Lecture X

[244:13] This method replaced the old theory of "catastrophes" through the efforts of the English geologists, Hutton (1726-1797) and Lyell (1767-1849).

[245:14] Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, published in 1628, was regarded as a step in this direction.

[250:15] From the account of La Mettrie in Lange: History of Materialism. Translation by Thomas, II, pp. 67-68.

[251:16] Quoted from Voltaire's London Letter on the English, by Lange: Op. cit., II, p. 18.

[252:18] The phrase "psycho-physical parallelism," current in psychology, may mean automatism of the kind expounded above, and may also mean dualism. It is used commonly as a methodological principle to signify that no causal relationship between mind and body, but one of correspondence, is to be looked for in empirical psychology. Cf. § 99.

[256:20] There are times when Huxley, e. g., would seem to be on the verge of the Berkeleyan idealism. Cf. Chap. IX.

[256:21] For the case of Karl Pearson, read his Grammar of Science, Chap. II.

[265:24] Quoted from Balfour: Foundations of Belief, pp. 29-31.

[265:25] Ferguson: Religion of Democracy, p. 10.

[266:27] Huxley: Evolution and Ethics, p. 45. Collected Essays, Vol. IX.

CHAPTER IX

SUBJECTIVISM[267:1]

[Sidenote: Subjectivism Originally Associated with Relativism and Scepticism.]

§ 126. When, in the year 1710, Bishop Berkeley maintained the thesis of empirical idealism, having rediscovered it and announced it with a justifiable sense of originality, he provoked a kind of critical judgment that was keenly annoying if not entirely surprising to him. In refuting the conception of material substance and demonstrating the dependence of being upon mind, he at once sought, as he did repeatedly in later years, to establish the world of practical belief, and so to reconcile metaphysics and common-sense. Yet he found himself hailed as a fool and a sceptic. In answer to an inquiry concerning the reception of his book in London, his friend Sir John Percival wrote as follows:

"I did but name the subject matter of your book of Principles to some ingenious friends of mine and they immediately treated it with ridicule, at the same time refusing to read it, which I have not yet got one to do. A physician of my acquaintance undertook to discover your person, and argued you must needs be mad, and that you ought to take remedies. A bishop pitied you, that a desire of starting something new should put you upon such an undertaking. Another told me that you are not gone so far as another gentleman in town, who asserts not only that there is no such thing as Matter, but that we ourselves have no being at all."[268:2]

There can be no doubt but that the idea of the dependence of real things upon their appearance to the individual is a paradox to common-sense. It is a paradox because it seems to reverse the theoretical instinct itself, and to define the real in those very terms which disciplined thought learns to neglect. In the early history of thought the nature of the thinker himself is recognized as that which is likely to distort truth rather than that which conditions it. When the wise man, the devotee of truth, first makes his appearance, his authority is acknowledged because he has renounced himself. As witness of the universal being he purges himself of whatever is peculiar to his own individuality, or even to his human nature. In the aloofness of his meditation he escapes the cloud of opinion and prejudice that obscures the vision of the common man. In short, the element of belief dependent upon the thinker himself is the dross which must be refined away in order to obtain the pure truth. When, then, in the critical epoch of the Greek sophists, Protagoras declares that there is no belief that is not of this character, his philosophy is promptly recognized as scepticism. Protagoras argues that sense qualities are clearly dependent upon the actual operations of the senses, and that all knowledge reduces ultimately to these terms.

"The senses are variously named hearing, seeing, smelling; there is the sense of heat, cold, pleasure, pain, desire, fear, and many more which are named, as well as innumerable others which have no name; with each of them there is born an object of sense,--all sorts of colors born with all sorts of sight and sounds in like manner with hearing, and other objects with the other senses."[269:3]

If the objects are "born with" the senses, it follows that they are born with and appertain to the individual perceiver.

"Either show, if you can, that our sensations are not relative and individual, or, if you admit that they are individual, prove that this does not involve the consequence that the appearance becomes, or, if you like to say, is to the individual only."[270:4]

The same motif is thus rendered by Walter Pater in the Conclusion of his "Renaissance":

"At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to act upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions--color, odor, texture--in the mind of the observer. . . . Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of these impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world."

The Protagorean generalization is due to the reflection that all experience is some individual experience, that no subject of discourse escapes the imputation of belonging to some individual's private history. The individual must start with his own experiences and ideas, and he can never get beyond them, for he cannot see outside his own vision, or even think outside his own mind. The scepticism of this theory is explicit, and the formulas of Protagoras--the famous "Man is the measure of all things*," and the more exact formula, "*The truth is what appears to each man at each time"[271:5]--have been the articles of scepticism throughout the history of thought.

[Sidenote: Phenomenalism and Spiritualism.]

§ 127. There is, therefore, nothing really surprising in the reception accorded the "new philosophy" of Bishop Berkeley. A sceptical relativism is the earliest phase of subjectivism, and its avoidance at once becomes the most urgent problem of any philosophy which proposes to proceed forth from this principle. And this problem Berkeley meets with great adroitness and a wise recognition of difficulties. But his sanguine temperament and speculative interest impel him to what he regards as the extension of his first principle, the reintroduction of the conception of substance under the form of spirit, and of the objective order of nature under the form of the mind of God. In short, there are two motives at work in him, side by side: the epistemological motive, restricting reality to perceptions and thoughts, and the metaphysical-religious motive, leading him eventually to the definition of reality in terms of perceiving and thinking spirits. And from the time of Berkeley these two principles, phenomenalism and spiritualism, have remained as distinct and alternating phases of subjectivism. The former is its critical and dialectical conception, the latter its constructive and practical conception.

[Sidenote: Phenomenalism as Maintained by Berkeley. The Problem Inherited from Descartes and Locke.]

§ 128. As phenomenalism has its classic statement and proof in the writings of Berkeley, we shall do well to return to these. The fact that this philosopher wished to be regarded as the prophet of common-sense has already been mentioned. This purpose reveals itself explicitly in the series of "Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous." The form in which Berkeley here advances his thesis is further determined by the manner in which the lines were drawn in his day of thought. The world of enlightened public opinion was then threefold, consisting of God, physical nature, and the soul. In the early years of the seventeenth century Descartes had sharply distinguished between the two substances--mind, with its attribute of thought; and body, with its attribute of extension--and divided the finite world between them. God was regarded as the infinite and sustaining cause of both. Stated in the terms of epistemology, the object of clear thinking is the physical cosmos, the subject of clear thinking the immortal soul. The realm of perception, wherein the mind is subjected to the body, embarrasses the Cartesian system, and has no clear title to any place in it. And without attaching cognitive importance to this realm, the system is utterly dogmatic in its epistemology.[273:6] For what one substance thinks, must be assumed to be somehow true of another quite independent substance without any medium of communication. Now between Descartes and Berkeley appeared the sober and questioning "Essay Concerning Human Understanding," by John Locke. This is an interesting combination (they cannot be said to blend) of traditional metaphysics and revolutionary epistemology. The universe still consists of God, the immortal thinking soul, and a corporeal nature, the object of its thought. But, except for certain proofs of God and self, knowledge is entirely reduced to the perceptual type, to sensations, or ideas directly imparted to the mind by the objects themselves. To escape dogmatism it is maintained that the real is what is observed to be present. But Locke thinks the qualities so discovered belong in part to the perceiver and in part to the substance outside the mind. Color is a case of the former, a "secondary quality"; and extension a case of the latter, a "primary quality." And evidently the above empirical test of knowledge is not equally well met in these two cases. When I see a red object I know that red exists, for it is observed to be present, and I make no claim for it beyond the present. But when I note that the red object is square, I am supposed to know a property that will continue to exist in the object after I have closed my eyes or turned to something else. Here my claim exceeds my observation, and the empirical principle adopted at the outset would seem to be violated. Berkeley develops his philosophy from this criticism. His refutation of material substance is intended as a full acceptance of the implications of the new empirical epistemology. Knowledge is to be all of the perceptual type, where what is known is directly presented; and, in conformity with this principle, being is to be restricted to the content of the living pulses of experience.

[Sidenote: The Refutation of Material Substance.]

§ 129. Berkeley, then, beginning with the threefold world of Descartes and of common-sense, proposes to apply Locke's theory of knowledge to the discomfiture of corporeal nature. It was a radical doctrine, because it meant for him and for his contemporaries the denial of all finite objects outside the mind. But at the same time it meant a restoration of the homogeneity of experience, the reëstablishment of the qualitative world of every-day living, and so had its basis of appeal to common-sense. The encounter between Hylas, the advocate of the traditional philosophy, and Philonous, who represents the author himself, begins with an exchange of the charge of innovation.

Hyl. I am glad to find there was nothing in the accounts I heard of you.

Phil. Pray, what were those?

Hyl. You were represented, in last night's conversation, as one who maintained the most extravagant opinion that ever entered into the mind of man, to wit, that there is no such thing as material substance in the world.

Phil. That there is no such thing as what philosophers call material substance, I am seriously persuaded: but if I were made to see anything absurd or sceptical in this, I should then have the same reason to renounce this that I imagine I have now to reject the contrary opinion.

Hyl. What! can anything be more fantastical, more repugnant to Common-Sense, or a more manifest piece of Scepticism, than to believe there is no such thing as matter?

Phil. Softly, good Hylas. What if it should prove that you, who hold there is, are, by virtue of that opinion, a greater sceptic, and maintain more paradoxes and repugnances to Common-Sense, than I who believe no such thing?[276:7]

Philonous now proceeds with his case. Beginning by obtaining from Hylas the admission that pleasure and pain are essentially relative and subjective, he argues that sensations such as heat, since they are inseparable from these feelings, must be similarly regarded. And he is about to annex other qualities in turn to this core of subjectivity, when Hylas enters a general demurrer:

"Hold, Philonous, I now see what it was deluded me all this time. You asked me whether heat and cold, sweetness and bitterness, were not particular sorts of pleasure and pain; to which I answered simply that they were. Whereas I should have thus distinguished:--those qualities as perceived by us, are pleasures or pains; but not as existing in the external objects. We must not therefore conclude absolutely, that there is no heat in the fire, or sweetness in the sugar, but only that heat or sweetness, as perceived by us, are not in the fire or sugar."[276:8]

[Sidenote: The Application of the Epistemological Principle.]

§ 130. Here the argument touches upon profound issues. Philonous now assumes the extreme empirical contention that knowledge applies only to its own psychological moment, that its object in no way extends beyond that individual situation which we call the state of knowing. The full import of such an epistemology Berkeley never recognized, but he is clearly employing it here, and the overthrow of Hylas is inevitable so long as he does not challenge it or turn it against his opponent. This, however, as a protagonist of Berkeley's own making, he fails to do, and he plays into Philonous's hands by admitting that what is known only in perception must for that reason consist in perception. He frankly owns "that it is vain to stand out any longer," that "colors, sounds, tastes, in a word, all those termed secondary qualities, have certainly no existence without the mind."[277:9]

Hylas has now arrived at the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. "Extension, Figure, Solidity, Gravity, Motion, and Rest" are the attributes of an external substance which is the cause of sensations. But the same epistemological principle readily reduces these also to dependence on mind, for, like the secondary qualities, their content is given only in perception. Hylas is then driven to defend a general material substratum, which is the cause of ideas, but to which none of the definite content of these ideas can be attributed. In short, he has put all the content of knowledge on the one side, and admitted its inseparability from the perceiving spirit, and left the being of things standing empty and forlorn on the other. This amounts, as Philonous reminds him, to the denial of the reality of the known world.

"You are therefore, by your principles, forced to deny the reality of sensible things; since you made it to consist in an absolute existence exterior to the mind. That is to say, you are a downright sceptic. So I have gained my point, which was to show your principles led to Scepticism."[278:10]

[Sidenote: The Refutation of a Conceived Corporeal World.]

§ 131. Having advanced the direct empiricist argument for phenomenalism, Berkeley now gives the rationalistic motive an opportunity to express itself in the queries of Hylas as to whether there be not an "absolute extension," somehow abstracted by thought from the relativities of perception. Is there not at least a conceivable world independent of perception?

The answers of Philonous throw much light upon the Berkeleyan position. He admits that thought is capable of separating the primary from the secondary qualities in certain operations, but at the same time denies that this is forming an idea of them as separate.

"I acknowledge, Hylas, it is not difficult to form general propositions and reasonings about those qualities, without mentioning any other; and, in this sense, to consider or treat of them abstractedly. But, how doth it follow that, because I can pronounce the word motion by itself, I can form the idea of it in my mind exclusive of body? or, because theorems may be made of extension and figures, without any mention of great or small, or any other sensible mode or quality, that therefore it is possible such an abstract idea of extension, without any particular size or figure, or sensible quality, should be distinctly formed, and apprehended by the mind? Mathematicians treat of quantity, without regarding what other sensible qualities it is attended with, as being altogether indifferent to their demonstrations. But, when laying aside the words, they contemplate the bare ideas, I believe you will find, they are not the pure abstracted ideas of extension."[279:11]

Berkeley denies that we have ideas of pure extension or motion, because, although we do actually deal with these and find them intelligible, we can never obtain a state of mind in which they appear as the content. He applies this psychological test because of his adherence to the general empirical postulate that knowledge is limited to the individual content of its own individual states. "It is a universally received maxim," he says, "that everything which exists is particular." Now the truth of mathematical reckoning is not particular, but is valid wherever the conditions to which it refers are fulfilled. Mathematical reckoning, if it is to be particular, must be regarded as a particular act or state of some thinker. Its truth must then be construed as relative to the interests of the thinker, as a symbolism which has an instrumental rather than a purely cognitive value. This conclusion cannot be disputed short of a radical stand against the general epistemological principle to which Berkeley is so far true, the principle that the reality which is known in any state of thinking or perceiving is the state itself.

[Sidenote: The Transition to Spiritualism.]

§ 132. This concludes the purely phenomenalistic strain of Berkeley's thought. He has taken the immediate apprehension of sensible objects in a state of mind centring about the pleasure and pain of an individual, to be the norm of knowledge. He has further maintained that knowledge cannot escape the particularity of its own states. The result is that the universe is composed of private perceptions and ideas. Strictly on the basis of what has preceded, Hylas is justified in regarding this conclusion as no less sceptical than that to which his own position had been reduced; for while he had been compelled to admit that the real is unknowable, Philonous has apparently defined the knowable as relative to the individual. But the supplementary metaphysics which had hitherto been kept in the background is now revealed. It is maintained that though perceptions know no external world, they do nevertheless reveal a spiritual substance of which they are the states. Although it has hitherto been argued that the esse of things is in their percipi, this is now replaced by the more fundamental principle that the esse of things is in their percipere or velle. The real world consists not in perceptions, but in perceivers.

[Sidenote: Further Attempts to Maintain Phenomenalism.]

§ 133. Now it is at once evident that the epistemological theory which has been Berkeley's dialectical weapon in the foregoing argument is no longer available. And those who have cared more for this theory than for metaphysical speculation have attempted to stop at this point, and so to construe phenomenalism as to make it self-sufficient on its own grounds. Such attempts are so instructive as to make it worth our while to review them before proceeding with the development of the spiritualistic motive in subjectivism.

