the spirit of Reid, by James McCosh (a native of Scotland, but since 1868 in America; _The Intuitions of the Mind_, 3d ed., 1872; _The Laws of Discursive Thought_, new ed., 1891; _First and Fundamental Truths_, 1889); while in Noah Porter (died 1892; _The Human Intellect_, new ed., 1876; _The Elements of Moral Science_, 1885) it appears modified by elements from German thinking.
Jeremy Bentham[1] (1748-1832) is noteworthy for his attempt to revive Epicureanism in modern form. Virtue is the surest means to pleasure, and pleasure the only self-evident good. Every man strives after happiness, but not every one in the right way. The honest man calculates correctly, the criminal falsely; hence a careful calculation of the value of the various pleasures, and a prudent use of the means to happiness, is the first condition of virtue; in this the easily attainable minor joys, whose summation amounts to a considerable quantum, must not be neglected. The value of a pleasure is measured by its intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity in the production of further pleasure, purity or freedom from admixture of consequent pain, and extent to the greatest possible number of persons. Every virtuous action results in a balance of pleasure. Inflict no evil on thyself or others from which a balance of good will not result. The end of morality is the “greatest happiness of the greatest number,” in the production of which each has first to care for his own welfare: whoever injures himself more than he serves others acts immorally, for he diminishes the sum of happiness in the world; the interest of the individual coincides with the interest of society. The two classes of virtues are prudence and benevolence. The latter is a natural, though not a disinterested affection: happiness enjoyed with others is greater than happiness enjoyed alone. Love is a pleasure-giving extension of the individual; we serve others to be served by them.
[Footnote 1: Bentham: _Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation_, 1789; new ed., 1823, reprinted 1876; _Deontology_, 1834, edited by Bowring, who also edited the _Works_, 1838-43. _The Principles of Civil and Criminal Legislation_, edited in French from Bentham’s manuscripts by his pupil Etienne Dumont (1801, 2d ed., 1820; English by Hildreth, 5th ed., 1887), was translated into German with notes by F.E. Beneke, 1830.]
Associationalism has been reasserted by James Mill (1773-1836; _Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind_, 1829), whose influence lives on in the work of his greater son. The latter, John Stuart Mill,[1] was born in London 1806, and was from 1823 to 1858 a secretary in the India House; after the death of his wife he lived (with the exception of two years of service as a Member of Parliament) at Avignon; his death occurred in 1873. Mill’s _System of Logic_ appeared in 1843, 9th ed., 1875; his _Utilitarianism_, 1863, new ed., 1871; _An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy_, 1865, 5th ed., 1878; his notes to the new edition of his father’s work, _Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind_, 2d ed., 1878, also deserve notice. With the phenomenalism of Hume and the (somewhat corrected) associational psychology of his father as a basis, Mill makes experience the sole source of knowledge, rejecting _a priori_ and intuitive elements of every sort. Matter he defines as a “permanent possibility of sensation”; mind is resolved into “a series of feelings with a background of possibilities of feeling,” even though the author is not unaware of the difficulty involved in the question how a series of feelings can be aware of itself as a series. Mathematical principles, like all others, have an experiential origin–the peculiar certitude ascribed to them by the Kantians is a fiction–and induction is the only fruitful method of scientific inquiry (even in mental science). The syllogism is itself a concealed induction.
[Footnote 1: Cf. on Mill. Taine, _Le Positivisme Anglais_, 1864 [English, by Haye]; the objections of Jevons _(Contemporary Review_, December, 1877 _seq_., reprinted in _Pure Logic and other Minor Works_, 1890; cf. _Mind_, vol. xvi. pp. 106-110) to Mill’s doctrine of the inductive character of geometry, his treatment of the relation of resemblance, and his exposition of the four methods of experimental inquiry in their relation to the law of causation; and the finely conceived essay on utilitarianism, by C. Hebler, _Philosophische Aufsãtze_, 1869, pp. 35-66. [Also Mill’s own _Autobiography_, 1873: Bain’s _John Stuart Mill, a Criticism_, 1882; and T.H. Green, Lectures on the _Logic, Works_, vol. ii.–TR.]]
When I assert the major premise the inference proper is already made, and in the conclusion the comprehensive formula for a number of particular truths which was given in the premise is merely explicated, interpreted. Because universal judgments are for him merely brief expressions for aggregates of particular truths, Mill is able to say that all knowledge is generalization, and at the same time to argue that all inference is from particulars to particulars. Inference through a general proposition is not necessary, yet useful as a collateral security, inasmuch as the syllogistic forms enable us more easily to discover errors committed. The ground of induction, the uniformity of nature in reference both to the coexistence and the succession of phenomena, since it wholly depends on induction, is not unconditionally certain; but it may be accepted as very highly probable, until some instance of lawless action (in itself conceivable) shall have been actually proved. Like the law of causation, the principles of logic are also not _a priori_, but only the highest generalizations from all previous experience.
Mill’s most brilliant achievement is his theory of experimental inquiry, for which he advances four methods: (1) The Method of Agreement: “If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon.” (2) The Method of Difference: “If an instance in which the phenomenon under investigation occurs, and an instance in which it does not occur, have every circumstance in common save one, that one occurring only in the former; the circumstance in which alone the two instances differ, is the effect, or the cause, or an indispensable part of the cause, of the phenomenon,” These two methods (the method of observation, and the method of artificial experiment) may also be employed in combination, and the Canon of the Joint Method of Agreement and Difference runs: “If two or more instances in which the phenomenon occurs have only one circumstance in common, while two or more instances in which it does not occur have nothing in common save the absence of that circumstance, the circumstance in which alone the two sets of instances differ is the effect, or the cause, or an indispensable part of the cause, of the phenomenon.” (3) The Method of Residues: “Subduct from any phenomenon such part as is known by previous inductions to be the effect of certain antecedents, and the residue of the phenomenon is the effect of the remaining antecedents.” (4) The Method of Concomitant Variations: “Whatever phenomenon varies in any manner whenever another phenomenon varies in some particular manner, is either a cause or an effect of that phenomenon, or is connected with it through some fact of causation.” When the phenomena are complex the deductive method must be called in to aid: from the inductively ascertained laws of the action of single causes this deduces the laws of their combined action; and, as a final step, the results of such ratiocination are verified by the proof of their agreement with empirical facts. To explain a phenomenon means to point out its cause; the explanation of a law is its reduction to other, more general laws. In all this, however, we remain within the sphere of phenomena; the essence of nature always eludes our knowledge.
In the chapter “Of Liberty and Necessity” (book vi. chap, ii.) Mill emphasizes the position that the necessity to which human actions are subject must not be conceived, as is commonly done, as irresistible compulsion, for it denotes nothing more than the uniform order of our actions and the possibility of predicting them. This does not destroy the element in the idea of freedom which is legitimate and practically valuable: we have the power to alter our character; it is formed _by_ us as well as _for_ us; the desire to mould it is one of the most influential circumstances in its formation. The principle of morality is the promotion of the happiness of all sentient beings. Mill differs from Bentham, however, from whom he derives the principle of utility, in several important particulars–by his recognition of qualitative as well as of quantitative differences in pleasures, of the value of the ordinary rules of morality as intermediate principles, of the social feelings, and of the disinterested love of virtue. Opponents of the utilitarian theory have not been slow in availing themselves of the opportunities for attack thus afforded.[1] A third distinguished representative of the same general movement is Alexander Bain, the psychologist (born 1818; _The Senses and the Intellect_, 3d ed., 1868; _The Emotions and the Will_, 3d ed., 1875; _Mental and Moral Science_, 1868, 3d ed., 1872, part ii., 1872; _Mind and Body_, 3d ed., 1874).
[Footnote 1: On the relation of Bentham and Mill cf. Höffding, p. 68: Sidgwick’s _Outlines_, chap. iv. § 16; and John Grote’s _Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy_, 1870, chap. i.]
The system projected by Herbert Spencer (born 1820), the major part of which has already appeared, falls into five parts: _First Principles_, 1862, 7th ed., 1889; _Principles of Biology_, 1864-67, 4th ed., 1888; _Principles of Psychology_, 1855, 5th ed., 1890; _Principles of Sociology_ (vol. i. 1876, 3d ed., 1885; part iv. _Ceremonial Institutions_, 1879, 3d ed., 1888, part v. _Political Institutions_, 1882, 2d ed., 1885, part vi. _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, 1885, 2d ed., 1886, together constituting vol. ii.); _Principles of Ethics_ (part i. _The Data of Ethics_, 1879, 5th ed., 1888; parts ii. and iii. _The Inductions of Ethics_ and _The Ethics of Individual Life_, constituting with part i. the first volume, 1892; part iv. _Justice_, 1891). A comprehensive exposition of the system has been given, with the authority of the author, by F.H. Collins in his _Epitome of the Synthetic Philosophy_, 1889.[1] The treatise on _Education_, 1861, 23d ed., 1890, his sociological writings, and his various essays have also contributed essentially to Mr. Spencer’s fame, both at home and abroad. The _First Principles_ begin with the “Unknowable.” Since human opinions, no matter how false they may seem, have sprung from actual experiences, and, when they find wide acceptance and are tenaciously adhered to, must have something in them which appeals to the minds of men, we must assume that every error contains a kernel of truth, however small it be. No one of opposing views is to be accepted as wholly true, and none rejected as entirely false. To discover the incontrovertible fact which lies at their basis, we must reject the various concrete elements in which they disagree, and find for the remainder the abstract expression which holds true throughout its divergent manifestations. No antagonism is older, wider, more profound, and more important than that between religion and science. Here too some most general truth, some ultimate fact must lie at the basis. The ultimate religious ideas are self-contradictory and untenable. No one of the possible hypotheses concerning the nature and origin of things–every religion may be defined as an _a priori_ theory of the universe, the accompanying ethical code being a later growth–is logically defensible: whether the world is conceived atheistically as self-existent, or pantheistically as self-created, or theistically (fetichism, polytheism, or monotheism), as created by an external agency, we are everywhere confronted by unthinkable conclusions. The idea of a First Cause or of the absolute (as Mansel, following Hamilton, has proved in his _Limits of Religious Thought_) is full of contradictions. But however widely the creeds diverge, they show entire unanimity, from the grossest superstition up to the most developed theism, in the belief that the existence of the world is a mystery which ever presses for interpretation, though it can never be entirely explained. And in the progress of religion from crude fetichism to the developed theology of our time, the truth, at first but vaguely perceived, that there is an omnipresent Inscrutable which manifests itself in all phenomena, ever comes more clearly into view.
[Footnote 1: Cf. also Fiske’s _Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy_, 2 vols., 1874. Numerous critiques and discussions of Spencer’s views have been given in various journals and reviews; among more extended works reference may be made to Bowne, _The Philösophy of Herbert Spencer_, 1874; Malcolm Guthrie, _On Mr. Spencer’s Formula of Evolution_, 1879, and the same author, _On Mr. Spencer’s Unification of Knowledge_, 1882; and T.H. Green, on Spencer and Lewes, _Works_, vol. i.–TR.]
Science meets this ultimate religious truth with the conviction, grasped with increasing clearness as the development proceeds from Protagoras to Kant, that the reality hidden behind all phenomena must always remain unknown, that our knowledge can never be absolute. This principle maybe established inductively from the incomprehensibility of the ultimate scientific ideas, as well as deductively from the nature of intelligence, through an analysis of the product and the process of thought. (1) The ideas space, time, matter, motion, and force, as also the first states of consciousness, and the thinking substance, the ego as the unity of subject and object, all represent realities whose nature and origin are entirely incomprehensible. (2) The subsumption of particular facts under more general facts leads ultimately to a most general, highest fact, which cannot be reduced to a more general one, and hence cannot be explained or comprehended. (3) All thought (as has been shown by Hamilton in his essay “On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned,” and by his follower Mansel) is the establishment of relations, every thought involving relation, difference, and (as Spencer adds) likeness. Hence the absolute, the idea of which excludes every relation, is entirely beyond the reach of an intelligence which is concerned with relations alone, and which always consists in discrimination, limitation, and assimilation–it is trebly unthinkable. Therefore: Religion and Science agree in the supreme truth that the human understanding is capable of relative knowledge only or of a knowledge of the relative (Relativity). Nevertheless, according to Spencer, it is too much to conclude with the thinkers just mentioned, that the idea of the absolute is a mere expression for inconceivability, and its existence problematical. The nature of the absolute is unknowable, but not the existence of a basis for the relative and phenomenal. The considerations which speak in favor of the relativity of knowledge and its limitation to phenomena, argue also the existence of a non-relative, whose phenomenon the relative is; the idea of the relative and the phenomenal posits _eo ipso_ the existence of the absolute as its correlative, which manifests itself in phenomena. We have at least an indefinite, though not a definite, consciousness of the Unknowable as the Unknown Cause, the Universal Power, and on this is founded our ineradicable belief in objective reality.
