History of Modern Philosophy

Auguste Comte

The brilliant audiences that hung spell-bound on the lips of Victor Cousin as he unrolled before them the Infinite, the Finite, and the relation between the two, little knew that France's only great philosopher since Descartes was working in obscurity among them. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the founder of Positivism, belonged to a Catholic and Legitimist family. By profession a mathematical teacher, he fell early under the influence of the celebrated St. Simon, a mystical socialist who exercised a powerful attraction on others besides Comte. The connection lasted four years, when they quarrelled; indeed Comte's character was such as to make permanent co-operation with him impossible, except on terms of absolute agreement with his opinions and submission to his will. At a subsequent period he obtained some fairly well-paid employment at the École Polytechnique, but lost it again owing to the injurious terms in which he spoke of his colleagues. In his later years he lived on a small annuity made up by contributions from his admirers.

Auguste Comte disliked and despised Plato, altogether preferring Aristotle to him as a philosopher; but it is fundamentally as a Platonist, not as an Aristotelian, that he should himself be classed – in this sense, that he valued knowledge above all as the means towards reconstituting society on the basis of an ideal life. And this is the first reason why his philosophy is called positive – to distinguish it as reconstructive from the purely negative thought of the Revolution. The second reason is to distinguish it as dealing with real facts from the figments of theology and the abstractions of metaphysics. Positive science explains natural events neither by the intervention of supernatural beings nor by the mutual relations of hypostasised concepts, but by verifiable laws of succession and resemblance. Turgot was the first to distinguish the theological, metaphysical, and mechanical interpretations as successive stages of a historical evolution (1750); Hume was the first to single out the relations of orderly succession and resemblance as the essential elements of real knowledge (1739); Comte, with the synthetic genius of the nineteenth century, first combined these isolated suggestions with a wealth of other ideas into a vast theory of human progress set out in the fifth and sixth volumes of his Philosophie Positive– the best sketch of universal history ever written.

The positive sciences fall into two great divisions – the concrete, dealing with the actual phenomena as presented in space and time; the abstract, which alone concern philosophy, dealing with their laws. The most important of the abstract sciences is Sociology, claimed by Comte as his own special creation. The study of this demands a previous knowledge of biology, psychology being dismissed as a metaphysical delusion and phrenology put in its place. The science of life presupposes Chemistry, before which comes Physics, presupposing Astronomy, and, as the basis of all, Mathematics, divided into the calculus and geometry. At a later period Morality was placed as a seventh fundamental science at the head of the whole hierarchy.

At a first glance some serious flaws reveal themselves in the imposing logic of this scheme. Astronomy as a concrete science ought to have been excluded from the series, its admission being apparently due to the historical circumstance that the most general laws of physics were ascertained through the study of celestial phenomena. But on the same ground geology can no longer be excluded, as its records led to the recognition of the evolution of life; or should evolution be referred to the concrete sciences of zoology and botany, by parity of reasoning human progress should be treated as a branch of universal history – which, in fact, is what Comte makes it in his fifth and sixth volumes. It would have been better had he also studied social statics on the historical method. As it is, the volume in which the conditions of social equilibrium are supposed to be established contains only one chapter on the subject, and that is very meagre, consisting of some rather superficial observations on family life and the division of labour. No doubt the matter receives a far more thorough discussion in the author's later work, Politique Positive. But this merely embodies his own plan of reorganisation for the society of the future, and therefore should count not as science, but as art.

The Positivist theory of social dynamics is that all branches of knowledge pass through three successive stages already described as the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific. And this advance is accompanied by a parallel evolution on the governmental side from the military to the industrial régime, with a revolutionary or transitional period answering to metaphysical philosophy. To this scheme it might be objected that the parallelism is merely accidental. A scientific view of nature and a profound knowledge of her laws is no doubt far more conducive to industry than a superstitious view; but it is also more favourable to the successful prosecution of war, which, indeed, always has been an industry like another. Nor, to judge by modern experience, does it look as if a government placed in the hands of a country's chief capitalists – which was what Comte proposed – would be less militant in its general disposition than the parliamentary governments which he condemns as "metaphysical." In fact, it is by theologians and metaphysicians that our modern horror of war has been inspired rather than by scientists.