The world is to be regarded as made up of sense-perceptions, ideas, or phenomena. What is to be accepted as the fundamental category which gives to all of these terms their subjectivistic significance? So far there seems to be nothing in view save the principle of relativity. The type to which these were reduced was that of the peculiar or unsharable experience best represented by an individual's pleasure and pain. But relativity will not work as a general principle of being. It consigns the individual to his private mind, and cannot provide for the validity of knowledge enough even to maintain itself. Some other course, then, must be followed. Perception may be given a psycho-physical definition, which employs physical terms as fundamental;[282:12] but this flagrantly contradicts the phenomenalistic first principle. Or, reality may be regarded as so stamped with its marks as to insure the proprietorship of thought. But this definition of certain objective entities of mind, of beings attributed to intelligence because of their intrinsic intelligibility, is inconsistent with empiricism, if indeed it does not lead eventually to a realism of the Platonic type.[283:13] Finally, and most commonly, the terms of phenomenalism have been retained after their original meaning has been suffered to lapse. The "impressions" of Hume, e. g., are the remnant of the Berkeleyan world with the spirit stricken out. There is no longer any point in calling them impressions, for they now mean only elements or qualities. As a consequence this outgrowth of the Berkeleyanism epistemology is at present merging into a realistic philosophy of experience.[283:14] Any one, then, of these three may be the last state of one who undertakes to remain exclusively faithful to the phenomenalistic aspect of Berkeleyanism, embodied in the principle esse est percipi.

[Sidenote: Berkeley's Spiritualism. Immediate Knowledge of the Perceiver.]

§ 134. Let us now follow the fortunes of the other phase of subjectivism--that which develops the conception of the perceiver rather than the perceived. When Berkeley holds that

"all the choir of heaven and furniture of the Earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a Mind,"

his thought has transcended the epistemology with which he overthrew the conception of material substance, in two directions. For neither mind of the finite type nor mind of the divine type is perceived. But the first of these may yet be regarded as a direct empirical datum, even though sharply distinguished from an object of perception. In the third dialogue, Philonous thus expounds this new kind of knowledge:

"I own I have properly no idea, either of God or any other spirit; for these being active, cannot be represented by things perfectly inert, as our ideas are. I do nevertheless know that I, who am a spirit or thinking substance, exist as certainly as I know my ideas exist. Farther, I know what I mean by the terms I and myself; and I know this immediately or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle, a color, or a sound."[284:15]

The knowledge here provided for may be regarded as empirical because the reality in question is an individual present in the moment of the knowledge. Particular acts of perception are said directly to reveal not only perceptual objects, but perceiving subjects. And the conception of spiritual substance, once accredited, may then be extended to account for social relations and to fill in the nature of God. The latter extension, in so far as it attributes such further predicates as universality and infinity, implies still a third epistemology, and threatens to pass over into rationalism. But the knowledge of one's fellow-men may, it is claimed, be regarded as immediate, like the knowledge of one's self. Perceptual and volitional activity has a sense for itself and also a sense for other like activity. The self is both self-conscious and socially conscious in an immediate experience of the same type.

[Sidenote: Schopenhauer's Spiritualism, or Voluntarism. Immediate Knowledge of the Will.]

§ 135. But this general spiritualistic conception is developed with less singleness of purpose in Berkeley than among the voluntarists and panpsychists who spring from Schopenhauer, the orientalist, pessimist, and mystic among the German Kantians of the early nineteenth century. His great book, "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," opens with the phenomenalistic contention that "the world is my idea." It soon appears, however, that the "my" is more profoundly significant than the "idea." Nature is my creation, due to the working within me of certain fixed principles of thought, such as space, time, and causality. But nature, just because it is my creation, is less than me: is but a manifestation of the true being for which I must look within myself. But this inner self cannot be made an object of thought, for that would be only to create another term of nature. The will itself, from which such creation springs, is "that which is most immediate" in one's consciousness, and "makes itself known in a direct manner in its particular acts." The term will is used by Schopenhauer as a general term covering the whole dynamics of life, instinct and desire, as well as volition. It is that sense of life-preserving and life-enhancing appetency which is the conscious accompaniment of struggle. With its aid the inwardness of the whole world may now be apprehended.

"Whoever has now gained from all these expositions a knowledge in abstracto, and therefore clear and certain, of what everyone knows directly in concreto, i. e., as feeling, a knowledge that his will is the real inner nature of his phenomenal being, . . . and that his will is that which is most immediate in his consciousness, . . . will find that of itself it affords him the key to the knowledge of the inmost being of the whole of nature; for he now transfers it to all those phenomena which are not given to him, like his own phenomenal existence, both in direct and indirect knowledge, but only in the latter, thus merely one-sidedly as idea alone."[287:16]

The heart of reality is thus known by an "intuitive interpretation," which begins at home in the individual's own heart.

[Sidenote: Panpsychism.]

§ 136. The panpsychist follows the same course of reflection. There is an outwardness and an inwardness of nature, corresponding to the knower's body on the one hand, and his feeling or will on the other. With this principle in hand one may pass down the whole scale of being and discover no breach of continuity. Such an interpretation of nature has been well set forth by a contemporary writer, who quotes the following from the botanist, C. v. Naegeli:

"Sensation is clearly connected with the reflex actions of higher animals. We are obliged to concede it to the other animals also, and we have no grounds for denying it to plants and inorganic bodies. The sensation arouses in us a condition of comfort and discomfort. In general, the feeling of pleasure arises when the natural impulses are satisfied, the feeling of pain when they are not satisfied. Since all material processes are composed of movements of molecules and elementary atoms, pleasure and pain must have their seat in these particles. . . . Thus the same mental thread runs through all material phenomena. The human mind is nothing but the highest development on our earth of the mental processes which universally animate and move nature."[288:17]

According to panpsychism, then, physical nature is the manifestation of an appetency or bare consciousness generalized from the thinker's awareness of his most intimate self. Such appetency or bare consciousness is the essential or substantial state of that which appears as physical nature.

[Sidenote: The Inherent Difficulty in Spiritualism. No Provision for Objective Knowledge.]

§ 137. We must now turn to the efforts which this doctrine has made to maintain itself against the sceptical trend of its own epistemology. For precisely as in the case of phenomenalism its dialectical principle threatens to be self-destructive. Immediate presence is still the test of knowledge. But does not immediate presence connote relativity and inadequacy, at best; an initial phase of knowledge that must be supplemented and corrected before objective reality and valid truth are apprehended? Does not the individuality of the individual thinker connote the very maximum of error? Indeed, spiritualism would seem to have exceeded even Protagoreanism itself, and to have passed from scepticism to deliberate nihilism. The object of knowledge is no longer even, as with the phenomenalist, the thinker's thought, but only his thinking. And if the thinker's thought is relative to him, then the thinker's act of thinking is the very vanishing-point of relativity, the negative term of a negating relation. How is a real, a self-subsistent world to be composed of such? Impelled by a half-conscious realization of the hopelessness of this situation, the exponent of spiritualism has sought to universalize his conception; to define an absolute or ultimate spirit other than the individual thinker, though known in and through him. But it is clear that this development of spiritualism, like all of the speculative procedure of subjectivism, threatens to exceed the scope of the original principle of knowledge. There is a strong presumption against the possibility of introducing a knowledge of God by the way of the particular presentations of an individual consciousness.

[Sidenote: Schopenhauer's Attempt to Universalize Subjectivism. Mysticism.]

§ 138. Schopenhauer must be credited with a genuine effort to accept the metaphysical consequences of his epistemology. His epistemology, as we have seen, defined knowledge as centripetal. The object of real knowledge is identical with the subject of knowledge. If I am to know the universal will, therefore, I must in knowing become that will. And this Schopenhauer maintains. The innermost heart of the individual into which he may retreat, even from his private will, is--the universal. But there is another way of arriving at the same knowledge. In contemplation I may become absorbed in principles and laws, rather than be diverted by the particular spacial and temporal objects, until (and this is peculiarly true of the æsthetic experience) my interest no longer distinguishes itself, but coincides with truth. In other words, abstract thinking and pure willing are not opposite extremes, but adjacent points on the deeper or transcendent circle of experience. One may reach this part of the circle by moving in either of two directions that at the start are directly opposite: by turning in upon the subject or by utterly giving one's self up to the object. Reality obtains no definition by this means. Philosophy, for Schopenhauer, is rather a programme for realizing the state in which I will the universal and know the universal will. The final theory of knowledge, then, is mysticism, reality directly apprehended in a supreme and incommunicable experience, direct and vivid, like perception, and at the same time universal, like thought. But the empiricism with which Schopenhauer began, the appeal to a familiar experience of self as will, has meanwhile been forgotten. The idea as object of my perception, and the will as its subject were in the beginning regarded as common and verifiable items of experience. But who, save the occasional philosopher, knows a universal will? Nor have attempts to avoid mysticism, while retaining Schopenhauer's first principle, been successful. Certain voluntarists and panpsychists have attempted to do without the universal will, and define the world solely in terms of the many individual wills. But, as Schopenhauer himself pointed out, individual wills cannot be distinguished except in terms of something other than will, such as space and time. The same is true if for will there be substituted inner feeling or consciousness. Within this category individuals can be distinguished only as points of view, which to be comparable at all must contain common objects, or be defined in terms of a system of relations like that of the physical world or that of an ethical community. The conception of pure will or pure feeling inevitably attaches to itself that of an undivided unity, if for no other reason because there is no ground for distinction. And such a unity, a will or consciousness that is no particular act or idea, can be known only in the unique experience which mysticism provides.

[Sidenote: Objective Spiritualism.]

§ 139. The way of Schopenhauer is the way of one who adheres to the belief that what the thinker knows must always be a part of himself, his state or his activity. From this point of view the important element of being, its very essence or substance, is not any definable nature but an immediate relation to the knower. The consequence is that the universe in the last analysis can only be defined as a supreme state or activity into which the individual's consciousness may develop. Spiritualism has, however, other interests, interests which may be quite independent of epistemology. It is speculatively interested in a kind of being which it defines as spiritual, and in terms of which it proposes to define the universe. Such procedure is radically different from the epistemological criticism which led Berkeley to maintain that the esse of objects is in their percipi, or Schopenhauer to maintain that "the world is my idea," or that led both of these philosophers to find a deeper reality in immediately intuited self-activity. For now it is proposed to understand spirit, discover its properties, and to acknowledge it only where these properties appear. I may now know spirit as an object; which in its properties, to be sure, is quite different from matter, but which like matter is capable of subsisting quite independently of my knowledge. This is a metaphysical spiritualism quite distinct from epistemological spiritualism, and by no means easily made consistent therewith. Indeed, it exhibits an almost irrepressible tendency to overstep the bounds both of empiricism and subjectivism, an historical connection with which alone justifies its introduction in the present chapter.

[Sidenote: Berkeley's Conception of God as Cause, Goodness and Order.]

§ 140. To return again to the instructive example of Bishop Berkeley, we find him proving God from the evidence of him in experience, or the need of him to support the claims of experience.

"But, whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my will. When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view: and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses; the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them.

The ideas of Sense are more strong, lively, and distinct than those of the Imagination; they have likewise a steadiness, order, and coherence, and are not excited at random, as those which are the effects of human wills often are, but in a regular train or series--the admirable connection whereof sufficiently testifies the wisdom and benevolence of its Author. Now the set rules, or established methods, wherein the Mind we depend on excites in us the ideas of Sense, are called the laws of nature."[294:18]

Of the attributes of experience here in question, independence or "steadiness" is not regarded as prima facie evidence of spirit, but rather as an aspect of experience for which some cause is necessary. But it is assumed that the power to "produce," with which such a cause must be endowed, is the peculiar prerogative of spirit, and that this cause gives further evidence of its spiritual nature, of its eminently spiritual nature, in the orderliness and the goodness of its effects.

"The force that produces, the intellect that orders, the goodness that perfects all things is the Supreme Being."[294:19]

That spirit is possessed of causal efficacy, Berkeley has in an earlier passage proved by a direct appeal to the individual's sense of power.

"I find I can excite ideas in my mind at pleasure, and vary and shift the scene as oft as I think fit. It is no more than willing, and straightway this or that idea arises in my fancy; and by the same power it is obliterated and makes way for another. This making and unmaking of ideas doth very properly denominate the mind active. Thus much is certain and grounded on experience: but when we talk of unthinking agents, or of exciting ideas exclusive of volition, we only amuse ourselves with words."[295:20]

Although Berkeley is here in general agreement with a very considerable variety of philosophical views, it will be readily observed that this doctrine tends to lapse into mysticism whenever it is retained in its purity. Berkeley himself admitted that there was no "idea" of such power. And philosophers will as a rule either obtain an idea corresponding to a term or amend the term--always excepting the mystical appeal to an inarticulate and indefinable experience. Hence pure power revealed in an ineffable immediate experience tends to give place to kinds of power to which some definite meaning may be attached. The energy of physics, defined by measurable quantitative equivalence, is a case in point. The idealistic trend is in another direction, power coming to signify ethical or logical connection. Similarly, in the later philosophy of Berkeley himself, God is known by the nature of his activity rather than by the fact of his activity; and we are said "to account for a thing, when we show that it is so best." God's power, in short, becomes indistinguishable from his universality attended with the attributes of goodness and orderliness. But this means that the analogy of the human spirit, conscious of its own activity, is no longer the basis of the argument. By the divine will is now meant ethical principles, rather than the "here am I willing" of the empirical consciousness. Similarly the divine mind is defined in terms of logical principles, such as coherence and order, rather than in terms of the "here am I thinking" of the finite knower himself. But enough has been said to make it plain that this is no longer the stand-point of empirio-idealism. Indeed, in his last philosophical writing, the "Siris," Berkeley is so far removed from the principles of knowledge which made him at once the disciple and the critic of Locke, as to pronounce himself the devotee of Platonism and the prophet of transcendentalism. The former strain appears in his conclusion that "the principles of science are neither objects of sense nor imagination; and that intellect and reason are alone the sure guides to truth."[297:21] His transcendentalism appears in his belief that such principles, participating in the vital unity of the Individual Purpose, constitute the meaning and so the substantial essence of the universe.

[Sidenote: The General Tendency of Subjectivism to Transcend Itself.]

§ 141. Such then are the various paths which lead from subjectivism to other types of philosophy, demonstrating the peculiar aptitude of the former for departing from its first principle. Beginning with the relativity of all knowable reality to the individual knower, it undertakes to conceive reality in one or the other of the terms of this relation, as particular state of knowledge or as individual subject of knowledge. But these terms develop an intrinsic nature of their own, and become respectively empirical datum, and logical or ethical principle. In either case the subjectivistic principle of knowledge has been abandoned. Those whose speculative interest in a definable objective world has been less strong than their attachment to this principle, have either accepted the imputation of scepticism, or had recourse to the radical epistemological doctrine of mysticism.

[Sidenote: Ethical Theories. Relativism.]