All knowledge is limited to the relative, and consists in increasing generalization: the apex of this pyramid is formed by philosophy. Common knowledge is un-unified knowledge; science is partially unified knowledge; philosophy, which combines the highest generalizations of the sciences into a supreme one, is completely unified knowledge. The data of philosophy are–besides an Unknowable Power–the existence of knowable likenesses and differences among its manifestations, and a resulting segregation of the manifestations into those of subject and object. Further, derivative data are space (relations of coexistence), time (relations of irreversible sequence), matter (coexistent positions that offer resistance), motion (which involves space, time, and matter), and force, the ultimate of ultimates, on which all others depend, and from our primordial experiences of which all the other modes of consciousness are derivable. Similarly the ultimate primary truth is the _persistence of force_, from which, besides the indestructibility of matter and the continuity of (actual or potential) motion, still further truths may be deduced: the persistence of relations among forces or the uniformity of law, the transformation and equivalence of (mental and social as well as of physical) forces, the law of the direction of motion (along the line of least resistance, or the line of greatest traction, or their resultant), and the unceasing rhythm of motion. Beyond these analytic truths, however, philosophy demands a law of universal synthesis. This must be the law of _the continuous redistribution of matter and motion_, for each single thing, and the whole universe as well, is involved in a (continuously repeated) double process of _evolution_ and _dissolution_, the former consisting in the integration of matter[1] and the dissipation of motion, the latter in the absorption of motion and the disintegration of matter. The law of evolution, in its complete development, then runs: “Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.” This is inductively supported by illustrations from every region of nature and all departments of mental and social life; and, further, shown deducible from the ultimate principle of the persistence of force, through the mediation of several corollaries to it, viz., the instability of the homogeneous under the varied incidence of surrounding forces, the multiplication of effects by action and reaction, and segregation. Finally the principle of equilibration indicates the impassable limit at which evolution passes over into dissolution, until the eternal round is again begun. If it may be said of Hegel himself, that he vainly endeavored to master the concrete fullness of reality with formal concepts, the criticism is applicable to Spencer in still greater measure. The barren schemata of concentration, passage into heterogeneity, adaptation, etc., which are taken from natural science, and which are insufficient even in their own field, prove entirely impotent for the mastery of the complex and peculiar phenomena of spiritual life.
[Footnote 1: Organic growth is the concentration of elements before diffused; cf. the union of nomadic families into settled tribes.]
Armed with these principles, however, Mr. Spencer advances to the discussion of the several divisions of “Special Philosophy.” Passing over inorganic nature, he finds his task in the interpretation of the phenomena of life, mind, and society in terms of matter, motion, and force under the general evolution formula. This procedure, however, must not be understood as in any wise materialistic. Such an interpretation would be a misrepresentation, it is urged, for the strict relativity of the standpoint limits all conclusions to phenomena, and permits no inference concerning the nature of the “Unknowable.” The _Principles of Biology_ take up the phenomena of life. Life is defined as the “continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.” No attempt is made to explain its origin, yet (in the words of Mr. Sully) it is clear that the lowest forms of life are regarded as continuous in their essential nature with sub-vital processes. The evolution of living organisms, from the lowest to the highest, with the development of all their parts and functions, results from the co-operation of various factors, external and internal, whose action is ultimately reducible to the universal law.
The field of _psychology_ is intimately allied with biology, and yet istinguished from it. Mental life is a subdivision of life in general, and may be subsumed under the general definition; but while biological truths concern the connection between internal phenomena, with but tacit or occasional recognition of the environment, psychology has to do neither with the internal connection nor the external connection, but “the connection between these two connections.” Psychology in its subjective aspect, again, is a field entirely _sui generis_. The substance of mind, conceived as the underlying substratum of mental states, is unknowable; but the character of those states of which mind, as we know it, is composed, is a legitimate subject of inquiry. If this be carefully investigated, it seems highly probable that the ultimate unit of consciousness is something “of the same order as that which we call a nervous shock.” Mind is proximately composed of feelings and the relations between feelings; from these, revived, associated, and integrated, the whole fabric of consciousness is built up. There is, then, no sharp distinction between the several phases of mind. If we trace its development objectively, in terms of the correspondence between inner and outer phenomena, we find a gradual progress from the less to the more complex, from the lower to the higher, without a break. Reflex action, instinct, memory, reason, are simply stages in the process. All is dependent on experience. Even the forms of knowledge, which are _a priori_ to the individual, are the product of experience in the race, integrated and transmitted by heredity, and become organic in the nervous structure. In general the correspondence of inner and outer in which mental life consists is mediated by the nervous organism. The structure and functions of this condition consciousness and furnish the basis for the interpretation of mental evolution in terms of “evolution at large, regarded as a process of physical transformation.” Nevertheless mental phenomena and bodily phenomena are not identical, consciousness is not motion. They are both phenomenal modes of the unknowable, disparate in themselves, and giving no indication of the ultimate nature of the absolute. Subjective analysis of human consciousness yields further proof of the unity of mental composition. All mental action is ultimately reducible to “the continuous differentiation and integration of states of consciousness.” The criterion of truth is the inconceivability of the negation. Tried by this test, as by all others, realism is superior to idealism, though in that “transfigured” form which implies objective existence without implying the possibility of any further knowledge concerning it,–hence in a form entirely congruous with the conclusion reached by many other routes.
_Sociology_ deals with super-organic evolution, which involves the co-ordinated actions of many individuals. To understand the social unit, we must study primitive man, especially the ideas which he forms of himself, of other beings, and of the surrounding world. The conception of a mind or other-self is gradually evolved through observation of natural phenomena which favor the notion of duality, especially the phenomena of sleep, dreams, swoons, and death. Belief in the influence of these doubles of the dead on the fortunes of the living leads to sorcery, prayer, and praise. Ancestor-worship is the ultimate source of all forms of religion; to it can be traced even such aberrant developments as fetichism and idolatry, animal-, plant-, and nature-worship. Thus the primitive man feels himself related not only to his living fellows, but to multitudes of supernatural beings about him. The fear of the living becomes the root of the political, and the fear of the dead the root of the religious, control. A society is an organic entity. Though differing from an individual organism in many ways, it yet resembles it in the permanent relations among its component parts. The Domestic Relations, by which the maintenance of the species is now secured, have come from various earlier and less developed forms; the militant type of society is accompanied by a lower, the industrial type by a higher stage of this development. Ceremonial observance is the most primitive kind of government, and the kind from which the political and religious governments have differentiated. Political organization is necessary in order to co-operation for ends which benefit the society directly, and the individual only indirectly. The ultimate political force is the feeling of the community, including as its largest part ancestral feeling. Many facts combine to obscure this truth, but however much it may be obscured, public feeling remains the primal source of authority. The various forms and instruments of government have grown up through processes in harmony with the general law. The two antithetical types of society are the militant and the industrial–the former implies compulsory co-operation under more or less despotic rule, with governmental assumption of functions belonging to the individual and a minimizing of individual initiative; in the latter, government is reduced to a minimum and best conducted by representative agencies, public organizations are largely replaced by private organizations, the individual is freer and looks less to the state for protection and for aid. The fundamental conditions of the highest social development is the cessation of war. The ideas and sentiments at the basis of Ecclesiastical Institutions have been naturally derived from the ghost-theory already described. The goal of religious development is the final rejection of all anthropomorphic conceptions of the First Cause, until the harmony of religion and science shall be reached in the veneration of the Unknowable. The remaining parts of Mr. Spencer’s Sociology will treat of Professional Institutions, Industrial Institutions, Linguistic Progress, Intellectual, Moral, and Aesthetic Progress.
The subject matter of _ethics_ is the conduct termed good or bad. Conduct is the adjustment of acts to ends. The evolution of conduct is marked by increasing perfection in the adjustment of acts to the furtherance of individual life, the life of offspring, and social life. The ascription of ethical character to the highly evolved conduct of man in relation to these ends implies the fundamental assumption, that “life is good or bad according as it does, or does not, bring a surplus of agreeable feeling.” The ideal of moral science is rational deduction: a rational utilitarianism can be attained only by the recognition of the necessary laws–physical, biological, psychological, and sociological–which condition the results of actions; among these the biological laws have been largely neglected in the past, though they are of the utmost importance as furnishing the link between life and happiness. The “psychological view,” again, explains the origin of conscience. In the course of development man comes to recognize the superiority of the higher and more representative feelings as guides to action; this form of self-restraint, however, is characteristic of the non-moral restraints as well, of the political, social, and religious controls. From these the moral control proper has emerged–differing from them in that it refers to intrinsic instead of extrinsic effects–and the element of coerciveness in them, transferred, has generated the feeling of moral compulsion (which, however, “will diminish as fast as moralization increases”).
Such a rational ethics, based on the laws which condition welfare rather than on a direct estimation of happiness, and premising the relativity of all pains and pleasures, escapes fundamental objections to the earlier hedonism (_e.g._, those to the hedonic calculus); and, combining the valuable elements in the divergent ethical theories, yields satisfactory principles for the decision of ethical problems. Egoism takes precedence of altruism; yet it is in turn dependent on this, and the two, on due consideration, are seen to be co-essential. Entirely divorced from the other, neither is legitimate, and a compromise is the only possibility; while in the future advancing evolution will bring the two into complete harmony. The goal of the whole process will be the ideal man in the ideal society, the scientific anticipation of which, absolute ethics, promises guidance for the relative and imperfect ethics of the transition period.
Examination of the actual, not the professed, ideas and sentiments of men reveals wide variation in moral judgments. This is especially true of the “pro-ethical” consciousnesses of external authorities, coercions, and opinions–religious, political, and social–by which the mass of mankind are governed; and is broadly due to variation in social conditions. Where the need of external co-operation predominates the ethics of enmity develops; where internal, peaceful co-operation is the chief social need the ethics of amity results: and the evolution principle enables us to infer that, as among certain small tribes in the past, so in the great cultivated nations of the future, the life of amity will unqualifiedly prevail. The Ethics of Individual Life shows the application of moral judgments to all actions which affect individual welfare. The very fact that some deviations from normal life are now morally disapproved, implies the existence of both egoistic and altruistic sanctions for the moral approval of all acts which conduce to normal living and the disapproval of all minor deviations, though for the most part these have hitherto remained unconsidered. Doubtless, however, moral control must here be somewhat indefinite; and even scientific observation and analysis must leave the production of a perfectly regulated conduct to “the organic adjustment of constitution to [social] conditions.”
The Ethics of Social Life includes justice and beneficence. Human justice emerges from sub-human or animal justice, whose law (passing over gratis benefits to offspring) is “that each individual shall receive the benefits and evils of its own nature and its consequent conduct.” This is the law of human justice, also, but here it is more limited than before by the non-interference which gregariousness requires, and by the increasing need for the sacrifice of individuals for the good of the species. The egoistic sentiment of justice arises from resistance to interference with free action; the altruistic develops through sympathy under social conditions, these being maintained meanwhile by a “pro-altruistic” sentiment, into which dread of retaliation, of social reprobation, of legal punishment, and of divine vengeance enter as component parts. The idea of justice emerges gradually from the sentiment of justice: it has two elements, one brute or positive, with inequality as its ideal, one human or negative, the ideal of which is equality. In early times the former of these was unduly appreciated, as in later times the latter, the true conception includes both, the idea of equality being applied to the limits and the idea of inequality to the benefits of action. Thus the formula of justice becomes: “Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man “–a law which finds its authority in the facts, that it is an _a priori_ dictum of “consciousness after it has been subject to the discipline of prolonged social life,” and that it is also deducible from the conditions of the maintenance of life at large and of social life. From this law follow various particular corollaries or rights, all of which coincide with ordinary ethical concepts and have legal enactments corresponding to them. Political rights so-called do not exist; government is simply a system of appliances for the maintenance of private rights. Both the nature of the state and its constitution are variable: the militant type requires centralization and a coercive constitution; the industrial type implies a wider distribution of political power, but requires a representation of interests rather than a representation of individuals. Government develops as a result of war, and its function of protection against internal aggression arises by differentiation from its primary function of external defense. These two, then, constitute the essential duties of the state; when war ceases the first falls away, and its sole function becomes the maintenance of the conditions under which each individual may “gain the fullest life compatible with the fullest life of fellow-citizens.” All beyond this, all interference with this life of the individual, whether by way of assistance, restraint, or education, proves in the end both unjust and impolitic. The remaining parts of the _Ethics_ will treat of Negative and Positive Beneficence.
If J.S. Mill and Spencer (the latter of whom, moreover, had announced evolution as a world-law before the appearance of Darwin), move in a direction akin to positivism, the same is true, further, of G.H. Lewes (1817-78; _History of Philosophy_, 5th ed., 1880; _Problems of Life and Mind_, 1874 _seq_).
Turning to the discussion of particular disciplines, we may mention as prominent among English logicians,[1] besides Hamilton, Whewell, and Mill, Whately, Mansel, Thomson, De Morgan, Boole (_An Investigation of the Laws of Thought_, 1854); W.S. Jevons (_The Principles of Science_, 2d ed., 1877); Venn (_Symbolic Logic_, 1881; _Empirical Logic_, 1889), Bradley, and Bosanquet. Among more recent investigators in the field of psychology we may name Carpenter, Ferrier, Maudsley, Galton, Ward, and Sully (_The Human Mind_, 1892), and in the field of comparative psychology, Lubbock, Romanes (_Mental Evolution in Animals_, 1883; _Mental Evolution in Man_, 1889), and Morgan (_Animal Life and Intelligence_, 1891). Among ethical writers the following, besides Spencer and Green, hold a foremost place: H. Sidgwick _(The Methods of Ethics_, 4th ed., 1890), Leslie Stephen _(The Science of Ethics_, 1882), and James Martineau _(Types of Ethical Theory_, 3d ed., 1891). The quarterly review _Mind_ (vols. i.-xvi. 1876-91, edited by G. Croom Robertson; new series from 1892, edited by G.F. Stout) has since its foundation played an important part in the development of English thought.
[Footnote 1: Cf. Nedich, _Die Lehre von der Quantifikation des Prädikats_ in vol. iii. of Wundt’s _Philosophische Studien_; L. Liard, _Les Logiciens Anglais Contemporains_, 1878; Al. Riehl in vol. i. of the _Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie_, 1877 [cf. also appendix A to the English translation of Ueberweg’s _Logic_.–TR.].]
