair. The ro- mantic school, with philosophical consistency, believed in applying their principle of waywardness to marriage also, and approved of elective affinities ; and accordingly, abso- lutely without an unkind word, the marriage of the Schle- gels was ultimately dissolved by means of a decree of the obliging Duke at Weimar, and ScheUing married Caro- line in 1803, after several years of friendship and corre- spondence. Schelling and Caroline remained on the best terms with Augustus Schlegel until Caroline's death in 1809. Caroline's letters to Schelling, between 1799 and 1803, are certainly much more than interesting. The wonderful charm of this herrliche Frau is once for all an irresisti- ble sensation as you read her intimate self-confessions. She is a marvelous compound of the pathetic, the roguish, the wise, the gay, the deeply sad, and the singularly thoughtful. She has seen, felt, suffered, struggled ; and she has conquered. She loves power intensely, is a very good hater, and yet, she has also a childlike and playful gentleness that fairly disarms you. When she is deep in trouble, a light or perhaps a bitter laugh is never far away, wherewith she wins again her composure. She is, in her romantic fashion, as high-minded as she is abso- lutely fearless, — a sort of Penthesilea, only vastly more tender, and with the heart of a bereaved mother, as well as with the temper of a trained warrior. To her husband Schlegel, in Berlin, she writes meanwhile as straightfor- wardly and lengthily as you please ; only to him she has more to say about literary matters. Philosophy she thought of often, and with just the easy swift insight into subtleties which must have enlightened the young Schelling more than once. Only system-making she re- garded with indifference. Hence it was, in part, for her admiration that Schelling must have thought out hia THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 183 subtle, but unsystematic fragments of philosophic creation. They frequently discussed such matters together. Once in conversation, as she writes in 1801 to her, husband Schlegel, she and ScheUing fell to inventing an appro- priate motto in verse for Fichte (the " Sun-clear," as she calls him, after the title of one of his essays, the " Sun clear Exposition of the Essence of Eecent Philosophy "), whose solemn and devout appeals to his readers to be honorable men for once, and agree with him, were then growing rather wearisome. They hit upon Hamlet's — " Doubt that the stars are fire, Doubt that the planets move.'' That had an idealistic sound, and seemed to begin a fit- ting motto for Fichte. They took these lines, of course, in the current German translation, and then Caroline's wit wrought out this as the whole motto : — " Zweifle an der Sonne Klarheit, Zweifle an der Sterne Lieht, Laser, nur an meiner Wahrheit Uud au deiner Dummheit nicht." I venture, with hesitation, to imitate Caroline in Eng- lish, but at a long distance, thus : — " Doubt that the stars are fire, Doubt all the things of sense, But, reader, doubt not I am wise, And thy poor wits are dense." But Caroline had not only the power to criticise Fichte in this fashion ; she knew also how to write an excellent contrast between Fichte's genius and Schelling's, as fol- lows, in a letter to her young friend himself, who did not marry her until two years later : " It is growing more and more needful now that you produce something eternal, without making so much ado about it. Surely, my dear- est friend, you are n't asking my opinion about Fichte's power, although you seem to come near it. I have always felt that, with aU his incomparable skill in thinking, he 184 THE SPIEIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Las his limits ; only, as I have thought, the reason is that he fails of the divine instinct that you possess ; and if you have broken through his charmed circle, then I feel as if it was not so much because you are a philosopher, but because you have poetry in you, while he has none. I suppose I use the word ' philosopher ' wrongly. If I do, laugh at me. But it is poetical inspiration that has led you to production, as it is simply sharpness of seeing that has led him to consciousness. He has the bright light, but you have the glowing iire; his gift can illuminate, only yours can produce. There, have n't I put that right neatly ? As if one should see an immeasurable landscape through a keyhole." You will now indeed be anxious to learn something of how Schelling had broken through Fichte's charmed cir- cle. Well, his most technical thought will be mentioned next time, when I compare him with Hegel, in whose company he worked for a brief, but important period. For this most significant deed of Sehelling's can only be understood in his relations with Hegel. Of Schelling, the poetical friend of Caroline, and the brilliant young crea- tor of the so-called Naturphilosophie, I have yet to say a word to-day. The most fruitful problem of Fichte's system was, of course, the problem of the relation of my conscious self to my deeper self, of my private thought to the universal and divine thought, whereof I am the transient expression. Now, it early occurred to Schelling that Fichte had not made all that he could of this rela- tion between the humanly conscious and the divine Ego. My external world, says Fichte, is the product of my own unconscious act ; and this act, unconscious to me, is ultimately an e^^^jression of God's eternal activity itself. Well, then, is not the true idealism this ? The outer world of sense has no existence except as a manifestation of the spirit. And there is but one spirit, after all ; but this spirit extends far beyond my little self. He is the THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 185 spirit of nature. You cannot comprehend him if you look only within. In you he is indeed the same that he is yonder in nature, only in nature his will is writ large, in dead and in living forces, in gravitation, in magnetism, in electricity, in vitality. Study these things, not as if they were ever utterly dead things in themselves, but as being other expressions of precisely the same life that is writ fine in your consciousness. Thus, by reversing, as it were, the Fichtean telescope, you see the human sub- ject indeed as the central being of the human world, only in himself he now appears less imposing. Turning, how- ever, the right end of the glass towards nature, you see therein the life of humanity typified, symbolized, crystal- lized, as it were ; for spirit comes to itself in man only because it has first expressed itself in nature, and is now striving in us to become conscious of its own work. Thus viewed, man is indeed simply an evolution from nature ; and Schelling indeed holds that a theory of the evolutio n o f consciou sness is needed as a complement to Fichte's theory. " In autumn, 1798, I entered upon my lectures at Jena," says Schelling himself, in one of his autobio- graphical statements, "full of the thought that the way from nature to spirit must be as possible as the reverse way, upon which Fichte had entered." Here, then, is ScheUing's epoch-making idea, and you will see hereafter that it is the idea which modern philosophic thought will henceforth be seeking to define. To complete the under- taking of idealism, you need a theory of the facts of nature, so interpreted as to be in harmony with the view that only ideas are the realities, and yet so adapted to experience as to free your idealism from the arbitrariness of the inner life of mere finite selves. Can we, then, prove that the very spirit whose life our own conscious- ness expresses is already present outside and beyond us, weaving the web of the external world, giving it sub- stance, and yet preserving its ideality and its harmony 186 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. with our inner life ? If we can, then, our doctrine will become what is technically called objective idealism. The outer world is, then, God's thought shown to our eyes ; the inner world is God's thought become conscious of itself. This doctrine was the centre of Schelling's Naturphilosophie. Unfortunately he was no man to prove such a theory. He could only suggest, develop imaginatively, and in later essays treat with a marvelous, but fragmentary technical skill. As poet, he indeed broke through Fichte's charmed circle ; but as poet, he never stated the essence of his Naturphilosophie more clearly or more boldly than he did in a poetic fragment written under the eyes of Caroline, and meant largely for her approval. Of this production he himself never pub- lished more than a brief portion ; in later years it has been printed from his papers. I refer to his whimsically so-called E2nlcurisch Glaubensbekenntniss Heinz Wider- porstens, " Epicurean Confession of Faith of Hans Bris- tleback." In this thoroughly wayward sketch in verse, Schelling assumes a grotesque name and character, in order to give himself greater freedom to express the heart of his Naturphilosophie in the boldest and most pantheistic terms. The meter is borrowed from the well-known re- vival, in Goethe's " Faust," of the old JTnittelvers, or free rhyme of early German poetry. Schelling's hero, in whose character he speaks, is supposed to be trying to play the irreligious materialist, whom the priests have been driving to despair, and who at last rebels. Nature is his religion, he says. He loves good cheer and fair faces, and he hates superstition. Is n't this world of the senses after all the genuine thing ? Heinz grows fairly rollicking in his materialistic and epicurean speeches. Suddenly, without warning, he assumes another tone, From beneath the mask of the epicurean, the voice of the romantic mystic sounds. Why, then, is this world of , THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 187 the senses the world for the truly wise man ? Because it is but the embodiment of one eternal and divine spirit. Then follows a Schellingian sketch of a process of evo- lution which, proceeding through the animals, culminates in us. The world of nature is thus full of the struggle of the great spirit to win his own higher life. The end and crown of this whole process is man. In him, blind nature gets a voice ; in him the spirit comes to himself. And all the universe is one glorious life, in whose con- templation the mystic soul rejoices. Let me give you, as a close, my own hasty rendering of some of Schelling's curious lines, with a certain effort to preserve the unequal metre and even the very unequal worth of the original. The Knittelvers, at its noblest, is only a sort of glorified doggerel, and is never easy to man- age in translation ; but I must suggest to you a little of the romantic intoxication of this sort of pantheism, so characteristic of one great tendency in German thought. After his introductory denunciation of priestcraft, asce- ticism, and superstition, the gay Heinz is made to run on thus, speaking of course in character : — " Therefore religion I forsake, All superstitious ties I break, No church will I visit to hear them preach, I have done with all that the parsons teach. I And yet there is one faith that masters my will, 1 Glows in my verse, and inspires me stiU, I Daily my heart with delight doth thrill, I Eternally showing New form ; till I knowing, i This faith so clear, This light so near, This poem undying, ' Must witness its truth beyond denying ; So that I can nothing hold nor conceive Save what it counsels me to believe ; Nor aught as certain or right maintain, Save what it reveals to my eyes so plain. 188 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Thus, then, in my heart am I freed from fear, Sound in body and soul stand here, And may, instead of posture and prayer, Instead of losing my way in the air, Here on the earth, in her blue eyes see The deepest depths that exist for me. Nay, and why should I in the world suffer dread, I, who know the world from the foot to the head ? 'T is a tame creature, is it not ? When has it ever its bonds forgot ? Yields to the yoke of all-ruling law, Crouches at my feet in awe. Within it a giant spirit doth dream. But his soul is a frozen lava stream ; ^ From his narrow house he cannot away, Nor his iron chains escape for a day. Yet often he flutters his wings in his sleep. Mightily stirs in his dungeon-keep, Travails in dead and in living things To know his wUl and to free his wings.^ His power, that flUs the veins with ore, And renews in the spring the buds once more, Labors unceasing in darkness and night. In all nature's nooks and crannies for light, Fears no pang in its fierce desire To live and to conquer and win its way higher. Organs and members it fashions anew, Lengthens or shortens, makes many or few. And wrestles and writhes in its search till it find The form that is worthiest of its mind. Struggling thus on life intent. Against a cruel environment. It triumphs at last, in one narrow space, And comes to itself in a dwarfish race. That, fair of form, of stature erect. Stands on earth as the giant's elect, 1 " Steckt zwar ein Kiesengeist darinnen, 1st aber versteinert mit seinen Sinnen.'' ' " In todten und lebendigen Dingen Thut nach Bewuastaeyn machtig ringen." THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 189 Is called iu our speech the son of man, Outcome and crown of the spirit's plan. From iron slumber, from dreaming set free, Now marvels the spirit who he may be. Looks on himself with wondering gaze, Measures his limbs in dim amaze, Longs in terror once more to be hid In nature's slumber, of sentience rid. But nay, his freedom is won for aye. No more in nature's peace may he lie ; In the vast dark world that is all his own. He wanders his life's narrow path aloue. Yes, he even fears, in his visions dim, That the giant himself may be wroth with him, And like Saturn of old, in godlike scorn. Devour his children scarcely born ; Know not that he himself is the Sprite That longingly toiled in the world's dark night ; Peoples the void with the ghosts of his fear. Yet could he say, the Giant's peer : — I am the God who nature's bosom fills, I am the life that in her heart's blood thrills.* From the first quiver of her mystic power. Until of life there came that primal hour. When force new form and body power assumed, And flowers the beauty showed that lay entombed, — Yes, now, wherever light, as dawn begins, A new created world from chaos wins, — And in the thousand eyes that, from the sky, Show night and day the heavenly mystery, — Onwards, to where, in thought's eternal truth Nature's deep self rewords itself in truth, — There stirs one might, one pulse-beat all sufficing, AH power retaining, aye, — and sacrificing." * " loh bin der Gott der sie im Bnsen tragt, Der Geist der sich in allem bewegt." leCtuke vii. HEGEL. Concerning Hegel, who forms our special topic in this lecture, it is extraordinarily difficult to get or to give any- general impressions that wiU not be seriously misleading. I undertake my task, therefore, with a very strong impres- sion of its importance and its difficulty. The outcome of what we have thus far discussed in these lectures is briefly this : Modern thought began with an endeavor to find a true and rational doctrine about the real outer universe, and to state this doctrine in clear and even mathematical form. The rediscovery of the importance of the inner life led, however, during the eighteenth century, to a skeptical scrutiny of the powers of the human reason it- self, and the magnificent systems of earlier thinkers ap- peared, when examined in the light of such scrutiny, dogmatic and uncertain. Thought endeavored, neverthe- less, to re-win its great assurances in a new form. Truth, said Idealism, is essentially an affair of the inner life. The world of truth is the world as it would appear to a complete and fully self-conscious self. The outer uni- verse is only a show world. Its reality is only practical. It is essentially a mirage of the inner life. The real universe is the universe of the spirit. Our deepest rela- tion is not to the natural order at aU, but to the one true self, namely, God's own life. Such, as we found, was the position reached alike by Fichte and the romanticists. But in their further thought they diverged. For Fichte, the centre of the universe, as HEGEL. 191 his idealism conceives it, is the moral law. The infinite self longs for rational and active self-possession. Hence it differentiates itself into numerous forms, as the vine grows out into its own branches. These branchings of the one great vine of the spirit form our finite and essen- tially incomplete selves. But for the romanticists, as we found, the centre of the world is not so much the moral law as the interest which every spirit has in a certain divine wealth of emotion and of experience. The world is the world of ideas ; things exist because spirits experience them ; and spirits experi- ence because, as parts of the divinely complete life, it is their interest to be as manifold and wealthy in their self- realization as possible. 1. Before we now pass directly to Hegel it is necessary to say yet a word of the more technical speculations of Schelling, of whom, in his character as romanticist, we heard something in the last lecture. Schelling's develop- ment, as you already know, was very rapid ; his writings were early voluminous. He was a man of mark and a professor at Jena by the time he had reached his twenty- third year. His systematic views during his youthful pe- riod seemed to his readers to alter with a dangerously magical ease and swiftness of transformation. He him- self meanwhile denied, during the years up to 1809, that there was so far any significant change from the essential doctrines of his early works. He had added, he said, to what he at first taught. More truth had come to him ; not a contradiction of former insight. But readers found it suspicious that each new book of Schelling's seemed to supersede all his previous efforts. In 1797, he published his " Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature." During the next three years appeared his " System of Transcen- dental Idealism " and his " First Sketch of a System of the Philosophy of Nature." These two latter works were 192 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. to be a first statement, so their author declared, of the two great and seemingly opposed aspects of philosophy. The outer world was to be shown as after all the mani- festation of spirit ; the inner world of the self was to be exhibited as inevitably expressing itself in relation to an outer, a natural order. The fundamental thought of the whole doctrine was in substance this :l Fichte had declared that it is the self-assertion of the absolute self, the free choice of the true Ego, that is the source of aU truth. When I as knower recognize a truth, that is because I as doer have first made this truth.] This view Schelling also accepts. But now, as one sees, a conscious seK is at once the doer of its present act, and the eontemplator of the results of its past acts. As I look out on the world of nature, I see crystallized before me the expression of what my true and absolute self has already been doing. The same activity that this present consciousness exemplifies for me has been there from eternity, and nature is the concrete embodiment to the onlooker of the results of his own eternal deeds. Nature then is not merely, as Fichte had said, my duty made manifest to my senses ; it is also my timelessly past spiritual life, — not of bourse my finite or individual and private past life, but the life of my deeper self, of the one and absolute divine spirit. This autobiography of spirit, manifest to our eyes, is then the natural order. On the other hand, the inner life as such is capable of a philosophical treatment ; for this is, as it were, not the record of the spirit's past, but the fullness of the spirit's conscious actuality. We have thus a two- fold philosophy to be wrought out, and Schelling in 1799 and 1800 publishes his two sketches as though in topic, if not in execution, they completely covered the ground. But in 1801 appeared a new treatise, called by Schelling simply "Exposition of my System of Philosophy," and here the doctrine seems to take a new form, which readers could only with great difficulty reconcile with what had HEGEL. 193 gone before. As during the winter of 1800-1801 Schel- ling expounded this system in lectures, before publishing the treatise, hearers asserted, as Schelling himself says, that he had wholly changed his doctrine. On the con- trary, says Schelling, in his preface to the new book, this is the system that I have held all along, and have merely been keeping to myself so far, because it was too deep a thing to expound before the time came. The system in question was called by its author the Identit'dts- System. Deeper than both nature and spirit is now something that Schelling calls by various mysterious names, the " Abso- lute," the " Identity," the " Indifference of Subject and Object," the " Unity of Nature and Spirit." It is a curi- ous metaphysical product, this new principle. It resem- bles Spinoza's Substance ; it pretends to be loftier than Fichte's Divine Self. It is something even dimmer and vaguer than the Giant Spirit of Nature, of whom Sehel- ling's verses told us in the last lecture. Hegel, a few years later, rudely called this Schellingian " Identity," this " Absolute," in whoee indescribable nature all truth was to be somehow hidden, " the infinite night in which all cows are black." Its nature was the kind of thing you think of when you think of nothing in particular. Yet this nature of the absolute was to be the deepest of all truth, deeper than the self, deeper than outer nature, deeper than anything ever before known in pliilosophy. I am not minded to trouble you here with a fuller ac- count of Schelling's Identit'dts- System, whose exposition, as it chances, is really very deep and suggestive, with all its vagueness. The thought that there must after all be some sort of synthesis possible of Kant and Spi- noza, was indeed an important thought. And historically the Identit'dts- System has a very significant relation to Hegel's thinking. For Schelling wrote this new treatise under the direct influence of his intercourse with Hegel, who had then appeared at Jena, where Schelling was 194 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. teaching. What Hegel maintained, and early impressed upon Schelling, was that an end must be put, if possible, to the romantic vagueness of all this dreaming about the relations of the individual and the absolute self, and about the conceptions of the finite and the infinite in general. "What philosophy needed was a more exact analysis and proof of the assertion that the individual consciousness and the outer order, the finite self and the infinite self, the world of the moment and the world of the universal, are linked in close spiritual ties. Philosophy must be- come a system, or else remain naught. This thought Schelling found present in Hegel's mind, and so ScheUing for the moment forced his poetical speculations to assume a Spinozistic garb. Largely ineffective, however, Schel- ling's best efforts remained thenceforth. We shall do well, therefore, to turn at once to the more successful sys- tematizer of the idealistic scheme, namely, Hegel. II. With the idealists of the romantic school Hegel had, indeed, many things in common, but he differed from them profoundly in temperament. They had reached their absolute seK by various mystical or otherwise too facile methods, which we need not further expound. Hegel hated easy roads in philosophy, and abhorred mys- ticism. He therefore, at first, in his private studies, had clung closely to Kant's original mode of dealing with the problems of the new philosophy until he had found his own fashion of reflection. To understand what this fash- ion was we must turn to the man himself. Yet, as I now come to speak of Hegel's temperament, I must at once point out that of aU first-class thinkers he is, indeed, personally^ one of the least imposing in charac- ter and life.i Kant was a man whose intellectual might 1 The expei't reader will easily detect the influence of Haym and of Dr. Hutchinson Stirling's estimates of Hegel's personality in what HEGEL. 195 and heroic moral elevation stood in a contrast to the weakness of his bodily presence, which, after all, had somethin'g of the sublime about it. Spinoza's lonely, almost princely, haughtiness of intellect joins with his religious mysticism to give his form grace, and his very isolation nobility. But Hegel is in no wise either graceful) or heroic in bearing. His dignity is solely the dignity of his work. Apart from his achievement, and his tempera- ment as making it possible, there is extremely little of mark in the man. The wonder of him lies in his profes- sional, not in his human aspect. He was a keen-witted Suabian, a born scholar, a successful teacher, self-pos- sessed, decidedly crafty, merciless to his enemies, quarrel- some on occasion after the rather crude fashion of the German scholar, sedate and methodical in the rest of his official life ; a rather sharp disciplinarian when he had to deal with young people or with subordinates ; a trifle ser- vile when he had to deal with official or with social supe- riors. From his biographer, Rosenkranz, we learn of him in many private capacities ; he interests us in hardly any of them. He was no patriot, like Fichte ; no romantic dreamer, like Novalis; no poetic seer of splendid meta-, physical visions, like Schelling. His career is absolutely devoid of romance. We even have one or two of his love- letters. They are awkward and dreary beyond measure. His inner life either had no crises, or concealed them obstinately. In his dealiiigs with his friends, as, for instance, with SeheUing, he was wily and masterful, using men for his advantage so long as he needed them, and turning upon them without scruple when they could no longer serve his ends. His life, in its official character, was indeed blameless. He was a faithful servant of his follows. The reader who desires a more eulogistic account will find snch, and from a high authority too, in Professor Edward Caird's discussion of Hegel in the volume on that thinker in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics. 196 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. various successive masters, and unquestionably he reaped his worldly reward. His students flattered him, and therefore he treated them well ; but towards opponents he showed scant courtesy. To the end he remains a self- seeking, determined, laborious, critical, unaffectionate man, faithful to his office and to his household, loyal to his employers, cruel to his foes. In controversy he spared not persons any more than doctrines. His style in his pub- lished books is not without its deep ingenuity and its mar- velous accuracy, but otherwise is notoriously one of the most barbarous, technical, and obscure in the whole his- tory of philosophy. If his lectures are more easy-flowing and genial, they are in the end, and as a whole, hardly more comprehensible. He does little to attract his reader, and everything to make the road long and painful to the student. All this is not awkwardness ; it is deliberate choice. He is proud of his barbarism. And yet — here is the miracle — this unattractive and unheroic person is one of the most noteworthy of all the chosen instru- ments through which, in our times, the spirit has spoken. It is not ours to comprehend this wind that bloweth where it listeth. We have only to, hear the sound thereof. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in August, 1770, at Stuttgart. His family was of a representative Suabian type ; his own early surroundings were favorable to an industrious, but highly pedantic sort of learning. At the gymnasium in Stuttgart, which he attended from his seventh year, he was an extraordinarily, but, on the whole, a very healthily studious boy. From his fifteenth until well on in his seventeenth year, we find him keeping a diary, from which Eosenkranz has published large frag- ments. It is in strong contrast to the sentimental diaries that the characteristic youth of genius, in those days, might be expected to keep. In fact there was no promise of genius, so far, in the young Hegel. His diary runs on much after this fashion: "Tuesday, June 28 (1785), 1 HEGEL. 197 observed to-day what different impressions the same thing can make on different people. ... I was eating cherries with excellent appetite, and having a very good time, . . . when somebody else, older than I, to he sure, looked on with indifference, and said that in youth one thinks that one cannot possibly pass a cherry-woman without having one's mouth water for the cherries (as we Suabians say), whereas, in more advanced years one can let a whole spring pass without feeling an equal longing for such things. Whereupon I thought out the following princi- ple, a rather painful one for me, but still a very profound one, namely, that in youth . . . one can't eat as much as one wants, while in age one does n't want to eat as much as one can." Such was the philosopher Hegel, at fifteen years of age. His diary never records a genuine event. Nothing seems to have happened to this young devourer of cherries' and learning, except such marvels as that one day at church he learned the date of the Augsburg Confession ; or that, during a walk, one of his teachers told him how every good thing has its bad side ; and again, during another walk, tried to explain to him why July and August are hotter than June. Of such matters the diary is full, — never does one learn of an inner experience of any signifi- cance. Aspirations are banished. The boy is pedantic enough, not to say out and out a prig ; but this at any rate appears as the distinctive feature of his tempera- ment : he is thoroughly objective. He wants to know life as it is in itself, not as it is for him ; he desires the true principles of things, not his private and sentimental inter- pretation of them. Meanwhile, he is at once well in- structed in religious faith, and given so far to the then popular and rather shallow rationalism which loved to make very easy work of the mysterious of every kind and grade. He devotes some space to the explanation of ghost stories. He even records, meanwhile, occasional 198 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. bits of dry Suabian humor, such as later, in a much improved form, found place in his academic lectures, and were so characteristic of his style, not to say of his system. The boyish form of this interest in the grotesque may be thus exemplified : January 3, 1787. — Total eclipse of the moon ; instruments prepared at the gymnasium, where some gathered to see, but the sky was too cloudy. So the rector " told us the following : As a boy he himseK had once gone out with other boys, at night, on the pre- tence of star-gazing. In reality they had only wandered about. The police found them, and were going to take them into custody ; but the gymnasium boys said, ' We 're out star-gazing.' ' Nay,' responded the police, ' but you boys ought to go to bed at night, and do your star-gazing in the day-time 1 ' " I note this trifle because, after all, it means more than one would think. Here and at other places in the young Hegel's record appear glimpses of a certain deep delight in the paradoxical, a delight which, at times merely dry and humorous, at times keenly intellectual, would mean little in another temperament, but which is, after all, the determining ten- dency of Hegel's mind. In fact, if one has eyes to see it, the Hegelian tempera- ment, although not at all the Hegelian depth, is, even as early as this, almost completely indicated. Of the later philosophical genius, as I have said, there is so far no promise ; but the general attitude which this genius was to render so significant is already taken by the boy Hegel. The traits present are, for the first an enormous intellec- tual acquisitiveness, which finds every sort of learning, but above all every sort of literary and humane learning, extremely interesting. The pedantry which oppresses the German gymnasiast of that day is relieved, meanwhile, by this dry and sarcastic Suabian humor, which notes the oddities and stupidities of human nature with a keen appreciation. The humor involves a love of the gro. HEGEL. 199 tesque, of the paradoxical, of the eternally self -contradic- tory in human life. The mature Hegel was to discover the deeper meaning of such paradoxes ; for the time being he simply notes them. For the rest, there is one trait already manifest which is also of no small significance in Hegel's life-work. This is a certain observant sensitive- ness to all manner of conscious processes in other people, joined with a singularly cool and impersonal aptitude for criticising these processes. Here, indeed, is a feature about Hegel which later, in his mature wisdom, assumed a very prominent place, and which always makes him, even apart from his style, very hard for some people to com- prehend. We are used in literature to the man who sym- pathizes personally with the passions of his fellows, and who thus knows their hearts because of the warmth of his own heart. We know also something of the tragically cynical type of man, who, like Swift, not because he is insensitive, but because he is embittered, sees, or chooses to describe in passion, only its follies. We have all about us, moreover, the simply unfeeling, to whom passion is an impenetrable mystery, because they are naturally blind to its depth and value. But Hegel's type is one of the rar- est, the one, namely, whose representative man will, so to speak, tell you in a few preternaturally accurate, though perhaps highly technical words, all that ever you did, who will seem to sound your heart very much as a skillful specialist in nervous diseases would sound the mysterious and secret depths of a morbid patient's consciousness ; but who, all the while, is apparently himself as free from deep personal experiences of an emotional type as the physician , is free from his patient's morbid and nervous web-spin- \ ning. Hegel has this quasi-professional type of sensitive- ness about his whole bearing towards life. Nobody keener or more delicately alive and watchful than he to comprehend, but also nobody more merciless to dissect, the wisest and the tenderest passions of the heart. And 200 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. yet, it is not all mercilessness in his case. When he has analyzed, he does not condemn after the cynic's fashion. After the dissection comes reconstruction. He singles out what he takes to be the truly humane in passion, he describes the artistic or the religious interests of man, he pictures the more admirable form of self-consciousness ; and now, indeed, his speech may ii'isume at moments a religious, even a mystical tone. He praises, he depicts approvingly, he admires the absolute worth of these things. You feel that at last you have found his heart also in a glow. But no ; this, too, is an illusion. A word erelong undeceives you as to his personal attitude. He is only engaged in his trade as shrewd professor ; he is only telling you the true and objective value of things ; h'- is not making any serious expression of his own piety wealth of concern. He is stiU the critic. His admira- tion was the approval of the onlooker. In his private person he remains what he was before, untouched by the glow of heart of the very seraphs themselves. In the year 1788, Hegel entered the university of his province at Tiibingen. -Here he studied until 1793, being somewhat interrupted in his academic work by ill health. His principal study was theology. A certificate given him at the conclusion of his course declared that he was a man of some gifts and industry, but that he had paid no seri- ous attention to philosophy. His reading, however, had been very varied. In addition to theology, he had shown a great fondness for the Greek tragedians. His most in- timate student friends of note had been the young poet Hblderlin and Schelling himself. Nobody had yet de- tected any element of greatness in Hegel. The friend- ship with Schelling was now continued in the form of a correspondence, which lasted while Hegel, as an obscure family tutor, passed the years from 1793 to 1796 in Swit- zerland, and then, in a similar capacity, worked in Frank- fort-on-the-Main until the end of 1800, when, through HEGEL. 201 Schelling's assistance, he found an opportunity to enter upon an academic career at the University of Jena. Dur- ing all these years Hegel matured slowly, and printed nothing. The letters to Schelling are throughout written in a flattering and receptive tone. Philosophy becomes more prominent in H'j-'jel's thought and correspondence as time goes on. T,v Schelling he appeals as to the elect leader of the newest evolution in thought. From the Kantian philosophy, he says, a great, new creative movement is to grow, and the central idea of this new movement will be the doctrine of the absolute and infinite self, whose constructive processes shall explain the funda- mental laws of the world. This notion Hegel expresses already in 1795, when he is but twenty-five and Schelling is but twenty years old. But as to the development f>f the new system in his own mind he gives little or no hii s until 1800, just before joining Schelling at Jena. Then, as he confesses to his friend, " the ideal of my youth has had to take a reflective form, and has become a system ; and I now am asking how I can return to life and set about influencing men." He had actually, by this time, written an outline of his future doctrine, which was al- ready in all its essentials fuUy defined. On his first ap- pearance at Jena, however, he was content to appear as a co-worker and even as in part an expositor of Schelling, and probably he purposely exaggerated the agreement between his friend and himself so long as he found Schel- ling's reputation and assistance a valuable introduction to the learned world, in which the youthful romanticist was already a great figure, while Hegel himself was so far unknown. In 1801, Hegel began his lectures as Privat- Docent at the university. In 1803, Schelling left the university, and Hegel, now dependent upon himself, ere- long made no secret of the fact that he had his own rela- tively independent philosophy, and that he could find as yet nothing definite and final about his friend's vsritings. 202 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. His own first great book, the " Phanomenologie des Geistes," finished at about the time of the battle of Jena, and published early in 1807, completed his separation from Schelling, whose romantic vagueness he unmerci- fully ridiculed, without naming Schelling himself, in the long preface with which the book opened. In a letter to Schelling accompanying a copy of the " Phanomenologie," Hegel indeed explained that his ridicule must be under- i stood as directed against the misuse which the former's followers were making of the romantic method in philoso- phy ; but the language of the preface was unmistakable. ScheUing replied curtly, and the correspondence ended. After the period of confusion which followed the battle of Jena, Hegel, who had been temporarily forced to abandon the scholastic life, found a place as gymnasium director at Niirnberg, where he married in 1811. In 1816, he was called to a profcfesorship of philosophy at Heidelberg. He had already published his " Logic." In 1818, he was called to Berlin, and here rapidly rose to the highest academic success. He had a great following, came into especial court favor, reached an almost despotic position in the world of German philosophic thought, and died of cholera, at the very height of his fame, in November, 1831. If we now undertake in a few words to characterize Hegel's doctrine, we must first of all cut loose almost entirely from that traditional description of his system which has been repeated in the text-books until almost everybody has forgotten what it means, and has therefore come to accept it as true. "We must furthermore limit our attention to Hegel's theory of the nature of self-con- sciousness, laying aside all detailed study of the rest of his elaborate system. And finally we must be rude to our thinker, as he was to every one else ; we must take what we regard as his " secret " (to borrow Dr. Stirling's word) out of the peculiar language in which Hegel chose HEGEL. 203 to express it, and out of the systematic tomb where he would have insisted upon burying it. So treated, Hegel's doctrine wiU appear as an analysis of the fundamental paradox of our consciousness. In terms of this paradox he will try to define, first the relation of the finite and the infinite self, then the relation between mind and reality. III. The world of our daily life, Kant had said, has good order and connection in it, not because the absolute order of external things in themselves is known to us, but (as I have reworded Kant) because we are sane, because our understanding, then, has its own coherence, and must see its experience in the light of this coherence. Idealism has already drawn the obvious conclusion from all this. If this be so, if it is our understanding that actually creates the order of nature for us, then the problem, " How shall I comprehend my world?" becomes no more or less than the problem, " How shall I understand my- self ? " We have already suggested into what romantic extravagances the effort to know exhaustively the inner life had by this time led. Some profound, but still vague relation was felt to exist between my own self and an in- finite self. To this vague relation, which Fichte conceived in purely ethical terms, and which the romanticists tried to grasp in numeroiis arbitrary and fantastic ways, phi- losophy was accustomed tp appeal. My real self is deeper than my conscious self, and this real self is bound- less, far spreading, romantic, divine. Only poets and other geniuses can dream of it justly. But nobody can tell squarely and simply, mit dilrren Worten, just what he means by it. Now Hegel, as a maliciously cool-headed and sternly unromantic Suabian, did indeed himself be- lieve in the infinite self, but he regarded all this vague- ness of the romanticists with contempt, and even with a 204 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. certain rude mirth. He appreciated all its euthusiasm in his own external way, of course ; he could even talk after that dreamy fashion himself, and once, not to the credit of his wisdom, perhaps not quite to the credit of his honesty, he did so, in an early essay, published, as we must note, while he was still Schelling's academic nursling at Jena. But he despised vagueness, and when the time came he said so. Yet still for him the great question of philoso- phy lay just where the romanticists had found it, yes, just where Kant himself had left it. My conscious and pres- ent self is n't the whole of me. I am constantly appeal- ing to my own past, to my own future self, and to my deeper self, also, as it now is. Whatever I affirm, or doubt, or deny, I am always searching my own mind for proof, for support, for guidance. Such searching consti- tutes in one sense all my active mental life. All philoso- phy then turns, as Kant had shown, upon understanding who and what I am, and who my deeper self is. Hegel recognizes this ; but he will not dream about it. He undertakes an analysis, therefore, which we must here re- word in our own fashion, and for the most part with our own illustrations.! Examine yourself at any instant: "I," you say, " know just now this that is now present to me, this feel- ing, this sound, this thought. Of past and future, of re- mote things, of other people, I can conjecture this or that, but just now and here I know whatever is here and now for me." Yes, indeed, but what is here and now for me ? See, even as I try to tell, the here and now have flown. I know this note of music that sounds, this wave that breaks on the beach. No, not so, even as I try to tell what I now know, the note has sounded and ceased, the wave is broken and another wave curves onward to its fall. I cannot say, " I know." I must always say, " I just ^ What immediately follows is of course suggested by the opening of the argument in the Phanomenologie. HEGEL. 205 knew." But wkat was it I just knew ? Is it already past and gone ? Then how can I now be knowing it at all ? One sees this endless paradox of consciousness, this eter- nal flight of myself from myself. After all, do I really ever know any one abiding or even momentarily finished and clearly present thing ? No, indeed. I am eternally changing my mind. All that I know, then, is not any present moment, but the moment that is just past, and the change from that moment to this. My momentary self, then, has knowledge in so far as it knows, recognizes, accepts, another self, the self of the moment just past. And again, my momentary self is known to the self of the next succeeding moment, and so on in eternal and fatal flight. All this is an old paradox. The poets make a great deal of it. You can illustrate endlessly its various forms and shadings. That I don't know my present mind, but can only review my past mind is the reason, for instance, why I never precisely know that I am happy at the very instant when I am happy. After a merry evening I can think it all over, and say, " Yes, I have heen happy. It all was good." Only then, mark you, the happiness is over. But still, you may say, I know that the memory of my past happiness is itself a happy thing. No, not even this do I now directly know. If I reflect on my memory of past joy, I see once more, but in a second reflective memory, that my previous mem- ory of joy was itself joyous. But, as you see, I get each new joy as my own in knowledge only when it has fled in being. It is my memory, that but a moment since or a while since I was joyful, that constitutes my knowledge of my joy. This is a somewhat sad paradox. I feel my best joys just when I hnow them least, namely, in my least reflective moments. To know that I enjoy is to re- flect, and to reflect is to remember a joy past. But surely, then, one may say, when I suffer I can know that I am miserable. Yes, but once more only reflectively. 206 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Each pang is past when I come to know that it was just now mine. " That is over," I say, " what next? " And it is this horror of the "• what next ? " this looking for my sor- row elsewhere than in the present, namely, in the dreaded and on-coming fatal future, that constitutes the deepest pang of loneliness, of defeat, of shame, or of bereave- ment. My illustrations are still my own, not Hegel's.^ The result of all this possibly too elaborate web-spin- ning of ours is not far to seek. We wanted to know who any one of us at any moment is ; and the answer to the question is : Each one of us is what some other moment of his life reflectively finds him to be. It is a mysterious and puzzling fact, but it is true. No one of us knows what he now is ; he can only know what he was. Each one of us, however, is now only what hereafter he shall find himself to be. This is the deepest paradox of the inner life. We get self-possession, self -apprehension, self-knowledge, only through endlessly fleeing from our- selves, and then turning back to look at what we were.^ But this paradox relates not merely to moments. It re- lates to all life. Youth does not know its own deep mind. Mature life or old age reflectively discovers a part of what youth meant, and sorrows now that the meaning is known only when the game is ended. All feeling, all character, all thought, all life, exists for us "only in so far as it can be reflected upon, viewed from without, seen at ^ Hegel's illustrations are more commonly from more higUy re- flective stages of consciousness. Yet the key to the " movement " of the whole " Logic " lies in just this fashion of viewing the facts of life and thought. 2 Cf. Logik, vol. i. {Werke, vol. iii.), pp. 99, 114, 152, 283, and 285, for a series of expressions, in highly ahstract form, of the nature of jthis process as manifested in case of various logical constructions and categories. The commonest technical name for the process is Nega- tion der Negation (1. c. p. 99), explained further on page 114. On page 152 the verb zuruckkehren is employed to name the same act ; so p. 288. HEGEL. 207 a distance, acknowledged by anotlier than itself, reworded in terms of fresh experience. Stand stiU where you are, stand alone, isolate your life, and forthwith you are no- thing. Enter into relations, exist for the reflective thought of yourself, or of other people, criticise yourself and be criticised, observe yourself and be observed, exist, and at the same time look upon yourself and be looked upon from without, and then indeed you are somebody, — a self with a consistency and a vitality, a being with a genuine life.^ In short, then, take me moment by moment, or take me in the whole of my life, and this comes out as the paradox of my existence, namely, I know myself only in so far as I am known or may be known by another than my present or momentary self. Leave me alone to the self-consciousness of this moment, and I shrivel up into a mere atom, an unknowable feeling, a nothing. My exis- tence is in a sort of conscious publicity of my inner life.^ Let me draw at once an analogy between this fact of the inner life and the well-known fact of social life to which I just made reference. This analogy evidently struck Hegel with a great deal of force, as he often refers to it. We are all aware, if we have ever tried it, how empty and ghostly is a life lived for a long while in abso- lute solitude. Free me from my fellows, let me alone to work out the salvation of my own glorious self, and surely (so I may fancy) I shall now for the first time show who I am. No, not so ; on the contrary I merely show in such a case who I am not. I am no longer friend, brother, companion, co-worker, servant, citizen, father, son ; I ex- ist for nobody ; and erelong, perhaps to my surprise, generally to my horror, I discover that I am nobody. The one thing means the other. In the dungeon of my 1 The Kampf des Anerkennens of tlie Phanomenologie. ^ Brief general descriptions of the process and paradox of self- oonsciousness as such are : Phanomenologie, p. 125 ; Logik, Werke, vol. iii. p. 66, and vol. v. p. 13 ; EncyMopadie, Werke, vol. vi. pp. 47, 91. 208 THE SPIKIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. isolated self -consciousness I rot away unheeded and terror- stricken. Idiocy is before me, and my true self is far be- hind, in those bright and bitter days when I worked and suffered with my fellows. My freedom from others is my doom, the most insufferable form of bondage. Could I speak to a living soul ! If any one knew of me, looked at me, thought of me, yes, hated me even, how blessed would be the deliverance ! Now note the analogy here between the inner life in each of us and the social life that each of us leads. Within myself the rule holds that I live consciously only in so far as I am known and re- flected upon by my subsequent life. Beyond what is called my private self, however, a similar rule holds. I exist in a vital and humane sense only in relation to my friends, my social business, my family, my fellow-workers, my world of other selves. This is the rule of mental life. We are accustomed to speak of consciousness as if it were wholly an inner affair, which each one has at each mo- ment solely in and by himself. But, after all, what con- sciousness do we then refer to ? What is love but the consciousness that somebody is there who either loves me (and then I rejoice) or does not (and then I am gloomy or jealous) ? What is self-respect but a conscious appeal to others to respect my right or my worth ? And if you talk of one's secret heart, what is it but just that inner brooding in one's own conscious life which so much the more illustrates, as we say, the very impossibility of know- ing myself except by looking back on my past self. See, then, it makes no difference how you look at me, you find the same thing. All consciousness is an appeal to other consciousness.^ That is the essence of it. The inner life is, as Hegel would love to express it, ebensosehr an outer life. Spirituality is just intercourse, communion of spir- its. This is the essential publicity of consciousness, whereby all the secrets of our hearts are known .^ 1 Phanomenologie, p. 135. ^ The word " publicity " is a very fair representative of Allgemdiv- HEGEL. 209 Here, then, Hegel has come upon the track of a pro- cess in consciousness whereby my private self and that deeper self of the romanticists may be somewhat more definitely connected. Let us state this process a little abstractedly. A conscious being is to think, or to feel, or to do something. Very weU, then, he must surely think or do this, one would say, in some one moment. So be it ; but as a conscious being he is also to know that he thinks or does this. To this end, however, he must exist in more than one moment. He must first act, and then live to know that he has acted. The self that acts is one, the self that knows of the act is another. Here, then, there are at least two moments, already two selves. We see at once how the same process could be indefinitely repeated. In order to know myself at all, I must thus live out an in- definitely numerous series of acts and moments. I must become many selves and live in their union and coherence. But stiU more. Suppose that what our self-conscious be- ing has to do is to prove a proposition in geometry. As he proves, he appeals to somebody, his other self, so to speak, to observe that his proof is sound. Or again, sup- pose that what he does is to love, to hate, to beseech, to pity, to appeal for pity, to feel proud, to despise, to exhort, to feel charitable, to long for sympathy, to converse, to do, in short, any of the social acts that ii.ake up, when taken all together, the whole of our innermost self-conscious- ness. All these acts, we see, involve at least the appeal to many selves, to society, to other spirits. We have no life alone. There is no merely inner self. There is the world of selves. We live in our coherence with other people, in our relationships. To sum it all up : From first to last the law of conscious existence is this paradox- heit as applied to self-eonscionsness by Hegel in the highly importaut § 436 of the Encyklopadie, Werke, vol. vii. 2, p. 283. Here already appears the nature of the true Universal of Hegel's system. Organic interrelationship of individuals is the condition even of their relatively independent selfhood. 210 THE SPIRIT OF MODLRN PHILOSOPHY. ical but real self-differentiation, whereby I, the so-called inner self, am through and through one of many selves, so that my inner self is already an outer, a revealed, an expressed self. The only mind then is the world of many related minds. It is of the essence of consciousness to find its inner reality by losing itself in outer, but spiritual relationships. Who am I then at this moment? I am just this knot of relationships to other moments and to other people. Do I converse busily and with absorption ? Then I am but just now this centre of the total conscious- ness of all those who are absorbed in this conversation. And so always it is of the essence of spirit to differen- tiate itself into many spirits, and to live in their relation- ships, to be one by virtue solely of their coherence. The foregoing illustrations of Hegel's paradox, some of which in these latter paragraphs have been his own, have not begun to suggest how manifold are, according to him, its manifestations. So paradoxical and so true does it seem to him, however, that he looks for further analogies of the same process in other regions of our conscious life. What we have found is that if I am to be I, " as I think I be," I must be more than merely I. I become myself by forsaking my isolation and by entering into commu- nity. My self-possession is always and everywhere self- surrender to my relationships. But now is not this para- dox of the spirit applicable still further in life ? Does n't a similar law hold of all that we do in yet a deeper sense? If you want to win any end, not merely the end of know- ing yourself, but say the end of becoming holy, is n't it true that, curiously enough, you in vain strive to become holy if you merely strive for holiness? Just pure holi- ness, what would it be ? To have never a worldly thought, to be peaceful, calm, untroubled, absolutely pure in spirit, without one blot or blemish, — that would indeed be noble, would it ? But consider, if one were thus quite unworldly just because one had never an unworldly thought, what HEGEL. 211 would tbat be but simple impassivity, innocence, pure emptiness? An innocent little cherub, that, just born into a pure light, had never even heard that there was a world at all, he would indeed in this sense be unworldly. But is such holiness the triumphant holiness of those that really excel in strength? Of course if I had never even heard of the world, I should not be a lover of the world. But that would be because of my ignorance. And all sorts of things can be alike ignorant, — cherubs, young tigers, infant Napoleons, or Judases. Yes, the very demons of the pit might have begun by being ignorant of the universe. If s», they would have been so far holy. But, after all, is such holiness worth much as holiness ? It is indeed worth a good deal as innocence, just to be looked at. A young tiger or a baby Napoleon fast asleep, or a new created demon that had not yet grown beyond the cherub stage — we should all like to look at such pretty creatures. But such holiness is no ideal for us moral agents. Here we are with the world in our hands, beset already with temptation and with all the pangs of our finitude. For us holiness means, not the abolition of worldliness, not innocence, not turning away from the world, but the victory that overcometh the world, the struggle, the courage, the vigor, the endurance, the hot fight with sin, the facing of the demon, the power to have him there in us and to hold him by the throat, the living and ghastly presence of the enemy, and the triumphant vra-estling with him and keeping him forever a panting, furious, immortal thrall and bondman. That is aU the holiness we can hope for. Yes, this is the only true holi- ness. Such triumph alone does the supreme spirit know, who is tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin. Holiness, you see, exists by virtue of its opposite. Holiness is a consciousness of sin with a consciousness of the victory over sin. Only the tempted are holy, and they only when they win against temptation. 212 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. All this I set down here, not merely because I believe it, although indeed I do, but because Hegel's cool diag- nosis of life loves to mark just such symptoms as this. " Die Tugend," says he in one passage of his " Logic," " die Tugend ist der hochste, voUendete Kampf." ^ Holi- ness, then, is the very height of the struggle with evil. It is a paradox, all this. And it is the same paradox of consciousness over again. You want the consciousness of virtue ; you win it, not by innocence, but through its own very opposite, namely, through meeting the enemy, endur- ins: and overcomine:. Consciousness here once more, as before, differentiates itself into various, into contrasted, forms and lives in their relationships, their conflicts, their contradictions, and in the triumph over these. As the warrior rejoices in the foeman worthy of his steel, and rejoices in him just because he wants to overcome and to slay him ; as courage exists by the triumph over terror, and as there is no courage in a world where there is nothing terrible ; as strength consists in the mastery of obstacles ; as even love is proved only through suffering, grows deep only when sorrow was with it, becomes often the tenderer because it is wounded by misunderstanding ; so, in short, everywhere in conscious life, consciousness is a union, an organization, of conflicting aims, purposes, thoughts, stirrings. And just this, according to Hegel, is the very perfection of consciousness. There is nothing simple in it, nothing unmittelbar, nothing there till you win it, nothing consciously known or possessed till you prove it by conflict with its opposite, till you develop its inner contradictions and triumph over them. This is the fatal law of life. This is the pulse of the spiritual world. For see, once more : our illustrations have run from highest to lowest in life. Everywhere, from the most 1 Werke, vol. iv., p. 63. The spirit of the foregoing exposition of the essence of holiness is found expressed in many places, especiallj in the Religionsphilosophie. HEGEL. 213 trivial games, where the players are always risking loss in order to enjoy triumph, from the lowest crudities of savage existence, where the warriors prove their heroism by lacerating their own flesh, up to' the highest conflicts and triumphs of the spirit, the law holds good. Spiritu- ality lives by self-differentiation into mutually opposing forces, and by victory in and over these oppositions. This law it is that Hegel singles out and makes the basis of his system. This is the logic of passion which he so skillfully diagnoses, and so untiringly and even mercilessly applies to all life. He gives his law various very techni- cal names. He calls it the law of the imiversal Negati- vitdt of self-conscious life ; and Negativit'dt means simply this principle of self-differentiation, by which, in order to possess any form of life, virtue, or courage, or wisdom, or self-consciousness, you play, as it were, the game of consciousness, set over against yourself your opponent, — the wicked impulse that your goodness holds by the throat, the cowardice that your courage conquers, the problem that your wisdom solves, — and then live by winning your game against this opponent. Having found this law, Hegel undertakes, by a sort of exhaustive induc- tion, to apply it to the explanation of every conscious rela- tion, and to construct, in terms of this principle of the self-differentiation of spirit, the whole mass of our rational relations to one another, to the world, and to God. His principle is, in another form, this : that the deeper self which the romanticists sought is to be found and defined only by spiritual struggle, toil, conflict ; by setting over against our private selves the world of our tasks, of our relationships, and by developing, defining, and mastering these tasks and relationships until we shall find, through the very stress and vastness and necessity and spirituality of the conflict, that we are in God's own infinite world of spiritual warfare and of absolute restless self-conscious- ness. The more of a self I am, the more contradictions 214 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. there are in my nature and the completer my conquest over these contradictions. The absolute self with which I am seeking to raise my soul, and which erelong I find to be a genuine self, yes, the only self, exists by the very might of its control over all these contradictions, whose infinite variety furnishes the very heart and content of its life. Hegel, as we see, makes his Absolute, the Lord, most decidedly a man of war. Consciousness is paradoxical, restless, struggling. Weak souls get weary of the fight, and give up trying to get wisdom, skill, virtue, because all these are won only in presence of the enemy. But the ab- solute self is simply the absolutely strong spirit who bears the contradictions of life, and wins the eternal victory. Yet one may say, if this is Hegel's principle, it amounts simply to showing us how conflict and active mastery con- tinually enlarge our finite selves. Does it enable us to prove that anywhere in the world there is this absolute self which embraces and wins all the conflicts ? Hegel tells us how the individual self is related to the deeper self, how the inner life finds itself through its own realization in the contradictions of the outer life. But does he any- where show that God exists ? To show this is precisely his object. I am not here judging how well he succeeds. The deepest presuj)posi- tion, he thinks, of all this paradoxical conscious life of ours is the existence of the absolute self, which exists, to be sure, not apart from the world, but in this whole organ- ized human warfare of ours. Only Hegel is not at all content to state this presupposition mystically. He de- sires to use his secret, — his formula for the very essence of consciousness, his fundamental law of rationality, to unlock problem after problem until he reaches the idea of the absolute self. Of the systematic fashion in which he attacked this task in his " Logic," in his " Encyclopaedia," and in his various courses of lectures, I can give no very satisfying notion. To my mind, however, he did his work HKGEL. 215 best of all in his deepest and most difficult book, the " Phe- nomenology of Spirit." Here he seeks to show how, in case you start just with yourself alone, and ask who you are and what you know, you are led on, step by step, through a process of active self-enlargement that cannot stop short of the recognition of the Absolute Spirit himself as the very heart and soul of your own life. This process consists everywhere in a repetition of the fundamental paradox of consciousness : In order to realize what I am I must, as I find, become more than I am or than I know myself to be. I must enlarge myself, conceive myself as in external relationships, go beyond my private self, pre- suppose the social life, enter into conflict, and, winning the conflict, come nearer to realizing my unity with my deeper self. But the real understanding of this process only comes, according to Hegel, when you observe that in trying thus to enlarge yourself for the very purpose of self-comprehension you repeat ideally the evolution of human civilization in your own person. This process of self-enlargement is the process which is writ large in the history of mankind. The " Phenomenology " is thus a sort of freely told philosophy of history. It begins with the Spirit on a crude and sensual stage ; it follows his para- doxes, his social enlargement, his perplexities, his rebel- lions, his skepticism, all his wanderings, until he learns, through toils and anguish and courage, such as represent the whole travail of humanitj^, that he is, after all, in his very essence the absolute and divine spirit himself, who is present already on the savage stage in the very brutalities of master and slave ; who comes to a higher life in the family ; who seeks freedom again and again in romantic sentimentality or in stoical independence ; who learns, however, always afresh that in such freedom there is no truth ; who returns, therefore, willingly to the bondage of good citizenship and of social morality ; and who, finally, in the religious consciousness, comes to an appreciation of 216 THE SPIKIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. the lesson that he has learned through this whole self- enlarging process of civilization, — the lesson, namely, that all consciousness is a manifestation of the one law of ' spiritual life, and so, finally, of the one Eternal Spirit. The Absolute of Hegel's " Phenomenology " is uo absolute on parade, so to speak, — no God that hides himself be- hind clouds and darkness, nor yet a Supreme Being who keeps himself carefully clean and untroubled in the re- cesses of an inaccessible infinity. No, Hegel's Absolute is, I repeat, a man of war. The dust and the blood of ages of humanity's spiritual life are upon him ; he comes before us pierced and wounded, but triumphant, — the God who has conquered contradictions, and who is simply the total spiritual consciousness that expresses, embraces, unifies, and enjoys the whole wealth of our human loyalty, endurance, and passion. IV. But still you may ask. Does all this yet give us the con- ditions of a genuine philosophical system ? Does it ex- plain outer nature and physical causation ? does it explain perception and knowledge ? does it tell us the true nature of things ? In brief, as you see, all this doctrine of He- gel's seems essentially ethical, practical, an exposition of spirituality, — not a theoretical account of nature. Well, Hegel believes himself to be in possession of devices whereby he can make his essentially practical categories of a deep theoretical significance. Consider, namely, those problems of the external world, of space and time, of cause and effect, of law and phenomena, of substance and show, of nature and of man, which previous philoso- phy has been treating. How do these problems arise, and what is their universal character ? Are n't they always problems about some paradoxical opposition that seems to exist in the nature of reality, and that baffles the human understanding just because both the opposed HEGEL. 217 terms, — say, for instance, knowing subject and known object ; or true reality and seeming reality ; or things in themselves and phenomena ; or finite and infinite, — just because, I say, both these opposed terms in each pair seem to be separate, sundered, mutually irreducible, in- accessible each to other, while yet hoth the opposed things nevertheless continually force themselves upon us, and demand of us an explanation. Philosophy is a nest of such problems. They vex men endlessly ; they gave Kant his troublesome pairs of contradictory assertions about space and time ; they gave Fichte the puzzle about self and not-self ; they gave Hume the problem about facts and laws, about experience that could never find necessity, and necessity that continually pretended to inflict itself upon experience. A logical system of such problems and of their solutions would be a complete theoretical philosophy, an account of the absolute, such as Schelling had dreamed of. Well, in our formula of the universal Negativitdt of the spiritual life, have n't we found precisely the formula that would both state and solves such puzzles as these? Spirit it is that makes the world. That, you remember, is, since Kant, presup- position of this whole age. The spirit, then, because of its Negativitdt, will everywhere differentiate itself, aud therefore, throughout all its universe, from the atoms to the archangels, will create seeming oppositions, will bur- den itself with a wealth of magnificent paradoxes ; and will do this equally and obstinately in the world of theory, as well as in the world of practice. If, therefore, we have the key to the process whereby the spirit wins unity in the midst of its own oppositions, then the puzzle of Hume and the problems of Kant, the conflicts of empiri- cal research and of a priori speculation, — yes, all the puzzles that the history of philosophy shows us, can be stated and solved ; for they will all be cases of the same fundamental paradox of self-consciousness. The talisman • 218 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. of the logic of passion will cause to open the doors of the richest treasure-houses of theoretical research. It is with this notion in mind that Hegel, influenced by Schelling's example, even as Schelling had been by his own, sets out to expound, not merely the history of the human or even of the absolute spirit, but the nature and the solution of every philosophical problem concerning the absolute as the history of philosophy has presented such problems to us, whether in the fundamental questions of logic, or in the inquiries of the philosophy of nature. 1 need not say that this stupendous undertaking was but indifferently executed. It is just this undertaking, however, that gives the He- gelian system its peculiarly technical and abstruse for- mulation. The system itself is set forth in three divisions : the " Logic," the " Philosophy of Nature," and the " Philoso- phy of Spirit." The "logic " is an exposition, in the most orderly and technical form, of the fundamental thoughts, or " categories," which are to be found exemplified in all the facts of this our world of the self. As for these categories themselves, the history of philosophy famishes them to Hegel. They are such fundamental ideas as those of Being and Something ; of Many and One ; of Quality, and Quantity, and Relation ; of Essence and Phenomenon ; of Form and Matter ; of Inner and Outer ; of Law and Substance ; of Subject and Object ; of Thought and the Absolute. You can't get on in phi- losophy without using such conceptions. They are the coinage of the spiritual realm. If you try to set forth truth you must employ them ; if you want to understand truth, you must comprehend them. And now compre- hension of these categories is n't to be got by merely de- fining them in abstract fashion, as Euclid defines a circle, or Spinoza his substance. Definition, simple, positive, hard and fast as it is, never tells the whole truth about HEGEL. 219 a conception ; for every fundamental conception is really to be comprehended only by viewing it in tbe true and yet paradoxical relation to its own opposite, that, as a product of self-consciousness, this conception must have. We have already seen how virtue and vice, present consciousness and past consciousness, individual consciousness and social consciousness, inner life and outer life, are indefinable, in- comprehensible, save by virtue of an insight into just that wondrous union of conflicting tendencies whereby each of the opposed conceptions gets its meaning for us. It is the flow, the change, the conflict of thought that the philosopher has to follow. In vain, for instance, do you try to define substance after Spinoza's fashion as a merely eternal, fixed, congealed, and immobile truth. The sub- stance of this world, of this universe of the self, must be a truth that lives in the very stream and struggle of finite and seeming existence. The true substance of the world is n't hidden, but revealed by the passionate change and ebb and flow of the phenomena ; for the true sub- stance is the self, the subject ; and he preserves himself by living, for he is the living God. As such, philosophy has to show him. Therefore you can't abstractly define his nature, apart from finite things and relations. You must concretely realize, even in your notion of substance, the organic unity in endless differentiation of which his universe is the embodiment. Even so it is with other categories. You comprehend them by virtue of their paradoxes. The " Logic " undertakes to be an exhaustive analysis of such paradoxes of the fundamental concep- tions. The method of the " Logic," then, is what Hegel calls the dialectical method. It is the method of what we have called the logic of passion, applied to the most theoreti- cal and seemingly least passionate of human conceptions. Take any notion you please. Hegel at once sees in that notion the traces of the self-conscious strife whereof it is 220 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. the offspring, or, if you like, the crystallized embodiment. Is it quantity that you are talking about ? Then you at once observe that there are two ways of looking at quan- tity. One, to which we get used in elementary arithmetic, regards quantity as what we call "discrete," that is, as made up of separate units. The other way, to which we get used in geometry and physics, regards quantity as continuous. The one fashion counts by units, the other measures by standards. Now in the ordinary view, this difference in the methods of viewing quantity is thought to correspond to an existent difference in the sorts of quantity that the world contains. There are discrete quantities and there are continuous quantities. But, for Hegel, the notion of quantity, as it truly exists, is a notion that is the product of self-consciousness, and not a mere datum of sense. As such a product of self-conscious- ness, true quantity proves to be, so he holds, at once both continuous and discrete, just as virtue proved to be der h'ochste Kampf, and so to involve ioth good and evil. Quantity is a mathematical thing, a seemingly cold and lifeless category, while virtue is obviously a creature of holy passion. But none the less is the paradox of self- consciousness present in the idea of quantity, just as in practical life. Discrete quantity consists of the separate and unjointed units. Continuous quantity resists and even defies description in terms of disjunct ultimate units, as, for instance, a line refuses to be made up of points. Yet, as Hegel thinks himself able to show, each of these sorts of quantity is such that when you try to think out its nature, it afflicts itself, so to speak, with the characteristics of the other, takes them on,i as Hegel loves ^ A suggestion of Hegel's technical use of an ihm or an ihr. Cf. Logik, Werke, vol. iii. p. 221 : " In gewohnlichen Vorstellungen von eontinnirlicher und discreter Grosse wird es Ubersehen, dass jede dieser Grossen beide Momente, sowohl die Continuitat als die Discre- tion, an ihr hat." HEGEL. 221 to say, in all such cases, just as the good wiU takes on to itself the evil impulse, in order that it may live by over- coming evil. How Hegel tries to show this in case of quantity I have indeed no time to expound. By means of this dialectical method Hegel seeks, more- over, not only to show each logical category as in itself an organism of opposed and yet mutually complementary elements, but also to show all these fundamental notions as forming one system, wherein the most apparently diverse and disparate ideas are actually interrelated as parts of the one highest and inclusive category, the divine Idee, or total thought of the world, whose full realization is the absolute self in its spiritual wholeness. The abso- lute Idee is the notion of the complete self, regarded just as a logical category. As true self, it appears to us later, in the philosophy of spirit. In the " Logic " it is only this thought of the total nature of things as being in the Hegelian sense self-determined. This thought contains all the subordinate categories as organic parts of the total, and as parts whose organic relation is precisely such as this dialectical, this paradoxical nature of self-con- sciousness demands. What the citizens are to the state, such are the individual categories of thought to the abso- lute logical Idee. In themselves they are endlessly con- flicting, and they are yet complementary to one another. In their totality they form but one highest category, the category of the organic unity of all thoughts in one. The Idee is also called by Hegel an objectiver Begriff^ the real law of laws, the thought of the organic relation of all things and thoughts in one universal order. One may thus obviously define the " Logic " as an effort to set forth all fundamental human thoughts as forming an organic system. ' This character of the " Logic " the most superficial reader at once sees. What is missed by the superficial reader of the " Logic " is an insight into what, 1 Logik, Werke, vol. v. p. 230. 222 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. according to Hegel's notion, constitutes organic unity, into what is the linkage that ties together the members of his kind of organism. This linkage, as we now sufficiently know, is the one that the nature of self -consciousness alone explains. It is therefore through and through a linkage of opposing and complementary members by reason of their very oppositions. This is the source of the perplex- ing analysis of contradictions whereof the " Logic " is full. The success or failure of the " Logic " therefore depends upon its author's right to read the processes of the higher practical spirituality into the products of purely theoreti- cal thinking. Here is the crux of the system. One fundamental consideration remains to be mentioned as characterizing the "Logic." Old-fashioned logic called itself formal. It discussed categories and methods of thinking, but it did not undertake to construct concrete truths. Its forms of thought were never real things for it. But Hegel's categories are, of course, more than this. The laws of thought are n't mere abstractions ; they are the soul of things. In the " Logic " one is constructing the very essence of the world-self. Now, Hegel further expressed this aspect of the matter by his remarkable doctrine about the relation between Begriffe, or universal notions, and the individual facts that faU under these notions. There is an old contro- versy as to whether individual things, or the classes that ' correspond to general conceptions, are the deepest real- ities in the world. Science, as Aristotle said, is always of the general. When we think, we always think of classes, of categories, in brief, of universals. But, on the other hand, the facts of the world always appear to our senses to be individual. Man, as a mere abstraction, doesn't exist ; individual men do. Here is one of the most per- plexing of the j)aradoxes of common sense : The business of science, namely, is with truth, and truth is always uni- versal, is known to us as the notion of things, the law of HEGEL. 223 things, the essence of the world. And, on the other hand, science is to be trne of facts, and yet the facts, at all events as sense views them, are n't universal, but are just the individual facts. This opposition between the form of science, which is universality, and the matter of sci- ence, which is individual fact, gave much trouble already to Aristotle,! into whose system it introduced a funda- mental contradiction. Hegel was weU aware of this con- tradiction between the Aristotelian ideal of universal knowledge, and the actual theory of the relation of uni- versals and individuals, as Aristotle developed it in his logical treatises.2 But this ancient paradox, which had given ground for one of the most famous of the contro- versies of the philosophy of the Middle Ages, was pre- cisely the kind of paradox that Hegel's method was pecu- liarly apt to characterize and deal with. In attempting his own solution of the problem he was therefore fuUy conscious of its difficulty, and of the relative novelty of his own theory. " The universal in its true and inclusive sense is a thought," he once says,^ " that it has cost thou- sands of years to bring to human consciousness, and that received its f uU recognition only through the aid of Chris- tianity. The Greeks knew neither God nor man in their true universality." The philosophical formulation of this thought is of course, according to Hegel, later than its concrete realization ; yes, this philosophical formulation of the " inclusive " nature of the universal is to be one of Hegel's own peculiar contributions to philosophical theory. ^ See Zeller's Philosophie der Griechen, part II. section 2, pp. 304- c 313 (3d edition), for a technical exposition of the resulting diffi- culties. ° Compare the two accounts of Aristotle's method of work in Hegel's own lectures on the History of Philosophy, Werke, vol. xiv. pp. 279, 282. See, also, the characterization of Aristotle's Logic, id., p. 368. 8 In a lecture, as reported by one of his students, Werke, vol. vi. p. 321. 224 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. The true universal, namely, or as Hegel calls it, the Bef griff, whose highest expression is to be the absolute Idee, is the organic union of the universal truth and the indi- vidual facts, an union determined by the principle that every truth is a truth constructed by the thought of the world-self, and that as such it will exemplify just that multiplicity of individual facts in the all-embracing and so universal unity of self-consciousness, which we have now so fully exemplified. The true universal of the whole world is, then, the divine Ide,e, or " all-enfolding " nature i of things, the true genus within which all individual facts ; fall. This universal is no abstraction at all, but a per- ' fectly concrete whole, since the facts are, one and all, not mere examples of it, but are embraced in it, are brought forth by it as its moments, and exist only in relation to one another and to it. It' is the vine ; they, the indi- viduals, are the branches. It is in nature the self. They are the individual thoughts, aspects, finite expressions, em- bodiments of the self. '•'•All reality," says Hegel, in one striking passage, " is the Idee. . . . The individual being is some aspect ( Seite') of the Idee. As such it therefore needs other realities [beside it], which seem as if they also existed all by themselves ; yet only in them together and in their relationship is the universal realized. I7ie I individual by itself does not embody its universal." ^ Thus the paradox of the relation of universal and indi- vidual is to be solved in a manner peculiarly character- istic of the whole system. The true law is to be the ' organic total of the facts that fall under it. The true general class, the actual object of science, is not an ab- stract something exemplified by the individuals, nor yet )an essence that is to be found in each individual. There is no such thing for Hegel as a merely individual object of thought existent aU alone for itself. The total world of the interrelated individuals is all that exists. The uni. 1 Werke, vol. vi. p. 385. HEGEL. 