§ 142. Since the essence of subjectivism is epistemological rather than metaphysical, its practical and religious implications are various. The ethical theories which are corollary to the tendencies expounded above, range from extreme egoism to a mystical universalism. The close connection between the former and relativism is evident, and the form of egoism most consistent with epistemological relativism is to be found among those same Sophists who first maintained this latter doctrine. If we may believe Plato, the Sophists sought to create for their individual pupils an appearance of good. In the "Theaetetus," Socrates is represented as speaking thus on behalf of Protagoras:

"And I am far from saying that wisdom and the wise man have no existence; but I say that the wise man is he who makes the evils which are and appear to a man, into goods which are and appear to him. . . . I say that they (the wise men) are the physicians of the human body, and the husbandmen of plants--for the husbandmen also take away the evil and disordered sensations of plants, and infuse into them good and healthy sensations as well as true ones; and the wise and good rhetoricians make the good instead of the evil seem just to states; for whatever appears to be just and fair to a state, while sanctioned by a state, is just and fair to it; but the teacher of wisdom causes the good to take the place of the evil, both in appearance and in reality."[299:22]

As truth is indistinguishable from the appearance of truth to the individual, so good is indistinguishable from a particular seeming good. The supreme moral value according to this plan of life is the agreeable feeling tone of that dream world to which the individual is forever consigned. The possible perfection of an experience which is "reduced to a swarm of impressions," and "ringed round" for each one of us by a "thick wall of personality" has been brilliantly depicted in the passage already quoted from Walter Pater, in whom the naturalistic and subjectivistic motives unite.[299:23] If all my experience is strictly my own, then my good must likewise be my own. And if all of my experience is valid only in its instants of immediacy, then my best good must likewise consist in some "exquisite passion," or stirring of the senses.

[Sidenote: Pessimism and Self-denial.]

§ 143. But for Schopenhauer the internal world opens out into the boundless and unfathomable sea of the universal will. If I retire from the world upon my own private feelings, I am still short of the true life, for I am asserting myself against the world. I should seek a sense of unison with a world whose deeper heart-beats I may learn to feel and adopt as the rhythm of my own. The folly of willing for one's private self is the ground of Schopenhauer's pessimism.

"All willing arises from want, therefore from deficiency, and therefore from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends it; yet for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least ten which are denied. Further, the desire lasts long, the demands are infinite; the satisfaction is short and scantily measured out. But even the final satisfaction is itself only apparent; every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new one, both are illusions; the one is known to be so, the other not yet. No attained object of desire can give lasting satisfaction, but merely a fleeting gratification; it is like the alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive to-day that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow. . . . The subject of willing is thus constantly stretched on the revolving wheel of Ixion, pours water into the sieve of the Danaids, is the ever-longing Tantalus."[300:24]

The escape from this torture and self-deception is possible through the same mystical experience, the same blending with the universe that conditions knowledge.

[Sidenote: The Ethics of Welfare.]

§ 144. But though pleasant dreaming be the most consistent practical sequel to a subjectivistic epistemology, its individualism presents another basis for life with quite different possibilities of emphasis. It may develop into an aggressive egoism of the type represented by the sophist Thrasymachus, in his proclamation that "might is right, justice the interest of the stronger."[301:25] But more commonly it is tempered by a conception of social interest, and serves as the champion of action against contemplation. The gospel of action is always individualistic. It requires of the individual a sense of his independence, and of the real virtue of his initiative. Hence those voluntarists who emphasize the many individual wills and decline to reduce them, after the manner of Schopenhauer, to a universal, may be said to afford a direct justification of it. It is true that this practical realism threatens the tenability of an epistemological idealism, but the two have been united, and because of their common emphasis upon the individual such procedure is not entirely inconsequential. Friedrich Paulsen, whose panpsychism has already been cited, is an excellent case in point. The only good, he maintains, is "welfare," the fulfilment of those natural desires which both distinguish the individual and signify his continuity with all grades of being.

"The goal at which the will aims does not consist in a maximum of pleasurable feelings, but in the normal exercise of the vital functions for which the species is predisposed. In the case of man the mode of life is on the whole determined by the nature of the historical unity from which the individual evolves as a member. Here the objective content of life, after which the will strives, also enters into consciousness with the progressive evolution of presentation; the type of life becomes a conscious ideal of life."[302:26]

Here, contrary to the teaching of Schopenhauer, the good consists in individual attainment, the extension and fulfilment of the distinct interests that arise from the common fund of nature. To be and to do to the uttermost, to realize the maximum from nature's investment in one's special capacities and powers--this is indeed the first principle of a morality of action.

[Sidenote: The Ethical Community.]

§ 145. But a type of ethics still further removed from the initial relativism has been adopted and more or less successfully assimilated by subjectivistic philosophies. Accepting Berkeley's spirits, with their indefinite capacities, and likewise the stability of the ideal principles that underlie a God-administered world, and morality becomes the obedience which the individual renders to the law. The individual, free to act in his own right, coöperates with the purposes of the general spiritual community, whose laws are worthy of obedience though not coercive. The recognition of such a spiritual citizenship, entailing opportunities, duties, and obligations, rather than thraldom, partakes of the truth as well as the inadequacy of common-sense.

[Sidenote: The Religion of Mysticism.]

§ 146. As for religion, at least two distinct practical appreciations of the universe have been historically associated with this chapter in philosophy. The one of these is the mysticism of Schopenhauer, the religious sequel to a universalistic voluntarism. Schopenhauer's ethics, his very philosophy, is religion. For the good and the true are alike attainable only through identification with the Absolute Will. This consummation of life, transcending practical and theoretical differences, engulfing and effacing all qualities and all values, is like the Nirvâna of the Orient--a positive ideal only for one who has appraised the apparent world at its real value.

"Rather do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but, conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all it's suns and milky-ways--is nothing."[304:27]

[Sidenote: The Religion of Individual Coöperation with God.]

§ 147. From the union of the two motives of voluntarism and individualism springs another and a more familiar type of religion, that of coöperative spiritual endeavor. In the religion of Schopenhauer the soul must utterly lose itself for the sake of peace; here the soul must persist in its own being and activity for the sake of the progressive goodness of the world. For Schopenhauer God is the universal solution, in which all motions cease and all differences disappear; here God is the General of moral forces. The deeper and more significant universe is

"a society of rational agents, acting under the eye of Providence, concurring in one design to promote the common benefit of the whole, and conforming their actions to the established laws and order of the Divine parental wisdom: wherein each particular agent shall not consider himself apart, but as the member of a great City, whose author and founder is God: in which the civil laws are no other than the rules of virtue and the duties of religion: and where everyone's true interest is combined with his duty."[304:28]

But so uncompromising an optimism is not essential to this religion. Its distinction lies rather in its acceptance of the manifest plurality of souls, and its appeal to the faith that is engendered by service.[305:29] As William James has said:

"Even God's being is sacred from ours. To coöperate with his creation by the best and rightest response seems all he wants of us. In such coöperation with his purposes, not in any chimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretical drinking of him up, must lie the real meaning of our destiny."[305:30]

FOOTNOTES:

[267:1] PRELIMINARY NOTE. By Subjectivism is meant that system of philosophy which construes the universe in accordance with the epistemological principle that all knowledge is of its own states or activities*. In so far as subjectivism reduces reality to states of knowledge, such as perceptions or ideas, it is *phenomenalism. In so far as it reduces reality to a more internal active principle such as spirit or will, it is spiritualism.

[268:2] Berkeley: Complete Works, Vol. I, p. 352. Fraser's edition.

[269:3] Plato: Theaetetus, 156. Translation by Jowett. The italics are mine.

[283:14] The same may be said of the "permanent possibilities of sensation," proposed by J. S. Mill. Such possibilities outside of actual perception are either nothing or things such as they are known to be in perception. In either case they are not perceptions.

In Ernst Mach's Analysis of Sensations, the reader will find an interesting transition from sensationalism to realism through the substitution of the term Bestandtheil for Empfindung. (See Translation by Williams, pp. 18-20.) See below, § 207.

[287:16] Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Idea. Translation by Haldane and Kemp, Vol. I, p. 141.

[288:17] Quoted from Naegeli: Die Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre*, by Friedrich Paulsen, in his *Introduction to Philosophy. Translation by Thilly, p. 103.

[299:22] Plato: Theaetetus, 167. Translation by Jowett.

[300:24] Schopenhauer: Op. cit. Translation by Haldane and Kemp, Vol. I, pp. 253-254.

[304:27] Schopenhauer: Op. cit. Translation by Haldane and Kemp, p. 532.

[305:29] For an interesting characterization of this type of religion, cf. Royce: Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 46.

CHAPTER X

ABSOLUTE REALISM[306:1]

[Sidenote: The Philosopher's Task, and the Philosopher's Object, or the Absolute.]

§ 148. No one has understood better than the philosopher himself that he cannot hope to be popular with men of practical common-sense. Indeed, it has commonly been a matter of pride with him. The classic representation of the philosopher's faith in himself is to be found in Plato's "Republic." The philosopher is there portrayed in the famous cave simile as one who having seen the light itself can no longer distinguish the shadows which are apparent to those who sit perpetually in the twilight. Within the cave of shadows he is indeed less at his ease than those who have never seen the sun. But since he knows the source of the shadows, his knowledge surrounds that of the shadow connoisseurs. And his equanimity need not suffer from the contempt of those whom he understands better than they understand themselves. The history of philosophy is due to the dogged persistence with which the philosopher has taken himself seriously and endured the poor opinion of the world. But the pride of the philosopher has done more than perpetuate the philosophical outlook and problem; it has led to the formulation of a definite philosophical conception, and of two great philosophical doctrines. The conception is that of the absolute; and the doctrines are that of the absolute being, and that of the absolute self or mind. The former of these doctrines is the topic of the present chapter.

Among the early Greeks the rôle of the philosopher was one of superlative dignity. In point of knowledge he was less easily satisfied than other men. He thought beyond immediate practical problems, devoting himself to a profounder reflection, that could not but induce in him a sense of superior intellectual worth. The familiar was not binding upon him, for his thought was emancipated from routine and superficiality. Furthermore his intellectual courage and resolution did not permit him to indulge in triviality, doubt, or paradox. He sought his own with a faith that could not be denied. Even Heraclitus the Dark, who was also called "the Weeping Philosopher," because he found at the very heart of nature that transiency which the philosophical mind seeks to escape, felt himself to be exalted as well as isolated by that insight. But this sentiment of personal aloofness led at once to a division of experience. He who knows truly belongs to another and more abiding world. As there is a philosophical way of thought, there is a philosophical way of life, and a philosophical object. Since the philosopher and the common man do not see alike, the terms of their experience are incommensurable. In Parmenides the Eleatic this motive is most strikingly exhibited. There is a Way of Truth which diverges from the Way of Opinion. The philosopher walks the former way alone. And there is an object of truth, accessible only to one who takes this way of truth. Parmenides finds this object to be the content of pure affirmation.

"One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is. In it are very many tokens that what is, is uncreated and indestructible, alone, complete, immovable, and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one."[308:2]

The philosophy of Parmenides, commonly called the Eleatic Philosophy, is notable for this emergence of the pure concept of absolute being as the final object of knowledge. The philosopher aims to discover that which is, and so turns away from that which is not or that which ceases to be. The negative and transient aspects of experience only hinder him in his search for the eternal. It was the great Eleatic insight to realize that the outcome of thought is thus predetermined; that the answer to philosophy is contained in the question of philosophy. The philosopher, in that he resolutely avoids all partiality, relativity, and superficiality, must affirm a complete, universal, and ultimate being as the very object of that perfect knowledge which he means to possess. This object is known in the history of these philosophies as the infinite or absolute.[309:3]

[Sidenote: The Eleatic Conception of Being.]

§ 149. The Eleatic reasons somewhat as follows. The philosopher seeks to know what is. The object of his knowledge will then contain as its primary and essential predicate, that of being. It is a step further to define being in terms of this essential predicate.

Parmenides thinks of being as a power or strength, a positive self-maintenance to which all affirmations refer. The remainder of the Eleatic philosophy is the analysis of this concept and the proof of its implications. Being must persist through all change, and span all chasms. Before being there can be only nothing, which is the same as to say that so far as being is concerned there is no before. Similarly there can be no after or beyond. There can be no motion, change, or division of being, because being will be in all parts of every division, and in all stages of every process. Hence being is "uncreated and indestructible, alone, complete, immovable, and without end."

The argument turns upon the application to being as a whole of the meaning and the implications of only being. Being is the affirmative or positive. From that alone, one can derive only such properties as eternity or unity. For generation and decay and plurality may belong to that which is also affirmative and positive, but not to that which is affirmative and positive only. The Eleatic philosophy is due, then, to the determination to derive the whole of reality from the bare necessity of being, to cut down reality to what flows entirely from the assertion of its only known necessary aspect, that of being. We meet here in its simplest form a persistent rationalistic motive, the attempt to derive the universe from the isolation and analysis of its most universal character. As in the case of every well-defined philosophy, this motive is always attended by a "besetting" problem. Here it is the accounting for what, empirically at least, is alien to that universal character. And this difficulty is emphasized rather than resolved by Parmenides in his designation of a limbo of opinion, "in which is no true belief at all," to which the manifold of common experience with all its irrelevancies can be relegated.

[Sidenote: Spinoza's Conception of Substance.]

§ 150. The Eleatic philosophy, enriched and supplemented, appears many centuries later in the rigorous rationalism of Spinoza.[311:4] With Spinoza philosophy is a demonstration of necessities after the manner of geometry. Reality is to be set forth in theorems derived from fundamental axioms and definitions. As in the case of Parmenides, these necessities are the implications of the very problem of being. The philosopher's problem is made to solve itself. But for Spinoza that problem is more definite and more pregnant. The problematic being must not only be, but must be sufficient to itself. What the philosopher seeks to know is primarily an intrinsic entity. Its nature must be independent of other natures, and my knowledge of it independent of my knowledge of anything else. Reality is something which need not be sought further. So construed, being is in Spinoza's philosophy termed substance. It will be seen that to define substance is to affirm the existence of it, for substance is so defined as to embody the very qualification for existence. Whatever exists exists under the form of substance, as that "which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception."[312:5]

[Sidenote: Spinoza's Proof of God, the Infinite Substance. The Modes and the Attributes.]

§ 151. There remains but one further fundamental thesis for the establishment of the Spinozistic philosophy, the thesis which maintains the exclusive existence of the one "absolutely infinite being," or God. The exclusive existence of God follows from his existence, because of the exhaustiveness of his nature. His is the nature "consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality." He will contain all meaning, and all possible meaning, within his fixed and necessary constitution. It is evident that if such a God exist, nothing can fall outside of him. One such substance must be the only substance. But upon what grounds are we to assert God's existence?

To proceed further with Spinoza's philosophy we must introduce two terms which are scarcely less fundamental in his system than that of substance. The one of these is "attribute," by which he means kind or general property; the other is "mode," by which he means case or individual thing. Spinoza's proof of God consists in showing that no single mode, single attribute, or finite group of modes or attributes, can be a substance; but only an infinite system of all modes of all attributes. Translated into common speech this means that neither kinds nor cases, nor special groups of either, can stand alone and be of themselves, but only the unity of all possible cases of all possible kinds.

The argument concerning the possible substantiality of the case or individual thing is relatively simple. Suppose an attribute or kind, A, of which there are cases am{1}, am{2}, am{3}, etc. The number of cases is never involved in the nature of the kind, as is seen for example in the fact that the definition of triangle prescribes no special number of individual triangles. Hence am{1}, am{2}, am{3}, etc., must be explained by something outside of their nature. Their being cases of A does not account for their existing severally. This is Spinoza's statement of the argument that individual events, such as motions or sensations, are not self-dependent, but belong to a context of like events which are mutually dependent.

The question of the attribute is more difficult. Why may not an attribute as a complete domain of interdependent events, itself be independent or substantial? Spinoza's predecessor, Descartes, had maintained precisely that thesis in behalf of the domain of thought and the domain of space. Spinoza's answer rests upon the famous ontological argument, inherited from scholasticism and generally accepted in the first period of modern philosophy. The evidence of existence, he declares, is clear and distinct conceivability.