German idealism, for which S.T. Coleridge (died 1834) and Thomas Carlyle (died 1881) endeavored to secure an entrance into England, for a long time gained ground there but slowly. Later years, however, have brought increasing interest in German speculation, and much of recent thinking shows the influence of Kantian and Hegelian principles. As pioneer of this movement we may name J.H. Stirling _(The Secret of Hegel_, 1865); and as its most prominent representatives John Caird _(An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion_, 1880), Edward Caird _(The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant_, 1889; _The Evolution of Religion_, 1893), both in Glasgow, and T.H. Green (1836-82; professor at Oxford; _Prolegomena to Ethics_, 3d ed., 1887; _Works_, edited by Nettleship, 3 vols., 1885-88).[1] In opposition to the hereditary empiricism of English philosophy–which appears in Spencer and Lewes, as it did in Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, though in somewhat altered form–Green maintains that all experience is constituted by intelligible relations. Knowledge, therefore, is possible only for a correlating self-consciousness; while nature, as a system of relations, is likewise dependent on a spiritual principle, of which it is the expression. Thus the central conception of Green’s philosophy becomes, “that the universe is a single eternal activity or energy, of which it is the essence to be self-conscious, that is, to be itself and not itself in one” (Nettleship). To this universal consciousness we are related as manifestations or “communications” under the limitations of our physical organization. As such we are free, that is, self-determined, determined by nothing from without. The moral ideal is self-realization or perfection, the progressive reproduction of the divine self-consciousness. This is possible only in terms of a development of persons, for as a self-conscious personality the divine spirit can reproduce itself in persons alone; and, since “social life is to personality what language is to thought,” the realization of the moral ideal implies life in common. The nearer determination of the ideal is to be sought in the manifestations of the eternal spirit as they have been given in the moral history of individuals and nations. This shows what has already been implied in the relation of morality to personality and society, that moral good must first of all be a common good, one in which the permanent well-being of self includes the well-being of others also. This is the germ of morality, the development of which yields, first, a gradual extension of the area of common good, and secondly, a fuller and more concrete determination of its content. Further representatives of this movement are W. Wallace, Adamson, Bradley; A. Seth is an ex-member.
[Footnote 1: Cf. on Green the Memoir by Nettleship in vol. iii. of the _Works_.]
The first and greatest of American philosophical thinkers was the Calvinistic theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-58; treatise on the _Freedom of Will_, 1754; _Works_, 10 vols., edited by Dwight, 1830). Edwards’s deterministic doctrine found numerous adherents (among them his son, who bore his father’s name, died 1801) as well as strenuous opponents (Tappan, Whedon, Hazard among later names), and essentially contributed to the development of philosophical thought in the United States. For a considerable period this crystallized for the most part around elements derived from British thinkers, especially from Locke and the Scottish School. In 1829 James Marsh called attention to German speculation [1] by his American edition of Coleridge’s _Aids to Reflection_, with an important introduction from his own hand. Later W.E. Channing (1780-1842), the head of the Unitarian movement, attracted many young and brilliant minds, the most noted of whom, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), became a leader among the New England transcendentalists. Metaphysical idealism has, perhaps, met with less resistance in America than in England. Kant and Hegel have been eagerly studied (G.S. Morris, died 1889; C.C. Everett; J. Watson in Canada; Josiah Royce, _The Spirit of Modern Philosophy_, 1892; and others); and _The Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, edited by W.T. Harris, has since 1867 furnished a rallying point for idealistic interests. The influence of Lotze has also been considerable (B.P. Bowne in Boston). Sympathy with German speculation, however, has not destroyed the naturally close connection with the work of writers who use the English tongue. Thus Spencer’s writings have had a wide currency, and his system numbers many disciples, though these are less numerous among students of philosophy by profession (John Fiske, _Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy_, 1874).
[Footnote 1: Cf. Porter, _op. cit._]
In the latest decades the broadening of the national life, the increasing acquaintance with foreign thought, and the rapid development of university work have greatly enlarged and deepened the interest in philosophical pursuits. This is manifested most clearly in the field of psychology, including especially the “new” or “physiological” psychology, and the history of philosophy, though indications of pregnant thought in other departments, as ethics and the philosophy of religion, and even of independent construction, are not wanting. Among psychologists of the day we may mention G.S. Hall, editor of _The American Journal of Psychology_ (1887 seq.), G.T. Ladd (_Elements of Physiological Psychology_, 1887), and William James (_Principles of Psychology_, 1890). _The International Journal of Ethics_ (Philadelphia, 1890 seq.), edited by S. Burns Weston, is “devoted to the advancement of ethical knowledge and practice”; among the foreign members of its editorial committee are Jodl and Von Gizycki. The weekly journal of popular philosophy, _The Open Court_, published in Chicago, has for its object the reconciliation of religion and science; the quarterly, _The Monist_ (1890 seq.), published by the same company under the direction of Paul Carus (_The Soul of Man_, 1891), the establishment of a monistic view of the world. Several journals, among them the _Educational Review_ (1891 seq., edited by N.M. Butler), point to a growing interest in pedagogical inquiry. _The American Philosophical Review_ (1892 seq., edited by J.G. Schurman, _The Ethical Import of Darwinism_, 1887) is a comprehensive exponent of American philosophic thought.
%4. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Holland.%
In _Sweden_ an empirical period represented by Leopold (died 1829) and Th. Thorild (died 1808), and based upon Locke and Rousseau, was followed, after the introduction of Kant by D. Boëthius, 1794, by a drift toward idealism. This was represented in an extreme form by B. Höijer (died 1812), a contemporary and admirer of Fichte, who defended the right of philosophical construction, and more moderately by Christofer Jacob Böstrom (1797-1866), the most important systematic thinker of his country. As predecessors of Böstrom we may mention Biberg (died 1827), E.G. Geijer (died 1846), and S. Grubbe (died 1853), like him professors in Upsala, and of his pupils, S. Ribbing, known in Germany by his peculiar conception of the Platonic doctrine of ideas (German translation, 1863-64), the moralist Sahlin (1877), the historian, of Swedish philosophy[1] (1873 seq.) A. Nyblaeus of Lund, and H. Edfeldt of Upsala, the editor of Böstrom’s works (1883).
[Footnote 1: Cf. Höffding, _Die Philosophie in Schweden_ in the _Philosophische Monatshefte_, vol. xv. 1879, p. 193 seq.]
Böstrom’s philosophy is a system of self-activity and personalism which recalls Leibnitz and Krause. The absolute or being is characterized as a concrete, systematically articulated, self-conscious unity, which dwells with its entire content in each of its moments, and whose members both bear the character of the whole and are immanent in one another, standing in relations of organic inter-determination. The antithesis between unity and plurality is only apparent, present only for the divisive view of finite consciousness. God is infinite, fully determinate personality (for determination is not limitation), a system of self-dependent living beings, differing in degree, in which we, as to our true being, are eternally and unchangeably contained. Every being is a definite, eternal, and living thought of God; thinking beings with their states and activities alone exist; all that is real is spiritual, personal. Besides this true, suprasensible world of Ideas, which is elevated above space, time, motion, change, and development, and which has not arisen by creation or a process of production, there exists for man, but only for him–man is formally perfect, it is true, but materially imperfect (since he represents the real from a limited standpoint)–a sensuous world of phenomena as the sphere of his activity. To this he himself belongs, and in it he is spontaneously to develop the suprasensible content which is eternally given him (i.e., his true nature), namely, to raise it from the merely potential condition of obscure presentiment to clear, conscious actuality. Freedom is the power to overcome our imperfection by means of our true nature, to realize our suprasensible capacities, to become for ourselves what we are in ourselves (in God). The ethics of Böstrom is distinguished from the Kantian ethics, to which it is related, chiefly by the fact that it seeks to bring sensibility into a more than merely negative relation to reason. Society is an eternal, and also a personal, Idea in God. The most perfect form of government is constitutional monarchy; the ideal goal of history, the establishment of a system of states embracing all mankind.
J. Borelius of Lund is an Hegelian, but differs from the master in regard to the doctrine of the contradiction. The Hegelian philosophy has adherents in _Norway_ also, as G.V. Lyng (died 1884; _System of Fundamental Ideas_), M.J. Monrad (_Tendencies of Modern Thought_, 1874, German translation, 1879), both professors in Christiania, and Monrad’s pupil G. Kent (_Hegel’s Doctrine of the Nature of Experience_, 1891).
The _Danish_ philosophy of the nineteenth century has been described by Höffding in the second volume of the _Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie_, 1888. He begins with the representatives of the speculative movement: Steffens (see above), Niels Treschow (1751-1833), Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851; _Spirit in Nature_, German translation, Munich, 1850-51), and Frederik Christian Sibbern (1785-1872). A change was brought about by the philosophers of religion Sören Kierkegaard (1813-55) and Rasmus Nielsen (1809-84; _Philosophy of Religion_, 1869), who opposed speculative idealism with a strict dualism of knowledge and faith, and were in turn opposed by Georg Brandes (born 1842) and Hans Bröchner (1820-75). Among younger investigators the Copenhagen professors, Harald Höffding[1] (born 1843) and Kristian Kroman[2] (born 1846) stand in the first rank.
[Footnote 1: Höffding: _The Foundations of Human Ethics_, 1876, German translation, 1880; _Outlines of Psychology_, 1882, English translation by Lowndes, 1891, from the German translation, 1887; _Ethics_, 1887, German translation by Bendixen, 1888.]
[Footnote 2: Kroman: _Our Knowledge of Nature_, German translation, 1883; _A Brief Logic and Psychology_, German translation by Bendixen, 1890.]
Land (_Mind_, vol. iii. 1878) and G. von Antal (1888) have written on philosophy in _Holland_. Down to the middle of the nineteenth century the field was occupied by an idealism based upon the ancients, in particular upon Plato: Franz Hemsterhuis (1721-90; _Works_, new ed., 1846-50), and the philologists Wyttenbach and Van Heusde. Then Cornelius Wilhelm Opzoomer[3] (1821-92; professor in Utrecht) brought in a new movement. Opzoomer favors empiricism. He starts from Mill and Comte, but goes beyond them in important points, and assigns faith a field of its own beside knowledge. In opposition to apriorism he seeks to show that experience is capable of yielding universal and necessary truths; that space, time, and causality are received along with the content of thought; that mathematics itself is based upon experience; and that the method of natural science, especially deduction, must be applied to the mental sciences. The philosophy of mind considers man as an individual being, in his connection with others, in relation to a higher being, and in his development; accordingly it divides into psychology (which includes logic, aesthetics, and ethology), sociology, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of history. Central to Opzoomer’s system is his doctrine of the five sources of knowledge: Sensation, the feeling of pleasure and pain, aesthetic, moral, and religious feeling. If we build on the foundation of the first three alone, we end in materialism; if we leave the last unused, we reach positivism; if we make religious feeling the sole judge of truth, mysticism is the outcome. The criteria of science are utility and progress. These are still wanting in the mental sciences, in which the often answered but never decided questions continually recur, because we have neither derived the principles chosen as the basis of the deduction from an exact knowledge of the phenomena nor tested the results by experience. The causes of this defective condition can only be removed by imitating the study of nature: we must learn that no conclusions can be reached except from facts, and that we are to strive after knowledge of phenomena and their laws alone. We have no right to assume an “essence” of things beside and in addition to phenomena, which reveals itself in them or hides behind them. Pupils of Opzoomer are his successor in his Utrecht chair, Van der Wyck, and Pierson. We may also mention J.P.N. Land, who has done good service in editing the works of Spinoza and of Geulincx, and the philosopher of religion Rauwenhoff (1888).
[Footnote 1: Opzoomer: _The Method of Science_, a Handbook of Logic, German translation by Schwindt, 1852; _Religion_, German translation by Mook, 1869.]
On the system of the Hungarian philosopher Cyrill Horváth (died 1884 at Pesth) see the essay by E. Nemes in the _Zeitschrift für Philosophie_, vol. lxxxviii, 1886. Since 1889 a review, _Problems of Philosophy and Psychology_, has appeared at Moscow in Russian, under the direction of Professor N. von Grot.
CHAPTER XVI.
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY SINCE THE DEATH OF HEGEL.
With Hegel the glorious dynasty which, with a strong hand, had guided the fate of German philosophy since the conclusion of the preceding century disappears. From his death (1831) we may date the second period of post-Kantian philosophy,[1] which is markedly and unfavorably distinguished from the first by a decline in the power of speculative creation and by a division of effort. If previous to this the philosophical public, comprising all the cultured, had been eagerly occupied with problems in common, and had followed with unanimous interest the work of those who were laboring at them, during the last fifty years the interest of wider circles in philosophical questions has grown much less active; almost every thinker goes his own way, giving heed only to congenial voices; the inner connection of the schools has been broken down; the touch with thinkers of different views has been lost. The latest decades have been the first to bring a change for the better, in so far as new rallying points of philosophical interest have been created by the neo-Kantian movement, by the systems of Lotze and Von Hartmann, by the impulse toward the philosophy of nature proceeding from Darwinism, by energetic labors in the field of practical philosophy, and by new methods of investigation in psychology.
[Footnote 1: On philosophy since 1831 cf. vol. iii. of J.E. Erdmann’s _History_; Ueberweg, _Grundriss_, part iii. §§ 37-49 (English translation, vol. ii. pp. 292-516); Lange, _History of Materialism_; B. Erdmann, _Die Philosophie der Gegenwart_ in the _Deutsche Rundschau_, vols. xix., xx., 1879, June and July numbers; (A. Krohn,) _Streifzüge durch die Philosophie der Gegenwart_ in the _Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik_, vols. lxxxvii., lxxxix., 1885-86; (Burt, _History of Modern Philosophy_, 1892), also the third volume of Windelband’s _Geschichte der neueren Philosophie_, when it appears.]
