Of these "monads" there exist, according to this view, infinitely many degrees. In fact all existence differs only in degree from our own. Even between mind and matter there is only a quantitative and not a qualitative gulf. For there are sleeping, dreaming, and more or less waking monads; and matter is a form of unconscious mind; the monads which compose material objects being "minds without memory," "momentary minds."

Let Leibniz speak for himself:—

"Each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, but is also actually subdivided without end.... Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls. Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants, or like a pond full of fishes.... Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe...."[11]

Leibniz may indeed be said to have been the first to outline a theory of "panpsychism" (as it is termed), according to which there is nothing that is not, in its degree, alive. As we shall have occasion to observe, Leibniz was here (as elsewhere) a forerunner of much recent philosophy.

The significance of the Spinozist and Leibnizian systems of thought, though regarding existence from such diverse standpoints, was, for practical purposes the same. Both alike led out, though by different paths, beyond the mechanical theory of the universe. They, indeed, represent two types of thought which attempt to reach the same end by different methods. Their counterparts will meet us again as this history proceeds.

Pascal.—But before passing out from the seventeenth century, one thinker ought to detain us; for from more than one point of view he was a notable personality, and of first-rate importance in the history of religious, as distinct from purely philosophical thought. He was indeed one of those figures who are distinguished among distinguished men of all times.

Blaise Pascal was born in 1623, and was a boy of precocious mathematical ability. By the age of twelve he is said to have worked out independently most of the first and second books of Euclid; at sixteen he wrote a treatise on Conics which attracted the attention of Descartes; at nineteen he completed a calculating machine—a device that had never been dreamt of before. At this point it is not surprising to learn that his health broke down.

Pascal is not a systematic philosopher; but his acute intellect was united to an inner restlessness of soul. Neither science nor philosophy could bring him peace, for his needs were far deeper than any merely rational systematisation of ideas could satisfy. Some have said of him that he was fundamentally a sceptic, but one for whom religious faith was essential; certainly in him were united an acute critical faculty and an intense religious experience. Perhaps the two are not so incompatible after all.

The "Pensées."—Pascal is chiefly famous for two works, the Lettres Provinciales and the Pensées. The former is controversial literature, but yet a classic of the French language: in sum, it is an attack on the Jesuits; but it need not here detain us, for with theology, as such, we are not concerned, and still less with ecclesiastical systems. The Pensées is a collection of fragments, the material for an Apology for Christianity which was never written. The autograph MS. preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris "is made up of scraps of paper of all shapes and sizes, written often on both sides ... and dealing with all sorts of subjects." One is reminded of the mythical scraps of manuscript from which the genius of Carlyle distilled the philosophy of the sagacious Teufelsdröch.

But it is in these detached fragments that Pascal has expressed his spiritual and intellectual struggles; they contain his philosophy of life. And, however unsystematic in arrangement, they do reveal a fairly definite temper and attitude of mind.

Pascal's Philosophy.—In the first place, the Thoughts voice a reaction against the "Cartesian intellectualism" which was then the prevalent tendency in scientific and philosophical circles. "The last attainment of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things beyond it" might perhaps have been published by Pascal's predecessors. "To laugh at philosophy is to be a true philosopher" would have seemed like blasphemy or nonsense to most of his contemporaries, but it was neither of these.

Behind sayings of this description lay the strong conviction that mere logic was incapable of probing the depths of existence. "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing," is sound psychology, and not scepticism or obscurantism. Of course it all depends what one means by "reason." Too many of Pascal's contemporaries applied the word to a more or less shallow rationalism utterly opposed to a spiritual view of things, whereas reason properly understood is "the logic of the whole personality."[12]

That Pascal was no mere narrow anti-rational obscurantist is evident, not only from his own extraordinary insight, but from his continual reiteration of his idea that the essential dignity of man lies in his thought:

"All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms, are not worth the smallest mind, for a mind knows them, and itself, and bodies know nothing."

Here lies the true greatness of man. In respect of material bulk he is nothing, but his thought cannot be measured. "Man is only a reed, the feeblest reed in nature, but he is a thinking reed." The saying has become famous, and the words that follow are hardly less so; they remove the overpowering and crushing incubus of man's illimitable material environment, which, since Copernicus, had weighed upon thinkers like a nightmare:

"Were the universe to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which slays him, because he knows that he dies, and the advantage that the universe has over him: of this the universe knows nothing. Thus all man's dignity lies in his thought."[13]

Pascal's Pessimism.—It has been said that an unbridgeable gulf lies between those who believe and those who disbelieve in mankind. It is to the latter category that Pascal belongs. His faith in the dignity of man is paradoxically associated with a realisation of his weakness and imbecility:

"What a chimera, then, is man! What an oddity, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, senseless earth-worm; depository of truth, cloaca of uncertainty and error; the glory and the refuse of the universe."

"We desire truth, and find in ourselves only uncertainty; we seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We are unable not to wish for truth and happiness, and incapable either of certainty or felicity."

In fact, we may say that Pascal was the first, in an age of exaggerated reverence for logic (the damnosa hereditas of the Scholastic theologians) to understand that the best arguments for religion are the facts of human experience, and the conditions of human life.

"In vain, O men, do ye seek within yourselves the cure for your troubles! All your knowledge can only teach you that it is not within yourselves that ye find the true or good!" Here we have the language of religious experience. The result of Augustine's meditation upon life was the same: Inquietum cor nostrum dum requiescat in te. It is a tongue that the "psychic man" can never understand; it seems to him affectation; such language is foreign to the easy optimism of an age of confidence. Indeed Pascal, though so intensely modern, is a stranger, and his words often enigmas to our time.

Vanitas vanitatum is thus the verdict that he passes upon human experience. "The last act is tragic, however fine the comedy of all the rest."