225 versal is therefore realized in this totality of individual life. For the nature of the universal is the nature of the self, and the self is a world of organically interrelated selves, moments of the infinite organism, phases of its infinity.! One could not mention a formula more characteristic of the Hegelian doctrine than this account of what Hegel calls the " concrete universal," which constructs, brings forth, in the endless play and toil of rationality, its own " differences," the individuals of the world of experience. It is this which for him explains how in the church or in the state we, the individuals, find ourselves " members one of another." It is this that shows us the whole world as an organism. Wherever this sort of universality is not found, as is the case in the world of uncomprehended sense-facts, where, for instance, only men as individuals seem to exist, and man appears to us as a dead abstrac- tion, we are not dealing with the world of truth. The first sign that we are dealing with the truth itself is our success in discovering an organic connection amongst things. For organism is selfhood or personality viewed in its outward manifestation. There is, then, for Hegel a lower form of thinking that reaches only a Yerstandes- Allgemeinheit. Such thinking finds itself in the presence of individual facts, and regards the universal either as a bare abstraction, or else as present only in each individual as its inner and separate nature. For such thinking the only concrete truth is the world of individual things as such. But the deeper insight into the world is revealed ^ Hegel's first published exemplification of this doctrine was in the before-mentioned theory of the Allgemeinheit des Bewusstseinx, as expounded in the PJidnomenologie. In the Logik the doctrine receives a most intricate and elaborate exposition. It is in later writings made the basis for Hegel's doctrine of the state and of the religious con- sciousness, although it was almost certainly reached, in the first place, through an examination of just these instances. For further citatoiia see Appendix C. 226 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. to US through a reflection upon the nature of self-con- sciousness, wherein the universal, or self, is the organic total of the facts of consciousness, which exist not save as ^related to one another, and to this universal. The true Universal of Hegel's theory is, then, what our own Shelley so well described when he told us in the " Prometheus " of the ' " One undivided Soul of many a soul ' Whose nature is its own divine control, ; Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea." * Of the philosophy of nature (Hegel's most unfinished and weakest undertaking), and of the philosophy of spirit (whereof the foregoing has already contained a sugges- tion), it is not our office here to treat. These matters be- long in their fuUness to technical expositions, upon whose province I have now doubtless too much trespassed. And herewith I must close this account. It wiU, per- haps, be already obvious to you all that there is a great deal in this Hegelian analysis of self-consciousness that seems to me of permanent and obvious value. As to the finality of the philosophical doctrine as a whole, that is another matter not here to be discussed. Still, I may, perhaps, do well, in closing, to suggest this one thought : People usually call Hegel a cold-hearted system-maker, who reduced all our emotions to purely abstract logical terms, and conceived his absolute solely as an incarnation of dead thought. I, on the contrary, call him one who knew marvelously well, with all his coldness, the secret of human passion, and who, therefore, described, as few others have done, the paradoxes, the problems, and the glories of the spiritual life. His great philosophical and systematic error lay, not in introducing logic into passion, ^ The Hegelian theory of universals is well sketched in Principal ^Caird's Philosophy of Religion, pp. 229-232. See, also, p. 241, where Principal Caird illustrates the true universal by the example of a family with many members. > HEGEL. 227 but in conceiving the logic, of passion as the only logic ; so that you in vain endeavor to get satisfaction from Hegel's treatment of outer nature, of science, of mathe- matics, or of any coldly theoretical topic. About all these things he is immensely suggestive, but never final. His system, as system, has crumbled, but his vital comprehen- sion of our life remains forever. LECTURE VIII. SCHOPENHATJEB. I NEED hardly remark in the presence of this audience that the name of Schopenhauer is better known to most general readers, in our day, than is that of any other mod- ern Continental metaphysician, except Kant. The reputed heretic has in this field the reward of his dangerous repu- tation, and I scarcely know whether to fear or to rejoice, as I now approach the treatment of so noteworthy and significant a man, at the position in which Schopenhauer's fame puts his expositor. In one respect, of course, my task is rendered easier by all this popular repute of my hero. Of his doctrine most of us have heard a good deal, and many of us may have followed to a considerable ex- tent his reasoning; at all events we have become ac- quainted, at least by hearsay, with the fact that his out- come was something called Pessimism. And thus, in dealing with him, I am not voyaging with you in seas un- known to all but the technical students of philosophy, as was last time the case, when I told you of Hegel. On the other hand, the kind of reputation that his writings have very naturally won is decidedly against me when I under- take to treat him with genuinely philosophical fairness. It is so much easier to be edifying than to face with courage certain serious and decidedly tragic realities ! Let me be frank with you, then, at the outset about my difficulty. It is, plainly stated, simply this : You have heard that Schopenhauer is a pessimist. You, meanwhile, are surely for the most part no pessimists. Therefore, as we ap- proach Schopenhauer, you want me, in your secret hearts, SCHOPENHAUER. 229 if not in your expressed wishes, to refute Schopenhauer. Now refutation is, as I have already tried to maintain, a thing of only very moderate service in the study of phi- losophy. We may refute a great thinker's accidental mis- judgments ; we can seldom refute his deeper insights. And as I must forthwith assure you, and shall very soon | show you, Schopenhauer's pessimism is actually expres-! sive of a very deep insight into life. This insight is in- deed not a final one. We must transcend it. But surely you would justly discover me in a very unphilosophical, and in fact very unworthily self-contradictory, attitude if now, after all these successive efforts to show you a continuity and a common body of truth in the modern philosophers, I should suddenly, at this point of my discourse, assume the airs of a champion of the faith against the infidels, and should fall to hewing and hacking at Schopenhauer with genuinely crusading zeal. In fact it is not my call- ing to do anything of the sort. I always admire the cru- saders, but my admiration is due rather to their enthusi- asm than to their philosophical many-sidedness ; rather to the vitality of their faith than to the universality of their comprehension. I fear that if I should try to join my- self unto them they would not accept me without reserve. I cannot therefore treat Schopenhauer as a crusader would treat him. He is to me a philosopher of considerable dignity, whom we could ill spare from the roll of modern thinkers ; whom I do not by any means follow as disciple, but to whom I owe, in common with other philosophical students, a great deal, for his skillful analysis and for his fearlessly clear assertion of his own significant tempera- ment. I. But as to pessimism itself, Schopenhauer's famous doc- trine, as to this terrible view that life is through and through tragic and evil, what is my attitude towards that ? I must, you will probably say, either accept it, and then 230 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. must avow it in manly fashion, or I must reject it. And if I reject it, then I am bound to refute it. My answer to the question is not far to seek. As an actual fact I do accept, and avow with perfect freedom, what to many gentle minds seems, as I am aware, a pessimistic view of life ; namely, precisely the view that at the last time we found Hegel maintaining and expanding into his marvel- ously ingenious and technical doctrine of what he called JVegativitdt as the very essence of the passionate spirit- ual existence. The spiritual life is n't a gentle or an easy thing. It is indeed through and through and forever paradoxical, earnest, enduring, toilsome ; yes, if you like, painfully tragic. Whoever hopes to find it anything else, either now or in some far-off heaven, hopes unquestionably in vain. If that is pessimism, — and in one sense, namely, in the sense in which many tender but thoughtless souls have used the phrase, it is pessimism, being opposed to , the gentle and optimistic hopes of such, — then I am now, and always shall be, in that very sense no optimist, but a maintainer of the sterner view that life is forever tragic. In so far as Schopenhauer has sought to make this plain, I follow him unhesitatingly, and honor him for his merci- lessness. Why I do so I shall try to make plain before this lecture is done. In so far, however, as Schopenhauer held that the tragedy of life disheartens every spirit that has once come to know the truth, I as plainly and abso- lutely reject so much of his outcome. The world is, on the whole, very nearly as tragic as Schopenhauer represents it to be. Only spirituality consists in being heroic enough to accept the tragedy of existence, and to glory in the strength wherewith it is given to the true lords of life to conquer this tragedy, and to make their world after all divine. The way to meet Schopenhauer's pessimism is, not to refute its assertions, but to grapple practically with its truths. And if you do so, you will find as the real heart and significance of Schopenhauer's own gloomy SCHOPENHAUER. 231 thought, a vital, yes, even a religious assurance, which will make you thank God, that, as we tried to suggest by a phrase quoted in an earlier lecture, the very ice and cold, the very frost and snow, of philosophy praise and magnify him forever. In short, my attitude towards pes- simism is one that, some years ago, in an article written for a Harvard College journal, I tried to express in words suggested by the then current accusation that too many Harvard students of ability were accustomed to pose as pessimists. If I quote now my former words, it is only because the right bearing towards such matters seems to me so simple that when I try to express it, I am troubled with a poverty of phrases, and have to fall back on oft repeated formulse, for which perhaps some defiant inter- jection, hurled into the face of our common enemy, namely, the inner spiritual sluggishness wherewith a man is so easily beset, would be the best embodiment. But, at all events, these were my poor words : — " One hears nowadays, very often, of youthful pessi- mism, prevalent, for instance, among certain clever college students. When I hear of these things, I do not always regret them. On the contrary, I think that the best man is the one who can see the truth of pessimism, can ab- sorb and transcend that truth, and can be nevertheless an optimist, not by virtue of his failure to recognize the evil of life, but by virtue of his readiness to take part in the struggle against this evil. Therefore, I am often glad when I hear of this spread of pessimistic ideas among studious but undeveloped youth. For, I say to myself, if these men are brave men, their sense of the evil that hin- ders our human life will some day arouse them to fight this evil in dead earnest, while if they are not brave men, opti- mism. can be of no service to cowards. But in any case I like to suggest to such brave and pessimistic youth where the solution of their problem must lie. It surely cannot lie in' any romantic dream of a pure and innocent world, 232 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. far off somewhere, in the future, in heaven or in the isles of the blessed. These things are not for us. We are born for the world of manly business, and if we are worthy of our destiny, we may possibly have some good part in the wars of the Lord. For nothing better have we any right to hope, and for an honest man that is enough." If these words which I have quoted seem to you rather unfeeling in their hardness, I beseech you to wait until I am done, not merely with to-day's exposition of Schopen- hauer, but with my whole course, before you judge them. As for living up to this obvious, but tremendously difficult kind of courage, of course you will not need to hear me say that a student of philosophy finds that quite as hard a task as do any of his neighbors. I am only stating the doctrine. A coward is not an admirable person, but it is only too easy to be one. Thus, then, forsaking for the moment my position as chronicler, I try to tell you, in this wholly unoriginal fash- ion, what, to be sure, has always been the creed of brave men ever since our remote ancestors, or their cousins, struggled with the climate of the glacial period. And having thus freed my mind and defined my attitude to- wards pessimism, I can venture to assume once more the position of the historical student, and to set forth some- thing of Schopenhauer's contribution to the great philo- sophic task of modern humanity. II. The general character and worth of this contribution I must first describe, and in doing so I shall follow in the main the view of a recent German writer on the history of philosophy, namely. Professor Windelband, to whose well- known book, " Die Geschichte der neueren Philosophic," these lectures have owed throughout not a little. Modern idealism, as it developed since Kant, was from the first an effort to discover the rationality of our world through an SCHOPENHAUKR. 233 analysis of the nature of consciousness. Such analysis was the problem that Kant bequeathed to his successors. For Kant showed that we know the world only in terms of consciousness and its laws, so that the understanding is the creator of the show nature that stands before our senses. Fichte tried to solve this Kantian problem by proving that it is the moral law which is the very heart and essence of our consciousness, so that our seemingly outer world is there as a means whereby we can do our work and win our deeper self. The romanticists, how- ever, felt that consciousness was no more exhaustively expressed by the moral will than by any other humane in- terest of the self. Thus, there entered into philosophy a reign of caprice, to which even Hegel did not put an end. Once understand the nature of this caprice, and you will see the place which Schopenhauer's system is to hold in the development of doctrine. Were it not, says all idealism, were it not that I am just such a conscious being as I am, my world would be a whoUy different one from the world that I see. To know the real nature of my world I must therefore un- derstand my own deeper self. Is there anything fixed, stable, necessary, about my nature? If so, then I am necessarily forced to exist in just this sort of world. But if I am essentially of no one fixed and necessary nature, then at any moment my whole world might alter. The ordinary realism of common sense does n't fear this, does n't feel the necessity of an ultimate appeal to any- thing stable or fixed about me as the real source of truth, because ordinary realism holds that the truth is there beyond me, as something knowable to all people of good intelligence, in the hard and fast matter of the world of sense. There is the moon yonder. For ordinary realism, the moon' is as permanent as nature makes it, and stays there whether any one knows it or not. Hence, in order to ask whether there is anything stable about the world, 234 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHT. ordinary realism has to put no questions to the inner life. But the very essence of idealism it is to say, My moon, the moon that I see and talk about, the moon of my own world of outer show and of empirical knowledge, is just one of my ideas. You see the same moon only in so far as in your world, in your inner life, there is a fact truly corresponding to what I call the moon in my inner life. Therefore, if you and I are to continue to see the same moon, that must be because both of us have some common and necessary deeper nature, a true and abiding oneness of spirit, that forces us to agree in this respect as to our inner life. Hence, not the abiding matter of the moon, as something that should stay there when you and I had both departed, but some common law that holds for your spirit as for mine, is the basis for the seeming perma- nence and common outer reality of the moon for us. The moon has the same sort of objective existence that, for instance, at this moment, my lecture has. The lec- ture exists as thought in me, and as experience in you. But because of a certain community of our thoughts, we all of us have the same lecture more or less present to us. We all of us, moreover, regard the lecture as an outer reality, and we therefore seem to be as much in presence of an objective fact as if the lecture were made of real atoms, instead of ideas. Or again, for the idealistic view, the existence of the events in matter, or of any other ex- ternal events, resembles the existence at any instant of the price of a stock in the stock-market, or the credit of a great firm in the commercial world. A consensus of the thoughts of the buyer and sellers exists at any moment, which, how- ever well founded, or again however arbitrary and chan- ging this consensus may be, is expressed for the instant as if it were a hard and fast material thing in a genuinely outer world. In fact, prices and credits are ideas, and exist in the show-world of market values and of commer- cial securities, being but the projections of the various SCHOPENHAUER. 235 ideas of people as these at any moment agree to express themselves. Even so, then, just as this lecture is at this instant a fact because our minds agree in making it so, and just as the price of the stock, or the credit of the great firm, is an often irresistible fact, to which the indi- vidual dealer must yield in so far as his own financial might is n't equal to altering it, even so the moon yonder is likewise for us aU an outer fact, because we are forced to agree in regarding it as outer. But our agreement itself is a fact of the deeper life of our common selfhood. Such common ideas being, then, the ideaHst's true world, his problem it is to determine whether there is any deeper and impersonally human necessity which guaran- tees that our ideas shall thus in any wise agree. This necessity must be sought, if at all, in our own hidden na- ture. Constructive idealists have always sought it in that common band of rationality which, as they conceive, so links us all together that we are organically related parts or moments of one deeper self. This self, which shaU ex- press itself in you, in me, in everybody, is to link your experience to mine in such fashion that we shall see related outer worlds. Because this self in you constructs a show-space in three dimensions, and does a similar thing for me, therefore we alike look out into the depths of space, where the same stars seem to glitter for us all. Unity, fixity, assurance, we get, if we get such prizes at all, only by virtue of that rational and spiritual unity that is beneath our lives. Can the philosopher find the true heart and essence of this our common selfhood ? If he can, then idealism becomes a system. We are, then, all in one world of truth. The outer world is indeed show, but no illusion ; and our life has an organic fixity, a lawful completeness about it, such as every philosophy longs for. But now, unfortunately, when idealists set about dedu- cing this unity and consistency of the spiritual world from some deep inner principle, their reflection always leaves us 236 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. in one great respect dissatisfied. We very certainly, namely, can never deduce from the idea of our common spirituality the idea of any particular sense thing, such as the moon. Or, to repeat one of my former illustrations, idealists can't tell us why we are spiritually or rationally bound all alike to perceive a starry world, wherein there shall be a belt of telescopic asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Such facts idealists get, like their neighbors, from daily experience or from science. Ideal- ists may say in general, as Fichte said, that the moral law needs a world of outer experience as the material for its embodiment. They cannot show why just this material is needed. There remains, then, an element of brute fact, a residuum, if you choose, of spiritual caprice, in their world of the aU-embracing self. Perhaps we have, as they say, the one deeper self in common, perhaps this deeper self has rational grounds for building in us all alike just this world of sense, of moons, of asteroids, oi comets, of jelly-fish, and of all the rest, only there is still, from our finite point of view, a vast element of at least apparent caprice about the entire universe of the spirit as thus built. And all idealists have to recognize this fact of the seeming capriciousness of the external order. The universal reason builds the world, says idealism ; but then does not the universal reason seem to build many irra- tional facts into its world? You see then the difficulty. Our common spiritual nature is to guarantee the truth of our common experience. Unless this nature has some hard and fast necessity in it, of which we can form an adequate conception, there is no satisfaction in our philo- sophy. But when we try to develop this idea of the uni- versal necessity of the world of our common selfhood, we come once more against an element of the most stubborn caprice. Idealism seems to be an insight as suggestive and inspiring as it is limited. The nature of this divine self has something seemingly irrational about it. Our SCHOPENHAUER. 237 attempted account of the world in terms of the universal reason therefore remains so far a mere programme, a pos- tulate, almost a dogma. And yet dogmas were just what our philosophy had all along been trying to reduce and to rationalize. In view of this common perplexity of all the idealistic systems, there were certain to arise, upon the historical basis of the Kantian theory, philosophies that not only accepted the perplexity, but that magnified it, that re- ferred it to the very nature of the quasi-mental reality behind the world of sense, and that declared : " Deeper than reason, in this world of the ideal existence, is the caprice which once for all expresses itself in the wealth of nature's facts." Of such systems Schopenhauer's phi- losophy is the classic representative. Not that Schopen- hauer was in this general tendency alone. Windelband very properly classes under the same head Schelling's later theologico-philosophical speculations (not studied in these lectures) along with two or three other doctrines. Windelband calls them all by the common name Irratio- nalismus. A doctrine of this sort, upon a Kantian basis, must run somewhat as follows : The world as we see it exists only in our ideas. We all have a common outer show-world because we all possess a common deeper nature, wherein we are one. You are essentially the same ultimate being that I am. Otherwise we should not have in common this outer projected world of seeming sea waves, star clusters, and city streets. For, as ideas, those things have no outer basis. As common to us all, they must have a deep inner basis. Yet this their basis can't be anything ultimately and universally rational. For in so far as we actually have reason in common, we think necessary, clearly coherent, exactly interrelated groups of ideas, such, for instance, as the multiplication table. But about the star clusters and the sea waves there is no such ultimate rational unity and coherency. 238 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Natural laws only bind such things together, in the fash- ion that Kant so prettily explained, in case the pheno- mena to be bound together are once for all there. Why, given sea waves and star clusters and city streets, we should be bound to think them as in some sort of inter- connection, Kant has told us. Only no such laws of nature can explain why there should be the phenomena there that are thus to conform to law. This is capricious. This is due to our common but irrational nature. The world of the true idealism is n't so much the world of the rational and divine self, as it is the world of the deep unreason that lies at the very basis of all of our natures, of all our common selfhood. Why should there be any world at all for us ? Is n't it just because we are all actu- ally minded to see one ? And is n't this being minded to see a world as ultimately and brutally unreasonable a fact as you could name? Let us find for this fact, then, a name not so exalted as Fichte's high-sounding speech would love. Let us call this ultimate nature of ours, which forces us all alike to see a world of phenomena in the show forms of space and time, simply our own deep common Will. Let us drop the divine name for it. Will, merely as such, is n't precisely a rational thing ; it 's capricious. It wills because it does will ; and if it wills in us all to be of such nature as to see just these stars and houses, then see them we must, and there is the end of it. Thus stated, you have an irrationalism on an idealistic basis, a doctrine that may be summed up in three propo- sitions ; — 1. The world has existence only as we see it. 2. What facts we are to see can only be learned from experience, and cannot be found a priori through any absurd transcendental deductions of the so-called essence of any absolute spirit. 3. The deepest ground, however, for all these seen facts, and for the community of our various visible worlds, SCHOPENHAUER. 239 is the common and single World- Will, whicli, expressed in all of us equally, forces us to see alike, but does so simply because this is tbe particular caprice that it happens to have, so that it embodies itself for us and in us as just this show-world, rather than any other, because such is its fashion of willing. The obvious value of such a theory is that it is at once idealistic in its analysis of the presuppositions of life, just to the direct and irresistible reality of the facts of experi- ence, and disposed, after all, to go deeper than experience in its search for the ultimate truth of the world. Final it certainly is not in this form. But it has an obvious advantage over the sort of caprice that, as we saw, was characteristic of the philosophy of the romantic school. Their caprice was the fickleness of private and individual choice. For them you can change, as it were, at any moment of time, your show-world. For them the man of genius makes whatever world he chooses. But for this theory of Schopenhauer's there is but one caprice, and that is the caprice of the World-Will itself, which once for all has hit upon this particular world of facts in time and in space. For us, in our individual capacity, there is no further caprice. We are in presence of this world now, because we ourselves are embodiments of the world-will. We cannot help the fact any longer. Experience is expe- rience ; fact is fact ; the show is going on for us all alike ; the world-will has chosen ; but it has not chosen at any point in time. Hence in the world, as it is in time, there is no further caprice, only fact. Time itself is indeed not any ultimate reality. Time belongs to the show-world, and is there like any other fact or form of things, because the world-will fancies such a form for the things of sense. But just for this very reason, we, as individuals, are just where we are, and the realities of sense and of science, although susceptible of so deep and mysterious an inter- pretation as this, are as inevitable and as objective for us & 240 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. as ever the most naive and unreflectively superficial real- ism made them. As against such realism our doctrine possesses depth, philosophical keenness of analysis, ideal- istic insight. As against the romantic idealism, our doc- trine has the advantage of objectivity and fixity. Just because our common temporal existence is part of the caprice of the World-Will, this temporal existence itself has for us individuals reality and fixity. So much for the theoretical side of our author's doc- trine. On the practical side, in respect, namely, of his pessimism, we shall find Schopenhauer in a very interest- ing historical relation to Hegel. In fact, as we shall learn, our author's pessimism is but another aspect of the same insight into the paradoxical logic of passion which we have discovered at the heart of Hegel's doctrine. It is true that Schopenhauer's World-Will, this blind power that, according to him, embodies itself in our universe, appears in his account, at first, as something that might be said to possess passion without logic. Yet this first view of the World-Will soon turns out to be inadequate. The very caprice of the terrible principle is seen, as we go on, to involve a sort of secondary rationality, a logic, fatal and gloomy, as well as deeply paradoxical, but stUl none the less truly rational for all that. Schopenhauer's world is, in fact, tragic in much the same sense as Hegel's. Only, for Schopenhauer the tragedy is hopeless, blind, undivine ; while for Hegel it is the divine tragedy of the much-tried Logos, whose joy is above all the sorrows of his world. Were this difference between these two think- ers merely one of personal and speculative opinion, it might have little significance. But since it involves, as we shall find, one of the most truly vital problems of our modern life, one which meets us at every step in our liter- ature and in our ethical controversies, we shall find it well worth our while to study the contrast more closely. First, then, here, let us see something of the man Schopenhauer^ and afterwards we may estimate the doctrine. SCHOPENHAUER. 241 III. Arthur Schopenhauer, born in 1788, was probably- descended, on the father's side, from a Dutch family. He was the son of a wealthy merchant of Danzig. His mother, the once noted Johanna Schopenhauer, brilliant novelist, and in her later years ambitious hostess in the literary circles at Weimar, had married, as she very frankly tells us, not from love, but for position. On both sides, Schopenhauer's ancestry was somewhat burdened, as we should say, in respect of nerves, although this fact is decidedly more marked on the father's side. The philo- sopher's paternal grandmother was declared insane during the latter years of her life ; and of his uncles, on the same side, one was idiotic, and one was given to excesses of the neurotic type. Schopenhauer's father, a busy and uncommonly intelligent man, many-sided and successful, still suffered, towards the last, from the family trouble. He showed at fifty-eight years of age occasional but acute symptoms of an excited form of derangement, lost, mean- while, his memory for well-known persons, and very soon died under mysterious circumstances that strongly indicated an insane suicide. Johanna herseK wao indeed personally quite free from noteworthy nervous defect, unless heart- lessness be reckoned as such. The philosopher himself, as is well known, lived in excelleat general health until past seventy, dying in 1860, of a cause having no appar- ent relation to nervous difficulties. Still, especially in youth, he was vexed by his hereditary burden enough to enable us without question to associate his pessimism in some measure with his temperament. Several neuras- thenic symptoms are reported, showing themselves in spo- radic but decided forms, — night-terrors, of a known pathological type ; causeless depressions ; a persistent dread of possible misfortunes; a complaining and frequently unbearable ill humor, with attendant crises of violent tern- 242 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. per. A troublesome and slowly growing deafness, similar to one manifest in Ms father, is referred to the same cause. Against these stood always a very fine general constitution and a rather over-anxiously guarded fashion of life. The question suggested by all these facts, — the well-known question whether Schopenhauer's pessimism was mainly due to mere morbidness of temperament, was in short mere Stimmungspessimismus, — is not so easy to decide as some of his critics fancy. In fact, the man was unquestionably incapable of a permanently cheerful view of life, — was a born outcast, doomed to hide and to be lonely. Unquestionably, moreover, he was given to pettiness in the minor relations of life, was vain, uncom- panionable, and bitter. But then, many clever men have had aU these burdens to bear, without being able to see the tragedy of life as wisely and deeply as Schopenhauer saw it. He would have said of his own unhappy temper very much what he once said of the crimes of Napoleon's career, namely, that there are conditions which make manifest the latent evil of human selfishness, the dangers of the restless will that is in us all alike, better than do other conditions, but which do not therefore create their latent evil. It will not do in any case to state the case against Schopenhauer's pessimism in such shallow fashion as to make it appear that, whilst all pessimism is mere pettiness, all optimism is prima facie noble-mindedness. Optimists also can be selfish and even intolerable. In fine, then, I am disposed to say, as a matter of mere his- torical judgment, that Schopenhauer's nervous burdens unquestionably opened his eyes to the particular aspect of life which he found so tragic, but that meanwhile the fact of such burdens is of positively no service to u^ in form- ing onr estimate of the ultimate significance of our philo- sopher's insight, — an insight which, for my part, I find as deep as it was partial. The Italian psyehologis*-, Lombroso, in his well-known SCHOPENHAUER. 2J:3 work on the relations of genius and insanity, makes use of course of Schopenhauer in his catalogue of pathological geniuses. The only value which such observations have, in the present chaotic condition of our knowledge upon the subject, is to remind us that we cannot dispose of a man's intellectual rank, or of his doctrine, by merely observing that he was weighted with morbid tendencies of mind. Genius has often, although by no means always, a back- ground of a pathological sort ; while, on the other hand, the nervously burdened, whether geniuses or not, actually do a great part of the world's work and of the world's thinking, and may be aU the wiser by reason of the depth of their nervous experiences. Specially interesting, how- ever, in Schopenhauer's case, is the relation of contrast between the peevishness of his private temper and the self-controlled calm and clearness of his literary style. To such a man intellectual work is a blessed relief from the storms of trivial but violent emotion. His reflective thought stands off, as it were, on one side, and surveys with a melancholy freedom his daily life of care and of bondage. His thinking rejoices in the wondrous craft whereby it has outwitted passion. His reflection, there- fore, throughout, is a negative self-criticism, a sort of reductio ad absurduni of the tempestuous natural man. It does not embody the peevishness of this natural man, but rather scorns the vanity of his unwisdom. As Scho- penhauer himself says : " Since all grief, because it is a mortification, a call to resignation, has in it the possi- bility of rendering one holy, therefore it is that great sorrow, deep pangs, arouse in us a certain reverence for the sufferer ; but the sufferer becomes whoUy venerable only when, seeing his whole life as one chain of sorrow, he yet does not dwell on the enchainment of circum- stances that brought grief to just his life ; . . . for then he would still be longing for life, only under other condi- tions. But he is truly venerable only when his look is 244 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. turned from the petty to the universal ; when he becomes, as it were, a genius in respect of ethical insight ; when he sees a thousand cases in one, so that life seen as one whole . . . moves him to resignation. ... A very noble character," continues Schopenhauer, " we always conceive with a certain tinge of melancholy in it, — a melancholy that is anything but a continual peevishness in view of the daily vexations of life (for such peevishness is an ignoble trait, and arouses suspicions of maliciousness), but rather a melancholy that comes from an insight into the vanity of all joys, and the sorrowfulness of all living, not alone of one's own fortune." Thus, as we see, Scho- penhauer's philosophy is not founded upon any summing up of the malicious judgments of his natural peevishness, but is an expression of a calm and relatively external survey and confession of his temperament in its whole- ness. This it is that is expressed in the lucidity of his style, and that gives permanent value to his insight. The strong opposition between will and contemplation is one of the chief features of his doctrine. As for this style in itself, it suggested Jean Paul's famous characterization of the first edition of Schopen- hauer's "Welt als Wille und Vorstellung " : "A book of philosophical genius, bold, many-sided, full of skill and depth, — but of a depth often hopeless and bottomless, akin to that melancholy lake in Norway, in whose deep waters, beneath the steep rock-walls, one never sees the sun, but only the stars reflected ; and no bird and no wave ever flies over its surface." Just this calm of Schopen- hauer's intellect is the characteristic thing about his writ- ing ; and no one who knows the highly intellectual and reflective type of the nervously burdened genius will fail to comprehend the meaning of the contrast between the man's peevishness, which tortured him, and his thinking, wherein he found rest. More cheerful spirits may think and will in the same moment, may reflect with vigorous SCHOPENHAUER. 245 vitality and work with keen reflection. But for men of Schopenhauer's type there is a profound contrast between their contemplative and their passionate life, precisely the same contrast that the ascetic mystics, with whom, once more, like Spinoza, Schopenhauer as philosopher had many things in common, have always loved to dwell upon and to exaggerate. Do you give yourself over to passion ? Then, as they will have it, you may be clever, well in- formed, ingenious ; in short, as all the ascetic mystics would say, you may be as wily as you are worldly ; but through it all you will be essentially ignorant, thought- less, irrational. Do you attain the true enlightenment, even for a moment ? Then you stand aside from passion ; its whirlwind goes by, and you remain undisturbed ; your thought, to use an old comparison that was a favorite of Schopenhauer's, pierces through passion as the sunlight through the wind. You see it all, but it moves you not. Such mysticism is essentially pessimistic ; we find it so even in Spinoza, or in the " Imitation of Christ ; " only, in the " Imitation," contemplation has the glory of God to turn to above and beyond the storm of sense and of vanity. A formula for Schopenhauer is that his pessi- mism is simply the doctrine of the " Imitation " with the glory of God omitted ; but as the glory of God in the latter book is described in purely abstract, mystical, and essentially unreal terms, one may see at once that the road from the mediaeval mystic to Schopenhauer's outcome is not so long as some people imagine. "I saw in my dream," says Bimyan, at the end of his " Pilgrim's Pro- gress," when the angels carry off poor Ignorance to the pit, — "I saw in my dream that there was a way to the bottomless pit from the very gate of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction." Now, Schopenhauer's mission it was to explore this highly interesting way with considerable speculative skill. The mystic who forsakes the world because of its vanity finds his comfort in a 246 THE SPIMT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHy. dream of something called the divine perfection, — some- thing pure, abstract, extra-mundane. He comes on " that which is," and catches, like Tennyson in the famous night vision on the lawn, in the " In Memoriam," " the deep pulsation of the world." Only by and by morning comes. Your mj'stic must awake ; his vision must van- ish, " stricken through with doubt." Tennyson seems to have endured the waking better than others. But, gener- ally speaking, the pessimist of Schopenhauer's type is simply the mystic of the type of the " Imitation," at the moment when he has awakened from the false glory of this religious intoxication. The events of our hero's life may be briefly disposed of. His father took or sent him on long travels during his early youth, made him well acquainted with both French and English, and insisted that he should in due time learn the mercantile business, and train himself to be a busy, intelligent, and many-sided man of the world. Scholarship and the university formed no part in the father's plans. The boy spent also considerable time on his father's country estate, loved nature, but was always a lonely child. As youth waxed, moodiness tormented him ; he already showed also the metaphysical turn. His father's death, in 1805, left him free to follow his own plans. He forsook the hated counting-house, where he had already set about his work, and began to study for the university ; making rapid progress in Latin, quarrel- ling with his elders, and writing rhetorically gloomy let- ters to his mother, who had now entered on her Weimar career. The son's native pessimism was still far, of course, from the later philosophical formulation, but he already perceived that one great evil about the world is its endless change, which dooms all ideal interests and moods to alteration and defeat. " Everything," he writes to his mother, " is washed away in time's stream. The minutes, the numberless atoms of pettiness into which SCHOPENHAUER, 247 every deed is dissolved, are the worms that gnaw at everything great and noble, to destroy it." His mother found this sort of thing rather tedious, and especially in- consistent with her son's social success as an occasional inmate of her house at Weimar. There already a most brilliant company often gathered, Goethe at the head. A youth of twenty or thereabouts could not add grace to such a scene so long as he could talk of nothing but time and worms. She wrote him plainly, being a woman as clear-headed as she was charming : " When you get older, dear Arthur, and see things more clearly, perhaps we shall agree better. TiU then let us see that our thousand little quarrels shall not hunt love out of our hearts. To that end we must keep well apart. You have your lodg- ings ; as for my house, whenever you come you are a guest, weU. received, of course, only you must n't interfere. I can't bear objections. Days when I receive, you may take supper with me, if you '11 only be so good as to re- frain from your painful disputations, which make me angry, too, and from all your lamentations over the stupid world and the sorrows of mankind ; for all that always gives me a bad night and horrid dreams, and I do so like a sound sleep." In 1809, Schopenhauer began his university studies at Gbttingen, devoted himself to Kant and Plato, and rap- idly acquired the type of erudition which he kept to the end, an erudition vast rather than technical, the learning of one who saw swiftly rather than studied exhaustively, remembered rather than systematized, enjoyed manifold labors rather than professional completeness. He was always a marvelous reader, of wide literary sympathies, especially fond of the satirists, the mystics, and the keen observers of all ages. For the processes of the exact sciences he had a poor comprehension ; for natural phe- nomena of a suggestive sort his eye was always very wide open ; he longed to catch the restless World- WiU in the 248 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. very act of its struggle and sorrow. He loved books of travel, energetic stories, strongly written historical sketches, tragic as well as satirical dramas, and books of well-described natural history. In nature itself, he was very fond of observing flowers, while, after his fashion, he loved animals passionately. They show the will naked, in all its naive cruelty, guilt, and innocence. Edifying literature of all but the purely mystical type, most systematic schemes of constructive thought, all merely sentimental poetry, and above all such moralizing poetry as Schiller's " Don Carlos," he in general bitterly despised. These things seemed to hira to hover above life. He wanted to contemplate the longing of life in itself. His critical and historical judgments are deep and yet wayward. He is once more on the lookout for tjj^pes, not for connections ; he had, for so learned a man, a poor eye for detecting unscholarly and fantastic theories, and frequently acsepts such when they relate to topics beyond his immediate control. His literary sense was after all his best safeguard in scholarship. Here his fine contem- plative intellect guided him. He could not make a bad blunder as to a purely linguistic question ; but where his taste and instinct for the immediate inner life of things and of people were unable to guide him, he wandered too often in the dark. On all matters of learning his judg- ment remains, therefore, largely that of the sensitive man of the world. His sense of humor was of the keenest. The will is once for all as comic in its irrationalities as it is deep in its unrest. A distinguishing feature of his style is due to this wide reading, namely, his skill in metaphor and in other forms of comparison. In this respect he rivals those wonderful masters of comparison, the Hindoo metaphysicians, whom he knew through translations, and admired much. One further trait may yet be mentioned as pervading his study and his whole view of life. He was an intense admirer of the English temperament, just SCHOPENHAUER. 249 as be was an intense hater of many English institutions. Not, of course, the English Philistine, but the English man of the world, attracted him, by that clear-headedness and that freedom from systematic delusions which are so characteristic of the stock. To sum all up in a word, the maxim of his whole life as a learner was. See and record the vital struggles and longings of the will wherever they appear. Such scholarship as this was ill-fitted to prepare Scho- penhauer for an academic life. In 1813, he printed his dissertation for the doctor's degree, on the " Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason." It is his most technical book, with least of his genius in it. In 1818 was published the first edition of his "■Welt als Wille und VorsteUung." In 1820, he entered on his work as Privat-Docent at the university of Berlin, and imme- diately made a sufficiently complete academic failure to discourage him from any serious effort to continue. Em- bittered by the indifference with which both his books and his attempts as a teacher were received, he gradually acquired that intense hatred of all professors of philoso- phy, and of the whole post-Kantian speculative movement in Germany, which he expressed more than once in a furious form, and which wholly misled him as to his own historical relations. After 1831, he retired to Frankfort- on-the-Main, and lived upon his little fortune until the close of his life. How he came slowly to be publicly known, in spite of the indifference with which academic circles treated him ; how in old age there gathered round him a little circle of well-received flatterers ; how young Russians used to come and stare at the wise man ; how he loved the attentions of all such people, and better still the more intelligent understanding of two or three faithful disciples, but best of all his dinner and his dog ; how he died at last suddenly, when he was quite alone, — are not all these things written in the books of modern literary 250 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. gossip ? I ueed not dwell upon them further ; nor need I repeat how Schopenhauer had only to die to acquire general fame, until now his name is everywhere a symbol for all that is most dark and deep and sad and dangerous about the philosophy of our time. Of the pettier inci- dents of his life, of his quarrels, of his one or two out- bursts of temper which led to public scandals, of his other eccentricities numberless, I have no time to speak further. IV. Schopenhauer's principal work, "Die Welt als "Wille und Vorstellung," is in form the most artistic philosophi- cal treatise in existence, if one excepts the best of Plato's " Dialogues." In its first edition it was divided into four books ; a later edition added in a second volume com- ments upon all four. Of these books, the first summa- rizes the Kantian basis of Schopenhauer's own doctrine. The world is, first of all, for each and for all of us, just our Vorstellung, our Idea. It is there because and while we see it ; it consists in its detail of facts of experience. These, however, are, for our consciousness, always inter- preted facts, seen in the sense forms of space and of time, and within these forms, perceived through and by virtue of our universal form of comprehension, namely, the prin- ciple of causation. When I experience anything, I in- evitably seek for a cause in space and in time for this experience. When I find such a cause, I localize the experience as an event manifesting some change in some- thing there in space and in time ; but these forms of space and of time, as well as this principle of causation, are all alike simply formal ideas in me. Kant's great service lay, in fact, in his proving the subjectivity, the purely mental nature, of such forms. The space and time worlds, with all that they contain, exist accordingly for the knowing subject. No subject without an object, and no object without a subject. I know in so far as there is a SCHOPENHAUER. 251 world to know ; and the world yonder exists in so far as I know it. In vain, moreover, would one seek for any thing in itself really outside of me as the cause of my experiences. For cause is just an idea of mine, useful and valid for the events of the show world, but wholly inapplicable to anything else. Within experience the law of causation is absolute, because such is my fashion of thinking experience and of perceiving the localized things of sense. But beyond experience what validity, what application, can one give to the principle of causa- tion ? None. There is no cause to be sought beyond my own true nature for my own experiences. But what is this my nature ? The second book answers ^ the question. My nature, you must observe, is something very wealthy. It does not indeed cause my experiences, in any proper sense ; for cause means only an event that in time or in space brings another event to pass ; and there is nothing that, in time or in space, brings to pass my own deepest, timeless, and spaceless nature. As phenomenon in time, my body may move or die, as other events deter- mine ; but my deepest nature is so superior to space and time that, as we have just shown, space and time are in fact in me, in so far as they are my forms of seeing and of knowing. Therefore my true nature neither causes, nor is caused ; but, as one now sees, it in truth is, com- 1/ prises, embodies itself in, all my world of phenomena. Hence you see how wealthy my true nature must be in its implications. Yes, in a deeper sense, you also, in so far as you truly exist, must have the same deepest nature that I have. Only in space and in time do we seem to be separate beings. Space and time form, as Schopenhauer says, the dividing principle of things. In an illusory way they seem to distinguish us all from one another ; but abstract space and time, with all their manifold and illusory distinctions of places and moments, and the real world collapses into one immanent nature of things. 252 THE SPIRIT OF MODEEN PHILOSOPHy. Since my own deepest nature is beneath and behind the time form of the apparent -world, it follows that, in an essential and deep sense, I am one with all that ever has been or that ever will be, either millions of ages ago or millions of ages to come. And as for space, there is no star so remote but that the same essential nature of things which is manifest in that star is also manifest in my own body. Space and time are, as the Hindoos declared, the veil of Maya or Illusion, wherewith the hid- den unity of things is covered, so that, through such illu- sion, the world appears manifold, although it is but one. To answer, therefore, the question, What is the nature of things ? I have only to find what, apart from my senses and my thought, is my own deepest essence. And of this 1 have a direct, an indescribable, but an unques- tionable awareness. My whole inner life is, namely, essen- tially my will. I long, I desire, I move, I act, I feel, I strive, I lament, I assert myself. The common name for all this is my will. By will, of course, Schopenhauer does not merely mean the highest form of my conscious choice, as some people do. He means simply the active nature of me, the wanting, longing, self-asserting part. This, in truth, as even the romantic idealists felt, lies deeper than my intellect, is at the basis of all my seeing and knowing. Why do I see and acknowledge the world in space and in time ? Why do I believe in matter, or recognize the existence of my fellow-men, or exercise my reason ? Is not all this just my actual fashion of behavor ? In vain, however, do I seek, as the idealists of Fichte's type often pretended to seek, for an ultimate reason why I should have this fashion of behavior. That is a mere fact. Deeper than reason is the inexplicable caprice of the inner life. We want to exist ; we long to know ; we make our world because we are just striving to come into being. Our whole life is as ultimate and inexplicable an activity as are our particular fashions of loving and of SCHOPENHAUER. 253 hating. So I am ; this is the nature of me, — to strive, to long, to will ; and I cannot rest in this striving. My life is a longing to be somewhere else in life than here, where I am. Here, then, is the solution of our mysteiy in so far as it can have a solution. The world is the Will. In time and space I see only the behavior of phenomena. I never get at things in themselves ; but I, in my timeless and spaceless inner nature, in the very heart, in the very germ, of my being, am not a mere outward succession of phe- nomena. I am a WiU, — a will which is not there for the sake of something else, but which exists solely because it desires to exist. Here is the true thing in itself. The whole world, owing to the utter iUusoriness of time and space, has collapsed into one single and ultimate nature of things. This nature, immediately experienced in the inner life, is the Will. This Will, then, is that which is so wealthy that the whole show world is needed to express its caprice. Look, then, on the whole world in its infinite complication of living creatures and of material processes. These, indeed, are remote enough from your body. Seen in space and time, you are a mere fragment in the endless world of phenomena, a mere drop in the ocean, a link in an endless chain. But look at the whole world otherwise. In its inmost life and truth it must be one, for space and time are the mere forms in which the one interest of the observer is pleased to express itself. Look upon all things, then, and it can be said of you as, once more, the Hindoos loved to say, " The life of all these things, — That art Thou." Schopenhauer himself was fond of quoting this well- known phrase of the Hindoo philosophy as expressing the kernel of his own doctrine. New about his philosophy was, he felt, the synthesis that he had made of Kant's thought and the Hindoo insight ; but with this insight itself he essentially agreed. "The inmost life of things is one, 254 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. and that life art thou." This sentence expresses to his mind the substance of the true thought about the world. Let us, then, quote a paragraph or two from one of the Hindoo philosophic classics called the " Upanishads," much read and loved by Schopenhauer, to illustrate his view. In the passage in question a teacher is repre- sented as in conversation with his pupil, who is also his son. " ' Bring me,' says the father, ' a fruit of yonder tree.' ' Here it is, O Venerable One.' ' Cut it open.' ' It is done.' ' What seest thou therein ? ' 'I see, O Venerable One, very little seeds.' ' Cut one of them open.' 'It is done. Venerable One.' 'What seest thou therein ? ' ' Nothing, Venerable One.' Then spake he : ' That fine thing which thou seest not, my well beloved, from that fine thing (that life) is, in truth, this mighty tree grown. Believe me, my well beloved, what this fine (substance) is, of whose essence is all the world, that is the Eeality, that is the Soul, — That art Thou, O Cve- taketu.' " " ' This bit of salt, lay it in the (vessel of) water, and come again to-morrow to me.' This did he. Then spake (the teacher) : ' Bring me that salt which yesterday even thou didst lay in the water.' He sought it and found it not, for it was melted. 'Taste the water here. How tastes it ? ' ' Salt.' ' Taste it there. How tastes it ? ' ' Salt.' ' Leave the vessel and sit at my feet.' So did he, and said, ' (The salt) is still there.' Then spake the teacher : ' Verily, so seest thou the truly Existent not in bodies, yet is it truly therein. What this fine substance is of whose essence is all the world, that is the Eeality, that is the Soul, — That art Thou, O Cvetaketu.' " " 'Just as, O my well beloved, a man whom they have led away out of the land of the Gandharis with eyes blind- folded, and have loosed him in the wilderness, — just as he wanders eastwards or westwards, southwards or north- wards, because he has been led hither blindfolded and SCHOPENHAUEE. 255 loosed blindfolded, but after some one has taken off the blind from his eyes, and has said, " Yonder lies the land of the Gandharis ; yonder go," he, asking the way in vil- lage after village, instructed and understanding, comes home at last to the Gandharis, — even so, too, is the man who here in the world has found a teacher ; for he knows " to this (world) I belong only until I am delivered ; then shall I come to my home." What this fine (substance) is, of whose essence is all the world, that is the Reality, that is the Soul, — That art Thou, O Cvetaketu.' " Here, one sees, is the Hindoo way of getting at the substance. It is also Schopenhauer's way. Look for the substance within, in your own nature. You will not see it without. It is the life of your own life, the soul of ^'' your own soul. When you find it, you will come home from the confusing world of sense-things to the heart and essence of the world, to the reality. That art TJiou. Since for Schopenhauer this soul of your soul is the capricious inner will, there is no reason to speak of it as God or as Spirit ; for these words imply rationality and conscious intelligence. And intelligence, whose presence in the world is merely one of the caprices of this will it- self, finds itself always in sharp contrast to the will, which it can contemplate, but which it can never explain. How- ever, of contemplation there are various stages, deter- mined in us phenomenal individuals by the various sizes and powers of our purely phenomenal brains. Why any intelligence exists at all, and why it is phenomenally as- sociated with a brain, nobody can explain. The will thus likes to express itself. That is the whole story. How- ever, once given the expression, this intelligence reaches its highest perfection in that power to contemplate the whole world of the will with a certain supreme and lofty calm, which, combined with an accurate insight into the truth of the will, is characteristic of the temperament of the productive artist. Art is, namely, the embodiment of 256 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. the essence of the will as the contemplative intelligence sees it. And to art Schopenhauer devotes his third book. The will has certain ultimate fashions of expressing itself, certain stages of self-objectification, as Schopenhauer calls them. These, in so far as contemplation can seize them, are the ultimate types, the Platonic ideas, of things, all endlessly exemplified in space and time by individual ob- jects, but, as types, eternal, time-transcending, immortal. They are the ultimate embodiments of passion, the eternal forms of longing that exist in our world. Art grasps these types and exhibits them. Architecture, for in- stance, portrays the blind nature-forces, or longings, of weight and resistance. Art is, then, the universal appre- ciation of the essence of the will from the point of view of a contemplative onlooker. Art is, therefore, disinter- ested, embodying passion, but itself not the victim of pas- sion. Of .aU the arts, according to Schopenhauer, Music most universally and many-sidedly portrays the very es- sence of the will, the very soul of passion, the very heart of this capricious, world-making, and incomprehensible inner nature of ours. Hence music is in some respects Schopenhauer's favorite art. Music shows us just what the will is, — eternally moving, striving, changing, flying, struggling, wandering, returning to itself, and then begin- ning afresh, — all with no deeper purpose than just life in all its endlessness, motion, onward-flying, conflict, full- ness of power, even though that shall mean fullness of sorrow and anguish. Music never rests, never is content ; repeats its conflicts and wanderings over and over ; leads them up, indeed, to mighty climaxes, but is great and strong never by virtue of abstract ideas, but only by the might of the will that it embodies. Listen to these cries and strivings, to this infinite wealth of flowing passion, to this infinite restlessness, and then reflect, — That art TJiou; just that unreposing vigor, longing, majesty, and — • caprice. SCHOPENHAUER. 257 Of all Schopenliauer's theories, except his pessimism itself, this theory of art has become the most widely known and influential. As he stated it, it was, indeed, evidently the notion, not of the systematic student of any art, but of the observant amateur of genius and sensibility. It lacks the professional tone altogether. Its illustrations are chosen whimsically from all sorts of directions. The opposition between will and contemplation reaches for the first time its height at this point in the system. On one side, the world of passion, throbbing, sorrowing, longing, hoping, toiling, above all, forever fleeing from the mo- ment, whatever it be ; on the other side, the majesty of artistic contemplation, looking in sacred calm upon all this world, seeing all things, but itself unmoved. Plainly, in this contemplative intellect the wiU has capriciously created for itself a dangerous enemy, who wiU discover its deep irrationality. This enemy is none other than that Wagnerian Briin- hilde, who is destined to see, through and through, the vanity of the world of the will, and who, not indeed with- out the connivance of the high gods of the will them- selves, is minded to destroy the whole vain show in one final act of resignation. There arise from time to time in the world, thinks Schopenhauer, holy men, full of sympathy • and pity for all their kind, full of a sense of the unity of all life, and of the vanity of this our common and endless paradox of the finite world. These men are called, in the speech of all the religions, saints. Whatever their land or creed, their thought is the same. Not the particular griefs of life, not the pangs of cold and hunger and of disease, not the horrors of the baseness that runs riot in humanity, — not these things do they weigh in the balance with any sort of precision or particularity, although these things, too, they see and pity. No, the source of all these griefs, the will itself, its paradox, its contradictory long- ing to be forever longing, its irrational striving to be for* J 258 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. ever as one that suffers lack, — this they condemn, com- passionate, and — resign. They do not strive or cry. They simply forsake the wiU. Life, they say, must be evil, for life is desire, and desire is essentially tragic, since it flees endlessly and restlessly from all that it has ; makes perfection impossible by always despising whatever it hap- pens to possess, and by longing for more ; lives in an eter- nal wilderness of its own creation ; is tossed fitfully in the waves of its own dark ocean of passion ; knows no peace ; finds in itself no outcome, — nothing that can finish the longing and the strife. And this hopelessly struggling desire, — so the saints teach, to each one of us in our blindness, — r That art Thou. The saints pity us all. Their very existence is compas- sion. They absent them from felicity awhile, that they may teach us the way of peace. And this way is what ? Suicide ? No, indeed. Schopenhauer quite consistently condemns suicide. The suicide desires bliss, and flees only from circumstance. He wiUs life. He hates only this life which he happens to have. No, this is not what the saints teach. One and all they counsel, as the path of perfection, the hard and steep road of Resignation. That alone leads to blessedness, to escape from the world. Deny the will to live. | Forsake the power that builds the world, i Deny the flesh. While you live be pitiful, mer- ciful, kindly, dispassionate, resisting no evil, turning away from all good fortune, thinking of all things as of vanity and illusion. The whole world, after all, is an evil dream. Deny the will that dreams, and the vision is ended. As for the result, " we confess freely," says Schopenhauer, in the famous concluding words of the fourth book of his first volume, " what remains, after the entire annul- ling of the will, is, for all those who are yet full of the wiU, indeed nothing. But, on the other hand, for those in whom the will has turned again, and has denied itself, this our own so very real world, with all her suns and Milky Ways, is —Nothing," SCHOPENHAUER. 259 V. The estimate of the doctrine which we now have before us will be greatly aided if we bear in mind the nature of its historic genesis. The problem bequeathed by Kant to his successors was, as we have seen throughout both this and the preceding discussion, the problem of the re- lation of the empirical self of each moment to the total or universal self. This problem exists alike for Hegel and for Schopenhauer. Hegel undertakes to solve it by examining the process of self -consciousness. This pro- cess, developed according to his peculiar and paradoxical logic, which we have ventured to call the Logic of Pas- sion, shows him that in the last analysis there is and can be but one self, the absolute spirit, the triumphant solver of paradoxes. Sure of his process, Hegel despises every such mystical and immediate seizing of the Universal as had been characteristic of the romanticists. With just these romanticists, however, Schopenhauer has in common the immediate intuition whereby he seizes, not so much the universal self as, in his opinion, the universal and irrational essence or nature that is at the heart of each finite self, and of aU things, namely, the Will. Yet when he describes this will, after his intuition has come to grasp it, he finds in it just the paradox that Hegel had logically developed. For Hegel, self-consciousness is, as even Fichte already had taught, essentially the longing to be more of a self than you are. Just so, for Schopen- hauer, if you exist you will, and if you will you are striv- ing to escape from your present nature. It is of the es- , sence of will to be always desiring a change. If the W^ill makes a world, the Will as such will be sure, then, thinks Schopenhauer, to be endlessly dissatisfied with its world. For, once more, when you will, the very essence of such will is discontentment with what is yours now. I no longer make that an object of desire which I already 260 THE SPIEIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. possess. I will what I have not yet, but hope to get, as a poor man wills wealth, but a rich man more wealth. I will the future, the distant, the unpossessed, the victory that I have not yet won, the defeat of the enemy who still faces me in arms, the cessation of the tedium or of the pain that besets me. Do I attain my desire, my will ceases, or, which is the same thing, turns elsewhere for food. Curiously enough, this, which is precisely the thought that led Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant spirit, appears to Schopenhauer the proof of the totally evil nature of things. Striving might be bearable were there a highest good, to which, by willing, I could attain, and if, when I once attained that good, I could rest. But if will makes the world and is the whole life and essence of it, then there is nothing in the world deeper than the longing, the unrest, which is the very heart of all willing. Does n't this unrest seem tragic ? Is there to be no end of longing in the world? If not, how can mere striving, mere willing, come to seem beara- ble ? Here is the question which leads Schopenhauer to his pessimism. Precisely the same problem made Hegel, with all his aj)preciation of the tragedy of life, an optimist. Hegel's Absolute, namely, is dissatisfied everywhere in his finite world, but is triumphantly content with the whole of it, just because his wealth is complete. An historical lecture like the present one has not to de- cide between the metaphysical claims and rights of the Schopenhauerian immediate intuition of the Universal and the Hegelian logic. As theories of the absolute, these two doctrines represent conflicting philosophical in- terests whose discussion would belong elsewhere. Our present concern is the more directly human one. Of the two attitudes towards the great spiritual interests of man which these systems embody, which is the deeper? To be sure, even this question cannot be answered without making a confession of philosophical faith, but that I must here do in merely dogmatic form. SCHOPENHAUEE. 261 For my part, I deepl;^ respect both doctrines. Both are essentially modern views of life, modern in their uni- versality of expression, in their keen diagnosis of human nature, in their merciless criticism of our consciousness, in their thorough familiarity with the waywardness of the inner life. The century of nerves and of spiritual sorrows has philosophized with characteristic ingenuity in the persons of these thinkers, — the one the inexorable and fairly Mephistophelian critic of the paradoxes of passion, the other the nervous invalid of brilliant insight. We are here speaking only of this one side of their doc- trines, namely, their diagnosis of the heart and of the issues of life. How much of the truth there is in both, every knowing man ought to see. Capricious is the will of man, thinks Schopenhauer, and therefore endlessly paradoxical and irrational. Paradoxical is the very con- sciousness, and therefore the very reason, of man, finds Hegel ; and therefore, where there is this paradox, there is not unreason, but the manifestation of a part of the true spiritual life, — a life which could not be spiritual were it not full of conflict. Hegel thus absorbs, as it were, the pessimism of Schopenhauer ; whUe Schopen- hauer illustrates the paradox of Hegel. But if both doctrines stand as significant expressions of the modern spirit, a glance at our more recent litera- ture — at the despairing resignation of Tolstoi, with its flavor of mysticism, and at the triumphant joy in the para- doxes of passion which Browning kept to the end — will show us how far our romancers and poets still are from having made an end of the inquiry as to which doc- trine is the right one. My own notion about the matter, such as it is, would indeed need for its full development the context of just such a philosophical argument as I have declined to introduce at the present stage of this course. As constructive idealist, regarding the absolute as indeed a spirit, I am in sympathy with Hegel's sense 262 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. of the triumphant rationality that reigns ahove all the conflicts of the spiritual world. But as to Schopenhauer's own account of life, I find indeed that his pessimism is usually wholly misunderstood and unappreciated, as well by those who pretend to accept as well by those who con- demn it. What people fail to comprehend concerning these deep and partial insights which are so characteristic of great philosophers is that the proper way to treat them is neither to scorn nor to bow down, but to experience, and then to get our freedom in presence of all such in- sights even by the very wealth of our experience. We are often so slavish in our relations with doctrines of this kind ! Are they expressed in traditional, in essentially clerical language, as in the " Imitation " or in some other devotional book, then the form deceives us often into ac- cepting mystical resignation as if it were the whole of spirituality, instead of bearing, as it does bear, much the same relation to the better life that sculptured marble bears to breathing flesh. But if it is a Schopenhauer, a notorious heretic, who uses much the same speech, then we can find no refuge save in hating him and his gloom. In fact, pessimism, in its deeper sense, is merely an ideal and abstract expression of one very deep and sacred ele- ment of the total religious consciousness of humanity. In fact, finite life is tragic, very nearly as much so as Schopenhauer represented, and tragic for the very reason that Schopenhauer and all the counselors of resignation are never weary of expressing, in so far, namely, as it is at once deep and restless. This is its paradox, that it is always unfinished, that it never attains, that it throbs as the heart does, and ends one pulsation only to begin an- other. This is what Hegel saw. This is what all the great poets depict, from Homer's wanderings of the much tossed and tried Odysseus down to " In Memoriam " of Tennyson, or the " Dramatic Lyrics " of Browning. Not only is this so, but it must be so. The only refuge from SCHOPENHAUER. 263 spiritual restlessness is spiritual sluggishness ; and that, as everybody is aware, is as tedious a thing as it is insipid. For the individual the lesson of this tragedy is always hard ; and he learns it first in a religious form in the mood of pure resignation. " I cannot be happy ; I must resign happiness." This is what all the Imitations and the Schopenhauers are forever and very justly teaching to the individual. Schopenhauer's special reason for this view is, however, the deep and philosophical one that at the heart of the world there seems to be an element of ca- pricious conflict. That fact was what drove him to reject the World Spirit of the constructive idealists, and to speak only of a World- Will. But is this the whole story ? No ; if we ever get our spiritual freedom, we shall, I think, not neglecting this caprice which Schopenhauer found at the heart of things, stiU. see that the world is divine and spiritual, not so much in spite of this capriciousness, as just because of it. Caprice is n't all of reason ; but reason needs facts and passions to conquer and to ration- alize, in order to become triumphantly rational. The spirit exists by accepting and by triumphing over the tragedy of the world. Restlessness, longing, grief, — these are evils, fatal evils, and they are everywhere in the world ; but the spirit must be strong enough to endure thenl. In this strength is the solution. And, after all, it is just endurance that is the essence of spirituality. Resignation, then, is indeed part of the truth, — resigna- tion, that is, of any hope of a final and private happiness. We resign in order to be ready to endure. But courage is the rest of the truth, — a hearty defiance of the whole hateful pang and agony of the will, a binding of the strong man by being stronger than he, a making of life once for all our divine game, where the passions are the mere chessmen that we move in carrying out our plan, and where the plan is a spiritual victory over Satan. Let us thank Schopenhauer, then, for at least this, that in his 264 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. pessimism he gives us an universal expression for the whole negative side of life. If you wiU let me speak of private experience, I myself have often found it deeply comforting, in the most bitter moments, to have dis- counted, so to speak, all the petty tragedies of experience, all my own weakness and caprice and foolishness and ill fortune, by one such absolute formula for evil as Scho- penhauer's doctrine gives me. It is the fate of life to be restless, capricious, and therefore tragic. Happiness comes, indeed, but by all sorts of accidents ; and it flies as it comes. One thing only that is greater than this fate endures in us if we are wise of heart ; and this one thing endures forever in the heart of the great World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection. This one thing, as I hold, is the eternal resolution that if the world will be tragic, it shall still, in Satan's despite, be spiritual. And this resolution is, I think, the very essence of the Spirit's own eternal joy. LECTURE IX. THE RISE OF THE BOCTEINE OF EVOLUTION. Idealism, in several of its most significant phases, has been described in the lectures on the movement from Kant to Hegel. In this lecture I have to discuss another phase of what I have several times called the return to the outer order. In looking back for a moment at certain of the suggestions of the last lecture, I shall not ask you to dwell any more upon Schopenhauer's pessimism. Of that topic we have had doubtless enough for the present. Coming as we do to a more cheerful chapter of modern philosophy, we want only to remind ourselves, at the out- set, of another element in Schopenhauer's thought, and one which wiU be of importance for the work that we now have in hand. Schopenhauer, as you may remember, while he was in his own way an idealist on a Kantian basis, was not, on the whole, what one would call, somewhat technically, a constructive idealist. That is, while he was very positive in saying that the world which we see and feel is just the world of our ideas, and nothing else, he did not follow out the plan of Fichte or of the romanticists by trying to show constructively what sort of a world we are all rationally bound to see. On the contrary, as Schopenhauer holds, the world that we see is at once the world of the self, of the inner life, and is also the world of that capricious wiU which is the very heart of the inner life. You can- not deduce a priori anything about the sorts of reality which this world must express and contain. You cannot gay, with Fichte, that it must be the world of the moral 266 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. law, das versinnlichte Material unserer Pfliclit. You cannot say, with Schelling, that it must be the world which expresses in symbolic form the life of a rational and gigantic World-Spirit. You must take the world as you find it. You may be sure indeed of its unity, yet this assurance rests only upon your power to prove that aU diversity is due to our sense-forms of time and space, and is therefore illusory. But the longing and struggling will cannot be described apart from experience. The philosopher must become a naturalist. He must look upon the world as the spectator looks on during a tragedy which he knows beforehand to be full of action and of suffering, but which he must watch before he can know the plot. It is this thought of Schopenhauer's that brings him very near to the position of most students of modern sci- ence. Schopenhauer marks then, in the history of thought, the transition from the romantic idealism to the modern realism, the return to the natural order. He is indeed an idealist of a Kantian type. He is philosopher in his sense of the unity of things, in his assurance that aU phenomenal plurality is a mere illusion, in his reitera- tion of the Hindoo That art Thou, and in his Kantian idealism itself. But as to the individual facts of the world, he is proud to be a naturalist, who studies men and beasts and art and flowers, merely to find out what the Will is doing. I. What I now want you to feel is that all this was in so far a natural and a healthy turn for the ideahstic philo- sophy to take. Philosophy had begun, in modern times, with the external order and with dogmatic assertions about it. Growing doubtful and self-critical, it had next fallen to scrutinizing the inner life. Becoming bold and clear as to both its powers and its limitations it had later said, with Kant : " Things in themselves, indeed, are n't THE EISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 261 for me ; but as for the order and unity of phenomena] nature, that is mine, and is even of my own creating." Waxing, however, afresh, still bolder, thought had next asserted : " Not only the order of nature, but the very content of nature is spiritual, and is even the creation of the very spirit whom my life embodies in finite form." " I therefore," it continued, " have a right to seize hold upon and to master the very deepest mysteries of this whole spiritual creation. There shall be no limits to my ventures, and no things in themselves shall stand between me and the rational construction of reality at which I aim." But here, indeed, the idealist had been doomed to fresh disappointment. That the world is the world of the absolute spirit he could make indeed plausible, — how plausible we ourselves have hardly had time in our brief survey to see. That, deeper than your conscious nature or than mine, there is a truth at the heart of the inner life of which we as finite spirits are embodiments, all this the idealist could try to explain by showing how the com- munity of our sense-worlds, our own human power to act in practical and rational concert, and all the other presup- positions of our spiritual existence, lead us to postulate that the whole environment of our inner life is spiritual, that there is but one self, and that this self is God. But, after all, even granting the force of these considerations, one difficulty remained which the idealists could not con- quer. Whatever your formula for the postulated spiritual world, whether it were Fichte's moral law or the various wayward theories of the romanticists, an element of stub- born caprice remained. From the constructions of your ideal philosophy to the empirical facts of outer nature remained a long and hopelessly tangled way. The world might be thus rational, but it was evident that the abso- lute spirit must be thinking of many things that you, in your finite weakness, could not well presume to construct a priori. 268 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. In view of all this, thought, as we now see, must be content to take one more step, not, as many superficial students of modern thought have supposed, the step of repenting once for all of the whole undertaking of the idealistic period, but rather the step of returning, enriched by the experience and the depth of insight which this period had produced, to the cautious scrutiny and rational interpretation of the external order itself. The first charge of idealism upon the fortress of the spiritual mys- teries of the world was indeed in one sense a failure. Constructive idealism meant, as the romanticists showed, no small danger of arbitrary speculative guesses, of way- wardness, and of dreaming. If Hegel sought to put an end to all this capriciousness by his marvelously skillful construction of the essence of the absolute spirit in terms of a formula derived from the study of the inner life, still, as we saw, this formula also was quite inadequate to the expression of the facts of outer nature. Hegel made a skillful diagnosis of the logic of passion. He pointed oxxt how spirituality means conflict. He tried to show how this conflict proceeds from lower to higher stages, and how, in its evolution, aU. the forms of spirituality which human civilization in its growth exemplifies are necessa- rily produced. In this way Hegel built up, after his own fashion, an inadequate but profoundly suggestive philoso- phy of history, as well as a sort of rational construction of the whole content of human, social, and political life. In other words, Hegel tried to show how, on a Kantian basis, the world of human passion can be explained, and how we can escape from what we called^ the prison of the inner life, and prove ourselves to be in the world of the infinite spirit. Every step of Hegel's investigation was indeed open to some question, but in his own proper field he discovered what might be said to offer very high hopes to the rational idealist. But not even Hegel could reaUy get into the charmed circle of the empirical sciences, and con« THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 269 struct the facts of nature upon the postulates of idealism. He attempted this after a certain limited fashion, as Schelling had attempted it ; but he failed. Both his pre- tensions in this regard and the nature of his failure have indeed been distorted and misrepresented by unjust oppo- nents ; but in any case there remains the fact that, as I just said, the first onslaught of idealism upon the central mysteries of reality failed; and it became necessary to consider what next to do. How simple, then, under these circumstances, for ideal- ists, or for men who had been trained in the idealistic school, but who saw this incompleteness of constructive idealism, — how simple for them now to say : " That the world is spiritual, that the inner life is in fact at the heart of it, seems, after Kant, clear. But equally clear it is that, at the depth of this nature which the inner life thus reveals to us, there are spiritual mysteries which for us, in our present ignorance, are so far unfathomable. Doubt- less these mysteries are n't unfathomable in themselves ; doubtless the one spirit whose life embodies itself in all our inner natures knows what he means, and has some sort of interpretation for even the apparently most capri- cious of his truths. But as for us, in our conscious na- ture, we only know that we, just now, are forced to see this sense-world and to work in it. Let us then turn for the solution of our mysteries back again to the long and painful road of experience. Why we are bound by our inner nature to see this world of sense-facts we can surely never say, until we shall have first learned empirically what sense-facts we are bound to see. This, however, only science can teach us." We return to the natural order, as you see, in company with such thinkers, but by no means as if, in returning, we left our idealism behind us. We return, but, once more, not to that outer order which we left for the paths of speculation in the seventeenth century. The empirical 270 THE SriKIT OP MODERN PHILOSOPHY. sciences, which, in their own way and largely apart from any but indirect speculative influences, have been develop- ing ever since the seventeenth century, which have been extending their field, elaborating their theories, tilling their vast and fruitful fields, wiU indeed no doubt at first misinterpret our return. Their servants, full of the learn- ing and the successes of two centuries of inductive re- search, will scornfully say : " See these idealists ! They long tried to call the world their dream, and to construct it a priori. But they grew hungry in their wilderness, feeding the swine of strange masters, and longing for the very husks of speculative guess-work and delusion. Now they come back like prodigals, hoping that experience, our master, will have facts enough and to spare for them. In truth, had they remained at home, their reflective clever- ness might have been of much use to science. But they took the portion of intelligence that belonged to them, and went away ; and here they come now, in all the rags of their poor systems." So, perhaps, the scoffers will insist. But this sort of scorn will not impose upon us. We know that we were not prodigals, but rather spies, sent to spy out the land of promise, and what we bring back with us are great clusters of grapes as specimens of the wealth of a land of milk and honey beyond the Jordan of mystery. That land is still unconquered. We return to the friendly camp in the wilderness of this world, and we ask its followers to arise and go with us, that we may yet enter into that land, and possess it. But, figures aside, our undertaking as we return to the study of the natural order is simply this : the mystery of the world is for us through and through an ideal, a spir- itual mystery. This great order is once for all divine. And thus much our idealism has taught us, namely, (1) by showing us that, except for the world of ideas, except for the phenomena that appear as outer to beings with minds, or that have their place in the inner life of such THE RISE OF THE DOCTKINE OF EVOLUTION. 