%1. From the Division of the Hegelian School to the Materialistic Controversy.%
A decade after the philosophy of Hegel had entered on its supremacy a division in the school was called forth by Strauss’s _Life of Jesus_(1835). The differences were brought to light by the discussion of religious problems, in regard to which Hegel had not expressed himself with sufficient distinctness. The relation of knowledge and faith, as he had defined it, admitted of variant interpretations and deductions, and this in favor of Church doctrine as well as in opposition to it. Philosophy has the same content as religion, but in a different form, _i.e._, not in the form of representation, but in the form of the concept–it transforms dogma into speculative truth. The conservative Hegelians hold fast to the identity of content in the two modes of cognition; the liberals, to the alteration in form, which, they assert, brings an alteration in content with it. According to Hegel the lower stage is “sublated” in the higher, _i.e._, conserved as well as negated. The orthodox members of the school emphasize the conservation of religious doctrines, their justification from the side of the philosopher; the progressists, their negation, their overcoming by the speculative concept. The general question, whether the ecclesiastical meaning of a dogma is retained or to be abandoned in its transformation into a philosopheme, divides into three special questions, the anthropological, the soteriogical, and the theological. These are: whether on Hegelian principles immortality is to be conceived as a continuance of individual existence on the art of particular spirits, or only as the eternity of the universal reason; whether by the God-man the person of Christ is to be understood, or, on the other hand, the human species, the Idea of Humanity; whether personality belongs to the Godhead before the creation of the world, or whether it first attains to self-consciousness in human spirits, whether Hegel was a theist or a pantheist, whether he teaches the transcendence or the immanence of God. The Old Hegelians defend the orthodox interpretation; the Young Hegelians oppose it. The former, Göschel, Gabler, Hinrichs, Schaller (died 1868; _History of the Philosophy of Nature since Bacon_, 1841 _seq_.), J.E. Erdmann in Halle (1805-92; _Body and Soul_, 1837; _Psychological Letters_, 1851, 6th ed., 1882; _Earnest Sport_, 1871, 4th ed., 1890), form, according to Strauss’s parliamentary comparison carried out by Michelet, the “right”; the latter, Strauss, Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and A. Ruge, who, with Echtermeyer, edited the _Hallesche_, afterward _Deutsche, Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst_, 1838-42, the “left.” Between them, and forming the “center,” stand Karl Rosenkranz[1] in Königsberg (1805-79), C.L. Michelet in Berlin (p. 16; _Hegel, the Unrefuted World-philosopher_, 1870; _System of Philosophy_, 1876 _seq_.), and the theologians Marheineke (a pupil of Daub at Heidelberg) and W. Vatke (_Philosophy of Religion_, edited by Preiss, 1888). Contrasted with these is the group of semi- or pseudo-Hegelians (p. 596), who declare themselves in accord with the theistic doctrines of the right, but admit that the left represents Hegel’s own opinion, or at least the correct deductions from his position.
[Footnote 1: K. Rosenkranz: _Psychology_, 1837, 3d ed., 1863; _Science of the Logical Idea_, 1858; _Studies_, 1839 _seq_., _New Studies_, 1875 _seq_.; _Aesthetics of the Ugly_, 1853; several works on the history of poetry.]
The following should also be mentioned as Hegelians: the philosopher of history, Von Cieszkowski, the pedagogical writer, Thaulow (at Kiel, died 1883), the philosopher of religion and of law, A. Lasson at Berlin, the aesthetic writers Hotho, Friedrich Theodor Vischer[1] (1807-87), and Max Schasler (_Critical History of Aesthetics_, 1872; _Aesthetics_, 1886), the historians of philosophy, Schwegler (died 1857; _History of Greek Philosophy_, 1859, 4th ed., 1886, edited by Karl Köstlin, whose _Aesthetics_ appeared 1869), Eduard Zeller[2] of Berlin (born 1814), and Kuno Fischer (born 1824; 1856-72 professor at Jena, since then at Heidelberg; _Logic and Metaphysics_, 2d ed., 1865). While Weissenborn (died 1874) is influenced by Schleiermacher also, and Zeller and Fischer strive back toward Kant, Johannes Volkelt[3] in Würzburg (born 1848), who started from Hegel and advanced through Schopenhauer and Hartmann, has of late years established an independent noëtical position and has done good service by his energetic opposition to positivism _(Das Denken als Hülfvorstellungs–Thätigkeit und als Aupassungsvorgang_ in the _Zeitschrift für Philosophic_, vols. xcvi., xcvii., 1889-90).
[Footnote 1: Vischer: _Aesthetics_, 1846-58; _Critical Excursions_, 1844 _seq_.; several _Hefte “Altes and Neues_”. The diary in the second part of the novel _Auch Einer_ develops an original pantheistic view of the world.]
[Footnote 2: Zeller: _The Philosophy of the Greeks in its Historical Development_, 5 vols., 3d ed., vol. i. 5th ed. (English translation, 1868 _seq_.); three collections of _Addresses and Essays_, 1865, 1877, 1884.]
[Footnote 3: Volkelt: _The Phantasy in Dreams_, 1875; _Kant’s Theory of Knowledge_, 1879; _On the Possibility of Metaphysics_, inaugural address at Basle, 1884; _Experience and Thought, Critical Foundation of the Theory of Knowledge_, 1886; _Lectures Introductory to the Philosophy of the Present Time_ (delivered in Frankfort on the Main), 1892.]
The leaders of the Hegelian left require more detailed consideration. In David Friedrich Strauss[1] (1808-74, born and died at Ludwigsburg) the philosophy of religion becomes a historical criticism of the Bible and of dogmatics. The biblical narratives are, in great part, not history (this has been the common error alike of the super-naturalistic and of the rationalistic interpreters), but myths, that is, suprasensible facts presented in the form of history and in symbolic language. It is evident from the contradictions in the narratives and the impossibility of miracles that we are not here concerned with actual events. The myths possess (speculative, absolute) truth, but no (historical) reality. They are unintentional creations of the popular imagination; the spirit of the community speaks in the authors of the Gospels, using the historical factor (the life-history of Jesus) with mythical embellishments as an investiture for a supra-historical, eternal truth (the speculative Idea of incarnation). The God become man, in which the infinite and the finite, the divine nature and the human, are united, is the human race. The Idea of incarnation manifests itself in a multitude of examples which supplement one another, instead of pouring forth its whole fullness in a single one. The (real) Idea of the race is to be substituted for a single individual as the subject of the predicates (resurrection, ascension, etc.) which the Church ascribes to Christ. The Son of God is _Humanity_.
[Footnote 1: Strauss: _The Life of Jesus_, 1835-36, 4th ed., 1840 [English translation by George Eliot, 2d. ed., 1893]; the same “for the German People,” 1864 [English translation, 1865]; _Christian Dogmatics_, 1840-41; _Voltaire_, 1870; _Collected Writings_, 12 vols., edited by Zeller, 1876-78. On Strauss cf. Zeller, 1874 [English, 1874], and Hausrath, 1876-78.]
In his second principal work Strauss criticises the dogmas of Christianity as sharply as he had criticised the Gospel narrative in the first one. The historical development of these has of itself effected their destruction: the history of dogma is the objective criticism of dogma. Christianity and philosophy, theism and pantheism, dualism and immanence, are irreconcilable opposites. To be able to know we must cease to believe. Dogma is the product of the unphilosophical, uncultured consciousness; belief in revelation, only for those who have not yet risen to reason. In the transformation of religious representations into philosophical Ideas nothing specifically representative is left; the form of representation must be actually overcome. The Christian contraposition of the present world and that which is beyond is explained by the fact that the sensuo-rational spirit of man, so long as it does not philosophically know itself as the unity of the infinite and the finite, but only feels itself as finite, sensuo-empirical consciousness, projects the infinite, which it has in itself, as though this were something foreign, looks on it as something beyond the world. This separation of faith is entirely unphilosophical; it is the mission of the philosopher to reduce all that is beyond the world to the present. Thus for him immortality is not something to come, but the spirit’s own power to rise above the finite to the Idea. And like future existence, so the transcendent God also disappears. The absolute is the universal unity of the world, which posits and sublates the individual as its modes. God is the being in all existence, the life in all that lives, the thought in all that think: he does not stand as an individual person beside and above other persons, but is the infinite which personifies itself and attains to consciousness in human spirits, and this from eternity; before there was a humanity of earth there were spirits on other stars, in whom God reflected himself.
Three decades later Strauss again created a sensation by his confession of materialism and atheism, _The Old Faith and the New_, 1872 (since the second edition, “With a Postscript as Preface”),[1] in which he continues the conflict against religious dualism. The question “Are we”–the cultured men of the day–“still Christians?” is answered in the negative. Christianity is a cult of poverty, despising the world, and antagonistic to labor and culture; but we have learned to esteem science and art, riches and acquisition, as the chief levers of culture and of human progress. Christianity dualistically tears apart body and soul, time and eternity, the world and God; we need no Creator, for the life-process has neither beginning nor end. The world is framed for the highest reason, it is true, but it has not been framed by a highest reason. Our highest Idea is the All, which is conformed to law, and instinct with life and reason, and our feeling toward the universe–the consciousness of dependence on its laws–exercises no less of ethical influence, is no less full of reverence, and no less exposed to injury from an irreverent pessimism, than the feeling of the devout of the old type toward their God. Hence the answer to the second question “Have we still a religion?” maybe couched in the affirmative. The new faith does not need a _cultus_ and a Church. Since the dry services of the free congregations offer nothing for the fancy and the spirit, the edification of the heart must be accomplished in other ways–by participation in the interests of humanity, in the national life, and, not last, by aesthetic enjoyment. Thus in his last work, which in two appendices reaches a discussion of the great German poets and musicians, the old man returns to a thought to which he had given earlier expression, that the religious _cultus_ should be replaced by the _cultus_ of genius.
[Footnote 1: English translation by Mathilde Blind, 1873.]
As Strauss went over from Hegelianism to pantheism, so Ludwig Feuerbach[1] (1804-72), a son of the great jurist, Anselm Feuerbach, after he had for a short time moved in the same direction, took the opposite, the individualistic course, only, like Strauss, to end at last in materialism. “My first thought,” as he himself describes the course of his development, “was God; my second, reason; my third and last, man.” As theology has been overcome by Hegel’s philosophy of reason, so this in turn must give place to the philosophy of man. “The new philosophy makes man, including nature as his basis, the highest and sole subject of philosophy, and, consequently, anthropology the universal science.” Only that which is immediately self-evident is true and divine. But only that which is sensible is evident (_sonnenklar)_; it is only where sensibility begins that all doubt and conflict cease. Sensible beings alone are true, real beings; existence in space and time is alone existence; truth, reality, and sensibility are identical. While the old philosophy took for its starting point the principle, “I am an abstract, a merely thinking being; the body does not belong to my essence,” the new philosophy, on the other hand, begins with the principle, “I am a real, a sensible being; the body in its totality is my ego, my essence itself.” Feuerbach, however, uses the concept of sensibility in so wide and vague a sense that, supported–or deceived–by the ambiguity of the word sensation, he includes under it even the most elevated and sacred feelings. Even the objects of art are seen, heard, and felt; even the souls of other men are sensed. In the sensations the deepest and highest truths are concealed. Not only the external, but the internal also, not only flesh, but spirit, not only the thing, but the ego, not only the finite, the phenomenal, but also the true divine essence is an object of the senses. Sensation proves the existence of objects outside our head–there is no other proof of being than love, than sensation in general. Everything is perceivable by the senses, if not directly, yet indirectly, if not with the vulgar, untrained senses, yet with the “cultivated senses,” if not with the eye of the anatomist or chemist, yet with that of the philosopher. All our ideas spring from the senses, but their production requires communication and converse between man and man. The higher concepts cannot be derived from the individual Ego without a sensuously given Thou; the highest object of sense is man; man does not reach concepts and reason in general by himself, but only as one of two. The nature of man is contained in community alone; only in life with others and for others does he attain his destiny and happiness. The conscience is the ego putting itself in the place of another who has been injured. Man with man, the unity of I and Thou, is God, and God is love.
[Footnote 1: Feuerbach was born at Landshut, studied at Heidelberg and Berlin, habilitated, 1828, at Erlangen, and lived, 1836-60, in the village of Bruckberg, not far from Bayreuth, and from 1860 until his death in Rechenberg, a suburb of Nuremberg. _Collected Works_ in 10 vols., 1846-66. The chief works are entitled: _P. Bayle_, 1838, 2d ed., 1844; _Philosophy and Christianity_, 1839; _The Essence of Christianity_, 1841, 4th ed., 1883 [English translation by George Eliot, 1854]; _Principles of the Philosophy of the Future_, 1843; _The Essence of Religion_, 1845; _Theogony_, 1857; _God, Freedom, and Immortality_, 1866. Karl Grün, 1874, C.N. Starcke, 1885, and W. Bolin, 1891, treat of Feuerbach.]
