The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 1

THE GERMAN LANGUAGE, AND PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

Using a New Testament, of which (in the narrative parts at least) any one word being given will suggest most of what is immediately consecutive, you evade the most irksome of the penalties annexed to the first breaking ground in a new language: you evade the necessity of hunting up and down a dictionary. Your own memory, and the inevitable suggestions of the context, furnish a dictionary pro hac vice. And afterwards, upon advancing to other books, where you are obliged to forego such aids, and to swim without corks, you find yourself already in possession of the particles for expressing addition, succession, exception, inference—in short, of all the forms by which transition or connection is effected (if, but, and, therefore, however, notwithstanding), together with all those adverbs for modifying or restraining the extent of a subject or a predicate, which in all languages alike compose the essential frame-work or extra-linear machinery of human thought. The filling-up—the matter (in a scholastic sense)—may differ infinitely; but the form, the periphery, the determining moulds into which this matter is fused—all this is the same for ever: and so wonderfully limited in its extent is this frame-work, so narrow and rapidly revolving is the clock-work of connections among human thoughts, that a dozen pages of almost any book suffice to exhaust all the επεα πτεροεντα20 which express them. To have mastered these επεα πτεροεντα is in effect to have mastered seven-tenths, at the least, of any language; and the benefit of using a New Testament, or the familiar parts of an Old Testament, in this preliminary drill, is, that your own memory is thus made to operate as a perpetual dictionary or nomenclator. I have heard Mr. Southey say that, by carrying in his pocket a Dutch, Swedish, or other Testament, on occasion of a long journey performed in 'muggy' weather, and in the inside of some venerable 'old heavy'—such as used to bestow their tediousness upon our respectable fathers some thirty or forty years ago—he had more than once turned to so valuable an account the doziness or the dulness of his fellow-travellers, that whereas he had 'booked' himself at the coach-office utterly αναλφαβητος, unacquainted with the first rudiments of the given language, he had made his parting bows to his coach brethren (secretly returning thanks to them for their stupidity), in a condition for grappling with any common book in that dialect. One of the polyglot Old or New Testaments published by Bagster, would be a perfect Encyclopædia, or Panorganon, for such a scheme of coach discipline, upon dull roads and in dull company. As respects the German language in particular, I shall give one caution from my own experience, to the self-instructor: it is a caution which applies to the German language exclusively, or to that more than to any other, because the embarrassment which it is meant to meet, grows out of a defect of taste characteristic of the German mind. It is this: elsewhere, you would naturally, as a beginner, resort to prose authors, since the license and audacity of poetic thinking, and the large freedom of a poetic treatment, cannot fail to superadd difficulties of individual creation to the general difficulties of a strange dialect. But this rule, good for every other case, is not good for the literature of Germany. Difficulties there certainly are, and perhaps in more than the usual proportion, from the German peculiarities of poetic treatment; but even these are overbalanced in the result, by the single advantage of being limited in the extent by the metre, or (as it may happen) by the particular stanza. To German poetry there is a known, fixed, calculable limit. Infinity, absolute infinity, is impracticable in any German metre. Not so with German prose. Style, in any sense, is an inconceivable idea to a German intellect. Take the word in the limited sense of what the Greeks called Συνθεσις ονοματων—i. e. the construction of sentences—I affirm that a German (unless it were here and there a Lessing) cannot admit such an idea. Books there are in German, and, in other respects, very good books too, which consist of one or two enormous sentences. A German sentence describes an arch between the rising and the setting sun. Take Kant for illustration: he has actually been complimented by the cloud-spinner, Frederic Schlegel, who is now in Hades, as a most original artist in the matter of style. 'Original' Heaven knows he was! His idea of a sentence was as follows:—We have all seen, or read of, an old family coach, and the process of packing it for a journey to London some seventy or eighty years ago. Night and day, for a week at least, sate the housekeeper, the lady's maid, the butler, the gentleman's gentleman, &c., packing the huge ark in all its recesses, its 'imperials,' its 'wills,' its 'Salisbury boots,' its 'sword-cases,' its front pockets, side pockets, rear pockets, its 'hammer-cloth cellars' (which a lady explains to me as a corruption from hamper-cloth, as originally a cloth for hiding a hamper, stored with viaticum), until all the uses and needs of man, and of human life, savage or civilised, were met with separate provision by the infinite chaos. Pretty nearly upon the model of such an old family coach packing, did Kant institute and pursue the packing and stuffing of one of his regular sentences. Everything that could ever be needed in the way of explanation, illustration, restraint, inference, by-clause, or indirect comment, was to be crammed, according to this German philosopher's taste, into the front pockets, side pockets, or rear pockets, of the one original sentence. Hence it is that a sentence will last in reading whilst a man