271 beings, there is no reality at all ; (2) by showing us, as Kant has shown, that there can be no rational order in nature unless the thought of some rational being intro- duces such order, and (3) by leading us to postulate, as all the post-Kantian constructive idealists have postulated, that beneath the nature of our conscious self, which finds itself forced to recognize this or that as outer, there must lie a complete, an infinite Self, which somehow, whether by a divine caprice or by a divine rationality, or by both combined, is actually and of its own nature not outwardly forced, but inwardly minded, to express itself in this whole vast world of ours. If, with all this at heart, we return to the outer order, it is because we desire our ideal- ism to remain no longer barren, abstract, afraid of ex- perience, capricious, wayward, sentimental, or fantastic. We want our idealism to do a manly work. We want it to enter upon its true task, not of dreaming of a possible perfection, but of transforming, of enlivening, of spirit- ualizing, the concrete life of humanity. Idealism on one side, dreaming its splendid dreams ; science on the other side, condemned to an irrational and Philistine enmity to 1 the spiritual, — what spectacle could be more unworthy of humanitjr ! In fact, nobody has ever really desired such a situation. In its most fantastic moments idealism, un- less it were perchance the romantic irony of some young Friedrich Schlegel, has been sincerely anxious to embody experience, and to get at the truth of life. Science, on the other hand, in the person and work of any earnest and sensible investigator, however narrow his specialty, however unspiritual seemed his facts, has been through and through spiritual in its inmost conception of reality. Divorced from speculation, as it has usually chosen to be, during the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century, it still has never lost sight of its task, namely, to elaborate the facts of experience in such wise as to fiud and to make apparent 272 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY, in them the laws, the essential truths, the ideas of things. When in Laj)laee's " Celestial Mechanics," and in La- grange's completion of the system of the whole mechani- cal science of his day, a vast multitude of the most con- fusing natural phenomena werereduced to expressions of a very few ultimate and rigid thoughts, what was this but an embodiment of the search for rationality in nature ? And aU modern science up to the moment of which we are now speaking has been one vast and toilsome poem of rationality, fragmentary indeed, but even in its fragments how beautiful ! The business of speculation is then already outlined. What science seeks is essentially what we are seeking, — to catch the rhythm and the very pulse-beat of the reason that is and must be, amidst all the caprice of nature, yes, even because of this wealth of caprice in nature, at the very heart of the world. We return to the world of sci- ence, then, to enrich its postulates by our idealistic inter- pretation, and to enrich our own too abstract fashion of conceiving the rationality of things through the wealth of nature's facts. Thus, as you see, I am now trying, still, of course, in my attitude as mere chronicler, to express the spirit in which, in the early decades of this century, many men of considerable speculative training set about their work in various departments of empirical research. They were idealists at heart ; they became scientific specialists by profession. Of course, such is the narrowness of human nature, that only with great difficulty could such persons keep at once the purity of their idealistic faith and the exactness of their powers of empirical observation, equally well in sight as they toiled. Some of them, especially in Germany, remained for a long time the prey of various forms of systematic delusion, and warped their observa- tions in order to illustrate their voluminous speculations. Still more of them, however, in turning their attention to THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 273 exact scholarship, or to physical science, sought as much as possible to lay aside whatever speculative concern they had ever possessed. But still, after all, say what one will, one cannot fairly examine the thinking of this our cen- tury without seeing that during its whole course empiri- cal research and the truly philosophical spirit have been bound in a close marriage tie compared to which all previ- ous unions of speculation and of experience have been but the most passing moods of mutual admiration. The most noteworthy oifspring and illustration of this marriage tie has been the vast industry that has gathered about what we now call the idea of evolution, as a law, or rather, a group of laws, of nature. II. The philosophy of evolution was, in fact, to be my spe- cial topic to-day, and doubtless I have spent too long a time in approaching this topic itself. But so much I have gained if I have now prepared the way for a brief preliminary statement of the nature of the process whereby this philosophy arose in modern thinking. The way was this : Idealism having proved as unable to construct the visible world upon any a priori rational scheme, as it was successful in laying the foundation for the spiritual phi- losophy of the future, the problem that the earlier ideal- ists had left to their successors was now : To comprehend the world of experience in terms of the fundamental idealistic postulates. In a search for the solution of this problem, thought was led to the rational study of human history. Surely if the great Spirit is anywhere to be manifest to us, then it should be in the growth of human- ity. To see this growth as a spiritual process became, therefore, an object of serious concern. Of course here, as everywhere else in science, some of the first efforts were bold and crude enough, but they were suggestive. They led in time to that vast undertaking known as modern 274 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. historical research, a sort of study that, strange as it may seem to say so, is not yet a century old. For, as we shall see, what used to be called historical research was some- thing that in former centuries embodied a spirit very dif- ferent from what we now know as the historical spirit. But the interest thus aroused spread to other branches of science. Natural history, which formerly had been, not- withstanding its name, a merely descriptive science, began to be pursued upon a deeper plan ; it became truly his- torical, examined into the genesis of organic forms, and, in the field of geological study, set about the study of the succession of organic forms upon the earth's surface. The field thus entered upon proved unexpectedly fruitful. The century became the typical century of the histori- cal theory of creation. In previous periods of modern thought, thinkers had deliberately neglected the history of things. Nature, not as it grows, but as it eternally is, was that which constituted the outer order known to the seventeenth century. Events had little concern to a doc- trine like Spinoza's. Newton's conception of physical science was founded, indeed, upon the observation of the actual events of nature ; but these events were to be ex- plained, if possible, by eternal laws like gravitation, and history was to be absorbed in mechanism. When the eighteenth century turned its eyes towards the inner life, it still studied an ideally permanent thing called human nature, which savage life illustrated in its primitive inno- cence, civilized life in its artificial disguises, but which nothing in heaven or earth, except the will of its creator, could essentially change. But for our nineteenth century it is just the change, the flow, the growth of things, that is the most interesting feature of the universe. Old- fashioned science used to go about classifying things. There were live things and dead things; of live things there were classes, orders, families, genera, species, — all permanent facts of nature. As for man, he had one char- THE EISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 275 acteristic type of inner life, that was in all ages and sta- tions essentially the same, — in the king and in the peas- ant, in the master and in the slave, in the man of the city and in the savage. The glory of science lay just in its power to perceive this essence of the eternally human everywhere in man's life. The dignity of human nature, too, lay in just this its permanence. Because of such per- manence one could prove all men to be naturally equal, and our own Declaration of Independence is thus founded upon speculative principles that, as they are there stated, have been rendered meaningless by the modern doctrine of evolution. Valuable, indeed, was all this unhistorical analysis of the world and of man, valuable as a prepara- tion for the coming insight ; but how unvital, how unspir- itual, how crude seems to us now all that eighteenth-cen- tury conception of the mathematically permanent, the essentially unprogressive and stagnant human nature, in •the empty dignity of its inborn rights, when compared with our modern conception of the growing, struggling, historically continuous humanity, whose rights are nothing until it wins them in the tragic process of civilization, whose dignity is the dignity attained as the prize of un- told ages of suffering, whose institutions embody thou- sands of years of ardor and of hard thinking, whose treas- ures even of emotion are the bequest of a sacred antiquity of self-conquest ! Not inalienable, but hard won and pain- fully kept are the true rights of man. Not a special crea- tion, but a living organism is our nature ; an organism not permanent in its structure, but the outcome of "labor ; an organism with a long embryonic development, capable of degeneration as well as of growth, and needing there- fore our constant care lest it lose all the spirituality and all the rights that it has thus far acquired. Thus, I say, the historical conception of the world, and above aU, of the world of human nature, has appeared in our modern life. I am now to trace more precisely the 276 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. growtli and the consequences of tliis doctrine of evolution. As in the case of the study of Schopenhauer, at the last time, my task is at once aided and hindered by the popu- lar reputation of my topic. Many of the things that one can most easily say about evolution are nowadays almost too familiar, having been discussed even in the newspa- pers until we are weary of them. On the other hand, a deeper insight into the true problems suggested by evolu- tion is rather the more difficult on account of this famil- iarity ; for the aspect of a deep subject which we most need to reflect upon is never the one which purely popu- lar discussion is likely to favor. My difficulty is, there- fore, in part like the difficulty of one writing an essay upon Hamlet's Soliloquy, or on the Beatitudes. The words are so familiar that the meaning comes to seem remote. Even so here ; the word " evolution " occurs on very many modern title-pages, until one too easily forms a habit of shutting any new book in which he chances to encounter a term thus often repeated, but seldom appre- ciated. The modern historical spirit assumed a definite form not far from the time of the battle of Waterloo. The two events were, in fact, not at all disconnected. In Ger- many, the romantic school proper had by this time fallen into a decline. The romantic movement, in a wider sense, was, however, still flourishing, and, in fact the new histor- ical movement was a direct outgrowth of this romantic interest in life. As for the mechanism of the process, that is very obvious, but as it is not so frequently de- scribed to our public as it has been to the German public, I must dwell for a moment on the main aspects of the in- tellectual situation in Germany in the first decade of the century. Germany itself, as you know, was at this time a land trodden under the invader's foot, corrupted by the invader's appeals to the avarice of its minor princes, and left, in general, in a hopeless political situation, which, THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 277 strangely enough, aroused no strong lamentations in the minds of the nation's own best men. Hegel, for example, warmly admired for a time Napoleon, whom ,he saw in person about the time of the battle of Jena, and whom he then looked upon wonderingly as upon a sort of Welt- geist zu Pferde, as the philosopher in effect expressed himself. This political indifference, this free intellectual curiosity, which marveled at the changes of the age and felt no patriotic longings, was typical of the mood of all Germany's intellectual class from Goethe down. Thought was, after all, free ; one had the empire of the air and the recesses of the heart to one's self, and one let contempo- rary history go its course as it would. Meanwhile, how- ever, this idealism without concrete and visible ideals was, as we have seen, not only a capricious but a dangerous thing. The representative younger poets of the time reveled, as we know, in emotion and in mystery. The whole romantic movement might be defined as a con- sciously wayward and, before it was done, a fairly morbid reflection upon the heart of man viewed merely as the heart. You felt, you experienced, you sang, you grew constantly more sentimental, you gloried in the wealth of your feelings, you wept in public with your numberless lyrics, and then you felt and experienced and sang again with endless ardor and garrulity. If you studied nature, you loved above all things mere mysteries, divining rods, magic, the night-side of nature generally. But, of course, in all this there had to be, after all, something objective as a foundation. Even feelings and mysteries must look for facts to support them, and, greatly to our advantage, the romanticists early turned their attention to certain records of humanity's past experience which had been, until very recently, almost wholly neglected by modern students. Such records were of various classes, but had in common this, that they all alike stood for ancient, or else for very remote experiences, the product either of 278 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. quite mysterious or of little understood times and peo- ples. The favorite sources of such records were the Orient and the Middle Ages. One could not have named two regions of learned research that were more remote from the customary thought of the middle of the eigh- teenth century than mediaeval and Oriental civilization ; one could not name any two branches of study that appealed more to the distinctively romantic spirit than did these. The Middle Ages, at any rate as men then conceived them, were of course the typical' period of ro- mance. Then emotion had possessed every possible object ■wherein to revel, — mysteries, magic, unknown countries, crusades, knightly ideals, fairy tales, religious ardor, free- dom of artistic forms, adventures, castles, saints, and the Holy Roman Empire. Now that all these things had per- ished, what better could romantic poets and readers do than recall the long-past glories, and revive the buried emotions. As for the Orient^ what wisdom might lie treasured there was still only faintly to be conjectured. The prosaic Englishmen indeed, having conquered India, had fallen to making learned researches into the litera- ture, the thought, and the laws of their new subjects, mainly with a view to the practical business of govern- ment. These researches had begun to become known on the Continent. Sacred books, some of them philosojDhical, had been translated. Meanwhile Mohammedan civiliza- tion also, from Persian and Arabic sources, was finding its way to the renewed attention of European scholars. No amateur esoteric Buddhist of our own day has felt a deeper curiosity about what this Oriental wisdom might mean, or has labored harder to find out, than did numerous scholarly youth of this romantic period. Poets imitated Oriental forms ; Hindu pantheism, or Persian Sufisra, was clothed in melodious verse by such voluminous singers as Riiokert ; men like the Schlegels forgot the romantic irony, to learn Sanskrit ; a Wilhelm von Humboldt ex- THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 279 pounded the Bhagavat-gita. Thus began the scholarship that has produced the science of modern comparative phi- lology, and our whole knowledge of the true life of the far East. Now the thing to note, for our purpose, in all this new study, is, that its motive was at first mainly romantic, but that its outcome was very significantly scientific. The scholars of the two previous centuries had been linguists, with a great love, in many cases, of the sesthetic aspects of scholarship, but with little sense for what we now think to be the truly human element in the study of the languages and literatures of the world. It was the ro- mantic love of passion, of mystery, and emotion, that now set the heart's blood of scholarship fairly bounding in the veins of the new learning. Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, the tongues of Europe in the Middle Ages, the old chroni- clers, the poems of the mediseval Empire, — why, all such things, if the eighteenth-century scholar had even deigned to think of them with respect at all, would have seemed to him but a series of crabbed linguistic puzzles, not worthy for an instant of comparison with the problems of classical philology. But the romantic movement changed all that. The very spirit that in Great Britain expressed itself in Scott's romances, once wedded to the minuteness of German scholarship, was destined to trans- form the whole study of history. For see, it was history that the romanticists thus found themselves erelong devotedly studying. Men who had set out to be merely fantastic dreamers perceived that the far-off humanity of Asia or of mediaeval Europe, had dreamed better than they themselves could ever hope to Jream. As they studied the records of this humanity, the dead past became once more alive. It was the pres- ent that now seemed, in its swift changes and in its un- steady ideals, the unessential expression of the spirit of humanity. Above all, men felt how those far-off times had 280 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. possessed, iu their more permanent institutions, a trea- sure which the nineteenth century was daily risking, if not losing, in the shifting conflicts of the Napoleonic period. And thus the institutions of humanity, whose study has become so characteristic of our whole modern movement, first came into the foreground of attention. Laws, customs, religions, began to show a human worth which students had, up to that time, persistently ignored. In the keen interest that now quickly grew and con- creted itself, nothing was too insignificant to deserve ob- servation, if it illustrated the passions or the deeper faiths of men. Fairy tales, preserved in the mouths of the coun- try people, ballads, rural superstitions, seemed interesting to the wisest thinkers. Even the rude dialects of the illiterate began to acquire dignity. The human was not of necessity the cultivated. The human was the wide- spread or the ancient in speech or in behavior. It was the deep, the emotional, the thing much loved by many men, the poetical, the organic, the vital, in civilization. Scholars looked for it not in modern books, but in the lore of forgotten ages, or heard it from the mouths of the very peasantry of their own time. The brothers Grimm began to collect their German popular tales. Poets were proud to imitate the ballads of the people. Nor did classical philology itself remain uninfluenced by the romantic movement. On the contrary, this move- ment transformed its very ideals and methods. It was no longer to favor mere linguistic skill, nor to cultivate taste by analyzing the finest models of ancient literary art. It was rather to comprehend the inner life of an- tiquity, to set forth the nature of Greek and Roman institutions, beliefs, and conduct, to show what relation that civilization had to our own, to make linguistic study a handmaid of truly humane scholarship, to treat the classical history, not as a mere collection of examples for moral or for literary edification, but as an evolution. For, THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 281 already, as you see, tlie idea of what we call evolution was dawning on the minds of the scholars of that day. Far off indeed was our modern theory, with all its world-era- bracing inductions ; but the spirit which it was to em- body was born of the very dreams of the romantic period. Herein lies the continuity of thought which connects us, in all the so-called realism of our prosaic modern research, with the dreamers who dreamed, with the fantastic poets who failed, in the first decades of our century. III. But I have already somewhat anticipated. I said a moment since that the battle of Waterloo was not discon- nected with the first bloom of the new historical study. The connection is not far to seek. Before 1815 the help- lessness of Germany, bleeding and corrupted, left for the intellectual leaders of the people no resource equal to their dreams and their abstract idealism. The end of the Napoleonic episode brought room on earth for the feet of those who had long been traversing the empire of the air. The romanticists, however, did not on that account forsake contemplation. They only found themselves more disposed to scholarship, and less given to fantasy. I called the return to the natural order, a little while since, a re- turn to the wilderness of this present world. Of course, I might reverse the Scripture metaphor and, appealing now to the book of Revelation, say that, as Satan lay bound in St. Helena, the church of the spirit could return from the wilderness into wMch it had fled ; and that it swiftly did so. The scholarly motives that we have just been analyzing produced hereupon, in quick succession, a long series of epoch-marking historical books. More- over, there was yet another reason why the political changes of the time were favorable to historical study. When great events are past, and a passionate episode of our lives is completed, we are easily disposed to the writ- 282 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. ing of cbronieles. After one's first love affair, one keeps a diary for a season, or perhaps begins an autobiography, with special reference to the story of one's mightier pas- sions. The doctrine of evolution took its rise in such an effort of humanity to write its own autobiography, after a terrible experience of being in love with what it had believed to be liberty, and of being jilted by what proved to be despotism. Thus all things worked together to the same end. It is surprising to look over the list of these great books, each one of which marks an era in modern investigation, and so many of which belong to the years between 1815 and 1835. The list shows a constant wid- ening and deepening of the historical interest. General literature, Roman law, mediaeval traditions and institu- tions, classical philology, Oriental literature, compara- tive philology, and at last Christian theology itself, are assailed after the historical fashion, and one research leads to another. The two Humboldts, the Schlegels, the Grimms, Niebuhr, Boeckh, Ranke, were all in the front rank of the students of the day, and a list, if complete, would name works by all of them, and by numerous other scarcely less important scholars. Curious was the fate that drove every scholarlj' specialty to become more and more historical. A book like Strauss's " Life of Jesus " might be in itself so novel in its methods, so tentative and imperfect in its hypotheses, that its own author would en- tirely change erelong his opinion about some of his own most noteworthy contentions. Yet the storm of contro- versy that it aroused would drive friend and foe to his- torical researches of a new sort ; and the whole of mod- ern Christology, orthodox as well as unorthodox, has been profoundly modified by the indirect effect of Strauss's bold and suggestive investigation. As for the outcome of all this ferment, it was inevita- bly the conception of the higher human life as one vast and connected growth from lower to nobler conditions, THE RISE OF THE DOCTKINE OF EVOLUTION. 283 with episodes, indeed, of stagnation and degeneracy, and ■with vast outlying regions of ahnost changeless barbaric or imperfectly civilized mankind, but with a meaning, after all, about even the saddest of its phenomena, such as the moralizing historians of former generations had never understood. This meaning lay in the physical de- pendence of man, for his whole civilization and culture, upon the former generations of men. After a fashion people had, of course, always recognized such dependence. But how deep and how concrete the new history found the dependence to be! Our language, our institutions, our beliefs, our ideals, whatever in short, is mightiest and dearest in all our world, all this together is a slow and hard-won growth, nobody's arbitrary invention, no gift from above, no outcome of a social compact, no immedi- ate expression of reason, but the slowly formed concre- tion of ages of blind effort, unconscious, but wise in its unconsciousness, often selfish, but humane even in its self- ishness. The ideals win the battle of life by the secret connivance, as it were, of numberless seemingly un-ideal forces. Climate, hunger, commerce, authority, supersti- tion, war, cruelty, toil, greed, compromise, tradition, con- servatism, loyalty, sloth, — all these cooperate, through countless ages, with a hundred other discernible tenden- cies, to build up civilization. And civilization itself is, in consequence, a much deeper thing than appears on the surface of our consciousness. Instinct has a larger share in it than reasoning. Faith counts for more in it than insight. It embodies in concrete form that deeper self that the idealists loved to talk about. Your deeper self is plainly a sort of abstract and epitome of the whole his- tory of humanity. A new and wiser form of the doc- trine of metempsychosis occurs to you. The humanity that toiled and bled and worshiped of old has trans- mitted to you, in your language and institutions, in the ancient lore that your fathers teach you, in your preju- 284 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. dices, in your faults, in your conscience, in your religion, the very soul of its agony and of its glory. You can read in history your personal instincts written in the lan- guage of evolution. You can watch the human spirit in its growth with a deeper sense of the " That art Thou " than you had ever before possessed. The metaphors of your heathen ancestors are crystallized in every word that you utter. The very horrors of their superstitious are the true though humble origin of your loftiest and most sacred devotions. Humanity never really forsakes its past. The days of mankind are bound each to each in mutual piety. All these ideas have now, to be sure, become, by dint of much repetition, too commonplace. It is well for us to remember that the most cultivated thinkers of the last cen- tury scarcely in any measure possessed them. The unity of humanity, as the last century conceived it, was, I repeat, an abstract unity, a dead and permanent thing. All men had erect stature, language, reason, and the power to laugh. As some men stood straighter than others, so some men had more wit, and of such were the enlightened souls of that century. That was to their own minds the whole story of the unity of human life, and as for the growth of institutions, and all the agony of the winning of our life by the men of old, — the eighteenth century, at least until its very last decades, thanked God that it knew too much of wisdom to worry itself about any of the men of old ex- cept the wise ones, such as Cicero, or the elegant ones, such as Horace. Superstition you outgrew, the customs of your ancestors you prudently forgot, and of history you remembered only what it would be pleasing to narrate on a social occasion. Hence, as we see, our modern common- place is after all something of a novelty, even a paradox. I have dwelt so long upon this transformation of our notion of human history, because people too frequently regard the doctrine of evolution as having for the first THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OP EVOLUTION. 285 time flashed upon the world after the appearance of Dar- win's " Origin of Species." Nobody can value more than I do the significance for the general student of the splendid achievement of Darwin ; but it was a splendid achieve- ment for humanity at large because the age was ripe for the extension of the historical conception far beyond the boundaries of humanity proper. And, once more, the age was thus ripe because by this time scholarship had brought into existence this very conception of history itself in the modern sense of the word. If you can con- ceive Darwin's knowledge of natural history, his investi- gations, and his marvelous induction that led to the principle of natural selection, with all its consequences, if, I say, you can conceive all this transferred to the last century, some properly informed naturalists might, no doubt, have been convinced ; but the world at large could have found no place for the doctrine. It would have been to them only one oddity the more in nature, or rather in speculation. They would have called it Darwin's paradox, and would have banished it into the realm of curiosities. It was coming into an historical age that made Darwin's book so great a prize, and the idea of natural selection so deeply suggestive to philosophy. And now, having spent so much time in laying our foundation, we can swiftly suggest in a few words the climax of the doctrine of evolution which the natural sciences have at last made possible. Germany began the historical movement. It was left for England to com- plete the ascendency of the new thought. It is matter of popular knowledge that geology, in its modern form, is largely due to the British mind. Lyell's researches sub- stituted for the catastrophes which the earlier geologists conceived relatively uniform natural processes, whereby, as they worked through long ages, the earth's crust had been slowly modified. On the basis of this uniformi- tarian geology, a doctrine of the transformation of species 286 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. besran to look more reasonable. Such a doctrine, indeed, as a mere speculation, is one of the oldest guesses of infant science, and even the Darwinian notion of natural selection had been first formulated in Greek speculation by Em- pedocles, before the time of Socrates. But such guesses, however finely a Schelling might write out their substance in poetical form, as we found him doing awhile since, could never mean much for science until modern geology had made probable that the earth's crust itself has a gen- uine history, wherein there is more of unity than of catas- trophic change. But herewith came very quickly the time when natural history as a whole could assume the truly historical shape. Von Baer's embryological researches, and the classifications and embryological studies of Agas- siz, showed that wonderful parallelism between the growtli of the individual life and the relation of each animal form to its neighbors and predecessors on the earth, which soon came to have so deep a scientific meaning. The appear- ance of Darwin's " Origin of Species " in 1859, however, brought to a focus all these tendencies of modern re- search. With the one exception of Newton's " Principia," no single book of empirical science has even been of more importance to philosophy than this work of Darwin's. And you know now wherein the importance lay. The world was longing for an historical view of phenomena. The historical interest was already excited to the keenest pitch. Human civilization was already conceived as an evolution. The earth's crust was already known to em- body a history whose gaps, still, even at this present moment, very large, were already, in 1859, sufficiently reduced to make probable the notion that a continuous series of physical process, without violent convulsions, had produced the whole succession of geological strata. The old nebular hypothesis of Kant and La Place sug- gested that the whole growth of our solar system to its present form had been part of the very process that has THli RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 287 ended in our own geological history. Only the boundary line between species and species, only the diflS.culty of con- ceiving in scientific terms the growth of animal forms without the interference anywhere of special creations, only this, which was, of course, most felt in case of the distinction between man and the animals, remained as an apparently impassable obstacle in the way of the triumph of the historical movement. Darwin's book removed this last great obstacle. In the working of natural selection he found an agency sufficient to explain, in part, if not in the main, the transformation of species. And there could be no question, after his researches, that natural selection is a vera causa, that is, is actually at work in the organic world. Moreover, he showed, in his first and in his later works, that the whole mass of evidence for the transfor- mation of species and the animal origin of man is far greater than the evidence that natural selection itself is the only natural agency at work. In fact, since Darwin, while naturalists differ endlessly as to the degree to which natural selection is responsible for the transformation of species, further investigation has put it farther and farther beyond question that, once granting the postulates of em- pirical science, the doctrine of the transformation of spe- cies, and of the animal origin of man, is simply beyond question. All modern naturalists of note are in this sense followers of Darwin, not that they all hold his views about natural selection, but that they all teach the doctrine of transformation. But our interest is just now much less in this bit of empirical science as such than in the philosophical views to which it has led men. iv. The doctrine of evolution had its rise, as we have now seen, in a twofold interest. This interest was first an historical one, the offspring of the idealistic interest in the 288 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. meaning of things, the product of an age for which the processes of the world were primarily spiritual processes, or were to be interpreted in the light and by the analogy of such processes. But, on the other side, this interest was a strongly empirical one, the offspring of a dread of the extravagances of the idealistic period, the product of a hard-learned lesson in caution, the embodiment of an un- willingness to mistake fantasy for truth. On the one side, then, the doctrine of evolution is to be sharply distin- guished from the naturalism of the seventeenth century. Unlike that naturalism our modern doctrine is primarily disposed, not merely to explain, but to estimate nature. It tries to find growth in the world as well as mechanism, progress as well as law, ideally interesting products as well as absolutely rigid processes. But, on the other hand, the same doctrine has become more and more dis- posed, as time has gone on, to suppress, or at all events to subordinate its own original idealism ; for it is a doctrine about experience, a theory founded on observation ; and mere experience as such does n't shovsr us ideal forces at work in nature, only facts that w.e, as observers, are able to interpret, if we like, in terms of ideals. Without in- terest in the historical aspect of things, without, then, an essentially idealistic concern for what the events of the world mean, for what story they seem to embody, we should never have come upon this notion of evolution at all. But without a patient devotion to facts, and a rigid self-control as to our romantic interpretations, we should never have done the work necessary to verify the notion. There remains, then, something conflicting, something in- herently self-contradictory in the views nowadays current as to the nature of the process of evolution itself. This inner conflict of modern thought furnishes one of the most characteristic problems of to-day. It is the problem of the so-called Philosophy of Evolution. The empirical generalization that the whole life of our planet is in all THE RISE OF THE DOC TRINE OF EVOLUTION. 289' probability one continuous process, free from unintelli- gible or magical breaks and interferences, is one great outcome of modern research, — an outcome inconceivable except on the basis of numerous presuppositions which philosophy must analyze, but for all that an outcome that appeals for proof to the facts of experience, rather than to the romantic intuitions of the age of Schelling. But the interpretation of this generalization, — the inner sense of it, — what of that ? Have we hereby banished ideals from the world ? have we really restored the faith in the rigid outer order of Spinoza? or have we not rather, for the first time, got a true empirical verification of the pre- sence of the great active Spirit in his world ? Is it the continuity, the physical necessity, the unalterably fatal law of the process that our science is beginning to make clear ? or is it rather the immanence in nature of ideal powers, of significant tendencies, that from the beginning so moulded the atoms, so predetermined the laws of their mechanism, so endowed them with swift flight and with close affinity, that the outcome of ages of their motion has been spiritual, — is it this that we are now discover- ing by our experience ? Here the thought of our day pauses, hesitant ; here the spirit in which the whole labor of the century was begun stands in conflict with the spirit of positive and empirical science that the century has developed as it has proceeded. But whatever is to be the outcome of this conflict, let me point out to you that at all events those who are now- adays accustomed to speak of a Philosophy of Evolution, ought to have no doubt as to what their expression, if it is to mean anything, must mean. A doctrine of evolu- tion may be, like Darwin's doctrine of natural selection, a purely empirical theory, a generalization from facts with a use of the postulates of science, and nothing more. How nature came by this seemingly ideal character of her processes, such an empirical doctrine need not try to 290 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHT. explain. 'Qxxt a, pJiilosophy of evolution, if there is ever to be one, must face just that ultimate question, Has the world a meaning ? and, as a philosophy of a true evolve tion, must answer that question in the afErmative ; for a philosophy, or at all events an affirmative, a positive phi losophy, is, as we have seen all along, an effort to express, and by criticism to establish, the presuppositions of the age which it reflects upon. Now the presumption of an historical age is that there is a history embodied in the known world, and a philosophy of evolution must be an effort to give voice to this presupposition. If there is anything true in a philosophy of evolution, then there is something more than mere physical causation, mere mech- anism in the world ; for how there can be history in the world, no causal explanation, no appeal to mechanism as such, can ever directly express. In so far as you find mechanism only in the world, you find neither growth nor decay ; you find no story at all. The return to the outer order in our century has therefore in its presupposition not been a return to the old outer order of the seventeenth century. It has been a return to a world pervaded, as it were, with the spirit of idealism. If there is not merely a group of sciences having a fictitiously historical interest, but a true evolution, then there are ideal interests ex- pressed in this outer order of nature, spiritual passions (to borrow Schelling's romantic expression) frozen into this lava stream of nature's mechanism. Those who have believed that the spirit of the age of evolution removed ideals, removed teleology from the world, have, then, failed to see that the presupposition of our historical age, ever since Kousseau and the romantic period, has been that history is worth studying for its own sake, and that therefore ideals are responsible for nature's mechanism. But just herein, you see, lies once more the deepest problem of recent philosophy. The seventeenth century, before doubt and idealism came, used to say : " We know THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 291 that there are rigid and necessary laws of nature's mecha- nism ; and as all is necessary, therefore the historical is insignificant. The world of to-day is the world of eter- nity." But our age, returning to a seemingly rigid outer order, returns with idealism in its reflective thought, with spiritual passion as its deepest presupposition, and insists that, whatever nature's mechanism, there is still no know- ledge so profound as the knowledge of the history of things. Yet how can this insistence be defended ? The doctrine of evolution, I assert, is in heart and essence the child of the romantic movement itself. Can the child, inheriting its mother's depth and longing for wisdom, defend this inheritance in this vast outer universe of rigid order and absolute law ? That is the true problem of the philosophy of evolution. I know many who regret the ten- dency in our day to apply the doctrine of the transforma^ tion of species to humanity, who fear the apparently materialistic results of the discovery that the human mind has grown. For my part there lies in all this discovery of our day the deeply important presupposition that the transition from animal to man is in fact reaUy an evolu- tion, that is, a real history, a process having significance. If this is in truth the real interpretation of nature, then the romantic philosophy has not dreamed in vain, and the outer order of nature will embody once more the life of a divine Self. V. Yet we must not too much anticipate later results. Presuppositions are not yet the philosophy which is to establish them ; passions are not yet proofs. Let me try, as I close, to suggest something of those attitudes towards the problems of our day which are now best known and most characteristic. Thus I shall be able to conclude our historical sketch, and to pass to the second and more posi- tive part of our survey of modern problems. Towards the vast world of science with the endless mul- 292 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. titude of its facts, collected as they have been under the influence of the spirit that I have been describing in the present lecture, it is possible to take the attitude of de- claring that, whatever interest led to their collection, the facts are now so numerous and complex as to exclude lienceforth and forever any attempts at a philosophy. The fantastic failures of the idealistic age may be looked upon as illustrating the weakness of human powers. A modest sense of the puzzling mystery of things may re- gard as final in Kant's doctrine only its confession of ignorance ; and may find in the later systems only ro- mances. The business of to-day, one may declare, is with science, with the world of experience, with the facts. The world in its wholeness is too much for us. The out- come of philosophy has been the one lesson of the need of recognizing our limitations. This result of the return to the outer order is nowadays natural and familiar enough. In so far as it expresses a mere private and personal unwillingness on the part of many people to undertake the philosophical task, I respect this spirit, and urge no argument against those who hap- pen to be possessed by it. Reflection is not a man's whole business. Our modern world is indeed vast. There is a great diversity of gifts amongst us. Many of us are better men without philosophy. Let such as are so cling to experience. I will not molest them. These lectures are not addressed to them. I object to this way of looking at the modern situation of human thought only when those who assume it declare that the history of thought teaches this sort of resigna^ tion, or that the problems and results of modern science demand it of us in any novel or peculiar sense. On the contrary, if ever there was an age that demanded not res- ignation, but industry in philosophy, it is our own. The incomplete results of the previous periods of thought, the wondrous suggestiveness of Kant, the marvelous analyses THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 293 of self-consciousness, and of its relation to trutli, whereof the idealistic age is full, this new problem suggested by the doctrine of evolution, — are not all these things a challenge to our time, a challenge such as previous ages have never heard ? What our age is challenged to do is, not to invent some revolutionary novelty in philosophy, but to organize the outcome of earlier reflection. Organ- ization — it is the one greatest idea of our time. Synthe- sis — it is the one undertaking of our century. Do you find a mass of fragmentary little states, spiritually related by tongue and literature, sundered by bitter fortune, — then by blood and iron you make them into one empire. Is your republic endangered by local jealousies and pri- vate interests, — then at the cost of years of warfare you force these factions to know their own brotherhood. Is society imperiled by too much individualism, — then your leaders become filled with the spirit of social organization. Everywhere the same spirit is abroad. Shall thought remain untouched by it? Shall reflection, frightened by the diversity of opinions, refuse to attempt their synthesis ? For what is needed, I repeat, is not some new gospel, preached by an angel from heaven, but a synthesis of the truth that we now have ready at hand. Schopenhauer and Hegel, Spinoza and Kant, mechanism and teleology, nature and evolution, experience and reason, — these are all, not mere names for warring tendencies, whose conflict proves that all things are and must remain a mystery to us men ; these stand rather for embodiments now of this, now of that deeper truth. Their existence is, I re- peat, a challenge to us, not to see how much they differ, but how well they belong together. No other age ever had so rich a suggestion of such a synthesis of truth. Can we afford to neglect our opportunity ? It is n't despair, then, that the complexity of modern thought teaches us. It is rather the wondrous beauty of the philosophical problem of the age that is shown us by 294 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHlLOSOrHY. this very complexity. Nor is the return to the outer order necessarily a forsaking of philosophic theory for experi- ence. No, experience itself is meaningless without pre- suppositions. Every one has an unconscious philosophy. Every one has beliefs about the world as world, and in its wholeness. One may neglect or even hate a conscious philosophy. Nobody is without the faith that it would need a whole philosophy to make articulate. The ques- tion. What is experience ? was Kant's own question ; and to that question the whole idealistic age was a fragmen- tary answer. In vain, then, do you say : I, for my part, hold fast by experience, and forsake theory. There is in truth no experience without theory, and philosophy is simply theory brought to consciousness of itself. VI. But now, if, still following the history of current ten- dencies, one passes to a mention of those thinkers who, recognizing the true situation of modern thought, and not abhorring reflection, have undertaken this great synthetic task of philosophy itself, and have done so from the mod- ern point of view, you will at once think, especially in connection with the doctrine of evolution, of the name of Mr. Herbert Spencer. You will ask of me, at this point, some suggestion of the relation of this noteworthy thinker to the movement whose growth I have been following. The barest suggestion, indeed, is all that I can make. Mr. Spencer wiU be to me here an illustration of one way of meeting the modern situation as it has now been described. Mr. Spencer, as everybody who knows any- thing of his career is aware, did not wait for the appear- ance of Darwin's " Origin of Species " before seizing upon the idea of his general " Formula of Evolution." The thought that the processes of nature are historical, that the very mechanism of the physical world is such as is bound to show to the onlooking spectator the spectacle THE RISE OF 'THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 295 of a rhythmic alternation of growth and decay, and that in this rhythmic alternation all the various histories of the solar system, of the earth's crust, and of the life of the animals and of men, are contained, — this thought came early to the mind of this singularly patient and many- sided student of science and of politics. During the fifties he thought out the main outlines of his future system of synthetic philosophy, published the first edition of his " Psychology," and embodied in periodical essays his notion of " Progress, its Law and Cause," as well as the application of this notion to several important problems of natural history, of social science, and of the history of hu- manity. Early in the sixties his system began to appear ; but it was not until after 1870 that he won the general recognition which has made him, in this country, in the eyes of so many, the one true prophet of the philosophy of evolution, and that has given him a worthy name and influence throughout the realm of European scientific in- quiry. To-day his system is still unfinished. A world of new investigations, which he follows industriously but without noteworthy change of his opinions, has grown up about him, inviting him to eternally new labors, hut always only confirming in his mind his own convictions. He undertook long since the task of a Titan. He has pursued this task for full thirty years with the patience of an enthusiast. The skillful devotion of the man is unquestionable. His value as an awakener and organizer of research is vast. What can we say of his place in the history of philosophy ? Mr. Spencer stands in a singular position, whether you regard him as an Englishman or as a philosopher. Eng- lishman he is, but how unlike Locke or Berkeley, with their classical limitations of outlook and of inquiry, with their doubtful attitude towards researches that lay beyond the circle of their immediate interests, with their unwill- ingness to apply philosophy to more than a few problems. 296 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Mr. Spencer in his position amongst English thinkers is so far more like Plobbes. The whole range of problems seems to concern him. He attempts fearlessly the most stupendous of tasks. He would unify science. His pro- vince is the world of experience in its entirety. He is fond of mentioning in the same sentence or paragraph nebulse and starfishes, savages and molecules, the laws of motion and the institutions of Europe. Nor is this wide range chosen by him because of mere waywardness, or from the mere love of variety in illustration. He men- tions all these things because he seems to himself to have a formula for them. Unlike Hobbes he is, on the other hand, in bis fondness for the letter of this formula itself, in his fearlessness about the use of highly abstract phrases, in his endless repetitions and illustrations of a few princi- pal aspects of his fundamental thought. All this, I say, this combination of universality of purpose with abstraot- ness of expression, is an un-English trait in Mr. Spencer. It allies him so far with Hegel, and with the other inven- tors of world-embracing formulas. An Englishman who writes on philosophy usually loves the Socratic fashion of posing as a plain man of simple undertakings and of obvious ideas. Mr. Spencer speaks rather as one having authority. If you criticise him, he replies that you have failed to comprehend the subtlety and the many-sidedness of his thought. He does not reply as Socrates or as Berkeley would have done, that it is the critic who is too subtle and artificial to grasp the concrete ideas of a plain man. On the contrary, Mr. Spencer, more after the fashion of Hegel, knows that his formula is only for trained minds, like his own, for men who, like himself, have lived long amidst deep contemplations, and who are accustomed to world-compelling synthetic thought. In this synthetic character of his thought, again, that seems to give him a place amongst the characteristic thinkers of this our third period of modern philosophy. As we have THE KISE OP THE DOCTKINE OF EVOLUTION. 297 now repeatedly seen, the great business of modem thought is the discovery of the unity of apparently diverse lines of investigation, the reconciliation of seemingly hopeless con- tradictions, the unification of the world which anarchical passion and analytic reflection have conspired to rend asunder. And Mr. Spencer undertakes everywhere to be a reconciler, an unifier, one who harmonizes through syn- thesis, and who brings to light oppositions only to enrich thought by suggesting their organic unity. Science and religion, empiricism and rationalism, Locke and Kant, egoism and altruism, mechanism and evolution, nature and history, — such are some of the seemingly opposing forces that he would critically reunite, even in the act of dwelling upon their warfare. His world, too, is rent by great conflicts ; but its unity is to be more than its con- flicts. Mr. Spencer's great popular reputation is largely due to this organizing spirit that everywhere shows itself in his writings. That, again, is why young men love him so intensely. And their love is so far well suggested by his imposing dignity of enterprise. His categories, mean- while, look so much more empirical and concrete than Hegel's, or than those of .other similar philosophic unifiers. The redistribution of matter and motion is so much more scientific-sounding a phrase for the description of the pro- cess of nature than is Hegel's notion of the absolute. The passage from the indefinite and homogeneous to the defi- nite and heterogeneous, which Mr. Spencer makes the type of all cosmical evolution, is so much more readily conceivable than is Hegel's Negativitdt. But one thus indeed forgets, as one reads, that over every statement of Mr. Spencer's about the outer world broods that dim and shadowy Unknowable of his, whose mystery gives to every assertion about the unity of its own processes an air of doubt and of unintelligibility. In the same breath Mr. Spencer, in fact, seems to assure you that he knows aU and nothing about this unity of scientific truth. The real outer 298 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. world is according to him this Unknowable itself. The Absolute is an impenetrable mystery. Consciousness can- not transcend its own boundaries. The limitation of know- ledge is thus for Mr. Spencer the tragic defeat of the high- est purpose of knowledge. Human thought will never reach its real goal, and that, not because human thought is merely unfinished, but because genuine knowledge of outer truth is in its very essence inconceivable, contradictory, hopeless. Yet all the while Mr. Spencer has that univer- sal formula, namely, his law of evolution. And this for- mula shall be true, and true about objective nature, about a real world, about something that does transcend conscious- ness. Idealistic constructions of the absolute shall be impossible, just because the absolute is unknowable. But unification of science, an empirical construction of an universally valid and objective law, shall be possible, although the outer truth is essentially unlcnowable. This well-known paradox of Mr. Spencer's is extremely characteristic of the halting attitude of much contempo- rary thought. As for the Unknowable itself, we shall have something to say of it hereafter, in the second part of our course. For the presept one may note, as an historical fact, that both doubters and mystery-mongers (of whom our time is full) often take an almost equal delight in Mr. Spencer's theory of the Unknowable : the one class because they perceive that he, too, doubts, the other class because they find in Mr. Spencer's vague speech, as to this matter, words that arouse their most religiously unutterable longings and croonings. Kant's things in themselves were, indeed, somewhat similar to this Unknowable ; yet they were at least sharply distin- guished from the knowable phenomena. All that Kant ever pretended, even provisionally or.partially, to " unify " was the world of the inner life. But in Mr. Spencer's doctrine it is our knowledge of the outer world which is to be " unified ; " and yet this outer, as such, cannot truly THE EISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 299 be known save as to the bare fact of its existence. The union of knowable and unknowable in Mr. Spencer's sys- tem is thus a painfully corrupt one. " Reconciled " they are in the system much as science and religion are recon- ciled at the outset of the " First Principles." In case of most of Mr. Spencer's " reconciliations," the opposing interests are, in fact, first more or less developed, and then deliberately ignored. The reconciled terms and interests enter into the reconciling formula, much as the dead in Job's lamentation enter Sheol, and find peace : " The small and the great are there, and the servant is free from his master." "The prisoners rest together, they hear not the voice of the oppressor." " The wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest." So, I say, are the great interests of humanity, the great problems of philosophy, the concerns of science, and the passions of religion, at rest in the dim recesses of the Spencerian formulas. One of the most noteworthy and valuable features of Mr. Spencer's thought, meanwhile, in its influence upon our age, is seen in the curious fact of the actual fruitful- ness for modern discussion of some of his very vaguest formulas. Mr. Spencer lives in a time when no accent of the Holy Ghost fails to reach the ear of some breathless listener. So hungry is this our modern world for truth that the least hint suggests to it a feast of insight. And that is why Mr. Spencer's comprehensive syntheses have been so significant for many minds, and, despite their vagueness, will have a part in the outcome of human phi- losophy. The whole doctrine of Mr. Spencer remains, to my mind, a vast programme of a philosophy of evolution. The author's idea, namely, to give a general account of the nature of the historical process as such, is a great idea. I do not find in his actual formula anything at all successful or satisfying. The processes of differentiation and of integration, which he tries to describe and unite in 300 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. this formula, are ill universalized through his famous defi- nition of evolution. Not all historical processes are de- scribed by even these abstract terms. Still less are all the processes that his formula includes historical in their nature. But still the thought of the whole, which is the thought that the world of natural mechanism must be shown to be also, in another aspect of its nature, histori- cal, is a deep and thoroughly modern thought, and that is the thought which I believe to be the outcome of the whole work of the century. VII. Outside of the circle of the special teachings of Mr. Spencer we find, meanwhile, a group of doctrines which make a more or less serious effort at being philosophical, and which retain of idealism only a few fragmentary ele- ments. But these doctrines are withal so significant of our age and of its problems, that I should do ill, even in this fragmentary sketch, if I wholly failed to characterize them. I allude to the doctrines best known by the very general epithet, Monistic. In them the idealistic tradi- tion still lives, but in an unconscious fashion. The coy doctrine of the world as spirit, pursued too hotly by former lovers, has been metamorphosed, and now survives in a sort of Daphne-like slumber, under such names as the Mind -Stuff theory, or the doctrine of the Double Aspect. Readers of modern discussion are not unfa- miliar with such statements as that the doctrine of evolu- tion has taught us the " Oneness of all Existence ; " this oneness meaning that the v^orld is somehow made of one stuff, and that this stuff is at once essentially physical and essentially mental in its qualities. Schopenhauer, whose real system was at heart a much more subtle and profound doctrine than much of this modern monism, used phrases that already suggest its formulas. The will, he used to say, is just nature's physical causation " seen THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 301 from within;" while the laws of nature are the wiU "seen from without." Using this phrase, and avoiding Scho- penhauer's own systematic context for the phrase, many recent thinkers have sought to reconcile science and phi- losophy after much the following fashion : — Nature, they say, shows us material processes, subject to fixed law. Matter is known to be real, for experience tells us so. The idealistic views of post-Kantian thought are mere romances. Kant's own subjectivism was unsci- entific. The real world first appears as the physical world, full of matter in motion. But now what is this matter in motion ? Experience makes clear that in certain very highly complex organisms, and, in particular, in the nerve- centres of these organisms, certain masses of matter exhibit mental characteristics, so that here molecular motion is accompanied by consciousness. The more highly organ- ized the nerve-centres in question, the higher the con- sciousness ; the simpler the organism, the simpler the consciousness, until, low in the scale, we come to what seem to be unconscious organisms, and lower still, to what seems to be inanimate matter. The doctrine of evolution teaches us that the transition from lower to higher has been, so far as the material processes are concerned, a continuous process. The more complex has evolved from the simpler. The organisms that possess consciousness are the offspring of an ancestry which in earlier stages of evolution would have seemed to possess none. Moreover, each conscious individual, in his growth from the egg, passes from the condition of a little mass of protoplasm to the condition of a knowing and thinking being. As matter organizes, mind gives evidence of its presence. As the brain disintegrates in old age or in disease, mind alters or disappears. What now is the meaning, the out- come, of all these facts ? Is it not this ? As the material elements of the brain existed before the brain, and came together to form it, so the elements of the mind existed 302 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. apart from and before the conscious mind itself, and by their synthesis have produced it. And what, once more, can this mean ? Does it not signify that the elements of the mind and the elements of the brain are not two sorts of substance, but one ; that the consciousness is, as it were, only the inner aspect of that which, seen from with- out, appears as the brain ; and that each atom of the brain is only the representative, in the world of physics, of that which, otherwise viewed, is in its essence an element of the mind? The world that the doctrine of evolution shows us is, in fact, a world of one continuous process. At one end of this process we find what seems to be dead matter. At the other end we find, say in our own inner life, what seems to be pure mind. How can one process show such different things ? Yet the continuity of the process, its persistence through all the ages of the evolu- tion of our planet, the absence of proof of external inter- ference, all these indicate that there must have been one real stuff present throughout, despite the variety of its manifestations. The various manifestations must then be only in seeming and not in ultimate foundation various. The so-called dead matter was always in essence mental. The consciousness known to us in our inner life has that physical aspect which the observer calls our brain. The same substance it is, then, that " seen from within " ap- pears as mind, and that " seen from without " is called matter. A weU-known passage of M. Taine's book on " The In- tellect " uses, to state this doctrine, the figure of a text and interlinear translation, which, in the book of nature, appear in some places side by side, as the two series : the mental and the physical phenomena of the world. In some regions the text only appears to the observer (as each one of us, and he only, knows his own inner life) ; while elsewhere, as in our observation of " dead " matter, only the translation appears to us, not the text. The in< THE KISE OF THE DOCTRINE OP EVOLUTION. 303 ference is that, mutilated as our copy of the text may be, both text and translation are meant in the original of our book to be parallel, correspondent, and, in deepest sense, one. This, then, is the theory of Monism, as the doctrine of evolution has suggested it to many recent thinkers. In further development the expressions of the doctrine differ widely. The lamented Clifford, in one of the most brilliant of his essays, that on " Mind-Stuff," gave to modern monism one of its most suggestive formulations. Independently, Dr. Morton Prince, of Boston, in a book on " The Nature of Mind and Human Automatism," reached, a number of years since, the same thought. So stated, monism declares that the real stuff of the world is 7iot an unknown somewhat, an x, that when viewed as we view our own states appears as mind, and that when viewed from without appears as matter. On the con- trary, this real stuff of things is, for Clifford and for Dr. Prince, nothing but mind itself, known to us directly and in its true essence when we know our own feelings, known to us indirectly and obscurely when it is formed of the feelings that are not ours, and that, affecting our feelings from without, are represented therein by our ideas of material things beyond us. The world is thus in reality mind, but not of necessity conscious mind, rather only a vast congeries of elementary feelings, out of which, when they come into close relations to one another, as they do in our organisms, complex mental life, and finally con- sciousness, can be and is made. The process of evolution is the process of the organization of this mind-stuff. The laws of nature's mechanism are the laws of the relations of mind-stuff atoms ; and there is but this one stuff in all things. Other lovers of this modern monism are not always so simple in their formulations. To many the truth of the doctrine lies in the thought that matter and mind are sim- ply diverse aspects of one ultimate substantial stuff. But 304 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. wh^t this is, conscious or unconscious, feeling or not-feel- ing, we are not to know. The true stuff is an x with two faces, a substance more like Spinoza's, whose two attri- butes, material and physical, we comprehend by experi- ■ ence, but whose essence is only made articulate for us in terms of these its attributes. Such is a suggestion of this, one of the best-known ten- dencies of recent speculation. You see its tentative and empirical character ; you see its close relation to the doc- trine of evolution ; you see also how far it is from meet- ing the critical requirements that, since Kant, are neces- sarily made of a philosophy. This naive acceptance of the possibility that out of a mass of feelings you can build up a self, this faith that feelings can somehow " come to- gether " or "^organize themselves," when we know of no such thing in experience as a loose feeling out of organ- ization at all, or apart from the unity of a seK, this belief in the " oneness " of things on the basis of an uncriticised experience, — all these things make modern empirical monism rather a suggestion than a philosophy. In some ways, as you will later see, I prize it highly and make use of its insight. I cannot rest content with it. VIII. Herewith ends my sketch of the rise of the doctrine of evolution. Of the positive significance of the doctrine for philosophy, a later discussion must say something. And herewith, as sometimes before in my lectures, I lay aside the attitude of the mere chronicler ; only this time I lay it aside finally and altogether. We have traveled a long road in company ; we have now, at last, reached the prob- lems of the present day. Heretofore I have tried to tell a story, — in my own words indeed, generally with my own illustrations, often in so untechnical a fashion as to run the risk of leaving my author sadly misunderstood ; but always with a desire to let the history in some fashion unfold its own inner meaning, display its own continuity, THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 305 and furnish its own criticism of the errors and partial insights which we have encountered. You have seen throughout, I suppose, where my sympathies have been ly- ing ; at the outset I confessed to you the nature of my own philosophical creed ; and on several occasions, especially in recent lectures, I have freely supplemented history by personal expressions of opinion. But from this time forth I am no longer to be a chronicler who frequently criti- cises, but a student who risks his own positive creed for whatever it may prove to be worth. The substance of this creed I shall in the concluding lectures suggest, with spe- cial reference to the point that we have now reached in our study. I shall try to make my doctrine the legitimate outcome of the reflective process that I have been de- scribing to you. I am, as you now know, an idealist. I find Kant's analysis of our knowledge in its essence the true one. Kant erred chiefly in what he omitted to ana- lyze, and in his assumption of those useless things in themselves. As far as his deeper study of the inner life of the intellect went, he was on his own ground, and he knew it wonderfully well, for all his burden of technical subtleties and for all his pedantic schematism. He held that space and time are mental. To my mind this is un- questionable. He held that all judgment is essentially only an appeal to my own deeper Self, and that all know- ledge depends on my unity with my deeper Self. This seems to me the profoundest truth of philosophy. What Kant did not make clear was what this, my deeper Self, is. It certainly is n't my empirically conscious self. It certainly is n't the person called by my individual name. I find in the later idealists many suggestions as to what this deeper Self is. I am very fond, as you have seen, of Hegel's tragic but highly vital formula for the paradox of consciousness, the struggle of self-knowledge and self- mastery, as the very life of this passionate deeper Self. I do not, however, think that Hegel has told the whole truth about the Self. I find great interest in saying, with 306 THE SPIRIT OF MODEltN PHILOSOPHY. Schopenhauer, that to know the Self we must first watch it as it plays the world-game, not as if the facts of the world were ever really external to thought, but because the deeper Self, although one, needs an infinity of sense-facts to express its wiU, and writes its ideas in a vast hiero- glyph, whose characters we call experience. Hence it is that I love to study science. And when I study sMence I do so naively, submissively, straightforwardly, just as if the atoms and the suns and the milky-ways, the brains and the nerve-cells and the reflex mechanisms, were all things in themselves. They are n't things in themselves ; they are mere manifestations of the Self. But I must for this very reason accept them as they come. Nor do I try, as the romanticists did, to find obvious symbolic interpre- tations for hastily recorded facts of sense before cau- tious science has scrutinized these facts thoroughly. I have confidence enough in the depth of meaning that the Self has to embody in the world, not to try to guess this meaning of its hieroglyph before d, good deal thereof has been empirically examined. I do not grow restive in lis- tening to the story of evolution, merely because I am well aware that the whole temporal view of things is largely illusory, and that the true Self, far from being subject to time, creates time. I rather delight in this craft whereby the Self thus hides its true nature in ener- getic nebulous masses and in flying meteors, pretends to be absent from the inorganic world, pretends to have de- scended from relatives of the anthropoid apes, pretends, in short, to be bounded in all sorts of nutshells ; yes, plays hide and seek amongst the aeons of forgotten time, when this planet was not, and demurely insists that with- out phosphorus it could not possibly have learned how to think. The Self has its comedies as well as its tragedies ; and these comedies are as far from being mere farces as the tragedies are from being the mere horror-plays at which Schopenhauer's saints turned pale, until they grew ineffectively holy, and finally vanished. No, the com- THE KISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION, 307 edies are as deep as the tragedies. The Self is as truly present in evolution as he is in sin and in ignorance. These are the World-Spirit's garments that we see him by. Only we must see patiently, watching every fold and lis- tening to every rustle of the garment ; for behind this garment stirs the infinite life, and to each one of us philosophy says. That art Thou. It is only after a pa- tient scientific scrutiny has revealed, as is the case with the doctrine of evolution, a vast unity in a long series of pbenomena ; a growth like this which links civilized to sav- age man ; and savage man to an animal ancestry ; and the animal ancestry to unicellular organisms ; and these to the inorganic matter of a primitive earth-crust ; and this crust to an antecedent fluid earth-ball, glowing, and parting with its bulky satellite, the moon ; and this glowing ball to a primitive nebula ; and perhaps this nebula to a previous manifold streaming of multitudinously clashing meteors, — it is only then, I say, when such a book as this splen- did history of life lies open before us, only partly deci- phered, but still suggestively grasped in its magnificent outlines, daily more clearly read by science, that we have a right to ask : Who, then, is this Self, and what man- ner of life is this he writes in this book, itself merely a waif from the lost tales of endless time, just as the end- less time also is merely an illusory form wherein the Self is pleased to embody and manifest this truth ? Its illu- sory form is not wholly an illusion. For the Self is all that is, and his world is the chosen outcome of his eter- nal reality. Beyond all these illusions must lie a mean- ing deeper than we have ever yet comprehended, higher than our thought will soon reach. What fragment, then, > of the meaning does the story of evolution convey ? To give that question a precise definition and to risk a sharp answer, to make this answer less mystical and more con- crete than the one now suggested, and to develop before you something of its proof, wiU be my business in the remaining lectures. PAET n. SUGGESTIONS OF DOCTRIXB. LECTUKE X. Nature and evolution; the outer world and its PARADOX. We begin herewith the task of thinking for ourselves concerning the problems of philosophy. We shall have learned little from the preceding historical discussions, if they have not strongly suggested to us that the world of truth must be something very unlike the naive notions of its nature that our primitive consciousness gives us. Empirical science is full of romantic surprises ; but phi- losophy has shown itself to be far more so. Copernicus transformed the universe for the natural man ; but Kant's " Copernican discovery " suggested a far more wondrous transformation. Our own work we have defined in ad- vance as an effort to bring into synthesis the thoughts that the history of modern philosophy has suggested to us. Following, then, in the paths of Kant and of his successors, we shall not expect to get glimpses of less marvelous things than they beheld. What we desire is that these insights of ours should be reasonable, and should be adjusted to the facts of life and of nature. It is the world of the outer order in which our histori- cal studies have left us, The idealistic interpretation of this world that I suggested as I closed the last lecture will not at first sight appear to you more than a mystical romance. Let it pass, for the moment, as such. I shall not here begin with it ; I shall begin with the assumption of realistic science, with the hypothesis of our own age, 312 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. namely, that there is a real world, which our senses more or less truly perceive, which a well-guarded experience can fruitfully investigate, and which our natural science has been learning in some measure to comprehend. This assumption is one presupposition of our age. We shall study it as critically as we can. If it needs a peculiarly cautious scrutiny, if it lacks in any sense foundation, or if it must be transformed before it can be accepted, we shall hope to discover the fact in the course of our analysis. That, once granting the foregoing presupposition, the reflection of a metaphysician should have any rights as against the stupendous acquisitions of the sciences of ex- perience, would seem at first glance absurd enough, were it not that the highest flights of science are precisely the ones that, to reflective persons, are always most suggestive of the need of a philosophy. At the close of the remark- able address of the president of the British Association at Cardiff (delivered in August, 1891), I find noteworthy words, concluding a presentation of the recent marvels of the progress of astronomy : — " Astronomy, the oldest of the sciences," says Dr. Hug- gins, " has more than renewed her youth. At no time in the past has she been so bright with unbounded aspira- tions and hopes. Never were her temples so numerous, nor the crowd of her votaries so great. . . . Happy is the lot of those who are still on the eastern side of life's meri- dian. . . . Since the time of Newton our knowledge of the phenomena of nature has wonderfully increased, but man asks, perhaps more earnestly now than in his days, What is the ultimate reality behind the reality of the per- ceptions ? Are they only the pebbles of the beach with which we have been playing? Does not the ocean of ultimate reality and truth lie beyond ? " Let these words of Dr. Huggins be the text of what is immediately to follow. The more one becomes absorbed NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 313 in the study of the wonders of nature, the nearer must lie the thought, that these things are not what they seem ; that space and time, and matter and motion, and life and our human consciousness, are but the show, the finite em- bodiment, the temporal manifestation, of a deeper truth. If this world of experience is indeed real, its reality must be far profounder than our experience. May not an analy- sis of the conditions of experience suggest to us wherein lies this profounder actuality, behind the show, and yet incorporated in it ? This world of scientific realism is first of all a world in space and in time. Space and time are themselves, as Kant has shown us, such puzzling conditions of natural law and of human knowledge, that we should run the risk of complicating hopelessly our inquiry if we here already dwelt afresh upon their paradoxes. Let us post- pone such a consideration until later ; let us look rather at the contents of the space world, as experience shows them to us. In space we find the universe of the stars and the nebulse, as the world wherein occur all the changes that fall within our ken. These changes, as physical science knows them, are, to use the well-known phrase, " redistributions " of matter and of energy. So far as we know, neither matter nor energy is ever altered in quantity. It is their distribution, the form of the physical world, which changes. As for the general ex- tent and character of these changes, the astronomer tells us (to quote once more from Dr. Huggins's address) something of the following nature : — " The heavens are richly but very irregularly inwrought with stars ; the brighter stars cluster into weU-known groups upon a background formed of an enlacement of streams and convoluted windings and interwined spirals of fainter stars, which becomes richer and more intricate in the irregularly rifted zone of the Milky Way. " We who form part of the emblazonry can see only 814 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. the design distorted and confused ; here crowded, therfe scattered, at another place superposed. The groupings due to our position are mixed up with those which are real. " Can we suppose that each luminous point has no rela- tion to the others near it than the accidental neighborship of grains of sand upon the shore, or particles of the wind- blown dust of the desert ? Surely every star, from Sirius and Vega down to each grain of the light dust of the Milky Way, has its present place in the heavenly pattern from the slow evolving of its past. We see a system of systems, for the broad features of clusters and streams and spiral windings which mark the general design are reproduced in every part. The whole is in motion, each point shifting its position by miles every second, though from the august magnitude of their distances from us and from each other, it is only by the accumulated movements of years or of generations that some small changes of relative position reveal themselves." A " system of systems," then, with the " broad fea- tures " " reproduced in every part," is before us. Its very outlines suggest a general process of physical evolution. This impression is after a fashion confirmed by two well- known considerations, one of which is relatively older in science, while the other is at the moment in process of highly novel development through spectroscopic research. The first consideration relates to the fact that the energy of this vast material system is now distributed in a man- ner that, from the nature of the case, is, so to speak, pecu- liarly unstable, and that appears to involve enormous future changes of distribution ; while if we look back- wards we see that there must have been involved in the past a long and continuous process of a particular type leading towards the present state. The hot stars, in cold space far from one another, are just now continually dissi- pating their heat by radiation. If one inquires into the NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 815 most probable source of all this heat-energy, now so waste- fully poured out, one finds but one highly plausible hypo- thesis, which has been suggested after a very considerable study of the phenomena of our own sun. Contraction, under the influence of gravity, most probably furnishes the source of this heat in case of each of the great stellar masses. Contraction, read backwards, and interpreted in the light of the well-known and now pretty widely con- firmed nebular hypothesis, indicates that each star must once have been far larger than it now is, and that the energy now radiated as heat must once have been stored up as the energy of position of widely diffused matter, whose particles gravitated towards one another, and whose state is probably indicated to us by such vast masses as certain of the nebulae show us. Condensation, the con- version of the energy of position into heat, radiation of heat, the continued contraction of stellar masses : such is the process that we now probably see indicated before us. The recent spectroscopic study of the stars furnishes a second and subordinate sort of evidence, which adds stiU. further plausibility to