"For a person to say that he has a clear and distinct--that is, a true--idea of a substance, but that he is not sure whether such substance exists, would be the same as if he said that he had a true idea, but was not sure whether or no it was false."[314:6]

Now we can form a clear and distinct idea of an absolutely infinite being that shall have all possible attributes. This idea is a well-recognized standard and object of reference for thought. But it is a conception which is highly qualified, not only through its clearness and distinctness, but also through its abundance of content. It affirms itself therefore with a certainty that surpasses any other certainty, because it is supported by each and every other certainty, and even by the residuum of possibility. If any intelligible meaning be permitted to affirm itself, so much the more irresistible is the claim of this infinitely rich meaning. Since every attribute contributes to its validity, the being with infinite attributes is infinitely or absolutely valid. The conclusion of the argument is now obvious. If the being constituted by the infinite attributes exists, it swallows up all possibilities and exists exclusively.

[Sidenote: The Limits of Spinoza's Argument for God.]

§ 152. The vulnerable point in Spinoza's argument can thus be expressed: that which is important is questionable, and that which is unquestionable is of doubtful importance. Have I indeed a clear and distinct idea of an absolutely infinite being? The answer turns upon the meaning of the phrase "idea of." It is true I can add to such meaning as I apprehend the thought of possible other meaning, and suppose the whole to have a definiteness and systematic unity like that of the triangle. But such an idea is problematic. I am compelled to use the term "possible," and so to confess the failure of definite content to measure up to my idea. My idea of an absolutely infinite being is like my idea of a universal language: I can think of it, but I cannot think it out, for lack of data or because of the conflicting testimony of other data. If I mean the infinity of my being to be a term of inclusiveness, and to insist that the all must be, and that there can be nothing not included in the all, I can scarcely be denied. But it is reasonable to doubt the importance of such a truth. If, on the other hand, I mean that my infinite being shall have the compactness and organic unity of a triangle, I must admit that such a being is indeed problematic. The degree to which the meaning of the part is dependent upon the meaning of the whole, or the degree to which the geometrical analogy is to be preferred to the analogy of aggregates, like the events within a year, is a problem that falls quite outside Spinoza's fundamental arguments.

[Sidenote: Spinoza's Provision for the Finite.]

§ 153. But the advance of Spinoza over the Eleatics must not be lost sight of. The modern philosopher has so conceived being as to provide for parts within an individual unity. The geometrical analogy is a most illuminating one, for it enables us to understand how manyness may be indispensable to a being that is essentially unitary. The triangle as triangle is one. But it could not be such without sides and angles. The unity is equally necessary to the parts, for sides and angles of a triangle could not be such without an arrangement governed by the nature triangle. The whole of nature may be similarly conceived: as the reciprocal necessity of natura naturans, or nature defined in respect of its unity, and natura naturata, or nature specified in detail. There is some promise here of a reconciliation of the Way of Opinion with the Way of Truth. Opinion would be a gathering of detail, truth a comprehension of the intelligible unity. Both would be provided for through the consideration that whatever is complete and necessary must be made up of incompletenesses that are necessary to it.

[Sidenote: Transition to Teleological Conceptions.]

§ 154. This consideration, however, does not receive its most effective formulation in Spinoza. The isolation of the parts, the actual severalty and irrelevance of the modes, still presents a grave problem. Is there a kind of whole to which not only parts but fragments, or parts in their very incompleteness, are indispensable? This would seem to be true of a progression or development, since that would require both perfection as its end, and degrees of imperfection as its stages. Spinoza was prevented from making much of this idea by his rejection of the principle of teleology. He regarded appreciation or valuation as a projection of personal bias. "Nature has no particular goal in view," and "final causes are mere human figments." "The perfection of things is to be reckoned only from their own nature and power."[318:7] The philosophical method which Spinoza here repudiates, the interpretation of the world in moral terms, is Platonism, an independent and profoundly important movement, belonging to the same general realistic type with Eleaticism and Spinozism. Absolute being is again the fundamental conception. Here, however, it is conceived that being is primarily not affirmation or self-sufficiency, but the good or ideal. There are few great metaphysical systems that have not been deeply influenced by Platonism; hence the importance of understanding it in its purity. To this end we must return again to the early Greek conception of the philosopher; for Platonism, like Eleaticism, is a sequel to the philosopher's self-consciousness.

[Sidenote: Early Greek Philosophers not Self-critical.]

§ 155. Although the first Greek philosophers, such men as Thales, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles, were clearly aware of their distinction and high calling, it by no means follows that they were good judges of themselves. Their sense of intellectual power was unsuspecting; and they praised philosophy without definitely raising the question of its meaning. They were like unskilled players who try all the stops and scales of an organ, and know that somehow they can make a music that exceeds the noises, monotones or simple melodies of those who play upon lesser instruments. They knew their power rather than their instrument or their art. The first philosophers, in short, were self-conscious but not self-critical.

[Sidenote: Curtailment of Philosophy in the Age of the Sophists.]

§ 156. The immediately succeeding phase in the history of Greek philosophy was a curtailment, but only in the most superficial sense a criticism, of the activity of the philosopher. In the Periclean Age philosophy suffered more from inattention than from refutation. The scepticism of the sophists, who were the knowing men of this age, was not so much conviction as indisposition. They failed to recognize the old philosophical problem; it did not appeal to them as a genuine problem. The sophists were the intellectual men of an age of humanism, individualism, and secularism. These were years in which the circle of human society, the state with its institutions, citizenship with its manifold activities and interests, bounded the horizon of thought. What need to look beyond? Life was not a problem, but an abundant opportunity and a sense of capacity. The world was not a mystery, but a place of entertainment and a sphere of action. Of this the sophists were faithful witnesses. In their love of novelty, irreverence, impressionism, elegance of speech, and above all in their praise of individual efficiency, they preached and pandered to their age. Their public, though it loved to abuse them, was the greatest sophist of them all--brilliant and capricious, incomparably rich in all but wisdom. The majority belonged to what Plato called "the sight-loving, art-loving, busy class." This is an age, then, when the man of practical common-sense is preëminent, and the philosopher with his dark sayings has passed away. The pride of wisdom has given way to the pride of power and the pride of cleverness. The many men pursue the many goods of life, and there is no spirit among them all who, sitting apart in contemplation, wonders at the meaning of the whole.

[Sidenote: Socrates and the Self-criticism of the Philosopher.]

§ 157. But in their midst there moved a strange prophet, whom they mistook for one of themselves. Socrates was not one who prayed in the wilderness, but a man of the streets and the market-place, who talked rather more incessantly than the rest, and apparently with less right. He did not testify to the truth, but pleaded ignorance in extenuation of an exasperating habit of asking questions. There was, however, a humor and a method in his innocence that arrested attention. He was a formidable adversary in discussion from his very irresponsibility; and he was especially successful with the more rhetorical sophists because he chose his own weapons, and substituted critical analysis, question and answer, for the long speeches to which these teachers were habituated by their profession. He appeared to be governed by an insatiable inquisitiveness, and a somewhat malicious desire to discredit those who spoke with authority.

But to those who knew him better, and especially to Plato, who knew him best, Socrates was at once the sweetest and most compelling spirit of his age. There was a kind of truth in the quality of his character. He was perhaps the first of all reverent men. In the presence of conceit his self-depreciation was ironical, but in another presence it was most genuine, and his deepest spring of thought and action. This other presence was his own ideal. Socrates was sincerely humble because, expecting so much of philosophy, he saw his own deficiency. Unlike the unskilled player, he did not seek to make music; but he loved music, and knew that such music as is indeed music was beyond his power. On the other hand he was well aware of his superiority to those in whom self-satisfaction was possible because they had no conception of the ideal. Of such he could say in truth that they did not know enough even to realize the extent of their ignorance. The world has long been familiar with the vivid portrayal of the Socratic consciousness which is contained in Plato's "Apology." Socrates had set out in life with the opinion that his was an age of exceptional enlightenment. But as he came to know men he found that after all no one of them really knew what he was about. Each "sight-loving, art-loving, busy" man was quite blind to the meaning of life. While he was capable of practical achievement, his judgments concerning the real virtue of his achievements were conventional and ungrounded, a mere reflection of tradition and opinion. When asked concerning the meaning of life, or the ground of his opinions, he was thrown into confusion or aggravated to meaningless reiteration. Such men, Socrates reflected, were both unwise and confirmed in their folly through being unconscious of it. Because he knew that vanity is vanity, that opinion is indeed mere opinion, Socrates felt himself to be the wisest man in a generation of dogged unwisdom.

[Sidenote: Socrates's Self-criticism a Prophecy of Truth.]

§ 158. It is scarcely necessary to point out that this insight, however negatively it be used, is a revelation of positive knowledge. Heraclitus and Parmenides claimed to know; Socrates disclaimed knowledge for reasons. Like all real criticism this is at once a confounding of error and a prophecy of truth. The truth so discovered is indeed not ordinary truth concerning historical or physical things, but not on that account less significant and necessary. This truth, it will also be admitted, is virtually rather than actually set forth by Socrates himself. He knew that life has some meaning which those who live with conviction desire at heart to realize, and that knowledge has principles with which those who speak with conviction intend to be consistent. There is, in short, a rational life and a rational discourse. Furthermore, a rational life will be a life wisely directed to the end of the good; and a rational discourse one constructed with reference to the real natures of things, and the necessities which flow from these natures. But Socrates did not conclusively define either the meaning of life or the form of perfect knowledge. He testified to the necessity of some such truths, and his testimony demonstrated both the blindness of his contemporaries and also his own deficiency.

[Sidenote: The Historical Preparation for Plato.]

§ 159. The character and method of Socrates have their best foil in the sophists, but their bearing on the earlier philosophers is for our purposes even more instructive. Unlike Socrates these philosophers had not made a study of the task of the philosopher. They were philosophers--"spectators of all time and all existence"; but they were precritical or dogmatic philosophers, to whom it had not occurred to define the requirements of philosophy. They knew no perfect knowledge other than their own actual knowledge. They defined being and interpreted life without reflecting upon the quality of the knowledge whose object is being, or the quality of insight that would indeed be practical wisdom. But when through Socrates the whole philosophical prospect is again revealed after the period of humanistic concentration, it is as an ideal whose possibilities, whose necessities, are conceived before they are realized. Socrates celebrates the rôle of the philosopher without assigning it to himself. The new philosophical object is the philosopher himself; and the new insight a knowledge of knowledge itself. These three types of intellectual procedure, dogmatic speculation concerning being, humanistic interest in life, and the self-criticism of thought, form the historical preparation for Plato, the philosopher who defined being as the ideal of thought, and upon this ground interpreted life.

There is no more striking case in history of the subtle continuity of thought than the relation between Plato and his master Socrates. The wonder of it is due to the absence of any formulation of doctrine on the part of Socrates himself. He only lived and talked; and yet Plato created a system of philosophy in which he is faithfully embodied. The form of embodiment is the dialogue, in which the talking of Socrates is perpetuated and conducted to profounder issues, and in which his life is both rendered and interpreted. But as the vehicle of Plato's thought preserves and makes perfect the Socratic method, so the thought itself begins with the Socratic motive and remains to the end an expression of it. The presentiment of perfect knowledge which distinguished Socrates from his contemporaries becomes in Plato the clear vision of a realm of ideal truth.

[Sidenote: Platonism: Reality as the Absolute Ideal or Good.]

§ 160. Plato begins his philosophy with the philosopher and the philosopher's interest. The philosopher is a lover, who like all lovers longs for the beautiful. But he is the supreme lover, for he loves not the individual beautiful object but the Absolute Beauty itself. He is a lover too in that he does not possess, but somehow apprehends his object from afar. Though imperfect, he seeks perfection; though standing like all his fellows in the twilight of half-reality, he faces toward the sun. Now it is the fundamental proposition of the Platonic philosophy that reality is the sun itself, or the perfection whose possession every wise thinker covets, whose presence would satisfy every longing of experience. The real is that beloved object which is "truly beautiful, delicate, perfect, and blessed." There is both a serious ground for such an affirmation and an important truth in its meaning. The ground is the evident incompleteness of every special judgment concerning experience. We understand only in part, and we know that we understand only in part. What we discover is real enough for practical purposes, but even common-sense questions the true reality of its objects. Special judgments seem to terminate our thought abruptly and arbitrarily. We give "the best answer we can," but such answers do not come as the completion of our thinking. Our thought is in some sense surely a seeking, and it would appear that we are not permitted to rest and be satisfied at any stage of it. If we do so we are like the sophists--blind to our own ignorance. But it is equally true that our thought is straightforward and progressive. We are not permitted to return to earlier stages, but must push on to that which is not less, but more, than what we have as yet found. There is good hope, then, of understanding what the ideal may be from our knowledge of the direction which it impels us to follow.

But to understand Plato's conception of the progression of experience we must again catch up the Socratic strain which he weaves into every theme. For Socrates, student of life and mankind, all objects were objects of interest, and all interests practical interests. One is ignorant when one does not know the good of things; opinionative when one rates things by conventional standards; wise when one knows their real good. In Platonism this practical interpretation of experience appears in the principle that the object of perfect knowledge is the good. The nature of things which one seeks to know better is the good of things, the absolute being which is the goal of all thinking is the very good itself. Plato does not use the term good in any merely utilitarian sense. Indeed it is very significant that for Plato there is no cleavage between theoretical and practical interests. To be morally good is to know the good, to set one's heart on the true object of affection; and to be theoretically sound is to understand perfection. The good itself is the end of every aim, that in which all interests converge. Hence it cannot be defined, as might a special good, in terms of the fulfilment of a set of concrete conditions, but only in terms of the sense or direction of all purposes. The following passage occurs in the "Symposium":

"The true order of going or being led by others to the things of love, is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upward for the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is."[329:8]

[Sidenote: The Progression of Experience toward God.]

§ 161. There is, then, a "true order of going," and an order that leads from one to many, from thence to forms, from thence to morality, and from thence to the general objects of thought or the ideas. In the "Republic," where the proper education of the philosopher is in question, it is proposed that he shall study arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and dialectic. Thus in each case mathematics is the first advance in knowledge, and dialectic the nearest to perfection. Most of Plato's examples are drawn from mathematics. This science replaces the variety and vagueness of the forms of experience with clear, unitary, definite, and eternal natures, such as the number and the geometrical figure. Thus certain individual things are approximately triangular, but subject to alteration, and indefinitely many. On the other hand the triangle as defined by geometry is the fixed and unequivocal nature or idea which such experiences suggest; and the philosophical mind will at once pass to it from these. But the mathematical objects are themselves not thoroughly understood when understood only in mathematical terms, for the foundations of mathematics are arbitrary. And the same is true of all the so-called special sciences. Even the scientists themselves, says Plato,

"only dream about being, but never can behold the waking reality so long as they leave the hypotheses they use unexamined, and are unable to give an account of them. For when a man knows not his own first principle, and when the conclusion and intermediate steps are also constructed out of he knows not what, how can he imagine that such a conventional statement will ever become science?"[330:9]

Within the science of dialectics we are to understand the connections and sequences of ideas themselves, in the hope of eliminating every arbitrariness and conventionality within a system of truth that is pure and self-luminous rationality. To this science, which is the great interest of his later years, Plato contributes only incomplete studies and experiments. We must be satisfied with the playful answer with which, in the "Republic," he replies to Glaucon's entreaty that "he proceed at once from the prelude or preamble to the chief strain, and describe that in like manner": "Dear Glaucon, you will not be able to follow me here, though I would do my best."

