Class 3J) ■ Book. ' / -j GopigM COPYRIGHT DEPOSm Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from The Library of Congress http://www.archive.org/details/approachtophilos01perr THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY BY RALPH BARTON PERRY, Ph.D. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1905 Library oToongsessJ Iwu Copies deceived j MAY 29 1905 Goiiyngm unify 7H4*fW9*A UU-'.SS// <2 XXa No-, j COPY B. Copyright, 1905, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS TROW DIRECTORY PRINTINO AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY NEW YORK THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED TO MY FATHER AS A TOKEN" OF MY LOVE AND ESTEEM PREFACE In an essay on "The Problem of Philosophy at the Present Time," Professor Edward Caird says that "philosophy is not a first venture into a new field of thought, but the rethinking of a secular and religious consciousness which has been devel- oped, in the main, independently of philosophy." * If there be any inspiration and originality in this book, they are due to my great desire that philoso- phy should appear in its vital relations to more familiar experiences. If philosophy is, as is com- monly assumed, appropriate to a phase in the de- velopment of every individual, it should grow out of interests to which he is already alive. And if the great philosophers are indeed never dead, this fact should manifest itself in their classic or his- torical representation of a perennial outlook upon the world. I am not seeking to attach to philoso- phy a fictitious liveliness, wherewith to insinuate it into the good graces of the student. I hope * Edw. Caird: Literature and Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 207. vii Via PREFACE rather to be true to the meaning of philosophy. For there is that in its stand-point and its problem which makes it universally significant entirely apart from dialectic and erudition. These are derived interests, indispensable to the scholar, but quite separable from that modicum of philosophy which helps to make the man. The present book is written for the sake of elucidating the inevitable philosophy. It seeks to make the reader more solicitously aware of the philosophy that is in him, or to provoke him to philosophy in his own in- terests. To this end I have sacrificed all else to the task of mediating between the tradition and technicalities of the academic discipline and the more common terms of life. The purpose of the book will in part account for those shortcomings that immediately reveal themselves to the eye of the scholar. In Part I various great human interests have been selected as points of departure. I have sought to intro- duce the general stand-point and problem of phi- losophy through its implication in practical life, poetry, religion, and science. But in so doing it has been necessary for me to deal shortly with topics of great independent importance, and so risk the disfavor of those better skilled in these several PREFACE ix matters. This is evidently true of the chapter which deals with natural science. But the prob- lem which I there faced differed radically from those of the foregoing chapters, and the method of treatment is correspondingly different. In the case of natural science one has to deal with a body of knowledge which is frequently regarded as the only knowledge. To write a chapter about science from a philosophical stand-point is, in the present state of opinion, to undertake a polemic against exclusive naturalism, an attitude which is itself philosophical, and as such is well known in the history of philosophy as positivism or agnosti- cism. I have avoided the polemical spirit and method so far as possible, but have, nevertheless, here taken sides against a definite philosophical position. This chapter, together with the Conclu- sion, is therefore an exception to the purely in- troductory and expository representation which I have, on the whole, sought to give. The relatively great space accorded to the discussion of religion is, in my own belief, fair to the general interest in this topic, and to the intrinsic significance of its relation to philosophy. I have in Part II undertaken to furnish the reader with a map of the country to which he has X PREFACE been led. To this end I have attempted a brief survey of the entire programme of philosophy. An accurate and full account of philosophical terms can be found in such books as Kiilpe's "In- troduction to Philosophy" and Baldwin's "Diction- ary of Philosophy," and an attempt to emulate their thoroughness would be superfluous, even if it were conformable to the general spirit of this book. The scope of Part II is due in part to a desire for brevity, but chiefly to the hope of fur- nishing an epitome that shall follow the course of the natural and historical differentiation of the general philosophical problem. Finally, I have in Part III sought to present the tradition of philosophy in the form of general types. My purpose in undertaking so difficult a task is to acquaint the reader with philosophy in the concrete ; to show how certain underlying prin- ciples may determine the whole circle of philosoph- ical ideas, and give them unity and distinctive flavor. Part II offers a general classification of philosophical problems and conceptions indepen- dently of any special point of view. But I have in Part III sought to emphasize the point of view, or the internal consistency that makes a system of philosophy out of certain answers to the special PREFACE xi problems of philosophy. In such a division into types, lines are of necessity drawn too sharply. There will be many historical philosophies that refuse to fit, and many possibilities unprovided for. I must leave it to the individual reader to overcome this abstractness through his own reflec- tion upon the intermediate and variant stand- points. Although the order is on the whole that of pro- gressive complexity, I have sought to treat each chapter with independence enough to make it pos- sible for it to be read separately ; and I have pro- vided a carefully selected bibliography in the hope that this book may serve as a stimulus and guide to the reading of other books. The earlier chapters have already appeared as articles : Chapter I in the International Journal of Ethics, Vol. XIII, No. 4 ; Chapter II in the Philo- sophical Review, Vol. XI, Xo. 6 ; Chapter III in the Monist, Vol. XIV, Xo. 5 ; Chapter IV in the International Journal of Ethics, Vol. XV, Xo. 1 ; and some paragraphs of Chapter V in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. I, Xo. 7. I am indebted to the editors of these periodicals for permission to reprint with minor changes. xii PREFACE In the writing of this, my first book, I have been often reminded that a higher critic, skilled in the study of internal evidence, could probably trace all of its ideas to suggestions that have come to me from my teachers and colleagues of the De- partment of Philosophy in Harvard University. I have unscrupulously forgotten what of their definite ideas I have adapted to my own use, but not that I received from them the major portion of my original philosophical capital. I am espe- cially indebted to Professor William James for the inspiration and resources which I have received from his instruction and personal friendship. Ralph Barton Perry. Cambridge, March, 1905. TABLE OF CONTENTS PART I APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY PAGE Chapter I. The Practical Man and the Philoso- pher 3 § 1. Is Philosophy a Merely Academic Interest?. ... 3 § 2. Life as a Starting-point for Thought 4 § 3. The Practical Knowledge of Means 8 § 4. The Practical Knowledge of the End or Purpose. 10 § 5. The Philosophy of the Devotee, the Man of Af- fairs, and the Voluptuary 12 § 6. The Adoption of Purposes and the Philosophy of Life 17 Chapter II. Poetry and Philosophy 24 § 7. Who is the Philosopher-Poet? 24 § 8. Poetry as Appreciation 25 § 9. Sincerity in Poetry. Whitman 27 § 10. Constructive Knowledge in Poetry. Shake- speare 30 §11. Philosophy in Poetry. The World- view. Omar Khayyam 36 § 12. Wordsworth 38 § 13. Dante 42 § 14. The Difference between Poetry and Philosophy 48 xiii xiv TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Chapter III. The Religious Experience 53 § 15. The Possibility of Defining Religion 53 § 16. The Profitableness of Defining Religion 54 § 17. The True Method of Defining Religion 56 § 18. Religion as Belief 59 § 19. Religion as Belief in a Disposition or Attitude. 62 § 20. Religion as Belief in the Disposition of the Re- sidual Environment, or Universe 64 § 21. Examples of Religious Belief. 66 § 22. Typical Religious Phenomena. Conversion. . . 69 § 23. Piety )..{ 72 § 24. Religious Instruments, Symbolism, and Modes of Conveyance , 74 § 25. Historical Types of Religion. Primitive Re- ligions 77 § 26. Buddhism 78 § 27. Critical Religion 79 Chapter IV. The Philosophical Implications of Religion 82 § 28. Resume of Psychology of Religion 82 § 29. Religion Means to be True 82 § 30. Religion Means to be Practically True. God is a Disposition from which Consequences May Rationally be Expected 85 § 31. Historical Examples of Religious Truth and Error. The Religion of Baal 88 § 32. Greek Religion 89 § 33. Judaism and Christianity 92 § 34. The Cognitive Factor in Religion 96 § 35. The Place of Imagination in Religion 97 § 36. The Special Functions of the Religious Imagi- nation 101 § 37. The Relation between Imagination and Truth in Religion 105 TABLE OF CONTENTS xv PAGE § 38. The Philosophy Implied in Religion and in Re- ligions 108 Chapter V. Natural Science and Philosophy .... 114 § 39. The True Relations of Philosophy and Science. Misconceptions and Antagonisms 114 § 40. The Spheres of Philosophy and Science 117 § 41. The Procedure of a Philosophy of Science 120 § 42. The Origin of the Scientific Interest 123 § 43. Skill as Free 123 § 44. Skill as Social 126 § 45. Science for Accommodation and Construction . 127 § 46. Method and Fundamental Conceptions of Natural Science. The Descriptive Method . . 128 § 47. Space, Time, and Prediction 130 § 48. The Quantitative Method 132 § 49. The General Development of Science 134 § 50. The Determination of the Limits of Natural Science 135 § 51. Natural Science is Abstract 136 § 52. The Meaning of Abstractness in Truth 139 § 53. But Scientific Truth is Valid for Reality 142 § 54. Relative Practical Value of Science and Phi- losophy 143 PART II THE SPECIAL PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY Chapter VI. Metaphysics and Epistomology 149 § 55. The Impossibility of an Absolute Division of the Problem of Philosophy 149 § 56. The Dependence of the Order of Philosophical Problems upon the Initial Interest 152 XVI TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE § 57. Philosophy as the Interpretation of Life 152 § 58. Philosophy as the Extension of Science 154 § 59. The Historical Differentiation of the Philosoph- ical Problem. 155 § 60. Metaphysics Seeks a Most Fundamental Con- ception 157 § 61. Monism and Pluralism 159 § 62. Ontology and Cosmology Concern Being and Process 159 § 63. Mechanical and Teleological Cosmologies 160 § 64. Dualism 162 § 65. The New Meaning of Monism and Pluralism . . . 163 § 66. Epistemology Seeks to Understand the Possi- bility of Knowledge 164 § 67. Scepticism, Dogmatism, and Agnosticism .... 166 § 68. The Source and Criterion of Knowledge ac- cording to Empiricism and Rationalism. Mysticism 168 § 69. /The Relation of Knowledge to its Object ac- cording to Realism, and the Representative Theory 172 § 70. The Relation of Knowledge to its Object ac- cording to Idealism 175 § 71. Phenomenalism, Spiritualism, and Panpsy- chism 176 § 72. Transcendentalism, or Absolute Idealism. .... 177 Chapter VII. The Normative Sciences and the Problems op Religion 180 § 73. The Normative Sciences 180 § 74. The Affiliations of Logic 182 § 75. Logic Deals with the Most General Conditions of Truth in Belief 183 § 76. The Parts of Formal Logic. Definition, Self- evidence, Inference, and Observation 184 § 77. Present Tendencies. Theory of the Judgment. 187 TABLE OF CONTENTS xvn PAGE § 78. Priority of Concepts 188 § 79. ^Esthetics Deals with the Most General Con- ditions of Beauty. Subjectivistic and For- malistic Tendencies 189 § 80. Ethics Deals with the Most General Conditions of Moral Goodness 191 § 81. Conceptions of the Good. Hedonism 191 § 82. Rationalism 193 § 83. Eudsemonism and Pietism. Rigorism and Intuitionism 194 § 84. Duty and Freedom. Ethics and Metaphysics 196 § 85. The Virtues, Customs, and Institutions 198 § 86. The Problems of Religion. The Special In- terests of Faith 199 § 87. Theology Deals with the Nature and Proof of God 200 § 88. The Ontological Proof of God 200 § 89. The Cosmological Proof of God 203 § 90. The Teleological Proof of God : 204 § 91. God and the World. Theism and Pantheism . . 205 § 92. Deism 206 § 93. Metaphysics and Theology 207 § 94. Psychology is the Theory of the Soul 208 § 95. Spiritual Substance 209 § 96. Intellectualism and Voluntarism 210 § 97. Freedom of the Will. Necessitarianism, De- terminism, and Indeterminism 211 § 98. Immortality. Survival and Eternalism 212 § 99. The Natural Science of Psychology. Its Prob- lems and Method 213 \ 100. Psychology and Philosophy 216 \ 101. Transition from Classification by Problems to Classification by Doctrines. Naturalism. Subjectivism. Absolute Idealism. Absolute Realism 217 xvill TABLE OF CONTENTS PART III SYSTEMS OF PHILOSOPHY PAGE Chapter VIII. Naturalism „ 223 § 102. The General Meaning of Materialism 223 § 103. Corporeal Being 224 § 104. Corporeal Processes. Hylozoism and Mech- anism 225 § 105. Materialism and Physical Science 228 § 106. The Development of the Conceptions of Phys- ical Science. Space and Matter 228 § 107. Motion and its Cause. Development and Ex- tension of the Conception of Force 231 § 108. The Development and Extension of the Con- ception of Energy 236 § 109. The Claims of Naturalism 239 § 110. The Task of Naturalism 241 § 111. The Origin of the Cosmos 242 § 112. Life. Natural Selection 244 § 113. Mechanical Physiology 246 § 114. Mind. The Reduction to Sensation 247 § 115. Automatism 248 §116. Radical Materialism. Mind as an Epiphe- nomenon 250 § 117. Knowledge. Positivism and Agnosticism. . . 252 § 118. Experimentalism 255 § 119. Naturalistic Epistemology not Systematic. . . 256 § 120. General Ethical Stand-point 258 § 121. Cynicism and Cyrenaicism 259 § 122. Development of Utilitarianism. Evolution- ary Conception of Social Relations 260 § 123. Naturalistic Ethics not Systematic 262 TABLE OF CONTENTS xix PAGE 124. Naturalism as Antagonistic to Religion ...... 263 125. Naturalism as the Basis for a Religion of Ser- vice, Wonder, and Renunciation 265 Chapter IX. Subjectivism 267 § 126. Subjectivism Originally Associated with Rel- ativism and Scepticism 267 § 127. Phenomenalism and Spiritualism 271 § 128. Phenomenalism as Maintained by Berkeley. The Problem Inherited from Descartes and Locke 272 § 129. The Refutation of Material Substance 275 § 130. The Application of the Epistemological Prin- ciple 277 § 131. The Refutation of a Conceived Corporeal World 278 § 132. The Transition to Spiritualism 280 § 133. Further Attempts to Maintain Phenomenal- ism 281 § 134. Berkeley's Spiritualism. Immediate Knowl- edge of the Perceiver 284 § 135, Schopenhauer's Spiritualism, or Voluntarism. Immediate Knowledge of the Will 285 § 136. Panpsychism 287 § 137. The Inherent Difficulty in Spiritualism. No Provision for Objective Knowledge 288 § 138. Schopenhauer's Attempt to Universalize Sub- jectivism. Mysticism 290 § 139. Objective Spiritualism 292 § 140. Berkeley's Conception of God as Cause, Good- ness, and Order 293 § 141. The General Tendency of Subjectivism to Transcend Itself 297 § 142. Ethical Theories. Relativism 298 § 143. Pessimism and Self-denial 299 xx TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE § 144. The Ethics of Welfare 300 § 145. The Ethical Community 302 § 146. The Religion of Mysticism 303 § 147. The Religion of Individual Cooperation with God 304 Chapter X. Absolute Realism 306 § 148. The Philosopher's Task, and the Philosopher's Object, or the Absolute 306 § 149. The Eleatic Conception of Being 309 § 150. Spinoza's Conception of Substance 311 § 151. Spinoza's Proof of God, the Infinite Substance. The Modes and the Attributes 312 § 152. The Limits of Spinoza's Argument for God . . 315 § 153. Spinoza's Provision for the Finite 317 § 154. Transition to Teleological Conceptions 317 § 155. Early Greek Philosophers not Self-critical. . . . 319 § 156. Curtailment of Philosophy in the Age of the Sophists 319 § 157. Socrates and the Self-criticism of the Phi- losopher 321 §158. Socrates's Self-criticism a Prophecy of Truth . 323 § 159. The Historical Preparation for Plato 324 § 160. Platonism : Reality as the Absolute Ideal or Good 326 § 161. The Progression of Experience toward God. . 329 § 162. Aristotle's Hierarchy of Substances in Rela- tion to Platonism 332 § 163. The Aristotelian Philosophy as a Reconcilia- tion of Platonism and Spinozism 335 § 164. Leibniz's Application of the Conception of Development to the Problem of Imperfec- tion 336 § 165. The Problem of Imperfection Remains Un- solved 338 TABLE OF CONTENTS xxi PAGB § 166. Absolute Realism in Epistemology. Ration- alism 339 § 167. The Relation of Thought and its Object in Absolute Realism 340 § 168. The Stoic and Spinozistic Ethics of Neces- sity 342 § 169. The Platonic Ethics of Perfection 344 § 170. The Religion of Fulfilment and the Religion of Renunciation 346 Chapter XL Absolute Idealism 349 § 171. General Constructive Character of Absolute Idealism 349 § 172. The Great Outstanding Problems of Absolu- tism 351 § 173. The Greek Philosophers and the Problem of Evil. The Task of the New Absolu- tism 352 § 174. The Beginning of Absolute Idealism in Kant's Analysis of Experience 354 § 175. Kant's Principles Restricted to the Experi- ences which they Set in Order 356 § 176. The Post-Kantian Metaphysics is a Generali- zation of the Cognitive and Moral Conscious- ness as Analyzed by Kant. The Absolute Spirit . . , 358 § 177. Fichteanism, or the Absolute Spirit as Moral Activity 360 § 178. Romanticism, or the Absolute Spirit as Senti- ment 361 § 179. Hegelianism, or the Absolute Spirit as Dia- lectic 361 § 180. The Hegelian Philosophy of Nature and His- tory 363 § 181. Resumed Failure of Absolute Idealism to Solve the Problem of Evil 365 xxn TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE § 182. The Constructive Argument for Absolute Idealism is Based upon the Subjectivistic Theory of Knowledge 368 § 183. The Principle of Subjectivism Extended to Reason 371 § 184. Emphasis on Self-consciousness in Early Christian Philosophy 372 § 185. Descartes's Argument for the Independence of the Thinking Self 374 § 186. Empirical Reaction of the English Philoso- phers 376 § 187. To Save Exact Science Kant Makes it Depen- dent on Mind 377 § 188. The Post-Kantians Transform Kant's Mind- in-general into an Absolute Mind 380 § 189. The Direct Argument. The Inference from the Finite Mind to the Infinite Mind 382 §190. The Realistic Tendency in Absolute Idealism . 385 § 191. The Conception of Self-consciousness Central in the Ethics of Absolute Idealism. Kant . 386 § 192. Kantian Ethics Supplemented through the Conceptions of Universal and Objective Spirit 388 § 193. The Peculiar Pantheism and Mysticism of Absolute Idealism 390 § 194. The Religion of Exuberant Spirituality 393 Chapter XII. Conclusion 395 § 195. Liability of Philosophy to Revision Due to its Systematic Character 395 § 196. The One Science and the Many Philoso- phies 396 § 197. Progress in Philosophy. The Sophistication or Eclecticism of the Present Age 398 § 198. Metaphysics. The Antagonistic Doctrines of Naturalism and Absolutism . 399 TABLE OF CONTENTS xxm PAGE 199. Concessions from the Side of Absolutism. Recognition of Nature. The Neo-Fich- teans 401 200. The Neo-Kantians 403 201. Recognition of the Individual. Personal Idealism 404 202. Concessions from the Side of Naturalism. Recognition of Fundamental Principles .... 405 203. Recognition of the Will. Pragmatism 407 204. Summary and Transition to Epistemology . . . 408 205. The Antagonistic Doctrines of Realism and Idealism. Realistic Tendency in Empirical Idealism 409 206. Realistic Tendency in Absolute Idealism. The Conception of Experience 410 207. Idealistic Tendencies in Realism. The Im- manence Philosophy 412 208. The Interpretation of Tradition as the Basis for a New Construction 413 209. The Truth of the Physical System, but Fail- ure of Attempt to Reduce all Experience to it 414 210. Truth of Psychical Relations but Impossi- bility of General Reduction to them 415 211. Truth of Logical and Ethical Principles. Va- lidity of Ideal of Perfection, but Impos- sibility of Deducing the Whole of Experi- ence from it 415 212. Error and Evil cannot be Reduced to the Ideal 417 213. Collective Character of the Universe as a Whole 419 214. Moral Implications of Such Pluralistic Phi- losophy. Purity of the Good 420 215. The Incentive to Goodness 422 216. The Justification of Faith 423 xxiv TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGB § 217. The Worship and Service of God 425 § 218. The Philosopher and the Standards of the Market-Place , 425 § 219. The Secularism of the Present Age 427 § 220. The Value of Contemplation for Life 428 Bibliography 431 Index 441 PART I APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY CHAPTER I THE PRACTICAL MAN AND THE PHILOSOPHER § 1. Philosophy suffers the distinction of being regarded as essentially an academic pursuit. The is Philosophy term philosophy, to be sure, is used in a Merely common speech to denote a stoical man- Academic r interest? term philosophy , to be sure, is used in but this conception sheds little or no light upon the meaning of philosophy as a branch of scholarship. The men who write the books on " Epistemology " or " Ontology," are regarded by the average man of affairs, even though he may have enjoyed a " higher education," with little sympathy and less intelligence, l^ot even philology seems less con- cerned with the real business of life. The pursuit of philosophy appears to be a phenomenon of ex- treme and somewhat effete culture, with its own peculiar traditions, problems, and aims, and with little or nothing to contribute to the real enterprises of society. It is easy to prove to the satisfaction of the philosopher that such a view is radically 3 4 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY mistaken. But it is another and more serious mat- ter to bridge over the very real gap that separates philosophy and common-sense. Such an aim is realized only when philosophy is seen to issue from some special interest that is humanly important; or when, after starting in thought at a point where one deals with ideas and interests common to all, one is led by the inevitableness of consistent think- ing into the sphere of philosophy. § 2. There is but one starting-point for reflec- tion when all men are invited to share in it. Life as a start- Though there be a great many special ing-pointfor , „ . „ Thought. platforms where special groups of men may take their stand together, there is only one platform broad enough for all. This universal stand-point, or common platform, is life. It is our more definite thesis, then, that philosophy, even to its most abstruse technicality, is rooted in life ; and that it is inseparably bound up with the satisfaction of practical needs, and the solution of practical problems. Every man knows what it is to live, and his immediate experience will verify those features of the adventure that stand out conspicuously. To begin with, life is our birthright. We did not ask for it, but when we grew old enough to be self- THE PRACTICAL MAN AND PHILOSOPHER 5 conscious we found ourselves in possession of it. ]SFor is it a gift to be neglected, even if we had the will. As is true of no other gift of nature, we must use it, or cease to be. There is a unique urgency about life. But we have already implied more, in so far as we have said that it must be used, and have thereby referred to some form of movement or activity as its inseparable attribute. To live is to find one's self compelled to do some- thing. To do something — there is another impli- cation of life : some outer expression, some medium in which to register the degree and form of its activity. Such we recognize as the environment of life, the real objects among which it is placed ; which it may change, or from which it may suffer change. Not only do we find our lives as unso- licited active powers, but find, as well, an arena prescribed for their exercise. That we shall act, and in a certain time and place, and with reference to certain other realities, this is the general condi- tion of things that is encountered when each one of us discovers life. In short, to live means to be compelled to do something under certain circum- stances. There is another very common aspect of life that would not at first glance seem worthy of men- 6 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY tion. Not only does life, as we have just described it, mean opportunity, but it means self-conscious opportunity. The facts are such as we have found them to be, and as each one of us has previously found them for himself. But when we discover life for ourselves, we who make the discovery, and we who live, are identical. From that moment we both live, and know that we live. Moreover, such is the essential unity of our natures that our living must now express our knowing, and our knowing guide and illuminate our living. Con- sider the allegory of the centipede. From the beginning of time he had manipulated his count- less legs with exquisite precision. Men had re- garded him with wonder and amazement. But he was innocent of his own art, being a contrivance of nature, perfectly constructed to do her bidding. One day the centipede discovered life. He dis- covered himself as one who walks, and the newly awakened intelligence, first observing, then fore- seeing, at length began to direct the process. And from that moment the centipede, because he could not remember the proper order of his going, lost all his former skill, and became the poor clumsy victim of his own self-consciousness. This same self-consciousness is the inconvenience and the THE PRACTICAL MAN AND PHILOSOPHER 7 great glory of human life. We must stumble along as best we can, guided by the feeble light of our own little intelligence. If nature starts us on our way, she soon hands over the torch, and bids us find the trail for ourselves. Most men are brave enough to regard this as the best thing of all; some despair on account of it. In either case it is admittedly the true story of human life. We must live as separate selves, observing, fore- seeing, and planning. There are two things that we can do about it. We can repudiate our nat- ures, decline the responsibility, and degenerate to the level of those animals that never had our chance; or we can leap joyously to the helm, and with all the strength and wisdom in us guide our lives to their destination. But if we do the for- mer, we shall be unable to forget what might have been, and shall be haunted by a sense of igno- miny; and if we do the second, we shall experi- ence the unique happiness of fulfilment and self- realization. Life, then, is a situation that appeals to intelli- gent activity. Humanly speaking, there is no such thing as a situation that is not at the same time a theory. As we live we are all theorists. Whoever has any misgivings as to the practical 8 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY value of theory, let him remember that, speaking generally of human life, it is true to say that there is no practice that does not issue at length from reflection. That which is the commonest experi- ence of mankind is the conjunction of these two, the thought and the deed. And as surely as we are all practical theorists, so surely is philosophy the outcome of the broadening and deepening of practical theory. But to understand how the practical man becomes the philosopher, we must inquire somewhat more carefully into the manner of his thought about life. § 3. Let anyone inspect the last moment in his life, and in all probability he will find that his The Practical mind was employed to discover the Knowledge of Means. means to some end. He was already bent upon some definite achievement, and was thoughtful for the sake of selecting the economical and effectual way. His theory made his practice skilful. So through life his knowledge shows him how to work his will. Example, experience, and books have taught him the uses of nature and society, and in his thoughtful living he is enabled to reach the goal he has set for the next hour, day, or year of his activity. The long periods of human life are spent in elaborating the means to THE PRACTICAL MAN AND PHILOSOPHER 9 some unquestioned end. Here one meets the curious truth that we wake up in the middle of life, already making headway, and under the guid- ance of some invisible steersman. When first we take the business of life seriously, there is a con- siderable stock in trade in the shape of habits, and inclinations to all sorts of things that we never consciously elected to pursue. Since we do not begin at the beginning, our first problem is to accommodate ourselves to ourselves, and our first deliberate acts are in fulfilment of plans outlined by some predecessor that has already spoken for us. The same thing is true of the race of men. At a certain stage in their development men found themselves engaged in all manner of ritual and custom, and burdened with concerns that were not of their own choosing. They were burning in- cense, keeping festivals, and naming names, all of which they must now proceed to justify with myth and legend, in order to render intelligible to themselves the deliberate and self-conscious repetition of them. Even so much justification was left to the few, and the great majority con- tinued to seek that good which social usage coun- tenanced and individual predisposition confirmed. So every man of us acts from day to day for 10 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY love's sake, or wealth's sake, or power's sake, or for the sake of some near and tangible object; reflecting only for the greater efficiency of his endeavor. § 4. But if this be the common manner of think- ing about life, it does not represent the whole of The Practical suc ^ thought. Nor does it follow that ^Emfor ° f because it occupies us so much, it is Purpose. therefore correspondingly fundamental. Like the myth makers of old, we all want more or less to know the reason of our ends. Here, then, we meet with a somewhat different type of reflection upon life, the reflection that underlies the adoption of a life purpose. It is obvious that most ends are selected for the sake of other ends, and so are virtually means. Thus one may strug- gle for years to secure a college education. This definite end has been adopted for the sake of a somewhat more indefinite end of self-advance- ment, and from it there issues a whole series of minor ends, which form a hierarchy of steps as- cending to the highest goal of aspiration. Now upon the face of things we live very unsystematic lives, and yet were we to examine ourselves in this fashion, we should all find our lives to be marvels of organization. Their growth, as we have seen, THE PRACTICAL MAN AND PHILOSOPHER 11 began before we were conscious of it; and we are commonly so absorbed in some particular flower or fruit that we forget the roots, and the design of the whole. But a little reflection reveals a re- markable unitary adjustment of parts. The unity is due to the dominance of a group of central pur- poses. Judged from the stand-point of experience, it seems bitter irony to say that everyone gets from life just what he wishes. But a candid searching of our own hearts will incline us to admit that, after all, the way we go and the length we go is determined pretty much by the kind and the intensity of our secret longing.^ That for which in the time of choice we are willing to sac- rifice all else, is the formula that defines the law of each individual life. All this is not intended to mean that we have each named a clear and definite ideal which is our chosen goal. On the contrary, such a conception may be almost mean- ingless to some of us. In general the higher the ideal the vaguer and less vivid is its presentation to our consciousness. But, named or unnamed, sharp or blurred, vivid or half-forgotten, there may be found in the heart of every man that which of all things he wants to be, that which of all deeds he wants to do. If he has had the normal youth 12 HE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY of dreaming, he has seen it, and warmed to the picture of his imagination; if he has been some- what more thoughtful than the ordinary, his rea- son has denned it, and adopted it for his vocation ; if neither, it has been present as an undertone throughout the rendering of his more inevitable life. He will recognize it when it is named as the desire to do the will of God, or to have as good a time as possible, or to make other people as happy as possible, or to be equal to his respon- sibilities, or to fulfil the expectation of his mother, or to be distinguished, wealthy, or influential. This list of ideals is miscellaneous, and ethically reducible to more fundamental concepts, but these are the terms in which men are ordinarily con- scious of their most intimate purposes. We must now inquire respecting the nature of the thought that determines the selection of such a purpose, or justifies it when it has been unconsciously ac- cepted. § 5. What is most worth while? So far as human action is concerned this obviously depends The Phiioso- u P on what is possible, upon what is Devofee^the ex P ec ted of us by our own natures, and Man of Affairs, U p 0n what interests and concerns are and the L voluptuary, conserved by the trend of events in our THE PRACTICAL MAN AND PHILOSOPHER 13 environment. What I had best do, presupposes what I have the strength and the skill to do, what I feel called upon to do, and what are the great causes that are entitled to promotion at my hands. It seems that practically we cannot separate the ideal from the real. We may feel that the high- est ideal is an immediate utterance of conscience, as mysterious in origin as it is authoritative in expression. We may be willing to defy the uni- verse, and expatriate ourselves from our natural and social environment, for the sake of the holy law of duty. Such men as Count Tolstoi have little to say of the possible, or the expedient, or the actual, and are satisfied to stand almost alone against the brutal facts of usage and economy. We all have a secret sense of chivalry, that prompts, however ineffectually, to a like devotion. But that which in such moral purposes appears to indicate a severance of the ideal and the real, is, if we will but stop to consider, only a severance of the ideal and the apparent. The martyr is more sure of reality than the adventurer. He is convinced that though his contemporaries and his environment be against him; the fundamental or eventual order of things is for him. He believes in a spiritual world more abiding, albeit less 14 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY obvious, than the material world. Though every temporal event contradict him, he lives in the cer- tainty that eternity is his. Such an one may have found his ideal in the voice of God and His proph- ets, or he may have been led to God as the justi- fication of his irresistible ideal; but in either case the selection of his ideal is reasonable to him in so far as it is harmonious with the ultimate nature of things, or stands for the promise of reality. In this wise, thought about life expands into some conception of the deeper forces of the world, and life itself, in respect of its fundamental attachment to an ideal, implies some belief con- cerning the fundamental nature of its environ- ment. But lest in this account life be credited with too much gravity and import, or it seem to be as- sumed that life is all knight-errantry, let us turn to our less quixotic, and perhaps more effectual, man of affairs. He works for his daily bread, and for success in his vocation. He has selected his vocation for its promise of return in the form of wealth, comfort, fame, or influence. He like- wise performs such additional service to his family and his community as is demanded of him by pub- lic opinion and his own sense of responsibility. THE PRACTICAL MAN AND PHILOSOPHER 15 He may have a certain contempt for the man who sees visions. This may be his manner of testify- ing to his own preference for the ideal of useful- ness and immediate efficiency. But even so he would never for an instant admit that he was pur- suing a merely conventional good. He may be largely imitative in his standards of value, recog- nizing such aims as are common to some time or race; nevertheless none would be more sure than he of the truth of his ideal. Question him, and he will maintain that his is the reasonable life under the conditions of human existence. He may maintain that if there be a God, he can best serve Him by promoting the tangible welfare of himself and those dependent upon him. He may maintain that, since there is no God, he must win such rewards as the world can give. If he have something of the heroic in him, he may tell you that, since there is no God, he will labor to the uttermost for his fellow-men. Where he has not solved the problem of life for himself, he may believe himself to be obeying the insight of some one wiser than himself, or of society as expressed in its customs and institutions. But no man ever admitted that his life was purely a matter of ex- pediency, or that in his dominant ideal he was 16 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY the victim of chance. In the background of the busiest and most preoccupied life of affairs, there dwells the conviction that such living is appropri- ate to the universe; that it is called for by the circumstances of its origin, opportunities, and destiny. Finally, the man who makes light of life has of all men the most transparent inner consciousness. In him may be clearly observed the relation between the ideal and the reflection that is as- sumed to justify it. " A Moment's Halt — a momentary taste Of Being from the Well amid the Waste — And Lo! — the phantom Caravan has reach'd The Nothing it set out from — ..." " We are no other than a moving row Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go Round with the Sun-illumin'd Lantern held In Midnight by the Master of the Show." Where the setting of life is construed in these terms, there is but one natural and appropriate manner of life. Once believing in the isolation and insignificance of life, one is sceptical of all worth save such as may be tasted in the moment of its purchase. If one's ideas and experiences are no concern of the world's, but incidents of a purely local and transient interest, they will real- THE PRACTICAL MAN AND PHILOSOPHER 17 ize most when they realize an immediate gratifi- cation. Where one does not believe that he is a member of the universe, and a contributor to its ends, he does well to minimize the friction that arises from its accidental propinquity, and to kindle some little fire of enjoyment in his own lonely heart. This is the life of abandonment to pleasure, accompanied by the conviction that the conditions of life warrant no more strenuous or heroic plan. § 6. In such wise do we adopt the life purpose, or justify it when unconsciously adopted. The The Adoption pursuit of an ideal implies a belief in of Purposes and the its effectuality. Such a belief will in- of Life. variably appear when the groundwork of the daily living is laid bare by a little reflection. And if our analysis has not been in error, there is something more definite to be obtained from it. We all believe in the practical wisdom of our fun- damental ideals ; but we believe, besides, that such wisdom involves the sanction of the universe as a whole. The momentousness of an individual's life will be satisfied with nothing less final than an absolutely wise disposition of it. For every in- dividual, his life is all his power and riches, and is not to be spent save for the greatest good that 18 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY he can reasonably pursue. But the solution of such a problem is not to be obtained short of a searching of entire reality. Every life will rep- resent more or less of such wisdom and enlighten- ment; and in the end the best selection of ideal will denote the greatest wealth of experience. It is not always true that he who has seen more will live more wisely, for in an individual case in- stinct or authority may be better sources of aspira- tion than experience. But we trust instinct and authority because we believe them to represent a comprehensive experience on the part of the race as a whole, or on the part of God. He whose knowledge is broadest and truest would know best what is finally worth living for. On this account, most men can see no more reasonable plan of life than obedience to God's will, for God in the abun- dance of his wisdom, and since all eternity is plain before him, must see with certainty that which is supremely worthy. We mean, then, that the selection of our ideals shall be determined by the largest possible knowl- edge of the facts pertaining to life. We mean to select as one would select who knew all about the antecedents and surroundings and remote conse- quences of life. In our own weakness and fini- THE PRACTICAL MAN AND PHILOSOPHER 19 tude we may go but a little way in the direction of such an insight, and may prefer to accept the judgment of tradition or authority, but we recog- nize a distinct type of knowledge as alone worthy to justify an individual's adoption of an ideal. That type of knowledge is the knowledge that com- prehends the universe in its totality. Such knowl- edge does not involve completeness of information respecting all parts of reality. This, humanly speaking, is both unattainable and inconceivable. It involves rather a conception of the kind of real- ity that is fundamental. For a wise purpose it is unnecessary that we should know many matters of fact, or even specific laws, provided we are con- vinced of the inner and essential character of the universe. Some of the alternatives are matters of every-day thought and speech. One cannot tell the simplest story of human life without disclos- ing them. To live the human life means to pur- sue ideals, that is, to have a thing in mind, and then to try to accomplish it. Here is one kind of reality and power. The planetary system, on the other hand, does not pursue ideals, but moves un- conscious of itself, with a mechanical precision that can be expressed in a mathematical formula ; and is representative of another kind of reality 20 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY and power. Hence a very common and a very practical question: Is there an underlying law, like the law of gravitation, fundamentally and per- manently governing life, in spite of its apparent direction by ideal and aspiration ? Or is there an underlying power, like purpose, fundamentally and permanently governing the planetary system and all celestial worlds, in spite of the apparent control of blind and irresistible forces ? This is a practical question because nothing could be more pertinent to our choice of ideals. Nothing could make more difference to life than a belief in the life or lifelessness of its environment. The faiths that generate or confirm our ideals always refer to this great issue. And this is but one, albeit the most profound, of the many issues that arise from the desire to obtain some conviction of the inner and essential character of life. Though so inti- mately connected with practical concerns, these issues are primarily the business of thought. In grappling with them, thought is called upon for its greatest comprehensiveness, penetration, and self-consistency. By the necessity of concentra- tion, thought is sometimes led to forget its origin and the source of its problems. But in naming itself philosophy, thought has only recognized the THE PRACTICAL MAN AND PHILOSOPHER 21 definiteness and earnestness of its largest task. Philosophy is still thought about life, representing but the deepening and broadening of the common practical thoughtfulness. We who began together at the starting-point of life, have now entered together the haven of phi- losophy. It is not a final haven, but only the point of departure for the field of philosophy proper. Nevertheless that field is now in the plain view of the man who occupies the practical stand-point. He must recognize in philosophy a kind of reflection that differs only in extent and persistence from the reflection that guides and jus- tifies his life. He may not consciously identify himself with any one of the three general groups which have been characterized. But if he is neither an idealist, nor a philistine, nor a pleasure lover, surely he is compounded of such elements, and does not escape their implications. He de- sires something most of all, even though his high- est ideal be only an inference from the gradation of his immediate purposes. This highest ideal represents what he conceives to be the greatest worth or value attainable in the universe, and its adoption is based upon the largest generalization that he can make or borrow. The complete justi- 22 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY fication of his ideal would involve a true knowl- edge of the essential character of the universe. For such knowledge he substitutes either authority or his own imperfect insight. But in either case his life is naturally and organically correlated with a thought about the universe in its totality, or in its deepest and essential character. Such thought, the activity and its results, is philoso- phy. Hence he who lives is, ipso facto, a philoso- pher. He is not only a potential philosopher, but a partial philosopher. He has already begun to be a philosopher. Between the fitful or prudential thinking of some little man of affairs, and the sus- tained thought of the devoted lover of truth, there is indeed a long journey, but it is a straight jour- ney along the same road. Philosophy is neither accidental nor supernatural, but inevitable and normal. Philosophy is not properly a vocation, but the ground and inspiration of all vocations. In the hands of its devotees it grows technical and complex, as do all efforts of thought, and to pur- sue philosophy bravely and faithfully is to encoun- ter obstacles and labyrinths innumerable. The general problem of philosophy is mother of a whole brood of problems, little and great. But THE PRACTICAL MAN AND PHILOSOPHER 23 whether we be numbered among its devotees, or their beneficiaries, an equal significance attaches to the truth that philosophy is continuous with life. CHAPTER II POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY § 7. As the ultimate criticism of all human in- terests, philosophy may be approached by avenues Who is the as various as these interests. Only Philosopher- Poet? when philosophy is discovered as the implication of well-recognized special interests, is the significance of its function fully appreciated. For the sake of such a further understanding of philosophy, those who find either inspiration or entertainment in poetry are invited in the present chapter to consider certain of the relations between poetry and philosophy. We must at the very outset decline to accept unqualifiedly the poet's opinion in the matter, for he would not think it presumptuous to incorporate philosophy in poetry. " !No man," said Cole- ridge, " was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a great philosopher." This would seem to mean that a great poet is a great philos- opher, and more too. We shall do better to begin with the prosaic and matter of fact minimum of 24 POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 25 truth: some poetry is philosophical. This will enable us to search for the portion of philosophy that is in some poetry, without finally defining their respective boundaries. It may be that all true poetry is philosophical, as it may be that all true philosophy is poetical ; but it is much more certain that much actual poetry is far from philo- sophical, and that most actual philosophy was not conceived or written by a poet. The mere poet and the mere philosopher must be tolerated, if it be only for the purpose of shedding light upon the philosopher-poet and the poet-philosopher. And it is to the philosopher-poet that we turn, in the hope that under the genial spell of poetry we may be brought with understanding to the more forbid- ding land of philosophy. § 8. Poetry is well characterized, though not defined, as an interpretation of life. The term Poetry as Ap- " ^ e " nere signifies the human pur- preciation. posive consciousness, and active pursuit of ends. An interpretation of life is, then, a selection and account of such values in human ex- perience as are actually sought or are worth the seeking. For the poet all things are good or bad, and never only matters of fact. He is neither an annalist nor a statistician, and is even an observer 26 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY only for the sake of a higher design. He is one who appreciates, and expresses his appreciation so fittingly that it becomes a kind of truth, and a per- manently communicable object. That " unbodied joy," the skylark's song and flight, is through the genius of Shelley so faithfully embodied, that it may enter as a definite joy into the lives of count- less human beings. The sensuous or suggestive values of nature are caught by the poet's quick feeling for beauty, and fixed by his creative activ- ity. Or with his ready sympathy he may perceive the value of some human ideal or mastering pas- sion, and make it a reality for our common feeling. Where the poet has to do with the base and hate- ful, his attitude is still appreciative. The evil is apprehended as part of a dramatic whole having positive moral or aesthetic value. Moral ideas may appear in both poetry and life as the inspira- tion and justification of struggle. Where there is no conception of its moral significance, the repul- sive possesses for the poet's consciousness the aesthetic value of diversity and contrast. Even where the evil and ugly is isolated, as in certain of Browning's dramatic monologues, it forms, both for the poet and the reader, but a part of some larger perception of life or character, which is sub- POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 27 lime or beautiful or good. Poetry involves, then, the discovery and presentation of human experi- ences that are satisfying and appealing. It is a language for human pleasures and ideals. Poetry is without doubt a great deal more than this, and only after a careful analysis of its peculiar lan- guage could one distinguish it from kindred arts : but it will suffice for our purposes to characterize and not differentiate. Starting from this most general truth respecting poetry, we may now look for that aspect of it whereby it may be a witness of philosophical truth. § 9. For the answer to our question, we must turn to an examination of the intellectual elements sincerity in of poetry. In the first place, the conP Poetry. whitman. mon demand that the poet shall be ac- curate in his representations is suggestive of an* indispensable intellectual factor in his genius. As we have seen, he is not to reproduce nature, but the human appreciative experiencejrf nature. [Nevertheless, he must even here be true to his object. His art involves his ability to express \ genuinely and sincerely what he himself experi- [ ences in the presence of nature, or what he can i catch of the inner lives of others by virtue of his intelligent sympathy. No amount of emotion or 28 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY even of imagination will profit a poet, unless he Lgan. render a true account of them. To be sure, he need not define, or even explain ; for it is his function to transfer the immediate qualities of ex- perience: but he must be able to speak the truth, and, in order to speak it, he must have known it. In all this, however, we have made no demand that the poet should see more than one thing at a time. Sincerity of expression does not require what is distinctly another mode of intelligence, comprehen- siveness of view. It is easier, and accordingly more usual, to render an account of the moments and casual units of experience, than of its totality. There are poets, little and great, who possess the intellectual virtue of sincerity, without the intel- lectual power of synthesis and reconciliation. This distinction will enable us to separate the in- telligence exhibited in all poetry, from that dis- tinct form of intelligence exhibited in such poetry as is properly to be called philosophical. The " barbarian " in poetry has recently been defined as " the man who regards his passions as their own excuse for being; who does not domes- ticate them either by understanding their cause or by conceiving their ideal goal." 1 One will read- 1 George Santayana, in his Poetry and Religion, p. 176. POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 29 ily appreciate the application of this definition to Walt Whitman. What little unity there is in this poet's world, is the composition of a purely sensu- ous experience, " The earth expending right hand and left hand, The picture alive, every part in its best light, The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is not wanted." In many passages Whitman manifests a marvel- lous ability to discover and communicate a fresh gladness about the commonest experiences. We cannot but rejoice with him in all sights and sounds. But though we cannot deny him truth, his truth is honesty and not understanding. The experiences in which he discovers so much worth, are random and capricious, and do not constitute a universe. To the solution of ultimate questions he contributes a sense of mystery, and the convic- tion " That you are here — that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse." His world is justly described by the writer just quoted as " a phantasmagoria of continuous vis- ions, vivid, impressive, but monotonous and hard to distinguish in memory, like the waves of the sea 30 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY or the decorations of some barbarous temple, sub- lime only by the infinite aggregation pf par ts." 2 As is Walt Whitman, so are many poets greater and less. Some who have seen the world-view, ex- hibit the same particularism in their lyric moods ; although, generally speaking, a poet who once has comprehended the world, will see the parts of it in the light of that wisdom. But Walt Whit- man is peculiarly representative of the poetry that can be true, without being wise in the manner that we shall come shortly to understand as the manner of philosophy. He is as desultory in his poet rap- tures as is the common man when he lives in his immediate experiences. The truth won by each is the clear vision of one thing, or of a limited col- lection of things, and not the broad inclusive vision of all things. § 10. The transition from Whitman to Shake- speare may seem somewhat abrupt, but the very differences between these poets serve Constructive r Knowledge in ^ mar k ou t arL interesting affinity. Shakespeare. Neither has put any unitary construc- tion upon human life and its environment. Neither, as poet, is the witness of any world-view ; which will mean for us that neither is a philos- 2 Santayana : op. cit., p. 180. POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 31 opher-poet. As respects Shakespeare, this is a hard saying. We are accustomed to the critical judgment that finds in the Shakespearian dramas an apprehension of the universal in human life. But though this judgment is true, it is by no means conclusive as respects Shakespeare's relation to the philosophical type of thought. For there can be universality without philosophy. Thus, to know the groups and the marks of the vertebrates is to know a truth which possesses generality, in con- tradistinction to the particularism of Whitman's poetic consciousness. Even so to know well the groups and marks of human character, vertebrate and invertebrate, is to know that of which the aver- age man, in his hand to hand struggle with life, is ignorant. Such a wisdom Shakespeare pos- sessed to a unique degree, and it enabled him to reconstruct human life. He did not merely per- ceive human states and motives, but he understood human nature so well that he could create consist- ent men and women. Moreover, Shakespeare's knowledge was not only thus universal in being a knowledge of general groups and laws, but also in respect of its extensity. His understanding was as rich as it was acute. It is true, then, that Shakespeare read human life as an open book, 32 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY knowing certainly the manner of human thinking and feeling, and the power and interplay of human motives. But it is equally true, on the other hand, that he possessed no unitary conception of the meaning and larger relations of human life. Such a conception might have been expressed either by means of the outlook of some dominating and per- sistent type of personality, or by a pervading sug- gestion of some constant world-setting for the variable enterprise of mankind. It could appear only provided the poet's appreciation of life in de- tail were determined by an interpretation of the meaning of life as a whole. Shakespeare appar- ently possessed no such interpretation. Even when Hamlet is groping after some larger truth that may bear upon the definite problems of life, he represents but one, and that a strange and un- usual, type of human nature. And Hamlet's re- flections, it should be noted, have no outcome. There is no Shakespearian answer to the riddles that Hamlet propounds. The poet's genius is not less amazing for this fact ; indeed, his peculiar dis- tinction can only be comprehended upon this basis. Shakespeare put no construction upon life, and by virtue of this very reserve accomplished an art of surpassing fidelity and vividness. The absence of POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 33 philosophy in Shakespeare, and the presence of the most characteristic quality of his genius, may both be imputed by the one affirmation, that there is no Shakespearian point of view. This truth signifies both gain and loss. The philosophical criticism of life may vary from the ideal objectivity of absolute truth, to the subjec- tivity of a personal religion. Philosophy aims to correct the partiality of particular points of view by means of a point of view that shall comprehend their relations, and effect such reconciliations or transformations as shall enable them to constitute a universe. Philosophy always assumes the hypo- thetical view of omniscience. The necessity of such a final criticism is implicit in every scientific item of knowledge, and in every judgment that is passed upon life. Philosophy makes a distinct and peculiar contribution to human knowledge by its heroic effort to measure all knowledges and all ideals by the standard of totality. Nevertheless it is significant that no human individual can pos- sibly possess the range of omniscience. The most adequate knowledge of which any generation of men is capable, will always be that which is con- ceived by the most synthetic and vigorously meta- physical minds; but every individual philosophy 34 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY will nevertheless be a premature synthesis. The effort to complete knowledge is the indispensable test of the adequacy of prevailing conceptions, but the completed knowledge of any individual mind will shortly become an historical monument. It will belong primarily to the personal life of its creator, as the articulation of his personal covenant with the universe. There is a sound justification for such a conclusion of things in the case of the indi- vidual, for the conditions of human life make it inevitable; but it will always possess a felt unity, and many distinct features, that are private and subjective. Now such a projection of personality, with its coloring and its selection, Shakespeare has avoided; and very largely as a consequence, his dramas are a storehouse of genuine human nature. Ambition, mercy, hate, madness, guilelessness, con- ventionality, mirth, bravery, deceit, purity — these, and all human states and attributes save piety, are upon his pages as real, and as mysterious withal, as they are in the great historical society. For an ordinary reader, these states and attributes are more real in Hamlet or Lear than in his own direct experience, because in Hamlet and Lear he can see them with the eye and intelligence of gen- ius. But Shakespeare is the world all over again, POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 35 and there is loss as well as gain in such realism. Here is human life, no doubt, and a brilliant pag- eantry it is ; but human life as varied and as prob- lematic as it is in the living. Shakespeare's fun- damental intellectual resource is the historical and psychological knowledge of such principles as govern the construction of human natures. The goods for which men undertake, and live or die, are any goods, justified only by the actual human striving for them. The virtues are the old win- ning virtues of the secular life, and the heroisms of the common conscience. Beyond its empirical generality, his knowledge is universal only in the sense that space and time are universal. His con- sciousness contains its representative creations, and expresses them unspoiled by any transforming thought. His poetic consciousness is like the very stage to which he likens all the world: men and women meet there, and things happen there. The stage itself creates no unity save the occasion and the place. Shakespeare's consciousness is univer- sal because it is a fair field with no favors. But even so it is particular, because, though each may enter and depart in peace, when all enter together there is anarchy and a babel of voices. All Shakespeare is like all the world seen through the 36 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY eyes of each of its inhabitants. Human experi- ence in Shakespeare is human experience as every- one feels it, as comprehensive as the aggregate of innumerable lives. But human experience in phi- losophy is the experience of all as thought by a synthetic mind. Hence the wealth of life depicted by Shakespeare serves only to point out the phi- losopher's problem, and to challenge his powers. Here he will find material, and not results; much to philosophize about, but no philosophy. § 11. The discussion up to this point has attrib- uted to poetry very definite intellectual factors Philosophy in that nevertheless do not constitute phi- Poetry. The World-view, losophy. Walt Whitman speaks his Omar Khay- yam. feeling with truth, but m general mani- fests no comprehensive insight. Shakespeare has not only sincerity of expression but an understand- ing mind. He has a knowledge not only of par- ticular experiences, but of human nature; and a consciousness full and varied like society itself. But there is a kind of knowledge possessed by neither, the knowledge sought by coordinating all aspects of human experience, both particular and general. Not even Shakespeare is wise as one who, having seen the whole, can fundamentally interpret a part. But though the philosopher-poet POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 37 may not yet be found, we cannot longer be ignorant of his nature. He will be, like all poets, one who appreciates experiences or finds things good, and he will faithfully reproduce the values which he discovers. But he must justify himself in view of the fundamental nature of the universe. The values which he apprehends must be harmonious, and so far above the plurality of goods as to trans- cend and unify them. The philosopher-poet will find reality as a whole to be something that accred- its the order of values in his inner life. He will not only find certain things to be most worthy objects of action or contemplation, but he will see why they are worthy, because he will have con- strued the judgment of the universe in their favor. In this general sense, Omar Khayyam is a phi- losopher-poet. To be sure his universe is quite the opposite of that which most poets conceive, and is perhaps profoundly antagonistic to the very spirit of poetry ; but it is none the less true that the joys to which Omar invites us are such as his universe prescribes for human life. " Some for the Glories of This World ; and some Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come; Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum." 38 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY Herein is both poetry and philosophy, albeit but a poor brand of each. We are invited to occupy ourselves only with spiritual cash, because the universe is spiritually insolvent. The immedi- ately gratifying feelings are the only feelings that the world can guarantee. Omar Khayyam is a philosopher-poet, because his immediate delight in " youth's sweet-scented manuscript " is part of a consciousness that vaguely sees, though it cannot grasp, " this sorry scheme of things entire." " Drink for you know not whence you come, nor why; Drink for you know not why you go, nor where." § 12. But the poet in his world-view ordinarily sees other than darkness. The same innate spir- Wordsworth. itual enterprise that sustains religious faith leads the poet more often to find the universe positively congenial to his ideals, and to ideals in general. He interprets human experience in the light of the spirituality of all the world. It is to Wordsworth that we of the present age are chiefly indebted for such imagery, and it will profit us to consider somewhat carefully the philosophical quality of his poetry. Walter Pater, in introducing his appreciation of Wordsworth, writes that " an intimate con- POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 39 sciousness of the expression of natural things, which weighs, listens, penetrates, where the earlier mind passed roughly by, is a large element in the complexion of modern poetry." We recognize at once the truth of this characterization as applied to Wordsworth. But there is something more dis- tinguished about this poet's sensibility even than its extreme fineness and delicacy ; a quality that is suggested, though not made explicit, by Shelley's allusion to Wordsworth's experience as " a sort of thought in sense." Nature possessed for him not merely enjoyable and describable characters of great variety and minuteness, but an immediately apprehended unity and meaning. It would be a great mistake to construe this meaning in sense as analogous to the crude symbolism of the educa- tor Froebel, to whom, as he said, " the world of crystals proclaimed, in distinct and univocal terms, the laws of human life." Wordsworth did not attach ideas to sense, but regarded sense itself as a communication of truth. We readily call to mind his unique capacity for apprehending the characteristic flavor of a certain place in a certain moment of time, the individuality of a situation. Now in such moments he felt that he was receiving intelligences, none the less direct and significant 40 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY for their inarticulate form. Like the boy on Windermere, whom he himself describes, " while he hung Loitering, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents ; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind, With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woodsy and that uncertain heaven received Into the bosom of the steady lake." For our purpose it is essential that we should recognize in this appreciation of nature, expressed in almost every poem that Wordsworth wrote, a consciousness respecting the fundamental nature of the world. Conversation, as we know, de- notes an interchange of commensurable meanings. Whatever the code may be, whether words or the most subtle form of suggestion, communication is impossible without community of nature. Hence, in believing himself to be holding converse with the so-called physical world, Wordsworth conceives that world as fundamentally like himself. He finds the most profound thing in all the world to be the universal spiritual life. In nature this life manifests itself most directly, clothed in its own proper dignity and peace. But it may be discov- ered in the humanity that is most close to nature, in the avocations of plain and simple people, and POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 41 the unsophisticated delights of children ; and, with the perspective of contemplation, even " among the multitudes of that huge city." So Wordsworth is rendering a true account of his own experience of reality when, as in " The Prelude," he says unequivocally: " A gracious spirit o'er this earth presides, And in the heart of man ; invisibly It comes to works of unreproved delight, And tendency benign; directing those Who care not, know not, think not, what they do." Wordsworth is not a philosopher-poet because by searching his pages we can find an explicit philo- sophical creed such as this, but because all the joys of which his poet-soul compels him to sing have their peculiar note, and compose their peculiar harmony, by virtue of such an indwelling consciousness. Here is one who is a philosopher in and through his poetry. He is a philosopher in so far as the detail of his appreciation finds fundamental justification in a world-view. From the immanence of " the universal heart " there follows, not through any mediate reasoning, but by the immediate experi- ence of its propriety, a conception of that which is of supreme worth in life. The highest and best of which life is capable is contemplation, or the consciousness of the universal indwelling of God. 42 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY Of those who fail to live thus fittingly in the midst of the divine life^ Walter Pater speaks for Words- worth as follows: "To higher or lower ends they move too often with some- thing of a sad countenance, with hurried and ignoble gait, becoming, unconsciously, something like thorns, in their anxiety to bear grapes ; it being possible for people, in the pursuit of even great ends, to become themselves thin and impoverished in spirit and temper, thus diminish- ing the sum of perfection in the world at its very sources." 