History Of Modern Philosophy
by
Richard Falckenberg
Part 10 out of 13
_Knowledge, Faith, and Presentiment_. Besides these he composed a _Handbook
of Psychical Anthropology_, 1821 (2d ed., 1837 _seq_.), text-books of
Logic, Metaphysics, the Mathematical Philosophy of Nature, and Practical
Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion, and a philosophical novel,
_Julius and Evagoras, or the Beauty of the Soul_.
Fries adopts and popularizes Kant's results, while he rejects Kant's
method. With Reinhold and Fichte, he thinks "transcendental prejudice" has
forced its way into philosophy, a phase of thought for which Kant himself
was responsible by his anxiety to demonstrate everything. That _a priori_
forms of knowledge exist cannot be proved by speculation, but only by
empirical methods, and discovered by inner observation; they are
given facts of reason, of which we become conscious by reflection or
psychological analysis. The _a priori_ element cannot be demonstrated nor
deduced, but only shown actually present. The question at issue[1] between
Fries and the idealistic school therefore becomes, Is the discovery of the
_a priori_ element itself a cognition _a priori_ or _a posteriori_? Is
the criticism of reason a metaphysical or an empirical, that is, an
anthropological inquiry? Herbart decides with the idealists: "All concepts
through which we think our faculty of knowledge are themselves metaphysical
concepts" (_Lehrbuch zur Einleitung_, p. 231). Fries decides: The criticism
of reason is an empirico-psychological inquiry, as in general empirical
psychology forms the basis of all philosophy.
[Footnote 1: Cf. Kuno Fischer's Pro-Rectoral Address, _Die beiden
Kantischen Schulen in Jena_, 1862.]
With the exception of this divergence in method Fries accepts Kant's
results almost unchanged, unless we must call the leveling down which they
suffer at his hands a considerable alteration. Only the doctrine of the
Ideas and of the knowledge of reason is transformed by the introduction and
systematization of Jacobi's principle of the immediate evidence of faith.
Reason, the faculty of Ideas, _i.e._, of the indemonstrable yet indubitable
principles, is fully the peer of the sensibility and the understanding. The
same subjective necessity which guarantees to us the objective reality of
the intuitions and the categories accompanies the Ideas as well; the faith
which reveals to us the _per se_ of things is no less certain than the
knowledge of phenomena. The ideal view of the world is just as necessary as
the natural view; through the former we cognize the same world as through
the latter, only after a higher order; both spring from reason or the
unity of transcendental apperception, only that in the natural view we are
conscious of the fact, from which we abstract in the ideal view, that this
is the condition of experience. That which necessitates us to rise from
knowledge to faith is the circumstance that the empty unity-form of reason
is never completely filled by sensuous cognition. The Ideas are of two
kinds: the aesthetic Ideas are intuitions, which lack clear concepts
corresponding to them; the logical Ideas are concepts under which no
correspondent definite intuitions can be subsumed. The former are reached
through combination; the latter by negation, by thinking away the
limitations of empirical cognition, by removing the limits from the
concepts of the understanding. By way of the negation of all limitations we
reach as many Ideas as there are categories, that is, twelve, among which
the Ideas of relation are the most important. These are the three axioms of
faith--the eternity of the soul (its elevation above space and time, to be
carefully distinguished from immortality, or its permanence in time),
the freedom of the will, and the Deity. Every Idea expresses something
absolute, unconditioned, perfect, and eternal.--The dualism of knowledge
and faith, of nature and freedom, or of phenomenal reality and true, higher
reality, is bridged over by a third and intermediate mode of apprehension,
feeling or presentiment, which teaches us the reconciliation of the two
realities, the union of the Idea and the phenomenon, the interpenetration
of the eternal and the temporal. The beautiful is the Idea as it manifests
itself in the phenomenon, or the phenomenon as it symbolizes the eternal.
The aesthetico-religious judgment looks on the finite as the revelation and
symbol of the infinite. In brief, "Of phenomena we have knowledge; in the
true nature of things we believe; presentiment enables us to cognize the
latter in the former."
Theoretical philosophy is divided into the philosophy of nature, which
is to use the mathematical method, hence to give a purely mechanical
explanation of all external phenomena, including those of organic life,
and to leave the consideration of the world as a teleological realm to
religious presentiment--and psychology. The object of the former is
external nature, that of the latter internal nature. I know myself only as
phenomenon, my body through outer, my ego through inner, experience. It
is only a variant mode of appearing on the part of one and the same
reality--so Fries remarks in opposition to the _influxus physicus_ and
the _harmonia praestabilata_--which now shows me my person inwardly as
my spirit, and now outwardly as the life-process of my body. Practical
philosophy includes ethics, the philosophy of religion, and aesthetics. In
accordance with the threefold interest of our animal, sensuo-rational, and
purely rational impulses, there result three ideals for the legislation of
values. These are the ideal of happiness, the ideal of perfection, and the
ideal of morality, or of the agreeable, the useful, and the good, the third
of which alone possesses an unconditioned worth and validity as a universal
and necessary law. The moral laws are deduced from faith in the equal
personal dignity of men, and the ennobling of humanity set up as the
highest mission of morality. The three fundamental aesthetical tempers are
the idyllic and epic of enthusiasm, the dramatic of resignation, the lyric
of devotion.
Fries's system is thus a union of Kantian positions with elements from
Jacobi, in which the former experience deterioration, and the latter
improvement, namely, more exact formulation. Among his adherents, and he
has them still, the following appear deserving of mention: the botanists
Schleiden and Hallier; the theologian De Wette; the philosophers Calker (of
Bonn, died 1870) and Apelt (1812-59). The last made himself favorably known
by his _Epochs of the History of Humanity_, 1845-46, _Theory of Induction_,
1854, and _Metaphysics_, 1857; his _Philosophy of Religion_ (1860) did not
appear until after his death. The Catholic theologian, Georg Hermes of Bonn
(1775-1831) favored a Kantianism akin to that of Fries.
* * * * *
The psychological view founded by Fries was consistently developed by
Friedrich Eduard Beneke (1798-1854). With the exception of three years of
teaching in Goettingen, 1824-27, whither he had gone in consequence of a
prohibition of his lectures called forth by his _Foundation of the Physics
of Ethics_, 1822, he was a member of the university of his native city,
Berlin, first as _Docent_, and, from 1832, after the death of Hegel, who
was unfavorably disposed toward him, as professor extraordinary.[1] Besides
Kant, Jacobi, and Fries, Schleiermacher, Herbart (with whom he became
acquainted in 1821), and the English thinkers exerted a determining
influence on the formation of his philosophy. Beneke denies the possibility
of speculative knowledge even more emphatically than Fries. Kant's
undertaking was aimed at the destruction of a non-experiential science from
concepts, and if it has not succeeded in preventing the neo-Scholasticism
of the Fichtean school, with its overdrawn attempts to revive a deductive
knowledge of the absolute, this has been chiefly due to the false,
non-empirical method of the great critic of reason. The root and basis of
all knowledge is experience; metaphysics itself is an empirical science, it
is the last in the series of philosophical disciplines. Whoever begins with
metaphysics, instead of ending with it, begins the house at the roof.
The point of departure for all cognition is inner experience or
self-observation; hence the fundamental science is psychology, and all
other branches of philosophy nothing but applied psychology. By the inner
sense we perceive our ego as it really is, not merely as it appears to us;
the only object whose _per se_ we immediately know is our own soul; in
self-consciousness being and representation are one. Thus, in opposition to
Kant, Beneke stands on the side of Descartes: The soul is better known
to us than the external world, to which we only transfer the existence
immediately given in the soul as a result of instinctive analogical
inference, so that in the descent of our knowledge from men organized
like ourselves to inorganic matter the inadequacy of our representations
progressively increases.
[Footnote 1: On Beneke's character cf. the fourth of Fortlage's _Acht
psychologische Vortraege_, which are well worth reading.]
Psychology--we may mention of Beneke's works in this field the
_Psychological Sketches_, 1825-27, and the _Text-book of Psychology_, 1833,
the third and fourth (1877) editions of which, edited by Dressler, contain
as an appendix a chronological table of all Beneke's works--must, as
internal natural science, follow the same method, and, starting with
the immediately given, employ the same instruments in the treatment of
experience as external natural science, _i.e._ the explanation of facts
by laws, and, further still, by hypotheses and theories. Gratefully
recognizing the removal of two obstacles to psychology, the doctrine of
innate ideas and the traditional theory of the faculties of the soul by
Locke and Herbart, (the commonly accepted faculties--memory, understanding,
feeling, will--are in fact not simple powers, but mere abstractions,
hypostatized class concepts of extremely complex phenomena,) Beneke seeks
to discover the simple elements from which all mental life is compounded.
He finds these in the numerous elementary faculties of receiving and
appropriating external stimuli, which the soul in part possesses, in part
acquires in the course of its life, and which constitute its substance;
each separate sense of itself includes many such faculties. Every act
or product of the soul is the result of two mutually dependent factors:
_stimulus and receptivity_. Their coming together gives the first of
the _four fundamental processes_, that of perception. The second is
the constant addition of new elementary faculties. By the third,
the equilibration or reciprocal transfer of the movable elements in
representations, Beneke explains the reproduction of an idea through
another associated with it, and the widening of the mental horizon by
emotion, _e.g._, the astounding eloquence of the angry. Since each
representation which passes out of consciousness continues to exist in the
soul as an unconscious product (where we cannot tell; the soul is not in
space), it is not retention, but obliviscence which needs explanation. That
which persists of the representation which is passing into unconsciousness,
and which makes its reappearance in consciousness possible, is called
a "trace" in reference to its departed cause, and a "disposition"
(_Angelegtheit_) in reference to its future results. Every such trace
or germ (_Anlage_)--that which lies intermediate between perception and
recollection--is a force, a striving, a tendency. The fourth of the
fundamental processes (which may be traced downward into the material
world, since the corporeal and the psychical differ only in degree and
pass over into each other) is the combination of mental products according
to the measure of their similarity, as these come to light in the formation
of judgments, comparisons, witticisms, of collective images, collective
feelings, and collective desires. The innate differences among men depend
on the greater or lesser "powerfulness, vivacity, and receptivity" of their
elementary faculties; all further differences arise gradually and are due
to the external stimuli; even the distinction between the human and the
animal soul, which consists in the spiritual nature of the former, is not
original.
Of the five constructive forms of the soul, which result from the varying
relation between stimulus and faculty, four are emotional products or
products of moods. If the stimulus is too small pain (dissatisfaction,
longing) arises, while pleasure springs from a marked, but not too great,
fullness of stimulus. If the stimulus gradually increases to the point of
excess, blunted appetite and satiety come in; when the excess is sudden
it results in pain. A clear representation, a sensation arises when the
stimulus is exactly proportioned to the faculty; it is in this case only
that the soul assumes a theoretical attitude, that it merely perceives
without any admixture of agreeable or disagreeable feelings. Desire is
pleasure remembered, the ego the complex of all the representations which
have ever arisen in the soul, the totality of the manifold given within me.
For the immortality of the immaterial soul Beneke advances an original and
attractive argument based on the principle that, in consequence of the
constantly increasing traces, through which the substance of the soul is
continually growing, consciousness turns more and more from the outer
to the inner, until finally perception dies entirely away. At death the
connection with the outer world ceases, it is true, but not the inner being
of the soul, for which that which has hitherto been highest now becomes the
foundation for new and still higher developments.
Like Herbart, on whom he was in many ways dependent, Beneke discussed
psychology and pedagogics with greater success than logic, metaphysics,
practical philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. He combats the
apriorism of Kant in ethics as elsewhere. The moral law does not arise
until the end of a long development. First in order are the immediately
felt values of things, which we estimate according to the degree of
enhancement or depression in the psychical state which they call forth.
From the feelings are formed concepts, from concepts judgments; and the
abstraction of the categorical imperative is a highly derivative phenomenon
and a very late result, although the feeling of oughtness or of moral
obligation, which accompanies the correct estimation of values and bids
us prefer spiritual to sensuous delights and the general good to our own
welfare, grows necessarily out of the inner nature of the human soul. There
are two sources of religion: one theoretical, for the idea of God; the
other practical, for the worship of God. We are impelled to the assumption
of a suprasensible, an unconditioned, a providence, on the one hand, by the
desire for a unitary conclusion for our fragmentary knowledge of the world;
and, on the other, by moral need, by our unsatisfied longing after the
good. The attributes which we ascribe to God are taken from experience, the
abstract attributes from being in general, the naturalistic from the world,
the spiritual from man. As an inevitable outcome of the transformation of
religious feelings into representations, and one which is harmless because
of the unmistakableness of their symbolic character, the anthropomorphic
predicates, through which we think the Deity as personal, themselves
establish the superiority of theism over pantheism. The object of religion,
moreover, is accessible only to the subjective certitude of feeling which
is given by faith, and not to scientific knowledge.
Feuerbach's anthropological standpoint will be discussed below. Like
Friedrich Ueberweg (1826-71; professor in Koenigsberg; _System of Logic_,
1857, 5th ed., edited by J.B. Meyer, 1882--English translation, 1871), Karl
Fortlage was strongly influenced in his psychological views by Beneke.