But a philosophical system has been projected. The real is that perfect significance or meaning which thought and every interest suggests, and toward which there is in experience an appreciable movement. It is this significance which makes things what they really are, and which constitutes our understanding of them. In itself it transcends the steps which lead to it; "for God," says Plato, "mingles not with men." But it is nevertheless the meaning of human life. And this we can readily conceive. The last word may transform the sentence from nonsense into sense, and it would be true to say that its sense mingles not with nonsense. Similarly the last touch of the brush may transform an inchoate mass of color into a picture, disarray into an object of beauty; and its beauty mingles not with ugliness. So life, when it finally realizes itself, obtains a new and incommensurable quality of perfection in which humanity is transformed into deity. There is frankly no provision for imperfection in such a world. In his later writings Plato sounds his characteristic note less frequently, and permits the ideal to create a cosmos through the admixture of matter. But in his moment of inspiration, the Platonist will have no sense for the imperfect. It is the darkness behind his back, or the twilight through which he passes on his way to the light. He will use even the beauties of earth only "as steps along which he mounts upward for the sake of that other beauty."

[Sidenote: Aristotle's Hierarchy of Substances in Relation to Platonism.]

§ 162. We have met, then, with two distinct philosophical doctrines which arise from the conception of the absolute, or the philosopher's peculiar object: the doctrine of the absolute being or substance, and that of the absolute ideal or good. Both doctrines are realistic in that they assume reality to be demonstrated or revealed, rather than created, by knowledge. Both are rationalistic in that they develop a system of philosophy from the problem of philosophy, or deduce a definition of reality from the conception, of reality. There remains a third doctrine of the same type--the philosophy of Aristotle, the most elaborately constructed system of Greek antiquity, and the most potent influence exerted upon the Scholastic Philosophy of the long mediæval period. This philosophy was rehabilitated in the eighteenth century by Leibniz, the brilliant librarian of the court of Hanover. The extraordinary comprehensiveness of Aristotle's philosophy makes it quite impossible to render here even a general account of it. There is scarcely any human discipline that does not to some extent draw upon it. We are concerned only with the central principles of the metaphysics.

Upon the common ground of rationalism and realism, Plato and Aristotle are complementary in temper, method, and principle. Plato's is the genius of inspiration and fertility, Aristotle's the genius of erudition, mastery, and synthesis. In form, Plato's is the gift of expression, Aristotle's the gift of arrangement. Plato was born and bred an aristocrat, and became the lover of the best--the uncompromising purist; Aristotle is middle-class, and limitlessly wide, hospitable, and patient in his interests. Thus while both are speculative and acute, Plato's mind is intensive and profound, Aristotle's extensive and orderly. It was inevitable, then, that Aristotle should find Plato one-sided. The philosophy of the ideal is not worldly enough to be true. It is a religion rather than a theory of reality. Aristotle, however, would not renounce it, but construe it that it may better provide for nature and history. This is the significance of his new terminology. Matter, to which Plato reluctantly concedes some room as a principle of degradation in the universe, is now admitted to good standing. Matter or material is indispensable to being as its potentiality or that out of which it is constituted. The ideal, on the other hand, loses its exclusive title to the predicate of reality, and becomes the form, or the determinate nature which exists only in its particular embodiments. The being or substance is the concrete individual, of which these are the abstracted aspects. Aristotle's "form," like Plato's "idea," is a teleological principle. The essential nature of the object is its perfection. It is furthermore essential to the object that it should strive after a higher perfection. With Aristotle, however, the reality is not the consummation of the process, the highest perfection in and for itself, but the very hierarchy of objects that ascends toward it. The highest perfection, or God, is not itself coextensive with being, but the final cause of being--that on account of which the whole progression of events takes place. Reality is the development with all of its ascending stages from the maximum of potentiality, or matter, to the maximum of actuality, or God the pure form.

[Sidenote: The Aristotelian Philosophy as a Reconciliation of Platonism and Spinozism.]

§ 163. To understand the virtue of this philosophy as a basis for the reconciliation of different interests, we must recall the relation between Plato and Spinoza. Their characteristic difference appears to the best advantage in connection with mathematical truth. Both regarded geometry as the best model for philosophical thinking, but for different reasons. Spinoza prized geometry for its necessity, and proposed to extend it. His philosophy is the attempt to formulate a geometry of being, which shall set forth the inevitable certainties of the universe. Plato, on the other hand, prized geometry rather for its definition of types, for its knowledge of pure or perfect natures such as the circle and triangle, which in immediate experience are only approximated. His philosophy defines reality similarly as the absolute perfection. Applied to nature Spinozism is mechanical, and looks for necessary laws, while Platonism is teleological, and looks for adaptation and significance. Aristotle's position is intermediate. With Plato he affirms that the good is the ultimate principle. But this very principle is conceived to govern a universe of substances, each of which maintains its own proper being, and all of which are reciprocally determined in their changes. Final causes dominate nature, but work through efficient causes. Reality is not pure perfection, as in Platonism, nor the indifferent necessity, as in Spinozism, but the system of beings necessary to the complete progression toward the highest perfection. The Aristotelian philosophy promises, then, to overcome both the hard realism of Parmenides and Spinoza, and also the supernaturalism of Plato.

[Sidenote: Leibniz's Application of the Conception of Development to the Problem of Imperfection.]

§ 164. But it promises, furthermore, to remedy the defect common to these two doctrines, the very besetting problem of this whole type of philosophy. That problem, as has been seen, is to provide for the imperfect within the perfect, for the temporal incidents of nature and history within the eternal being. Many absolutist philosophers have declared the explanation of this realm to be impossible, and have contented themselves with calling it the realm of opinion or appearance. And this realm of opinion or appearance has been used as a proof of the absolute. Zeno, the pupil of Parmenides, was the first to elaborate what have since come to be known as the paradoxes of the empirical world. Most of these paradoxes turn upon the infinite extension and divisibility of space and time. Zeno was especially interested in the difficulty of conceiving motion, which involves both space and time, and thought himself to have demonstrated its absurdity and impossibility.[337:10] His argument is thus the complement of Parmenides's argument for the indivisible and unchanging substance. Now the method which Zeno here adopts may be extended to cover the whole realm of nature and history. We should then be dialectically driven from this realm to take refuge in absolute being. But the empirical world is not destroyed by disparagement, and cannot long lack champions even among the absolutists themselves. The reconciliation of nature and history with the absolute being became the special interest of Leibniz, the great modern Aristotelian. As a scientist and man of affairs, he was profoundly dissatisfied with Spinoza's resolution of nature, the human individual, and the human society into the universal being. He became an advocate of individualism while retaining the general aim and method of rationalism.

Like Aristotle, Leibniz attributes reality to individual substances, which he calls "monads"; and like Aristotle he conceives these monads to compose an ascending order, with God, the monad of monads, as its dominating goal.

"Furthermore, every substance is like an entire world and like a mirror of God, or indeed of the whole world which it portrays, each one in its own fashion; almost as the same city is variously represented according to the various situations of him who is regarding it. Thus the universe is multiplied in some sort as many times as there are substances, and the glory of God is multiplied in the same way by as many wholly different representations of his works."[338:11]

The very "glory of God," then, requires the innumerable finite individuals with all their characteristic imperfections, that the universe may lack no possible shade or quality of perspective.

[Sidenote: The Problem of Imperfection Remains Unsolved.]

§ 165. But the besetting problem is in fact not solved, and is one of the chief incentives to that other philosophy of absolutism which defines an absolute spirit or mind. Both Aristotle and Leibniz undertake to make the perfection which determines the order of the hierarchy of substances, at the same time the responsible author of the whole hierarchy. In this case the dilemma is plain. If the divine form or the divine monad be other than the stages that lead up to it, these latter cannot be essential to it, for God is by definition absolutely self-sufficient. If, on the other hand, God is identical with the development in its entirety, then two quite incommensurable standards of perfection determine the supremacy of the divine nature, that of the whole and that of the highest parts of the whole. The union of these two and the definition of a perfection which may be at once the development and its goal, is the task of absolute idealism.

[Sidenote: Absolute Realism in Epistemology. Rationalism.]

§ 166. Of the two fundamental questions of epistemology, absolute realism answers the one explicitly, the other implicitly. As respects the source of the most valid knowledge, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza are all agreed: true knowledge is the work of reason, of pure intellection. Plato is the great exponent of dialectic, or the reciprocal affinities and necessities of ideas. Aristotle is the founder of deductive logic. Spinoza proposes to consider even "human actions and desires" as though he were "concerned with lines, planes, and solids." Empirical data may be the occasion, but cannot be the ground of the highest knowledge. According to Leibniz,

"it seems that necessary truths, such as we find in pure mathematics, and especially in arithmetic and geometry, must have principles whose proof does not depend upon instances, nor, consequently, upon the witness of the senses, although without the senses it would never have come into our heads to think of them."[340:12]

[Sidenote: The Relation of Thought and its Object in Absolute Realism.]

§ 167. The answers which these philosophies give to the question of the relation between the state of knowledge and its object, divide them into two groups. Among the ancients reason is regarded as the means of emancipation from the limitations of the private mind. "The sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own," but "the waking"--the wise men--"have one and the same world." What the individual knows belongs to himself only in so far as it is inadequate. Hence for Plato the ideas are not the attributes of a mind, but that self-subsistent truth to which, in its moments of insight, a mind may have access. Opinion is "my own," the truth is being. The position of Aristotle is equally clear. "Actual knowledge," he maintains, "is identical with its object."

Spinoza and Leibniz belong to another age. Modern philosophy began with a new emphasis upon self-consciousness. In his celebrated argument--"I think, hence I am" (cogito ergo sum)--Descartes established the independent and substantial reality of the thinking activity. The "I think" is recognized as in itself a fundamental being, known intuitively to the thinker himself. Now although Spinoza and Leibniz are finally determined by the same motives that obtain in the cases of Plato and Aristotle, they must reckon with this new distinction between the thinker and his object. The result in the case of Spinoza is the doctrine of "parallelism," in which mind is defined as an "infinite attribute" of substance, an aspect or phase coextensive with the whole of being. The result in the case of Leibniz is his doctrine of "representation" and "preëstablished harmony," whereby each monadic substance is in itself an active spiritual entity, and belongs to the universe through its knowledge of a specific stage of the development of the universe. But both Spinoza and Leibniz subordinate such conceptions as these to the fundamental identity that pervades the whole. With Spinoza the attributes belong to the same absolute substance, and with Leibniz the monads represent the one universe. And with both, finally, the perfection of knowledge, or the knowledge of God, is indistinguishable from its object, God himself. The epistemological subtleties peculiar to these philosophers are not stable doctrines, but render inevitable either a return to the simpler and bolder realism of the Greeks, or a passing over into the more radical and systematic doctrine of absolute idealism.

[Sidenote: The Stoic and Spinozistic Ethics of Necessity.]

§ 168. We have met with two general motives, both of which are subordinated to the doctrine of an absolute being postulated and sought by philosophy. The one of these motives leads to the conception of the absolutely necessary and immutable substance, the other to the conception of a consummate perfection. There is an interpretation of life appropriate to each of these conceptions. Both agree in regarding life seriously, in defining reason or philosophy as the highest human activity, and in emphasizing the identity of the individual's good with the good of the universe. But there are striking differences of tone and spirit.

Although the metaphysics of the Stoics have various affiliations, the Stoic code of morality is the true practical sequel to the Eleatic-Spinozistic view of the world. The Stoic is one who has set his affections on the eternal being. He asks nothing of it for himself, but identifies himself with it. The saving grace is a sense of reality. The virtuous man is not one who remakes the world, or draws upon it for his private uses; even less one who rails against it, or complains that it has used him ill. He is rather one who recognizes that there is but one really valid claim, that of the universe itself. But he not only submits to this claim on account of its superiority; he makes it his own. The discipline of Stoicism is the regulation of the individual will to the end that it may coincide with the universal will. There is a part of man by virtue of which he is satisfied with what things are, whatever they be. That part, designated by the Stoics as "the ruling part," is the reason. In so far as man seeks to understand the laws and natures which actually prevail, he cannot be discontented with anything whatsoever that may be known to him.

"For, in so far as we are intelligent beings, we cannot desire anything save that which is necessary, nor yield absolute acquiescence to anything, save to that which is true: wherefore, in so far as we have a right understanding of these things, the endeavor of the better part of ourselves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole."[344:13]

In agreement with this teaching of Spinoza's is the famous Stoic formula to the effect that "nothing can happen contrary to the will of the wise man," who is free through his very acquiescence. If reason be the proper "ruling part," the first step in the moral life is the subordination of the appetitive nature and the enthronement of reason. One who is himself rational will then recognize the fellowship of all rational beings, and the unitary and beneficent rationality of the entire universe. The highest morality is thus already upon the plane of religion.

[Sidenote: The Platonic Ethics of Perfection.]

§ 169. With Spinoza and the Stoics, the perfection of the individual is reduced to what the universe requires of him. The good man is willing to be whatever he must be, for the sake of the whole with which through reason he is enabled to identify himself. With Plato and Aristotle the perfection of the individual himself is commended, that the universe may abound in perfection. The good man is the ideal man--the expression of the type. And how different the quality of a morality in keeping with this principle! The virtues which Plato enumerates--temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice--compose a consummate human nature. He is thinking not of the necessities but of the possibilities of life. Knowledge of the truth will indeed be the best of human living, but knowledge is not prized because it can reconcile man to his limitations; it is the very overflowing of his cup of life. The youth are to

"dwell in the land of health, amid fair sights and sounds; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, will visit the eye and ear, like a healthful breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul even in childhood into harmony with the beauty of reason."[345:14]

Aristotle's account of human perfection is more circumstantial and more prosaic. "The function of man is an activity of soul in accordance with reason," and his happiness or well-being will consist in the fulness of rational living. But such fulness requires a sphere of life that will call forth and exercise the highest human capacities. Aristotle frankly pronounces "external goods" to be indispensable, and happiness to be therefore "a gift of the gods." The rational man will acquire a certain exquisiteness or finesse of action, a "mean" of conduct; and this virtue will be diversified through the various relations into which he must enter, and the different situations which he must meet. He will be not merely brave, temperate, and just, as Plato would have him, but liberal, magnificent, gentle, truthful, witty, friendly, and in all self-respecting or high-minded. In addition to these strictly moral virtues, he will possess the intellectual virtues of prudence and wisdom, the resources of art and science; and will finally possess the gift of insight, or intuitive reason. Speculation will be his highest activity, and the mark of his kinship with the gods who dwell in the perpetual contemplation of the truth.

[Sidenote: The Religion of Fulfilment, and the Religion of Renunciation.]

§ 170. Aristotle's ethics expresses the buoyancy of the ancient world, when the individual does not feel himself oppressed by the eternal reality, but rejoices in it. He is not too conscious of his sufferings to be disinterested in his admiration and wonder. It is this which distinguishes the religion of Plato and Aristotle from that of the Stoics and Spinoza. With both alike, religion consists not in making the world, but in contemplating it; not in coöperating with God, but in worshipping him. Plato and Aristotle, however, do not find any antagonism between the ways of God and the natural interests of men. God does not differ from men save in his exalted perfection. The contemplation and worship of him comes as the final and highest stage of a life which is organic and continuous throughout. The love of God is the natural love when it has found its true object.