The great idea of Comte's life, that the positive sciences, philosophically systematised, are destined to supply the basis of a new religion surpassing Catholicism in its social efficacy, seems a delusion really inherited from one of his pet aversions, Plato. It arose from a profound misconception of what Catholicism had done, and a misconception, equally profound, of the means by which its priesthood worked. In spite of Comte's denials, the leverage was got not by appeals to the heart, but by appeals to that future judgment with which the preaching of righteousness and temperance was associated by St. Paul, his supposed precursor in religion, as Aristotle was his precursor in philosophy.

The worship of Humanity, or, as it has been better called, the Service of Man, is a great and inspiring thought. Only it is not a religion, but a metaphysical idea, derived by Comte from the philosophers of the eighteenth century, and by them through imperial Rome from the Humanists and Stoics of ancient Athens.

J. S. Mill

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was, like Comte, a Platonist in the sense of valuing knowledge chiefly as an instrument of social reform. He was indeed bred up by his father, James Mill (1773-1836), and by Jeremy Bentham as a prophet of the new Utilitarianism as Comte was, to some extent, trained by St. Simon to substitute a new order for that which the Revolution had destroyed. Mill, however, had been educated on the lines of Greek liberty rather than in the tradition of Roman authority; while both were largely affected by the Romanticism current in their youth. The worship of women, revived from the age of chivalry, entered into the romantic movement; and it may be mentioned in this connection that Mill calls Mrs. Taylor, the lady with whom he fell in love at twenty-four and married eighteen years later, "the inspirer and in part the author of all" that was best in his writings; while Comte refers his religious conversion to Madame Clotilde de Vaux, the object of his adoration in middle life. It seems probable, however, from the little we know of Mrs. Taylor – whom Carlyle credits with "the keenest insight and the royallest volition" – that her influence was the reverse of Clotilde's. If anything, she attached Mill still more firmly to the cause of pure reason.

It has been mentioned how Kant's metaphysical agnosticism was played out by Hamilton against Cousin. A little later Whewell, the Cambridge historian of physical science, imported Kant's theory of necessary truth in opposition to the empiricism of popular English thought, and Kant's Categorical Imperative in still more express contradiction to Bentham's utilitarian morality. Now Mill, educated as he had been on the associationist psychology and in the central line of the English epistemological tradition, rejected the German apriorism as false in itself, while more particularly hating it as, in his opinion, a dangerous enemy to all social progress. For to him what people called their intuitions, whether theoretic or practical, were merely the time-honoured prejudices in which they had been brought up, and the contradictory of which they could not conceive. Comte similarly interpreted the metaphysical stage of thought as the erection into immutable principles of certain abstract ideas whose value – if they had any – was merely relative and provisional. Mill, with his knowledge of history, might have remembered that past thought, beginning with Plato, shows no such connection between intuitionism and immobility or reaction, while such experientialists as Hobbes and Hume have been political Tories. But in his own time the à priori philosophy went hand in hand with conservatism in Church and State, so he set himself to explode it in his System of Logic (1843).