Born in 1806 at Osnabrueck, and at his death in 1881 a professor in Jena,
Fortlage shared with Beneke an impersonality of character, as well as the
fate of meeting with less esteem from his contemporaries than he merited
by the seriousness and originality of his thinking. To his _System of
Psychology_, 1855, in two volumes, he added, as it were, a third volume,
his _Contributions to Psychology_, 1875, besides psychological lectures of
a more popular cast (_Eight Lectures_, 1869, 2d ed., 1872; _Four Lectures_,
1874).[1] Fortlage characterizes his psychological method--in the criticism
of which F.A. Lange fails to show the justice for which he is elsewhere
to be commended--as observation by the inner sense. In the first place,
consciousness, as the active form of representation, must be separated from
that of which we are conscious, from the "content of representation," which
is in itself unconscious, but capable of coming into consciousness. Next
Fortlage seeks to determine the laws of these two factors. In regard to
the content of representation he distinguishes more sharply than Herbart
between the fusibility of the homogeneous and the capacity for complex
combination possessed by the heterogeneous (the fusion of similars goes on
even without aid from consciousness, while the connection of dissimilars is
brought about only through the help of the latter), and adds to these two
general properties of the content of representation two further ones, its
revivability (its persistence in unconsciousness), and its dissolubility in
the scale of size, color, etc. Consciousness, on the other hand, which for
Fortlage coincides with the ego or self, is treated as the presupposition
of all representations, not as their result--it is underived activity. He
explains the nature of consciousness by the concept of attention,
characterizes them both as "questioning activity" (_Fragethaetigkeit_), and
follows them out in their various degrees from expectation through
observation up to reflection. The listening and watching of the hunter
when waiting for the game is only a prolongation of the same consciousness
which accompanies all less exciting representations. The essential element
in conscious or questioning activity is the oscillation between yes and no.
As soon as the disjunction is decided by a yes, the desire which lies at
its basis, and which in the condition of consciousness is arrested, passes
over into activity. All consciousness is based on interest, and in its
origin is "arrested impulse" (_Triebhemmung_). "The direction of impulse
to an intuition to be expected only in the future is called
consciousness." The rank of a being depends on its capacity for
reflection: the greater the extent of its attention and the smaller
the stimuli which suffice to rouse this to action, the higher it stands.
Impulse--this is the fundamental idea of Fortlage's psychology, like will
with Fichte, and representation with Herbart--consists of an element of
representation and an element of feeling.
Pleasure + effort-image = impulse.
[Footnote 1: Among Fortlage's other works we may mention his valuable
_History of Poetry_, 1839; the _Genetic History of Philosophy since Kant_,
1852; and the attractive _Six Philosophical Lectures_, 1869, 2d ed., 1872.]
In his metaphysical convictions, to which he gave expression in his
_Exposition and Criticism of the Arguments for the Existence of God_,
1840, among other works, Fortlage belongs to the philosophers of identity.
Originally sailing in Hegel's wake, he soon recognizes that the roots of
the theory of identity go back to the Kantio-Fichtean philosophy, with
which the system of absolute truth, as he holds, has come into being. He
thus becomes an adherent of the Science of Knowledge, whose deductive
results he finds inductively confirmed by psychological experience.
Psychology is the empirical test for the metaphysical calculus of the
Science of Knowledge. In regard to the absolute Fortlage is in agreement
with Krause, the younger Fichte, Ulrici, etc., and calls his standpoint
_transcendent pantheism_. According to this all that is good, exalted, and
valuable in the world is divine in its nature; the human reason is of
the same essence as the divine reason (there can be nothing higher than
reason); the Godhead is the absolute ego of Fichte, which employs the
empirical egos as organs, which thinks and wills in individuals, in so
far as they think the truth and will the good, but at the same time as
universal subject goes beyond them. If, after the example of Hegel, we give
up transcendent pantheism in favor of immanence, two unphilosophical modes
of representing the absolute at once result--on the one hand, materialism;
on the other, popular, unphilosophical theism. If the Fichtean Science
of Knowledge could be separated from its difficult method, which it is
impossible ever to make comprehensible to the unphilosophical mind, it
would be called to take the place of religion.[1]
[Footnote 1: Among Fortlage's posthumous manuscripts was one on the
Philosophy of Religion, on which Eucken published an essay in the
_Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie_, vol. lxxxii. 1883, p. 180 _seq_. after
Lipsius had given a single chapter from it--"The Ideal of Morality
according to Christianity"--in his _Jahrbuecher fuer protestantische
Theologie_ (vol. ix. pp. 1-45). The journals _Im Neuen Reich_, 1881, No.
24, and _Die Gegenwart_, 1882, No. 34, contained warmly written notices of
Fortlage by J. Volkelt. Leopold Schmid (in Giessen, died 1869) gives a
favorable and skillfully composed outline of Fortlage's system in his
_Grundzuege der Einleitung in die Philosophie mit einer Beleuchtung der
von K. Ph. Fischer, Sengler, und Fortlage ermoeglichten Philosophie der
That_, 1860, pp. 226-357. Cf. also Moritz Brasch, _K. Fortlage, Ein
philosophisches Charakterbild_, in _Unsere Zeit_, 1883, Heft II,
pp. 730-756, incorporated in the same author's _Philosophie der
Gegenwart_, 1888.]
%2. Realism: Herbart.%
Johann Friedrich Herbart was scientifically the most important among the
philosophers of the opposition. Herbart was born at Oldenburg in 1776, the
son of a councilor of justice, and had already become acquainted with the
systems of Wolff and Kant before he entered the University of Jena in
1794. In 1796 he handed in to his instructor Fichte a critique of two of
Schelling's treatises, in which the youthful thinker already broke
away from idealism. While a private tutor in Switzerland he made the
acquaintance of Pestalozzi. In 1802 he habilitated in Goettingen, where, in
1805, he was promoted to a professorship extraordinary; while in 1809 he
received the professorship in Koenigsberg once held by Kant, and later by
W. Tr. Krug (died 1842). He died in 1841 at Goettingen, whither he had been
recalled in 1833. His _Collected Works_ were published in twelve volumes,
1850-52 (reprinted 1883 _seq_.), by his pupil Hartenstein, who has also
given an excellent exposition of his master's system in his _Probleme und
Grundlehren der allgemeinen Metaphysik_, 1836, and his _Grundbegriffe der
ethischen Wissenschaften_, 1844; a new edition, in chronological order, and
under the editorship of K. Kehrbach, began to appear in 1882, or rather
1887, and has now advanced to the fourth volume, 1891. Herbart's chief
works were written during his Koenigsberg residence: the _Text-book of
Introduction to Philosophy_, 1813, 4th ed., 1837 (very valuable as an
introduction to Herbartian modes of thought); _General Metaphysics_, 1829
(preceded in 1806 and 1808 by _The Principal Points in Metaphysics_, with a
supplement, _The Principal Points in Logic); Text-book of Psychology_,[1]
1816, 2d ed., 1834; _On the Possibility and Necessity of applying
Mathematics to Psychology_, 1822; _Psychology as a Science_, 1824-25. The
two works on ethics, which were widely separated in time, were, on the
other hand, written in Goettingen: _General Practical Philosophy_, 1808;
_Analytical Examination of Natural Right and of Morals_, 1836. To these
may be added a _Discourse on Evil_, 1817; _Letters on the Doctrine of
the Freedom of the Human Will_, 1836; and the _Brief Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy_, 1831, 2d ed., 1841. His works on education and instruction,
whose influence and value perhaps exceed those of his philosophical
achievements (collected editions of the pedagogical works have been
prepared by O. Willmann, 1873-75, 2d ed., 1880; and by Bartholomaei),
extended through his whole life. Besides pedagogics, psychology was the
chief sphere of his services.
[Footnote 1: English translation by M.K. Smith, 1891.]
In antithesis to the philosophy of intuition with its imagined superiority
to the standpoint of reflection, Herbart makes philosophy begin with
attention to concepts, defining it as the elaboration of concepts.
Philosophy, therefore, is not distinguished from other sciences by its
object, but by its method, which again must adapt itself to the
peculiarity of the object, to the starting point of the investigation in
question--there is no universal philosophical method. There are as many
divisions of philosophy as there are modes of elaborating concepts. The
first requisite is the discrimination of concepts, both the discrimination
of concepts from others and of the marks within each concept. This work
of making concepts clear and distinct is the business of logic. With this
discipline, in which Herbart essentially follows Kant, are associated two
other forms of the elaboration of concepts, that of physical and that
of aesthetic concepts. Both of these classes require more than a merely
logical elucidation. The physical concepts, through which we apprehend the
world and ourselves, contain contradictions and must be freed from them;
their correction is the business of meta-physics. Metaphysics is the
science of the comprehensibility of experience. The aesthetic (including
the ethical) concepts are distinguished from the nature-concepts by a
peculiar increment which they occasion in our representation, and which
consists in a judgment of approval or disapproval. To clear up these
concepts and to free them from false allied ideas is the task of aesthetics
in its widest sense. This includes all concepts which are accompanied by a
judgment of praise or blame; the most important among them are the ethical
concepts. Thus, aside from logic, we reach two principal divisions of
philosophy, which are elsewhere contrasted as theoretical and practical,
but here in Herbart as metaphysics and aesthetics. Herbart maintains that
these are entirely independent of each other, so that aesthetics, since it
presupposes nothing of metaphysics, may be discussed before metaphysics,
while the philosophy of nature and psychology depend throughout on
ontological principles. Together with natural theology the two latter
sciences constitute "applied" metaphysics. This in turn presupposes
"general" metaphysics, which subdivides into four parts: Methodology,
Ontology, Synechology, _i.e._, the theory of the continuous ([Greek:
_suneches_]), which treats of the continua, space, time, and motion, and
Eidolology, _i.e._, the theory of images or representations. The last forms
the transition to psychology, while synechology forms the preparation
for the philosophy of nature, whose most general problems it solves. Our
exposition will not need to observe these divisions closely.
Metaphysics starts with the given, but cannot rest content with it, for it
contains contradictions. In resolving these we rise above the given. What
_is given_? Kant has not answered this question with entire correctness.
We may, indeed, term the totality of the given "phenomena," but this
presupposes something which appears. If nothing existed there would also
nothing appear. As smoke points to fire, so appearance to being. So much
seeming, so much indication of being. Things in themselves may be known
mediately, though not immediately, by following out the indications of
being contained by the given appearance. Further, not merely the unformed
matter of cognition is given to us, but it is rather true that everything
comes under this concept which experience so presses on us that we cannot
resist it; hence not merely single sensations, but entire sensation-groups,
not merely the matter, but also the forms of experience. If the latter were
really subjective products, as Kant holds, it would necessarily be possible
for us at will to think each perceptive-content either under the category
of substance, or property, or cause--possible for us, if we chose, to see
a round table quadrilateral. In reality we are bound in the application of
these forms; they are given for each object in a definite way. The given
forms--Herbart calls them experience-concepts--contain contradictions.
How can these contradictions be removed? We may neither simply reject the
concepts which are burdened with contradictions, for they are given, nor
leave them as they are, for the logical _principium contradictionis_
requires that the contradiction as such be rooted out. The
experience-concepts are valid (they find application in experience), but
they are not thinkable. Therefore we must so transform and supplement them
that they shall become free from contradictions and thinkable. The method
which Herbart employs to remove the contradictions is as follows: The
contradiction always consists in the fact that an _a_ should be the same as
a _b_, but is not so. The desiderated likeness of the two is impossible so
long as we think _a_ as _one_ thing. That which is unsuccessful in this
case will succeed, perhaps, if in thought we break up the _a_ into several
things--[Greek: _a b g_]. Then we shall be able to explain through the
"together" (_Zusammen_) of this plurality what we were unable to explain
from the undecomposed _a_, or from the single constituents of it. The
"together" is a "relation" established by thought among the elements of the
real. For this reason Herbart terms his method of finding out necessary
supplements to the given "the method of relations." Another name for the
same thing is "the method of contingent aspects." Mechanics operates with
contingent aspects when, for the sake of explanation, it resolves a given
motion into several components. Such fictions and substitutions--auxiliary
concepts, which are not real, but which serve only as paths for
thought--may be successfully employed by metaphysics also. The abstract
expression of this method runs: The contradiction is to be removed by
thinking one of its members as manifold rather than as one. In order to
observe the workings of this Herbartian machine we shall go over the four
principal contradictions by which his acuteness is put to the test--the
problems of inherence, of change, of the continuous, of the ego.
We call the given sensation-complexes "things," and ascribe "properties" to
them. How can one and the same thing have different properties--how can
the one be at the same time many? To say that the thing "possesses" the
properties does not help the matter. The possession of the different
properties is itself just as manifold and various as the properties which
are possessed. Hence the concept of the thing and its properties must be
so transformed that the plurality which seems to be in the thing shall be
transferred without it. Instead of one thing let us assume several, each
with a single definite property, from whose "together" the appearance
of many qualities in one thing now arises. The appearance of manifold
properties in the one thing has its ground in the "together" of many
things, each of which has one simple quality. Again, it is just as
impossible for a thing to have different qualities in succession, or to
change, as it is for it to have them at the same time. The popular view
of change, which holds that a thing takes on different forms (ice, water,
steam) and yet remains the same substance, is untenable. How is it possible
to become another, and yet to remain the same? The universal feeling that
the concept needs correction betrays itself in the fact that everyone
involuntarily adds a cause to the change in thought, and seeks a cause for
it, and thus of himself undertakes a transformation of the concept, though,
it is true, an inadequate one. If we think this concept through we come
upon a trilemma, a threefold impossibility. Whether we endeavor to deduce
the change from external or from internal causes, or (with Hegel) to think
it as causeless, in each case we involve ourselves in inconceivabilities.
All three ideas--change as mechanism, as self-determination or freedom,
as absolute becoming--are alike absurd. We can escape these contradictions
only by the bold decision to conceive the quality of the existent as
unchangeable. For the truly existent there is no change whatever. It
remains, however, to explain the appearance of change, in which the wand of
decomposition and the "together" again proves its magic power. Supported by
the motley manifoldness of phenomena, we posit real beings as qualitatively
different, and view this diversity as partial contraposition; we resolve,
_e.g._, the simple quality _a_ into the elements _x_ + _z_, and a second
quality _b_ into _y - z_. So long as the individual things remain by
themselves, the opposition of the qualities will not make itself evident.