"For he who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty--and this, Socrates, is that final cause of all our former toils, which in the first place is everlasting--not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning; in the next place not fair in one point of view and foul in another, . . . or in the likeness of a face or hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, nor existing in any other being; . . . but beauty only, absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things."[347:15]

The religion of Spinoza is the religion of one who has renounced the favor of the universe. He was deprived early in life of every benefit of fortune, and set out to find the good which required no special dispensation but only the common lot and the common human endowment. He found that good to consist in the conviction of the necessity, made acceptable through the supremacy of the understanding. The like faith of the Stoics makes of no account the difference of fortune between Marcus the emperor and Epictetus the slave.

"For two reasons, then, it is right to be content with that which happens to thee; the one because it was done for thee and prescribed for thee, and in a manner had reference to thee, originally from the most ancient causes spun with thy destiny; and the other because even that which comes severally to every man is to the power which administers the universe a cause of felicity and perfection, nay even of its very continuance. For the integrity of the whole is mutilated, if thou cuttest off anything whatever from the conjunction and the continuity either of the parts or of the causes. And thou dost cut off, as far as it is in thy power, when thou art dissatisfied, and in a manner triest to put anything out of the way."[348:16]

FOOTNOTES:

[306:1] By Absolute Realism is meant that system of philosophy which defines the universe as the absolute being, implied in knowledge as its final object, but assumed to be independent of knowledge. In the Spinozistic system this absolute being is conceived under the form of substance, or self-sufficiency; in Platonism under the form of perfection; and in the Aristotelian system under the form of a hierarchy of substances.

[308:2] Burnet: Early Greek Philosophy, p. 185.

[309:3] When contrasted with the temporal realm of "generation and decay," this ultimate object is often called the eternal.

[312:5] Spinoza: Ethics, Part I. Translation by Elwes, p. 45.

[329:8] Plato: Symposium, 211. Translation by Jowett.

[330:9] Plato: Republic, 533. Translation by Jowett.

[338:11] Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics. Translation by Montgomery, p. 15.

In so far as the monads are spiritual this doctrine tends to be subjectivistic. Cf. Chap. IX.

[340:12] Leibniz: New Essays on the Human Understanding. Translation by Latta, p. 363.

[347:15] Plato: Symposium, 210-211. Translation by Jowett.

[348:16] Marcus Aurelius Antoninus: Thoughts. Translation by Long, p. 141.

CHAPTER XI

ABSOLUTE IDEALISM[349:1]

[Sidenote: General Constructive Character of Absolute Idealism.]

§ 171. Absolute idealism is the most elaborately constructive of all the historical types of philosophy. Though it may have overlooked elementary truths, and have sought to combine irreconcilable principles, it cannot be charged with lack of sophistication or subtlety. Its great virtue is its recognition of problems--its exceeding circumspection; while its great promise is due to its comprehensiveness--its generous provision for all interests and points of view. But its very breadth and complexity render this philosophy peculiarly liable to the equivocal use of conceptions. This may be readily understood from the nature of the central doctrine of absolute idealism. According to this doctrine it is proposed to define the universe as an absolute spirit; or a being infinite, ultimate, eternal, and self-sufficient, like the being of Plato and Spinoza, but possessing at the same time the distinguishing properties of spirit. Such conceptions as self-consciousness, will, knowledge, and moral goodness are carried over from the realm of human endeavor and social relations to the unitary and all-inclusive reality. Now it has been objected that this procedure is either meaningless, in that it so applies the term spirit as to contradict its meaning; or prejudicial to spiritual interests, in that it neutralizes the properties of spirit through so extending their use. Thus one may contend that to affirm that the universe as a whole is spirit is meaningless, since moral goodness requires special conditions and relations that cannot be attributed to the universe as a whole; or one may contend that such doctrine is prejudicial to moral interests because by attributing spiritual perfection to the totality of being it discredits all moral loyalties and antagonisms. The difficulties that lie in the way of absolute idealism are due, then, to the complexity of its synthesis, to its complementary recognition of differences and resolution of them into unity. But this synthesis is due to the urgency of certain great problems which the first or realistic expression of the absolutist motive left undiscovered and unsolved.

[Sidenote: The Great Outstanding Problems of Absolutism.]

§ 172. It is natural to approach so deliberate and calculating a philosophy from the stand-point of the problems which it proposes to solve. One of these is the epistemological problem of the relation between the state of knowledge and its object. Naturalism and absolute realism side with common-sense in its assumption that although the real object is essential to the valid state of knowledge, its being known is not essential to the real object. Subjectivism, on the other hand, maintains that being is essentially the content of a knowing state, or an activity of the knower himself. Absolute idealism proposes to accept the general epistemological principle of subjectivism; but to satisfy the realistic demand for a standard, compelling object, by setting up an absolute knower, with whom all valid knowledge must be in agreement. This epistemological statement of absolute idealism is its most mature phase; and the culminating phase, in which it shows unmistakable signs of passing over into another doctrine. We must look for its pristine inspiration in its solution of another fundamental problem: that of the relation between the absolute and the empirical. Like absolute realism, this philosophy regards the universe as a unitary and internally necessary being, and undertakes to hold that being accountable for every item of experience. But we have found that absolute realism is beset with the difficulty of thus accounting for the fragmentariness and isolation of the individual. The contention that the universe must really be a rational or perfect unity is disputed by the evident multiplicity, irrelevance, and imperfection in the foreground of experience. The inference to perfection and the confession of imperfection seem equally unavoidable. Rational necessities and empirical facts are out of joint.

[Sidenote: The Greek Philosophers and the Problem of Evil. The Task of the New Absolutism.]

§ 173. Even Plato had been conscious of a certain responsibility for matters of fact. Inasmuch as he attached the predicate of reality to the absolute perfection, he made that being the only source to which they could be referred. Perhaps, then, he suggests, they are due to the very bounteousness of God.

"He was good, and no goodness can ever have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as possible."[352:2]

Plotinus, in whom Platonism is leavened by the spirit of an age which is convinced of sin, and which is therefore more keenly aware of the positive existence of the imperfect, follows out this suggestion. Creation is "emanation"--the overflow of God's excess of goodness. But one does not readily understand how goodness, desiring all things to be like itself, should thereupon create evil--even to make it good. The Aristotelian philosophy, with its conception of the gradation of substances, would seem to be better equipped to meet the difficulty. A development requires stages; and every finite thing may thus be perfect in its way and perfect in its place, while in the absolute truth or God there is realized the meaning of the whole order. But if so, there is evidently something that escapes God, to wit, the meaningless and unfitness, the error and evil, of the stages in their successive isolation. Nor is it of any avail to insist (as did Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza alike) that these are only privation, and therefore not to be counted in the sum of reality. For privation is itself an experience, with a great variety of implications, moral and psychological; and these cannot be attributed to God or deduced from him, in consideration of his absolute perfection.

The task of the new absolutism is now in clear view. The perfect must be amended to admit the imperfect. The absolute significance must be so construed as to provide for the evident facts; for the unmeaning things and changes of the natural order; for ignorance, sin, despair, and every human deficiency. The new philosophy is to solve this problem by defining a spiritual absolute, and by so construing the life or dynamics of spirit, as to demonstrate the necessity of the very imperfection and opposition which is so baffling to the realist.

[Sidenote: The Beginning of Absolute Idealism in Kant's Analysis of Experience.]

§ 174. Absolute idealism, which is essentially a modern doctrine, does not begin with rhapsodies, but with a very sober analysis of familiar truths, conducted by the most sober of all philosophers, Immanuel Kant. This philosopher lived in Königsberg, Germany, at the close of the eighteenth century. He is related to absolute idealism much as Socrates is related to Platonism: he was not himself speculative, but employed a critical method which was transformed by his followers into a metaphysical construction. It is essential to the understanding both of Kant and of his more speculative successors, to observe that he begins with the recognition of certain non-philosophical truths--those of natural science and the moral consciousness. He accepts the order of nature formulated in the Newtonian dynamics, and the moral order acknowledged in the common human conviction of duty. And he is interested in discovering the ground upon which these common affirmations rest, the structure which virtually supports them as types of knowledge. But a general importance attaches to the analysis because these two types of knowledge (together with the æsthetic judgment, which is similarly analyzed) are regarded by Kant as coextensive with experience itself. The very least experience that can be reported upon at all is an experience of nature or duty, and as such will be informed with their characteristic principles. Let us consider the former type. The simplest instance of nature is the experience of the single perceived object. In the first place, such an object will be perceived as in space and time. These Kant calls the forms of intuition. An object cannot even be presented or given without them. But, furthermore, it will be regarded as substance, that is, as having a substratum that persists through changes of position or quality. It will also be regarded as causally dependent upon other objects like itself. Causality, substance, and like principles to the number of twelve, Kant calls the categories of the understanding. Both intuition and understanding are indispensable to the experience of any object whatsoever. They may be said to condition the object in general. Their principles condition the process of making something out of the manifold of sensation. But similarly, every moral experience recognizes what Kant calls the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is the law of reasonableness or impartiality in conduct, requiring the individual to act on a maxim which he can "will to be law universal." No state of desire or situation calling for action means anything morally except in the light of this obligation. Thus certain principles of thought and action are said to be implicit in all experience. They are universal and necessary in the sense that they are discovered as the conditions not of any particular experience, but of experience in general. This implicit or virtual presence in experience in general, Kant calls their transcendental character, and the process of explicating them is his famous Transcendental Deduction.

[Sidenote: Kant's Principles Restricted to the Experiences which they Set in Order.]

§ 175. The restriction which Kant puts upon his method is quite essential to its meaning. I deduce the categories, for example, just in so far as I find them to be necessary to perception. Without them my perception is blind, I make nothing of it; with them my experience becomes systematic and rational. But categories which I so deduce must be forever limited to the rôle for which they are defined. Categories without perceptions are "empty"; they have validity solely with reference to the experience which they set in order. Indeed, I cannot even complete that order. The orderly arrangement of parts of experience suggests, and suggests irresistibly, a perfect system. I can even define the ideas and ideals through which such a perfect system might be realized. But I cannot in the Kantian sense attach reality to it because it is not indispensable to experience. It must remain an ideal which regulates my thinking of such parts of it as fall within the range of my perception; or it may through my moral nature become the realm of my living and an object of faith. In short, Kant's is essentially a "critical philosophy," a logical and analytical study of the special terms and relations of human knowledge. He denies the validity of these terms and relations beyond this realm. His critiques are an inventory of the conditions, principles, and prospects of that cognition which, although not alone ideally conceivable, is alone possible.

[Sidenote: The Post-Kantian Metaphysics is a Generalization of the Cognitive and Moral Consciousness as Analyzed by Kant. The Absolute Spirit.]

§ 176. With the successors of Kant, as with the successors of Socrates, a criticism becomes a system of metaphysics. This transformation is effected in the post-Kantians by a generalization of the human cognitive consciousness. According to Kant's analysis it contains a manifold of sense which must be organized by categories in obedience to the ideal of a rational universe. The whole enterprise, with its problems given in perception, its instruments available in the activities of the understanding, and its ideals revealed in the reason, is an organic spiritual unity, manifesting itself in the self-consciousness of the thinker. Now in absolute idealism this very enterprise of knowledge, made universal and called the absolute spirit or mind, is taken to be the ultimate reality. And here at length would seem to be afforded the conception of a being to which the problematic and the rational, the data and the principles, the natural and the ideal, are alike indispensable. We are now to seek the real not in the ideal itself, but in that spiritual unity in which appearance is the incentive to truth, and natural imperfection the spring to goodness. This may be translated into the language which Plato uses in the "Symposium," when Diotima is revealing to Socrates the meaning of love. The new reality will be not the loved one, but love itself.

"What then is Love? Is he mortal?"

"What then?"

"As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but is a mean between them."

"What is he then, Diotima?"

"He is a great spirit, and like all that is spiritual he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal."[359:3]

Reality is no longer the God who mingles not with men, but that power which, as Diotima further says, "interprets and conveys to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and rewards of the gods."

In speaking for such an idealism, Emerson says:

"Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry. . . . The mid-world is best."[359:4]

The new reality is this highway of the spirit, the very course and raceway of self-consciousness. It is traversed in the movement and self-correction of thought, in the interest in ideals, or in the submission of the will to the control of the moral law.

[Sidenote: Fichteanism, or the Absolute Spirit as Moral Activity.]

§ 177. It is the last of these phases of self-consciousness that Fichte, who was Kant's immediate successor, regards as of paramount importance. As Platonism began with the ideal of the good or the object of life, so the new idealism begins with the conviction of duty, or the story of life. Being is the living moral nature compelled to build itself a natural order wherein it may obey the moral law, and to divide itself into a community of moral selves through which the moral virtues may be realized. Nature and society flow from the conception of an absolute moral activity, or ego. Such an ego could not be pure and isolated and yet be moral. The evidence of this is the common moral consciousness. My duty compels me to act upon the not-self or environment, and to respect and coöperate with other selves. Fichte's absolute is this moral consciousness universalized and made eternal. Moral value being its fundamental principle the universe must on that very account embrace both nature, or moral indifference, and humanity, or moral limitation.

[Sidenote: Romanticism, or the Absolute Spirit as Sentiment.]

§ 178. But the Romanticists, who followed close upon Fichte, were dissatisfied with so hard and exclusive a conception of spiritual being. Life, they said, is not all duty. Indeed, the true spiritual life is quite other, not harsh and constrained, but free and spontaneous--a wealth of feeling playing about a constantly shifting centre. Spirit is not consecutive and law-abiding, but capricious and wanton, seeking the beautiful in no orderly progression, but in a refined and versatile sensibility. If this be the nature of spirit, and if spirit be the nature of reality, then he is most wise who is most rich in sentiment. The Romanticists were the exponents of an absolute sentimentalism. And they did not prove it, but like good sentimentalists they felt it.

[Sidenote: Hegelianism, or the Absolute Spirit as Dialectic.]

§ 179. Hegel, the master of the new idealism, set himself the task of construing spirit in terms as consecutive as those of Fichte, and as comprehensive as those of the Romanticists. Like Plato, he found in dialectic the supreme manifestation of the spiritual life. There is a certain flow of ideas which determines the meaning of experience, and is the truth of truths. But the mark of the new prophet is this: the flow of ideas itself is a process of self-correction due to a sense of error. Thus bare sensation is abstract and bare thought is abstract. The real, however, is not merely the concrete in which they are united, but the very process in the course of which through knowledge of abstraction thought arrives at the concrete. The principle of negation is the very life of thought, and it is the life of thought, rather than the outcome of thought, which is reality. The most general form of the dialectical process contains three moments: the moment of thesis, in which affirmation is made; the moment of antithesis, in which the opposite asserts itself; and the moment of synthesis, in which a reconciliation is effected in a new thesis. Thus thought is the progressive overcoming of contradiction; not the state of freedom from contradiction, but the act of escaping it. Such processes are more familiar in the moral life. Morality consists, so even common-sense asserts, in the overcoming of evil. Character is the resistance of temptation; goodness, a growth in grace through discipline. Of such, for Hegel, is the very kingdom of heaven. It is the task of the philosopher, a task to which Hegel applies himself most assiduously, to analyze the battle and the victory upon which spiritual being nourishes itself. And since the deeper processes are those of thought, the Hegelian philosophy centres in an ordering of notions, a demonstration of that necessary progression of thought which, in its whole dynamical logical history, constitutes the absolute idea.