3 The quiet and worshipful spirit, won by the culti- vation of the emotions appropriate to the presence of nature and society, is the mark of the complet- est life and the most acceptable service. Thus for Wordsworth the meaning of life is inseparable from the meaning of the universe. In apprehend- ing that which is good and beautiful in human experience, he was attended by a vision of the totality of things. Herein he has had to do, if not with the form, at any rate with the very sub- stance of philosophy. § 13. Unquestionably the supreme philosopher- poet is Dante. He is not only philosophical in the Dante. temper of his mind, but his greatest poem is the incarnation of a definite system of 3 Appreciations, p. 59. POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 43 philosophy, the most definite that the world has seen. That conception of the world which in the thirteenth century found argumentative and or- derly expression in the " Summa Theologias " of Thomas of Aquino, and constituted the faith of the church, is visualized by Dante, and made the basis of an interpretation of life. The " Divina Commedia " deals with all the heavens to the Empyrean itself, and with all spirit- ual life to the very presence of God. It derives its imagery from the cosmology of the day, its dramatic motive from the Christian and Greek conceptions of God and his dealings with the world. Sin is punished because of the justice of God; knowledge, virtue, and faith lead, through God's grace and mercy manifested in Christ, to a perpetual union with Him. Hell, purgatory, and paradise give place and setting to the events of the drama. But the deeper meaning of the poem is allegorical. In a letter quoted by Lowell, Dante writes : "The literal subject of the whole work is the state of the soul after death, simply considered. But if the work be taken allegorically the subject is man, as by merit or de- merit, through freedom of the will, he renders himself liable to the reward or punishment of justice." 4 4 Letter to Can Grande. See Lowell's Essay on Dante, p. 34. 44 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY In other words, the inner and essential meaning of the poem has to do not with external retribution, but with character, and the laws which determine its own proper ruin or perfection. The punish- ments described in the " Inferno " are accounts of the state of guilt itself, implications of the will that has chosen the part of brutishness. Sin itself is damnable and deadening, but the knowledge that the soul that sinneth shall die is the first way of emancipation from sin. The guidance of Virgil through hell and purgatory signifies the knowledge of good and evil, or moral insight, as the guide of man through this life of struggle and progress. The earthly paradise, at the close of the " Purga- torio," represents the highest state to which human character can attain when choice is determined by ordinary experience, intelligence, and understand- ing. Here man stands alone, endowed with an enlightened conscience. Here are uttered the last words of Virgil to Dante, the explorer of the spir- itual country: " Expect no more or word or sign from me. Free, up- right, and sane is thine own free will, and it would be wrong not to act according to its pleasure ; wherefore thee over thyself I crown and mitre." 5 5 Purgatorio, Canto XXVII. Translation by Norton, POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 45 But moral self-reliance is not the last word. As Beatrice, the image of tenderness and holiness, comes to Dante in the earthly paradise, and leads him from the summit of purgatory into the heaven of heavens, and even to the eternal light ; so there is added to the mere human, intellectual, and moral resources of the soul, the sustaining power of the divine grace, the illuminating power of divine truth, and the transforming power of divine love. Through the aid of this higher wisdom, the journey of life becomes the way to God. Thus the allegorical truth of the " Divina Commedia " is not merely an analysis of the moral jaature of man, but the revelation of a universal spiritual order, manifesting itself in the moral evolution of the individual, and above all in his ultimate community with the eternal goodness. "Thou shouldst not, if I deem aright, wonder more at thy ascent, than at a stream if from a high mountain it descends to the base. A marvel it would be in thee, if, deprived of hindrance, thou hadst sat below, even as quiet by living fire in earth would be." 6 Such, in brief, is Dante's world-view, so suggestive of the freer idealistic conceptions of later thought as to justify a recent characterization of him as one who, " accepting without a shadow of a doubt 6 Paradiso, Canto I. 46 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY or hesitation all the constitutive ideas of mediaeval thought and life, grasped them so firmly and gave them such luminous expression that the spirit in them broke away from the form." 7 But it must be added, as in the case of Words- worth, that Dante is a philosopher-poet not be- cause St. Thomas Aquinas appears and speaks with authority in the Thirteenth Canto of the " Para- diso," nor even because a philosophical doctrine can be consistently formulated from his writings, but because his consciousness of life is informed with a sense of its universal bearings. There is a famous passage in the Twenty-second Canto of the " Paradiso," in which Dante describes himself as looking down upon the earth from the starry heaven. "'Thou art so near the ultimate salvation/ began Bea- trice, 'that thou oughtest to have thine eyes clear and sharp. And therefore ere thou further enterest it, look back downward, and see how great a world I have already set beneath thy feet, in order that thy heart, so far as it is able, may present itself joyous to the triumphant crowd which comes glad through this round ether.' With my sight I returned through each and all the seven spheres, and saw this globe such that I smiled at its mean sem- blance; and that counsel I approve as the best which holds it of least account; and he who thinks of other things maybe called truly worthy." 7 Edward Caird, in his Literature and Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 24. POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 47 Dante's scale of values is that which appears from the starry heaven. His austere piety, his invin- cible courage, and his uncompromising hatred of wrong, are neither accidents of temperament nor blind reactions, but compose the proper character of one who has both seen the world from God, and returned to see God from the world. He was, as Lowell has said, " a man of genius who could hold heartbreak at bay for twenty years, and would not let himself die till he had done his task " ; and his power was not obstinacy, but a vision of the ways of God. He knew a truth that justified him in his sacrifices, and made a great glory of his defeat and exile. Even so his poetry or ap- preciation of life is the expression of an inward contemplation of the world in its unity or essence. It is but an elaboration of the piety which he attributes to the lesser saints of paradise, when he has them say : "Nay, it is essential to this blessed existence to hold our- selves within the divine will, whereby our very wills are made one. So that as we are from stage to stage through- out this realm, to all the realm is pleasing, as to the King who inwills us with His will. And His will is our peace; it is that sea whereunto is moving all that which It creates and which nature makes." 8 8 Paradiso. Canto III. 48 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY § 14. There now remains the brief task of dis- tinguishing the philosopher-poet from the philoso- The Difference P ner himself. The philosopher-poet is Poetry and one wno ? having made the philosophical Philosophy. p i n t f v i ew hi s own, expresses himself in the form of poetry. The philosophical point of view is that from which the universe is compre- hended in its totality. The wisdom of the philos- opher is the knowledge of each through the knowl- edge of all. Wherein, then, does the poet, when possessed of such wisdom, differ from the philoso- pher proper ? To this question one can give read- ily enough the general answer, that the difference lies in the mode of utterance. Furthermore, we have already given some account of the peculiar manner of the poet. He invites us to experience with him the beautiful and moving in nature and life. That which the poet has to express, and that which he aims to arouse in others, is an appre- ciative experience. He requires what Words- worth calls " an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings." Therefore if he is to be philosophical in intelligence, and yet essentially a poet, he must find his universal truth in immediate experience. He must be one who, in seeing the many, sees the one. The philosopher-poet is he POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 49 who visualizes a fundamental interpretation of the world. " A poem," says one poet, " is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth." The philosopher proper, on the other hand, has the sterner and less inviting task of rendering such an interpretation articulate to thought. That which the poet sees, the philosopher must define. That which the poet divines, the philosopher must calculate. The philosopher must dig for that which the poet sees shining through. As the poet transcends thought for the sake of experience, the philosopher must transcend experience for the sake of thought. As the poet sees all, and all in each, so the philosopher, knowing each, must think all consistently together, and then know each again. It is the part of philosophy to collect and criticise evidence, to formulate and coordinate conceptions, and finally to define in exact terms. The reani- mation of the structure of thought is accomplished primarily in religion, which is a general con- ception of the world made the basis of daily living. For religion there is no subjective correlative less than life itself. Poetry is another and more circumscribed means of restoring thought to life. By the poet's imagination, and through the art of 50 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY his expression, thought may be sensuously per- ceived. " If the time should ever come." says Wordsworth, " when what is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man." 9 As respects truth, philosophy has an in- dubitable priority. The very sternness of the phi- losopher's task is due to his supreme dedication to truth. But if validity be the merit of philosophy, it can well be supplemented by immediacy, which is the merit of poetry. Presuppose in the poet conviction of a sound philosophy, and we may say with Shelley, of his handiwork, that " it is the per- fect and consummate surface and bloom of all things ; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption." " Indeed," as he adds, " what were our consolations on this side of the grave — and our aspirations beyond it — if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire 9 Observations prefixed to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 51 from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar ? " 10 The unity in outlook, attended by differences of method and form, which may exist between poet and philosopher, is signally illustrated by the rela- tion between Goethe and Spinoza. What Goethe saw and felt, Spinoza proved and defined. The universal and eternal substance was to Spinoza, as philosopher, a theorem, and to Goethe, as poet, a perception and an emotion. Goethe writes to Jacobi that when philosophy " lays itself out for division," he cannot get on with it, but when it " confirms our original feeling as though we were one with nature," it is welcome to him. In the same letter Goethe expresses his appreciation of Spinoza as the complement of his own nature : " His all-reconciling peace contrasted with my all-agita- ting endeavor; his intellectual method was the opposite counterpart of my poetic way of feeling and expressing myself; and even the inflexible regularity of his logical procedure, which might be considered ill-adapted to moral subjects, made me his most passionate scholar and his devoted adherent. Mind and heart, understanding and sense, were drawn together with an inevitable elective affinity, and this at the same time produced an intimate union between individuals of the most different types." 11 10 A Defence of Poetry. 11 Quoted by Caird in his Literature and Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 60 52 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY It appears, then, that some poets share with all philosophers that point of view from which the horizon line is the boundary of all the world. Poetry is not always or essentially philosophical, but may be so; and when the poetic imagination restores philosophy to immediacy, human experi- ence reaches its most exalted state, excepting only religion itself, wherein God is both seen and also served. ISTor is the part of philosophy in poetry and religion either ignoble or presumptuous, for, humanly speaking, " the owl-winged faculty of cal- culation " is the only safe and sure means of access to that place on high, " Where the nightingale doth sing Not a senseless, tranced thing, But a divine melodious truth; Philosophic numbers smooth ; Tales and golden histories Of heaven and its mysteries." CHAPTER III THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE § 15. The least religious experience is so mys- terious and so complex that a moderate degree of The Possibility reflection upon it tends to a sense of of Defining Religion. intellectual impotence. " If I speak," says Emerson, " I define and confine, and am less." One would gladly set down religion among the un- speakable things and avoid the imputation of de- grading it. It is certain that the enterprise of defining religion is at present in disrepute. It has been undertaken so often and so unsuccessfully that contemporary students for the most part prefer to supply a list of historical definitions of religion, and let their variety demonstrate their futility. Metaphysicians and psychologists agree that in view of the differences of creed, ritual, organiza- tion, conduct, and temperament that have been true of different religions in different times and places, one may as well abandon the idea that there is a constant element. 53 54 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY But on the other hand we have the testimony afforded by the name religion ; and the ordinary judgments of men to the effect that it signifies something to be religious, and to be more or less religious. There is an elementary logical prin- ciple to the effect that a group name implies cer- tain common group characters. Impatience with abstract or euphemistic definitions should not blind us to the truth. Even the psychologist tends in his description of religious phenomena to single out and emphasize what he calls a typical religious ex- perience. And the same applies to the idealist's treatment of the matter. 1 Religion, he reasons, is essentially a development of which the true meaning can be seen only in the higher stages. The primitive religion is therefore only implicit religion. But lower stages cannot be regarded as belonging to a single development with higher stages, if there be not some actual promise of the later in the earlier, or some element which endures throughout. It is unavoidable, then, to assume that in dealing with religion we are dealing Avith a specific and definable experience. § 16. The profitableness of undertaking such a definition is another matter. It may well be that 1 Cf. Caird: The Evolution of Religion, Lectures II, III. THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 55 in so human and practical an affair as religion, definition is peculiarly inappropriate. But is there The Profit- no ^ a ^ uman an d practical value in the abieness of very defining of religion ? Is there not Religion. a demand for it in the peculiar rela- tion that exists between religion and the progress of enlightenment ? Religion associates itself with the habits of society. The progress of enlighten- ment means that more or less all the time, and very profoundly at certain critical times, society must change its habits. The consequence is that religion is likely to be abandoned with the old habits. The need of a new religion is therefore a chronic one. The reformer in religion, or the man who wishes to be both enlightened and religious, is chiefly oc- cupied with the problem of disentangling religion pure and undefiled from definite discredited prac- tices and opinions. And the solution of the prob- lem turns upon some apprehension of the essence of religion. There is a large amount of necessary and unnecessary tragedy due to the extrinsic con- nection between ideas and certain modes of their expression. There can be no more serious and urgent duty than that of expressing as directly, and so as truly as possible, the great permanent human concerns. The men to whom educational 56 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY reform has been largely due have been the men who have remembered for their fellows what this whole business of education is after all for. Co- menius and Pestalozzi served society by stripping educational activity of its historical and institu- tional accessories, and laying bare the genuine human need that these are designed to satisfy. There is a similar virtue in the insistent attempt to distinguish between the essential and the acces- sory in religion. § 17. Although declining to be discouraged by the conspicuousness of past failures in this connec- The True tion, one may well profit by them. The n^n ° f amazing complexity of religious phe- Reiigion. nomena must somehow be seen to be con- sistent with their common nature. The religious experience must not only be found, but must also be reconciled with " the varieties of religious ex- perience." The inadequacy of the well-known definitions of religion may be attributed to several causes. The commonest fallacy is to define relig- ion in terms of a religion. My definition of re- ligion must include my brother's religion, even though he live on the other side of the globe, and my ancestor's religion, in spite of his prehistoric remoteness. Error may easily^afise through the THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 57 attempt to define religion in terms of my own re- ligion, or what I conceive to be the true religion. Whatever the relation between ideal religion and actual religion, the field of religion contains by common consent cults that must on their own grounds condemn one another; religions that are bad religions, and yet religions. A more enlightened fallacy, and a more danger- ous one, is due to the supposition that religion can be defined exclusively in terms of some department of human nature. There have been descriptions of religion in terms of feeling, intellect, and con- duct respectively. But it is always easy to over- throw such a description, by raising the question of its application to evidently religious experiences that belong to some other aspect of life. Religion is not feeling, because there are many phlegmatic, God-fearing men whose religion consists in good works. Religion is not conduct, for there are many mystics whose very religion is withdrawal from the field of action. Religion is not intellec- tion, for no one has ever been able to formulate a creed that is common to all religions. Yet with- out a doubt one must look for the essence of relig- ion in human nature. The present psychological interest in religion has emphasized this truth. 58 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY How, then, may we describe it in terms of certain constant conditions of human life, and yet escape the abstractness of the facultative method ? Mod- ern psychology suggests an answer in demon- strating the interdependence of knowledge, feeling, and volition. 2 The perfect case of this unity is belief. The believing experience is cognitive in intent, but practical and emotional as well in con- tent. I believe what I take for granted; and the object of my belief is not merely known, but also felt and acted upon. What I believe expresses itself in my total experience. There is some hope, then, of an adequate defi- nition of the religious experience, if it be regarded as belonging to the psychological type of belief. 3 Belief, however, is a broader category than relig- ion. There must be some religious type of believ- ing. An account of religion in terms of believing, and the particular type of it here in question, would, then, constitute the central stem of a psy- chology of religion, and affords the proper concep- tions for a description of the religious experience. Even here the reservation must be made that belief is always more than the believing state, in that it 2 Cf. Leuba: Introduction to a Psychological Study of Relig- ion, Monist, Vol. XI, p. 195. 3 Cf. Leuba: Ibid. THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 59 means to be true. 4 " Hence to complete an account of religion one should consider its object, or its cognitive implications. But this direct treatment of the relation between religion and philosophy must be deferred until in the present chapter we shall have come to appreciate the inwardness of the religious consciousness. To this end we must permit ourselves to be enlightened by the experi- ence of religious people as viewed from within. It is not our opinion of a man's religion that is here in question, but the content and meaning which it has for him. "I would have you," says Fielding, in his "Hearts of Men," "go and kneel beside the Mahommedan as he prays at the sunset hour, and put your heart to his and wait for the echo that will surely come. ... I would have you go to the hillman smearing the stone with butter that his god may be pleased, to the woman crying to the forest god for her sick child, to the boy before his monks learning to be good. No matter where you go, no matter what the faith is called, if you have the hearing ear, if your heart is in unison with the heart of the world, you will hear always the same song." 5 § 18. The general identification of religion with belief is made without serious difficulty. The essential factor in belief, is, as we have Religion ' ' as Belief. seen, the reaction of the whole person- * Cf. § 29. 5 P. 322. 60 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY ality to a fixed object or accepted situation. A similar principle underlies common judgments about a man's religion. He is accounted most re- ligious whose religion penetrates his life most inti- mately. In the man whose religion consists in the outer exercise of attendance upon church, we rec- ognize the sham. He appears to be religious. He does one of the things which a religious man would do; but an object of religious faith is not the constant environment of his life. He may or may not feel sure of God from his pew, but God is not among the things that count in his daily life. God does not enter into his calculations or determine his scale of values. Again, discursive thinking is regarded as an interruption of religion. When I am at pains to justify my religion, I am already doubting; and for common opinion doubt is identical with irreligion. In so far as I am religious, my religion stands in no need of justifi- cation, even though I regard it as justifiable. In my religious experience I am taking something for granted ; in other words I act about it and feel about it in a manner that is going to be determined by the special conditions of my mood and tem- perament. The mechanical and prosaic man ac- knowledges God in his mechanical and prosaic THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 61 way. He believes in divine retribution as he believes in commercial or social retribution. He is as careful to prepare for the next world as he is to be respectable in this. The poet, on the other hand, believes in God after the manner of his genius. Though he worship God in spirit he may conduct his life in an irregular manner peculiar to himself. Difference of mood in the same in- dividual may be judged by the same measure. When God is most real to him, brought home to him most vividly, or consciously obeyed, in these moments he is most religious. When, on the other hand, God is merely a name to him, and church a routine, or when both are forgotten in the daily occupations, he is least religious. His life on the whole is said to be religious in so far as periods of the second type are subordinated to periods of the first type. Further well-known elements of belief, corollaries of the above, are evidently pres- ent in religion. A certain imagery remains con- stant throughout an individual's experience. He comes back to it as to a physical object in space. And although religion is sporadically an exclusive and isolated affair, it tends strongly to be social. The religious object, or God, is a social object, common to me and to my neighbor, and presup- 62 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY posed in our collective undertakings. This reduc- tion of religion to the type of the believing state should thus provide us with an answer to that old and fundamental question concerning the relative priority of faith and works. The test of the faith is in the works, and the works are religious in so far as they are the expression of the faith. Re- ligion is not the doing of anything nor the feel- ing of anything nor the thinking of anything, but the reacting as a whole, in terms of all pos- sible activities of human life, to some accepted situation. § 19. We may now face the more interesting but difficult question of the special character of Religion as religious belief. In spite of the fact Belief in a ^ t in these days the personality of God Disposition or Practically tres is a practical and not a scientific GoTis a Dis- truth. A practical truth does not com- position from mit itgelf t • le sc i ent ifi c state _ which Conse- J ° quences May men t and can of ten survive the over- Rationally be Expected, throw of that scientific statement in which at any given time it has found expression. In other words, an indefinite number of scientific truths are compatible with a single practical truth. An instance of this is the consistency with my ex- pectation of the alternation of day and night, of either the Ptolemaic or Copernican formulation of the solar system. Now expectation that the sun will rise to-morrow is an excellent analogue of my religious belief. Celestial mechanics is as relevant to the one as metaphysics to the other. Neither is overthrown until a central practical judgment is discredited, and either could remain true through 86 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY a very considerable alteration of logical definition ; but neither is on this account exempt from theoreti- cal responsibility. In so far as religion deliber- ately enters the field of science, and defines its formularies with the historical or metaphysical method, this difficulty does not, of course, exist. Grant that the years of Methuselah's life, or the pre- cise place and manner of the temptation of Jesus, or the definition of Christ in the terms of the Athanasian Creed, are constitutive of Christianity, and the survival of that religion will be determined by the solution of ordinary problems of historical or metaphysical research. But the Christian will very properly claim that his religion is only exter- nally and accidentally related to such propositions, since they are never or very rarely intended in his experience. As religious he is occupied with Christ as his saviour or with God as his protector and judge. The history of Jesus or the meta- physics of God essentially concern him only in so far as they may or may not invalidate this relation- ship. He cares only for the power and disposition of the divine, and these are affected by history and metaphysics only in so far as he has definitely put them to such proof. For my religion is my sense of a practical situa- RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 87 tion, and only when that has been proved to be folly has my religion become untrue. My God is my practical faith, my plan of salvation. My re- ligion is overthrown if I am convinced that I have misconceived the situation and mistaken what I should do to be saved. The conception of God is very simple practically, and very complex theo- retically, a fact that confirms its practical genesis. My conception of God contains an idea of my own interests, an idea of the disposition of the universe toward my interests, and some working plan for the reconciliation of these two terms. These three elements form a practical unity, but each is capable of emphasis, and a religion may be transformed through the modification of any one of them. It appears, then, as has always been somewhat vaguely recognized, that the truth of religion is ethical as well as metaphysical or scientific. My religion will be altered by a change in my conception of what constitutes my real interest, a change in my conception of the fundamental causes of reality, or a change in my conception of the manner in which my will may or may not affect these causes. God is neither an entity nor an ideal, but always a relation of entity to ideal : reality regarded from the stand-point of its favorableness or unfavorable- 88 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY ness to human life, and prescribing for the latter the propriety of a certain attitude. §31. The range of historical examples is limit- Historical less, but certain of these are especially Examples of . . Religious calculated to emphasize the application Truth and » . . . . . , . , Error. oi a criterion to religion, buch is the of Baal gl< l case with Elijah's encounter with the prophets of Baal, as narrated in the Old Testa- ment. "And Elijah came near unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? If Yahweh be God, follow him : but if Baal, then follow him. . . . And call ye on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of Yahweh: and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God. . . . And Elijah said unto the prophets of Baal, Choose you one bullock for yourselves, and dress it first; for ye are many; and call on the name of your god, but put no fire under. And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice, nor any that answered. . . . And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is musing, or he is gone aside, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked. And they cried aloud, and cut them- selves after their manner with knives and lances, till the blood gushed out upon them. . . . But there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded." 2 2 Quoted with some omissions from / Kings, 18:21-29. The Hebrew term Yahweh, the name of the national deity, has been substituted for the English translation, "the Lord." RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 89 The religion of the followers of Baal here con- sists in a belief in the practical virtue of a mode of address and form of ritual associated with the traditions and customs of a certain social group. The prophets of this cult agree to regard the ex- periment proposed by Elijah as a crucial test, and that which is disproved from its failure is a plan of action. These prophets relied upon the pres- ence of a certain motivity, from which a defi- nite response could be evoked by an appeal which they were peculiarly able to make ; but though " they prophesied until the time of the offering of the evening oblation," there was none that regarded. § 32. An equally familiar and more instructive example is the refutation of the Greek national Greek religion by Lucretius. The conception Religion. £ j-£ e which Lucretius finds unwar- ranted is best depicted in Homer. There we hear of a society composed of gods and men. Though the gods, on the one hand, have their own history, their affairs are never sharply sundered from those of men, who, on the other hand, must constantly reckon with them, gauge their attitude, and seek their favor by paying tribute to their individual humors and preferences. In the Ninth Book of 90 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY the " Iliad/' Phcenix addresses himself to the re- calcitrant Achilles as follows : "It fits not one that moves The hearts of all, to live unmov'd, and succor hates for loves. The Gods themselves are flexible; whose virtues, honors, pow'rs, Are more than thine, yet they will bend their breasts as we bend ours. Perfumes, benign devotions, savors of offerings burn'd, And holy rites, the engines are with which their hearts are turn'd, By men that pray to them." s Here is a general recognition of that which makes sacrifice rational. It is because he conceives this presupposition to be mistaken, that Lucretius declares the practices and fears which are founded upon it to be folly. It is the same with all that is practically based upon the expectation of a life beyond the grave. The correction of the popular religion is due in his opinion to that true view of the world taught by Epicurus, whose memory Lucretius thus invokes at the opening of the Third Book of the " De Eerum Natura " : "Thee, who first wast able amid such thick darkness to raise on high so bright a beacon and shed a light on the true interests of life, thee I follow, glory of the Greek race, and plant now my footsteps firmly fixed in thy imprinted marks. . . . For soon as thy philosophy 3 Iliad, Book IX, lines 467 sq. Translation by Chapman. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 91 issuing from a godlike intellect has begun with loud voice to proclaim the nature of things, the terrors of the mind are dispelled, the walls of the world part asunder, I see things in operation throughout the whole void: the divinity of the gods is revealed and their tranquil abodes which neither winds do shake nor clouds drench with rains nor snow congealed by sharp frost harms with hoary fall: an ever cloudless ether o'ercanopies them, and they laugh with light shed largely round. Nature too supplies all their wants and nothing ever impairs their peace of mind. But on the other hand the Acheru- sian quarters 4 are nowhere to be seen, though earth is no bar to all things being descried, which are in opera- tion underneath our feet throughout the void." 5 In another passage, after describing the Phry- gian worship of Cybele, he comments as follows: " All which, well and beautifully as it is set forth and told, is yet widely removed from true reason. For the nature of gods must ever in itself of necessity enjoy immortality together with supreme repose, far removed and withdrawn from our concerns; since exempt from every pain, exempt from all dangers, strong in its own resources, not wanting aught of us, it is neither gained by favors nor moved by anger. . . . The earth however is at all time without feeling, and because it receives into it the first-beginnings of many things, it brings them forth in many ways into the light of the sun." 6 If the teaching of Epicurus be true it is evident 4 The supposed abode of departed spirits. 5 Lucretius: De Return Natura, Book III, lines 1 sq. Trans- lated by Munro. 8 Ibid., Book II, lines 644 sq. 92 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY that those who offered hecatombs with the idea that they were thereby mitigating anger, or securing special dispensation, were playing the fool. They were appealing to a fictitious motivity, one not grounded in " the nature of things." To one for whom the walls of the world had parted asunder, such a procedure was no longer possible; though he might choose to " call the sea Neptune " and reverence the earth as " mother of the gods." 7 § 33. The history of religion contains no more impressive and dramatic chapter than that which Tudaism and recor d s the development of the religion Christianity. £ ^ Q j ewSt Passing over its obscure beginnings in the primitive Semitic cult, we find this religion first clearly defined as tribal self- interest sanctioned by Yahweh. 8 God's interest 7 It would be interesting to compare the equally famous criticism of Greek religion in Plato's Republic, Book II, 377 sq. 8 Cf. W. Robertson Smith's admirable account of the Semitic religions: "What is requisite to religion is a practical acquaintance with the rules on which the deity acts and on which he ex- pects his worshippers to frame their conduct — what in II Kings, 17:26 is called the 'manner,' or rather the 'customary law' (mishpat), of the god of the land. This is true even of the religion of Israel. When the prophets speak of the knowledge of God, they always mean a practical knowledge of the laws and principles of His government in Israel, and a summary expression for religion as a whole is 'the knowledge and fear of Jehovah,' i. e., the knowledge RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 93 in his chosen people determines the prosperity of him who practises the social virtues. " The name of Yahweh is a strong tower : the righteous runneth into it, and is safe." " He that is steadfast in righteousness shall attain unto life." "To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to Yahweh than sacrifice." 9 But in time it is evident to the believer that his experience does not bear out this expectation. Neither as a Jew nor as a righteous man does he prosper more than his neighbor. He comes, there- fore, to distrust the virtue of his wisdom. "Then I saw that wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth darkness. The wise man's eyes are in his head, and the fool walketh in darkness: and yet I perceived that one event happeneth to them all. Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so will it happen even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also was vanity. For of the wise man, even as of the fool, there is no remem- brance forever; seeing that in the days to come all will have been already forgotten. And how doth the wise man die even as the fool! So I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun was grievous unto me: for all is vanity and a striving after wind." 10 It is evident that he who expects the favor of for- of what Jehovah prescribes, combined with a reverent obe- dience." The Religion of the Semites, p. 23. 9 Proverbs, 18: 10; 11 : 19; 21:3. 10 Ecclesiastes, 2:13 sq. 94 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY tune in return for his observance of precept is mis- taken. The " work that is wrought under the sun " makes no special provision for him during his lifetime. Unless the cry of vanity is to he the last word there must be a reinterpretation of the promise of God. This appears in the new ideal of patient submission, and the chastened faith that expects only the love of God. And those whom God loves He will not forsake. They will come to their own, if not here, then beyond, according to His inscrutable but unswerving plan. " The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit : a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." " For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones." 11 In this faith Judaism merges into Christian- ity. 12 In the whole course of this evolution God ^ is regarded as the friend of his people, but his people learn to find a new significance in his friendship. That which is altered is the conduct which that friendship requires and the expecta- 11 Psalms, 51:17; Isaiah, 57:15. 12 In this discussion of Judaism I am much indebted to Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma, especially Chap- ters I and II. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 95 tion which it determines. The practical ideal which the relationship sanctions, changes gradually from that of prudence to that of goodness for its own sake. God, once an instrument relevant to human temporal welfare, has come to be an object of disinterested service. No such transformation as this was absolutely realized during the period covered by the writings of the Old Testament, nor has it even yet been realized in the development of Christianity. But the evolution of both Judaism and Christianity has taken this direction. The criterion of this evolution is manifestly both ethical and metaphys- ical. A Christian avows that he rates purity of character above worldly prosperity, so that the former cannot properly be prized for the sake of the latter. Furthermore, he shares more or less unconsciously such philosophical and scien- tific opinions as deny truth to the conception of special interferences and dispensations from a su- pernatural agency. Therefore he looks for no fire from heaven to consume his sacrifice. But his religion is nevertheless a practical expectation. He believes that God is good, and that God loves him and sustains him. He believes that there obtains between himself, in so far as good, and the 96 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY universe sub specie eternitatis, a real sympathy and reciprocal reenforcement. He believes that he secures through the profoundly potent forces of the universe that which he regards as of most worth ; and that somewhat is added to these forces by vir- tue of his consecration. The God of the Christians cannot be denned short of some such account as this, inclusive of an ideal, an attitude, and an ex- pectation. In other words the God of the Chris- tians is to be known only in terms of the Christ- like outlook upon life, in which the disciple is taught to emulate the master. When moral and intellectual development shall have discredited either its scale of values, or its conviction that cosmical events are in the end determined in ac- cordance with that scale of values, then Christian- ity must either be transformed, or be untenable for the wise man. If we have conceived the essence of Christianity too broadly or vaguely, it does not much matter for our present purposes. Its es- sence is, at any rate, some such inwardness of life resolving ideality and reality into one, and draw- ing upon objective truth only to the extent required for the confirming of that relation. § 34. We conclude, then, our attempt to empha- size the cognitive factor in religion, with the thesis RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 97 The Cognitive that every religion centres in a practical Factor in Religion. secret of the universe. To be religious is to believe that a certain correlation of forces,, moral and factual, is in reality operative, and that it determines the propriety and effectiveness of a certain type of living. Whatever demonstrates the futility, vanity, or self-deception of this living, discredits the religion., And, per contra, except as they define or refute such practical truth, religion is not essentially concerned with theoretical judg- ments. §35. But neither religion nor any other human interest consists in essentials. Such a practical The Place of conviction as that which has been de- Imagination . in Religion, fined inevitably flowers into a marvel- ous complexity, and taps for its nourishment every spontaneity of human nature. If it be said that only the practical conviction is essential, this is not the same as to say that all else is super- fluous. There may be no single utterance that my religion could not have spared, and yet were I to be altogether dumb my religion would, indeed, be as nothing. For if I believe, I accept a pres- ence in my world, which as I live will figure in my dreams, or in my thoughts, or in my habits. 98 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY And each of these expressions of myself will have a truth if it do but bear out my practical accept- ance of that presence. The language of religion, like that of daily life, is not the language of sci- ence except it take it upon itself to be so. There is scarcely a sentence which I utter in my daily intercourse with men which is not guilty of trans- gressions against the canons of accurate and defi- nite thinking. Yet if I deceive neither myself nor another, I am held to be truthful, even though my language deal with chance and accident, material purposes and spiritual causes, and though I vow that the sun smiles or the moon lets down her hair into the sea. Science is a special interest in the discovery of unequivocal and fixed conceptions, and employs its terms with an unalterable connotation. But no such algebra of thought is indispensable to life or conversation, and its lack is no proof of error. Such is the case also with that eminently living affair, religion. I may if I choose, and I will if my reasoning powers be at all awakened, be a theologian. But theology, like science, is a special intellectual spontaneity. St. Thomas, the master theologian, did not glide unwittingly from prayer into the qucestiones of the " Summa Theo- logian," but turned to them as to a fresh adventure. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 99 Theology is inevitable, because humanly speaking adventure is inevitable. For man, with his intel- lectual spontaneity, every object is a problem ; and did he not seek sooner or later to define salvation, there would be good reason to believe that he did not practically reckon with any. But this is simi- larly and independently true of the imagination, the most familiar means with which man clothes and vivifies his convictions, the exuberance with which he plays about them and delights to confess them. The imagination of religion, contributing what Matthew Arnold called its " poetry and elo- quence," does not submit itself to such canons as are binding upon theology or science, but exists and flourishes in its own right. The indispensableness to religion of the imagina- tion is due to that faculty's power of realizing what is not perceptually present. Religion is not inter- ested in the apparent, but in the secret essence or the transcendent universal. And yet this interest is a practical one. Imagination may introduce one into the vivid presence of the secret or the transcendent. It is evident that the religious im- agination here coincides with poetry. For it is at least one of the interests of poetry to cultivate and satisfy a sense for the universal; to obtain an LofC. 100 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY immediate experience or appreciation that shall have the vividness without the particularism of ordinary perception. And where a poet elects so to view the world, we allow him as a poet the privilege, and judge him by the standards to which he submits himself. That upon which we pass judgment is the fitness of his expression. This expression is not, except in the case of the theo- retical mystic, regarded as constituting the most valid form of the idea, but is appreciated expressly for its fulfilment of the condition of immediacy. The same sort of critical attitude is in order with the fruits of the religious imagination. These may or may not fulfil enough of the require- ments of that art to be properly denominated poetry ; but like poetry they are the translation of ideas into a specific language. They must not, therefore, be judged as though they claimed to excel in point of validity, but only in point of con- sistency with the context of that language. And the language of religion is the language of the 'practical life. Such translation is as essential to an idea that is to enter into the religious experi- ence, as translation into terms of immediacy is essential to an idea that is to enter into the appre- ciative consciousness of the poet. No object can RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 101 find a place in my religion until it is conjoined with my purposes and hopes ; until it is taken for granted and acted upon, like the love of my friends, or the courses of the stars, or the stretches of the sea. § 36. The religious imagination, then, is to be understood and justified as that which brings the The Special objects of religion within the range of t F hTRe ii n g"o°us livin g- The central religious object, as Imagination. hag been gee ^ j g &n a ft^g Q f t ^ e re _ siduum or totality of things. To be religious one must have a sense for the presence of an attitude, like his sense for the presence of his human fel- lows, with all the added appreciation that is proper in the case of an object that is unique in its mys- tery or in its majesty. It follows that the religious imagination fulfils its function in so far as it pro- vides the object of religion with properties similar to those which lend vividness and reality to the normal social relations. The presence of one's fellows is in part the per- ceptual experience of their bodies. To this there corresponds in religion some extraordinary or sub- tle appearance. The gods may in visions or dreams be met with in their own proper embodi- ments; or, as is more common, they may be re- 102 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY garded as present for practical purposes: in some inanimate object, as in the case of the fetish ; in some animal species, as in the case of the totem; in some place, as in the case of the shrine ; or even in some human being, as in the case of the inspired prophet and miracle worker. In more refined and highly developed religions the medium of God's presence is less specific. He is perceived with " — a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man." God is here found in an interpretation of the com- mon and the natural, rather than in any individual and peculiar embodiment. And here the poet's appreciation, if not his art, is peculiarly indis- pensable. But, furthermore, his fellows are inmates of " the household of man " in that he knows their history. They belong to the temporal context of actions and events. Similarly, the gods must be historical. The sacred traditions or books of re- ligion are largely occupied with this history. The more individual and anthropomorphic the gods, the more local and episodic will be the account of their affairs. In the higher religions the acts of RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 103 God are few and momentous, such as creation or special providence; or they are identical with the events of nature and human history when these are construed as divine. To find God in this lat- ter way requires an interpretation of the course of events in terms of some moral consistency, a faith that sees some purpose in their evident des- tination. There is still another and a more significant way in which men recognize one another : the way of address and conversation. And men have in- variably held a similar intercourse with their gods. To this category belong communion and prayer, with all their varieties of expression. I have no god until I address him. This will be the most direct evidence of what is at least from my point of view a social relation. There can be no general definition of the form which this address will take. There may be as many special languages, as many attitudes, and as much playfulness and subtlety of symbolism as in human intercourse. ' But, on the other hand, there are certain utterances that are peculiarly appropriate to religion. In so far as he regards his object as endowed with both power and goodness the worshipper will use the lan- guage of adoration; and the sense of his depend- 104 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY ence will speak in terms of consecration and thanksgiving. "O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee, In a dry and weary land, where no water is. So have I looked upon thee in the sanctuary, To see thy power and thy glory. For thy loving-kindness is better than life; My lips shall praise thee." These are expressions of a hopeful faith; but, on the other hand, God may be addressed in terms of hatred and distrust. " Who is most wretched in this dolorous place? I think myself; yet I would rather be My miserable self than He, than He Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace. " The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou From whom it had its being, God and Lord! Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred, Malignant and implacable." 13 In either case there may be an indefinite degree of hyperbole. The language of love and hate, of confidence and despair, is not the language of de- scription. In this train of the religious conscious- ness there is occasion for whatever eloquence man can feel, and whatever rhetorical luxuriance he can utter. 13 James Thomson: The City of Dreadful Night. Quoted by James, in The Will to Believe, etc., p. 45. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 105 § 37. Such considerations as these serve to ac- count for the exercise and certain of the fruits of The Relation the religious imagination, and to des- between imagination ignate the general criterion governing and Truth in . Religion. its propriety. But how is one to deter- mine the boundary between the imaginative and the cognitive? It is commonly agreed that what religion says and does is not all intended literally. But when is expression of religion only poetry and eloquence, and when is it matter of conviction? If we revert again to the cognitive aspect of re- ligion, it is evident that there is but one test to apply : whatever either fortifies or misleads the will is literal conviction. This test cannot be applied absolutely, because it can properly be applied only to the intention of an individual experience. However I may express my religion, that which I express, is, we have seen, an expectation. The degree to which I literally mean what I say is then the degree to which it determines my expec- tations. Whatever adds no item to these expecta- tions, but only recognizes and vitalizes them, is pure imagination. But it follows that it is en- tirely impossible from direct inspection to define any given expression of religious experience as myth, or to define the degree to which it is myth. 106 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY It submits to such distinctions only when viewed from the stand-point of the concrete religions ex- perience which it expresses. Any such given ex- pression could easily be all imagination to one, and all conviction to another. Consider the pas- sage which follows : "And I saw the heaven opened; and behold, a white horse, and he that sat thereon, called Faithful and True; and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. And his eyes are a flame of fire, and upon his head are many diadems; and he hath a name written, which no one knoweth but he himself. And he is arrayed in a garment sprinkled with blood : and his name is called The Word of God." 14 Is this all rhapsody, or is it in part true report? There is evidently no answer to the question so conceived. But if it were to express my own re- ligious feeling it would have some specific propor- tion of literal and metaphorical significance, ac- cording to the degree to which its detail contributes different practical values to me. It might then be my guide-book to the heavens, or only my testimony to the dignity and mystery of the function of Christ. The development of religion bears in a very im- portant way upon this last problem. The factor 14 Revelation, 19 : 11-13. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 107 of imagination has undoubtedly come to have a more clearly recognized role in religion. There can be no doubt that what we now call myths were once beliefs, and that what we now call poetry was once history. If we go back sufficiently far we come to a time when the literal and the meta- phorical were scarcely distinguishable, and this because science had not emerged from the early animistic extension of social relations. Men meant to address their gods as they addressed their fellows, and expected them to hear and respond, as they looked for such reactions within the narrower circle of ordinary intercourse. The advance of science has brought into vogue a description of nature that inhibits such expectations. The re- sult has been that men, continuing to use the same terms, essentially expressive as they are of a prac- tical relationship, have come to regard them as only a general expression of their attitude. The differences of content that are in excess of factora of expectation remain as poetry and myth. On the other hand, it is equally possible, if not equally common, for that which was once imagined to come to be believed. Such a transformation is, perhaps, normally the case when the inspired utter- ance passes from its author to the cult. The 108 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY prophets and sweet singers are likely to possess an exuberance of imagination not appreciated by their followers ; and for this reason almost certainly misunderstood. For these reasons it is manifestly absurd to fasten the name of myth or the name of creed upon any religious utterance whatsoever, unless it be so regarded from the stand-point of the personal religion which it originally expressed, or unless one means by so doing to define it as an expression of his own religion. He who defines " the myth of creation," or " the poetical story of Samson," as parts of the pre-Christian Judaic re- ligion, exhibits a total loss of historical sense. The distinction between cognition and fancy does not exist among objects, but only in the intending ex- perience ; hence, for me to attach my own distinc- tion to any individual case of belief, viewed apart from the believer, is an utterly confusing projec- tion of my own personality into the field of my study. § 38. Only after such considerations as these are we qualified to attack that much-vexed question The Phiioso- as to whether religion deals invariably phy Implied . in Religion with a personal god. It is often as- an d in , . , Religions. sumed in discussion of this question that " personal god," as well as " god," is a dis- RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 109 tinct and familiar kind of entity, like a dragon or centaur; its existence alone being problematical. This is doubly false to the religious employment of such an object. If it be true that in religion we mean by God a practical interpretation of the world, whatsoever be its nature, then the personal- ity of God must be a derivative of the attitude, and not of the nature of the world. Given the prac- tical outlook upon life, there is no definable world that cannot be construed under the form of God. My god is my world practically recognized in re- spect of its fundamental or ultimate attitude to my ideals. In the sense, then, conveyed by this term attitude my god will invariably possess the char- acters of personality. But the degree to which these characters will coincide with the characters which I assign to human persons, or the terms of any logical conception of personality, cannot be absolutely defined. Anthropomorphisms may be imagination or they may be literal conviction. This will depend, as above maintained, upon the degree to which they determine my expectations. Suppose the world to be theoretically conceived as governed by laws that are indifferent to all human interests. The practical expression of this concep- tion appears in the naturalism of Lucretius, or HO THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY Diogenes, or Omar Khayyam. Living in the vivid presence of an indifferent world, I may pict- ure my gods as leading their own lives in some remote reahn which is inaccessible to my petitions, or as regarding me with sinister and contemptuous cruelty. In the latter case I may shrink and cower, or return them contempt for contempt. I mean this literally only if I look for consequences following directly from the emotional coloring which I have bestowed upon them. It may well be that I mean merely to regard myself sub specie eternitatis, in which case I am personifying in the sense of free imagination. In the religion of en- lightenment the divine attitude tends to belong to the poetry and eloquence of religion rather than to its cognitive intent. This is true even of optimistic and idealistic religion. The love and providence of God are less commonly supposed to warrant an expectation of special and arbitrary favors, and have come more and more to mean the play of my own feeling about the general central conviction of the f avorableness of the cosmos to my deeper or moral concerns. But the factor of personality can- not possibly be entirely eliminated, for the religious consciousness creates a social relationship between man and the universe. Such an interpretation of RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 11 1 life is not a case of the pathetic fallacy, unless it incorrectly reckons with the inner feeling which it attributes to the universe. It is an obvious prac- tical truth that the total or residual environment is significant for life. . Grant this and you make rational a recognition of that significance, or a more or less constant sense of coincidence or con- flict with cosmical forces. Permit this conscious- ness to stand, and you make some expression of it inevitable. Such an expression may, furthermore, with perfect propriety and in fulfilment of human nature, set forth and transfigure this central belief until it may enter into the context of immediacy. Thus any conception of the universe whatso- ever may afford a basis for religion. But there is no religion that does not virtually make a more definite claim upon the nature of things, and this entirely independently of its theology, or explicit attempt to define itself. Every religion, even in the very living of it, is naturalistic, or dualistic, or pluralistic, or optimistic, or idealistic, or pessi- mistic. And there is in the realm of truth that which justifies or refutes these definite practical ways of construing the universe. But no historical religion is ever so vague even as this in its phil- osophical implications. Indeed, we shall always 112 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY be brought eventually to the inner meaning of some individual religious experience, where no general criticism can be certainly valid. There is, then, a place in religion for that which is not directly answerable to philosophical or sci- entific standards. But there is always, on the other hand, an element of hope which conceives the nature of the world, and means to be grounded in reality. In respect of that element, philosophy is indispensable to religion. The meaning of re- ligion is, in fact, the central problem of philosophy. There is a virtue in religion like that which Emer- son ascribes to poetry. " The poet is in the right attitude; he is believing; the philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons for believing." But whatever may be said to the disparagement of its dialectic, philosophy is the justification of religion, and the criticism of religions. To it must be assigned the task of so refining positive religion as to contribute to the perpetual establish- ment of true religion. And to philosophy, with religion, belongs the task of holding fast to the idea of the universe. There is no religion except before you begin, or after you have rested from, your philosophical speculation. But in the uni- verse these interests have a common object. As RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY H3 philosophy is the articulation and vindication of religion, so is religion the realization of philoso- phy. In philosophy thought is brought up to the elevation of life, and in religion philosophy, as the sum of wisdom, enters into life. CHAPTER V NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY § 39. In the case of natural science we meet not only with a special human interest, but with a The True theoretical discipline. We are con- Relations of Philosophy fronted, therefore, with a new question : and Science. Misconcep- that of the relation within the body of tions and An- . . . 