To the philosophy of religion Feuerbach assigns the task of giving a psychological explanation of the genesis of religion, instead of showing reason in religion. In bidding us believe in miracles dogma is a prohibition to think. Hence the philosopher is not to justify it, but to uncover the illusion to which it owes its origin. Speculative theology is an intoxicated philosophy; it is time to become sober, and to recognize that philosophy and religion are diametrically opposed to each other, that they are related to each other as health to disease, as thought to phantasy. Religion arises from the fact that man objectifies his own true essence, and opposes it to himself as a personal being, without coming to a consciousness of this divestment of self, of the identity of the divine and human nature. Hence the Hegelian principles, that the absolute is self-consciousness, that in man God knows himself, must be reversed: self-consciousness is the absolute; in his God man knows himself only. The Godhead is our own universal nature, freed from its individual limitations, intuited and worshiped as another, independent being, distinct from us. God is self objectified, the inner nature of man expressed; man is the beginning, the middle, and the end of religion. All theology is anthropology, for all religion is a self-deification of man. In religion man makes a division in his own nature, posits himself as double, first as limited (as a human individual), then as unlimited, raised to infinity (as God); and this deified self he worships in order to obtain from it the satisfaction of his needs, which the course of the world leaves unmet. Thus religion grows out of egoism: its basis is the difference between our will and our power; its aim, to set us free from the dependence which we feel before nature. (Like culture, religion seeks to make nature an intelligible and compliant being, only that in this it makes use of the supernatural instruments faith, prayer, and magic; it is only gradually that men learn to attack the evils by natural means.) That which man himself is not, but wishes to be, that he represents to himself in his gods as existing; they are the wishes of man’s heart transformed into real beings, his longing after happiness satisfied by the fancy. The same holds true of all dogmas: as God is the affirmation of our wishes, so the world beyond is the present embellished and idealized by the fancy. Instead of “God is merciful, is love, is omnipotent, he performs miracles and hears prayers,” the statement must be reversed: mercy, love, omnipotence, to perform miracles, and to hear prayers, is divine. In the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s supper Feuerbach sees the truth that water and food are indispensable and divine. As Feuerbach, following out this naturalistic tendency, reached the extreme of materialism, the influence of his philosophy–whose different phases there is no occasion to trace out in detail–had already passed its culmination. From his later writings little more has found its way into public notice than the pun, that man is (_ist_) what he eats (_isst_).
The remaining members of the Hegelian left may be treated more briefly. Bruno Bauer[1] (died in 1882; his principal work is the _Critique of the Synoptics_, in three volumes, 1841-42, which had been preceded, in 1840, by a _Critique of the Evangelical History of John_) at first belonged on the right of the school, but soon went over to the extreme left. He explains the Gospel narratives as creations with a purpose (_Tendenzdichtungen_), as intentional, but not deceitful, inventions, from which, despite their unreality, history may well be learned, inasmuch as they reflect the spirit of the time in which they were constructed. His own publications and those of his brother Edgar are much more radical after the year 1844. In these the brothers advocate the standpoint of “pure or absolute criticism,” which extends itself to all things and events for or against which sides are taken from any quarter, and calmly watches how everything destroys itself. As soon as anything is admitted, it is no longer true. Nothing is absolutely valid, all is vain; it is only the criticising, all-destroying ego, free from all ethical ties, that possesses truth.
[Footnote 1: Not to be confused with the head of the Tübingen School, Ferdinand Christian Baur (died 1860).]
One further step was possible beyond Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, that from the community to the particular, selfish individual, from the criticising, therefore thinking, ego, to the ego of sensuous enjoyment. This step was taken in that curious book _The Individual and his Property_, which Kaspar Schmidt, who died in 1856 at Berlin, published in 1845 (2d ed., 1882), under the pseudonym of Max Stirner. The Individual of whom the title speaks is the egoist. For me nothing is higher than myself; I use men and use up the world for my own pleasure. I seek to be and have all that I can be and have; I have a right to all that is within my power. Morality is a delusion, justice, like all Ideas, a phantom. Those who believe in ideals, and worship such generalities as self-consciousness, man, society, are still deep in the mire of prejudice and superstition, and have banished the old orthodox phantom of the Deity only to replace it by a new one. Nothing whatever is to be respected.
* * * * *
Among the opponents of the Hegelian philosophy the members of the “theistic school,” who have above been designated as semi-Hegelians, approximate it most closely. These endeavor, in part retaining the dialectic method, to blend the immanence of the absolute, which philosophy cannot give up and concerning which Hegel had erred only by way of over-emphasis, with the transcendence of God demanded by Christian consciousness, to establish a theism which shall contain pantheism as a moment in itself. God is present in all creatures, yet distinct from them; he is intramundane as well as extramundane; he is self-conscious personality, free creative spirit, is this from all eternity, and does not first become such through the world-development. He does not need the world for his perfection, but out of his goodness creates it. Philosophy must begin with the living Godhead instead of beginning, like Hegel’s Logic, with the empty concept of being. For the categories–as Schelling had already objected–express necessary forms or general laws only, to which all reality must conform, but which are never capable of generating reality; the content which appears in them and which obeys them, can only be created by a Deity, and only empirically cognized. This is the standpoint of Christian Hermann Weisse[1] in Leipsic (1801-66), Karl Philipp Fischer[2] in Erlangen (1807-85), Immanuel Hermann Fichte[3] (1797-1879; 1842-65 professor in Tübingen), and the follower of Schleiermacher, Julius Braniss in Breslau (1792-1873). The following hold similar views, influenced, like Weisse and K. Ph. Fischer, by Schelling: Jacob Sengler of Freiburg (1799-1878; _The Idea of God_, 1845 _seq_.), Leopold Schmid of Giessen (1808-69; cf. p. 516, note), Johannes Huber (died 1879), Moritz Carrière[4] (born 1817), both in Munich, K. Steffensen of Basle (1816-88; _Collected Essays_, 1890), and Karl Heyder in Erlangen (1812-86; _The Doctrine of Ideas_, vol. i. 1874). Chalybaeus at Kiel (died 1862), and Friedrich Harms at Berlin (died 1880; _Metaphysics_, posthumously edited by H. Wiese, 1885), who, like Fortlage and I.H. Fichte, start from the system of the elder Fichte, should also be mentioned as sympathizing with the opinions of those who have been named.
[Footnote 1: Weisse: _System of Aesthetics_, 1830; _The Idea of the Godhead_, 1833; _Philosophical Dogmatics_, 1855. His pupil Rudolf Seydel has published several of his posthumous works; H. Lotze also acknowledges that he owes much to Weisse. Rud. Seydel in Leipsic (born 1835), _Logic_, 1866; _Ethics_, 1874; cf. p. 17.]
[Footnote 2: K. Ph. Fischer: _The Idea of the Godhead_, 1839; _Outlines of the System of Philosophy_, 1848 _seq_.; _The Untruth of Sensationalism and Materialism_, 1853.]
[Footnote 3: I.H. Fichte: _System of Ethics_, 1850-53, the first volume of which gives a history of moral philosophy since 1750; _Anthropology_, 1856, 3d ed., 1876; _Psychology_, 1864.]
[Footnote 4: Carrière: _Aesthetics_, 1859, 3d ed., 1885; _The Moral Order of the World_, 1877, 2d ed., 1891; _Art in connection with the Development of Culture_, 5 vols., 1863-73.]
The same may be said, further, of Hermann Ulrici[1] of Halle (1806-84), for many years the editor of the _Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik_, founded in 1837 by the younger Fichte and now edited by the author of this _History_, which, as the organ of the theistic school, opposed, first, the pantheism of the Young Hegelians, and then the revived materialism so loudly proclaimed after the middle of the century. This _Zeitschrift_ of Fichte and Ulrici, following the altered circumstances of the time, has experienced a change of aim, so that it now seeks to serve idealistic efforts of every shade; while the _Philosophische Monatshefte_ (founded by Bergmann in 1868, edited subsequently by Schaarschmidt, and now) edited by P. Natorp of Marburg, favors neo-Kantianism, and the _Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie_ (begun in 1877, and) edited by R. Avenarius of Zurich, especially cultivates those parts of philosophy which are open to exact treatment.
[Footnote 1: Ulrici: _On Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art_, 1839, 3d ed., 1868 [English, 1876]; _Faith and Knowledge_, 1858; _God and Nature_, 1861, 2d ed., 1866; _God and Man_, in two volumes, _Body and Soul_, 1866, 2d ed., 1874, and _Natural Law_, 1872; various treatises on Logic–in which consciousness is based on the distinguishing activity, and the categories conceived as functional modes of this–on Spiritualism, etc.]
The appearance of _materialism_ was the consequence of the flagging of the philosophic spirit, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the dissatisfaction of the representatives of natural science with the constructions of the Schelling-Hegelian school. If the German naturalist is especially exposed to the danger of judging all reality from the section of it with which he is familiar, from the world of material substances and mechanical motions, the reason lies in the fact that he does not find it easy, like the Englishman for example, to let the scientific and the philosophico-religious views of the world go on side by side as two entirely heterogeneous modes of looking at things. The metaphysical impulse to generalization and unification spurs him on to break down the boundary between the two spheres, and, since the physical view of things has become part of his flesh and blood, psychical phenomena are for him nothing but brain-vibrations, and the freedom of the will and all religious ideas, nothing but illusions. The materialistic controversy broke out most actively at the convention of naturalists at Göttingen in 1854, when Rudolph Wagner in his address “On the Creation of Man and the Substance of the Soul” declared, in opposition to Karl Vogt, that there is no physiological reason for denying the descent of man from one pair and an immaterial immortal soul. Vogt’s answer was entitled “Collier Faith and Science.” Among others Schaller (_Body and Soul_, 1855), J.B. Meyer in a treatise with the same title, 1856, and the Jena physicist, Karl Snell,[1] took part in the controversy by way of criticism and mediation. A much finer nature than the famous leaders of materialism–Moleschott (_The Circle of Life_, 1852, in answer to Liebig’s _Chemical Letters_), and Louis Büchner, with whose _Force and Matter_ (1855, 16th ed., 1888; English translation by Collingwood, 4th ed., 1884) the gymnasiast of to-day still satisfies his freethinking needs–is H. Czolbe (1819-73; _New Exposition of Sensationalism_, 1855; _The Limits and Origin of Human Knowledge_, 1865), who, on ethical grounds, demands the exclusion of everything suprasensible and contentment with the given world of phenomena, but holds that, besides matter and motion, eternal, purposive forms and original sensations in a world-soul are necessary to explain organic and psychical phenomena.
[Footnote 1: Snell (1806-86): _The Materialistic Question_, 1858; _The Creation of Man_, 1863. R. Seydel has edited _Lectures on the Descent of Man_, 1888, from Snell’s posthumous writings.]
%2. New Systems: Trendelenburg, Fechner, Lotze, and Hartmann%.
The speculative impulse, especially in the soul of the German people, is ineradicable. It has neither allowed itself to be discouraged by the collapse of the Hegelian edifice, nor to be led astray by the clamor of the apostles of empiricism, nor to be intimidated by the papal proclamation of the infallibility of Thomas Aquinas.[1] Manifold attempts have been made at a new conception of the world, and with varying success. Of the earlier theories[2] only two have been able to gather a circle of adherents–the dualistic theism of Günther (1783-1863), and the organic view of the world of Trendelenburg (1802-72).
[Footnote 2: In 1879 a summons was sent forth from Rome for the revival and dissemination of the Thomistic system as the only true philosophy (cf. R. Eucken, _Die Philosophic des Thomas von Aquino und die Kultur der Neuzeit_, 1886). This movement is supported by the journals, _Jahrbuch für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie_, edited by Professor E. Commer of Münster, 1886 _seq_., and _Philosophisches Jahrbuch_, edited, at the instance and with the support of the Görres Society, by Professor Const. Gutberlet of Fulda, 1888 _seq_. While the text-books of Hagemann, Stoeckl, Gutberlet, Pesch, Commer, C.M. Schneider, and others also follow Scholastic lines, B. Bolzano (died 1848), M. Deutinger (died 1864) and his pupil Neudecker, Oischinger, Michelis, and W. Rosenkrantz (1821-74; _Science of Knowledge_, 1866-68), who was influenced by Schelling, have taken a freer course.]
[Footnote 2: Trahndorff, gymnasial professor in Berlin (1782-1863), _Aesthetics_, 1827 (cf. E. von Hartmann in the _Philosophische Monatshefte_, vol. xxii. 1886, p. 59 _seq_., and J. von Billewicz, in the same, vol. xxi. 1885, p. 561 _seq_.); J.F. Reiff in Tübingen: _System of the Determinations of the Will_, 1842; K. Chr. Planck (died 1880): _The Ages of the World_, 1850 _seq_.; _Testament of a German_, edited by Karl Köstlin, 1881; F. Röse (1815-59), _On the Method of the Knowledge of the Absolute_, 1841; _Psychology as Introduction to the Philosophy of Individuality_, 1856. Emanuel Sharer follows Röse. Friedrich Rohmer (died 1856): _Science of God, Science of Man_, in _Friedrich Rohmer’s Wissenschaft und Leben_, edited by Bluntschli and Rud. Seele, 6 vols., 1871-92.]
Anton Günther (engaged in authorship from 1827; _Collected Writings_, 1881; _Anti-Savarese_, edited with an appendix by P. Knoodt), who in 1857 was compelled to retract his views, invokes the spirit of Descartes in opposition to the Hegelian pantheism. In agreement with Descartes, Günther starts from self-consciousness (in the ego being and thought are identical), and brings not only the Creator and the created world, but also nature (to which the soul is to be regarded as belonging) and spirit into a relation of exclusive opposition, yet holds that in man nature (body and soul) and spirit are united, and that they interact without prejudice to their qualitative difference. J.H. Pabst (died in 1838 in Vienna), Theodor Weber of Breslau, Knoodt of Bonn (died 1889), V. Knauer of Vienna and others are Güntherians.
Adolf Trendelenburg[1] of Berlin, the acute critic of Hegel and Herbart, in his own thinking goes back to the philosophy of the past, especially to that of Aristotle. Motion and purpose are for him fundamental facts, which are common to both being and thinking, which mediate between the two, and make the agreement of knowledge and reality possible. The ethical is a higher stage of the organic. Space, time, and the categories are forms of thought as well as of being; the logical form must not be separated from the content, nor the concept from intuition. We must not fail to mention that Trendelenburg introduced a peculiar and fruitful method of treating the history of philosophy, viz., the historical investigation of particular concepts, in which Teichmüller of Dorpat (1832-88; _Studies in the History of Concepts_, 1874; _New Studies in the History of Concepts_, 1876-79; _The Immortality of the Soul_, 2d ed., 1879; _The Nature of Love_, 1880; _Literary Quarrels in the Fourth Century before Christ_, 1881 and 1884), and Eucken of Jena (cf. pp. 17 and 623) have followed his example. Kym in Zurich (born 1822; _Metaphysical Investigations_, 1875; _The Problem of Evil_, 1878) is a pupil of Trendelenburg.
