Chapter 12
Naturalism is not of to-day or of yesterday, but is very ancient,—as old, indeed, as philosophy,—as old as human thought and doubt. Indeed, we may say that it almost invariably played its part whenever man began to reflect on the whence and the how of the actual world around him. In the philosophical systems of Leucippus and Democritus and Epicurus it lies fully developed before us. It persisted as a latent and silently dreaded antagonist, even in times when “orthodox” anti-naturalistic and super-naturalistic systems were the officially prevailing ones, and were to all appearance generally adhered to. So in the more modern systems of materialism and positivism, in the _Système de la nature_ and in the theory of _l’homme machine_, in the materialistic reactions from the idealistic nature-speculations of Schelling and Hegel, in the discussions of materialism in the past century, in the naturalistic writings of Moleschott, Czolbe, Vogt, Büchner, and Haeckel, and in the still dominant naturalistic tendency and mood which acquired new form and deep-rooted individuality through Darwinism,—in all these we find naturalism, not indeed originating as something new, but simply blossoming afresh with increased strength. The antiquity of Naturalism is no reproach, and no reason for regarding it as a matter long since settled; it rather indicates that Naturalism is not a chance phenomenon, but an inevitable growth. The favourite method of treating it as though it were the outcome of modern scepticism, malice, or obduracy, is just as absurd as if the “naturalists” were to treat the convictions of their opponents as the result of incredible narrow-mindedness, priestly deception, senility, or calcification of the brain-cells. And as naturalism is of ancient origin so also do its different historical phases and forms resemble each other in their methods, aims, and arguments, as well as in the moods, sympathies, and antipathies which accompany them. Even in its most highly developed form we can see that it did not spring originally from a completed and unified principle, but was primarily criticism of and opposition to other views.
What is Distinctive in the Naturalistic Outlook.
At first tentative, but becoming ever more distinctly conscious of its real motive, Naturalism has always arisen in opposition to what we may call “supernatural” propositions, whether these be the naïve mythological explanations of world-phenomena found in primitive religions, or the supernatural popular metaphysics which usually accompanies the higher forms. It is actuated at the same time by one of the most admirable impulses in human nature,—the impulse to explain and understand,—and to explain, if possible, through simple, familiar, and ordinary causes. The sane human understanding sees all about it the domain of everyday and familiar phenomena. It is quite at home in this domain; everything seems to it well-known, clear, transparent, and easily understood; it finds in it intelligible causes and certain laws which govern phenomena, as well as a constant association of cause and effect. Here everything can be individually controlled and examined, and everything “happens naturally.” Things govern themselves. Nothing unexpected, nothing that has not its obvious causes, nothing mysterious or miraculous happens here. Sharply contrasted with this stands the region of the apparently inexplicable, the supernatural, with all its influences and operations, and results. To the religious interpretation in its naïve, pious, or superstitious forms of expression, this region of the supernatural seems to encroach broadly and deeply on the domain of the everyday world. But with the awakening of criticism and reflection, and the deepening of investigation into things, it retreats farther and farther, it surrenders piece after piece to the other realm of thought, and this arises doubt and suspicion. With these there soon awakens a profound conviction that a similar mode of causal connection binds all things together, a glimmering of the uniformity and necessity embracing, comprehending, and ultimately explaining all things. And these presentiments, in themselves at first quite childishly and almost mythologically conceived, may still be, even when they first arise, and while they are still only vaguely formulated, anticipations of later more definite scientific conceptions. Such a beginning of naturalistic consciousness may remain quite naïve and go no farther than a silent but persistent protest. It makes free use of such familiar expressions as “everything comes about of itself”; “everything happens by natural means”; “it is all ‘nature’ or ‘evolution.’ ” But from the primitive naturalistic outlook there may arise reconstructions of nature and cosmic speculations on a large scale, expanding into naturalistic systems of the most manifold kinds, beginning with those of the Ionic philosophers and coming down to those of the most recent times. Their watchwords remain the same, though in an altered dialect: “nature and natural phenomena,” the denial of “dualism,” the upholding of the one principle “monism,” the all-sufficiency of nature, and the absence of any intervening influences from without or beyond nature. Rapidly and of necessity this last item becomes transformed into a “denial of teleology”: nature knows neither will nor purpose, it has only to do with conditions and results. With these it deals and through them it works. Even in the most elementary naturalistic idea, that “everything happens of itself,” there lurks that aversion to purpose which characterises all naturalistic systems.
