History of Modern Philosophy

Now, according to Kant, that there should be so many kinds of judgment and no more implies that our understanding contributes a formal element to the constitution of all knowledge, consisting of four combining principles, without which experience would be impossible. He calls these Categories, and they are enumerated in the following table: —

(i.) Quantity.

Unity, Plurality, Totality.

(ii.) Quality.

Reality, Negation, Limitation.

(iii.) Relation.

Substance and Accident; Cause and Effect; Action and Reaction (Reciprocity).

(iv.) Modality.

Possibility and Impossibility; Existence and Non-Existence; Necessity and Contingency.

A study of the Categories suggests some rather obvious criticisms on the Critical Philosophy itself. (i.) The first two terms in each triad evidently form an antithetical couple, of which the third term is the synthesis. Here we have the first germ of a disease by which the systems of Kant's successors were much more seriously infected. In the table it is shown by the intrusion of Limitation, a wholly superfluous adjunct to Reality and Negation; in the conversion of Reciprocity into a wholly fictitious synthesis of Substantiality with Causation; and in the complete absurdity of making Necessity a combination of Possibility with Existence. (ii.) Innate ideas, after they had been exploded by Locke, are reintroduced into philosophy by a sufficiently transparent piece of legerdemain. For assuming that the human intelligence possesses a power of organising and drilling the sensuous appearances which without its control would appear only as a disorderly mob, it by no means follows that they must thereby be referred to an extraphenomenal principle. But such a principle is plainly implied by the category of Substance. Used in a scholastic sense, it does not mean the sensuous attributes of a thing taken altogether, but something that underlies and supports them. And Kant himself seems to take his category in that significance. For he claims to deduce from it the law of the indestructibility of matter; as if I could not say snow is white without committing myself to the assertion that the ultimate particles of snow have existed and will exist for ever. (iii.) The substitution of Causation for logical sequence, as implicated in the hypothetical judgment of Relation, is perfectly scandalous; and still more scandalous is substitution of Reciprocity or Action and Reaction for Disjunction. The last points require to be examined a little more in detail.

The sequence of an effect to its cause has only a verbal resemblance to the sequence of a logical consequent to its reason. We declare categorically that every change has a cause which precedes it. Logical sequence is, on the other hand, as the very name of the judgment shows, hypothetical, and may possibly not represent any actual occurrence, besides being, what causation is not, independent of time. A particular case of causation may be hypothetical in respect to our belief that it actually occurred; never the law of causation itself as a general truth. And the same distinction applies with even greater force to the alleged connection between a logical disjunction and a physical reaction. When I say A is either B or C, but not both, there is only this much resemblance, that both cases involve the ideas of equality and of opposition. From the admission that A is not B, I infer that it is C, or, contrariwise, from the admission that it is B, I infer that it is not C, and in both instances with the same certainty; but this does not prove that the earth attracts the moon as much as the moon attracts the earth, only in opposite directions; nor yet that in certain instances all the heat lost by one body is gained by another.

Kant had learned this much from Hume, that causation is essentially a relation of antecedence and consequence in time; and apparently his way of "categorising" the relation —i. e., of proving its apriority – is to represent it as the logical form of reason and consequent masquerading, so to speak, under the intuitional time-form. Yet he frequently speaks of our senses as being affected by things in themselves, implying that the resulting sensations are somehow caused by those otherwise unknown entities. But since things in themselves do not, according to Kant, exist in space and time, they cannot be causally related to phenomena or to anything else.

In his criticism of Pure Reason, properly so called – that is, of inferences made by human faculty with regard to questions transcending all experience – Kant shows that of such things nothing can be known. The ideality of time and space once taken as proved, this amount of agnosticism seems to follow as a matter of course. It is idle to speculate about the possible extent or duration of a universe that cannot be described in terms of coexistence and succession. For each of us at the dissolution of our bodily organism time itself, and therefore existence as alone we conceive it, comes to an end. The law of causation, applying as it does to phenomena alone, offers no evidence for the existence of a God who transcends phenomena. Kant, however, is not satisfied with such a simple and summary procedure as this. He tries to show, with most unnecessary pedantry, that the conditional synthesis of the Understanding inevitably leads thought on to the unconditional synthesis of the Reason only to find itself lost in a hopeless welter of paralogisms and self-contradictions.

