Pragmatism and idealism

The form of Anglo-German Rationalism or Intellectualism which I shall venture to select for the purposes of consideration from the point of view of Pragmatism and Humanism is the first volume of the recent Gifford Lectures of Dr. Bernard Bosanquet, who has long been regarded by the philosophical public of Great Britain as one of the most characteristic members of a certain section of our Neo-Hegelian school. I shall first give the barest outline of the argument and contentions of “The Principle of Individuality and Value,” and then venture upon some paragraphs of what shall seem to me to be relevant criticism.

Dr. Bosanquet’s initial position is a conception of philosophy, and its task which is for him and his book final and all-determining. To him Philosophy is (as it is to some extent to Hegel) “logic” or “the spirit of totality.” It is “essentially of the concrete and the whole,” as Science is of the “abstract and the part.” Although the best thing in life is not necessarily “philosophy,” philosophy in this sense of “logic” is the clue to “reality and value and freedom,” the key to everything, in short, that we can, or that we should, or that we actually do desire and need. It [philosophy] is “a rendering in coherent thought of what lies at the heart of actual life and love.” His next step is to indicate “the sort of things,” or the sort of “experiences,” or the sort of “facts” that philosophy needs as its material, if it would accomplish its task as “universal logic.” This he does (1) negatively, by the rejection of any form of “immediateness,” or “simple apprehension,” such as the “solid fact,” the “sense of being,” or the “unshareable self” of which we sometimes seem to hear, or such as the “naïve ideas” of “compensating justice,”326 “ethics327 which treats the individual as isolated” and “teleology”328 as “guidance by finite minds,” as the data (or as part of the data) of philosophy; and (2) positively, by declaring that his subject-matter throughout will be “the principle of ‘individuality,’ of ‘self-completeness,’ as the clue to reality.” This “individuality” or “self-completeness” is then set forth in a quasi-Platonic manner as the “universal,” the real “universal” being (he insists) the “concrete universal,” the “whole,” that is to say, “the logical system of connected members,” that is to him the “ideal of all thought.” We must think of this “individuality,” therefore, either as “a living world, complete and acting out of itself, a positive, self-moulding cosmos,” or “as a definite striving of the universe”[!]329

The next question (so far as our partial purposes are concerned) that Dr. Bosanquet asks is, “What help do we get from the notion of a ‘mind’ which ‘purposes’ or ‘desires’ things in appreciating the work of factors in the universe, or of the universe as [ex-hypothesi] self-directing and self-experiencing whole?” The answer is spread over several chapters, and is practically this, that although there is undoubtedly a “teleology” in the universe (in the shape of the “conjunctions and results of the co-operation of men,” or of “the harmony of geological and biological evolution”), and although “minds such as ours play a part in the work of direction, we cannot judge of this work in question in any human manner.” The real test of teleology or value is “wholeness,” “completeness,” “individuality” [the topic of the book], and it is made quite clear that it is the “Absolute” who is “real” and “individual” and not we. We are, indeed, in our lives “carried to the Absolute without a break,”330 and our nature “is only in process of being communicated to us.”331 “We should not think of ourselves after the pattern of separate things or personalities in the legal sense, nor even as selves in the sense of isolation and exclusion of others.” “Individuality” being this “logical self-completeness,” there can be only one “Individual,” and this one Individual is the one criterion of “value,” or “reality,” or “existence,” “importance” and “reality [!]” being sides of the one “characteristic” [i.e. “thinkableness” as a whole]. Dr. Bosanquet confesses in his seventh chapter that this idea of his of “individuality,” or “reality,” is essentially the Greek idea that it is only the “whole nature” of things that gives them their reality or value.

We are then assured, towards the close of this remarkable book, that “freedom” (the one thing that we mortals value as the greatest of all “goods”) is “the inherent effort of mind considered as a [!] world, and that the ”Absolute“ [the ”universal” of logic, Plato’s “Idea”] is the “high-water mark of our effort,” and that each “self” is “more like a rising and a falling tide than an isolated pillar with a fixed circumference.” The great fact of the book, the fact upon which its accomplished author rests when he talks in his Preface of his belief, “that in the main the work [of philosophy] has been done,” is the daily “transmutation of experience according to the level of the mind’s energy and self-completeness,” the continued and the continuous “self-interpretation [of ‘experience’] through the fundamental principle of individuality.”