the idea of this unity of process throughout the heavens. The stars seem, we are told, to fall into, classes, whose physical condition strongly sug- gests, although it cannot yet prove, just such varieties of age, just such different stages in the process of condensa- tion and of cooling, as we might expect to discover in a universe of a stellar evolution of the sort that the nebular hypothesis demands. The confirmation from this source, incomplete though it is, is highly significant. Granting these hypotheses about the world-system around us, — hypotheses rendered daily more probable in the light of that general unity of material structure and of physical law which the spectroscope so wonderfully reveals, — then the process that is going on has a character that renders it very highly problematic. The energy of this system is being transformed, as we have seen ; but the average oj.6 THE SPIRIT OF MODEBN PHILOSOPHY. transformations appear to conform to a type whicli sug- gests tliat the bright world of the hot stars, as it now is, must be destined to only a finite period of existence. These transformations, namely, are taking place in one direction. The energy of the stellar world seems to be " running down," that is, to be passing from " available " to " unavailable " forms. The total quantity of energy in the world remains constant ; but its serviceableness for continuing the world -process that we now observe and admire must be growing momentarily less. We cannot with serious probability discover any compensating pro- cess of sufficient magnitude and universality to enable us to see how the stellar evolution could go on forever, in any one part of space, however large, without an entire change in the character of the events involved. A rhythm of growth and decay, a passing of energy from " liigher " to '-'lower" forms, and then back again from "lower" to " higher " forms, in case that were the law of the process before us, would suggest an ultimately stable " moving equilibrium " in the universe, whose " broad features," " reproduced in every part," would be those of an endless life of ripening and decaying solar and stellar systems. But unfortunately, the greater part of the energy involved in this world of the hot stars and the cold space no sooner reaches the form of heat energy, shown in the glowing steUar surfaces themselves, than it is radiated off into space ; and there is nothing rhythmical, so far as we can see, about the results of the process of radiation. The fashion of this woi-ld changes ; and no restoring process adequately compensates for the change. The steUar imi- verse continually casts this bread of its energy on to the waters of infinite space. When shall it be found again ? To speak of the facts more particularly, each star tends to cool off, since it is radiating enormous quantities of heat. What can supply the loss, and keep the star hot ? The answer is, that the contraction of each steUar mass, NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 317 by reason of gravitation, continually converts energy of position into heat-energy. But in no single case could this contraction go on indefinitely. The stars that we know must one and all grow old and die. What could restore life to the cooling universe ? Collisions of stellar masses ? These in any one case would bring to pass enormous dif- fusions of matter, would form fresh nebulae, would begin the vast processes of single systems once more ; but would do so only by drawing afresh on the store of the higher forms of energy (that is, upon the energy of position and the energy of relative stellar motions). The energy thus won, and made available, would be radiated off in the end ; would be lost in the depths of space ; and the pro- cess would continue only at a loss. This law of the " degradation " of energy, of the ten- dency everywhere for higher forms of energy, such as those of the energy of position and the energy of the mo- tion of masses of matter, to pass, when transformed, into the lower form of energy, namely, heat, and then to be radiated off into space, is a well-known tendency, present in all sorts of physical processes. Only at a certain loss can heat-energy be transformed back into higher forms of energy, even by the best of known devices. Heat wa- ter, here at the earth's surface, and you can make steam, and get the steam to raise bodies to higher levels, and so get some of your heat-energy stored up once more in forms that will be later " available " for useful service. But you can do so only at a loss. In order to transform some of the heat-energy at your disposal into a higher and more useful form, you have to waste a good deal of heat, by let- ting it heat up the bodies in the neighborhood of the water that you use, and by so letting it ultimately diffuse itself through space by radiation. Lost heat you can't restore. Energy you employ, then, only by giving part of it away as waste heat, and using the remainder to do your work. That seems to be the way of our universe. Its 318 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. energies continually diffuse themselves through infinite space in " degraded " form as ether vibrations. The stars waste vastly more than they can give to their planets. And even what they give to their planets is continually being lost, as our own earth shows us, through radiation. If, then, this stellar universe possesses at present any finite quantity of " kinetic " or of " potential " energy in available undiffused forms, that is, if the process before us is confined to any finite portion of space, then the energy seems to be so tending to lose itself in diffused form, that in some finite time the whole process must " run down." The evolution must cease. So, at least, it would seem. The problem as suggested to us in the other direction is obvious. If this evolution must sometime cease, how, carrying it backwards, can we conceive it as having been without a beginning ? A rhythmical process, in which there is a regular alterna- tion of certain conditions, can easily be conceived as hav- ing always existed. Look back, namely, as far as you will, and you will find this process present at any moment of time, in some stage of its endlessly repeated rhythm. But a physical process that shall have gone on through endless time, and yet always in the same direction, an endless wasting of energy by the continual conversion of higher into lower forms, — how hard to conceive of such a process as having already gone on forever ! The only plausible hypothesis that makes such a conception possible seems at first sight to be the one discussed by Professor W. K. Clifford, in his brilliant lecture on " The First and Last Catastrophe." ^ In order to follow Clifford's thought, let us fix our attention for a moment on the case of the earth. If, says Clifford, we follow back the probable con- dition of the earth itself, we find that, according to cer- tain computations, this planet must have solidified a lim- 1 See his Lectures and Essays, vol. i. pp. 191-227 ; iu particular, the passages, pp. 220, 221. NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 319 ited number of millions of years since. " Before that, it was cooling as a liquid." And before tbis again, further computations would show that, at a certain time, the earth had passed from the gaseous to the liquid state. And then, continues Clifford : — " If we went further back still we should probably find the earth falling together out of a great ring of matter surrounding the sun, and distributed over its orbit. The same thing is true of every body of matter ; if we trace its history back, we come to a certain time at which a ca- tastrophe took place ; and if we were to trace back the history of all the bodies in the universe in that way, we should continually see them separating up into smaller parts. What they have actually done .is to fall together and get solid. If we could reverse the process we should see them separating and getting fluid ; and, as a limit to that, at an indefinite distance in past time, we should find that all these bodies would be resolved into molecules, and all these would be flying away from each other. There would be no limit to that process, and we could trace it as far back as ever we liked to trace it. So that on the assumption — a very large assumption — that the present constitution of the laws of geometry and mechanics has held good during the whole of past time, we should be led to the conclusion that, at an inconceivably long time ago, the universe did consist of ultimate molecules, all separate from one another and approaching one another. Then they would meet together and form a great number of small, hot bodies. Then you would have the process of cooling going on in these bodies, exactly as we find it going on now. But you will observe that we have no evi- dence of such a catastrophe as implies a beginning of the laws of nature." Clifford, as you will see from his words, does not regard this hypothesis as more than a very provisional one. All that we are seeking for the moment, however, is a plausi- 320 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. ble way of regarding the world that now is as continuously linked with what was, and with what will be, by a world process that extends indefinitely both towards the past and towards the future. Towards the future, as we have seen, it is very hard to conceive the present process as indefinitely extended without coming to what Clifford himself (page 224 of the same lecture_) describes thus : ■ — " If we were to travel forward, . . . and consider things as falling together, we should come finally to a great central mass, all in one piece, which would send out waves of heat through a perfectly empty ether, and grad- ually cool itself down. As this mass got cool it would be deprived of all life and motion ; it would be just an enormous frozen block in the middle of the ether." In the past, again, extending the present process back- wards, we come, as Clifford has shown us, to a condition of greater and greater diffusion of matter, to a state where more and more energy took the form of energy of position, and where there was less and less of the present condi- tion of stellar systems with highly heated solar siirfaces. In both cases our effort to conceive the world-j)rocess as one process is founded, as Clifford points out, on the " large assumption " that the " present constitution of the laws of geometry and mechanics has held good during the whole of past time," or in other words that the world is what it now seems to be to our more exact scientific con- sciousness. The question now is whether the conception that we thus get is an essentially coherent one. At the present stage of our inquiry it would be mere Philistinism to dwell, as many are disposed to do, upon the disheartening notion of the past and future state of our universe which these considerations and hypotheses so far suggest. Our criticism of the jjresuppositions of mod- ern inquiry will have, in due time and place, to study the moral and religious aspect of the real world. But just now we dare not call in question hypotheses as to nature, NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 321 merely because they do not meet the longings of our hearts. Our criticism must go deeper. Turning back at once, however, to the theoretical as- pect of the matter, we find that this conception of the real world is, as we have already observed, at all events a very highly problematic one. We may well doubt the ultimate coherence of these our empirical notions of the physical world when thus driven, as it were, to their limits, when pressed into service to define a possible world-pro- cess that shall include the known phenomena, and that shall still be continuous and boundless in time. Yet not in vain will have been our efforts so far if we take into account a consideration that just now becomes highly im- portant for us. There is, namely, no more useful experiment in philo- sophy than just such an effort as the one now before us, to universalize our conceptions of things, to try what be- comes of them when we do pass to the limit, and suppose them true for all the world and for all time. Such an experiment often is for philosophy what a crucial test in a laboratory is for physics. It decides for us, namely, what sort of conception we are dealing with ; and that is why these speculations are worth our while. A concep- tion that could consistently be thus universalized, that could be used to define an absolute or a self-completed world-process, that thus could have an essentially bound- less application, might be a conception of an objective and well-founded type, true of the real world apart from our merely human point of view. But a conception that you can't universalize, that seems to contradict itself, or that gives rise to highly suspicious incongruities, so soon as you press it to the limit, so soon as you suppose it to apply semper et ubique, is thereby shown to be in all prob- ability a conception of an essentially human character or else of no world-wide objectivity. It may have truth about it, but this truth will in part be due to our own 322 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. limited point of view, to our particular station in the uni- verse. This notion will be, so to speak, a mortal concep- tion of things, not a conception of a really eternal truth. For example : the notion of the earth as supported by an elephant that stood on a tortoise -was such an essen- tially transient and merely human conception, just because it was derived from the analogy of a very special and limited experience of ours, and was obviously incapable of true universalization. Seeking to pass to the limit, you found yourself in a world whose law was that all things needed support from beneath, while you could never find a real supporter in the world, whether for the earth or for anything else. For any supporter in your world-series would be such only in so far as he was first conceived to be supported. And so as no unsupported supporter could be found in a series thus defined, while an unsup- ported supporter would be essentially needed somewhere to give all above him a real foundation, the defined series would be worthless for the purpose of explaining the earth's apparent stability. Very different, however, is the conception (a purely ideal one, to be sure) of the stability of a gravitative system in otherwise absolutely empty space, — a system that should consist, say, of a sun and a planet, both moving with perfect freedom about their common centre of gravity, both uninfluenced by disturbances from without, and both rigid and homogene- ous spherical bodies. Such a system, although it does not exist in our physical world, can be conceived as existing. Such a system, moreover, under the law of gravity, would give us an endless rhythmic change of position on the part of its members, the small planet revolving in an established orbit about its large sun, or rather both mov- ing about their common centre. The motion in question would be a stable one.' There would be no difficulty in predicting the position, velocity, and acceleration of the planet at any time, from its position and motion at any NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 323 other. The possible positions of the planet in its orbit would form a closed curve. One complete cycle of the system would exhaustively exemplify aU, and would not be in need of a support or explanation from any source outside the system. The motion in an universe so consti- tuted would be, as defined, essentially endless. In this empty space no physical condition could have produced or begun it ; and nothing could end it. The conception of such an universe is essentially self-completed, and so as an universe possible. Such an universe, then, although it is not real, might be real. The universe where the stabil- ity of things was only to be explained by such a notion as that of the earth supported by elephant and tortoise, cavbt be real ; for either elephant and tortoise, as con- ceived, would not be real supporters at all, or else if they were, then, like the conceived earth itself, they would need support ere they could become supporters, whilst in the world as so conceived they could find no ultimate support whatever. I exemplify this rather abstruse-seeming distinction between essentially coherent and essentially incoherent notions of the universe in its wholeness, not for the sake of involving my argument in unnecessary subtlety, but for the sake of preparing the way for what seems to me a not unimportant step forwards in our discussion. II. No one doubts the validity of the foregoing inductions of physical science when judged by their own presupposi- tions, and taken within their chosen limits. But they are confessedly inductions about the world as it seems. As they are originally made, they therefore do not profess to give us a theory about the ultimately real world. It is our own reflective interest that has now suggested to us the mere experiment of seeing whether the conceptions that these inductions involve are capable of being universalized, 324 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. of being pressed to the limit, and whether they remain coherent when this is hypothetically done. The purpose of the experiment is to see whether the world as it seems to outer experience can really be viewed as a fair speci- men of the world as it really is. Supposing this process of the aggregation of matter and the radiation of energy into space to be a specimen of the ultimately real process of nature, can we, with Clif- ford, regard this as a process that, uncertainties apart, can without incoherence be conceived as boundless in time ? As an example of a hypothetical process that can be so conceived, we have just had the case of the ideal system of rigid sun and planet, alone in space and changeless in inner physical structure. Their rhythm would be a perfect one. Their motion would occur in closed cycles. Beginning or end of their process would be physically unintelligible. An universe that contained them and them only would be logically as well as physi- cally complete. No evolution would occur there ; and none would be needed or conceivable. Is our seeming world that is now one of a " running-down " energy, con- stant in quantity, but such that it is tending to " degrada- tion " in form, a world that we can coherently conceive as eternal ? Difficulties at once occur to us. Let us put them as simply as possible. A process called aggregation shall have been endlessly going on. What stage has it now reached ? The answer is, one of very imperfect aggre- gation. The masses of matter now coherent in the world before us are, despite their imposing size, after all com- paratively small. Their number is, meanwhile, compara- tively speaking, very great. Many millions of suns, — no sun in sight that we are forced to regard as after all so very much larger than our own sun. Some stars may be several hundreds or thousands of times the mass of our own sun. None, however, are big enough to show us NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 825 across the interstellar spaces any disk. What we see are mere points of light. Where instead of points we see large nebulae, of considerable apparent area, we get evi- dence of the presence of diffused gas and perhaps, also, of meteor - swarms, not of highly aggregated and still ex- tremely vast masses of matter. As to the significance of this fact, there is indeed nothing exact, as yet, about our present consideration. So far it merely arouses our sus- picion. If aggregation has been going on endlessly, there ought to be, one would think, at least a few prodigious centres of aggregation, as big, say, in angular size, when seen even across these prodigious spaces, sSt the larger nebulae appear to us, and still as coherent at least as is the mass of Sirius. The small average size of the suns is precisely what one might expect to see if at some finite time in the past aggregation had begun hereabouts in space, the nebular gaseous matter, or the meteoric swarms, having at the beginning of that time iilled pretty evenly our part of space. But this is not what our hypothesis, carried to the limit, pretends to suggest. Universal aggregation, going on wherever there was matter, — this is what shall have filled the endless past. And still, — this incomplete result ! I repeat, I do not at all exaggerate the force of so inex- actly formidated a consideration. Clifford's way of stat- ing his hypothetical case of a look into the past might al- ready seem to have forestalled our objection. But I give it this form by way of introducing later a more serious reflection. Meanwhile, a second doubt comes to mind, and this time with regard to the energy of our world. It shall have tended always towards the final state of indefinite degradation and dispersion. And yet there is so much of it still " available ! " These stars are so hot, this store of energy, wasted for an infinite time, shall have left us after all still so far from the frozen termination of all 326 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. evolution ! Is not this incompleteness another cause of suspicion ? Can our conceptions thus be fully universal- ized witboiit a curious inconsistency? Ought not a pro- cess that from all eternity has taken but one direction to have been completed long ago ? But I hasten to correct these inexact considerations by opposing to them ClifEord's very simple way of stating the case for the inner coherence of our present concep- tions of natural law. What "• the bodies of the universe " " have actually done," he says, " is to fall together and get solid. If we could reverse the process we should see them separating, . . . and as a limit . . . at an indefinite distance in past time we should find that all these bodies would be resolved into molecules, and " [if we read the process backwards] " all these would be flying away from each other. There would be no limit to that process, and we could trace it as far back as ever we liked to trace it." In this way, thinks Clifford, we should, get a definable endless process for the physical universe. That we our- selves happen to live and to be sentient just at the mo- ment when the infinite process has reached tJiis stage, is, after all, not more marvelous than that we live at all. Infinite past and future time being once assumed, we our- selves must of course come somewhere in the process, and we come just where we actually find ourselves, the pro- cess being in a peculiarly critical and transitional stage. But it is not our own existence that is just here the problem. It is the real world which thus conceived has, when viewed in time, a very singular character. There is a stage in its endless life, when, for a finite period, which we may call E (meaning thereby the portion of time during which what we call processes of evolution are possible), there is a considerable, but still not an extreme asfffresa- tion of its matter, and yet a considerable, though not an extreme retention of energy of position on the part of its constituent masses. During this time suns and systems NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 327 form, stars are hot, and planetary life may, as on our earth, be possible. Before this period lies an endless time P, a past when aggregation was small, but when there were nebulae, meteor swarms, yes, if you go far enough back, separated molecules. These had much energy of position, or of motion, or of both. They had not yet, on the aver- age, converted much of it into heat. There were in those times no processes of evolution possible. Then beyond and after the time E there is to lie an endless future F, wherein once more the matter is aggregated but cold, the energy is dispersed through space in the ether, and what we call evolution is over. The result is an absolute divi- sion of infinite time into the three parts : — < P I E I F > and this division shall be not merely our private and finite interpretation of the thing, but the truth of nature. The world of high temperatures, of large and rapidly condens- ing masses, of planets and suns, of all the complex nat- ural processes, electrical, magnetic, chemical, connected with the life of solar systems, — this world is an excep- tion in the wastes of infinite time. P contains nothing of the sort. F contains nothing of the sort. Only the select region E, of the temporal process, gives birth to such things. Now a natural process that is essentially confined to one part of infinite time, and that finds no place elsewhere, is the real anomaly with which we have so far to deal. We wanted to conceive nature as one process. We have really conceived it as a drama in three acts, essentially separate in physical character from one another, despite the continuity of motions that joins them. This anomaly needs, at all events, further scrutiny. This is an odd world that we have got ourselves into. How odd, we shall in some measure comprehend only after I have taxed your patience with yet one more subtlety, to which I now invite your brief, but very careful attention. 828 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. III. Whatever other difficulties this conceived world may or may not contain, it is sure that its boundlessness in time, and the fashion of its presence in boundless space, are of a sort very different from those which we before as- cribed to the conceived simple gravitative system consist- ing of two bodies. In the latter world, namely, there was always going on a certain cyclical process of one fixed type. The sun and its conceived planet were somehow there in space. Looking back as far as we liked, we should always find the pair occupying some one of the determinate relative positions that they pass through during their endlessly repeated cycles. Looking back- wards or forwards, therefore, we should not be driven hj any special physical problems of this conceived world to puzzle ourselves about the sense in which there is any real infinity of space and time at all. It is true, as every- body has heard, that ther§ are obvious and serious difficul- ties in the way of conceiving how space and time are to be really infinite actualities, — how, off yonder, there can actually exist parts of space infinitely remote from us, or how, looking backwards, we can say that there ever did occur events an infinitely long time ago. But now, as we see, the world of our closed cycle of planet revolving about sun suggests by no marked physical peculiarity of its processes any question about this reality of infinite space and infinite time as such. We have called its exis- tence boundless in time. We mean by that only that its supposed existence would seem to be as endless as is time, — not less so, not more so. If there is any trouble about conceiving of infinite time, that is the fault of time, not of this simple mechanical rhythm of planet swinging about sun. Whatever endless time means, that the rhythm of this conceived simple system is adequate to fill. Even so, too, in case of space. We have supposed NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 329 our sun and planet to be alone in boundless space. Just •what an actually boundless space is, it is hard to define. One soon comes to suspect, when one tries a definition, that one is dealing with a self-contradictory notion. But be that as it may, the conceived sun and planet, there to- gether in space, require space to exist in, but have by hypothesis no physical relations to infinite space, do not trouble themselves, as it were, about whether space is in- finite or no. If a really infinite space can exist, then the sun and planet can be in it ; but for their physical rela- tions they require only the finite bit of space within their own masses and within the planet's orbit. The existence of such a system, then, is to be called essentially bound- less in time just because its physical properties drive us to no assumptions about what boundless time is and means, but are processes that, as being rhythmical and self-com- pleted, arouse no question as to how or when they could have begun, and are therefore boundless in whatever sense time itself proves to be boundless. This same existence is again intelligible as a conceived fact in boundless space, because, whatever boundless space means, this process, as being a definite and limited one, could find its place in such a space. But now (and here is the important point), the world of the " running-down " energy, and of the endlessly consoli- dating matter, differs from this simple world of the sun and planet, in that its existence has, as conceived, an essen- tially physical relation to an actually infinite space and time, so that its processes cannot be conceived as bound- less in time, merely because they suggest to us, like the sun and planet, no possible beginning ; but can only be conceived as boundless by first meeting and overcoming all the difficulties as to an actually infinite space and time. Infinite space and time as such become, in such a theory, matters, not of dim possibility, but rather parts of a phys- ical hypothesis. They render this physical hypothesis. 330 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. therefore, peculiarly hard to conceive with congruity. This is no place for dwelling in full upon what these diffi- culties about infinite space and time really are. I am not here setting forth at length a philosophy, but only sug- gesting one. What I have to point out, however, may be indicated by returning to a former analogy. I have said that this world, where all the processes take the one direc- tion towards the consolidation of matter, is very unlike the simple and rhythmical world of the conceived sun and planet. What I now have to point out is that this our world of the endlessly consolidating- matter, if taken as au absolutely real world, would much resemble in one feature that other conceived world where the elephant rested on the tortoise. The trouble with that world was that support was assumed to be needed, and yet none was ever defined. The trouble with this world is that the store of available energy at any moment, lacking both permanency in itself and any tendency to get, through rhythmic processes, a periodic restoration of its previous quantity, sends us backwards endlessly in time for a definition of the very physical process and constitution to which its present quantity shall have been due. Now some sort of endless regress in time is in one sense forced upon us by every physical process. The simple rhythm of the sun and planet also sent us back endlessly into time ; not in order that we should find out what sort of process it was (for that we learned from any one cy- cle), but only in order that we should see how such a process as that could not be conceived to have a physical beginning. But this process of the endlessly consolidating world, as Clifford defines it, sends us back into time much as the earth, elephant and tortoise series would send us off into space. Would it be any answer to an objector to say, in case of the elephant and tortoise series : — Oh, the tortoise, too, is supported by another creature, say a giant ; and he by a tree ; that by something else ; and so on ad NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 331 infinitum ? No, for thus no support would to all infinity ever begin to be explained. Even so, although a perfectly rhythmical and complete physical process can easily, with- out incongruity, be regarded as unbounded when we look backwards, — a boundless regress where, on the other hand, all the character of the process changes as we go backwards, and changes, wholly without rhythm or any sort of reversal of type, in one general direction, does and must involve incongruity. What incongruity may now be finally and succinctly pointed out. Any moment of time, however remote, must actually have been passed through in order that our con- solidating world should have reached its present state. To any such past moment, would correspond some actual physical state of our supposed world. Far back in time its state would have been one of greater and greater dis- integration. Passing to the limit we can say that our hypothesis would suppose, (1) that at an infinite past time the particles of matter now together in the stars must have been infinitely distant from one another ; and (2) that, since every state, even the present one, presup- poses and demands all the previous states of this un- rhythmical process as physically necessary antecedents, the present state of the universe could not be unless that antecedent state of the mutually infinite remoteness of its parts actually did precede. The idea of infinite remoteness, as being an actual physical fact, is, however, notoriously hard to conceive. It is one thing to say that our space is such that, however far you go out into its depths, you could always go further. To mention that character of space is merely to state a fact of our space conception, — a fact that nobody has any trouble to conceive. It is quite another thing to try to conceive a state of the world in which there are actu- ally two particles of matter that shall be an infinite num- ber of leagues apart. The conception of the boundless- 332 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. ness of space is, in the first case, a mere expression of our actual failure to conceive of a boundary. This failure is a fact of immediate observation for our consciousness. But if I say, in the second case : There are, in a certain state of the world, two particles of matter, p and q, and the distance between these two particles is an infinite dis tance, I contradict myself. For the line pq which joins these particles must by hypothesis end in one direction at ■p and in the other direction at q, — in other words must be finite. And yet our present hypothesis as to the real world demands of us the assertion that such a contradictory state of things must have been real in order that the present state of the world should have come to pass. Clifford himself, in stating the hypothesis, avoids our present incongruity by saying only that, in case of the endlessly consolidating world, the behavior of things is such that if we go back as far as ever we like, we shall find the particles of matter further and further apart. But unfortunately such a statement does not exhaust the difficulty in case this seeming process has always been an absolutely real one. Fixing our attention once more on two particles, p and q, we see that, by the hypothesis, at a time (^i) they were a certain distance apart (c?i), and that an earlier time (t^^ they were yet further apart (say a dis- tance c?2)» ^-nd so on indefinitely. But now in order that they should reach the distance apart that we have called (?i, they must before have been actually at the distance from another that we have called d^. Passing to the limit, then, we have to say that in order to reach the less dis- tances they must universally have been jf?rsi at the greater distances, so that unless one presupposes the greater as real, and so at the limit, the infinite distance as actually precedent, the finite distances cannot have been reached. It is n't merely the case, then, that we are dealing with an hypothesis of a process that, however far we choose to NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 333 follow it, proves to be for our consciousness, and from our point of view, unlimited. The trouble is that unless we first conceive the unlimited distances as real, the limited distances can never be reached. Therefore, if the process is what it seems to be, namely, an absolutely real one, the unlimited distances must have been real. Our infinite in this case is n't the indefinite beyond that we do not attain, however far back we go. It is the impossible that yet must have been actually and absolutely attained hefore any of the states of the world that we experience could have been reached. Only by passing through this im- possible infinite distance from one another, can the parti- cles p and q have reached the conceivable finite distances from one another. The parallel between this supposed real world and that of the elephant and tortoise is now fairly plain. The true supporter of the elephant-tortoise earth must, if he exists at all, be infinitely remote and yet real. Without him elephant and tortoise, by hypothesis, could not sup- port anything, being themselves unsupported. Even so, the true antecedent of our present physical world must, on Clifford's hypothesis, be a state in which the space relations of the smallest particles of matter were relations of infinite remoteness from one another. Dropping out the consideration of the infinite time, we can then say in absolute terms that, on this hypothesis, there was for- merly a real state of the world in which its ultimate par- ticles were at infinite distances from' one another. Is this not as if we said of the elephant and tortoise : There is, at an infinite distance, that which supports the whole series and them ? I repeat, upon the more technical aspect of the difficul- ties regarding infinite space and time, I have not here further to dwell. What we have found is simply this : — 1. There are possible physical processes that you can conceive as universalized, as essentially boundless in time. 334 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. as existent in boundless space, without any effort to define what the positive nature of a really infinite time and space are. Such processes are the ones known as " cycli- cal." In case of these processes, the definition of one cycle involves the description of all. A " cyclical " physi- cal process, conceived as isolated in space, could not change its character through any physical cause. How- ever long, therefore, you followed it forwards or back- wards, you would find only the same thing repeated. In this conception there is nothing difficult. Such a process you would call essentially endless ; meaning thereby that whatever endless time really means, and whatever its ulti- mate nature turns out to be, the processes in question would be adequate to that endlessness. Of such processes our supposed sun and planet example is an illustration. There is no incongruity involved in universalizing such processes. 2. But there are, on the other hand, possible physical processes that you cannot thus universalize, without pre- supposing infinite space and time as being themselves, in all their infinity, elements in the definition of certain states of the physical process in question. Of such phys- ical processes the world of the elephant and tortoise series, and the world of Clifford's hypothesis, are possible examples, so soon as you suppose them to be not seeming but genuinely real worlds. Common sense will at once say that as we have no notion of infinite space and time as actual physical wholes, we can have no right thus to universalize such processes, in case we meet with special examples of them in our experience. Philosophy goes deeper, and declares that thus to universalize such physi- cal process involves us in incongruity, involves the presup- position of a real past state of the world whose very defi- nition is self-contradictory. The result, so far, is that the world of the endlessly con- solidating matter can't be the ultimately real world, but NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 335 must be only a seeming world whose anomalous character is due to our private and human point of view. Seen as we see it, the empirical truth about matter and energy must be only the show of a deeper truth. This apparent law of the endless consolidation of the universe must be only a fragmentary aspect. These stars and " intertwined spirals " and " convoluted windings " of stars, these hypo- thetical molecules that have been forever falling nearer and nearer together, this process that has been forever taking one direction without reaching as yet its goal, — all these things must belong to the show of reality. The substance, the soul of it all, must lie behind. The real world process cannot thus be essentially a paradox, essen- tially incomplete, fundamentally absurd. It must have at least as much unity and self-consistency as a " cyclical " physical process. When we see it as we do, in this ragged and unintelligible shape, that must be because, in our ex- perience, we are but playing with the "pebbles on the beach." The " ocean of ultimate reality and truth " must lie beyond. In all the foregoing I have not wished to create diffi- culties ; I have merely found them where they exist. Nor have I wished to make light of the world of our modern realism. On the contrary, as I repeat, those who study this world most devotedly are often the first to acknow- ledge not only its mystery, but its probable fragmentari- ness, its suggestion of a hidden truth beyond. " Unknow- able," some investigators call this real world on account of such paradoxes. It is, however, precisely the men who thus call reality unknowable, who seem to me to make light of the serious business of science. What one learns from such puzzles is not that our scientific experience is untrue, but that it is n't the revealer of the whole truth, — not that matter and energy and their laws are illusions, but that they are partial revelations only of what, seen from a higher point of view, would have to get the unity 336 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. and completeness that our human point of view so far lacks. These puzzles, then, do not turn us away from the world of science ; they rather encourage us to philoso- phize as to the meaning of the presuppositions that lie be- neath science. If you find a significant limitation in your knowledge, philosophy bids you scrutinize the bases of your knowledge to see what in the human point of view it is that is the source of this limitation. Clifford, whose way of stating the hypothesis of the law of endless consolidation we have been criticising, was him- self one of the first to insist, although for other reasons, upon the probable inadequacy of this hypothesis. Him- self one of the most admirable minds of recent British thought, he was restlessly at work, during his brief career, at the task of criticising the fuijdamental postulates of science. That the laws of physics and even of geometry are probably not ultimate truths about the nature of things, he used to argue with all the clearness of the ma- thematician and all the reflective skill of the born specu- lator. Our space and time, with their paradoxical infini- ties, he used to regard as very suspicious appearances. In criticising him I have therefore, after all, only borrowed certain of his own methods of thinking. He was his own keenest critic. He dwelt on the borderland of philosophy. It is a source of deep regret 'that he never lived to enter into that land with the powers which he had been training so skillfully. He would there have proved himself a great conqueror. IV. The considerations of the foregoing discussion must have been wearisome enough in their abstractness. I hasten to suggest their more concrete bearings. The problem of the outer order, as we conceive it in these modern days, is the problem of the true relation of nature and evolution. The question of the previous dis- cussion has been only a highly abstract formulation of NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 33T this problem. The seeming world, as we find it in space and time, is one whose matter and energy are permanent in quantity, while their distribution is endlessly changing. The changes of distribution going on about us on this planet have been, for what we call a long time, favorable to evolution. These same changes will, however, so far as we can see, lead to the ultimate extinction of evolution on our planet. The question arises. Does the same relation between the nature of the physical world and the evolu- tion, the progres.s, of the significant features of its various parts, hold true universally? The heavens, too, in their wholeness, suggest to us, from one point of view, a vast process of cosmical evolution. Examined more carefully, however, their physical phenomena seem to show that this evolution is but a transient stage of the endless world- process. The further question arises hereupon : Can we form a conception of the world -process in its true and entire nature, and so make out how it is actually related to what we call evolution ? To this question we have found thus far only such an answer as suggests that the true world, whose mere show is embodied in these physi- cal events now before our eyes, is at all events very in- adequately represented by them. For the solution of our problem, if it is to find any, we must search deeper. In what direction we have to search, our argument it- self very readily suggests. It is plain that in what we said about the incongruity of such physical conceptions as involve the existence of an actually infinite space and time, and of actually infinite distances between bodies, we have touched close upon those considerations concerning the objectivity of space and time themselves which we have now learned to associate with the name of Kant. "What if the foregoing paradoxes of the world of the " running down " energy, and of the endlessly consolidat- ing matter, were due to the fact that we have been try- ing to give an hypothetical account of an absolute world- 338 THE SPIRIT OF MODEEN PHILOSOPHY. process in terms of human forms of conception and of experience ? What if the truly complete world-process does not occur in time at aU, but can only be conceived " under the form of eternity," as Spinoza would have said ? " Such existence," said Spinoza, speaking of eter- nal truths, " cannot be explained by means of continuance or time." What if both the permanent laws and energy of nature on the one hand, and what we know as the pro- cess of evolution on the other, were but the temporal sign of something whose significance is to be othervrise con- ceived ? Doubtful phrases these, one may say ; yet, after all, what more doubtful than the ultimate truth of a physical world in which occur such paradoxical processes as we have been examining ? On the other hand, what more obvious than that if one conceives man as the product of a physical evolution of the type that we have heretofore been discussing, if one says that a planet-crust, at a particular stage of its his- tory, brought forth man, while the heat of a slowly dying sun sustained his life, as it had done the lives of his countless animal ancestors before him, — if one holds all this to be true, then one must indeed look with equal won- der upon the power of such a creature to conceive at all of the real universe, or of the eternal, and upon the naivete, that trusts, without analysis and criticism, his no- tions of space and of time, his natural perceptions of the outer world, as if they were sure to be well-founded. The marvel of marvels, that this being, evolved from inorganic nature, from the stufE and the energy of a cooling solar system, — this mortal bit of mechanism — should after all know, should look forwards and backwards to eternity, and learn so much of the nature that gave him birth, — such a marvel surely calls for a deeper scrutiny. The world where such things appear is surely not what it seems ; and the lesson is that, in the critical study of just this knowinff power of ours, in the scrutiny of our most NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 339 fundamental ideas, is to be found, if anywhere, the key to these mysteries. We have been so far inquiring into this or that truth. Now, more than ever, we see the need of assailing the problem. What is truth itself ? What are our powers to know ? And what validity have our ideas of the world and of its endless life ? And thus we are prepared, by the paradoxes of the outer order, to return for awhile, in order to seek a solu- tion of them, to the recesses of the inner life, there to examine our conceptions of the world once more with a truly philosophical reflectiveness. Does our result so far seem nothing but a sense of the mystery of things ? Then remember at least that, as all modern thought has been teaching us from the start, the outer world is n't merely foreign to us. What we call the dark external universe yonder is, after all, our universe, even when we only go so far as to doubt or to wonder about it. Whatever the success or the failure of this or that idealistic theory, the permanent lesson of modern idealism has been that the inner and the outer worlds must have organic relations. If one of them is the world of the thinker, the other is the object of his thought. Ignorant as he may be of numberless facts in it, it has to echo somehow, even from its remotest heavens, the magic words that utter his deepest beliefs about it. Philosophy promises help, just because, when it speaks of the world whose mystery man's mind longs to penetrate, it also speaks of the mind itself whose nature it is to acknow- ledge, yes, and in acknowledging, just so far to penetrate the mystery. For, as we shall hereafter see, I cannot recognize a rational problem even as a problem, unless I already know a good deal about the object whose nature gives me this problem. What I definitely recognize as unknown must have such a knowable nature as enables me to make sure that it is unknown. An object of my conscious and rational ignorance is still an object, deter- 340 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. mined as such for me by my thought, and so in one aspect known to me, even in order that in some other aspect it may be unknown. Ignorance, if only it be definite igno- rance, is sure to be partial knowledge. In so far as our study has made us aware of the mysteries that are in the world, it has already taught us much about the world. We don't know the precise value of the ratio of the cir- cumference of a circle to its diameter. That is a good example of a rational mystery. For it is a definite, a highly scientific mystery. But see, we don't know this ratio just because we do know enough about the nature of a circle to be sure that this ratio is absolutely unstate- able in any finite form. Well, even so, if philosophy shows us in any definite way how mysterious the world is, that will only be because philosophy will tell us enough about the true nature of the world to make clear to us where the mystery lies. Vague mysteries are the amuse- ment of fools. Precise and rational mysteries are, in one sense, the goal of science. In defining our relation to nature, then, in making clear the issues of science, philo- sophy wiU aid us, not to solve all mysteries, as a dream might pretend to do, but to know where the deepest prob- lems of the world lie, and thereby to show us something of the very essence of the reality which we have a right to find obscure. It is in this spirit that I shall in the next lecture under- take to give you, in brief, my reasons for holding that an idealistic interpretation of the physical world, and in par- ticular the theory of one absolute Self as the truth em- bodied vsx both nature and mind, is a doctrine that, with- out any presumptuous effort to transcend our human powers, may be explained and established. LECTUEE XI. REALITY AND IDEALISM : — THE INNER WORLD AND ITS MEANING. Such brief essays as I am to embody in these untech- nical discussions must needs fail somewhere. I shall be glad, at all events, if they do not fail in frank state- ment of opinion. I do not want to weary you with bare assurances ; I do not want to leave you with nothing to remember but my own word that in case I had time, I would expound my meaning and my reason for it ; but I do want, above all things, in so far as I see any glimpse of truth, to risk in your presence a plain confession of it. If I must come short of the purpose of these lectures, let it be in technical exactness, since once for all that belongs elsewhere ; but let me not fail of showing you that I have convictions, such as they are, whether I can make you agree with them or not. I do not know how you have found it, but for my part, as I have read the writ- ings of some of the modern authors whose intelligence and caution I most value, I am frequently tormented with their tenderness of conscience about risking a state- ment of their personal beliefs. They have been driven to take this attitude, no doubt, through the warning which is given them by the traditional dogmatism of certain the- ologians. Longing to escape from the over-assurance and intolerance of such, the writers to whom I now refer lay more stress upon liberality, caution, patience, and learn- ing, than even upon courage. I hope that I do not under- value liberality or caution, and I am sure that I long for vastly more learning and patience than I shall ever pos- 342 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. sess ; but, after all, it is what a man by chance believes, not what he does not believe, that enables him to be of service to his fellows as a thinker; and whatever frag- ment of knowledge one may possess will surely remain undiscovered unless he sometime ventures assertion of his temperament for whatever it may happen to be worth. The business of the present lecture is to tell you in what sense and for what reasons I am an idealist. In the next following lectures, returning to the study of the outer order, I shall try to explain how, in consequence, I ven- ture to conceive our human relationships to that physical world from which we have sprung and of which we are a part. In my concluding lecture I shall set forth what practical consequences I conceive to flow from my philo- sophy concerning that which constitutes the vocation of man. You will not require me to say that, as to all these three matters, I must needs be not only very fragmentary and unpersuasive, but also highly unoriginal. Other investigators may deal with novelties. It is the fate of the philosophical student to be cut off, by his very task, from all but a very relative and imperfect sort of original- ity, fie is simply making articulate the life which he is privileged to enjoy. He invents nothing ; he only con- fesses. Prophets create ideals ; he critically expounds them. Poets, whose relation to passion is more direct and momentary, and therefore less universal, less abstract, less critical, less systematic, have for this very reason far more of the inventive about them. The student of philo- sophy is privileged to survey, to contemplate life from without, to reword. Others create ; he observes. Con- sequently, were a philosophy original, it would be ipso facto untrue. The doctrines of philosophy are borrowed from passion. If, for instance, idealism is true at all, that is because all of you are already idealists. The phi- losopher only tells you so. He does not make you so. The fashion of my exposition in the following lectures may REALITY AND IDEALISM. 343 have this or that of my own about it. The matter is as old as it is true ; or, if it is not old, then that is because it is not true. But in still another sense is this discussion unoriginal. The time is long past when really intelligent thinkers sought to do anything outside of intimate relations to the history of thought. It stiU happens, indeed, that even in our day some lonesome student will occasionally publish a philosophical book that he regards as entirely revolu- tionary, as digging far beneath all that thought has ever yet accomplished, and as beginning quite afresh the labors of human reflection. Such men, when they appear nowa- days, as once in a while they do appear, are anachro- nisms ; and you will always find them either ignorant of the history of the very subject that they propose to revo- lutionize or incapable of reading this history intelligently. What they give you is always an old doctrine, more or less disguised in a poorly novel terminology, and much worse thought out than it has already been thought out, time after time, in the history of speculation. It is one of the defects of the current liberalism in matters of opin- ion that it does encourage, only too often, this sort of thinking ; and the sole corrective of the error is a certain amount of philosophical study of an historical sort before one begins to print one's speculations. Now, as you know, I have been fearing such unhistori- cal fashions of procedure so much that I have been devot- ing myself wholly, during the first part of these lectures, to telling a story, and adding occasional criticisms. It fol- lows that I have no doctrine to teach save the one that this history has taught me. Personal conviction, then, offered for whatever it is worth, — a reflective confession of my own temperament — but all this reflection guided throughout by the light which the history of thought gives me about what is really human and worth confessing in this temperament of mine, — such must be the busi 344 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. ness of tbese concluding lectures. For how it is that a man can thus be at once merely the critic of his own deeper nature, and still merely the mouthpiece for the telling of the lesson that he has learned from the history of thought, you wiU now after aU these discussions surely be able to see. The philosophical student confesses his own ideals ; for what others has he to confess ? He learns, however, from history what amongst his ideals have any permanent human value ; for the history of thought is the school in which alone one can learn to humanize one's reflective processes, and to distinguish the accidental from the essential in one's temperament. I am very sorry that I cannot state my idealism in a simple and unproblematic form; but the nature of the doc- trine forbids. I must first of all puzzle you with a para- dox, by saying that my idealism has nothing in it which contradicts the principal propositions of what is nowa- days called scientific Agnosticism, in so far, namely, as this agnosticism relates to that, world of facts of experi- ence which man sees and feels and which science studies. Of such agnosticism we learned something in our last lecture. But I must go on to say that the fault of our modern so-called scientific agnosticism is only that it has failed to see how the world in space and time, the world of causes and effects, the world of matter and of finite mind, whereof we know so little and long to know so much, is a very subordinate part of reality. It will be my effort to explain how we do know something very deep and vital about what reality is in its innermost essence. My explanation will indeed be very poor and fragmentary, but the outcome of it will be the very highly paradoxical assertion that while the whole finite world is full of dark problems for us, there is absolutely nothing, not even the immediate facts of our sense at this moment, REALITY AND IDtAL^SM. 345 SO clear, so certain, as the existence and the unity of that infinite conscious Self of whom we have now heard so much. About the finite world, as I shall assert, we know in general only what experience teaches us and science records. There is nothing in the universe absolutely sure except the Infinite. That will be the curious sort of agnosticism that T shall try in a measure to expound. Of the infinite we know that it is one and conscious. Of the finite things, that is, of the particular fashions of be- havior in terms of which the infinite Consciousness gives himself form and plays the world-game, we know only what we experience. Yet doubtless it will at once seem to you that in one important respect my announced doc- trine is in obvious conflict with a wise agnosticism. For is it not confessedly anthro^orphic in its character? And is not anthropomorphism precisely the defect that modern thinkers have especially taught us to avoid ? Anthropomorphism was the savage view, which led primitive man to interpret extraordinary natural events as expressions of the will of beings like himself. How- ever he came by his fancy, whether by first believing in the survival of the ghosts of his ancestors, and then con- ceiving them as the agents who produced lightning, and who moved the sun, or by a simple and irreducible instinct of his childish soul, leading him to see himself in nature, and to regard it all as animate ; in any case he made the bad induction, created the gods in his own image, and then constituted them as the causes of all natural events. His ignorant self-multiplication we must avoid. Shall our limited inner experience be the only test of what sorts of causation may exist in the world? What we know is that events happen to us, and happen in a certain fixed order. We do not know the ultimate causes of these events. If we lived on some other planet, doubtless causes of a very novel sort would become manifest to us, and our whole view of nature would change. It is self- 346 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHy. contradictory, it is absurd, to make our knowledge tbe measure of all tkat is ! The real world that causes our experience is a great aj, whoUy unknown to us except in a few select phenomena, which happen to fall within our ken. How wild to guess about the mysteries of the infi- nite ! But now this agnosticism, too, as I assure you, I ar- dently and frankly agree with, so far as it concerns itself with precisely that world in which it pretends to move, and to which it undertakes to apply itself. I have no desire to refute it. Touching all the world in space and time beyond experience, in the scientific sense of the term experience, I repeat that I know nothing positive. I know, for instance, nothing about the stratification of Saturn, or the height of the mountains on the other side of the moon. For the same reason, also, I know nothing of any anthropomorphic daemons or gods here or there in nature, acting as causes of noteworthy events. Of these I know nothing, because science has at present no need fof such hypotheses. There may be such beings ; there doubt- less are in nature many curious phenomena; but what curiosities further experience might show us, we must wait for experience to point out ere we shaU know. I re- peat, in its own world, agnosticism is in all these respects in the right. For reasons that you will later see, I object indeed to the unhappy word unknowable. In the world of experience, as in the world of abstracter problems, there are infinitely numerous things unknown to us. But there is no rational question that could not somehow be answered by a sufficiently wise person. There are things relatively unknowable for us, not things absolutely so. There are numberless experiences that I shall never have, in my individual capacity; and there are numberless problems that I shall never solve. But the only absolute insoluble mysteri.es, as I shall hereafter point out to you, would be the questions that it is essentially absurd to ask. REALITY AND IDEALISM. 347 Still, not to quarrel over words, what many agnostics mean by unknowable is simply the stubbornly unknown, and, in that sense, I fuUy agree and indeed insist that human knowledge is an island in the vast ocean of mys- tery, and that numberless questions, which it deeply con- cerns humanity to answer, wiU never be answered so long as we are in our present limited state, bound to one planet, and left for our experience to our senses, our emotions, and our moral activities. But, if I thus accept this agnostic view of the world of experience, what chance is left, you will say, for anything like an absolute system of philosophy? In what sense can I pretend to talk of idealism, as giving any final view of the whole nature of things ? In what sense, above all, can I pretend to be a theist, and to speak of the absolute Self as the very essence and life of the whole world ? For is this not mere anthropomorphism ? Is n't it making our private human experience the measure of all reality ? Is n't it making hypotheses in terms of our experience, about things beyond our experience ? Is n't it making our petty notions of causation a basis for judging of the nature of the unknown first cause ? Is n't it another case of what the savage did when he saw his gods in the thun- der-clouds, because he conceived that causes just like his own angry moods must be here at work ? Surely, at best, this is sentiment, faith, mystical dreaming. It can't be philosophy. I answer, just to change our whole view of the deeper reality of things, just to turn away our attention from any iUusive search for first causes in the world of experience, just to get rid of fanciful faith about the gods in outer nature, and just to complete the spiritual task of agnosti- cism by sending us elsewhere than to phenomena for the true and inner nature of things, — for just this end was the whole agony of modern philosophy endured by those \ who have wrestled with its problems. Is any one agnos- 348 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. tic about the finite world ? Then I more. I know no- thing of any first cause in the world of appearances yon- der. I see no gods in the thunder clouds, no Keplerian angels carrying the planets in conic sections around the sun ; I imagine no world-maker far back in the ages, beginning the course of evolution. Following Laplace, I need, once more, no such hypothesis. I await the ver- dict of science about all facts and events in physical nature. And yet that is just why I am an idealist. It ) is my agnosticism about the causes of my experience that makes me search elsewhere than amongst causes for the meaning of experience. The outer world which the agnostic sees and despairs of knowing is not the region where I look for light. The living God, whom idealism knows, is not the first cause in any physical sense, at all. No possible experience could find him as a thing amongst things or show any outer facts that would prove his exist- ence. He is n't anywhere in space or in time. He makes from without no worlds. He is no hypothesis of empiri- cal science. But he is all the more real for that, and his existence is all the surer. For causes are, after aU, very petty and subordinate truths in the world, and facts, phenomena, as such, could never demonstrate any impor- tant spiritual truth. The absolute Self simply does n't cause the world. The very idea of causation belongs to things of finite experience, and is only a mythological term when applied to the real truth of things. Not be- cause I interpret the causes of my experience in terms of my limited ideas of causation is the universe of God a live thing to me, but for a far deeper reason ; for a rea- son which deprives this world of agnosticism of all sub- stantiality and converts it once for all into mere show. I am ignorant of this world just because it is a show-world. And this deeper reason of the idealist I may as well first suggest in a form which may perhaps seem just now even more mysterious than the problem which I solve by REALITY AND IDEALISM. 349 means of it. My reason for believing that there is one ab- solute World-Self, who embraces and is aU reality, whose consciousness includes and infinitely transcends our own, in whose unity all the laws of nature and all the mysteries of experience must have their solution and their very being, — is simply that the profoundest agnosticism which you can possibly state in any coherent fashion, the deepest doubt which you can any way formulate about the world or the things that are therein, already presupposes, implies, ; demands, asserts, the existence of such a World-Self. The agnostic, I say, already asserts this existence — unconsciously, of course, as a rule, but none the less inev- itably. For, as we shall find, there is no escape from the infinite Self except by self-contradiction. Ignorant as I am about first causes, I am at least clear, therefore, about the Self. If you deny him, you already in denying affirm him. You reckon ill when you leave him out. Him when you fly, he is the wings. He is the doubter and the doubt. You in vain flee from his presence. The wings of the morning will not aid you. Nor do I mean all this now as any longer a sort of mysticism. This truth is, I assure you, simply a product of dry logic. When I try to tell you about it in detail, I shall weary you by my wholly unmystical analysis of commonplaces. Here is, in fact, as we shall soon find, the very presupposition of presuppositions. You cannot stir, nay, you cannot even stand still in thought without it. Nor is it an unfamiliar idea. On the contrary, philosophy finds trouble in bring- ing it ito your consciousness merely because it is so famil- iar.. When they told us in childhood that we could not fee God just because he was everywhere, just because his Timnipresence gave us no chance to discern him and to fix our eyes upon him, they told us a deep truth in allegori- cal fashion. The infinite Self, as we shall learn, is actu- ally asserted by you in every proposition you utter, is there at the heart, so to speak, of the very multiplication 350 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. table. The Self is so little a thing merely guessed at as the unknowable source of experience, that already, in the very least of daily experiences you unconsciously know him as something present. This, as we shall find, is the deepest tragedy of our finitude, that continually he comes to his own, and his own receive him not, that he becomes flesh in every least incident of our lives ; whilst we, gazing with wonder upon his world, search here and there for first causes, look for miracles, and beg him to show us the Father, since that alone will suffice us. No wonder that thus we have to remain agnostics. " Hast thou been so long time with me, and yet hast thou not knoivn me ? " Such is the eternal answer of the Logos to every doubting question. Seek him not as an outer hypothesis to explain experience. Seek him not anywhere yonder in the clouds. He is no " thing in itself." But for all that, experience contains him. He is the reality, the soul of it. " Did not our heart burn within us while he talked with us by the way ? " And, as we shall see, he does not talk merely to our hearts. He reveals himself to our coolest scrutiny. II. But enough of speculative boasting. Coming to closer quarters with my topic, I must remind you that idealism has two aspects. It is, for the first, a kind of analysis of the world, an analysis which so far has no absolute char- acter about it, but which undertakes, in a fashion that might be acceptable to any skeptic, to examine what you mean by all the things, whatever they are, that you be- lieve in or experience. This idealistic analysis consists merely in a pointing out, by various' devices, that the world of your knowledge, whatever it contains, is through and through such stuff as ideas are made of, that you , never in your life believed in anything definable hut ideas, that, as Berkeley put it, "this whole choir, of heaven and furniture of earth " is nothing for any of us but a system KEALITY AND IDEALISM. 351 of ideas which govern our belief and our conduct. Such idealism has numerous statements, interpretations, embod- iments : forms part of the most various systems and expe- riences, is consistent with Berkeley's theism, with Fichte's ethical absolutism, with Professor Huxley's agnostic em- piricism, with ClifEord's mind-stuff theory, with countless other theories that have used such idealism as a part of their scheme. In tiiis aspect idealism is already a little puzzling to our natural consciousness, but it becomes quickly familiar, in fact almost commonplace, and seems after all to alter our practical faith or to solve our deeper problems very little. The other aspect of idealism is the one which gives us 1 our notion of the absolute Self. To it the first is only I preparatory. This second aspect is the one which from Kant, until the present time, has formed the deeper prob- lem of thought. Whenever the world has become more conscious of its significance, the work of human philoso- phy will be, not nearly en^ed (Heaven forbid an end!), but for the first time fairly begun. For then, in criti- cally estimating our passions, we shall have some true* sense of whose passions they are. I begin with the first and the less significant aspect of idealism. Our world, I say, whatever it may contain, is such stuff as ideas are made of. This preparatory sort of idealism is the one that, as I just suggested, Berkeley made prominent, and, after a fashion familiar. I must state it in my own way, although one in vain seeks to attain novelty in illustrating so frequently described a view. Here, then, is our so real world of the senses, full of light and warmth and sound. If anything could be solid and external, surely, one at first will say, it is this world. Hard facts, not mere ideas, meet us on every hand. Ideas any one can mould as he wishes. Not so facts. In idea socialists can dream out Utopias, disappointed lovers can 352 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. imagine themselves successful, beggars can ride horses, wanderers can enjoy the fireside at home. In the realm of facts, society organizes itself as it must, rejected lovers stand for the time defeated, beggars are alone with their wishes, oceans roll drearily between home and the wan- derer. Yet this world of fact is, after all, not entirely stubborn, not merely hard. The strenuous will can mould facts. • We can form our world, in part, according to our ideas. Statesmen influence the social order, lovers woo afresh, wanderers find the way home. But thus to alter the world we must work, and just because the laborer is worthy of his hire, it is well that the real world should thus have such fixity of things as enables us to anticipate what facts will prove lasting, and to see of the travail of our souls when it is once done. This, then, is the pre- supposition of life, that we work in a real world, where house-walls do not melt away as in dreams, but stand firm against the winds of many winters, and can be felt as real. We do not wish to find facts wholly plastic ; we want them to be stubborn, if only the stubbornness be not altogether unmerciful. Our will makes constantly a sort of agreement with the world, whereby, if the world will continually show some respect to the will, the will shall consent to be strenuous in its industry. Interfere with the reality of my world, and you therefore take the very life and heart out of my will. The reality of the world, however, when thus defined in terms of its stubbornness, its firmness as against the will that has not conformed to its laws, its kindly rigidity in preserving for us the fruits of our labors, — such real- ity, I say, is stiU something wholly unanalyzed. In what does this stubbornness consist? Surely, many different sorts of reality, as it would seem, may be stubborn. Matter is stubborn when it stands in hard walls against us, or rises in vast mountain ranges before the path-find- ing explorer. But minds can be stubborn also. The REALITY AND IDEALISM, 353 lonely wanderer, who watches by the seashore the waves that roll between him and his home, talks of cruel facts, material barriers that, just because they are material, and not ideal, shall be the irresistible foes of his longing heart. " In wish," he says, " I am with my dear ones, but alas, wishes cannot cross oceans ! Oceans are mate- rial facts, in the cold outer world. Would that the world of the heart were all ! " But alas ! to the rejected*lover the world of the heart is all, and that is just his woe. Were the barrier between him and his beloved only made of those stubborn material facts, only of walls or of oceans, how lightly might his will erelong transcend them all ! Matter stubborn ! Outer nature cruelly the foe of ideas ! Nay, it is just an idea that now opposes him, — just an idea, and that, too, in the mind of the maiden he loves. But in vain does he calls this stubborn bit of dis- dain a merely ideal fact. No flint was ever more definite in preserving its identity and its edge than this disdain may be. Place me for a moment, then, in an external world that shall consist whoUy of ideas, — the ideas, namely, of other people about me, a world of maidens who shall scorn me, of old friends who shall have learned to hate me, of angels who shall condemn me, of God who shall judge me. In what piercing north winds, amidst what fields of ice, in the labyrinths of what tangled forests, in the depths of what thick-walled dungeons, on the edges of what tremendous precipices, should I be more gen- uinely in the presence of stubborn and unyielding facts than in that conceived world of ideas ! So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas. On the contrary, as every teacher knows, the ideas of the people are often the most difficult of facts to influence. We were wrong, then, when we said that whilst matter was stubborn, ideas could be moulded at pleasure. Ideas are often the most impla- cable of facts. Even my own ideas, the facts of my own 354 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. inner life, may cruelly decline to be plastic to my wish. The wicked will that refuses to be destroyed, — what rock has often more consistency for our senses than this will has for our inner consciousness ! The king, in his soli- loquy in " Hamlet," — in what an unyielding world of hard facts does he not move ! and yet they are now only inner facts. The fault is past ; he is alone with his con- science. " What rests ? Try what repentance can. What can it not ? Yet what can it, when one cannot repent ? O wretched state ! O bosom black as death ! limed soul, that, struggling to be free, Art more engaged I " No, here are barriers worse than any material chains. The world of ideas has its own horrible dungeons and chasms. Let those who have refuted Bishop Berkeley's idealism by the wonder why he did not walk over every precipice or into every fire if these things existed only in his idea, let such, I say, first try some of the fires and the precipices of the inner life, ere they decide that dangers cease to be dangers as soon as they are called ideal, or even subjectively ideal in me. Many sorts of reality, then, may be existent at the heart of any world of facts. But this bright and beauti- ful sense-world of ours, — what, amongst these many possi- ble sorts of reality, does that embody? Are the stars and the oceans, the walls and the pictures, real as the maiden's heart is real, — embodying the ideas of somebody, but none the less stubbornly real for that ? Or can we make something else of their reality ? For, of course, that the stars and the oceans, the walls and the pictures have some sort of stubborn reality, just as the minds of our fellows have, our analysis so far does not for an instant think of denying. Our present question is, what sort of reality ? Consider, then, in detail, certain a spects of the realit y KEALITY AND IDEALISM. 355 that seems to be exegyjlified^n our_sense-world.. The sublimity^ of tHe'^ky, the life and majesty of the ocean, the interest of a picture, — to what sort of real facts do these belong? Evidently here we shall have no question. So far as the sense-world is beautiful, is majestic, is sub- lime, this beauty and dignity exist only for the appreciative observer. If they exist beyond him, they exist only for some other mind, or as the thought and embodied purpose of some universal soul of nature. A man who sees the same world, but who has no eye for the fairness of it, will find all the visible facts, but will catch nothing of their value. At once, then, the sublimity and beauty of the world are thus truths that one who pretends to insight ought to see, and they are truths which have no meaning except for such a beholder's mind, or except as embody- ing the thought of the mind of the world. So here, at least, is so much of the outer world that is ideal, just as j the coin or the jewel or the bank-note or the bond has its value not alone in its physical presence, but in the idea that it symbolizes to a beholder's mind, or to the relatively universal thought of the commercial world. But let us look a little deeper. Surely, if the objects yonder are unideal and outer, odors and tastes and temperatures do not exist in these objects in just the way in which they exist in us. Part of the being of these properties, at least, if not all of it, is ideal and exists for us, or at best is once more the embodiment of the thought or purpose of some world-mind. Ab^ut tastes yon cannot dispute, ■ because they are not only ideal but personal. For the benumbed tongue and palate of diseased bodily condi- tions, all things are tasteless. As for temperatures, a well known experiment will show how the same water may seem cold to one hand and warm to the other. But even so, colors and sounds are at least in part ideal. Their causes may have some other sort of reality; but colors themselves are not in the things, since they change with 356 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. the light that falls on the things, vanish in the dark (whilst the things remained unchanged), and differ for different eyes. And as for sounds, both the pitch and the quality of tones depend for us upon certain interesting peculiarities of our hearing organs, and exist in nature only as voiceless sound-waves trembling through the air. All such sense qualities, then, are ideal. The world yon- der may — yes, must — have attributes that give reasons why these qualities are thus felt by us ; for so we assume. The world yonder may even be a mind that thus expresses its will to us. But these qualities need not, nay, cannot resemble the ideas that are produced in us, unless, indeed, that is because these qualities have place as ideas in some world-mind. Sound-waves in the air are not like our musical sensations ; nor is the symphony as we hear it and feel it any physical property of the strings and the wind instruments ; nor are the ether-vibrations that the sun sends us like our ideas when we see the sun ; nor yet is the flashing of moonlight on the water as we watch the waves a direct expression of the actual truths of fluid motion as the water embodies them. Unless, then, the real physical world yonder is itself the embodiment of some world - spirit's ideas, which he conveys to us, unless it is real only as the maiden's heart is real, namely, as itself a conscious thought, then we have so far but one result : that real world (to repeat one of \ the commonplaces of modern popular science) is in itself, apart from somebody's eyes and tongue and ears and touch, neither colored nor tasteful, neither cool nor warm, neither light nor dark, neither musical nor silent. All these qualities belong to our ideas, being indeed none the less genuine facts for that, but being in so far ideal facts. We must see colors when we look, we must hear music when there is playing in our presence ; but this must is a must that consists in a certain irresistible presence of an idea in us under certain conditions. That this idea must REALITY AND IDEALISM. 