At this stage we are handed over to the guidance of what Kant calls the Practical Reason. This faculty gives a synthesis for conduct, as Pure Reason gave a synthesis for intelligence. All reason demands uniformity, order, law; only what in theory is recognised as true has in practice to be imposed as right. In this way Kant arrives at his formula of absolute morality: Act so that the principle of thy conduct may be the law for all rational beings. He calls this the Categorical Imperative, as distinguished from such hypothetical imperatives as: Act this way if you wish to be happy either here or hereafter; or, act as public opinion tells you. Moreover, the motive, as distinguished from the end of moral action, should not be calculating self-interest nor uncalculating impulse, but simply desire to fulfil the law as such. Previous moralists had set up the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the end of action, and such an aim does not lie far from Kant's philosophy; but they could think of no better motive for pursuing it than self-love or a rather undefined social instinct; and their summum bonum would take the happiness of irrational animals into account, while Kant absolutely subordinates the interests of these to human good. A further coincidence between the Utilitarian and the Kantian ethics is that in the latter also the happiness of others, not their perfection, should be the end and aim of each. Finally, the philosophy of Pure Reason adopts from contemporary French thought as the governing idea of political organisation what was long to be a principle of English Utilitarianism – "the liberty of each, bounded only by the equal liberty of all."

Nevertheless, the old postulate of a necessary connection between virtue and individual happiness reappears in Kant's ethical theory, and leads to the construction of a new religious philosophy. His critique had left no place for the old theology, nor yet for that doctrine of free-will so dear to most theologians. Its whole object had been to vindicate against Hume the necessity and universality of causation. Human actions then must, like all other phenomena, form an unbroken chain of antecedents and consequents. Nor does Kant conceal his conviction that, with sufficient knowledge and powers of calculation, a man's whole future conduct might be foretold. Nevertheless, under the eighteenth-century idea of man as naturally the creature of passion or self-interest, he claims for us, as moral agents, the power of choosing to obey duty in preference to either. And this freedom is supposed to be made conceivable by the subjectivity of time and causation, outside of which, as a thing in itself, stands the moral will. That morality, whether as action or mere intention, involves succession in time is utterly ignored. Nor is this all. Assuming without warrant that the moral law demands an ultimate coincidence between happiness and virtue, made impossible in this life by human weakness, Kant argues that there must be an unending future life to secure time enough for working out a problem whose solution is infinitely remote. And, finally, there must be an omnipotent moral God to provide facilities for undertaking that somewhat gratuitous Psyche's task. Before Kant moral theology had argued that the Judge of all the world must do right, apportioning happiness to desert. It was reserved for him to argue, conversely, that for right to be done such a Judge must exist, and that therefore he does exist.

In appreciating the services of Kant to philosophy we must guard ourselves against being influenced by the extravagant panegyrics of his countrymen, whose passion for square circles he so generously gratifies. Still, after every deduction for mere Laputian pedantry has been made, the balance of fruitful suggestion remains vast. (i.) The antithesis of object and subject, although not counted among the categories of his Critique, has remained a prime category of thought ever since. (ii.) The idea of a necessary limit to human knowledge, given by the very theory of that knowledge, as distinguished from the Scepticism of the Greeks – in other words, what we now call Agnosticism – may not be final, but it still remains to be dealt with. (iii.) The possibility of reducing à priori knowledge to a form of unconscious experience has put an end to dogmatic metaphysics. (iv.) The problems of Time and Space have taken a central place in speculation; it has been shown – what Hume did not see – that Causation has the certainty of a mathematical axiom; and it has been made highly probable that all these difficulties may find their solution in a larger interpretation of experience. (v.) Morality has been definitely dissociated from the appeal to selfish interests, whether in this life or in another.