Now it is quite obvious that according to many of the considerations that have been put forward as true in the foregoing chapters, this philosophy of Dr. Bosanquet’s which treats the “concept,” or the “universal” as an end in itself (as the one answer to all possible demands for a “teleology”) and as an “individual,” “a perfected and self-perfecting [!] individual,” can be regarded as but another instance of the abstract Rationalism against which Pragmatism and Humanism have entered their protests. It is untrue, therefore, to the real facts of knowledge and the real facts of human nature. It will be sufficient to state that the considerations of which we are thinking are (in the main) the positions that have been taken in respect of such things as: (1) the claim that a true metaphysic must serve not merely as an intellectual “system” but as a “dynamic,” and as a “motive” for action and achievement; (2) the fact of the “instrumental” character of thought and of ideas, and of all systems (of science or of philosophy or of politics) that fail to include as part of their data the various ideals of mankind; (3) the idea that all truth and all thought imply a belief in the existence of objects and persons independent of the mere mental states or activities of the thinking individual, and that belief rather than knowledge is, and always has been, man’s fundamental and working estimate of reality; (4) the fact that our human actions and re-actions upon reality are a part of what we mean by “reality,” and that these actions and re-actions of ours are real and not imaginary; (5) the attitude in general of Pragmatism to Rationalism; (6) the various concessions that have been made by representative rationalists to the pragmatist movement.

Dr. Bosanquet’s theory of reality has already impressed some of his most competent critics as utterly inadequate as a motive or an incentive to the efforts and endeavours of men as we know them in history and in actual life, and we shall immediately return to this topic. And although there are many signs in his Lectures that he is himself quite aware of the probability of such an impression, his book proceeds upon the even tenor of its way, following wherever his argument may lead him, irrespective entirely of the truth contained in the facts and the positions we have just recounted and reaffirmed. It lends itself, therefore, only too naturally to our present use of it as a highly instructive presentation of many, or most, of the tendencies of Rationalism and Intellectualism, against which Pragmatism and Humanism would fain protest. At the same time there is in it, as we hope to show, a fundamental element332 of truth and of fact without which there could be no Pragmatism and no Humanism, and indeed no philosophy at all.

A broad, pervading inconsistency333 in “Individuality and Value” which militates somewhat seriously against the idea of its being regarded as a tenable philosophy, is the obvious one between the position (1) that true reality is necessarily individual, and the position (2) that reality is to be found in the “universal” (or the “concept”) of logic.334 It would, however, perhaps be unfair to expect Dr. Bosanquet to effect a harmony between these two positions that Aristotle (who held them both) was himself very largely unable to do. There is, in other words, a standing and a lasting contradiction between any and all philosophy which holds that it is reason [or logic] alone that attains to truth and reality, and the apparently natural and inevitable tendency of the human mind [it is represented in Dr. Bosanquet’s own procedure] to seek after “reality” in the “individual” thing, or person, or being, and in the perfecting of “individuality” in God (or in a kingdom of perfected individuals).

The positive errors, however, which we would venture to refer to as even more fatal to Dr. Bosanquet’s book than any of its incidental inconsistencies are those connected with the following pieces of procedure on his part: (1) his manifest tendency to treat the “universal” as if it were an entity on its own account with a sort of development and “value” and “culmination” of its own;335 (2) his tendency to talk and think as if a “characteristic” or a “predicate” (i.e. the “characteristic” or “quality” that some experiencing being or some thinker attributes to reality) could be treated as anything at all apart from the action and the reaction of this “experient” (or “thinker”) conceived as an agent; (3) the tendency to talk of “minds”336 rather than persons, as “purposing” and “desiring” things; (4) his tendency to talk as if “teleology” were “wholeness”; (5) his tendency to regard (somewhat in the manner of Spinoza) “selves” and “persons” as like “rising and falling tides,” and of the self as a “world of content”337 engaged in certain “transformations”; and (6) his tendency to think and speak as if demonstration [“mediation” is perhaps his favourite way of thinking of the logical process] were an end in itself, as if we lived to think, instead of thinking to live.