Significance of Pascal.—It is not as a systematic thinker that Pascal is of importance to the historian of thought. He typifies that more or less inarticulate and unreasoned revolt which the arrogance and optimism of a new science or a new philosophy arouse against themselves. He voices the eternal protest that it is not by bread alone that men live. As is generally the case with such protests, the pessimism of Pascal was no doubt exaggerated; but exaggeration is necessary if minds are to be impressed; and those who feel strongly see only one side of a question.

Results.—Thus in the three figures that have passed before us, we see a threefold protest against that exclusion of the spiritual from the human view of life. Spinoza, the pantheist, sees God everywhere;[14] Leibniz finds in every recess of nature the principle of personality; Pascal finds the only cure for human frailty and misery in religion.

CHAPTER V

Anti-Religious Propaganda.—That this comparatively pacific state of affairs came to an end was the fault, primarily, at least, neither of the theologians nor of the scientists. A different atmosphere gradually began to envelop and to embitter the controversy. Orthodox religion, especially in Catholic countries, came to be associated with political reaction, and the most envenomed onslaughts began to be made upon what seemed to be the chief stronghold of a discredited regime. Especially was this the case in France, where corrupt political conditions were aggravated by the intense social misery which they had created.

Thus France became the cradle of the phenomenon known as anti-clericalism, which is the product not so much of disbelief in a creed as of hatred of a system; it was the correlative of a Church in which religion was extinct, for genuine Catholicism had been rooted out of France early in the eighteenth century, just as Protestantism had been drowned in blood a century before.[15]

Science Popularised.—In two respects France, during the second half of the eighteenth century, was far in advance of other countries. No other literature of that age can be compared with the French for the skill and charm with which scientific views were expressed. There was no lack of first-rate propagandists. And not only in the popularisation, but in the systematic teaching of science, France for a long period led the way.[16] Whereas the history of English or German literature of the eighteenth century could be written almost without reference to science, it is with scientific problems that the names of some of the most brilliant French littérateurs are associated. And whereas in England, scientific men worked (in spite of the existence of the Royal Society) more or less in isolation, in France the savants have always been a brotherhood.[17]

Voltaire.—One of the most notorious names associated with the type of propaganda referred to is that of Voltaire (1694-1778). Voltaire's polemic cannot be described as anti-religious, for he himself was a theist. It was, rather, political in character. The object of his attack was the Catholic Church as existing in France in his day, which he regarded as the chief surviving obstacle to human progress. Écrasez l'infâme was his motto; and if this seems a trifle fanatical, let us not forget, as an acute critic has observed, "that what Catholicism was accomplishing in France in the first half of the eighteenth century was not anything less momentous than the slow strangling of French civilisation."[18]

Voltaire was an industrious and prolific writer (his works are numbered by scores), but he was also a master of French prose, and he was universally read. From the point of view of the history of European thought his importance lies in his popularisation in France of the Newtonian physics.[19] Newtonisme was a word coined by him, and became associated with a mechanical view of nature. He also conducted a vigorous polemic against certain religious notions, then current, but now out-of-date, and which need not here detain us. Voltaire was an anti-clerical, but he was not hostile to religion; he was chiefly regarded as an exponent of English (i.e. progressive) ideas.

La Mettrie.—An advance in the materialistic direction was taken, however, by La Mettrie (1709-1751), who approached the problem from the side of physiology (he was a physician by profession). His two important contributions were Histoire naturelle de l'âme (1745), and L'Homme Machine (1748). The titles are sufficient to indicate the scope of these works. That of the latter points back to Descartes, who had applied the mechanical theory to animals only, and not to man. La Mettrie extended his application to include man. The implications of this theory did not escape La Mettrie's contemporaries.

Diderot and His Encyclopædia.—A definite period in the history of thought is certainly marked by the successful attempt on the part of a group of progressive thinkers, to extend the circle open to scientific ideas by the publication of an Encyclopædia which should contain all the latest knowledge and speculation. The credit for this notable performance was due to Diderot, who in spite of immense difficulties, which were aggravated by the ecclesiastical authorities and the supporters of reaction in general, carried the work through to a triumphant conclusion. The first volume appeared in 1751. The work was composed with an eye to current prejudices; the language was guarded, but the anti-clerical tendency of the whole was by no means obscure. Diderot, however, did not obtrude in the Encyclopædia the definitely anti-religious opinions which he had developed and which are revealed in his correspondence.

Holbach.—A disciple of the Encyclopædist—Holbach, a young German settled in Paris—was bolder than his master, and published, under the name of a savant who had recently died, a book which became widely notorious, and has been called the Bible of materialism—the Système de la Nature (1770). Like Voltaire's Élémens, and La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine, it was published in Holland. "The book is materialism reduced to a system. It contains no really new thoughts. Its significance lies in the energy and indignation with which every spiritualistic and dualistic view was run to earth on account of its injuriousness both in practice and in theory,"[20] is the estimate of a distinguished and impartial writer.

Rumour gave the credit of its authorship to Diderot, who was so disturbed by the compliment as hastily to leave Paris for the frontier. His admiration of it is, however, recorded. After proclaiming his disgust at the contemporary fashion of "mixing up incredulity and superstition," he observes that no such fault is to be found in the System of Nature. "The author is not an atheist in one page, and a deist in another. His philosophy is all of a piece."

Certainly to those with an appetite for negative dogmatism the work left nothing to be desired. The following passage indicates the attitude and method of the author, who, in the matter of style, did not fall short of the French tradition:

"If we go back to the beginning, we shall always find that ignorance and fear have created gods; fancy, enthusiasm or deceit has adorned or disfigured them; weakness worships them; credulity preserves them in life; custom regards them, and tyranny supports them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own ends."