357 come is, indeed, a truth as unalterable, once more, as tlie king's settled remorse in Hamlet. But like this remorse, again, it exists as an ideal truth, objective, but through and through objective for somebody, and not apart from anybody. What this truth implies we have yet to see. So far it is only an ideal truth for the beholder, with just the bare possibility that behind it all there is the thought of a world-spirit. And, in fact, so far we must all go to- gether if we reflect. But now, at this point, the Berkeleyan idealist goes one step further. The real outside world that is still left un- explained and unanalyzed after its beauty, its warmth, its odors, its tastes, its colors, and its tones, have been rele- gated to the realm of ideal truths, what do you now mean by calling it real ? No doubt at is known as somehow real, but what is this reality known as being ? If you know that this world is still there and outer, as by hypothesis you know, you are bound to say what this outer character implies for your thought. And here you have trouble. Is the outer world, as it exists outside of your ideas, or of anybody's ideas, something having shape, filling space, possessing solidity, full of moving things ? That would in the first place seem evident. The sound is n't outside of me, but the sound-waves, you say, are. The colors are ideal facts ; but the ether-waves don't need a mind to know them. Warmth is ideal, but the physical fact called heat, this playing to and fro of molecules, is real, and is there apart from any mind. But once more, is this so evident? What do I mean by the shape of anything, or by the size of anything ? Don't I mean just the idea of shape or of size that I am obliged to get under certain circumstances ? What is the meaning of any property that I give to the real outer world ? How can I express that property except in case I think it in terms of my ideas ? As for the sound-waves and the ether-waves, what are they but things ideally conceived to explain the facts 358 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. of nature ? The conceptions have doubtless their truth, but it is an ideal truth. What I mean by saying that the things yonder have shape and size and trembling mole- cules, and that there is air with sound-waves, and ether with light-waves in it, — what I meaw by all this is that experience forces upon me, directly or indirectly, a vast system of ideas, which may indeed be founded in truth beyond me, which in fact must be founded in such truth if my experience has any sense, but which, like my ideas of color and of warmth, are simply expressions of how the world's order must appear to me, and to anybody consti- tuted like me. Above all, is this plain about space. The real things, I say, outside of me, fiU space, and move about in it. But what do I mean by space ? Only a vast sys- tem of ideas which experience and my own mind force upon me. Doubtless these ideas have a validity. They have this validity, that I, at all events, when I look upon the world, am bound to see it in space, as much bound as the king in Hamlet was, when he looked within, to see himself as guilty and unrepentant. But just as his guilt was an idea, — a crushing, an irresistible, an overwhelm- ing idea, — but still just an idea, so, too, the space in which I place my world is one great formal idea of mine. That is just why I can describe it to other people. " It has three dimensions," I say, " length, breadth, depth." I describe each. I form, I convey, I construct, an idea of it through them. I know space, as an idea, very well. I can compute all sorts of unseen truths about the rela- tions of its parts. I am sure that you, too, share this idea. But, then, for all of us alike it is just an idea ; and when we put our world into space, and call it real there, we simply think one idea into another idea, not volun- tarily, to be sure, but inevitably, and yet without leaving the realm of ideas. Thus, all the reality that we attribute to our world, in so far as we know and can tell what we mean thereby, REALITY AND IDEALISM, 359 becomes ideal. There is, in fact, a certain system of ideas, forced upon .us by experience, which we have to use as the guide of our conduct. This system of ideas we can't change by our wish ; it is for us as overwhelming a fact as guilt, or as the bearing of our fellows towards us, but we know it only as such a system of ideas. And we call it the world of matter. John Stuart Mill very well ex- pressed the puzzle of the whole thing, as we have now reached the statement of this puzzle, when he called mat- ter a mass of " permanent possibilities of experience " for each of us. Mill's definition has its faults, but it is a very fair beginning. You know matter as something that either now gives you this idea or experience, or that would give you some other idea or experience under other cir- cumstances. A fire, while it burns, is for you a perma- nent possibility of either getting the idea of an agreeable warmth, or of getting the idea of a bad burn, and you treat it accordingly. A precipice amongst mountains is a permanent possibility of your experiencing a fall, or of your getting a feeling of the exciting or of the sublime in mountain scenery. You have no experience just now of the tropics or of the poles, but both tropical and polar climates exist in your world as permanent possibilities of experience. When you call the sun 92,000,000 miles away, you mean that between you and the sun (that is, between your present experience and the possible experi- ence of the sun's surface) there would inevitably lie the actually inaccessible, but still numerically conceivable series of experiences of distance expressed by the number of miles in question. In short, your whole attitude to- wards the real world may be summed up by saying : " I have experiences now which I seem bound to have, expe- riences of color, sound, and all the rest of my present ideas ; and I am also bound by experience to believe that in case I did certain things (for instance, touched the wall, traveled to the tropics, visited Europe, studied 360 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. physics), I then should get, in a determinate order, de- pendent wholly upon what I had done, certain other expe- riences (for instance, experiences of the wall's solidity, or of a tropical climate, or of the scenes of an European tour, or of the facts of physics)." And this acceptance of actual experience, this belief in possible experience, con- stitutes all that you mean by your faith in the outer world. But, you say. Is not, then, aU this faith of ours after all j well founded ? Isn't there really something yonder that corresponds in fact to this series of experiences in us? j Yes, indeed, there no doubt is. But what if this, which j so shall correspond without us to the ideas within us, what j if this hard and fast reality should itself be a system of \ ideas, outside of our minds but not outside of every mind? | As the maiden's disdain is outside the rejected lover's mind, unchangeable so far for him, but not on that ac- count the less ideal, not the less a fact in a mind, as, to take afresh a former fashion of illustration, the price of a security or the objective existence of this lecture is an ideal fact, but real and external for the individual person, — even so why might not this world beyond us, this " per- manent possibility of experience," be in essence itself a system of ideal experiences of some standard thought of which ours is only the copy ? Nay, must it not be such a system in case it has any reality at all ? For, after all, is n't this precisely what our analysis brings us to ? No- thing whatever can I say about my world yonder that I do not express in terms of mind. What things are, ex- tended, moving, colored, tuneful, majestic, beautiful, holy, what they are in any aspect of their nature, mathematical, logical, physical, sensuously pleasing, spiritually valuable, all this must mean for me only something that I have to express in the fashion of ideas. The more I am to know my world, the more of a mind I must have for the pur- pose. The closer I come to the truth about the things, REALITY AND IDEALISM. 361 the more ideas I get. Is n't it plain, then, that if my world yonder is anything knowable at aU, it must be in and for itself essentially a mental world ? Are my ideas to resemble in any way the world ? Is the truth of my thought to consist in its agreement with reality? And am I thus capable, as common sense supposes, of conform^ ing my ideas to things ? Then reflect. What can, after all, so well agree with an idea as another idea ? To what can things that go on in my mind conform unless it be to another mind ? If the more my mind grows in mental clearness, the nearer it gets to the nature of reality, then surely the reality that my mind thus resembles must be in itself mental. After all, then, would it deprive the world here about me of reality, nay, would it not rather save and assure the reality and the knowableness of my world of experi- ence, if I said that this world, as it exists outside of my mind, and of any other human minds, exists in and for a standard, an universal mind, whose system of ideas sim- ply constitutes the world? Even if I fail to prove that there is such a mind, do I not at least thus make plausi- ble that, as I said, our world of common sense has no fact in it which we cannot interpret in terms of ideas, so that this world is throughout such stuff as ideas are made of ? To say this, as you see, in no wise deprives our world of its due share of reality. If the standard mind knows now that its ideal fire has the quality of burning those who touch it, and if I in my finitude am bound to con- form in my experiences to the thoughts of this standard mind, then in case I touch that fire I shall surely get the idea of a burn. The standard mind will be at least as hard and fast and real in its ideal consistency as is the maiden in her disdain for the rejected lover ; and I, in presence of the ideal stars and the oceans, will see the gen- uine realities of fate as certainly as the lover hears his fate in the voice that expresses her will. 362 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. I need not now proceed further with an analysis that will be more or less familiar to many of you, especially after our foregoing historical lectures. What I have de- sired thus far is merely to give each of you, as it were, the sensation of being an idealist in this first and purely analytical sense of the word idealism. The sum and sub- stance of it aU is, you see, this : you know your world in fact as a system of ideas about things, such that from moment to moment you find this system forced upon you by experience. Even matter you know just as a mass of coherent ideas that you cannot help having. Space and time, as you think them, are surely ideas of yours. Now, what more natural than to say that if this be so, the real world beyond you must in itself be a system of some- body's ideas ? If 'it is, then you can comprehend what its existence means. If it is n't, then since all you can know of it is ideal, the real world must be utterly unknowable, a bare x. Minds I can understand, because I myself am a mind. An existence that has no mental attribute is wholly opaque to rae. So far, however, from such a world of ideas, existent beyond me in another mind, seeming to coherent thought essentially Mwreal, ideas and minds and their ways, are, on the contrary, the hardest and stubborn- est facts that we can name. Ifihn external world is in it- self mental, then, be this reality a standard and universal thought, or a mass of little atomic minds constituting the various particles of matter, in any case one can compre- hend what it is, and will have at the same time to submit to its stubborn authority as the lover accepts the real- ity of the maiden's moods. If the world i& nH such an ideal thing, then indeed all our science, which is through and through concerned with our mental interpretations of things, can neither have objective validity, nor make satis- factory progress towards truth. For as science is con. cerned with ideas, the world beyond all ideas is a bare x. REALITY AND IDEALISM. 363 III. But with this bare x, you will say, this analytical ideal- ism after all leaves me, as with something that, spite of all my analyses and interpretations, may after aU be there beyond me as the real world, which my ideas are vainly striving to reach, but which eternally flees before me. So far, you will say, what idealism teaches is that the real world can only be interpreted by treating it as if it were somebody's thought. So regarded, the idealism of Berke- ley and of other such thinkers is very suggestive ; yet it does n't tell us what the true world is, but only that so much, of the true world as we ever get into our compre- hension has to be conceived in ideal terms. Perhaps, however, whilst neither beauty, nor majesty, nor odor, nor warmth, nor tone, nor color, nor form, nor motion, nor space, nor time (all these being but ideas of ours), can be said to belong to the extra-mental world, — perhaps, after all, there does exist there yonder an extra-mental world, which has nothing to do, except by accident, with any mind, and which is through and through just extra-mental, something unknowable, inscrutable, the basis of experi- ence, the source of ideas, but itself never experienced as it is in itself, never adequately represented by any idea in us. Perhaps it is there. Yes, you will say, must it not be there ? Must not one accept our limitations once for all, and say, " What reality is, we can never hope to make clear to ourselves. That which has been made clear becomes an idea in us. But always there is the beyond, the mystery, the inscrutable, the real, the x. To be sure, perhaps we can't even know so much as that this x after all does exist. But then we feel bound to regard it as existent ; or even if we doubt or deny it, may it not be there all the same ? " In such doubt and darkness, then, this first form of idealism closes. If that were all there, were to say, I should indeed have led you a long road in 364 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. vain. Analyzing what the known world is for you, in case there is haply any world known to you at all, — this surely is n't proving that there is any real world, or that the real world can be known. Are we not just where we started ? No ; there lies now just ahead of us the goal of a syn- thetic idealistic conception, which will not be content with this mere analysis of the colors and forms of things, and with the mere discovery that all these are for us nothing but ideas. In this second aspect, idealism grows bolder, and fears not the profoundest doubt that may have entered your mind as to whether there is any world at all, or as to whether it is in any fashion knowable. State in full the deepest problem, the hardest question about the world that your thought ever conceived. In this new form ideal- ism offers you a suggestion that indeed will not wholly answer nor do away with every such problem, but that certainly will set the meaning of it in a new light. What this new light is, I must in conclusion seek to illustrate. Note the point we have reached. Either, as you see, your real world yonder is through and through a world of ideas, an outer mind that you are more or less compre- hending through your experience, or else, in so far as it is real and outer it is unknowable, an inscrutable x, an absolute mystery. ' The dilemma is perfect. There is no. third alternative. Either a mind yonder, or else the un- i knowable ; that is your choice. Philosophy loves such dilemmas, wherein all the mightiest interests of the spirit, all the deepest longings of human passion, are at stake, waiting as for the fall of a die. Philosophy loves such situations, I say, and loves, too, to keep its scrutiny as cool in the midst of them as if it were watching a game of chess, instead of the great world-game. Well, try the darker choice that the dilemma gives you. The world yonder shall be an x, an unknowable something, outer, problematic, foreign, opaque. And you, — you shall look REALITY AND IDEALISM. 365 upon it and believe in it. Yes, you shall for argument's sake first put on an air of resigned confidence, and say, " I do not only fancy it to be an extra-mental and un- knowable something there, an impenetrable x, but I know it to be such. I can't help it. I did n't make it unknow- able. I regret the fact. But there it is. I have to ad- mit its existence. But I know that I shall never solve the problem of its nature." Ah, its nature is a, 2}roblem,' then. But what do you mean by this " problem " ? Problems are, after a fashion, rather familiar things, — that is, in the world of ideas. There are problems soluble and problems insoluble in that world of ideas. It is 'a soluble problem if one asks what whole number is the square root of 64. The answer is 8. It is an insoluble problem if one asks me to find what whole number is the square root of 65. There is, namely, no such whole num- ber. If one asks me to name the length of a straight line that shall be equal to the circumference of a circle of a known radius, that again, in the world of ideas, is an insoluble problem, because, as can be proved, the circum- ference of a circle is a length that cannot possibly be ex- actly expressed in terms of any statable number when the radius is of a stated length. So in the world of ideas, problems are definite questions which can be asked in know- able terms. Fair questions of this sort either may be fairly answered in our present state of knowledge, or else they could be answered if we knew a little or a good deal more, or finally they could not possibly be answered. But in the latter case, if they could not possibly be answered, they always must resemble the problem how to square the circle. They then always turn out, namely, to be absurdly stated questions, and it is their absurdity that makes these problems absolutely insoluble. Any fair question could be answered by one who knew enough. No fair question has an unknowable answer. But now, if your unknow- able world out there is a thing of wholly, of absolutely 366 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. problematic and inscrutable nature, is it so because you don't yet know enough about it, or because in its very nature and essence it is an absurd thing, an x that would answer a question, which actually it is nonsense to ask? Surely one must choose the former alternative. The real world may be unknown ; it can't be essentially unknowable. This subtlety is wearisome enough, I know, just here, but I shall not dwell long upon it. Plainly if the unknow- able world out there is through and through in its nature a really inscrutable problem, this must mean that in nature it resembles such problems as. What is the whole number that is the square root of 66? Or, What two adjacent hills are there that have no valley between them? For in the world of thought such are the only insoluble problems. All others either may now be solved, or would be solved if we knew more than we now do. But, once more, if this unknowable is only just the real world as now unknown to us, but capable some time of becoming known, then remember that, as we have just seen, only a mind can ever become an object known to a mind. If I know you as external to me, it is only because you are minds. If I can come to know any truth, it is only in so far as this truth is essentially mental, is an idea, is a thought, that I can ever come to know it. Hence, if that so-called unknowable, that unknown outer world there, ever could, by any device, come within our ken, then it is already an ideal world. For just that is what our whole idealistic analysis has been proving. Only ideas are knowable. And nothing absolutely unknowable can exist. For the absolutely unknowable, the x pure and simple, the Kantian thing in itself, simply cannot be admitted. The notion of it is nonsense. The assertion of it is a con- tradiction. Round-squares, and sugar salt-lumps, and Snarks, and Boojums, and Jabberwocks, and Abracada- bras ; such, I insist, are the only unknowables there are. REALITY AND IDEALISM. 367 The unknown, that which our human and finite selfhood has n't grasped, exists spread out before us in a bound- less world of truth ; but the unknowable is essentially, confessedly, ipso facto a fiction. The nerve of our whole argument in the foregoing is now pretty fairly exposed. We have seen that the outer truth must be, if anything, a " possibility of experience." But we may now see that a hare " possibility " as such, is, like the unknowable, something meaningless. That which, whenever I come to know it, turns out to be through and through an idea, an experience, must be in itself, before I know it, either somebody's idea, somebody's experience, or it must be nothing. What is a " possibil- ity " of experience that is outside of me, and that is still nothing _/or any one one else than myself ? Is n't it a bare X, a nonsense phrase ? Is n't it like an unseen color, an untasted taste, an unfelt feeling? In proving that the world is one of " possible " experience, we have proved that in so far as it is real it is one of actual experience. Once more, then, to sum up here, if, however vast the world of the unknown, only the essentially knowable can exist, and if everj'thing knowable is an idea, a mental somewhat, the content of some mind, then once for all we are the world of ideas. Your deepest doubt proves this. Only the nonsense of that inscrutable cc, of that Abracar dabra, of that Snark, the Unknowable of whose essence you make your real world, prevents you from seeing this. To return, however, to our dilemma. Either ideal- ism, we said, or the unknowable. What we have now said is that the absolutely unknowable is essentially an' absurdity, a non-existent. For any fair and statable problem admits of an answer. If the world exists yonder, its essence is then already capable of being known by some mind. If capable of being known by a mind, this essence is then already essentially ideal and mental. A mind that knew the real world would, for instance, find it 368 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. a something possessing qualities. But qualities are ideal existences, just as much as are the particular qualities called odors or tones or colors. A mind knowing the real world would again find in it relations, such as equality and inequality, attraction and repulsion, likeness and unlikeness. But such relations have no meaning except as objects of a mind. In brief, then, the world as known would be found to be a world that had all the while been ideal and mental, even before it became known to the particular mind that we are to conceive as coming into connection with it. Thus, then, we are driven to the sec- ond alternative. The real world must be a mind, or else a group of minds. IV. But with this result we come in presence of a final problem. All this, you say, depends upon my assurance that there is after all a real and therefore an essentially knowable and rational world yonder. Such a world would have to be in essence a mind, or a world of minds. But after all, how does one ever escape from the prison of the inner life? Am I not in all this merely wandering amidst the realm of my own ideas ? My world, of course, is n't and can't be a mere a;, an essentially unknowable thing, just because it is my world, and I have an idea of it. But then does not this mean that my world is, after all, for- ever just my world, so that I never get to any truth beyond myself ? Is n't this result very disheartening ? My world is thus a world of ideas, but alas! how do I then ever reach those ideas of the minds beyond me ? The answer is a simple, but in one sense a very prob- lematic one. You, in one sense, namely, never do or can get beyond your own ideas, nor ought you to wish to do so, because in truth all those other minds that constitute your outer and real world are in essence one with your own self. This whole world of ideas is essentially one world, and so it is essentially the world of one self and That art Thou, REALITY AND IDEALISM. 369 The truth and meaning of this deepest proposition of all idealism is now not at aU remote from us. The con- siderations, however, upon which it depends are of the dryest possible sort, as commonplace as they are deep. Whatever objects you may think about, whether they are objects directly known to you, or objects infinitely far removed, objects in the distant stars, or objects remote in time, or objects near and present, — such objects, then, as a number with fifty places of digits in it, or the moun- tains on the other side of the moon, or the day of your death, or the character of CromweU, or the law of gravi- tation, or a name that you are just now trying to think of and have forgotten, or the meaning of some mood or feel- ing or idea now in your mind, — all such objects, I insist, stand in a certain constant and curious relation to your mind whenever you are, thinking about them, — a relation that we often miss because it is so familiar. What is this rela^on ? Such an object, while you think about it, need n't be, as popular thought often supposes it to be, the cause of your thoughts concerning it. Thus, when you think about Cromwell's character, Cromwell's charac- ter is n't just now causing any ideas in you, — is n't, so to speak, doing anything to you. Cromwell is dead, and af- ter life's fitful fever his character is a very inactive thing. Not as the cause, but as the object of your thought is Crom- well present to you. Even so, if you choose now to think of the moment of your death, that moment is somewhere off there in the future, and you can make it your object, but it is n't now an active cause of your ideas. The mo- ment of your death has no present physical existence at all, and just now causes nothing. So, too, with the moun- tains on the other side of the moon. When you make them the object of your thought, they remain indifferent to you. They do not affect you. You never saw them. But aU the same you can think about them. Yet this thinking about things is, after all, a very curi- 370 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. ous relation in which to stand to things. In order to, think about a thing, it is not enough that I should have an idea in me that merely resembles that thing. This last is a very important observation. I repeat, it is not enough that I should merely have an idea in me that re- sembles the thing whereof I think. I have, for instance, in me the idea of a pain. Another man has a pain just like mine. Say we both have toothache ; or have both burned our finger-tips in the same way. Now my idea of pain is just like the pain in him, but I am not on that account necessarily thinking about Ms pain, merely because what I am thinking about, namely my own pain, resembles his pain. No ; to think about an object you must not merely have an idea that resembles the object, but you must mean to have your idea resemble that object. Stated in other form, to think of an object you must consciously aim at that object, you must pick out that object, you must al- ready in some measure possess that object enough, namely, to identify it as what you mean. But how can you mean, how can you aim at, how can you possess, how can you pick out, how can you identify what is not already pres- ent in essence to your own hidden self ? Here is surely a deep question. When you aim at yonder object, be it the mountains in the moon or the day of your death, you really say, " I, as my real self, as my larger self, as my complete consciousness, already in deepest truth possess that object, have it, own it, identify it. And that, and that alone, makes it possible for me in my transient, my in- dividual, my momentary personality, to mean yonder ob- ject, to inquire about it, to be partly aware of it and partly ignorant of it." You can't mean what is utterly foreign to you. You mean an object, you assert about it, you talk about it, yes, you doubt or wonder about it, you admit your private and individual ignorance about it, only in so far as your larger self, your deeper personality, your to- tal of normal consciousness already has that object. Your REALITY AND IDEALISM. 371 momentary and private wonder, ignorance, inquiry, or assertion, about the object, implies, asserts, presupposes, that your total self is in full and immediate possession of the object. This, in fact, is the very nature of that curi- ous relation of a thought to an object which we are now considering. The self that is doubting or asserting, or that is even feeling its private ignorance about an object, and that still, even in consequence of all this, is meaning, is aiming at such object, is in essence identical with the self for which this object exists in its complete and con- sciously known truth. So paradoxical seems this final assertion of idealism that I cannot hope in one moment to make it very plain to you. It is a difficult topic, about which I have elsewhere printed a very lengthy research,^ wherewith I cannot here trouble you. But what I intend by thus saying that the f self which thinks about an object, which reaUy, even in ! the midst of the blindest ignorance and doubt concerning its object still means the object, — that this self is identi- \ cal with the deeper self which possesses and truly knows the object, -.-^ what I intend hereby I can best illustrate by simple cases taken from your own experience. You are in doubt, say, about a name that you have forgotten, or about a thought that you just had, but that has now escaped you. As you hunt for the name or the lost idea, you are all the while sure that you mean just one particu- lar name or idea and no other. But you don't yet know what name or idea this is. You try, and reject name after name. You query, " Was this what I was thinking of, or this ? " But after searching you erelong find the name or the idea, and now at once you recognize it. " Oh, that," you say, " was what I meant all along, only — I didn't know what I meant." Did not know? Yes, in one sense you knew aU the while, — that is, your deeper self, 1 See The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (Boston, 1885), ch. xi., « The Possibility of Error," pp. 384-435. 372 THE SPIRIT OF M0DE15N PHILOSOPHY. yoiir true consciousness knew. It was your momentary self that did not know. But when you found the long- souglit name, recalled the' lost idea, you recognized it at once, because it was all the while your own, because you, the true and larger self, who owned the name or the idea and were aware of what it was, now were seen to include the smaller and momentary self that sought the name or tried to recall the thought. Your deeper consciousness of the lost idea was all the while there. In fact, did you not presuppose this when you sought the lost idea ? How can I mean a name, or an idea, unless I in truth am the self who knows the name, who possesses the idea ? In hunting for the name or the lost idea, I am hunting for my own thought. Well, just so I know nothing about the far-off stars in detail, but in so far as I mean the far-off stars at all, as I speak of them, I am identical with that remote and deep thought of my own that already knows the stars. . When I study the stars, I am trying to find out what I really mean by them. To be sure, only experience can' tell me, but that is because only experience can bring me into relation with my larger self. The escape from the prison of the inner self is simply the fact that the in- ner self is through and through an appeal to a larger self. 'The self that inquires, either inquires without meaning, or if it has a meaning, this meaning exists in and for the larger self that knows. Here is a suggestion of what I mean by Synthetic Ideal- ism. No truth, I repeat, is more familiar. That I am always meaning to inquire into objects beyond me, what clearer fact could be mentioned ? That only in case it is already I who, in deeper truth, in my real and hidden thought, hnow the lost object yonder, the object whose na- ture I seek to comprehend, that only in this case I can truly mean the thing yonder, — this, as we must assert, is involved in the very idea of meaning. That is the logical analysis of it. You can mean what your deeper self REALITY AND IDEALISM. 373 knows ; you cannot mean what your deeper self does n't know. To be sure, the complete illustration of this most critical insight of idealism belongs elsewhere. Few see the familiar. Nothing is more common than for people to thinli that they mean objects that have nothing to do with themselves. Kant it was, who, despite his things in themselves, first showed us that nobody really means an object, really knows it, or doubts it, or aims at it, unless he does so by aiming at a truth that is present to his own larger self. Except for the tmity of my true self, taught Kant, I have no objects. And so it makes no difference whether I know a thing or am in doubt about it. So long as I really mean it, that is enough. The self that means the object is identical with the larger self that possesses the object, just as when you seek the lost idea you are already in essence with the self that possesses the ; lost idea. In this way I suggest to you the proof which a rigid analysis of the logic of our most commonplace thought \ would give for the doctrine that in the world there is but | one Self, and that it is his world which we all alike are truly meaning, whether we talk of one another or of Cromwell's character or of the fixed stars or of the far- off aeons of the future. The relation of my thought to ■ its object has, I insist, this curious character, that unless ' the thought and its object are parts of one larger thought, I can't even be meaning that object yonder, can't even be in error about it, can't even doubt its existence. You, for instance, are part of one larger self with me, or else I can't even be meaning to address you as outer beings. You are part of one larger self along with the most mys- terious or most remote fact of nature, along with the moon, and all the hosts of heaven, along with all truth and all beauty. Else could you not even intend to speak of such objects beyond you. For whatever you speak of you will find that your world is meant by you as just 374 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. your world. Talk of the unknowable, and it forthwith becomes your unknowable, your problem, whose solution, unless the problem be a mere nonsense question, your larger self must own and be aware of. The deepest prob- lem of life is, " What is this deeper self? " And the only 1 answer is. It is the self that knows in unity all truth. This, I insist, is no hypothesis. It is actually the pre- supposition of your deepest doubt. And that is wby I say : Everything finite is more or less obscure, dark, doubtful. Only the Infinite Self, the problem-solver, the complete thinker, the one who knows what we mean even when we are most confused and ignorant, the one who in- cludes us, who has the world present to himself in unity, before whom all past and future truth, all distant and dark truth is clear in one eternal moment, to whom far and forgot is near, who thinks the whole of nature, and in whom are all things, the Logos, the world-possessor, — only his existence, I say, is perfectly sure. V. Yet I must not state the outcome thus confidently with- out a little more analysis and exemplification. Let me put the whole matter in a slightly different way. When a man beHeves that he knows any truth about a fact beyond his present and momentary thought, what is the position, with reference to that fact, which he gives himself ? We must first answer. He believes that one who really knew his, the thinker's, thought, and compared it with the fact yonder, would perceive the agreement between the two. Is this all, however, that the believer holds to be true of of his own thought ? No, not so, for he holds not only that his thought, as it is, agrees with some fact outside his present self (as my thought, for instance, of my toothache may agree with the fact yonder called my neighbor's toothache), but also that his thought agrees with the fact with which it meant to agree. To mean to agree, REALITY AND IDEALISM. 375 however, with a specific fact beyond my present self, in- volves such a relation to that fact that if I could somehow come directly into the presence of the fact itself, could somehow absorb it into my present consciousness, I should become immediately aware of it as the fact that 1 all along had meant. Our previous examples have been in- tended to bring clearly before us this curious and in fact unique character of the relation called meaning an ob- ject of our thought. To return, then, to our supposed believer : he believes that he knows some fact beyond his present consciousness. This involves, as we have now seen, the assertion that he believes himself to stand in such an actual relation to the fact yonder that were it in, instead of out of his ' present consciousness, he would rec- ognize it both as the object meant by his present thought, and also as in agreement therewith ; and it is all this which, as he believes, an immediate observer of his own thought and of the object — that is, an observer who should in- clude our believer's present self, and the fact yonder, and who should reflect on their relations — would find as the real relation. Observe, however, that only by reflec- tion would this higher observer find out that real relation. Nothing but Reflective Self-consciousness could discover it. To believe that you know anything beyond your pre- sent and momentary self, is, therefore, to believe that you do stand in such a relation to truth as only a larger and reflectively observant self, that included you and your object, could render intelligible. Or once more, so to believe is essentially to appeal confidently to a possible larger self for approval. But now to say, I know a truth, and yet to say, This larger self to whom I appeal is ap- pealed to only as to a possible self, that need n't be real, — all this involves just the absurdity against which our whole idealistic analysis has been directed in case of all the sorts of fact and truth in the world. To believe, is to say, I stand in a real relation to truth, a relation which 376 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. transcends wholly my present momentary self ; and tHs real relation is of such a curious nature that only a larger inclusive self which consciously reflected .upon my mean- ing and consciously possessed the object that I mean, could know or grasp the reality of the relation. If, 'how- ever, this relation is a real one, it must, like the colors, the sounds, and all the other things of which we spoke be- fore be real /or somebody. Bare j)ossibilities are nothing. Really possible things are already in some sense real. If, then, my relation to the truth, this complex relation of meaning an object and conforming to it, when the object, although at this moment meant by me, is not now present to my momentary thought, — if this relation is genuine, and yet is such as only a possible larger self could render intelligible, then my possible larger self must be real in order that my momentary self should in fact possess the truth in question. Or, in briefest form. The relation of [ conforming one's thought to an outer object meant by this thought is a relation which only a Reflective Larger Self could grasp or find real. If the relation is real, the larger self is real, too. So much, then, for the ease when one believes that one has grasped a truth beyond the moment. But now for the case when one is actually in error about some object of his momentary and finite thought. Error is the actual failure to agree, not with any fact taken at random, biit with just the fact that one had meant to agree with. Under what circumstances, then, is error possible ? Only in case one's real thought, by virtue of its meaning, does transcend his own momentary and in so far ignorant self. As the true believer, meaning the truth that he believes, must be in real relation thereto, even so the blunderer, really meaning, as he does, the fact yonder, in order that he should be able even to blunder about it, must be, in so far, in the same real relation to truth as the true believer. His error lies in missing that conformity with the meant REALITY AND IDEALISM. 377 object at which he aimed. None the less, however, did he really mean and really aim ; and, therefore, is he in error, because his real and larger self finds him to be so. True thinking and false thinking alike involve, then, the same fundamental conditions, in so far as both are carried on in moments ; and in so far as, in both cases, the false moment and the true are such by virtue of being organic parts of a larger, critical, reflective, and so conscious self. To sum up so far : Of no object do I speak either falsely or truly, unless I mean that object. Never do I mean an object, unless I stand in such relation thereto that were the object in this conscious moment, and imme- diately present to me, I should myself recognize it as completing and fulfilling my present and momentary meaning. The relation of meaning an object is thus one that only conscious Reflection can. define, or observe, or constitute. No merely _/o»'ei(7«. observer, no external test, could decide upon what is meant at any moment. There- fore, when what is meant is outside of the moment which means, only a Self inclusive of the moment and its object could complete, and so confirm or refute, the opinion that the moment contains. Really to mean an object, then, whether in case of true opinion or in case of false opinion, involves the real possibility of such a reflective test of one's meaning from the point of view of a larger self. But to say, My relation to the object is such that a reflec- tive larger self, and only such a reflective and inclusive self, could see that I meant the object, is to assert a fact, a relation, an existent truth in the world, that either is a truth for nobody, or is a truth for an actual reflective self, inclusive of the moment, and critical of its meaning. Our whole idealistic analysis, however, from the begin- ning of this discussion, has been to the effect that facts must be facts for somebody, and can't be facts for nobody, and that hare possibilities are really impossible. Hence 378 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. ■whoever believes, whether truly or falsely, about objects beyond the moment of his belief, is an organic part of a reflective and conscious larger self that has those objects immediately present to itself, and has them in organic relation with the erring or truthful momentary self that believes. Belief, true and false, having been examined, the case of doubt follows at once. To doubt about objects beyond my momentary self is to admit the "possibility of error" as to such objects. Error would involve my inclusion in a larger self that has directly present to it the object meant by me as I doubt. Truth would involve the same inclusion. The inclusion itself, then, is, so far, no object of rational doubt. To doubt the inclusion would be merely to doubt whether I meant anything at aU beyond the moment, and not to doubt as to my particular know- ledge about the nature of some object beyond, when once the object had been supposed to be meant. Doubt pre- supposes then, whenever it is a definite doubt, the real possibility, and so, in the last analysis, the reality of the normal self-consciousness that possesses the object con- cerning which one doubts. But if, passing to the extreme of skepticism, and stating one's most despairing and most uncompromising doubt, one so far confines himself to the prison of the inner life as to doubt whether one ever does mean any object beyond the moment at all, there comes the final consider- ation that in doubting one's power to transcend the mo- ment, one has already transcended the moment, just as we found in following Hegel's analysis.^ To say. It is im- possible to mean any object beyond this moment of my thought, and the moment is for itself " the measure of all things," is at all events to give a meaning to the words this moment. And this moment means something only in opposition to other moments. Yes, even in saying this 1 See, in the lecture on Hegel, pp. 204-207. REALITY AND IDEALISM. 379 moment, I have already left this moment, and am mean- ing and speaking of a past moment. Moreover, to deny that one can mean an object " beyond the moment " is already to give a meaning to the phrase heyond the mo- ment, and then to deny that anything is meant to fall within the scope of this meaning. In every case, then, one must transcend by one's meaning the moment to which one is confined by one's finitude. Flee where we will, then, the net of the larger Self en- snares us. We are lost and imprisoned in the thickets of its tangled labyrinth. The moments are not at all in themselves, for as moments they have no meaning ; they exist only in relation to the beyond. The larger Self alone is, and they are by reason of it, organic parts of it. They perish, but it remains ; they have truth or error only in its overshadowing presence. And now, as to the unity of this Self. Can there be many such organic selves, mutually separate unities of moments and of the objects that these moments mean ? Nay, were there many such, would not their manifoldness be a truth ? Their relations, would not these be real ? Their distinct places in the world-order, would not these things be objects of possible true or false thoughts ? If so, must not there be once more the inclusive real Self for whom these truths were true, these separate selves inter- related, and their variety absorbed in the organism of its rational meaning ? There is, then, at last, but one Self, organically, reflec- tively, consciously inclusive of all the selves, and so of all truth. I have called this self. Logos, problem-solver, all- knower. Consider, then, last of all, his relation to prob- lems. In the previous lecture we doubted many things ; we questioned the whole seeming world of the outer order ; we wondered as to space and time, as to nature and evo- lution, as to the beginning and the end of things. Now he who wonders is like him who doubts. Has his wonder 380 THli SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. any rationality about it ? Does he mean anything by his doubt ? Then the truth that he means, and about which he wonders, has its real constitution. As wonderer, he in the moment possesses not this solving truth; he appeals to the self who can solve. That self must possess the solution just as surely as the problem has a meaning. The real nature of space and time, the real beginning of things, where matter was at any point of time in the past, what is to become of the world's energy : these are mat- ters of truth, and truth is necessarily present to tlie Self as in one all-comprehending self-completed moment, be- yond which is naught, within which is the world. The world, then, is such stuff as ideas are made of. Thought possesses all things. But the world is n't unreal. It extends infinitely beyond our private consciousness, because it is the world of an universal mind. What facts it is to contain only experience can inform us. There is no magic that can anticipate the work of science. Absor lutely the only thing sure from the first about this world, however, is that it is intelligent, rational, orderly, essen- tially comprehensible, so that all its problems are some- where solved, all its darkest mysteries are known to the supreme Self. This Self infinitely and reflectively tran- scends our consciousness, and therefore, since it includes us, it is at the very least a person, and more definitely conscious than we are ; for what it possesses is self-reflect- ing knowledge, and what is knowledge aware of itself, but consciousness ? Beyond the seeming wreck and chaos of our finite problems, its eternal insight dwells, there- fore, in absolute and supreme majesty. Yet it is not far from every one of us. There is no least or most transient thought that flits through a child's mind, or that troubles with the faintest line of care a maiden's face, and that still does not contain and embody something of this divine Logos. LECTUEE XII. PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM: — THE WORLD OP DESCRIPTION AND THE WORLD OF APPRECIATION. Wb return from the general notion of the world as the universe of the Logos, to the business of trying to inter- pret the facts of experience. " Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?" We must go into all the world and preach the gospel of this rationality and unity of the truth, until the most unspiritual and misbe- lieving of phenomena shall have been converted. Our business is not that of gazing, but of interpreting. And it is hard indeed so to interpret idealism that it shall seem to the ordinary mind anything but an idle comment upon the general connectedness of things. The business of the present lecture is with the idealistic interpretation of the outer order. In what precise sense is this world in space and in time still real for us ? Is the true world one of rigid necessity, or is it a world of free and spiritual ideals ? What place in it have the sci- entific notions of causality, and of such physical truths as energy and matter ? In what sense has the doctrine of evolution a place in this universe of the Logos ? Is this world a moral order ? And is it a world where a man's mind is still dependent upon his nervous mechanism, as empirical science assures us ? And what ultimate connec- tion does idealism recognize between finite mind and the truth that physical science calls matter ? These questions, technically called the problems of a philosophical cosmology, are before us. The study of them is hard and dry. The exposition must of necessity 382 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. be in some places extremely intricate, in others far too dogmatic and aphoristic. The outcome may be unex- pected, and even light-giving. The fashion wherein we shall attack the undertaking will be in some respects dif- ferent from the traditional one ; but we shall still at every step be guided by the lessons of our historical lectures. Despite our idealism, and in fact even because of our idealism, the world of experience is to appear to us, in what follows, as at least the outward aspect of a genuinely real world. We have asked. What sort of a world is it ? The answer has been, It is a world of outer and ideal truth, a world of mind. The doctrine of the idealist is not one that involves or encourages any doubt that there is truth beyond his own private and finite selfhood. A popular and trivial objection to idealism, often repeated by critics who comprehend it not, accuses each finite ideal- istic thinker of believing more in this his finite self than in anybody or anything else. But, on the contrary, as we have seen, it is only the idealist who has a reasonable account to give of his faith in outer truth, and of his own relation thereto. This outer truth is for him the content of the ti'anscendent personality of the Logos, of whom our experience is a fragmentary suggestion. As I have pointed out elsewhere, in the book to which I have already referred, it is just the popular, the common-sense notion of external reality, for which the outer world is a bare postulate, a mere practical assumption.^ Only idealism, 1 Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 304-305. — " If the history of popular speculation on these topics could be written, how much of cowardice and shuffling would be found in the behavioy of the nat- ural mind before the question : ' How dost thou know au external world ? ' Instead of simply and plainly answering, ' I mean by the external world in the first place something that I accept or, demand, that I posit, postulate, aotiially construct on the basis of sense-data,' the natural man gives us all kinds of vague compromise answers. . . , PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 883 with its theory of the world of the Logos as the one ohjec- tive reality, implied by every doubt and half-conscious belief of every finite fragment of this true self, finds a warrant for the postulates of common-sense, converts the mere faith in the outer world into an insight, possesses an objective truth in coming thus to an awareness of our relation to our own deepest nature, and interprets our own deepest nature by showing that it is not our finite self- hood merely as such, but is through and through objec- tive.^ II. This being premised as to the idealist's attitude towards the objective truth, our next undertaking must be, to define more exactly the characteristics that objective truth, as such, possesses. For such a definition will of necessity throw light on the nature of the world in which we find ourselves. This task is a very hard one, and can be accomplished only by advancing from one tentative definition to another. We must begin, therefore, with a provisional definition of the genuine outer reality as distinguished from any seeming outer world. What character, we ask, is the essential character of an objective truth as such ? What do we mean by the outer order ? The natural and provi- The ultimate motive with the every-day man is the will to have an external world. . . . We construct but do not receive the external reality." I quote this passage here because some of my critics have taken it, strangely enough, as the expression of my own idealism. On the contrary, it is expressly stated in the book in question as the substance of the popular and every-day point of view, to which only a genuine idealism ever gives any sound and objective basis. ^ It is of this objective truth that on p. 332 of the Religious A sped I ventured to speak as of something " not our postulate." Of this absolute aspect of the outer truth, later chapters of that work sought to give proof. Yet, in common with other objective idealists, I have occasionally had the fortune to be spoken of as one who does not pretend to know any truth beyond the finite self, but only to pos- tulate such truth. 384 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. sionally acceptable answer is, that from our human point of view, the outer order, in so far at least as it is the object of science, is simply so much of the truth of the self as is revealed, through our experience, and to our finite consciousness, in aspects that are universal and abiding, and not merely private, fleeting, and momentary. The contrast between the inner and the outer is generally recognized, in fact, as the contrast between the transient and the permanent in our outer experience. AVhat per- sists in experience, must, we say, correspond to some real truth beyond our private selves. In this sense we call a dream unreal, because all the dream-people and the dream-objects vanish when we awake. On the other hand, we call the matter of physical nature real, because its quantity appears to be unchangeable, in so far as our experience enables us to measure this quantity. For a similar reason it is that Professor Tait has frequently argued that from the physical point of view the two cer- tain realities of the outer order are matter and energy (the latter being distinguished very decidedly from what is technically called force). For these two, says Profes- sor Tait, are permanent throughout the whole range of scientific experience. But at all events, whether any given theory as to what the permanent elements in expe- rience may be proves correct or no, it seems very fair indeed to say, at the outset, that the objective, the outer reality is for us mortals that which is experienced as enduring. Yet permanence, as such, is not the only character of the reality that we call outer. There is another character, closely associated with permanence, that is of still deeper meaning. We are accustomed, namely, to distinguish the inner from the outer by saying that their contrast is that between what only some one finite consciousness, or only a certain limited number of such consciousnesses expe- rience, in their relative and fleeting life of limitations, PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 385 and that which all must experience, in so far as they share in a common rationality. As I now am, I feel pain or pleasure. That is, in itself considered, just my pain or pleasure, in so far as I am this finite and changing bit of a self, bound here to these moments of time. That pleasure or pain, then, for the first, exists only in me and in nobody else. The world of the true and absolute Self contains that fact, but contains it here only. The true Self has the pleasure or pain, but only in so far forth as he is limited to me. You know nothing directly concern- ing it. You are another bit of a self, like me ; you have your feelings, I mine. It is true that in order even to be thus bounded in time and experience, we must have a real and organic communion of life in and through the one Spirit, It is he who feels and works in us. No fragment of our life but is his. But our feelings, the facts of our inner life as such, are his onlj' in so far as he is conceived under the form and the limitations of our various finite selves and moments of life. On the other hand, I now can think of numbers, and when I think that three and two together make five, I think by virtue indeed of feelings that are mine and not yours, but with reference to a truth that I mean, and that in the finite and individual sense of the words is neither yours nor mine, but that is truth for all of us. So space and time, if indeed they are more than mere seemings of our human point of view, are such universal and conse- quently ever present truths. To say that space and time are objectively real is to say, then, that these things, re- vealed though they are through your feelings and through mine (and so far merely facts of the inner life), are yet truth for all of us, like the numbers, and not only for all of us men, but for every intelligent bit of a self in all the universe, be he archangel or dweller in Mars. To doubt the reality of space is to doubt just this opinion.^ ^ An objector may say that, if this account of the nature of outer 386 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. There is, then, for us, this provisional contrast between the inner order and the outer. Whether this contrast expresses the last word of philosophy, we have yet to see. So far it is n't a contrast that enables us to separate the two orders, but it is one that does enable us to distinguish them. This contrast is that between the permanent and universal elements of experience on the one hand, and the private and fleeting elements of experience on the other. Our finite life has its inner aspect in so far as it is just individual, the truth of our moments as such, the breaking of just our waves of consciousness on the beach. But our finite consciousness relates to outer and physical truth in so far as it means something that may be pre- sent for any and all intelligent moments and individuals. When one questions, as we did in an earlier lecture, truth be even provisionally accepted, the laws of number would be objectively true in no other sense than the laws of physics. But (so the objector will ask) are numbers real in the same sense in which matter is real ? I answer, It is a familiar proposition of what is called modern positivism in pliilosophy that the laws of arithmetic, of geometry, and of mathematics generally, are merely physical truths of a peculiar simplicity and abstractness. This proposition of positivism I fully accept. Numbers, in so far as they are ab- stractions, are indeed unreal, because our experience is always of a number of physical facts. But the laws of arithmetic are laws of the physical world, and are true because they are so. To be sure, the physical world is not what many who call themselves positivists take it to be. It is the world of the truth, in so far forth as this truth is public property for all finite intelligences ; it is the world of the truth that lasts, and that can be shared, that is n't the private property of momentary consciousness, like our feelings, but that, although revealed to each of us through his feelings, has a commu- nicable, an universal aspect. In this sense, the principle that three and two make five, or suc"h a principle as the binomial theorem, is as genuinely physical a law as is the law of gravitation ; save that the last-mentioned law deals with a far more complex and concrete reality, and may have, for that very Reason, a far 'more limited scope. In what sense the arithmetical laws are a priori and absolutely uni. versal, we shall see later. PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 387 whether the world of the interwoven spirals and streams of stars, the world of the consolidating matter and of the " running down " energy, is what it seems to be, one's question means this : Is this world that we men have been thinking out as we interpreted our human feelings, a world of truth that would necessarily be present to other than human intelligences in the same form as those in which it is present to us ? If the archangels can count, if the inhabitants of Mars can add, they will all agree with us that three and two make five. But we know not as yet whether they would or would not, in case they came to think of the same truth that we think of when we look at the stars, agree with us as to the forms and laws of this truth. Therefore, and in no other sense, do we doubt whether the world of the stars is what it seems, and whether we are after all playing with the " pebbles on the beach." III. What we want, then, next in order, is a fuller state- ment of what is implied in this provisional criterion of objectivity. Each of us is thinking in more or less frag'- mentary ways and moments. We want some means of distinguishing the essentially private in our thoughts from the permanent, the public, and the universal. Our effort to define such a criterion must begin in an extremely naive and simple fashion. If I am dealing with my neighbor, and he says that he has experiences which stand for outer truth, and which are n't merely his private feelings, my first disposition is to demand that he shall put me where I can get these experiences, too, or something that we shall both recognize as similar expe- riences. If he sees a ra,inbow, and regards it as standing for a real and outer truth, as being essentially an objec- tive idea, and I doubt that he sees the rainbow, I ask to be shown it. If, looking towards the quarter of the heavens to which he points, I see that to which I readily 388 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. apply the same name, I am quickly convinced, from the point of view of untutored common sense, that we are both seeing the same rainbow. A very close and critical ob- servation would, however, erelong prove to us both, as he and I moved about, that his rainbow and mine do not occupy precisely the same apparent place, with reference to our experiences of other objects. If we become aware of this fact, we may first begin to differ as to whose rain- bow is the real one, and later, with proper instruction, we shall come to see that just because an essential character of the visible rainbow, namely, its seeming place in the world of the things upon whose reality we are already agreed, is a matter of the point of view, the rainbow it- self must have a decidedly different sort of physical objectivity from that possessed by other objects, say, for instance, trees and mountains. ' So far, then, the test of objectivity is the apparent similarity of our human experiences when two or more of us are in given circumstances. This similarity, how- ever, is critically examined by comparing, as far as pos- sible, the accounts that we can give to one another of the relations amongst the objects of our experience. In other words, the test of objectivity is, so far, permanence and community of ideas, and the test of the permanence and community of ideas is the sameness of the descrip- tion that we can give to one another of the relations amongst the various parts of our private experience. Here at once appears an important distinction in our private experiences themselves. As they come to us, they are very complex, and they interest us from moment to moment in ways that embody just our private mood. But one interest we take in them which brings to pass for us just that distinction upon which the whole of natural science depends. This is the interest in describing them. The distinction that it introduces is one between what ia describahle, and what is only appreciable. As my expe- PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 389 rience comes to me at any moment, I may, namely, be said to appreciate it in some fashion. That is, it feels to me so or so. I like it or I hate it. Or again, where pleasure and pain are n't marked, still there is an essen- tially indescribable value that my experience has for me ■when regarded just as my own feeling. Tastes have one sort of worth for me, colors another. An electric shock from a Leyden jar is appreciated as a peculiar and atro- cious interruption of all other trains of feeling, such that its painful value is surely, but inexpressibly, different from that of all other experiences. Such elementary and personal interests in the passing moment, such essentially dumb appreciations, have in them few elements or none whereby we can test whether or no we have them in common with our neighbors. Real sympathy, real shar- ing of even the most elementary appreciations there may be ; and of the significance of such, in case they exist, we shall hear something later on. For the moment we are disposed to call our elementary appreciations indescrib- able, and to regard them as the most characteristic in- stances of private and individual experience, which reveal merely wie es uns zu Muthe ist, not what can be called objective. On the other hand, there are certain elements of our experience which we regard as describable. How my own hat feels when I pick it up, taking it from amongst a large number of hats in a dimly lighted cloak-room, is something that I can only appreciate. I know my hat by the /"eel of it when I pick it up. How I know it I can't tell you. On the other hand, that I find my hat hung a peg higher than I myself left it, that it is hung on the right or the left side of the room, that just as I took it the clock struck ten, these are experiences that I pretend to be able to describe. I can tell you, so I say, just what I mean by them. I hold them to be exj)eriences that anybody might have, whether he felt about my hat as I do, or did not. 390 THE SPIEIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Now the character that makes an experience describa- ble, involves two facts concerning its nature. The first fact is that an experience, just in so far forth as it is describable, is reproducible at pleasure by the person who can describe it. For him, indeed, the act of description is always a voluntary and more or less complete or abbre- viated reproduction of the experience described. As he thus reproduces for the purpose of description, he has a sense of his own power over the reproduction. The feel- ing was confined to the moment ; the description already involves a communication from moment to moment within a man's own life. Here, already, is a partial interpretar- tion of the permanence which we before recognized as a character of outer truth. The describable, as such, has for us one sort of permanence. The second fact is that, in the unity of consciousness, the relations amongst feelings which permit us to describe the content of any moment must themselves fall under certain general types, or, as we more technically say, under either Forms or Categories of experience. By forms of experience we mean the charac- teristics which we express by saying that our experience involved ideas of space or of time ; that is, that our feel- ings were those of extensive size or of shape, or of dura^ tion. By categories of experience we mean at present the characteristics which enable us to say, that what we expe- rienced consisted of one or of many feelings, of like or of different feelings, or again, of feelings that differed from one another, or resembled one another, in quantity or in quality. There are many other such categories used in the work of physical science. Here is no place to enu- merate or to explain them. Our meaning at present is that the formless and uncategorized experience, in so far as it is such, appears, from our present and provi- sional point of view, a merely private appreciation, which does not reveal outer truth, while the well formed and sharply categorized experience is in so far regarded as PHYSICAL LAW AND FEEEDOM. 391 capable of description, and therefore as apt to reveal outer truth. I can't tell you much about the curious minor feelings of vague depression that once followed, in my own case, an attack of influenza. If you have passed through a similar experience, you may appreciate my feel- ings. But I can never be quite sure that you do. On the contrary, I can tell you, if I like, a good deal about any experience that I can define in terms of known geo- metrical figures, of numbers, of duration, of size, or of some law of the recurrence of experiences. " Ten strokes of the clock," " two feet to the right," " a regular recur- rence of wind and rain, following, on several occasions, a rapidly falling barometer," — all these are phrases of description, — not indeed of unlimited or of complete de- scription ; for all these phrases suggest elementary expe- riences of sound, of sight, and of other indescribable feel- ings, that are in so far mere appreciations. But they are phrases of description in so far as they express definite relations in space and in time, and relations that fall under such typical categories as quantity, number, recur- rence, likeness, regularity, and other such notions, — these relations of experience being so far under our control that we can reproduce at will typical instances which exem- plify them. AU such phrases pretend to tell something j about a conceived outer reality. Of such is the kingdom of natural science. To recapitulate : (1) An experience is indescribable if I lose it beyond clear recall as soon as it is gone. In order to be describable it must contain aspects that I can reconstruct out of their elements at pleasure, so long as my intelligent memory lasts. I can describe only what I can keep and permanently think out. (2) In the next place, this my power to think out and reconstruct my experience must, in every case of description, depend upon my discovery of the forms and the categories that the experience exemplifies. (3) Only that which is re- 392 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. vealed through our experience in describable form, how- I ever, has, so far ia our discussion, approved itself as objective, as public property, as universal. It may indeed be that we shall need to modify soon this provisional and tentative account ; and that some of the objective truths are indescribable. But so far we have not found in- stances of the sort. Thus far describable facts and objec- tive facts mean pretty much the same thing for us who live under ordinary human limitations. The business of natural science is the " description of the world of experi- ence." And the real is so far the describable. With such a provisional definition of the real in mind, let us glance back at the world of the mere appreciations, to bring out the contrast now defined. The noblest and the most stupid appreciations, it would seem, may, and in many cases do alike exemplify this formless and uncate- gorized character of the merely private and so far illusory experience. On the other hand, the most artistically worthless fact in what we call nature, the physical thing that we appreciate least and regard as of least worth, will exemplify, in so far as it is an outer fact, this definable, this universal character, this conformitj'^ to rules of de- scription, this presence in space and in time, this submis- sion to categories, which together make natural science possible. The reasons in both cases appear so far to be ones already pointed out. What is describable is as such public property. A man who knows it once for what it is, and who keeps his wits, can think out its characters, can mentally reproduce the relationships of its elements, can tell his neighbor about it, and can feel tolerably sure that if any intelligent being got into the right place in the world-order, he too would experience something of much the same description, however colored his inner feel- ings might be. On the other hand, what is n't so defi^ned by space and time and number and quantity, and the other types of intelligent experience, as to have the rela- PHYSICAL LAW AND FKEEDOM. 393 tions of its parts describable is, first of all, when once it is past, like the " tender grace of a day that is dead." It comes not back. While it is present it is like " the tears, idle tears," whereof " I know not what they mean." It is like — " That sense, which at the winds of spring In rarest visitation, or the voice Of one beloved, heard in youth alone, Fills the faint eyes with falling tears which dim The radiant looks of unbewailing flowers, And leaves this peopled earth a solitude When it returns no more." The merely appreciable, then, as such, is, in our human world, notoriously fleeting. So with all the lovely things in Schiller's lines : — " Warum bin ich verganglich, O Zeus ? So fragte die Schonheit. Macht dich dock, sagte der Gott, nur das Vergdngliche schon J Und die Liebe, die Jugend, der Thau und die Blumen vernahmen 's ; AUe gingen sie weg, weinend von Jupiter's Thron:" The atoms, as describable, seem thus far to be realities, and they survive. The noble emotions of youth and of lovers die. If, however, this provisional definition of the real is to be in any way supplemented, and if the apprecia- tions too are to become of eternal significance, as the poets desire, then the appreciations, it would seem, must not be ^the appreciations of merely temporal and transient beings, but of some being that himself does not live in moments, as we mortals on earth do, but that appreciates in eter- nity, or that shares in such an eternal appreciation. " Only that which never has been," in our world of time, as Schiller tells us, " that alone grows never old." He is speaking of course of appreciable realities, not of physical ones. Or, again, the enduring appreciation may be con- ceived as belonging to an immortal soul, that survives the loveliness of all passing moments : — " Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie, 394 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. My music shows ye have your closes, And all must die. " Only a sweet and virtuous soul Like seasoned timber never gives ; But though the whole world turn to coal Then chiefly lives." Or finally, a community of such free spirits miglit share together the lasting appreciation. But such eternal ap- preciation is confessedly, for us mortals, far too much an ideal. Whether we do in any measure partake of such an appreciative consciousness remains to be seen, and forms one of the deepest problems of constructive philoso- phy. For the moment, we have suggested to us, in this distinction between the outer reality which is describable, and the inner appreciation which is unreal, one tragedy of our finitude, namely, that our descriptive consciousness, coldly and dispassionately devoting itself to the typical, to the relatively universal structure of our experience, seems to seize upon what is for that very reason real, abiding, yes, like the numbers and the atoms, everlasting in time, while, on the other hand, that which makes the moment often so dear to us, its appreciable aspect, its value, is indescribable, and so essentially private and fleeting. This it is that makes science often so cold to us, and facts so lifeless, while the glowing world of appre- ciation appears to be, after all, so fantastic and vain ; — " Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, Und griiu des Lebens goldeuer Baum.' So far, however, we have come seeking for the conse- quences of our provisional definition of the essential nature of the outer order. "We see now, plainer than at first, that the outer order as viewed by us men must be one of well-knit and universal law, structure, order, that it must be in definite forms, subject to categories, inde* PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 395 pendent of momentary caprices. All this, as we begin to see, it must be in order to be describable. And describa- ble it must appear to us in order that the content of one intelligent moment of conscious life should be, under the conditions of our finite human existence, communicable to another. In short, the outer and natural order is begin- ning to show itself in its complete character as a " World of Description," that, as such, is bound to appear in our experience as a world of permanence and of necessity. Forms and categories are necessary to description, and these mean order and fixity of type. On the other hand there may already appear, on the horizon of our discussion, the notion of another sort of conceivable reality, different from our natural order, but as possible in the logical sense as ours, namely, the real- ity of what we may call a World of Appreciation. For consider, were our human intercourse of another sort, were all the moments of all our human lives directly appreciable by us together and at our pleasure, — then the world of our accessible truth would have quite another aspect from that of the world of description. Conceive, namely, for the sake of argument, and as an ideal, of beings who were so aware of their common relations to the true Self that their life together was one of an inti- mate spiritual communion, so that the experience of each was an open book for all of them. In other words, con- ceive of beings who were mutually perfect mind-readers one of another. Their highest spiritual world would be for them what, in our finite bondage, our physical world of the outer order is not for us, a world of " one undivided soul of many a soul." The truth of it would be universal, without having to be first abstractly described. Or, to remind ourselves of what we learned in studying Hegel's characteristic theory of universals, the community of truth, in the world of such spirits, would be rather of the Hegelian type of universality, than of the ordinary type 896 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. of the more abstract universality. Forms and categories there would doubtless be in the experience of such beings, but the necessity for such forms would be of another kind. The experience of each individual would there be directly and organically related to the experience of all. It would n't be necessary to put it into abstract shape before communicating it. Nor would the appreciative moment, once passed, be for each individual beyond recall, leaving this peopled earth a solitude when it returned no more. For each spirit in that free world would read at pleasure his own past mind and experience as well as his neighbor's, would not abstractly and discursively recon- struct, but would directly acknowledge the world of his whole inner and of his whole outer order, by virtue of the one oiganic and complete form of intercourse which would there exist. In such a world of spiritual inter- course, all the thoughts of one man would become directly the object of his neighbor's thought. In such a case we should stand in the presence of an order in which the dis- tinction of outer and inner would be no ultimate one. All would be appreciable, spiritual, significant. But, as such appreciative mind-reading is under ordinary human con- ditions denied us, what we mean by having common objects, a common truth, and the same nature of things present to us all, is expressible only by saying that in so far as we can describe the contents of our moments of experience, and communicate these descriptions through imitative gestures, or through conventional speech, — so far and no further does our experience appear to us to represent the permanent, the outer, the objective. And hence, however the objective world may appear to freer spirits, or however it ultimately appears to the Self in his wholeness, to us it must appear, for the first, as a world of formed and well-categorized experience, that is, as a world of orderly universality. For only orderly universality is describable. PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 397 IV. I must beg you to glance back once more over the course of this necessarily intricate argument. We have been trying to define what is meant by the true and ob- jective, as distinct from the private and merely subjective elements of our human experience. We have provision- ally defined the physically real, for us men, as that which we experience and can describe. We have defined the business of natural science, therefore, as the description of the content of experience. We have formed a provi- sional notion of nature, as being " the World of Descrip- tion." As only that which has Form, Categories, Univer- sality, about it is describable, we have asserted already that this world of description must be a world of rigid necessity. On the other hand, however, we have suggested hypo- thetically what a " World of Appreciation " might be. It would be a world such as the organic Self in his whole- ness might have present to him at a glance, or such as the community of conceived spiritual mind-readers might share. It would be a world whose Universals were of the type that Hegel defined. It might be free from the type of necessity that our order of nature possesses. It might be a world altogether inspired by appreciative ideals ,• and yet it would be a world of objective truth, for each individual in it, each conscious moment of it, would find the others as outer and yet not foreign facts. But now we must turn back from the hypothetical sug- gestion of that world of appreciation, whose reality we have yet by no means verified, and must study a little more closely the world of description, — ■ the world, as we have seen, in which our actual human science moves. This world of empirical science suggests a well-known philosophical problem to which we must next refer. Sci- ence, as everybody knows, assumes that the physical world 398 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. is one where the law of causation rules, where nature is uniform, and where, in general, what have been called axioms, namely, certain obvious and a priori principles, are valid. Now it is an old problem how empirical sci- ence comes by these a priori principles. You remember Hume's doubts about the " original of our idea of neces- sary connection." You remember the controversy over the innate ideas. You remember Kant's " Transcendental Deduction of the Categories." Now in our day many stu- dents of the philosophy of science, following more or less unconsciously in the footsteps of Kant, have been more and more inclined to agree upon an account of the nature of these so-called " axioms " that I myself regard as un- questionably on the right track, although there is still much to be done in developing this view in all its details.^ According to this view the one postulate of physical sci- ence is that the real objects revealed to us in our experi- ence are describable in universal terms, and are so whether these objects are " things " or " events." In order to be describable, the things and the events must appear, to us men, in space and in time, because these forms of our ex- perience are actually the aspects of our conscious life that we have to use as the basis of every description. Fur- thermore, in order to make our description valid for all intelligent human beings, the fashions of our descriptioi^ have to be universal. We can't describe the unique, e. c]., Shelley's " sense that at the winds of spring," etc. That we have to appreciate. Therefore it is n't an object of scientific experience. Moreover, in order to describe, we ^ The present is no place for a bibliography. I must refer to the now almost classic discussions in the introductory lecture of Kirch- hofE's Vorlesungen iiber Mathematische Physik, in the Lectures and E$' says of Clifford, vol. i. pp. 111-123, and in Mach's Die MecJianik in ihrer Entwickelung, etc. See, for a popular suggestion of some re- lated views, the interesting book on Fundamental Problems, by Dr. Paul Carus. The present use of the word "description" I borro\( from Kirehhoff, extending, however, liis notion in my own way. PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 399 have to reduce the transient to the permanent. Other- wise the description would not be independent of the appreciative content of the moment. Hence we have to de- scribe in terms of assumed changeless things (e. gr., atoms, elements, media, — in a word, substances). And in so far as the world of experience endlessly changes, we have to refer (1) these changes of experience to changes of space and time relations amongst the assumed substances, and (2) the ways of changing themselves, so far as possible, to universal laws. The axiom of the "permanence of substance" has this very simple meaning, namely, that in so far as I can describe my experience to other men, who stand quite outside of this moment, there must be elements in the thing that is the object of this experi- ence which are quite independent of the particular time when I experienced the object itself. In fact, so far as anybody else, at any other time, could conceivably expe- rience this same thing, it must, ipso facto, be changeless. And unless anybody else you please could conceivably experience this same thing, either at the same time, or at any other time you please, the object is n't public property, and I am doubtless in so far busied with my private ap- preciation. The changing elements in my experience of things may, however, themselves be described, in so far as they involve changes of relation amongst the permanent things that have been assumed to exist in space and time. For ti/pes of change must have permanent descriptions.^ From this point of view events too, as well as things, may be objects of scientific experience, i. e., may be freed from ^ The discovery of the exact meaning of this truth by Galileo and his contemporaries gave rise later to the Calculus, which is especially devoted to the mathematical description of the permanent types of change (cf. Newton's name, Theory of Fluxions), and eventually has brought within the prospective range of exact science the vast world of " sublunary " changes, which ancient thought found almost hope- less, or only sought to appreciate in terms of ideals ; cf. Lasswitz, Die Atomistik, vol. i. pp. 79-86 and 175-183. 400 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. the appreciative privacy of tlie momentary experience. The axiom of Causation is the axiom of the Describability of Events, in so far as they are real and public and are not merely events as privately appreciated. The axiom of the Uniformity of Nature is the axiom that the event once described, i. e., reduced to an universal type, is de- scribed forever. Is that event one of a type that may be- come a possible object of anybody's experience, — then it has universal and unchangeable characteristics. These constitute its law. Whoever experienced an event of the type, i. e., an event involving the same things in the same time and space relations, would observe in it these same characteristics. For otherwise there is something incom- municable, i. e., merely appreciable about the event. All these thoughts I have to suggest very dogmatically. Let a few brief illustrations indicate, not their proof, but their meaning. First then, all the so-called axioms of natural science relate to things and events in so far as they are describa- ble. There is notoriously no axiom as to the caprices of maidens, or as to the wayward human heart generally. The axioms of natural science are about number, space, time, motion, force (in the technical sense of the word), — all describable matters.