In opposition to all this it may be affirmed firstly that every “conception” of the human mind is but the more or less clear consciousness of a disposition to activity, and is representative, not so much of the “features” of objects which might appear to be their “characteristics” from a purely theoretical point of view, as of the different ways in which objects have seemed to men to subserve the needs of their souls and bodies. The study of the development of the “concept” in connexion with the facts of memory and with the slow evolution of language, and with the “socialized percepts” of daily life will all tend to confirm this position. The phenomena of religion, for example, and all the main concepts of all the religions are to be studied not merely as intellectual phenomena, as solutions of some of the many difficulties of modern Agnosticism, or of modern Rationalism, or of modern Criticism, but as an expressive of the modes of behaviour of human beings (with all their needs and all their ideals) towards the universe in which they find themselves, and towards the various beings, seen and unseen, which this universe symbolises to them. These phenomena and these conceptions are unintelligible, in short, apart from the various activities and cults and social practices and social experiences and what not, with which they have dealt from first to last.

Then it is literally impossible to separate in the manner of Dr. Bosanquet the “predicate” of thought from the active relations sustained by things towards each other, or towards the human beings who seek to interpret these active relations for any or for all “purposes,” Dr. Bosanquet’s idea, however, of the relation of “mind” to “matter,” to use these symbols for the nonce (for they are but such), is in the main purely “representational”338 or intellectualistic.339 To him “mind” seems to reflect either a “bodily content” or some other kind of “content”340 that seems to exist for a “spectator” of the world, or for the “Absolute,” rather than for the man himself as an agent, who of course uses his memories of himself, or his “ideal” of himself, for renewed effort and activity. One of the most important consequences of this unduly intellectualistic view of mind is that Dr. Bosanquet seems (both theoretically and practically) unable to see the place of “mind,” as “purpose,” in ordinary life,341 or of the place of mind in evolution,342 giving us in his difficult but important chapter on the “relation of mind and body” a version of things that approaches only too perilously close to Parallelism or Dualism, or even to Materialism.343 And along with this quasi-“representational” or “copy-like” theory of mind there are to be associated his representational and intellectualistic views of the “self”344 and the “universal”345 and “spirit.”346

There are, doubtless, hints in Dr. Bosanquet’s pages of a more “dynamic” view of mind or of a deeper view347 than this merely “representational” view, but they are not developed or worked into the main portion of his argument, which they would doubtless very largely transform. This is greatly to be regretted, for we remember that even Hegel seemed to notice the splitting-up of the real for our human purposes which takes place in the ordinary judgment. And of course, as we have noticed, all “purpose” is practical and theoretical at one and the same time.

Then, thirdly, it is persons, and not “minds,” who desire and purpose things, “mind” being a concept invented by the spectator of activity in a person other than himself, which (from the analogy of his own conscious activity and experience) he believes to be purposive.348 Dr. Bosanquet’s use, too, of the expression “mind” invariably leaves out of the range of consideration the phenomena of desire and volition—intelligible, both of them, only by reference to an end that is to be understood from within, and not from outside of the personality, from the point of view of the mere spectator. The phenomena of desire and volition are just as integral ingredients of our lives as persons as are our cognitive states.

Fourthly, it is doubtful whether the treatment of teleology as “wholeness” (or its sublimation in “Individuality and Value” into “wholeness”) is much of an explanation of this difficult topic, or indeed whether it is any explanation at all. Dr. Bosanquet, in fact, confesses that teleology is a conception which “loses its distinctive meaning as we deepen its philosophical interpretation, and that it has very little meaning when applied to the universe as a whole” [a thing that is apparent to any Kantian student]. “It is impossible seriously,” he says, “to treat a mind which is the universe[!] as a workman of limited resources, aiming at some things and obliged to accept others as means to these.” And it is equally impossible, he holds, to apply “to the universe” the distinction of “what is purpose for its own sake and what is not so.” In fact, Dr. Bosanquet’s treatment of teleology is thus mainly negative, as including not only this rejection349 of the notion in reference to the “universe as a whole,” but its rejection, too, in reference to the purposes of our human life;350 although he admits (as of course he must) that the conception of end or purpose is drawn from some of the features (“the simplest features,” he says) of our “finite life,” or “finite consciousness.” If the notion were “to be retained at all,” he says, “it could only be a name for some principle which would help to tell us what has value quite independent of being or not being, the purpose of some mind.”351 Now, of course, according to the Pragmatism and Humanism that we have been considering in this book, no intelligent person could take any conceivable interest in such a useless fancy as a teleology of this kind. Thus teleology is really blotted out altogether of existence in this volume, and with its disappearance there must go also the notion of any value that might be intelligibly associated with the idea of the attainment of purposes or ends by the human beings with whom we are acquainted in our ordinary daily life.

