Part 5

It is a temptation to find in this passage a symbol both of German philosophy and of the temper of Germany at the time. Its outer defeats, its weakness in the world of action, had developed an exasperated introspection. This outer weakness, coinciding, as Von Sybel points out, with the bloom of Germany in art, philosophy, history, philology and philosophy, made the Ego of Germany the noblest contemporary object of contemplation, yet one surrounded with other national Egos who offended by what they did and what they did not do. Patriotism, national feeling, national consciousness are common enough facts. But nowhere save in Germany, in the earlier nineteenth century, have these sentiments and impulses been transformed by deliberate nurture into a mystic cult. This was the time when the idea of the _Volks-seele_, the _Volks-geist_, was born; and the idea lost no time in becoming a fact. Not merely poetry was affected by it, but philology, history and jurisprudence. The so-called historic school is its offspring. The science of social psychology derives from it at one remove. The soul, however, needed a body, and (quite in accord with German idealism) it formed a body for itself--the German State as a unified Empire.

While the idealistic period came first, it is important to bear in mind the kind of idealism it was. At this point the pantheistic allusion becomes significant. The idealism in question was not an idealism of another world but of _this_ world, and especially of the State. The embodiment of the divine and absolute will and ideal is the existing world of nature and of men. Especially is the human ego the authorized and creative agent of absolute purpose. The significance of German philosophy was precisely to make men aware of their nature and destiny as the direct and active representatives of absolute and creative purpose.

If I again quote Heine, it is because, with his contempt for technical philosophy, he had an intimate sense of its human meaning. Of German pantheistic idealism, he wrote in 1833 while it was still in its prime:

"God is identical with the world. . . . But he manifests himself most gloriously in man, who feels and thinks at the same time, who is capable of distinguishing his own individuality from objective nature, whose intellect already bears within itself the ideas that present themselves to him in the phenomenal world. In man Deity reaches self-consciousness, and this self-consciousness God again reveals through man. But this revelation does not take place in and through individual man, but in and through collective humanity . . . which comprehends and represents in idea and in reality the whole God-universe. . . . It is an error to suppose that this religion leads men to indifference. On the contrary, the consciousness of his divinity will inspire man with enthusiasm for its manifestation, and from this moment the really noble achievements of true heroism glorify the earth."

In one respect, Heine was a false prophet. He thought that this philosophy would in the end accrue to the profit of the radical, the republican and revolutionary party in Germany. The history of German liberalism is a complicated matter. Suffice it in general to say that the honey the libertarians hived was appropriated in the end by the party of authority. In Heine's assurance that these ideas would in due time issue in action he was profoundly right. His essay closes with burning words, from which I extract the following:

"It seems to me that a methodical people, such as we, must begin with the reformation, must then occupy ourselves with systems of philosophy, and only after their completion pass to the political revolution. . . . Then will appear Kantians, as little tolerant of piety in the world of deeds as in the world of ideas, who will mercilessly upturn with sword and axe the soil of our European life to extirpate the last remnants of the past. Then will come upon the scene armed Fichteans, whose fanaticism of will is to be restrained neither by fear nor self-interest, for they live in the spirit. . . . Most of all to be feared would be the philosophers of nature,[84:A] were they actively to mingle. . . . For if the hand of the Kantian strikes with strong unerring blow; if the Fichtean courageously defies every danger, since for him danger has in reality no existence;--the Philosopher of Nature will be terrible in that he has allied himself with the primitive powers of nature, in that he can conjure up the demoniac forces of old German pantheism; and having done so, aroused in him that ancient Germanic eagerness which combats for the joy of the combat itself. . . . Smile not at my counsel as at the counsel of a dreamer. . . . The thought precedes the deed as the lightning the thunder. . . . The hour will come. As on the steps of an amphitheater, the nations will group themselves around Germany to witness the terrible combat."

[84:A] He refers to the followers of Schelling, who as matter of fact had little vogue. But his words may not unjustly be transferred to the naturalistic schools, which have since affected German thought.

In my preoccupation with Heine, I seem to have wandered somewhat from our immediate topic: the connection of the idealistic philosophy with the development and organization of the national state of Germany. But the necessity of the organized State to care for the moral interests of mankind was an inherent part of Fichte's thought. At first, _what_ state was a matter of indifference. In fact his sympathies were largely French and republican. Before Jena, he writes:

"What is the nation for a truly civilized Christian European? In a general way, Europe itself. More particularly at any time the State which is at the head of civilization. . . . With this cosmopolitan sense, we can be tranquil before the vicissitudes and catastrophes of history."