A naturalism which has arisen and grown in this manner has in itself nothing to do with concrete and exact knowledge of nature. It may comprise a large number of ideas which are sharply opposed to “science,” and which may be in themselves mythological, or poetical, or even mystical. For what “nature” itself really is fundamentally, how it moves, unfolds, or impels, how things actually happen “naturally,” this naturalism has never attempted to think out. Indeed, naturalism of this type, though it opposes “dualism,” does not by any means usually intend to set itself against religion. On the contrary, in its later developments, it may take it up into itself in the form of an apotheosis and a worship of nature. Almost invariably naturalism which begins thus develops, not into atheism, but into pantheism. It is true that all is nature and happens naturally. But nature itself, as Thales said, is “full of gods,” instinct with divine life. It is the all-living which, unwearied and inexhaustible, brings forth form after form and pours out its fulness. It is Giordano Bruno’s “Cause, Principle, and Unity,” in endless beauty and overpowering magnificence, and it is Goethe’s “Great Goddess,” herself the object of the utmost admiration, reverence, and devotion. This mood may readily pass over into a kind of worship of God and belief in Him, “God” being regarded as the soul and mind, the “Logos” of Heraclitus and the Stoics, the inner meaning and reason of this all-living nature. And thus naturalism in its last stages may sometimes be quite devout, and may assure us that it is compelled to deny only the transcendental and not the immanent God, the Divine being enthroned above the world, but not the living God dwelling within it. And ever anew Goethe’s verse is quoted:
What God would _outwardly_ alone control, And on His finger whirl the mighty Whole? He loves the _inner_ world to move, to view Nature in Him, Himself in nature too, So that what in Him works, and is, and lives, The measure of His strength, His spirit gives.
The True Naturalism.
But naturalism becomes fundamentally different when it ceases to remain at the level of naïve or fancifully conceived ideas of “nature” and “natural occurrences,” when, instead of poetry or religious sentiments, it incorporates something else, namely, exact natural science and the idea of a mathematical-mechanical calculability in the whole system of nature. “Nature” and “happening naturally”, as used by the naïve intelligence, are half animistic ideas and modes of expression, which import into nature, or leave in it, life and soul, impulse, and a kind of will. And that speculative form of naturalism which tends to become religious develops this fault to its utmost. But a “nature” like this is not at all a possible subject for natural science and exact methods, not a subject for experiment, calculation, and fixed laws, for precise interpretation, or for interpretation on simple rational principles. Instead of the naïve, poetical, and half mystical conceptions of nature we must have a really scientific one, so that, so to speak, the supernatural may be eliminated from nature, and the apparently irrational rationalised; that is, so that all its phenomena may be traced back to simple, unequivocal, and easily understood processes, the actual why and how of all things perceived, and thus, it may be, understood; so that, in short, everything may be seen to come about “by natural means.”
There is obviously one domain and order of processes in nature which exactly fulfils those requirements, and is really in the fullest sense “natural,” that is, quite easily understood, quite rational, quite amenable to computation and measurement, quite rigidly subordinate to laws which can be formulated. These are the processes of physics and chemistry, and in a still higher degree those of movement in general, the processes of mechanics in short. And to bring into this domain and subordinate to its laws everything that occurs in nature, all becoming, and passing away, and changing, all development, growth, nutrition, reproduction, the origin of the individual and of the species, of animals and of man, of the living and the not living, even of sensation and perception, impulse, desire and instinct, will and thought—this alone would really be to show that things “happen naturally,” that is, to explain everything in terms of natural causes. And the conviction that this can be done is the only true naturalism.