We have now to trace, within the limits prescribed by the nature of this work, the development of philosophy under Kant's German successors.

Chapter IV.

THE GERMAN IDEALISTS

Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Herbart

The Critical Philosophy won its first success in Germany less as a new epistemology than as what, in fact, its author meant it to be, a rehabilitation of religious belief. The limits of Reason had been drawn so closely only to make room for Faith. But the current of Rationalism was running too strongly to be so summarily stopped; and so with Kant's ablest successors faith is altogether abandoned, while the claims of reason are pushed relentlessly through. Among these more logical thinkers the first is J. G. Fichte (1762-1814). In him – for the third time in modern history, for the first and last time in Germany – the hero as philosopher finds a worthy representative. Born in Silesia, like Kant of humble parentage, and bred in circumstances of more oppressive poverty, he also received a severely religious and moral training as a preparation for the pastoral office. The bounty of an aristocratic patron gave him an excellent public-school education; but as a university student, first at Jena and then at Leipzig, he had to earn a scanty living by private tuition, finally abandoning his destined career to accept a post in a Swiss family at Zurich. There, as the result of an attachment in which the love was nearly all on the lady's side, he became engaged to a niece of the poet Klopstock, and after a long delay, caused by money difficulties, was enabled to marry her. In the meantime he had become a convert to Kant's philosophy, winning the admiration of the old master himself by a Critique of all Revelation, written in four weeks. Published anonymously by an oversight, it was generally attributed to Kant himself, and, on the real authorship becoming known, won for Fichte an extraordinary Professorate of Philosophy at Jena, where his success as a lecturer and writer gave him for a time the leadership in German speculation (1794-1799). An untoward incident brought this stage of his career to an end. Writing in a philosophical review, he defined God as "the moral order of the universe." Dr. Temple long afterwards used much the same phrase when Bishop of Exeter, finding it, presumably, compatible with official Theism; but such was not the impression created in Saxony. A cry of atheism arose, much to the disgust of Fichte, whose position would have been better described as pantheistic. But what incensed him most was the suspicion of an attempt to interfere with the liberty of academic teaching. With his usual impetuosity he talked about resigning his chair – with a hint that others would follow his example – were the authorities at Weimar to permit such an outrage. Goethe, who was then Minister, observed that no Government could allow itself to be threatened, and Fichte was at once relieved of his post. Settling at Berlin, he became Professor of Philosophy in the new University founded after the French conquest of Prussia, having previously done much to revive the national spirit by his Addresses to the German Nation (1807-1808). These were in appearance the programme of a new educational Utopia; but their real purpose was so evident that the speaker lived in daily expectation of being summoned before a French court-martial and shot. Unlike his countrymen, Goethe, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, Fichte passionately resented the Napoleonic despotism, throwing himself heart and soul into the great uprising by which it was finally overthrown. Although his wish to accompany the victorious army as field preacher could not be gratified, the campaign of 1813 still claimed him as one of its victims. After nursing his heroic wife to recovery from a hospital fever caught in attendance on the sick and wounded at Berlin, he took the infection from her and died early in 1814, soon after hearing that Blücher had crossed the Rhine.

G. H. Lewes, in a well-known story, has made himself and his readers merry over a German savant who undertakes to evolve the idea of a camel out of the depths of his moral consciousness. The phrase is commonly quoted as "inner consciousness," but this takes away its whole point. For the original satirist, who, I think, was not Lewes, but Heine, had in view the philosophy of Fichte. It need hardly be said that German savants are as careful observers and diligent collectors of facts as any others; and Fichte in particular trusted solely to experience for the knowledge of natural phenomena. But even as regards his general philosophy the place it gives to morality has been misconceived even by his closest students. With him goodwill really plays a less important part than with Kant, being not an end in itself, but a means towards an end. And what that end is his teaching makes quite clear.