[Sidenote: The Hegelian Philosophy of Nature and History.]

§ 180. The Hegelian philosophy, with its emphasis upon difference, antagonism, and development, is peculiarly qualified to be a philosophy of nature and history. Those principles of spiritual development which logic defines are conceived as incarnate in the evolution of the world. Nature, as the very antithesis to spirit, is now understood to be the foil of spirit. In nature spirit alienates itself in order to return enriched. The stages of nature are the preparation for the reviving of a spirituality that has been deliberately forfeited. The Romanticists, whether philosophers like Schelling or poets like Goethe and Wordsworth, were led by their feeling for the beauty of nature to attribute to it a much deeper and more direct spiritual significance. But Hegel and the Romanticists alike are truly expressed in Emerson's belief that the spiritual interpretation of nature is the "true science."

"The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow of space was strown with these flowers we call suns and moons and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought."[364:5]

The new awakening of spirit which is for Hegel the consummation of the natural evolution, begins with the individual or subjective spirit, and develops into the social or objective spirit, which is morality and history. History is a veritable dialectic of nations, in the course of which the consciousness of individual liberty is developed, and coördinated with the unity of the state. The highest stage of spirit incarnate is that of absolute spirit, embracing art, religion, and philosophy. In art the absolute idea obtains expression in sensuous existence, more perfectly in classical than in the symbolic art of the Orient, but most perfectly in the romantic art of the modern period. In religion the absolute idea is expressed in the imagination through worship. In Oriental pantheism, the individual is overwhelmed by his sense of the universal; in Greek religion, God is but a higher man; while in Christianity God and man are perfectly united in Christ. Finally, in philosophy the absolute idea reaches its highest possible expression in articulate thought.

[Sidenote: Résumé. Failure of Absolute Idealism to Solve the Problem of Evil.]

§ 181. Such is absolute idealism approached from the stand-point of antecedent metaphysics. It is the most elaborate and subtle provision for antagonistic differences within unity that the speculative mind of man has as yet been able to make. It is the last and most thorough attempt to resolve individual and universal, temporal and eternal, natural and ideal, good and evil, into an absolute unity in which the universal, eternal, ideal, and good shall dominate, and in which all terms shall be related with such necessity as obtains in the definitions and theorems of geometry. There is to be some absolute meaning which is rational to the uttermost and the necessary ground of all the incidents of existence. Thought could undertake no more ambitious and exacting task. Nor is it evident after all that absolute idealism enjoys any better success in this task than absolute realism. The difference between them becomes much less marked when we reflect that the former, like the latter, must reserve the predicate of being for the unity of the whole. Even though evil and contradiction belong to the essence of things, move in the secret heart of a spiritual universe, the reality is not these in their severalty, but that life within which they fall, the story within which they "earn a place." And if absolute idealism has defined a new perfection, it has at the same time defined a new imperfection. The perfection is rich in contrast, and thus inclusive of both the lights and shades of experience; but the perfection belongs only to the composition of these elements within a single view. It is not necessary to such perfection that the evil should ever be viewed in isolation. The idealist employs the analogy of the drama or the picture whose very significance requires the balance of opposing forces; or the analogy of the symphony in which a higher musical quality is realized through the resolution of discord into harmony. But none of these unities requires any element whatsoever that does not partake of its beauty. It is quite irrelevant to the drama that the hero should himself have his own view of events with no understanding of their dramatic value, as it is irrelevant to the picture that an unbalanced fragment of it should dwell apart, or to the symphony that the discord should be heard without the harmony. One may multiply without end the internal differences and antagonisms that contribute to the internal meaning, and be as far as ever from understanding the external detachment of experiences that are not rational or good in themselves. And it is precisely this kind of fact that precipitates the whole problem. We do not judge of sin and error from experiences in which they conduct to goodness and truth, but from experiences in which they are stark and unresolved.

In view of such considerations many idealists have been willing to confess their inability to solve this problem. To quote a recent expositor of Hegel,

"We need not, after all, be surprised at the apparently insoluble problem which confronts us. For the question has developed into the old difficulty of the origin of evil, which has always baffled both theologians and philosophers. An idealism which declares that the universe is in reality perfect, can find, as most forms of popular idealism do, an escape from the difficulties of the existence of evil, by declaring that the universe is as yet only growing towards its ideal perfection. But this refuge disappears with the reality of time, and we are left with an awkward difference between what philosophy tells us must be, and what our life tells us actually is."[368:6]

If the philosophy of eternal perfection persists in its fundamental doctrine in spite of this irreconcilable conflict with life, it is because it is believed that that doctrine must be true. Let us turn, then, to its more constructive and compelling argument.

[Sidenote: The Constructive Argument for Absolute Idealism is Based upon the Subjectivistic Theory of Knowledge.]

§ 182. The proof of absolute idealism is supposed by the majority of its exponents to follow from the problem of epistemology, and more particularly from the manifest dependence of truth upon the knowing mind. In its initial phase absolute idealism is indistinguishable from subjectivism. Like that philosophy it finds that the object of knowledge is inseparable from the state of knowledge throughout the whole range of experience. Since the knower can never escape himself, it may be set down as an elementary fact that reality (at any rate whatever reality can be known or even talked about) owes its being to mind.

Thus Green, the English neo-Hegelian, maintains that "an object which no consciousness presented to itself would not be an object at all," and wonders that this principle is not generally taken for granted and made the starting-point for philosophy.[369:7] However, unless the very term "object" is intended to imply presence to a subject, this principle is by no means self-evident, and must be traced to its sources.

We have already followed the fortunes of that empirical subjectivism which issues from the relativity of perception. At the very dawn of philosophy it was observed that what is seen, heard, or otherwise experienced through the senses, depends not only upon the use of sense-organs, but upon the special point of view occupied by each individual sentient being. It was therefore concluded that the perceptual world belonged to the human knower with his limitations and perspective, rather than to being itself. It was this epistemological principle upon which Berkeley founded his empirical idealism. Believing knowledge to consist essentially in perception, and believing perception to be subjective, he had to choose between the relegation of being to a region inaccessible to knowledge, and the definition of being in terms of subjectivity. To avoid scepticism he accepted the latter alternative. But among the Greeks with whom this theory of perception originated, it drew its meaning in large part from the distinction between perception and reason. Thus we read in Plato's "Sophist":

"And you would allow that we participate in generation with the body, and by perception; but we participate with the soul by thought in true essence, and essence you would affirm to be always the same and immutable, whereas generation varies."[370:8]

It is conceived that although in perception man is condemned to a knowledge conditioned by the affections and station of his body, he may nevertheless escape himself and lay hold on the "true essence" of things, by virtue of thought. In other words, knowledge, in contradistinction to "opinion," is not made by the subject, but is the soul's participation in the eternal natures of things. In the moment of insight the varying course of the individual thinker coincides with the unvarying truth; but in that moment the individual thinker is ennobled through being assimilated to the truth, while the truth is no more, no less, the truth than before.

[Sidenote: The Principle of Subjectivism Extended to Reason.]

§ 183. In absolute idealism, the principle of subjectivism is extended to reason itself. This extension seems to have been originally due to moral and religious interests. From the moral stand-point the contemplation of the truth is a state, and the highest state of the individual life. The religious interest unifies the individual life and directs attention to its spiritual development. Among the Greeks of the middle period life was as yet viewed objectively as the fulfilment of capacities, and knowledge was regarded as perfection of function, the exercise of the highest of human prerogatives. But as moral and religious interests became more absorbing, the individual lived more and more in his own self-consciousness. Even before the Christian era the Greek philosophers themselves were preoccupied with the task of winning a state of inner serenity. Thus the Stoics and Epicureans came to look upon knowledge as a means to the attainment of an inner freedom from distress and bondage to the world. In other words, the very reason was regarded as an activity of the self, and its fruits were valued for their enhancement of the welfare of the self. And if this be true of the Stoics and the Epicureans, it is still more clearly true of the neo-Platonists of the Christian era, who mediate between the ancient and mediæval worlds.

[Sidenote: Emphasis on Self-consciousness in Early Christian Philosophy.]

§ 184. It is well known that the early period of Christianity was a period of the most vivid self-consciousness. The individual believed that his natural and social environment was alien to his deeper spiritual interests. He therefore withdrew into himself. He believed himself to have but one duty, the salvation of his soul; and that duty required him to search his innermost springs of action in order to uproot any that might compromise him with the world and turn him from God. The drama of life was enacted within the circle of his own self-consciousness. Citizenship, bodily health, all forms of appreciation and knowledge, were identified in the parts they played here. In short the Christian consciousness, although renunciation was its deepest motive, was reflexive and centripetal to a degree hitherto unknown among the European peoples. And when with St. Augustine theoretical interests once more vigorously asserted themselves, this new emphasis was in the very foreground. St. Augustine wished to begin his system of thought with a first indubitable certainty, and selected neither being nor ideas, but self. St. Augustine's genius was primarily religious, and the "Confessions," in which he records the story of his hard winning of peace and right relations with God, is his most intimate book. How faithfully does he represent himself, and the blend of paganism and Christianity which was distinctive of his age, when in his systematic writings he draws upon religion for his knowledge of truth! In all my living, he argues, whether I sin or turn to God, whether I doubt or believe, whether I know or am ignorant, in all I know that I am I. Each and every state of my consciousness is a state of my self, and as such, sure evidence of my self's existence. If one were to follow St. Augustine's reflections further, one would find him reasoning from his own finite and evil self to an infinite and perfect Self, which centres like his in the conviction that I am I, but is endowed with all power and all worth. One would find him reflecting upon the possible union with God through the exaltation of the human self-consciousness. But this conception of God as the perfect self is so much a prophecy of things to come, that more than a dozen centuries elapsed before it was explicitly formulated by the post-Kantians. We must follow its more gradual development in the philosophies of Descartes and Kant.

[Sidenote: Descartes's Argument for the Independence of the Thinking Self.]

§ 185. When at the close of the sixteenth century the Frenchman, René Descartes, sought to construct philosophy anew and upon secure foundations, he too selected as the initial certainty of thought the thinker's knowledge of himself. This principle now received its classic formulation in the proposition, Cogito ergo sum--"I think, hence I am." The argument does not differ essentially from that of St. Augustine, but it now finds a place in a systematic and critical metaphysics. In that my thinking is certain of itself, says Descartes, in that I know myself before I know aught else, my self can never be dependent for its being upon anything else that I may come to know. A thinking self, with its knowledge and its volition, is quite capable of subsisting of itself. Such is, indeed, not the case with a finite self, for all finitude is significant of limitation, and in recognizing my limitations I postulate the infinite being or God. But the relation of my self to a physical world is quite without necessity. Human nature, with soul and body conjoined, is a combination of two substances, neither of which is a necessary consequence of the other. As a result of this combination the soul is to some extent affected by the body, and the body is to some extent directed by the soul; but the body could conceivably be an automaton, as the soul could conceivably be, and will in another life become, a free spirit. The consequences of this dualism for epistemology are very grave. If knowledge be the activity of a self-subsistent thinking spirit, how can it reveal the nature of an external world? The natural order is now literally "external." It is true that the whole body of exact science, that mechanical system to which Descartes attached so much importance, falls within the range of the soul's own thinking. But what assurance is there that it refers to a province of its own--a physical world in space? Descartes can only suppose that "clear and distinct" ideas must be trusted as faithful representations. It is true the external world makes its presence known directly, when it breaks in upon the soul in sense-perception. But Descartes's rationalism and love of mathematics forbade his attaching importance to this criterion. Real nature, that exactly definable and predictable order of moving bodies defined in physics, is not known through sense-perception, but through thought. Its necessities are the necessities of reason. Descartes finds himself, then, in the perplexing position of seeking an internal criterion for an external world. The problem of knowledge so stated sets going the whole epistemological movement of the eighteenth century, from Locke through Berkeley and Hume to Kant. And the issue of this development is the absolute idealism of Kant's successors.

[Sidenote: Empirical Reaction of the English Philosophers.]

§ 186. Of the English philosophers who prepare the way for the epistemology of Kant, Hume is the most radical and momentous. It was he who roused Kant from his "dogmatic slumbers" to the task of the "Critical Philosophy." Hume is one of the two possible consequences of Descartes. One who attaches greater importance to the rational necessities of science than to its external reference, is not unwilling that nature should be swallowed up in mind. With Malebranche, Descartes's immediate successor in France, nature is thus provided for within the archetypal mind of God. With the English philosophers, on the other hand, externality is made the very mark of nature, and as a consequence sense-perception becomes the criterion of scientific truth. This empirical theory of knowledge, inaugurated and developed by Locke and Berkeley, culminates in Hume's designation of the impression as the distinguishing element of nature, at once making up its content and certifying to its externality. The processes of nature are successions of impressions; and the laws of nature are their uniformities, or the expectations of uniformity which their repetitions engender. Hume does not hesitate to draw the logical conclusion. If the final mark of truth is the presence to sense of the individual element, then science can consist only of items of information and probable generalizations concerning their sequences. The effect is observed to follow upon the cause in fact, but there is no understanding of its necessity; therefore no absolute certainty attaches to the future effects of any cause.

[Sidenote: To Save Exact Science Kant Makes it Dependent on Mind.]

§ 187. But what has become of the dream of the mathematical physicist? Is the whole system of Newton, that brilliant triumph of the mechanical method, unfounded and dogmatic? It is the logical instability of this body of knowledge, made manifest in the well-founded scepticism of Hume, that rouses Kant to a reëxamination of the whole foundation of natural science. The general outline of his analysis has been developed above. It is of importance here to understand its relations to the problem of Descartes. Contrary to the view of the English philosophers, natural science is, says Kant, the work of the mind. The certainty of the causal relation is due to the human inability to think otherwise. Hume is mistaken in supposing that mere sensation gives us any knowledge of nature. The very least experience of objects involves the employment of principles which are furnished by the mind. Without the employment of such principles, or in bare sensation, there is no intelligible meaning whatsoever. But once admit the employment of such principles and formulate them systematically, and the whole Newtonian order of nature is seen to follow from them. Furthermore, since these principles or categories are the conditions of human experience, are the very instruments of knowledge, they are valid wherever there is any experience or knowledge. There is but one way to make anything at all out of nature, and that is to conceive it as an order of necessary events in space and time. Newtonian science is part of such a general conception, and is therefore necessary if knowledge is to be possible at all, even the least. Thus Kant turns upon Hume, and shuts him up to the choice between the utter abnegation of all knowledge, including the knowledge of his own scepticism, and the acceptance of the whole body of exact science.

But with nature thus conditioned by the necessities of thought, what has become of its externality? That, Kant admits, has indeed vanished. Kant does not attempt, as did Descartes, to hold that the nature which mind constructs and controls, exists also outside of mind. The nature that is known is on that very account phenomenal, anthropocentric--created by its cognitive conditions. Descartes was right in maintaining that sense-perception certifies to the existence of a world outside the mind, but mistaken in calling it nature and identifying it with the realm of science. In short, Kant acknowledges the external world, and names it the thing-in-itself; but insists that because it is outside of mind it is outside of knowledge. Thus is the certainty of science saved at the cost of its metaphysical validity. It is necessarily true, but only of a conditioned or dependent world. And in saving science Kant has at the same time prejudiced metaphysics in general. For the human or naturalistic way of knowing is left in sole possession of the field, with the higher interest of reasons in the ultimate nature of being, degraded to the rank of practical faith.