The philosophy of religion which inspired these sentences may appear to us sufficiently crude. And indeed an impartial reader will have to confess that much of this eighteenth century polemic against religion, however well-intentioned, is singularly wide of the mark. It is all characterised by an imperfect knowledge of the psychological foundations of religion, and quite devoid of what is now termed the "historic sense." The faults of Voltaire and Holbach, however, were those of their age, which was often short-sighted in its recognition of facts, and superficial in its reasoning from them. Even Dr. Johnson, who found this section of contemporary French literature so distasteful, never laid his finger upon its real weakness; the fundamental fallacies upon which it rested escaped him. He, like Voltaire and the rest, was a child of the age.

Propaganda not Science.—It is very doubtful whether the genuine scientists, who devoted themselves not to propaganda but to research, could have been ready to sanction the uses to which their own discoveries were put. From the exhaustive references of Lange in his History of Materialism (Engl. Trans., Vol. II, pp. 49-123), it is evident that "the extreme views of La Mettrie, Diderot, and Holbach cannot be fathered on any of the great scientists or philosophers, but were an attempt to supply scientific principles to the solution of philosophical, ethical, or religious questions, frequently for practical and political purposes."[21]

There are certainly risks attached to the popularisation of the results of scientific research. Theories have to be presented with an appearance of finality which does not legitimately belong to them, and sometimes in a somewhat startling aspect, otherwise the reader is left cold, for it is excitement rather than genuine information that attracts the majority. As a judicious writer has observed:

"No ideas lend themselves to such easy, but likewise to such shallow generalisations as those of science. Once let out of the hand which uses them in the strict and cautious manner by which alone they lead to valuable results, they are apt to work mischief. Because the tool is so sharp, the object to which it is applied seems to be so easily handled. The correct use of scientific ideas is only learnt by patient training, and should be governed by the not easily acquired habit of self-restraint."[22]

Scientific Progress.—Alongside of this rigorous propaganda, which prepared the way for the upheaval of 1789, genuine scientific progress was being made, especially in the regions of Astronomy, Botany and Chemistry. The ideas of Newton were taken up and elaborated by means of more efficient mathematical processes—especially the theory of infinitesimals—by the distinguished astronomer, Laplace, in his Système du Monde (1796), and in the successive volumes of his Méchanique Céleste (1799-1825), which has been called a new Principia.

Important advances in chemistry are associated with the name of Lavoisier (1743-1794), who introduced into that science a principle which has become axiomatic, and which to-day remains the foundation of all work in the laboratory. To Lavoisier belongs the merit of introducing what is known as the "quantitative method" into chemistry, and thus establishing that science upon the exact—that is to say mathematical—basis, where it now rests and putting exact research in the place of vague reasoning. His principle was that in all chemical combinations and reactions, the total weight of the various ingredients remains unchanged; there is (in spite of appearances) neither loss nor gain of actual matter. "The quantity of matter is the same at the end as at the beginning of every operation." It was Lavoisier who finally established the correct theory of combustion; that it consisted in the combination of a special element called oxygen, with other bodies or elements.

The Atomic Theory.—Lavoisier had opened a door to researches which naturally led the way to the establishment of the atomic theory of matter on an experimental, and not merely a theoretical basis. That theory is indeed nothing more than the elaboration of Lavoisier's own principle. John Dalton (1766-1844), a Manchester quaker, published in 1810 his New System of Chemical Philosophy, where highly important conclusions are drawn both from Lavoisier's facts and from experimental results of other chemists. Of these, Dalton gave an account and an explanation which has ever since been the soul of all chemical reasoning. This explanation is known as his Atomic theory.

The two facts of which Dalton's theory is an explanation are as follows. First (Lavoisier's fact), that the total weight of substances remains always the same, be they combined in ever so many different ways. Second, that all substances, be they in large or in small quantities, combine with each other, or separate from each other, in definite and fixed proportions. The theory of Dalton was that these combinations take place between independent particles of matter, which are indestructible and indivisible. These "atoms" of the various elements have definite weights which are responsible for the proportion in which they are found to combine. These facts of proportion in combination, or "chemical affinity," could not be accounted for by the theory which regards matter as "continuous," but only by the opposite theory that it is "discrete" (i.e. divided up into particles).

Philosophical Corollaries.—These strictly scientific theories associated with the name of Laplace, Lavoisier, and Dalton tended to strengthen in the popular estimation, the philosophical conclusions of writers like Holbach. The scientists themselves remained "agnostic" with regard to questions that lay outside their scope: they maintained here the correct attitude for scientific research. The question put by Napoleon to Laplace, why he had not introduced the name of God into the Méchanique Céleste, was out of place, and deserved the crushing reply it received. Scientific research is not concerned with questions of philosophy.

Still, it did not escape popular attention that the old pillar of a mechanistic view of the universe now seemed to be reinforced by another. The theory of the conservation of energy was now supplemented by that of the indestructibility of matter (Lavoisier). And to crown all, the old atomic theory, which Lucretius had made the foundation of his dogmatic materialism, was now re-established on an experimental basis.

So far as physical science was concerned, the situation seemed menacing to a religious view of life. Men felt that they inhabited a world of indestructible matter, moved by a certain measure of force, unchangeable and fixed. The prison of determinism and matter was closing around them.

CHAPTER VI

As the strength of Samson lay in his unshorn hair, so the strength of the mechanical theory lay, and still lies, in the acceptance of Locke's theory of human knowledge, i.e. that it is all derived from the senses. And the Delilah who can shear away Locke's conclusions, leaves Samson helpless; mechanical materialism becomes a discredited theory. Hence the truth of the saying that the problem of knowledge is the preliminary question for philosophy.