We shall below352 refer to the fact that this rejection of teleology and value is one that must be regarded as fatal to ethics or to Absolutism in the realm of ethics. It requires, too, to be added here that even the most unprejudiced reading of Dr. Bosanquet’s work must create in the mind of the reader the conviction that its author is altogether unfair to the views of those who believe in the existence of definite manifestations of purpose in human life.353 He talks as if those who uphold this idea or this fact are committed either to the absurd notion that man is “the end of the universe,” or to the equally absurd notion that “art, thought, society, history, in which mind begins to transcend its finiteness should be ascribed to the directive abilities of units in a plurality, precisely apart from the world content and the underlying solidarity of spirits, the medium through which all great things are done.”

With a view of bringing our discussion of these striking Gifford Lectures within the scope of the general subject of this book the following might be regarded as their leading, fundamental characteristics to which the most serious kind of exception might well be taken: (1) its “abstractionism”354 and its general injustice to fact due to its initial and persistent “conviction”355 [strange to say, this is the very word used by Bosanquet] that the real movement in things is a “logical” movement; (2) its fallacious conception of the task of philosophy as mainly the obligation to think the world “without contradiction”; (3) its obvious tendency in the direction of the “subjective idealism”356 that has been the bane of so much modern philosophy and that is discarded altogether357 by Pragmatism and Humanism; (4) its retention of many of the characteristic polemical358 faults of Neo-Hegelianism and its manifestation of a similar spirit of polemical unfairness359 on the part of their accomplished author; (5) its implication in several really hopeless contradictions in addition to the broad contradiction already referred to; (6) its failure [a common Neo-Hegelian failing] to do justice to the spirit and (in certain important regards) the letter of Kant; (7) its essential non-moralism or its apparently anti-ethical character.

As for the first of these charges, the “abstractionism” of “Individuality and Value,” coming as it does on the top of the general perversity of the book, is really a very disastrous thing for philosophy. While we may pardon an enthusiastic literary Frenchman360 for saying that, “The fact is, you see, that a fine book is the end for which the world was made,” there is hardly any excuse for a philosopher like Dr. Bosanquet coming before the world with the appearance of believing that the richly differentiated universe that we know only in part, exists for the benefit of the science that he represents, for the dialectic of the metaphysician, to enable the “universal” to “become more differentiated” and “more individualized,” to become “more representative” of the “whole.”361 We might compare, says Dr. Bosanquet, in a striking and an enthralling362 passage, “the Absolute to Dante’s mind as uttered in the Divine Comedy ... as including in a single, whole poetic experience a world of space and persons, ... things that, to any ordinary mind, fall apart.” Now even apart from the highly interesting question of the manifestly great and far-reaching influence of Dante over Dr. Bosanquet, and apart, too, from the notable modesty of Dr. Bosanquet’s confession as to the “imperfect” character of the simile just reproduced, no one to-day can think of attaching any ultimate importance to “Dante’s mind” without thinking of the extent to which this truly great man363 was under the influence, not only of his own passions and of the general “problem” of his own life, but of such specialized influences as, for example (1) the mediaeval dualism between the City of God and the Empire of the World, (2) Aristotle’s unfortunate separation of the “intellectual” and the “practical” virtues, (3) the evil as well as the good of the dogmatic theology of the fathers of the Church. Goethe is of infinitely more value to us men of the twentieth century than Dante. And one of the very things Goethe is most calculated to teach us is precisely this very matter of the limitations of the cultural ideal of the Middle Ages and of the entire Renaissance period that succeeded it.364 We should never, therefore, think for a moment of taking Dr. Bosanquet’s intellectual abstractionism about the “universal” literally without thinking at the same time of its limitations, and of its sources in Plato and in Hegel and in Neo-Hegelian rationalism, and of remembering with Hegel himself, “after all, the movement of the notion is a sort of illusion.”

Then, secondly, to attempt to think in philosophy or any other science merely in accordance with the Principle of “Non-Contradiction” will never365 take us beyond the few initial positions of fact or of principle (God, “substance,” pure being, matter, identity, final cause, freedom, force, the will, the idea a perfect being, or what not) with which we happen for one reason or another to start in our reflections. Nor will this procedure account, of course, for these initial assumptions or facts.

Thirdly, in virtue of its implication in the “solipsism” and the “representationalism” of Subjective Idealism, Dr. Bosanquet’s “Absolute” is inferior (both so far as fact and theory are concerned) to the Pluralism and the possible Theism of Pragmatism and Humanism to which we have already made partial references.366

Fourthly, it is only natural that, on account of these, its many polemical mannerisms, “Individuality and Value” has already made upon some of its critics the impression of being a book that refuses to see things as they are—in the interests of their forced adaptation to the purposes of a preconceived philosophical theory.