Naturalism of this type is fundamentally different in mood and character from the naïve and poetic form, and is, indeed, in sharp contrast to it. It is working against the very motives which are most vital to the latter—namely, reverence for and deification of nature. Where the two types of naturalism really understand themselves nothing but sharp antagonism can exist between them. Those on the one side must condemn this unfeeling and irreverent, cold and mathematical dissection and analysis of the “Great Goddess” as a sacrilege and outrage. And those on the other side must utterly reject as romantic the view which is summed up in the confession: “Ist nicht Kern der Natur Menschen im Herzen?” [Is not the secret of nature in the human heart?]
Goethe’s Attitude to Naturalism.
The most instructive example we can take is Goethe: his veneration for nature on the one hand, and on the other his pronounced opposition to the naturalism both of the materialists and of the mathematicians. Modern naturalists are fond of seeking repose and mental refreshment in Goethe’s conception of the world, under the impression that it fits in best and most closely with their own views. That they do this says much for their mood and taste, but not quite so much for their powers of discrimination or for their consistency. It is even more thoughtless than when the empiricists and sensationalists acclaim as their hero, Spinoza, the strict, pure rationalist, the despiser of empiricism and of knowledge acquired through the senses. For to Goethe nature is far from being a piece of mechanism which can be calculated on and summed up in mathematical formulæ, an everlasting “perpetuum mobile,” a magnificent all-powerful machine. In fact, all this and especially the word “machine” expresses exactly what Goethe’s conception was most directly opposed to. To him nature is truly the “Goddess,” the great Diana of the Ephesians, the everlasting Beauty, the artist of genius, ceaselessly inventing and creating, in floods of Life, in Action’s storm—an infinite ocean, a restless weaving, a glowing Life. Embracing within herself the highest and the humblest, she is in all things, throughout all change and transformation, the same, shadowing forth the most perfect in the simplest, and in the highest only unfolding what she had already shown in the lowliest. Therefore Goethe hated all divisions and rubrics, all the contrasts and boundaries which learned analysis attempts to introduce into nature. Passionately he seized on Herder’s idea of evolution, and it was towards establishing it that all his endeavours, botanical, zoological, morphological and osteological, were directed. He discovered in the human skull the premaxillary bone which occurs in the upper jaw of all mammals, and this “keystone to man” gave him, as he himself said, “such joy that all his bowels moved.” He interpreted the skull as developed from three modified vertebræ. He sketched a hypothesis of the primitive plant, and the theory that all the organs of the plant are modifications and developments of the leaf. He was a friend of Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire, who defended “l’unité de composition organique” in the forms of nature, and evolution by gradual stages, and he was the vehement opponent of Cuvier, who attempted to pick the world to pieces according to strictly defined architectural plans and rigid classes. And what the inner impulse to all this was he has summed up in the motto to his “Morphology” from the verse in Job:
Lo, he goeth by me, and I see him not; He is transformed, but I perceive him not.
He further declares it in the introductory verse to his Osteology:
Joyfully some years ago, Zealously my spirit sought To explore it all, and know How all nature lived and wrought: And ’tis ever One in all, Though in many ways made known; Small in great, and great in small, Each in manner of its own. Ever shifting, yet fast holding; Near and far, and far and near; So, with moulding and remoulding,— To my wonder I am here.