^ In the second place our most assured and universal ax- ioms all relate to matters of the completest describability. I know that aU beings, if only they can count, must find that three and two make five. Perhaps the angels can't count ; but if they can, this axiom is true for them. If I met an angel who declared that his experience had occa- sionally shown him a three and a two that did not make five, I should know at once what sort of an angel he was. ^ Or about matters assumed to be describable. A deeper study than there is here room to undertake would show how limited our actual powers of description are. At the basis of every description, e. g., of space, one finds a fundamental and irreducible appreciation. PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 401 But now why am I so sure of this ? Simply because my description of three and of two is so free from merely appreciative elements, because I know so perfectly their precise structure, and know that it is their structure, and is not any part of the appreciative content of the feelings of the moment when I count three and two. My feelings may be of what you wiU, of notes of music or of chalk- marks. I count ; that is enough. The numbers as num- bers are producible and reproducible at my pleasure by my counting, and are not matters of my feelings. They are then indeed in my experience, but are not of the moment. Of geometrical axioms there is no time to speak at present. Let us pass immediately to more concrete in- stances. Take the ancient case of the principle that " all men are mortal." This is confessedly no axiom. It is an induction from experience. What is the reason why we are so sure of it ? If anybody, e. g.., the angel aforesaid, told us that in his experience there were cases of men who had lived a hundred thousand years, and who ap- peared to him to be essentially immortal, what should we reply ? If we thought already pretty highly of the angel in question, we might not respond according to our first impulse, but might reflect a little. If we did thus hesi- tate, what axiomatic answer to his assertion could we very soon suggest ? Very obviously this : That if this indeed were so, then the people that he called men must he in some fashion of a very different description from the peo- ple to whom we are accustomed to limit the name. That answer would express the scientific postulate very pre- cisely. If any man is a real man, and not a creature in a dream, then he must have some sort of public and defi- nite description, capable of being put into universal terms ; and this description must be such as to follow him through all his fortunes to the end. The description will be one involving substances, and changes in the relations of these substances, the changes having a definable type. If this 402 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. definable type of change is such as to involve some day the death of the man, — well then, anybody else who corresponds to this same description must also be doomed to death. That is the whole story of the universal mor- tality of man. That is all that we know about it, except indeed in so far as our knowledge of the description of the typical process of heredity enables us to say that the offspring of men must be describable as a man, and must therefore be as mortal as his fathers. To take another illustration : the Paul of Acts xxviii. 2-6 gathered sticks to make a fire, and thereupon the viper came out of the heat, and stung him. The barba- rians, looking on, anticipated his death, and made appro- priate but rather narrowly appreciative comments. But " he shook off the beast into the fire, and felt no harm." So, " after they had looked a great while and saw no harm come to him, they changed their minds, and said that he was a god." The reasoning, granted the facts of the narrative, was crude, but not extraordinary. Evi- dently these barbarians used, after their fashion, the prin- ciple of the uniformity of nature. And what was this principle in their eyes ? It was the principle of the uni- versality and consequent permanence of descriptions. A man was described, according to their notion, as a being who, amongst other general characters, possessed that of swelling up and dropping down dead when stung by a viper. The description was inexact, but it served for lack of a better. Now Paul did not do this. He felt no harm. Well then, what followed ? Not that one changed one's description of a man, but that one looked for an- other class with another description, wherein to place Paul. Paul's companions already had in mind a certain sub-class of men, described as apostles, who were, amongst other general characteristics, exempt from injury by the touch of " deadly things." To them, therefore, the classi fication as " god " was both superfluous and excluded. PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 403 The real axiom is then, that both things and events, in so far as they are objective, have universal and perma- nent descriptions, in whose unity all that is real concerning the events is so bound up that a given grouping of char- acteristics can be predicted for any object that corre- sponds to the given description. All prediction of natural events is therefore of necessity hypothetical. The sun will certainly rise to-morrow if in this part of the cosmos the same bodies keep moving in the present ways ; and this they will do unless some describable physical catar ■ strophe (e. g., the blowing into small fragments of the earth from some enormous internal tension) takes place before to-morrow ; and this catastrophe, again, will not take place, unless describable physical changes are now going on in the earth and in the universe at large that are tending towards such an explosion, and tending in such manner as to lead to it before to-niorrow. So one must always state one's predictions. That the same causes lead to the same effects means, when interpreted in exact me- chanical terms, that certain definable motions, velocities, and accelerations of certain definite bodies are such, that when you describe them mathematically and exactly, you find certain earlier conditions of a system of bodies leading to and involving, as part of the whole description, certain later states. The belief that there is physical causation is then the belief that such mathematically ex- act descriptions of the things and events of the world are possible, whether we have found them as yet or not. And the genuine foundation of this belief is the observation that only by thus categorizing and formalizing our experi- ence do we find ourselves able to make its content public property, for our later thought, or for our neighbors. I must reconstruct my experience, or it is not publicly mine, is not universal, is not impersonal. And to reconstruct it I must lay stress upon so much of it as exemplifies forms and categories. 404 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. One returns then, for the sake of characterizing this whole world of description, to the suggestion that the case of the rainbow already brought before us at the out- set. My neighbor experiences this or that. He says that this experience was not his alone, but was an experience of universal truth. Well then, we say, tell us what it icas. In so far as he does this, with exactness, and under the conditions of scientific rigidity, he describes. If he describes successfully, he tells us, then, of definite and permanent things, in space and time, that behave in defi- nite and permanent ways. Does he fail of this rigidity of description (as our imperfect science is continually failing, in all but its mathematical departments), what is our con- clusion? It is one that first voices itself thus: Then, as we say, you have not yet experienced enough of your object. Go bade to it, and study it and its relations to other ob- jects until you have reached mathematical exactness. Does our observer now reply : — " But I can't reach such exactness, with any amount of study, because the object itself is n't exact, conforms to no laws, behaves in no per- manent way, is n't a lasting or a definite object " ? — Then our final answer is : Ah, very well, if this be so, your object is n't an object, but your private feeling. This Gewiihl von Erscheinungen we have heard of before from Kant. It is the very essence of the private and personal experience, uncategorized, incapable therefore of being shared by anybody else, and therefore not objective. So much then for a sketch of the world of description. So much for the gist of what I take to be the only possi- ble " deduction of the categories " of physical nature. Therefore is this our physical world one of rigid law, of immovable order, of atoms and ether vibrations and well- conserved energy. Therefore, moreover, is it an essen- tially human world, the world not of the fully conscious Self as such, in his eternal completeness, but of beings who never communicate with exactness through any de- vices but those of abstract description. PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 405 V. It hardly needs a very elaborate proof to show that this world of description as it has now at length been de- fined for us cannot be the whole of the real world. Our provisional assumption has indeed aided us thus far very well. It has defined for us the world of exact natural science, a world of boundless intellectual concern to us men, and surely a part or at all events an aspect of the real world. But our assumption has not pretended to be adequate to the account of one sort of outer reality, in which we all believe, and which we continually long to know. Here in my world of daily experience is my friend. In what sense is he real to me ? Very imperfectly I can describe him — a man of such height, so or so conditioned and habited as to this space form, wherein I find all the things of my world. Science teaches me to guess at a closer description of him. If one saw him through and through, as with my poor eyes I see him not, one would ultimately experience as the describable physical facts about him, — a quivering mass of molecules. I need not go further as to the constitution of these molecules. Enough, they would be flying about together, a swarm of trillions upon trillions, — restless with the pent-up energy of their unstable mutual positions, and with the live energy of their swift and ceaseless flight. Multitudes of them would be perpetually leaving, at every breath he draws, the form that I call his. Multitudes of new ones would take the place of what he had lost. Especially complex with intertwined spirals and streams of multitu- dinous molecules would be each of the many tens of mil- lions of cells of his brain. In this " system of systems," like the astronomer in the boundless heavens, I the ob- server, were I acute enough to witness all this, would be lost. Thus my friend, however, might be found, as a fact 406 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. in space and time, public before all men and angels in so far as they too were able to view him. Thus he might be found ? Nay, I have as yet found him not at all. I did not mean this maze of molecules by my friend. I meant his intelligence, which he more or less transmits to me through his own descriptive gestures and speech, — this and his appreciations themselves, which, as I have all along been saying, are his, and his alone, purely private facts of his inner life, but which, after all, I value most about him. His ideals, which I so admire, his will, which is often so much wiser than mine, his approval, which I prize so highly, — where are all these ? Are they for me facts in my world ? Yes, for I mean to speak of them. I think about them, and either they are real as I think them to be, or else, if I am in error, the true Self, who knows aU things, is aware of what place in the true and absolute order the genuine object of my thoughts occu- pies, and knows what facts really constitute that to me in- accessible object. Facts they are for me ; and they are not facts witJiin me ; nor yet are they describable facts in my space and in my time. The forms of my world con- tain them nowhere. The categories of my understanding cannot be impressed upon them. And yet they are real. They are in truth amongst the most vitally real objects of my faith, of my thinking, and of my will. What sort of reality then is this ? Is it not a most familiar kind of reality, in which our human social con- sciousness is absolutely bound up, without constant refer- ence to which we speak hardly a waking word ? And yet is it not a reality that as such absolutely transcends our private consciousness, and absolutely defies our powers of physical description ? And still all along, even in trying so resolutely to con- fine the objective consciousness to the consciousness of whatever is describable, were we not meanwhile recogniz- ing and appealing to this objective other consciousness oi PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 407 our fellows ? Yes, we were ; for we were speaking of what truth we could describe, and so share with the beings who possess this other consciousness. What we pretended to share, however, with them, was some abstraction or other, which in their experience we hoped that they could also Y-ealize. Their experience as such we never hoped to share. That was private, inner, incommunicable. What we could describe would be real for them only in case they too could experience what they could then abstractly describe in the same forms as those used by us. What was shared was then never consciousness, but only the imitative abstract and epitome of it, rendered cold and unappreciative, in order that it might the better be trans- ferred, through word and gesture, from our appreciative inner life to their foreign but equally warm and glowing world of feeling. Yet all along they were real for us and for one another. Their monad-like privacy, their window- less isolation of momentary consciousness, — we acknow- ledged its existence, and we pretended to intrude upon it with our descriptions of our own space and time world, descriptions which we asked them to verify. W^hat could we be meaning by all this ? Our answer, as idealists, is already fully prepared and indicated. The reality that I attribute to my friend, the genuine external existence that (even while we defined the outer order as that which could be experienced and de- scribed) we all the while bad to attribute to the appre- ciations of our fellows (which we can never, in our finite capacity, either experience or describe), — all this is unin- telligible except in so far as one recognizes that we seem- ingly isolated and momentary beings do share in the organic life of the one Self. I mean my friend's inner life when I am fond of him. And yet my friend's inner life is not one of my finite experiences at all ; nor can it ever become so, however much I peer about for his mind in all my own world of space and of time; nor can I 408 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. describe how it must seem to all beholders, as I describe the things of nature. What do I mean by him, then? Anything definite ? Yes, a most definite, although not a physical fact. I mean a fact in the same conscious spiritual realm with me, a fact whose relation to me, as the true object of my thought, only the inclusive Self, in whose thought, for whose reflection, both my friend and I exist, — only he can know, and knowing can con- stitute. Neither my friend's inner life, nor the human lives all about me whose experience I try to re-word in abstractly universal terms in my descriptive science, are themselves describable objects. They are, nevertheless, real ; and so there is a sense in which, despite my limitations, I know myself as in a world of appreciation, a world whose facts are hard and fast, are beyond my private life, cannot be expressed in terms of my space and time, and yet must be present and united in the organic universality of the one Self. And I presupposed this world at every step, even while I spoke provisionally as if the objective and the describable were one and the same. The communion of spirits, then, is genuine, although we have no con- sciousness of a spiritual mind-reading of other finite beings. Our relations with the universe are essentially social The world of description itself but expresses, in so far as it is the truth, one aspect of this fact of our spiritual intercourse. Because we can communicate with each other, therefore we can so far identify our descrip- tive accounts of our various inner experiences as to know that we have truth in common. But we could not even mean to communicate with each other, did we not presup- pose, as an objective fact, such organic spiritual relations as cannot possibly be expressed in any physical terms, but only in terms of the assertion that all the spirits are trulj together in one Spirit. PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 409 Tt. The facts of the world of appreciation have already forced us to alter in one respect our definition of the nature of this world. At the outset it was for us the world of essentially private appreciations, that is, of what we called feelings. In so far as we regard ourselves as beings bounded in time and space, the appreciative facts do indeed still retain this private and inner nature. But what we have now further found is the truth that the facts of this universe of appreciative feelings are not as iso- lated as at the outset they seemed to be, or as, in the world of space and of time, they must still seem. My friend yonder is, a^ fact of space and time, real to me only in so far as his inner life is foreign. But in so far as I truly communicate with him, we are members of the same world of appreciation ; and in this sense he is real to me by virtue of our organic unity in the one Self. This organic unity, whereby the monads of the spiritual world cease to be merely monads, has already introduced that form of universality into the world of the apprecia- tions which we have just recognized. This world is one whose parts never become public property for one another, in so far as you observe them from without. Their ties are of another sort. They are " windowless " (as Leibnitz said of the Monads that in his doctrine made up the uni- verse of finite beings) ; but they are windowless only to one another's finite view in the world of space and time relations. From above they are open to the light of the reflective Self, in whom they live and move and have their being. It is with their relations as it is already within our own finite lives, in so far as we are individual bits of the Self. For the moments of our lives are all separate in time, — isolated as the various finite selves are, yet in reflection we commune within ourselves, and catch in one moment the meaning of a thought that was only half 410 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. articulate in another ; or correct, or otherwise review and reword the ideas that, left solely to time, would seem to be lost and dead forever. However small a bit of a seK I am, I already, then, possess something of the inclusive transcendency of the true Self, for I " look before and after," and join in my one consciousness more of time than the mathematical instant would possess. And as the moments of my finite thought are to me when I reflect upon my own meaning, and upon the relations of many moments of my life, so my neighbors and I are to the larger Self when, discoursing together about the same objects, we find ourselves as it were but moments in his inclusive unity. The world of appreciation is, then, one of a sort of reflective " publicity " and interconnectedness ; and such an interconnection and publicity is, as we have seen, the very presupposition of the existence of any genuine truth in the world of description. If I cannot really communi- cate with my neighbor, and think of meanings that arq like his, there is no truth in any of our descriptions. Without the multitude of genuinely interrelated expe- riences, no true similarities, no describable universality of experience ; without the facts of appreciation, no laws of description ; without the cloud of witnesses, no ab- stract and epitome of the common truth to which they can bear witness. Destroy the organic and appreciable unity of the world of appreciative beings, and the de- scribable objects all vanish; atoms, brains, "suns and milky ways " are naught. On the other hand, if you destroy our describing kind of intercommunication, you can at least conceive of beings, as we did before, whose communications were of a direct and appreciative sort, as those of mother bird and nestlings now often seem to be as we look at them. The world of science, then, presup' voses the world of spiritual oneness ; the unity of the Self is through and through His Own, and is in so far appreciative. PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 411 Nor are all appreciations dumb. The whole Moral World presupposes a sharing of definite and express ap- preciations amongst moral beings,^ a " realization " of the life of one by another. Describable phenomena may aid this mutual realization, but can never assure it ; and only when it is assured does the moral life begin. "What Kant called the Practical Reason, the moral nature of man, is through and through appreciative, but it is not on that account merely emotional. It is like the true Self, thor- oughly and reflectively rational. The moral law itself is in no physical sense an outer reality. You cannot describe its facts as you can those of gravitation, by looking on and computing; but none the less is the moral law a truth, — a truth, namely, of the universal appreciation of the world of finite ideals and strivings, all of them inner facts, but, in their totality, an universe of genuine objec- \ tivity. The world of appreciation is, then, the deeper reality. Its rival, the world of description, is the result ( of an essentially human and finite outlook. ' Not on that account, however, is the latter unreal. It is simply the way in which the world of appreciation, the world of the true and spiritual Self, must needs appear when viewed hy a finite being loliose consciousness expe- riences in the forms of our space and of our time, and who is interested in giving to his fellows a dispassionate and universalized account of how he views it. Here is the permanent truth of Kant's doctrine. But now, ere we pass to a closer study of the relations of these two aspects of reality, shall we not restate the modified. view that we have gained of the nature of the world of appreciation ? As we now view it, it is the world whose categories are not those of abstractly formal de- scription, but are not the less true categories. They are the Categories of Self-Consciousness as such. When one 1 See The Religious Aspect of PMlosophy, chap vi. : The Moral In' tight, p. 131 sqq. 412 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. is describing an object of physical science, he is so much concerned with the structure of this object, tliat it is his business to forget, as we say, himself, and to live solely in the process of constructive imitation whereby he seizes upon what is enduring about this object. When he appre- ciates, he says, on the contrary : So this thing is for me. Hence it was that, at the outset, appreciation appeared to us a sort of private exercise of each self-consciousness. It was, as we first found it, a sort of speaking with tongues, whereby each little bit of a self edified himself, but not the brethren. Now, however, we have learned a more excellent way. The truly objective and universal appre- ciation is lilie the Pauline charity. It is none the less self-conscious because it seeketh not its own, and rejoiceth rather in the truth. It stands for the unity of self -con- sciousness of the one Spirit, whom aU finite things and experiences presuppose. His appreciations are indeed his own ; for he is alone and none beside him. Yet in them we all share, for that fact is what binds us together. Categories the universal appreciation has, and what are they ? They are the categories of the self-conscious and of the significant world, the categories of the realm of inter-related interests, and of the mutual dependence of each finite consciousness upon others for its own truth and meaning. In this realm it is, too, that thoughts have objects beyond them and true relations to these objects. Here, also, the categories of objective worth and of pur- pose have validity ; for it is self-consciousness that gives worth to things, and that reflectively compares the worth of things seen from one point of view with their worth as estimated otherwise. The world of appreciations is, then, the world of ideals. In space and in time you find no such things as worth and ideals ; there you find only hard facts. The consciousness of us finite beings who know and judge the things of space and time is the source of the transient worth which appears to us here or there in PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 413 our world. Only the eternal consciousness, in its time- transcending completeness, can know the really abiding and eternally true value of the world. On the other hand, the specific categories of the world of description have no application to this world of appre- ciation, in so far as it is regarded in itself. It is real, but there is no physical necessity in it, no natural causation links together its parts ; and we know this, at present, because we have found what is the nature of physical necessity and of natural causation. In so far as two finite beings, A and B, separated in space and time, are to communicate with each other by abstract rewording of experience, they must find present in the experience of each of them a world of facts that submit to the cate- gories of science ; and of these one is that of physical! necessity. But in so far as A considers what he means by the inner existence of B, he finds here a fact, to wit, an- other self-consciousness, recognized by him as real. This fact, however, is one that he cannot describe. He can describe the outward seeming of B, but never the inner appreciations of B as such. It is useless to say, therefore, that the category of physical causation applies to the true relations of B and A. A's body, indeed, by virtue of its changes, causes changes in the body of B. So far physi- cal causation reigns supreme ; but A's body and B's body I are describable phenomena in the world of space and time, r and only describable phenomena have physical relations. A and B, however, are in their actual and appreciable relations by virtue of the part they both play in the inner self -consciousness of the organic and inclusive Self, who, being what he is, embodies his personality in numerous finite bits of selfhood, whereof A and B are examples. In him they are together, in so far as each of them thinks of the other. Another person of whom I think is, as such, not the cause, but the appreciable object of my thoughts. Where real things are in this relation, they 414 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. are not in the describable relation called that of cause and effect. The spiritual world, as such, then, causes in me no thoughts. I think of it thus or thus by virtue of my place in its organic wholeness. The more of a self I am, the more and the deeper do I know its truth. And as a whole the world of the self is caused by nothing, is what it is by virtue of its own self-knowledge, is consti- tuted by the reflective self-consciousness in and for which it has its own being. It is, then, through and through, a world of Freedom ; its own significance is what occasions it thus to express itself. Nothing causes or explains it from without. It is its own excuse for being. As for the proof of all this, I can now only refer you again to the argument as to the nature of objective truth, and as to our relation thereto, that I so imperfectly set forth at the last time. Just this problematic but real relation of a thought to its object is the one implied in every least assertion of our lives. It is not true that we believe in outer objects because we suppose somehow, a priori, that our inner experiences must have adequate causes, and then make hypotheses as to the nature of these causes. On the contrary, unless I first believed in outer objects, and in the validity of my thoughts about them, I should never talk of laws and of causes at all.^ The objects of my thought are not the producers of my thought, but the truths that correspond thereto. A cup of coffee may, as I say, " set me thinking," that is, may increase the activity of my nerve-centres ; but what I think of may, then, be, not the coifee, but the feelings of my fellow-men, or the nature of things, or the prepara- tion of this lecture. The relation of object to thought is here, you see, not a physical, but a logically appreciable one, — one that only my relation to the inclusive Logos can explain or express. And this case is typical. Rela- ^ A fuller exposition of these considerations will be found in the Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 354r-360. PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM, 415 tions of causation, however, exist amongst certain objects of thought, in a certain aspect of their nature. Is an object, namely, to be regarded by me in so far forth as it is abstractly describabfe, then, and only then, does it stand in causal relations to other objects. As for causes that affect me personally, these do so, once more, only in so far as I, too, am conceived, not in my inner and appreciable nature, but as myself capable of being looked upon and described from without, that is, as myself an object amongst objects, existent in space and time, and public to all men. " The coffee sets me thinking : " this expression refers to the physical fact of the essentially describable relation of a certain alkaloid to the physiological changes that its presence in my blood produces in my nerve cen- tres. Of this describable change in me as phenomenal thing my own inner life, after I drink coffee, is the appre- ciable aspect. 1 vn. ' Our last word, " aspect," suggests to us at once how near in one way we have now come to the language of the so-called " Monism " of recent times.^ In fact, unsatis- factory as the " mind-stuff " theory seems to an idealist in the ordinary formulation of this theory, he has only to substitute his own interpretation of the fundamental truth of things for certain of the statements of Clifford and of the other Monists, and the doctrine of the " Double Aspect " becomes at once luminous and inevitable. We shall aid ourselves greatly if we interpret the theory now in our hands by the aid of this monistic formula. In doing so wc shall again survey, but from a new outlook, our whole argument. The true world is, to state our theory afresh, the system of the thoughts of the Logos. His unity, as we have seen, is a reflective, a self-conscious, and so an appreciable, but not, in its deepest truth, a describable unity. We know 1 See above, Lecture IX., pp. 300-304. 416 THE SPIRIT OF MODEKN PHILOSOPHY. this unity just in so far forth as we ourselves consciously and rationally enter into it and form part of it. There- fore, in so far as we have inner unity of thinking, in so far as we commune with our fellows, and in so far as we rightly see significance in the outer universe, we are in and of the world of appreciation that embodies the thought of the Logos. On the other hand, once having recognized ourselves as finite beings, distinct from our feUows in so far as we are different centres of appreciative consciousness, and sun- dered from them in so far as we are all only bits of the true Self, we become aware of our private world of inner truth as distinguishable from the truth as experienced by other men, and from the universal truth of the all-know- ing world-consciousness. A new question then arises : — How much of this private truth of ours is a revelation to us in our finitude of what other. finite selves can also know ? Then comes the answer : So much as can be de- scribed to these other finite selves and then, in their ex- perience, appreciatively verified, may be regarded as not our private content, but as universal. Herewith began a little while ago our effort to describe the content of our experience. Using the space and time forms, and the cate- gories of theoretical science, we get, as the result of a long- continued common effort of humanity at describing things, the world of science. But again the question returns upon us, In what sense is this world of description real ? The only answer is, It is real in so far as it is in very truth an aspect of the world of the Logos, such an aspect, namely, as can be expressed by finite consciousness in terms of the space and time forms, and of the categories of empirical science. Only as such an aspect has the physical world a reality. Consequently all its laws, all its necessity, its causation, its uniformity, belong, not to its inner nature as such, but to the external show of this nature. If we could grasp the whole truth at a glance, PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 417 as the Logos does, we should see what now is dark to us, namely, why and how the world of appreciation, when viewed under the conditions of our finite experience, has thus to seem a world of matter in motion. As it is, how- ever, we already know that the world of matter in motion is simply an external aspect of the true and appreciable world. That is, in substance, the whole of our philosophi- cal insight into the matter. Therefore it is perfectly true to say that my friend's brain, with its countless molecules, is simply the outward aspect of my friend's inaccessible inner life, in so far as this life is expressed, symbolized, translated, into the language of my personal experience of time and space phenomena. My friend, as he is in him- self, is therefore not a new sort of thing, called a soul or mind, existent somewhere yonder in space, in amongst his brain molecules, — a thing imprisoned in his body. No, he is himself the reality that, when I look at his body, I am vainly trying to see and describe. What I see and describe is simply the physical, the phenomenal aspect of his inner and appreciative life. That he does appear at all in my world of phenomena is due to the fact, not fur- ther explicable from the human point of view, that he and I, by virtue of our places in the world-order, have spirit- ual relations, think of each other, and do somehow indi- rectly commune together. That this relation of his inner life to me is symbolized by the describable facts of his physical organism, is due in general to my nature as a being who can perceive and describe only what appears to me in space and in time. That just this particular set of facts, however, should symbolize to me his inaccessible inner life, is once more, for us human beings, an ultimate datum. The Logos knows, not we, why inner feelings, outwardly symbolized in space and time to our percep- tions, should appear as nerve-centres made up of countless flying molecules. The twofold aspect itself is, however, a certain truth of our experience. There is my friend. 418 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. He is for himself conscious, i. e., appreciative. The only aspect of this appreciative life that can become manifest to me actually appears to me as matter in motion. And this is describable. Herewith we have however only the fact of the double aspect. The inner intelligibility of this fact is regarded by us as something that must be un- derstood by the Logos. It is for us a problem ; but is not so for our true Self, who completes the insight that for us is so fragmentary. Our theory, then, does not declare, as do other forms of the double aspect theory, that there is a curious kind of substance in the world, a substance mysterious and essen- tially inscrutable, that has the two aspects, the mental and the physical. For our theory undertakes to know what this substance is. It is the conscious life of the Logos, whereof my friend is a finite instance, and whereby I too am so conceived as to be in appreciable relations to him. Nor yet do we say, as the mind-stuff theory says, that my friend is a mass of mind-stuff atoms, which pro- duce effects upon my mass of mind-stuff atoms. On the contrary, for our theory, my true friend stands in relations to me that are essentially appreciable, not physical at all. He causes no effects in me whatever. His body affects my body ; but that is an affair of physics, not of inner life. I am genuinely related to him in so far only as the insight of the Logos reflectively so constitutes our mutual concern for each other that, as a fact, it is what it is. My friend then is no cause in the world of physical phenomena, at all. He is neither' matter nor energy. His thoughts move no molecules. His feelings towards me innervate no muscles, set in motion no bodily limbs, release no phy- sical energy. But his organism, as it appears in space and time, is the describable show and symbol of the inner and appreciable reality that is his ; and, even so, the physical effects that his organism produces upon mine are merely the describable show of oxir spiritual and appreciable inter- PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 419 relationships. His matter and energy, his nervous tre- mors and his innervated muscles, his deeds and their phy- sical effects are the phenomenal aspect of his part of the world-order. His mind does not influence his body. His body is merely a very imperfect translation of his mind into the describable language of space. The physical causation that I attribute to him should be attributed, therefore, solely to this body. For all physical causation is only the describable translation of the inner meaning of things into terms of relations amongst bodies. The rela- tions of the world of appreciation, which is the true world, to the world of description, which is its show, are theref fore themselves in no wise relations of cause and effect. I as observer, interpreting the true world in terms of our human forms and the categories of theoretical science, am bound to see, in the world as thus interpreted, rigid laws of causation. But the laws thus seen are symbols of deeper truth, and not the physical effects of this truth. This deeper truth itself is not causal. It is only such truth as, in order to be describable, must show the aspect that the laws of causal connection in our experience inter- pret in their own imperfect way. Till. Three further and closing considerations occur to us, in this connection, as giving fuller expression to our form of the doctrine of the "double aspect." The first of these is suggested by the problem of the relation of the inorganic world to our human consciousness. The second is suggested by the problem of the real nature of physical evolution. The third has to do with the problem of the freedom of the will. The theory of the "double aspect," applied to the facts of the inorganic world, suggests at once that they, too, in so far as they are real, must possess their own inner and appreciable aspect. Upon this suggestion we have no 420 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. time to dwell at great length. In general it is an obvious corollary of all that we have been saying. When I think of the stars and of matter, of space and of the energy that appears forever to be dissipating itself therein, I think of something real, or else of merely a pri- vate experience of mine. If, now, the common experience of humanity is our sufficient warrant for assuming some universal reality as actually embodied in these hot stars and cold interspaces, of what sort must this reality be ? In and for itself, we now answer, it must be an appre- ciable reality, the expression of what, in Schopenhauer's sense of the word, may be called a World- Will ; as well as of what, in Hegel's sense, may be called an Universal Self-Conscious Thought. But to say this is not to commit ourselves to the acceptance of those paradoxes of the seem- ing outer order which we set forth in our tenth lecture. These paradoxes were due to the assumption of infinite space and time as themselves outer and real, and to their introduction into our account of the physical processes of the stellar world. We now have reached a deeper insight. The " antinomies " of the physical order no longer terrify us. They are due to our trying to express the whole appreciable system of things in our human forms of space and time. Here before us is the order of the embodied Logos. We try to describe it. Our science undertakes the task ; our highest descriptive synthesis encounters in- congruities. What do these mean ? They mean simply that our descriptive science is, indeed, in one aspect of its work, playing with " pebbles on the beach." For the fashion of this world of space and time is such as to give us no united and intelligible definition of the world- process in its wholeness. Only the self-completed is in- telligible ; and our physical world in endless time and in infinite space, being no world of self-completed, that is, of " cyclical " processes, is a mere aspect of the true world, and is also an aspect that must be but fragmentary, PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 421 Higher beings than we may have other forms of descrip- tive science, based upon a consciousness, say, of some other form of space and time, e. g., oi a "non-Euclidean" space of three dimensions, or of a space of four or more dimensions, and of a time that includes the truth of ours, and that still makes clear how the world-process somehow returns into itself. Such higher forms of consciousness we can speculatively view as possibilities. They may be adequate to a description of the whole world of pheno- mena as viewed by such higher beings. We, however, in our limitation, know only that the Self must have unity' in himself, — an appreciable wholeness in his conception of the world. We speak of him as infinite; we do not mean that he is vaguely infinite, so that however much of his thought one might consider there would always be more to consider. On the contrary, he knows himself as one, and so as eternally complete, — as a finished whole. Otherwise he would be no self. Therefore our vague in- finities of space and time, never- finished, never explor- able as wholes, are very poor embodiments of his truth. His infinity, however it is constituted, must mean self- completion. We inay expect, therefore, so soon as we approach the limits of our science about the phenomenal things in space and time, to get warnings that our descrip- tive knowledge is an inadequate translation of the truth. Such a warning we got in the study of the outer order a little while since. The world of the stars, then, and of the " running down " energy is not really what it seems. It is a " well-founded phenomenon," but not a final truth. On the other hand, we have, indeed, a perfect right thus to say that the world of the stars is, like the brains of our friends, the well-founded show in space and time of an appreciative consciousness, and that the unity of the laws of physical nature is the outer aspect of some deep spiritual unity of will and plan in the world. We have a right to interpret this unity, in hypothetical forms, as well 422 THE SPIEIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. as we are able. Only we must not say that this will and plan are in any physical sense the causes of our show- world. On the contrary, all physical causation is itself part of the show, in so far as the show is describable. They are perfectly right, therefore, who deny designs as factors in natural processes. The true World- Will, being no phenomenon in space and time, is no form of physical energy, and moves no matter. The laws of matter more or less completely portray, but do not, physically speak- ing, result from the Logos. No creative fiat produced the world at any moment in past time. To say that would be to assert the existence somewhere in time of an utterly indescribable event, which is precisely what nobody can assert of the world of time, since this world is nothing unless in so far as it is describable. For the same reason no will, infinite or finite, ever, by any temporal interference, turned aside a single atom in its flight. The physical world shows us, indeed, a plan, but only in so far as the space and time phenomena symbolize and very poorly translate an unity, that, as it is in itself, is an unity of will, of self-consciousness, of a divine interest in truth, of an equally divine self-possession, of an eternal rest in the fullness of perfected being. In this will, the finite wills themselves share, and of it they are a part, since this unity includes, knows, and justifies the organ- ized relationships of the whole universe of finite apprecia- tions. The physical world, then, expresses such a world- will, but is not subject to the interference of this will. Turning to the other aspect of the natural order — to the aspect in which this seems to be a world of evolution, — we now see something of what that point of view also means. The world is for us human observers a world that contains processes of evolution, in so far as, in this or that portion of it, we detect temporal series of pheno- mena that are not merely describable, but that, regarded as wholes, suggest to us something significant, — a tale, an PHYSICAL LAW AND FKEEDOM. 423 appreciable form of some lengthy sequence, — an ideal realized, a bit of a plan embodied. The first question of a philosophy of evolution is, Have we a right thus to look for the suggestion of plans symbolized by the most rigid and necessary causal sequences of nature ? The answer is, Certainly. For, as we now see, all describable truth is an outward symbol of an appreciable truth. Of this one central principle our doctrine of the Logos assures us ; and to look for a plan embodied in a physical sequence is not to look for a designing Daemon in nature, interfering with rigid causation. On the contrary, thus to look is simply to watch for signs and hints of the appreciable aspect that, as we already know, is there. To believe that my friend lives as a conscious being, is not to doubt that in the physical world his only representative is a nervous mechanism, whose physiological processes are as rigidly necessary and purely material as the flight of a planet or the fall of a stone. My friend's physical life is, indeed, merely a series of reflexes, with which his will never interferes, any more than the concave side of the curve interferes with the convex. Eegarded physiologi- cally, his consciousness is a superfluous extra accompani- ment, or as it has been called, an " epiphenomenon," that does nothing with his brain-molecules, but merely runs parallel to them ; but regarded more deeply, his will, his appreciative inner life, is really bis bit of the truth of the Logos, and is the only real truth present. It is the physi- ological view, after all, that has to do only with seemings. His brain is the phenomenal outer aspect of this deeper truth. Well, even so in nature the truth present is once I more the mind of the Logos. Of this mind the laws of matter are the show. When we search for a hint of the 1 significance of things, we do not doubt the absolute valid- ity and unchangeableness of physical laws in their own sphere. We look for signs of the truth that is behind them, interfering not with them, but speaking through 424 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. the mask of them. Such signs appear to us as processes of evolution. As I often misread my friend's mind, so every such interpretation of nature's facts is tentative, and may be wrong. In this sphere we can but guess. We have, however, now mentioned a somewhat novel contrast between our descriptive and our appreciative atti- tude towards a temporal series of events, a contrast at which it is necessary still to glance a moment. When, namely, I physically describe, that is, explain events by their causes, I first seize upon some one instant of time, some one event, and ask : What is the configuration- of the world now ? Having found in a measure this descrip- tion of one moment of the world, this cross section of the temporal series of events, I ask myself : How did this condition result from the previous state of the world ? ' Descriptively, or contemplatively, then, I study the world from one moment to another. But when I view a physi- cal series appreciatively, when I estimate the world, or any part of it, say a kind action, or the inner life of my friend, or a process of evolution, I don't thus dwell on the momentary description or configuration of things, but I, as it were, take in at one glance a whole series of mo- ments. I treat some portion of the world as a story. I look before and after until I have grasped the whole of it. So (to take a case that already illustrates our attitude towards all evolution), as I follow a melody, I don't dwell so much on the single note, but on the whole sequence, and on the sequence as a whole. Or, once more, to esti- mate such an act as that of the good Samaritan in the parable is not to study his single attitudes, as configura- tions of the molecules of his body. Now indeed he comes, now he stops, now he kneels, now he rises. And all these conditions might be causally explained as a series of described configurations of his molecules. But not thus does one estimate the good Samaritan ideally. One rather looks at the whole story of his deed as one PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 425 whole story, just as one considers a melody, or a progres- sion of chords, or a drama, or any such sequence of events. To appreciate the world in histori<3al terms, then, to find processes of evolution in it, we must in some mea- sure forsake the purely temporal and lunited point of view to which we naturally find ourselves confined, and to which every scientific explanation of nature is always confined. To appreciate even hypotheticaUy the meaning of a pro- cess in time, we must in some measure transcend time. And this once more suggests how the ideal interests that the processes of nature seem to serve wherever we find evo- lution cannot themselves be viewed as physical factors in these processes. An evolution is a series of events that in itseK as series is purely physical, — a set of necessary occurrences in the world of space and time. An egg de- velops into a chick ; a poet grows up from infancy ; a nation emerges from barbarism ; a planet condenses from the fluid state, and develops the life that for millions of years makes it so wondrous a place. Look upon all these things descriptively, and you shall see nothing but matter moving instant after instant, each instant containing in its full description the necessity of passing over into the next. Nowhere will there be, for descriptive science, any genuine novelty or any discontinuity admissible. But look at the whole appreciatively, historically, syTithetically, as a musi- cian listens to a symphony, as a spectator watches a drama. Now you shall seem to have seen, in phenomenal form, a story. Passionate interests will have been realized. The will of the growing animal, the ideals of the poet, the his- tory of the evolving races, these will have passed before you. In taking such a view are you likely to be coming nearer to the inner truth of things ? Yes ; for the con- sciousness of the Logos must be one that essentially tran- scends our own natural time-limitations ; and in so far as we view sequences in their wholeness, we are therefore 426 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. likely to be approaching the unity of his world-possessing insight. In doing all this, however, we are not learning how ideals have interfered with nature's mechanism, but how nature's mechanism, in its temporal sequences, sym- bolizes, as it must, a world of ideals. The student of evo- lution finds the world mechanical, because he is watching describable processes. But he finds the world also teleo- logical, because he is viewing not merely the sequences as such, but the wholes of sequence ; is listening not merely for the notes of nature's music (the passing events of in- stant after instant), but for the melody (the appreciable total of the life that is made up of many successive in- stants). And as the appreciable is deeper and truer than the describable, as the insight into the whole of what we mortals call time is logically prior, in the unity of the eternal Logos, to the isolation of our own finite lives, so the student of evolution, in thus viewing the world of his- tory, the world of interests that in the world of appre- ciation contend for the mastery, of ideals that long for realization, is coming nearer to the truth of things than is he who merely describes the necessary sequence of time. It is true that every such interpretation of nature is fragmentary and hypothetical ; since we dwell not at the centre of the truth of the Logos, but in our finite iso- lation of half -con scions temporal insights. It is also true that every interpretation which I make of my friend's in- ner life is fragmentary and hypothetical. It is neverthe- less true that in both cases interpretation in appreciative terms is deeper than mere description of phenomena, and is more likely to get at the truth of things. And now, surely, we may see how vain are the anxi- eties of those who wonder how conscious life could ever have been evolved on our planet under purely physical conditions, and what will become of all such life when the energy of the stars runs down. For at the present Btage of our argument we know that there is no real PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 427 process of nature that must not have, known or unknown to us, its inner, its appreciable aspect. Otherwise it could not be real ; since in so far as it is merely describable, it is also merely show, is merely abstract, like the numbers and the geometrical figures, and has no true fullness of being.i The difference between living and inanimate na- ture is for us now merely the difference between the na- ture that like the face of a friend is near enough to our own for us to get a sympathetic suggestion of what ap- preciative truth it probably embodies, and the nature that like the infinitely complex ether waves which fill the inter- planetary spaces is too remote from our own to be appre- ciable from our point of view. But the power of nature to embody divine appreciations is not in this fashion lim- ited. Even so, processes of evolution are for us such series of events as are near enough to our human interests to suggest their probable interpretation as stories. And so what we call life appeared on our globe as soon as na- ture's products were such as can at present come wdthin the range of our appreciative insight. The " miracle " of the beginning of life is merely the subjective miracle of our own human point of view. Beyond that beginning we have no appreciative insight. This side of it we have. The " discontinuity " exists in us, not in the truth. " Animism," to be sure, the tendency that we formerly also called " anthropomorphism," the tendency by mere analogy to endow stones or planets with a quasi-human life, remains a misleading tendency. For it is not ours to speculate what appreciative inner life is hidden be- hind the describable but seemingly lifeless things of the world. But what we know is that it must be what it is in so far as the self-consciousness of the Logos finds a place for it ; and this place must be, like that of our own finite consciousness, a place in the world of appreciation. The rest is to us mortals as yet wholly unknown. But this 1 Or, as Hegel would say, Wirklichkeit. 428 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. consideration sets aside the anxious question as to the rise of consciousness in general. The world has always had its appreciable aspect. We mortals ourselves stand on the shore of this boundless world of appreciation, and describ- ing this or that pebble, or looking at this or that breaking wave, seem to understand a little of their meaning. We know that the whole limitless ocean is full of an infinite meaning, since otherwise its throbbing billows and innu- merable currents, its depths and unexplored solitudes, its resistless tides and its divinely mighty storms, would not be real. If we ask what this meaning is, we see again only wave after wave approaching, curving, gleaming, and breaking on the beach ; and we hear only the eter- nal thunder of this restless life. Each new wave we men call a process of evolution. The world of what appears to us as endless time seems in our neighborhood to be filled with, such processes. And herewith our empirical knowledge ends. Do we doubt whether there is truth and clear insight behind all this imperfect experience of ours ? The very question, as we have already seen, in- volves its own answer. The problem can exist only as transcended by the insight of the Solver of problems. .IX. The third and last of our concluding considerations relates to the problem of freedom. If one asks as to the world of appreciation in its whole- ness, What efficient power caused it to exist? the ques- tion is for the first meaningless. For cause, as usually understood, relates to the world of description, and to the explanation of temporal sequences. The only cause that you can seek in the world of appreciation is in a very dif- ferent sense a cause. It is, namely, a justification for this as against any other fashion of will and of self-consciousness. The world in its wholeness ajipears to us in space and time as a describable system of phenomena, bound together PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 429 by rigid law. That, however, just this system of phe- nomena, these atoms, these physical laws, this order of nature should be there, rather than some other equally describable system, with other atoms and other types of motion, — this seems to us the mere fact, the gigantic ca- price of nature. Viewing this same caprice in its other aspect, namely, as a system of appreciable truth and of the inner ideals of the Logos, we do not indeed get rid of the aspect of what Hegel called Unmittelbarheit or " im- mediacy " about the world. It is what it is. So the Logos, from eternity, and in one organic all-embracing act, constitutes his system of appreciative truth. If we still ask why ? we must answer, not with Schopenhauer, " For no reason," but with all the rational idealists, " Freely, and solely for the reason most pleasing to him- self, hut not without reason." For such is the necessary consequence of the conception of an untrammeled and fully self-possessed Self, who solves all his own problems, including the problem. Why this eternal choice? The element of caprice is there, in so far as none but the Self can fathom his own will. The World-WiU is so far like a fair maiden, "in her silence eloquent," who chooses be- cause such is her choice. Yet the caprice is, in the case of the completely self-conscious "Will, a necessary element of its reason. The highest Keason has no reason beyond it, and in so far it is capricious. But it includes all lower reasons, and all finite points of view, and so as against them is infinitely less capricious, in the baser sense of the word, than they, since they are infinitely less aware of their own meaning ; and it lacks their blindness. It is for this reason that we have called the world of appreciation one of freedom. But how are our finite wills related to this freedom? Are we predestined to our place in the world-order ? Are we " impotent pieces of the game he plays ? " The answer, as I conceive, is this : In so far as we are clearly conscious of our own 430 THE SPIRIT OF MODEBN PHILOSOPHY. choices, we ourselves are part of the world of appreciar tion. We are then, ourselves, conscious bits of the Self. Our wills are part of his freedom. And hereby we too are free. Only in so far, however, as we are not conscious of our choices, but only find in ourselves blind and uncon- scious impulses, mere facts of hereditary temperament, or of momentary mood, we do not enter into his freedom. Some one else, we know not who, some ancestor, some good or evil angel, may then have chosen these things for us, not we. But our conscious volition is a fragment of the freedom of the World- Will. But how, one may ask, can I be in any sense thus free ? After all, is not my consciousness, viewed as a fact in time, tied hopelessly to this describable nervous mechanism of mine ? The world, in its divinely free capriciousness, involves a physical order that necessarily contains just this organism. What the organism itself will do in given circumstances, is therefore physiologically determined by the whole order of nature and by the whole of past time. And my will moves no atom of this mechanism aside from its predestined course. And yet I, whose will is just so much of the world of appreciation as constitutes the inner aspect of this describable mechanism, — I shall in some sense be free ? How explain such a paradox ? In answer I appeal afresh to that double aspect which the world of time has already presented to us as we spoke of the facts of evolution. Whatever the true facts about what we call time may be, as they are known to the Self, we are sure that the order of nature, from what we are obliged to call the infinite past to the infinite future, just because it does all of it express one law, just because it must all be absolutely foreknown, is present in one time- transcending instant to the insight of the Logos. It is present, I insist, because it is all one truth, and because the infinite Self is there to know all truth. But how all the world of time can and must thus form to the infinite PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 431 Self a single instant of time-transcending knowledge is after all not so very hard to conceive, at least in general. You all the while, in your finite capacity, in so far as you are self-conscious, do transcend time, yes, you yourself. A sequence of chords is not a mere series of events to you, whose earlier moments are non-existent when the later are there. The whole series is one artistic moment to you. Reflection continually transcends time. Your life is a "looking before and after." This time-transcendence bears precisely the relation to the single events of your life that consciousness in general bears to your brain- states. This transcending of a time-series, and estimat- ing it as one whole, is in fact what one might call the soul of the natural order. For the ideal or appreciable order is thus in fact linked to the natural order precisely as mind in the finite sense is linked to body. Without time to re- flect upon and transcend, there would indeed be no finite consciousness of an ideal or appreciable value in things. But this consciousness of the appreciable aspect of the events of time views the temporal world as the musical hearer views the whole symphony, seeing the end in the beginning, and the beginning in the end, not explaining, not describing in causal terms, but making an appreciable synthesis of time in one glance. This being the case, our own consciousness, at a moment of choice, is itself twofold. Our organism passes through a series of states, constituting what we call an act. This act fills up a considerable time. Of the successive states we are aware. So far we ourselves live in time, and fol- low the series, perceiving nothing but what must be de- scribable and necessary. On the other hand, if we are truly self-conscious, we are aware of some significance, of some ideal value, in the series of states as a whole. The melody (to return to that figure) — the melody of con- duct interests us, far more than the notes of our momen- tary physical reaction. But in just so far we actually 432 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. seem to ourselves to be choosing the conduct as such, since we are approving this whole series of physical events. On this side of our twofold consciousness, then, we are all the while truly transcending time, yes, are taking hold upon and forming spiritually part of that absolutely time-tran- scending appreciation that the Self possesses in view of the whole physical order. Such an inclusive moment of conscious choice, in fact, does possess in one act a past and a future, does estimate whole series of events, and, although, in its finite capacity, it is dependent on a brain state, still, in its significance, in this its ideal comment, it takes hold upon the distant in time. Such consciousness, therefore, being always a time-transcending estimate of physical series as wholes, may be indeed dependent on brain-states, but in significance it is already, in its mea- sure, a part of the eternal world-estimate, which, as we have learned, is a far deeper reality than the world of phy- sical nature itself, and as a whole is no event in time at all, but a transcendent spiritual estimate of all time. But if you have follow.ed me thus far into this rather breathless region of speculation you may now finally ask, " But .does all this make us morally free ? " I answer, in a very profound sense, it does. For gather once more into one the threads of our argument. The Self, we say, regards its world in a twofold way : (1) As a time series of events in which the earlier events fatally cause the later; (2) As an eternally complete world total, whose significance it ideally estimates and chooses. And we, in so far as we are morally judging beings, in so far as we too make ideal estimates, are a part of the Self in this second sense, living not merely in time, but also above time, beyond time. In so far as we are temporal facts, we are indeed mere descendants of an animal ancestry, mere creatures of nerves. But we are far more than tem- poral. And now remember : this temporal order, rigid and necessary in itself, is it not after all only one of infi" PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 433 nitely numerous possible world-orders, any one of whicli could be conceived by the Self, but all of which, from the eternal point of view, are deliberately left unconceived, unreal, because of the ideal estimate which the Self makes in choosing this world ? What then, though we are bound in the temporal world, may we not indeed be free, — yes, and in a non-temporal and transcendent sense effective too in the eternal world ? May we not in fact, as parts of an eternal order, be choosing not indeed this or that thing in time, hut helping to choose out and out what world this fatal temporal world shall eternally he and have been? This, as some of you know, was Kant's famous doctrine of what he called the transcendental or extra-temporal freedom and the temporal necessity of all our actions. From this point of view, as you may already in part see, the natural and the spiritual orders, the physical and the moral orders, the divine and the human, the fatal and the free, may be finally reconciled. If this be so, then indeed we shall no longer fear fate, no longer dread the facts of nervous physiology, no longer be appalled by na- ture, no longer appeal to temporal miracles to save the ideals. God and Cassar will indeed become reconciled. Is such an hypothesis after all impossible ? I think not. I hold it rather to be the deepest truth. But all this, I once more admit, must still seem, when thus presented, very unpersuasive. The limits of a rela- tively untechnical discussion permit as I thus close only this dim suggestion of one of the deepest insights ot modern philosojjhy. If it is right, your acts are at onc6 from the temporal point of view absolutely bound, and from the eternal point of view absolutely free. For you enter into the divine order in two ways. In this world you are a fact in time, descended from the animals, a creature with just this brain, doomed for countless ages to precisely this conduct. But the whole temporal order is for the absolute Self, of whom you are a part, only 434 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. one way of looking at truth. All eternity is before him at a glance. He has chosen not temporally, but in an act above all time, yet an act in which you yourself share, to conceive this world which contains you. He has chosen this world for the sake of its worth. And in the estimate that eternally chooses, your will, your time-tran- scending personality, your consciousness has its part also. You are not morally free to change laws in this world. But you are moral and free because you are in the eter- nal sense a part of the eternal World-Creator, who never made the world at any moment of time, but whose choice of this deseribable world of time in its wholeness is what constitutes the world of appreciation, which is the world of truth. LECTUEE XIII. OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MOEAL ORDER. Too long I have detained you, in the previous lecture, with the discussion of the intricate sjaeculative problems suggested to us hy the physical world. This evening I return to more practical issues. During the course of our historical discussions, we have had occasion to study the idealistic doctrines of earlier thinkers from two points of view. They appeared as efforts to explain the nature of human knowledge, and as attempts to give form to the spiritual interests of humanity. It is, of course, in the latter sense that idealism usually seems most attractive to thfe general reader. Other theories of the world may or may not be influenced by ethical considerations. A doc- trine which defines reality in terms of the absolute Self seems bound to make prominent the spiritual. In fact this is, to many minds, a defect of idealism, in that the doctrine appears to them rather the outcome of a moral enthusiasm than an embodiment of a cool and critical scrutiny of the world as it is. We have already' tried, so far as our limited time permitted, to remove from idealism something of this reproach of being a mere poem of moral enthusiasm. We do not believe in the world of the abso- lute Self because we merely long for something spiritual in our world. The doctrine, such as I conceive it to be, seems to me rather the outcome of a rigid logical analysis, whose nature indeed I could only sketch in these brief lectures, but whose value for philosophy is indicated by the whole history of modern thought. Yet now that the theoretical question has been considered, we have a right 436 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. in conclusion to draw what advantage we can for our spir- itual interests from the truths that theory has taught us. I. You are aware already how much and how little this idealism pretends to know ahout the world. The world has inevitably the moment of relatively capricious wiU about it. Its existence is a fact, chosen from eternity by the Self. We cannot fathom this choice, we cannot be clear as to the precise meaning of this decree, except in so far as we men too share in the choice, that is, in so far as we too, in our own active life, are conscious of our owii purposes. In choosing for ourselves, we enter into and partake of the Self who chooses this from the infinity of possible worlds. No abstract " descriptive " reason can deduce what it is about the world which makes it good, that is, worth choosing. We can for the first only say, So it is. We can comprehend the significance of this world- estimate, of this appreciative aspect of things, only in 30 far as we too are appreciative, are more than theoretical, are will as weU as thought. From the purely theoretical or " descriptive " point of view all will, all appreciation, is capricious ; for in vain do you try to show by merely describing the laws and contents of things why they should possess this or that value. Deduction only proves ideal values when such values have already been presupposed. Yet this capri- ciousness of the will is not, as Schopenhauer thought, irrationality. The rational will is one that to complete self-consciousness adds self-justification, and that is, ac- cordingly, its own judge and its own vindicator. Is the choice that wills the world of this nature ? Regarded from the purely theoretical side it must appear as capri- cious, for there can be no merely theoretical, or, as we are accustomed to say, logical reason, why it might not have chosen otherwise. But regarded as the choice of an eternal OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 437 World-Self, the world cannot, so to speak, be the choice of a dissatisfied and peevish Logos, who eternally sorrows that he does not choose some other world instead. For dissatisfaction is due to either one of two causes: (1) That the dissatisfied will is not the only one concerned, but finds itself defeated by a foreign opponent ; or (2) That the dissatisfied will is foolish, and knows not what it really wants. We finite bits of the Self are well ac- quainted with both these sources of grief ; and since the World-Self is simply the self-conscious organism of all of us, he too is inevitably well acquainted with the nature of these our woes, and in so far shares them. But his acquaintance with our griefs need not be, cannot be, the sense of the entire failure of the whole organism of his timeless choice. That choice includes all the time events, and it is of the essence of temporal moments of conscious- ness to be discontented. But Hegel has already suggested to us how above the endless conflict victory- may live. It is the purpose of this final lecture to give to that thought further illustration. Two principles must be propounded at the start. Their reconciliation may be difficult. They form in fact the opposing members of the great " antinomy " of the spirit- ual world. They are, that is, in sharp apparent conflict with each other. Yet they must both be true, for they are both demonstrable. One of them is the principle that there must be some sort of evil present wherever there is a finite will. It is not joyous to be finite, in so far as one is finite. One longs always to know more, and to possess more ; and one lives in all sorts of paradoxical relations to other finite life. One lives in time, or in some such imperfect form of appreciative consciousness, and one preserves one's finitude, and so one's endless cares, by wondering and striving with some sort of reference to the other moments of time, to the other appreciations that lie be- 438 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. youd one. To be sure all this has too its joyous side, in so far, namely, as there is more about our finite life than its mere finitude. Most of us had rather be finite than nothing, although even that is not necessarily our opinion. But to be bounded in a nut-shell and to have bad dreams as well is of the essence of temporality and finitude in so far as they are regarded as such. In view of this truth one can well say that, speaking in temporal terms, there just now is in the world nobody who is content with it. The Om.ar Khayyam stanzas of Fitzgerald are so far philosophically right, and forever true : — " Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate, And many a Knot unravel 'd by the Road ; But not the Master-Knot of Human Pate. " There was the Door to which I found no Key ; There was the Veil through which I might not see : Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee There was — and then no more of Thee and Me. " Earth could not answer ; nor the Seas that mourn In flowing Purple, of their Lord forlorn ; Nor rolling Heaven with all his Signs revealed And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn.'' No better account could be given of the temporal order as it appears, when viewed appreciatively, at any finite moment, or of the inevitable result of seeking the divine or the satisfying therein. So viewed the seas are indeed of their Lord forlorn. As Lord he is found in no temporal moment, whether one passes through the " seventh gate " or not to look for him. If one is speaking of the com- plete God, the true Logos, and if one is using the temporal and not the eternal sense of is, it is perfectly accurate to say that God is not, say in the year 1892, just as he was not in Elijah's fire and earthquake. He is no affair of con- OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THK MORAL ORDER.- 439 temporary history. No reporter of even a celestial news- paper could discover, by any watching, items of current interest concerning him. His omnipresence is the presence of time and of space in him, not of his completeness in any part of them. He is their universal, they are not his prison. Tlierefore search the world as you might at this moment, with the well-known astronomer's telescope that very truthfully showed no God, or with the eyes of men and angels ; you would doubtless find only discontented worms and seraphs, and other such finite toilers, ^ the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain, and cry- ing. Lord, how long ! For time is in fact very long^ nor does one get to the end of sorrow in the whole of it. Some of these finite creatures would indeed be callipg this or that temporal joy good, but all of them, however amused they were, would be in the act of striving for the next moment of time to come. For to do that seems to be of the very essence of temporal consciousness. Not one of them all who knew what he was saying would be uttering the fatal cry that Faust was to avoid : " Oh moment, stay, thou art so fair ! " The best of their joyous moments would be under the illusion that the next mo- ment was likely to be a little better ; and they would be hoping for that, as one hopes continually, while one listens to music, for the next phrase, and colors one's joy with this longing. The other principle mentioned above is the thought that, notwithstanding all this, the Logos in his wholeness must find his choice of this universe rational, and so, in and through aU. this imperfection, must find a total per- fection. Were it a problem how to have a better world, the Self, as complete, would have solved the problem. AVere it a question of a wiser choice, the Self in his wis- dom would have executed from eternity this wiser choice. Were it a matter of foreign necessity that inflicted evil, the Self would, in existing, have eternally absorbed this 440 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. foreign element into his own organic nature.^ The world that is, is then indeed, as Leibnitz said, the best of pos- sible worlds. The problem is. How can this be, without interfering with the foregoing principle of the essential evil of finite existence ? II. Let us begin our discussion of this ancient problem with its most immediately obvious illustration, the prob- lem of moral evil. One who first sees the truth that the world of the Self must be, in its wholeness, a good world, is likely to rejoice even too easily in the potion that through this insight he has come indeed very near to the goal that all the religions have sought. Yet one who finds himself thus close, as it were, to the gate of the celestial city and to a glimpse of the golden glories within it, nigh to the palace of the king, does, after all, well to tremble, nevertheless, when he considers how easy it is to say such things about the perfection of God's world, and how hard it is to give concreteness and weight to the mere abstrac- tions of the religious consciousness. God's world, in be- ing good, can surely be nothing less serious than a moral order. And a moral order, regarded from a temporal point of view, is so grave and stern a thing ! Remember the fate of poor Ignorance, in Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Prog- ress," the fate that we mentioned when we were studying Schopenhauer's pessimism. Poor Ignorance reached the very gate of the celestial city, yet the angels carried him ^ Here, of course, Von Hartmann's doctrine of the twofold nature of his unconscious, as Will and Wisdom, these two being essentially foreign to each other, will suggest itself to some. The former lec- ture has suggested my own reason for holding that these two are inseparable. The parallelism and at the same time the opposition of my own views to those of Von Hartmann will be obvious to many readers. Like him I am endeavoring to draw a synthetic conclusion from the post-Kantian idealists, from Schopenhauer, and from modern science. I have worked, for the most part, quite independently of Lis influence. I must acknowledge his great value and his priority. OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL OEDEE. 441 away to the bottomless pit. Those who view the perfec- tion of God's world merely in this first abstract fashion run indeed the risk of a similar fate. Pessimism and despair are not so far away from them as they think. It is not until they shall have learned somehow the serious- ness of the moral aspect of the divine order ; it is not until they have faced the tragedy of life, as well as its divine consummation ; it is not until they have learned to recognize the moral order as essentially a hard master, and the misery of the finite world as a necessary element of the essentially severe significance of the universe ; it is not until all this has come home to them that they will have any real right to the comfort that idealism offers. I want to make this fact plain. All popular religious faith usually begins, as we saw in an earlier lecture, by assuring a man after far too light and easy a fashion that everything will be well in this world for those who do God's will, and that the moral order secures at once the triumph of the good cause, and the joy of all who serve this cause with a pure heart. Just at the present moment, curiously enough, despite aU the skepticism of the day, such easy religious ofitimism as this chances to be in great popular favor ; and for all my idealism, I regret this popularity of optimism. During these controversies concerning creed-revisions and other forms of religious progress which have been before the public during the past few years, I have noticed not only that it has been customary to frown upon all attempts to defend stern old dogmas, such as the depravity of man and the universal condemnation of aU our race in its unsaved condition, but that the reason given as an axio- matic justification for this disapproval has usually been a very optimistic reason. People who pretend at other times to be very agnostic, become here of a sudden very confident. It would be melancholy, they say, to live in a world where the heathen had not as fair a chance for sal' 442 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. vation as anybody else. It would be atrocious If tlie consequences of sin were to prove too grave. If we can- not reconcile a given supposition with the mercy of God, then the supposition mast be false. And all this reason- ing, when more fully analyzed, usually proves to mean, in the minds of those who use it, a senss that if there is any ' spiritual order in this universe it must be an order that does not permit very many ills, and that, above all, does reward, quickly, aU good efforts. Thus reasoning, the reKgious optimist of the day finds his comfort in an as- surance of the kindliness of God, of the early triumph of morality and of the general peacefulness of the universe, an assurance, I say, which, on the whole, I cannot share. I believe, indeed, that all the evil is part of a good order. I believe in the supremacy of the spiritual ; and yet often during those popular controversies of recent years, I have found myself, as a relatively dispassionate metaphysical observer, sympathizing rather with the advocates of the sterner old creeds, not, to be sure, because I have accepted the sometimes irrational form which tradition had given to this or that dogma, but because I regretted the loss of moral rigidity which our fathers knew how to conceive as the very essence of the truly spiritual. But, not to weary you with the details of too well-known and unfruitful theological controversies, I may as well at once remind you of a modern poem which confesses in a most interest- ing fashion just such a religious optimism as I now have in mind, and as I do not accept. I am undertaking at this point a study and criticism of such a fashion of conceiving the world of spiritual concerns ; I am glad to be able to let it express itself so fervently and skillfully. The poem which I refer to is one of the few really strong produc- tions of the interesting Southern poet, Sidney Lanier, whose death a few years since deprived our country of a promising, but so far comparatively undeveloped man. The poem, entitled " How Love looked for Hell," is in- OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 443 tended to describe the world where all evil is purely illu- sory, and where the spirit triumphs by simply denying the existence of all its opponents. Many people, and for that matter many idealists, conceive their world in these terras. And I therefore let Lanier state their case : — " To heal his heart of long-time pain One day Prince Love for to travel was fain With Ministers Mind and Sense. ' Now what to thee most strange may be ? ' Quoth Mind and Sense. ' All things above, One curious thing I first would see, — Hell,' quoth Love. "Then Mind rode in and Sense rode out : They searched the ways of man about. First frightfully groaneth Sense, ' 'T is here, 't is here,' and spurreth in fear To the top of the hill that hangeth above And plucketh the Prince : ' Come, come, 't is here.' ' Where ? ' quoth Love." Accordingly, as Lanier proceeds to describe, Love fol- lows his minister Sense to the place where, according to the latter, there is a very black stream flowing, and where a very cold wind blows, while beyond the stream one can see lost souls strugghng in burning lakes. Love goes very curiously to the place, hunting somewhat skeptically, as if, to borrow a certain modern and possibly too crudely optimistic comparison that I have sometimes found in use, he were an electric light engaged in the search for a shadow ; and lo ! when he reaches the spot in question, somehow the scene has become transformed. The black stream has changed to a living riU, and instead of the flaming lake beyond there are ouly lilies growing. Sense is of course somewhat disconcerted by this change of the scene. " For lakes of pain, yon pleasant plain Of woods and grass and yellow grain Doth ravish the soul and sense : 444 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. And never a sigh beneath the sky, And folk that smile and gaze above." Such a transformation Love has wrought by his mere coming, and in his unconsciousness he also wonders. " Then Love rode round, and searched the ground, The caves below, the hills above ; ' But I cannot find where thou hast found — Hell ! ' quoth Love." Hereupon, however, Sense having failed, the other minis« ter is appealed to : — " There, while they stood in a green wood And marveled still on 111 and Good, Came suddenly Minister Mind. 'In the heart of sin doth hell begin : 'Tis not below, 'tis not above. It lieth within, it lieth within : ' (' Where ? ' quoth Love.) " ' I saw a man sit by a corse ; Hell 's in the murderer's breast : remorse ! ' Thus clamored his mind to his mind ; Not fleshly dole is the sinner's goal, ' Hell 's not below, nor yet above, 'T is fixed in the ever damned soul ' — ' Fixed ? ' quoth Love. "'Fixed : follow me, would'st thou but see He weepeth under yon willow tree, Fast chained to his corse 1 ' quoth Mind. Full soon they passed, for they rode fast, Where the piteous willow bent above. ' Now shall I see pX last, at last. Hell,' quoth Love. " There when they came Mind suffered shame t ' These be the same and not the same ; ' A-wondering whispered Mind. Lo, face by face two spirits pace Where the blissful willow waves above : One saith : ' Do me a friendly grace — * (' Grace 1 ' quoth Love.) OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 445 " ' Read me two dreams that linger long, Dim as returns of old-time song, That flicker about the mind. I dreamed (how deep in mortal sleep !) I struck thee dead, then stood above With tears that none but dreamers weep ; ' 'Dreams,' quoth Love. " ' In dreams, again, I plucked a flower That clung with pain and stung with power. Yea, nettled me, body and mind. 