History of Modern Philosophy

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

The German Eclectics

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

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

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

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

The Latest Developments

Since the beginning of the twentieth century the interest in philosophy and the ability devoted to its cultivation have shown no sign of diminution. Two new doctrines in particular have become subjects of world-wide discussion. I refer to the theory of knowledge called Pragmatism, and to the metaphysics of Professor Henri Bergson. Both are of so revolutionary, so contentious, and so elusive a character as to preclude any discussion or even outline of the new solutions for old problems which they claim to provide. But I would recommend the study of both, and especially of Bergson, to all who imagine that the possibilities of speculation are exhausted, or that we are any nearer finality and agreement than when Heracleitus first glorified war as the father of all things, and contradiction as the central spring of life.

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