'Might reap an acre of his neighbour's corn.'

Nor is this any peculiarity of Kant's. It is common to the whole family of prose writers of Germany, unless when they happen to have studied French models, who cultivate the opposite extreme. As a caution, therefore, practically applied to this particular anomaly in German prose-writing, I advise all beginners to choose between two classes of composition—ballad poetry, or comedy—as their earliest school of exercise; ballad poetry, because the form of the stanza (usually a quatrain) prescribes a very narrow range to the sentences; comedy, because the form of dialogue, and the imitation of daily life in its ordinary tone of conversation, and the spirit of comedy naturally suggesting a brisk interchange of speech, all tend to short sentences. These rules I soon drew from my own experience and observation. And the one sole purpose towards which I either sought or wished for aid, respected the pronunciation; not so much for attaining a just one (which I was satisfied could not be realised out of Germany, or, at least, out of a daily intercourse with Germans) as for preventing the formation, unawares, of a radically false one. The guttural and palatine sounds of the ch, and some other German peculiarities, cannot be acquired without constant practice. But the false Westphalian or Jewish pronunciation of the vowels, diphthongs, &c., may easily be forestalled, though the true delicacy of Meissen should happen to be missed. Thus much guidance I purchased, with a very few guineas, from my young Dresden tutor, who was most anxious for permission to extend his assistance; but this I would not hear of: and, in the spirit of fierce (perhaps foolish) independence, which governed most of my actions at that time of life, I did all the rest for myself.

'It was a banner broad unfurl'd,The picture of that western world.'

These, or words like these, in which Wordsworth conveys the sudden apocalypse, as by an apparition, to an ardent and sympathising spirit, of the stupendous world of America, rising, at once, like an exhalation, with all its shadowy forests, its endless savannas, and its pomp of solitary waters—well and truly might I have applied to my first launching upon that vast billowy ocean of the German literature. As a past literature, as a literature of inheritance and tradition, the German was nothing. Ancestral titles it had none; or none comparable to those of England, Spain, or even Italy; and there, also, it resembled America, as contrasted with the ancient world of Asia, Europe, and North Africa.21 But, if its inheritance were nothing, its prospects, and the scale of its present development, were in the amplest style of American grandeur. Ten thousand new books, we are assured by Menzel, an author of high reputation—a literal myriad—is considerably below the number annually poured from all quarters of Germany, into the vast reservoir of Leipsic; spawn infinite, no doubt, of crazy dotage, of dreaming imbecility, of wickedness, of frenzy, through every phasis of Babylonian confusion; yet, also, teeming and heaving with life and the instincts of truth—of truth hunting and chasing in the broad daylight, or of truth groping in the chambers of darkness; sometimes seen as it displays its cornucopia of tropical fruitage; sometimes heard dimly, and in promise, working its way through diamond mines. Not the tropics, not the ocean, not life itself, is such a type of variety, of infinite forms, or of creative power, as the German literature, in its recent motions (say for the last twenty years), gathering, like the Danube, a fresh volume of power at every stage of its advance. A banner it was, indeed, to me of miraculous promise, and suddenly unfurled. It seemed, in those days, an El Dorado as true and undeceiving as it was evidently inexhaustible. And the central object in this interminable wilderness of what then seemed imperishable bloom and verdure—the very tree of knowledge in the midst of this Eden—was the new or transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