But as soon as they come together, something takes place--now the opposites
(+_z_ and -_z_) seek to destroy or at least to disturb each other. The
reals defend themselves against the disturbance which would follow if the
opposites could destroy each other, by each conserving its simple,
unchangeable quality, _i.e._, by simply remaining self-identical.
_Self-conservation against_ threatened _disturbances_ from without (it may
be compared to resistance against pressure) is the only real change, and
apparent change, the empirical changes of things, to be explained from
this. That which changes is only the relations between the beings, as a
thing maintains itself now against this and now against that other thing;
the relations, however, and their change are something entirely contingent
and indifferent to the existent. In itself the self-conservation of a real
is as uniform as the quality which is conserved, but in virtue of the
changing relations (the variety of the disturbing things) it can express
itself for the observer in manifold ways as force. The real itself changes
as little as a painting changes, for instance, when, seen near at hand, the
figures in it are clearly distinguished, while for the distant
observer, on the contrary, they run together into an indistinguishable
chaos. Change has no meaning in the sphere of the existent.
Anyone who speaks thus has denied change, not deduced it. Among the many
objections experienced by Herbart's endeavor to explain the empirical
fact of change by his theory of self-conservation against threatened
disturbances Lotze's is the most cogent: The unsuccessful attempt to
solve the difficulties in the concept of becoming and action is still
instructive, for it shows that they cannot be solved in this way--from the
concept of inflexible being. If the "together," the threatened disturbance,
and the reaction against the latter be taken as realities, then, in the
affection by the disturber, the concept of change remains uneliminated and
uncorrected; if they be taken as unreal concepts auxiliary to thought,
change is relegated from the realm of being to the realm of seeming.
Herbart gives to them a kind of semi-reality, less true than the unmoving
ground of things (their unchangeable, permanent qualities), and more true
than their contradictory exterior (the empirical appearance of change).
Between being and seeming he thrusts in, as though between day and night,
the twilight region of his "contingent aspects," with their relations,
which are nothing to the real, their disturbances, which do not come to
pass, and their self-conservations, which are nothing but undisturbed
continuance in existence on the part of the real.
Besides the contradictions in the concepts of inherence, of change,
and action and passion, it is the concept of being which prevents our
philosopher from ascribing a living character to reality. Being, as Kant
correctly perceived, contains nothing qualitative; it is absolute position.
Whoever affirms that an object _is_, expresses thereby that the matter is
to rest with the simple position; in which is included that it is nothing
dependent, relative, or negative. (Every negation is something relative,
relates to a precedent position, which is to be annulled by it.) Besides
being, the existent contains something more--a quality; it consists of this
absolute position and a _what_. If this _what_ is separated from being we
reach an "image"; united with being it yields an essence or a real. This
_what_ of things is not their sensuous qualities; the latter belong rather
to the mere phenomenon. No one of them indicates what the object is by
itself, when left alone. They depend on contingent circumstances, and apart
from these they would not exist--what is color in the dark? what sound
in airless space? what weight in empty space? what fusibility without
fire?--they are each and all relative. Since being excludes negation of
every kind, the quality of the existent must be absolutely _simple and
unchangeable_; it brooks no manifoldness, no quantity, no distinctions in
degree, no becoming; all this were a corruption of the purely affirmative
or positive character of being. The existent is unextended and eternal.
The Eleatics are to be praised because the need of escaping from the
contradictions in the world of experience led them to make themselves
masters of the concept of being without relation and without negation, and
of the simple, homogeneous quality of the existent in its full purity. But
while the Eleatics conceived the existent as one, the atomists made an
advance by assuming a _plurality_ of reals. The truly one never becomes
a plurality; plurality is given, hence an original plurality must be
postulated. Herbart characterizes his own standpoint as qualitative
atomism, since his reals are differentiated by their properties, not by
quantitative relations (size and figure). The idealists and the pantheists
make a false use of the tendency toward unity which, no doubt, is present
in our reason, when they maintain that true being must be one. There is
absolutely nothing in the concept of being to forbid us to think the
existent as many; while the world of phenomena, with its many things and
their many properties, gives irrefragable grounds which compel us to this
conclusion. Hence, according to Herbart, the true reality is a (very
large, though not, it is true, an infinite[1]) plurality of supra-sensible
(non-spatial and non-temporal) reals, or, according to the Leibnitzian
expression, monads, which all their life have nothing further to do than
to preserve intact against disturbances the simple quality in which they
consist (for the existent is not distinct from its quality; it does not
have the quality, but is the quality). Each thing has but one response for
the most varied influences: it answers all suggestions from without by
affirming its _what_, by continually repeating, as it were, the same note,
which gains a varying meaning only in so far as, in accordance with the
character of the disturber, it appears now as a third, now as a fifth or
seventh. This picture of the world is certainly not attractive; in it all
change and becoming, all life and all activity is offered up on the altar
of monotonous being. Happily Herbart is inconsistent enough to enliven this
comfortless waste of changeless being by the relatively real or semi-real
manifoldness of the self-conservations.
The infinite divisibility of space and of matter forms the chief difficulty
in the problem of the continuous. Herbart endeavors to solve it by the
assumption of an intelligible space with "fixed" lines (lines formed by a
definite number of points, hence finitely divisible, and not continuous).
Metaphysics demands the fixed or discrete line, although common thought
is incapable of conceiving it. Space is a mere form of combination in
representation or for the observer, and yet it is objective, _i.e._, it is
valid for all intelligences, and not merely for human intelligence.
From his complex and unproductive endeavors to derive the appearance of
continuity from discontinuous reality we hurry on to the fourth, the
psychological problem, which Herbart discusses with great acuteness. He
considers it the chief merit of Fichte's Science of Knowledge that it
called attention to this problem.
The concept of the ego, of whose reality we have so strong and immediate a
conviction that, in the formula of asseveration, "as true as I exist,"
it is made the criterion of all other certitude, labors under various
contradictions. Besides the familiar difficulty, here especially sensible,
of one thing with many marks, it contains other absurdities of its own. In
the ego or self-consciousness subject and object are to be identical.
The identity of the representing and the represented ego is a
self-contradictory idea, for the law of contradiction forbids the equation
of opposites, while a subject is subject only through the fact that it is
not object. But, again, self-consciousness can never be realized, because
it involves a _regressus in infinitum_. The ego is defined as that which
represents itself. What is this "self"? It is, in turn, the self-knower.
This new explanation contains still a further self; which once more
signifies the self-knower and so on to infinity. The ego represents the
representation (_Vorstellen_) of its representation (_Vorstellen)_, etc.
The representation (_Vorstellung_) of the ego, therefore, can never be
actually brought to completion. (The assumption of the freedom of the will
leads to an analogous _regressus in infinitum_, in which the question,
"Willst thou thy volition?" "Willst thou the willing of this volition"? is
repeated to infinity.) The only escape from this tissue of absurdities
is to think the ego otherwise than is done by popular consciousness. The
knowing and the known ego are by no means the same, but the observing
subject in self-consciousness is one group of representations, the observed
subject another. Thus, for example, newly formed representations are
apperceived by the existing older ones, but the highest apperceiver is not,
in turn, itself apperceived. The ego is not a unit being, which represents
itself in the literal meaning of the phrase, but that which is represented
is a plurality. The ego is the junction of numberless series of
representations, and is constantly changing its place; it dwells now in
this representation, now in that. But as we distinguish the point of
meeting from the series which meet there, and imagine that it is possible
simultaneously to abstract from all the represented series (whereas in fact
we can only abstract from each one separately), there arises the appearance
of a permanent ego as the unit subject of all our representations. In
reality the ego is not the source of our representations, but the final
result of their combination. The representation, not the ego, is the
fundamental concept of psychology, the ego constituting rather its most
difficult problem.[1] It is a "result of other representations, which,
however, in order to yield this result, must be together in a single
substance, and must interpenetrate one another" (_Text-book of
Introduction_, p. 243). In this way Herbart defends the substantiality
of the soul against Kant and Fries. The soul's immortality (as also its
pre-existence) goes without saying, because of the non-temporal character
of the real.
[Footnote 1: On the Herbartian psychology, cf. Ribot, _German Psychology of
To-day_, English Translation by Baldwin, 1886, pp. 24-67; and G.F. Stout,
_Mind_, vols. xiii.-xiv.--TR.]
The soul is one of these reals which, unchangeable in themselves, enter
into various relations with others, and conserve themselves against the
latter. In its simple _what_ as unknowable as the rest, it is yet familiar
to us in its self-conservations. In the absence of a more fitting
expression for the totality of psychical phenomena we call these
_representations_, the phenomenal manifoldness of which is due to the
variety of the disturbances and exists for the observer alone. In itself,
without a plurality of dispositions and impulses, the soul is originally
not a representative force, but first becomes such under certain
circumstances, viz., when it is stimulated to self-conservation by other
beings. The sum of the reals which stand in immediate relation to the soul
is called its body; this, an aggregate of simple beings, furnishes the
intermediate link of causal relation between the soul and the external
world. The soul has its (movable) seat in the brain. In opposition to the
physiological treatment of psychology, Herbart remarks that psychology
throws much more light on physiology than she can ever receive from it.
The simplest representations are the sensations, which, amid all their
variety, still group themselves into definite classes (odors, sounds,
colors). They serve us as symbols of the disturbing reals, but they are not
images of things, nor effects of these, but products of the soul itself:
the generation of sensations is the soul's peculiar way of guarding itself
against threatened disturbances. Every representation once come into being
disappears again from consciousness, it is true, but not from the soul.
It persists, unites with others, and stands with them in a relation of
interaction--in both cases according to definite laws. These original
representations are the only ones which the soul produces by its own
activity; all other psychical phenomena, feeling, desire, will, attention,
memory, judgment, the whole wealth of inner events, result of themselves
from the interplay of the primary representations under law. Representation
(more exactly sensation) is alone original; space, time, the categories,
which Kant makes _a priori_, are all acquired, _i.e._, like all the higher
mental life, they are the results of a psychical _mechanism_, results whose
production needs no renewed exertion on the part of the soul itself. It has
been a very harmful error in psychology hitherto to ascribe each particular
mental activity to a special _faculty of the soul_ having a similar name,
instead of deriving it from combinations of simple representations.
Abstract, empty class ideas have been treated as real forces, in the belief
that thus the single concrete acts had been "explained."
There is no bitterer foe of the faculty theory than Herbart. His campaign
against it, if not victorious, was yet salutary, and the motives of his
hostility, up to a certain point, entirely justified. Nothing is more
useless than the assurance that what the soul actually does, that it must
also have the power to do. Who disputes this? A faculty explains nothing
so long as the laws under which its functions and its relations to other
faculties remain unexplained. But although the faculty idea serves no
positive end, it cannot be entirely discarded. It marks the boundary where
our ability to reduce one class of psychical phenomena to another ceases.
Herbart's polemic has no force against the moderate and necessary use of
this idea, no matter how much it was in place in view of the impropriety of
a superfluous multiplication of the faculties of the soul. The realization
of the ideal of psychology, the reduction of the complex phenomena of
mental life to the smallest possible number of simple elements, is limited
by the heterogeneity of the original phenomena, knowing, feeling, willing,
which wholly resists derivation from the combination of sensations. That
which blinded Herbart to these limitations was that tendency toward unity,
which, as a metaphysician and moral philosopher, he had all too willfully
suppressed, and which now took revenge for this infringement of its rights
by misleading the psychologist to an exaggeration which had important
consequences. Nevertheless his unsuccessful attempt remains interesting and
worthy of gratitude.
The discovery of the laws which govern the interaction of the psychical
elements is the task of a _statics and a mechanics_ of representations. The
former investigates the equilibrium or the settled final state; the latter,
the change, _i.e._ the movements of representations. These names of
themselves betray Herbart's conviction that mathematics can and must be
applied to psychology. The bright hopes, however, which Herbart formed for
the attempt at a mathematical psychology, were fulfilled neither in his own
endeavors nor in those of his pupils, although, as Lotze remarks, it would
be asserting too much to say that the most general formulas which he set up
contradict experience.--The unity of the soul forces representations to act
on one another. Disparate representations, those, that is, which belong
to different representative series, as the visual image of a rose and the
auditory image of the word rose, or as the sensations yellow, hard, round,
ringing, connected in the concept gold piece, enter into complications
[complexes]. Homogeneous representations (the memory image and the
perceptual image of a black poodle) fuse into a single representation.
Opposed representations (red and blue) arrest one another when they are in
consciousness together. The connection and graded fusion of representations
is the basis of their retention and reproduction, as well as of the
formation of continuous series of representations. The reproduction is in
part immediate, a free rising of the representation by its own power as
soon as the hindrances give way; in part mediate, a coming up through
the help of others. On the _arrest_ of partially or totally opposed
representations Herbart bases his psychological calculus. Let there be
given simultaneously in consciousness three opposed representations of
different intensities, the strongest to be called _a_, the weakest _c_, the
intermediate one _b_. What happens? They arrest one another, _i.e._ a part
of each is forced to sink below the threshold of consciousness.[1]
What is the amount of the arrest? As much as all the weaker representations
together come to--the sum of arrest or the sum of that which becomes
unconscious (as it were the burden to be divided) is equal to the sum of
all the representations with the exception of the strongest (hence = _b_ +
_c_), and is divided among the individual representations in the inverse
ratio of their strength, consequently in such a way that the strongest (the
one which most actively and successfully resists arrest) has the least,
and the weakest the most, of it to bear. It may thus come to pass that a
representation is entirely driven out of consciousness by two stronger
ones, while it is impossible for this to happen to it from a single one,
no matter how superior it be. The simplest case of all is when two equally
strong representations are present, in which case each is reduced to
the half of its original intensity. The sum of that which remains in
consciousness is always equal to the greatest representation.