In 1807 he writes:

"The distinction between Prussia and the rest of Germany is external, arbitrary and fortuitous. The distinction between Germany and the rest of Europe is founded in nature."

The seeming gulf between the two ideas is easily bridged. The "Addresses on the Fundamental Features of the Present Age" had taught that the end of humanity on earth is the establishment of a kingdom in which all relations of humanity are determined with freedom or according to Reason--according to Reason as conceived by the Fichtean formula. In his "Addresses to the German Nation," in 1807-08, the unique mission of Germany in the establishment of this kingdom is urged as a motive for securing national unity and the overthrow of the conqueror. The Germans are the sole people who recognize the principles of spiritual freedom, of freedom won by action in accord with reason. Faithfulness to this mission will "elevate the German name to that of the most glorious among all the peoples, making this Nation the regenerator and restorer of the world." He personifies their ancestors speaking to them, and saying: "We in our time saved Germany from the Roman World Empire." But "yours is the greater fortune. You may establish once for all the Kingdom of the Spirit and of Reason, bringing to naught corporeal might as the ruling thing in the world." And this antithesis of the Germanic and the Roman principles has become a commonplace in the German imagination. Moreover, for Germany to win is no selfish gain. It is an advantage to all nations. "The great promise of a kingdom of right reason and truth on earth must not become a vain and empty phantom; the present iron age is but a transition to a better estate." Hence the concluding words: "There is no middle road: If you sink, so sinks humanity entire with you, without hope of future restoration."

The premises of the historic syllogism are plain. First, the German Luther who saved for mankind the principle of spiritual freedom against Latin externalism; then Kant and Fichte, who wrought out the principle into a final philosophy of science, morals and the State; as conclusion, the German nation organized in order to win the world to recognition of the principle, and thereby to establish the rule of freedom and science in humanity as a whole. The Germans are patient; they have a long memory. Ideas produced when Germany was divided and broken were retained and cherished after it became a unified State of supreme military power, and one yielding to no other people in industrial and commercial prosperity. In the grosser sense of the words, Germany has not held that might makes right. But it has been instructed by a long line of philosophers that it is the business of ideal right to gather might to itself in order that it may cease to be merely ideal. The State represents exactly this incarnation of ideal law and right in effective might. The military arm is part of this moral embodiment. Let sentimentalists sing the praises of an ideal to which no actual force corresponds. Prussian faith in the reality and enforcement among men of the ideal is of a more solid character. As past history is the record of the gradual realization in the Germanic State of the divine idea, future history must uphold and expand what has been accomplished. Diplomacy is the veiled display of law clothed with force in behalf of this realization, and war is its overt manifestation. That war demands self-sacrifice is but the more convincing proof of its profound morality. It is the final seal of devotion to the extension of the kingdom of the Absolute on earth.

For the philosophy stands or falls with the conception of an Absolute. Whether a philosophy of absolutes is theoretically sound or unsound is none of my present concern. But that philosophical absolutism may be practically as dangerous as matter of fact political absolutism history testifies. The situation puts in relief what finally is at issue between a theory which is pinned to a belief in an Absolute beyond history and behind experience, and one which is frankly experimental. For any philosophy which is not consistently experimental will always traffic in absolutes no matter in how disguised a form. In German political philosophy, the traffic is without mask.