Kant's first critics put their finger on the weak point of his system, the thing in itself. So, assuming it to be discarded, Fichte set to work on new lines, the lines of pure idealism. But, though an idealist, he is not, any more than Berkeley, a solipsist. The celebrated antithesis of the ego and the non-ego dates from him, and strikes the keynote of his whole system. It might be thought that, as compared with the old realism, this was a distinction without a difference. But that is not so; for, according to Fichte, the non-ego is subjective in its origin, and that is where he departs widely from Berkeley's theological idealism. Not that I create the not-myself; I assume it as the condition of my self-consciousness – a remarkable feat of logic, but after all not more wonderful than that space and time should result from the activity of the outer and inner senses. This figment of my imagination is anyhow solid enough to beget a new feeling of resistance and recoil, throwing the self back on itself, and bringing with it the interpretation of that external impact by the category of causation, of its own activity as substance, and of the whole deal between the ego and the non-ego as interaction or reciprocity. In this way the first triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is obtained; and from this, by a vast expenditure of ingenuity, the whole array of Kant's forms, categories, and faculties is evolved as a coherent system of scientific thought in obedience to a single principle – the self-realisation of the ego, alternatively admitting and transcending a limit to its activity.

It will be easily understood that this self-realising ego is neither Fichte's nor anyone else's self, but a universal principle, fundamentally the same in all. One is reminded of Descartes's self-thinking thought by which the reality of the universe was guaranteed; but between the two there is this vast difference, that the Frenchman's ego resembles a box containing a variety of independent ideas, to be separately handled and examined; the German's is a box enclosing a coiled-up spring by the expansion of which all the wheels of the philosophical machine are made go round. From the action of the not-self on the self results the whole of nature as we conceive it; from the reaction of the self on the not-self, the whole mentality and morality of man – morality being understood to include the domestic, social, political, educational, and industrial organisation of life. The final cause, the impelling ideal of existence, is the self-realisation of the ego, the entire absorption into its personal energy of the non-ego, of nature, to be effected by perfect knowledge of how the physical universe is constituted issuing in perfect subjugation of its forces to the human will. But such a realisation of the Absolute Ego would mean its annihilation, for, as we have seen, the antithesis between objective and subjective is the very condition of consciousness that without which it could neither begin nor continue to exist. Therefore the process must go on for ever, and this necessity guarantees the eternal duration of the human race – not, as Kant had dreamed, of the individual soul, since for Fichte the Categorical Imperative demands a consummation widely different from that combination of virtue with happiness which had satisfied his master. And the agency by which it is being effected through infinite time is not a personal God, but that moral order of the world which Fichte regarded as the only true object of religious feeling. As for human immortality, he seems to have first accepted, but afterwards rejected it in favour of a mystical union with the divine.

It has been said that morality was not with Fichte what it had been with Kant – the highest good. Nevertheless, as a means towards the final synthesis, morality interested him intensely, and his best work has been done in ethics. As a condition of self-realisation the primal ego becomes personified in a multitude of free individualities. Just as in Stoicism, each individual is conceived as having a special office to perform in the world-process, and the State exists – ideally speaking – in order to guarantee the necessary independence of all its citizens. For this purpose everyone must have the right to work and the right to a living wage. Thus Fichte appears as the first theorist of State Socialism in the history of German thought. Probably the example of the Greek Stoics with their communistic utopias acting on a kindred spirit, rather than any prophetic vision of the coming century, is to be credited for this remarkable anticipation.

Schelling

German philosophy is prolific of self-contradictions; and so far the most flagrant example has been offered by Fichte's Theory of Knowledge, starting as it does with the idea of an impersonal ego, developing through a process in which this selfless self demands its own negation at every step, and determined by the prospect of a catastrophe that would be the annihilation of consciousness itself. In fact, there seemed no need to wait until time had run out; the self, or, as it was now called, the subject, had absorbed all reality, only to find that the material universe, reconstituted as the object of knowledge, was an indispensable condition of its existence. And meanwhile the physical sciences, more particularly those concerned with inorganic nature, were entering on a series of triumphs unparalleled since the days of Newton. Philosophy must come to terms with these or cease to exist.