1 . „ . tagonisms. human knowledge 01 two of its con- stituent members. Owing to the militant temper of the representatives of both science and philos- ophy, this has long since ceased to be an academic question, and has frequently been met in the spirit of rivalry and partisanship. But the true order of knowledge is only temporarily distorted by the brilliant success of a special type of investigation ; and the conquests of science are now so old a story that critical thought shows a disposition to judge of the issue with sobriety and logical highminded- ness. In the seventeenth century a newly emancipated and too sanguine reason proposed to know the whole of nature at once in terms of mathematics 114 NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY H5 and mechanics. Thus the system of the English- man Hobbes was science swelled to world-propor- tions, simple, compact, conclusive, and all-compre- hensive. Philosophy proposed to do the work of science, but in its own grand manner. The last twenty years of Hobbes's life, spent in repeated discomfiture at the hands of Seth Ward, Wallis, Boyle, and other scientific experts of the new Royal Society, certified conclusively to the failure of this enterprise, and the experimental specialist thereupon took exclusive possession of the field of natural law. But the idealist, on the other hand, reconstructed nature to meet the demands of phil- osophical knowledge and religious faith. There issued, together with little mutual understanding and less sympathy, on the one hand positivism, or exclusive experimentalism, and on the other hand a rabid and unsympathetic transcendentalism. Hume, who consigned to the flames all thought save " abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number," and " experimental reasoning concern- ing matter of fact and existence " ; Comte, who assigned metaphysics to an immature stage in the development of human intelligence ; and Tyndall, who reduced the religious consciousness to an emo- tional experience of mystery, are typical of the one 116 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY attitude. The other is well exhibited in Schill- ing's reference to " the blind and thoughtless mode of investigating nature which has become generally established since the corruption of philosophy by Bacon, and of physics by Boyle." Dogmatic ex- perimentalism and dogmatic idealism signify more or less consistently the abstract isolation of the scientific and philosophical motives. There is already a touch of quaintness in both of these attitudes. We of the present are in the habit of acknowledging the autonomy of science, and the unimpeachable validity of the results of experimental research in so far as they are sanc- tioned by the consensus of experts. But at the same time we recognize the definiteness of the task of science, and the validity of such reservations as may be made from a higher critical point of view. Science is to be transcended in so far as it is under- stood as a whole. Philosophy is critically empiri- cal ; empirical, because it regards all bona fide de- scriptions of experience as knowledge ; critical, because attentive to the conditions of both general and special knowledge. And in terms of a critical empiricism so defined, it is one of the problems of philosophy to define and appraise the generating problem of science, and so to determine the value NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 117 assignable to natural laws in the whole system of knowledge. § 40. If this be the true function of philosophy with reference to science, several current notions The spheres of of the relations of the spheres of these Philosophy and Science, disciplines may be disproved. In the first place, philosophy will not be all the sciences regarded as one science. Science tends to unify without any higher criticism. The various sci- ences already regard the one nature as their com- mon object, and the one system of interdependent laws as their common achievement. The philoso- pher who tries to be all science at once fails igno- miniously because he tries to replace the work of a specialist with the work of a dilettante; and if philosophy be identical with that body of truth accumulated and organized by the cooperative ac- tivity of scientific men, then philosophy is a name and there is no occasion for the existence of the philosopher as such. Secondly, philosophy will not be the assembling of the sciences; for such would be a merely clerical work, and the philoso- pher would much better be regarded as non-existent than as a book-keeper. Nor, thirdly, is philosophy an auxiliary discipline that may be called upon in emergencies for the solution of some baffling prob- 118 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY lem of science. A problem defined by science must be solved in the scientific manner. Science will accept no aid from the gods when engaged in her own campaign, but will fight it out according to her own principles of warfare. And as long as science moves in her own plane, she can acknowl- edge no permanent barriers. There is then no need of any superscientific research that shall replace, or piece together, or extend the work of science. But the savant is not on this account in possession of the entire field of knowledge. It is true that he is not infrequently moved to such a conviction when he takes us about to view his estates. Together we ascend up into heaven, or make our beds in sheol, or take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea — and look in vain for anything that is not work done, or work projected, by natural science. Persuade him, however, to define his estates, and he has cir- cumscribed them. In his definition he must em- ploy conceptions more fundamental than the work- ing conceptions that he employs within his field of study. Indeed, in viewing his task as definite and specific he has undertaken the solution of the problem of philosophy. The logical self -conscious- ness has been awakened, and there is no honorable NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 119 way of putting it to sleep again. This is precisely what takes place in any account of the generating problem of science. To define science is to define at least one realm that is other than science, the realm of active intellectual endeavor with its own proper categories. One cannot reflect upon sci- ence and assign it an end, and a method proper to that end, without bringing into the field of knowledge a broader field of experience than the field proper to science, broader at any rate by the presence in it of the scientific activity itself. Here, then, is the field proper to philosophy. The scientist qua scientist is intent upon his own determinate enterprise. The philosopher comes into being as one who is interested in observing what it is that the scientist is so intently doing. In taking this interest he has accepted as a field for investigation that which he would designate as the totality of interests or the inclusive experi- ence. He can carry out his intention of defining the scientific attitude only by standing outside it, and determining it by means of nothing less than an exhaustive searching out of all attitudes. Phi- losophy is, to be sure, itself a definite activity and an attitude, but an attitude required by definition to be conscious of itself, and, if you please, con- 120 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY scious of its own consciousness, until its attitude shall have embraced in its object the very prin- ciple of attitudes. Philosophy defines itself and all other human tasks and interests. None have furnished a clearer justification of philosophy than those men of scientific predilections who have claimed the title of agnostics. A good instance is furnished by a contemporary physicist, who has chosen to call his reflections " antimetaphysical." " Physical science does not pretend to be a complete view of the world; it simply claims that it is working toward such a complete view in the future. The highest philosophy of the scientific investigator is precisely this toleration of an incomplete conception of the world and the preference for it, rather than an apparently perfect, but inadequate conception." 1 It is apparent that if one were to challenge such a statement, the issue raised would at once be philosophical and not scientific. The problem here stated and answered, requires for its solu- tion the widest inclusiveness of view, and a pe- culiar interest in critical reflection and logical coordination. § 41. One may be prepared for a knowledge of 1 Ernst Mach : Science of Mechanics. Translation by McCor- mack, p. 464. No one has made more important contribu- tions than Professor Mach to a certain definite modern philosophical movement. Cf. § 207. NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 121 the economic and social significance of the railway The Procedure even if one does not know a throttle of a Philoso- phy of science, f rom a piston-rod, provided one has broad and well-balanced knowledge of the inter- play of human social interests. One's proficiency here requires one to stand off from society, and to obtain a perspective that shall be as little distorted as possible. The reflection of the philosopher of science requires a similar quality of perspective. All knowledges, together with the knowing of them, must be his object yonder, standing apart in its wholeness and symmetry. Philosophy is the least dogmatic, the most empirical, of all disciplines, since it is the only investigation that can permit itself to be forgetful of nothing. But the most comprehensive view may be the most distorted and false. The true order of knowl- edge is the difficult task of logical analysis, requir- ing as its chief essential some determination of the scope of the working conceptions of the differ- ent independent branches of knowledge. In the case of natural science this would mean an exam- ination of the method and results characteristic of this field, for the sake of defining the kind of truth which attaches to the laws which are being gradually formulated. But one must immediately 122 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY reach either the one or the other of two very gen- eral conclusions. If the laws of natural science cover all possible knowledge of reality, then there is left to philosophy only the logical function of justifying this statement. Logic and natural sci- ence will then constitute the sum of knowledge. If, on the other hand, it be found that the aim of natural science is such as to exclude certain as- pects of reality, then philosophy will not be re- stricted to logical criticism, but will have a cog- nitive field of its own. The great majority of philosophers have assumed the latter of these alter- natives to be true, while most aggressive scientists have intended the former in their somewhat blind attacks upon " metaphysics." Although the se- lection of either of these alternatives involves us in the defence of a specific answer to a philosophi- cal question, the issue is inevitable in any intro- duction to philosophy because of its bearing upon the extent of the field of that study. Further- more there can be no better exposition of the mean- ing of philosophy of science than an illustration of its exercise. The following, then, is to be re- garded as on the one hand a tentative refutation of positivism, or the claim of natural science to he coextensive with hnowable reality; and on the NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 123 other hand a programme for the procedure of phi- losophy with reference to natural science. § 42. Science issues through imperceptible stages from organic habits and instincts which The origin of signify the possession by living creat- the Scientific interest. ures of a power to meet the environ- ment on its own terms. Every organism pos- sesses such a working knowledge of nature, and among men the first science consists in those habit- ual adjustments common to men and infra-human organisms. Man is already practising science before he recognizes it. As skill it distinguishes itself early in his history from lore, or untested tradition. Skill is familiarity with general kinds of events, together with ability to identify an in- dividual with reference to a kind, and so be pre- pared for the outcome. Thus man is inwardly prepared for the alternation of day and night, and the periods of the seasons. He practically antici- pates the procession of natural events in the count- less emergencies of his daily life. But science in the stricter sense begins when skill becomes free and social. § 43. Skill may be said to be free when the es- sential terms of the action have been abstracted from the circumstances attending them in individ- 124 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY ual experiences, and are retained as ideal plans ap- SkiiiasFree. plicable to any practical occasion. The nionkey who swings with a trapeze from his perch on the side of the cage, counts upon swinging back again without any further effort on his own part. His act and its successful issue signify his practi- cal familiarity with the natural motions of bodies. We can conceive such a performance to be accom- panied by an almost entire failure to grasp its es- sentials. It would then be necessary for nearly the whole situation to be repeated in order to induce in the monkey the same action and expectation. He would require a similar form, color, and dis- tance. But he might, on the other hand, regard as practically identical all suspended and freely swinging bodies capable of affording him support, and quite independently of their shape, size, time, or place. In this latter case his skill would be applicable to the widest possible number of cases that could present themselves. Having a discern- ing eye for essentials, he would lose no chance of a swing through looking for more than the bare necessities. When the physicist describes the pen- dulum in terms of a formula such as t = 27T'\/l/g he exhibits a similar discernment. He has found that the time occupied by an oscillation of any pen- NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 125 dulum may be calculated exclusively in terms of its length and the acceleration due to gravity. The monkey's higher proficiency and the formula alike represent a knowledge that is free in the sense that it is contained in terms that require no single fixed context in immediacy. The knowledge is valid wherever these essential terms are present; and calculations may be based upon these essential terms, while attendant circumstances vary ad infi- nitum. Such knowledge is said to be general or universal. There is another element of freedom, however, which so far has not been attributed to the monkey's knowledge, but which is evidently present in that of the physicist. The former has a practical ability to deal with a pendulum when he sees it. The latter, on the other hand, knows about a pen- dulum whether one be present or not. His knowl- edge is so retained as always to be available, even though it be not always applicable. His knowl- edge is not merely skill in treating a situation, but the possession of resources which he may employ at whatever time, and in whatever manner, may suit his interests. Knowing what he does about the pendulum, he may act from the idea of such a contrivance, and with the aid of it construct 126 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY some more complex mechanism. His formulas are his instruments, which he may use on any occasion. Suppose that a situation with factors a } b, and c requires factor d in order to become M , as desired. Such a situation might easily be hopeless for an organism reacting directly to the stimulus abc, and yet be easily met by a free knowledge of d. One who knows that I, m, and n will produce d, may by these means provide the missing factor, complete the sum of required conditions, abed, and so obtain the end M. Such indirection might be used to obtain any required factor of the end, or of any near or remote means to the end. There is, in fact, no limit to the complexity of action made possible upon this basis; for since it is available in idea, the whole range of such knowledge may be brought to bear upon any individual problem. § 44. But knowledge of this free type becomes at the same time social or institutional. It con- sidii as social, sists no longer in a skilful adaptation of the individual organism, but in a system of terms common to all intelligence, and preserved in those books and other monuments which serve as the articulate memory of the race. A knowl- edge that is social must be composed of unequivo- cal conceptions and fixed symbols. The mathe- NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 127 matical laws of the exact sciences represent the most successful attainment of this end so far as form is concerned. Furthermore, the amount of knowledge may now be increased from generation to generation through the service of those who make a vocation of its pursuit. Natural science is thus a cumulative racial proficiency, which any indi- vidual may bring to bear upon any emergency of his life. § 45. Such proficiency as science affords is in every case the anticipation of experience. This Science for nas a twofold value for mankind, that Accommoda- £ accommo ^ a f;i on anc [ that of construc- tion and Con- ' struction. tion. Primitively, where mere survival is the function of the organism as a whole, the value of accommodation is relatively fundamental. The knowledge of what may be expected enables the organism to save itself by means of its own counter-arrangement of natural processes. Con- struction is here for the sake of accommodation. But with the growth of civilization construction becomes a positive interest, and man tends to save himself for definite ends. Accommodation comes to take place for the sake of construction. Science then supplies the individual with the ways and means wherewith to execute life purposes which 128 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY themselves tend to assume an absolute value that cannot be justified merely on the ground of science. § 46. If natural science be animated by any special cognitive interest, this motive should ap- Method and pear in the development of its method Fundamental , „ , - . T . . Conceptions and fundamental conceptions. If that science. interest has been truly defined, it should sfcript^ve now ena bl e ns to understand the pro- Method, gressive and permanent in scientific in- vestigation as directly related to it. For the aim of any discipline exercises a gradual selection from among possible methods, and gives to its laws their determinate and final form. The descriptive method is at the present day fully established. A leading moral of the history of science is the superior usefulness of an exact account of the workings of nature to an explana- tion in terms of some qualitative potency. Expla- nation has been postponed by enlightened science until after a more careful observation of actual processes shall have been made ; and at length it has been admitted that there is no need of any explanation but perfect description. !Now the practical use of science defined above, requires no knowledge beyond the actual order of events. For such a purpose sufficient reason signifies only suffi- NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 129 cient conditions. All other considerations are ir- relevant, and it is proper to ignore them. Such has actually been the fate of the so-called meta- physical solution of special problems of nature. The case of Kepler is the classic instance. This great scientist supplemented his laws of planetary motion with the following speculation concerning the agencies at work: " We must suppose one of two things : either that the moving spirits, in proportion as they are more removed from the sun, are more feeble ; or that there is one moving spirit in the centre of all the orbits, namely, in the sun, which urges each body the more vehemently in propor- tion as it is nearer ; but in more distant spaces languishes in consequence of the remoteness and attenuation of its virtue." 2 The following passage from Hegel affords an interesting analogy: "The moon is the waterless crystal which seeks to complete itself by means of our sea, to quench the thirst of its arid rigidity, and therefore produces ebb and flow." 3 No scientist has ever sought to refute either of these theories. They have merely been neglected. 2 Whewell: History of the Inductive Sciences, Vol. I, p. 289. Quoted from Kepler: Mysterium Cosmographicum. 3 Quoted by Sidgwick in his Philosophy, its Scope and Relations, p. 89. 130 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY They were advanced in obedience to a demand for the ultimate explanation of the phenomena in ques- tion, and were obtained by applying such general conceptions as were most satisfying to the reasons of their respective authors. But they contributed nothing whatsoever to a practical familiarity with the natural course of events, in this case the times and places of the planets and the tides. Hence they have not been used in the building of science. In our own day investigators have become con- scious of their motive, and do not wait for histori- cal selection to exclude powers and reasons from their province. They deliberately seek to formu- late exact descriptions. To this end they employ symbols that shall serve to identify the terms of nature, and formulas that shall define their systematic relationship. These systems must be exact, or deductions cannot be made from them. Hence they tend ultimately to assume a mathe- matical form of expression. § 47. But science tends to employ for these sys- tems only such conceptions as relate to prediction ; and of these the most fundamental are Space, Time, and Prediction. S p ace anc [ time. The first science to establish its method was the science of astronomy, where measurement and computation in terms of NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 131 space and time were the most obvious means of description; and the general application of the method of astronomy by Galileo and Newton, or the development of mechanics, is the most impor- tant factor in the establishment of modern sci- ence upon a permanent working basis. The per- sistence of the term cause, testifies to the fact that science is primarily concerned with the determina- tion of events. Its definitions of objects are means of identification, while its laws are dynami- cal, i. e. } have reference to the conditions under which these objects arise. Thus the chemist may know less about the properties of water than the poet ; but he is preeminently skilled in its pro- duction from elements, and understands similarly the compounds into which it may enter. Now the general conditions of all anticipation, whereby it becomes exact and verifiable, are spacial and tem- poral. A predictable event must be assigned to what is here now, or there now; or what is here then, or there then. An experimentally verifiable system must contain space-time variables, for which can be substituted the here and now of the experi- menter's immediate experience. Hence science deals primarily with calculable places and mo- ments. The mechanical theory of nature owes its 132 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY success to a union of space and time through its conceptions of matter and motion* And the pro- jected theory of energetics must satisfy the same conditions. § 48. But, furthermore, science has, as we have seen, an interest in freeing its descriptions from The Ouantita- ^ e P ecu li ar angle and relativity of an tive Method, individual's experience, for the sake of affording him knowledge of that with which he must meet. Science enlightens the will by ac- quainting it with that which takes place in spite of it, and for which it must hold itself in readi- ness. To this end the individual benefits himself in so far as he eliminates himself from the objects which he investigates. His knowledge is useful in so far as it is valid for his own indefinitely varying stand-points, and those of other wills rec- ognized by him in his practical relations. But in 4 The reader is referred to Mr. Bertrand Russell's chapters on matter and motion in his Principles of Mathematics, Vol. I. Material particles he defines as "many-one rela- tions of all times to some places, or of all terms of a con- tinuous one-dimensional series t to some terms of a con- tinuous three-dimensional series s." Similarly, " when different times, throughout any period however short, are correlated with different places, there is motion; when different times, throughout some period however short, are all correlated with the same place, there is rest." Op. cit., p. 473. NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 133 attempting to describe objects in terms other than those of a specific experience, science is compelled to describe them in terms of one another. For this purpose the quantitative method is peculiarly ser- viceable. With its aid objects permit themselves to be described as multiples of one another, and as occupying positions in relation to one another. When all objects are described strictly in terms of one another, they are expressed in terms of arbi- trary units, and located in terms of arbitrary spacial or temporal axes of reference. Thus there arises the universe of the scientific imagina- tion, a vast complexity of material displacements and transformations, without color, music, pleas- ure, or any of all that rich variety of qualities that the least of human experiences contains. It does not completely rationalize or even completely describe such experiences, but formulates their suc- cession. To this end they are reduced to terms that correspond to no specific experience, and for this very reason may be translated again into all definable hypothetical experiences. The solar sys- tem for astronomy is not a bird's-eye view of elliptical orbits, with the planets and satellites in definite phases. ISTor is it this group of objects from any such point of view, or from any number 134 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY of such points of view ; but a formulation of their motions that will serve as the key to an infinite number of their appearances. Or, consider the picture of the ichthysauria romping in the meso- zoic sea, that commonly accompanies a text-book of geology. Any such picture, and all such pict- ures, with their coloring and their temporal and spacial perspective, are imaginary. !No such spe- cial and exclusive manifolds can be defined as hav- ing been then and there realized. But we have a geological knowledge of this period, that fulfils the formal demands of natural science, in so far as we can construct this and countless other specific ex- periences with reference to it. § 49. Science, then, is to be understood as springing from the practical necessity of antici- The General pating the environment. This antici- Development of Science. pation appears first as congenital or acquired reactions on the part of the organism. Such reactions imply a fixed coordination or sys- tem in the environment whereby a given circum- stance determines other circumstances ; and science proper arises as the formulation of such systems. The requirement that they shall apply to the phenomena that confront the will, determines their spacial, temporal, and quantitative form. The NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 135 progress of science is marked by the growth of these conceptions in the direction of comprehen siveness on the one hand, and of refinement and delicacy on the other. Man lives in an environ- ment that is growing at the same time richer and more extended, but with a compensatory simplifi- cation in the ever closer systematization of scien- tific conceptions under the form of the order of nature. § 50. At the opening of this chapter it was maintained that it is a function of philosophy to The Determi- criticise science through its generating Limits of Nat- P r °M em > or its self-imposed task viewed urai science. ag determining its province and selecting its categories. The above account of the origin and method of science must suffice as a definition of its generating problem, and afford the basis of our answer to the question of its limits. Enough has been said to make it clear that philosophy is not in the field of science, and is therefore not entitled to contest its result in detail or even to take sides within the province of its special prob- lems. Furthermore, philosophy should not aim to restrain science by the imposition of external bar- riers. Whatever may be said of the sufficiency of its categories in any region of the world, that body 136 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY of truth of which mathematics, mechanics, and physics are the foundations, must be regarded as a whole that tends to be all-comprehensive in its own terms. There remains for philosophy, then, the critical examination of these terms, and the appraisal as a whole of the truth that they may express. § 51. The impossibility of embracing the whole of knowledge within natural science is due to the Natural fact that the latter is abstract. This Science is Abstract. follows from the fact that natural sci- ence is governed by a selective interest. The for- mulation of definitions and laws in exclusively mechanical terms is not due to the exhaustive or even preeminent reality of these properties, but to their peculiar serviceableness in a verifiable de- scription of events. Natural science does not affirm that reality is essentially constituted of mat- ter, or essentially characterized by motion; but is interested in the mechanical aspect of reality, and describes it quite regardless of other evident as- pects and without meaning to prejudice them. It is unfortunately true that the scientist has rarely been clear in his own mind on this point. It is only recently that he has partially freed himself from the habit of construing his terms as final and NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 137 exhaustive. 5 This he was able to do even to his own satisfaction, only by allowing loose rein to the imagination. Consider the example of the atomic theory. In order to describe such occurrences as chemical combination, or changes in volume and density, the scientist has employed as a unit the least particle, physically indivisible and qualita- tively homogeneous. Look for the atom in the body of science, and you will find it in physical laws governing expansion and contraction, and in chemical formulas. There the real responsibility of science ends. But whether through the need of popular exposition, or the undisciplined imagina- tion of the investigator himself, atoms have figured in the history of thought as round corpuscles of a grayish hue scurrying hither and thither, and armed with special appliances wherewith to lock in molecular embrace. Although this is nonsense, we need not on that account conclude that there 6 That the scientist still permits himself to teach the people a loose exoteric theory of reality, is proven by Pro- fessor Ward's citation of instances in his Naturalism and Agnosticism. So eminent a physicist as Lord Kelvin is quoted as follows : " You can imagine particles of some- thing, the thing whose motion constitutes light. This thing we call the luminiferous ether. That is the only substance we are confident of in dynamics. One thing we are sure of, and that is the reality and substantiality of the luminiferous ether." Vol. I, p. 113. 138 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY are no atoms. There are atoms in precisely the sense intended by scientific law, in that the formu- las computed with the aid of this concept are true of certain natural processes. The conception of ether furnishes a similar case. Science is not re- sponsible for the notion of a quivering gelatinous substance pervading space, but only for certain laws that, e. g., describe the velocity of light in terms of the vibration. It is true that there is such a thing as ether, not as gratuitously rounded out by the imagination, with various attributes of immediate experience, but just in so far as this concept is employed in verified descriptions of radiation, magnetism, or electricity. Strictly speaking science asserts nothing about the existence of ether, but only about the behavior, e. g., of light. If true descriptions of this and other phenomena are reached by employing units of wave propaga- tion in an elastic medium, then ether is proved to exist in precisely the same sense that linear feet are proved to exist, if it be admitted that there are 90,000,000 x 5,280 of them between the earth and the sun. And to imagine in the one case a jelly with all the qualities of texture, color, and the like, that an individual object of sense would possess, is much the same as in the other to imag- NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 139 ine the heavens filled with foot-rules and tape- measures. There is but one safe procedure in dealing with scientific concepts : to regard them as true so far as they describe, and no whit further. To supplement the strict meaning which has been verified and is contained in the formularies of science, with such vague predicates as will suffice to make entities of them, is mere ineptness and confusion of thought. And it is only such a sup- plementation that obscures their abstractness. For a mechanical description of things, true as it doubt- less is, is even more indubitably incomplete. § 52. But though the abstractness involved in scientific description is open and deliberate, we The Meaning must come to a more precise under- of Abstract- ness in Truth, standing of it, if we are to draw any conclusion as to what it involves. In his " Prin- ciples of Human Knowledge," the English phi- losopher Bishop Berkeley raises the question as to the universal validity of mathematical demonstra- tions. If we prove from the image or figure of an isosceles right triangle that the sum of its angles is equal to two right angles, how can we know that this proposition holds of all triangles? " To which I answer, that, though the idea I have in view whilst I make the demonstration be, for instance, 140 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY that of an isosceles rectangular triangle whose sides are of a determinate length, I may nevertheless be certain it extends to all other rectilinear triangles, of what sort or bigness soever. And that because neither the right angle, nor the equality, nor determinate length of the sides are at all concerned in the demonstration. It is true the diagram I have in view includes all these par- ticulars; but then there is not the least mention made of them in the proof of the proposition." 9 Of the total conditions present in the concrete picture of a triangle, one may in one's calculations neglect as many as one sees fit, and work with the remainder. Then, if one has clearly distinguished the conditions used, one may confidently assert that whatever has been found true of them holds regardless of the neglected conditions. These may be missing or replaced by others, provided the selected or (for any given investigation) essential conditions are not affected. That which is true once is true always, provided time is not one of its conditions; that which is true in one place is true everywhere, provided location is not one of its conditions. But, given any concrete situation, the more numerous the conditions one ignores in one's calculations, the less adequate are one's calcula- tions to that situation. The number of its inhabi- 9 Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduc- tion. Edition of Fraser, p. 248. NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 141 tants, and any mathematical operation made with that number, is true, but only very abstractly true of a nation. A similar though less radical ab- stractness appertains to natural science. Simple qualities of sound or color, and distinctions of beauty or moral worth, together with many other ingredients of actual experience attributed therein to the objects of nature, are ignored in the me- chanical scheme. There is a substitution of cer- tain mechanical arrangements in the case of the first group of properties, the simple qualities of sense, so that they may be assimilated to the gen- eral scheme of events, and their occurrence pre- dicted. But their intrinsic qualitative character is not reckoned with, even in psychology, where the physiological method finally replaces them with brain states. Over and above these neglected properties of things there remain the purposive activities of thought. It is equally preposterous to deny them and to describe them in mechani- cal terms. It is plain, then, that natural science calculates upon the basis of only a fraction of the conditions that present themselves in actual experi- ence. Its conclusions, therefore, though true so far as they go, and they may be abstractly true of everything, are completely true of nothing. 142 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY § 53. Such, in brief, is the general charge of inadequacy which may be urged against natural But Scientific science, not in the spirit of detraction, Truth is Valid for Reality. but for the sake of a more sound belief concerning reality. The philosopher falls into error no less radical than that of the dogmatic scientist, when he charges the scientist with un- truth, and attaches to his concepts the predicate of unreality. The fact that the concepts of science are selected, and only inadequately true of reality, should not be taken to mean that they are sportive or arbitrary. They are not " devices " or abbre- viations, in any sense that does not attach to such symbolism as all thought involves. Nor are they merely " hypothetical," though like all thought they are subject to correction. 7 The scientist does not merely assert that the equation for energy is true if nature's capacity for work be measurable, but that such is actually the case. The statistician does not arrive at results contingent upon the sup- position that men are numerable, but declares his sums and averages to be categorically true. Simi- larly scientific laws are true; only, to be sure, so 7 The reader who cares to pursue this topic further is referred to the writer's discussion of "Professor Ward's Philosophy of Science" in the Journal of Philosophy. Psy- chology and Scientific Methods, Vol. I, No. 13. NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 143 far as they go, but with no condition save the con- dition that attaches to all knowledge, viz., that it shall not need correction. The philosophy of sci- ence, therefore, is not the adversary of science, but supervenes upon science in the interests of the ideal of final truth. No philosophy of science is sound which does not primarily seek by an analysis of scientific concepts to understand science on its own grounds. Philosophy may understand science bet- ter than science understands itself, but only by holding fast to the conviction of its truth, and in- cluding it within whatever account of reality it may be able to formulate. § 54. Though philosophy be the most ancient and most exalted of human disciplines, it is not Relative infrequently charged with being the * T3i C U C £11 Value of most unprofitable. Science has amassed Science and Philosophy, a fortune of information, which has facilitated life and advanced civilization. Is not philosophy, on the other hand, all programme and idle questioning ? In the first place, no question- ing is idle that is logically possible. It is true that philosophy shows her skill rather in the ask- ing than in the answering of questions. But the formal pertinence of a question is of the greatest significance. No valid though unanswered ques- 144 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY tion can have a purely negative value, and especially as respects the consistency or completeness of truth. But, in the second place, philosophy with all its limitations serves mankind as indispensably as science. If science supplies the individual with means of self-preservation, and the instruments of achievement, philosophy supplies the ideals, or the objects of deliberate construction. Such reflection as justifies the adoption of a fundamental life pur- pose is always philosophical. For every judgment respecting final worth is a judgment sub specie eternitatis. And the urgency of life requires the individual to pass such judgments. It is true that however persistently reflective he may be in the matter, his conclusion will be premature in con- sideration of the amount of evidence logically de- manded for such a judgment. But he must be as wise as he can, or he will be as foolish as conven- tionality and blind impulse may impel him to be. Philosophy determines for society what every in- dividual must practically determine upon for him- self, the most reasonable plan of reality as a whole which the data and reflection of an epoch can afford. It is philosophy's service to mankind to compensate for the enthusiasm and concentration of the specialist, a service needed in every " pres- NATURAL SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 145 ent day." Apart from the philosopher, public opinion is the victim of sensationalism, and indi- vidual opinion is further warped by accidental propinquity. It is the function of philosophy to interpret knowledge for the sake of a sober and wise belief. The philosopher is the true prophet, appearing before men in behalf of that which is finally the truth. He is the spokesman of the most considerate and comprehensive reflection pos- sible at any stage in the development of human thought. Owing to a radical misconception of function, the man of science has in these later days begun to regard himself as the wise man, and to teach the people. Popular materialism is the logical outcome of this determination of belief by natural science. It may be that this is due as much to the indifference of the philosopher as to the forwardness of the scientist, but in any case the result is worse than conservative loyalty to re- ligious tradition. For religion is corrected surely though slowly by the whole order of advancing truth. Its very inflexibility makes it proof against an over-emphasis upon new truth. It has generally turned out in time that the obstinate man of religion was more nearly right than the adaptable intellectual man of fashion. But phi- 146 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY losophy, as a critique of science for the sake of faith, should provide the individual religious be- liever with intellectual enlightenment and gentle- ness. The quality, orderliness, and inclusiveness of knowledge, finally determine its value ; and the philosopher, premature as his synthesis may some day prove to be, is the wisest man of his own gen- eration. From him the man of faith should obtain such discipline of judgment as shall enable him to be fearless of advancing knowledge, because ac- quainted with its scope, and so intellectually can- did with all his visions and his inspirations. PART II THE SPECIAL PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY CHAPTER VI METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY § 55. The stand-point and purpose of the phi- losopher define his task, but they do not necessarily The impossi- prearrange the division of it. That the bility of an . . . . . Absolute task is a complex one, embracing many Division of the it it i • i , i Problem of subordinate problems which must be philosophy, treated seriatim, is attested both by the breadth of its scope and the variety of the inter- ests from which it may be approached. But this complexity is qualified by the peculiar importance which here attaches to unity. That which lends philosophical quality to any reflection is a stead- fast adherence to the ideals of inclusiveness and consistency. Hence, though the philosopher must of necessity occupy himself with subordinate prob- lems, these cannot be completely isolated from one another, and solved successively. Perspective is his most indispensable requisite, and he has solved no problem finally until he has provided for the solution of all. His own peculiar conceptions are 149 150 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY those which order experience, and reconcile such aspects of it as other interests have distinguished. Hence the compatibility of any idea with all other ideas is the prime test of its philosophical suffi- ciency. On these grounds it may confidently be asserted that the work of philosophy cannot be assigned by the piece to different specialists, and then assembled. There are no special philosoph- ical problems which can be finally solved upon their own merits. Indeed, such problems could never even be named, for in their discreteness they would cease to be philosophical. The case of metaphysics and epistemology affords an excellent illustration. The former of these is commonly defined as the theory of real- ity or of first principles, the latter as the theory of knowledge. But the most distinctive philosoph- ical movement of the nineteenth century issues from the idea that knowing and being are iden- tical. 1 The prime reality is defined as a knowing mind, and the terms of reality are interpreted as terms of a cognitive process. Ideas and logical principles constitute the world. It is evident that in this Hegelian philosophy epistemology embraces 1 The post-Kantian movement in Germany — especially in so far as influenced by Hegel. See Chap. XII. METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 151 metaphysics. In defining the relations of knowl- edge to its object, one has already defined one's fundamental philosophical conception, while logic, as the science of the universal necessities of thought, will embrace the first principles of real- ity. Now, were one to divide and arrange the prob- lems of philosophy upon this basis, it is evident that one would not have deduced the arrangement from the general problem of philosophy, but from a single attempted solution of that problem. It might serve as an exposition of Hegel, but not as a general philosophical programme. Another case in point is provided by the present- day interest in what is called " pragmatism." 2 This doctrine is historically connected with Kant's principle of the " primacy of the practical rea- son," in which he maintained that the conscious- ness of duty is a profounder though less scientific insight than the knowledge of objects. The cur- rent doctrine maintains that thought with its fruits is an expression of interest, and that the will which evinces and realizes such an interest is more orig- inal and significant than that which the thinking defines. Such a view attaches a peculiar impor- tance to the springs of conduct, and in its more 2 Cf. §203. 152 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY systematic development 3 has regarded ethics as the true propaedeutic and proof of philosophy. But to make ethics the key-stone of the arch, is to de- fine a special philosophical system; for it is the very problem of philosophy to dispose the parts of knowledge with a view to systematic construction. The relation of the provinces of metaphysics, epis- temology, logic, and ethics cannot, then, be defined without entering these provinces and answering the questions proper to them. § 56. Since the above terms exist, however, there can be no doubt but that important divisions The Depend- within the general aim of philosophy ence of the Order of Phil- have actually been made. The inevi- osophical . Problems tableness of it appears m the variety of upon the Ini- .. . . . .. . tiai interest, the sources from which that aim may spring. The point of departure will always de- termine the emphasis and the application which the philosophy receives. If philosophy be needed to supplement more special interests, it will re- ceive a particular character from whatever inter- est it so supplements. He who approaches it from a definite stand-point will find in it primarily an interpretation of that stand-point. § 57. There are two sources of the philosophical *E. g., the system of Fichte. Cf. § 177. METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 153 aim, which are perennial in their human signifi- cance. He, firstly, who begins with the demands Philosophy as of life and its ideals, looks to philoso- the Interpreta- tion of Life, phy for a reconciliation of these with the orderly procedure of nature. His philosophy will receive its form from its illumination of life, and it will be an ethical or religious philosophy. Spinoza, the great seventeenth-century philosopher who justified mysticism after the manner of mathe- matics, 4 displays this temper in his philosophy : "After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in them- selves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to in- quire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else : whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, su- preme, and unending happiness." 5 In pursuance of this aim, though he deals with the problem of being in the rigorous logical fash- ion of his day, the final words of his great work are, " Of Human Freedom " : "Whereas the wise man, in so far as he is regarded as such, is scarcely at all disturbed in spirit, but, being * See Chap. XI. 5 Spinoza: On the Improvement of the Understanding. Translation by Elwes, p. 3. 154 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY 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. If the way which I have pointed out as leading to this result seems exceed- ingly 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." 6 § 58. On the other hand, one who looks to phi- losophy for the extension and correction of scien- pwiosophyas tific knowledge will be primarily inter- the Extension . _ . , of Science. ested m the philosophical definition of ultimate conceptions, and in the method wherewith such a definition is obtained. Thus the philosophy of the scientist will tend to be logical and meta- physical. Such is the case with Descartes and Leibniz, who are nevertheless intimately related to Spinoza in the historical development of philos- ophy. " Several years have now elapsed/' says the former, "since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was "con- vinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of com- 8 Spinoza: Ethics, Part V, Proposition XLII. Translation by Elwes, p. 270. METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 155 mencing anew the work of building from the foundation, if I desired to establish a firm and abiding superstructure in the sciences." 7 Leibniz's mind was more predominantly logical even than Descartes's. He sought in philosophy a supreme intellectual synthesis, a science of the universe. " Although," he says retrospectively, " I am one of those who have worked much at mathematics, I have none the less meditated upon philosophy from my youth up; for it always seemed to me that there was a possi- bility of establishing something solid in philosophy by clear demonstrations. ... I perceived, after much medi- tation, that it is impossible to find the principles of a real unity in matter alone, or in that which is only pas- sive, since it is nothing but a collection or aggregation of parts ad infinitum." 8 § 59. Though these types are peculiarly repre- sentative, they are by no means exhaustive. There The Historical are as many possibilities of emphasis as Differentia- / L r tion of the there are incentives to philosophical re- Philosophical Problem. flection. It is not possible to exhaust the aspects of experience which may serve as bases from which such thought may issue, and to which, after its synthetic insight, it may return. But it is evident that such divisions of philosophy rep- 7 Descartes: Meditations, I. Translation by Veitch, p. 97. 8 Leibniz: New System of the Nature of Substances. Trans- lation by Latta, pp. 299, 300. 156 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY resent in their order, and in the sharpness with which they are sundered, the intellectual autobiog- raphy of the individual philosopher. There is but one method by which that which is peculiar either to the individual, or to the special position which he adopts, may be eliminated. Though it is im- possible to tabulate the empty programme of phi- losophy, we may name certain special problems that have appeared in its history. Since this history comprehends the activities of many individuals, a general validity attaches to it. There has been, moreover, a certain periodicity in the emergence of these problems, so that it may fairly be claimed for them that they indicate inevitable phases in the development of human reflection upon experience. They represent a normal differentiation of interest which the individual mind, in the course of its own thinking, tends to follow. It is true that it can never be said with assurance that any age is utterly blind to any aspect of experience. This is obviously the case with the practical and theoreti- cal interests which have just been distinguished. There is no age that does not have some practical | consciousness of the world as a whole, nor any . which does not seek more or less earnestly to uni- versalize its science. But though it compel us to METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 157 deal abstractly with, historical epochs, there is abundant compensation in the possibility which this method affords of finding the divisions of philosophy in the manifestation of the living phil- osophical spirit. § 60. To Thales, one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, is commonly awarded the honor of being Metaphysics khe founder of European philosophy. Fundamental -^ he d esery e this distinction, it is on conception. accoim t f the question which he raised, and not on account of the answer which he gave to it. Aristotle informs us that Thales held " water " to be " the material cause of all things." 9 This crude theory is evidently due to an interest in the totality of things, an interest which is therefore philosophical. But the interest of this first philosopher has a more definite character. It looks toward the definition in terms of some single conception, of the constitution of the world. As a child might conceivably think the moon to be made of green cheese, so philosophy in its child- hood thinks here of all things as made of water. Water was a well-known substance, possessing well- known predicates. To define all nature in terms of it, was to maintain that in spite of superficial 9 Burnet: Early Greek Philosophy, p. 42. 158 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY differences, all things have these predicates in com- mon. They are the predicates which qualify for reality, and compose a community of nature from which all the individual objects and events of nature arise. The successors of Thales were evi- dently dissatisfied with his fundamental concep- tion, because of its lack of generality. They seized upon vaguer substances like air and fire, for the very definiteness of the nature of water for- bids the identification of other substances with it. But what is so obviously true of water is scarcely less true of air and fire ; and it appeared at length that only a substance possessing the most general characters of body, such as shape, size, and mobil- ity, could be thought as truly primeval and univer- sal. In this wise a conception like our modern physical conception of matter came at length into vogue. Now the problem of which these were all tentative solutions is, in general, the problem of metaphysics; although this term belongs to a later era, arising only from the accidental place of the discussion of first principles after physics in the system of Aristotle. The attempt to secure a most fundamental conception which attaches some defi- nite meaning to the reality including and inform- ing every particular thing, is metaphysics. METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 159 § 61. It must not be supposed that metaphysics is dogmatically committed to the reduction of all Monism and reality to a unity of nature. It is quite Pluralism. consistent with its purpose that the parts of reality should be found to compose a group, or an indefinite multitude of irreducibly different entities. But it is clear that even such an account of things deals with what is true of all reality, and even in acknowledging the variety of its constituents, attributes to them some kind of relationship. The degree to which such a relation- ship is regarded as intimate and essential, deter- mines the degree to which any metaphysical sys- tem is monistic, 10 rather than pluralistic. But the significance of this difference will be better appre- ciated after a further differentiation of the meta- physical problem has been noted. § 62. It has already been suggested that the test of Thales's conception lay in the possibility of Ontology and deriving nature from it. A world prin- ConTern Bring ciple must be fruitful. Now an ab- and Process. gtrac |. distinction has prevailed more or less persistently in metaphysics, between the gen- eral definition of being, called ontology, and the 10 No little ambiguity attaches to the term "monism" in current usage, because of its appropriation by those who 160 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY study of the processes wherewith being is divided into things and events. This latter study has to do primarily with the details of experience enu- merated and systematized by the natural sciences. To reconcile these, or the course of nature, with the fundamental definition of being, is the prob- lem of cosmology. Cosmology is the construing of the prima facie reality in terms of the essential reality. It is the proof and the explanation of ontology. Since the most familiar part of the prima facie reality, the part almost exclusively no- ticed by the naive mind, is embraced within the field of the physical sciences, the term cosmology has come more definitely to signify the philosophy of nature. It embraces such an examination of space, time, matter, causality, etc., as seeks to answer the most general questions about them, and provide for them in the world thought of as most profoundly real. Such a study receives its philo- sophical character from its affiliation with ontol- ogy, as the latter would find its application in cosmology. § 63. But in addition to the consideration of maintain that the universe is unitary and homogeneous in 'physical terms (cf. § 108). It should properly be used to emphasize the unity of the world in any terms. METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 161 the various parts of nature, cosmology has com- Mechanicai monly dealt with a radical and far- caftaamohf-" reacn i n g alternative that appeared at gies * the very dawn of metaphysics. Dif- ferences may ariss within a world constituted of a single substance or a small group of ultimate substances, by changes in the relative position and grouping of the parts. Hence the virtue of the conception of motion. The theory which explains all differences by motions of the parts of a quali- tatively simple world, is called mechanism. An- other source of change familiar to naive experi- ence is will, or the action of living creatures. According to the mechanical theory, changes occur on account of the natural motions of the parts of matter; according to the latter or teleological conception, changes are made by a formative agency directed to some end. Among the early Greek philosophers, Leucippus was an exponent of mechanism. "He says that the worlds arise when many bodies are collected together into the mighty void from the surrounding space and rush together. They come into collision, and those which are of similar shape and like form become entangled, and from their entanglement the heavenly bodies arise." " 11 Burnet: Op. cit., p. 358. 162 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY Anaxagoras, on the other hand, was famed for his doctrine of the Nous, or Intelligence, to whose di- rection he attributed the whole process of the world. The following is translated from extant fragments of his book, " irepl v<;" : " And Nous had power over the whole revolution, so that it began to revolve in the beginning. And it began to revolve first from a small beginning; but the revolu- tion now extends over a larger space, and will extend over a larger still. And all the things that are mingled together and separated off and distinguished are all known by the Nous. And Nous set in order all things that were to be and that were, and all things that are not now and that are, and this revolution in which now revolve the stars and the sun and the moon, and the air and the ether that are separated off." 12 § 64. It is clear, furthermore, that the doctrine of Anaxagoras not only names a distinct kind of Dualism. cause, but also ascribes to it an inde- pendence and intrinsic importance that do not belong to motion. Whereas motion is a property of matter, intelligence is an originative power working out purposes of its own choosing. Hence we have here to do with a new ontology. If we construe ultimate being in terms of mind, we have a definite substitute for the physical theories out- lined above. Such a theory is scarcely to be at- tributed to any Greek philosopher of the early 12 Burnet: Op. (At., p. 284. METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 163 period ; it belongs to a more sophisticated stage in the development of thought, after the rise of the problem of episteniology. But Anaxagoras's sharp distinction between the material of the world on the one hand, and the author of its order and evo- lution on the other, is in itself worthy of notice. It contains the germ of a recurrent philosophical dualism, which differs from pluralism in that it finds two and only two fundamental divisions of being, the physical, material, or potential on the one hand, and the mental, formal, or ideal on the other. § 65. Finally, the alternative possibilities which these cosmological considerations introduce, bear The New directly upon the general question of Mon^nfand tne interdependence of the parts of the Pluralism. WO rld, a question which has already appeared as pertinent in ontology. Monism and pluralism now obtain a new meaning. Where the world process is informed with some singleness of plan, as teleology proposes, the parts are recip- rocally necessary, and inseparable from the unity. Where, on the other hand, the processes are random and reciprocally fortuitous, as Leucippus proposes, the world as a whole is an aggregate rather than a unity. In this way uniformity in kind of being 164 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY may prevail in a world the relations of whose parts are due to chance, while diversity in kind of being may prevail in a world knit together by some thorough-going plan of organization. Thus mon- ism and pluralism are conceptions as proper to cos- mology as to ontology. But enough has been said to demonstrate the interdependence of ontology and cosmology, of the theory of being and the theory of differentiation and process. Such problems can be only abstractly sundered, and the distinctive character of any metaphysical system will usually consist in some theory determining their relation. Philosophy returns to these metaphysical problems with its thought enriched and its method complicated, after becoming thoroughly alive to the problems of epistemology, logic, and ethics. §66. Epistemology is the theory of the possibil- ity of knowledge, and issues from criticism and Epistemology scepticism. If we revert again to the Seeks to Un- derstand the history of Greek philosophy, we find a Possibility of Knowledge. first period of enterprising speculation giving place to a second period of hesitancy and doubt. This phase of thought occurs simulta- neously with the brilliantly humanistic age of Pericles, and it is undoubtedly true that energy is METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 165 withdrawn from speculation largely for the sake of expending it in the more lively and engaging pursuits of politics and art. But there are patent reasons within the sphere of philosophy itself for entailment of activity and taking of stock. For three centuries men have taken their philosophical powers for granted, and used them without ques- tioning them. Repeated attacks upon the prob- lem of reality have resulted in no concensus of opinion, but only in a disagreement among the wise men themselves. A great variety of mere theories has been substituted for the old unanimity of religious tradition and practical life. It is natural under these circumstances to infer that in philosophy man has overreached himself. He would more profitably busy himself with affairs that belong to his own sphere, and find a basis for life in his immediate relations with his fellows. The sophists, learned in tradition, and skilled in disputation, but for the most part entirely lacking in originality, are the new prophets. As teachers of rhetoric and morals, they represent the prac- tical and secular spirit of their age ; while in their avoidance of speculation, and their critical justifi- cation of that course, they express its sceptical philosophy. 