[Footnote 1: By their mutual pressure representations are transformed into
a mere _tendency_ to represent, which again becomes actual representation
when the arrest ceases. The parts of a representation transformed into a
tendency, and the residua remaining unobscured, are not pieces cut off,
but the quantity denotes merely a degree of obscuration in the whole
representation, or rather in the representation which actually takes
place.]
As soon as a representation reaches the zero point of consciousness, or as
soon as a new representation (sensation) comes in, the others begin at
once to rise or sink. The Mechanics seeks to investigate the laws of these
movements of representations; but we may the more readily pass over its
complicated calculations since their precise formulas can never more than
very roughly represent the true state of the case, which simply rebels
against precision. The rock on which every immanent use of mathematics
in psychology must strike, is the impossibility of exactly measuring one
representation by another. We may, indeed, declare one stronger than
another on the basis of the immediate impression of feeling, but we cannot
say how much stronger it is, nor with reason assert that it is twice or
half as intense. Herbart's mathematical psychology was wrecked by this
insurmountable difficulty. The demand for exactness which it raised, but
which it was unable to satisfy with the means at its disposal, has recently
been renewed, and has led to assured results in psycho-physics, which works
on a different basis and with ingenious methods of measurement.
Herbart endeavors, as we have seen, to deduce the various mental activities
from the play of representations, Feeling and desire are not something
beside representations, are not special faculties of the soul, but results
of the relations of representations, changing states of representations
arrested and working upward against hindrances. A representation which has
been forced out of consciousness persists as a _tendency or effort_ to
represent, and as such exerts a pressure on the conscious representations.
If a representation is suspended between counteracting forces a feeling
results; desire is the rise of a representation in the face of hindrances,
aversion is hesitation in sinking. If the effort is accompanied by the idea
that its goal is attainable, it is termed will. The character of a man
depends on the fact that definite masses of representations have
become dominant, and by their strength and persistence hold opposing
representations in check or suppress them. The longer the dominant mass of
representations exercises its power, the firmer becomes the habit of acting
in a certain way, the more fixed the will. Herbart's intellectualistic
denial of self-dependence to the practical capacities of the soul leads him
logically to determinism. Volition depends on insight, is determined by
representations; freedom signifies nothing but the fact that the will
can be determined by motives. If the individual decisions of man were
undetermined he would have no character; if the character were free in the
choice between two actions, then, along with the noblest resolve, there
would remain the possibility of an opposite decision; freedom of choice
would make pure chance the doer of our deeds. Pedagogics, above all,
must reject the idea of an undetermined freedom; education, along with
imputation, correction, and punishment, would be a meaningless word, if no
determining influence on the will of the pupil were possible.--This last
objection overlooks the fact that the pedagogical influence is always
mediate, and can do no more than, by disciplining the impulses of the pupil
and by supplying him with aids against immoral inclinations, to lighten his
moral task. We can work on the motives only, never directly on the will
itself. Otherwise it would be inexplicable that even the best pedagogical
skill proves powerless in the case of many individuals.
Herbart's psychology was preceded by a philosophy of nature, which
construes matter from attraction and repulsion, and declares an _actio in
distans_ impossible. The intermediate link between physics and psychology
is formed by the science of organic life (physiology or biology); and
with this natural theology is connected by the following principles: The
purposiveness which we notice with admiration in men and the higher animals
compels us, since it can neither come from chance nor be explained on
natural grounds alone, to assume as its author a supreme artificer,
an intelligence which works by ends. It is true, indeed, that the existence
of the Deity is not demonstrated by the teleological argument; this is only
an hypothesis, but one as highly probable as the assumption that the human
bodies by which we are surrounded are inhabited by human souls--a fact
which we can only assume, not perceive nor prove. The assurance of faith
is different from that of logic and experience, but not inferior to it.
Religion is based on humility and grateful reverence, which is favored, not
injured, by the immeasurable sublimity of its object, the incompleteness of
our idea of the Supreme Being, and the knowledge of our ignorance. If faith
rests, on the one hand, on the teleological view of nature, it is, on the
other, connected with moral need, and exercises, in addition, aesthetic
influences. By comforting the suffering, setting right the erring,
reclaiming and pacifying the sinner, warning, strengthening, and
encouraging the morally sound, religion brings the spirit into a new and
better land, shows it a higher order of things, the order of providence,
which, amid all the mistakes of men, still furthers the good. The religious
spirit always includes an ethical element, and the bond of the Church holds
men together even where the state is destroyed. Indispensable theoretically
as a supplement to our knowledge, and practically because of the moral
imperfection of men, who need it to humble, warn, comfort, and lift them
up, religion is, nevertheless, in its origin independent of knowledge
and moral will. Faith is older than science and morals: the doctrine of
religion did not wait for astronomy and cosmology, nor the erection of
temples for ethics. Before the development of the moral concepts religion
already existed in the form of wonder without a special object, of a gloomy
awe which ascribed every sudden inner excitement to the impulse of an
invisible power. Since a speculative knowledge of the nature of God is
impossible, the only task which remains for metaphysics is the removal of
improper determinations from that which tradition and phantasy have to
say on the subject. We are to conceive God as personal, extramundane, and
omnipotent, as the creator, not of the reals themselves, but of their
purposive coexistence (_Zusammen_). In order, however, to rise from the
idea of the original, most real, and most powerful being to that of the
most excellent being we need the practical Ideas, without which the former
would remain an indifferent theoretical concept. Man can pray only to a
wise, holy, perfect, just, and good God.
This, in essential outline, is the content of the scattered observations
on the philosophy of religion given by Herbart. Drobisch (_Fundamental
Doctrines of the Philosophy of Religion_, 1840), from the standpoint of
religious criticism and with a renewal of the moral argument, and Taute
(1840-52) and Fluegel (_Miracles and the Possibility of a Knowledge of God_,
1869) with an apologetic tendency and one toward a belief in miracles,
have, among others, endeavored to make up for the lack of a detailed
treatment of this discipline by Herbart--from which, moreover, much of
value could hardly have been expected in view of the jejuneness of his
metaphysical conceptions and the insufficiency of his appreciation of evil.
It remains only to glance at Herbart's Aesthetics. The beautiful is
distinguished from the agreeable and the desirable, which, like it, are the
objects of preference and rejection, by the facts, first, that it arouses
an involuntary and disinterested judgment of approval; and second, that it
is a predicate which is ascribed to the object or is objective. To these is
added, thirdly, that while desire seeks for that which is to come, taste
possesses in the present that which it judges.
That which pleases or displeases is always the form, never the matter;
and further, is always a relation, for that which is entirely simple is
indifferent. As in music we have succeeded in discovering the simplest
relations, which please immediately and absolutely--we know not why--so
this must be attempted in all branches of the theory of art. The most
important among them, that which treats of moral beauty, moral philosophy,
has therefore to inquire concerning the simplest relations of will, which
call forth moral approval or disapproval (independently of the interest
of the spectator), to inquire concerning the practical Ideas or
pattern-concepts, in accordance with which moral taste, involuntarily and
with unconditional evidence, judges concerning the worth or unworth of
(actually happening or merely represented) volitions. Herbart enumerates
five such primary Ideas or fundamental judgments of conscience.
(1) The Idea of inner freedom compares the will with the judgment, the
conviction, the conscience of the agent himself. The agreement of his
desire with his own judgment, with the precept of his taste, pleases, lack
of agreement displeases. Since the power to determine the will according
to one's own insight of itself establishes only an empty consistency and
loyalty to conviction, and may also subserve immoral craft, the first Idea
waits for its content from the four following.
(2) The Idea of perfection has reference to the quantitative relations
of the manifold strivings of a subject, in intensity, extension, and
concentration. The strong is pleasing in contrast with the weak, the
greater (more extended, richer) in contrast with the smaller, the collected
in contrast with the scattered; in other words, in the individual
desires it is energy which pleases, in their sum variety, in the system
co-operation. While the first two Ideas have compared the will of the
individual man with itself, the remaining ones consider its relation to the
will of other rational beings, the third to a merely represented will, and
the last two to an actual one.
(3) According to the Idea of benevolence or goodness, which gives the most
immediate and definite criterion of the worth of the disposition, the will
pleases if it is in harmony with the (represented) will of another, _i.e._,
makes the satisfaction of the latter its aim.
(4) The Idea of right is based on the fact that strife displeases. If
several wills come together at one point without ill-will (in claiming a
thing), the parties ought to submit themselves to right as a rule for the
avoidance of strife.
(5) In retribution and equity, also, the original element is displeasure,
displeasure in an unrequited act as a disturbance of equilibrium. This
last Idea demands that no deed of good or evil remain unanswered; that in
reward, thanks, and punishment, a quantum of good and evil equal to that of
which he has been the cause return upon the agent. The one-sided deed of
good or ill is a disturbance, the removal of which demands a corresponding
requital.
Herbart warns us against the attempt to derive the five original Ideas
(which scientific analysis alone separates, for in life we always judge
according to all of them together) from a single higher Idea, maintaining
that the demand for a common principle of morals is a prejudice. From
the union of several beings into one person proceed five other
pattern-concepts, the derived or social Ideas of the ethical institutions
in which the primary Ideas are realized. These correspond to the primary
Ideas in the reverse order: The system of rewards, which regulates
punishment; the legal society, which hinders strife; the system of
administration, aimed at the greatest possible good of all; the system
of culture, aimed at the development of the greatest possible power and
virtuosity; finally, as the highest, and that which unites the others in
itself, society as a person, which, when it is provided with the necessary
power, is termed the state.
If we combine the totality of the original Ideas into the unity of the
person the concept of virtue arises. If we reflect on the limitations which
oppose the full realization of the ideal of virtue, we gain the concepts of
law and duty. An ethics, like that of Kant, which exclusively emphasizes
the imperative or obligatory character of the good, is one-sided; it
considers morality only in arrest, a mistake which goes with its false
doctrine of freedom. On the other hand, it was a great merit in Kant
that he first made clear the unconditional validity of moral judgment,
independent of all eudemonism. Politics and pedagogics are branches of the
theory of virtue. The end of education is development in virtue, and, as
a means to this, the arousing of varied interests and the production of a
stable character.
In conclusion, we may sum up the points in which Herbart shows himself
a follower of Kant--he calls himself a "Kantian of the year 1828." His
practical philosophy takes from Kant its independence of theoretical
philosophy, the disinterested character of aesthetic judgment, the
absoluteness of ethical values, the non-empirical origin of the moral
concepts: "The fundamental ethical relations are not drawn from
experience." His metaphysics owes to Kant the critical treatment of the
experience-concepts (its task is to make experience comprehensible), in
which the leading idea in the Kantian doctrine of the antinomies, the
inevitableness of contradictions, is generalized, extended to all the
fundamental concepts of experience, and, as it were, transferred from the
Dialectic to the Analytic; it owes to him, further, the conception of being
as absolute position, and, finally, the dualism of phenomena and things
in themselves. Herbart (with Schopenhauer) considers the renewal of the
Platonic distinction between seeming and being the chief service of the
great critical philosopher, and finds his greatest mistake in the _a
priori_ character ascribed to the forms of cognition. In the doctrine of
the pure intuitions and the categories, and the Critique of Judgment, he
rejects, and with full consciousness, just those parts of Kant on which the
Fichtean school had built further. Finally, Herbart's method of thought,
his impersonality, the at times anxious caution of his inquiry, and the
neatness of his conceptions, are somewhat akin to Kant's, only that he
lacked the gift of combination to a much greater degree than his great
predecessor on the Koenigsberg rostrum. His remarkable acuteness is busier
in loosening than in binding; it is more happy in the discovery of
contradictions than in their resolution. Therefore he does not belong to
the kings who have decided the fate of philosophy for long periods of time;
he stands to one side, though it is true he is the most important figure
among these who occupy such a position.
The first to give his adherence to Herbart in essential positions, and so
to furnish occasion for the formation of an Herbartian school, was Drobisch
(born 1802), in two critiques which appeared in 1828 and 1830. Besides
Drobisch, from whom we have valuable discussions of Logic (1836, 5th ed.,
1887) and Empirical Psychology (1842), and an interesting essay on _Moral
Statistics and the Freedom of the Will_ (1867), L. Struempell (born 1812;
_The Principal Points in Herbart's Metaphysics Critically Examined_, 1840),
is a professor in Leipsic. The organ of the school, the _Zeitschrift
fuer exakte Philosophie_, now edited by Fluegel (the first volume, 1860,
contained a survey of the literature of the school), was at first issued
by T. Ziller, the pedagogical thinker, and Allihn. The _Zeitschrift fuer
Voelkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft_, from 1859, edited by M. Lazarus
(born 1824; _The Life of the Soul_, 3 vols., 1856 _seq_., 3d ed., 1883
_seq_.) and H. Steinthal (born 1823; _The Origin of Language_, 4th ed.,
1888; _Sketch of the Science of Language_, part i. 2d ed., 1881; _General
Ethics_, 1885) of Berlin, also belongs to the Herbartian movement.
Distinguished service has been done in psychology by Nahlowsky (_The Life
of Feeling_, 1862, 2d. ed., 1884), Theodor Waitz in Marburg (1821-84;
_Foundation of Psychology_, 1846; _Text-book of Psychology_, 1849), and
Volkmann in Prague (1822-77; _Text-book of Psychology_, 3d. ed., by
Cornelius, 1884 and 1885); while Friedrich Exner (died 1853) was formerly
much spoken of as an opponent of the Hegelian psychology (1843-44). Robert
Zimmermann in Vienna (born 1824) represents an extreme formalistic tendency
in aesthetics (_History of Aesthetics_, 1858; _General Esthetics as Science
of Form_, 1865; further, a series of thorough essays on subjects in the
history of philosophy). Among historians of philosophy Thilo has given a
rather one-sided representation of the Herbartian standpoint. The school's
philosophers of religion have been mentioned above (p. 532). Beneke, whom
we have joined with Fries on account of his anthropological standpoint,
stands about midway between Herbart and Schopenhauer. He shares in the
former's interest in psychology, in the latter's foundation of metaphysical
knowledge on inner experience, and in the dislike felt by both for Hegel;
while, on the other hand, he differs from Herbart in his empirical method,
and from Schopenhauer in the priority ascribed to representation over
effort.