Fifthly, there is certainly a sufficient number of contradictions in “Individuality and Value” to prevent it from being regarded as a consistent and a workable (i.e. really explanatory) account of our experience as we actually know it. Of these contradictions we think the following may well be enumerated here: (1) That between Dr. Bosanquet’s professed principle of accepting as real only that which is “mediated” or established by proof, and the arbitrariness he displays in announcing convictions like the following: “That what really matters is not the preservation of separate minds as such, but the qualities and achievement which, as trustees of the universe, they elicit from the resources assigned them.” (2) The contradiction between his belief in the conservation of “values” without the conservation of the existence of the individuals who “elicit” these “values,” or who are, as he puts it, the “trustees” for the “universe.” (3) That between what he logically wants (his “concrete individual”) and what he gives us (an impersonal “system”). (4) The contradiction between the completed personal life in God (or in a perfected society of individuals) that most of us (judging from the great religions of the world) want as human beings, and the impersonal “conceptual” experience of his book. (5) The contradiction that exists between his intellectualism and his commendable belief in “great convictions” and “really satisfying emotions and experiences.” (6) The standing contradiction between his “solipsistic” view of reality (his reduction of the universe to the conceptual experience of a single self-perfecting individual), and the facts of history in support of the idea of the “new,” or the “creative” character of the contributions of countless individuals and groups of individuals, to the evolution of the life of the world, or the life of the infinite number of worlds that make up what we think of as the universe. (7) The remarkable contradiction between Dr. Bosanquet’s calm rejection in his argumentation of all “naïve ideas” and his own naïve or Greek-like faith in reason, in the substantial existence of the concept or the idea over and above the phenomena and the phenomenal experiences which it is used to intepret.

Lastly, as for the matter of the non-moralism or the essentially anti-ethical character of “Individuality and Value,” this is a characteristic of the book that should, as such, be partly apparent from what has already been said, in respect of its main argument and its main contentions, and in respect of the apparent contributions of Pragmatism and Humanism to philosophy generally. The abstractionism of the book, and the absence in it of any real provision for the realities of purpose and of accomplishment (and even of “movement” and “process” in any real sense of these words), are all obviously against the interests of ethics and of conduct, as purposive, human action. So, too, are the findings of the critics that Dr. Bosanquet’s “Absolute” is not a reality (for, with Professor Taylor and others, man must367 have an Absolute, or a God, in whom he can believe as real) that inspires to action and to motive on the part of ordinary human beings. And it is also fatal to the ethical interests of his book that he does not see with the pragmatists that our human actions and reactions must be regarded as part of what we mean by “reality.” And so on.

Apart, however, from these and other hostile pre-suppositions the following would seem to be the chief reasons for pronouncing, as unsatisfactory, the merely incidental treatment that is accorded in “Individuality and Value” to ethics and to the ethical life.

(1) It is not “conduct” or the normative368 voluntary actions of human beings (in a world or society of real human beings) requiring “justice” and “guidance” and “help” that is discussed in these Lectures, but abstractions like “desire,” or “ordinary desire,” or “the selective conations of finite minds,” or “the active form of a totality of striving” or [worst of all] the “self as it happens to be,” that are discussed there.

(2) Even if conduct, as of course an “organic totality” in its way, be faced for the nonce in “Individuality and Value,” it is invariably branded and thought of by Dr. Bosanquet as “naïve morality,”369 and it is forthwith promptly transformed and transmuted, in the most open and unabashed manner in the interests and exigencies of (1) logical theory, (2) aesthetics and aesthetic products [perhaps Dr. Bosanquet’s deepest or most emotional interest], and (3) metaphysical theory of a highly abstract character.

(3) The conception of ethics as a “normative science” and of conduct as free and autonomous,370 and as the voluntary affirmation of a norm or standard or type or ideal, is conspicuous by its absence.

(4) There is really no place either in Dr. Bosanquet’s “concrete universal” or in his fugitive pages upon ethics for the reality of the distinction between good and evil (as “willed” in actions or as present in dispositions and tendencies). Good and evil371 are for him, “contents” either for himself as a spectator of man’s actions, or for the “concrete universal,” or the “whole,” or the completed “individual” of his too consummate book.