166 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY § 67. In their self-justification certain of the sophists attached themselves to a definite doctrine Scepticism, maintained by those of their prede- and^nosti- cessors an d contemporaries who were cism * atomists, or followers of that same Leucippus whom we have quoted. This doctrine was the result of an attempt to construe perception in terms of the motion of atoms. Outer objects were said to give off fine particles which, through the mediation of the sense organs, impinged upon the soul-atom. But it was evident even to the early- exponents of this theory that according to such an account, each perceiver is relegated to a world peculiar to his own stand-point. His perception informs him concerning his own states as affected by things, rather than concerning the things them- selves. Upon this ground the great sophist Pro- tagoras is said to have based his dictum : Hdvrtov Xprj/xdrtov fxirpov avdpwrros, — " Man is the measure of all things." This is the classic statement of the doctrine of relativity. But we have now entered v " into the province of epistemology, and various alternatives confront us. Reduce thought to per- ception, define perception as relative to each indi- vidual, and you arrive at scepticism, or the denial of the possibility of valid knowledge. Plato ex- METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 167 pounds this consequence in the well-known discus- sion of Protagoras that occurs in the " Theaetetus." "I am charmed with his doctrine, that what appears is to each one, but I wonder that he did not begin his book on Truth with a declaration that a pig or a dog- faced baboon, or some other yet stranger monster which has sensation, is the measure of all things; then he might have shown a magnificent contempt for our opinion of him by informing us at the outset that while we were reverencing him like a God for his wisdom, he was no better than a tadpole, not to speak of his fellow-men — would not this have produced an overpowering effect? For if truth is only sensation, and no man can discern another's feelings better than he, or has any superior right to determine whether his opinion is true or false, but each, as we have several times repeated, is to himself the sole judge, and everything that he judges is true and right, why, my friend, should Protagoras be preferred to the place of wisdom and instruction, and deserve to be well paid, and we poor ignoramuses have to go to him, if each one is the measure of his own wisdom? . . . The attempt to supervise or refute the notions or opinions of others would be a tedious and enormous piece of folly, if to each man his own are right; and this must be the case if Protagoras's Truth is the real truth, and the philosopher is not merely amusing himself by giving oracles out of the shrine of his book." 13 This is the full swing of the pendulum from dog- matism, or the uncritical conviction of truth. A modified form of scepticism has been developed in these later days under the influence of natural sci- 13 Plato: Theoetetus, 161. Translation by Jowett. Ref- erences to Plato are to the marginal paging. 168 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY ence, and is called agnosticism or positivism. It accepts the Protagorean doctrine only in the sense of attributing to human knowledge as a whole an incapacity for exceeding the range of perception. Beyond this realm of natural science, where theories can be sensibly verified, lies the unknow- able realm, more real, but forever inaccessible. § 68. It is important to note that both scepti- cism and agnosticism agree in regarding percep- The Source tion as the essential factor in knowledge. and Criterion of Knowledge bo lar at any rate as our knowledge is Empiricism concerned, the certification of being con- and Rational- • , . • •..,., T7 - -. ■• ism sists m perceivability. .Knowledge is Mysticism. coextensive with actual and possible human experience. This account of the source and criterion of knowledge is called empiricism, in distinction from the counter-theory of ration- alism. The rationalistic motive was a quickening in- fluence in Greek philosophy long before it became deliberate and conspicuous in Socrates and Plato. Parmenides, founder of the Eleatic School, has left behind him a poem divided into two parts: " The Way of Truth " and " The Way of Opin- ion." 14 In the first of these he expounds his u Burnet: Early Greek Philosophy, pp. 184, 187. METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 169 esoteric philosophy, which is a definition of being established by dialectical reasoning. He finds that being must be single, eternal, and changeless, because otherwise it cannot be thought and defined without contradiction. The method which Par- menides here employs presupposes that knowledge consists in understanding rather than perception. Indeed, he regards the fact that the world of the senses is manifold and mutable as of little conse- quence to the wise man. The world of sense is the province of vulgar opinion, while that of rea- son is the absolute truth revealed only to the phi- losopher. The truth has no concern with appear- ance, but is answerable only to the test of rationality. That world is real which one is able by thinking to make intelligible. The world is what a world must be in order to be possible at all, and the philosopher can deduce it directly from the very conditions of thought which it must satisfy. He who would know reality may disregard what seems to be, provided he can by reflective analysis discover certain general necessities to which being must conform. This is rationalism in its extreme form. The rationalism of Socrates was more moderate, as it was more fruitful than that of Parmenides. 170 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY As is well known, Socrates composed no philo- sophical books, but sought to inculcate wisdom in his teaching and conversation. His method of inculcating wisdom was to evoke it in his inter- locutor by making him considerate of the meaning of his speech. Through his own questions he sought to arouse the questioning spirit, which should weigh the import of words, and be satis- fied with nothing short of a definite and consistent judgment. In the Platonic dialogues the Socratic method obtains a place in literature. In the " Thesetetus," which is, perhaps, the greatest of all epistemological treatises, Socrates is represented as likening his vocation to that of the midwife. "Well, my art of midwifery is in most respects like theirs, but differs in that I attend men, and not women, and I look after their souls when they are in labor, and not after their bodies: and the triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of the young man brings forth is a false idol or a noble and true birth. And, like the midwives, I am barren, and the reproach which is often made against me, that I ask questions of others and have not the wit to answer them myself, is very just; the reason is that the god compels me to be a midwife, but does not allow me to bring forth. And therefore I am not myself at all wise, nor have I anything to show which is the invention or birth of my own soul, but those who converse with me profit. . . . It is quite clear that they never METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 171 learned anything from me; the many fine discoveries to which they cling are of their own making." 1B The principle underlying this method is the insist- ence that a proposition, to be true of reality, must at least bespeak a mind that is true to itself, in- ternally luminous, and free from contradiction. That which is to me nothing that I can express in form that will convey precise meaning and bear analysis, is so far nothing at all. Being is not, as the empiricist would have it, ready at hand, ours for the looking, but is the fruit of critical reflection. Only reason, overcoming the relativity of perception, and the chaos of popular opinion, can lay hold on the universal truth. A very interesting tendency to clothe the articu- lations of thought with the immediacy of percep- tion is exhibited in mysticism, which attributes the highest cognitive power to an experience that tran- scends thought, an ineffable insight that is the oc- casional reward of thought and virtuous living. This theory would seem to owe its great vigor to the fact that it promises to unite the universality of the rational object with the vivid presence of the empirical object, though it sacrifices the defi- nite content of both. The mystic, empiricist, and 15 Plato: Thecetetus, 150 B. Translation by Jowett. 172 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY rationalist are in these several ways led to revise their metaphysics upon the basis of their episte- mology, or to define reality in terms dictated by the means of knowing it. § 69. But within the general field of episte- mology there has arisen another issue of even The Relation greater significance in its bearing upon of Knowledge to its object metaphysics. The first issue, as we According to Realism, and have seen, has reference to the criterion the Represent- . , 1 . . ative Theory, oi knowledge, to the possibility oi ar- riving at certainty about reality, and the choice of means to that end. A second question arises, con- cerning the relation between the knowledge and its object or that which is known. This problem does not at first appear as an epistemological diffi- culty, but is due to the emphasis which the moral and religious interests of men give to the concep- tion of the self. My knowing is a part of me, a function of that soul whose welfare and eternal happiness I am seeking to secure. Indeed, my knowing is, so the wise men have always taught, the greatest of my prerogatives. Wisdom apper- tains to the philosopher, as folly to the fool. But though my knowledge be a part of me, and in me, the same cannot, lightly at any rate, be said of what I know. It would seem that I must dis- METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 173 tinguish between the knowledge, which is my act or state, an event in my life, and the known^which is object, and belongs to the context of the outer world. The object of knowledge would then be quite independent of the circumstance that I know it. This theory has acquired the name of real- ism, 16 and is evidently as close to common sense as any epistemological doctrine can be said to be. If the knowledge consists in some sign or symbol which in my mind stands for the object, but is 16 Much ambiguity attaches to the terms " realism" and "idealism" in current usage. The first had at one time in the history of philosophy a much narrower meaning than that which it now possesses. It was used to apply to those who, after Plato, believed in the independent reality of ideas, universals, or general natures. Realists in this sense were opposed to nominalists and conceptualists. Nominalism main- tained the exclusive reality of individual substances, and re- duced ideas to particular signs having, like the name, a purely symbolical or descriptive value. Conceptualism sought to unite realism and nominalism through the conception of mind, or an individual substance whose meanings may pos- sess universal validity. Though this dispute was of funda- mental importance throughout the mediaeval period, the issues involved have now been restated. Realism in the old sense will, if held, come within the scope of the broader epistemological realism defined above. Nominalism is cov- ered by empirical tendencies, and conceptualism by modern idealism. The term idealism is sometimes applied to Plato on ac- count of his designation of ideas as the ultimate realities. This would be a natural use of the term, but in our own day it has become inseparably associated with the doctrine 174 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY quite other than the object, realism is given the form known as the representative theory. This theory is due to a radical distinction between the inner world of consciousness and the outer world of things, whereby in knowledge the outer object re- quires a substitute that is qualified to belong to the inner world. Where, on the other hand, no specific and exclusive nature is attributed to the inner world, realism may flourish without the rep- resentative theory. In such a case the object would be regarded as itself capable of entering into any number of individual experiences or of remaining outside them all, and without on either account for- feiting its identity. This view was taken for granted by Plato, but is elaborately defended in our own day. During the intervening period epistemology has been largely occupied with diffi- culties inherent in the representative theory, and which attributes to being a dependence upon the activity of mind. It is of the utmost importance to keep these two meanings clear. In the preferred sense Plato is a realist, and so opposed to idealism. The term idealism is further confused on account of its employment in literature and common speech to denote the control of ideals. Although this is a kindred meaning, the student of philosophy will gain little or no help from it, and will avoid confusion if he distinguishes the term in its technical use and permits it in that capacity to acquire an independent meaning. METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 175 from that discussion there has emerged the theory of idealism, 17 the great rival theory to that of realism. § 70. The representative theory contains at least one obvious difficulty. If the thinker be The Relation confined to his ideas, and if the reality of Knowledge to its object be at the same time beyond these ideas, According to idealism. how can he ever verify their report ? Indeed, what can it mean that an idea should be true of that which belongs to a wholly different category? How under such circumstances can that which is a part of the idea be attributed with any certainty to the object? Once grant that you know only your ideas, and the object reduces to an unknown x, which you retain to account for the outward pointing or reference of the ideas, but which is not missed if neglected. The obvious though radical theory of idealism is almost inevitably the next step. Why assume that there is any object other than the state of mind, since all positive content belongs to that realm? The eighteenth century English philos- opher, Bishop Berkeley, was accused by his con- temporaries of wilful eccentricity, and even mad- ness, for his boldness in accepting this argument and drawing this conclusion: 17 See note, p. 173. 176 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY "The table I write on I say exists; that is, I see and feel it: and if I were out of my study I should say it existed; meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it. There was an odor — that is, it was smelt; there was a sound — that is, it was heard; a color or figure, and it was perceived by sight or touch. This is all that I can understand by these and the like expres- sions. For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things, without any relation to their being perceived, that is to me perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi ; nor is it possible that they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking thing which perceives them." 18 § 71. In this paragraph Berkeley maintains that it is essential to things, or at any rate to their Phenomenal- qualities, that they be perceived. This ism and ltUa " principle when expressed as an episte- PanpsycMsm. m0 ] gi ca i or metaphysical generaliza- tion, is called phenomenalism. But in another phase of his thought Berkeley emphasizes the perceiver, or spirit. The theory which maintains that the only real substances are these active selves, with their powers and their states, has been called somewhat vaguely by the name of spiritualism. 19 Philosophically it shows a strong tendency to de- 18 Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, Fraser's edition, p. 259. 19 To be distinguished from the religious sect which bears the same name. METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 177 velop into either panpsychism or transcendental- ism. The former is radically empirical. Its classic representative is the German pessimist Schopenhauer, who denned reality in terms of will because that term signified to him most eloquently the directly felt nature of the self. This imme- diate revelation of the true inwardness of being serves as the key to an " intuitive interpretation " of the gradations of nature, and will finally awaken a sense of the presence of the universal Will. § 72. Transcendentalism, or absolute idealism, on the other hand, emphasizes the rational activity, Transcenden- rather than the bare subjectivity, of the Absolute 1 se tf- ^ ie term " transcendental " has idealism. become associated with this type of idealism through Kant, whose favorite form of argument, the " transcendental deduction," was an analysis of experience with a view to discovering the categories, or formal principles of thought, implied in its meaning. From the Kantian method arose the conception of a standard or abso- lute mind for the standard experience. This mind is transcendental not in the sense of being alien, but in the sense of exceeding the human mind in the direction of what this means and strives to be. It is the ideal or normal mind, in which the true 178 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY reality is contained, with all the chaos of finite experience compounded and redeemed. There is no being hut the absolute, the one all-inclusive spiritual life, in whom all things are inherent, and whose perfection is the virtual implication of all purposive activities. " God's life . . . sees the one plan fulfilled through all the manifold lives, the single consciousness winning its purpose by virtue of all the ideas, of all the individual selves, and of all the lives. No finite view is wholly illusory. Every finite intent taken precisely in its wholeness is fulfilled in the Absolute. The least life is not neglected, the most fleeting act is a recognized part of the world's meaning. You are for the divine view all that you know yourself at this instant to be. But you are also infinitely more. The preciousness of your present purposes to yourself is only a hint of that preciousness which in the end links their meaning to the entire realm of Being." 20 The fruitfulness of the philosopher's reflective doubt concerning his own powers is now evident. Problems are raised which are not merely urgent in themselves, but which present wholly new alter- natives to the metaphysician. Rationalism and empiricism, realism and idealism, are doctrines which, though springing from the epistemological query concerning the possibility of knowledge, may 20 Quoted from Professor Josiah Royce's The World and the Individual, First Series, pp. 426-427. METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY 179 determine an entire philosophical system. They bear upon every question of metaphysics, whether the fundamental conception of being, or the prob- lems of the world's unity, origin, and significance for human life. CHAPTER VII THE NORMATIVE SCIENCES AND THE PROBLEMS OF RELIGION § 73. There are three sets of problems whose general philosophical importance depends upon the The Normative pl &ce which metaphysics assigns to the human critical faculties. Man passes judgment upon that which claims to be true, beau- tiful, or good, thus referring to ideals and stand- ards that define these values. Attempts to make these ideals explicit, and to formulate principles which regulate their attainment, have resulted in the development of the three so-called normative sciences: logic, wsthetics, and ethics. These sci- ences are said to owe their origin to the Socratic method, and it is indeed certain that their prob- lem is closely related to the general rationalistic attitude. 1 In Plato's dialogue, " Protagoras," one may observe the manner of the inception of both ethics and logic. The question at issue between Socrates and the master sophist Pro- 1 Cf. § 68. 180 NORMATIVE SCIENCES AND RELIGION 181 tagoras, is concerning the possibility of teach- ing virtue. Protagoras conducts his side of the discussion with the customary rhetorical flourish, expounding in set speeches the tradition and usage in which such a possibility is accepted. Socrates, on the other hand, conceives the issue quite differ- ently. One can neither affirm nor deny anything of virtue unless one knows what is meant by it. Even the possession of such a meaning was scarcely recognized by Protagoras, who was led by Soc- rates's questions to attribute to the various vir- tues an external grouping analogous to that of the parts of the face. But Socrates shows that since justice, temperance, courage, and the like, are ad- mittedly similar in that they are all virtues, they must have in common some essence, which is vir- tue in general. This he seeks to define in the terms, virtue is knowledge. The interest which Socrates here shows in the reduction of the ordi- nary moral judgments to a system centering in some single fundamental principle, is the ethical interest. But this is at the same time a particu- lar application of the general rationalistic method of definition, and of the general rationalistic pos- tulate that one knows nothing until one can form unitary and determinate conceptions. The recog- 182 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY nition which Socrates thus gives to criteria of knowledge is an expression of the logical interest. In a certain sense, indeed, the whole labor of Soc- rates was in the cause of the logical interest. For he sought to demonstrate that belief is not neces- sarily knowledge; that belief may or may not be true. In order that it shall be true, and con- stitute knowledge, it must be well-grounded, and accompanied by an understanding of its object. Socrates thus set the problem of logic, the discov- ery, namely, of those characters by virtue of the possession of which belief is knowledge. § 74. Logic deals with the ground of belief, and thus distinguishes itself from the psychological ac- TheAffiiia- count of the elements of the believing tions of Logic. state. 2 But it is not possible sharply to sunder psychology and logic. This is due to the fact that the general principles which make belief true, may be regarded quite independently of this fact. They then become the most general truth, belonging to the absolute, archetypal realm, or to the mind of God. 3 When the general prin- ciples of certainty are so regarded, logic can be 2 The Socratic distinction between the logical and the psychological treatment of belief finds its best expression in Plato's Gorgias, especially, 454, 455. Cf. also § 29. 3 Thus, e. g. Hegel. See § 179. Cf. also §§199, 200. NORMATIVE SCIENCES AND RELIGION 183 distinguished from metaphysics only by adding to the study of the general principles themselves, the study of the special conditions (mainly psy- chological) under which they may be realized among men. In the history of human thought the name of logic belongs to the study of this attain- ment of truth, as the terms aesthetics and ethics belong to the studies of the attainment of beauty and goodness. 4 It is evident that logic will have a peculiar importance for the rationalist. For the empiricist, proposing to report upon things as they are given, will tend on the whole to maintain that knowledge has no properties save those which are given to it by its special subject- matter. One cannot, in short, define any absolute relationship between the normative sciences and the other branches of philosophy. § 75. Logic is the formulation, as independently as possible of special subject-matter, of that which Logic Deals conditions truth in belief. Since logic with the Most General con- is concerned with truth only in so far ditions of . . Truth in Belief, as it is predicated of belief, and since belief in so far as true is knowledge, logic can be defined as the formulation of the most general principles of knowledge. The principles so for- 4 Cf . § 84. 184 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY mulated would be those virtually used to justify belief or to disprove the imputation of error. § 76. What is called formal logic is animated with the hope of extracting these formulations The Parts of directly from an analysis of the pro- DefinTtion° glC cedure of thought. The most general SftenS^d lo S ical Principles which have appeared observation. in the Historical development of formal logic are definition, self-evidence, inference, and observation. Each of these has been given special study, and each has given rise to special issues. Definition has to do with the formation of con- cepts, or determinate and unequivocal meanings. The universality of such concepts, and their conse- quent relation to particular things, was, as we have seen, investigated at a very early date, and gave rise to the great realistic-nominalistic controversy. 5 A large part of the logical discussion in the Pla- tonic dialogues is an outgrowth of the earlier " eristic," a form of disputation in favor with the sophists, and consisting in the adroit use of am- biguity. 6 It is natural that in its first conscious self-criticism thought should discover the need of definite terms. The perpetual importance of defi- 5 See § 69, note. 8 The reader will find a good illustration of eristic in Plato's Euthydemus, 275. NORMATIVE SCIENCES AND RELIGION 185 nition has been largely due to the great prestige in modern philosophy of the method of geometry, which was regarded by Descartes and Spinoza as the model for systems of necessary truth. Self-evidence is the principle according to which conviction of truth follows directly from an under- standing of meaning. In the practice of his in- tellectual midwifery, Socrates presupposed that thought is capable of bringing forth its own cer- tainties. And rationalism has at all times re- garded truth as ultimately accredited by internal marks recognizable by reason. Such truth ar- rived at antecedent to acquaintance with instances is called a priori, as distinguished from a posteriori knowledge, or observation after the fact. There can be no principles of self -evidence, but logicians have always been more or less concerned with the enumeration of alleged self-evident principles, notably those of contradiction and identity. A philosophical interest in the mathematical method has led to a logical study of axioms, but with a view rather to their fruitfulness than their intrin- sic truth. Indeed, the interest in self-evident truth has always been subordinate to the interest in sys- tematic truth, and the discovery of first principles most commonly serves to determine the relative 186 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY priority of definite concepts, or the correct point of departure for a series of inferences. The greater part of the famous Aristotelian logic consists in a study of inference, or the derivation of new knowledge from old knowledge. Aristotle sought to set down and classify every method of advancing from premises. The most important form of inference which he defined was the syllogism, a scheme of reasoning to a conclu- sion by means of two premises having one term in common. From the premises " all men are mor- tal " and " Socrates is a man/' one may conclude that " Socrates is mortal." This is an instance not only of the syllogism in general, hut of its most important " mood/' the subsumption of a particular case under a general rule. Since the decline of Aristotle's influence in philosophy there has been a notable decrease of interest in the dif- ferent forms of inference ; though its fundamental importance as the very bone and sinew of reason- ing or deductive thinking has never been chal- lenged. Its loss of preeminence is in part due to the growth of empiricism, stimulated by the writ- ings of Lord Bacon in the seventeenth century, and fostered by the subsequent development of ex- perimental science. NORMATIVE SCIENCES AND RELIGION 187 Observation is the fundamental logical prin- ciple of empiricism. For a radical empiricism, knowledge would consist of descriptive generaliza- tions based upon the summation of instances. That branch of logic which deals with the advance from individual instances to general principles, is called inductive logic. It has resulted in the an- nouncement of canons of accuracy and freedom from preconception, and in the methodological study of hypothesis, experiment, and verification. Rules for observation directed to the end of discov- ering causes, constitute the most famous part of the epoch-making logic of °t t' m '' which Conditions goodness Moral* ° f °f conduct. Ethics is commonly con- Goodness. cerned with goodness only in so far as it is predicated of conduct, or of character, which is a more or less permanent disposition to conduct. Since conduct, in so far as good, is said to consti- tute moral goodness, ethics may be defined as the formulation of the general principles of morality. The principles so formulated would be those vir- tually employed to justify conduct, or to disprove the imputation of immorality. § 81. The student of this science is confronted with a very considerable diversity of method and conceptions differentiation of problems. The ear- of the Good. Hedonism. liest and most profound opposition of 192 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY doctrine in ethics arose from the differences of in- terpretation of which the teaching of Socrates is capable. His doctrine is, as we have seen, ver- bally expressed in the proposition, virtue is knowl- edge. Socrates was primarily concerned to show that there is no real living without an understand- ing of the significance of life. To live well is to know the end of life, the good of it all, and to govern action with reference to that end. Virtue is therefore the practical wisdom that enables one to live consistently with his real intention. But what is the real intention, the end or good of life ? In the " Protagoras," where Plato represents Soc- rates as expounding his position, virtue is inter- preted to mean prudence, or foresight of pleasur- able and painful consequences. He who knows, possesses all virtue in that he is qualified to adapt himself to the real situation and to gain the end of pleasure. All men, indeed, seek pleasure, but only virtuous men seek it wisely and well. "And do you, Protagoras, like the rest of the world, call some pleasant things evil and some painful things good ? — for I am rather disposed to say that things are good in as far as they are pleasant, if they have no con- sequences of another sort, and in as far as they are painful they are bad." 9 8 Plato: Protagoras, 351. Translation by Jowett. NORMATIVE SCIENCES AND RELIGION 193 According to this view painful things are good only when they lead eventually to pleasure, and pleasant things evil only when their painful con- sequences outweigh their pleasantness. Hence moral differences reduce to differences of skill in the universal quest for pleasure, and sensible grati- fication is the ultimate standard of moral value. This ancient doctrine, known as hedonism, express- ing as it does a part of life that will not suffer itself for long to be denied, is one of the great perennial tendencies of ethical thought. In the course of many centuries it has passed through a number of phases, varying its conception of pleas- ure from the tranquillity of the Avise man to the sensuous titillations of the sybarite, and from the individualism of the latter to the universalism of the humanitarian. But in every case it shows a respect for the natural man, praising morality for its disciplinary and instrumental value in the ser- vice of such human wants as are the outgrowth of the animal instinct of self-preservation. § 82. But if a man's life be regarded as a truer representation of his ideals than is his spoken Rationalism, theory, there is little to identify Soc- rates with the hedonists. At the conclusion of the defence of his own life, which Plato puts into his 194 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY mouth in the well-known " Apology," he speaks thus: " When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing, — then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing." 10 It is plain that the man Socrates cared little for the pleasurable or painful consequences of his acts, provided they were worthy of the high calling of human nature. A man's virtue would now seem to possess an intrinsic nobility. If knowledge be virtue, then on this basis it must be because knowl- edge is itself excellent. Virtue as knowledge contributes to the good by constituting it. We meet here with the rationalistic strain in ethics. It praises conduct for the inherent worth which it may possess if it express that reason which the Stoics called " the ruling part." The riches of wisdom consist for the hedonist in their purchase of pleasure. For the rationalist, on the other hand, wisdom is not coin, but itself the very sub- stance of value. § 83. Rationalism has undergone modifications *° Plato: Apology, 41. Translation by Jowett. NORMATIVE SCIENCES AND RELIGION 195 even more significant than those of hedonism, Eudsmonism an d involving at least one radically SgorSTnd new g rou P of conceptions. Among the intuitionism. Greeks rationalism and hedonism alike are eudcemonistic. They aim to portray the ful- ness of life that makes " the happy man." In the ethics of Aristotle, whose synthetic mind weaves together these different strands, the Greek ideal finds its most complete expression as " the high- minded man," with all his powers and trappings. But the great spiritual transformation which ac- companied the decline of Greek culture and the rise of Christianity, brought with it a new moral sensibility, which finds in man no virtue of him- self, but only through the grace of God. "And the virtues themselves," says St. Augustine, " if they bear no relation to God, are in truth vices rather than virtues; for although they are regarded by many as truly moral when they are desired as ends in them- selves and not for the sake of something else, they are, nevertheless, inflated and arrogant, and therefore not to be viewed as virtues but as vices." 11 The new ideal is that of renunciation, obedience, and resignation. Ethically this expresses itself in pietism. Virtue is good neither in itself nor on account of its consequences, but because it is con- 11 Quoted by Paulsen in his System of Ethics. Transla- tion by Thilly, p. 69. 196 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY f ormable to the will of God. The extreme inward- ness of this ideal is characteristic of an age that despaired of attainment, whether of pleasure or knowledge. To all, even the persecuted, it is per- mitted to obey, and so gain entrance into the kingdom of the children of God. But as every special study tends to rely upon its own concep- tions, pietism, involving as it does a relation to God, is replaced by rigorism and intuitionism. The former doctrine defines virtue in terms of the inner attitude which it expresses. It must be done in the spirit of dutifulness, because one ought, and through sheer respect for the law which one's moral nature affirms. Intuitionism has attempted to deal with the source of the moral law by defin- ing conscience as a special faculty or sense, quali- fied to pass directly upon moral questions, and deserving of implicit obediences. It is character- istic of this whole tendency to look for the spring of virtuous living, not in a good which such living obtains, but in a law to which its owes obedience. § 84. This third general ethical tendency has thus been of the greatest importance in emphasiz- Duty and ing the consciousness of duty, and has Ethics and brought both hedonism and rationalism etap ysics. ^ o & recognition of its fundamental im- NORMATIVE SCIENCES AND RELIGION 197 portance. Ethics must deal not only with the moral ideal, but also with the ground of its appeal to the individual, and his obligation to pursue it. In connection with this recognition of moral re- sponsibility, the problem of human freedom has come to be regarded in the light of an inevitable point of contact between ethics and metaphysics. That which is absolutely binding upon the human will can be determined only in view of some theory of its ultimate nature. On this account the rationalistic and hedonistic motives are no longer abstractly sundered, as in the days of the Stoics and Epicureans, but tend to be absorbed in broader philosophical tendencies. Hedonism ap- pears as the sequel to naturalism ; or, more rarely, as part of a theistic system whose morality is divine legislation enforced by an appeal to motives of pleasure and pain. Rationalism, on the other hand, tends to be absorbed in rationalistic or ideal- istic philosophies, where man's rational nature is construed as his bond of kinship with the universe. Ethics has exhibited from the beginning a ten- dency to universalize its conceptions and take the central place in metaphysics. Thus with Plato good conduct was but a special case of goodness, the good being the most general principle of 198 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY reality. 12 In modern times Fichte and his school have founded an ethical metaphysics upon the con- ception of duty. 13 In these cases ethics can be dis- tinguished from metaphysics only by adding to the study of the good or of duty, a study of the special physical, psychological, and social condi- tions under which goodness and dutifulness may obtain in human life. It is possible to attach the name of ethics, and we have seen the same to be true of logic, either to a realm of ideal truth or to that realm wherein the ideal is realized in humanity. § 85. A systematic study of ethics requires that the virtues, or types of moral practice, shall be The virtues, interpreted in the light of the central Customs, and institutions, conception of good, or of conscience. Justice, temperance, wisdom, and courage were praised by the Greeks. Christianity added self- sacrifice, humility, purity, and benevolence. These and other virtues have been defined, justified, and co-ordinated with the aid of a standard of moral value or a canon of duty. There is in modern ethics a pronounced ten- dency, parallel to those already noted in logic and aesthetics, to study such phenomena belonging to 12 Cf. § 160. 13 Cf. § 177. NORMATIVE SCIENCES AND RELIGION 199 its field as have become historically established. A very considerable investigation of custom, insti- tutions, and other social forces has led to a con- tact of ethics with anthropology and sociology scarcely less significant than that with metaphysics. § 86. In that part of his philosophy in which he deals with faith, the great German philosopher The Problems Kant mentions God, Freedom, and Im- of Religion. The special mortality as the three pre-eminent re- Interests of Faith. ligious interests. Religion, as we have seen, sets up a social relationship between man and that massive drift of things which determines his destiny. Of the two terms of this relation, God signifies the latter, while freedom and immor- tality are prerogatives which religion bestows upon the former. Man, viewed from the stand-point of religion as an object of special interest to the uni- verse, is said to have a soul ; and by virtue of this soul he is said to be free and immortal, when thought of as having a life in certain senses inde- pendent of its immediate natural environment. The attempt to make this faith theoretically in- telligible has led to the philosophical disciplines known as theology and psychology. 141 14 Concerning the duty of philosophy to religion in these 200 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY § 87. Theology, as a branch of philosophy, deals with the proof and the nature of God. Since Theology " ^od " is not primarily a theoretical Na?re W and the conce P tion > tb e proof of God is not Proof of God. properly a philosophical problem. His- torically, this task has been assumed as a legacy from Christian apologetics ; and it has involved, at any rate so far as European philosophy is con- cerned, the definition of ultimate being in such spiritual terms as make possible the relation with man postulated in Christianity. For this it has been regarded as sufficient to ascribe to the world an underlying unity capable of bearing the predicates of perfection, omnipotence, and omniscience. Each proof of God has defined him pre-eminently in terms of some one of these his attributes. § 88. The ontological proof of God held the foremost place in philosophy's contribution to The Ontoiog- Christianity up to the eighteenth cen- ical Proof of God. tury. This proof infers the existence from the ideal of God, and so approaches the nat- ure of God through the attribute of perfection. It owes the form in which it was accepted in the Middle Ages and Renaissance to St. Anselm, matters, Cf. Descartes: Meditations, Dedication. Transla- tion by Veitch, p. 81. NORMATIVE SCIENCES AND RELIGION 201 Archbishop of Canterbury at the close of the eleventh century. He argued from the idea of a most perfect being to its existence, on the ground that non-existence, or existence only in idea, would contradict its perfection. It is evident that the force of this argument depends upon the necessity of the idea of God. The argument was accepted in Scholastic Philosophy 15 largely because of the virtual acceptance of this necessity. Mediaeval thought was under the dominance of the philosoph- ical ideas of Plato and Aristotle, and through them rationalism had come to be the unquestioned start- ing-point for all thought. For Plato reality and rationality meant one and the same thing, so that the ultimate reality was the highest principle of rationality, which he conceived to be the idea of the good. In the case of Aristotle the ideal of rationality was conceived to determine the course of the cosmical evolution as its immanent final cause. But in itself it was beyond the world, or transcendent. For Plato perfection itself is reality, whereas for Aristotle perfection determines the hierarchical order of natural substances. The latter theory, more suitable to the uses of Chris- 15 The school-philosophy that flourished from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, under the authority of the church. 202 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY tianity, because it distinguished between God and the world, was incorporated into the great school systems. But both theories contain the essence of the ontological proof of God. In thought one seeks the perfect truth, and posits it as at once the cul- mination of insight and the meaning of life. The ideal of God is therefore a necessary idea, because implied in all the effort of thought as the object capable of finally satisfying it. St. Anselm adds little to the force of this argument, and does much to obscure its real significance. In stating the ontological argument the term perfection has been expressly emphasized, because it may be taken to embrace both truth and good- ness. Owing to a habit of thought, due in the main to Plato, it was long customary to regard degrees of truth and goodness as interchangeable, and as equivalent to degrees of reality. The ens realissimum was in its completeness the highest object both of the faculty of cognition and of the moral will. But even in the scholastic period these two different aspects of the ideal were clearly recognized, and led to sharply divergent tenden- cies. More recently they have been divided and embodied in separate arguments. The epistemo- logical argument defines God in terms of that abso- NORMATIVE SCIENCES AND RELIGION 203 lute truth which is referred to in every judgment. Under the influence of idealism this absolute truth has taken the form of a universal mind, or all- embracing standard experience, called more briefly the absolute. The ethical argument, on the other hand, conceives God as the perfect goodness im- plied in the moral struggle, or the power through which goodness is made to triumph in the universe to the justification of moral faith. While the former of these arguments identifies God with being, the latter defines God in terms of the intent or outcome of being. Thus, while the epistemo- logical argument does not distinguish God and the world, the latter does so, assuming that independent reality can be attributed to the stages of a process and to the purpose that dominates it. § 89. The cosmological proof of God approaches him through the attribute of creative omnipotence. The Cosmo- The common principle of causal ex- logical Proof of God. planation refers the origin of natural events to similar antecedent events. But there must be some first cause from which the whole series is derived, a cause which is ultimate, suffi- cient to itself, and the responsible author of the world. Because God's function as creator was a part of the Christian teaching, and because expla- 204 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY nation by causes is habitual with common sense, this argument has had great vogue. But in phi- losophy it has declined in importance, chiefly be- cause it has been absorbed in arguments which deal with the kind of causality proper to a first cause or world^ound. The argument that follows is a case in point. § 90. The teleological proof argues that the world can owe its origin only to an intelligent first The Teieoiogi- cause. The evidence for this is f ur- eal Proof of God. nished by the cunning contrivances and beneficent adaptations of nature. These could not have come about through chance or the working of mechanical forces, but only through the fore- sight of a rational will. This argument originally infers God from the character of nature and his- tory; and the extension of mechanical principles to organic and social phenomena, especially as stimulated by Darwin's principle of natural selec- tion, has tended greatly to diminish its importance. When, on the other hand, for nature and history there are substituted the intellectual and moral activities themselves, and the inference is made to the ideal which they imply, the teleological argu- ment merges into the ontological. But the old- fashioned statement of it remains in the form of NORMATIVE SCIENCES AND RELIGION 205 religious faith, and in this capacity it has had the approval even of Hume and Kant, the philosophers who have contributed most forcibly to its over- throw as a demonstration of God. They agree that the acknowledgment of God in nature and history is the sequel to a theistic belief, and an in- evitable attitude on the part of the religious con- sciousness. § 91. Another group of ideas belonging to philo- sophical theology consists of three generalizations God and respecting God's relation to the world, the World. k nown as theism, pantheism, and deism. Theism and ' l ' Pantheism. Although, theoretically, these are corol- laries of the different arguments for God, two of them, theism and pantheism, owe their importance to their rivalry as religious tendencies. Theism emphasizes that attitude to God which recognizes in him an historical personage, in some sense dis- tinct from both the world and man, which are his works and yet stand in an external relationship to him. It expresses the spirit of ethical and monotheistic religion, and is therefore the natural belief of the Christian. Pantheism appears in primitive religion as an animistic or polytheistic sense of the presence of a divine principle diffused throughout nature. But it figures most notably 206 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY in the history of religions, in the highly reflective Brahmanism of India. In sharp opposition to Christianity, this religion preaches the indivisible unity of the world and the illusoriness of the in- dividual's sense of his own independent reality. In spite of the fact that such a doctrine is alien to the spirit of Christianity, it enters into Chris- tian theology through the influence of philosophy. The theoretical idea of God tends, as we have seen, to the identification of him with the world as its most real principle. Or it bestows upon him a nature so logical and formal, and so far removed from the characters of humanity, as to forbid his entering into personal or social relations. Such reflections concerning God find their religious ex- pression in a mystical sense of unity, which has in many cases either entirely replaced or profoundly modified the theistic strain in Christianity. In current philosophy pantheism appears in the epis- temological argument which identifies God with being; while the chief bulwark of theism is the ethical argument, with its provision for a distinc- tion between the actual world and ideal principle of evolution. § 92. While theism and pantheism appear to be permanent phases in the philosophy of religion, NORMATIVE SCIENCES AND RELIGION 207 deism is the peculiar product of the eighteenth cen- Deism, tury. It is based upon a repudia- tion of supernaturalism and " enthusiasm," on the one hand, and a literal acceptance of the cosmo- logical and teleological proofs on the other. Re- ligions, like all else, were required, in this epoch of clear thinking, to submit to the canons of experi- mental observation and practical common sense. These authorize only a natural religion, the ac- knowledgment in pious living of a God who, hav- ing contrived this natural world, has given it over to the rule, not of priests and prophets, but of natural law. The artificiality of its conception of God, and the calculating spirit of its piety, make deism a much less genuine expression of the re- ligious experience than either the moral chivalry of theism or the intellectual and mystical exalta- tion of pantheism. § 93. The systematic development of philosophy leads to the inclusion of conceptions of God within Metaphysics the problem of metaphysics, and the and Theology, subordination of the proof of God to the determination of the fundamental principle of reality. There will always remain, however, an outstanding theological discipline, whose function it is to interpret worship, or the living religious 208 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY attitude, in terms of the theoretical principles of philosophy. § 94. Psychology is the theory of the soul. As we have already seen, the rise of scepticism directs Psychology is attention from the object of thought to the Theory of """" the Soul. the thinker, and so emphasizes the self as a field for theoretical investigation. But the orig- inal and the dominating interest in the self is a practical one. The precept, P rmc ipl es > seeks to meet the special Naturalism, requirements of philosophy. The con- ception of the unity of nature is directly in the line of a purely scientific development, but natu- ralism takes the bold and radical step of regarding nature so unified as coextensive with the real, or at any rate knowable, universe. It will be remem- bered that among the early Greeks Anaxagoras had referred the creative and formative processes of nature to a non-natural or rational agency, which he called the Nous. The adventitious character of this principle, the external and almost purely nominal part which it played in the actual cos- mology of Anaxagoras, betrayed it into the hands 240 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY of the atomists, with their more consistently natu- ralistic creed. Better, these maintain, the some- what dogmatic extension of conceptions proved to be successful in the description of nature, than a vague dualism which can serve only to distract the scientific attention and people the world with ol> scurities. There is a remarkable passage in Lu- cretius in which atomism is thus written large and inspired with cosmical eloquence: " For verily not by design did the first-beginnings of things station themselves each in its right place guided by keen intelligence, nor did they bargain sooth to say what motions each should assume, but because many in number and shifting about in many ways throughout the universe, they are driven and tormented by blows during infinite time past, after trying motions and unions of every kind at length they fall into arrangements such as those out of which our sum of things has been formed, and by which too it is preserved through many great years, when once it has been thrown into the appropriate motions, and causes the streams to replenish the greedy sea with copious river waters, and the earth, fostered by the heat of the sun, to renew its produce, and the race of living things to come up and flourish, and the gliding fires of ether to five: all which these several things could in no wise bring to pass, unless a store of matter could rise up from infinite space, out of which store they are wont to make up in due season whatever has been lost." 10 The prophecy of La Place, the great French mathematician, voices the similar faith of the 10 Lucretius: Op. cit., Bk. I, lines 1021-1237. NATURALISM 241 eighteenth century in a mechanical understanding of the universe: " The human mind, in the perfection it has been able to give to astronomy, affords a feeble outline of such an intelligence. Its discoveries in mechanics and in geome- try, joined to that of universal gravitation, have brought it within reach of comprehending in the same analytical expressions the past and future states of the system of the world." 11 As for God, the creative and presiding intelligence, La Place had " no need of any such hypothesis." § 110. But these are the boasts of Homeric heroes before going into battle. The moment The Task of sucn a general position is assumed there Naturalism. ar i se sundry difficulties in the applica- tion of naturalistic principles to special interests and groups of facts. It is one thing to project a mechanical scheme in the large, but quite another to make explicit provision within it for the origin of nature, for life, for the human self with its ideals, and for society with its institutions. The naturalistic method of meeting these problems in- volves a reduction all along the line in the direc- tion of such categories as are derived from the infra-organic world. That which is not like the 11 Quoted from La Place's essay on Probability by Ward: Op. cit., I, p. 41. 242 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY planetary system must be construed as mechanical by indirection and subtlety. § 111. The origin of the present known natural world was the first philosophical question to be The Ori "n of definitely me ^ D J science. The general the cosmos. f orm f solution which naturalism of- fers is anticipated in the most ancient theories of nature. These already suppose that the observed mechanical processes of the circular or periodic type, like the revolutions and rotations of the stars, are incidents in a historical mechanical process of a larger scale. Prior to the present fixed motions of the celestial bodies, the whole mass of cosmic matter participated in irregular motions analogous to present terrestrial redistributions. Such mo- tions may be understood to have resulted in the integration of separate bodies, to which they at the same time imparted a rotary motion. It is such a hypothesis that Lucretius paints in his bold, impressionistic colors. But the development of mechanics paved the way for a definite scientific theory, the so-called " nebular hypothesis," announced by La Place in 1796, and by the philosopher Kant at a still earlier date. Largely through the Newtonian principle of the parallelogram of forces, the present masses, NATURALISM 243 orbits, and velocities were analyzed into a more primitive process of concentration within a nebu- lous or highly diffused aggregate of matter. And with the aid of the principle of the conservation of energy this theory appears to make possible the derivation of heat, light, and other apparently non-mechanical processes from the same original energy of motion. But a persistently philosophical mind at once raises the question of the origin of this primeval nebula itself, with a definite organization and a vast potential energy that must, after all, be re- garded as a part of nature rather than its source. Several courses are here open to naturalism. It may maintain that the question of ultimate origin is unanswerable; it may regard such a process of concentration as extending back through an infi- nitely long past; 12 or, and this is the favorite alternative for more constructive minds, the his- torical cosmical process may be included within a still higher type of periodic process, which is re- garded as eternal. This last course has been fol- lowed in the well-known synthetic naturalism of Herbert Spencer. " Evolution," he says, " is the 12 An interesting account and criticism of such a theory (Clifford's) is to be found in Royce's Spirit of Modern Philoso- phy, Lecture X. 244 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY progressive integration of matter and dissipation of motion." But such a process eventually runs down, and may be conceived as giving place to a counter-process of devolution which scatters the parts of matter and gathers another store of poten- tial motion. The two processes in alternation will then constitute a cosmical system without begin- ning or end. In such wise a sweeping survey of the physical universe may be thought in the terms of natural science. The uniformitarian method in geology, resolving the history of the crust of the earth into known processes, such as erosion and igneous fusion ; 13 and spectral analysis, with its discov- eries concerning the chemical constituents of dis- tant bodies through the study of their light, have powerfully reenforced this effort of thought, and apparently completed an outline sketch of the uni- verse in terms of infra-organic processes. § 112. But the cosmos must be made internally homogeneous in these same terms. There awaits Life. solution, in the first place, the serious Natural . . Selection. problem of the genesis and maintenance of life within a nature that is originally and ulti- 13 This method replaced the old theory of " catastrophes" through the efforts of the English geologists, Hutton (1726- 1797) and Lyell (1767-1849). NATURALISM 245 mately inorganic. The assimilation of the field of biology and physiology to the mechanical cosmos had made little real progress prior to the nine- teenth century. Mechanical theories had, indeed, been projected in the earliest age of philosophy, and proposed anew in the seventeenth century. 14 Nevertheless, the structural and functional tele- ology of the organism remained as apparently irrefutable testimony to the inworking of some principle other than that of mechanical necessity. Indeed, the only fruitful method applicable to organic phenomena was that which explained them in terms of purposive adaptation. And it was its provision for a mechanical interpretation of this very principle that gave to the Darwinian law of natural selection, promulgated in 1859 in the " Origin of Species," so profound a significance for naturalism. It threatened to reduce the last stronghold of teleology, and completely to dispense with the intelligent Author of nature. Darwin's hypothesis sought to explain the origin of animal species by survival under competitive conditions of existence through the possession of a structure suited to the environment. Only the 14 Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, published in 1628, was regarded as a step in this direction. 246 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY most elementary organism need be presupposed, together with slight variations in the course of subsequent generations, and both may be conceived to arise mechanically. There will then result in surviving organisms a gradual accumulation of such variations as promote survival under the spe- cial conditions of the environment. Such a prin- ciple had been suggested as early as the time of Empedocles, but it remained for Darwin to estab- lish it with an unanswerable array of observation and experimentation. If any organism whatsoever endowed with the power of generation be allowed to have somehow come to be, naturalism now prom- ises to account for the whole subsequent history of organic phenomena and the origin of any known species. § 113. But what of life itself? The question of the derivation of organic from inorganic matter „ . . . has proved insoluble by direct means, Mechanical r " Physiology. an( j fo.Q case of naturalism must here rest upon such facts as the chemical homogeneity of these two kinds of matter, and the conformity of physiological processes to more general physical laws. Organic matter differs from inorganic only through the presence of proteid, a peculiar product of known elements, which cannot be artificially NATURALISM 247 produced, but which is by natural means perpetu- ally dissolved into these elements without any dis- coverable residuum. Respiration may be studied as a case of aerodynamics, the circulation of the blood as a case of hydrodynamics, and the heat given off in the course of work done by the body as a case of thermodynamics. And although vital- istic theories still retain a place in physiology, as do teleological theories in biology, on the whole the naturalistic programme of a reduction of or- ganic processes to the type of the inorganic tends to prevail. § 114. The history of naturalism shows that, as in the case of life, so also in the case of mind, Mind. its hypotheses were projected by the The Reduction . to Sensation. Greeks, but precisely formulated and verified only in the modern period of science. In the philosophy of Democritus the soul was itself an atom, finer, rounder, and smoother than the ordinary, but thoroughly a part of the mechanism of nature. The processes of the soul are construed as interactions between the soul and surrounding objects. In sensation, the thing perceived pro- duces images by means of effluxes which impinge upon the soul-atom. These images are not true reports of the outer world, but must be revised by 248 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY thought before its real atomic structure emerges. For this higher critical exercise of thought De- mocritus devised no special atomic genesis. The result may be expressed either as the invalidity of such operations of mind as he could provide for in his universe, or the irreducibility to his chosen first principles of the very thought which defined them. Later naturalism has generally sacrificed epistemology to cosmology, and reduced thought to sensation. Similarly, will has been regarded as a highly developed case of instinct. Knowledge and will, construed as sensation and instinct, may thus be interpreted in the naturalistic manner within the field of biology. § 115. But the actual content of sensation, and the actual feelings which attend upon the prompt- Automatism, ings of instinct, still stubbornly testify to the presence in the universe of something belong- ing to a wholly different category from matter and motion. The attitude of naturalism in this crucial issue has never been fixed and unwavering, but there has gradually come to predominate a method of denying to the inner life all efficacy and real significance in the cosmos, while admitting its presence on the scene. It is a strange fact of his- tory that Descartes, the French philosopher who NATURALISM 249 prided himself on having rid the soul of all dependence on nature, should have greatly con- tributed to this method. But it is perhaps not so strange when we consider that every dualism is, after all, symmetrical, and that consequently what- ever rids the soul of nature at the same time rids nature of the soul. It was Descartes who first con- ceived the body and soul to be utterly distinct substances. The corollary to this doctrine was his automatism, applied in his own system to animals other than man, but which those less concerned with religious tradition and less firmly convinced of the soul's originating activity were not slow to apply universally. This theory conceived the vital processes to take place quite regardless of any inner consciousness, or even without its attendance. To this radical theory the French materialists of the eighteenth century were especially attracted. With them the active soul of Descartes, the distinct spiritual entity, disappeared. This latter author had himself admitted a department of the self, which he called the " passions," in which the course and content of mind is determined by bod- ily conditions. Extending this conception to the whole province of mind, they employed it to dem- onstrate the thorough-going subordination of mind 250 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY to body. La Mettrie, a physician and the author of a book entitled " L'Homme Machine," was first interested in this thesis by a fever delirium, and afterward adduced anatomical and pathological data in support of it. The angle from which he views human life is well illustrated in the fol- lowing : " What would have sufficed in the case of Julius Csesar, of Seneca, of Petronius, to turn their fearlessness into timidity or braggartry? An obstruction in the spleen, the liver, or the vena portae. For the imagination is intimately connected with these viscera, and from them arise all the curious phenomena of hypochondria and hysteria. ... 'A mere nothing, a little fibre, some trifling thing that the most subtle anatomy cannot dis- cover, would have made two idiots out of Erasmus and Fontenelle.'" 15 § 116. The extreme claim that the soul is a physical organ of the body, identical with the Radical brain, marked the culmination of this Materialism. , Mind as an militant materialism, so good an in- non. stance of that over-simplification and whole-hearted conviction characteristic of the doc- trinaire propagandism of France. Locke, the Eng- lishman, had admitted that possibly the substance which thinks is corporeal. In the letters of Vol- 15 From the account of La Mettrie in Lange: History of Materialism. Translation by Thomas, II, pp. 67-68. NATURALISM 251 taire this thought has already found a more posi- tive expression: " I am body, and I think ; more I do not know. Shall I then attribute to an unknown cause what I can so easily attribute to the only fruitful cause I am acquainted with? In fact, where is the man who, without an absurd godlessness, dare assert that it is impossible for the Creator to endow matter with thought and feeling? " 18 Finally, Holbach, the great systematizer of this movement, takes the affair out of the hands of the Creator and definitively announces that " a sensi- tive soul is nothing but a human brain so consti- tuted that it easily receives the motions communi- cated to it." 17 This theory has been considerably tempered since the age of Holbach. Naturalism has latterly been less interested in identifying the soul with the body, and more interested in demonstrating its dependence upon specific bodily conditions, after the manner of La Mettrie. The so-called higher faculties, such as thought and will, have been re- lated to central or cortical processes of the nervous system, processes of connection and complication which within the brain itself supplement the im- pulses and sensations congenitally and externally 18 Quoted from Voltaire's London Letter on the English, by Lange: Op. cit., II, p. 18. 17 Quoted by Lange: Op. cit., II, p. 113. 252 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY stimulated. The term " epi phenomenon " has been adopted to express the distinctness but entire de- pendence of the mind. Man is " a conscious automaton." The real course of nature passes through his nervous system, while consciousness attends upon its functions like a shadow, present but not efficient. 