%3. Pessimism: Schopenhauer.%
Schopenhauer is in all respects the antipodes of Herbart. If in Herbart
philosophy breaks up into a number of distinct special inquiries,
Schopenhauer has but one fundamental thought to communicate, in the
carrying out of which, as he is convinced, each part implies the whole and
is implied by the whole. The former operates with sober concepts where the
latter follows the lead of gifted intuition. The one is cool, thorough,
cautious, methodical to the point of pedantry; the other is passionate,
ingenious, unmethodical to the point of capricious dilettantism. In the one
case, philosophy is as far as possible exact science, in which the person
of the thinker entirely retires behind the substance of the inquiry; in the
other, philosophy consists in a sum of artistic conceptions, which derive
their content and value chiefly from the individuality of the author. The
history of philosophy has no other system to show which to the same
degree expresses and reflects the personality of the philosopher as
Schopenhauer's. This personality, notwithstanding its limitations and its
whims, was important enough to give interest to Schopenhauer's views, even
apart from the relative truth which they contain.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was the son of a merchant in Dantzic and
his wife Johanna, _nee_ Trosiener, who subsequently became known as a
novelist. His early training was gained from foreign travel, but after the
death of his father he exchanged the mercantile career, which he had begun
at his father's request, for that of a scholar, studying under G.E. Schulze
in Goettingen, and under Fichte at Berlin. In 1813 he gained his doctor's
degree in Jena with a dissertation _On the Fourfold Root of the Principle
of Sufficient Reason_. Then he moved from Weimar, the residence of his
mother, where he had associated considerably with Goethe and had been
introduced to Indian philosophy by Fr. Mayer, to Dresden (1814-18). In the
latter place he wrote the essay _On Sight and Colors_ (1816; subsequently
published by the author in Latin), and his chief work, _The World as Will
and Idea_ (1819; new edition, with a second volume, 1844). After the
completion of the latter he began his first Italian journey, while his
second tour fell in the interval between his two quite unsuccessful
attempts (in Berlin 1820 and 1825) to propagate his philosophy from the
professor's desk. From 1831 until his death he lived in learned retirement
in Frankfort-on-the-Main. Here he composed the opuscule _On Will in
Nature_, 1836, the prize treatises _On the Freedom of the Human Will_ and
_On the Foundation of Ethics_ (together, _The Two Fundamental Problems
of Ethics_, 1841), and the collection of minor treatises _Parerga and
Paralipomena_, 2 vols., 1851 (including an essay "On Religion").
J. Frauenstaedt has published a considerable amount of posthumous material
(among other things the translation, _B. Gracians Handorakel der
Weltklugheit_); the _Collected Works_ (6 vols., 1873-74, 2d ed., 1877, with
a biographical notice); _Lichtstrahlen aus Schopenhauers Werken_, 1861, 5th
ed. 1885; and a _Schopenhauer Lexicon_, 2 vols., 1871.[1]
[Footnote 1: From the remaining Schopenhauer literature (F. Laban has
published a chronological survey of it, 1880) we may call attention to the
critiques of the first edition of the chief work by Herbart and Beneke, and
that of the second edition by Fortlage (_Jenaische Litteratur Zeitung_,
1845, Nos. 146-151); J.E. Erdmann _Herbart und Schopenhauer, eine Antithese
(Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie_, 1851); Wilh. Gwinner, _Schopenhauers
Leben_, 1878 (the second edition of _Schopenhauer aus persoenlichem
Umgang dargestellt_, 1862); Fr. Nietzsche, _Schopenhauer als Erzieher
(Unzeitgemaesse Betrachtungen, Stueck iii_., 1874); O. Busch, _A.
Schopenhauer_, 2d. ed., 1878; K. Peters, _Schopenhauer als Philosoph und
Schriftsteller_, 1880; R. Koeber, _Die Philosophie A. Schopenhauers_, 1888.
[The English reader may be referred to Haldane and Kemp's translation of
_The World as Will and Idea_, 3 vols., 1883-86; the translation of _The
Fourfold Root_ and the _Will in Nature_ in Bohn's Philosophical Library,
1889; Saunders's translations from the _Parerga and Paralipomena_, 1889
_seq_.; Helen Zimmern's _Arthur Schopenhauer, his Life and his Philosophy_,
1876; W. Wallace's _Schopenhauer_, Great Writers Series, 1890 (with a
bibliography by Anderson, including references to numerous magazine
articles, etc.); Sully's _Pessimism_, 2d ed., 1882, chap. iv.; and Royce's
_Spirit of Modern Philosophy_, chap, viii., 1892.--TR.]]
In regard to subjective idealism Schopenhauer confesses himself a
thoroughgoing Kantian. That sensations are merely states in us has long
been known; Kant opened the eyes of the world to the fact that the forms of
knowledge are also the property of the subject. I know things only as they
appear to me, as I represent them in virtue of the constitution of my
intellect; the world is my idea. The Kantian theory, however, is capable of
simplification, the various forms of cognition may be reduced to a single
one, to the category of causality or principle of sufficient reason--which
was preferred by Kant himself--as the general expression of the regular
connection of our representations. This principle, in correspondence with
the several classes of objects, or rather of representations--viz., pure
(merely formal) intuitions, empirical (complete) intuitions, acts of will,
abstract concepts--has four forms: it is the _principium rationis essendi,
rationis fiendi, rationis agendi, rationis cognoscendi_. The _ratio
essendi_ is the law which regulates the coexistence of the parts of space
and the succession of the divisions of time. The _ratio fiendi_ demands for
every change of state another from which it regularly follows as from its
cause, and a substance as its unchangeable substratum--matter. All changes
take place necessarily, all that is real is material; the law of causality
is valid for phenomena alone, not beyond them, and holds only for the
states of substances, not for substances themselves. In inorganic nature
causes work mechanically, in organic nature as stimuli (in which the
reaction is not equal to the action), and in animated nature as motives.
A motive is a conscious (but not therefore a free) cause; the law of
motivation is the _ratio agendi_. This serial order, "mechanical cause,
stimulus, and motive," denotes only distinctions in the mode of action, not
in the necessity of action. Man's actions follow as inevitably from his
character and the motives which influence him as a clock strikes the hours;
the freedom of the will is a chimera. Finally, the _ratio cognoscendi_
determines that a judgment must have a sufficient ground in order to be
true. Judgment or the connection of concepts is the chief activity of the
reason, which, as the faculty of abstract thought and the organ of science,
constitutes the difference between man and the brute, while the possession
of the understanding with its intuition of objects is common to both. In
opposition to the customary overestimation of this gift of mediate
representations, of language, and of reflection, Schopenhauer gives
prominence to the fact that the reason is not a creative faculty like the
understanding, but only a receptive power, that it clarifies and transforms
the content furnished by intuition without increasing it by new
representations.
Objective cognition is confined within the circle of our representations;
all that is knowable is phenomenon. Space, time, and causality spread out
like a triple veil between us and the _per se_ of things, and prevent a
vision of the true nature of the world. There is one point, however, at
which we know more than mere phenomena, where of these three disturbing
media only one, time-form, separates us from the thing in itself. This
point is the consciousness of ourselves.
On the one hand, I appear to myself as body. My body is a temporal,
spatial, material object, an object like all others, and with them subject
to the laws of objectivity. But besides this objective cognition, I have,
further, an immediate consciousness of myself, through which I apprehend
my true being--I know myself as willing. My will is more than a mere
representation, it is the original element in me, the truly real which
appears to me as body. The will is related to the intellect as the primary
to the secondary, as substance to accident; it is related to the body
as the inner to the outer, as reality to phenomenon. The act of will is
followed at once and inevitably by the movement of the body willed, nay,
the two are one and the same, only given in different ways: will is the
body seen from within, body the will seen from without, the will become
visible, objectified. After the analogy of ourselves, again, who appear to
ourselves as material objects but in truth are will, all existence is to
be judged. The universe is the _mac-anthropos_; the knowledge of our own
essence, the key to the knowledge of the essence of the world. Like our
body, the whole world is the visibility of will. The human will is the
highest stage in the development of the same principle which manifests its
activity in the various forces of nature, and which properly takes its name
from the highest species. To penetrate further into the inner nature of
things than this is impossible. What that which presents itself as will
and which still remains after the negation of the latter (see below) is in
itself, is for us absolutely unknowable.
The world is _per se_ will. None of the predicates are to be attributed to
the primal will which we ascribe to things in consequence of our subjective
forms of thought--neither determination by causes or ends, nor plurality:
it stands outside the law of causality, as also outside space and time,
which form the _principium individuationis_. The primal will is groundless,
blind stress, unconscious impulse toward existence; it is one, the one
and all, [Greek: en nai pan]. That which manifests itself as gravity, as
magnetic force, as the impulse to growth, as the _vis medicatrix naturae_,
is only this one world-will, whose unity (not conscious character!) shows
itself in the purposiveness of its embodiments. The essence of each thing,
its hidden quality, at which empirical explanation finds its limit, is its
will: the essence of the stone is its will to fall; that of the lungs is
the will to breathe; teeth, throat, and bowels are hunger objectified.
Those qualities in which the universal will gives itself material
manifestation form a series with grades of increasing perfection, a realm
of unchangeable specific forms or eternal Ideas, which (with a real value
difficult to determine) stand midway between the one primal will and
the numberless individual beings. That the organic individual does not
perfectly correspond to the ideal of its species, but only approximates
this more or less closely, is grounded in the fact that the stadia in the
objectification of the will, or the Ideas, contend, as it were, for matter;
and whatever of force is used up in the victory of the higher Ideas over
the lower is lost for the development of the examples of the former. The
higher the level on which a being stands the clearer the expression of its
individuality. The most general forces of nature, which constitute the raw
mass, play the fundamental bass in the world-symphony, the higher stages
of inorganic nature, with the vegetable and animal worlds, the harmonious
middle parts, and man the guiding treble, the significant melody. With the
human brain the world as idea is given at a stroke; in this organ the will
has kindled a torch in order to throw light upon itself and to carry out
its designs with careful deliberation; it has brought forth the intellect
as its instrument, which, with the great majority of men, remains in a
position of subservience to the will. Brain and thought are the same; the
former is nothing other than the will to know, as the stomach is will
to digest. Those only talk of an immaterial soul who import into
philosophy--where such ideas do not belong--concepts taught them when they
were confirmed.
Schopenhauer's philosophy is as rich in inconsistencies as his personality
was self-willed and unharmonious. "He carries into his system all the
contradictions and whims of his capricious nature," says Zeller. From the
most radical idealism (the objective world a product of representation) he
makes a sharp transition to the crassest materialism (thought a function of
the brain); first matter is to be a mere idea, now thought is to be merely
a material phenomenon! The third and fourth books of _The World as Will and
Idea_, which develop the aesthetic and ethical standpoint of their author,
stand in as sharp a contradiction to the first (poetical) and the second
(metaphysical) books as these to each other. While at first it was
maintained that all representation is subject to the principle of
sufficient reason, we are now told that, besides causal cognition, there is
a higher knowledge, one which is free from the control of this principle,
viz., aesthetic and philosophical intuition. If, before, it was said that
the intellect is the creature and servant of the will, we now learn that in
favored individuals it gains the power to throw off the yoke of slavery,
and not only to raise itself to the blessedness of contemplation free from
all desire, but even to enter on a victorious conflict with the tyrant,
to slay the will. The source of this power--is not revealed. R. Haym _(A.
Schopenhauer_, 1864, reprinted from the _Preussische Jahrbuecher_) was not
far wrong in characterizing Schopenhauer's philosophy as a clever novel,
which entertains the reader by its rapid vicissitudes.
The contemplation which is free from causality and will is the essence of
aesthetic life; the partial and total sublation, the quieting and negation
of the will, that of ethical life. It is but seldom, and only in the
artistic and philosophical genius, that the intellect succeeds in freeing
itself from the supremacy of the will, and, laying aside the question of
the _why_ and _wherefore_, _where_ and _when_, in sinking itself completely
in the pure _what_ of things. While with the majority of mankind, as with
animals, the intellect always remains a prisoner in the service of the will
to live, of self-preservation, of personal interests, in gifted men,
in artists and thinkers, it strips off all that is individual, and, in
disinterested vision of the Ideas, becomes pure, timeless subject, freed
from the will. Art removes individuality from the subject as well as from
the object; its comforting and cheering influence depends on the fact that
it elevates those enjoying it to the stand-point--raised above all pain
of desire--of a fixed, calm, completely objective contemplation of the
unchangeable essence, of the eternal types of things. For aesthetic
intuition the object is not a thing under relations of space, time, and
cause, but only an expression, an exemplification, a representative of
the Idea. Poetry, which presents--most perfectly in tragedy--the Idea of
humanity, stands higher than the plastic arts. The highest rank, however,
belongs to music, since it does not, like the other arts, represent single
Ideas, but--as an unconscious metaphysic, nay, a second, ideal world above
the material world--the will itself. In view of this high appreciation
of their art, it is not surprising that musicians have contributed a
considerable contingent to the band of Schopenhauer worshipers. A different
source of attraction for the wider circle of readers was supplied by the
piquant spice of pessimism.