'T was the nettle of sin, 't was medicine ; No need nor seed of it here Above ; In dreams of Hate true Loves begin.' ' True,' quoth Love. " ' Now strange,' quoth Sense, and ' Strange,' quoth Mind ; ' We saw it, and yet 't is hard to find, — But we saw it,' quoth Sense and Mind. ' Stretched on the ground, beautiful crowned Of the piteous willow that wreathed above,' ' But I cannot find where ye have found Hell,' quoth Love." Once more, then, Love fails, you see, since even as he approached Remorse, too, has fled. Thus Lanier depicted Love as wandering in his ovfn universe. Mind and Sense find all sorts of mischief there, but they cannot show such things to their master. Abiding is only the ideal ; evil is but the illusion. Here, then, is an embodiment, — in extreme form to be sure, but in a form that you will recognize, — of that mod- ern faith which, in curious contrast to the prevalent agnos- ticism of our age, defends the spiritual in the world by denying the very existence of evil. I need hardly tell you more at length how to many minds such a doctrine contains the very deepest essence of religion. In such a world, think they, we can make easy work of demonstrat- ing the immortality of the soul, the final restoration of all things, the unreality of Satan, the triumph of every 446 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. good cause, in short, the gracious perfection which is hid- den behind every apparent and illusory evil of life. To such persons thus to deny ill is to have spiritual insight, and Love is indeed ignorant of hell just because Love knows all things. I do not know how far Lanier regarded this as a final doctrine. But let us for the moment treat it as such, and draw further conclusions for which he is indeed not responsible. Extremely characteristic of the mood of such religious optimism is in many minds a dread of the natural order as science knows it. Your optimist of this type, if he devotes himself to political theorizing, has a peculiarly violent dislike for economic facts. To his mind there are no evils in society except competition and poverty, which will both cease so soon as we by chance faU to loving one another, and to owning the property of the nation in common. Crime is not a result of anything deep in human nature ; selfishness is a mere incident of a defective social system. With fewer hours of labor, we should have many times the spirituality that we now have. Sin is not only mere ignorance ; it is something still more limited ; it is mere ignorance of the proper theory of the functions of government. Satan is mainly an invention of false theories in political economy. A single tax system, or a national- ized labor army, would end the sorrows of mankind, and make us all artists and patriots. The end of human woe is n't far off ; the day of the Lord is at hand. The day of the Lord is in fact, in one form or another, the favorite hope of these romantic optimists. Evil being only an illusion, the spiritual powers being in complete ownership of the entire world, there is no reason why any day the scene of our sorrow should not be entirely trans- formed. In the hope of such transformation the faithful wait and trust. Meanwhile they expect little help from mere science, which once for all deals with the world of mind and of sense in a lower sphere. The truth of the OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 447 spirit is not plain to the natural man ; the faithful rather pray to the Lord that such an one's eyes may be opened, so that he may see the chariots of the Lord all about him. Then he will believe in his immortal destiny, he will for- sake remorse, gloom, dread, yes, even strenuousness itself. Spirituality, after all, is n't a very strenuous thing. That is n't its true quality. It rather blesseth him that gives and him that takes. In the world of the divine love all is well. III. But now is this, after all, a truly spiritual doctrine of the world ? Is this the notion of life and its problems to which a genuine idealism leads us ? I confess that I do not think so ; I hold rather that Love, in Sidney La- nier's vision, was rather the deluded one, or, if you like, the deceiver ; I hold that good is the final goal of iU in a wholly different sense, and that the gravity of the issues of the spiritual world is one which no one is fitted to under- stand until he has once fairly comprehended the sense and the bitterness of such a pessimism as even that of Schopenhauer himself. For a true pessimism, not as the last word of wisdom, but as an element of the true doc- trine, is as much a moment in genuine spirituality as tragedy is a part of the fortune of true love. Even in Lanier's poem Love had felt heart-pain, and needed heal- ing. Evil is . not a dream, but a bitter truth, which we make spiritual by conquering it. And as for the day of the Lord, as for the moment when the divinely grave meaning, the genuine spirituality, of the world dawns upon man's comprehension, the first of the great prophets whose literary remains have come down to us from the days of ancient Israel fuUy expressed the essential fact concerning that experience when he said to the optimists of his time : " Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord ! To what end is it for you ? The day of the Lord 448 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. is darkness, and not light. As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him ; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him." I assure you in all earnestness, speaking as an idealist, as one who longs to have men recognize the spiritual order, to believe in the supremacy of the good in this our world, to rise above sense, and to feel secure of the rationality of the universe, — speaking thus, I still regard as one of the most lamentable and disheartening features in our modern life the dreary opposition between those who, studying the order of nature as science shows it, remain agnostic about the spiritual realities of the world, and those who, on the other hand, believing, as they say, in a divine order, remain gently optimistic, and refuse to look at the woes and horrors of the world of Darwin and of science, because forsooth, since the Lord reigns, all must be right with the world. Thus on the one hand we have a romantic idealism that loves, with false liberalism, to cheapen religious faith by ignoring all the graver dogmas of the traditional creeds, that invents, meanwhile, social Utopias, that denies the profound waywardness and wick- edness of human nature, and that refuses to grapple by the throat the real ills of life ; while on the other hand we have an agnosticism that refuses to believe in the spir- itual, because once for all there is so much mischief in the phenomenal order of nature. A genuine synthesis of this optimism and its opposing pessimism, a spiritual idealism that does not deny the reality and the gravity of evil, a religion that looks forward to the day of the Lord as to something very great and therefore very serious, and that accepts life as something valuable enough to be tragio — this is what we need. In human history the schoolmaster to bring us to the higher sense of what a genuine idealism means has al- ways been just that bitter sense of the unreality and vanity of religious optimism which Amos so ferventlj OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 449 expressed, and whicli for other thinkers, for a Voltaire or for a Swift, has frequently taken either the form of a skeptical assault upon all faith in the supremacy of the good in the universe, or else the shape of a cynical despair which, at all events in man's nature, could find no encour- aging feature. The difficulties of religious optimism are indeed manifold enough. If all is ordered for the best in the best of possible worlds, if, in the presence of the divine love, even the hell of remorse itself ceases to exist, if what is called sin is a mere medicine of the soul, a net- tle that stings a trifle, in order that we may be the better spiritually for the experience, if in a higher state we shall see that there was positively nothing to lament in this mortal life, then indeed the whole universe of action loses its gravity and its earnestness. Why should I not sin, since sin also is an illusion ? Why not experience the sting of the nettle of crime, since that also is a medicine ? If all is well, what is there to resist, to conquer, to change, to meet courageously, to regret, to avoid ? If divine wisdom is present equally in the highest and the lowest, equally in the good and in the ill, then why resist the unreal evil ? Whatever I am God chooses me, and surely not as a vessel of wrath, for there is no wrath in him at all, only gentleness, love, peace. I need not dwell on such difficulties of the optimistic scheme. In its spirituality, as you see, it is in danger of becoming out and out immoral. Nor need I point out how, along with the study of the empirical facts which show us the world fuU of apparent ills all about us, these fundamental difficulties of optimism have led many to abandon altogether the hope of vindicating for any spir- itual order a supremacy in our world. And, in fact, for those who, like myself, accept a general idealistic scheme of things there would seem at first sight to be no resource open, but either a resigned acceptance of the divine order as something to be conceived only in mj\stical terms, or else a consent to such a pessimism as Schopenhauer's. 450 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. The first resource here, to wit, mystical resignation, ■which once for all accepts the divine order as real and supreme, which stiU admits that the finite world is full of evil, and which then solves its problem by simply refus- ing to face it, and by surrendering all clear thought in favor of a rapt and helpless adoration of God, — this re- source is already known to us from our study of Spinoza, and, still better, of the " Imitation." Your mystic is never an optimist of the type suggested in Sidney Lanier's poem. He rather loves to dwell on the miseries of the finite life. These are for him perfectly real miseries. The source of them, however, is simply our own absorp- tion in our finitude. Why the divine order permits us to become thus absorbed is never clear, nor can it be made clear for the mystic. It is God who knows, not I, why I am thus imprisoned in the fatal misery of my finite igno- rance. What he means by letting me become finite is utterly mysterious. I submit to this, as to everything else : — " The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes, But Here or There as strikes the Player goes ; And he that toss'd you down into the Field, He knows about it all — He knows — He knows.'' The divine vnsdom is existent for itself, not for me. It is remote, foreign, impenetrable, so long indeed as I remain finite. If I consent to lose myself indeed, there may come moments of ecstasy, when I shall, as it were at the moment of my vanishing, seem to catch a glimpse of God's meaning. But the glimpse will mean little ; it will be inexpressible, a divine suggestion, with no bearings upon practical life in this world. Are we now, as idealists, condemned to such a mysti- cism as this ? If we are, is not the way indeed a short one to Schopenhauer's pessimism ? In fact, all the three views of life that we have just been considering are not so remote from one another in their oppositions as might OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL OEDER. 451 seem at first sight to be the case. The fact is that the finite world is full of at least apparent evils. Religious optimism of the simple-minded sort simply denies their actual existence. God's perfection, it says, excludes them. They are n't anything positive. They are essen- tially unreal. All is light and clear when viewed from above. The ills of life, including even the crimes of the world of sense, vanish from God's point of view. Mysti- cal resignation, on the contrary, while asserting that the evils of life have a genuine existence, deprives them of any significant place in the divine order as such. The evils are, for the mystic, once more illusions, only so long as you remain in the finite world they are necessary illu- sions. God, too, knows them to be here in our finite world, doubtless even wills them to be here, so long as we remain remote from absorption in him. The sins in- separable from our finite existence are imposed upon us as the penalties of our consenting to remain apart from him. The difference between these two views is, that, on the one hand, for the believer in Sidney Lanier's eon- quest of divine Love, the higher insight brings with it to the finite beings a certain joy in their very finitude, a delight in their own past sins, in these experiences that have proved a medicine to them. This joy seems to make them content with the flowers and caresses of their world. On the other hand, the mystical resignation never sees in the finite world anything but dust and ashes, and to the end turns from it scornfully to God, who is the only good. Yet the two views agree in this, that they both alike deprive the finite world of all gravity and of all deeper ethical significance. What we do here, our work, our purposes, our problems, our doubts, our battles, all these things have for the mystic as for the optimist no essential meaning. There are no issues in the finite world for either view. And this idea, that just because there are no true issues in the finite world, just because 452 THE SPIRIT OP MODERN PHILOSOPHY. there is no gravity about it, nothing stern, nothing worthy of a good fight, no salvation that may be lost, and is hard to win, no significant toil that ought to be entered upon and that is calling for us with the voice of a positive duty — that just because of allthis our life is essentially vain ; what is such an idea but the very essence of pessimism itself ? Pessimism, then, the sense of the utter vanity of life, is the necessary outcome of every half-hearted scheme of the moral order, of every scheme which says you can escape the evils of finitude, if at all, only in case you can find some way to deny their existence. For the fact is that from every such half-hearted scheme of the moral order we return to the facts of life themselves. There they are, our ills and our sins — denying does not destroy them, calling them illusions does not remove them, de- claring them utterly insignificant only makes all the more hollow and empty the life of which they are an organic part. If, then, the only escape of our philosophy from the individual ills of life lies in denying their significance, and so the significance of this whole seeming world whereof they are a part, then indeed are we of all men most mis- erable. For our life is in this world. And if the world of experience is only a vain show, then the last word is a sense of the utter illusoriness and insignificance of the issues of life which is the very essence of pessimism. Or once more, to put the matter more concretely : If one who had long been toiling courageously up the steep and narrow path of virtue, fighting sin after sin, doing good as it was given him, aiming in his little way for the victory of righteousness in the finite world, if such an one, I say, has suddenly revealed to him as a truth the substance of Lanier's vision of all-conquering Love, who wins not by warfare with iU, but by a simple ignoring of ill, in whose presence crimes become the medicine of the soul, and hatreds the germs of the glorified friendships of free spirits — will not your moral hero of the finite world, OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 453 scarred with liis long warfare, worn with toils and sor- rows, a patient servant of the good cause which as he fondly had hoped needed him — will he not see the cheat and delusion of all his warfare ? What vainer than the conflict with all the powers of hell, when there are no such powers ? Will he not say of us all in a new and bitter sense : — " 'T is we who wrapt in gloomy visions keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife " ? Nay, what shall it profit us that after the manner of men we have fought wild beasts at Ephesus ? There are no wild beasts, you see. It was aU a dream, our morality. This optimistic awakening, — could any irony of fate seem to us more bitter ? We have offered our little all to virtue, and the offering was vain ; for in the world of truth there was no offering to bring to virtue. Thus the whole moral conduct of finite beings proves to be based upon as irrational a striving as that which makes Scho- penhauer call the blind world-will so worthless a thing. If the mystical interpretation of life be the right one, if the finite world is indeed simply banished from God, and has no share in him except at the moment when it denies itself, the pessimistic result is once more the plain one. All these half-hearted views, in their endless dialectic, resolve themselves into the same vanity. And yet they are not without worth — these partial insights — as approaches to the truth. When religious optimism declares the joyous divine love to be all-conquer- ing and omnipresent, it is trying to express a truth. Dis- satisfied with his eternal world the divine Self cannot be. It is only in the temporal world that from moment to moment, as the drama changes, there is of necessity rest- lessness, evil, strife, and therefore a serious business in- volved. That the evil also, however real to the finite being, however lamentable or hateful from the finite point 454: THE SPIKIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. of view, has its place in the perfection of the Self, this is what optimism means, and in so far it is right. The truth in fact will lie somehow in a synthesis of all these points of view, for all three have a certain relative valid- ity. The genuine moral order must contain that "per- fection in imperfection " which Browning, in his best and most vital poems, was always striving to describe to us. Thus constituted it must be indeed problematic, even as the mystics make it, and tragic, even as the pessimists declare it, but also somehow perfect just as optimism dreams. IT. Can we now suggest, from an idealistic point of view, how the world of the one Self can be thus at once a world of moral issues, and a world of moral completeness ; a world of goodness, and yet a world where evil has its genu- ine place ; a world of restless spirituality, where at every moment of time there is something for moral agents to do, and a world of supreme triumph, where the spirit eter- nally rests from his labors ? All these things, apparently, a moral order which is to be at once divine in its perfec- tion so that we can worship it, and great in its needs so that our life may not be vain as we try to serve the good — all these paradoxically opposed qualities a moral order must contain. Is it conceivable that they should be reconciled ? Is not the very attempt an absurdity ? I answer that, on the contrary, if you look at the matter fairly, and from the point of view of an idealist's inter- pretation of life, nothing is more possible than just such an union of the apparently conflicting requirements of the religious conception of the world. Consider, then, that more familiar problem of practical and daily life with vfhose philosophical bearings our his- torical study of Hegel and of Schopenhauer has now made us acquainted. AU living, in the first place, how. ever commonplace its aims, however accidental its ideals, OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDEB. 455 involves a deep paradox. We long to live. Very well, then, we long to be active. For life means activity ; and activity, that again means longing, striving, suffering lack, hoping for the end of the activity in which we are immediately engaged. This is the essence of living, just as Schopenhauer said. Life is will ; and every wiU aims at its own completion, that is, at its own cessation. I wiU to be wiser than I am. Well, then, I will that my present foolishness shall cease. I will to get somebody's love | and that means that I will the cessation of my unloved condition. Every will aims at the attainment of its desire ; and attainment is the death of just this desire, and so of just this act of will. And yet, on the whole, I will to live. I will then that which will always be in one sense a longing for its own cessation ; I will to suifer lack ; I desire to be always desiring. My highest good, then, whatever my life, will always have this tinge of bit- terness about it, will always be a restless, longing, suffer- ing good. Hegel saw this paradox, declared it to be the very essence of spirituality, gloried in it, and founded his whole system on the paradoxical logic of passion. Scho- penhauer saw the same truth in another light, and aban- doned hope in life because of the universality of this truth. As for us, we Iiave found reason to side in this one respect rather with Hegel. The life that we seek in this world cannot be colorlessly perfect. At the very low- est estimate of its seriousness it has the worth and the risk of the game about it. We win, only by risking de- feat ; we have our courage only by conquering our fear ; we can triumph in life only by transcending the pains of risk and of conflict even while they are in us and part of us. Well, if this be so in other sorts of life, may it not also be so in the moral life ? Sin is moral defeat, and. is therefore indeed a part of a world where there is serious moral effort, jflst as lost games are part of the world of every earnest player. Imagine, then, that the 456 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. infinite Self, in the unity of his eternal life, wills a com- plete moral consciousness. Must not this consciousness express itself in a world of finite persons, each one of whom is limited enough not merely to strive and suffer, but also to be in danger of sin? Many of these moral agents, then, loill sin, will fail in the conflict of life. Their errors will not be unreal ; their remorse wiU not be an illusion. But in the spiritual tragedy of the world as known to the divine perfection their failure will have the share that bitterness and sorrow always have in the life" of the stern and earnest will. Or, once again, to make this notion of the moral world clearer, remember that, as we saw at the last time, the infinite Self, looking at the world in its entirety, must contain, must include, must consciously possess its whole spiritual world, as the musi- cal consciousness, in its estimate of the succession of sounds, contains not merely the single notes, not merely the chords as they come singly in time, but the whole symphony, whose dissonances may thus be moments in the eternal perfection of the whole. Regarded temporally, music, which, as Schopenhauer suggested, does in this respect resemble the whole life of the will, is restless, in- satiable, unable to give you any perfection at any single moment of its progress. Everything it gets only to flee from its own attainment. And even the final chords which its striving reaches in any composition would be worthless if alone. Yet this finite and temporal imper- fection, this restless flight from every note, every melody, every chord, every chord-sequence, constitutes the indwell- ing perfection of the whole work. Mozart, as you may know, used to say, in words which the German philoso- pher Von Hartmann has very significantly quoted, that the blessedest moment of his artistic production was the one wherein this significance of his whole composition came home to him in one instanfr, wherein as it were he transcended time, and possessed all the succession of rest- OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 457 less musical strivings in one artistic glance. " My ideas," says, in substance, Mozart, in a letter to a friend, " come as they will, I don't know how, all in a stream. If I like them I keep them in my head, and people say that I often hum them over to myself. Well, if I can hold on to them, they begin to join on to one another, as if they were bits that a pastry cook should joint together in his pantry. And now my soul gets heated, and if nothing disturbs me the piece grows larger and brighter until, however long it is, it is all finished at once in my mind, so that I can see it at a glance as if it were a pretty picture or a pleasing person. Then I don't hear the notes one after another, as they are hereafter to be played, but it is as if in my fancy they were all at once. And that is a revel (^das ist nun ein Sclunaus). While I'm inventing, it all seems to me like a fine vivid dream ; but that hearing it all at once (when the invention is done), that 's the best. What I have once so heard I forget not again, and perhaps this is the best gift that God has granted me." Well, such non-temporal grasping of the significance of' a restless temporal progress, we must indeed attribute, as we have seen, to the Self in whom our logical analysis found the realization of all truth. The truth of time must be seen by the absolute Knower, as Mozart saw his whole compositions. For that is, not the dream, but the technically defensible result which our idealism has forced upon us. If what we have to call the infinite past and future have even at this instant a genuine truth, so that of any moment in the past or in the future there is only one of two contradictory assertions now true, then the infi- nite Self to whom I appeal when I talk of past and future must, in the eternal sense, grasp and possess the whole of time. After this fashion, then, the very paradox may be realized by his consciousness which we are now seeking to explain, the paradox of a world where, in the individ- ual moments of life, there is indeed evil, dissonance. 458 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHr. tragedy, restlessness, imperfection, where the struggle with these things is not illusory, and where the value of the whole does not come, as in Sidney Lanier's dream, through an abolition of the knowledge of individual ills, through an ignoring of evil, whether physical or moral, but rather through an eternal insight into the value of the entire restless life of the whole temporal world. But perhaps you may say that such a vindication as this of the perfection of the divine order does not, after all, sufficiently do justice to the gravity of the moral world. The moral world, as experience shows it to us, is not a symphony, nor anything else artistic, but either it is a world of moral agony, of crime, of darkness, as Amos said, and not of light, or else our conscience, in condemn- ing sin as absolutely hateful, is wrong. Conscience de- clares that moral evil simplj^ ought not to exist. Moral evil is n't a mere dissonance in the world-symphony, any more than it is, as Sidney Lanier's optimistic dream made it, a gentle medicine for the soul. Sin is through and through regrettable, diabolical. It ought not to exist. No contrast of temporal and eternal will save us here. So, in its stern hatred of the wrong, our moral conscious- ness seems to declare. Can our idealism aid us in recon- ciling the divine perfection with such dissonances, with such paradoxes as these of the moral world? Well, I admit, indeed, that it is very hard to formulate the truth as to this problem without giving it the false accent. Yet, after all, we have now in our hands all the elements that are necessary for a genuine solution of the problem of the existence of sin, in so far, at least, as it is related to the consciousness of the sinner himself. Spiritual evil has, to be sure, other aspects that will need yet more study. Sin, says our moral consciousness, is utterly hateful, and ought not to exist in a perfect world. If our moral consciousness is wrong in asserting this, then one appar- OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 459 ently returns to Lanier's superficial optimism. Evil is only illusory. But in that case, as we saw, the world utterly loses deeper significance. If, however, moral evil, as it exists in the sinner's soul, is not illusory, then how can the divine order be at once good and triumphant, in a world where there is so much sin ? The answer is sug- gested to us by a consideration not now of sin as such, but of latent sin, namely, of temptation. In the world of our own acts we have an experience which is very enlight- ening as to the paradoxical constitution of the whole moral world. Only the tempted, as we saw when we studied Hegel's doctrine, — only the tempted can be holy. For instance, if I find in myself an evil impulse, I find what in itself considered is, indeed, something hateful, lamentable, possibly horrible, something which regarded for itself can apparently form no part of a good order. If I tolerate the impulse, if I declare it to be just the nettle of sin, if I call its evil illusory, then my moral optimism is indeed open to the condemnation of Amos, who cries woe upon all such vindications of the divine order. But suppose I resist the evil impulse, hate it, hold it down, overcome it, then, in this moment of hating and condemn- ing it / make it a part of my larger moral goodness. The justification of the existence of my evil impulse comes just at the ifistant when I hate and condemn it. Con- demning and conquering the evil will makes it part of a good will. Here is the paradox of all will stated not now in artistic but in moral terms. There are elements in a good world which, individually regarded, ought not to be there, which are in themselves hateful, regrettable, the just object of wrath. Yet they become part of the world of the good will just in so far as they are in fact hated, con- demned, subdued, overcome. The good world is not inno- cent. It does not ignore evil ; it possesses and still con- quers evil. Well, then, if this is true of our latent sins, of our 460 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. resisted temptations, if they are permissible parts of u moral order, in so far as they are condemned and hated by our larger moral consciousness, then, I ask, may not the same be true of our actual sins, only in a yet graver and more tragic sense ? Is n't there a deep truth after all in the stern theology that said that even sin exists for the glory of God, but that God's glory is vindicated not through an ignoring, but through a hating and a triumph- ing over sin? "I," a sinner may say, "am in all my wickedness a part of the divine order, which is perfect. Therefore my sin is iUusory." We answer, not illusory is this sin. Only, just because our idealism makes of the divine Self one transcendent person, in whom and for whom are all things, persons, and acts, just for this reason there is open to us a vindication of the moral order of God, which will insist at once upon the gravity of sin and upon the perfection of the divine morality. In God, so we say to the wiUful sinner, you are a part of a good will, which bears just such organic relation to your sinfulness as, in a good man, his virtue bears to the evil impulse that forms a part of his goodness. The hatred and con- demnation of just your life and character makes God holy. God loves you, indeed, in so far as you are in any wise worthy ; but just in so far as you are a rebel, you enter into the perfect moral order, not because your evil is illusory, but because God knows you to hate you and to triumph over you. Your evil will bears to his the rela- tion that a brave man's fears bear to his triumphant courage, just the relation that a good man's weaknesses bear to the scorn which his conscience feels towards such weaknesses. Just because of that unity of the infinite Self which idealism teaches, God's organic perfection vin- dicates sin by scorning it, rqakes it a part of his moral order only by hating it, binds in the chains of his hatred all the countless ills of t^e finite world, and rests in liis eternal perfection beyond the moral dissonances of the OPTIMISM, t-ESSlMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 461 temporal world, just because everywhere in this tem- poral world each dissonance is resolved, is condemned, is restlessly transcended. Whatever we are, we are, indeed, a part of God's perfection. But the question is, what sort of part ? Are we there to be scorned, despised, con- demned by the organic Self, whose perfection will be vin- dicated in such case through the very courage and em- phasis of its scorn and hatred for us? If so, whatever our sin, it is part of the moral order, only the moral order exists by conquering us, and we live only to be despised by the very Self that includes us. God's holiness we, then, assist, but only as the evil impulse serves the saint's triumphant higher self. God's glory we then, in our way, also serve, but only as vessels of his wrath. But do we ourselves choose the good ? Then once more we enter into the divine order, but this time as vessels of honor, as min- isters of the good, as servants and not as enemies, as co- workers and nab as rebels, as beloved and not as scorned. Thus I have tried to show you how idealism, by its very definition of the divine Self as the one organic per- sonality, in whom and for whom we all exist, is able to suggest a solution of this one amongst the religious problems of the ages, and a synthesis of the truths that are at the he%rt both of moral optimism and of moral pessimism, both of the mystical and of the morally active religious piety, both of the faith in God's eternal perfection and of the desire to do right in the temporal world. All this, you remember, is true, so far as to the explanation of the existence of sin as it exists within the evil-doer's soul. There is another aspect of the problem of evil that is much darker from our finite point of view than this one ; and to this other aspect I must pass as I close. T. For I do not feel that I have yet quite expressed the full farce of the* deepest argument for pessimism, or the 462 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. full seriousness of the eternal problem of evil. In fact, when, in the past, I have gone over these considerations in company with those of my fellows who have experienced widely and deeply, I have always found that whether they were themselves naturally disposed to be pessimists or not, they declined to recognize this way of looking at our question about evil as really exhausting the meaning of it. The mood that genuinely questions the value of life is after all a very gloomily ingenious mood. Its dialectic is endless ; it turns its reflection from sorrow to sorrow, with a remorselessly industrious scrutiny ; it refuses easy comfort ; it readily finds the philosopher's formulas pedan- tic and unspiritual ; and in fact no lighter experience of grief, no superficial disappointment, no mere wounded sentiment, nor 3'et even a transient remorse, can give you a true sense of what the problem of evil is. Even that remorse which Lanier's poem depicts is ill-adapted to ex- press whether hell has its seat in this universe. In fact, to see where the worst problems of life lie is a very black experience. And yet, so much does human reason love insight, that I have never met a man who was alive to these deepest problems, and who still repented him of his insight. The strong and hearty beings who know not the clear bitterness of all higher truth often wonder hownien can doubt as to the worth of life, and-. often., condemn as mere morbidness every such scrutiny as that in which we are now engaged. Many persons I linow, and honor, too, — nien of cheerful souls and well-knit purposes, high- minded men and strenuous, to whom every ultimate, above aU every philosophical inquiry as to this matter of the meaning and the final justification of life, seems essen- tially either vain or dangerous. Why we live, they say, and what our duty is, and why it is a worthy thing to do our duty, and how evil is to be explained, — to ask this wlnj ? is to hesitate, to dream, to speculate, to poison life. The best thing is to work and not to inquire. OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL OK0EE. 463 Yet there is another way of viewing life, and that is just the way upon which we have been dwelling. It is the way of men who demand ultimate answers, and who, if jthey can't get them, prefer doubt, even if doubt means, j despair. Pessimism, in the true sense, is n't the doctrinej of the merely peevish man, but of the man who, to bor- row a word of Hegel's, "has once feared not for this moment or for that in his life, but who has feared with all his nature ; so that he has trembled through and through, and all that was most fixed in him has become shaken." There are experiences in life that do just this for us. And when the fountains of the great deep are once thus broken up, and the floods have come, it is n't over this or that lost spot of our green earth that we sor- row ; it is because of all that endless waste of tossing waves which now rolls cubits deep above the top of what were our highest mountains. In our natural state, you see, we desire many things, some more, and some less ; life has its strange mingling of joys and of pangs ; but there is nothing in it absolute, nothing whose place could n't be taken by another. We are, then, cheerful and reasonably content, just because everything in our world has its price, and can conceivably be gained by finite labor ; nor is there for us anything this side death that might not, with good fortune, turn out well for us. This is the mood that, of course, with an inaccurate use of the superlative, and so with a very characteristic ex- aggeration of speech, common sense calls optimism. The mood which really opposes it, however, is just the mood that has learned to demand absolute standards, and that finds none ; the mood that refuses to be comforted with such good things as can be brought, because it longs for the priceless goods of the spirit. This opposing mood, then, this true pessimism, is in its very nature the mood of the painfully awakened, who cry for God's truth, and who so far find it not. It is the despair of those who 464 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. want a plan in life, and who see how our ordinary and natural life is planless, accidental, a mere creature of for- tune. This despair is the first voice, in many hearts, of the truly devout spirit. He who has never felt it does not know what the deepest religious experience must in- volve. And he who has once become possessed of this longing for a deeper meaning in life than natural expe- rience can give or can find there, would not for worlds exchange his insight, gloomy as he may find it, for the vain cheerfulness of unchastened optimism. Better, to his mind, this waste of dark tossing waves than the blind and misbelieving world before the flood ; better to be broken in spirit, than to be vainly puffed up with miser- able finite conceits. Well, it is just this absolutely inquiring mood, just this thorough-going doubt, that we shall not yet have shaken by all the foregoing. Easy it is, such doubt will say, easy it is to refute the religious optimists of Lanier's type ; easy it is to get past the stately resignation of the mysti- cal mood ; easy, too, if you will, for an idealist, to justify the existence of countless evils in the finite world, if only they have the less tragic type. Only there are still doors to which we have found no key. The eternal insight of the All-knower may look in lofty peace upon the rest- less flight of our time - moments. Everywhere in his world there will be change and dissatisfaction ; yet in his completeness he may judge it all as good. But there is still one condition that must be met by the struggles of the finite world, if they are obviously to conform to this solution of our problem. They must, namely, be signifi- cant conflicts. If they are, then, so far, the difference of the eternal and the temporal aspects does, indeed, aid us. As for the willing sinner and his just remorse, it is n't i« his case that one need feel deeply concerned. He has played the game of sin ; he is only exemplifying the rules of the game. The awakened sinner may sometimes ban« OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 465 isli himself almost cheerfully to that hell, bearing, viith a stern contempt for his own sorrow, the bitterness of his moral defeat. No, the worst tragedy of the world is the tragedy of the brute chance to which everything spiritual seems to be subject amongst us — the tragedy of the diabolical irra- tionality of so many among the foes of whatever is sig- nificant. An open enemy you can face. The temptation to do evil is indeed a necessity for spirituality. But one's own foolishness, one's ignorance, the cruel accidents of dis- ease, the fatal misunderstandings that part friends and lovers, the chance mistakes that wreck nations : — these things we lament most bitterly, not because they are pain- ful, but because they are farcical, distracting, — not foe- men worthy of the sword of the spirit, nor yet mere pangs of our finitude that we can easily learn to face courage- ously, as one can be indifferent to physical pain. No, these things do hot make life merely painful to us ; they make it hideously petty. They are like the " mean knights " that beat down Lancelot during his hopeless wandering in search of the Grail. Some of you may know a little poem called " The Fool's Prayer," a bit of verse that was first printed some years ago, and that has more recently been rather often quoted by the author's growing circle of readers and ad- mirers. The author himself, a man of not altogether happy destiny, is now dead. I knew him well ; he was first a valued teacher and adviser of my own, and after- wards an intimate friend. The words sprang so earnestly from his heart, and they suggest our problem here so thoughtfully, that I may venture to repeat the most of them : — " The royal feast was done ; the king Sought out some new sport to banish care, And to his jester cried ; ' Sir Fool, Kneel now, and make for us a prayer.' 466 THE SPIRIT OF JIODERN PHILOSOPHYo " The jester doffed his cap and bells And stood the mocking court before ; They could not see the bitter smile Behind the painted grin he wore. " He bowed his head, and bent his knee Upon the monarch's silken stool ; His pleading voice arose : ' O Lord, Be merciful to me, a fool ! " • No pity. Lord, could change the heart From red with wrong to white as wool ; The rod must heal the sin ; but Lord, Be merciful to me, a fool ! " ' Tis not by guilt the onward sweep Of truth and right, O Lord, we stay ; 'T is by our follies that so long We hold the earth from heaven away- " ' These clumsy feet, still in the mire, Go crushing blossoms without end ; These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust Among the heart-strings of a friend " ' The ill-timed trutli we might have kept — Who knows ho%v sharp it pierced and stung? The word we had not sense to say — Who knows how grandly it had rung ? " ' Our faults no tenderness should ask, The chastening stripes must cleanse them all ; But for our blunders — oh, in shame Before the eyes of heaven we fall. " ' Earth bears no balsam for mistakes ; Men crown the knave, and scourge the tool That did his will ; but thou, O Lord, Be merciful to me, a fool.' " I think that you will see how my old friend here sug- gested where the burden of the problem of evil lies much more wisely than Lanier did. For my friend, who wrote OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 467 these words, thus touched upon one element of that caprice of life which does prove the cruelest note in all its trage- dies. As I knew him, the poet of these verses was pecu- liarly sensitive to the presence in the world of that will- fulness both of fortune and of our fellows, which not because of conscious sinfulness, nor yet because of any obviously necessary discord of motives, but because of mere brute accident or stupidity, tears to pieces whatever is spiritual, kills our infant children, leaves our unrecog- nized heroes to die neglected and ineffective, sunders the wounded hearts of faithful lovers, makes brother war with brother, plunges society into bitter confusions, defeats over and over the most sacred ideals. My friend some- times even used this fateful fact of defeat, I remember, as a sort of test of the spirituality of things. Were they good, he said, willfulness would assail them the more surely. Once, when he was a little weary because of the hatred that he had met with during some of his under- takings in a very good cause, I said to him, by way of a sort of conventional comfort and of friendly admonition at once, " Why do you work so hard as you do for the good of people who only misunderstand you after all? They don't deserve the good things that you offer, for they are people who won't and can't appreciate your trouble. Why cast pearls before swine ? They only turn and rend you." " Ah, Eoyce," replied my friend, " but one does n't quite surely know that they were pearls that he cast until he feels the tusks." But perhaps you will say that, thus put, the problem of the stupidity of our human nature and of our fortune seems a rather sentimental problem, after all. Is not this capriciousness of life simply part of its painfulness ? Is it manly to lament just this woe so deeply ? I answer, to the enlightened soul it is n't ever so much the painful- ness as the blind irrationality of fortune that seems to drive God out of our thoughts when we look at our world. 468 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Mere pain can be borne, for cause, very fairly. One may whine, but one can still hold out to the end and not la- ment it when it is once over. But this capriciousness of life is what really makes it seem like an evil dream. Consider once more that horror involved in hereditary disease, and in the fatal and unearned baseness which often goes therewith. Consider the way in which the wrong-doing of one person often entails not the physical pain, but the utter and inevitable corruption and end- less moral degradation of another. Consider how not mere disloyalty, but a transient mistake, may wreck the most spiritual of causes, after years of devotion have built up its fortunes nearly to the heights of success. These, alas ! are the mere commonplaces of our temporal order. Is it easy to say that these things are needed as a part of the gravity of the spiritual world ? No, for they don't make the world spiritually grave ! They make it rather insane and contemptible. Moral evil in the willful sinner himself, you can look in the face and defy, and that too even if you are yourself the sinner. Here, you can say, is my natural foe ; I know what he is and wherefore he is. I condemn him, and I rejoice in defeating him. But the hopeless and helpless degradation of the sinner's passive victim, how shall you speak comfortably or even defiantly after that ? Here is the place only for pity ; and in a world that is full of such things, and that always will be full of such things, so long as its order is the prey of the mechanical accidents of nature, where is there room for anything but pity for its worthlessness ? Well, here indeed we find the enemy of whose works Shakespeare wrote in the sonnet that begins " Tired of all these, for restful death I cry.'' And this will always be the cry of our darker moments so long as the tragedies of our world decline to appear to us as mainly moral tragedies. Nay, if it were only our sin OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 469 that kept us from God, might men not often hope to see his face ? The true devil is n't crime, then, but brute chance. For this devil teaches us to doubt and grow cold of heart ; he denies God everywhere and iu all his crea- tures, makes our world of action, that was to be a spirit- ual tragedy, too often a mere farce before our eyes. And to see this farcical aspect of the universe is for the first time to come to a sense of the true gloom of life. VI. "Well, then, if this is the final and deepest truth of pes- simism, what comfort still remains for one who in hope- less affliction, or in the chaos of defeated spirituality, still looks to the truth for aid ? Surely concerning this sort of doubt one can only speak in the tenderest and most re- spectful of terms. Cowards shrink from the petty pains of fortune ; sinners and sentimentalists want to get rid of the penalties of sin ; but they who most lament and won- der over this capricious irrationality of the world are just the noblest and gentlest of souls, who would pause at no heroism were its warfare only a significant one, who would shrink from no pang, if only by enduring it one served God ; but who cannot endure this weary dwelling cheek by ]0wl with the mocking demons of chance and absurd- ity. Well, can one still plausibly insist that somehow, in fashions unknown to us, the infinite Self is strong enoush to make the facing and the endurance of even these demons somehow significant? Can our chance be by any possibility his rationality ; our chaos his order, our farce his tragedy, our horror his spirituality ? Yes, even this may come home to us if we remember that he at least, in his absoluteness, does not find these things as foreign facts, forced upon him from without. He endures them, as we do ; he condemns them as we must ; but he knows them, as we in our finitude cannot. And so, if knowing them he wills these horrors for himself, must he 470 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. not know wherefore ? In our strength we cannot walk when we face them. Can we not walk in his strength ? He who solves all problems, shall he not solve this one also ? And thus, indeed, if in our finitude we have but one com- fort, surely we have that. From our finite point of view there is no remotely discoverable justification for this caprice. This is to our eyes no embodiment of a stern moral order. It is Satan's own irresistible and mocking presence in our life. He ought not to be here ; yet no thing that we can do will have any chance to remove him. And so, indeed, were our insight into the truth of the Logos based upon any sort of empirical assurance, it would surely fail us here. But now, as it is, if we have the true insight of deeper idealism, we can turn from our chaos to him, who is our own true and divine self, and can hear from him with absolute assurance this one wordT: " O ye who despair, I grieve with you. Yes, it is I who grieve in you. Your sorrow is mine. No pang of your finitude but is mine too. I suffer it all, for all things are mine ; I bear it, and yet I triumph." This word of the Self, I say, we can be sure of, for it is the one final word of our whole idealistic insight. It is this thought of the suffering God, who is just our own true self, who actually and in our flesh bears the sins of the world, and whose natural body is pierced by the capricious wounds that hate- ful fools inflict upon him — it is this thought, I say, that traditional Christianity has in its deep symbolism first taught the world, but that, in its fullness, only an ideal- istic interpretation can reaUy and rationally express. Were not the Logos our own fulfillment, were he other than our own very flesh, were he a remote god, were he not our own selves in unity, were he foreign to the horror and to the foolishness of our chaotic lives, we should indeed look to him in vain ; for then his eternal peace would be indifference and cruelty, his perfection would be our de- spair, his loftiness would be our remote and dismal help* OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MOEAL OBDEE. 471 lessness. But he is ours, and we are Ms. He is pierced and wounded for us and in us. Our defeats are his ; and yet, above time, triumphant in the sacred glory of an insight that looks before and after through the endless ages and the innumerable worlds, he somehow finds amidst all these horrors of time his peace, and so ours. " My peace," he says, " I give unto you ; not as the world giveth, give I unto you." This, then, at last, is the true realization of the rapt wonder that the mystics sought. What in time is hopelessly lost, is attained for him in his eternity. I know not that I have persaaded you of all this. True philosophical persuasion would rest upon something much more elaborate than I have had time to present. I have only sketched. What I do know is that of such truth philosophy must yet some day persuade those who are ready to listen and apt to comprehend. Herein, too, as I think, are woven into one cord the strands of partial knowledge that in our history we have been finding. Sjii- noza and Schopenhauer, Berkeley and Fichte, Kant and Hegel, join in suggesting to us our result. Like the pre- decessors of Childe Roland, they stand at the close of our day, ranged along the hillsides to view the end of our quest. For herewith, indeed, the task of these lectures is ended. We have found in a world of doubt but one assur- ance — but one, and yet how rich ! All else is hypothesis. The Logos alone is sure. The brief and seemingly so abstract creed of philosophy : " This world is the world of the Logos" has answered our questions in the one sense in which we can dare to hope for an answer. The rest is silence — and, here on the earth, endless labor in the might of the spirit, for whom and in whom is all sor- row and bitterness, and aU light and life — and peace. APPENDIX A. Anything resembling an exhaustive bibliography of the topics treated in the present book is excluded by the plan of the work. A syllabus, with notes, containing a few suggestions for the fur- ther study of the problems and thinkers considered in the course of these lectures, was prepared, was printed in a series of broad- sides, and was then put into the hands of the hearers on some of the occasions of the delivery of the lectures. This syllabus, much revised, here follows as an appendix. For its fragmen- tariness, the nature of the present undertaking may be some explanation. It extends to the historical lectures of the course. Of the doctrinal lectures it gives only a brief suggestion in a single summary statement. SYLLABUS. The general purposes of this course are : — 1. To give personal characterizations of some of the more note- worthy modern thinkers. 2. To suggest, as clearly as may be possible without technical details, something of the nature of their various attitudes towards the great concerns and issues of humanity. 3. To illustrate, in the light of such a study, certain significant spiritual problems of our own day. LECTURE I. INTKODUCTION. I. The general business of philosophy. II. The variety and seeming failure of the philosophers. III. The positive significance of philosophy. IV. The many-sidedness of truth. V. The skeptical element in philosophy in its relation to the posi. tive purpose of the study. VI, The limitations of the present undertaking. 474 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. LECTURE II. THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY ; CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FIRST PERIOD ; ILLUSTRATION BY MEANS OF THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF SPINOZISM. I. The periods of modern philosophy. II. General observations on the first period. III. Spinoza as an illustration of the first period ; his fortune and character. Spinoza's relation to the problems of religion. Two general forms of the religious consciousness distinguished, and illus- trated from various sources, including the devotional book called " The Imitation of Christ." V. Spinoza possesses one of these two sorts of religious interest, but not the other. Parallel between his mysticism and that of the " Imitation." VI. His system as an outcome of his religious interest. His concep- tion of the Substance, of the Eternal Order, of Body and of Mind. Mystical experiences justified by geometrical meth- ods. "VTI. Spinoza's ideal of the wise man and of the love of God. Notes. The periods of moderii philosophy, as distinguished for the present piu'pose, are : — I. Period of Naturalism and of Eationalisin : From Galileo to Spinoza. [Its specially noteworf-hy characteristies are, in addition to its general interest in outer nature : (1) Its belief that the whole order of nature is subject to rigid laws of a mechanical type ;. (2) Its faith in the power of the human reason to know absolute truth ; and (3) Its fondness for mathe- matical methods in philosophy. 1 II. Period of the study of the Inner Life : From Locke to Kant. [Its general characteristics are : (1) A critical analysis of the powers of man's mind ; (2) A growing skepticism ; (3) In the end a tendency towards revolutionary reconstructions of all doctrine]. III. Period of recent philosophy : From Kant to the present time. [Beginning at the culmination of the previous critical period, the third period is at first devoted to the study of the inner life, but is later led to fresh efforts to comprehend outer nature. It is throughout much influ- enced by natural science and by the newer study of history. In conse- quence it develops the idea of evolution. Its problem is the synthesis and reconciliation of our knowledge of outer nature with our understanding of the inner life of man.] The principal dates of Spinoza's life are as follows: birth, 1632; ex- communication from synagogue, 16.56 ; first philosophic work (Principles of Cartesian Philosophy) published, 1663 ; Theologioo-Politioal Tractate APPENDIX A. 475 published 1670 ; refusal of a call to a professorship in Heidelberg, 1673 ; death, 1677. Spinoza's principal treatise is the Ethics, published posthu- mously in 1677. He lived first in Amsterdam, then in various minor Dutch towns, and died at the Hague. His principal works have been recently translated into English in Bohn's Philosophical Library, in two volumes. The best accounts and commenta- ries in English are those of Pollock {Spinoza's Life and Fkilosopky, Lon- don, 1880), Martineau (Study of Spinoza), and John Caird (Spinoza, Edin- burgh, 1888). The best complete edition is that of Van Vloten and Land (The Hague, 1882-83, 2 vols.). For comparison are added the dates of several other early modem think- Montaigne Giordano Brnno Bacon Galileo Campanella Kepler 1533-1592 1548-1600 1561-1626 1564-1641 1568-1639 1571-1630 Jakob Boehme Hobbes Descartes Pascal Locke Malebranche 1575-1624 1588-1679 1596-1650 1623-1662 1632-1704 1638-1715 LECTURE III. THE EEDISCOTERY OF THE INNER LIFE j KANT. - FKOM SPINOZA TO Introductory characterization of this period as one of analysi s, skepticism, and study of the Inner Life., I. Value of skepticism in philosophy. II. The problem concerning Innate Ideas ; its origin and early stages in modern discussion. III. Locke's treatment of the question : historical consequences of the controversy, direct and indirect ; its value for the ?tudy of the Inner Life. IV. Berkeley's idealism. V. Hume's skepticism. VI. The transition of Kant.' Locke (1632-1704) has been often edited. A good edition of his Essay on the Human Understanding, for purposes of actual study, is the one in Bohn's Philosophical Library, in the edition of his Philosophical Works. The best life is that by H. R. Fox Bourne, London and New York, 1876, 2 vols. Berkeley was born 1684, died 1753. He matriculated at Trinity Col- lege, Dublin, in 1700, took his Master's degree in 1707, published his Essay towards a New Theory of Vision in 1709, and his Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710. From 1729 to 1731 he lived 476 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. in Ehode Island, planning his university, which was to he estahlished in the Bermudas. The plan came to nothing. In 1132, returned to Eng- land, he published his Alciphron. He became bishop of Cloyne in 1734. The best recent edition of his works is that of Fraser (Oxford, 1871). The same editor has also written his life, published at the same time as the works. Hume was born in Edinburgh, 1711, died 1776. His History of England appeared in 1754-1762. His first philosophical treatise, the Treatise on Human Nature, was written between 1734 and 1737. His Essays appeared in 1748. The philosophical works have been edited in four volumes by Green and Grose, London, 1874-75. On this whole period one may read Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. LECTURE IV. KANT. I. Difficulties of the study of Kant. ' II. Kant's person and character. III. Kant's religious views, and his early philosophical develop- ment, in outline. ^ Nh-IV. His doctrine of Space and of Time. fV. His doctrine as to the Laws of Nature. '" VI. The Moral Law as the central truth in Kant's world. Kant was born in 1724 ; received his appointment as professor in the university of his native city, Konigsberg (in far eastern Prussia), in 1770; published the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 ; published his own prin- cipal works between this year and 1798; and died in 1804. The best English translation of the Critique is that of Max Miiller. The transla- tion in Bohn's Library, by Meiklejohn, is now regarded as superseded. Watson's Selections from Kant (MacmUlans, 1886), Wallace's Kant, in Blackwood's Philosophical Library (Edinburgh and Philadelphia, 1882), Edward Caird's Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (2d ed., New' York, Macmillans, 1889, 2 vols.), and J. H. Stirling's Text-Book to Kant (New York, Putnams, 1882), are the best aids to the study of Kant in English. The German literature on the subject is enormous, embracing some hun- dreds of works. BRIEF OUTLINE 8UMMAEY OF KANT's DOCTEINE. 1. The origin of Kant's philosophy is the £rablajIL2£-l™'™a«L_rea3on as the eighteenth century had developed this problem. The problem was. How can the truth which not only theology, but also common sense and natural science, pretend to know about our world, be defended against skepticism ? Our human powers being once for all so limited, how can any genuine truth of any sort be known ? 2. Kant's first answer is ; Things in themselves are of necessity unknown APPENDIX A. 477 to us. We can know in a theoretical sense only the things that appear to our senses, that is, the Phenomena of the World of Show. Neither com- mon sense, nor science, nor theology, can, with theoretical assurance, carry us beyond the world as it seems to our human powers of observation and experience. 3. In particular, Space and Time can be shown to be mere forms of our human sense-consciousness, and to have no relation to things in them- selves. The unknowable real world without us exists, therefore, neither in space nor in time. We know not how this world exists at all ; we only recognize that it exists. 4. But we can nevertheless be sure that our world of seeming things in space and time must conform to rigid laws, such as the law of causation. ' For our active understanding, in thinking our world, is bound by its own nature, in order to preserve, as it were, our very sanity (or, as Kant would say, the Unity of our Self -Consciousness), to regard aU observed facts as/ conforming to laws. Yet these laws of Mature, which science studies, are the very creation of our own understanding acting upon the data of our senses. Such laws are not the laws of the unknowable real world at all. They hold only for the show-world of our experience. Our own under- standing is, therefore, the source for us of all knowable rational truth. 5. Yet, ignorant as we are of all absolute truth, confined as we are for all theoretical knowledge to the seeming world of sense and understanding in space and time, we are yet morally bound to postulate that the real world of the things in themselves is a Divine Moral Order ; that is, we are bound to act as if such a real and absolute moral order were known to us to exist. 6. In this way we are theoretically certain that the seeming world is a world of orderly law, such as common sense and science believe in ; and we are practically certain that the unknown real world is a divine and moral world, because it is our duty to treat that unknown world as if it were divine and moral. LECTURE V. FICHTE. I. Restatement of Kant's general significance in modern thought. "• II. A possible transformation of Kant's world : First statement of the Idealism common to Eiehte, Sohelling, and Hegel, and of its relations to Christianity. III. Fichte's fortunes and character. 'IV. and V. Fichte's Subjective Idealism. -^ VI. His book on the " Vocation of Man." Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born in 1762, was a student in Leipzig and Jena from 1780 to 1784, was private tutor thereafter, and lived in great poverty, until 1794, when he was called to a professorship in Jena, as a result of his first book, published in 1792. In 1799 he was removed from 478 THE SPIEIT OF IIODEKN PHILOSOPHY. his professorship on a charge of atheism, but was later active, as professor, at the new University of Berlin, until his death in 1S14. His publications were numerous. Of his best works the most popular, translated by Wil- liam bmith, have been published in several editions by Triibner & Co. (3d ed., London, 1873, in one vol.). On this whole period, in its general as- pects, a very useful book, is the German, is the History of Literature by Julian Schmidt. LECTURE VI. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. Introductory summary of Kant and Fiehte : — I. The arbitrary element in Fichte's doctrine, and the relation of this arbitrariness to the Komantic School and to the doc- trines of our day. II. The place of the Romantic School in German literature. AVider and narrower use of the term Romantic School. Characteristics of the principal members of the Romantic School proper. III. Illustrations of the Romantic view of life : Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. IV. Schelling and Caroline. Sketch of some of Schelliug's views. Concerning the Romantic School, on the literary side, the reader must be referred to the bibliographies of German literature. The well-known early essays of Carlyle form here an introduction which has not yet lost its value for English readers ; and his translations are of pei'manent worth. Heine's sketches of the History of German Thought and Literature are as suggestive as they are charming and untrustworthy. Schelling's volumi- nous writings are still for the most part accessible only in the original. The best recent technical and critical exposition of a portion of liis doc- trine is that by Professor John Watson, Schelling^s Transcendental Ideal- ism (Chicago, 1882). For comparison are added a number of biographical dates, in both Ger- man and English Literature ; — BOEN BORN Herder 1744 Tieck 1773 Goethe 1749 Schelling 1775 Schiller 1759 Schopenhauer 1788 Fiehte 1762 Wordsworth 1770 A. W. Schlegel 1767 Scott 1771 Schleiermacher 1768 Coleridge 1772 Hegel 1770 Southey 1774 Friedrich Schlegel 1772 Byron 1788 Novalis 1772 , SheUey 1792 APPENDIX A. 479 LECTURE VII. HEGEL. I. Sehelling's doctrine of Identity. II. Hegel's character and attitude. III. The paradox of Self-consciousness. IV. Systematic application of the paradox. Hegel was born in 1770 at Stuttgart, studied at the University of TUbin- gen, was private tutor from 1793 to 1800, was doceut at Jena from 1801 untU after the battle of Jena, was gymnasium director at Niirnberg from 1808 until 1816, was then made professor at Heidelberg, and from 1818 until his death, in 1831, was professor at Berlin. His works, including many very unevenly edited notes of his academic lectures, were published by his pupils in eighteen volumes (1832—45), and his son has recently added aa nineteenth volume his letters. His life was written admiiingly by Karl Kosenkranz (1844), and reviewed, together with his system, with much severity of criticism, by Haym (Hegel und seine Zeit, 1857). Since Haym's book and Trendelenburg's keen criticism of the dialectic method in his Logische Studien (2d ed., 1862, 3d ed., 1870), the Hegelian doctrine has received less and less attention in Germany, although its indirect and un- consciously effective influence has been great. On the other hand, in Great Britain, Dr. Hutchinson Stirling's Secret of Hegel (London, 1865), one of the most waywardly constructed of remarkable philosophical books, began (through its very skillful exposition of some features of Hegel's thought) a movement that has given Hegel first-class importance for recent specula- tion. Wallace's Logic of Hegel, and Caird's Life of Hegel, in Black- wood's Philosophical Series, are important introductions to the study of the philosopher. Mr. W. T. Harris's Hegel's Logic, in Grigg's Philosophical Classics, is a scholarly exposition of a highly technical sort LECTURE VIII. SCHOPENHAUER. I. The significance of Pessimism. II. The general character of Schopenhauer's system, m. Schopenhauer's person, fortunes, and quality. IV. Summary of his principal treatise. V. Estimate of Schopenhauer's doctrine. Arthur Schopenhauer was horn in 1788, published the first volume of his principal work in 1818, made in 1820 an effort to succeed as decent at Berlin, but failing here, lived as wanderer and recluse until his death at Frankfort in 1860. The recent expiration of the copyright upon his works (published in six volumes by Brockhaus) has led to many reprints of part 480 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. or all of his writing-a. His philosophy is best expounded hy himself, and so fine a master of style should be read in his own tongue, although he is now extremely accessible in English translations. His two biographers, Frauenstadt and Gwinner (the latter's Schopenhauer's Leben, published in 1878, is the best), have told the story of his eccentric career with much detail. Very useful is Wallace's Life of Arthur Schopenhauer (London. Great Writers series, 1890). LECTURE IX. THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OP EVOLUTION. I. The return to the outer order initiated by Schopenhauer. II. The Romantic School in its relation to historical science. III. The Historical School and the idea of evolution. IV. The problems of the doctrine of Evolution. V. Empiricism, skepticism, and philosophy. VI. The position of Mr. Herbert Spencer. VII. The Monistic movement. VIII. Outlook towards a positive creed. LECTURES X. TO XIII. GENERAL SUMMARY OP THE POSITIVE LECTURES OP THE COURSE. I. The positive lectures discuss : (1) The general cosmological problems connected with certain aspects of the doctrine of Evolution (Lecture X.) ; (2) The general doctrine of Idealism as the result of the historical movement that the previous lectures have traced, and as the fundamental doctrine of philosophy (Lecture XL) ; (3) The application of the doctrine of idealism to the explanation of the fun- damental problems of science, in so far as they concern the relations between natural law and moral freedom, and between the inner life and the external world (Lecture XII.) ; and (4) The concluding discussion of the moral and religious issues that centre about the pro- blem of optimism and pessimism (Lecture XIII.). II. The doctrine of idealism itself has two portions, here called respectively Analytic Idealism (the doctrine with which the name of Berkeley is especially associated), and Synthetic Idealism (or the doctrine of the universal self as the world thinker). III. It is the province of analytic idealism to show, by a study of the elements whereof all our beliefs consist, that, in case the real world is to be knowable at all, it must be, in its deepest nature, a world of ideas, that is, of facts that can only exist for minds. In other words, the knowable world is, only in so far as beings with minds actually know it to be. APPENDIX A. 481 IV. There remains the alternative, however, that the real, world is existent as something essentially unknowable (as, for instance, Mr. Herbert Spencer asserts). This doctrine is considered in Lecture XI. and is there set aside. V. A final objection to the whole foregoing argument for idealism •appears, in case one asserts that, after all, nobody ever does truly hnow any reality beyond his own self, so that our previous discussion is helpless as against a stubborn skepticism, which doubts every pos- sible assertion about reality. VI. To this it is finally answered that the objection is in one sense as well founded as it is imperfectly understood by those who regard it as a truly skeptical objection. Properly regarded, this very asser- tion, that beyond the self no truth is knowable, brings to fulfillment our synthetic idealism, by showing us that there is but one self in the world, namely, the Logos or world-mind. The finite self knows truth beyond its own limitations, just because it is an organic part of the complete Self. VII. The doctrine of idealism once thus discussed in its abstract- ness, the remaining argument depends throughout on the thought that only experience can give us any clue to the contents and the actual world of this world-mind, and that idealism is in no sense a doctrine of illusion, or one which leaves finite selves to their own caprices. Idealism demands (1) That we should interpret experi- ence in terms of the doctrine of the world-mind ; but that (2) We should depend upon experience for the revelation of that truth which, for us finite beings, must remain a fast "outer" truth, just because it is the content of othey mind than our own bits of selfhood, and is universally true for all intelligences. VIII. The problem of the philosophy of experience is, then, to distinguish between what is really "outer" and what is "inner" about our finite experience, that is, between "facts," and our private point of view about the facts. IX. The world of outer experience is then the world of Facts. But what is a fact ? It appears to be something, in the first place, that one must describe, in some sort of universal terms, in order to get at the truth of it. The principle of ordinary realism is, that you must not be sentimental or otherwise emotional in your account of the truth of things, but rather exact in your descriptions of what things are. And this principle has a thoroughly idealistic justification. Not Appreciation, then, but Desckiption shall give you outer truth. This is the characteristic presupposition of all natural science. And descriptive thinking is such as seizes on universal aspects of things, as opposed to momentary and transient aspects. 482 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. X. But what does this presupposition involve ? In the first place, as developed in the work of science, the presupposition involves the assumption that the world is essentially describable. But one can only describe, in general terms, the well-knit, the orderly, that which con- forms to Law. Hence science assumes the universality and rigidity of the laws of nature. And because the most exact descriptions are possible only in case of processes of a mechanical type, such as go on in Space and in Time, science assumes that all things are a part of nature's mechanism. Man too, from this point of view is a thing amongst things, a product of nature, with a nervous mechanism, but without free will. XI. Yet this point of view is as inadequate as it is partially true. For a closer analysis shows that one can only describe what has first been appreciated, that there therefore must be universal types of appreciation, and that in consequence Ideals must be deeper than Mechanism, so that, in order to be relatively describable, nature must embody purposes, and so be possessed of worth. XII. With this result we return to our idealism, which is now enriched by the thought that the Natural Order must also be a Moral Order, that the world of the absolute Self must appear to us as having two aspects, one a temporal, the other an eternal aspect, one of Law and one of Worth. Man then turns out to be at once a part of nature's mechanism, and a part of the Moral Order ; at once temporally determined and morally free. XIII. It is this consideration that in the concluding lecture leads to special suggestions as to the problem of evil. APPENDIX B. ON KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION OF THE CATEGORIES. The statement of the spirit of the Deduction in my text, page 126 sqq., is confessedly a paraphrase of only a few of the cen- tral thoughts of this extremely intricate doctrine. A recent edi- tor of the " Kritik," Erich Adickes,* has shown, in a fashion which I find on the whole very convincing, that the very difficult deduction of the first edition is in fact a piecemeal combination of a number of independent lines of argument which Kant must have written down at decidedly different times during the years 1772-80.^ As to what, notwithstanding the variety and the diverse origin of Kant's different trains of thought in this deduc- tion, is the most important outcome of the whole, opinions have of course differed widely. But Falckenberg, in his " Geschichte d. neueren Philosophie," ' has stated the general and ultimate ^ Immaiiuel Kant^s '^Kritik der reinen Yernunft^'' mil einer Einleitung und Anmerkungen, hrsg. v. Dr. Erich Adickes. Berlin, 1889. ^ Op. cit. page 683, note: " Im vorhergehenden habe ich nachzuweisen versuclit, dasa was man bisher im allgemeinen fiir eine einheitliche gross- artige Konception bielt, vielmehr als eine mosaikartige Zusammenstellung und Verschlingung verschiedener Gedanken aus verschiedenen Zeiten anzu- sehen ist." The view here carried out by Adickes with very great critical ingenuity, was suggested in a general way as early as 1878 by Benno Erd- mann, in his book, Kant's Kriticismus in der ersten und in der zweiten Auflage der "Kritik der reinen Vernunft" on page 25. The notion is to-day rendered an inevitable one by a combination of the internal evidence of the text of the first edition with the evidence as to Kant's method of work presented in Erdmann's edition of the Eeflexionen, and in Reicke's Lose Blatter. As to some of the special results of Adickes, opinions will of course differ. ' Pages 268, 269, 272, note 3. " Ein doppeltes ist was nach Kant ausser- halb der Vorstellung des Individuums existiert. (1) Die unbekannten Dinge an sich. ... (2) Die Erscheinungen selbst, mit ihren erkennbaren immanenten Gesetzen. . . . Die Dinge u. Ereignisse der Ersoheinungswelt 484 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. result of the Kantian argument as to the reality and the consti- tution of the world of the objects of our human knowledge, in a fashion that, as I hold, correctly represents what is, for the fully developed Kant, the most important thing to be proved in the Deduction and in its related arguments. According to Falcken- berg, namely, the final view of Kant is that one must distinguish betvreen my subjective, or momentary consciousness, and my ueberindividuelles transcendentales Bewusstsein, which is equi- valent to die Tnenschliche Gattungsvernunft?- This latter it is which gets its sense data from the unknown Dinge an sich, which applies the categories to these sense-data, which gives the "laws" to "nature," which constitutes the world of "objects," which makes these objects independent of my momentary con- sciousness, which distinguishes them from the subjeJctive Vorstel- lungen of the emplrisohes Bewusstsein, and which at the same time secures a complete agreement between the suhjektive Vor- stellungen and the eine JSrfahrung, or the universal experience wherein all sane human beings agree. This then is the out- come of the completed Kantian doctrine, peparated from all the dross of imperfect and frequently inconsistent comments, expla- nations, and proofs, with which, especially in the first edition, he confused it. This it is which the Deduction is above all to prove. This is that notion of the one Self, constitutive of the one true experience, which Kant introduced to philosophy, and which only the peculiar limitations of his personal point of view prevented him from developing further in the direction in which the post-Kantian thinkers continued the progress of thought. While, as I have said, this seems to me, in the light of the most recent results of " Kant-philology," indubitably the true outcome of Kant's study concerning the nature and objectivity of truth for existieren sowohl vor als nach meiner Wabmeliraung', sind etwas von mei- iier subjektiven und momentanen Vorstellung derselben verschiedenes." " Was ausserbalb meines gegenwartigen Bewusstseina ist, ist desbalb noeh nicht ausser aUem menschlichen Bewusstsein." ^ Op. cit. page 2G9. Die Erscheinung^ says Falckenberg, is for Kant something that stands between the absolute object, the Ding on sich, and tbe Suhjekt^ deren gemeinschafiliches Product es ist, as a sort of relatives Ding an sich. On p. 139 of my text I myself have pointed out how much Kant's unit;/ ofself-oonsciousness tended towards the later interpretation of Fiohte and others. APPENDIX B. 485 us men, the fact of course remains that in the " Kritik " there are very many passages which not only bear hut require a less developed and less consistent, as well as a more subjective inter- pretation. These passages content themselves with saying that, while the Dinge an sich are and remain unknowable, we, lim- ited to our Vorstellungen as we are, actually do apply our cate- gories to the world of the Vorstellungen, because it is our nature to do so ; ^ and so we build up the world of the Erscheinungen by a process of binding Empfindungen together through the instrumentality of the categories, thus creating objects which are themselves nothing but our own private Vorstellungen. From this less advanced and subjective point of view the dif- erence between my empirisches or subjektives Bewusstsein and my transcendentales Bewusstsein, that is, my total self, would become at best merely a quantitative, not a qualitative differ- ence. For, from this point of view, at each moment I apply my categories. My Gemilth is of such a nature that I must do so. By this application I get, in the world of each moment, a categorized object. The object thus gained is itself nothing but my Vorstellung, existent here and now. My whole expe- rience consists of the numerous moments of my life ; and since each moment is categorized, the whole series must be. If one asks why I have a right thus to categorize my moments of expe- rience, the only answer is that my experiences are my own, and may be treated as my own nature determines. If one asks why I thus categorize in each moment the experiences thereof, the only answer is, that otherwise I could not think them. If one still asks why could I not think otherwise, the only reply is that such is the nature of my thought. The product of the moment thus remains subjective ; there is nothing objective but the Binge an sich, and they are unknowable. Kant's doctrine, stated in this second and purely subjective fashion, Is the doctrine that many interpreters have found in his book, as the main outcome of the Analytik. If, as I have stated, It is not his final view, why, one may ask, does it often seem so prominent in the Deduction and elsewhere, especially in ^ Falckenberg recognizes and briefly summarizes these inconsistent pa* on p. 270 and 271, op. cit. 486 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. the first edition ? Why, again, if this was the case, and Kant's true doctrine was not this second one, did he fail to perceive the consequences of the assumption of the difference between the empirisohes and the transcendentales Bewusstsein ? Why did he leave the inconsistent passages standing ? Why did he not proceed further on the road towards the later idealism ? These questions can only be answered by a reference to the now so well-known but peculiarly complex conditions of Kant's own development. He took no definite step forwards until he was forced to do so. He unconsciously preferred inconsistency to any dangerous symmetry and dogmatism of statement. His own doctrine of an objehtive Einheit des Bewusstseins, equiva- lent substantially to what Falckenberg calls die menschliohe Gattungsvernunft, was of extremely slow and consequently imperfect growth in his mind. There was a stage of his critical philosophy in which he certainly did not yet hold it. He worked with wonderful patience and conscientiousness. He builded far better than he knew. An unconsciousness as to his own consequences remained to the end a peculiar charac- teristic of his mind and his method. Therefore, although it is indeed our privilege to-day to understand Kant (if one may borrow again his own often quoted words) besser ah er sich sel- ber verstand, a brief popular summary of his Deduction must limit itself to a comparatively neutral statement of his views. The present is no place for any lengthy discussion of Kant- philology. I must confine myself, therefore, to a few mere references and statements concerning the real outcome and the gradual development of the Kantian doctrine. The best recent discussion of the whole matter of the relation of empirisches and transcendentales Bewusstsein is, so far as I can see, the admirable study by Vaihinger, Zu Kant's Wider- legung des IdealiswMS,^ a paper wholly free from any effort to read a falsely consistent meaning into Kant's complex doctrine of the nature of "objectivity," but still seriously devoted to demonstrating what was the actual tendency of Kant's growing thought. Vaihinger stands side by side with Benno Erdmann ^ Published in the Strassburger Abhandlungen zur Philosaphie (Freiburg u. Tubingen, 1884), pp. 87-164 APPENDIX B. 487 as one of the two highest authorities at present concerning Kant's growth and teaching. Both these scholars are thorough philologists, cautious, elaborate, patient, and at the same time capable of broad outlooks and wide generalizations. This pres- ent paper of Vaihinger's is in his best mood. His principal re- sult is the statement and explanation of the remarkable thesis : * " From Kant's fundamental assumptions follows necessarily the existence of a physical world independent of our [subjective] ideas.'' Surprising as this notion must seem to those who inter- pret their Kant in a purely subjective fashion, it is not only true that Kant stated this thesis in so many words in the famous Refutation of Idealism, of the second edition, but it is also true, as Vaihinger shows, and as all intelligent readers of the " Kritik " must in the end come to recognize, that this doctrine is, despite all of Kant's hesitancy and inconsistencies, the deep- est expression of the genuine spirit of the whole '' Kritik." Nor is this principle of the real objectivity of Kant's physical world at all opposed to the other equally fundamental thesis of Kant, namely, the thesis that, as I have stated the matter on page 34 of my text, " Man's nature is the real creator of man's world," so that " it is the inner structure of the human spirit which merely expresses itself in the visible nature about us." For Kant's most important metaphysical deed lies precisely in his distinction of the private or subjective personality proper from the universally human and therefore genuine selfhood, and in his reference of the phenomena and laws of outer nature in space and time to the constructive and objectively categorizing activity of the latter, that is, to the relatively universal Unity of Apperception. Hereby he prepared the way for the further universalizing of this human selfhood into the notion of the World-Self of objective idealism, — the highest and deepest result of all modern philosophy. " I " exist, for Kant, in a twofold sense. I am here and now in the world as this suc- cession of flying moments, this empirisches Bewusstsein. But I also exist in another way ; I have ohjehtive Einheit der Apper- ception, and to this objektive Einheit I, as empirical subject, 1 Op. cit. p. 140 : " Aus Kant's f undamentalen Annahmen folget noth- wendig die Existenz einer von der Vorstellung uuabhangigen Korperwelt." 