III

THE GERMANIC PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

The unity of the German people longed for and dreamed of after 1807 became an established fact through the war of 1870 with France. It is easy to assign symbolic significance to this fact. Ever since the time of the French Revolution--if not before--German thought has taken shape in conflict with ideas that were characteristically French and in sharp and conscious antithesis to them. Rousseau's deification of Nature was the occasion for the development of the conception of Culture. His condemnation of science and art as socially corrupting and socially divisive worked across the Rhine to produce the notion that science and art are the forces which moralize and unify humanity. The cosmopolitanism of the French Enlightenment was transformed by German thinkers into a self-conscious assertion of nationalism. The abstract Rights of Man of the French Revolution were set in antithesis to the principle of the rights of the citizen secured to him solely by the power of the politically organized nation. The deliberate breach of the revolutionary philosophy with the past, the attempt (foreshadowed in the philosophy of Descartes) to make a _tabula rasa_ of the fortuitous assemblage of traditions and institutions which history offers, in order to substitute a social structure built upon Reason, was envisaged as the _fons et origo_ of all evil. That history is itself incarnate reason; that history is infinitely more rational than the formal abstracting and generalizing reason of individuals; that individual mind becomes rational only through the absorption and assimilation of the universal reason embodied in historic institutions and historic development, became the articles of faith of the German intellectual creed. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that for almost a century the characteristic philosophy of Germany has been a philosophy of history even when not such in apparent form.

Yet the meaning of this appeal to history is lost unless we bear in mind that the Enlightenment after all transmitted to Germany, from medieval thought, its foundation principle. The appeal was not from reason to experience, but from analytic thought (henceforth condemned to be merely "Understanding"--"_Verstand_") to an absolute and universal Reason (_Vernunft_) partially revealed in nature and more adequately manifested in human history as an organic process. Recourse to history was required because not of any empirical lessons it has to teach, nor yet because history bequeathes to us stubborn institutions which must be reckoned with, but because history is the dynamic and evolving realization of immanent reason. The contrast of the German attitude with that of Edmund Burke is instructive. The latter had the same profound hostility to cutting loose from the past. But his objection was not that the past is an embodiment of transcendent reason, but that its institutions are an "inheritance" bequeathed to us from the "collected wisdom" of our forefathers. The continuity of political life centers not about an inner evolving Idea, but about "our hearths, our sepulchers and our altars." He has the same suspicion of abstract rights of man. But his appeal is to experience and to practical consequences. Since "circumstances give in reality to every principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect," there is no soundness in any principle when "it stands stripped of every relation in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction."

According to the German view, the English protested because of interference with empirically established rights and privileges; the Germans, because they perceived in the Revolution a radical error as to the nature and work of reason. In point of fact, the Germans never made that break with tradition, political or religious, of which the French Revolution is an emphatic symbol. I have already referred to Kant's disposition to regard church dogmas (of which, as dogmas, he disapproved) as vehicles of eternal spiritual truths--husks to preserve an inner grain. All of the great German idealists gave further expression to this disposition. To Hegel, for example, the substance of the doctrines of Protestant Christianity is identical with the truths of absolute philosophy, except that in religion they are expressed in a form not adequate to their meaning, the form, namely, of imaginative thought in which most men live. The disposition to philosophize Christianity is too widely shown in Germany to be dismissed as a cowardly desire at accommodation with things established. It shows rather an intellectual piety among a people where freedom of thought and conscience had been achieved without a violent political upheaval. Hegel finds that the characteristic weakness of Romance thought was an inner split, an inability to reconcile the spiritual and absolute essence of reality with which religion deals with the detailed work of intelligence in science and politics. The Germans, on the contrary, "were predestined to be the bearers of the Christian principle and to carry out the Idea as the absolutely Rational end." They accomplished this, not by a flight away from the secular world, but by realizing that the Christian principle is in itself that of the unity of the subjective and the objective, the spiritual and the worldly. The "spirit finds the goal of its struggle, its harmony, in that very sphere which it made the object of its resistance,--it finds that secular pursuits are a spiritual occupation";--a discovery, surely, which unites simplicity with comprehensiveness and one which does not lead to criticism of the secular pursuits carried on. Whatever is to be said of this as philosophy, it expresses, in a way, the quality of German life and thought. More than other countries, Germany has had the fortune to preserve as food for its imaginative life and as emotional sanction the great ideas of the past. It has carried over their reinforcement into the pursuit of science and into politics--into the very things which in other countries, notably in the Latin countries, have been used as weapons of attack upon tradition.