18 § 117. Holbach's " Systeme de la Mature," pub- lished in 1770, marks the culmination of the un- Knowiedge. equivocally materialistic form of natu- Positivism and . . Agnosticism, ralism. Its epistemological difficulties, always more or less in evidence, have since that day sufficed to discredit materialism, and to foster the growth of a critical and apologetic form of naturalism known as positivism or agnosticism. The modesty of this doctrine does not, it is true, strike very deep. For, although it disclaims knowl- edge of ultimate reality, it also forbids anyone else to have any. Knowledge, it affirms, can be of but one type, that which comprises the verifiable laws governing nature. All questions concerning 18 The phrase " psycho-physical parallelism," current in psychology, may mean automatism of the kind expounded above, and may also mean dualism. It is used commonly as a methodological principle to signify that no causal relationship between mind and body, but one of corre- spondence, is to be looked for in empirical psychology. Cf. §99. NATURALISM 253 first causes are futile, a stimulus only to excursions of fancy popularly mistaken for knowledge. The superior certainty and stability which attaches to natural science is to be permanently secured by the savant's steadfast refusal to be led away after the false gods of metaphysics. But though this is sufficient ground for an ag- nostic policy, it does prove an agnostic theory. The latter has sprung from a closer analysis of knowledge, though it fails to make a very brave showing for thoroughness and consistency. The crucial point has already been brought within our view. The general principles of naturalism re- quire that knowledge shall be reduced to sensations, or impressions of the environment upon the or- ganism. But the environment and the sensations do not correspond. The environment is matter and motion, force and energy; the sensations are of motions, to be sure, but much more conspicuously of colors, sounds, odors, pleasures, and pains. Critically, this may be expressed by saying that since the larger part of sense-perception is so un- mistakably subjective, and since all knowledge alike must be derived from this source, knowledge as a whole must be regarded as dealing only with appearances. There are at least three agnostic 254 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY methods progressing from this point. All agree that the inner or essential reality is unfathomable. But, in the first place, those most close to the tradition of materialism maintain that the most significant appearances, the primary qualities, are those which compose a purely quantitative and corporeal world. The inner essence of things may at any rate be approached by a monism of matter or of energy. This theory is epistemological only to the extent of moderating its claims in the hope of lessening its responsibility. Another agnosti- cism places all sense qualities on a par, but would regard physics and psychology as complementary reports upon the two distinct series of phenomena in which the underlying reality expresses itself. This theory is epistemological to the extent of granting knowledge, viewed as perception, as good a standing in the universe as that which is accorded to its object. But such a dualism tends almost irresistibly to relapse into materialistic monism, because of the fundamental place of physical con- ceptions in the system of the sciences. Finally, in another and a more radical phase of agnosticism, we find an attempt to make full provision for the legitimate problems of epistemology. The only datum, the only existent accessible to knowledge, NATURALISM 255 is said to be the sensation, or state of consciousness. In the words of Huxley: " What, after all, do we know of this terrible ' matter ' except as a name for the unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our own consciousness? And what do we know of that 'spirit' over whose threatened extinc- tion by matter a great lamentation is arising, . . . except that it is also a name for an unknown and hypo- thetical cause, or condition, of states of consciousness?" 19 The physical world is now to be regarded as a construction which does not assimilate to itself the content of sensations, but enables one to anticipate them. The sensation signifies a contact to which science can provide a key for practical guidance. § 118. This last phase of naturalism is an at- tempt to state a pure and consistent experimental- Experimen- * sm > a wor kable theory of the routine of taiism. sensations. But it commonly falls into the error of the vicious circle. The hypothetical cause of sensations is said to be matter. From this point of view the sensation is a complex, compris- ing elaborate physical and physiological processes. But these processes themselves, on the other hand, are said to be analyzable into sensations. Now two such methods of analysis cannot be equally ultimate. If all of reality is finally reducible to 9 Quoted by Ward: Op. cit, I, p. 18. 256 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY sensations, then the term sensation must be used in a new sense to connote a self-subsistent being, and can no longer refer merely to a function of certain physiological processes. The issue of this would be some form of idealism or of the experi- ence-philosophy that is now coming so rapidly to the front. 20 But while it is true that idealism has sometimes been intended, and that a radically new philosophy of experience has sometimes been closely approached, those, nevertheless, who have developed experimentalism from the naturalistic stand-point have in reality achieved only a thinly disguised materialism. For the very ground of {heir agnosticism is materialistic. 21 Knowledge of reality itself is said to be unattainable, because knowledge, in order to come within the order of nature, must be regarded as reducible to sensation ; and because sensation itself, when regarded as a part of nature, is only a physiological process, a special phenomenon, in no way qualified to be knowledge that is true of reality. § 119. Perhaps, after all, it would be as fair to the spirit of naturalism to relieve it of responsibil- 20 There are times when Huxley, e. g., would seem to be on the verge of the Berkeleyan idealism. Cf. Chap. IX. 21 For the case of Karl Pearson, read his Grammar of Science, Chap. II. NATURALISM 257 ity for an epistemology. It has never thoroughly reckoned with this problem. It has deliberately Naturalistic selected from among the elements of ex- Epistemology . . not Systematic, perience, and been so highly construc- tive in its method as to forfeit its claim to pure empiricism; and, on the other hand, has, in this same selection of categories and in its insistence upon the test of experiment, fallen short of a thor- ough-going rationalism. While, on the one hand, it defines and constructs, it does so, on the other hand, within the field of perception and with con- stant reference to the test of perception. The ex- planation and justification of this procedure is to be found in the aim of natural science rather than in that of philosophy. It is this special interest, rather than the general problem of being, that de- termines the order of its categories. Naturalism as an account of reality is acceptable only so far as its success in satisfying specific demands obtains for it a certain logical immunity. These demands are unquestionably valid and fundamental, but they are not coextensive with the demand for truth. They coincide rather with the immediate practical need of a formulation of the spacial and temporal changes that confront the will. Hence naturalism is acceptable to common-sense as an account of 258 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY what the every-day attitude to the environment treats as its object. Naturalism is common-sense about the " outer world/' revised and brought up to date with the aid of the results of science. Its deepest spring is the organic instinct for the reality of the tangible, the vital recognition of the signifi- cance of that which is on the plane of interaction with the body. § 120. Oddly enough, although common-sense is ready to intrust to naturalism the description of General the situation of life, it prefers to deal Ethical stand-point, otherwise with its ideals. Indeed, com- mon-sense is not without a certain suspicion that naturalism is the advocate of moral reversion. It is recognized as the prophecy of the brute majority of life, of those considerations of expediency and pleasure that are the warrant for its secular moods rather than for its sustaining ideals. And that strand of life is indeed its special province. For the naturalistic method of reduction must find the key to human action among those practical condi- tions that are common to man and his inferiors in the scale of being. In short, human life, like all life, must be construed as the adjustment of the organism to its natural environment for NATURALISM 259 the sake of preservation and economic advance- ment. § 121. Early in Greek philosophy this general idea of life was picturesquely interpreted in two c nicism and contrasting ways, those of the Cynic Cyrenaicism. an{ J fae Cy rena i c> Both of these wise men postulated the spiritual indifference of the universe at large, and looked only to the contact of life with its immediate environment. But while the one hoped only to hedge himself about, the other sought confidently the gratification of his sensibilities. The figure of the Cynic is the more familiar. Diogenes of the tub practised self- mortification until his dermal and spiritual callous- ness were alike impervious. From behind his pro- tective sheath he could without affectation despise both nature and society. He could reckon himself more blessed than Alexander, because, with de- mand reduced to the minimum, he could be sure of a surplus of supply. Having renounced all goods save the bare necessities of life, he could neglect both promises and threats and be played upon by no one. He was securely intrenched within himself, an unfurnished habitation, but the citadel of a king. The Cyrenaic, on the other hand, did not seek to make impervious the surface 260 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY of contact with nature and society, but sought to heighten its sensibility, that it might become a medium of pleasurable feeling. For the inspira- tion with which it may be pursued this ideal has nowhere been more eloquently set forth than in the pages of Walter Pater, who styles himself " the new Cyrenaic." " Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstacy, is success in life. . . . While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any ex- quisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a mo- ment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colors, and curious odors, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening." 22 § 122. In the course of modern philosophy the ethics of naturalism has undergone a transforma- 22 Pater: The Renaissance, pp. 249-250. NATURALISM 261 tion and development that equip it much more formidably for its competition with rival theories. Development If the Cynic and Cyrenaic philosophies of Utilitarian- ism, of life seem too egoistic and narrow in Evolutionary . Conception outlook, this inadequacy has been large- Relations, ly overcome through the modern con- ception* of the relation of the individual to society. Man is regarded as so dependent upon social rela- tions that it is both natural and rational for him to govern his actions with a concern for the com- munity. There was a time when this relation of dependence was viewed as external, a barter of goods between the individual and society, sanc- tioned by an implied contract. Thomas Hobbes, whose unblushing materialism and egoism stimu- lated by opposition the whole development of Eng- lish ethics, conceived morality to consist in rules of action which condition the stability of the state, and so secure for the individual that " peace " which self-interest teaches him is essential to his welfare. " And therefore so long a man is in the condition of mere nature, which is a condition of war, as private appetite is the measure of good and evil: and conse- quently all men agree on this, that peace is good, and therefore also the ways or means of peace, which, as I have showed before, are 'justice/ 'gratitude/ modesty/ 262 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY 'equity,' 'mercy,' and the rest of the laws of Nature, are good; that is to say, 'moral virtues'; and their contrary 'vices,' evil." 23 Jeremy Bentham, the apostle of utilitarianism in the eighteenth century, denned political and social sanctions through which the individual could pur- chase security and good repute with action condu- cive to the common welfare. But the nineteenth century has understood the matter better — and the idea of an evolution under conditions that select and reject, is here again the illuminating thought. ~No individual, evolutionary naturalism maintains, has survived the perils of life without possessing as an inalienable part of his nature, congenital like his egoism, certain impulses and instinctive desires in the interest of the community as a whole. The latest generation of a race whose perpetuation has been conditioned by a capacity to sustain social relations and make common cause against a more external environment, is moral, and does not adopt morality in the course of a calculating egoism. Conscience is the racial instinct of self-preservation uttering itself in the individual member, who draws his very life-blood from the greater organism. § 123. This latest word of naturalistic ethics has 23 Hobbes: Leviathan, Chap. XV. NATURALISM 263 not won acceptance as the last word in ethics, and this in spite of its indubitable truth within its scope. Naturalistic For the deeper ethical interest seeks not Ethics not Systematic. so much to account for the moral nature as to construe and justify its promptings. The evolutionary theory reveals the genesis of con- science, and demonstrates its continuity with nat- ure, but this falls as far short of realizing the pur- pose of ethical study as a history of the natural genesis of thought would fall short of logic. In- deed, naturalism shows here, as in the realm of epistemology, a persistent failure to appreciate the central problem. Its acceptance as a philosophy, we are again reminded, can be accounted for only on the score of its genuinely rudimentary char- acter. As a rudimentary phase of thought it is both indispensable and inadequate. It is the philosophy of instinct, which should in normal development precede a philosophy of reason, in which it is eventually assimilated and supple- mented. § 124. There is, finally, an inspiration for life which this philosophy of naturalism may convey — Naturalism as atheism, its detractors* would call it, but Antagonistic . to Religion, none the less a iaitn and a spiritual ex- altation that spring from its summing up of truth. 264 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY It is well first to realize that which is dispiriting in it, its failure to provide for the freedom, im- mortality, and moral providence of the more san- guine faith. " For what is man looked at from this point of view? . . . Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets. Of the combination of causes which first converted a dead organic compound into the living progenitors of humanity, science, indeed, as yet knows nothing. It is enough that from such beginnings famine, disease, and mutual slaughter, fit nurses of the future lords of creation, have gradually evolved, after infinite travail, a race with conscience enough to feel that it is vile, and intelligence enough to know that it is insignificant. . . . We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. ' Im- perishable monuments' and 'immortal deeds/ death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be worse for all that the labor, genius, devo- NATURALISM 265 tion, and suffering of man have striven through count- less generations to effect." 24 § 125. But though our philosopher must accept the truth of this terrible picture, he is not left Naturalism as without spiritual resources. The ab- ReH B ion S of ra stract religion provided for the agnostic Service, faithful by Herbert Spencer does not, Wonder, and J L Renunciation. ft j s true, afford any nourishment to the religious nature. He would have men look for a deep spring of life in the negative idea of mystery, the apotheosis of ignorance, while religious faith to live at all must lay hold upon reality. But there does spring from naturalism a positive religion, whose fundamental motives are those of service, wonder, and renunciation: service of humanity in the present, wonder at the natural truth, and re- nunciation of a universe keyed to vibrate with human ideals. "Have you," writes Charles Ferguson, "had dreams of Nirvana and sickly visions and raptures? Have you imagined that the end of your life is to be absorbed back into the life of God, and to flee the earth and forget all? Or do you want to walk on air, or fly on wings, or build a heavenly city in the clouds? Come, let us take our kit on our shoulders, and go out and build the city here." 25 u Quoted from Balfour: Foundations of Belief, pp. 29-31. 25 Ferguson: Religion of Democracy, p. 10. 266 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY For Haeckel " natural religion " is such as " the astonishment with which we gaze upon the starry- heavens and the microscopic life in a drop of water, the awe with which we trace the marvellous working of energy in the motion of matter, the reverence with which we grasp the universal dominance of the law of substance throughout the uni verse." 28 There is a deeper and a sincerer note in the stout, forlorn humanism of Huxley : " That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to the State of Nature, the State of Art of an organized polity; in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy civilization, capable of maintaining and constantly improving itself, until the evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon its downward course that the cosmic process resumes its sway; and, once more, the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet." 27 26 Haeckel: Op. tit., p. 344. 27 Huxley: Evolution and Ethics, p. 45. Collected Essays, Vol. IX. CHAPTER IX SUBJECTIVISM § 126. Whew, in the year 1710, Bishop Berke- ley maintained the thesis of empirical idealism, Subjectivism having rediscovered it and announced Originally As- it ^ -justifiable sense of originality, sociated with •> ° J 7 Relativism j^ p roV oked a kind of critical judgment 3.11(1 oCGptl - ■ cism. foal was keenly annoying if not entirely surprising to him. In refuting the conception of material substance and demonstrating the depend- ence of being upon mind, he at once sought, as he did repeatedly in later years, to establish the world of practical belief, and so to reconcile metaphysics and common-sense. Yet he found himself hailed as a fool and a sceptic. In answer to an inquiry 1 Preliminary Note. By Subjectivism is meant that system of philosophy which construes the universe in ac- cordance with the epistemological principle that all knowledge is of its own states or activities. In so far as subjectivism reduces reality to states of knowledge, such as perceptions or ideas, it is phenomenalism. In so far as it reduces reality to a more internal active principle such as spirit or will, it is spiritualism. 267 268 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY concerning the reception of his book in London, his friend Sir John Percival wrote as follows: " I did but name the subject matter of your book of Principles to some ingenious friends of mine and they immediately treated it with ridicule, at the same time refusing to read it, which I have not yet got one to do. A physician of my acquaintance undertook to discover your person, and argued you must needs be mad, and that you ought to take remedies. A bishop pitied you, that a desire of starting something new should put you upon such an undertaking. Another told me that you are not gone so far as another gentleman in town, who asserts not only that there is no such thing as Matter, but that we ourselves have no being at all." 2 There can be no doubt but that the idea of the dependence of real things upon their appearance to the individual is a paradox to common-sense. It is a paradox because it seems to reverse the theoretical instinct itself, and to define the real in those very terms which disciplined thought learns to neglect. In the early history of thought the nature of the thinker himself is recognized as that which is likely to distort truth rather than that which conditions it. When the wise man, the devotee of truth, first makes his appearance, his authority is acknowledged because he has re- nounced himself. As witness of the universal 2 Berkeley: Complete Works, Vol. I, p. 352. Fraser's edition. SUBJECTIVISM 269 being he purges himself of whatever is peculiar to his own individuality, or even to his human nature. In the aloofness of his meditation he escapes the cloud of opinion and prejudice that obscures the vision of the common man. In short, the element of belief dependent upon the thinker himself is the dross which must be refined away in order to obtain the pure truth. When, then, in the critical epoch of the Greek sophists, Protagoras declares that there is no belief that is not of this character, his philosophy is promptly recognized as scepti- cism. Protagoras argues that sense qualities are clearly dependent upon the actual operations of the senses, and that all knowledge reduces ultimately to these terms. "The senses are variously named hearing, seeing, smelling; there is the sense of heat, cold, pleasure, pain, desire, fear, and many more which are named, as well as innumerable others which have no name; with each of them there is born an object of sense, — all sorts of colors born with all sorts of sight and sounds in like manner with hearing, and other objects with the other senses." 3 If the objects are " born with " the senses, it fol- lows that they are born with and appertain to the individual perceiver. 8 Plato: Theaetetus, 156. Translation by Jowett. The italics are mine. 270 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY " Either show, if you can, that our sensations are not relative and individual, or, if you admit that they are individual, prove that this does not involve the con- sequence that the appearance becomes, or, if you like to say, is to the individual only." 4 The same motif is thus rendered by Walter Pater in the Conclusion of his " Renaissance " : "At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to act upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions — color, odor, texture — in the mind of the observer. . ... Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of these impressions is the impression of the indi- vidual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world." The Protagorean generalization is due to the re- flection that all experience is some individual ex- perience, that no subject of discourse escapes the imputation of belonging to some individual's pri- vate history. The individual must start with his own experiences and ideas, and he can never get 4 Plato: Op. tit., 166. SUBJECTIVISM 271 beyond them, for he cannot see outside his own vision, or even think outside his own mind. The scepticism of this theory is explicit, and the for- mulas of Protagoras — the famous " Man is the measure of all things," and the more exact for- mula, " The truth is what appears to each man at each time " 5 — have been the articles of scepticism throughout the history of thought. § 127. There is, therefore, nothing really sur- prising in the reception accorded the " new phi- Phenomenai- losophy " of Bishop Berkeley. A scep- ism and Spirit- ualism, tical relativism is the earliest phase of subjectivism, and its avoidance at once becomes the most urgent problem of any philosophy which proposes to proceed forth from this principle. And this problem Berkeley meets with great adroit- ness and a wise recognition of difficulties. But his sanguine temperament and speculative interest impel him to what he regards as the extension of his first principle, the reintroduction of the con- ception of substance under the form of spirit, and of the objective order of nature under the form of the mind of God. In short, there are two mo- tives at work in him, side by side: the epistemo- logical motive, restricting reality to perceptions 6 &Arj0« t eKdartfi e/coCTore fjonu. 272 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY and thoughts, and the metaphysical-religious mo- tive, leading him eventually to the definition of reality in terms of perceiving and thinking spirits. And from the time of Berkeley these two prin- ciples, 'phenomenalism and spiritualism, have re- mained as distinct and alternating phases of subjectivism. The former is its critical and dialectical conception, the latter its constructive and practical conception. § 128. As phenomenalism has its classic state- ment and proof in the writings of Berkeley, we Phenomenal- sna U do well to return to these. The tainedb Iam " ^ ac * ^ a t this philosopher wished to be The^lo^em re g ar ded as the prophet of common- inhented from gense h as already been mentioned. This Descartes " and Locke. purpose reveals itself explicitly in the series of " Dialogues between Hylas and Philo- nous." The form in which Berkeley here advances his thesis is further determined by the manner in which the lines were drawn in his day of thought. The world of enlightened public opinion was then threefold, consisting of God, physical nature, and the soul. In the early years of the seventeenth century Descartes had sharply distinguished be- tween the two substances — mind, with its attri- bute of thought; and body, with its attribute of SUBJECTIVISM 273 extension — and divided the finite world between them. God was regarded as the infinite and sus- taining cause of both. Stated in the terms of epistemology, the object of clear thinking is the physical cosmos, the subject of clear thinking the immortal soul. The realm of perception, wherein the mind is subjected to the body, embarrasses the Cartesian system, and has no clear title to any place in it. And without attaching cognitive im- portance to this realm, the system is utterly dog- matic in its epistemology. 6 For what one sub- stance thinks, must be assumed to be somehow true of another quite independent substance without any medium of communication. Now between Descartes and Berkeley appeared the sober and questioning " Essay Concerning Human Under- standing," by John Locke. This is an interesting combination (they cannot be said to "blend) of traditional metaphysics and revolutionary episte- mology. The universe still consists of God, the immortal thinking soul, and a corporeal nature, the object of its thought. But, except for certain proofs of God and self, knowledge is entirely reduced to the perceptual type, to sensations, or ideas directly imparted to the mind by the objects 6 For another issue out of this situation, cf. §§185-187. 274 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY themselves. To escape dogmatism it is main- tained that the real is what is observed to be pres- ent. But Locke thinks the qualities so discovered belong in part to the perceiver and in part to the substance outside the mind. Color is a case of the former, a " secondary quality " ; and exten- sion a case of the latter, a " primary quality." And evidently the above empirical test of knowl- edge is not equally well met in these two cases. When I see a red object I know that red exists, for it is observed to be present, and I make no claim for it beyond the present. But when I note that the red object is square, I am supposed to know a property that will continue to exist in the object after I have closed my eyes or turned to something else. Here my claim exceeds my ob- servation, and the empirical principle adopted at the outset would seem to be violated. Berkeley develops his philosophy from this criticism. His refutation of material substance is intended as a full acceptance of the implications of the new em- pirical epistemology. Knowledge is to be all of the perceptual type, where what is known is directly presented ; and, in conformity with this principle, being is to be restricted to the content of the living pulses of experience. SUBJECTIVISM 275 § 129. Berkeley, then, beginning with the three- fold world of Descartes and of common-sense, TheRefuta- proposes to apply Locke's theory of Material knowledge to the discomfiture of cor- Substance. poreal nature. It was a radical doc- trine, because it meant for him and for his contemporaries the denial of all finite objects out- side the mind. But at the same time it meant a restoration of the homogeneity of experience, the reestablishment of the qualitative world of every- day living, and so had its basis of appeal to common-sense. The encounter between Hylas, the advocate of the traditional philosophy, and Philo- nous, who represents the author himself, begins with an exchange of the charge of innovation. Hyl. I am glad to find there was nothing in the accounts I heard of you. ■ Phil. Pray, what were those? Hyl. You were represented, in last night's conversa- tion, as one who maintained the most extravagant opinion that ever entered into the mind of man, to wit, that there is no such thing as material substance in the world. Phil. That there is no such thing as what philosophers call material substance, I am seriously persuaded: but if I were made to see anything absurd or sceptical in this, I should then have the same reason to renounce this that I imagine I have now to reject the contrary opinion. Hyl. What! can anything be more fantastical, more 276 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY repugnant to Common-Sense, or a more manifest piece of Scepticism, than to believe there is no such thing as matter? Phil. Softly, good Hylas. What if it should prove that you, who hold there is, are, by virtue of that opinion, a greater sceptic, and maintain more paradoxes and repugnances to Common-Sense, than I who believe no such thing? 7 Philonous now proceeds with his case. Begin- ning by obtaining from Hylas the admission that pleasure and pain are essentially relative and sub- jective, he argues that sensations such as heat, since they are inseparable from these feelings, must be similarly regarded. And he is about to annex other qualities in turn to this core of subjectivity, when Hylas enters a general demurrer : "Hold, Philonous, I now see what it was deluded me all this time. You asked me whether heat and cold, sweetness and bitterness, were not particular sorts of pleasure and pain ; to which I answered simply that they were. Whereas I should have thus distinguished: — those qualities as perceived by us, are pleasures or pains; but not as existing in the external objects. We must not therefore conclude absolutely, that there is no heat in the fire, or sweetness in the sugar, but only that heat or sweetness, as perceived by us, are not in the fire or sugar." 8 7 Berkeley: Op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 380-381. 8 Ibid., p. 389. SUBJECTIVISM 277 § 130. Here the argument touches upon pro- found issues. Philonous now assumes the extreme empirical contention that knowledge tion of the applies only to its own psychological Epistemologi- rr a r o v cai Principle, 'moment, that its object in no way ex- tends beyond that individual situation which we call the state of knowing. The full import of such an epistemology Berkeley never recognized, but he is clearly employing it here, and the overthrow of Hylas is inevitable so long as he does not challenge it or turn it against his opponent. This, however, as a protagonist of Berkeley's own making, he fails to do, and he plays into Philonous's hands by ad- mitting that what is known only in perception must for that reason consist in perception. He frankly owns " that it is vain to stand out any longer," that " colors, sounds, tastes, in a word, all those termed secondary qualities, have certainly no existence without the mind." 9 Hylas has now arrived at the distinction be- tween primary and secondary qualities. " Exten- sion, Figure, Solidity, Gravity, Motion, and Rest " are the attributes of an external substance which is the cause of sensations. But the same episte- mological principle readily reduces these also to 9 Ibid., p. 397. 278 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY dependence on mind, for, like the secondary quali- ties, their content is given only in perception. Hylas is then driven to defend a general material substratum, which is the cause of ideas, but to which none of the definite content of these ideas can be attributed. In short, he has put all the content of knowledge on the one side, and admitted its inseparability from the perceiving spirit, and left the being of things standing empty and for- lorn on the other. This amounts, as Philonous re- minds him, to the denial of the reality of the known world. " You are therefore, by your principles, forced to deny the reality of sensible things; since you made it to consist in an absolute existence exterior to the mind. That is to say, you are a downright sceptic. So I have gained my point, which was to show your principles led to Scepticism." 10 § 131. Having advanced the direct empiricist argument for phenomenalism, Berkeley now gives The Refuta- the rationalistic motive an opportunity tion of a Conceived to express itself in the queries of Hylas world. as to whether there be not an " absolute extension," somehow abstracted by thought from the relativities of perception. Is there not at least a conceivable world independent of perception? 10 Ibid., p. 418. SUBJECTIVISM 279 The answers of Philonous throw much light upon the Berkeleyan position. He admits that thought is capable of separating the primary from the sec- ondary qualities in certain operations, but at the same time denies that this is forming an idea of them as separate. " I acknowledge, Hylas, it is not difficult to form general propositions and reasonings about those quali- ties, without mentioning any other; and, in this sense, to consider or treat of them abstractedly. But, how doth it follow that, because I can pronounce the word motion by itself, I can form the idea of it in my mind exclusive of body? or, because theorems may be made of extension and figures, without any mention of great or small, or any other sensible mode or quality, that therefore it is possible such an abstract idea of extension, without any particular size or figure, or sensible quality, should be distinctly formed, and apprehended by the mind? Mathematicians treat of quantity, without re- garding what other sensible qualities it is attended with, as being altogether indifferent to their demonstrations. But, when laying aside the words, they contemplate the bare ideas, I believe you will find, they are not the pure abstracted ideas of extension." 11 Berkeley denies that we have ideas of pure exten- sion or motion, because, although we do actually deal with these and find them intelligible, we can never obtain a state of mind in which they appear as the content. He applies this psychological test 11 Ibid., pp. 403-404. 280 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY because of his adherence to the general empirical postulate that knowledge is limited to the indi- vidual content of its own individual states. " It is a universally received maxim," he says, " that everything which exists is particular." Now the truth of mathematical reckoning is not particular, but is valid wherever the conditions to which it refers are fulfilled. Mathematical reckoning, if it is to be particular, must be regarded as a particular act or state of some thinker. Its truth must then be construed as relative to the interests of the thinker, as a symbolism which has an in- strumental rather than a purely cognitive value. This conclusion cannot be disputed short of a rad- ical stand against the general epistemological prin- ciple to which Berkeley is so far true, the principle that the reality which is known in any state of thinking or perceiving is the state itself. § 132. This concludes the purely phenomenal- istic strain of Berkeley's thought. He has taken The Transition ^ ne immediate apprehension of sensible to Spiritualism. 0D j ec t s in a state of mind centring about the pleasure and pain of an individual, to be the norm of knowledge. He has further main- tained that knowledge cannot escape the particu- larity of its own states. The result is that the SUBJECTIVISM 281 universe is composed of private perceptions and ideas. Strictly on the basis of what has preceded, Hylas is justified in regarding this conclusion as no less sceptical than that to which his own posi- tion had been reduced; for while he had been compelled to admit that the real is unknowable, Philonous has apparently defined the knowable as relative to the individual. But the supplementary metaphysics which had hitherto been kept in the background is now revealed. It is maintained that though perceptions know no external world, they do nevertheless reveal a spiritual substance of which they are the states. Although it has hitherto been argued that the esse of things is in their percipi, this is now replaced by the more fundamental principle that the esse of things is in their percipere or velle. The real world consists not in perceptions, but in perceivers. § 133. Now it is at once evident that the episte- mological theory which has been Berkeley's dia- FurtherAt- lectical weapon in the foregoing argu- tempts to m Maintain ment is no longer available. And those Phenomenal- 7 „ , . , ism. who have cared more tor this theory than for metaphysical speculation have attempted to stop at this point, and so to construe phenom- enalism as to make it self-sufficient on its own 282 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY grounds. Such attempts are so instructive as to make it worth our while to review them before proceeding with the development of the spiritual- istic motive in subjectivism. The world is to be regarded as made up of sense- perceptions, ideas, or phenomena. What is to be accepted as the fundamental category which gives to all of these terms their subjectivistic signifi- cance ? So far there seems to be nothing in view save the principle of relativity. The type to which these were reduced was that of the peculiar or unsharable experience best represented by an in- dividual's pleasure and pain. But relativity will not work as a general principle of being. It con- signs the individual to his private mind, and can- not provide for the validity of knowledge enough even to maintain itself. Some other course, then, must be followed. Perception may be given a psycho-physical definition, which employs physical terms as fundamental; 12 but this flagrantly con- tradicts the phenomenalistic first principle. Or, reality may be regarded as so stamped with its marks as to insure the proprietorship of thought. But this definition of certain objective entities of 12 Cf. Pearson: Grammar of Science, Chap. II. See above, § 118. SUBJECTIVISM 283 mind, of beings attributed to intelligence because of their intrinsic intelligibility, is inconsistent with empiricism, if indeed it does not lead eventu- ally to a realism of the Platonic type. 13 Finally, and most commonly, the terms of phenomenalism have been retained after their orignal meaning has been suffered to lapse. The " impressions " of Hume, e. g., are the remnant of the Berkeleyan world with the spirit stricken out. There is no longer any point in calling them impressions, for they now mean only elements or qualities. As a consequence this outgrowth of the Berkeleyanism epistemology is at present merging into a realistic philosophy of experience. 14 Any one, then, of these three may be the last state of one who under- takes to remain exclusively faithful to the phe- nomenalistic aspect of Berkeleyanism, embodied in the principle esse est percipi. 13 See Chap. XI. Cf. also § 140. 14 The same may be said of the " permanent possibilities of sensation," proposed by J. S. Mill. Such possibilities out- side of actual perception are either nothing or things such as they are known to be in perception. In either case they are not perceptions. In Ernst Mach's Analysis of Sensations, the reader will find an interesting transition from sensationalism to realism through the substitution of the term Bestandtheil for Em- pfindung. (See Translation by Williams, pp. 18-20.) See below, § 207. 284 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY Berkeley's § 134. Let us now follow the fortunes Spiritualism. immediate of the other phase of subjectivism — Knowledge of . . the Perceiver. that which develops the conception of the perceiver rather than the perceived. When Berkeley holds 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 without a Mind," his thought has transcended the epistemology with which he overthrew the conception of material sub- stance, in two directions. For neither mind of the finite type nor mind of the divine type is perceived. But the first of these may yet be regarded as a direct empirical datum, even though sharply dis- tinguished from an object of perception. In the third dialogue, Philonous thus expounds this new kind of knowledge : " I own I have properly no idea, either of God or any other spirit; for these being active, cannot be represented by things perfectly inert, as our ideas are. I do never- theless know that I, who am a spirit or thinking sub- stance, exist as certainly as I know my ideas exist. Farther, I know what I mean by the terms / and myself; and I know this immediately or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle, a color, or a sound." 15 15 Berkeley: Op. cit., p. 447. SUBJECTIVISM 285 The knowledge here provided for may he regarded as empirical because the reality in question is an individual present in the moment of the knowl- edge. Particular acts of perception are said di- rectly to reveal not only perceptual objects, but perceiving subjects. And the conception of spir- itual substance, once accredited, may then be ex- tended to account for social relations and to fill in the nature of God. The latter extension, in so far as it attributes such further predicates as uni- versality and infinity, implies still a third episte- mology, and threatens to pass over into rationalism. But the knowledge of one's fellow-men may, it is claimed, be regarded as immediate, like the knowl- edge of one's self. Perceptual and volitional ac- tivity has a sense for itself and also a sense for other like activity. The self is both self-conscious and socially conscious in an immediate experience of the same type. § 135. But this general spiritualistic conception is developed with less singleness of purpose in schopen- Berkeley than among the voluntarists hauer's Spirit- ualism, or and panpsychists who spring from Voluntarism. " ■ . . immediate bchopenhauer, the orientalist, pessimist, of the will, and mystic among the German Kan- tians of the early nineteenth century. His great 286 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY book, "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," opens with the phenomenalistic contention that " the world is my idea." It soon appears, how- ever, that the " my " is more profoundly signifi- cant than the " idea." Nature is my creation, due to the working within me of certain fixed principles of thought, such as space, time, and causality. But nature, just because it is my crea- tion, is less than me : is but a manifestation of the true being for which I must look within myself. But this inner self cannot be made an object of thought, for that would be only to create another term of nature. The will itself, from which such creation springs, is " that which is most immedi- ate " in one's consciousness, and " makes itself known in a direct manner in its particular acts." The term will is used by Schopenhauer as a gen- eral term covering the whole dynamics of life, in- stinct and desire, as well as volition. It is that sense of life-preserving and life-enhancing appe- tency which is the conscious accompaniment of struggle. With its aid the inwardness of the whole world may now be apprehended. " Whoever has now gained from all these expositions a knowledge in abstracto, and therefore clear and certain, of what everyone knows directly in concreto, i. e., as SUBJECTIVISM 287 feeling, a knowledge that his will is the real inner nature of his phenomenal being, . . . and that his will is that which is most immediate in his consciousness, . . . will find that of itself it affords him the key to the knowledge of the inmost being of the whole of nature ; for he now transfers it to all those phenomena which are not given to him, like his own phenomenal existence, both in direct and indirect knowledge, but only in the latter, thus merely one-sidedly as idea alone." 16 The heart of reality is thus known by an " intui- tive interpretation/' which begins at home in the individual's own heart. § 136. The panpsychist follows the same course of reflection. There is an outwardness and an Panpsychism. inwardness of nature, corresponding to the knower's body on the one hand, and his feel- ing or will on the other. With this principle in hand one may pass down the whole scale of being and discover no breach of continuity. Such an interpretation of nature has been well set forth by a contemporary writer, who quotes the following from the botanist, C. v. ISTaegeli : " Sensation is clearly connected with the reflex actions of higher animals. We are obliged to concede it to the other animals also, and we have no grounds for denying it to plants and inorganic bodies. The sensation arouses in us a condition of comfort and discomfort. In general, 16 Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Idea. Transla- tion by Haldane and Kemp, Vol. I, p. 141. 288 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY the feeling of pleasure arises when the natural impulses are satisfied, the feeling of pain when they are not satis- fied. Since all material processes are composed of movements of molecules and elementary atoms, pleasure and pain must have their seat in these particles. . . . Thus the same mental thread runs through all material phenomena. The human mind is nothing but the highest devolpment on our earth of the mental processes which universally animate and move nature." 17 According to panpsyckism, then, physical nature is the manifestation of an appetency or bare con- sciousness generalized from the thinker's awareness of his most intimate self. Such appetency or bare consciousness is the essential or substantial state of that which appears as physical nature. § 137. We must now turn to the efforts which this doctrine has made to maintain itself against The inherent the sceptical trend of its own episte- slrituaHsm m °l°gy> For precisely as in the case No Provision £ phenomenalism its dialectical prin- for Objective ■*■ A Knowiedge. ciple threatens to be self-destructive. Immediate presence is still the test of knowledge. But does not immediate presence connote relativ- ity and inadequacy, at best; an initial phase of knowledge that must be supplemented and cor- 17 Quoted from Naegeli: Die Mechanisch-physiologische Theo~ He der Abstammungslehre, by Friedrich Paulsen, in his Intro- duction to Philosophy. Translation by Thilly, p. 103. SUBJECTIVISM 289 rected before objective reality and valid truth are apprehended? Does not the individuality of the individual thinker connote the very maximum of error ? Indeed, spiritualism would seem to have exceeded even Protagoreanism itself, and to have passed from scepticism to deliberate nihilism. The object of knowledge is no longer even, as with the phenomenalist, the thinker's thought, but only his thinking. And if the thinker's thought is relative to him, then the thinker's act of thinking is the very vanishing-point of relativity, the negative term of a negating relation. How is a real, a self-subsistent world to be composed of such ? Im- pelled by a half-conscious realization of the hope- lessness of this situation, the exponent of spiritu- alism has sought to universalize his conception; to define an absolute or ultimate spirit other than the individual thinker, though known in and through him. But it is clear that this development of spiritualism, like all of the speculative proced- ure of subjectivism, threatens to exceed the scope of the original principle of knowledge. There is a strong presumption against the possibility of introducing a knowledge of God by the way of the particular presentations of an individual con- sciousness. 290 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY § 138. Schopenhauer must be credited with a genuine effort to accept the metaphysical conse- schopen- quences of his epistemology. His fempt S t At " epistemology, as we have seen, defined Universalize knowledge as centripetal. The object Subjectivism. ox •> Mysticism. f rea i knowledge is identical with the subject of knowledge. If I am to know the uni- versal will, therefore, I must in knowing become that will. And this Schopenhauer maintains. The innermost heart of the individual into which he may retreat, even from his private will, is — the universal. But there is another way of arriving at the same knowledge. In contemplation I may become absorbed in principles and laws, rather than be diverted by the particular spacial and temporal objects, until (and this is peculiarly true of the aesthetic experience) my interest no longer distinguishes itself, but coincides with truth. In other words, abstract thinking and pure willing are not opposite extremes, but adjacent points on the deeper or transcendent circle of experience. One may reach this part of the circle by moving in either of two directions that at the start are directly opposite : by turning in upon the subject or by utterly giving one's self up to the object. Reality obtains no definition by this means. Phi- SUBJECTIVISM 291 losophy, for Schopenhauer, is rather a programme for realizing the state in which I will the universal and know the universal will. The final theory of knowledge, then, is mysticism, reality directly ap- prehended in a supreme and incommunicable ex- perience, direct and vivid, like perception, and at the same time universal, like thought. But the empiricism with which Schopenhauer began, the appeal to a familiar experience of self as will, has meanwhile been forgotten. The idea as object of my perception, and the will as its subject were in the beginning regarded as common and verifiable items of experience. But who, save the occasional philosopher, knows a universal will ? ISTor have at- tempts to avoid mysticism, while retaining Scho- penhauer's first principle, been successful. Certain voluntarists and panpsychists have attempted to do without the universal will, and define the world solely in terms of the many individual wills. But, as Schopenhauer himself pointed out, individual wills cannot be distinguished except in terms of something other than will, such as space and time. The same is true if for will there be substituted inner feeling or consciousness. Within this cate- gory individuals can be distinguished only as points of view, which to be comparable at all must 292 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY contain common objects, or be defined in terms of a system of relations like that of the physical world or that of an ethical community. The con- ception of pure will or pure feeling inevitably at- taches to itself that of an undivided unity, if for no other reason because there is no ground for dis- tinction. And such a unity, a will or conscious- ness that is no particular act or idea, can be known only in the unique experience which mysticism provides. § 139. The way of Schopenhauer is the way of one who adheres to the belief that what the thinker elective knows must always be a part of himself, spiritualism, j^g g^g or ki s activity. From this point of view the important element of being, its very essence or substance, is not any definable nature but an immediate relation to the knower. The consequence is that the universe in the last analysis can only be defined as a supreme state or activity into which the individual's consciousness may develop. Spiritualism has, however, other interests, interests which may be quite independent of epistemology. It is speculatively interested in a kind of being which it defines as spiritual, and in terms of which it proposes to define the universe. Such procedure is radically different from the SUBJECTIVISM 293 epistemological criticism which led Berkeley to maintain that the esse of objects is in their percipi, or Schopenhauer to maintain that " the world is my idea," or that led both of these philosophers to find a deeper reality in immediately intuited self- aetivity. For now it is proposed to understand spirit, discover its properties, and to acknowledge it only where these properties appear. I may now know spirit as an object; which in its properties, to be sure, is quite different from matter, but which like matter is capable of subsisting quite independ- ently of my knowledge. This is a metaphysical spiritualism quite distinct from epistemological spiritualism, and by no means easily made con- sistent therewith. Indeed, it exhibits an almost irrepressible tendency to overstep the bounds both of empiricism and subjectivism, an historical con- nection with which alone justifies its introduction in the present chapter. § 140. To return again to the instructive ex- Berkeiey's ample of Bishop Berkeley, we find him Conception of God as cause, proving God f rom the evidence of him Goodness and . . . 1 . Order. m experience, or the need ol him to support the claims of experience. " But, whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense 294 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY have not a like dependence on my will. When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view: and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses; the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them. The ideas of Sense are more strong, lively, and distinct than those of the Imagination; they have likewise a steadiness, order, and coherence, and are not excited at random, as those which are the effects of human wills often are, but in a regular train or series — the admirable connection whereof sufficiently testifies the wisdom and benevolence of its Author. Now the set rules, or estab- lished methods, wherein the Mind we depend on excites in us the ideas of Sense, are called the laws of nature." 18 Of the attributes of experience here in question, independence or " steadiness " is not regarded as prima facie evidence of spirit, but rather as an aspect of experience for which some cause is nec- essary. But it is assumed that the power to " pro- duce," with which such a cause must be endowed, is the peculiar prerogative of spirit, and that this cause gives further evidence of its spiritual nature, of its eminently spiritual nature, in the orderli- ness and the goodness of its effects. " The force that produces, the intellect that orders, the goodness that perfects all things is the Supreme Being." 1B 18 Berkeley: Op. cit., p. 273. 19 Op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 272-273. SUBJECTIVISM 295 That spirit is possessed of causal efficacy, Berke- ley has in an earlier passage proved by a direct appeal to the individual's sense of power. " I find I can excite ideas in my mind at pleasure, and vary and shift the scene as oft as I think fit. It is no more than willing, and straightway this or that idea arises in my fancy; and by the same power it is ob- literated and makes way for another. This making and unmaking of ideas doth very properly denominate the mind active. Thus much is certain and grounded on experience: but when we talk of unthinking agents, or of exciting ideas exclusive of volition, we only amuse ourselves with words." 20 Although Berkeley is here in general agreement with a very considerable variety of philosophical views, it will be readily observed that this doctrine tends to lapse into mysticism whenever it is re- tained in its purity. Berkeley himself admitted that there was no " idea " of such power. And philosophers will as a rule either obtain an idea corresponding to a term or amend the term — always excepting the mystical appeal to an inar- ticulate and indefinable experience. Hence pure power revealed in an ineffable immediate experi- ence tends to give place to kinds of power to which some definite meaning may be attached. The energy of physics, defined by measurable quan- 20 Op. cit., Vol. Ill, p. 278. 296 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY titative equivalence, is a case in point. The ideal- istic trend is in another direction, power coming to signify ethical or logical connection. Simi- larly, in the later philosophy of Berkeley himself, God is known by the nature of his activity rather than by the fact of his activity; and we are said " to account for a thing, when we show that it is so best." God's power, in short, becomes indis- tinguishable from his universality attended with the attributes of goodness and orderliness. But this means that the analogy of the human spirit, conscious of its own activity, is no longer the basis of the argument. By the divine will is now meant ethical principles, rather than the " here am I willing " of the empirical consciousness. Simi- larly the divine mind is denned in terms of logical principles, such as coherence and order, rather than in terms of the " here am I thinking " of the finite knower himself. But enough has been said to make it plain that this is no longer the stand- point of empirio-idealism. Indeed, in his last philosophical writing, the " Siris," Berkeley is so far removed from the principles of knowledge which made him at once the disciple and the critic of Locke, as to pronounce himself the devotee of Platonism and the prophet of transcendentalism. SUBJECTIVISM 297 The former strain appears in his conclusion that " the principles of science are neither objects of sense nor imagination ; and that intellect and rea- son are alone the sure guides to truth." 21 His transcendentalism appears in his belief that such principles, participating in the vital unity of the Individual Purpose, constitute the meaning and so the substantial essence of the universe. § 141. Such then are the various paths which lead from subjectivism to other types of philos- The General ophy, demonstrating the peculiar apti- Tendency of Subjectivism tude of the former for departing from to Transcend , . , . itself. its first principle. Beginning with the relativity of all knowable reality to the individual knower, it undertakes to conceive reality in one or the other of the terms of this relation, as particu- lar state of knowledge or as individual subject of knowledge. But these terms develop an intrinsic nature of their own, and become respectively empirical datum, and logical or ethical principle. In either case the subjectivistic principle of knowl- edge has been abandoned. Those whose specula- tive interest in a definable objective world has been less strong than their attachment to this principle, have either accepted the imputation of scepticism, 21 Op. (At., Vol. Ill, p. 249. 298 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY or had recourse to the radical epistemological doc- trine of mysticism. § 142. Since the essence of subjectivism is epistemological rather than metaphysical, its prac- Ethicai tical and religious implications are Theories. Relativism. various. The ethical theories which are corollary to the tendencies expounded above, range from extreme egoism to a mystical univer- salism. The close connection between the former and relativism is evident, and the form of egoism most consistent with epistemological relativism is to be found among those same Sophists who first maintained this latter doctrine. If we may believe Plato, the Sophists sought to create for their individual pupils an appearance of good. In the " Theaetetus," Socrates is represented as speaking thus on behalf of Protagoras : " And I am far from saying that wisdom and the wise man have no existence; but I say that the wise man is he who makes the evils which are and appear to a man, into goods which are and appear to him. ... I say that they (the wise men) are the physicians of the human body, and the husbandmen of plants — for the husband- men also take away the evil and disordered sensations of plants, and infuse into them good and healthy sensa- tions as well as true ones ; and the wise and good rhetori- cians make the good instead of the evil seem just to states ; for whatever appears to be just and fair to a state, while SUBJECTIVISM 299 sanctioned by a state, is just and fair to it ; but the teacher of wisdom causes the good to take the place of the evil, both in appearance and in reality." 22 As truth is indistinguishable from the appearance of truth to the individual, so good is indistinguish- able from a particular seeming good. The su- preme moral value according to this plan of life is the agreeable feeling tone of that dream world to which the individual is forever consigned. The possible perfection of an experience which is " re- duced to a swarm of impressions," and " ringed round " for each one of us by a " thick wall of personality " has been brilliantly depicted in the passage already quoted from Walter Pater, in whom the naturalistic and snbjectivistic motives unite. 23 If all my experience is strictly my own, then my good must likewise be my own. And if all of my experience is valid only in its instants of immediacy, then my best good must likewise con- sist in some " exquisite passion," or stirring of the senses. § 143. But for Schopenhauer the internal world opens out into the boundless and unfathom- able sea of the universal will. If I re- tire from the world upon my own pri- Pessimism and Self-denial. Plato: Theaetetus, 167. Translation by Jowett. See § 121. 300 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY vate feelings, I am still short of the true life, for I am asserting myself against the world. I should seek a sense of unison with a world whose deeper heart-beats I may learn to feel and adopt as the rhythm of my own. The folly of willing for one's private self is the ground of Schopenhauer's pessimism. " All willing arises from want, therefore from de- ficiency, and therefore from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends it; yet for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least ten which are denied. Further, the desire lasts long, the demands are infinite; the satisfac- tion is short and scantily measured out. But even the final satisfaction is itself only apparent; every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new one, both are illusions ; the one is known to be so, the other not yet. No at- tained object of desire can give lasting satisfaction, but merely a fleeting gratification; it is like the alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive to-day that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow. . . . The subject of willing is thus constantly stretched on the revolving wheel of Ixion, pours water into the sieve of the Danaids, is the ever-longing Tantalus." 24 The escape from this torture and self-deception is possible through the same mystical experience, the same blending with the universe that conditions knowledge. § 144. But though pleasant dreaming be the 24 Schopenhauer: Op. cit. Translation by Haldane and Kemp, Vol. I, pp. 253-254. SUBJECTIVISM 301 most consistent practical sequel to a subjectivistic epistemology, its individualism presents another The Ethics basis for life with quite different pos- of welfare. sibilities of emphasis. It may develop into an aggressive egoism of the type represented by the sophist Thrasymachus, in his proclamation that " might is right, justice the interest of the stronger." 25 But more commonly it is tempered by a conception of social interest, and serves as the champion of action against contemplation. The gospel of action is always individualistic. It requires of the individual a sense of his inde- pendence, and of the real virtue of his initiative. Hence those voluntarists who emphasize the many individual wills and decline to reduce them, after the manner of Schopenhauer, to a universal, may be said to afford a direct justification of it. It is true that this practical realism threatens the tena- bility of an epistemological idealism, but the two have been united, and because of their common emphasis upon the individual such procedure is not entirely inconsequential. Friedrich Paulsen, whose panpsychism has already been cited, is an excellent case in point. The only good, he main- tains, is " welfare," the fulfilment of those natural 25 See Plato: Republic, Bk. I, 338. 302 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY desires which both distinguish the individual and signify his continuity with all grades of being. "The goal at which the will aims does not consist in a maximum of pleasurable feelings, but in the normal exercise of the vital functions for which the species is predisposed. In the case of man the mode of life is on the whole determined by the nature of the historical unity from which the individual evolves as a member. Here the objective content of life, after which the will strives, also enters into consciousness with the progres- sive evolution of presentation; the type of life becomes a conscious ideal of life." M Here, contrary to the teaching of Schopenhauer, the good consists in individual attainment, the extension and fulfilment of the distinct interests that arise from the common fund of nature. To be and to do to the uttermost, to realize the maxi- mum from nature's investment in one's special capacities and powers — this is indeed the first principle of a morality of action. § 145. But a type of ethics still further re- moved from the initial relativism has been adopted The Ethical anc ^ more or ^ ess successfully assimi- commumty. 2ated by subjectivistic philosophies. Accepting Berkeley's spirits, with their indefinite capacities, and likewise the stability of the ideal principles that underlie a God-administered world, 26 Paulsen: Op. tit., p. 423. SUBJECTIVISM 303 and morality becomes the obedience which the in- dividual renders to the law. The individual, free to act in his own right, cooperates with the pur- poses of the general spiritual community, whose laws are worthy of obedience though not coercive. The recognition of such a spiritual citizenship, entailing opportunities, duties, and obligations, rather than thraldom, partakes of the truth as well as the inadequacy of common-sense. § 146. As for religion, at least two distinct practical appreciations of the universe have been The Reli ion of historically associated with this chap- Mysticism. | er j n philosophy. The one of these is the mysticism of Schopenhauer, the religious sequel to a universalistic voluntarism. Schopen- hauer's ethics, his very philosophy, is religion. For the good and the true are alike attainable only through identification with the Absolute Will. This consummation of life, transcending practical and theoretical differences, engulfing and effacing all qualities and all values, is like the Nirvana of the Orient — a positive ideal only for one who has appraised the apparent world at its real value. " Rather do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but, conversely, to 304 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY those in whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky- ways — is nothing." 