If the purposiveness of the phenomena of nature points to the unity of the
primal will, the unspeakable misery of life, which Schopenhauer sets forth
with no less of eloquence, proves the blindness and irrationality of the
world-ground. To live is to suffer; the world contains incomparably more
pain than pleasure; it is the worst possible world. In the world of
sub-animal nature aimless striving; in the animal world an insatiable
impulse after enjoyment--while the will, deceiving itself with fancied
happiness to come, which always remains denied it, and continually
tossed to and fro between necessity and _ennui_, never attains complete
satisfaction. The pleasure which it pursues is nothing but the removal of
a dissatisfaction, and vanishes at once when the longing is stilled, to
be replaced by fresh wants, that is, by new pains. In view of the
indescribable misery in the world, to favor optimism is evidence not so
much of folly and blindness as of a wanton disposition. The old saying is
true: Non-existence is better than existence. The misery, however, is the
just punishment for the original sin of the individual, which gave itself
its particular existence by an act of intelligible freedom. Redemption from
the sin and misery of existence is possible only through a second act
of transcendental freedom, which, since it consists in the complete
transformation of our being, and since it is supernatural in its origin,
the Church is right in describing as a new birth and work of grace.
Morality presupposes pessimistic insight into the badness of the world and
the fruitlessness of all desire, and pantheistic discernment of the untruth
of individual existence and the identity in essence of all individuals
from a metaphysical standpoint. Man is able to free himself from egoistic
self-affirmation only when he perceives the two truths, that all striving
is vain and the longed-for pleasure unattainable, and that all individuals
are at bottom one, viz. manifestations of the same primal will. This is
temporarily effected in sympathy, which, as the only counterpoise to
natural selfishness, is the true moral motive and the source of all love
and justice. The sympathizer sees himself in others and feels their
suffering as his own. The entire negation of the will, however, inspiring
examples of which have been furnished by the Christian ascetics and
Oriental penitents, stands higher than the vulgar virtue of sympathy with
the sufferings of others. Here knowledge, turned away from the individual
and vain to the whole and genuine, ceases to be a motive for the will and
becomes a means of stilling it; the intellect is transformed from a motive
into a quietive, and brings him who gives himself up to the All safely
out from the storm of the passions into the peace of deliverance from
existence. Absence of will, resignation, is holiness and blessedness in
one. For him who has slain the will in himself the motley deceptive dream
of phenomena has vanished, he lives in the ether of true reality, which for
our knowledge is an empty nothingness ("Nirvana"), yet (as the ultimate,
incomprehensible _per se_, which remains after the annulling of the will)
only a relative nothingness--relative to the phenomenon.
Schopenhauer disposes of the sense of responsibility and the reproofs of
conscience, which are inconvenient facts for his determinism, by making
them both refer, not to single deeds and the empirical character, but to
the indivisible act of the intelligible character. Conscience does not
blame me because I have acted as I must act with my character and the
motives given, but for being what in these actions I reveal myself to be.
_Operari sequitur esse_. My action follows from my being, my being was my
own free choice, and a new act of freedom is alone capable of transforming
it.
If Schopenhauer is fond of referring to the agreement of his views with the
oldest and most perfect religions, the idea lies in the background that
religion,--which springs from the same metaphysical needs as philosophy,
and, for the great multitude, who lack the leisure and the capacity for
philosophical thought, takes the place of the former,--as the metaphysics
of the people, clothes the same fundamental truths which the philosopher
offers in conceptual form and supports by rational grounds in the garb of
myth and allegory, and places them under the protection of an external
authority. When this character of religion is overlooked, and that which
is intended to be symbolical is taken for literal truth (it is not
the supernaturalists alone who start with this unjust demand, but the
rationalists also, with their minimizing interpretations), it becomes the
worst enemy of true philosophy. In Christianity the doctrines of original
sin and of redemption are especially congenial to our philosopher, as well
as mysticism and asceticism. He declares Mohammedanism the worst religion
on account of its optimism and abstract theism, and Buddhism the best,
because it is idealistic, pessimistic, and--atheistic.
It was not until after the appearance of the second edition of his
chief work that Schopenhauer experienced in increasing measure the
satisfaction--which his impatient ambition had expected much earlier--of
seeing his philosophy seriously considered. A zealous apostle arose for
him in Julius Frauenstaedt (died 1878; _Letters on the Philosophy of
Schopenhauer_, 1854; _New Letters on the Philosophy of Schopenhauer_,
1876), who, originally an Hegelian, endeavored to remove pessimism from the
master's system. Like Eduard von Hartmann, who will be discussed below,
Julius Bahnsen (died 1882; _The Contradiction in the Knowledge and Being
of the World, the Principle and Particular Verification of Real-Dialectic_,
1880-81; also, interesting characterological studies) seeks to combine
elements from Schopenhauer and Hegel, while K. Peters (_Will-world and
World-will_, 1883) shows in another direction points of contact with the
first named thinker. Of the younger members of the school we may name P.
Deussen in Kiel (_The Elements of Metaphysics_, 2d ed., 1890), and Philipp
Mainlaender (_Philosophy of Redemption_, 2d ed., 1879). As we have mentioned
above, Schopenhauer's doctrines have exercised an attractive force in
artistic circles also. Richard Wagner (1813-83; _Collected Writings_, 9
vols., 1871-73, vol. x. 1883; 2d ed., 1887-88), whose earlier aesthetic
writings (_The Art-work of the Future_, 1850; _Opera and Drama_, 1851) had
shown the influence of Feuerbach, in his later works (_Beethoven_, 1870;
_Religion and Art_, in the third volume of the _Bayreuther Blaetter_, 1880)
became an adherent of Schopenhauer, after, in the _Ring of the Nibelung_,
he had given poetical expression to a view of the world nearly allied to
Schopenhauer's, though this was previous to his acquaintance with the works
of the latter.[1] One of the most thoughtful disciples of the Frankfort
philosopher and the Bayreuth dramatist is Fried rich Nietzsche (born 1844).
His _Unseasonable Reflections_, 1873-76,[2] is a summons to return from the
errors of modern culture, which, corrupted by the seekers for gain, by the
state, by the polite writers and savants, especially by the professors
of philosophy, has made men cowardly and false instead of simple and
honorable, mere self-satisfied "philistines of culture." In his writings
since 1878[3] Nietzsche has exchanged the role of a German Rousseau for
that of a follower of Voltaire, to arrive finally at the ideal of the man
above men.[4]
[Footnote 1: Cf. on Wagner, Fr. v. Hausegger, _Wagner und Schopenhauer_,
1878. [English translation of Wagner's _Prose Works_ by Ellis, vol. i.,
1892.--TR.]]
[Footnote 2: "D. Strauss, the Confessor and the Author"; "On the Advantage
and Disadvantage of History for Life"; "Schopenhauer as an Educator"; "R.
Wagner in Bayreuth."]
[Footnote 3: _Human, All-too-human_, new ed., 1886; _The Dawn, Thoughts on
Human Prejudices_, 1881; _The Merry Science_, 1882; _So spake Zarathustra_,
1883-84; _Beyond Good and Evil_, 1886; _On the Genealogy of Morals_, 1887,
2d ed., 1887; _The Wagner Affair_, 1888, 2d ed., 1892; _Goetzendaemmerung, or
How to Philosophize with the Hammer_, 1889.]
[Footnote 4: Cf. H. Kaatz, _Die Weltanschauung Fr. Nietzsches, I. Kultur
und Moral_, 1892.]
CHAPTER XV.
PHILOSOPHY OUT OF GERMANY.
%1. Italy.%
The Cartesian philosophy, which had been widely accepted in Italy, and had
still been advocated, in the sense of Malebranche, by Sigismond Gerdil
(1718-1802), was opposed as an unhistorical view of the world by
Giambattista Vico,[1] the bold and profound creator of the philosophy of
history (1668-1744; from 1697 professor of rhetoric in the University
of Naples). Vico's leading ideas are as follows: Man makes himself the
criterion of the universe, judges that which is unknown and remote by the
known and present. The free will of the individual rests on the judgments,
manners, and habits of the people, which have arisen without reflection
from a universal human instinct. Uniform ideas among nations unacquainted
with one another are motived in a common truth. History is the development
of human nature; in it neither chance nor fate rules, but the legislative
power of providence, in virtue of which men through their own freedom
progressively realize the idea of human nature. The universal course of
civilization is that culture transfers its abode from the forests and huts
into villages, cities, and, finally, into academies; the nature of the
nations is at first rude, then stern, gradually it becomes mild, nay,
effeminate, and finally wanton; at first men feel only that which is
necessary, later they regard the useful, the convenient, the agreeable
and attractive, until the luxury sprung from the sense for the beautiful
degenerates into a foolish misuse of things. Vico divides antiquity into
three periods: the divine (theocracy), the heroic (aristocracy), and the
human (democracy and monarchy). The same course of things repeats itself in
the nations of later times: to the patriarchal dominion of the fanciful,
myth-making Orient correspond the spiritual states of the migrations; to
the old Greek aristocracy, the chivalry and robbery of the period of the
Crusades; to the republicanism and the monarchy of later antiquity, the
modern period, which gives even the citizens and peasants a share in the
universal equality. If European culture had not been transplanted to
America, the same three-act drama of human development would there be
playing. Vico carries this threefold division into his consideration of
manners, laws, languages, character, etc.
[Footnote 1: Vico: _Principles of a New Science of the Common Nature of
Nations_, 1725; _Works_, in six volumes, edited by G. Ferrari, 1835-37,
new ed.. 1853 _seq_. On Vico cf. K. Werner, 1877 and 1879. [Also Flint's
_Vico_, Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, 1884.--TR.]]
If Vico anticipates the Hegelian view of history, Antonio Genovesi
(1712-69), who also taught at the University of Naples, and while the
former was still living, shows himself animated by a presentiment of the
Kantian criticism.[1] Appreciating Leibnitz and Locke, and appropriating
the idea of the monads from the one and the unknowableness of substance
from the other, he reaches the conviction--according to statements in his
letters--that sense-bodies are nothing but the appearances of intelligible
unities; that each being for us is an activity, whose substratum and
ground remains unknown to us; that self-consciousness and the knowledge
of external impressions yield phenomena alone, through the elaboration of
which we produce the intellectual worlds of the sciences. For the rest,
Genovesi thus advises his friends: Study the world, devote yourselves to
languages and to mathematics, think more about men than about the things
above us, and leave metaphysical vagaries to the monks! His countrymen
honor in him the man who first included ethics and politics in
philosophical instruction, and who used the Italian language both from the
desk and in his writings, holding that a nation whose scientific works are
not composed in its own tongue is barbarian.
[Footnote 1: In the following account we have made use of a translation of
the concluding section of Francesco Florentine's _Handbook of the History
of Philosophy_, 1879-81, which was most kindly placed at our disposal by
Dr. J. Mainzer. Cf. _La Filosofia Contemporanea in Italia_, 1876, by the
same author; further, Bonatelli, _Die Philosophic in Italien seit_, 1815;
_Zeitschrift fuer Philosophic und philosophische Kritik_, vol. liv. 1869, p.
134 _seq._; and especially, K. Werner, _Die Italienische Philosophic des
XIX. Jahrhunderts_, 5 vols., 1884-86. [The English reader may be referred to
the appendix on Italian philosophy in vol. ii. of the English translation
of Ueberweg, by Vincenzo Botta; and to Barzellotti's "Philosophy in Italy,"
_Mind_, vol. in. 1878.--TR.]]
The sensationalism of Condillac, starting from Parma, gained influence over
Melchiore Gioja (1767-1828; _Statistical Logic_, 1803; _Ideology_, 1822)
and Giandomenico Romagnosi (1761-1835; _What is the Sound Mind?_ 1827), but
not without experiencing essential modification from both. The importance
of these men, moreover, lies more in the sphere of social philosophy than
in the sphere of noetics.
Of the three greatest Italian philosophers of this century, Galluppi,
Rosmini, and Gioberti, the first named is more in sympathy with the Kantian
position than he himself will confess. Pasquale Galluppi[1] (1770-1846;
from 1831 professor at Naples) adheres to the principle of experience, but
does not conceive experience as that which is sensuously given, but as
the elaboration of this through the synthetic relations _(rapporti)_ of
identity and difference, which proceed from the activity of the mind.
Vincenzo de Grazia (_Essay on the Reality of Human Knowledge_, 1839-42),
who holds all relations to be objective, and Ottavio Colecchi (died 1847;
_Philosophical Investigations_, 1843), who holds them all subjective,
oppose the view of Galluppi that some are objective and others subjective.
According to De Grazia judgment is observation, not connection; it finds
out the relations contained in the data of sensation; it discovers, but
does not produce them. Colecchi reduces the Kantian categories to two,
substance and cause. Testa, Borelli (1824), and, among the younger men,
Cantoni, are Kantians; Labriola is an Herbartian.
[Footnote 1: Galluppi: _Philosophical Essay on the Critique of Knowledge_,
1819 _seq.; Lectures on Logic and Metaphysics_, 1832 _seq.; Philosophy
of the Will_, 1832 _seq.; On the System of Fichte, or Considerations on
Transcendental Idealism and Absolute Rationalism_, 1841. By the _Letters
on the History of Philosophy from Descartes to Kant_, 1827, in the later
editions to Cousin, he became the founder of this discipline in his native
land.]