Political development tells a somewhat similar tale. The painful transition from feudalism to the modern era was, for the most part, accomplished recently in Germany, and accomplished under the guidance of established political authorities instead of by revolt against them. Under their supervision, and mainly at their initiative, Germany has passed in less than a century to the regime of modern capitalistic competitive enterprise, moderated by the State, out of the dominion of those local and guild restrictions which so long held economic activity in corporate bonds. The governing powers themselves secured to members of the State what seems, at least to Germans, to be a satisfying degree of political freedom. Along with this absence of internal disturbance and revolution, we must put the fact that every step in the development of Germany as a unified political power has been effected by war with some of the neighbors by which it is hemmed in. There stands the unfolding sequence: 1815 (not to go back to Frederick the Great), 1864, 1866, 1870. And the significant thing about these wars is not that external territory was annexed as their consequence, but the rebound of external struggle upon the achieving of internal unity. No wonder the German imagination has been impressed with the idea of an organic evolution from within, which takes the form of a unity achieved through conflict and the conquest of an opposing principle.

Such scattering comments as these prove nothing. But they suggest why German thought has been peculiarly sensitive to the idea of historic continuity; why it has been prone to seek for an original implicit essence which has progressively unfolded itself in a single development. It would take much more than an hour to give even a superficial account of the growth of the historical sciences and historic methods of Germany during the first half of the eighteenth century. It would involve an account of the creation of philology, and the philological methods which go by the name of higher criticism; of their extension to archeology; of the historic schools of jurisprudence and political economy, as well as of the ways in which such men as Niebuhr, Mommsen and Ranke remade the methods of studying the past. I can only say here that Germany developed such an effective historical technique that even mediocre men achieved respectable results; and, much more significantly, that when Taine made the remark (quoted earlier) that we owe to the Germany of the half century before 1830 all our distinctively modern ideas, his remarks apply above all to the disciplines concerned with the historical development of mankind.

The bases of this philosophy are already before us. Even in Kant we find the idea of a single continuous development of humanity, as a progress from a reign of natural instinct to a final freedom won through adherence to the law of reason. Fichte sketched the stages already traversed on this road and located the point at which mankind now stands. In his later writings, the significance of history as the realization of the absolute purpose is increasingly emphasized. History is the continuous life of a divine Ego by which it realizes in fact what it is in idea or destiny. Its phases are successive stages in the founding of the Kingdom of God on earth. It and it only is the revelation of the Absolute. Along with this growing deification of history is the increased significance attached to nationalism in general and the German nation in particular. The State is the concrete individual interposed between generic humanity and particular beings. In his words, the national folk is the channel of divine life as it pours into particular finite human beings. He says:

"While cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose of the existence of humanity be actually realized in humanity, patriotism is the will that this end be first realized in the particular nation to which we ourselves belong, and that this achievement _thence_ spread over the entire race."

Since the State is an organ of divinity, patriotism is religion. As the Germans are the only truly religious people, they alone are truly capable of patriotism. Other peoples are products of external causes; they have no self-formed Self, but only an acquired self due to general convention. In Germany there is a self which is self-wrought and self-owned. The very fact that Germany for centuries has had no external unity proves that its selfhood is metaphysical, not a gift of circumstance. This conception of the German mission has been combined with a kind of anthropological metaphysics which has become the rage in Germany. The Germans alone of all existing European nations are a pure race. They alone have preserved unalloyed the original divine deposit. Language is the expression of the national soul, and only the Germans have kept their native speech in its purity. In like vein, Hegel attributes the inner disharmony characteristic of Romance peoples to the fact that they are of mixed Germanic and Latin blood. A purely artificial cult of race has so flourished in Germany that many social movements--like anti-Semitism--and some of Germany's political ambitions cannot be understood apart from the mystic identification of Race, Culture and the State. In the light of actual science, this is so mythological that the remark of an American periodical that race means a number of people reading the same newspapers is sober scientific fact compared with it.[101:A]

[101:A] Chamberlain, for example, holds that Jesus must have been of Teutonic birth--a perfect logical conclusion from the received philosophy of the State and religion. Quite aware that there is much Slav blood in northern Germany and Romance blood in southern Germany, he explains that while with other peoples crossing produces a mongrel race, the potency of the German blood is such that cross-breeding strengthens it. While at one time he explains the historic strength of the Jew on the ground that he has kept his race pure, another place he allows his indignation at the Jews to lead him to include them among the most mongrel of all peoples. To one thing he remains consistent: By the very essence of race, the Semites represent a metaphysical principle inherently hostile to the grand Germanic principle. It perhaps seems absurd to dignify the vagaries of this garrulous writer, but according to all report the volumes in which such expressions occur, "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century," has had august approval and much vogue.