27 § 147. From the union of the two motives of voluntarism and individualism springs another The Religion an( ^ a more familiar type of religion, Cooperation 1 ^ ia ^ °^ cooperative spiritual endeavor, with God. j n ^g re ijgi on f Schopenhauer the soul must utterly lose itself for the sake of peace ; here the soul must persist in its own being and activity for the sake of the progressive goodness of the world. For Schopenhauer God is the uni- versal solution, in which all motions cease and all differences disappear; here God is the General of moral forces. The deeper and more significant universe is "a society of rational agents, acting under the eye of Providence, concurring in one design to promote the common benefit of the whole, and conforming their actions to the established laws and order of the Divine parental wisdom: wherein each particular agent shall not consider himself apart, but as the member of a great City, whose author and founder is God: in which the civil laws are no other than the rules of virtue and the duties of religion: and where everyone's true interest is combined with his duty." 28 27 Schopenhauer: Op. cit. Translation by Haldane and Kemp, p. 532. 28 Berkeley: Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 138. SUBJECTIVISM 305 But so uncompromising an optimism is not essen- tial to this religion. Its distinction lies rather in its acceptance of the manifest plurality of souls, and its appeal to the faith that is engendered by service. 29 As William James has said : " Even God's being is sacred from ours. To cooperate with his creation by the best and rightest response seems all he wants of us. In such cooperation with his pur- poses, not in any chimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretical drinking of him up, must lie the real meaning of our destiny." 30 28 For an interesting characterization of this type of religion, cf. Royce: Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 46. 30 James: The Will to Believe, p. 141. CHAPTER X ABSOLUTE KEALISM 1 § 148. ISTo one has understood better than the philosopher himself that he cannot hope to be popu- The pwioso- l Rr with men of practical cominon- and r thJ aSk * sense - Indeed, it has commonly been Philosopher's a mat ter of pride with him. The Object, or the x Absolute. classic representation of the philoso- pher's faith in himself is to be found in Plato's " Republic." The philosopher is there portrayed in the famous cave simile as one who having seen the light itself can no longer distinguish the shadows which are apparent to those who sit per- petually in the twilight. Within the cave of shadows he is indeed less at his ease than those who have never seen the sun. But since he knows the source of the shadows, his knowledge surrounds 1 By Absolute Realism is meant that system of philosophy which defines the universe as the absolute being, implied in knowledge as its final object, but assumed to be inde- pendent of knowledge. In the Spinozistic system this absolute being is conceived under the form of substance, or self-sufficiency; in Platonism under the form of perfection; and in the Aristotelian system under the form of a hierarchy of substances. 306 ABSOLUTE REALISM 307 that of the shadow connoisseurs. And his equa- nimity need not suffer from the contempt of those whom he understands better than they understand themselves. The history of philosophy is due to the dogged persistence with which the philosopher has taken himself seriously and endured the poor opinion of the world. But the pride of the phi- losopher has done more than perpetuate the philo- sophical outlook and problem; it has led to the formulation of a definite philosophical conception, and of two great philosophical doctrines. The conception is that of the absolute; and the doc- trines are that of the absolute being, and that of the absolute self or mind. The former of these doctrines is the topic of the present chapter. Among the early Greeks the role of the philos- opher was one of superlative dignity. In point of knowledge he was less easily satisfied than other men. He thought beyond immediate prac- tical problems, devoting himself to a profounder reflection, that could not but induce in him a sense of superior intellectual worth. The familiar was not binding upon him, for his thought was eman- cipated from routine and superficiality. Fur- thermore his intellectual courage and resolution did not permit him to indulge in triviality, doubt, 308 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY or paradox. He sought his own with a faith that could not he denied. Even Heraclitus the Dark, who was also called " the Weeping Philosopher," because he found at the very heart of nature that transiency which the philosophical mind seeks to escape, felt himself to be exalted as well as isolated by that insight. But this sentiment of personal aloofness led at once to a division of experience. He who knows truly belongs to another and more abiding world. As there is a philosophical way of thought, there is a philosophical way of life, and a philosophical object. Since the philosopher and the common man do not see alike, the terms of their experience are incommensurable. In Par- menides the Eleatic this motive is most strikingly exhibited. There is a Way of Truth which di- verges from the Way of Opinion. The philoso- pher walks the former way alone. And there is an object of truth, accessible only to one who takes this way of truth. Parmenides finds this object to be the content of pure affirmation. " One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is. In it are very many tokens that what is, is uncreated and indestructible, alone, complete, im- movable, and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one." 2 2 Burnet: Early Greek Philosophy, p. 185. ABSOLUTE REALISM 309 The philosophy of Parmenides, commonly called the Eleatic Philosophy, is notable for this emer- gence of the pure concept of absolute being as the final object of knowledge. The philosopher aims to discover that which is, and so turns away from that which is not or that which ceases to be. The negative and transient aspects of experience only hinder him in his search for the eternal. It was the great Eleatic insight to realize that the out- come of thought is thus predetermined; that the answer to philosophy is contained in the question of philosophy. The philosopher, in that he reso- lutely avoids all partiality, relativity, and super- ficiality, must affirm a complete, universal, and ultimate being as the very object of that perfect knowledge which he means to possess. This ob- ject is known in the history of these philosophies as the infinite or absolute? § 149. The Eleatic reasons somewhat as fol- lows. The philosopher seeks to know what is. The Eleatic The object of his knowledge will then Conception . . . of Being. contain as its primary and essential predicate, that of being. It is a step further to define being in terms of this essential predicate. 3 When contrasted with the temporal realm of " genera- tion and decay," this ultimate object is often called the eternal. 310 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY Parmenides thinks of being as a power or strength, a positive self-maintenance to which all affirma- tions refer. The remainder of the Eleatic philos- ophy is the analysis of this concept and the proof of its implications. Being must persist through all change, and span all chasms. Before being there can be only nothing, which is the same as to say that so far as being is concerned there is no before. Similarly there can be no after or beyond. There can be no motion, change, or division of being, because being will be in all parts of every division, and in all stages of every process. Hence being is " uncreated and indestructible, alone, complete, immovable, and without end." The argument turns upon the application to being as a whole of the meaning and the implica- tions of only being. Being is the affirmative or positive. From that alone, one can derive only such properties as eternity or unity. For generation and decay and plurality may belong to that which is also affirmative and positive, but not to that which is affirmative and positive only. The Eleatic phi- losophy is due, then, to the determination to de- rive the whole of reality from the bare necessity of being, to cut down reality to what flows en- tirely from the assertion of its only known nee- ABSOLUTE REALISM 311 essary aspect, that of being. We meet here in its simplest form a persistent rationalistic motive, the attempt to derive the universe from the isolation and analysis of its most universal character. As in the case of every well-defined philosophy, this motive is always attended by a " besetting " prob- lem. Here it is the accounting for what, empiri- cally at least, is alien to that universal character. And this difficulty is emphasized rather than re- solved by Parmenides in his designation of a limbo of opinion, " in which is no true belief at all," to which the manifold of common experience with all its irrelevancies can be relegated. § 150. The Eleatic philosophy, enriched and supplemented, appears many centuries later in the Spinoza's rigorous rationalism of Spinoza. 4 With Conception . . of Substance, opmoza philosophy is a demonstration of necessities after the manner of geometry. Reality is to be set forth in theorems derived from fundamental axioms and definitions. As in the case of Parmenides, these necessities are the im- plications of the very problem of being. The phi- losopher's problem is made to solve itself. But for Spinoza that problem is more definite and more pregnant. The problematic being must not 4 Holland, 1632-1677. 312 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY only be, but must be sufficient to itself. What the philosopher seeks to know is primarily an intrinsic entity. Its nature must be independent of other natures, and my knowledge of it independent of my knowledge of anything else. Reality is something which need not be sought further. So construed, being is in Spinoza's philosophy termed substance. It will be seen that to define substance is to affirm the existence of it, for substance is so defined as to embody the very qualification for existence. Whatever exists exists under the form of substance, as that " which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception." 5 § 151. There remains but one further funda- mental thesis for the establishment of the Spino- Spinoza's zistic philosophy, the thesis which main- ProofofGod, the infinite tains the exclusive existence of the one Substance. The Modes " absolutely infinite being," or God. Attributes. The exclusive existence of God follows from his existence, because of the exhaustiveness of his nature. His is the nature " consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality." He will contain all 5 Spinoza: Ethics, Part I. Translation by Elwes, p. 45. ABSOLUTE REALISM 313 meaning, and all possible meaning, within his fixed and necessary constitution. It is evident that if such a God exist, nothing can fall outside of him. One such substance must be the only substance. But upon what grounds are we to assert God's existence ? To proceed further with Spinoza's philosophy we must introduce two terms which are scarcely less fundamental in his system than that of sub- stance. The one of these is " attribute," by which he means hind or general property; the other is " mode," by which he means case or individual thing. Spinoza's proof of God consists in show- ing that no single mode, single attribute, or finite group of modes or attributes, can be a substance ; but only an infinite system of all modes of all at- tributes. Translated into common speech this means that neither kinds nor cases, nor special groups of either, can stand alone and be of them- selves, but only the unity of all possible cases of all possible kinds. The argument concerning the possible substan- tiality of the case or individual thing is relatively simple. Suppose an attribute or kind, A, of which there are cases am 1} am 2 , am 3 , etc. The number of cases is never involved in the nature of the 314 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY kind, as is seen for example in the fact that the definition of triangle prescribes no special num- ber of individual triangles. Hence am x , am 2 , am z , etc., must be explained by something outside of their nature. Their being cases of A does not ac- count for their existing severally. This is Spi- noza's statement of the argument that individual events, such as motions or sensations, are not self- dependent, but belong to a context of like events which are mutually dependent. The question of the attribute is more difficult. Why may not an attribute as a complete domain of interdependent events, itself be independent or substantial ? Spinoza's predecessor, Descartes, had maintained precisely that thesis in behalf of the domain of thought and the domain of space. Spinoza's answer rests upon the famous ontological argument, inherited from scholasticism and gen- erally accepted in the first period of modern philos- ophy. The evidence of existence, he declares, is clear and distinct conceivability. "For a person to say that he has a clear and distinct — that is, a true — idea of a substance, but that he is not sure whether such substance exists, would be the same as if he said that he had a true idea, but was not sure whether or no it was false." 8 8 Ibid., p. 49. ABSOLUTE REALISM 315 Now we can form a clear and distinct idea of an absolutely infinite being that shall have all possible attributes. This idea is a well-recognized stand- ard and object of reference for thought. But it is a conception which is highly qualified, not only through its clearness and distinctness, but also through its abundance of content. It affirms itself therefore with a certainty that surpasses any other certainty, because it is supported by each and every other certainty, and even by the residuum of possibility. If any intelligible meaning be permitted to affirm itself, so much the more irre- sistible is the claim of this infinitely rich mean- ing. Since every attribute contributes to its valid- ity, the being with infinite attributes is infinitely or absolutely valid. The conclusion of the argu- ment is now obvious. If the being constituted by the infinite attributes exists, it swallows up all possibilities and exists exclusively. § 152. The vulnerable point in Spinoza's argu- ment can thus be expressed: that which is im- The Limits of portant is questionable, and that which Argument * s unquestionable is of doubtful im- for God. portance. Have I indeed a clear and distinct idea of an absolutely infinite being? The answer turns upon the meaning of the 316 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY phrase " idea of." It is true I can add to such meaning as I apprehend the thought of possible other meaning, and suppose the whole to have a definiteness and systematic unity like that of the triangle. But such an idea is prob- lematic. I am compelled to use the term " pos- sible," and so to confess the failure of definite content to measure up to my idea. My idea of an absolutely infinite being is like my idea of a Uni- versal language : I can think of it, but I cannot think it out, for lack of data or because of the con- flicting testimony of other data. If I mean the infinity of my being to be a term of inclusiveness, and to insist that the all must be, and that there can be nothing not included in the all, I can scarcely be denied. But it is reasonable to doubt the importance of such a truth. If, on the other hand, I mean that my infinite being shall have the compactness and organic unity of a triangle, I must admit that such a being is indeed prob- lematic. The degree to which the meaning of the part is dependent upon the meaning of the whole, or the degree to which the geometrical analogy is to be preferred to the analogy of aggregates, like the events within a year, is a problem that falls quite outside Spinoza's fundamental arguments. ABSOLUTE REALISM 317 § 153. But the advance of Spinoza over the Eleatics must not be lost sight of. The modern Spinoza's philosopher has so conceived being as Provision for . . , . , . . , the Finite. to provide for parts withm an individ- ual unity. The geometrical analogy is a most illuminating one, for it enables us to understand how manyness may be indispensable to a being that is essentially unitary. The triangle as triangle is one. But it could not be such without sides and angles. The unity is equally necessary to the parts, for sides and angles of a triangle could not be such without an arrangement governed by the nature triangle. The whole of nature may be similarly conceived : as the reciprocal necessity of natura naturans, or nature defined in respect of its unity, and natura naturata, or nature specified in detail. There is some promise here of a recon- ciliation of the Way of Opinion with the Way of Truth. Opinion would be a gathering of detail, truth a comprehension of the intelligible unity. Both would be provided for through the considera- tion that whatever is complete and necessary must be made up of incompletenesses that are necessary to it. § 154. This consideration, however, does not receive its most effective formulation in Spinoza. 318 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY The isolation of the parts, the actual severalty and irrelevance of the modes, still presents a grave Transition to problem. Is there a kind of whole to Teleological conceptions, which not only parts but fragments, or parts in their very incompleteness, are indispen- sable ? This would seem to be true of a progres- sion or development, since that would require both perfection as its end, and degrees of imperfection as its stages. Spinoza was prevented from making much of this idea by his rejection of the principle of teleology. He regarded appreciation or valu- ation as a projection of personal bias. " Nature has no particular goal in view," and " final causes are mere human figments." " The perfection of things is to be reckoned only from their own nature and power." 7 The philosophical method which Spinoza here repudiates, the interpretation of the world in moral terms, is Platonism, an indepen- dent and profoundly important movement, belong- ing to the same general realistic type with Eleati- cism and Spinozism. Absolute being is again the fundamental conception. Here, however, it is conceived that being is primarily not affirmation or self-sufficiency, but the good or ideal. There are few great metaphysical systems that have not 7 Ibid., pp. 77, 81. ABSOLUTE REALISM 319 been deeply influenced by Platonism; hence the importance of understanding it in its purity. To this end we must return again to the early Greek conception of the philosopher ; for Platonism, like Eleaticism, is a sequel to the philosopher's self- consciousness. § 155. Although the first Greek philosophers, such men as Thales, Heraelitus, Parmenides, and Early Greek Empedocles, were clearly aware of their nSfsS?'" distinction and hi g h calling, it by no critical. means follows that they were good judges of themselves. Their sense of intellectual power was unsuspecting; and they praised phi- losophy without definitely raising the question of its meaning. They were like unskilled players who try all the stops and scales of an organ, and know that somehow they can make a music that exceeds the noises, monotones or simple melodies of those who play upon lesser instru- ments. They knew their power rather than their instrument or their art. The first philoso- phers, in short, were self-conscious but not self- critical. § 156. The immediately succeeding phase in the history of Greek philosophy was a curtailment, but 320 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY only in the most superficial sense a criticism, of the activity of the philosopher. In the Periclean curtailment of A g e philosophy suffered more from in- Phiiosophyia attention tlian f rom refutation. The the Age of the sophists, scepticism of the sophists, who were the knowing men of this age, was not so much convic- tion as indisposition. They failed to recognize the old philosophical problem; it did not appeal to them as a genuine problem. The sophists were the intellectual men of an age of humanism, individu- alism, and secularism. These were years in which the circle of human society, the state with its in- stitutions, citizenship with its manifold activities and interests, bounded the horizon of thought. What need to look beyond ? Life was not a prob- lem, but an abundant opportunity and a sense of capacity. The world was not a mystery, but a place of entertainment and a sphere of action. Of this the sophists were faithful witnesses. In their love of novelty, irreverence, impressionism, elegance of speech, and above all in their praise of individual efficiency, they preached and pan- dered to their age. Their public, though it loved to abuse them, was the greatest sophist of them all — brilliant and capricious, incomparably rich in all but wisdom. The majority belonged to what ABSOLUTE REALISM 321 Plato called " the sight-loving, art-loving, busy class." This is an age, then, when the man of practical common-sense is preeminent, and the philosopher with his dark sayings has passed away. The pride of wisdom has given way to the pride of power and the pride of cleverness. The many men pursue the many goods of life, and there is no spirit among them all who, sitting apart in con- templation, wonders at the meaning of the whole. § 157. But in their midst there moved a strange prophet, whom they mistook for one of themselves. Socrates and Socrates was not one who prayed in the the self- wilderness, but a man of the streets and criticism of the " Philosopher. tlie mar ket-place, who talked rather more incessantly than the rest, and apparently with less right. He did not testify to the truth, but pleaded ignorance in extenuation of an exasperat- ing habit of asking questions. There was, how- ever, a humor and a method in his innocence that arrested attention. He was a formidable adversary in discussion from his very irresponsibility ; and he was especially successful with the more rhetorical sophists because he chose his own weapons, and substituted critical analysis, question and answer, for the long speeches to which these teachers were habituated by their profession. He appeared to 322 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY be governed by an insatiable inquisitiveness, and a somewhat malicious desire to discredit those who spoke with authority. But to those who knew him better, and especially to Plato, who knew him best, Socrates was at once the sweetest and most compelling spirit of his age. There was a kind of truth in the quality of his character. He was perhaps the first of all reverent men. In the presence of conceit his self -deprecia- tion was ironical, but in another presence it was most genuine, and his deepest spring of thought and action. This other presence was his own ideal. Socrates was sincerely humble because, ex- pecting so much of philosophy, he saw his own de- ficiency. Unlike the unskilled player, he did not seek to make music ; but he loved music, and knew that such music as is indeed music was beyond his power. On the other hand he was well aware of his superiority to those in whom self-satisfaction was possible because they had no conception of the ideal. Of such he could say in truth that they did not know enough even to realize the extent of their ignorance. The world has long been famil- iar with the vivid portrayal of the Socratic con- sciousness which is contained in Plato's " Apol- ogy." Socrates had set out in life with the opinion ABSOLUTE REALISM 323 that his was an age of exceptional enlightenment. But as he came to know men he found that after all no one of them really knew what he was about. Each " sight-loving, art-loving, busy " man was quite blind to the meaning of life. While he was capable of practical achievement, his judgments concerning the real virtue of his achievements were conventional and ungrounded, a mere reflec- tion of tradition and opinion. When asked con- cerning the meaning of life, or the ground of his opinions, he was thrown into confusion or aggra- vated to meaningless reiteration. Such men, Soc- rates reflected, were both unwise and confirmed in their folly through being unconscious of it. Because he knew that vanity is vanity, that opin- ion is indeed mere opinion, Socrates felt himself to be the wisest man in a generation of dogged unwisdom. § 158. It is scarcely necessary to point out that this insight, however negatively it be used, is a Socrates's revelation of positive knowledge. Her- seu-criticism ac ii tus an( j p a rmenides claimed to a Prophecy of Truth. know; Socrates disclaimed knowledge for reasons. Like all real criticism this is at once a confounding of error and a prophecy of truth. The truth so discovered is indeed not ordinary 324 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY truth concerning historical or physical things, but not on that account less significant and necessary. This truth, it will also he admitted, is virtually rather than actually set forth by Socrates himself. He knew that life has some meaning which those who live with conviction desire at heart to realize, and that knowledge has principles with which those who speak with conviction intend to be con- sistent. There is, in short, a rational life and a rational discourse. Furthermore, a rational life will be a life wisely directed to the end of the good ; and a rational discourse one constructed with reference to the real natures of things, and the necessities which flow from these natures. But Socrates did not conclusively define either the meaning of life or the form of perfect knowledge. He testified to the necessity of some such truths, and his testimony demonstrated both the blindness of his contemporaries and also his own deficiency. § 159. The character and method of Socrates have their best foil in the sophists, but their The Historical bearing on the earlier philosophers is Preparation for Plato. for our purposes even more instructive. Unlike Socrates these philosophers had not made a study of the task of the philosopher. They were philosophers — " spectators of all time and all ex- ABSOLUTE REALISM 325 istence " ; but they were precritical or dogmatic philosophers, to whom it had not occurred to define the requirements of philosophy. They knew no perfect knowledge other than their own actual knowledge. They defined being and interpreted life without reflecting upon the quality of the knowledge whose object is being, or the quality of insight that would indeed be practical wisdom. But when through Socrates the whole philosophical prospect is again revealed after the period of humanistic concentration, it is as an ideal whose possibilities, whose necessities, are conceived be- fore they are realized. Socrates celebrates the role of the philosopher without assigning it to himself. The new philosophical object is the philosopher himself; and the new insight a knowledge of knowledge itself. These three types of intellectual procedure, dogmatic speculation concerning being, humanistic interest in life, and the self-criticism of thought, form the historical preparation for Plato, the philosopher who defined being a the ideal of thought, and upon this ground interpreted life. There is no more striking case in history of the subtle continuity of thought than the relation between Plato and his master Socrates. The wonder of it is due to the absence of any formula- 326 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY tion of doctrine on the part of Socrates himself. He only lived and talked ; and yet Plato created a system of philosophy in which he is faithfully embodied. The form of embodiment is the dia- logue, in which the talking of Socrates is perpetu- ated and conducted to profounder issues, and in which his life is both rendered and interpreted. But as the vehicle of Plato's thought preserves and makes perfect the Socratic method, so the thought itself begins with the Socratic motive and remains to the end an expression of it. The presentiment of perfect knowledge which distinguished Socrates from his contemporaries becomes in Plato the clear vision of a realm of ideal truth. § 160. Plato begins his philosophy with the philosopher and the philosopher's interest. The piatonism: philosopher is a lover, who like all lov- Absoiute aS ideai ers lon S s for the beautiful. But he is or Good. ^ e sll p reme lover, for he loves not the individual beautiful object but the Absolute Beauty itself. He is a lover too in that he does not possess, but somehow apprehends his object from afar. Though imperfect, he seeks perfec- tion; though standing like all his fellows in the twilight of half-reality, he faces toward the sun. Now it is the fundamental proposition of the Pla- ABSOLUTE REALISM 327 tonic philosophy that reality is the sun itself, or the perfection whose possession every wise thinker covets, whose presence would satisfy every long- ing of experience. The real is that beloved object which is " truly beautiful, delicate, perfect, and blessed." There is both a serious ground for such an affirmation and an important truth in its mean- ing. The ground is the evident incompleteness of every special judgment concerning experience. We understand only in part, and we know that we understand only in part. What we discover is real enough for practical purposes, but even com- mon-sense questions the true reality of its objects. Special judgments seem to terminate our thought abruptly and arbitrarily. We give " the best answer we can," but such answers do not come as the completion of our thinking. Our thought is in some sense surely a seeking, and it would appear that we are not permitted to rest and be satisfied at any stage of it. If we do so we are like the sophists — blind to our own ignorance. But it is equally true that our thought is straightforward and progressive. We are not permitted to return to earlier stages, but must push on to that which is not less, but more, than what we have as yet found. There is good hope, then, of understanding what 328 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY the ideal may be from our knowledge of the direc- tion which it impels us to follow. But to understand Plato's conception of the progression of experience we must again catch up the Socratic strain which he weaves into every theme. For Socrates, student of life and man- kind, all objects were objects of interest, and all interests practical interests. One is ignorant when one does not know the good of things ; opin- ionative when one rates things by conventional standards; wise when one knows their real good. In Platonism this practical interpretation of ex- perience appears in the principle that the object of perfect knowledge is the good. The nature of things which one seeks to know better is the good of things, the absolute being which is the goal of all thinking is the very good itself. Plato does not use the term good in any merely utilitarian sense. Indeed it is very significant that for Plato there is no cleavage between theoretical and prac- tical interests. To be morally good is to know the good, to set one's heart on the true object of affec- tion ; and to be theoretically sound is to understand perfection. The good itself is the end of every aim, that in which all interests converge. Hence it cannot be defined, as might a special good, in ABSOLUTE REALISM 329 terms of the fulfilment of a set of concrete condi- tions, but only in terms of the sense or direction of all purposes. The following passage occurs in the " Symposium " : "The true order of going or being led by others to the things of love, is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upward for the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is." 8 § 161. There is, then, a " true order of going," and an order that leads from one to many, from The Progres- thence to f orms, from thence to moral- sion of • . an( ^ £ rom thence to the general ob- Expenence «/ " P toward God. j ectg of thoxight or the ideas. In the " Republic," where the proper education of the phi- losopher is in question, it is proposed that he shall study arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and dia- lectic. Thus in each case mathematics is the first advance in knowledge, and dialectic the nearest to perfection. Most of Plato's examples are drawn from mathematics. This science replaces the va- riety and vagueness of the forms of experience with clear, unitary, definite, and eternal natures, 8 Plato: Symposium, 211. Translation by Jowett. 330 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY such as the number and the geometrical figure. Thus certain individual things are approximately triangular, but subject to alteration, and indefi- nitely many. On the other hand the triangle as defined by geometry is the fixed and unequivocal nature or idea which such experiences suggest ; and the philosophical mind will at once pass to it from these. But the mathematical objects are them- selves not thoroughly understood when understood only in mathematical terms, for the foundations of mathematics are arbitrary. And the same is true of all the so-called special sciences. Even the scientists themselves, says Plato, " only dream about being, but never can behold the waking reality so long as they leave the hypotheses they use unexamined, and are unable to give an ac- count of them. For when a man knows not his own first principle, and when the conclusion and intermediate steps are also constructed out of he knows not what, how can he imagine that such a conventional statement will ever become science?" 8 Within the science of dialectics we are to under- stand the connections and sequences of ideas them- selves, in the hope of eliminating every arbitrari- ness and conventionality within a system of truth that is pure and self-luminous rationality. To 8 Plato: Republic, 533. Translation by Jowett. ABSOLUTE REALISM 331 this science, which is the great interest of his later years, Plato contributes only incomplete studies and experiments. We must be satisfied with the playful answer with which, in the " Re- public," he replies to Glaucon's entreaty that " he proceed at once from the prelude or preamble to the chief strain, and describe that in like man- ner " : " Dear Glaucon, you will not be able to fol- low me here, though I would do my best." But a philosophical system has been projected. The real is that perfect significance or meaning which thought and every interest suggests, and toward which there is in experience an appreciable movement. It is this significance which makes things what they really are, and which constitutes our understanding of them. In itself it tran- scends the steps which lead to it ; " for God," says Plato, " mingles not with men." But it is never- theless the meaning of human life. And this we can readily conceive. The last word may trans- form the sentence from nonsense into sense, and it would be true to say that its sense mingles not with nonsense. Similarly the last touch of the brush may transform an inchoate mass of color into a picture, disarray into an object of beauty ; and its beauty mingles not with ugliness. So life, 332 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY when it finally realizes itself, obtains a new and incommensurable quality of perfection in which humanity is transformed into deity. There is frankly no provision for imperfection in such a world. In his later writings Plato sounds his characteristic note less frequently, and permits the ideal to create a cosmos through the admixture of matter. But in his moment of inspiration, the Platonist will have no sense for the imperfect. It is the darkness behind his back, or the twilight through which he passes on his way to the light. He will use even the beauties of earth only " as steps along which he mounts upward for the sake of that other beauty." § 162. We have met, then, with two distinct philosophical doctrines which arise from the con- Aristotie's ception of the absolute, or the philoso- Hierarchy of Substances pher's peculiar object : the doctrine of in Relation . to piatonism. the absolute being or substance, and that of the absolute ideal or good. Both doctrines are realistic in that they assume reality to be de- monstrated or revealed, rather than created, by knowledge. Both are rationalistic in that they develop a system of philosophy from the problem of philosophy, or deduce a definition of reality ABSOLUTE REALISM 333 from the conception of reality. There remains a third doctrine of the same type — the philosophy of Aristotle, the most elaborately constructed sys- tem of Greek antiquity, and the most potent in- fluence exerted upon the Scholastic Philosophy of the long mediaeval period. This philosophy was rehabilitated in the eighteenth century by Leibniz, the brilliant librarian of the court of Hanover. The extraordinary comprehensiveness of Aris- totle's philosophy makes it quite impossible to ren- der here even a general account of it. There is scarcely any human discipline that does not to some extent draw upon it. We are concerned only with the central principles of the metaphysics. Upon the common ground of rationalism and realism, Plato and Aristotle are complementary in temper, method, and principle. Plato's is the gen- ius of inspiration and fertility, Aristotle's the genius of erudition, mastery, and synthesis. In form, Plato's is the gift of expression, Aristotle's the gift of arrangement. Plato was born and bred an aristocrat, and became the lover of the best — the uncompromising purist; Aristotle is middle-class, and limitlessly wide, hospitable, and patient in his interests. Thus while both are speculative and acute, Plato's mind is intensive 334 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY and profound, Aristotle's extensive and orderly. It was inevitable, then, that Aristotle should find Plato one-sided. The philosophy of the ideal is not worldly enough to be true. It is a religion rather than a theory of reality. Aristotle, how- ever, would not renounce it, but construe it that it may better provide for nature and history. This is the significance of his new terminology. Matter, to which Plato reluctantly concedes some room as a principle of degradation in the uni- verse, is now admitted to good standing. Mat- ter or material is indispensable to being as its potentiality or that out of which it is consti- tuted. The ideal, on the other hand, loses its ex- clusive title to the predicate of reality, and becomes the form, or the determinate nature which exists only in its particular embodiments. The being or substance is the concrete individual, of which these are the abstracted aspects. Aristotle's " form," like Plato's " idea," is a teleological prin- ciple. The essential nature of the object is its perfection. It is furthermore essential to the ob- ject that it should strive after a higher perfection. With Aristotle, however, the reality is not the consummation of the process, the highest perfec- tion in and for itself, but the very hierarchy of ABSOLUTE REALISM 335 objects that ascends toward it. The highest per- fection, or God, is not itself coextensive with being, but the final cause of being — that on account of which the whole progression of events takes place. Reality is the development with all of its ascending stages from the maximum of potential- ity, or matter, to the maximum of actuality, or God the pure form. § 163. To understand the virtue of this philoso- phy as a basis for the reconciliation of different TheAristote- interests, we must recall the relation lian Philos- ophy as a between Plato and Spinoza. Their Reconcilia- tion of Plato- characteristic difference appears to the nism and . ... Spinozism. best advantage in connection with mathematical truth. Both regarded geometry as the best model for philosophical thinking, but for different reasons. Spinoza prized geometry for its necessity, and proposed to extend it. His philosophy is the attempt to formulate a geometry of being, which shall set forth the inevitable cer- tainties of the universe. Plato, on the other hand, prized geometry rather for its definition of types, for its knowledge of pure or perfect natures such as the circle and triangle, which in imme- diate experience are only approximated. His philosophy defines reality similarly as the absolute 336 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY perfection. Applied to nature Spinozism is me- chanical, and looks for necessary laws, while Platonism is teleological, and looks for adaptation and significance. Aristotle's position is inter- mediate. With Plato he affirms that the good is the ultimate principle. But this very principle is conceived to govern a universe of substances, each of which maintains its own proper being, and all of which are reciprocally determined in their changes. Final causes dominate nature, but work through efficient causes. Reality is not pure per- fection, as in Platonism, nor the indifferent neces- sity, as in Spinozism, but the system of beings necessary to the complete progression toward the highest perfection. The Aristotelian philosophy promises, then, to overcome both the hard realism of Parmenides and Spinoza, and also the super- naturalism of Plato. § 164. But it promises, furthermore, to remedy the defect common to these two doctrines, the very Leibniz's Ap- besetting problem of this whole type of plication of the Conception philosophy. That problem, as has been of Develop- ment to the seen, is to provide for the imperfect Problem of . . 1 . imperfection, withm the perfect, lor the temporal in- cidents of nature and history within the eternal being. Many absolutist philosophers have de- ABSOLUTE REALISM 337 clared the explanation of this realm to be impos- sible, and have contented themselves with calling it the realm of opinion or appearance. And this realm of opinion or appearance has been used as a proof of the absolute. Zeno, the pupil of Par- menides, was the first to elaborate what have since come to be known as the paradoxes of the empirical world. Most of these paradoxes turn upon the infinite extension and divisibility of space and time. Zeno was especially interested in the diffi- culty of conceiving motion, which involves both space and time, and thought himself to have de- monstrated its absurdity and impossibility. 10 His argument is thus the complement of Parmenides's argument for the indivisible and unchanging sub- stance. Now the method which Zeno here adopts may be extended to cover the whole realm of nat- ure and history. We should then be dialectically driven from this realm to take refuge in absolute being. But the empirical world is not destroyed by disparagement, and cannot long lack champions even among the absolutists themselves. The rec- onciliation of nature and history with the abso- lute being became the special interest of Leibniz, the great modern Aristotelian. As a scientist and 10 See Burnet: Op. cit., pp. 322-333. 338 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY man of affairs, he was profoundly dissatisfied with Spinoza's resolution of nature, the human indi- vidual, and the human society into the universal being. He became an advocate of individualism while retaining the general aim and method of rationalism. Like Aristotle, Leibniz attributes reality to in- dividual substances, which he calls " monads " ; and like Aristotle he conceives these monads to compose an ascending order, with God, the monad of monads, as its dominating goal. " Furthermore, every substance is like an entire world and like a mirror of God, or indeed of the whole world which it portrays, each one in its own fashion; almost as the same city is variously represented according to the various situations of him who is regarding it. Thus the universe is multiplied in some sort as many times as there are substances, and the glory of God is multiplied in the same way by as many wholly different representa- tions of his works." 11 The very " glory of God," then, requires the in- numerable finite individuals with all their char- acteristic imperfections, that the universe may lack no possible shade or quality of perspective. § 165. But the besetting problem is in fact not 11 Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics. Translation by Montgomery, p. 15. In so far as the monads are spiritual this doctrine tends to be subjectivistic. Cf. Chap. IX. ABSOLUTE REALISM 339 solved, and is one of the chief incentives to that other philosophy of absolutism which defines an The Problem absolute spirit or mind. Both Aristotle tilii Remains anc ^ Leibniz undertake to make the Unsolved. jDerfection which determines the order of the hierarchy of substances, at the same time the responsible author of the whole hierarchy. In this case the dilemma is plain. If the divine form or the divine monad be other than the stages that lead up to it, these latter cannot be essential to it, for God is by definition absolutely self-sufficient. If, on the other hand, God is identical with the development in its entirety, then two quite incom- mensurable standards of perfection determine the supremacy of the divine nature, that of the whole and that of the highest parts of the whole. The union of these two and the definition of a perfec- tion which may be at once the development and its goal, is the task of absolute idealism. § 166. Of the two fundamental questions of epistemology, absolute realism answers the one Absolute explicitly, the other implicitly. As re- E^emoio s P^cts the source of the most valid Rationalism, knowledge, Parmenides, Plato, Aris- totle, Spinoza are all agreed: true knowledge is 340 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY the work of reason, of pure intellection. Plato is the great exponent of dialectic, or the reciprocal affinities and necessities of ideas. Aristotle is the founder of deductive logic. Spinoza proposes to consider even " human actions and desires " as though he were " concerned with lines, planes, and solids." Empirical data may be the occasion, but cannot be the ground of the highest knowledge. According to Leibniz, " it seems that necessary truths, such as we find in pure mathematics, and especially in arithmetic and geometry, must have principles whose proof does not depend upon instances, nor, consequently, upon the witness of the senses, although without the senses it would never have come into our heads to think of them." 12 § 167. The answers which these philosophies give to the question of the relation between the The Relation state of knowledge and its object, divide of Thought and its object them into two groups. Among the an- in Absolute Realism. cients reason is regarded as the means of emancipation from the limitations of the pri- vate mind. " The sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own," but " the waking " — the wise men — " have one and the same world." What the individual knows belongs to himself only in so 12 Leibniz: New Essays on the Human Understanding. Translation by Latta, p. 363. ABSOLUTE REALISM 341 far as it is inadequate. Hence for Plato the ideas are not the attributes of a mind, but that self-sub- sistent truth to which, in its moments of insight, a mind may have access. Opinion is " my own," the truth is being. The position of Aristotle is equally clear. "Actual knowledge," he main- tains, " is identical with its object." Spinoza and Leibniz belong to another age. Modern philosophy began with a new emphasis upon self-consciousness. In his celebrated argu- ment — " I think, hence I am " (cogito ergo sum) — Descartes established the independent and sub- stantial reality of the thinking activity. The " I think " is recognized as in itself a fundamental being, known intuitively to the thinker himself. Now although Spinoza and Leibniz are finally de- termined by the same motives that obtain in the cases of Plato and Aristotle, they must reckon with this new distinction between the thinker and his object. The result in the case of Spinoza is the doctrine of " parallelism," in which mind is de- fined as an " infinite attribute " of substance, an aspect or phase coextensive with the whole of being. The result in the case of Leibniz is his doctrine of " representation " and " pre-established harmony," whereby each monadic substance is in 342 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY itself an active spiritual entity, and belongs to the universe through its knowledge of a specific stage of the development of the universe. But both Spinoza and Leibniz subordinate such conceptions as these to the fundamental identity that pervades the whole. With Spinoza the attributes belong to the same absolute substance, and with Leibniz the monads represent the one universe. And with both, finally, the perfection of knowledge, or the knowledge of God, is indistinguishable from its object, God himself. The epistemological subtle- ties peculiar to these philosophers are not stable doctrines, but render inevitable either a return to the simpler and bolder realism of the Greeks, or a passing over into the more radical and systematic doctrine of absolute idealism. § 168. We have met with two general motives, both of which are subordinated to the doctrine of The stoic and an absolute being postulated and sought Etwcs 1 ? h J philosophy. The one of these mo- Necessity. tives leads to the conception of the ab- solutely necessary and immutable substance, the other to the conception of a consummate perfec- tion. There is an interpretation of life appropri- ate to each of these conceptions. Both agree in ABSOLUTE REALISM 343 regarding life seriously, in defining reason or phi- losophy as the highest human activity, and in em- phasizing the identity of the individual's good with the good of the universe. But there are striking differences of tone and spirit. Although the metaphysics of the Stoics have various affiliations, the Stoic code of morality is the true practical sequel to the Eleatic-Spinozistic view of the world. The Stoic is one who has set his affections on the eternal being. He asks nothing of it for himself, but identifies himself with it. The saving grace is a sense of real- ity. The virtuous man is not one who remakes the world, or draws upon it for his private uses ; even less one who rails against it, or com- plains that it has used him ill. He is rather one who recognizes that there is but one really valid claim, that of the universe itself. But he not only submits to this claim on account of its superiority ; he makes it his own. The discipline of Stoicism is the regulation of the individual will to the end that it may coincide with the universal will. There is a part of man by virtue of which he is satisfied with what things are, whatever they be. That part, designated by the Stoics as " the ruling part," is the reason. In so far as man seeks to 344 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY understand the laws and natures which actually prevail, he cannot be discontented with anything whatsoever that may be known to him. " For, in so far as we are intelligent beings, we cannot desire anything save that which is necessary, nor yield absolute acquiescence to anything, save to that which is true : wherefore, in so far as we have a right understand- ing of these things, the endeavor of the better part of our- selves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole." 13 In agreement with this teaching of Spinoza's is the famous Stoic formula to the effect that " nothing can happen contrary to the will of the wise man," who is free through his very acquiescence. If rea- son be the proper " ruling part," the first step in the moral life is the subordination of the appeti- tive nature and the enthronement of reason. One who is himself rational will then recognize the fellowship of all rational beings, and the unitary and beneficent rationality of the entire universe. The highest morality is thus already upon the plane of religion. § 169. With Spinoza and the Stoics, the per- fection of the individual is reduced to what the The Platonic universe requires of him. The good Perfection. man is willing to be whatever he must 13 Spinoza: Op. cit., Part IV. Translation by Elwes, p. 243. ABSOLUTE REALISM 345 be, for the sake of the whole with which through reason he is enabled to identify himself. With Plato and Aristotle the perfection of the individ- ual himself is commended, that the universe may abound in perfection. The good man is the ideal man — the expression of the type. And how dif- ferent the quality of a morality in keeping with this principle ! The virtues which Plato enu- merates — temperance, courage, wisdom, and jus- tice — compose a consummate human nature. He is thinking not of the necessities but of the possi- bilities of life. Knowledge of the truth will indeed be the best of human living, but knowledge is not prized because it can reconcile man to his limitations; it is the very overflowing of his cup of life. The youth are to " dwell in the land of health, amid fair sights and sounds; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, will visit the eye and ear, like a healthful breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul even in childhood into harmony with the beauty of reason." 14 Aristotle's account of human perfection is more circumstantial and more prosaic. " The function of man is an activity of soul in accordance with reason," and his happiness or well-being will con- 14 Plato: Op. cit., 401. 346 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY sist in the fulness of rational living. But such fulness requires a sphere of life that will call forth and exercise the highest human capacities. Aris- totle frankly pronounces " external goods " to be indispensable, and happiness to be therefore " a gift of the gods." The rational man will acquire a certain exquisiteness or finesse of action, a " mean " of conduct ; and this virtue will be diver- sified through the various relations into which he must enter, and the different situations which he must meet. He will be not merely brave, temper- ate, and just, as Plato would have him, but liberal, magnificent, gentle, truthful, witty, friendly, and in all self-respecting or high-minded. In addi- tion to these strictly moral virtues, he will possess the intellectual virtues of prudence and wisdom, the resources of art and science; and will finally possess the gift of insight, or intuitive reason. Speculation will be his highest activity, and the mark of his kinship with the gods who dwell in the perpetual contemplation of the truth. The Religion § 170. Aristotle's ethics expresses the of Fulfilment, and the Re- buoyancy of the ancient world, when ligion of Re- ...... nunciation. the individual does not feel himself oppressed by the eternal reality, but rejoices in it. He is not too conscious of his sufferings to be ABSOLUTE REALISM 347 disinterested in his admiration and wonder. It is this which distinguishes the religion of Plato and Aristotle from that of the Stoics and Spinoza. With both alike, religion consists not in making the world, but in contemplating it ; not in cooperating with God,' but in worshipping him. Plato and Aristotle, however, do not find any antagonism between the ways of God and the natural inter- ests of men. God does not differ from men save in his exalted perfection. The contemplation and worship of him comes as the final and highest stage of a life which is organic and continuous through- out. The love of God is the natural love when it has found its true object. " For he who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty — and this, Socrates, is that final cause of all our former toils, which in the first place is everlasting — not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning; in the next place not fair in one point of view and foul in another, . . . or in the likeness of a face or hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, nor existing in any other being; . . . but beauty only, absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things." 15 15 Plato: Symposium, 210-211. Translation by Jo wett. 348 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY The religion of Spinoza is the religion of one who has renounced the favor of the universe. He was deprived early in life of every benefit of fortune, and set out to find the good which required no special dispensation but only the common lot and the common human endowment. He found that good to consist in the conviction of the neces- sity, made acceptable through the supremacy of the understanding. The like faith of the Stoics makes of no account the difference of fortune between Marcus the emperor and Epictetus the slave. " For two reasons, then, it is right to be content with that which happens to thee; the one because it was done for thee and prescribed for thee, and in a manner had reference to thee, originally from the most ancient causes spun with thy destiny; and the other because even that which comes severally to every man is to the power which administers the universe a cause of felicity and perfection, nay even of its very continuance. For the integrity of the whole is mutilated, if thou cuttest off anything whatever from the conjunction and the con- tinuity either of the parts or of the causes. And thou dost cut off, as far as it is in thy power, when thou art dissatisfied, and in a manner triest to put anything out of the way." 16 16 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus: Thoughts. Translation by- Long, p. 141. CHAPTER XI ABSOLUTE IDEALISM § 171. Absolute idealism is the most elabo- rately constructive of all the historical types of General philosophy. Though it may have over- Constructive character of looked elementary truths, and have Absolute idealism. sought to combine irreconcilable prin- ciples, it cannot be charged with lack of sophistica- tion or subtlety. Its great virtue is its recognition of problems — its exceeding circumspection; while its great promise is due to its comprehensiveness — its generous provision for all interests and points of view. But its very breadth and complexity ren- der this philosophy peculiarly liable to the equivo- cal use of conceptions. This may be readily understood from the nature of the central doctrine of absolute idealism. According to this doctrine it is proposed to define the universe as an abso- 1 By Absolute Idealism is meant that system of philosophy which defines the universe as the absolute spirit, which is the human moral, cognitive, or appreciative consciousness universalized; or as the absolute, transcendental mind, whose state of complete knowledge is implied in all finite thinking. 349 350 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY lute spirit; or a being infinite, ultimate, eternal, and self-sufficient, like the being of Plato and Spinoza, but possessing at the same time the dis- tinguishing properties of spirit. Such conceptions as self-consciousness, will, knowledge, and moral goodness are carried over from the realm of human endeavor and social relations to the unitary and all-inclusive reality. Now it has been objected that this procedure is either meaningless, in that it so applies the term spirit as to contradict its meaning; or prejudicial to spiritual interests, in that it neutralizes the properties of spirit through so extending their use. Thus one may contend that to affirm that the universe as a whole is spirit is meaningless, since moral goodness requires spe- cial conditions and relations that cannot be at- tributed to the universe as a whole; or one may contend that such doctrine is prejudicial to moral interests because by attributing spiritual perfec- tion to the totality of being it discredits all moral loyalties and antagonisms. The difficulties that lie in the way of absolute idealism are due, then, to the complexity of its synthesis, to its complement- ary recognition of differences and resolution of them into unity. But this synthesis is due to the urgency of certain great problems which the first ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 351 or realistic expression of the absolutist motive left undiscovered and unsolved. § 172. It is natural to approach so deliberate and calculating a philosophy from the stand-point The Great °^ the problems which it proposes to Probkmt'of s °l ve - One of these is the epistemo- Absoiutism. logical problem of the relation between the state of knowledge and its object. Naturalism and absolute realism side with common-sense in its assumption that although the real object is es- sential to the valid state of knowledge, its being known is not essential to the real object. Sub- jectivism, on the other hand, maintains that being is essentially the content of a knowing state, or an activity of the knower himself. Absolute ideal- ism proposes to accept the general epistemological principle of subjectivism; but to satisfy the real- istic demand for a standard, compelling object, by setting up an absolute knower, with whom all valid knowledge must be in agreement. This episte- mological statement of absolute idealism is its most mature phase ; and the culminating phase, in which it shows unmistakable signs of passing over into another doctrine. We must look for its pris- tine inspiration in its solution of another funda- mental problem: that of the relation between the 352 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY absolute and the empirical. Like absolute realism, this philosophy regards the universe as a unitary and internally necessary being, and undertakes to hold that being accountable for every item of ex- perience. But we have found that absolute real- ism is beset with the difficulty of thus accounting for the fragmentariness and isolation of the indi- vidual. The contention that the universe must really be a rational or perfect unity is disputed by the evident multiplicity, irrelevance, and imper- fection in the foreground of experience. The in- ference to perfection and the confession of im- perfection seem equally unavoidable. Rational necessities and empirical facts are out of joint. § 173. Even Plato had been conscious of a cer- tain responsibility for matters of fact. Inasmuch The Greek as he attached the predicate of reality Philosophers and the Prob- to the absolute perfection, he made that lem of Evil. . The Task being the only source to which they Absolutism, could be referred. Perhaps, then, he suggests, they are due to the very bounteousness of God. " He was good, and no goodness can ever have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as possible." 2 2 Plato: Timceus. 29. Translation by Jowett. ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 353 Plotinus, in whom Platonism is leavened by the spirit of an age which is convinced of sin, and which is therefore more keenly aware of the posi- tive existence of the imperfect, follows out this suggestion. Creation is " emanation " — the over- flow of God's excess of goodness. But one does not readily understand how goodness, desiring all things to be like itself, should thereupon create evil — even to make it good. The Aristotelian philosophy, with its conception of the gradation of substances, would seem to be better equipped to meet the difficulty. A development requires stages ; and every finite thing may thus be perfect in its way and perfect in its place, while in the absolute truth or God there is realized the meaning of the whole order. But if so, there is evidently something that escapes God, to wit, the meaning- less and unfitness, the error and evil, of the stages in their successive isolation. Nor is it of any avail to insist (as did Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza alike) that these are only privation, and therefore not to be counted in the sum of reality. For pri- vation is itself an experience, with a great variety of implications, moral and psychological ; and these cannot be attributed to God or deduced from him, in consideration of his absolute perfection. 