Weakness of Speculative Philosophy.—Spinoza and Leibniz may be said to have dispensed with this foundation. Taking the scientific knowledge of their time for granted, they drew certain conclusions therefrom; but their results, however imposing, were felt to be the result rather of speculation than of reason. Such was the more or less unexpressed estimate of their work. It was undervalued, for both Spinoza and Leibniz were thinkers of the first calibre; and yet there was some justice in the charge. By the end of the eighteenth century the days of merely speculative philosophy were past.

The Critical Philosophy.—The time was ripe for a new metaphysic—for a fresh step forward in philosophic method. That step was taken by the celebrated Immanuel Kant, who is the originator of what is known, in the history of thought, as the Critical Philosophy.

The word critical signifies a particular method of approaching the problem of existence, a method which must be contrasted with that of the speculative philosophy, of which Spinoza and Leibniz are examples.

The critical philosophy, before attempting (as Spinoza had done) to tackle the problem of existence, first attacked the problem of knowledge. Before asking What is the truth? it put the preliminary question, What are the means at man's disposal for reaching the truth? It prefaced all philosophical enquiry by an examination into the nature and scope of human thought. Such was the preparatory investigation which was to place metaphysics upon a secure and scientific foundation. For the new philosophy, the gateway to all sound knowledge is the reflection of the human mind upon itself. "Know thyself," is its advice to the inquiring spirit of man. Here, if anywhere, is to be found the philosopher's stone.

Immanuel Kant.—The celebrated Immanuel Kant was born at Königsberg in 1724, and died in his native town in 1804. Between those dates he lived the industrious and uneventful life of a university professor. The Seven Years' War and the French Revolution left him undisturbed, though not unmoved. He was a man of quiet, regular habits, and his fellow-townsmen would set their clocks by his daily promenade.[23] But the adventurous originality of his thought serves as a contrast to this peaceful picture.

Kant, indeed, laid the foundations of philosophy afresh. With characteristic insight, he went to the very root problem of all, and challenged human thought itself. Before we can know anything, we must first of all demand the credentials of the instrument by which knowledge is gained. Before asking, What do I know? the preliminary question should be, How do I know? Otherwise we cannot say whether we are in a position to give any answer to those ultimate problems, the answers to which constitute philosophy.

It is far from easy to present Kant's criticism of knowledge at once simply and accurately. This philosopher has a not undeserved reputation for obscurity, and had he written in any other language than German, he would perhaps have found no readers.

The Problem of Knowledge.—It had already been realised by the predecessors of Kant that what is called "sense-experience" is a less simple process than it seems, and that our senses cannot be said to reveal to us any object as it actually is. John Locke himself was not the first to point out that the so-called "secondary qualities" of any material object (i.e. colour, taste, etc.) are produced just as much by the person who perceives, as by the object which is perceived. Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes, besides others, had been aware of this fact, which indeed becomes evident to the most superficial analysis of sense-experience.

The "primary qualities," i.e. density, extension, etc., continued to be regarded as subsisting in the objects themselves, and independently of any perceiving consciousness. But even this view did not prove permanent, and it was the episcopal philosopher, George Berkeley (1685-1753) who demonstrated in his New Theory of Vision that not even these qualities could rightly be regarded as subsisting independently.

Thus it had already been realised, long before Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason (published, 1781), that our senses are far from revealing to us things as they are; it is only the appearances of things and not the things themselves that the senses present to us. Indeed, as is well known, the Scotch philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), who was a master in the art of raising problems, extended this line of criticism until it reached to pure scepticism. He put the question, If all our knowledge is derived from sense-experience, and if sense-experience only supplies us with appearance and not reality, what degree of trustworthiness can there be in human knowledge? And he was not afraid to give the logical answer—None. Hume may thus be said to have brought things to an impasse. As a matter of fact, what he had done was to refute Locke's theory of knowledge (i.e. that it is derived entirely from sense-experience) by means of a reductio ad absurdum.

The Kantian Criticism.—Kant says that it was Hume who "awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers." By this he meant that Hume made him realise that it was no use indulging in philosophic speculation generally, or listening to the speculations of others, until "the Problem of Knowledge" was satisfactorily solved. To this problem Kant applied himself. And recognising Locke to be the fons et origo malorum, he subjected his theory of human knowledge to a close analysis, and exposed it as being fallacious.

Far from sense-experience being responsible for all our knowledge, Kant proved that important elements of knowledge are quite independent of sense-experience; especially was this so in the case of certain mathematical propositions. (Hence the question, How is pure mathematics possible? was put by Kant at the beginning of his philosophy.)

But it is neither necessary nor desirable to enter into the arguments by means of which Kant proved his thesis, which was that the human mind contains in itself certain principles of knowledge (e.g. the idea of cause and effect, the ideas of mathematics, and so on) which it does not owe to sense-experience.

Kant's Copernican Hypothesis.—Kant called these principles of knowledge, forms of thought or categories. The name, perhaps, is irrelevant to our purpose; all that we need to understand is that Kant turned the tables upon Locke. Locke said that the mind was a tabula rasa which passively received impressions from outside. Kant said that the mind is nothing of the kind; it is not passive, but active; it does not "receive" whatever is offered, it "selects" what it wants; and it imposes its own "forms of thought" upon the outside world.

Photography had not been invented at the time of this controversy, but Kant might have said: The mind is not a photographic plate receiving impressions from without, it rather resembles the lens which impressions must pass through, and be transformed by, before they can create a picture.

Kant had, in fact, by this theory, instituted a revolution. His new dogma was: The mind is the mould into which all our knowledge must be cast; and the constitution of our mind predetermines the shape that our knowledge takes.

Thus Kant had discovered that not only sensuous perception, but rational understanding also, has its forms and presuppositions. Just as we become aware of objects only by means of senses which perhaps hide or distort as much as they reveal; so also our rational knowledge is conditioned by the nature of our understanding, which dictates to reality the "forms" under which it can be understood and known.