In all this there is absolutely nothing of the characteristic mood and spirit of “exact” naturalism, with its mechanical and mathematical categories. It matters little that Goethe, when he thought of evolution, never had present to his mind the idea of Descent which is characteristic of “Darwinism,” but rather development in the lofty sense in which it is worked out in the nature-philosophy of Schelling and of Hegel. The chief point is, that to him nature was the all-living and ever-living, whose creating and governing cannot be reduced to prosaic numbers or mathematical formulæ, but are to be apprehended as a whole by the perceptions of genius rather than worked out by calculation or in detail. Any other way of regarding nature Goethe early and decisively rejected. And he has embodied his strong protest against it in his “Dichtung und Wahrheit”:
“How hollow and empty it seemed to us in this melancholy, atheistical twilight.... Matter, we learnt, has moved from all eternity, and by means of this movement to right and left and in all directions, it has been able, unaided, to call forth all the infinite phenomena of existence.”
The book—the “Système de la Nature”—“seemed to us so grey, so Cimmerian, so deathlike that it was with difficulty we could endure its presence.”
And in a work with remarkable title and contents, “Die Farbenlehre,” Goethe has summed up his antagonism to the “Mathematicians,” and to their chief, Newton, the discoverer and founder of the new mathematical-mechanical view of nature. Yet the mode of looking at things which is here combated with so much labour, wit, and, in part, injustice, is precisely that of those who, to this day, swear by the name of Goethe with so much enthusiasm and so little intelligence
The two Kinds of Naturalism.
But let us return to the two kinds of naturalism we have already described. Much as they differ from one another in reality, they are very readily confused and mixed up with one another. And the chief peculiarity of what masquerades as naturalism among our educated or half-educated classes to-day lies in the fact that it is a mingling of the two kinds. Unwittingly, people combine the moods of the one with the reasons and methods of the other; and having done so they appear to themselves particularly consistent and harmonious in their thought, and are happy that they have been able thus to satisfy at once the needs of the intellect and those of the heart.
On the one hand they stretch the mathematical-mechanical view as far as possible from below upwards, and even attempt to explain the activities of life and consciousness as the results of complex reflex mechanisms. And on the other hand they bring down will soul and instincts into the lowest stages of existence, and become quite animistic. They wish to be nothing if not “exact,” and yet they reckon Goethe and Bruno among the greatest apostles of their faith, and set their verses and sayings as a _credo_ and motto over their own opinions. In this way there arises a “world conception” so indiarubber-like and Protean that it is as difficult as it is unsatisfactory to attempt to come to an understanding with it. If we attempt to get hold of it by the fringe of poetry and idealism it has assumed, it promptly retires into its “exact” half. And if we try to limit ourselves to this, in order to find a basis for discussion, it spreads out before us all the splendours of a great nature pantheism, including even the ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful. One thing only it neglects, and that is, to show where its two very different halves meet, and what inner bond unites them. Thus if we are to discuss it at all, we must first of all pick out and arrange all the foreign and mutually contradictory constituents it has incorporated, then deal with Pantheism and Animism, and with the problem of the possibility of “the true, the good, the beautiful” on the naturalistic-empiric basis, and finally there would remain a readily-grasped residue of naturalism of the second form, to come to some understanding with which is both necessary and instructive.
In the following pages we shall confine ourselves entirely to this type, and we shall not laboriously disentangle it from the bewildering medley of ideas foreign to it, or attempt to make it consistent; we shall neglect these, and have regard solely to its clear fundamental principles and aims. Thus regarded, its horizons are perfectly well-defined. It is startling in its absolute poverty of ideal content, warmth, and charm, but impressive and grand in the perseverance and tenacity with which it adheres to one main point of view throughout. In reality, it is aggressive to nothing, but cold and indifferent to everything, and for this very reason is more dangerous than all the excited protests and verdicts of the enthusiastic type of naturalism, which it is impossible to attack, because of its lack of definite principles, and which, in the pathetic stress it lays on worshipping nature, lives only by what it has previously borrowed from the religious conceptions of the world.
Aim and Method of Naturalism.