354 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY The task of the new absolutism is now in clear view. The perfect must be amended to admit the imperfect. The absolute significance must be so construed as to provide for the evident facts; for the unmeaning things and changes of the nat- ural order; for ignorance, sin, despair, and every human deficiency. The new philosophy is to solve this problem by defining a spiritual absolute, and by so construing the life or dynamics of spirit, as to demonstrate the necessity of the very imperfection and opposition which is so baffling to the realist. § 174. Absolute idealism, which is essentially a modern doctrine, does not begin with rhapsodies, The Beginning Du * w ^ n a ver y sober analysis of f amil- ideausm Ute * ar truths, conducted by the most sober in Kant's Q f ^l philosophers, Immanuel Kant. Analysis of - 1 *■ ' Experience. This philosopher lived in Konigsberg, Germany, at the close of the eighteenth century. He is related to absolute idealism much as Soc- rates is related to Platonism: he was not himself speculative, but employed a critical method which was transformed by his followers into a metaphysi- cal construction. It is essential to the understand- ing both of Kant and of his more speculative successors, to observe that he begins with the recognition of certain non-philosophical truths — ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 355 those of natural science and the moral conscious- ness. He accepts the order of nature formulated in the Newtonian dynamics, and the moral order acknowledged in the common human conviction of duty. And he is interested in discovering the ground upon which these common affirmations rest, the structure which virtually supports them as types of knowledge. But a general importance attaches to the analysis because these two types of knowledge (together with the aesthetic judg- ment, which is similarly analyzed) are regarded by Kant as coextensive with experience itself. The very least experience that can be reported upon at all is an experience of nature or duty, and as such will be informed with their char- acteristic principles. Let us consider the former type. The simplest instance of nature is the ex- perience of the single perceived object. In the first place, such an object will be perceived as in space and time. These Kant calls the forms of intuition. An object cannot even be presented or given without them. But, furthermore, it will be regarded as substance, that is, as having a sub- stratum that persists through changes of position or quality. It will also be regarded as causally dependent upon other objects like itself. Causal- 356 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY ity, substance, and like principles to the number of twelve, Kant calls the categories of the under- standing. Both intuition and understanding are indispensable to the experience of any object what- soever. They may be said to condition the object in general. Their principles condition the process of making something out of the manifold of sen- sation. But similarly, every moral experience recognizes what Kant calls the categorical impera- tive. The categorical imperative is the law of reasonableness or impartiality in conduct, requir- ing the individual to act on a maxim which he can " will to be law universal." ~No state of de- sire or situation calling for action means anything morally except in the light of this obligation. Thus certain principles of thought and action are said to be implicit in all experience. They are universal and necessary in the sense that they are discovered as the conditions not of any particu- lar experience, but of experience in general. This implicit or virtual presence in experience in gen- eral, Kant calls their transcendental character, and the process of explicating them is his famous Transcendental Deduction. § 175. The restriction which Kant puts upon his method is quite essential to its meaning. I ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 357 deduce the categories, for example, just in so far as I find them to be necessary to perception. Kant's Princi- Without them my perception is blind, t P o e th?Exp C eri- 1 make nothing of it; with them my ex- ^ ces wh ^ ch perience becomes systematic and ration- Order. a L j-> U £ categories which I so deduce must be forever limited to the role for which they are defined. Categories without perceptions are " empty " ; they have validity solely with reference to the experience which they set in order. Indeed, I cannot even complete that order. The orderly arrangement of parts of experience suggests, and suggests irresistibly, a perfect system. I can even define the ideas and ideals through which such a perfect system might be realized. But I cannot in the Kantian sense attach reality to it because it is not indispensable to experience. It must re- main an ideal which regulates my thinking of such parts of it as fall within the range of my perception; or it may through my moral nature become the realm of my living and an object of faith. In short, Kant's is essentially a " critical philosophy," a logical and analytical study of the special terms and relations of human knowledge. He denies the validity of these terms and relations beyond this realm. His critiques are an inven- 358 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY tory of the conditions, principles, and prospects of that cognition which, although not alone ideally conceivable, is alone possible. § 176. With the successors of Kant, as with the successors of Socrates, a criticism becomes a The Post- system of metaphysics. This transfor- physicsfe a 6 " mation is effected in the post-Kantians o?tta aTS-" kj a generalization of the human tive and Moral CO q n m ve consciousness. According to Consciousness u as Analyzed Kant's analysis it contains a manifold by Kant. The J Absolute Spirit, of sense which must be organized by categories in obedience to the ideal of a ra- tional universe. The whole enterprise, with its problems given in perception, its instruments available in the activities of the understand- ing, and its ideals revealed in the reason, is an organic spiritual unity, manifesting itself in the self-consciousness of the thinker. Now in ab- solute idealism this very enterprise of knowl- edge, made universal and called the absolute spirit or mind, is taken to be the ultimate reality. And here at length would seem to be afforded the conception of a being to which the problematic and the rational, the data and the principles, the natural and the ideal, are alike indispensable. We are now to seek the real not in the ideal itself, ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 359 but in that spiritual unity in which appearance is the incentive to truth, and natural imperfection the spring to goodness. This may he translated into the language which Plato uses in the " Sym- posium," when Diotima is revealing to Socrates the meaning of love. The new reality will be not the loved one, but love itself. " What then is Love? Is he mortal? " "No." "What then?" "As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but is a mean between them." " What is he then, Diotima? " " He is a great spirit, and like all that is spiritual he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal." 3 Reality is no longer the God who mingles not with men, but that power which, as Diotima further says, " interprets and conveys to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the com- mands and rewards of the gods." In speaking for such an idealism, Emerson says : "Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Be- tween these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry. . . . The mid- world is best." 4 3 Plato: Symposium, 202. Translation by Jowett. 4 Emerson: Essays, Second Series, pp. 65-66. 360 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY The new reality is this highway of the spirit, the very course and raceway of self -consciousness. It is traversed in the movement and self -correction of thought, in the interest in ideals, or in the sub- mission of the will to the control of the moral law. § 177. It is the last of these phases of self-con- sciousness that Fichte, who was Kant's immediate Fichteanism, successor, regards as of paramount im- or the Abso- lute Spirit as portance. As Platonism began with the Moral Activity. ideal of the good or the object of life, so the new idealism begins with the conviction of duty, or the story of life. Being is the living moral nature compelled to build itself a natural order wherein it may obey the moral law, and to divide itself into a community of moral selves through which the moral virtues may be realized. ISTature and society flow from the conception of an absolute moral activity, or ego. Such an ego could not be pure and isolated and yet be moral. The evidence of this is the common moral con- sciousness. My duty compels me to act upon the not-self or environment, and to respect and cooper- ate with other selves. Fichte's absolute is this moral consciousness universalized and made eter- nal. Moral value being its fundamental prin- ciple the universe must on that very account em- ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 361 brace both nature, or moral indifference, and hu- manity, or moral limitation. § 178. But the Romanticists, who followed close upon Fichte, were dissatisfied with so hard and ex- Romanticism, elusive a conception of spiritual being, spirit' a A s bs ° lute Life, they said, is not all duty. In- Sentiment. deed, the true spiritual life is quite other, not harsh and constrained, but free and spon- taneous — a wealth of feeling playing about a con- stantly shifting centre. Spirit is not consecutive and law-abiding, but capricious and wanton, seek- ing the beautiful in no orderly progression, but in a refined and versatile sensibility. If this be the nature of spirit, and if spirit be the nature of real- ity, then he is most wise who is most rich in sen- timent. The Romanticists were the exponents of an absolute sentimentalism. And they did not prove it, but like good sentimentalists they felt it. § 179. Hegel, the master of the new idealism, set himself the task of construing spirit in terms Hegeiianism, as consecutive as those of Fichte, and spirit 6 f s bsolute as comprehensive as those of the Ro- Diaiectic. manticists. Like Plato, he found in dialectic the supreme manifestation of the spirit- ual life. There is a certain flow of ideas which 362 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY determines the meaning of experience, and is the truth of truths. But the mark of the new prophet is this : the flow of ideas itself is a process of self- correction due to a sense of error. Thus bare sensation is abstract and bare thought is abstract. The real, however, is not merely the concrete in which they are united, but the very process in the course of which through knowledge of abstraction thought arrives at the concrete. The principle of negation is the very life of thought, and it is the life of thought, rather than the outcome of thought, which is reality. The most general form of the dialectical process contains three moments: the moment of thesis, in which affirmation is made ; the moment of antithesis, in which the opposite as- serts itself ; and the moment of synthesis, in which a reconciliation is effected in a new thesis. Thus thought is the progressive overcoming of contra- diction; not the state of freedom from contradic- tion, but the act of escaping it. Such processes are more familiar in the moral life. Morality consists, so even common-sense asserts, in the over- coming of evil. Character is the resistance of temptation; goodness, a growth in grace through discipline. Of such, for Hegel, is the very king- dom of heaven. It is the task of the philosopher, ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 363 a task to which Hegel applies himself most as- siduously, to analyze the battle and the victory upon which spiritual being nourishes itself. And since the deeper processes are those of thought, the Hegelian philosophy centres in an ordering of notions, a demonstration of that necessary pro- gression of thought which, in its whole dynamical logical history, constitutes the absolute idea. § 180. The Hegelian philosophy, with its em- phasis upon difference, antagonism, and develop- The Hegelian men t, is peculiarly qualified to be a phi- of W Nat ure y losophy of nature and history. Those and History, principles of spiritual development which logic defines are conceived as incarnate in the evolution of the world. Nature, as the very antithesis to spirit, is now understood to be the foil of spirit. In nature spirit alienates itself in order to return enriched. The stages of nature are the preparation for the reviving of a spiritu- ality that has been deliberately forfeited. The Romanticists, whether philosophers like Schelling or poets like Goethe and Wordsworth, were led by their feeling for the beauty of nature to attribute to it a much deeper and more direct spiritual sig- nificance. But Hegel and the Romanticists alike are truly expressed in Emerson's belief that the 364 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY spiritual interpretation of nature is the " true science." " The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegeta- tion, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow of space was strown with these flowers we call suns and moons and stars ; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods ; for in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought." 5 The new awakening of spirit which is for Hegel the consummation of the natural evolution, begins with the individual or subjective spirit, and de- velops into the social or objective spirit, which is morality and history. History is a veritable dia- lectic of nations, in the course of which the con- sciousness of individual liberty is developed, and coordinated with the unity of the state. The high- est stage of spirit incarnate is that of absolute spirit, embracing art, religion, and philosophy. In art the absolute idea obtains expression in sen- suous existence, more perfectly in classical than in 6 Emerson: Op. cit., p. 25. The possibility of conflict between this method of nature study and the empirical method of science is significantly attested by the circumstance that in the year 1801 Hegel published a paper in which he maintained, on the ground of certain numerical harmonies, that there could be no planet between Mars and Jupiter, while at almost exactly the same time Piazzi discovered Ceres, the first of the as- teroids. ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 365 the symbolic art of the Orient, but most perfectly in the romantic art of the modern period. In re- ligion the absolute idea is expressed in the imagi- nation through worship. In Oriental pantheism, the individual is overwhelmed by his sense of the universal ; in Greek religion, God is but a higher man ; while in Christianity God and man are per- fectly united in Christ. Finally, in philosophy the absolute idea reaches its highest possible ex- pression in articulate thought. § 181. Such is absolute idealism approached from the stand-point of antecedent metaphysics. Resume. I* is the most elaborate and subtle foTute^idfauL P rovision for antagonistic differences to solve the w ithin unity that the speculative mind EviL of man has as yet been able to make. It is the last and most thorough attempt to resolve individual and universal, temporal and eternal, natural and ideal, good and evil, into an absolute unity in which the universal, eternal, ideal, and good shall dominate, and in which all terms shall be related with such necessity as obtains in the defi- nitions and theorems of geometry. There is to be some absolute meaning which is rational to the uttermost and the necessary ground of all the in- cidents of existence. Thought could undertake no 366 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY more ambitious and exacting task. Nor is it evi- dent after all that absolute idealism enjoys any better success in this task than absolute realism. The difference between them becomes much less marked when we reflect that the former, like the latter, must reserve the predicate of being for the unity of the whole. Even though evil and con- tradiction belong to the essence of things, move in the secret heart of a spiritual universe, the reality is not these in their severalty, but that life within which they fall, the story within which they " earn a place." And if absolute idealism has defined a new perfection, it has at the same time defined a new imperfection. The perfection is rich in contrast, and thus inclusive of both the lights and shades of experience ; but the perfection belongs only to the composition of these elements within a single view. It is not necessary to such perfection that the evil should ever be viewed in isolation. The idealist employs the analogy of the drama or the picture whose very significance re- quires the balance of opposing forces ; or the anal- ogy of the symphony in which a higher musical quality is realized through the resolution of discord into harmony. But none of these unities requires any element whatsoever that does not partake of its ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 367 beauty. It is quite irrelevant to the drama that the hero should himself have his own view of events with no understanding of their dramatic value, as it is irrelevant to the picture that an un- balanced fragment of it should dwell apart, or to the symphony that the discord should be heard without the harmony. One may multiply without end the internal differences and antagonisms that contribute to the internal meaning, and be as far as ever from understanding the external detach- ment of experiences that are not rational or good in themselves. And it is precisely this kind of fact that precipitates the whole problem. We do not judge of sin and error from experiences in which they conduct to goodness and truth, but from experiences in which they are stark and unresolved. In view of such considerations many idealists have been willing to confess their inability to solve this problem. To quote a recent expositor of Hegel, " We need not, after all, be surprised at the apparently insoluble problem which confronts us. For the question has developed into the old difficulty of the origin of evil, which has always baffled both theologians and philoso- phers. An idealism which declares that the universe is in reality perfect, can find, as most forms of popular 368 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY idealism do, an escape from the difficulties of the ex- istence of evil, by declaring that the universe is as yet only growing towards its ideal perfection. But this refuge disappears with the reality of time, and we are left with an awkward difference between what philosophy tells us must be, and what our life tells us actually is." 8 If the philosophy of eternal perfection persists in its fundamental doctrine in spite of this irreconcil- able conflict with life, it is because it is believed that that doctrine must be true. Let us turn, then, to its more constructive and compelling argument. § 182. The proof of absolute idealism is sup- posed by the majority of its exponents to follow The Construe- from the problem of epistemology, and tive Argument .• i i j* .i •£ j. for Absolute more particularly from the manliest B^dTpon the dependence of truth u P on the lowing subjectivistic m j n( j. I n its initial phase absolute Theory of r Knowledge, idealism is indistinguishable from sub- jectivism. Like that philosophy it finds that the object of knowledge is inseparable from the state of knowledge throughout the whole range of ex- perience. Since the knower can never escape him- self, it may be set down as an elementary fact that reality (at any rate whatever reality can be known or even talked about) owes its being to mind. 6 McTaggart: Studies in Hegelian Dialectic, p. 181. ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 369 Thus Green, the English neo-Hegelian, maintains that " an object which no consciousness presented to itself would not be an object at all," and won- ders that this principle is not generally taken for granted and made the starting-point for philoso- phy. 7 However, unless the very term " object " is intended to imply presence to a subject, this prin- ciple is by no means self-evident, and must be traced to its sources. We have already followed the fortunes of that empirical subjectivism which issues from the rel- ativity of perception. At the very dawn of phi- losophy it was observed that what is seen, heard, or otherwise experienced through the senses, de- pends not only upon the use of sense-organs, but upon the special point of view occupied by each individual sentient being. It was therefore con- cluded that the perceptual world belonged to the human knower with his limitations and perspec- tive, rather than to being itself. It was this epi- stemological principle upon which Berkeley found- ed his empirical idealism. Believing knowledge to consist essentially in perception, and believing perception to be subjective, he had to choose between the relegation of being to a region inac- 7 Green: Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 15. 370 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY cessible to knowledge, and the definition of being in terms of subjectivity. To avoid scepticism he accepted the latter alternative. But among the Greeks with whom this theory of perception origi- nated, it drew its meaning in large part from the distinction between perception and reason. Thus we read in Plato's " Sophist " : "And you would allow that we participate in genera- tion with the body, and by perception ; but we participate with the soul by thought in true essence, and essence you would affirm to be always the same and immutable, whereas generation varies." 8 It is conceived that although in perception man is condemned to a knowledge conditioned by the affections and station of his body, he may nev- ertheless escape himself and lay hold on the " true essence " of things, by virtue of thought. In other words, knowledge, in contradistinction to " opinion," is not made by the subject, but is the soul's participation in the eternal natures of things. In the moment of insight the varying course of the individual thinker coincides with the unvarying truth ; but in that moment the individ- ual thinker is ennobled through being assimilated to the truth, while the truth is no more, no less, the truth than before. 8 Plato: The Sophist, 248. Translation by Jowett. ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 371 § 183. In absolute idealism, the principle of subjectivism is extended to reason itself. This The Principle extension seems to have been originally of "bjecti- ( j ue £ mora i an( j religious interests. vism Extend- © ed to Reason. ;p rom ^he m0 ral stand-point the contem- plation of the truth is a state, and the highest state of the individual life. The religious interest uni- fies the individual life and directs attention to its spiritual development. Among the Greeks of the middle period life was as yet viewed objectively as the fulfilment of capacities, and knowledge was regarded as perfection of function, the exercise of the highest of human prerogatives. But as moral and religious interests became more absorbing, the individual lived more and more in his own self- consciousness. Even before the Christian era the Greek philosophers themselves were preoccupied with the task of winning a state of inner serenity. Thus the Stoics and Epicureans came to look upon knowledge as a means to the attainment of an inner freedom from distress and bondage to the world. In other words, the very reason was regarded as an activity of the self, and its fruits were valued for their enhancement of the welfare of the self. And if this be true of the Stoics and the Epicureans, it is still more clearly true of the neo-Platonists of 372 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY the Christian era, who mediate between the an- cient and mediaeval worlds. § 184. It is well known that the early period of Christianity was a period of the most vivid Emphasis on self-consciousness. The individual be- Self-con- sciousness in lieved that his natural and social Early Christian . . Philosophy, environment was alien to his deeper spiritual interests. He therefore withdrew into himself. He believed himself to have but one duty, the salvation of his soul; and that duty re- quired him to search his innermost springs of action in order to uproot any that might compro- mise him with the world and turn him from God. The drama of life was enacted within the circle of his own self -consciousness. Citizenship, bodily health, all forms of appreciation and knowledge, were identified in the parts they played here. In short the Christian consciousness, although renun- ciation was its deepest motive, was reflexive and centripetal to a degree hitherto unknown among the European peoples. And when with St. Augus- tine theoretical interests once more vigorously asserted themselves, this new emphasis was in the very foreground. St. Augustine wished to begin his system of thought with a first indubitable cer- tainty, and selected neither being nor ideas, but ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 373 self. St. Augustine's genius was primarily re- ligious, and the " Confessions," in which he re- cords the story of his hard winning of peace and right relations with God, is his most intimate book. How faithfully does he represent him- self, and the blend of paganism and Christianity which was distinctive of his age, when in his systematic writings he draws upon religion for his knowledge of truth! In all my living, he argues, whether I sin or turn to God, whether I doubt or believe, whether I know or am ignorant, in all / know that I am I. Each and every state of my consciousness is a state of my self, and as such, sure evidence of my self's existence. If one were to follow St. Augustine's reflections further, one would find him reasoning from his own finite and evil self to an infinite and perfect Self, which centres like his in the conviction that I am I, but is endowed with all power and all worth. One would find him reflecting upon the possible union with God through the exaltation of the human self-consciousness. But this conception of God as the perfect self is so much a prophecy of things to come, that more than a dozen centuries elapsed before it was explicitly formulated by the post- Kantians. We must follow its more gradual de- 374 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY velopment in the philosophies of Descartes and Kant. § 185. When at the close of the sixteenth cen- tury the Frenchman, Rene Descartes, sought to Descartes's construct philosophy anew and upon se- Argument for the indepen- cure foundations, he too selected as the dence of the Thinking Self . initial certainty of thought the think- er's knowledge of himself. This principle now received its classic formulation in the proposition, Cogito ergo sum — " I think, hence I am." The argument does not differ essentially from that of St. Augustine, but it now finds a place in a system- atic and critical metaphysics. In that my think- ing is certain of itself, says Descartes, in that I know myself before I know aught else, my self can never be dependent for its being upon anything else that I may come to know. A thinking self, with its knowledge and its volition, is quite ca- pable of subsisting of itself. Such is, indeed, not the case with a finite self, for all finitude is sig- nificant of limitation, and in recognizing my limi- tations I postulate the infinite being or God. But the relation of my self to a physical world is quite without necessity. Human nature, with soul and body conjoined, is a combination of two substances, neither of which is a necessary consequence of the ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 375 other. As a result of this combination the soul is to some extent affected by the body, and the body is to some extent directed by the soul; but the body could conceivably be an automaton, as the soul could conceivably be, and will in another life become, a free spirit. The consequences of this dualism for epistemology are very grave. If knowledge be the activity of a self-subsistent think- ing spirit, how can it reveal the nature of an ex- ternal world ? The natural order is now literally " external." It is true that the whole body of exact science, that mechanical system to which Descartes attached so much importance, falls within the range of the soul's own thinking. But what assurance is there that it refers to a province of its own — a physical world in space ? Descartes can only suppose that " clear and distinct " ideas must be trusted as faithful representations. It is true the external world makes its presence known directly, when it breaks in upon the soul in sense- perception. But Descartes's rationalism and love of mathematics forbade his attaching importance to this criterion. Real nature, that exactly de- finable and predictable order of moving bodies defined in physics, is not known through sense- perception, but through thought. Its necessities 376 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY are the necessities of reason. Descartes finds himself, then, in the perplexing position of seek- ing an internal criterion for an external world. The problem of knowledge so stated sets going the whole epistemological movement of the eighteenth century, from Locke through Berkeley and Hume to Kant. And the issue of this development is the absolute idealism of Kant's successors. § 186. Of the English philosophers who pre- pare the way for the epistemology of Kant, Hume Empirical * s ^ ne mos t radical and momentous. It tt^EnSsii was he who roused Kant from his Philosophers, « dogmatic slumbers " to the task of the " Critical Philosophy." Hume is one of the two possible consequences of Descartes. One who at- taches greater importance to the rational necessi- ties of science than to its external reference, is not unwilling that nature should be swallowed up in mind. With Malebranche, Descartes's imme- diate successor in France, nature is thus provided for within the archetypal mind of God. With the English philosophers, on the other hand, exter- nality is made the very mark of nature, and as a consequence sense-perception becomes the crite- rion of scientific truth. This empirical theory of knowledge, inaugurated and developed by Locke ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 377 and Berkeley, culminates in Hume's designation of the impression as the distinguishing element of nature, at once making up its content and certify- ing to its externality. The processes of nature are successions of impressions ; and the laws of nature are their uniformities, or the expectations of uni- formity which their repetitions engender. Hume does not hesitate to draw the logical conclusion. If the final mark of truth is the presence to sense of the individual element, then science can consist only of items of information and probable general- izations concerning their sequences. The effect is observed to follow upon the cause in fact, but there is no understanding of its necessity ; therefore no absolute certainty attaches to the future effects of any cause. § 187. But what has become of the dream of the mathematical physicist ? Is the whole system To save Exact of Newton, that brilliant triumph of the Science Kant Makes it mechanic al method, unfounded and dog- Dependent ,• - . . . -I.-I. j> on Mind. matic ? It is the logical instability of this body of knowledge, made manifest in the well- founded scepticism of Hume, that rouses Kant to a reexamination of the whole foundation of natural science. The general outline of his analysis has been developed above. It is of importance here 378 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY to understand its relations to the problem of Des- cartes. Contrary to the view of the English phi- losophers, natural science is, says Kant, the work of the mind. The certainty of the causal rela- tion is due to the human inability to think other- wise. Hume is mistaken in supposing that mere sensation gives us any knowledge of nature. The very least experience of objects involves the em- ployment of principles which are furnished by the mind. Without the employment of such prin- ciples, or in bare sensation, there is no intelligible meaning whatsoever. But once admit the employ- ment of such principles and formulate them sys- tematically, and the whole Newtonian order of nature is seen to follow from them. Furthermore, since these principles or categories are the condi- tions of human experience, are the very instru- ments of knowledge, they are valid wherever there is any experience or knowledge. There is but one way to make anything at all out of nature, and that is to conceive it as an order of necessary events in space and time. Newtonian science is part of such a general conception, and is therefore neces- sary if knowledge is to be possible at all, even the least. Thus Kant turns upon Hume, and shuts him up to the choice between the utter abnegation ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 379 of all knowledge, including the knowledge of his own scepticism, and the acceptance of the whole body of exact science. But with nature thus conditioned by the neces- sities of thought, what has become of its external- ity? That, Kant admits, has indeed vanished. Kant does not attempt, as did Descartes, to hold that the nature which mind constructs and con- trols, exists also outside of mind. The nature that is known is on that very account phenomenal, anthropocentric — created by its cognitive condi- tions. Descartes was right in maintaining that sense-perception certifies to the existence of a world outside the mind, but mistaken in calling it nature and identifying it with the realm of science. In short, Kant acknowledges the external world, and names it the thing -in-itself ; but insists that be- cause it is outside of mind it is outside of knowl- edge. Thus is the certainty of science saved at the cost of its metaphysical validity. It is necessarily true, but only of a conditioned or de- pendent world. And in saving science Kant has at the same time prejudiced metaphysics in gen- eral. For the human or naturalistic way of knowing is left in sole possession of the field, with the higher interest of reasons in the ultimate 380 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY nature of being, degraded to the rank of practical faith. § 188. The transformation of this critical and agnostic doctrine into absolute idealism is inevi- The Post- table. The metaphysical interest was Kantians Transform bound to avail itself of the speculative Kant's Mind- in-general into suggestiveness with which the Kantian Mind. philosophy abounds. The transforma- tion turns upon Kant's assumption that whatever is constructed by the mind is on that account phe- nomenon or appearance. Kant has carried along the presumption that whatever is act or content of mind is on that account not real object or thing-in- itself. We have seen that this is generally ac- cepted as true of the relativities of sense-percep- tion. But is it true of thought ? The post-Kan- tian idealist maintains that that depends upon the thought. The content of private individual think- ing is in so far not real object ; but it does not fol- low that this is true of such thinking as is univer- sally valid. ~No\v Kant has deduced his categories for thought in general. There are no empirical cases of thinking except the human thinkers; but the categories are not the property of any one human individual or any group of such individuals. They are the conditions of experi- ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 381 ence in general, and of every possibility of ex- perience. The transition to absolute idealism is now readily made. Thought in general becomes the absolute mind, and experience in general its content. The thing-in-itself drops out as having no meaning. The objectivity to which it testified is provided for in the completeness and self- sufficiency which is attributed to the absolute ex- perience. Indeed, an altogether new definition of subjective and objective replaces the old. The sub- jective is that which is only insufficiently thought, as in the case of relativity and error; the objective is that which is completely thought. Thus the natural order is indeed phenomenal; but only because the principles of science are not the high- est principles of thought, and not because nature is the fruit of thought. Thus Hegel expresses his relation to Kant as follows : " According to Kant, the things that we know about are to us appearances only, and we can never know their essential nature, which belongs to another world, which we cannot approach. . . . The true statement of the case is as follows. The things of which we have direct consciousness are mere phenomena, not for us only, but in their own nature; and the true and proper case of these things, finite as they are, is to have their existence founded not in themselves, but in the universal divine idea. This view of things, it is true, is as idealist 382 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY as Kant's, but in contradistinction to the subjective idealism of the Critical Philosophy should be termed Absolute Idealism." 9 § 189. Absolute idealism is thus reached after a long and devious course of development. But The Direct the argument may be stated much more The^toence briefly. Plato, it will be remembered, Stt e thi nitefound that ex P erienc e tends ever to infinite Mind, transcend itself. The thinker finds himself compelled to pursue the ideal of immu- table and universal truth, and must identify the ultimate being with that ideal. Similarly Hegel says: "That upward spring of the mind signifies that the being which the world has is only a semblance, no real being, no absolute truth; it signifies that beyond and above that appearance, truth abides in God, so that true being is another name for God." 10 The further argument of absolute idealism dif- fers from that of Plato in that the dependence of truth upon the mind is accepted as a first principle. The ideal with which experience is informed is now the state of perfect hnoivledge, rather than the 9 Hegel: Encyclopadie, §45, lecture note. Quoted by McTaggart: Op. cit., p. 69. 10 Hegel: Encyclopadie, § 50. Quoted by McTaggart: Op. cit., p. 70. ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 383 system of absolute truth. The content of the state of perfect knowledge will indeed be the system of absolute truth, but none the less content, precisely as finite knowledge is the content of a finite mind. In pursuing the truth, I who pursue, aim to realize in myself a certain highest state of knowledge. Were I to know all truth I should indeed have ceased to be the finite individual who began the quest, but the evolution would be continuous and the character of self-consciousness would never have been lost. I may say, in short, that God or being, is my perfect cognitive self. The argument for absolute idealism is a con- structive interpretation of the subjectivistic con- tention that knowledge can never escape the circle of its own activity and states. To meet the de- mand for a final and standard truth, a demand which realism meets with its doctrine of a being independent of any mind, this philosophy defines a standard mind. The impossibility of defining objects in terms of relativity to a finite self, con- ducts dialectically to the conception of the abso- lute self. The sequel to my error or exclusiveness, is truth or inclusiveness. The outcome of the dia- lectic is determined by the symmetry of the antith- esis. Thus, corrected experience implies a last 384 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY correcting experience ; partial cognition, complete cognition; empirical subject, transcendental sub- ject; finite mind, an absolute mind. The follow- ing statement is taken from a contemporary ex- ponent of the philosophy : " What you and I lack, when we lament our human ignorance, is simply a certain desirable and logically possible state of mind, or type of experience; to wit, a state of mind in which we should wisely be able to say that we had fulfilled in experience what we now have merely in idea, namely, the knowledge, the immediate and felt presence, of what we now call the Absolute Reality. . . . There is an Absolute Experience for which the conception of an absolute reality, i. e., the conception of a system of ideal truth, is fulfilled by the very contents that get presented to this experience. This Absolute Experience is related to our experience as an organic whole to its own fragments. It is an ex- perience which finds fulfilled all that the completest thought can conceive as genuinely possible. Herein lies its definition as an Absolute. For the Absolute Experience, as for ours, there are data, contents, facts. But these data, these contents, express, for the Absolute Experience, its own meaning, its thought, its ideas. Contents beyond these that it possesses, the Absolute Experience knows to be, in genuine truth, impossible. Hence its contents are indeed particular, — a selection from the world of bare or merely conceptual possi- bilities, — but they form a self-determined whole, than which nothing completer, more organic, more fulfilled, more transparent, or more complete in meaning, is concretely or genuinely possible. On the other hand, these contents are not foreign to those of our finite ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 385 experience, but are inclusive of them in the unity of one life." u § 190. As has been already intimated, at the opening of this chapter, the inclusion of the whole The Realistic °^ reality within a single self is clearly involute a questionable proceeding. The need idealism. £ av oiding the relativism of empirical idealism is evident. But if the very meaning of the self -consciousness be due to a certain selection and exclusion within the general field of experi- ence, it is equally evident that the relativity of self-consciousness can never be overcome through appealing to a higher self. One must appeal from the self to the realm of things as they are. In- deed, although the exponents of this philosophy use the language of spiritualism, and accept the idealistic epistemology, their absolute being tends ever to escape the special characters of the self. And inasmuch as the absolute self is commonly set over against the finite or empirical self, as the standard and test of truth, it is the less distin- 11 Royce: Conception of God, pp. 19, 43-44. This argument is well summarized in Green's statement that " the existence of one connected world, which is the presupposition of knowledge, implies the action of one self- conditioning and self-determining mind." Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 181. 386 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY guishable from the realist's order of independent beings. § 191. But however much absolute idealism may tend to abandon its idealism for the sake of The Concep- its absolutism within the field of meta- consdoSLs physics, such is not the ease within the Swcs al of athe field of ethics and reli g ion - Tbe con- Absolute ception of the self here receives a new Idealism. A Kant. emphasis. The same self-consciousness which admits to the highest truth is the evidence of man's practical dignity. In virtue of his im- mediate apprehension of the principles of self- hood, and his direct participation in the life of spirit, man may be said to possess the innermost secret of the universe. In order to achieve good- ness he must therefore recognize and express him- self. The Kantian philosophy is here again the starting-point. It was Kant who first gave ade- quate expression to the Christian idea of the moral self-consciousness. "Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name that dost embrace nothing charming or insinuating, but requirest submission, and yet seekest not to move the will by threatening aught that would arouse natural aversion or terror, but merely holdest forth a law which of itself finds entrance into the mind, ... a law before which all inclinations are dumb, even though they ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 387 secretly counterwork it; what origin is there worthy of thee, and where is to be found the root of thy noble descent which proudly rejects all kindred with the in- clinations . . . ? It can be nothing less than a power which elevates man above himself, ... a power which connects him with an order of things that only the understanding can conceive, with a world which at the same time commands the whole sensible world, and with it the empirically determinable existence of man in time, as well as the sum total of all ends." 12 With Kant there can be no morality except con- duct be attended by the consciousness of this duty imposed by the higher nature upon the lower. It is this very recognition of a deeper self, of a per- sonality that belongs to the sources and not to the consequences of nature, that constitutes man as a moral being, and only such action as is inspired with a reverence for it can be morally good. Kant does little more than to establish the uncompro- mising dignity of the moral will. In moral action man submits to a law that issues from himself in virtue of his rational nature. Here he yields nothing, as he owes nothing, to that appetency which binds him to the natural world. As a rational being he himself affirms the very principles which determine the organization of 12 Kant: Critical Examination of Practical Reason. Trans- lated by Abbott in Kant's Theory of Ethics, p. 180. 388 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY nature. This is his freedom, at once the ground and the implication of his duty. Man is free from nature to serve the higher law of his personality. § 192. There are two respects in which Kant's ethics has been regarded as inadequate by those Kantian Ethics who draw from it their fundamental Supplemented through the principles. It is said that Kant is too Conceptions of Universal rigoristic, that he makes too stern a and Objective . „ , . . , . Spirit. business oi morality, in speaking so much of law and so little of love and spontaneity. There are good reasons for this. Kant seeks to isolate the moral consciousness, and dwell upon it in its purity, in order that he may demonstrate its incommensurability with the values of inclination and sensibility. Furthermore, Kant may speak of the principle of the absolute, and recognize the deeper eternal order as a law, but he may not, if he is to be consistent with his own critical prin- ciples, affirm the metaphysical being of such an order. With his idealistic followers it is possible to define the spiritual setting of the moral life, but with Kant it is only possible to define the an- tagonism of principles. Hence the greater opti- mism of the post-Kantians. They know that the higher law is the reality, and that he who obeys it thus unites himself with the absolute self. That ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 389 which for Kant is only a resolute obedience to more valid principles, to rationally superior rules for action, is for idealism man's appropriation of his spiritual birthright. Since the law is the deeper nature, man may respect and obey it as valid, and at the same time act upon it gladly in the sure knowledge that it will enhance his eternal welfare. Indeed, the knowledge that the very universe is founded upon this law will make him less suspicious of nature and less exclusive in his adherence to any single law. He will be more confident of the essential goodness of all manifes- tations of a universe which he knows to be fun- damentally spiritual. But it has been urged, secondly, that the Kan- tian ethics is too formal, too little pertinent to the issues of life. Kant's moral law imposes only obe- dience to the law, or conduct conceived as suitable to a universal moral community. But what is the nature of such conduct in particular ? It may be answered that to maintain the moral self -conscious- ness, to act dutifully and dutifully only, to be self-reliant and unswerving in the doing of what one ought to do, is to obtain a very specific char- acter. But does this not leave the individual's conduct to his own interpretation of his duty ? 390 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY It was just this element of individualism which Hegel sought to eliminate through the applica- tion of his larger philosophical conception. If that which expresses itself within the individual consciousness as the moral law be indeed the law of that self in which the universe is grounded, it will appear as objective spirit in the evolution of society. For Hegel, then, the most valid standard of goodness is to be found in that customary mo- rality which bespeaks the moral leadings of the general humanity, and in those institutions, such as the family and the state, which are the moral acts of the absolute idea itself. Finally, in the realm of absolute spirit, in art, in revealed religion, and in philosophy, the individual may approach to the self-consciousness which is the perfect truth and goodness in and for itself. § 193. Where the law of life is the implication in the finite self-consciousness of the eternal and The Peculiar divine self-consciousness, there can be Pantheism , , and Mysticism no division between morality and re- of Absolute i • • i i i idealism. ligion, as there can be none between thought and will. Whatever man seeks is in the end God. As the perfect fulfilment of the think- ing self, God is the truth ; as the perfect fulfilment of the willing self, God is the good. The finite ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 391 self-consciousness finds facts that are not under- stood, and so seeks to resolve itself into the perfect self wherein all that is given has meaning. On the other hand, the finite self-consciousness finds ideals that are not realized, and so seeks to resolve itself into that perfect self wherein all that is sig- nificant is given. All interests thus converge toward "some state of conscious spirit in which the opposition of cognition and volition is overcome — in which we neither judge our ideas by the world, nor the world by our ideas, but are aware that inner and outer are in such close and necessary harmony that even the thought of possible discord has become impossible. In its unity not only cognition and volition, but feeling also, must be blended and united. In some way or another it must have overcome the rift in discursive knowledge, and the immediate must for it be no longer the alien. It must be as direct as art, as certain and universal as philoso- phy." 13 The religious consciousness proper to absolute idealism is both pantheistic and mystical, but with distinction. Platonism is pantheistic in that nat- ure is resolved into God. All that is not perfect is esteemed only for its promise of perfection. And Platonism is mystical in that the purification and universalization of the affections brings one 13 Quoted from McTaggart: Op. cit., pp. 231-232. 392 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY in the end to a perfection that exceeds all mode3 of thought and speech. With Spinoza, on the other hand, God may be said to be resolved into nature. Nature is made divine, but is none the less nature, for its divinity consists in its absolute necessity. Spinoza's pantheism passes over into mysticism because the absolute necessity exceeds in both unity and richness the laws known to the human understanding. In absolute idealism, finally, both God and nature are resolved into the self. For that which is divine in experience is self -consciousness, and this is at the same time the ground of nature. Thus in the highest knowledge the self is expanded and enriched without being left behind. The mystical experience proper to this philosophy is the consciousness of identity, together with the sense of universal immanence. The individual self may be directly sensible of the absolute self, for these are one spiritual life. Thus Emerson says: " It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his possessed and con- scious intellect he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power upon which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 393 through him; then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or 'with the flower of the mind ' ; not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life." 14 § 194. But the distinguishing flavor and qual- ity of this religion arises from its spiritual hos- The Religion pitality. It is not, like Platonism, a of Exuberant . ■ Spirituality, contemplation of the best ; nor, like plu- ralistic idealisms, a moral knight-errantry. It is neither a religion of exclusion, nor a religion of reconstruction, but a profound willingness that things should be as they really are. For this rea- son its devotees have recognized in Spinoza their true forerunner. But idealism is not Spinozism, though it may contain this as one of its strains. For it is not the worship of necessity, Emerson's " beautiful necessity, which makes man brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger that is ap- pointed, nor incur one that is not " ; but the wor- ship of that which is necessary. Not only must one understand that every effort, however despairing, is an element of sense in the universal significance ; 14 Emerson: Op. cit., pp. 30-31. 394 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY " that the whole would not be what it is were not pre- cisely this finite purpose left in its own uniqueness to speak precisely its own word — a word which no other purpose can speak in the language of the divine will"; 15 but one must have a zest for such participation, and a heart for the divine will which it profits. Indeed, so much is this religion a love of life, that it may, as in the case of the Romanticists, be a love of caprice. Battle and death, pain and joy, error and truth — all that belongs to the story of this mortal world, are to be felt as the thrill of health, and relished as the essences of God. Re- ligion is an exuberant spirituality, a fearless sen- sibility, a knowledge of both good and evil, and a will to serve the good, while exulting that the evil will not yield without a battle. 15 Royce: The World and the Individual, First Series, p. 465. CHAPTEE XII CONCLUSION § 195. One who consults a book of philosophy in the hope of finding there a definite body of Liability of truth, sanctioned by the consensus of ex- iSSHT' 10 P erts ' cannot fail t0 be disappointed. Due to its ^ n( j ft S ] 10U 1J now }yQ plain that this is Systematic A character. j ue no £ ^ ^h e frailties of philosophers, but to the meaning of philosophy. Philosophy is not additive, but reconstructive. Natural science may advance step by step without ever losing ground; its empirical discoveries are in their severalty as true as they can ever be. Thus the stars and the species of animals may be recorded successively, and each generation of astronomers and zoologists may take up the work at the point reached by its forerunners. The formulation of results does, it is true, require constant correction and revision — but there is a central body of data which is little affected, and which accumulates from age to age. Now the finality of scientific truth is proportional to the modesty of its claims. 395 396 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY Items of truth persist, while the interpretation of them is subject to alteration with the general advance of knowledge; and, relatively speaking, science consists in items of truth, and philosophy in their interpretation. The liability to revision in science itself increases as that body of knowl- edge becomes more highly unified and systematic. Thus the present age, with its attempt to construct a single comprehensive system of mechanical sci- ence, is peculiarly an age when fundamental con- ceptions are subjected to a thorough reexamination — when, for example, so ancient a conception as that of matter is threatened with displacement by that of energy. But philosophy is essentially uni- tary and systematic — and thus superlatively liable to revision. § 196. It is noteworthy that it is only in this age of a highly systematic natural science that The One different systems are projected, as in the^aif 1 " 1 the case just noted of the rivalry Philosophies. b e t wee n the strictly mechanical, or cor- puscular, theory and the newer theory of ener- getics. It has heretofore been taken for granted that although there may be many philosophies, there is but one body of science. And it is still taken for granted that the experimental detail of CONCLUSION 397 the individual science is a common fund, to the progressive increase of which the individual scien- tist contributes the results of his special research ; there being rival schools of mechanics, physics, or chemistry, only in so far as fundamental concep- tions or principles of orderly arrangement are in question. But philosophy deals exclusively with the most fundamental conceptions and the most general principles of orderly arrangement. Hence it is significant of the very task of philosophy that there should be many tentative systems of philoso- phy, even that each philosopher should project and construct his own philosophy. Philosophy as the truth of synthesis and reconciliation, of compre- hensiveness and coordination, must be a living unity. It is a thinking of entire experience, and can be sufficient only through being all-sufficient. The heart of every philosophy is a harmonizing in- sight, an intellectual prospect within which all human interests and studies compose themselves. Such knowledge cannot be delegated to isolated co- laborers, but will be altogether missed if not loved and sought in its indivisible unity. There is no modest home-keeping philosophy ; no safe and con- servative philosophy, that can make sure of a part through renouncing the whole. There is no phi- 398 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY losophy without intellectual temerity, as there is no religion without moral temerity. And the one is the supreme interest of thought, as the other is the supreme interest of life. § 197. Though the many philosophies be inev- itable, it must not be concluded that there is Progress in therefore no progress in philosophy. Tn'eSopMstica- The solution from which every great ticfem'of the" phil° s °phy is precipitated is the min- PresentAge. ^ed w j s( j om f some latest age, with all of its inheritance. The " positive " knowledge furnished by the sciences, the refinements and dis- tinctions of the philosophers, the ideals of society — these and the whole sum of civilization are its ingredients. Where there is no single system of philosophy significant enough to express the age, as did the systems of Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and the others who belong to the roll of the great philosophers, there exists a general sophistication, which is more elu- sive but not less significant. The present age — at any rate from its own stand-point — is not an age of great philosophical systems. Such systems may indeed be living in our midst unrecognized; but historical perspective cannot safely be anticipated. It is certain that no living voice is known to speak CONCLUSION 399 for this generation as did Hegel, and even Spencer, for the last. There is, however, a significance in this very passing of Hegel and Spencer, — an en- lightenment peculiar to an age which knows them, but has philosophically outlived them. There is a moral in the history of thought which just now no philosophy, whether naturalism or transcendental- ism, realism or idealism, can fail to draw. The characterization of this contemporary eclecticism or sophistication, difficult and uncertain as it must needs be, affords the best summary and interpre- tation with which to conclude this brief survey of the fortunes of philosophy. § 198. Since the problem of metaphysics is the crucial problem of philosophy, the question of its Metaphysics, present status is fundamental in any The Antagonis- tic Doctrines of characterization of the age. It will Naturalism and Absolutism, appear from the foregoing account of the course of metaphysical development that two fundamental tendencies have exhibited themselves from the beginning. The one of these is natural- istic and empirical, representing the claims of what common sense calls " matters of fact " ; the other is transcendental and rational, representing the claims of the standards and ideals which are im- manent in experience, and directly manifested in 400 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY the great human interests of thought and action. These tendencies have on the whole been antago- nistic ; and the clear-cut and momentous systems of philosophy have been fundamentally determined by either the one or the other. Thus materialism is due to the attempt to re- duce all of experience to the elements and prin- ciples of connection which are employed by the physical sciences to set in order the actual motions, or changes of place, which the parts of experience undergo. Materialism maintains that the motions of bodies are indifferent to considerations of worth, and denies that they issue from a deeper cause of another order. The very ideas of such non- mechanical elements or principles are here pro- vided with a mechanical origin. Similarly a phe- nomenalism, like that of Hume, takes immediate presence to sense as the norm of being and knowl- edge. Individual items, directly verified in the moment of their occurrence, are held to be at once the content of all real truth, and the source of those abstract ideas which the misguided ration- alists mistake for real truth. But the absolutist, on the other hand, contends that the thinker must mean something by the real- ity which he seeks. If he had it for the looking, CONCLUSION 401 thought would not be, as it so evidently is, a pur- posive endeavor. And that which is meant by reality can be nothing short of the fulfilment or final realization of this endeavor of thought. To find out what thought seeks, to anticipate the con- summation of thought and posit it as real, is therefore the first and fundamental procedure of philosophy. The mechanism of nature, and all matters of fact, must come to terms with this ab- solute reality, or be condemned as mere appear- ance. Thus Plato distinguishes the world of " generation " in which we participate by percep- tion, from the "true essence ""in which we par- ticipate by thought; and Schelling speaks of the modern experimental method as the " corruption " of philosophy and physics, in that it fails to construe nature in terms of spirit. § 199. Now it would never occur to a sophis- ticated philosopher of the present, to one who has Concessions thought out to the end the whole tra- from the Side of Absolutism, dition of philosophy, and felt the grav- Recognition . . of Nature. ity of the great historical issues, to Fkhteans. suffer either of these motives to domi- nate him to the exclusion of the other. Abso- lutism has long since ceased to speak slightingly of physical science, and of the world of perception. 402 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY It is conceded that motions must be known in the mechanical way, and matters of fact in the matter- of-fact way. Furthermore, the prestige which sci- ence enjoyed in the nineteenth century, and the prestige which the empirical and secular world of action has enjoyed to a degree that has steadily increased since the Renaissance, have convinced the absolutist of the intrinsic significance of these parts of experience. They are no longer reduced, but are permitted to flourish in their own right. From the very councils of absolute idealism there has issued a distinction which is fast becoming current, between the World of Appreciation, or the realm of moral and logical principles, and the World of Description, or the realm of empirical generalizations and mechanical causes. 1 It is indeed maintained that the former of these is metaphysically superior; but the latter is ranked without the disparagement of its own proper cate- gories. With the Fichteans this distinction corresponds to the distinction in the system of Fichte between the active moral ego, and the nature which it posits to act upon. But the neo-Fichteans are 1 Cf. Josiah Royce: The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, Lecture XII; The World and the Individual, Second Series. CONCLUSION 403 concerned to show that the nature so posited, or the World of Description, is the realm of me- chanical science, and that the entire system of mathematical and physical truth is therefore mor- ally necessary. 2 § 200. A more pronounced tendency in the same direction marks the work of the neo-Kan- The Neo- Hans. These philosophers repudiate Kantians. ^ spiritualistic metaphysics of Scho- penhauer, Fichte, and Hegel, believing the real significance of Kant to lie in his critical method, in his examination of the first principles of the dif- ferent systems of knowledge, and especially in his analysis of the foundations of mathematics and physics. 3 In approaching mathematics and phys- 2 Cf. Hugo Munsterberg: Psychology and Life. The more important writings of this school are: Die Philosophic im Beginn des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts , edited by Wilhelm Windelband, and contributed to by Windelband, H. Rickert, O. Liebmann, E. Troeltsch, B. Bauch, and others. This book contains an excellent bibliography. Also, Rickert: Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis ; Die Grenzen der natur- wissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, and other works. Windel- band: Praludien; Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft. Miinster- berg: Grundziige der Psychologie. Eucken: Die Grundbegriffe der Gegenwart. 3 Cf. F. A. Lange: History of Materialism, Book II, Chap. I, on Kant and Materialism; also Alois Riehl: Introduction to the Theory of Science and Metaphysics. Translation by Fairbanks. The more important writings of this school are: Hermann Cohen: Kant's Theorie der Erfahrung; Die 404 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY ics from a general logical stand-point, these neo- Kantians become scarcely distinguishable in inter- est and temper from those scientists who approach logic from the mathematical and physical stand- point. § 201. The finite, moral individual, with his peculiar spiritual perspective, has long since been Recognition of recognized as essential to the meaning the individual. £ ^ e un i verse rationally conceived. Personal •> idealism. -g u ^ j n jj- g g rg ^ movement absolute idealism proposed to absorb him in the indivisible absolute self. It is now pointed out that Fichte, and even Hegel himself, means the absolute to be a plurality or society of persons. 4 It is commonly conceded that the will of the absolute must coincide with the wills of all finite creatures in their sever- alty, that God wills in and through men. 5 Cor- responding to this individualistic tendency on the part of absolute idealism, there has been recently Logik derreinen Erkenntniss, and other works. Paul Natorp: Sozialpadagogik; Einleitung in die Psychologie nach kritischer Methods, and other works. E. Cassirer: Leibniz' System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen. Riehl: Der philoso- phische Kriticismus, und seine Bedeutung fur die Positive Wissenschaft. Cf . also E. Husserl : Logische Untersuchungen. 4 Cf. J. M. E. McTaggart: Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, Chap. III. 5 Cf. Royce: The Conception of God, Supplementary Essay, pp. 135-322; The World and the Individual, First Series. CONCLUSION 405 projected a personal idealism, or humanism, which springs freshly and directly from the same motive. This philosophy attributes ultimate importance to the human person with his freedom, his interests, his control over nature, and his hope of the ad- vancement of the spiritual kingdom through co- operation with his fellows. 6 § 202. Naturalism exhibits a moderation and liberality that is not less striking than that of Concessions absolutism. This abatement of its ^Naturalism c l amis began in the last century with Recognition of ae - n osticism. It was then conceded Fundamental ° Principles. that there is an order other than that of natural science ; but this order was held to be inaccessible to human knowledge. Such a theory is essentially unstable because it employs prin- ciples which define a non-natural order, but re- fuses to credit them or call them knowledge. The 8 This movement began as a criticism of Hegelianism in behalf of the human personality. Cf. Andrew Seth: Hegelian- ism and Personality; Man and the Cosmos; Two Lectures on Theism. G. H. Howison: The Limits of Evolution. The important writings of the more independent movement are: William James: The Will to Believe. H. Sturt, editor: Personal Idealism, Philosophical Essays by Eight Members of Oxford University. F. C. S. Schiller: Humanism. Henri Bergson: Essoi sur les donnees immediates de la conscience; Matiere et memoire. This movement is closely related to that of Pragmatism. See under § 203. 406 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY agnostic is in the paradoxical position of one who knows of an unknowable world. Present-day naturalism is more circumspect. It has interested itself in bringing to light that in the very pro- cedure of science which, because it predetermines what nature shall be, cannot be included within nature. To this interest is due the rediscovery of the rational foundations of science. It was already known in the seventeenth century that exact science does not differ radically from mathe- matics, as mathematics does not differ radically from logic. Mathematics and mechanics are now being submitted to a critical examination which reveals the definitions and implications upon which they rest, and the general relation of these to the fundamental elements and necessities of thought. 