(5) Like nearly all forms of Absolutism (Hegelianism, Neo-Hegelianism, Spinozism, Hobbism) Dr. Bosanquet’s ethics (or the vestigial ethics with which he leaves us) comes perilously near to what is known as Determinism372 or Fatalism or even Materialism.

As for the first of the preceding five points, it is perfectly evident that any discussion of the various psychological phenomena that are doubtless involved in conduct can be regarded as but a preliminary step to the discussion of the real problems of ethics—that of the actions and habits and standards of persons who are the subjects of rights and duties and who affirm certain actions to be right, and certain other actions to be wrong. The point, however, about Dr. Bosanquet’s psychological abstractionism, especially when it rises to the height of writing as if the “self” as the “active form of a totality of striving,” or the “self as it happens to be,” were the same thing as the “personal self” with which we alone are mainly concerned in ethics, is that it is but another instance of the old “spectator”373 fallacy that we have already found to underlie his whole treatment of the “self” and of “purpose” and of “striving.” Such a philosophy, or point of view, is quite foreign to ethics, because it is only in the ethical life that we think of ourselves as “persons,” as beings playing a part, as actors or players upon the great stage of life. By not facing the ethical life directly, from within, instead of from without, Dr. Bosanquet has entirely failed to understand it. And if he had attempted this internal consideration of “personality,” his whole metaphysic of “individuality” and of the great society of beings who inhabit (or who may be thought of as inhabiting) this universe, would have been very different from what it is.

Then as for the second and third points, it is surely evident from the footnotes that have been appended in connexion with the matter of his transformation of the facts of ethics in the interests of other things like logic, and aesthetics, and metaphysics, that there is indeed, in Bosanquet, no recognition of what must be called the genuine, or independent reality of the moral life, or of the moral ideal as a force in human nature. And as for the fourth point, students of modern ethics are naturally by this time perfectly familiar with the tendency of Rationalism to make evil action and the “evil self” simply the affirmation of a “logically incoherent” point of view. It exists in an English writer like Wollaston374 as well as in a German philosopher like Hegel. This tendency is indeed a piece of sophistry and illusion because the distinction between good and evil, and the distinction between right and wrong (perhaps the better and the more crucial formulation of the two—for us moderns at least) is unintelligible apart from the fact or the idea of the existence of moral agents, who make (in their volition, and in the judgments that accompany or precede their volitions) a “norm,” or rule, or line between the ethically permissible and the ethically unpermissible. The rationalism that makes these distinctions merely a matter of “logic,” overlooks the fact that in actual life men must be warded off from wrong-doing (and they are in many cases actually so warded off by their consciences and by other things, like the love of home, or the love of honour, or the love of God) by something stronger than the mere idea of a possible theoretical mistake.

As for the fifth point of the Determinism or the Necessitarianism that hangs like a sword of Damocles over the entire ethic of Dr. Bosanquet, the nature of this should be perfectly apparent from many of the statements and considerations that have been brought forward as typical of his entire line of thought. He teaches a “passivism”375 and an “intellectualism” that are just as pronounced and just as essential to his thought as they are to the great system of his master, Hegel, in whose ambitious philosophy of spirit man’s whole destiny is unfolded without the possibility of his playing himself any appreciable part in the impersonal, dialectic movement in which it is made to consist.

It is now necessary to speak definitely and outspokenly of the element of supreme truth and value in Dr. Bosanquet’s unique book, of the positive contribution it makes to philosophy and to natural theology.376 This is, in a word, its tribute to the permanent element of truth and reality in the idealistic philosophy. And he testifies to this in his “belief” that in the main the work of philosophy has been done, and “that what is now needed is to recall and concentrate the modern mind from its distraction rather than to invent wholly new theoretic conceptions.” This declaration is of itself a position of considerable importance, however widely one is obliged to differ from its author as to what exactly it is that has already been demonstrated and accomplished “in philosophy.” If there has really been “nothing done” in philosophy since the time of Socrates, if philosophy is to-day no true antithesis of, and corrective to science, then there is possible neither Pragmatism, nor Humanism, nor any other, possibly more fundamental, philosophy. There can, as Dr. Bosanquet puts it, “indeed be no progress if no definite ground is ever to be recognized as gained.” This then is the first thing of transcendent importance in “Individuality and Value,” its insistance upon the fundamentally different estimate of reality given by philosophy in distinction from science and its merely hypothetical treatment of reality. This “difference” is, of course, but natural, seeing that to philosophy there are no things or phenomena without minds, or persons or beings to whom they appear as things and phenomena.