[Footnote 1: Trendelenburg: _Logical Investigations_, 1840, 3d ed., 1870; _Historical Contributions to Philosophy_, 3 vols., 1846, 1855, 1867; _Natural Law on the Basis of Ethics_, 1860, 2d ed., 1868. On Trendelenburg cf. Eucken in the _Philosophische Monatshefte_, 1884.]
Of more recent systematic attempts the following appear worthy of mention: Von Kirchmann (1802-84; from 1868 editor of the _Philosophische Bibliothek_), _The Philosophy of Knowledge_, 1865; _Aesthetics_, 1868; _On the Principles of Realism_, 1875; _Catechism of Philosophy_ 2d ed., 1881; E. Dühring (born 1833), _Natural Dialectic_, 1865; _The Value of Life_, 1865, 3d ed, 1881; _Critical History of the Principles of Mechanics_, 1873, 2d ed., 1877; _Course of Philosophy_, 1875 (cf. on Dühring, Helene Druskowitz, 1889); J. Baumann of Göttingen (born 1837), _Philosophy as Orientation concerning the World_, 1872; _Handbook of Ethics_, 1879; _Elements of Philosophy_, 1891; L. Noiré, _The Monistic Idea_, 1875, and many other works; Frohschammer of Munich (born 1821), _The Phantasy as the Fundamental Principle of the World-process_, 1877; _On the Genesis of Humanity, and its Spiritual Development in Religion, Morality and Language_, 1883; _On the Organization and Culture of Human Society_, 1885.
In the first rank of the thinkers who have made their appearance since Hegel and Herbart stand Fechner and Lotze, both masters in the use of exact methods, yet at the same time with their whole souls devoted to the highest questions, and superior to their contemporaries in breadth of view as in the importance and range of their leading ideas–Fechner a dreamer and sober investigator by turns, Lotze with gentle hand reconciling the antitheses in life and science.
Gustav Theodor Fechner[1] (1801-87; professor at Leipsic) opposes the abstract separation of God and the world, which has found a place in natural inquiry and in theology alike, and brings the two into the same relation of correspondence and reciprocal reference as the soul and the body. The spirit gives cohesion to the manifold of material parts, and needs them as a basis and material for its unifying activity. As our ego connects the manifold of our activities and states in the unity of consciousness, so the divine spirit is the supreme unity of consciousness for all being and becoming. In the spirit of God everything is as in ours, only expanded and enhanced. Our sensations and feelings, our thoughts and resolutions are His also, only that He, whose body all nature is, and to whom not only that which takes place in spirits is open, but also that which goes on between them, perceives more, feels deeper, thinks higher, and wills better things than we. According to the analogy of the human organism, both the heavenly bodies and plants are to be conceived as beings endowed with souls, although they lack nerves, a brain, and voluntary motion. How could the earth bring forth living beings, if it were itself dead? Shall not the flower itself rejoice in the color and fragrance which it produces, and with which it refreshes us? Though its psychical life may not exceed that of an infant, its sensations, at all events, since they do not form the basis of a higher activity, are superior in force and richness to those of the animal. Thus the human soul stands intermediate in the scale of psychical life: beneath and about us are the souls of plants and animals, above us the spirits of the earth and stars, which, sharing in and encompassing the deeds and destinies of their inhabitants, are in their turn embraced by the consciousness of the universal spirit. The omnipresence of the divine spirit affords at the same time the means of escaping from the desolate “night view” of modern science, which looks upon the world outside the perceiving individual as dark and silent. No, light and sound are not merely subjective phenomena within us, but extend around us with objective reality–as sensations of the divine spirit, to which everything that vibrates resounds and shines.
[Footnote 1: _Nanna, or on the Psychical Life of Plants_, 1848; _Zend-Avesta, or on the Things of Heaven and the World Beyond_, 1851; _Physical and Philosophical Atomism_, 1855; _The Three Motives and Grounds of Belief_, 1863; _The Day View_, 1879; _Elements of Aesthetics_, 1876; _Elements of Psycho-physics_, 1860; _In the Cause of Psycho-physics_, 1877; _Review of the Chief Points in Psycho-physics_, 1882; _Book of the Life after Death_, 1836, 3d ed., 1887; _On the Highest Good_, 1846; _Four Paradoxes_, 1846; _On the Question of the. Soul_, 1861; _Minor Works by Dr. Mises_ (Fechner’s pseudonym), 1875. On Fechner cf. J. E. Kuntze, Leipsic, 1892.]
The door of the world beyond also opens to the key of analogy. Similar laws unite the here with the hereafter. As intuition prepares the way for memory, and lives on in it, so the life of earth merges in the future life, and continues active in it, elevated to a higher plane. Fechner treats the problem of evil in a way peculiar to himself. We must not consider the fact of evil apart from the effort to remove it. It is the spur to all activity–without evil, no labor and no progress.
Fechner’s “psycho-physics,” a science which was founded by him in continuation of the investigations of Bernoulli, Euler, and especially of E.H. Weber, wears an entirely different aspect from that of his metaphysics (the “day view,” moreover does not claim to be knowledge, but belief–though a belief which is historically, practically, and theoretically well-grounded). This aims to be an exact science of the relations between body and mind, and to reach indirectly what Herbart failed to reach by direct methods, that is, a measurement of psychical magnitudes, using in this attempt the least observable differences in sensations as the unit of measure. Weber’s law of the dependence of the intensity of the sensation on the strength of the stimulus–the increase in the intensity of the sensation remains the same when the relative increase of the stimulus (or the relation of the stimuli) remains constant;[1] so that, _e.g._, in the case of light, an increase from a stimulus of intensity 1 to one of intensity 100, gives just the same increase in the intensity of the sensation as an increase from a stimulus of intensity 2 (or 3) to a stimulus of 200 (or 300)–is much more generally valid than its discoverer supposed; it holds good for all the senses. In the case of the pressure sense of the skin, with an original weight of 15 grams (laid upon the hand when at rest and supported), in order to produce a sensation perceptibly greater we must add not 1 gram, but 5, and with an original weight of 30 grams, not 5, but 10. Equal additions to the weights are not enough to produce a sensation of pressure whose intensity shall render it capable of being distinguished with certainty, but the greater the original weights the larger the increments must be; while the intensities of the sensations form an arithmetical, those of the stimuli form a geometrical, series; the change in sensation is proportional to the relative change of the stimulus. Sensations of tone show the same proportion (3:4) as those of pressure; the sensibility of the muscle sense is finer (when weights are raised the proportion is 15:16), as also that of vision (the relative brightness of two lights whose difference of intensity is just perceptible is 100:101). In addition to the investigations on the threshold of difference there are others on the threshold of stimulation (the point at which a sensation becomes just perceptible), on attention, on methods of measurement, on errors, etc. Moreover, Fechner does not fail to connect his psycho-physics, the presuppositions and results of which have recently been questioned in several quarters,[2] with his metaphysical conclusions. Both are pervaded by the fundamental view that body and spirit belong together (consequently that everything is endowed with a soul, and that nothing is without a material basis), nay, that they are the same essence, only seen from different sides. Body is the (manifold) phenomenon for others, while spirit is the (unitary) self-phenomenon, in which, however, the inner aspect is the truer one. That which appears to us as the external world of matter, is nothing but a universal consciousness which overlaps and influences our individual consciousness. This is Spinozism idealistically interpreted. In aesthetics Fechner shows himself an extreme representative of the principle of association.
[Footnote 1: Fechner teaches: The sensation increases and diminishes in proportion to the logarithm of the stimulus and of the psycho-physical nervous activity, the latter being directly proportional to the external stimulus. Others, on the contrary, find a direct dependence between nervous activity and sensation, and a logarithmic proportion between the external stimulus and the nervous activity.]
[Footnote 2: So by Helmholtz; Hering _(Fechners psychophysisches Gesetz_, 1875); P. Langer _(Grundlagen der Psychophysik_, 1876); G.E. Müller in Göttingen _(Zur Grundlegung der Psychophysik_, 1878); F.A. Müller _(Das Axiom der Psychophysik_, 1882); A. Elsas _(Ueber die Psychophysik_, 1886); O. Liebmann _(Aphorismen zur Psychologie, Zeitschrift für Philosophie_, vol. ci.–Wundt has published a number of papers from his psycho-physical laboratory in his _Philosophische Studien_, 1881 _seq_. Cf. also Hugo Münsterberg, _Neue Grundlegung der Psychophysik_ in _Heft_ iii. of his _Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie_, 1889 _seq_). [Further, Delboeuf, in French, and a growing literature in English as A. Seth, _Encyclopedia Britannica_, vol. xxiv. 469-471; Ladd, _Elements of Physiological Psychology_, part ii. chap, v.; James, _Principles of Psychology_, vol. i. p. 533 _seq_.; and numerous articles as Ward, _Mind_, vol. i.; Jastrow, _American Journal of Psychology_, vols. i. and iii.–TR.]]
The most important of the thinkers mentioned in the title of this section is Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817-81: born at Bautzen; a student of medicine, and of philosophy under Weisse, in Leipsic; 1844-81 professor in Göttingen; died in Berlin). Like Fechner, gifted rather with a talent for the fine and the suggestive than for the large and the rigorous, with a greater reserve than the former before the mystical and peculiar, as acute, cautious, and thorough as he was full of taste and loftiness of spirit, Lotze has proved that the classic philosophers did not die out with Hegel and Herbart. His _Microcosmus_ (3 vols., 1856-64, 4th ed., 1884 _seq_; English translation by Hamilton and Jones, 3d ed., 1888), which is more than an anthropology, as it is modestly entitled, and _History of Aesthetics in Germany_, 1868, which also gives more than the title betrays, enjoy a deserved popularity. These works were preceded by the _Medical Psychology_, 1852, and a polemic treatise against I.H. Fichte, 1857, as well as by a _Pathology_ and a _Physiology_, and followed by the _System of Philosophy_, which remained incomplete (part i. _Logic_, 1874, 2d ed., 1881, English translation edited by Bosanquet, 2d ed., 1888; part ii. _Metaphysics_, 1879, English translation edited by Bosanquet, 2d ed., 1887). Lotze’s _Minor Treatises_ have been published by Peipers in three volumes (1885-91); and Rehnisch has edited eight sets of dictata from his lectures, 1871-84.[1] Since these “Outlines,” all of which we now have in new editions, make a convenient introduction to the Lotzean system, and are, or should be, in the possession of all, a brief survey may here suffice.
[Footnote 1: _Outlines of Psychology, Practical Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Nature, Logic and the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Metaphysics, Aesthetics_, and the _History of Philosophy since Kant_, all of which may be emphatically commended to students, especially the one first mentioned, and, in spite of its subjective position, the last. [English translations of these _Outlines_ except the fourth and the last, by Ladd, 1884 _seq_.] On Lotze cf. the obituaries by J. Baumann (_Philosophische Monatshefte_, vol. xvii.), H. Sommer (_Im Neuen Reich_), A. Krohn (_Zeitschrift für Philosophie_, vol. lxxxi. pp. 56-93), R. Falckenberg (Augsburg _Allgemeine Zeitung_, 1881, No. 233), and Rehnisch (_National Zeitung_ and the _Revue Philosophique_, vol. xii.). The last of these was reprinted in the appendix to the _Grundzüge der Aesthetik_, 1884, which contains, further, a chronological table of Lotze’s works, essays, and critiques, as well as of his lectures. Hugo Sommer has zealously devoted himself to the popularization of the Lotzean system. Cf., further, Fritz Koegel, _Lotzes Aesthetik_, Göttingen, 1886, and the article by Koppelmann referred to above, p. 330.]
The subject of metaphysics is reality. Things which are, events which happen, relations which exist, representative contents and truths which are valid, are real. Events happening and relations existing presuppose existing things as the subjects in and between which they happen and exist. The being of things is neither their being perceived (for when we say that a thing is we mean that it continues to be, even when we do not perceive it), nor a pure, unrelated position, its position in general, but _to be is to stand in relations_. Further, the _what_ or essence of the things which enter into these relations cannot be conceived as passive quality, but only abstractly, as a rule or a law which determines the connection and succession of a series of qualities. The nature of water, for example, is the unintuitable somewhat which contains the ground of the change of ice, first into the liquid condition, and then into steam, when the temperature increases, and conversely, of the possibility of changing steam back into water and ice under opposite conditions. And when we speak of an unchangeable identity of the thing with itself, as a result of which it remains the same essence amid the change of its phenomena, we mean only the consistency with which it keeps within the closed series of forms a1, a2, a3, without ever going over into the series b1, b2. The relations, however, in which things stand, cannot pass to and fro between things like threads or little spirits, but are states in things themselves, and the change of the former always implies a change in these inner states. To stand in relations means to _exchange actions_. In order to experience such effects from others and to exercise them upon others, things must neither be wholly incomparable (as red, hard, sweet) and mutually indifferent, nor yet absolutely independent; if the independence of individual beings were complete the process of action would be entirely inconceivable. The difficulty in the concept of causality–how does being _a_ come to produce in itself a different state _a_ because another being _b_ enters into the state [Greek: _b_]?–is removed only when we look on the things as modes, states, parts of a single comprehensive being, of an infinite, unconditioned substance, in so far as there is then only an action of the absolute on itself. Nevertheless the assumption that, in virtue of the unity and consistency of the absolute or of its impulse to self-preservation, state [Greek: _b_] in being _b_ follows state [Greek: _a_] in being _a_ as an accommodation or compensation follows a disturbance, is not a full explanation of the process of action, does not remove the difficulty as to how one state can give rise to another. Metaphysics is, in general, unable to show how reality is made, but only to remove certain contradictions which stand in the way of the conceivability of these notions. The so far empty concept of an absolute looks to the philosophy of religion for its content; the conception of the Godhead as infinite personality (it is a person in a far higher sense than we) is first produced when we add to the ontological postulate of a comprehensive substance the ethical postulate of a supreme good or a universal world-Idea.