Mill's Logic, the most important English contribution to philosophy since Hume, is based on Hume's theory of knowledge, amended and supplemented by some German and French ideas. It is conceded to Kant that mathematical truths are synthetic, not analytic. It is not contained in the idea of two and two that they make four, nor in the idea of two straight lines that they cannot enclose a space. Such propositions are real additions to our knowledge; but it is only experience that justifies us in accepting them. What constitutes their peculiar certainty is that they can be verified by trial on imagined numbers and lines, without reference to external objects. But by what right we generalise from mental experience to all experience Mill does not explain. Hume's analysis of causation into antecedence and sequence of phenomena is accepted by Mill as it was accepted by Kant; but the law that every change must have a cause is affirmed, in adhesion to Dr. Thomas Brown (1778-1820), with more distinctness than by Hume. As Laplace put it, the whole present state of the universe is a product of its whole preceding state. But we only know this truth by experience; and we can conceive a state of things where phenomena succeed one another by a different law or without any law at all. Mill himself was ready to believe that causation did not obtain at some very remote point of space; though what difference remoteness could make, except we suppose it to be causal – which would be a reassertion of the law – he does not explain; nor yet what warrant we have for assuming that causation holds through all time, or at any future moment of time.

Next to the law of universal causation inductive science rests on the doctrine of natural kinds. The material universe is known to consist of a number of substances – namely, the chemical elements and their combinations, so constituted that a certain set of characteristic properties are invariably associated with an indefinite number of other properties. Thus, if in a strange country a certain mineral answers the usual tests for arsenic, we know that a given dose of it will destroy life; and we are equally certain that if the spectroscopic examination of a new star shows the characteristic lines of iron, a metal possessing all the properties of iron as we find it in our mines is present in that distant luminary. According to Mill, we are justified in drawing that sweeping inference on the strength of a single well-authenticated observation, because we know by innumerable observations on terrestrial substances that natural kinds possessing such index qualities do exist, whereas there is not a single instance of a substance possessing those qualities without the rest.

For Mill, as for Hume, reality means states of consciousness and the relations between them. Matter he defines as a permanent possibility of sensation; mind as a permanent possibility of thought and feeling. But the latter definition is admittedly not satisfactory. For a stream of thoughts and feelings which is proved by memory to have the consciousness of itself seems to be something more than a mere stream. All explanations must end in an ultimate inexplicability. God may be conceived as a series of thoughts and feelings prolonged through eternity; and it is a logically defensible hypothesis that the order of nature was designed by such a being, although the amount of suffering endured by living creatures excludes the notion of a Creator at once beneficent and omnipotent. And if the Darwinian theory were established, the case for a designing intelligence would collapse. Personally Mill believed neither in a God nor in a future life.

In morals Mill may be considered the creator of what Henry Sidgwick, in his Methods of Ethics (1874), called Universalistic Hedonism. The English moralists of the eighteenth century had set up the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the ideal end of action; but they did not hold that each individual could be expected to pursue anything but his own happiness; the object of Bentham (1748-1832) being to make the two coincide. Kant showed that the rule of right excluded any such accommodation, and a crisis in his own life led Mill to adopt the same conclusion. Afterwards he rather confused the issues by distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures, leaving experts to decide which were the pleasures to be preferred. The universalistic standard settles the question summarily by estimating pleasures according to their social utility.

Mill fully sympathised with Comte's demand for social reorganisation as a means towards the moral end. But, with his English and Protestant traditions, he had no faith in the creation of a new spiritual power with an elaborate religious code and ritual as the best machinery for the purpose. In his opinion, the claims of the individual to extended liberty of thought and action, not their restriction, were what first needed attention. Second to this – if second at all – came the necessity for reforming representative government on the lines of an enlarged franchise and a readjusted electoral system with plural suffrage determined by merit, votes for women, and a contrivance for giving minorities a weight proportioned to their numbers. The problem of poverty was to be dealt with by restrictions on the increase of population and on the amount of inheritable property, the maximum of which ought not to exceed a modest competence.

Among the noble characters presented by the history of philosophy we may distinguish between the heroic and the saintly types. To the former in modern times belong Giordano Bruno, Fichte, and to some extent Comte; to the latter, Spinoza, Berkeley, and Kant. To the second class we may surely add John Stuart Mill, whom Gladstone called "the saint of rationalism," and of whom Auguste Laugel said, "He was not sincere – he was sincerity itself."