The second great thing of “Individuality and Value” is its insistence upon the need to all philosophy of a recognized grasp of the principle of “Meaning.”377 What this instance implies to Dr. Bosanquet is, that “at no point in our lives [either] as [agents or] thinkers are we to accept any supposed element of fact or circumstance as having any significance” apart from the great “whole” or the great “reality,” with which we believe ourselves to be in contact in our daily experience, when interpreted in the light of our consciousness of ourselves as persons. In the letter of the book his interpretation of the great “whole,” or the great reality, of life is by no means as broad and as deep as the one at which we have just hinted in attempting to describe his position. But overriding altogether the mere intellectualism of Dr. Bosanquet’s interpretation, is the fact of the dynamic idealism for which he virtually stands,378 in virtue of the great and the simple effort of his lectures379 to find “value” in “our daily experience with its huge obstinate plurality of independent facts.” He would start, as we mentioned (at the beginning of this chapter), with what he believes to be “the daily transformation of our experience as verified within what we uncritically take as our private consciousness, so far as its weakness may permit,” and “as verified on a larger scale when we think of such splendid creations as the State and fine art and religion,” and when we think, too, of “the mode of our participation in them.” Now again nothing could indeed be more nobly true (in idea) of the great work of the philosopher than the proper theory and description of this “daily transformation” of our lives, out of the life of “sense” and the life of selfishness, into the spiritual communion380 that is the essence of all right thinking and all right living.

But we may go further than all this and signalize one or two things in Dr. Bosanquet that we venture to construe as a kind of unconscious testimony, on his part, to the very humanism for which we have been contending throughout.

The things to which we refer are, firstly, his use of the word “belief”381 in speaking of his opinion that the work of philosophy has in the main been accomplished, and, second, his fine and really praiseworthy382 confession that his lectures, whatever they may have done or may not have done, at least “contain the record of a very strong conviction.” Dr. Bosanquet’s departure, in the letter of his argumentation, from the spirit of these declarations only accentuates what we regard as the regrettable failure and abstractionism of his whole official (or professed) philosophy.

His use of the word belief383 shows that it is, after all his professional homage to “mediation” and to the necessary abstractions of logic and system, belief and not knowledge that is to him the final and “working” estimate of truth and of reality. And the same conclusion follows from the second matter of the confession of which we have spoken, that his entire argumentation is but the expression of a strong conviction.384 It is again, therefore, we would insist a spiritual conviction, and not a conceptual system that is actually and necessarily the moving force of his entire intellectual activity. And, we would add to his own face, it is a conviction moreover that “works,” and not a “logical whole” or a mere conceptual ideal, that he must (as a philosopher) engender in the mind of his average reader about reality. His “logical whole” and his “individuality as logical completeness,” “work” with him [Professor Bosanquet] for the reason that he is primarily an intellectual worker, a worker in the realm of mind. But reality (as the whole world of human work and human effort is there to tell us) is more than an intellectual system. And what is a conviction to him is not necessarily a conviction that works with the ordinary man, who knows reality better than he does, or who knows it (like himself) in his desires and in his beliefs rather than in the terms and conceptions that are the mere tools of the intellect and the specialist. For, taking his book as a whole, we may say about it that the dissolution of reality into a conceptual system that is effected there is at best but another convincing proof of the truth of the words of the great David Hume,385 that the understanding, “when it acts alone, and according to its most general principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the slightest degree of evidence in any proposition, either in philosophy or common life.”