The task of reconciliation was first attempted by F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854), a Suabian, and the first South German who made a name in pure philosophy. Educated at the University of Tübingen, at an early age he covered an encyclopædic range of studies and began authorship at nineteen, gaining a professorship at Jena four years later. Wandering about from one university to another, and putting forward new opinions as often as he changed his residence, the young adventurer ceased to publish after 1813, and remained silent till in 1841 he came forward at Berlin as the champion of a reactionary current, practically renouncing the naturalistic pantheism by which his early reputation had been made. But he utterly failed in the attempt, which was finally abandoned in the fifth year from its inception. Lewes, who saw Schelling in his old age, describes him as remarkably like Socrates; his admirers called him a modern Plato; but he had nothing of the deep moral earnestness that characterised either, nor indeed was morality needed for the work that he actually did. This, to use the phrase of his fellow-student Hegel, consisted in raising philosophy to its absolute standpoint, in passing from the subjective moralism of the eighteenth century to the all-comprehensive systematisation of the nineteenth.

Schelling began as a disciple of Fichte, but he came simultaneously under the influence of Spinoza, whose fame had been incessantly spreading through the last generation in Germany, with some reinforcement from the revived name of Bruno. Their teaching served to make the latent pantheism of Fichte more explicit, while the great contemporary discoveries gave a new interest to the study of nature, which Fichte, unlike Kant, had put in the background, strictly subordinating it to the moral service of man. Had he cared to evolve the idea of a camel from his moral consciousness, the operation would not have demanded several years, but only a few minutes' thought. As thus: the moral development of humanity needed the co-operation of such a race as the Semites. To form their character a long residence in the Arabian deserts was needed. But for such nomads an auxiliary animal would be needed with long legs and neck, a stomach for storing water, hump, etc. – Q. E. D. Schelling also began by explaining the material world as a preparation for the spiritual; only he did not employ the method of teleological adaptation, but a method of rather fanciful analogy. As the evolution of self-conscious reason had proceeded by a triple movement of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, so a parallel process had to be discovered in the advance towards a consciousness supposed to be exhibited in organic and inorganic nature.

The fundamental idea of natural philosophy is polarity – opposite forces combining to neutralise one another and then parting to be reunited at a higher stage of evolution. Thus attraction and repulsion – represented as space and time – by their synthesis compose matter; magnetism and electricity produce chemical affinity; life results from a triad of inorganic forces; in life itself productivity and irritability give birth to sensibility. The order of the terms made little, if any, difference. When long afterwards iron was magnetised by the electric current, Schelling claimed for himself the credit of anticipating this discovery, although he had placed magnetism before electricity.

The next step was to construct a philosophy of history. This, with much else, is included under the name of A System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) in the most finished of Schelling's literary compositions. History, according to the view here unfolded, is the gradual self-revelation of God, or the Absolute, in whom Nature and Spirit are united and identified, who never is nor can be, but always is to be. Meanwhile the supreme ideal is not that ever-increasing mastery of nature by man which Fichte contemplated, but their reconciliation as achieved by Art. For just as natural philosophy carried an element of consciousness into the material universe, so æstheticism recognises a corresponding element of unconscious creation in the supreme works of artistic genius where spirit reaches its highest and best. Here Schelling appears as the philosopher of Romanticism, a movement that characterised German thought from 1795 to 1805, and is known to ourselves by the faded and feeble image of it exhibited in a certain section of English society nearly a century later. Beginning with a more cultivated intelligence of Hellenic antiquity, this movement rapidly grew into a new appreciation of medieval culture, falsely supposed to have given more scope to individuality than modern civilisation, and then into a search for ever-varying sources of excitement or distraction in the whole history, art, and literature of past or present times, religion being at last singled out as the vitalising principle of all.