I have described the gorgeousness of my expectations in those early days of my prelusive acquaintance with German literature. I have a little lingered in painting that glad aurora of my first pilgrimage to the fountains of the Rhine and of the Danube, in order adequately to shadow out the gloom and blight which soon afterwards settled upon the hopes of that golden dawn. In Kant, I had been taught to believe, were the keys of a new and a creative philosophy. Either 'ejus ductu,' or 'ejus auspiciis'—that is, either directly under his guidance, or indirectly under any influence remotely derived from his principles—I looked confidingly to see the great vistas and avenues of truth laid open to the philosophic inquirer. Alas! all was a dream. Six weeks' study was sufficient to close my hopes in that quarter for ever. The philosophy of Kant—so famous, so commanding in Germany, from about the period of the French Revolution—already, in 1805, I had found to be a philosophy of destruction, and scarcely, in any one chapter, so much as tending to a philosophy of reconstruction. It destroys by wholesale, and it substitutes nothing. Perhaps, in the whole history of man, it is an unexampled case, that such a scheme of speculation—which offers nothing seducing to human aspirations, nothing splendid to the human imagination, nothing even positive and affirmative to the human understanding—should have been able to found an interest so broad and deep among thirty-five millions of cultivated men. The English reader who supposes this interest to have been confined to academic bowers, or the halls of philosophic societies, is most inadequately alive to the case. Sects, heresies, schisms, by hundreds, have arisen out of this philosophy—many thousands of books have been written by way of teaching it, discussing it, extending it, opposing it. And yet it is a fact, that all its doctrines are negative—teaching, in no case, what we are, but simply what we are not to believe—and that all its truths are barren. Such being its unpopular character, I cannot but imagine that the German people have received it with so much ardour, from profound incomprehension of its meaning, and utter blindness to its drift—a solution which may seem extravagant, but is not so; for, even amongst those who have expressly commented on this philosophy, not one of the many hundreds whom I have myself read, but has retracted from every attempt to explain its dark places. In these dark places lies, indeed, the secret of its attraction. Were light poured into them, it would be seen that they are culs-de-sac, passages that lead to nothing; but, so long as they continue dark, it is not known whither they lead, how far, in what direction, and whether, in fact, they may not issue into paths connected directly with the positive and the infinite. Were it known that upon every path a barrier faces you insurmountable to human steps—like the barriers which fence in the Abyssinian valley of Rasselas—the popularity of this philosophy would expire at once; for no popular interest can long be sustained by speculations which, in every aspect, are known to be essentially negative and essentially finite. Man's nature has something of infinity within itself, which requires a corresponding infinity in its objects. We are told, indeed, by Mr. Bulwer, that the Kantian system has ceased to be of any authority in Germany—that it is defunct, in fact—and that we have first begun to import it into England, after its root had withered, or begun to wither, in its native soil. But Mr. Bulwer is mistaken. The philosophy has never withered in Germany. It cannot even be said that its fortunes have retrograded: they have oscillated: accidents of taste and ability in particular professors, or caprices of fashion, have given a momentary fluctuation to this or that new form of Kantianism,—an ascendency, for a period, to various, and, in some respects, conflicting, modifications of the transcendental system; but all alike have derived their power mediately from Kant. No weapons, even if employed as hostile weapons, are now forged in any armoury but that of Kant; and, to repeat a Roman figure which I used above, all the modern polemic tactics of what is called metaphysics, are trained and made to move either ejus ductu or ejus auspiciis. Not one of the new systems affects to call back the Leibnitzian philosophy, the Cartesian, or any other of earlier or later date, as adequate to the purposes of the intellect in this day, or as capable of yielding even a sufficient terminology. Let this last fact decide the question of Kant's vitality. Qui bene distinguit bene docet. This is an old adage. Now, he who imposes new names upon all the acts, the functions, and the objects of the philosophic understanding, must be presumed to have distinguished most sharply, and to have ascertained with most precision, their general relations—so long as his terminology continues to be adopted. This test, applied to Kant, will show that his spirit yet survives in Germany. Frederic Schlegel, it is true, twenty years ago, in his lectures upon literature, assures us that even the disciples of the great philosopher have agreed to abandon his philosophic nomenclature. But the German philosophic literature, since that date, tells another tale. Mr. Bulwer is, therefore, wrong; and, without going to Germany, looking only to France, he will see cause to revise his sentence. Cousin—the philosophic Cousin, the only great name in philosophy for modern France—familiar as he is with North Germany, can hardly be presumed unacquainted with a fact so striking, if it were a fact, as the extinction of a system once so triumphantly supreme as that of Kant; and yet Mr. Bulwer, admiring Cousin as he does, cannot but have noticed his efforts to naturalise Kant in France. Meantime, if it were even true that transcendentalism had lost its hold of the public mind in Germany, primâ facie, this would prove little more than the fickleness of that public which must have been wrong in one of the two cases—either when adopting the system, or when rejecting it. Whatever there may be of truth and value in the system, will remain unimpeached by such caprices, whether of an individual or of a great nation; and England would still be in the right to import the philosophy, however late in the day, if it were true even (which I doubt greatly) that she is importing it.