Mechanism Undermined.—How did this affect the mechanical theory? The connection is obvious. Mechanism is nothing but one of the forms of thought that the mind imposes on phenomena. Just as Copernicus had discovered that it is due to our position on the earth that the heavenly bodies appear to move round us, so Kant had discovered that it is due to the nature of our senses and understanding that we perceive things in space and time, and understand them as being mechanically determined. The space and time, and the mechanical determinism are not in the things, but in our minds. The fact is that we can only grasp things under these forms. Space, time, mechanical causation are forms and laws, not of nature, but of the human intellect, which is so constituted as to see things in this way.

Thus those axioms of science and of mathematics which lie at the base of all exact knowledge, and which had hitherto been regarded as objective, i.e. as inherent in the nature of things, were shewn by Kant to be, as a matter of fact, subjective, that is (in Kant's own phrase) "they express the conditions under which alone we are able to apprehend or understand the object." Thus all knowledge is conditioned by our nature, by the framework, so to speak, not only of our senses but of our minds.

In this way the mechanical view was outflanked; that view certainly seems to us inevitable and certain, but this is due to the constitution of our minds; the world seems to us to be determined, just as it seems blue to a person wearing blue spectacles. But there is no sufficient reason for supposing that it is either determined or blue. The law of mechanical causation is an axiom, but it is a subjective axiom.

Appearance and Reality.—This may not seem much of an advance on Hume's position. Human knowledge still seems precarious, if we assume the mind to be a kind of dictator which imposes its own laws upon nature. And Kant indeed frankly admitted that neither our senses nor our reason were able to reveal to us things as they are, but only things as they seem; we grasp appearance, not reality, and (to use Kant's phraseology) phenomena not noumena. Thus Kant cut away the ground from under all rationalistic dogmatism; he shewed its presumptuous futility.

The Pathway to Reality.—Kant, however, did not remain satisfied with the negative results of his critical philosophy, valuable as these were. Reality, it is true, lies out of range of the human reason, but it is not entirely inaccessible to us, and scepticism about the ultimate nature of things is not the necessary corollary of Kant's, as it was of Hume's, philosophy.

Kant drew a distinction between the "Theoretical Reason," which his Critique of Pure Reason had dealt with, and the "Practical Reason," which he discusses in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788).

The "Practical Reason."—By the "practical reason" Kant meant the moral consciousness, and the law of the "practical reason" is the moral law, the fulfilment of which constitutes duty. This law springs neither from outside authority nor from experience; it is autonomous. And it is upon the existence of this autonomous moral consciousness that Kant plants his foothold in his endeavour to find a refuge from the philosophic agnosticism to which his analysis of the "theoretical reason" had led; and upon this rock he founded his belief in "God, Freedom, and Immortality."

By means of his "practical reason," man gets into touch with that real world, which his "theoretical reason" is unable to reach. In fact, the "practical reason" itself (or moral consciousness) is an element in man's nature which belongs to the real, as opposed to the phenomenal world. For man himself is a citizen of both worlds, and has (so to speak) a dual nature, a foot on either shore. He is an inhabitant both of the world of mechanical phenomena, and of the "timeless world of freedom," which lies altogether outside of all mechanical conceptions.

Kant and Religion.—"Religion we must seek in ourselves, not outside ourselves," is a saying of Kant's that gives the clue to his general attitude.

It is only in that world which cannot be interpreted mechanically (i.e. the inner world of freedom of which we never cease to be conscious) that we may seek, or can hope to find the source of religion. It is not the spectacle of the mechanically determined world of nature, but the demands of the moral consciousness that create religion.

For instance, it is the gulf that yawns between the ideal commands of the moral law, and the actual possibilities (so poor and meagre) of fulfilling and satisfying them, that creates, in the view of Kant, the need of God and immortality. These alone can guarantee the realisation of the ideal claims of the moral consciousness.

Religious Faith.—Thus the "practical reason" leads on to convictions concerning what lies beyond the limits defined by the "theoretical reason." The nature of the demands of the moral consciousness give us an insight into the nature of the super-phenomenal (transcendental, noumenal) world. That world must be of such a kind as to sanction and guarantee our moral ideals; it must be friendly and not hostile or indifferent to those ideals which man cherishes, but which his "phenomenal" experience seems to contradict. Thus we see the truth of the saying that "The universe as a moral system is the last word of the Kantian philosophy."[24]

Kant's Influence.—Kant was one of those thinkers who are responsible for turning the stream of thought into fresh channels. Through his researches into the nature of human knowledge, he discovered the conditions upon which it rests, and defined the limits beyond which it cannot pass. Thus, once for all, he put an end to dogmatism.

And to Kant also belongs the credit of having established the reality and validity of inner experience. The rock upon which his philosophy is built is no external fact or event—nothing in time or space—but the moral consciousness itself. And thus he restores, as the central interest of philosophy, the human individual, with all his experiences of need, of hope, and of insight. Personality is the principle of his philosophy. In this he is the true successor of the Reformation.

CHAPTER VII

Rousseau.—Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a man of unique genius whose figure occupies a prominent position not only in the annals of philosophy, but in social, political, and literary history. Even more than Voltaire was he responsible for sowing seeds of thought which bore fruit in the events of the Revolution. And indeed, it is as the author of the notorious Contrat Social that he is most widely known.

Rousseau's "Sensibility."—Rousseau was one of those philosophers whose character is the formative element which gives shape to their doctrines. His was a profoundly emotional temperament. He left behind him an invaluable document which lays bare all the psychological sources of his philosophy. The Confessions reveal to us a man highly sensitive and morbidly introspective, the slave of unreasoning impulses and passions. In the eyes of some short-sighted persons, these first-hand revelations will obscure or cast doubt upon the capacity and genius of the man, for they do little to prejudice opinion in his favour.