The aim and method of the strict type of naturalism may be easily defined. In its details it will become more distinct as we proceed with our analysis. Taking it as a whole, we may say that it is an endeavour on a large scale after consistent simplification and gradual reduction to lower and lower terms. Since it aims at explaining and understanding everything according to the axiom _principia non temere esse multiplicanda_ [principles are not to be heedlessly multiplied], explaining, that is, with the fewest, simplest, and most obvious principles possible, it is incumbent upon it to attempt to refer all phenomena to a single, uniform mode of occurrence, which admits of nothing outside of or beyond itself, and which regulates itself according to its own system of fundamentally similar causal sequences. It is further incumbent upon it to trace back this universal mode of occurrence to the simplest and clearest form possible, and its uniformities to the fewest and most intelligible laws, that is, ultimately, to laws which can be determined by calculation and summed up in formulæ. This tracing back is equivalent to an elimination of all incommensurable causes, of all “final causes,” that is, of ultimate causes and “purposes” which, in an unaccountable manner, work into the network of proximate causes and control them, and by thus interrupting their connectedness, make it difficult to come to a clear understanding of the “Why?” of things. And this elimination is again a “reduction to simpler terms,” for it replaces the “teleological” consideration of purposes, by a purely scientific consideration of causes, which inquires only into the actual conditions antecedent to certain sequences.
But Being and Becoming include two great realms: that of “Nature” and that of “Mind,” _i.e._ consciousness and the processes of consciousness. And two apparently fundamentally different branches of knowledge relate to these: the natural sciences, and the mental sciences. If a unified and “natural” explanation is really possible, the beginning and end of all this “reducing to simpler terms” must be to bridge over the gulf between these; but this, in the sense of naturalism, necessarily means that the mental sciences must in some way be reduced to terms of natural science, and that the phenomena, processes, sequences, and laws of consciousness must likewise be made “commensurable” with and be linked on to the apparently simpler and clearer knowledge of “Nature,” and, if possible, be subordinated to its phenomena and laws, if not indeed derived from them. As it is impossible to regard consciousness itself as corporeal, or as a process of movement, naturalism must at least attempt to show that the phenomena of consciousness are attendant and consequent on corporeal phenomena, and that, though they themselves never become corporeal, they are strictly regulated by the laws of the corporeal and physical, and can be calculated upon and studied in the same way.
But even the domain of the natural itself, as we know it, is by no means simple and capable of a unified interpretation. Nature, especially in the realm of organic life, the animal and plant world, appears to be filled with marvels of purposefulness, with riddles of development and differentiation, in short with all the mysteries of life. Here most of all it is necessary to “reduce” the “teleological view” to terms of the purely causal, and to prove that all the results, even the evolution of the forms of life, up to their highest expressions and in the minutest details of their marvellous adaptations, came “of themselves,” that is to say, are quite intelligible as the results of clearly traceable causes. It is necessary to reduce the physiological and developmental, and all the other processes of life, to terms of physical and chemical processes, and thus to reduce the living to the not living, and to derive the organic from the forces and substances of inanimate nature.
The process of reduction does not stop even here. For physical and chemical processes are only really understood when they can be resolved into the simplest processes of movement in general, when all qualitative changes can be traced hack to purely quantitative phenomena, when, finally, in the mechanics of the great masses, as well as of the infinitely small atoms, everything becomes capable of expression in mathematical terms.
But naturalism of this kind is by no means pure natural science; it consciously and deliberately oversteps in speculation the bounds of what is strictly scientific. In this respect it bears some resemblance to the nature-philosophy associated with what we called the first type of naturalism. But its very poverty enables it to have a strictly defined programme. It knows exactly what it wants, and thus it is possible to argue with it. The religious conception of the world must come to an understanding with it, for it is quite obvious that the more indifferent this naturalism is to everything outside of itself, and the less aggressive it pretends to be, the more does the picture of the world which it attempts to draw exert a cramping influence on religion. Where the two come into contact we shall endeavour to make clear in the following pages.