[Sidenote: The Post-Kantians Transform Kant's Mind-in-general into an Absolute Mind.]

§ 188. The transformation of this critical and agnostic doctrine into absolute idealism is inevitable. The metaphysical interest was bound to avail itself of the speculative suggestiveness with which the Kantian philosophy abounds. The transformation turns upon Kant's assumption that whatever is constructed by the mind is on that account phenomenon or appearance. Kant has carried along the presumption that whatever is act or content of mind is on that account not real object or thing-in-itself. We have seen that this is generally accepted as true of the relativities of sense-perception. But is it true of thought? The post-Kantian idealist maintains that that depends upon the thought. The content of private individual thinking is in so far not real object; but it does not follow that this is true of such thinking as is universally valid. Now Kant has deduced his categories for thought in general. There are no empirical cases of thinking except the human thinkers; but the categories are not the property of any one human individual or any group of such individuals. They are the conditions of experience in general, and of every possibility of experience. The transition to absolute idealism is now readily made. Thought in general* becomes the *absolute mind, and experience in general its content. The thing-in-itself drops out as having no meaning. The objectivity to which it testified is provided for in the completeness and self-sufficiency which is attributed to the absolute experience. Indeed, an altogether new definition of subjective and objective replaces the old. The subjective is that which is only insufficiently thought, as in the case of relativity and error; the objective is that which is completely thought. Thus the natural order is indeed phenomenal; but only because the principles of science are not the highest principles of thought, and not because nature is the fruit of thought. Thus Hegel expresses his relation to Kant as follows:

"According to Kant, the things that we know about are to us appearances only, and we can never know their essential nature, which belongs to another world, which we cannot approach. . . . The true statement of the case is as follows. The things of which we have direct consciousness are mere phenomena, not for us only, but in their own nature; and the true and proper case of these things, finite as they are, is to have their existence founded not in themselves, but in the universal divine idea. This view of things, it is true, is as idealist as Kant's, but in contradistinction to the subjective idealism of the Critical Philosophy should be termed Absolute Idealism."[382:9]

[Sidenote: The Direct Argument. The Inference from the Finite Mind to the Infinite Mind.]

§ 189. Absolute idealism is thus reached after a long and devious course of development. But the argument may be stated much more briefly. Plato, it will be remembered, found that experience tends ever to transcend itself. The thinker finds himself compelled to pursue the ideal of immutable and universal truth, and must identify the ultimate being with that ideal. Similarly Hegel says:

"That upward spring of the mind signifies that the being which the world has is only a semblance, no real being, no absolute truth; it signifies that beyond and above that appearance, truth abides in God, so that true being is another name for God."[382:10]

The further argument of absolute idealism differs from that of Plato in that the dependence of truth upon the mind is accepted as a first principle. The ideal with which experience is informed is now the state of perfect knowledge, rather than the system of absolute truth. The content of the state of perfect knowledge will indeed be the system of absolute truth, but none the less content, precisely as finite knowledge is the content of a finite mind. In pursuing the truth, I who pursue, aim to realize in myself a certain highest state of knowledge. Were I to know all truth I should indeed have ceased to be the finite individual who began the quest, but the evolution would be continuous and the character of self-consciousness would never have been lost. I may say, in short, that God or being, is my perfect cognitive self.

The argument for absolute idealism is a constructive interpretation of the subjectivistic contention that knowledge can never escape the circle of its own activity and states. To meet the demand for a final and standard truth, a demand which realism meets with its doctrine of a being independent of any mind, this philosophy defines a standard mind. The impossibility of defining objects in terms of relativity to a finite self, conducts dialectically to the conception of the absolute self. The sequel to my error or exclusiveness, is truth or inclusiveness. The outcome of the dialectic is determined by the symmetry of the antithesis. Thus, corrected experience implies a last correcting experience; partial cognition, complete cognition; empirical subject, transcendental subject; finite mind, an absolute mind. The following statement is taken from a contemporary exponent of the philosophy:

"What you and I lack, when we lament our human ignorance, is simply a certain desirable and logically possible state of mind, or type of experience; to wit, a state of mind in which we should wisely be able to say that we had fulfilled in experience what we now have merely in idea, namely, the knowledge, the immediate and felt presence, of what we now call the Absolute Reality. . . . There is an Absolute Experience for which the conception of an absolute reality, i. e., the conception of a system of ideal truth, is fulfilled by the very contents that get presented to this experience. This Absolute Experience is related to our experience as an organic whole to its own fragments. It is an experience which finds fulfilled all that the completest thought can conceive as genuinely possible. Herein lies its definition as an Absolute. For the Absolute Experience, as for ours, there are data, contents, facts. But these data, these contents, express, for the Absolute Experience, its own meaning, its thought, its ideas. Contents beyond these that it possesses, the Absolute Experience knows to be, in genuine truth, impossible. Hence its contents are indeed particular,--a selection from the world of bare or merely conceptual possibilities,--but they form a self-determined whole, than which nothing completer, more organic, more fulfilled, more transparent, or more complete in meaning, is concretely or genuinely possible. On the other hand, these contents are not foreign to those of our finite experience, but are inclusive of them in the unity of one life."[385:11]

[Sidenote: The Realistic Tendency in Absolute Idealism.]

§ 190. As has been already intimated, at the opening of this chapter, the inclusion of the whole of reality within a single self is clearly a questionable proceeding. The need of avoiding the relativism of empirical idealism is evident. But if the very meaning of the self-consciousness be due to a certain selection and exclusion within the general field of experience, it is equally evident that the relativity of self-consciousness can never be overcome through appealing to a higher self. One must appeal from the self to the realm of things as they are. Indeed, although the exponents of this philosophy use the language of spiritualism, and accept the idealistic epistemology, their absolute being tends ever to escape the special characters of the self. And inasmuch as the absolute self is commonly set over against the finite or empirical self, as the standard and test of truth, it is the less distinguishable from the realist's order of independent beings.

[Sidenote: The Conception of Self-consciousness Central in the Ethics of Absolute Idealism. Kant.]

§ 191. But however much absolute idealism may tend to abandon its idealism for the sake of its absolutism within the field of metaphysics, such is not the case within the field of ethics and religion. The conception of the self here receives a new emphasis. The same self-consciousness which admits to the highest truth is the evidence of man's practical dignity. In virtue of his immediate apprehension of the principles of selfhood, and his direct participation in the life of spirit, man may be said to possess the innermost secret of the universe. In order to achieve goodness he must therefore recognize and express himself. The Kantian philosophy is here again the starting-point. It was Kant who first gave adequate expression to the Christian idea of the moral self-consciousness.

"Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name that dost embrace nothing charming or insinuating, but requirest submission, and yet seekest not to move the will by threatening aught that would arouse natural aversion or terror, but merely holdest forth a law which of itself finds entrance into the mind, . . . a law before which all inclinations are dumb, even though they secretly counterwork it; what origin is there worthy of thee, and where is to be found the root of thy noble descent which proudly rejects all kindred with the inclinations . . . ? It can be nothing less than a power which elevates man above himself, . . . a power which connects him with an order of things that only the understanding can conceive, with a world which at the same time commands the whole sensible world, and with it the empirically determinable existence of man in time, as well as the sum total of all ends."[387:12]

With Kant there can be no morality except conduct be attended by the consciousness of this duty imposed by the higher nature upon the lower. It is this very recognition of a deeper self, of a personality that belongs to the sources and not to the consequences of nature, that constitutes man as a moral being, and only such action as is inspired with a reverence for it can be morally good. Kant does little more than to establish the uncompromising dignity of the moral will. In moral action man submits to a law that issues from himself in virtue of his rational nature. Here he yields nothing, as he owes nothing, to that appetency which binds him to the natural world. As a rational being he himself affirms the very principles which determine the organization of nature. This is his freedom, at once the ground and the implication of his duty. Man is free from nature to serve the higher law of his personality.

[Sidenote: Kantian Ethics Supplemented through the Conceptions of Universal and Objective Spirit.]

§ 192. There are two respects in which Kant's ethics has been regarded as inadequate by those who draw from it their fundamental principles. It is said that Kant is too rigoristic, that he makes too stern a business of morality, in speaking so much of law and so little of love and spontaneity. There are good reasons for this. Kant seeks to isolate the moral consciousness, and dwell upon it in its purity, in order that he may demonstrate its incommensurability with the values of inclination and sensibility. Furthermore, Kant may speak of the principle of the absolute, and recognize the deeper eternal order as a law, but he may not, if he is to be consistent with his own critical principles, affirm the metaphysical being of such an order. With his idealistic followers it is possible to define the spiritual setting of the moral life, but with Kant it is only possible to define the antagonism of principles. Hence the greater optimism of the post-Kantians. They know that the higher law is the reality, and that he who obeys it thus unites himself with the absolute self. That which for Kant is only a resolute obedience to more valid principles, to rationally superior rules for action, is for idealism man's appropriation of his spiritual birthright. Since the law is the deeper nature, man may respect and obey it as valid, and at the same time act upon it gladly in the sure knowledge that it will enhance his eternal welfare. Indeed, the knowledge that the very universe is founded upon this law will make him less suspicious of nature and less exclusive in his adherence to any single law. He will be more confident of the essential goodness of all manifestations of a universe which he knows to be fundamentally spiritual.

But it has been urged, secondly, that the Kantian ethics is too formal, too little pertinent to the issues of life. Kant's moral law imposes only obedience to the law, or conduct conceived as suitable to a universal moral community. But what is the nature of such conduct in particular? It may be answered that to maintain the moral self-consciousness, to act dutifully and dutifully only, to be self-reliant and unswerving in the doing of what one ought to do, is to obtain a very specific character. But does this not leave the individual's conduct to his own interpretation of his duty? It was just this element of individualism which Hegel sought to eliminate through the application of his larger philosophical conception. If that which expresses itself within the individual consciousness as the moral law be indeed the law of that self in which the universe is grounded, it will appear as objective spirit in the evolution of society. For Hegel, then, the most valid standard of goodness is to be found in that customary morality which bespeaks the moral leadings of the general humanity, and in those institutions, such as the family and the state, which are the moral acts of the absolute idea itself. Finally, in the realm of absolute spirit, in art, in revealed religion, and in philosophy, the individual may approach to the self-consciousness which is the perfect truth and goodness in and for itself.

[Sidenote: The Peculiar Pantheism and Mysticism of Absolute Idealism.]

§ 193. Where the law of life is the implication in the finite self-consciousness of the eternal and divine self-consciousness, there can be no division between morality and religion, as there can be none between thought and will. Whatever man seeks is in the end God. As the perfect fulfilment of the thinking self, God is the truth; as the perfect fulfilment of the willing self, God is the good. The finite self-consciousness finds facts that are not understood, and so seeks to resolve itself into the perfect self wherein all that is given has meaning. On the other hand, the finite self-consciousness finds ideals that are not realized, and so seeks to resolve itself into that perfect self wherein all that is significant is given. All interests thus converge toward

"some state of conscious spirit in which the opposition of cognition and volition is overcome--in which we neither judge our ideas by the world, nor the world by our ideas, but are aware that inner and outer are in such close and necessary harmony that even the thought of possible discord has become impossible. In its unity not only cognition and volition, but feeling also, must be blended and united. In some way or another it must have overcome the rift in discursive knowledge, and the immediate must for it be no longer the alien. It must be as direct as art, as certain and universal as philosophy."[391:13]

The religious consciousness proper to absolute idealism is both pantheistic and mystical, but with distinction. Platonism is pantheistic in that nature is resolved into God. All that is not perfect is esteemed only for its promise of perfection. And Platonism is mystical in that the purification and universalization of the affections brings one in the end to a perfection that exceeds all modes of thought and speech. With Spinoza, on the other hand, God may be said to be resolved into nature. Nature is made divine, but is none the less nature, for its divinity consists in its absolute necessity. Spinoza's pantheism passes over into mysticism because the absolute necessity exceeds in both unity and richness the laws known to the human understanding. In absolute idealism, finally, both God and nature are resolved into the self. For that which is divine in experience is self-consciousness, and this is at the same time the ground of nature. Thus in the highest knowledge the self is expanded and enriched without being left behind. The mystical experience proper to this philosophy is the consciousness of identity, together with the sense of universal immanence. The individual self may be directly sensible of the absolute self, for these are one spiritual life. Thus Emerson says:

"It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power upon which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or 'with the flower of the mind'; not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life."[393:14]

[Sidenote: The Religion of Exuberant Spirituality.]

§ 194. But the distinguishing flavor and quality of this religion arises from its spiritual hospitality. It is not, like Platonism, a contemplation of the best; nor, like pluralistic idealisms, a moral knight-errantry. It is neither a religion of exclusion, nor a religion of reconstruction, but a profound willingness that things should be as they really are. For this reason its devotees have recognized in Spinoza their true forerunner. But idealism is not Spinozism, though it may contain this as one of its strains. For it is not the worship of necessity, Emerson's "beautiful necessity, which makes man brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger that is appointed, nor incur one that is not"; but the worship of that which is necessary.

Not only must one understand that every effort, however despairing, is an element of sense in the universal significance;

"that the whole would not be what it is were not precisely this finite purpose left in its own uniqueness to speak precisely its own word--a word which no other purpose can speak in the language of the divine will";[394:15]

but one must have a zest for such participation, and a heart for the divine will which it profits. Indeed, so much is this religion a love of life, that it may, as in the case of the Romanticists, be a love of caprice. Battle and death, pain and joy, error and truth--all that belongs to the story of this mortal world, are to be felt as the thrill of health, and relished as the essences of God. Religion is an exuberant spirituality, a fearless sensibility, a knowledge of both good and evil, and a will to serve the good, while exulting that the evil will not yield without a battle.

FOOTNOTES:

[349:1] By Absolute Idealism is meant that system of philosophy which defines the universe as the absolute spirit, which is the human moral, cognitive, or appreciative consciousness universalized; or as the absolute, transcendental mind, whose state of complete knowledge is implied in all finite thinking.

[352:2] Plato: Timæus, 29. Translation by Jowett.

[359:3] Plato: Symposium, 202. Translation by Jowett.

The possibility of conflict between this method of nature study and the empirical method of science is significantly attested by the circumstance that in the year 1801 Hegel published a paper in which he maintained, on the ground of certain numerical harmonies, that there could be no planet between Mars and Jupiter, while at almost exactly the same time Piazzi discovered Ceres, the first of the asteroids.

[368:6] McTaggart: Studies in Hegelian Dialectic, p. 181.

[370:8] Plato: The Sophist, 248. Translation by Jowett.

[382:9] Hegel: Encyclopädie, § 45, lecture note. Quoted by McTaggart: Op. cit., p. 69.

This argument is well summarized in Green's statement that "the existence of one connected world, which is the presupposition of knowledge, implies the action of one self-conditioning and self-determining mind." Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 181.

[387:12] Kant: Critical Examination of Practical Reason. Translated by Abbott in Kant's Theory of Ethics, p. 180.

[394:15] Royce: The World and the Individual, First Series, p. 465.