NOTE

It is necessary for me to append a few words as to the possible connexion between the foregoing criticism of the first volume of Dr. Bosanquet’s Gifford Lectures and the subject-matter of the second volume, which appeared while I was preparing the manuscript of this book for the press. I have been able only to inspect its contents and to inform myself about the ways in which it has impressed some of its representative critics. What I have thus learned does not, in my opinion, make it necessary for me to unsay or to rewrite what I have said in this chapter. My desire was to indicate the kind of criticism that the pragmatists and the humanists, as far as I understand them, would be inclined to make of Absolutism as represented in the Principle of Individuality and Value as the last significant Anglo-Hegelian output. This, I think, I have done, and the reader may be desirably left to himself to settle the question of the relation of the first of Dr. Bosanquet’s books to its companion volume that appeared in the following calendar year. I cannot, however, be so wilfully blind to the existence of this second great “Gifford” book of his as to appear to ignore the fact, that on its very face and surface it seems to do many of the things that I have allowed myself to signalize as things that Absolutism and Anglo-Hegelianism have not done, or have done but imperfectly. Its very title, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, and the titles of many of its chapters, and the reception accorded to it in such instructive reviews as those of Professor Sir Henry Jones and Professor Muirhead (in the July numbers of the Hibbert Journal and Mind respectively), are to my mind convincing proof that it is by far the most serious Anglo-Hegelian attempt of the passing generation to deal with many of the objections that have been brought against Rationalistic Idealism by the pragmatists and the voluntarists, by the defenders of faith and feeling and experience, and (before all these recent people) by many independent idealist writers of our time in England and elsewhere. In the interest of truth and of the thinking public generally, I append the mere titles of some of the chapters and divisions of Dr. Bosanquet’s second volume: “The Value of Personal Feeling, and the Grounds of the Distinctness of Persons,” “The Moulding of Souls,” “The Miracle of Will,” the “Hazards and Hardships of Finite Selfhood,” the “Stability and Security of Finite Selfhood,” “The Religious Consciousness,” “The Destiny of the Finite Self,” “The Gates of the Future.” There is in all the rich content that is thus indicated, and in all the high and deep discussion of “the ideas of a lifetime” that it includes, a veritable mine of philosophical reflection for the reader who desires to think in a connected, or Hegelian, manner about things—a mine, too, that is at least indicative of the wide territory both of fact and of principle upon which pragmatist philosophy must enter before it can become a true philosophy. I cannot find, however—this was surely not to be expected in a thinker of Dr. Bosanquet’s power—that the principles of argumentation that determined the nature and contents of the earlier volume have undergone any modification in its success or successor; indeed, what is here offered, and discovered by the reader and the critics, is but a continuation and application of the same dialectic principles to “finite beings, that is, in effect to human souls.” If any one will take upon himself the task of estimating the success or the non-success of the enterprise he will travel through a piece of philosophical writing that is as comprehensive and as coherent, and as elevating in its tone, as anything that has appeared from the Neo-Hegelian camp. The things that I chiefly feel and believe about it are, firstly, that its account of the facts of life and thought are, again, all determined by certain presuppositions about conceivability and about the principles of contradiction and negation; secondly, that it is still the same “whole” of logic that is to it the test of all reality and individuality; and, thirdly, that it is, again, a great pity that Dr. Bosanquet should not have acted upon some sort of recognition of the relation of his own dialectical principles to those of his master Hegel, or to those of some of his Neo-Hegelian predecessors in England and America. Although it is almost an impertinence on the part of one who has just made the acquaintance of this outstanding volume to speak in any detail of its contents, I can indicate part of my meaning by pointing out that it is throughout such things as “finite mind,” the “finite mind” that is “best understood by approaching it from the side of the continuum” [the “whole”], the “finite mind” that is “shaped by the universe,” that is “torn between existence and self-transcendence,” “appearance,” an “externality which is the object of mind,” the “positive principle of totality or individuality manifesting itself in a number of forms,” “good” and “evil as attitudes concerning a creature’s whole being,” “volition” in terms of the “principle that there is for every situation a larger and more effective point of view than the given”—that are discussed, and not the real persons who have what they call “minds” and “volitions” and “attitudes,” and who invent all these principles and distinctions to describe the world of their experience and the world of their thoughts. As against him Pragmatism and Humanism would, I think, both insist that the first reality for all thought and speculation is not the “logical whole” that underlies, in the mind of the thinker, the greater number of all his categories and distinctions, but the life and the lives of the persons in a world of inter-subjective intercourse, wherein these points of view are used for different purposes. And I cannot see how Dr. Bosanquet is entitled to scorn all those who hold to the idea of the reality of the lives of the persons who are agents and thinkers in this personal realm, which is for us the highest reality of the universe, as believers in the “exclusiveness of personality,” although I would certainly agree with him that our experience, when properly interpreted, carries us beyond the subjectivism and the individualism of some forms of Pragmatism or Pluralism. The reader who is anxious to know about the real value of the Hegelianism upon which Dr. Bosanquet’s philosophy reposes should consult the work of Croce upon the “living” and the “dead” elements in Hegel’s System. It has recently been translated into English. Dr. Bosanquet, like many Hegelians, seems to me to overlook almost entirely the important elements in the philosophy of Kant—of some of which I speak of in the next chapter as developed in the spiritualistic philosophy of Bergson.