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was the son of a Nonconformist country schoolmaster, but was educated chiefly by his uncle Thomas, an Evangelical clergyman of the Church of England. A radical reformer of the old school, Thomas Spencer seems to have indoctrinated his youthful charge with the germinal principles afterwards generalised into a whole cosmic philosophy. He had a passion for justice realised under the form of liberty, individual responsibility, and self-help. In his opinion, until it was modified by private misfortunes, everything served everybody right. Beginning as an economical administrator of the new Poor Law, he at last became an advocate of its total abolition; and, alone among fifteen thousand clergymen, he was an active member of the Anti-Corn Law League, besides supporting the separation of Church and State. At twenty-two Herbert Spencer accepted and summed up this policy under the form of a general hostility to State interference with individual liberty, supporting it by a reference to the reign of Natural Law in all orders of existence. In his first great work, Social Statics, the principle of laissez-faire received its full systematic development as the restriction of State action to the defence of liberty against internal and external aggression, the raising of taxes for any other purpose being unjust, as is also private ownership of land, which is by nature the common heritage of all. Spencer subsequently came to abandon land nationalisation, probably from alarm at its socialistic implications.

The doctrine of natural law and liberty carried with it for Spencer a strong repugnance not only to protectionism in politics, but also to miracles in theology. The profession of journalism brought him into touch with a freethinking set in London. Whether under their influence, or Shelley's, or by some spontaneous process, his religious convictions evaporated by twenty-eight into the agnosticism which thenceforth remained their permanent expression. There might or not be a First Cause; if there was, we know nothing about it. At this stage Lyell's attempted refutation of Lamarck converted Spencer to the belief in man's derivation from some lower animal by a process of gradual adaptation. Thus the scion of an educationalist family came to interpret the whole history of life on our planet as an educative process.

It seemed, however, as if there was one fatal exception to the scheme of naturalistic optimism. The Rev. Thomas Malthus had originally published his Essay on Population (1798) as a telling answer to the "infidel" Godwin's Political Justice (1793), the bolder precursor of Social Statics. The argument was that the tendency of population to outrun the means of subsistence put human perfectibility out of the question. It had been suggested by the idealists, Mill among the number, that the difficulty might be obviated by habitual self-restraint on the part of married people. But Spencer, with great ingenuity, made the difficulty its own solution. The pressure of population on the means of subsistence is the source of all progress; and of progress not only in discoveries and inventions, but also, through its increased exercise, in the instrument which effects them – that is, the human brain. Now, it is a principle of Aristotle's, revived by modern biology, that individuation is antagonistic to reproduction; and increasing individuation is the very law of developing life, shown above all in the growing power of life's chief instrument, which is thought's organ, the brain. For, as Spencer proceeded to show in his next work, the Principles of Psychology, life means a continuous series of adjustments of internal to external relations. Therefore the rate of multiplication must go on falling with the growth of intellectual and moral power until it only just suffices to balance the loss by death. The next step was to revive Laplace's nebular hypothesis, and to connect it through Lyell's uniformitarian geology with Lamarck's developmental biology, thereby extending the same evolutionary process through the whole history of the universe.

Nor was this all. Milne-Edwards, by another return to Aristotle, had pointed to the "physiological division of labour" as a mark of ascending organic perfection, to which Spencer adds integration of structure as its obverse side, at the same time extending the world-law, already made familiar in part through its industrial applications by Adam Smith, to all orders of social activity. Finally, differentiation and integration were stretched back from living to lifeless matter, thus bringing astronomy and geology, which had already entered into the causal series of cosmic transformations, under one common law of evolution; while at the same time, seeing it to be generally admitted that inorganic changes originated from the operation of purely mechanical forces, they suggested that mechanism, without teleology, could adequately explain organic evolution also.

Finally came the great discovery of Darwin and Wallace, with its extension of Malthus's law to the whole world of living things. Spencer had just touched, without grasping, the same idea years before. He now gladly accepted Natural Selection as supplementing without superseding Lamarck's theory of spontaneous adaptation.