7 7 Cf . Bertrand Russell : Principles of Mathematics, Vol. I. Among the more important writings of this move- ment are the following: Giuseppi Peano: Formulaire de Mathematique, published by the Rivista di matematica, Tom. I-IV. Richard Dedekind: Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen? Georg Cantor: Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Mannigfaltigkeitslehre. Louis Couturat: De I'lnfini Mathe- matique, and articles in Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale. A. N. Whitehead : A Treatise on Universal Algebra. Heinrich Hertz: Die Prinzipien der Mechanik. Henri Poincar^: La Science et VHypothese. For the bearing of these investiga- tions on philosophy, see Royce: The Sciences of the Ideal, in Science, Vol. XX, No. 510. CONCLUSION 407 § 203. This rationalistic tendency in natural- Recognition ism is balanced by a tendency which is of the Will. . . Pragmatism, more empirical, but equally subversive of the old ultra-naturalism. Goethe once wrote: " I have observed that I hold that thought to be true which is fruitful for me. . . . When I know my relation to myself and to the outer world, I say that I possess the truth." Similarly, it is now frequently observed that all knowledge is humanly fruitful, and it is proposed that this shall be regarded as the very criterion of truth. According to this principle science as a whole, even knowledge as a whole, is primarily a human utility. The nature which science defines is an artifact or construct. It is designed to ex- press briefly and conveniently what man may prac- tically expect from his environment. This ten- dency is known as pragmatism. It ranges from systematic doctrines, reminiscent of Fichte, which seek to define practical needs and deduce knowl- edge from them, to the more irresponsible utter- ances of those who liken science to " shorthand," 8 and mathematics to a game of chess. In any case pragmatism attributes to nature a certain depend- ence on will, and therefore implies, even when it 8 The term used by Karl Pearson in his Grammar of Science. 408 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY does not avow, that will with its peculiar principles or values cannot be reduced to the terms of nature. In short, it would be more true to say that nature expresses will, than that will expresses nature. 9 § 204. Such, then, is the contemporary eclecti- cism as respects the central problem of meta- Summary, and physics. There are naturalistic and in- Transition to ... . . . Epistemoiogy. dividualistic tendencies in absolutism ; rationalistic and ethical tendencies in naturalism; and finally the independent and spontaneous move- ments of personal idealism and pragmatism. Since the rise of the Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, metaphysics and epistemoiogy have maintained relations so intimate that the present state of the former cannot be characterized with- out some reference to the present state of the latter. Indeed, the very issues upon which meta- 9 The important English writings of the recent inde- pendent movement known as pragmatism are: C. S. Peirce: Illustrations of the Logic of Science, in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. XII. W. James: The Pragmatic Method, in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. I; Humanism and Truth, in Mind, Vol. XIII, N. S.; The Essence of Humanism, in Jour, of Phil., Psych., and Sc. Meth., Vol. II (with bibliography); The Will to Believe. John Dewey: Studies in Logical Theory. W. Caldwell: Pragmatism, in Mind, Vol. XXV., N. S. See also literature on personal idealism, § 201. A similar tendency has appeared in France in Bergson, LeRoy, Milhaud, and in Germany in Simmel. CONCLUSION 409 physicians divide are most commonly those pro- voked by the problem of knowledge. The counter- tendencies of naturalism and absolutism are always connected, and often coincide with, the episte- mological opposition between empiricism, which proclaims perception, and rationalism, which pro- claims reason, to be the proper organ of knowl- edge. The other great epistemological controversy does not bear so direct and simple a relation to the central metaphysical issues, and must be exam- ined on its own account. § 205. The point of controversy is the depend- ence or independence of the object of knowledge The Antagonis- on the state of knowledge; idealism of Realism maintaining that reality is the knower Realistic Sm ' or n ^ s con t eil t of mind, realism, that Tendency m b e i n p- known is a circumstance which Empirical ° idealism. appertains to some reality, without being the indispensable condition of reality as such. Now the sophisticated thought of the pres- ent age exhibits a tendency on the part of these opposite doctrines to approach and converge. It has been already remarked that the empirical ideal- ism of the Berkeleyan type could not avoid tran- scending itself. Hume, who omitted Berkeley's active spirits, no longer had any subjective seat or 410 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY locus for the perceptions to which Berkeley had reduced the outer world. And perceptions which are not the states of any subject, retain only their intrinsic character and become a series of elements. When there is nothing beyond, which appears, and nothing within to which it appears, there ceases to be any sense in using such terms as appearance, phenomenon, or impression. The term sensation is at present employed in the same ill-considered manner. But empirical idealism has come gradu- ally to insist upon the importance of the content of perception, rather than the relation of percep- tion to a self as its state. The terms element and experience, which are replacing the subjectivistic terms, are frankly realistic. 10 § 206. There is a similar realistic trend in the development of absolute idealism. The pure Realistic Hegelian philosophy was notably ob- IbsohTte 7 m J ec ti ye - The principles of development idealism. j n which ft centres were conceived by The Conception u of Experience. Hegel himself to manifest themselves most clearly in the progressions of nature and his- tory. Many of Hegel's followers have been led by moral and religious interests to emphasize con- 10 Cf. Ernst Mach: Analysis of Sensation. Translation by- Williams. CONCLUSION 411 sciousness, and, upon epistemological grounds, to lay great stress upon the necessity of the union of the parts of experience within an enveloping self. But absolute idealism has much at heart the over- coming of relativism, and the absolute is defined in order to meet the demand for a being that shall not have the cognitive deficiencies of an object of finite thought. So it is quite possible for this philosophy, while maintaining its traditions on the whole, to abandon the term self to the finite sub- ject, and regard its absolute as a system of rational and universal principles — self-sufficient because externally independent and internally necessary. Hence the renewed study of categories as logical, mathematical, or mechanical principles, and en- tirely apart from their being the acts of a think- ing self. Furthermore, it has been recognized that the general demand of idealism is met when reality is regarded as not outside of or other than knowledge, whatever be true of the question of dependence. Thus the conception of experience is equally con- venient here, in that it signifies what is imme- diately present in knowledge, without affirming it to consist in being so presented. 11 11 Cf. F. H. Bradley: Appearance and Reality. in Realism The Im- manence 412 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY § 207. And at this point idealism is met by a latter-day realism. The traditional modern real- ideaiistic * sm springing from Descartes was dualistic. It was supposed that reality in itself was essentially extra-mental, Philosophy. an( j ^hus under the necessity of being either represented or misrepresented in thought. But the one of these alternatives is dogmatic, in that thought can never test the validity of its rela- tion to that which is perpetually outside of it; while the other is agnostic, providing only for the knowledge of a world of appearance, an improper knowledge that is in fact not knowledge at all. But realism is not necessarily dualistic, since it requires only that being shall not be dependent upon being known. Furthermore, since empiri- cism is congenial to naturalism, it is an easy step to say that nature is directly known in perception. This first takes the form of positivism, or the theory that only such nature as can be directly known can be really known. But this agnostic provision for an unknown world beyond, inevitably falls away and leaves reality as that which is directly known, but not conditioned by knowledge. Again the term experience is the most useful, and provides a common ground for idealistic realism CONCLUSION 413 with realistic idealism. A new epistemological movement makes this conception of experience its starting-point. What is known as the immanence philosophy defines reality as experience, and means by experience the subject matter of all knowledge — not defined as such, but regarded as capable of being such. Experience is conceived to be both in and out of selves, cognition being but one of the special systems into which experience may enter. 12 § 208. Does this eclecticism of the age open any philosophical prospect? Is it more than a The interpre- general compromise — a confession of dWonasthe" failure on the part of each and every Basis for a radical and clear-cut doctrine of meta- New Con- struction, physics and epistemology ? There is no final answer to such a question short of an in- 12 Cf. Carstanjen: Richard Avenarius, and his General Theory of Knowledge, Empiriocriticism. Translation by H. Bosanquet, in Mind, Vol. VI, N. S. Also James: Does Consciousness Exist ? and A World of Pure Experience, in Jour, of Phil., Psych., and Sc. Meth., Vol. I; The Thing and its Relations, ibid., Vol. II. The standard literature of this movement is unfortunately not available in English. Among the more important writ- ings are: R. Avenarius: Kritik der reinen Erfahrung; Der menschliche Weltbegriff, and other works. Joseph Petzoldt: Einfuhrung in die Philosophic der reinen Erfahrung. Ernst Mach: Die Analyse der Empfindung und das Verhaltniss des Physischenzum Psychischen, 2.Auff. Wilhelm Schuppe : Grund- 414 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY dependent construction, and such procedure would exceed the scope of the present discussion. But there is an evident interpretation of tradition that suggests a possible basis for such construction. § 209. Suppose it to be granted that the cate- gories of nature are quite self-sufficient. This The Truth of would mean that there might eonceiv- the Physical system, but ably be a strictly physical order, gov- tempt to Re- erned only by mechanical principles, perience to it. an d by the more general logical and mathematical principles. The body of physical science so extended as to include such general con- ceptions as identity, difference, number, quality, space, and time, is the account of such an order. This order need have no value, and need not be \y known. But reality as a whole is evidently not such a strictly physical order, for the definition of the physical order involves the rejection of many of the most familiar aspects of experience, such as its value and its being known in conscious selves. Materialism, in that it proposes to conceive the whole of reality as physical, must attempt to re- riss der Erkenntnisstheorie und Logik. Friedrich Carstanjen: Einfuhrung in die " Kritik der reinen Erfahrung" — an exposi- tion of Avenarius. Also articles by the above, R. Willy, R. v. Schubert-Soldern, and others, in the Vierteljahrsschrift fur wissenschaftliche Philosophie. CONCLUSION 415 duce the residuum to physical terms, and with no hope of success. Goodness and knowledge can- not be explained as mass and force, or shown to he mechanical necessities. § 210. Are we then to conclude that reality is not physical, and look for other terms to which we Truth of may reduce physical terms ? There is Psychical Re- lations, but ao lack of such other terms. Indeed, we of General could as fairly have begun elsewhere. Reduction „, „ to Them. Ihus some parts ol experience compose the consciousness of the individual, and are said to be known by him. Experience so contained is connected by the special relation of being known together. But this relation is quite indifferent to physical, moral, and logical relations. Thus we may be conscious of things which are physically disconnected, morally repugnant, and logically con- tradictory, or in all of these respects utterly irrel- evant. Subjectivism, in that it proposes to con- ceive the whole of reality as consciousness, must attempt to reduce physical, moral, and logical rela- tions to that co-presence in consciousness from which they are so sharply distinguished in their very definition. The historical failure of this attempt was inevitable. § 211. But there is at least one further start- 416 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY ing-point, the one adopted by the most subtle and elaborate of all reconstructive philosophies. Truth of Logical necessities are as evidently real Logical and ° d Ethical Prin- as bodies or selves. It is possible to ciples. validity of define general types of inference, as Ideal of Perfection, well as compact and internally neces- but Impossi- bility of De- sary systems such as those of mathe- ducing the . . »,-,.. whole of Ex- matics. There is a perfectly distm- fromit. guishable strain of pure rationality in the universe. Whether or not it be possible to conceive a pure rationality as self-subsistent, inas- much as there are degrees it is at any rate possible to conceive of a maximum of rationality. But similarly there are degrees of moral goodness. It is possible to define with more or less exactness a morally perfect person, or an ideal moral com- munity. Here again it may be impossible that pure and unalloyed goodness should constitute a universe of itself. But that a maximum of good- ness, with all of the accessories which it might involve, should be thus self-subsistent, is quite conceivable. It is thus possible to define an abso- lute and perfect order, in which logical necessity, the interest of thought, or moral goodness, the interest of will, or both together, should be real- ized to the maximum. Absolutism conceives real- CONCLUSION 417 ity under the form of this ideal, and attempts to reconstruct experience accordingly. But is the prospect of success any better than in the cases of materialism and subjectivism ? It is evident that the ideal of logical necessity is due to the fact that certain parts of knowledge approach it more closely than others. Thus mechanics contains more that is arbitrary than mathematics, and mathematics more than logic. Similarly, the theory of the evo- lution of the planetary system, in that it requires the assumption of particular distances and par- ticular masses for the parts of the primeval nebula, is more arbitrary than rational dynamics. It is impossible, then, in view of the parts of knowledge which belong to the lower end of the scale of ration- ality, to regard reality as a whole as the maximum of rationality; for either a purely dynamical, a purely mathematical, or a purely logical, realm would be more rational. The similar disproof of the moral perfection of reality is so unmistakable as to require no elucidation. It is evident that even where natural necessities are not antagonistic to moral proprieties, they are at any rate indiffer- ent to them. § 212. But thus far no reference has been made to error and to evil. These are the terms which 418 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY the ideals of rationality and goodness must repudi- ate if they are to retain their meaning. Never- En-or and Evil theless experience contains them and Reduced to psychology describes them. We have the ideal. already followed the efforts which abso- lute idealism has made to show that logical per- fection requires error, and that moral perfection requires evil. Is it conceivable that such efforts should be successful ? Suppose a higher logic to make the principle of contradiction the very bond of rationality. What was formerly error is now indispensable to truth. But what of the new error — the unbalanced and mistaken thesis, the unresolved antithesis, the scattered and discon- nected terms of thought? These fall outside the new truth as surely as the old error fell outside the old truth. And the case of moral goodness is pre- cisely parallel. The higher goodness may be so defined as to require failure and sin. Thus it may be maintained that there can be no true success without struggle, and no true spiritual exaltation except through repentance. But what of failure unredeemed, sin unrepented, evil uncompensated and unresolved ? Nothing has been gained after all but a new definition of goodness — and a new definition of evil. And this is an ethical, not a CONCLUSION 419 metaphysical question. The problem of evil, like the problem of error, is as far from solution as ever. Indeed, the very urgency of these problems is due to metaphysical absolutism. For this phi- losophy defines the universe as a perfect unity. Measured by the standard of such an ideal uni- verse, the parts of finite experience take on a frag- mentary and baffling character which they would not otherwise possess. The absolute perfection must by definition both determine and exclude the imperfect. Thus absolutism bankrupts the uni- verse by holding it accountable for what it can never pay. § 213. If the attempt to construct experience in the special terms of some part of experience be Collective abandoned, how is reality to be defined ? the Universe ^ ^ s ey ident that in that case there can as a Whole. ^ Q no d e fi n ition of reality as such. It must be regarded as a collection of all elements, relations, principles, systems, that compose it. All truths will be true of it, and it will be the subject of all truths. Reality is at least physical, psychical, moral, and rational. That which is physical is not necessarily moral or psychical, but may be either or both of these. Thus it is a commonplace of experience that what has bulk and 420 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY weight may or may not be good, and may or may not be known. Similarly, that which is psychical may or may not be physical, moral, or rational; and that which is moral or rational may or may not be physical and psychical. There is, then, an indeterminism in the universe, a mere coincidence of principles, in that it contains physical, psy- chical, moral, logical orders, without being in all respects either a physical, a psychical, a moral, or a logical necessity. 13 Reality or experience itself is neutral in the sense of being exclusively predeter- mined by no one of the several systems it contains. But the different systems of experience retain their specific and proper natures, without the compro- mise which is involved in all attempts to extend some one until it shall embrace them all. If such a universe seems inconceivably desultory and chaotic, one may always remind one's self by di- rectly consulting experience that it is not only found immediately and unreflectively, but re- turned to and lived in after every theoretical excursion. § 214. But what implications for life would be 13 It is not, of course, denied that there may be other orders, such as, e. g., an aesthetic order; or that there may be definite relations between these orders, such as, e. g., the psycho-physical relation. CONCLUSION 421 contained in such a philosophy? Even if it be theoretically clarifying, through being hospitable Moral impii- *° a ^ differences and adequate to the canons of such mu ltifarious demands of experience, is Philosophy, j^. no £ on ^^ ver y account morally Purity of the J J Good. dreary and stultifying? Is not its refusal to establish the universe upon moral foun- dations destructive both of the validity of goodness, and of the incentive to its attainment ? Certainly not — if the validity of goodness be determined by criteria of worth, and if the incentive to goodness be the possibility of making that which merely exists, or is necessary, also good. This philosophy does not, it is true, define the good, but it makes ethics autonomous, thus distin- guishing the good which it defines, and saving it from compromise with matter-of-fact, and logical or mechanical necessity. The criticism of life is founded upon an independent basis, and affords justification of a selective and exclusive moral idealism. Just because it is not required that the good shall be held accountable for whatever is real, the ideal can be kept pure and intrinsically worthy. The analogy of logic is most illuminating. If it be insisted that whatever exists is logically neces- sary, logical necessity must be made to embrace 422 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY that from which it is distinguished by definition, such as contradiction, mere empirical existence, and error. The consequence is a logical chaos which has in truth forfeited the name of logic. Similarly a goodness defined to make possible the deduction from it of moral evil or moral indiffer- ence loses the very distinguishing properties of goodness. The consequence is an ethical neutral- ity which invalidates the moral will. A meta- physical neutrality, on the other hand, although denying that reality as such is predestined to morality — and thus affording no possibility of an ethical absolutism — becomes the true ground for an ethical purism. § 215. But, secondly, there can be no lack of incentive to goodness in a universe which, though The incentive not all-good, is in no respect incapable to Goodness. £ Dec0 ming good. That which is me- chanically or logically necessary, and that which is psychically present, may be good. And what can the realization of goodness mean if not that what is natural and necessary, actual and real, shall be also good. The world is not good, will not be good, merely through being what it is, but is or shall be made good through the accession of goodness. It is this belief that the real is not CONCLUSION 423 necessarily, but may be, good; that the ideal is not necessarily, but may be, realized ; which has inspired every faith in action. Philosophically it is only a question of permitting such faith to be sincere, or condemning it as shallow. If the world be made good through good-will, then the faith of moral action is rational ; but if the world be good because whatever is must be good, then moral action is a tread-mill, and its attendant and animat- ing faith only self-deception. Moral endeavor is the elevation of physical and psychical existence to the level of goodness. "Relate the inheritance to life, convert the tradition into a servant of character, draw upon the history for support in the struggles of the spirit, declare a war of extermination against the total evil of the world; and then raise new armies and organize into fighting force every belief available in the faith that has descended to you." " Evil is here a practical, not a theoretical, prob- lem. It is not to be solved by thinking it good, for to think it good is to deaden the very nerve of action ; but by destroying it and replacing it with good. § 216. The justification of faith is in the prom- 14 Quoted from George A. Gordon: The New Epoch for Faith, p. 27. 424 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY ise of reality. For what, after all, woul be the meaning of a faith which declares that all things, The justifica- § ooc ^ ^ad, an< ^ indifferent, are everlast- tion of Faith. i U g\j an( j necessarily what they are — even if it were concluded on philosophical grounds to call that ultimate necessity good. Faith has interests; faith is faith in goodness or beauty. Then what more just and potent cause of despair than the thought that the ideal must be held ac- countable for error, ugliness, and evil, or for the indifferent necessities of nature ? 15 Are ideals to be prized the less, or believed in the less, when there is no ground for their impeachment ? How much more hopeful for what is worth the hoping, that nature should discern ideals and take some steps toward realizing them, than that ideals should have created nature — such as it is ! How much better a report' can we give of nature for its ideals, than of the ideals for their handiwork, if it be nature ! Emerson writes : " Suffice it for the joy of the universe that we have not arrived at a wall, but at interminable oceans. Our life seems not present so much as prospective ; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast-flowing vigor. Most of fife seems to be mere ad- 15 Cf. James: The Will to Believe, essay on The Dilemma of Determinism, passim. CONCLUSION 425 vertisement of faculty; information is given us not to sell ourselves cheap; that we are very great. So, in particulars, our greatness is always in a tendency or direction, not in an action. It is for us to believe in the rule, not in the exception. The noble are thus known from the ignoble. So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe." 16 § 217. If God be rid of the imputation of moral evil and indifference, he may be intrinsically wor- The Worship ship ful, because regarded under the and Service r»ii-i • a -i • r» i of God. form of the highest ideals. And if the great cause of goodness be in fact at stake, God may both command the adoration of men through his purity, and reenforce their virtuous living through representing to them that realization of goodness in the universe at large which both con- tains and exceeds their individual endeavor. § 218. Bishop Berkeley wrote in his " Com- monplace Book " : " My speculations have the same effect as visiting foreign countries : in the end I return where I was before, but my heart at ease, and enjoying life with new satisfaction." If it be essential to the meaning of philosophy that it should issue from life, it is equally essen- 16 Essays, Second Series, p. 75. 426 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY tial that it should return to life. But this con- nection of philosophy with life does not mean its The Phiioso- reduction to the terms of life as con- pher and the standards of ceived in the market-place. Philosophy the Market- place. cannot emanate from life, and quicken life, without elevating and ennobling it, and will therefore always he incommensurable with life narrowly conceived. Hence the philosopher must always be as little understood by men of the street as was Thales by the Thracian handmaiden. He has an innocence and a wisdom peculiar to his perspective. " When he is reviled, he has nothing personal to say in answer to the civilities of his adversaries, for he knows no scandals of anyone, and they do not interest him; and therefore he is laughed at for his sheepishness; and when others are being praised and glorified, he cannot help laughing very sincerely in the simplicity of his heart ; and this again makes him look like a fool. When he hears a tyrant or king eulogized, he fancies that he is listening to the praises of some keeper of cattle — a swine- herd, or shepherd, or cowherd, who is being praised for the quantity of milk which he squeezes from them; and he remarks that the creature whom they tend, and out of whom they squeeze the wealth, is of a less tractable and more insidious nature. Then, again, he observes that the great man is of necessity as ill-mannered and uneducated as any shepherd, for he has no leisure, and he is surrounded by a wall, which is his mountain-pen. Hearing of enormous landed proprietors of ten thousand CONCLUSION 427 acres and more, our philosopher deems this to be a trifle, because he has been accustomed to think of the whole earth; and when they sing the praises of family, and say that some one is a gentleman because he has had seven generations of wealthy ancestors, he thinks that their sentiments only betray the dulness and narrow- ness of vision of those who utter them, and who are not educated enough to look at the whole, nor to consider that every man has had thousands and thousands of progenitors, and among them have been rich and poor, kings and slaves, Hellenes and barbarians, many times over." 17 It is not to be expected that the opinion of the " narrow, keen, little, legal mind " should appreciate the philosophy which has acquired the " music of speech," and hymns " the true life which is lived by immortals or men blessed of heaven." Complacency cannot understand rever- ence, nor secularism, religion. § 219. If we may believe the report of a con- The Secular- temporary philosopher, the present age ism of the Present Age. is made insensible to the meaning of life through preoccupation with its very achieve- ments : " The world of finite interests and objects has rounded itself, as it were, into a separate whole, within which the mind of man can fortify itself, and live securus ad- versus deos, in independence of the infinite. In the 17 Plato: Thecetetus, 174-175. Translation by Jowett. 428 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY sphere of thought, there has been forming itself an ever- increasing body of science, which, tracing out the rela- tion of finite things to finite things, never finds it neces- sary to seek for a beginning or an end to its infinite series of phenomena, and which meets the claims of theology with the saying of the astronomer, 'I do not need that hypothesis.' In the sphere of action, again, the complexity of modern life presents a thousand isolated interests, crossing each other in ways too subtle to trace out — interests commercial, social, and political — in pur- suing one or other of which the individual may find ample occupation for his existence, without ever feeling the need of any return upon himself, or seeing any reason to ask himself whether this endless striving has any meaning or object beyond itself." 18 § 220. There is no dignity in living except it be in the solemn presence of the universe ; and The Value of only contemplation can summon such a Contemplation for Life. presence. Moreover, the sessions must be not infrequent, for memory is short and visions fade. Truth does not require, however, to be fol- lowed out of the world. There is a speculative detachment from life which is less courageous, even if more noble, than worldliness. Such is Dante's exalted but mediaeval intellectualism. " And it may be said that (as true friendship between men consists in each wholly loving the other) the true philosopher loves every part of wisdom, and wisdom 18 E. Caird: Literature and Philosophy, Vol. I, pp. 218-219. CONCLUSION 429 every part of the philosopher, inasmuch as she draws all to herself, and allows no one of his thoughts to wander to other things." Even though, as Aristotle thought, pure contem- plation be alone proper to the gods in their per- fection and blessedness, for the sublunary world this is less worthy than that balance and unity of faculty which distinguished the humanity of the Greek. " Then," writes Thucydides, " we are lovers of the beau- tiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness. Wealth we employ, not for talk and ostentation, but when there is a real use for it. To avoid poverty with us is no disgrace; the true disgrace is in doing nothing to avoid it. An Athenian citizen does not neglect the State because he takes care of his own household ; and even those of us who are engaged in busi- ness have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs not as a harmless, but as a useless character ; and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges, of a policy. The great impediment to action is, in our opinion, not discus- sion, but the want of that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act, and of acting too, whereas other men are courageous from ignorance, but hesitate upon reflection." 19 Thus life may be broadened and deepened with- out being made thin and ineffectual. As the civil 10 Translation by Jowett. Quoted by Laurie in his Pre- Christian Education, p. 213. 430 THE APPROACH TO PHILOSOPHY community is related to the individual's private interests, so the community of the universe is re- lated to the civil community. There is a citizen- ship in this larger community which requires a wider and more generous interest, rooted in a deeper and more quiet reflection. The world, how- ever, is not to be left behind, but served with a new sense of proportion, with the peculiar forti- tude and reverence which are the proper fruits of philosophy. " This is that which will indeed dignify and exalt knowledge, if contemplation and action may be more nearly and straitly conjoined and united together than they have been; a conjunction like unto that of the two highest planets: Saturn, the planet of rest and contem- plation, and Jupiter, the planet of civil society and action." 20 20 Bacon: Advancement of Learning, Book I. BIBLIOGRAPHY The references contained in this bibliography have been selected on the score of availability in English for the general reader and beginning student of philosophy. But I have sought wherever possible to include passages from the great philosophers and men of letters. These are placed first in the list, followed by references to contemporary writers and secondary sources. CHAPTER I, THE PRACTICAL MAN AND THE PHILOSOPHER. Plato: Republic, especially Book VII. Translations by Jowett and Vaughan. Theaetetus, 172 ff. Trans- lation by Jowett. Aristotle: Ethics, Book X. Translation by Welldon. Marcus Aurelius : Thoughts. Translation by Long. Epictetus: Discourses. Translation by Long. Bacon: The Advancement of Learning. Emerson: Representative Men — Plato; or the Philosopher. Conduct of Life — Culture. Essays, Second Series — Experience. Royce, Josiah: Spirit of Modern Philosophy. Introduction. Hibben, J. G.: Problems of Philosophy. Introduction. CHAPTER II, POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY. Plato: Republic, Books II and III. Translation by Jowett. (Criticism of the poets as demoralizing.) Wordsworth: Observations Prefixed to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Shelley: Defence of Poetry. 431 432 BIBLIOGRAPHY Everett, C. C. : Poetry, Comedy, and Duty. (Discussion of the philosophy of poetry.) Essays, Theologi- cal and Literary. (On the poetry of Emer- son, Goethe, Tennyson, Browning.) Caird, Edward: Literature and Philosophy. (Wordsworth, Dante, Goethe, etc.) Royce, Josiah: Studies of Good and Evil. Essay on Tennyson and Pessimism. Santa y ana, George: Poetry and Religion. (Philosophy of poetry; Greek poetry, Shakespeare, etc.) Sneath, E. H.: Philosophy in Poetry: A Study of Sir John Davies's Poem, "Nosce Teipsum." CHAPTERS III AND IV, RELIGION. Plato: Republic, Book III. Translations by Jowett and Vaughan. (Criticism of religion from the stand- point of morality and politics.) St. Augustine: Confessions. Translation by Pusey. (Docu- ment of religious experience.) Thomas a. Kempis: Imitation of Christ. Translation by Stanhope. (Mediaeval programme of personal religion.) Spinoza: Theological-Political Treatise. Translation by El- wes. (One of the first great pleas for religious liberty and one of the first attempts to define the essential in religion. Kant: Critique of Pure Reason — The Canon of Pure Reason. Translation by Max Miiller. Critique of Practical Reason. Translation by Abbott in Theory of Ethics. (Defines religion as the province of faith, distin- guishes it from knowledge, and relates it to mo- rality.) Schleiermacher : On Religion. Speeches to its Cultured De- spisers. Translation by Oman. (Pon- derous, dogmatic in its philosophy, but profound and sympathetic in its under- standing of religion.) BIBLIOGRAPHY 433 Arnold: Literature and Dogma. (On the essence of religion as exemplified in Judaism and Christianity.) Sabatier, A.: Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History. Translation by Seed. Religions of Authority and the Re- ligion of the Spirit. Translation by Hough- ton. (These books emphasize the essential importance of the believer's attitude to God.) James, William: The Varieties of Religious Experience. (A rich storehouse of religion, sympatheti- cally interpreted.) Everett, C. C. : The Psychological Elements of Religious Faith. (A study in the definition and meaning of religion.) Caird, Edward: Evolution of Religion. (Indoctrinated with the author's idealistic philosophy.) Fielding, H. : The Hearts of Men. (A plea for the universal religion. Special feeling for Indian re- ligions.) Harnack, A. : What is Christianity ? Translation by Saun- ders. (Attempt to define the essence of Christianity.) Palmer, G. H.: The Field of Ethics, Chapters V and VI. (On the relation of ethics and religion.) Brown, W. A.: The Essence of Christianity. (Special study of the definition of religion.) Jastrow, M. : The Study of Religion. (Method of history and psychology of religion.) Smith, W. Robertson: The Religion of the Semites. (Excel- lent study of tribal religions.) Clarke, W. N.: What Shall We Think of Christianity ? (An interpretation of Christianity.) Leuba, J. H. : Introduction to a Pyschological Study of Re- ligion. In The Monist, Vol. XI, p. 195. Starbtjck, E. D. : The Pyschology of Religion. 434 BIBLIOGRAPHY CHAPTER V, THE PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM OF SCIENCE.* Plato: Republic, Book VII, 526 ff. Translations by Jowett and Vaughan. Phaedo, 96 ff. Translation by Jowett. Berkeley: Alciphron, the Fourth Dialogue. Siris, espe- cially 234-264. (On the failure of the scientist to grasp the deeper truth respecting causes and substances.) Descartes: Discourse on Method. Translation by Veitch. Spinoza: On the Improvement of the Understanding. Trans- lation by Elwes. Kant: Critique of Pure Reason — Transcendental ^Esthetic and Transcendental Analytic. Translation by Max Miil- ler. (Studies of the Method of Science.) Ward, James: Naturalism and Agnosticism. (Full but clear account of recent development of natural science, and criticism of its use as phi- losophy.) Mach, Ernst: Science of Mechanics. (Historical and meth- odological.) James, William: Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, Chap, xxviii. (Emphasizes the practical in- terest underlying science.) Royce, Josiah: The World and the Individual, Second Series, Man and Nature. (Interpretation of the province of natural science from the stand- point of absolute idealism.) Pearson, Karl: The Grammar of Science. (The limits of science from the scientific stand-point.) Clifford, W. K.: Lectures and Essays: On the Aims and In- struments of Scientific Thought; The Phi- losophy of the Pure Sciences; On the Ethics of Belief. * For further contemporary writings on this topic, see foot-notes under §§ 199, 200, 203. BIBLIOGRAPHY 435 Huxley, T. H.: Method and Results. (The positivistic posi- tion.) Muensterberg, Hugo: Psychology and Life. (Epistemo- logical limitations of natural sci- ence applied to psychology, from idealistic stand-point.) Fullerton, G. E. : A System of Metaphysics, Part II. Taylor, A. E. : Elements of Metaphysics, Book III. CHAPTERS VI AND VII, THE SPECIAL PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY. Plato: Dialogues, especially Protagoras and Theaetetus. Translation by Jowett. (The actual genesis of special problems.) Kuelpe, Oswald : Introduction to Philosophy. Translation by Pillsbury and Titchener. (Full and ac- curate account of the traditional terms and doctrines of philosophy.) Hibben, J. G. : Problems of Philosophy. (Brief and elementary.) Sidgwick, Henry: Philosophy, its Scope and Relations. Paulsen, Friedrich: Introduction to Philosophy. Transla- tion by Thilly. Baldwin, J. M.: Dictionary of Philosophy. (Full, and con- venient for reference.) Ferrier, J. F.: Lectures on Greek Philosophy. (Interpreta- tion of the beginning and early develop- ment of philosophy.) Burnet, J.: Early Greek Philosophy. Translation of the sources. Fairbanks, A. : The First Philosophers of Greece. Gomperz, Th.: Greek Thinkers, Vol. I. Translation by Mag- nus. (On the first development of phil- osophical problems.) Palmer, G. H.: The Field of Ethics. (On the relations of the ethical problem.) Puffer, Ethel: The Psychology of Beauty. (On the rela- tions of the sesthetical problem.) 436 BIBLIOGRAPHY CHAPTER VIII, NATURALISM.* Lucretius: On the Nature of Things. Translation by Munro. (Early materialism.) Hobbes: Metaphysical System. Edited by Calkins. Levia- than, Part I. (Modern materialism.) Buechner, Louis: Force and Matter. Translation by Colling- wood. (Nineteenth century material- ism.) Janet, Paul: Materialism of the Present Day. Translation by Masson. Lange, F. A.: History of Materialism. Translation by Thomas. Haeckel, Ernst: The Riddle of the Universe. Translation by McCabe. ("Monism of Energy.") Clifford, W. K.: Lectures and Essays: The Ethics of Belief; Cosmic Emotion; Body and Mind. (Pos- itivism.) Huxley, T. H.: Evolution and Ethics; Prologomena. (Dis- tinguishes between the moral and natural.) Science and Hebrew Tradition; Science and Christian Tradition. (Controversies of the naturalist with Gladstone and Duke of Argyle.) Spencer, Herbert: First Principles. (The systematic evo- lutionary philosophy.) Principles of Ethics. (Ethics of naturalism.) The Nature and Reality of Religion. (Con- troversy with Frederick Harrison.) Balfour, A. J.: Foundations of Belief, Part I. (On the re- ligious, moral, and aesthetic consequences of naturalism.) Pater, Walter: Marius the Epicurean. (Refined hedo- nism.) Romanes, G. J.: Thoughts on Religion. (Approached from stand-point of science.) * For histories of philosophy, see supplementary bibliography at end. BIBLIOGRAPHY 437 Bentham, J.: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. (Utilitarian.) Stephen, L.: Science of Ethics. (Evolutionary and social.) CHAPTER IX, SUBJECTIVISM. Plato : Theaetetus. Translation by Jowett. (Exposition and criticism of Protagoras.) Berkeley: Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous; Principles of Human Knowledge. Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Idea. Translation by Haldane and Kemp. Mill, J. S.: An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Phi- losophy, X-XIII. Clifford, W. K.: Lectures and Essays: On the Nature of Things in Themselves. (Panpsychism.) Deussen, Paul: Elements of Metaphysics. Translation by Duff. (Following Schopenhauer and Oriental philosophy.) Paulsen, Fr.: Introduction to Philosophy. (Panpsychism.) Strong, C. A.: Why the Mind Has a Body. (Panpsychism.) James, William: Reflex Action and Theism, in The Will to Believe. (Morality and religion of in- dividualism.) CHAPTER X, ABSOLUTE REALISM. Parmenides: Fragments. Arrangement and translation by Burnet or Fairbanks. Plato: Republic, Books VI and VII. Translations by Jowett and Vaughan. Symposium, Phozdrus, Phosdo, Phil- ebus. Translation by Jowett. Aristotle*: Psychology. Translations by Hammond and Wallace. Ethics. Translation by Welldon. * The Metaphysics of Aristotle, Fichte, and Hegel must be found by the English reader mainly in the secondary sources. 438 BIBLIOGRAPHY Spinoza: Ethics, especially Parts I and V. Translations by Elwes and Willis. Leibniz: Monadology, and Selections. Translation by Latta. Discourse on Metaphysics. Translation by Mont- gomery. Marcus Aurelitjs : Thoughts. Translation by Long. Epictetus: Discourses. Translation by Long. Caird, Edward: The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Phi- losophers. (The central conceptions of Plato and Aristotle.) Joachim: A Study of the Ethics of Spinoza. CHAPTER XI, ABSOLUTE IDEALISM. Descartes: Meditations. Translation by Veitch. Kant: Critique of Pure Reason. Translation by Max Miiller. Critique of Practical Reason. Translation by Ab- bott, in Kant's Theory of Ethics. Fichte*: Science of Ethics. Translation by Kroeger. Popu- lar Works: The Nature of the Scholar; The Voca- tion of Man; The Doctrine of Religion. Transla- tion by Smith. Schiller: Msthetic Letters, Essays, and Philosophical Letters. Translation by Weiss. (Romanticism.) Hegel*: Ethics. Translation by Sterrett. Logic. Transla- tion, with Introduction, by Wallace. Philosophy of Mind. Translation, with Introduction, by Wallace. Philosophy of Religion. Translation by Spiers and Sanderson. Philosophy of Right. Translation by Dyde. Green, T. H. : Prolegomena to Ethics. Emerson: The Conduct of Life — Fate. Essays, First Series — The Over-Soul; Circles. Essays, Second Series — The Poet; Experience; Nature. (The apprecia- tion of life consistent with absolute idealism.) Wordsworth: Poems, passim. Coleridge: Aids to Reflection. The Friend. BIBLIOGRAPHY 439 Royce, J.: Spirit of Modern Philosophy. (Sympathetic ex- position of Kant, Fichte, Romanticism, and Hegel.) The Conception of God. (The episte- mological argument.) The World and the In- dividual, First Series. (Systematic devel- opment of absolute idealism; its moral and religious aspects.) Caird, Edward: The Critical Philosophy of Kant. (Exposi- tion and interpretation from stand-point of later idealism.) Everett, C. C: Fichte' s Science of Knowledge. McTaggart, J. M. E.: Studies in Hegelian Dialectic. Studies in Hegelian Cosmology. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE HIS- TORY OF PHILOSOPHY. I— GENERAL. Rogers: Student's History of Philosophy. (Elementary and clear; copious quotations.) Weber: History of Philosophy. Translation by Thilly. (Com- prehensive and compact.) Windelband: A History of Philosophy. Translation by Tufts. (Emphasis upon the problems and their de- velopment.) Erdmann: History of Philosophy. Translation edited by Hough; in three volumes. (Detailed and accu- rate exposition.) Ueberweg: A History of Philosophy. Translation by Morris and Porter, in two volumes. (Very complete; excellent account of the literature.) II.— SPECIAL PERIODS. Ferrier: Lectures on Greek Philosophy. (Excellent intro- duction.) Marshall: Short History of Greek Philosophy. (Brief and clear.) 440 BIBLIOGRAPHY Windelband: History of Ancient Philosophy. Translation by Cushman. (Very accurate and scholarly; also brief.) Zeller: Pre-Socratic Philosophy. Translation by Alleyne. Socrates and the Socratic Schools. Translation by Reichel. (Full and accurate.) Gomperz: Greek Thinkers. Translated by Magnus, in four volumes. (Very full ; especially on Plato. Goes no further than Plato.) Burnet: Early Greek Philosophy. (Translations of frag- ments, with commentary.) Fairbanks: The First Philosophers of Greece. (Translations of fragments, with commentary.) Turner: History of Philosophy. (Excellent account of Scholastic philosophy.) Royce: The Spirit of Modern Philosophy. (Very illumin- ating introductory exposition of modern idealism.) Falckenberg : History of Modern Philosophy. Hoeffding: History of Modern Philosophy. Translation by Meyer, in two volumes. (Full and good.) INDEX Absolute, the, 307, 309, 332, 391, 392, 400, 404; being, 308; substance, 312; ideal, 326; spirit, 349 {note), 358 ff.; mind, 349 {note), 358, 380, 322 ff. Absolute Idealism, chap, xi; general meaning, 177, 349 {note), 400; criticism of, 349, 365, 385, 411, 416; epistemol- ogy of, 368 ff . ; as related to Kant, 380; direct argu- ment for, 383; ethics of, 386 ff.; religion of, 390 ff . ; of present day, 402 ff., 410. Absolute Realism, chap, x; general meaning, 306 {note), 400; epistemology of, 339; ethics of, 342; religion of, 346; criticism of, 338, 416. Abstract, the, 139. Activity, 209, 285, 295. .(Esthetics, 189. Agnosticism, 168, 252 ff. Anaxagoras, 239 ; quoted, 162. Anaximander, 224. Anselm, Saint, 200. Anthropomorphism, 109. Appreciation, 25, 402. Aristotle, in formal logic, 186 ; ethics of, 195, 345; psy- chology of, 208; philosophy of, 306, 332 ff . ; and Plato, 333, 336; and Spinoza, 336; epistemology of, 339 ; religion of, 346, 429; on evil, 353. Atomism, 166, 229. Also see under Leucippus, and De- mocritus. Attitude, 62. Attribute, in Spinoza, 312 ff. Augustine, Saint, on com- munion with God, 68; on pietism, 195; his conception of self, 372. Automatism, 248. Baal, religion of, 88. Bacon, Francis, on thought and action, 430. Balfour, A. J., on materialism, 264. Beauty, in aesthetics, 189; in Plato, 327, 332. Being, Eleatic conception of, 308 ff. Belief, key to definition of re- ligion, 58; general characters applied to religion, 59 ff . ; in persons and dispositions, 62; examples of religions, 66 ff . ; object of religions, 65, 82, 97 ; relation to logic, 182, 183. Bentham, 262. Berkeley, on idealism, 176; relation to common - sense, 267; his refutation of ma- terial substance, 275 ff . ; epis- temology of, 277, 296, 369; theory of mathematics, 279; his spiritualism, 280, 284, 292; his conception of God, 284, 293; ethics of, 302; re- ligion of, 304. Buddhism, 78. Cause, in science, 131 ; God as first, 203; of motion, 231 f f . ; spirit as, 293 ff. Christianity, persistence of, 76; essence of, 86; develop- ment from Judaism, 94; ethics of, 195, 198, 386; idea of God in, 200 ff., 205; em- phasis on self-consciousness in, 372. COMTE, 115. Contemplation, 428. Conversion, 69 ff. Corporeal Being, 224; proc- esses of, 225; Berkeley's critique of, 278; historical conceptions of, 229. 441 442 INDEX Cosmological Proof, the, of God, 203. Cosmology, general meaning of, 159; mechanism in, 161, 225; teleology in, 161. Cosmos, origin of, 242. Critical Method, 319 ff. Cynicism, 259. Cyrenaicism, 259. Dante, as philosopher-poet, 42 ff . ; general meaning of the Divine Comedy, 43; and Thomas Aquinas, 43, 46; his vision of the ways of God, 46; on contemplation, 428. Darwin, 204. Deism, 207. Democritus, 247. Also see Atomism. Descartes, on function of philosophy, 154; dualism of, 272, 412; his theory of space and matter, 229; automa- tism of, 248 ; epistemology of, 341, 375; his conception of self, 374. Description, as method of science, 128. Dialectic, in Plato, 320; in Hegel, 361. Diogenes, 259. Dogmatism, 167. Dualism, general meaning, 162; of Descartes, 272, 412. Duty, 196, 356, 360, 386. Eclecticism, contemporary, 398 ff., 413. Eleatics. See under Parmen- ides, and Zeno. Emerson, on spirit, 359; on nature, 364; on absolute, 392; on necessity, 393; on faith, 424. Empiricism, general meaning, 168; in logic, 187; in natural- ism, 252 ff.; of Locke, 274; of Berkeley, 274 ff. Energy, development of, con- ception of, 236 ff. Epistemology, relation to metaphysics, 150; definition of, 164; fundamental prob- lems of, 168, 172; argument for God from, 202; of natu- ralism, 248, 252 ff., 257; of Descartes, 273, 341, 375; of Berkeley, 277, 296; of ab- solute realism, 339, 351 ; of Leibniz, 340, 341; of Plato, 340, 341; of Hume, 376; of Aristotle, 340, 341; of abso- lute idealism, 351, 368 ff.; of present day, 408 ff. Eternal, the, 309. Ether, 230. Ethics, relation to metaphys- ics, 151, 196 ff., 360 ; its origin in Socratic method, 181; definition of, 191 ; special problems and theories in, 191 ff.; of Socrates, 192, 194; of Aristotle, 195, 345; of naturalism, 258 ff . ; of sub- jectivism, 298 ff. ; of Schopen- hauer, 299; argument for God from, 203; individual- ism in, 301 ; pluralism in, 302, 421 ; of Stoics and Spinoza, 342; Platonic, 342; of Kant, 386; of absolute idealism, 388. EuDiEMONISM, 195. Evil, Problem of, 317, 336, 339, 352, 365 ff.; in Greek philosophy, 352; in absolute idealism, 367, 418. Evolution, of cosmos, 242 ff . ; of morality, 262. Experience, 410, 411, 412; analysis of, by Kant, 354. Faith, 424 ; special interests of, 199. See also Religion and Belief. Ferguson, Chas., quoted, 265. Fichte, 360, 402. Fielding, H., quoted on re- ligion, 59, 74. Force, development of con- ception of, 231 ff. Form, in Aristotle, 334. Freedom, in ethics, 196, 388; meanings and theories, 211. God, as guarantee of ideals, 18, 425; personality of, 62, 108 f f . ; St. Augustine's commun- ion with, 68; presence of, 68; INDEX 443 as a disposition from which consequences may be ex- pected, 85; meaning of, in religion, 87 ; idea of, in Juda- ism and Christianity, 92; why historical, 102; social relation with, 103; the onto- logical proof of, 200; ethical and epistemological argu- ments for, 202; cosmological proof of, 203; teleological proof of, 204; relation to the world, in theism; pantheism and deism, 205 ff. ; will of, 212; conception of, in Berke- ley, 284, 293 ff. ; conception and proof of, in Spinoza, 312 ff., 392, 393; conception of, in Plato, 331, 352, 391, 393; conception of, in Leib- niz, 338, 353. Also see Ab- solute. Goethe, on Spinoza, and on philosophy, 51; on pragma- tism, 407. Good, the, theories of, in ethics, 191 ff. ; and the real, 326 ff., 421 ff. Greek, religion, in Homer and Lucretius, 89; ideals, 195, 198 429. Green, T. H., quoted, 369, 385 (note). Haeckel, quoted, 236, 266. Hedonism, 192. Hegel, on science, 129; philos- ophy of, 150, 361 ff.; rela- tion to Kant, 381 ; on the ab- solute, 382; ethics of, 390. Heraclitus, 308. History, philosophy of, in Hegel, 363. Hobbes, his misconception of relations of philosophy and science, 115; quoted on eth- ics, 261. Holbach, 251, 252. Homer, on Greek religion, 90. Humanism, 320, 404, 405. Hume, positivism of, 115, 377; phenomenalism of, 283; and Descartes, 376. Huxley, quoted, 255, 266. Hylozoism, 225. Ideal, the, in Plato, 326 ; valid- ity of, 416. Idealism, various meanings of term, 173 (note) ; meaning of, as theory of knowledge, 175 ff., 409; of present day, 409 ff . ; empirical, see Subjec- tivism, Phenomenalism, Spiritualism; absolute, see Absolute Idealism. Ideals, in life, 10 ff. ; adoption of, 17 ff. Ideas, the, in Plato, 329. Imagination, in poetry, 99; place of, in religion, 80, 97 ff. ; special functions of, in religion, 101 ff. ; scope of, in religion, 105 ff. ; and the personality of God, 110. Imitatio Christi, quoted, 68. Immanence Theory, 412, 413. Immortality, 212. Individualism, 301, 320, 338, 404. Intuitionism, in ethics, 196. James, William, quoted on re- ligion, 65, 71, 305. Judaism, development of, 92; and Christianity, 94. Kant, his transcendentalism, 177, 356; his critique of knowledge, 354 ff., 377 ff.; and absolute idealism, 380; ethics of, 386. Kepler, quoted, 129. Knowledge, of the means in life, 8; of the end, 10; in poetry, 27 f f . ; in religion, 82, 85, 97, 105; general theory of, on epistemology, 164 ff. ; problem of source and cri- terion of, 168 ff. ; problem of relation to its object, 172 ff., 277, 340, 351, 368 ff.; rela- tion of logic to, 183 ff. ; ac- count of, in naturalism, 253 ff . Also see Epistemology. La Mettrie, quoted, 250. La Place, 242; quoted, 241. Leibniz, on function of philos- ophy, 155; philosophy of, 333, 336 ff . ; epistemology of, 339. 444 INDEX Letjcippus, quoted, 161. Life, as a starting-point for thought, 3; definition of, 5 ff. ; and self-consciousness, 6; philosophy of 17 ff., 153 mechanical theory of, 244 ff . return of philosophy to, 427 ff. ; contemplation in, 428. Locke, epistemology of, 273. Logic, origin in Socratic meth- od, 181; affiliations of, 182, 188; definition of, 183; parts of formal, 184 ff. ; present tendencies in, 187 ff. ; alge- bra of, 189. Lucretius, his criticism of Greek religion, quoted, 89 ff.; on mechanism, 226, 240. McTaggart, J. M. E., on Hegel, 367; on the absolute, 391. Mach, E., 283; on philosophy and science, 120. Malebranche, 376. Marcus Aurelius, 348. Materialism, 254, 256; gen- eral meaning, 223, 414; de- velopment, 224 ff.; and science, 228; French, 249; theory of mind in, 250. Mathematics, importance in science, 132; logic in, 188; Berkeley's conception of, 279; Plato's conception of, 329, 335; Spinoza's concep- tion of, 311, 335. Matter, 225, 228; and space, 229 ; Berkeley's refutation of, 275 f f . ; in Plato and Aristotle, 334. Mechanical, Theory, practi- cal significance of its exten- sion to the world at large, 20; in cosmology, 161, 225; of Descartes, 231 ; of Newton 232; of origin of cosmos, 242; of fife, 244; in Spinoza, 336. Metaphysics, relation to epis- temology, 150; relation to ethics, 151, 196 ff. ; definition of, 158; relation to logic, 188; relation to theology, 207; present tendencies in, 399 ff., 408. Mill, J. S., 283 (note). Mind, explanation of in nat- uralism, 237, 247 ff . ; of God, in Berkeley, 284, 294, 296; absolute, 349 (note), 358, 382 ff . Also see under Self, and Soul. Mode, in Spinoza, 313. Monads, in Leibniz, 338. Monism, 159, 163. Morality, and religion, 73; grounds of, according to Kant, 356; incentive to, 422. Mysticism, general account, 171; Schopenhauer's, 290; types of religions, 391. Naegeli, C. v., quoted, 287. Natural Science, true rela- tions of, with philosophy, 116; sphere of, with reference to philosophy, 117 ff.; phil- osophy of, its procedure, 121, 135, 142, 154, 401; origin of, as special interest, 123 ff.; human value of, 126, 127, 143; method and fundament- al conceptions of, 406, 128 ff. ; general development of, 134; limits of, because ab- stract, 136 ff., 414; validity of, 142; logic and, 188; de- velopment of conceptions in, 229 ff . ; grounds of, according to Kant, 355, 377; Hume on, 377; permanence and prog- ress in, 395 ff. Natural Selection, 204, 245. Naturalism, chap, viii; gen- eral meaning, 217, 223 (note), 399 ; claims of, 239 ; task of, 241; criticism of, 117, 257, 263 ; of present day, 405, 412. Also see under Materialism, and Positivism. Nature, 160, 244, 337; in Berkeley, 294; in Spinoza, 317, 338; in Hegel, 363; in Kant, 377 ff. ; in contem- porary philosophy, 401. Also see Natural Science, and Naturalism. Nebular Hypothesis, 242. Necessity, of will, 211 ; ethics of, 342; religion of, 393. INDEX 445 Neo-Fichteans, 402, 403 (note). Neo-Kantians, 403. Newton, 232, 235, 242, 355, 377. Normative Sciences, the, 180. Omar Khayyam, quoted, 16; as a philosopher-poet, 36. Ontological Proof, of God, 200. Ontology, 159. Optimism, 104, 388, 422, 424. Panpsychism, 176, 238, 285 ff. Pantheism, in primitive re- ligion, 78; general meaning, 205; types of, 390. Parker, Theodore, quoted on religion, 67. Parmenides, and rationalism, 168; philosophy of, 308 ff., 337; and Aristotle, 336. Pater, Walter, on Words- worth, 38; on Cyrenaicism, 260; on subjectivism, 270. Paulsen, Friedrich, ethics of, quoted, 302. Pearson, Karl, quoted, 230. Perception. See Sense-per- ception. Personal Idealism, 404, 405. Personality, of God, impor- tant in understanding of re- ligion, 62; essential to relig- ion? 108 ff. Persons, description of be- lief in, 62; imagination of, 101, 110. Pessimism, 104, 299, 424. Phenomenalism, general meaning, 176, 267 (note); of Berkeley, 272, 275 ff.; of Hume, 283; various ten- dencies in, 281. Philosopher, the practical man and the, chap, i; the role of the, 306, 426. Philosophy, commonly mis- conceived, 3; of the devotee, 13; of the man of affairs, 14; of the voluptuary, 16; of life, its general meaning, 17 ff., 153; its relations with poetry, chap, ii, 112; lack of, in Shakespeare, 33; as expres- sion of personality, 33; as premature, 33 ; in poetry of Omar Khayyam, 36 ; in poe- try of Wordsworth, 38 ff . ; in poetry of Dante, 42 ff . ; differ- ence between philosophy and poetry, 48 ff. ; in religion, 108 ff . ; compared with religion, 112; true attitude of, toward science, 116; sphere of, in re- lation to science, 117, 395 ff. ; procedure of, with reference to science, 121, 135, 142, 154, 160; human value of, 143, 426 ff. ; can its problem be divided? 149, 155; origin of, 157; special problems of, chap, vi, vii; and psychol- ogy, 216; peculiar object of, 308; self-criticism in, 319 ff., 325; permanence and progress in, 395 ff. ; contem- porary, 398 ff. Physical. See Corporeal Being, Materialism, etc. Physiology, 246. Piety, description and inter- pretation of, 72; in ethics, 195. Plato, on Protagoras, 167, 269, 270, 298; quoted, on Socra- tes, 170, 192, 194; historical preparation for, 324; psy- chology of, 209; philosophy of, 306, 318, 326 ff., 382; and Aristotle, 333; and Spinoza, 318, 335; epistemol- ogy of, 339, ethics of, 342; religion of, 346, 391, 393; on evil, 352; on spirit, 359; on reason and perception, 370; on the philosopher, 426. Pluralism, general meaning of, 159, 163, 419; in ethics, 302, 421 ff. ; in religion, 304. Poetry, relations with phi- losophy, chap, ii; as appre- ciation, 25; virtue of sincer- ity in, 27; the "barbarian" in, 28; constructive knowl- edge in, 30; difference be- tween philosophy and, 48 ff. Positivism, on relation of philosophy and science, 115, 446 INDEX 122; general meaning of , 168, 234, 252 ff., 412. Practical Knowledge, of means, 8 ff. ; of end or pur- pose, 10 ff. ; implied in relig- ion, 85, 97; philosophy as, 153. Practical Man, the, and the philosopher, chap, i ; his failure to understand phi- losophy, 3; his ideal, 14; virt- ually a philosopher, 22. Pragmatism, 151, 407, 408. Prayer, 103. Prediction, in science, 130. Present Day, philosophy of the, 398 ff. Protagoras, scepticism of, 166, 271; subjectivism of, 269; ethics of, 298. Psychology, of religion, 58, 82; inadequate to religion, 82; as branch of philosophy, 208 ff., 216; as natural science, 213; affiliations of, 215; limits of, 415. Psycho-physical Parallel- ism, 215, 252. Purpose, in life, 10 ff. ; adop- tion of life-purpose, 17 ff. ; practical significance of, in the world at large, 20. Also see Teleology, Ideal, etc. Qualities, primary and sec- ondary, 254, 274, 277. Rationalism, general meaning, 168, 416; in logic, 180, 184; in ethics, 193; of eleatics, 310; of Spinoza, 311; in ab- solute realism, 339; criti- cism of, 418. Realism, various meanings of term, 173 (note) ; meaning of, as theory of knowledge, 172; of Parmenides, 308 ff . ; of Plato and Aristotle, 341; of present day, 409 ff. Reason, 370. See Ration- alism. Relativism, 166, 267 ff.; in ethics, 298. Religion, chaps, iii, iv; rela- tion to poetry and phi- losophy, 49, 52; difficulty of defining, 53; possibility of defining, 54 ; profitableness of defining, 54; true method of defining, 56; misconcep- tions of, 56; as possessing the psychological character of belief, 59 ff . ; degree of, in individuals and moods, 60, 61 ; definition of, as belief in disposition of universe, 64 ff., 82; and morality, 73; symbolism in, 75; prophet and preacher of, 75; con- veyance of, 76; primitive, 77; Buddhism, 78; the criti- cal or enlightened type of, 80; means to be true, 82 ff. ; implies a practical truth, 85; cases of truth and error in, 88 ff. ; of Baal, 88; Greek, 89 ; of Jews, its development, 92 ; Christian, 94 ; definition of cognitive factor in, 97; place of imagination in, 80, 97 ff. ; special functions of imagina- tion in, 101 ff. ; relation of imagination and truth in, 105; philosophy implied in, 108 ff. ; is personal god es- sential to, 108; compared with philosophy, 112; com- pared with science, 145; special philosophical prob- lems of, 199 ff. ; of natural- ism, 263 ff. ; of subjectivism and spiritualism, 302 ff. ; of Plato and Aristotle, 346, 393; of Stoics and Spinoza, 348, 393; philosophy of, in Hegel, 365 ; of absolute ideal- ism. 390 ff. Religious Phenomena, inter- pretation of, 69 ff. Representative Theory, of knowledge, 174, 412. Romanticism, 361. Rousseau, quoted on nature, 64. Royce, Josiah, quoted on absolute idealism, 178, 384, 394. Santayana, George, quoted on poetry 28, 29. INDEX 447 Scepticism, 166, 267 ff. See under Positivism, and Ag- nosticism. Schelling, misconception of science, 116. Scholasticism, 333; idea of God in, 201. Schopenhauer, his panpsych- ism or voluntarism, 177, 285 ff. ; universalizes subjec- tivism, 290; mysticism of, 290; ethics of, 299; religion of, 303. Science. Also see under Na- tural Science, and Nor- mative Science. Secularism, of Shakespeare, 34; of Periclean Age, 320; of present age, 427. Self, problem of, 216; proof of, in St. Augustine, 372; proof of, in Descartes, 374; deeper moral of, 387; in contempo- rary philosophy, 411, 413. Also see Soul, and Mind. Self-consciousness, essential to human life, 6; develop- ment of conception of, 371 f f . ; in absolute idealism, 383 ; in idealistic ethics, 386. Sensationalism, 247, 255, 269. Sense-perception, 168, 247, 269, 370; being as, in Berke- ley, 281. Shakespeare, general criti- cism of, 30 ff . ; his universal- ity, 31; lack of philosophy in, 33. Shelley, quoted on poetry, 50. Social Relations, belief in- spired by, analogue of re- ligion, 62; imagination of, extended to God, 101. Socrates, rationalism of, 169; and normative science, 180; ethics of, 192, 194; method of, 321 ff. Sophists, the, epistemology of, 165; scepticism of, 271, 320; ethics of, 298, 301; age of, 320. Soul, the, in Aristotle, 208; in Plato, 209; as substance, 209 ; intellectualism and vol- untarism in theory of, 210; immortality of, 212; Berke- ley's theory of, 284. Also see under Mind, and Self. Space, importance in science, 130; and matter, 229. Spencer, 236 (note), 243, 265. Spinoza, and Goethe, 51; quoted on philosophy and life, 153; philosophy of, 306, 311 f f . ; criticism and esti- mate of, 315 ff. ; and Plato, 318, 335; and Aristotle, 336; epistemology of, 339; ethics of, 342; religion of, 348, 392, 393. Spirit, the absolute, 358 ff. Spiritualism, general mean- ing, 176, 267 (note) ; in Berke- ley, 280, 292; in Schopen- hauer, 285; criticism of, 288; objective, 292. Stevenson, R. L., quoted on religion, 67. Stoicism, ethics of, 342; relig- ion of, 348. Subjectivism, chap, ix; gen- eral meaning, 175, 218, 267 (note), 415; in aesthetics, 190; of Berkeley, 275 ff . ; univer- salization of, in Schopen- hauer, 290; criticism of, 297, 415; ethics of, 298 ff.; in ab- solute idealism, 368; of pres- ent day, 409. Substance, spiritual, 209, 284; material, Berkeley's refuta- tion of, 275 ff . ; Spinoza's conception of, 311; the in- finite, in Spinoza, 312; Aris- totle's conception of, 334; Leibniz's conception of, 338. Symbolism, in religion, 75. Teleology, in cosmology, 161 ; proof of God from, 204; Spinoza on, 318; in Plato, 326 ff., 336; in Aristotle, 336. Theism, 205. Theology, relation to religion, 98; in philosophy, 199 ff.; relation to metaphysics, 207. Thomson, J., quoted, 104. Thought, and life, 6 ff. ; as being, in Hegel, 361 ff. 448 INDEX Thucydides, on thought and action, 429. Time, importance in science, 130. Transcendentalism, 177, 349 (note), 356. See Idealism, absolute. Tyndall, 115. Universal, scientific knowl- edge as, 125, 139. Universe, the, as object of religious reaction, 64; com- mon object of philosophy and religion, 112; as collec- tive, 419. Utilitarianism, 261. Virtue, 198, 345. Voltaire, quoted, 231, 251. Voluntarism, in psychology, 210; in Schopenhauer, 285. Whitman, Walt, 27 ff. Will, in psychology, 210; free- dom and determination of, 211; in Schopenhauer, 177; as cause, in Berkeley, 293 ff. ; in pragmatism, 407. Wordsworth, as philosopher- poet, 38 ff . ; his sense for the universal, 40; quoted on poetry and philosophy, 48, 50. Zeno, 337. Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proce Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: Sept. 2004 PreservationTechnologie A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATH 1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16066 (724) 779-21 1 1