Both truth and value there certainly is in one part of the Kantian philosophy; and that part is its foundation. I had intended, at this point, to introduce an outline of the transcendental philosophy—not, perhaps, as entering by logical claim of right into any biographical sketch, but as a very allowable digression in the record of that man's life to whom, in the way of hope and of profound disappointment, it had been so memorable an object. For two or three years before I mastered the language of Kant,22 it had been a pole-star to my hopes, and in hypothesi agreeably to the uncertain plans of uncertain knowledge, the luminous guide to my future life—as a life dedicated and set apart to philosophy. Such it was some years before I knew it: for, at least ten long years after I came into a condition of valueing its true pretensions and measuring its capacities, this same philosophy shed the gloom of something like misanthropy upon my views and estimates of human nature; for man was an abject animal, if the limitations which Kant assigned to the motions of his speculative reason were as absolute and hopeless as, under his scheme of the understanding and his genesis of its powers, too evidently they were. I belonged to a reptile race, if the wings by which we had sometimes seemed to mount, and the buoyancy which had seemed to support our flight, were indeed the fantastic delusions which he represented them. Such, and so deep and so abiding in its influence upon my life, having been the influence of this German philosophy, according to all logic of proportions, in selecting the objects of my notice, I might be excused for setting before the reader, in its full array, the analysis of its capital sections. However, in any memorial of a life which professes to keep in view (though but as a secondary purpose) any regard to popular taste, the logic of proportions must bend, after all, to the law of the occasion—to the proprieties of time and place. For the present, therefore, I shall restrict myself to the few sentences in which it may be proper to gratify the curiosity of some readers, the two or three in a hundred, as to the peculiar distinctions of this philosophy. Even to these two or three out of each hundred, I shall not venture to ascribe a larger curiosity than with respect to the most general 'whereabouts' of its position—from what point it starts—whence and from what aspect it surveys the ground—and by what links from this starting-point it contrives to connect itself with the main objects of philosophic inquiry.