To complete even in outline the vast sweep of his projected Synthetic Philosophy two steps more remained for Spencer to take. The law of evolution had to be brought under the recently-discovered law of the Conservation of Energy, or, as he called it, the Persistence of Force, and the whole of unified science had to be reconciled with religion. The first problem was solved by interpreting evolution as a redistribution of matter and motion – a process in which, of course, energy is neither lost nor gained. The second problem was solved by reducing faith and knowledge to the common denominator of Agnosticism – a method that found more favour with Positivists (in the wide sense) than with Christian believers.

Herbert Spencer was disappointed to find that people took more interest in the portico (as he called it in a letter to the present writer) – that is to say, the metaphysical introduction to his philosophical edifice – than in its interior. He probably had some suspicion that the portico was mere lath and plaster, while he felt sure that the columns and architraves behind it were of granite. The public, however, besides their perennial interest in religion, might be excused for giving more attention to even a baroque exterior with some novelty about it than to the formalised eclecticism of what stood behind it. Unfortunately, they soon found that the alleged reconciliation was a palpable sham. Religion is nothing if not a revelation, and an unknowable God is no God at all. Even the pretended proofs of that poor residual deity involved their author in the transparent self-contradiction of calling the universe the manifestation of an Unknowable Power. Then the relations between this Power (such as it was) and the Energy (or Force) whose conservation (or persistence) was the very first of First Principles seemed hard to adjust. Either energy is created, or it is not. In the one case, what becomes of its eternity? in the other case, what need is there to assume a Power (knowable or not) behind it? Science will not shrink back before such a phantom, nor will Religion adore it.

Such faulty building in the portico prepares us for somewhat unsteady masonry within; and in fact none holds together except what has been transported bodily from other temples. In the past history of the universe, considered as a "rearrangement of matter and motion," disintegration and assimilation play quite as great a part as integration and differentiation. Such formulas have no advantage over the metaphysical systematisation of Aristotle, and they give us as little power either to predict or to direct. Will war be abolished at some future time, or property equalised or abolished, or morality exalted, or religion superseded? Spencer was ready with his answer; but the law of evolution could not prove it true. Nevertheless, his name will long be associated with evolution as a world-wide process, though neither in the way of original discovery nor of complete generalisation, and far less of successful application to modern problems; but rather of diffusion and popularisation, even as other valuable ideas have been impressed on the public mind by other philosophies at a vast expense of ingenuity, knowledge, and labour, but not at greater expense than the eventual gain has been worth.

The English Hegelians

Hegel's philosophy first drew attention in England through its supposed connection with Strauss's mythic theory of the Gospels and Baur's theory of New Testament literature as a product of party conflicts and compromises in the primitive Church. Rightly interpreted as a system of Pantheism, it was decried and ridiculed by orthodox theologians in the name of religion and common sense, while cherished by the advanced Broad Church as a means of symbolising away the creeds they continued to repeat. Then the triumph of Spencer's Agnosticism in the middle Victorian period (1864-1874) suggested an appeal to a logic whose object had been to resolve the negations of eighteenth-century enlightenment in the synthesis of a higher unity. The first pronunciation in this sense was The Secret of Hegel (1865), by Dr. Hutchison Stirling (1820-1909), a writer of geniality and genius, who, writing from the Hegelian standpoint, tried to represent the English rationalists of the day as a superficial and retrograde school. It was a bold but unsuccessful attempt to plant the banner of the Hegelian Right on British soil. By attacking Darwinism Stirling put himself out of touch with the general movement of thought. Professor William Wallace (1844-1897), John Caird (1820-1898), and his brother Edward Caird (1835-1908) inclined more or less to the Left, as also does Lord Haldane (b. 1865) in his Gifford Lectures (1903); and all have the advantage over Stirling of writing in a clearer if less picturesque style.