488 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. must submit. Now this ohjehtive JEinheit is something essen- tially human. " We " possess it together. "Es gibt nur eine Erfahru?ig." ^ It is the objektives Subjekt of this higher expe- rience who is affected somehow by the unknowable Dinge an sich, who applies the categories to his Empfindungen, and who thus gives laws to nature. For me, as private subject, these laws are outer, these categorized things are objective and un- changeable. Meanwhile, I, as private subject, can still know these outer things because, although they are independent of my momentary caprice, they are not independent of my deeper, of my genuinely human personality. I, even in the privacy of the moment, share in the nature of the ohjehtive Einheit, repeat • its activity, reconstruct its origmal constructions, join my tran- sient to my deeper selfhood, and am thus, by implication, more than my purely subjective self. Vaihinger's philological demonstration of the foregoing inter- pretation of Kant's outcome will be all the more convincing to the reader in view of the fact that Vaihinger himself is quite free from all suspicion of any predisposition to force an " He- gehan " interpretation, or any absolutely idealistic tendencies upon Kant. His strictly objective discussion of the fact is, therefore, extremely persuasive. I can here only refer to it in this general fashion, and must leave the technically skilled reader to study it for himself. Apart from Vaihinger's paper, the careful reader of the " Kritik " will often have pondered over such phrases as refer to the difference between the objektive Einheit and the subjektive Einheit der Apperception, and over such statements as those in the deduction of the principle of causation, in the second Ana- logy of Experience, where repeatedly the distinction is drawn ^ In one of the Meflexionen of Benno Erdraann's edition, vol. ii. p. 285, Kant liimself gives tliii5 thought an expression that is almost startingly near the later formulas of constructive idealism. I refer to Hefl. 989 of Erdmann's arrangement ; — " Dinge "werden vorgestellt als Erscheinungen, weil es Wesen gibt, die Sinne hahen. Dieselben Wesen haben aber aueh Verstand, unter dessen Gesetzen die Erscheinungen stehen, sofern ihr mog- liches Bewusstsein nothwendig zu einem allgemeingiltigen Bewusstsein stimmen muss, d. i., sie haben eine Natur." Yet this note doubtless belongs to a time before 1781. APPENDIX B. 489 between " subjective succession " in me, and " objective se- quence " im Gegenstande. The reader will have observed that over this distinction Kant himself struggles with an almost pathetic earnestness of reflection, that he again and again seeks to give it final articulation, and again and again fails, his clear- est assertions being after all those which approach nearest to Vaihinger's formulation as above, and to the wording of the Refutation of Idealism in the second edition. Slowly it will dawn upon the reader that Kant is in the birth-throes of bring- ing forth a new and wonderful reflective notion, whose corre- spondent in the spiritual faith of humanity is very old, but whose existence as a reflective doctrine is highly novel. This notion is that of the objectively subjective self, — objective to me in my private capacity, but subjectively constructive of the world of the standard human experience, in so far as this is the true or normal self. Kant does not himself fully know what he is pro- ducing. He feels the birth throes ; he gives forth all sorts of uncertain sounds ; he often seems to deny, and in fact does deny his own ofEspring. But none the less is it truly his ofBspring. But the best view of Kant's relation to the new doctrine we get as we read the notes now accessible in Benno Erdmann's " Reflexionen," and in Reicke's " Lose Blatter." Here Kant's endlessly patient efforts to deduce ever afresh the categories, his wavering between a subjective and an objective interpretation of their application, the gradual and for a long time very dim appearance of the transcendentale JEinheit, Kant's own final obscurity as to whether it really is a conscious and wholly actual or complete self at all, his own unconscious hints at the coming objective idealism, — all these things are depicted in a fashion that makes intelligible to us as never before the piecemeal struc- ture of the text of the " Kritik," the inevitable inconsistencies of that great work, and the beautifully conscientious self-re- straint of the patient Kant himself, who stood on the border of the promised land of modern idealism, and could not enter. In the light of all this we understand how the thesis of the Refu- tation of Idealism in the second edition, a thesis which has been a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense to numberless readers, is in fact one of the most genuinely consistent and 490 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. idealistic of Kant's propositions, so that, as Vaihinger declares : ''■ " Die Anerkennung einer von unseren empirischen Vorstellun- gen unabhangigen Korperwelt im Raume, ist eine nothwendige und uuabweisliche logische Consequenz aus den fundamentalen Positionen Kants. Diese Consequenz hat Kant auch gezogen." Yet, of course, there remains the conflict between the con- sistent Kant who drew his own final conclusions, and the hesi- tant Kant whose language is often so narrowly subjective. The historical fact of this conflict has led me, in my general state- ment of Kant's results in my text, to prefer, as I have said, a more neutral formulation, which points towai'ds the deeper con- sequences, but does not expressly embody them. It remains, of course, all the while sure that Kant's urspriing- liche or objektive JSinheit der Apperception was at its deepest never the unity of a true World-Self in any absolute or com- plete sense. The argument of the Dialectic forbade Kant to look for absolute VoUstandigheit in any direction. Kant's highest principle was at its best, therefore, limited to what Falckenberg calls a Tiienschliche Gattungsvernunft. This limi- tation, meanwhile, was precisely what later thinkers were bound to transcend. As a fact, therefore, one would give an unhistorical impres- sion of the true Kant, in all his admirable cautiousness of phrase- ology, if one took his doctrine of the transcendentales Bewusst- sein, as he stated in his most advanced and suggestive discus- sions, out of its characteristically obscure environment, and set it down as not only Kant's final, but as his whole doctrine. Un- able in my text to present all the aspects of the argument of the Deduction, I have therefore deemed it least misleading to lay stress on the relatively neutral and therefore somewhat equivo- cal statement of his views. I have pointed out how he ap- pealed to the transcendentale Einheit der Apperception; I have pointed out how this Einheit is, for each of us, our true self, and how the appeal is constantly made to it by every one of us, in so far as he is rational. This notion is so far unques- tionably Kantian. What I have not pointed out, except inciden- tally, as in the passage on page 139 of the text, is that the trail/' 1 Oja. cit. p. 164. APPENDIX B. 491 scendentale Einheit der Apperception is in effect what Falcken- berg calls it, a menschliche Gattungsvernunft, and is so already, by implication, identical with the Self of later idealists, a Self which is only Kant's transoendentale Einheit writ large. I have deliberately left doubtful, in the text, how far Kant's cate- gorized world of physical nature is genuinely objective for the individual consciousness. The Kant of the final stage of the critical philosophy knew that this world is objective for the individual, is no product of his empirisches Bewusstsein, is not set in order, nor categorized, nor objectified by his momentary thinking, but is properly accepted by him as a world of fact. The Kant of an earlier stage, while the critical philosophy was forming, did not yet hold this view. The Kant of the final stage attributed the application of the categories to an ursprung- liche Einheit der Apperception, with which the empirisches Bewusstsein is simply bound to agree. The Kant of the earlier stage made no clear distinction between empirisches or subjek- tives, and ohjektives or transcendentales Bewusstsein at all. But, by reason of that curious fashion of composition which Adickes has so well demonstrated in the text of his own edition, various stages of the growing critical philosophy are represented in the book as it comes before us. And the actual Kant, by reason of all the complexity of his marvelous investigation, was himself never wholly aware of his own inconsistencies, nor of the extent to which they obscured his true thought. APPENDIX C. THE HEGELIAN THEORY OF UNIVERSALS. In the text, pp. 222-226, 1 have briefly set forth Hegel's theory as to the reality of the " concrete " universal. The one true Genus, according to him, is the divine Idee, in which, ac- cording to Hegel, every genuine individual reality has its organic place. This theory of the Organic Universal as the Totalitat containing and determining all the interrelated and true Indi- viduals, vi^hich latter have genuine being only as members of the organized body of their Universal, has been shown in the text to be a necessary result of the Hegelian metaphysics of Self-consciousness. The historical importance of the matter jus- tifies here the addition of a few citations and references for the use of the more technical students The Hegelian theory of Universals is intended, of course, as the text has also shown, to offer a solution of the ancient ques- tion as to the reality of universals. What objective validity have our general concepts? "They must have validity, they must correspond to objective truth," so some thinkers have said, " be- cause all science is of the general, and all science is also of the truth." "They cannot have, as general ideas, objective valid- ity," so other thinkers have said, " because all that truly exists in the world is individual. For there is no such thing as dog in general. There are in the world only individual dogs. The universal, therefore, exists only as realized in the single indi- vidual." In view of this antinomy of traditional discussion, Hegel offers his characteristic solution. The real world is the world of the Absolute Self. His truth is organic, is allumfassend, is a Totalitat, and is, in logical formulation, the universal Idee. Now the Idee is not an " abstract universal," nor a general idea that is merely exemplified by the individual objects of the world. APPENDIX C. 493 On the c ontr ary, tliey are in_Jt _; fnr hy it theyjiy-a-and-move and have their being ; and it, on the other hand, is i n them only in so far forth a s__ ^ey are first in h. No finite individual, in its isolation, embodies the Idee, or corresponds to this true Uni- versal. Only the organic totality of the finite embodies the Universal. And in this sense the Genus is real. Hegel's theory, expressed in his own words, is : • — "AUes Wirkliche, in sofern es ein Wahres ist, ist die Idee, und hat seine Wahrheit allein durch und kraft der Idee. Das einzelne Seyn ist irgend eine Seite der Idee ; fiir dieses bedarf es daher noch anderer Wirklichkeiten, die gleichfalls als beson- ders fiir sich bestehende erscheinen ; in ihnen zusammen und in ihrer Beziehung ist allein der BegrifE realisirt. Das Einzelne fiir sich entspricht seinem BegrifEe nicht ; diese Beschranktheit seines Daseyns macht seine Endlichkeit und seinen Untergang aus." 1 To the illustration of this theory it is worth while, however, to devote some further space. With his customary manysided- ness of treatment, Hegel, of course, endeavors to show how previous theories of the universal have a relative and historical justification as stages on the way to the true insight, and as embodiments of lower and partly untrue forms of the universal forms, which are presented to us in the phenomenal appear- ances of the finite world. To these lower forms of the universal, Hegel devotes a patient and extended attention ; and we must first briefly refer to the principal one amongst them. In particular, then, Hegel's theory of Universals cannot be understood without a clear distinction between the lower form of what he calls Verstandes-Allgemeinheit, and the true or higher form of the Vernunft-Allgemeinheit or Allgemeinheit des Begriffes. The Understanding, according to Hegel, is the first form of the activity of thought.'' As such it produces, not Begriffe in the proper sense at all, but what Hegel technically ^ The passage here given in full is referred to and in larger part trans- lated in the text, p. 224. 2 Encycloped. § 487, Werke, vol. vii. 2, p. 355. 494 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. calls Gedanken?- Gedanken of this first sort are the universals of the understanding, such ideas as man or house or animal. These are often called Begriffe, but wrongly.^ On this stage they are the product of analysis and abstraction ; and abstrac- tion is as necessary in the beginning of our thinking as it is untrue from the higher point of view. It is the very business of philosophy to transform Gedanken into Begriffe.^ The Ge- danke, as it is first reached, embodies the universal qualities or characteristics present in each of many individuals. Out of such individuals it thus makes an abstractly defined class or Gattung. This class, or genus of the understanding, is related to the sub-classes and individuals that fall within its Umfang in the fashion that the Aristotelian logic originally defined.* The Gattung, namely, has species or Arten, which as subordinate classes are subsumed under it, forming each a part of its Um- fang, while the individuals are in their turn subsumed under the various Arten. Both Gattung and Art, for this stage of thinking, express only das Gemeinsame found in each and all of many individuals. In experience, meanwhile, only the individuals can be shown, not the Gattung. For the Cfattung is not yet the Begriff, which will turn out to be much more than ein Ge- meinsohaftUches. This Gattung of the understanding has no Existens. For it is thus far, on its subjective side, the Gedanke of the observer, which, being formal, does not explain either 1 Phdnomenol., Werke, vol. ii. pp. 24-25. ^ Encyclop., Werke, vol. vi. p. 324. ^ Phdnomenol., Werke, vol. ii. p. 26. On the definition of the Verstand, see, also, Werke, vol. vii. 2, p. 356. The understanding is there "formal." Its activity depends upon Abstrahiren. " Trennt er das Zufallige vom We- sentlichen ab, so ist er durchaus in aeinem Kechte und ersoheint ala Das was er in Wahrheit seyn soil." Das Wesentliche, so abstracted, the under- standing uses to define its universals. * "Aristoteles," says Hegel, in his Gesch. d. Philos., Werke, vol. xiv. p. 368, " ist der Urheber der verstdndigen Logik ; ihre Formen hetreffen nur das Verhaltniss von Endlichen zu einander, und in ihnen kaun das Wahre nicht gefasst werden." This observation occurs in connection with a dis- cussion of the Aristotelian theory of universals, which is there said to in- volve the method used "in den endlichen Wissenschaften," namely, ^^ das Subsumiren des Besondern unter das Allgemeine." It is just this sort of universality and this kind of subsumptiou that Hegel's theory is intended to supersede. APPENDIX C. 495 the content of the individual thing, or the totality of the actual relations of this individual thing to others in the real world.^ Speaking in objective terms we can indeed already say that the Gedanke corresponds to an aUg^nevneTNwtvj]^ present as das WesemUche, or as die hestimmte Wesentliohlceit of the finite in- dividuals that belong to the Gattung. For the thoughts even of tlie understanding have a lower sort of truth. Whatever is in the world is the embodiment of thought ; and in so far as the Gedanken of the understanding are also the product of thought, they do correspond to the inner nature of things. Only, the universals of the understanding tell but a portion of the real truth about the objects present in experience. And in just so far these universals are untrue. The Begriff, or the truly objec- tive thought of the whole nature of things, will be " mehr als nur die Angabe der wesentlichen Bestimmtheiten, d. i., der Ver- standesbestimmungen einer Sache." ° The universal of the understanding, applying to a nature which is only exemplified by each individual, and which exists nowhere but in such indi- vidual examples (as animality exists only in individual ani- mals), tells us nothing about the interrelationship of the indi- viduals themselves, gives us therefore no Einheit des Begriffes. Of this universal of the understanding Hegel gives us many accounts. No intelligent student of his works can confound this sort of universality with the true Vernunft-Allgemeinheit, whose exposition forms Hegel's peculiar contribution to the theory of universals. To sum up so far: The universal of the under- 1 It ig of this stage of thought that Hegel is speaking when, in the En- cyclop., Werke, vol. vi. p. 46, he says : " Daa Thier als solches ist nicht zu zeigen, sondern immer nur ein Bestimmtes. Das Thier existirt nicht, son- dern ist die allgemeine Natur der einzelnen Thiere." Thier is, so far, no Begriff, no true universal at alj. And Existenz, with its verb existiren, has a special meaning in Hegel's logic. The Begriff, when we get to it, win have a higher sort of reality, namely, what Hegel calls Objelctivildt, something much more than hare Existenz. 2 Logik, Werke, vol. iii. p. 2'74. Compare Encyclop., Werke, vol. vi. p. 65, where the business of the understanding in grasping the wesentlichen Inhalt of finite things, in classifying abstractly, and in applying predicates accordingly, is further illustrated. The technical phrases wesentliche Be- stimmtheit, bestimmte Wesentlichheit, etc., refer, then, only to universality as conceived by the understanding. 496 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. standing is the first discovery of our thouglit when the latter is applied to things. Of this universal it was that Aristotle's logic gave the traditional theory. Aristotle himself, to be sure, in his metaphysical theory, really transcended the limitations of his logical theory, and implied the existence of a deeper and truer sort of universality in the nature of things. But he did this haltingly.-' His metaphysical instinct is truer than his logic. He uses the higher universal, but has a logical theory only of the lower. And as for this lower, it appears to the understand- ing as objectively existent only in each individual, as constitut- ing the essence or wesentliche Bestimmtheit thereof. Subjec- tively it is represented by the Gedanlie, which is the thought of some abstractly defined class-essence. And such class-essences appear to the understanding to have no Existenz as such, apart from the individuals in which they are exemplified. This is why we are accustomed to say, from the point of view of ordi- nary thought, that general ideas do not represent concrete reali- ties, and that only the individual is real. II. Principal Caird, in his " Philosophy of Religion," ' after de- scribing the foregoing lower sort of universality, and pointing out its inadequacy to the expression of the truth of the real world, proceeds, in a confessedly Hegelian spirit, to set forth the nature of the Vernunft-Allgemeinheit, and its application to the comprehension of the relations of God and the world, as follows : — " But thought is capable of another and deeper movement. It can rise to a universality which is not foreign to, but the very inward nature of things in themselves, not the universal of an abstraction from the particular and difEerent, but the unity which is immanent in them and finds in them its own necessary 1 Gesch. d. Phil., Werhe, vol. xiv. p. 283 : " Hat Aristoteles ater aueh . . . die aUgemeine Idee nicht logisch herausgehoben, (denn sonst ware seine sogenannt Logik, die etwas Anderes ist, f Ur die Methode als der eine Begriff in AUem zu erkennen), so eiBcheint doch andererseits bei Aristoteles die Idee Gottes, selbst auch als ein Besonderes an ihrer SteUe neben den Andern, obzwar sie alle Wahrheit ist." " Page 229, sqq. APPENDIX C. 497 expression ; not an arbitrary Invention of the observing and classifying mind, . . . but an idea which expresses the inner dialectic, the movement or process towards unity, which exists in and constitutes the being of the objects themselves. This deeper and truer universality is that which may be designated ideal or orga7iic universality. ■ The idea of a living organism ... is not a common element which can be got at by abstrac- tion and generalization, by taking the various parts and mem- bers, stripping away their differences, and forming a notion of that which they have in common. That in which they differ is rather just that out of which their unity arises and in which is the very life and being of the organism ; that which they have in common they have, not as members of a living organ- ism, but as dead matter, and what you have to abstract in order to get it is the very life itself. Moreover, the universal, in this case, is not last but first. We do not reach it by first thinking the particulars, but conversely, we get at the true notions of the particulars only through the universal. What the parts or members of an organism are, — their form, place, structure, proportion, functions, relations, their whole nature and being, is determined by the idea of the organism which they are to com- pose. It is it which produces them, not they it. In it lies their reason and ground. They are its manifestations or specifica- tions. It realizes itself in them, fulfills itself in their diversity and harmony. . . . You cannot determine the particular mem- ber or organ save by reference to that which is its limit or nega- tion. It does not exist in and by itself, but in and through what is other than itself, — through the other members and organs which are at once outside of and within it, beyond it, and yet part and portion of its being. . . . Here, then, we have a kind of universality which is altogether different from the barren and formal universality of generalization, and the indi- cation of a movement of thought corresponding to an inner rela- tion of things which the abstracting, generalizing understanding is altogether inadequate to grasp." Applying the notion of universality thus reached to the rela- tions of our own thought to the reality about which we think, Principal Caird next proceeds, on p. 233, sqq., to " a brief con- 498 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. sideration of the relation of Nature to Finite Mind." He dwells upon the well-known opposition between matter and mind, which, for the understanding, are two separate and opposed realities. He states the familiar problem as to how mind can know the natural order outside of our minds, shows that this problem is the same in principle with the problem about the rela- tion between finite mind and God, and suggests, as a solution of both problems, the thought, the " Nature," the finite mind, and God or the infinite mind, are not discordant or irreconcilable ideas, but ideas which belong to one organic whole or system of knowledge. After devoting considerable space to the illus- tration of this view, and dwelling further on the " principle of Organic Unity " (p. 238), he points out (p. 239) that the prob- lem of knowledge is to be solved on the basis of the theory of the organic universal itself. " It is but a spurious idealism which makes the world without only the illusory creation of the individual mind. Bather the truth is that the individual mind must renounce its own isolated independence, must cease to assert itself, must lose itself in the object, before it can attain to any true knowledge of Nature. ... In order, therefore, to attain to the universal life of reason that is in the world, it is an indispensable condition that I renounce my own individuality, my particular thought and opinion, and find the true realization of my own reason in that absolute reason or truth which Nature manifests. . . . The principle in fine that solves the difPerence between Nature and Finite Mind is, that their isolated reality and exclusiveness is a figment, and that the organic life of reason is the truth or reality of both." On page 240, Principal Caird continues his discussion by ap- plying the same principle to " the solution of the higher prob- lem of Religion, or of the relation of the Finite Mind to God." " Here, too, it will be seen that the understanding, which clings to the hard independent identity of either side . . . renders any true solution impossible. ... A true solution can be reached only by apprehending the Divine and the Human, the Infinite and the Finite, as the moments or members of an organic whole, in which both exist, at once in their distinction and their unity." Principal Caird then gives as a further illustration of the true APPENDIX C. 499 theory of universals, and as an aid in comprehending the organic unity first mentioned, " the relation of the individual to other individuals " in the " case of our social relations." " The ordi- nary conception of self-identity isolates the individual from his f eUow-men." But this, says our author, is wrong. " The ah- stract individual is not truly man, but only a fragment of human- ity, a being as devoid of the moral and spiritual elements which are of the essence of the man's life, as the amputated limb of participation in the vital existence of the organism. The social relations are a necessary part of the being of the individual. . . . It is not by supposing in the first place a number of individual human beings, each complete in himself, and then combining these individuals, that we reach the idea of the Family ; rather must we first think the Family in order to know the individual. . . . Here, as elsewhere, the universal is the prius of the par- ticular. Yet the universal must not be conceived as having any reality apart from the particulars, any more than the body apart from its members. The true idea is reached only by holding both together in that higher unity which at once comprehends and transcends them, that organic unity, whether of the Family or the State, which is the living integration of the individual members which compose it." " In the same fashion," con- tinues Principal Caird, " the true Infinite is not the negation of ■the Finite, but that which is the organic unity of the Infinite and Finite." III. The foregoing quotations from Principal Caird will serve, both to give an excellent summary of certain aspects of the Hegelian theory of universals, and to show that the theory itself is no novelty to English readers.* It has become a common- place of discussion for one whole school of neo-Hegelians. To pass, however, to Hegel's own account of the matter. " Thought," says Hegel, "is in the first place thought after the fashion of the understanding ; but thought does not remain on this stage, and the Begriff is not a mere Verstandeshestim- 1 Cf . also Professor Edward Caird's Social Philosophy of Auguste Comte, p. 199 : " The universal of science and philosophy is . . . not merely a generic name, under which things are brought together, hut a principle which unites them and detenuiuea their relation to each other." 500 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. mung." ^ The higher movement of the Vernunft depends on the well-known DialeJctik of thought, which takes the abstract facts and qualities that the understanding has sundered, the Bestimmungen, or Seiten, or Indivif^ien of the finite world, and discovers " die Einheit der Bestimmungen in ihrer Entgegen- setzung." ^ This Bialektik has a " positive result," namely, the discovery of das Vernilnftige, which is not merely ein Ab- straktes, but " zugleich ein Konkretes,^ well es nicht einfache, formelle Einheit, sondern Einheit unterschiedener Bestimmun- gen ist. Mit blossen Abstraktionen oder formellen Gedanken hat es darum iiberhaupt die Philosophic ganz und gar nicht zu thun, sondei-n allein mit konkreten Gedanken." The Allgemeinheit des Verstandes is, therefore, transformed into the Begriff whenever two related processes have been carried out : (1) When the formal abstractions or wesentliche Bestimmungen, which the understanding separates from one an- other, and opposes to one another, — such abstractions as right and left, inner and outer, substance and accidetit, — have been united once more by organic ties, and shown to be interrelated and inseparable ^ ; and (2) When, by the same means, the things of the finite world have been shown to be members of one organic total. The intimate relationship of these two processes for Hegel is one of the prominent characteristics of his whole method. Das Wahre ist konkret means for him equally, " The truth is an organic union of interrelated aspects, characters, qualities," and " The truth is the Universal in which the par- ticulars and individuals are organically joined." '° For example, 1 Encycl., Werke, vol. -vi. p. 147. The folio-wing pages contain a repeti- tion of the account given above of the nature and limitations of the Yer- standes-AUgemcinkeit. ^ Loc. cit., p. 157. ^ On the Hegelian use of JconJcret, see the excellent definition of Falcken- terg's Gesch. d. neueren Fhiloscrphie, p. 478: "The concrete Begriff o' Hegel is an Universal that has the Particular in itself, and that produces its own particulars (sich besondert)." * Logik, Werke, vol. iv. pp. 63, 64. ^ " Das einzelne Seyn ist irgend eine Seite der Idee," Hegel has said in the passage quoted above. In various passages he identifies Seite with Bestimmung ; so, for instance, in the Beligionsphilosophie, Werke, vol. xii. p. 422, where he speaks of the Zusammenhang zweier Seiten oder Bestitn- mungen. From these and many other passages it easily becomes evident APPENDIX C. 501 in the case of any man such as Caius or Titus, Hegel says : * " Was der einzelne Mensoh im Besonderen ist, das ist er nur in sofern, als er vor alien Dingen Mensch als solcher ist und im AUgemeinen ist, und diess AUgemeine ist nicht nur etwas ausser und neben andern abstrakten Qualitaten . . . sondern viel- mehr das alles Besondere Durchdringende und in sich Beschlies- sende." Moreover, as he tells us, das AUgemeine is here, in case of humanity, and in its deepest truth, something more than all men.^ It does more than include in an indifferent way the individuals. It is for them all not " bloss etwas denselbeii Gemeinschaftliches" it is their Grand, their Boden, their Suh- stanz. Now here is humanity regarded as something universal and konkret. As such it is at once all men, and it is more. It is something pervading and determining all the characteristics of each man, and binding together all his besondere Qualitaten. It is thus konkret in two senses, namely, in so far as in it all men are together, and in so far as through it all Qualitaten of each man are united. Yet not even in this passage is Hegel expounding the completely organic universal, but only a form on the way towards the realization of it. It wiU be noticed, how- ever, that here he distinctly declares that the individual is im AUgemeinen, " hi the Universal," which is, therefore, the inclu- sive Suhstanz of the individuals. The notion of the Vernunft-AUgemeinheit thus introduced re- ceives a lengthy development in the " Logik." The way for this Allgemeinheit des Begriffes is prepared, in the larger " Logik," by elaborate discussions under the head of Wesen (that is, in Part Second of the work). In the sec6nd division of Wesen, in dis- that for Heg-el both abstract characters and abstract individuals are to be treated alike, in so far as they have their truth only in the organic "whole of which they are elements. Compare once more Falckenberg's definition of Hegel's use of " concrete, '' as given above. That the Individual is con- tained in the Universal is also expressly asserted by Hegel ( Werlce, vol. vi. p. 323 ; compare p. 316). 1 Encyclop., Werlce, vol. vi. p. 340. ^ Id., p. 339. In case of the form of logical judgment -which Hegel is discussing in the passage now cited, he is laying special stress upon the fact that here already, although the true Vernunft-AUgemeinheit has not been fully reached, the individual stands in relation to others, and is not con- ceived by himself, or apart from his relations. 502 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. cussing the Erscheinung, Hegel shows, in a fasMon which he was elsewhere fond of dwelling upon, and illustrating, that the qualities or Eigenschaften of every finite thing are its Weisen des Verhaltens zu Andern ; ^ so that all the things of the finite world are what they are by virtue of their relations to one an- other. They are in Wechselwirhung,^ and it is their nature to be so. Hence the world of these finite things is a world of a Gesetz, or all-embracing law, of which the things and qualities are the appearance, while this Gesetz or Reich der Gesetze is a self-determined Totalitdt. As the law at the basis of the finite world is, however, fully expressed, but only expressed in the phenomena themselves, the result here is an Einheit des Innern und des Aeussern wherein, as Hegel tells us, the Begriff is already present in a latent form ; for our world of finite things is thus a totaUtij of interrelated individuals that embody a laxv and Tnahe it manifest. It is, however, just this Totalitdt that im Begrijfe als solchem appears as das Allgemeine? In the world of Wesen this unity of inner and outer is so far called die Wirklichkeit.* The true nature of Wirldichkeit appears in the exposition of the category of Substanz at the end of Wesen, where finally die absolute Suhstanz, or general nature of things, appears as a " Totality " that is as a " simple "Whole," which determines itself " and contains its self-determinations in itself." This Totality is das Allgemeine, which, together with its correlated categories, das Einzelne and das Besondere, makes up the Begriff, to which Hegel herewith passes. The intricate exposition of the Begriff, in the third part of the "Logik," is rendered somewhat clearer by the lecture notes which were added by Hegel's editors to the corresponding para- graphs of the " Encyklopadie." From these one or two quota- tions have been made in the text. It is perhaps enough to point out here that one best and most easily sees what the Begrff is meant to be if one passes forthwith to the place where its nature is " writ large " in the world of Objektivitdt, ^ into which it 1 Logik, Werke, vol. iv. p. 125. 2 Id., p. 128. ^ Logi/c, Werke, vol. iv. p. 174. * Id., p. 178. Die Wirklichkeit appears first as das Absolute, whieh corre- sponds {loc. cit. pp. 187-190) to Spinoza's SuhstanQe. ^ Logik, Werke, vol. v., pp. 167-228 ; Encydop., Werke, vol. vi. pp. 365-384 APPENDIX C. 503 " passes over," and in which it expresses itself. Here one has a repetition on a higlier stage of what took place in Wesen. Once more one deals with a world of objects, only now they are known to embody the Begriff, whose true universality they show in three ascending phases, ^neohanism, chemism, and teleology. The world of mechanism, or, as one might say, the world as " Machine," is the world whose parts have indeed interrelation- ships, but only those of abstract law. In the world of " affini- ties " or of " Chemism," the individuals exist only as interrelated, and only by virtue of their affinities and the results of these. In the still truer and more inclusive world of " Teleology," or, as one might say, in the world as " Organism," the interrelated- ness of the individual objects and their cooperation aS instru- ments of one immanent purpose, which is their true universal, prepares the way for that complete union of Begriff and Objekt which is given us in the Idee. The Idee, in fact, is the world as " Person " so far as the categories of the " Logik " enable the notion of personality to be introduced. The full notion of person- ality is developed, later in the system, in the philosophy of spirit. These Hegelian formulations of the theory of universals have no doubt many antiquated features. Their presence and impor- tance in the system is indubitable. As pointed out in my text, the most interesting expressions of the whole doctrine occur in Hegel's ethical and theological works. A full collection of pas- sages is impossible in the present space. A few more may yet be given. It is an explicit and deliberate application of the theory of the organic universal when Hegel says, in his " Rechts- philosophie," that the individual man is no person " ohne Rela- tion zu anderen Personen." ^ This notion, closely related to that of the Allgemeinheit des Bewusstseins mentioned in the text, appears very prominently in the whole structure of the " Rechts- philosophie." It is another application of this same theory when Hegel says, in the " Religionsphilosophie," in describing the life of the church, that the subjective religious consciousness has to be realized by eine Vielheit von Subjekten und Individuen, but that, since this consciousness is to be universal in the deeper 1 Werhe, vol. -riii., p. 417. Cf. p. 110 : " Es ist dureh die Vernunft ebenso nothwendig dass die Menschen in Vertrags-Verhaltnisse eingehen als dass sie Eigenthum beaitzen.' ' 504 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. sense, " so ist die Vielheit der Individuen durchaus zu setzen als nur ein Schein, und eben dieses, dass sie sicli selbst als diesen Schein setzt, ist die Einheit des Glaubens. . . . Das ist die Liebe der Gemeinde, die aus vielen Subjekten zu bestehen scheint, welche Vielheit aber nur ein Schein ist." ^ " Many mem- bers," then, but only one body, one Lord, one faith. Further on Hegel discusses in the same spirit the relation of the individ- uals to their universal as illustrated by the relation of the faith- ful to the person of Christ. The application of the same theory of universals to the general problem of the relation of God to the world appears at the close of the " Encyklopadie." The " Na- turphilosophie " is also full of applications : so, for instance, the explanation of the relations of the sexes, and of the struggle of the various species of animals for existence, as in both cases due to the fact that the universal can nowhere completely realize itself in any one individual, or in any group of individuals.^ Since, ac- cording to Hegel, the Idee cannot come to full expression in outer nature, the Universal is in all these cases displayed to us only imperfectly, as an endless series of efforts towards the completely organic, which is perfectly realized only in the world as spirit. To return, finally, for one moment, to the logical theory it- self : It is the immanently organic nature of the true universal that in the doctrine of the suhjektiven Begriff forces the Begriff to develop its various Seiten in the Urtlieil, since only by vir- tue of the relation of apparently divided, but really and organi- cally inseparable, aspects or individuals can any universality be realized. Of Urtheile the highest sort, before the class in the Urtheile des Begriff es proper is reached, is the disjunc- tive judgments, just because they represent the Unterschiede or Besonderungen of their subjects as in every case an inter- related group of species or of individuals.* For " das Allge- meine ist das Einfache welches ebensosehr das Reichste in sich ^ Werke, vol. xii., pp. 313, 314. The important thing here is that Hegel expressly regards this as an application of his logical theory. Compare p. 309. 2 WerTce, vol. vii., 1, pp. 640, 641, 643, 64.5, 648, 649. In particular, p, 648, ■' Die Gattnng existirt in eiuer Keihe von einzelnen Lebendigen," — « not in any single individual. » Werke, vol. v., pp. 102-107. APPENDIX C. 505 selbst ist," * and this wealth of the universal gets unfolded in the disjunctive judgment. The universal is die Negativitdt uherhaupt ; ^ and this self-differentiation gets an expression in the disjunctive judgment. It is the Begriff itself that sieh dis- jungirt in the true disjunctive judgment.^ But the genuine Urtheil des Begriffes is something still higher, since not only the fact, but the inner necessity and self-determination of this differentiation must be made evident, a thing vrhich can only be done by forms of judgment that carry us on to the ScMuss.^ The ScMuss passes through a number of successive forms whose highest is the disjunctive conclusion,^ wherein once more the reason for the result reached by the conclusion lies in the rela- tion of one included member or Moment of some universal to the universal itself, and to the other members or Momente of the same organic and self-differentiated whole. With the disjunc- tive conclusion the transition is made to the world of Ohjektivi- tat, where, as before shown, the universal is realized in expli- citly organic form as the totality of the related individuals or Momente, whose perfection and truth is the Idee. One word still in conclusion as to the relation of the lower or Aristotelian form of the " universal of the understanding," to Hegel's own " universal of the reason." Hegel himself says : ° " The logic of the mere understanding is contained in the logic of reason, and can be made at once therefrom. Nothing is needed for this purpose but the omission from the latter of the dialectical and so distinctively rational element." It is well to observe that, as Hegel himself has confessed, in one of his let- ters to Niethammer,' it was according to this method that he felt himself obliged to proceed in the exposition of his logic, 1 Id., p. 36. ^ Id., p. 39. Readers of the discussion of Negativitdt in the text will see the significance of this consideration. sjrf., p. 105. 1 Irf., p. 115, sqq. « 18., p. 162, sqq. ^ Encydop., Werlce, vol. vi. p. 158 : " In der spekulativen Logik ist die blosse Verstandes-Logik enthalten, und kann aus jener sogleich gemacht werden ; es bedarf dazu Nichts als daraus das Dialektisehe und Yemiinf- tige wegzulassen." ' See the recently issued vol. xix. of the Werhe^ edited by Karl Hegel (Leipzig, 1887), part i. p. 340. 506 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. which he undertook for the boys in the Nlirnberg gymnasium. Only die verstandige Logik, he tells Niethammer, is suited to gymnasial instruction. Youth at this time needs purely posi- tiven Inhalt and is not ripe for das Spekulative. The dialecti- cal can be only here and there suggested, and never correctly presented in such elementary work. Hence it happens that in the so-called Propaedeutik, which Rosenkranz edited from He- gel's posthumous MSS and published in 1840 as the eighteenth volume of the " Werke," and which contains the gist of Hegel's instruction to the boys at Nurnberg, one finds but few hints of the Hegelian theory of Universals. If this little volume, in fact, were our only record of Hegel, all his peculiar theories, whether as to Idealism in general or as to the nature of Self- consciousness, or as to Universals, would remain almost whoUy unknown to us ; and such theories must not be sought there, but in Hegel's own deliberate expressions of them, and above all in the works which he himself published during his life. INDEX. Absolute, the, with Kant, 139, 142- 145 ; -with Fichte, 159, 160, 192 ; with Sohelling, l84, 193; with Hegel, 213-216, 221 ; with Scho- penhauer, 239, 240, 253, 263, 264. See Self, absolute. Adiekes, Erich, Kant's " Kritik der Reinen Vemunft " edited by, 483, 491. Agassiz, embryological studies of, 286. Aggregation, process of, 324, 325. Agnosticism, its relation to idealism, 344-349, 448. Amos, the prophet, a false religious optimism condemned by, 447, 448, 458, 459. Analogies of experience, 488. Analysis, self-, as characteristic of the eighteenth-century philosophy, 33, 80-82, 93, 101. Analytic and synthetic aspects of idealism, 350, 351, 364. yAnthropomorphism, doctrine of, 345, 427. Antinomies, cosmological, Kant, 123 ; their source, 420 ; in the spiritual world, 437-440. Apperception, transcendental unity of, 484-491. Appreciation, distinction between, and description, in ordinary real- ism, 387-389 ; its formless and un- eategorized character, 390, 391 ; illustrated from Shelley, 393 ; from Schiller, 393 ; that outer truth is not given by appreciation is the presupposition of natural science, 390, 395 ; a possible real world of, 393-897 ; exemplified by the or- ganic unity of the spiritual world, 405-410 ; its categories those of self -consciousness, 411; a world of ideals, 412 ; presupposed by the world of description, 410, 413-415. See Aspect, double ; Description. A priori principles, of empirical sci- ence, 398. Aristotle, the writings of, and Plato, interpret Hellenic life, 9; the founder of the logic of the under- standing, 494, 490, 505. Art, Schopenhauer's theory of, 255- 257. Ashley, Lord Anthony, later Earl of Shaftesbury, a friend of Locke, 78. Aspect, double, doctrine of, 415-419 ; applied to the facts of the inor- ganic world, 419—422 ; to the prob- lem of evolution, 422—428 ; to the problem of freedom, 428-434. Astronomy, the progress of, 312. Atoms, the nature of, 393, 399. Axioms, of Spinoza, questioned in the eighteenth century, 69-70 ; of natural science, relate to the world of description, 397-404. Bacon, 475. Baer, von, embryological researches of, 286. Beethoven, 172. Begriff, the Hegelian, 221, 222, 500- 506. Being, Berkeley's theory of, 87-90 ; the nature of, Kant, 124, 125, 485-488 ; Hegel's theory of, 218- 227, 492-506. Belief, true and false, 374-378. Berkeley, Bishop, idealism of, a de- velopment of eighteenth-century humanism, 33, 71 ; type of char- acter, 86, 87 ; his theory of vision, 88-89, 475 ; the being of sensible 508 INDEX. things, to lie perceived, 87, 90 ; his doctrine an extension of Locke's, 90 ; the sources of ideas, 91 ; an omnipresent eternal mind, 91 ; at- tractive form of his idealism, 91, 92 ; relation of his doctrine to the rediscovery of the inner life, 93, 351 ; his " Principles of Human Knowledge," 93, 475. Berlin, as a centre of German liter- ary interest, 170. Bible, the, modern critical study of, 45. Boeckh, 282. Boehme, 475. Bourne, H. K. F., " Life of Locke," by, 475. Brown, John, Kant the, of nine- teenth century speculative war- fare, 138. Browning, delight of, in the para^ doxes of passion, 261 ; " perfec- tion in imperfection," 454. Bruno, 475. Byron, 478. Caird, Edward, " PhUosophy of Im- manuel Kant " by, cited, 108, 476 J "Life of Hegel" by, cited, 195, 479; "Social Philosophy of Au- gustus Comte " by, cited, 499. Caird, John, "Spinoza" by, 475; "Philosophy of Religion" by, quoted, 496-499. Campanella, 475. Caprice, an element of, in the com- mon selfhood of idealism, 236 ; doctrine of, by Schopenhauer, 237- 240, 203-264 ; the, of the highest reason, 429. Caroline Sohlegel, 181 ; wife of Schel- ling, 182 ; her remarkable letters, 185 ; motto in verse by, for Fichte, 183 ; Fichte's genius and Sehel- ling's contrasted by, 183, 184. Carus, Paul, "Fundamental Princi- ples" by, cited, 398. Categories, Kant's, forms of thought, 127-131 ; the, of Hegel, 218-222 ; the, of the world of description, 397—404; of the world of appre- ciation, 411-415. See Deduction of the categories. Causation, origin of the conception, Hume, 94^97; doctrine of Scho- penhauer, 250, 251 ; physical, in- sufficient to explain the history of the -world, 290, 425, 426; axiom of, belongs to the world of descrip- tion, 344-348, 400-404 ; no appli- cation to world of appreciation, 348, 413-415 ; reality is the world- self, 348-350, 415^t22. Certainty, Descartes' quest for, 75- 78. Chance, brute, the deepest problem of evil, 465-469 ; our, the ration- ality of the Infinite, 469-472. Change. See Evolution, Nature and Evolution. Christopher, St. , his service of God, 53. Christianity, essence of, embodied in speculative theory, 143-145. Civilization, progress of, 7-12, 281- 287. Clearness, essential in thought, Locke, 83. Clifford, W. K., " The First and Last Catastrophe," a lecture by, cited, 318 ; his theory of a definable end- less process for the physical uni- verse, 318-324 ; difficulties of his hypothesis, 324-336. " Cogito, ergo sum," famous princi- ple of Descartes, 76. Coleridge, 478. Conscience, doctrine of, Kant, 112- 118. Consciousness, discussion of human, by Locke, 82-86 ; relation of, to outer reality, Berkeley, 93 ; space and time, conditions of, Kant, 123-125 ; " all consciou.sness is an appeal to other consciousness," Hegel, 208-210; paradox of, 21(V- 215 ; analysis of, the problem of modem idealism, 232, 233 ; a re- sult of evolution, mind -stuff theory, 311 ; twofold character of, 406, 407, 411, 419-434 ; rela- tion of empirical and transcenden- tal, 483-4S8. See Self-conscious- ness. Consciousness, religious, twofold in- terests of, 46-48; contemplative form of, Spinoza and the " Imita- tion," 49-57, 69 ; the perfection of the divine substance, Spinoza, 58- 66 ; active form of, Kant, 111-118 ; Fichte's theism, 160-162 ; Hegel's paradox, 203 - 218 ; transcends time, in world of appreciation 425-428, 457-461. INDEX. 509 Constructive imagination, offiee of, Kant, 130, 139. Contraction, as a source of heat, 315. Copernicus, Kant the, of pliilosophy, 311. Cosmology, problems of a philosophi- cal, 381. Courage, spiritual, 117. "Critique of the Pure Reason," Kant's publication of, 34, 68, 107, 476, 483 ; its essential thought, 34 ; phases in study of, 102-105 ; its early influence, 108, 148; its de- structive and constructive eifects, 111. See Kant. Crusaders, spirit of, 229. Curiosity, different forms of, 6-12. Cynicism, "wonderful temperament of, in Spinoza, 56 ; occasional, of Fichte, 149. Darwin, his power of detailed inves- tigation, 78 ; the doctrine of evo- lution, and his " Origin of Spe- cies," 284-287. Declaration of Independence, 275. Deduction of the categories, Kant's, 126-131 ; the Kantian doctrine, a development, Palckenberg, 483- 486 ; Vaihinger, 486-488 ; Erdmann, 489 ; neutral formulation of Kant's results, 490, 491. See Categories. Descartes, a representative thinker of the seventeenth century, 29, 475 ; his philosophic doubt, 29, 75 ; " CojrtVo, ergo SMin," his princi- ple of absolute certainty, 76 ; his system of innate truths, 75-77 ; problem of their multiplicity, 77, 78. _ Description, the world of, the outer or natural order, 383, 395 ; its per- manent and universal elements, 384^388 ; the test of its objectiv- ity, similarity of human experi- ence, 387, 388 ; the test of similar experience, the sameness of de- scription, 388 ; describable expe- rience, reproducible and under forms or categories, 390-395 ; de- duction of the categories of, 397- 404; not the whole of the real world, 405-408 ; contrast of, and the world of appreciation, 395, 396, 409.415, 424-428 ; real in so far as it is an aspect of the world of the Logos, 416-423, 432-434. Design, old argument of, 92 ; physi- cal world symbolic of the, of the Logos, 421—424. Diderot, 81. Dilemma, the, either idealism or the unknowable, 364-368. Dinge an sich, Kant's, unknowable, 131, 476, 484, 485. Distance, infinite, difficulties of, in Clifford's statement of an endlessly consolidating world, 332-334. Dogmatism, Kant's relation to, 115- 119. Doubt, philosophical, fruitful peri- ods of, 71-74; Cartesian, 29, 75; ablest expression of, by Hume, 93-98 ; lesson of, 98-100 ; Kantian, 11.5-119, 126-132, 477; involves the larger self, 378-379; the, of genuine pessimism, 463-469; an- swered, 469-471. Duty, emphasized by Kant, 112- 114. Eclecticism, 16. Ego, the, Fichte, 156-160. Emerson's " Brahma, " 99. Emotions, human, explanation of, in the seventeenth century, 28 ; the romantic spirit, 174. Energy, redistributions of matter and, 313-315, 337 ; law of degrada- tion of, and evolution, 316-318, 337 ; Clifford's theory of a defin- able endless process, 318-336 ; the world of the " running down," not the final truth, 337-340, 421. "Epicurean Confession of Faith of Hans Bristleback," Sehelling's, 186 ; its clear statement of the Naturphilosophie, 186; the poem, 187-189. Erdmann, Benno, his "Reflexionen Kant's zur Kritischen Philoso- phic," cited, 107, 119, 122, 123, 125, 126, 486, 489. " Essay on the Human Understand- ing," Locke's, publication of, 78, 475; history of, in its preface, 79, 80 ; its historical influence, 80, 81; its doctrine, 81-86. See Locke. Error, involves the larc'er self, 376- 378. Ethics, English, of eighteenth cen- tury, a development of the new humanism, 33; the "Ethics" of 510 INDEX. Spinoza, cited, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, 475 ; quoted, 66, 67. Euclid, Hegelian categories not com- prehensible by definitions of, 218. European thought, transformed, 80, 84. Events, predetermined, Spinoza, 63 ; character of, in the world of de- scription, 387-404 ; in the world of appreciation, 405-415. Evil, attitude towards, of Spinoza, 54 ; of Kant, 11.5-117 ; problem of, 437-441 ; an illusion, Lanier, 442- 447 ; and mystical resignation, 450, 451 ; and pessimism, 452 ; the syn- thesis, ' ' perfection in imperfec- tion," 454-461, 469-471. Evolution, rise of the doctrine of. Lecture IX; transition from ro- mantic idealism to modern realism in Schopenhauer, 264-266 ; the return not an abandonment of idealism, 266-270 ; science thereby enriched, 270-272 ; evolution a postulate of idealistic Interpreta- tion, 273-276 ; modem historical spirit an outgrowth of romanti- cism, 276-285; Darwin's "Origin of Species," 285, 286; his natural selection and the transformation of species, 287 ; conflict of physical necessity and historical ideals, 288 ; problem of the philosophy of evo- lution, 288-291 ; synthesis, 291- 294 ; Spencer's " Formula of Evo- lution," 294-298 ; his Unknowable, 298 ; result of his system, 299, 300 ; monistic doctrines, 300, 304 ; mind- stufB theory, 301-303 ; the deeper self, 304-307. See Nature and Evolution. Experience, the basis of all know- ledge, Locke, 83, 84; the world of, a world of ideas, Berkeley, 87- 91 ; furnishes all the materials of thought, Hume, 94 ; must conform to the forms of thought, Kant, 127, 844 ; due to caprice of world will, Schopenhauer, 239 ; agnostic view of, 344-347 ; in every, the absolute self, 348-350 ; nature of, in the world of description, 387-395, 398-404; the reality of the world of appreciation, 395-397, 404-415. Explanation and cause, the same, Spinoza, 59. Faith, not a dogma but an active postulate, Kant, 115-117. Falckenberg, his view of the Kant* ian deduction, 483-486. " Faust," Goethe's, a product of the revolutionary period, 99 ; quoted, 100, 439. Feeling, a guide to reason, romanti.. cists, 175. Fichte, the significance of Kantian doctrine, 135-139; its transforma.. tion the common task of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, 139-145 ; his career and temperament, 146-151 ; ransomed from Spinozism by Kant, 151, 152 ; rejects Kant's things in themselves, 152 ; principles of his *' Subjective Idealism," 152,153; its essence, " ethical idealism," 154-156 ; the true self, an infinite moral will, 156-160 ; theism of his " Vocation of Man," 160, 161 ; out- come of his doctrine, 162, 163. Summary of lecture, 477, 478. Finite, the, depreciation of, by the " Imitation," 52 ; reality of the in- finite in multiplicity of, 140-142. Fitzgerald, stanzas from '* Omar KhayyAm " of, 438. "Fool's Prayer, The," by Edward Rowland Sill, 465, 466. " Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason," Schopen- hauer's, 250. Frauenstadt, " Arthur Schopen- hauer " by, 480. Freedom of the will, denied, Spi- noza, 58-60 ; as affirmed, by Kant, 131 ; by Fichte, 148. See Physical law and Freedom. French Revolution, demonstrates the importance of passion, 34. Galileo, his relation to modem phys- ical science, 28, 38 ; his verification of hypothesis by experiment, 38, .39 ; influence of his method upon philosophy, 39, 40. Genius, with the romanticists, 171 ; often a pathological background to, 243. Germany, intellectual situation in, before the Battle of Waterloo, 276-281 ; after the triumph over Napoleon, 140, 281-284. Geology, modern, its indebtedness ta the BiitiA mind, 285. INDEX. 511 Geometry, the model science, in seventeenth century, 40, 41 ; mathe- matical method of Spinoza, 58-65 ; innate, Descartes, 77 ; nature must obey, Kant, 122, 126; laws of, probably not ultimate truths, Clif- ford, 336. God, doctrine of Spinoza, 60, 61 ; argument for the existence of, Descartes, 76 ; presence of, Berke- ley, 92; insufficiency of human reason, Hume, 94; Kant's postu- late of existence of, 131 ; the moral order, Fichte, 160 ; Hegel's abso- lute, 214-216 ; with Schopenhauer, 255. See Logos. Goethe, his admiration for the works of Spinoza, 41, 42; and Fichte, 151 ; and Schiller, at Weimar, 170, 171. See "Faust." Gravitative system, an imagined, 322 ; its effects, 323, 328, 329. Greek life, essence of, in writings of Plato and Aristotle, 9. Green and Grose, Hume's philosophi- cal works edited by, 476. Grimms, the, 232. Gwinner, " Schopenhauer's Leben " by, 476. Habit, basis of the idea of cause, Hume, 95-98. Hamlet, 276, 354, 356. Harris, W. J., " Hegel's Logic " by, 479. Hartmann, von, acknowledgment to, 440. Haym, " Hegel und seine Zeit " by, 479. Hegel, transition from Sehelling to, 191-194 ; his career and tempera- ment, 194-202, 478, 479 ; his " Phii- nomenologie des Geistes," 202, 215 ; the paradox of self -conscious- ness, 202-204 ; illustrated by mem- ory, 205, 206 ; an analogy in social life, 207, 208 ; " All consciousness an appeal to other consciousness," 208 ; the process of self -differen- tiation, 209, 210; analogy in the spiritual life, 210-212 ; the law of the universal Negativitdt, 213, 214 ; the absolute, 215, 216 ; theoretical significance of his doctrine, 216- 218; the "Logik," 218, 219; its dialectical method applied to quantity, 2 19-221 ; his doctrine of Begriffe, 221-224, 492-506; the divine Idee, 224-227; his his- torical relation to Schopenhauer, 240, 259, 260, 455, 456. Summary of lecture and works, 479. See Universals. Heine, sketch of Kant's daily life by, 108, 109; his " Buch der Leider,' ' 155 ; his position in Ger- man literature, 169 ; " History of German Thought and Literature " by, 478. " Heinrich Ofterdingen," Schlegel's, 178. Heraclitus, 156. Herder, 106, 108. Heredity, view of Descartes, 77; view of Locke, 79. Historical spirit, modern, the out- come of the romantic movement, 273-281 ; assumes definite form after the battle of Waterloo, 281- 285. Hobbes, his merit as a thinker, 30, 58. Hoffmann, 180. "Holy Grail," 97, 1.56,465. Huggins, Dr., address of, upon Astronomy, 312-314. Humboldt, Wilhelm von, the Bha- gavat-gita expounded by, 27S. Humanity, task of idealism to spir- itualize, 271 ; the deeper self an epitome of its history, 283. Hume, his philosophical rank, 93 ; his extension of Locke's empiricism, 94, 95, 101 ; the idea of causation founded on habit by, 96, 97 ; sig- nificance of his doctrine, 97-100, 101, 136 ; awakens Kant from his "dogmatic slumber," 105, 125- 127; his works, 476. Ibsen, the drama " Emperor and Galilean " by, quoted, 36-38. Ideal, Kant's, 132, 133. Idealism, analytic, of Berkeley, 33, 71, 87-92, 351 ; transcendental, of Kant, 122-124, 477, 484-491 ; transformation of Kant's doctrine, the aim of post-Kantian, 139-145, 162, 2.33; subjective, of Fichte, 152-154 ; objective, of Sehelling, 183-186, 192, 478; absolute, of Hegel, 203-225, 492-506; ideal- ism on a Kantian basis, Schopen- hauer, 237-240, 265 ; task of con- structive, 235, 236, 268-282, 339, 512 INDEX. 344-350 ; nature of analytic, 350- 363; of synthetic, 364-386; the Logos, 415-434, 436^40, 454-461, 469—471. Summary of positive lectures, 480-482. See Logos, Eeality, and Idealism. Ideals, the world of appreciation a world of, 412 ; the mechanism of nature symbolizes a world of, 426. Ideas, innate, problem of, 74, 75 ; affirmed by Descartes, 76-78, denied by Locke, 79 ; their origin, in sensation and reflection, Locke, 83, 84 ; the sense-world a world of, Berkeley, 87-92, 350 ; theory of Hume, 94-97. See Idealism. Idee, the absolute, of Hegel, 221- 224, 492-506. Illusion, all phenomenal plurality an, Schopenhauer, 266 ; behind the, a deeper self, 307. Imagination, the constructive, its nature, Kant, 130. '' Imitation of Christ," its state- ment against philosophy, 5 ; its contemplative religious mood, 51- 54 ; parallel between the religious consciousness of its author and of Spinoza, 54, 69. Induction, the method of, Galileo, MS-40 ; marvelous, of Darwin, 285. Infinite, the, pervades the finite, 139-145. See Idealism. " In Memoriam," 246. Inner life, period of the study of the, from Locke to Kant, 6K, 474 ; its general characteristics, 68—74, 475. Insight, novelty of Kant's, 114, 115. Intellect, will deeper than, Schopen- hauer, 252. Irrationalismus, doctrine of, 237-239. Jena, a literary centre during the romantic era, 170. Jew, Spinoza a, by birth, 44. Kant, mission of, in modern thought, 34, 35, 75, 100, 135 ; difficulties in the study of, iO;?-105 ; his person and life, 106-109; consistent de- velopment of his religious belief, 110, 11 1 ; his piety contrasted with Spinoza's naysticism, 111, 112, 114, 134; the moral law revealed by conscience, 112-114; faith, not a dogma, but an active postulate, 114-118, 133 ; his early philosoph- ical development, 119-122 ; the subjectivity of space and time, 122-124; awakened from "dog- matic slumber " by Hume's skepti- cism, 93, 102, 125, 126 ; his " Cri- tique of Pure Reason," 34, 102, 126, 476, 483 ; laws of nature must conform to laws of thought, 126, 127 ; the transcendental unity of apperception, 128, 487-491; the constructive imagination, 129, 130 ; deduction of the categories, 128, 131, 483-491 ; absolute certainty of the moral law, 132, 133 ; out- come of his doctrine, 134-139 ; its transformation the common task of post-Kantian German idealists, 139-145 ; Fichte, and, 150, 151, 154; Sohelling, and, 193, 217; Hegel, and, 201, 204, 217 ; Scho- penhauer, and, 237-239, 253, 265, 266 ; his influence upon the doe-, trine of evolution, 271, 286. Sum- mary of lecture, books, and doc- trine, 476, 477. See Deduction of the categories. Kirchoff, " Vorlesungen iiber Mathe- matische Physik " by, cited, 398. Knowledge, a scrutiny of its basis demanded, by Locke, 83 ; by Kant, 125 ; in modern problems, 339. Konigsberg, birthplace of Kant, 106 ; Kantian archives in, 120. Lagrange, 272. Lange, F. A., his criticism of meta- physicians, 4. Ijanier, Sidney, his poem " How Love looked for Hell," 442; ex- presses a false religious optimism, 443-445. Language, nature a divine, Berkeley, 91. Laplace, nebular hypothesis of, 106, 110; his "Celestial Mechanics," 272. Law, sanction of, in the seventeenth century, 31 ; laws of natur'e, Berke- ley, 9l ; Kant, 126 ; moral, cer- tainty of, Kant, 132, 133; the universe its embodiment, Fichte, 152, 159, 160, 166, 167, 174, 191. Lectures, general purposes of, the, 1, 473 ; studies of thinkers and prob- lems, 25 ; suggestions of doctrine, 309 ; summary of the historical, 473-480 ; of the positive, 480-482. INDEX. 613 Leibnitz, historical position of, 83, 70 ; his philosophical theology, 71 ; his monadology, 409 ; his opti- mism, 440. Lessin^, the forerunner of classical German literature, 109. Life, inner, period of its rediscovery, Spinoza to Kant, OS-lOO, 274, 475 ; an embodiment of God's life, with Fichte, 144, 14.5; vfith Sehelling, 186 ; paradoxes of the, Hegel, 204- 210 ; the will, Schopenhauer, 254- 256 ; a deeper self, 372-374, 470. Lisbon, earthquake in, A. D. 1758, 70. Literature, German, classical period, 166-170. Locke, second period of modern philosophy begins "with, 33 ; his career and character, 78 ; origin of his ' ' Essay on the Human Under- standing," 79-80; historical value of his insistence upon a knowledge of the scope of human reason, 80-82; ideas not innate, 79, 82; their origin in sensation and reflec- tion, 83, 84; his influence upon the study of the inner life, 84f-86. See pages 474, 475. Logic, the world not explained by, of seventeenth century, Kant, 119, 120 ; categories of Hegel's " Logic," 218 ; its dialetical method, 219-222 ; its universal Idee, 222-226, 492-506. Logos, the, the deeper self, 372—380 ; evolution in the universe of, 381 ; the world of description real as an aspect of, 408, 416, 422 ; the world of appreciation is the system of the thoughts of, 415-434, 454-461 ; this world the choice of a rational, 437, 439, 440, 469-471. Lombroso, the Italian psychologist, 242. Love, false optimistic, in a poem of Lanier, 442-447. Love-letters of Fichte, 147-150. Lyell, 285. Mach, " Die Meohanik in ihrer Ent- wickelung " by, 398. Man, regarded as a mechanism, in seventeenth century, 28 ; if such, a knowing mechanism, in the sec- ond period, 32 ; two forms of his religious interest, 45, 46. See Life. Martineau, " Study of Spinoza " by, 475. Matter, an expression of the divine substance, Spinoza, 63-65 ; proof of its existence, Descartes, 76 ; causes sensations, Locke, 83 ; a world of ideas, Berkeley, 87, 92 ; laws of, must conform to laws of thought, Kant, 122, 125, 131 ; " the material for our duty," Fichte, 152 ; " permanent possibilities of experience," Mill, 359 ; an external aspect of the Logos, 415-419. Maximos, in Ibsen's " Emperor and Galilean," 37. Meaning, analysis of, 370, 371. Meiklejohn, his translation of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," 102, 174. Memory, paradox of consciousness illustrated by, 205, 206. Metaphysics, value of, 22-24 ; Kant "a lover of," 120. Metempsychosis, a new form of, 283. Method, mathematical, of Spinoza, 58-60 ; dissatisfaction with, in the eighteenth century, 69, 93 ; ana- lytic and synthetic methods, of idealism, 350, 351. Middle Ages, the, the typical period of romance, 278. Mill, John Stuart, his definition of matter, 3.59. Mind, a revelation of the divine sub- stance, Spinoza, 63-66 ; its innate truth, Descartes, 75, 76 ; a blank tablet, written on by experience, Locke, 74, 79-86 ; one omnipresent, Berkeley, 91 ; the world of appre- ciation, 36s, 415-419. Mind-stuff, theory of, Clifford and Dr. Prince, 300-304, 415. Miracles, denied, Spinoza, 29, 70. Monads, of Leibnitz, 409. Monism, as " Double Aspect " doc- trine, 300-304; applied to the world of the Logos, 415-434. Mood, the skeptical, 71-73. Morals, doctrine of, Kant, 112-114; as " ethical idealism," Fichte, 152- 163. Mozart, on artistic production, 456, 457. Miiller, Max, his translation of Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason," 476. Music, best portrays the essence of the will, Schopenhauer, 256; in 514 INDEX. illustration of the paradox of the moral order, 456. Mysteries, the only insoluble, those absurd to ask, 346. Mysticism, parallel between, the, of Spinoza and of the "Imitation," 51-55 ; philosophic, of Spinoza, 55, 06 ; hated by Locke, bO, 158 ; Kant's piety opposed to Spinoza's, 111-114; of the historical church, 145 ; the pessimistic type, Scho- penhauer, 245, 246 ; its attitude towards evil, 450-453. Napoleon, defeat of, advances the historical movement, 276, 281, 282. Naturalism, period of, from Galileo to Spinoza, 27, 474. See Galileo, Spinoza. Nature, a vast mechanism, by Gali- leo, 38-41 ; by Spinoza, o8-t)6 ; laws of, the order of ideas, Berke- ley, t)l ; must conform to laws of thought, Kant, lli2-125, 131; a work of unconscious art, roman- ticists, 175 ; Naturpkilosophie of ScheUing, 184-189, 193 ; my duty made manifest to my senses, Fichte, 102; the philosophy of Hegel, 21S. See Evolution. Nature and Evolution," Lecture X ; critical study of the world under- the assumption of realistic science, 312; its changes, "redistribu- tions " of matter and energy, 313 ; their character and extent, 313. 314 ; suggest a general process of physical evolution, 314, 315; the law of the " degradation " of energy, 310, 317 ; this cessation of evolution raises question of its beginning, 318 ; Cliiford's hypo- thesis of a definable endless pro- cess, 318-321 ; the cyclical pro- cess, 322, 323, 334 ; di'fficulties in an endless process of aggrega- tion, 324, 325 ; and dispersion, 325- 327 ; avoided by the gravitative system, 328-331; the endlessly consolidating matter not the ulti- mately real world, 331-336; fore- going paradoxes due to a hypo- thetical account of a world-process in terms of experience, 337, 338 ; necessity of a critical study of the knowing power of man, 338, 330 ; permanent lesson of modern ideal- ism that the inner and outer world must have organic relations, 339, 340. See Reality and Idealism. Natural science, axioms of, relate to world of description, 3.17-400. Natural selection, Darwin's theory of, 285-287, 289. Necessity, mathematical, of Spinoza 58-61 ; its conception the result ot habit, Hume, 95-97. Negativitdt^ Hegel's formula of, 213-218 ; less conceivable tham Spencer's cosmical evolution, 2U7. Newton, his conception of physical science, 274; his " Principia," 280. Nihilism, the outcome of an arbitrary idealism, 180. Novalis, his character, 177, 178 ; tale of his love, illustrative of romantic idealism, 178-180. Objects of human knowledge, innate, with Descartes, 77 ; given by sen- sation and reflection, Locke, 83, 84 ; ideas and spirits, Berkeley, 90, 91 ; impressions and ideas, Hume, 94^98 ; the meaning of, 375-377. *' Omar Khayyim," Fitzgerald's, stanzas from, 43S. "Optimism, Pessimism, and the Moral Order," Lecture XIII; idealism both of theoretical and of practical interest, 435, 430 ; anti- nomy of the spiritual world, 437 ; (1) evil an essential in finite exist- ence, 437-439 ; (2) and the rational choice of this universe by the Logos, 437, 439, 440 ; the problem of moral evil, 440, 441 ; the denial of its existence, 441, 442; illus- trated by a poem of Sidney Lanier, 443-445 ; results in a false reli- gious optimism, 4'l.'3-447 ; evil a reality, 447-449, 458 ; mystical re- signation of Spinoza and the " Im- itation," 450, 451 ; pessimism of Schopenhauer, 450, 452, 453 ; a synthesis of " perfection in im- perfection " demanded, 454 ; par- adoxes of the moral order, 454 ; the paradox of daily life, 454, 455 ; of music, 456, 457 ; evil becomes part of the moral order only by its condemnation, 45S-4G0 ; this solu- tion made possible by the organic personality of the divine Self, INDEX. 615 461 ; the mood of deepest doubt, 4t)l-4t)4; the trag-edy of hrute chance, 405 ; illustrated by " The Fool's Prayer," Sill, 465-468 ; our chance, the rationality of the infi- nite, 469-471 ; " this world is the world of the Loffos," 471. Order, outer, see World ; moral, see Optimism. Organism, Hegel's universal an, of interrelated selves, 224, 225, 492, 493 ; the world an, with a history of develoj)ment, 275 ; a manifes- tation of the Logos, 418, 419. Orient, the, records of, 278. Paradox, Hegel's analysis of the, of consciousness, 203-217 ; of the re- lation of universal and individual, 218-227, 492-506; Spencer's, of evolution and the unknowable, 296-300; in the moral order, of " perfection in imperfection," 437- 440, 454-471. Passion, the logic of, Hegel, 219-227. Paul, the Apostle, 145, 402. Perception, clearness of, Descartes, 76 ; by sensation and reflection, Locke, 83, 84 ; space and time forms of, Kant, 124. Periods of modern philosophy, 27-38, 134. Personality, of the finite, Kant, 131 ; of the infinite, Fichte, 144, 145, 161 ; of the absolute, Hegel, 224 ; of the Logos, 409-413, 434, 471. Pessimism, element of, in the " Im- itation," 52 ; in Spinoza, 55 ; Schopenhauer, its reputed expo- nent, 228. See Schopenhauer ; Optimism. "Phanomenologie,'' Hegel's, cited, 207, 208, 225, 494. Philosophy, not an effort to explain mysteries by any superhuman insight, 1 ; but an attempt to give a reasonable account of our per- sonal attitude towards life, 1 ; the result of a natural tendency to reflect critically upon life, 1-3 ; statement of the objection, to its numerous systems, 3, 4 ; to its ap- parent futility, 5, 6; the defense: contemplative insight a necessary element in civilization, 7-12; truth, a synthesis of the various partial reflections upon life, 13-17 ; criticism necessary that worthy ideals may be discovered and main- tained, 18-22 ; its systems valuable by their record of spiritual experi- ence and by their bearings upon life, 22-24. Philology, influence of the romantic movement upon, 280. "Physical Law and Freedom," Lecture XII ; the idealistic inter- pretation of the outer order, 380- 383 ; provisional characteristics of objective truth, 384 ; its perma- nence, 384 ; its universality, 384- 387 ; its describability, 388 ; con- trast of describable and appreci- able experience, 388-302 ; nature, the world of description, 393-395, 397 ; deduction of its categories, 397-404; possible reality of an appreciable world, 393, 395-397, 405 ; ideals and organic spiritual relations real, yet not describable facts, 405-408 ; the world of sci- ence presupposes the world of ap- preciation, 409^11 ; its categories of self -consciousness, 411-413; a world of freedom, 414, 415 ; the " double aspect" of the world of the Logos, 415-419 ; this doctrine applied to the facts of the inor- ganic world, 419-422 ; to evolution, 422^28 ; to freedom of the wiU, 428-434. Plato, his analysis of Hellenic life, 9 ; Berkeley and, 86, 87. Poe, Edgar Allan, gloom of, the out- come of wayward idealism, 180. Pollock, '"Spinoza's Life and Phil- osophy " by, 475. Post-Kantian idealism, aim of, 162. Postulates, Kant's, of practical rea- son, 113, 141 ; of science, enriched by an idealistic interpretation, 272. Process, the "cyclical," 328, 834. Quantity, Hegel's category of, 218, 220. Rahn, Johanna, letters of Fichte to, 147-149. Rationality, our chance the, of the infinite, 469-471. Realism, the assumption of, criti- cally studied, 311-340. See Nat- ure and Evolution. " Reality and Idealism," Lecture XI , 516 INDEX. historical study necessary to re- flective confession, 341-344 ; ag- nosticism as to the causes of expe- rience, not opposed to idealism, 344r-348 ; the Log-os not the cause but the soul of all reality, 348- 350 ; (1) analytic idealism, 351 ; the world of knowledge, a world of ideas, 351, 352 ; their stubborn reality, 352-354 ; qualities of the sense-world, ideal, 355-357 ; its reality known only as a system of ideas, 357-360 ; hence a universal mind or an unknowable a;, 360- 364; (2) synthetic idealism, the absolutely unknowable, non-exist- ent, 365, 366 ; the real world, mind, 367, 368 ; the self, meaning an ob- ject identical with the larger self that already has the object, 368- 373 ; the reflective larger self real, in case of truth, 375, 376 ; of error, 376, 377 ; of doubt, 379 ; the unity of the organic self, 373, 374, 379 ; the Logos, 374, 379, 380. Reason, human, trusted in the seven- teenth century, 30, 69 ; scrutinized in the eighteenth century, 33, 69 ; by Loeke, 79; by Berkeley, 87; by Hume, 93 ; by Kant. 118, 476 ; theoretical and practical, of Kant, 113, 141; identified by Fichte, 158 ; principle of sufficient, Scho- penhauer, 249. Reflection, internal perception, of Locke, 84. Rediscovery of the inner life, period of, 68-100, 474. See Loclie, Berke- ley, Hume, Kant. Reicke, " Lose Blatter aus Kant's Nachlass" by, 121. "Religious Aspect of Philosophy," cited, 373, 382, 383, 411, 414. Religious interest, two kinds of, 47- .57. Resignation, mystical, 263, 450, 451. Richter, Jean Paul, bis characteriza- tion of Schopenhauer's style, 104, 244 ; of the German empire, 108, 156. Biehl, "Der Philcsophische Kriti- cismus " by, 122. Romantic school, the, in philosophy, 164 ; doctrines preceding, of Kant and Fichte, 164, 105; Fichte's arbitrary ethical idealism supple- mented by, 166-109; in German literature, 169 ; the general move- ment, 170 ; members of the spe- cial school, 172 ; Fichte's moral will replaced by emotion, 173, 174 ; nature a work of unconscious art, 174, 175 ; understood only by men of genius, 175 ; the philosophical attitude of, illustrated by life of Schlegel, 176, 177; of Novalis, 177-180 ; Schelling, the prince of romanticists, 181 ; and Caroline, 181-184 ; his " Naturpliilosophie," 184^187. Summary and literature, 478. See Schelling. Rosenkranz, Karl, biographer of Hegel, 195, 479. Rousseau, self-analysis of, 33, 79. Sanity, the idea of, 128, 129. Science, natural, the study of, 7, 8, 335, 336 ; recent advance of, 35 ; coherency in the world of, Kant, 130 ; task of ideahsm in, 269-274, 348 ; unification of, Spencer, 296- 29S ; realism and, 312 ; the realm of, the world of description, 387— 397 ; its presupposition, the world of appreciation, 410. Schelling, prince of romanticists, 181 ; his Spinozism, 41, 181 ; and Caroline, 181-183; Fichte's doc- trine of the Ego transformed by, 184, . 185 ; objective idealism of his " Naturphilosophie," 185, 186 ; of his " Epicurean Confession of Faith," 186-189; development of his doctrine, 191-193 ; his Identi- tdts- System, 193, 194 ; and Hegel, 193, 194, 218 ; Irrationalismus of, 237. See page 478. Schiller, and Kant, 103, 164 ; quoted, 142 ; Goethe and, 170, 171. Schlegel, Augustus, a romanticist, 172, 181, 478. Schlegel, Friedrich, romantic critic, 172 ; his romanticism, 176, 177= See page 478. Schleiermacher, the theologian of the romantic school, 172. Schmidt, Julian, ' ' Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur seit Lessing's Tod " by, cited, 150, 478. Schopenhauer, his popular repute, 228, 229 ; general significance of pessimism, 229-232 ; development of idealistic caprice, 233-237; his idealism on a Kantian basis, INDEX. 617 237-239 ; caprice of the world-will, 239, 240; ancestry of, 241; hia temperament and pessiiuiam, 241- 244 ; Riehter on his style, 244 ; his career, 246-250; his "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," 250; the world of experience, our idea, 250 ; space, time, and cause, sub- jective, 250, 251 ; hence multipli- city, 251, 252 ; will, the essence of the world, 252, 253; "That art Thou," 253-255 ; art, its embodi- ment to the contemplative intel- lect, 255-257 ; opposition of will and contemplation, 257, 258 ; HegeJ and, 259-261 ; estimate of bis doctrine, 261-264 ; transition from romantic idealism to modern realism in, 265, 266. Summary, and works, 479, 480. Scott, influence of, on history, 279. Selection, natural, Darwin's, 286, ^ 287. Self, absolute, the, with Fichte, 153, 157-163 ; with Schelling, 193 ; with Hegel, 224, 492, 493 ; with Scho- penhauer, 252-255. See Logos. Self-consciousness, the desire for, 94, 165; without will, no, Scho- penhauer, 252 ; paradox of, Hegel, 204-217; the reflective, 375, 377, 409,411-414. Sensation, as source of ideas, Locke, 83 ; all sensible qualities, sensa- tions, Berkeley, 87-90; "impres- sions," Hume, 94. Shakespeare, Greek tragedy and, 171 ; quoted, 468. Shelley, his "Prometheus," 226. Sill, Edward Rowland, "The Fool's Prayer" by, 465, 466. Sin, latent, 459 ; actual, 460. Skepticism, philosophical, nature of, 18-22 ; value of, 71-74; true atti- tude toward, 99, 100. Socrates, Schlegel and, 176. Solidity, an inference, Berkeley, 89. Space and time, forms of percep- tion, with Kant, 152-156, 477; with Schopenhauer, 250-253 ; as system of ideas, 358, 359; forms of the world of description, 398, 412 ; antinomies due to false ap- plication of, to the world of ap- preciation, 420-422. Spencer, Herbert, development of his philosophy, 294, 295 ; compari- son of, with Hohbes, 296; with Hegel, 296; his synthetic task, 296, 297 ; his formula of evolution, 297, 298; his unknowable, 297, 298 ; paradox in union of hia knowable and unknowable, 298, 299; fruitfulness of his system, 293, 294. See EeaUty and Ideal- ism. Spinoza, exemplifies the philosophrt piety of the seventeenth century, 32, 43 ; opposing views of, 41, 42 ; his profound character, 4^, 43 ; of Jewish ancestry, 44; excommuni- cated, 44; his " Theologico-Politi- cal Tractate," 45, 475; his power of dispassionate criticism, 45, 46 ; his adoration of the divine order, 43, 46 ; two forms of religious consciousness, 46, 48; (1) the ac- tive, of St. Christopher, 47, 48; (2) the contemplative, of the " Im- itation of Christ)" 48,49; paraUel between his mysticism and that of the " Imitation," 49-54 ; his mys- ticism united with a wonderful temperament of cynicism, 54-57; his doctrine founded upon geomet- rical methods, 58-60 ; his universal "Substance," 60-62; its self-ex- pressions, body and mind, 63-65 ; his description in the " Ethics " of the wise man's love of God, 65- 67. Summary, dates, and works, 474, 475. Stephen, Leslie, " History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Cen- tury" by, 476. Stirling, J. H., " Text-Book to Kant" by, 194, 476; "Secret of Hegel" by, 479. " Storm and Stress " period of Ger- man literatm'e, 34. Strauss, "Life of Jesus" by, 282. " Substance," Spinoza's universal, 60 ; the characteristics of, de- scribed, 60-62; its two knowable self-expressions, body and mind, 63-65 ; in relation to Kant, 134, 141; to Fichte, 158; to Hegel, 219. Sublime, the, Kant on, 110. Tannhauser, 105. Tennyson, parallel between the moral world of, and of Kant, 113, Thales, 11. 518 INDEX. " That art Thou," " the life of aU tiiese things,' ' Hindoo phrase ex- pressive of Schopenhauer's doe- trine, 253, 255 ; of the absolute Self, 3U7. Things in themselTOS, Kant's doc- trine of, 125-127, 484, 485; re- jected by Fichte, 141, 152 ; and others, 164. Thought, existence the standard as- surance of, Descartes, 76 ; theo- retical limits of, Kant, 125 ; the laws of, the soul of things, Hegel, 222 ; reflective self -consciousness necessary to uniformity of, and object, 375-380. Tieek, Ludwig, a romanticist, 172. Time, infinite, anomalous division of, involved in Clifford's definable endless process, 827, 332-334 ; its avoidance by a suggested " cycli- cal " physical process, 328—331, 334 ; the theory of " double as- pect," 422-428. See Space and Time. Tolstoi, his mystical resignation, 261. Tragedy, life a, Schopenhauer, 240, 262-264. See Optimism. Trendelenburg, " Logische Studien " by, 479. Truth, the mauy-sidedness of, 12-14 ; " the whole," 14-15 ; innate, Des- cartes, 74 ; a matter of experience, Locke, 83; its divine language, Berkeley, 90 ; Hume's doubts, 94 ; must be won, Kant, 117, 129, 138; belongs to the moral self, Fichte, 152-156 ; an aifair of genius, the romantic school, 174 ; the divine Idee, Hegel, 224, 492 ; describ- able, the outward symbol of the world of appreciation, 419-428 ; the Logos, 374^380, 415-419, 471. Types, of men, in Spinoza, 54 ; in Berkeley, 80 ; in Hegel, 199 ; in Schopenhauer, 244, 245 ; of re- ligious interest, 46, 47, 86 ; of pessimism, 245, 246, 461-465 ; of optimism, 446-450. Understanding, the, Kant's cate- gories of, 131, 139, 48:5-491 ; He- gel's universals of, 492-495. Universals, Hegel's theory of, 222- 226 ; the Idee not an " abstract universal,' ' 492 ; but the organic totality of true individuals, 492, 493 ; two kinds of, 493, 494 ; theil different degrees of reality, 494- 496 ; Caird on the higher form of the, 496—499 ; transformation of the lower, into the higher by the dialectic processes, 50U, 501 ; sub- stance as "a simple whole," 502; three phases of the higher, 503 ; the /rfe«as "Person," 503; ethi- cal application of the theory of, 503, 504 ; the universal Negativi- tdt, 505 ; stages in the study of the, 505, 506. " Unknowable," Spencer's, 297, 298 ; its impossibility, 367. " Upanishads," the Hindoo, quoted, 253-255. Vaihinger, " Zu Kant's Widerlegung des Idealismus " by, quoted, 4S6- 488. Van Vloten and Land, a complete edition of Spinoza by, 475. Via Dolorosa, 136. Vision, Berkeley's theory of, 87-90. "Vocation of Man," Fichte's, de- scribed, 160 ; quoted, 161. Wagnerian Briinhilde, 257. WaUace, " Kant " by, 476 ; " Logic of Hegel" by, "479; "Life of Arthur Schopenhauer " by, 480. Waterloo, the battle of, in relation to the modern historical move- ment, 276, 281. Watson, John, " Selections from Kant" by, 476; " ScheUing's Transcendental Idealism " by, 478. Waywardness, of Fichte, 155, 166 ; as characteristic of the romantic period, 166, 176, 177, 186. "WUhelra Meister," 171. WUl, the moral world founded on, Kant, 114, 137; finite -nills the embodiment of the infinite, Fichte, 159 - 163 ; all reality tlie will, Schopenhauer, 252-256; freedom of the, 428-434 ; and rationality, 435-438, 469-471. Windelband, "Die Geschichte der neuern Philosophic" by, 232. World, the, its unity and necessity, Spinoza, 60-63 ; a divine language, Berkeley, 90, 91; the laws of, laws of thought, Kant, 126-13U ; " the material for our duty," Fichte, 152-154; the mamfesta INDEX. 619 tion of spirit, Solielling, 192 ; the true, an organism, Hegel, 225, 493 ; as idea and wUl, Schopenhauer, 238, 250-253, 266; paradox of, of endlessly consolidating matter, 330-340; idealistic interpretation of, 341-379; theory of "double aspect" applied to the problems of, 419-434; "This world is the ■world of the Logos," 471.