Immanuel Kant was originally a dogmatist in the school of Leibnitz and Wolf; that is, according to his trisection of all philosophy into dogmatic, sceptical, and critical, he was, upon all questions, disposed to a strong affirmative creed, without courting any particular examination into the grounds of this creed, or into its assailable points. From this slumber, as it is called by himself, he was suddenly aroused by the Humian doctrine of cause and effect. This celebrated essay on the nature of necessary connection—so thoroughly misapprehended at the date of its first publication to the world by its soi-disant opponents, Oswald, Beattie, &c., and so imperfectly comprehended since then by various soi-disant defenders—became in effect the 'occasional cause' (in the phrase of the logicians) of the entire subsequent philosophic scheme of Kant—every section of which arose upon the accidental opening made to analogical trains of thought, by this memorable effort of scepticism, applied by Hume to one capital phenomenon among the necessities of the human understanding. What is the nature of Hume's scepticism as applied to this phenomenon? What is the main thesis of his celebrated essay on cause and effect? For few, indeed, are they who really know anything about it. If a man really understands it, a very few words will avail to explain the nodus. Let us try. It is a necessity of the human understanding (very probably not a necessity of a higher order of intelligences) to connect its experiences by means of the idea of cause and its correlate, effect: and when Beattie, Oswald, Reid, &c. were exhausting themselves in proofs of the indispensableness of this idea, they were fighting with shadows; for no man had ever questioned the practical necessity for such an idea to the coherency of human thinking. Not the practical necessity, but the internal consistency of this notion, and the original right to such a notion, was the point of inquisition. For, attend, courteous reader, and three separate propositions will set before your eyes the difficulty. First Prop., which, for the sake of greater precision, permit me to throw into Latin:—Non datur aliquid [A] quo posito ponitur aliud [B] à priori; that is, in other words, You cannot lay your hands upon that one object or phenomenon [A] in the whole circle of natural existences, which, being assumed, will entitle you to assume à priori, any other object whatsoever [B] as succeeding it. You could not, I say, of any object or phenomenon whatever, assume this succession à priori—that is, previously to experience. Second Prop. But, if the succession of B to A be made known to you, not à priori (by the involution of B in the idea of A), but by experience, then you cannot ascribe necessity to the succession: the connection between them is not necessary but contingent. For the very widest experience—an experience which should stretch over all ages, from the beginning to the end of time—can never establish a nexus having the least approximation to necessity; no more than a rope of sand could gain the cohesion of adamant, by repeating its links through a billion of successions. Prop. Third. Hence (i. e. from the two preceding propositions), it appears that no instance or case of nexus that ever can have been offered to the notice of any human understanding, has in it, or, by possibility, could have had anything of necessity. Had the nexus been necessary, you would have seen it beforehand; whereas, by Prop. I. Non datur aliquid, quo posito ponitur aliud à priori. This being so, now comes the startling fact, that the notion of a cause includes the notion of necessity. For, if A (the cause) be connected with B (the effect) only in a casual or accidental way, you do not feel warranted in calling it a cause. If heat applied to ice (A) were sometimes followed by a tendency to liquefaction (B) and sometimes not, you would not consider A connected with B as a cause, but only as some variable accompaniment of the true and unknown cause, which might allowably be present or be absent. This, then, is the startling and mysterious phenomenon of the human understanding—that, in a certain notion, which is indispensable to the coherency of our whole experience, indispensable to the establishing any nexus between the different parts and successions of our whole train of notices, we include an accessary notion of necessity, which yet has no justification or warrant, no assignable derivation from any known or possible case of human experience. We have one idea at least—viz. the idea of causation—which transcends our possible experience by one important element, the element of necessity, that never can have been derived from the only source of ideas recognised by the philosophy of this day. A Lockian never can find his way out of this dilemma. The experience (whether it be the experience of sensation or the experience of reflection) which he adopts for his master-key, never will unlock this case; for the sum total of human experience, collected from all ages, can avail only to tell us what is, but never what must be. The idea of necessity is absolutely transcendant to experience, per se, and must be derived from some other source. From what source? Could Hume tell us? No: he, who had started the game so acutely (for with every allowance for the detection made in Thomas Aquinas, of the original suggestion, as recorded in the Biographia Literaria of Coleridge, we must still allow great merit of a secondary kind to Hume for his modern revival and restatement of the doctrine), this same acute philosopher broke down confessedly in his attempt to hunt the game down. His solution is worthless.