He Defies the Zeitgeist.—Rousseau's profound originality lies in his having dared to dispute a dogma to which the prestige of an axiom then attached. He endeavoured to undermine the popular faith in scientific and philosophic culture. He went right back to Pascal, who, a century before, had raised the question as to the value of scientific knowledge for personal life, by proclaiming "The whole of philosophy is not worth an hour's study."

Rousseau's first philosophical work was occasioned by the offer of a prize on the part of a provincial academy for a thesis on the problem "Whether the restoration of the sciences and arts has contributed to purify manners?" "The question pierced Rousseau's soul like a flash of lightning." He felt (he tells us) that he saw a new world, and felt a new man; he saw no longer the world of culture, of science, of philosophy (which he felt to be as artificial as it was ineffective and vain), but the real world of personality, of living feeling, of the inner life. It flashed upon him that it was the primitive and elementary feelings, the great and simple relations of life, which gave to existence its value. The rest was superficial and irrelevant.

Rousseau and Religion.—The intellectualist is ever the aristocrat.[25] Voltaire and the philosophers of the "enlightenment" spoke of the unenlightened multitude as la canaille. Its beliefs were superstitions. Rousseau knew that the things which men have in common are more vital than those in which they differ, and the primitive instincts of the race which we all share, are the most important part of our nature.

Among these primitive instincts, indomitable and irrepressible, is the instinct of religion. Thus Rousseau transferred the religious problem from the sphere of external observation and explanation of the world (to which the rationalists had promoted or degraded it), back to inner personal feeling. This marked an epoch in the philosophy of religion.

Moreover, Rousseau was able to write in a convincing fashion of religion, because (and here he differed from the intellectuals of his day) he had personal experience of what it meant. Hence wherever he alludes to religion his language has the ring of sincerity; it is always spontaneous, and sometimes it is passionate and poetic. His religious experience took the form of nature-mysticism, undogmatic (because non-intellectualist), but rich and deep:

"I can find no more worthy adoration of God than the silent admiration which the contemplation of His works begets in us, and which cannot be expressed by any prescribed acts.... In my room I pray seldomer and more coldly; but the sight of a beautiful landscape moves me, I cannot tell why. I once read of a certain bishop, who, when visiting in his diocese, encountered an old woman whose only prayers consisted in a sigh 'Oh!' The bishop said to her, 'Good mother, always pray like that; your prayer is worth more than ours.' My prayer is of that kind."[26]

Here we have one form of the religious spirit; for the mystic it is always true that "there is neither speech nor language." The mystic and the dogmatist stand at opposite poles, for dogmatism is always an attempt at definition even when that which is to be defined is indefinable; and here is to be found the common denominator between Kant and Rousseau. The former, by his analysis of reason, discredited dogmatism: the latter, by his apotheosis of feeling, contributed towards the same result.

Romanticism in Germany.—This strong movement of feeling, created on the one hand by Kant's Critique, and by the mysticism of Rousseau, took different forms in the two countries to which these two philosophers belonged. In France the new philosophy became the hot-bed of revolutionary ideas; whereas in Germany it found vent in a ferment of speculative systems, and in an outcrop of artistic production. It produced the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and the prose and poetry of Goethe and Schiller.

"It was the age of 'beautiful souls' and of 'noble hearts'; men believed themselves capable of the highest things; the immediate needs of the heart were set over against reason ... under many successive forms Romanticism prevailed in literature, effecting the re-birth of human fancy after the long labour of intellect."[27]

The Goal of Philosophy.—Philosophic young Germany had set itself an ambitious programme. Kant, indeed, had cleared the ground for them, but his warnings that an eagle cannot soar beyond the atmosphere which supports it, were disregarded.

The philosophy of Kant himself was felt by the successors to be lacking in the idea of totality—in the conception of a whole. His division of existence into Appearance and Reality seemed to indicate a certain lack of finish in his philosophy; and they set themselves to explore the root of reality which to Kant seemed undiscoverable, but in which the sensuous and super-sensuous worlds are united, and from which they have emerged. This task became and remained the grand problem of philosophy for a whole generation of thinkers. All externality, isolation, and division were to disappear, all existence must be shown to be but degrees and phases of the one infinite reality. Spinoza's work had to be done again in the light of increased psychological knowledge.

Fichte.—Of the thinkers who addressed themselves to this ambitious task, only two need be considered here; and these are chosen because they attacked the problem from different directions.

In the first place, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who had been the first to lay down the programme of thought with explicitness, realised and admitted that the task which philosophy had set itself was beyond the powers of any logical train of thought. The "higher unity" of existence, the demonstration of which was the goal of philosophy, could be reached only by a process of intellectual intuition,[28] it must be guessed or divined; for it presents itself (and this is a characteristically "Romanticist" idea) to the human mind in the immediacy of feeling, and not by discursive thought.

It was of the essence of Fichte's philosophy, as it had been of Spinoza's, that a point may be attained where the mind feels itself to be at one with the truly real, and only when this point is reached—i.e. sub specie aeternitatis, will it arrive at and retain the conviction of the universal order and unity of existence. From this standpoint, and from this alone, does it become possible to grasp "the meaning of those dualities and contrasts which we find around and in us, the differences of self and not-self, of mind and matter, of subject and object, of appearance and reality, of truth and semblance."

Hegel.—It has been said, perhaps with justice, that "philosophy is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct." The remark might seem, at least in the eyes of some, to be particularly applicable to the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Not because his arguments are bad, but because he attempted to establish by strict logic the conclusions which Fichte sought to reach by means of intuition, and which perhaps are only attainable by that method. Hegel attempted to climb, by a strict process of reasoning, to the position from which the Fichtean landscape might spread itself below as a logical whole: he claimed to be a reasoner as well as a seer. And thereby he may be said to have furnished "the programme of thought for a certain class of intellects which will never die out."