By “thing” we understand the permanent unit-subject of changing states. But the fact of consciousness furnishes the only guaranty that the different states _a, [Greek: b], y_, are in reality states of one being, and not so many different things alternating with one another. Only a conscious being, which itself effects the distinction between itself and the states occurring in it, and in memory and recollection feels and knows itself as their identical subject, is actually a subject which has states. Hence, if things are to be real, we must attribute to them a nature in essence related to that of our soul. Reality is existence for self. All beings are spiritual, and only spiritual beings possess true reality. Thus Lotze combines the monadology of Leibnitz with the pantheism of Spinoza, just as he understands how to reconcile the mechanical view of natural science (which is valid also for the explanation of organic life) with the teleology and the ethical idealism of Fichte. The sole mission of the world of forms is to aid in the realization of the ideal purposes of the absolute, of the world of values.
The ideality of space, which Kant had based on insufficient grounds, is maintained by Lotze also, only that he makes things stand in “intellectual” relations, which the knowing subject translates into spatial language. The same character of subjectivity belongs not only to our sensations, but also to our ideas concerning the connection of things. Representations are results, not copies, of the external stimuli; cognition comes under the general concept of the interaction of real elements, and depends, like every effect, as much upon the nature of the being that experiences the effect as upon the nature of the one which exerts it, or rather, more upon the former than upon the latter. If, nevertheless, it claims objective reality, truth must not be interpreted as the correspondence of thought and its object (the cognitive image can never be like the thing itself), nor the mission of cognition, made to consist in copying a world already finished and closed apart from the realm of spirits, to which mental representation is added as something accessory. Light and sound are not therefore illusions because they are not true copies of the waves of ether and of air from which they spring, but they are the end which nature has sought to attain through these motions, an end, however, which it cannot attain alone, but only by acting upon spiritual subjects; the beauty and splendor of colors and tones are that which of right ought to be in the world; without the new world of representations awakened in spirits by the action of external stimuli, the world would lack its essential culmination. The purpose of things is to be known, experienced, and enjoyed by spirits. The truth of cognition consists in the fact that it opens up the meaning and destination of the world. That which ought to be is the ground of that which is; that which is exists in order to the realization of values in it; the good is the only real. It is true that we are not permitted to penetrate farther than to the general conviction that the Idea of the good is the ground and end of the world; the question, how the world has arisen from this supreme Idea as from the absolute and why just this world with its determinate forms and laws has arisen, is unanswerable. We understand the meaning of the play, but we do not see the machinery by which it is produced at work behind the stage. In ethics Lotze emphasizes with Fechner the inseparability of the good and pleasure: it is impossible to state in what the worth or goodness of a good is to consist, if it be conceived out of all relation to a spirit capable of finding enjoyment in it.
If Lotze’s philosophy harmoniously combines Herbartian and Fichteo-Hegelian elements, Eduard von Hartmann (born 1842; until 1864 a soldier, now a man of letters in Berlin) aims at a synthesis of Schopenhauer and Hegel; with the pessimism of the former he unites the evolutionism of the latter, and while the one conceives the nature of the world-ground as irrational will, and the other as the logical Idea, he follows the example of Schelling in his later days by making will and representation equally legitimate attributes of his absolute, the Unconscious. His principal theoretical work, _The Philosophy of the Unconscious_, 1869 (10th ed., 1891; English translation by Coupland, 1884), was followed in 1879 by his chief ethical one, _The Moral Consciousness_ (2d ed., 1886, in the _Selected Works_); the two works on the philosophy of religion, _The Religious Consciousness of Humanity in the Stages of its Development_, 1881, and _The Religion of Spirit_, 1882, together form the third chief work (_The Self-Disintegration of Christianity and the Religion of the Future_, 1874, and _The Crisis of Christianity in Modern Theology_, 1880, are to be regarded as forerunners of this); the fourth is the _Aesthetics_ (part i. _German Aesthetics since Kant_, 1886; part ii. _Philosophy of the Beautiful_, 1887). The _Collected Studies and Essays_, 1876, were preceded by two treatises on the philosophy of nature, _Truth and Error in Darwinism_, 1875, and _The Unconscious from the Standpoint of Physiology and the Theory of Descent_, published anonymously in 1872, in the latter of which, disguised as a Darwinian, he criticises his own philosophy. Of his more recent publications we may mention the _Philosophical Questions of the Day_, 1885; _Modern Problems_, 1886; and the controversial treatise _Lotzes Philosophy_, 1888.[1]
[Footnote 1: On Hartmann cf. Volkelt in _Nord und Süd_, July, 1881; the same, _Das Unbewusste und der Pessimismus_, 1873; Vaihinger, _Hartmann_, _Dühring und Lange_, 1876; R. Koeber, _Das philosophische System Ed. v, Hartmann_, 1884; O. Pfleiderer, critique of the _Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (Im neuen Reich)_, 1879; L. von Golther, _Der moderne Pessimismus_, 1878; J. Huber, _Der Pessimismus_, 1876; Weygoldt, _Kritik des philosophischen Pessimismus der neuesten Zeit_, 1875; M. Venetianer, _Der Allgeist_, 1874; A Taubert (Hartmann’s first wife), _Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner_, 1873; O. Plümacher, _Der Kampf ums Unbewusste_ (with a chronological table of Hartmann literature appended), 1881; the same, _Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart_, 1884; Krohn, _Streifzüge_ (see above); Seydel (see above). During the year 1882 four publications appeared under the title _Der Pessimismus und die Sittenlehre_, by Bacmeister, Christ, Rehmke, and H. Sommer (2d ed., 1883). [English translation of _Truth and Error in Darwinism_ in the _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, vols. xi.-xiii., and of _The Religion of the Future_, by Dare, 1886; cf. also Sully’s _Pessimism_, chap. v.–TR.]]
In polemical relation, on the one hand, to the naïve realism of life, and, on the other, to the subjective idealism of Kant, or rather of the neo-Kantians, the logical conclusion of which would be absolute illusionism, Hartmann founds his “transcendental realism,” which mediates between these two points of view (the existence and true nature of the world outside our representations is knowable, if only indirectly; the forms of knowledge, in spite of their subjective origin, have a more than subjective, a transcendental, significance) by pointing out that sense-impressions, which are accompanied by the feeling of compulsion and are different from one another, cannot be explained from the ego, but only by the action of things in themselves external to us, _i.e._, independent of consciousness, and themselves distinct from one another. The causality of things in themselves is the bridge which enables us to cross the gulf between the immanent world of representations and the transcendent world of being. The causality of things in themselves proves their reality, their difference at different times, their changeability and their temporal character; change, however, demands something permanent, existence, an existing, unchangeable, supra-temporal, and non-spatial substance (whether a special substance for each thing in itself or a common one for all, is left for the present undetermined). My action upon the thing in itself assures me of its causal conditionality or necessity; the various affections of the same sense, that there are many things in themselves; the peculiar form of change shown by some bodies, that these, like my body, are united with a soul. Thus it is evident that, besides the concept of cause, a series of other categories must be applied to the thing in itself, hence applied transcendentally.
The “speculative results” obtained by Hartmann on an “inductive” basis are as follows: The _per se (Ansich)_ of the empirical world is the Unconscious. The two attributes of this absolute are the active, groundless, alogical, infinite will, and the passive, finite representation (Idea); the former is the ground of the _that_ of the world, the latter the ground of its purposive _what_ and _how_. Without the will the representation, which in itself is without energy, could not become real, and without the representation (of an end) the will, which in itself is without reason, could not become a definite willing (relative or immanent dualism of the attributes, a necessary moment in absolute monism). The empirical preponderance of pain over pleasure, which can be shown by calculation,[1] proves that the world is evil, that its non-existence were better than its existence; the purposiveness everywhere perceptible in nature and the progress of history toward a final goal (it is true, a negative one) proves, nevertheless, that it is the best world that was possible (reconciliation of eudemonistic pessimism with evolutionistic optimism). The creation of the world begins when the blind will to live groundlessly and fortuitously passes over from essence to phenomenon, from potency to act, from supra-existence to existence, and, in irrational striving after existence, draws to itself the only content which is capable of realization, the logical Idea. This latter seeks to make good the error committed by the will by bringing consciousness into the field as a combatant against the insatiable, ever yearning, never satisfied will, which one day will force the will back into latency, into the (antemundane) blessed state of not-willing. The goal of the world-development is deliverance from the misery of existence, the peace of non-existence, the return from the will and representation, become spatial and temporal, to the original, harmonious equilibrium of the two functions, which has been disturbed by the origin of the world or to the antemundane identity of the absolute. The task of the logical element is to teach consciousness more and more to penetrate the illusion of the will–in its three stages of childlike (Greek) expectation of happiness to be attained here, youthful (Christian) expectation of happiness to be attained hereafter, and adult expectation of happiness to be attained in the future of the world-development–and, finally, to teach it to know, in senile longing after rest, that only the doing away with this miserable willing, and, consequently, with earthly existence (through the resolve of the majority of mankind) can give the sole attainable blessedness, freedom from pain. The world-process is the incarnation, the suffering, and the redemption of the absolute; the moral task of man is not personal renunciation and cowardly retirement, but to make the purposes of the Unconscious his own, with complete resignation to life and its sufferings to labor energetically in the world-process, and, by the vigorous promotion of consciousness, to hasten the fulfillment of the redemptive purpose; the condition of morality is insight into the fruitlessness of all striving after pleasure and into the essential unity of all individual beings with one another and with the universal spirit, which exists in the individuals, but at the same time subsists above them. “To know one’s self as of divine nature, this does away with all divergence between selfwill and universal will, with all estrangement between man and God, with all undivine, that is, merely natural, conduct.”
[Footnote 1: Cf. Volkelt, _Ueber die Lust als höchsten Werthmassstab_ (in the _Zeitschrift für Philosophie_, vol. lxxxviii.), 1886, and O. Pfleiderer, _Philosophy of Religion_, vol. ii. p. 249 _seq_.]
Religion, which, in common with philosophy, has for its basis the metaphysical need for, or the mystical feeling of, the unity of the human individual and the world-ground, needs transformation, since in its traditional forms it is opposed to modern culture, and the merging of religion (as a need of the heart) in metaphysics is impossible. The religion of the future, for which the way has already been prepared by the speculative Protestantism of the present, is _concrete monism_ (the divine unity is transcendent as well as immanent in the plurality of the beings of earth, every moral man a God-man), which includes in itself the abstract monism (pantheism) of the Indian religions and the Judeo-Christian (mono-) theism as subordinate moments. (The original henotheism and its decline into polytheism, demonism, and fetichism was followed by–Egyptian and Persian, as well as Greek, Roman, and German–naturalism, and then by supernaturalism in its monistic and its theistic form. The chief defect of the Christian religion is the transcendental-eudemonistic heteronomy of its ethics.) The _Religion of Spirit_ divides into three parts. The psychology of religion considers the religious function in its subjective aspect, faith as a combined act of representation, feeling, and will, in which one of these three elements may predominate–though feeling forms the inmost kernel of the theoretical and practical activities as well–and, as the objective correlate of faith, grace (revealing, redeeming, and sanctifying), which elevates man above peripheral and phenomenal dependence on the world, and frees him from it, through his becoming conscious of his central and metaphysical dependence upon God. The metaphysics of religion (in theological, anthropological, and cosmological sections) proves by induction from the facts of religion the existence, omnipotence, spirituality, omniscience, righteousness, and holiness of the All-one, which coincides with the moral order of the world. Further, it proves the need and the capacity of man for redemption from guilt and evil–here three spheres of the individual will are distinguished, one beneath God, one contrary to God, and one conformable to God, or a natural, an evil, and a moral sphere–and, preserving alike the absoluteness of God and the reality of the world, shows that it is not so much man as God himself, who, as the bearer of all the suffering of the world, is the subject of redemption. The ethics of religion discusses the subjective and objective processes of redemption, namely, repentance and amendment on the part of the individual and the ecclesiastical _cultus_ of the future, which is to despise symbols and art.
It is to Hartmann’s credit, though the fact has not been sufficiently appreciated by professional thinkers, that in a time averse to speculation he has devoted his energies to the highest problems of metaphysics, and in their elaboration has approached his task with scientific earnestness and a comprehensive and thorough consideration of previous results. Thus the critique of ethical standpoints in the historical part of the _Phenomenology of the Moral Consciousness_, especially, contains much that is worthy of consideration; and his fundamental metaphysical idea, that the absolute is to be conceived as the unity of will and reason, also deserves in general a more lively assent than has been accorded to it, while his rejection of an infinite consciousness has justly met with contradiction. It has been impossible here to go into his discussions in the philosophy of nature–they cannot be described in brief–on matter (atomic forces), on the mechanical and teleological views of life and its development, on instinct, on sexual love, etc., which he very skillfully uses in support of his metaphysical principle.
%3. From the Revival of the Kantian Philosophy to the Present Time.%
%(a) Neo-Kantianism, Positivism, and Kindred Phenomena.%–The Kantian philosophy has created two epochs: one at the time of its appearance, and a second two generations after the death of its author. The new Kantian movement, which is one of the most prominent characteristics of the philosophy of the present time, took its beginning a quarter of a century ago. It is true that even before 1865 individual thinkers like Ernst Reinhold of Jena (died 1855), the admirer of Fries, J.B. Meyer of Bonn, K.A. von Reichlin-Meldegg, and others had sought a point of departure for their views in Kant; that K. Fischer’s work on Kant (1860) had given a lively impulse to the renewed study of the critical philosophy; nay, that the cry “Back to Kant” had been expressly raised by Fortlage (as early as 1832 in his treatise _The Gaps in the Hegelian System_), and by Zeller (p. 589). But the movement first became general after F.A. Lange in his _History of Materialism_ had energetically advocated the Kantian doctrine according to his special conception of it, after Helmholtz[1] (born 1821) had called attention to the agreement of the results of physiology with those of the Critique of Reason, and at the same time Liebmann’s youthful work, _Kant and the Epigones_, in which every chapter ended with the inexorable refrain, “therefore we must go back to Kant,” had given the strongest expression to the longing of the time.