Antonio Rosmini-Serbati[1] (born 1797 at Rovereto, died 1855 at Stresa)
regards knowledge as the common product of sensibility and understanding,
the former furnishing the matter, the latter the form. The form is one: the
Idea of being which precedes all judgment, which does not come from myself,
which is innate, and apprehensible by immediate inner perception _(essere
ideale, ente universale)_. The pure concepts (substance, cause, unity,
necessity) arise when the reflecting reason analyzes this general Idea
of being; the mixed Ideas (space, time, motion; body, spirit), when the
understanding applies it to sensuous experience. The universal Idea of
being and the particular existences are in their being identical, but in
their mode of existence different. In his posthumous _Theosophy_,
1859 _seq_., Rosmini no longer makes the universal being receive its
determinations from without, but produce them from its own inner nature
by means of an _a priori_ development. Vincenzo Gioberti[1] (born 1801 in
Turin, died 1852 at Paris) has been compared as a patriot with Fichte, and
in his cast of thought with Spinoza. In place of Rosmini's "psychologism,"
which was advanced by Descartes and which leads to skepticism, he seeks to
substitute "ontologism," which is alone held capable of reconciling science
and the Catholic religion. By immediate intuition (the content of which
Gioberti comprehends in the formula "Being creates the existences") we
cognize the absolute as the creative ground of two series, the series of
thought and the series of reality. The endeavors of Rosmini and Gioberti to
bring the reason into harmony with the faith of the Church were fiercely
attacked by Giussepe Ferrari (1811-76) and Ausonio Franchi (1853), while
Francesco Bonatelli _(Thought and Cognition_, 1864) and Terenzio Mamiani
(1800-85; _Confessions of a Metaphysician_, 1865), follow a line of thought
akin to the Platonizing views of the first named thinkers. The review
_Filosofia delle Scuole Italiane_, called into life by Mamiani in 1870, has
been continued since 1886 under the direction of L. Ferri as the _Rivista
Italiana di Filosofia_.
[Footnote 1: Rosmini: _New Essay on the Origin of Ideas_, 1830 (English
translation, 1883-84); _Principles of Moral Science_, 1831; _Philosophy
of Right_, 1841.] [Footnote B: Gioberti: _Introduction to the Study of
Philosophy_, 1840; _Philosophical Errors of A. Rosmini_, 1842; _On the
Beautiful_, 1841; _On the Good_, 1842; _Protology_ edited by Massari, 1857.
On both cf. R. Seydel, _Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie_, 1859.]
The Thomistic doctrine has many adherents in Italy, among whom the Jesuit
M. Liberatore (1865) may be mentioned. The Hegelian philosophy has also
found favor there (especially in Naples), as well as positivism. The former
is favored by Vera, Mariano, Ragnisco, and Spaventa (died 1885); the
_Rivista di Filosofia Scientifica_, 1881 _seq_., founded by Morselli,
supports the latter, and E. Caporali's _La Nuova Scienza_, 1884, moves in
a similar direction. Pietro Siciliani _(On the Revival of the Positive
Philosophy in Italy_, 1871) makes the third, the critical, period of
philosophy by which scholasticism is overthrown and the reason made
authoritative, commence with Vico, and bases his doctrine on Vico's
formula: The conversion (transposition) of the _verum_ and the _factum_,
and _vice versa_. Subsequently he inclined to positivism, which he had
previously opposed, and among the representatives of which we may mention,
further, R. Ardigo of Pavia _(Psychology as Positive Science_, 1870; _The
Ethics of Positivism_, 1885; _Philosophical Works_, 1883 _seq_.), and
Andrea Angiulli of Naples (died 1890; _Philosophy and the Schools_, 1889),
who explain matter and spirit as two phenomena of the same essence;
further, Giuseppe Sergi, Giovanni Cesca, and the psychiatrist, C. Lombroso,
the head of the positivistic school of penal law.
%2. France.%
Among the French philosophers of this century[1] none can compare in
far-reaching influence, both at home and abroad, with Auguste Comte,[2] the
creator of positivism (born at Montpellier in 1798, died at Paris in 1857),
whose chief work, the _Course of Positive Philosophy_, 6 vols., appeared in
1830 42. [English version, "freely translated and condensed," by Harriet
Martineau, 1853.]
[Footnote 1: Accounts of French philosophy in the nineteenth century have
been given by Taine (1857, 3d ed., 1867); Janet _(La Philosophie Francaise
Contemporaine_, 2d ed., 1879); A. Franck; Ferraz (3 vols., 1880-89); Felix
Ravaisson (2d ed., 1884); the Swede, J. Borelius _(Glances at the Present
Position of Philosophy in Germany and France_, German translation by Jonas,
1887); [and Ribot, _Mind_, vol. ii., 1877].]
[Footnote 2: On Comte cf. B. Puenjer, _Jahrbuecher fuer protestantische
Theologie_, 1878; R. Eucken, _Zur Wuerdigung Comtes und des Positivismus_,
in the _Aufsaetze zum Zellerjubilaeum_, 1887; Maxim. Bruett, _Der
Positivismus_, Programme of the _Realgymnasium des Johanneums_, Hamburg,
1889; [also, besides Mill, p. 560, John Morley, _Encyclopedia Britannica_,
vol. vi. pp. 229-238, and E. Caird, _The Social Philosophy and Religion of
Comte_, 1885.--Tr.]]
The positive philosophy seeks to put an end to the hoary error that
anything more is open to our knowledge than given facts--phenomena and
their relations. We do not know the essence of phenomena, and just
as little their first causes and ultimate ends; we know--by means of
observation, experiment, and comparison--only the constant relations
between phenomena, the relations of succession and of similarity among
facts, the uniformities of which we call their laws. All knowledge is,
therefore, relative; there is no absolute knowledge, for the inmost essence
of facts, and likewise their origin, the way in which they are produced,
is for us impenetrable. We know only, and this by experience, that the
phenomenon A is invariably connected with the phenomenon B, that the
second always follows on the first, and call the constant antecedent of a
phenomenon its cause. We know such causes only as are themselves phenomena.
The fact that our knowledge is limited to the succession and coexistence of
phenomena is not to be lamented as a defect: the only knowledge which is
attainable by us is at the same time the only useful knowledge, that which
lends us practical power over phenomena. When we inquire into causes we
desire to hasten or hinder the effect, or to change it as we wish, or at
least to anticipate it in order to make our preparations accordingly. Such
foresight and control of events can be attained only through a knowledge
of their laws, their order of succession, their phenomenal causes. _Savoir
pour prevoir_. But, although the prevision of facts is the only knowledge
which we need, men have always sought after another, an "absolute"
knowledge, or have even believed that they were in possession of it; the
forerunners of the positive philosophy themselves, Bacon and Descartes,
have been entangled in this prejudice. A long intellectual development was
required to reach the truth, that our knowledge does not extend beyond
the cognition of the succession and coexistence of facts; that the same
procedure must be extended to abstract speculation which the common mind
itself makes use of in its single actions. On the other hand, the positive
philosophy, notwithstanding its rejection of metaphysics, is far from
giving its sanction to empiricism. Every isolated, empirical observation
is useless and uncertain; it obtains value and usefulness only when it is
defined and explained by a theory, and combined with other observations
into a law--this makes the difference between the observations of the
scholar and the layman.
The positive stage of a science, which begins when we learn to explain
phenomena by their laws, is preceded by two others: a theological stage,
which ascribes phenomena to supposed personal powers, and a metaphysical
stage, which ascribes them to abstract natural forces. These three periods
denote the childhood, the youth, and the manhood of science.
The earliest view of the world is the theological view, which derives the
events of the world from the voluntary acts of supernatural intelligent
beings. The crude view of nature sees in each individual thing a being
animated like man; later man accustoms himself to think of a whole class
of objects as governed by one invisible being, by a divinity; finally
the multitude of divinities gives place to a single God, who creates,
maintains, and rules the universe, and by extraordinary acts, by miracles,
interferes in the course of events. Thus fetichism (in its highest form,
astrolatry), polytheism, and monotheism are the stages in the development
of the theological mode of thought. In the second, the metaphysical,
period, the acts of divine volition are replaced by entities, by abstract
concepts, which are regarded as realities, as the true reality back of
phenomena. A force, a power, an occult property or essence is made to dwell
in things; the mysterious being which directs events is no longer called
God, but "Nature," and invested with certain inclinations, with a horror
of a vacuum, an aversion to breaks, a tendency toward the best, a _vis
medicatrix_, etc. Here belong, also, the vegetative soul of Aristotle, the
vital force and the plastic impulse of modern investigators. Finally the
positive stage is reached, when all such abstractions, which are even yet
conceived as half personal and acting voluntarily, are abandoned, and
the unalterable and universally valid laws of phenomena established by
observation and experiment alone. But to explain the laws of nature
themselves transcends, according to Comte, the fixed limits of human
knowledge. The beginning of the world lies outside the region of the
knowable, atheism is no better grounded than the theistic hypothesis, and
if Comte asserts that a blindly acting mechanism is less probable than a
world-plan, he is conscious that he is expressing a mere conjecture which
can never be raised to the rank of a scientific theory. The origin and the
end of things are insoluble problems, in answering which no progress has
yet been made in spite of man's long thought about them. Only that which
lies intermediate between the two inscrutable termini of the world is an
object of knowledge.
It is not only the human mind in general that exhibits this advance from
the theological, through the metaphysical, to the positive mode of thought,
but each separate science goes through the same three periods--only that
the various disciplines have developed with unequal rapidity. While some
have already culminated in the positive method of treatment, others yet
remain caught in the theological period of beginnings, and others still are
in the metaphysical transition stage. Up to the present all three phases
of development exist side by side, and even among the objects of the most
highly developed sciences there are some which we continue to regard
theologically; these are the ones which we do not yet understand how to
calculate, as the changes of the weather or the spread of epidemics. Which
science first attained the positive state, and in what order have the
others followed? With this criterion Comte constructs his _classification
of the sciences_, in which, however, he takes account only of those
sciences which he calls abstract, that is, those which treat of "events" in
distinction from "objects." The abstract sciences (as biology) investigate
the most general laws of nature, valid for all phenomena, from which the
particular phenomena which experience presents to us cannot be deduced, but
on the basis of which an entirely different world were also possible. The
concrete sciences, on the other hand (_e.g._, botany and zooelogy), have to
do with the actually given combinations of phenomena. The former follow out
each separate one of the general laws through all its possible modes of
operation, the latter consider only the combination of laws given in an
object. Thus oaks and squirrels are the result of very many laws, inasmuch
as organisms are dependent not only on biological, but also on physical,
chemical, and mathematical laws.
Comte enumerates six of these abstract sciences, and arranges them in such
a way that each depends on the truths of the preceding, and adds to these
its own special truths, while the first (the most general and simplest)
presupposes no earlier laws whatever, but is presupposed by all the
later ones. According to this principle of increasing particularity and
complexity the following scale results: (i) Mathematics, in which the
science of number, as being absolutely without presuppositions, precedes
geometry and mechanics; (2) Astronomy; (3) Physics (with five subordinate
divisions, in which the first place belongs to the theory of weight, and
the last to electrology, while the theory of heat, acoustics, and optics
are intermediate); (4) Chemistry; (5) Biology or physiology; (6) Sociology
or the science of society. This sequence, which is determined by the
increasing complexity and increasing dependence of the objects of the
sciences, is the order in which they have historically developed--before
the special laws of the more complicated sciences can be ascertained, the
general laws of the more simple ones must be accurately known. It is also
advisable to follow this same order of increasing complexity and difficulty
in the study of the sciences, for acquaintance with the methods of those
which are elementary is the best preparation for the pursuit of the higher
ones. In arithmetic and geometry we study positivity at its source; in the
sociological spirit it finds its completion.
Mathematics entered on its positive stage at quite an early period,
chemistry and biology only in recent times, while, in the highest and most
complicated science, the metaphysical (negative, liberal, democratic,
revolutionary) mode of thought is still battling with the feudalism of the
theological mode. To make sociology positive is the mission of the second
half of Comte's work, and to this goal his philosophical activity had been
directed from the beginning. Comte rates the efforts of political economy
very low, with the exception of the work of Adam Smith, and will not let
them pass as a preparation for scientific sociology, holding that they are
based on false abstractions. Psychology, which is absent from the above
enumeration, is to form a branch of biology, and exclusively to use the
objective method, especially phrenology (to the three faculties of the
soul, "heart, character, and intellect," correspond three regions of the
brain). Self-observation, so Comte, making an impossibility out of a
difficulty, teaches, can at most inform us concerning our feelings and
passions, and not at all concerning our own thinking, since reflection
brings to a stop the process to which it attends, and thus destroys its
object. The sole source of knowledge is external sense-perception. In his
_Positive Polity_ Comte subsequently added a seventh fundamental science,
ethics or anthropology.
Sociology,[1] the elevation of which to the rank of a positive science is
the principal aim of our philosopher, uses the same method as the natural
sciences, namely, the interrogation and interpretation of experience by
means of induction and deduction, only that here the usual relation of
these two instruments of knowledge is reversed. Between inorganic and
organic philosophy, both of which proceed from the known to the unknown,
there is this difference, that in the former the advance is from the
elements, as that which alone is directly accessible, to the whole which is
composed of them, while in the latter the opposite is the case, since here
the whole is better known than the individual parts of which it consists.
Hence, in inorganic science the laws of the composite phenomena are
obtained by deduction (from the laws of the simple facts inductively
discovered) and confirmed by observation; in sociology, on the other
hand, the laws are found through (historical) experience, and deductively
verified (from the nature of man as established by biology) only in the
sequel. Since the phenomena of society are determined not merely by the
general laws of human nature, but, above all, by the growing influence of
the past, historical studies must form the basis of sociological inquiry.
[Footnote 1: Cf. Krohn: _Beitraege zur Kenntniss und Wuerdigung der
Soziologie, Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik_, New Series,
vols. i. and iii., 1880 and 1881.]
Of the two parts of sociology, the Statics, which investigates the
equilibrium (the conditions of the existence, the permanence, and the
coexistence of social states), and Dynamics, which investigates the
movement (the laws of the progress) of social phenomena, the first was in
essence established by Aristotle. The fundamental concept of the Statics
is the _consensus_, the harmony, solidarity, or mutual dependence of the
members of the social organism. All its parts, science, art, religion,
politics, industry, must be considered together; they stand in such
intimate harmony and correlation that, for every important change of
condition in one of these parts, we may be certain of finding
corresponding changes in all the others, as its causes and effects.