Thus Hegel was something of a hybrid, and may be described as a rationalistic-romanticist. Nor are his arguments the easiest to understand. "The only thing that is certain," writes a commentator who stands at an opposite philosophical pole, "is that whatever you may say of his procedure, some one will accuse you of misunderstanding it. I make no claim to understanding it; I treat it merely impressionistically."[29] And this is all we can do here.

Hegel's Method.—Hegel proceeds by means of what he calls the Dialectical Method. He understands by "dialectic" (1) a property of all our thoughts in virtue of which, each particular thought necessarily passes over into another; and also (2) a property of things, in virtue of which every particular thing necessarily belongs to, or is related to, all other things. A thing "by itself" is nothing.

Hence a similarity or parallelism between the method of thought and the nature of things. Logic is of the nature of things. The way in which thought reaches truth is also the way in which things exist. Hegel expressed this in his well-known saying "the real is the rational, and the rational is the real." Perhaps more poetically or obscurely the same proposition is expressed by declaring: "When we think existence, existence thinks in us," and "The pulse of existence itself beats in our thinking."

Hegel's logic may, in fact, be described as an attempt to conceive the movement of thought as being at the same time the law of the universe. Logic (to repeat what we said before) is of the nature of things: reality is rational, and what is rational is real.

Thus logic for Hegel did not mean (as it meant for Kant) the forms or laws of thought: it signified the very core of reality. For all that Kant knew, reality might or might not be rational: all he asserted was that the human mind rationalised reality (or parts of it). For Hegel, logic or reason was the living and moving spirit of the world. The essence of reality and the essence of thought were one. The absolute reality was spirit.[30]

Hegelianism.—Hegel's philosophy may be described as an attempt to reach the standpoint of religious mysticism by means of purely rational processes. It is the finding of rational grounds for supra-rational intuitions. The attempt is laudable, and, in the eyes of many, it was successful. And, as we shall see, Hegelianism had an important future, especially in England; nor, as a system of thought, is it yet extinct. Its central conception is that which, in one shape or another, will never cease to appeal to mankind—that existence is, at bottom, spiritual in character—that spirit is the only ultimate reality.

That Hegelianism provides a rational basis for a spiritual religion is obvious enough; nor is it necessary to indicate the possibilities of linking up the Christian doctrine of the Logos with a philosophy for which Reason was the very core and ground of existence. Hegel may indeed be said to have laid the foundation of Christian theology afresh; or rather to have restored what was best in the old theology, and given it the prestige of modernity.

Religion and Philosophy.—In fact, for Hegel as for all rationalists whose attitude is also religious, religion and philosophy were two forms of the same thing. Religion contains philosophic truths under the form of imagination: philosophy contains religious truth under the form of reason. The difference is one of form only, not of content. This had not been the view of Rousseau, nor is it the deepest view; and it was not the view of a thinker of the Romantic school who did more than any individual among his predecessors to bring the religious problem to the point where it now stands.

Schleiermacher.—While the sun of Romanticism was at its zenith, the spirit of Kant's critical philosophy was kept alive by a thinker of as deep spiritual and intellectual insight as Hegel himself.

Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher (1768-1834) brought the religious problem down from those altitudes to which Romanticist metaphysics had raised it, to what Kant had called "the fertile bathos of experience." He approached religion from the side of inner experience, the point of view of psychology. The profound insight of Kant had already shown that this was the direction on which future thought would travel, by tracing back the religious problem to a personal need more clearly and penetratingly than ever before—a need set up by the incongruity of the real and the ideal.

His View of Religious Ideas.—Just as Rousseau, owing to his own religious experience, was in a better position to attack the religious problem than the philosophers of the "enlightenment," so Schleiermacher had the advantage of some Romanticists. As a boy, he had been put to school with the Moravians, and throughout his own life he never ceased to declare that the years spent among them had been of vital importance to the development of his views. In 1801 he writes:

"My way of thinking has indeed no other foundation than my own peculiar character, my inborn mysticism, my education as it has been determined from within."

And his own experience of religion established in him the conviction that the innermost life of men must be lived in feeling, and that this alone can bring man into immediate relation to the highest. His acceptance of Kant's criticism of reason led him to understand that intellectual concepts, in the religious sphere, (i.e. dogmas) must always be of secondary importance: experience comes first. And his profound originality lies just here, and it is just here that Schleiermacher stands out as the forerunner of the modern view. He it was who first made it evident that religious ideas derive their validity from that inner experience which they are an attempt to describe. If a dogma is an expression of an experience felt by man in his innermost life, it is a valid dogma, even if philosophic criticism hesitates to sanction it.[31]

What Is Religion?—The distance of this position from that of the eighteenth century intellectualism which regarded religion either as a form of philosophy or of superstition, is obvious. Schleiermacher attacks two intellectualist prejudices in particular: (1) That according to which religion is conceived of primarily as a doctrine (either revealed, or grounded on reason), and (2) That which regards religion as merely a means towards morality.

Religion, according to Schleiermacher, has an existence independent of (though, no doubt, associated with) philosophy, superstition, or morality. Its essence consists neither in speculation nor in action, but in a certain type of feeling, of inner experience. Schleiermacher characterised this particular type of feeling as a feeling of dependence: the immediate consciousness that everything finite exists in and through the infinite, everything temporal in and through the eternal.

That Schleiermacher should have described the specifically religious feeling in this particular way is comparatively irrelevant so far as our present purpose is concerned. The point of importance is that he was the first to recognise the independence of religion, to see in it a legitimate and natural form of human activity, which exists, not for the sake of knowledge or of morality, but for its own sake, and on its own account.