[Footnote 1: Helmholtz: _On Human Vision_, 1855; _Physiological Optics_, 1867; _Sensations of Tone_, 1863, 4th ed., 1877 [English translation by Ellis, 2d ed., 1885].]
Otto Liebmann (cf. also the chapter on “The Metamorphoses of the A Priori” in his _Analysis of Reality_) sees the fundamental truth of criticism in the irrefutable proof that, space, time, and the categories are functions of the intellect, and that subject and object are necessary correlates, inseparable factors of the empirical world, and finds Kant’s fundamental error, which the Epigones have not corrected, but made still worse, in the non-concept of the thing in itself, which must be expelled from the Kantian philosophy as a remnant of dogmatism, as a drop of alien blood, and as an illegitimate invader which has debased it.
According to Friedrich Albert Lange[1] (1828-75; during the last years of his life professor at Marburg), materialism, which is unfruitful and untenable as a principle, a system, and a view of the world, but useful and indispensable as a method and a maxim of investigation, must be supplemented by formal idealism, which, rejecting all science from mere reason limits knowledge to the sensuous, to that which can be experienced, yet at the same time conceives the formal element in the sense world as the product of the organization of man, and hence makes objects conform to our representations. Above the sensuous world of experience and of mechanical becoming, however, the speculative impulse to construction, rounding off the fragmentary truth of the sciences into a unified picture of the whole truth, rears the ideal world of that which ought to be. Notwithstanding their indefeasible certitude, the Ideas possess no scientific truth, though they have a moral value which makes them more than mere fabrics of the brain: man is framed not merely for the knowledge of truth, but also for the realization of values. But since the significance of the Ideas is only practical, and since determinations of value are not grounds of explanation, science and metaphysics or “concept poetry” (_Begriffsdichtung_) must be kept strictly separate.
[Footnote 1: F.A. Lange: _Logical Studies_, 1877. Cf. M. Heinze in the _Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophic_, 1877, and Vaihinger in the work cited above, p. 610 note.]
Friedrich Paulsen of Berlin (born in 1846; cf. pp. 330, 332, note) sees in the Kantian philosophy the foundation for the philosophy of the future. A profounder Wolff (the self-dominion of the reason), a Prussian Hume (the categories of the understanding are not world-categories; rejection of anthropomorphic metaphysics), and a German Rousseau (the primacy of the will, consideration of the demands of the heart; the good will alone, not deeds nor culture, constitutes the worth of man; freedom, the rights of man) in one person, Kant has withdrawn from scientific discussion the question concerning the dependence of reality on values or the good, which is theoretically insoluble but practically to be answered in the affirmative, and given it over to faith. Kant is in so far a positivist that he limits the mission of knowledge to the reduction of the temporo-spatial relations of phenomena to rules, and declares the teleological power of values to be undemonstrable. But science is able to prove this much, that the belief in a suprasensible world, in the indestructibility of that which alone has worth, and in the freedom of the intelligible character, which the will demands, is not scientifically impossible. Since, according to formal rationalism, the whole order of nature is a creation of the understanding, and hence atomism and mechanism are only forms of representation, valid, no doubt, for our peripheral point of view, but not absolutely valid, since, further, the empirical view of the world apart from the Idea of the divine unity of the world (which, it is true, is incapable of theoretical realization) would lack completion, the immediate conviction of the heart in regard to the power of the good is in no danger of attack from the side of science, although this can do no further service for faith than to remove the obstacles which oppose it. The will, not the intellect, determines the view of the world; but this is only a belief, and in the world of representation, the intelligible world, with which the will brings us into relation, can come before us only in the form of symbols.–While Albrecht Krause (_The Laws of the Human Heart, a Formal Logic of Pure Feeling_, 1876) and A. Classen (_Physiology of the Sense of Sight_, 1877) are strict followers of Kant, J. Volkelt (_Analysis of the Fundamental Principles of Kant’s Theory of Knowledge_, 1879) has traced the often deplored inconsistencies and contradictions in Kant down to their roots, and has shown that in Kant’s thinking, which has hitherto been conceived as too simple and transparent, but which, in fact, is extremely complicated and struggling in the dark, a number of entirely heterogeneous principles of thought (skeptical, subjectivistic, metaphysico-work, rationalistic, _a priori_, and practical motives) are at which, conflicting with and crippling one another, make the attainment of harmonious results impossible. Benno Erdmann (p. 330) and Hans Vaihinger (pp. 323 note, 331) have given Kant’s principal works careful philological interpretation.
Among the various differences of opinion which exist within the neo-Kantian ranks, the most important relates to the question, whether the individual ego or a transcendental consciousness is to be looked upon as the executor of the _a priori_ functions. In agreement with Schopenhauer and with Lotze, who makes the subjectivity of space, time, and the pure concepts parallel with that of the sense qualities, Lange teaches that the human individual is so organized that he must apprehend that which is sensuously given under these forms. Others, on the contrary, urge that the individual soul with its organization is itself a phenomenon, and consequently cannot be the bearer of that which precedes phenomena–space, time, and the categories as “conditions” of experience are functions of a pure consciousness to be presupposed. The antithesis of subject and object, the soul and the world, first arises in the sphere of phenomena. The empirical subject, like the world of objects, is itself a product of the _a priori_ forms, hence not that which produces them. To the transcendental group belong Hermann Cohen[1] in Marburg, A. Stadler[2], Natorp, Lasswitz (p.17), E. König (p. 17), Koppelmann (p. 330), Staudinger (p. 331). Fritz Schultze of Dresden is also to be counted among the neo-Kantians (_Philosophy of Natural Science_, 1882; _Kant and Darwin_, 1875; _The Fundamental Thoughts of Materialism_, 1881; _The Fundamental Thoughts of Spiritualism_, 1883; _Comparative Psychology_, i. 1, 1892).
[Footnote 1: Cohen: _Kant’s Theory of Experience_, 1871, 2d ed., 1886; _Kant’s Foundation of Ethics_, 1877; _Kant’s Foundation of Aesthetics_, 1889.]
[Footnote 2: Stadler: _Kant’s Teleology_, 1874; _The Principles of the Pure Theory of Knowledge in the Kantian Philosophy_, 1876; _Kant’s Theory of Matter_, 1883.]
The German positivists[1]:–E. Laas of Strasburg (1837-85), A. Riehl of Freiburg in Baden (born 1844), and R. Avenarius of Zurich (born 1843)–develop their sensationalistic theory of knowledge in critical connection with Kant. Ernst Laas defines positivism (founded by Protagoras, advocated in modern times by Hume and J.S. Mill, and hostile to Platonic idealism) as that philosophy which recognizes no other foundations than positive facts (_i.e._, perceptions), and requires every opinion to exhibit the experiences on which it rests. Its basis is constituted by three articles of belief: (1) The correlative facts, subject and object, exist and arise only in connection (objects are directly known only as the contents of a consciousness, _cui objecta sunt_, subjects only as centers of relation, as the scene or foundation of a representative content, _cui subjecta sunt_: outside my thoughts body does not exist as body, nor I myself as soul). (2) The variability of the objects of perception. (3) Sensationalism–all specific differences in consciousness must be conceived as differences in degree, all higher mental processes and states, including thought, as the perceptions and experiences, transformed according to law, of beings which feel, have wants, possess memory, and are capable of spontaneous motion. The subject coincides with its feeling of pleasure and pain, from which sensation is distinguished by its objective content. The illusions of metaphysics are scientifically untenable and practically unnecessary. Various yearnings, wants, presentiments, hopes, and fancies, it is true, lead beyond the sphere of that which can be checked by sense and experience, but for none of their positions can any sufficient proof be adduced. As physics has discarded transcendent causes and learned how to get along with immanent causes, so ethics also must endeavor to establish the worth of moral good without excursions into the suprasensible. The ethical obligations arise naturally from human relations, from earthly needs. The third volume of Laas’s work differs from the earlier ones by conceding the rank of facts to the principles of logic as well as to perception. Aloys Riehl opposes the theory of knowledge (which starts from the fundamental fact of sensation) as scientific philosophy to metaphysics as unscientific, and banishes the doctrine of the practical ideals from the realm of science into the region of religion and art. Richard Avenarius defends the principle of “pure experience.” Sensation, which is all that is left as objectively given after the removal of the subjective additions, constitutes the content, and motion the form of being.
[Footnote 1: Laas: _Idealism and Positivism_, 1879-84. Riehl: _Philosophical Criticism_, 1876-87; Address _On Scientific and Unscientific Philosophy_, 1883. Avenarius (p. 598): _Philosophy as Thought concerning the World according to the Principle of Least Work_, 1876; _Critique of Pure Experience_, vol. i. 1888, vol. ii. 1890; _Man’s Concept of the World_, 1891. C. Göring (died 1879; _System of Critical Philosophy_, 1875) may also be placed here.]
With the neo-Kantians and the positivists there is associated, thirdly, a coherent group of noëtical thinkers, who, rejecting extramental elements of every kind, look on all conceivable being as merely a conscious content. This monism of consciousness is advocated by W. Schuppe of Greifswald (born 1836; _Noëtical Logic_, 1878), J. Rehmke, also of Greifswald (_The World as Percept and Concept_, 1880; “The Question of the Soul” in vol. ii. of the _Zeitschrift für Psychologie_, 1891), A. von Leclair (_Contributions to a_ _Monistic Theory of Knowledge_, 1882), and R. von Schubert-Soldern (_Foundations of a Theory of Knowledge_, 1884; _On the Transcendence of Object and Subject_, 1882; _Foundations for an Ethics_, 1887). J. Bergmann[1] in Marburg (born 1840) occupies a kindred position.
[Footnote 1: Bergmann: _Outlines of a Theory of Consciousness_, 1870; _Pure Logic_, 1879; _Being and Knowing_, 1880; _The Fundamental Problems of Logic_, 1882; _On the Right_, 1883; _Lectures on Metaphysics_, 1886; _On the Beautiful_, 1887; _History of Philosophy_, vol. i., _Pre-Kantian Philosophy_, 1892.]
It is the same scientific spirit of the time, which in the fifties led many who were weary of the idealistic speculations over to materialism, that now secures such wide dissemination and so widespread favor for the endeavors of the neo-Kantians and the positivists or neo-Baconians, who desire to see metaphysics stricken from the list of the sciences and replaced by noëtics, and the theory of the world relegated to faith. The philosophy of the present, like the pre-Socratic philosophy and the philosophy of the early modern period, wears the badge of physics. The world is conceived from the standpoint of nature, psychical phenomena are in part neglected, in part see their inconvenient claims reduced to a minimum, while it is but rarely that we find an appreciation of their independence and co-ordinate value, not to speak of their superior position. The power which natural science has gained over philosophy dates essentially from a series of famous discoveries and theories, by which science has opened up entirely new and wide outlooks, and whose title to be considered in the formation of a general view of reality is incontestable. To mention only the most prominent, the following have all posited important and far-reaching problems for philosophy as well as for science: Johannes Müller’s (Müller died 1858) theory of the specific energies of the senses, which Helmholtz made use of as an empirical confirmation of the Kantian apriorism; the law of the conservation of energy discovered by Robert Mayer (1842, 1850; Helmholtz, 1847, 1862), and, in particular, the law of the transformation of heat into motion, which invited an examination of all the forces active in the world to test their mutual convertibility; the extension of mechanism to the vital processes, favored even by Lotze; the renewed conflict between atomism and dynamism; further, the Darwinian theory[1] (1859), which makes organic species develop from one another by natural selection in the struggle for existence (through inheritance and adaptation); finally, the meta-geometrical speculations[2] of Gauss (1828), Riemann (_On the Hypotheses which lie at the Basis of Geometry_, 1854, published in 1867), Helmholtz (1868), B. Erdmann (_The Axioms of Geometry_, 1877). G. Cantor, and others, which look on our Euclidean space of three dimensions as a special case of the unintuitable yet thinkable analytic concept of a space of _n_ dimensions. The circumstance that these theories are still largely hypothetical in their own field appears to have stirred up rather than moderated the zeal for carrying them over into other departments and for applying them to the world as a whole. Thus, especially, the Darwinians[3] have undauntedly attempted to utilize the biological hypothesis of the master as a philosophical principle of the world, and to bring the mental sciences under the point of view of the mechanical theory of development, though thus far with more daring and noise than success. The finely conceived ethics of Höffding (p. 585) is an exception to the rule which is the object of this remark.
[Footnote 1: A critical exposition of the modern doctrine of development and of the causes used to explain it is given by Otto Hamann, _Entwickelungslehre und Darwinismus_, Jena, 1892. Cf. also, O. Liebmann, _Analysis der Wirklichkeit_; and Ed. von Hartmann (above, p. 610). [Among the numerous works in English the reader may be referred to the article “Evolution,” by Huxley and Sully, _Encyclopedia Britannica_, 9th ed., vol. viii.; Wallace’s _Darwinism_, 1889; Romanes, _Darwin and after Darwin_, i. _The Darwinian Theory_, 1892; and Conn’s _Evolution of To-day_, 1886.–TR.]]
[Footnote 2: Cf. Liebmann, _Analysis der Wirklichkeit_, 2d ed., pp. 53-59.