Besides the selfish propensities, there dwell in man an equally original,
but intrinsically weaker, impulse toward association, which instinctively
leads him to seek the society of his fellows without reflection on the
advantages to be expected therefrom, and a moderate degree of
benevolence. As altruism conflicts with egoism, so the reason, together
with the impulse to get ahead, which can only be satisfied through
labor, is in continual conflict with the inborn disinclination to regulated
activity (especially to mental effort). The character of society depends on
the strength of the nobler incentives, that is, the social inclinations and
intellectual vivacity in opposition to the egoistic impulses and natural
inertness. The former nourish the progressive, the latter the conservative
spirit. Women are as much superior to men in the stronger development of
their sympathy and sociability as they are inferior in insight and reason.
Society is a group of families, not of individuals, and domestic life is
the foundation, preparation, and pattern for social life, Comte praises the
family, the connecting link between the individual and the species, as a
school of unselfishness, and approves the strictness of the Catholic Church
in regard to the indissolubility of the marriage relation. He remarks the
evil consequences of the constantly increasing division of labor, which
makes man egoistic and narrow-minded, since it hides rather than reveals
the social significance of the employment of the individual and its
connection with the welfare of the community, and seeks for a means of
checking them. Besides the universal education of youth, he demands
the establishment of a spiritual power to bring the general interest
continually to the minds of the members of all classes and avocations, to
direct education, and to enjoy the same authority in moral and intellectual
matters as is conceded to the astronomer in the affairs of his department.
The function of this power would be to occupy the position heretofore held
by the clergy. Comte conceives it as composed of positive philosophers,
entirely independent of the secular authorities, but in return cut off from
political influence and from wealth. Secular authority, on the other hand,
he wishes put into the hands of an aristocracy of capitalists, with the
bankers at the head of these governing leaders of industry.
The Dynamics, the science of the temporal succession of social phenomena,
makes use of the principle of development. The progress of society,
which is to be regarded as a great individual, consists in the growing
predominance of the higher, human activities over the lower and animal. The
humanity in us, it is true, will never attain complete ascendency over the
animality, but we can approach nearer and nearer to the ideal, and it is
our duty to aid in this march of civilization. Although the law of progress
holds good for all sides of mental life, for art, politics, and morals,
as well as for science, nevertheless the most important factor in the
evolution of the human race is the development of the intellect as the
guiding power in us (though not in itself the strongest). Awakened first by
the lower wants, the intellect assumes in increasing measure the guidance
of human operations, and gives a determinate direction to the feelings. The
passions divide men, and, without the guidance of the speculative faculty,
would mutually cripple one another; that which alone unites them into
a collection force is a common belief, an idea. Ideas are related to
feeling--to quote a comparison from John Stuart Mill's valuable treatise
_Auguste Comte and Positivism_, 3d ed., 1882, a work of which we have made
considerable use--as the steersman who directs the ship is to the steam
which drives it forward. Thus the history of humanity has been determined
by the history of man's intellectual convictions, and this in turn by the
three familiar stages in the theory of the universe. With the development
from the theological to the positive mode of thought is most intimately
connected, further, the transition from the military to the industrial
mode of life. As the religious spirit prepares the way for the scientific
spirit, so without the dominion of the military spirit industry could not
have been developed. It was only in the school of war that the earliest
societies could learn order; slavery was beneficial in that through it
labor was imposed upon the greater part of mankind in spite of their
aversion to it. The political preponderance of the legists corresponds to
the intermediate, metaphysical stage. The sociological law (discovered by
Comte in the year 1822) harmonizes also with the customary division which
separates the ancient from the modern world by the Middle Ages.
In his philosophy of history Comte gives the further application of these
principles. Here he has won commendation even from his opponents for a
sense of justice which merits respect and for his comprehensive view. The
outlooks and proposals for the future here interspersed were in later
writings[1] worked out into a comprehensive theory of the regeneration
of society; the extravagant character of which has given occasion to his
critics to make a complete division between the second, "subjective or
sentimental," period of his thinking, in which the philosopher is said to
be transformed into the high priest of a new religion, and the first, the
positivistic period, although the major part of the qualities pointed out
as characteristic of the former are only intensifications of some which may
be shown to have been present in the latter. Beneath the surface of the
most sober inquiry mystical and dictatorial tendencies pulsate in Comte
from the beginning, and science was for him simply a means to human
happiness. But now he no longer demands the independent pursuit of science
in order to the attainment of this end, but only the believing acceptance
of its results. The intellect is to be placed under the dominion of the
heart, and only such use made of it as promises a direct advantage for
humanity; the determination of what problems are most important at a given
time belongs to the priesthood. The systematic unity or harmony of the
mind demands this dominion of the feelings over thought. The religion of
positivism, which has "love for its principle, order for its basis, and
progress for its end," is a religion without God, and without any other
immortality than a continuance of existence in the grateful memory of
posterity. The dogmas of the positivist religion are scientific principles.
Its public _cultus_ with nine sacraments and a large number of annual
festivals, is paid to the _Grand Etre_ "Humanity" (which is not omnipotent,
but, on account of its composite character, most dependent, yet infinitely
superior to any of its parts); and, besides this, space, the earth, the
universe, and great men of the past are objects of reverence. Private
devotion consists in the adoration of living or dead women as our guardian
angels. The _ethics_ of the future declares the good of others to be the
sole moral motive to action (altruism). Comte's last work, the _Philosophy
of Mathematics_, 1856, indulges in a most remarkable numerical mysticism.
The historical influence exercised by Comte through his later writings is
extremely small in comparison with that of his chief work. Besides
Blignieres and Robinet, E. Littre, the well-known author of the
_Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise_ (1863 _seq_.) who was the most
eminent of Comte's disciples and the editor of his _Collected Works_ (1867
_seq_.), has written on the life and work of the master. Comte's school
divided into two groups--the apostates, with Littre (1801-81) at their
head, who reject the subjective phase and hold fast to the earlier
doctrine, and the faithful, who until 1877, when a new division between
strict and liberal Comteans took place within this group, gathered about P.
Laffitte (born 1823).[2] The leader of the English positivists is Frederic
Harrison (born 1831). Positivistic societies exist also in Sweden, Brazil,
Chili, and elsewhere. Positivism has been developed in an independent
spirit by J.S. Mill and Herbert Spencer.
[Footnote 1: _Positivist Catechism_, 1852 [English translation by Congreve,
1858, 2d ed., 1883]; _System of Positive Polity_, 4 vols., 1851-54 [English
translation, 1875-77]. Cf. Puenjer, _A. Comtes "Religion der Menschheit_" in
the _Jahrbuecher fuer protestantische Theologie_, 1882.]
[Footnote 2: On this division cf. E. Caro, _M. Littre et le Positivisme_,
1883, and Herm. Gruber (S.J.), _Der Positivismus vom Tode Comtes bis auf
unsere Tage_, 1891.]
The following brief remarks on the course of French philosophy may also be
added. Against the sensationalism of Condillac as continued by Cabanis,
Destutt de Tracy (see above, pp. 259-260), and various physiologists, a
twofold reaction asserted itself. One manifestation of this proceeded from
the _theological school_, represented by the "traditionalists" Victor de
Bonald (1818), Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821; _St. Petersburg Soirees_,
1821), and F. de Lamennais (1782-1854), who, however, after his break with
the Church (_Words of a Believer_, 1834) developed in his _Sketch of a
Philosophy_, 1841 _seq_., an ontological system after Italian and German
models. The other came from the _spiritualistic school_, at whose head
stood Maine de Biran[1] (1766-1824; _On the Foundations of Psychology_; his
_Works_ have been edited by Cousin, 1841, Naville, 1859, and Bertrand) and
Royer Collard (1763-1845). Their pupil Victor Cousin (1792-1867; _Works_,
1846-50), who admired Hegel also, became the head of the _eclectic school_.
Cousin will neither deny metaphysics with the Scotch, nor construe
metaphysics _a priori_ with the Germans, but with Descartes bases it on
psychology. For a time an idealist of the Hegelian type (infinite and
finite, God and the world, are mutually inseparable; the Ideas reveal
themselves in history, in the nations, in great men), he gradually sank
back to the position of common sense. His adherents, among whom Theodore
Jouffroy (died 1842) was the most eminent, have done special service in the
history of philosophy. From Cousin's school, which was opposed by P. Leroux
and J. Reynaud, have come Ravaisson, Saisset, Jules Simon, P. Janet (born
1823),[2] and E. Caro (born 1826; _The Philosophy of Goethe_, 1866). Kant
has influenced Charles Renouvier (born 1817; _Essays in General Criticism_,
4 vols., 1854-64) and E. Vacherot (born 1809; _Metaphysics and Science_,
1858, 2d ed., 1863; _Science and Consciousness_, 1872).
[Footnote 1: Cf. E. Koenig in _Philosophische Monatshefte_, vol. xxv. 1889,
p.160 _seq_.]
[Footnote 2: Janet: _History of Political Science in its Relations to
Morals_, 1858, 3d ed., 1887; _German Materialism of the Present Day_, 1864,
English translation by Masson, 1866: _The Family_, 1855; _The Philosophy of
Happiness_, 1862; _The Brain and Thought_, 1867; _Elements of Morals_,
1869 [English translation by Corson, 1884]; _The Theory of Morals_, 1874
[English translation by Mary Chapman, 1883]; _Final Causes_, 1876 [English
translation by Affleck, with a preface by Flint, new ed., 1883].]
Among other thinkers of reputation we may mention the socialist Henri de
Saint-Simon (1760-1825; _Selected Works_, 1859), the physiologist Claude
Bernard (1813-78), the positivist H. Taine (1828-93; _The Philosophy of
Art_, English translation by Durand, 2d ed., 1873; _On Intelligence_, 1872,
English translation by Haye, 1871), E. Renan (1823-92; _The Life of
Jesus_, 1863, English translation by Wilbour, _Philosophical Dialogues and
Fragments_--English, 1883), the writer on aesthetics and ethics J.M. Guyau
(_The Problems of Contemporary Aesthetics_, 1884; _Sketch of an Ethic
without Obligation or Sanction_, 1885; _The Irreligion of the Future_,
1887), Alfred Fouillee _(The Future of Metaphysics founded on Experience_,
1889; _Morals, Art, and Religion according to Guyau_, 1889; _The
Evolutionism of the Idea-Forces_, 1890), and the psychologist Th. Ribot,[1]
editor of the _Revue Philosophique_ (from 1876).
[Footnote 1: Ribot: _Heredity_, 2d ed., 1882 [English translation, 1875];
_The Diseases of Memory_, 1881 [English translation, 1882]; _The Diseases
of the Will_, 1883 [English. 1884]; _The Diseases of Personality_, 1885
[English, 1887]; _The Psychology of Attention_, 1889 [English, 1890];
_German Psychology of To-day_, 2d ed., 1885 [English translation by
Baldwin, 1886].]
%3. Great Britain and America.%
Prominent among the British philosophers of the nineteenth century[1]
are Hamilton, Bentham, J.S. Mill, and Spencer. Hamilton is the leading
representative of the Scottish School; Bentham is known as the advocate of
utilitarianism; Mill, an exponent of the traditional empiricism of English
thinking, develops the theory of induction and the principle of utility;
Spencer combines an agnostic doctrine of the absolute and thoroughgoing
evolution in the phenomenal world into a comprehensive philosophical
system.[2] In recent years there has been a reaction against empirical
doctrines on the basis of neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian principles. Foremost
among the leaders of this movement we may mention T.H. Green.
[Footnote 1: Cf. Harald Hoeffding, _Einleitung in die englische Philosophie
unserer Zeit_ (Danish, 1874), German (with alterations and additions by the
author) by H. Kurella, 1889; David Masson, _Recent British Philosophy_,
1865, 3d ed., 1877; Ribot, _La Psychologie Anglaise Contemporaine_, 1870,
2d ed., 1875 [English, 1874] Guyau, _La Morale Anglaise Contemporaine_,
1879 [Morris, _British Thought and Thinkers_, 1880; Porter, "On English and
American Philosophy," Ueberweg's _History_, English translation, vol.
ii. pp. 348-460; O. Pfleiderer, _Development of Theology_, 1890, book
iv.--TR.]]
[Footnote 2: Cf. on Mill and Spencer, Bernh. Puenjer, _Jahrbuecher fuer
protestantische Theologie_, 1878.]
The Scottish philosophy has been continued in the nineteenth century by
James Mackintosh (_Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy_,
1830, 3d ed., 1863), and William Whewell (_History of the Inductive
Sciences_, 3d ed., 1857; _Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences_, 1840, 3d
ed., 1858-60). Its most important representative is Sir William Hamilton[1]
of Edinburgh (1788-1856), who, like Whewell, is influenced by Kant.
Hamilton bases philosophy on the facts of consciousness, but, in antithesis
to the associational psychology, emphasizes the mental activity of
discrimination and judgment. Our knowledge is relative, and relations its
only object. Consciousness can never transcend itself, it is bound to
the antithesis of subject and object, and conceives the existent under
relations of space and time. Hence the unconditioned is inaccessible to
knowledge and attainable by faith alone. Among Hamilton's followers belong
Mansel (_Metaphysics_, 3d. ed., 1875; _Limits of Religions Thought_, 5th
ed., 1870) and Veitch. The Scottish doctrine was vigorously opposed by J.F.
Ferrier (1808-64; _Institutes of Metaphysics_, 2d ed., 1856), who himself
developed an idealistic standpoint.
[Footnote 1: Hamilton: _Discussions on Philosophy and Literature_, 1852, 3d
ed., 1866; _Lectures on Metaphysics_, 2d ed., 1860, and on _Logic_, 2d ed.,
1866, edited by his pupils, Mansel and Veitch; _Reid's Works_, with notes
and dissertations, 1846, 7th ed., 1872. On Hamilton cf. Veitch, 1882, 1883
[Monck, 1881].]
In the United States the Scottish philosophy has exercised a wide
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