Here, though Hegel took a different view, Schleiermacher is one in spirit with the Romantic school; indeed, he may be said to have drawn the logical conclusions of Romanticism. The independence and originality of religion is the necessary consequence of a philosophy which set itself against the unbalanced intellectualism of the "enlightenment."

The permanent significance of Romanticism lies here: That it discredited once for all the notion that there is only one road to reality—that of logic. It is not only philosophy, but religion and art that remove the veil which hides the supra-sensible world from us. And to close our eyes to the facts of religious experience, or to attempt to discredit them by the application of irrelevant terms such as "superstition," is not only to display ourselves as philistines, but also to forsake the highest traditions of science—veneration for experience, and the realms of fact.

CHAPTER VIII

"This discovery destroyed the difference which was then considered to exist between organic and inorganic bodies, viz. that the former could only be formed under the influence of vegetable or animal vital forces, whereas the latter could be artificially produced."[32]

Ten years later another German, Schleider (1804-1881) propounded the cellular theory of the structure and growth of plants, a theory which was soon extended to animal organisms by Schwann (1810-1882). The publication of this famous theory was described by a contemporary as "a burst of daylight"; it indeed illuminated what had hitherto been buried in mystery and mythology—the structure and method of growth of plants and animals. It seemed to render superfluous any form of the old conception of a "vital force" to explain the phenomena of growth, if it could now be assumed that the cells automatically absorbed outside material, increased in number by the division of individuals, and built up the organism by continual repetition of this process.

Schwann was also responsible for initiating a number of minute physiological investigations which led to a far more intimate knowledge of the action of nerves and muscles, and interpreted these in mechanical terms. "Investigations which were carried on with all the resources of modern physics regarding the phenomena of animal movements, gradually substituted for the miracles of the 'vital forces' a molecular mechanism, complicated, indeed, and likely to baffle our efforts for a long time to come, but intelligible, nevertheless, as a mechanism."[33]

Subsequent researches, notably of Helmholtz (1821-1895) and Meyer, lent strong support to this interpretation. The conception of the conservation of energy (an important axiom of the mechanical theory) was successfully applied by them to the economy of organisms. The organism was found not to create energy, but only to contain remarkably efficient means of deriving it from materials absorbed as food. Thus animal warmth and the power of motion are originally "sunlight transformed in the organism of the plant," and afterwards appropriated by the animal. The power with which we move our limbs is as much the product of combustion as is the power of a steam engine, the only difference being that the organism is, of the two, the more efficient converter of energy.

The Mechanical Theory Substantiated.—Thus, whether biologists were considering the structure or the behaviour of organisms, they were arriving at the same conclusions. The structure was revealed as physical and chemical structure, and the behaviour as the resultant of familiar physical and chemical processes. Hence biology came to be regarded as a compartment of physics and chemistry, for life itself was nothing but a complex physical or chemical phenomenon. Life could thus be satisfactorily expressed in terms of matter and energy. The speculations of Descartes seemed to be established by experimental science.

The Final Obstacle.—The situation, already satisfactory to those whose hope it was to see the mechanical theory impregnably established, was marred, however, by one untoward circumstance. The phenomena of organic structure, growth, and behaviour having been reduced to order, and expressed in terms of physics and chemistry, certain important facts still resisted explanation, and stood out as a last stronghold of the older view.

The Origin of Species.—The existence of definite forms of animal and vegetable life, whose infinite variety and complexity was continually being increased by research[34]—still remained a mystery. How did these innumerable species naturally and automatically come into being? was the question that must be satisfactorily answered before the mechanical view could be held to cover all the facts.

The direction in which to look for a reply had been indicated by a number of thinkers. The French naturalist Buffon, the philosopher Kant, and the poet Goethe—besides other thinkers—had already in the eighteenth century familiarised the idea that species are not immutable, but that, by some means or other, new forms of life are derived from pre-existing ones. The conception had gained a firm foothold in England, where it was hospitably entertained by Mr. Herbert Spencer, and where it formed the staple of a book which caused a good deal of controversy in its day, and which is not yet forgotten.[35]

Lamarck.—The evolutionary idea, however, though attractive to philosophers, and even to men of science, was insufficient as an explanation of the origin of species so long as the processes of transformation remained obscure. Naturalists could not accept an hypothesis for which there seemed to be such imperfect evidence. An ingenious French scientist, J. Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) had indeed, in 1809, propounded the theory—ever since known by his name—that the use or disuse of particular organs might, after a long series of generations, result in the formation of new species. (The ideas denoted by the words "environment," "adaptation," "acquired habits"—now so familiar—may be said to have been introduced by him). But the scientific prejudices of the time were against Lamarck's theories, and he had to lament their inhospitable reception. Indeed Lamarck's critics did not hesitate to exercise their powers of ridicule, or to make fun of the giraffe who derived his long neck from the attempts of his ancestors to browse on high trees. Darwin himself talks of "Lamarck's nonsense," and of his "veritable rubbish"—language, however, which he was subsequently able to retract.

The New Geology.—Perhaps the most stubborn obstacle which Lamarckian theories had to meet was the current prejudice as to the age (or youth) of the earth. Contemporary geologists were by no means prepared to grant Lamarck the illimitable periods of time which his transformation processes seemed to require. Consequently it is not surprising that the new theories, perhaps for the first time, received a measure of justice at the hands of one who himself became responsible for a revolution in the science of geology.

"I devoured Lamarck en voyage," writes Charles Lyell, describing a journey from Oxford in 1827. "His theories delighted me more than any novel I ever read, and much in the same way, for they address themselves to the imagination.... That the earth is quite as old as he supposes, has long been my creed."[36]