CHAPTER XV.

THE TWO AGES OF REASON.

The eighteenth century--it has been often said--was a rationalising, unhistorical, age: and, in contrast, the nineteenth has been declared to be _par excellence_ the founder and the patron of the historical method. In the one, the tendency governing the main movement of European civilisation was towards cosmopolitan and universal enlightenment. A common ideal, and, because common, necessarily rather general and abstract, perhaps even somewhat vulgarly utilitarian, pervaded Western Europe, and threw its influence for good and evil on literature and art, on religion and polity. It grew out of a revulsion, in many ways natural, from the religious extravagances of the century-and-a-half preceding, which had led prudent thinkers to reduce religion to a 'reasonable' minimum, and to reject all things that savoured of or suggested enthusiasm, fanaticism, and superstition. In politics the same one type or system of government and laws was aimed at, more or less, in all advancing states. National peculiarities and patriotism were looked at askance, as unworthy of the free 'humanity' which was set forward as the end of all training. To simplify, to level, to render intelligible, and self-consistent was the task of enlightenment in dealing with all institutions. To remove all anomalies and inequalities, to give security for liberty and to facilitate the right to pursue happiness[1], was the chief watchword of this movement. Its questions were--Is religion, Is art and science, Is political organisation, a source of happiness? Are poetry, and a belief in divine things, and abstruse knowledge, upon the whole for human advantage and benefit? Only such civilisation can be justified as, taken all in all, is a blessing; if not (cried some) we may as well cling to the happiness of the barbarian.

That these are important questions, and that the purposes above-mentioned are in many ways good, is clear. But before we can answer the questions, or decide as to the feasibility of the aims, there are some things to be brought and to be kept in view. And these things were not as a rule brought and kept in view. It was assumed that the standard of adjudication was found in the averagely educated and generally cultured individual among the class of more or less 'advanced thinkers' who asked the questions and set up the aims. That class, already denationalised by function, forming a commonwealth or rather a friendly fraternity throughout the capitals of Europe, had cut itself off from the narrower and the deeper sympathies of the national life. Forming a sort of mean or middle stratum in the social organisation, they tended to ignore or despise equally the depths below them and the heights above. They took themselves as the types of humanity, and what _their_ understandings found acceptable they dubbed rational: all else was a survival from the ages of darkness. They forgot utterly that they were only a part, a class, a member in the social body: and that they could only be and do what they were and did, because what they were not and did not do was otherwise supplied. It takes all sorts of people to make a world: but each class--and the order of literature and intelligence is no exception--tends to set itself up as the corner-stone (if not something more) of the social edifice. What is more: in such a loose aggregate as the intelligent upper-middle class, the individual tends more and more to count as something, detached and by himself, to be an equal and free unit of judgment and choice, to be emancipated from all the bonds which hold in close affinity members of a group whose functions are unlike each other's, and yet decidedly complementary. Such a class, again--though there are of course conspicuous exceptions--is, by the stress of special interests, removed from direct contact with nature and reality, and lives what in the main may be styled an artificial life.

When such a class asked what were the benefits of art or religion, it thought first of itself; and it looked upon art and religion--and the same would be true of philosophy and science, or of political sanctions--as _merely_ objective and outward entities, foreign to the individual, yet by some mechanical influences brought into connexion with him,--as one might apply to him a drug or a viand. But clearly to a person of practical aims, bent on conveying information and enlightenment, bent on making all men as like each other as possible in the medium range of cultivation which he thinks desirable, the utility of some of these things is questionable and limited. It is only a little modicum of religion, of art and of science, which can be justified by its obvious pleasure-giving power; and it is easy to point the thesis against enthusiasm in these regions, by reference to the disastrous wars fanned by religion, to the license that has followed the steps of art, and to the lives wasted in the zeal for increasing knowledge. In his ideal of human life such a practical reformer will tend to suppress all that bears too clear a trace of natural, infra-rational, non-intelligent kindred,--all that ties us too closely to mother earth and universal nature.

But if this was the dominant tone of the literary teachers who had chief audience from the public ear, there was no lack of dissentient voices who appealed to nature, who loved the past, who set sentiment and imagination above intellect, and who never bowed the knee to the great idols of enlightened middle-class utilitarianism. Even in the leaders of the enlightening host--amongst the chiefs of the _Aufklärung_--there is a breadth and a depth of human interest which sets them far above their average followers, and which should prevent us from joining without discrimination in the depreciatory judgments so often passed on the eighteenth century. The pioneers in the great emancipatory movement of modern times should not be allowed to suffer from the exaggerations and haste of their more vulgar imitators--still less refused the meed of gratitude we owe them. But when their ideas were violently translated into reality, when the levelling, unshackling process was set at work by vulgar hands, the shortcomings of their theories were made to show even greater than they were: and inevitable reaction set in. Even the revolutionist himself has come to admit that fraternity at that time came badly off in comparison with liberty and equality[2]. But these drawbacks were accentuated when the cosmopolitan reform-movement, by its haste and intolerance, awakened the spirit of national jealousy. The deeper instincts of life rose in protest against the supposed superiority of intellect: the heart claimed its rights against the head: the man of nature and feeling was roused up to meet the man of reasoning and criticism. The spirit of war evoked those energies of human nature--some of them not its least valuable--which had slumbered in times of easy-going peace. The days of adversity and humiliation taught men that the march of literary culture is not the all-in-all of life and history.

It was made apparent, practically at least, that intelligence, with its hard and fast formulae, its logical principles, its keen analysis, was not deep enough or wide enough to justify its claim to the august title of reason. To be reasonable implies a more comprehensive, patient, many-sided observation than is necessary to prove the claim to mere intelligence. To be intelligent is to seize the right means to execute a given or accepted end--it is to be quick and correct in the practice of life, to carry out in detail what has been determined on in general. Understanding plays upon the surface of life and deals with the momentary case: and its greatest praise is to be fleet in the application of principles, apt to detect the point on which to direct action, correct in its estimate of means to ends. Clearsighted, prudent, and direct, it is the supreme virtue in a given sphere: but the sphere must be given, and its end constituted in the measured round of practical life, its system complete: or, understanding is bewildered before a hopeless puzzle. Understanding is--the improvident cynic might say--a certain animal-like sagacity--(such cynical philosophers were perhaps Hobbes and Schopenhauer[3])--a mere power of carrying out a given rule in a new but similar case, and of doing so, perhaps, through a long chain of intermediate links and means.

But there are more things in heaven and earth than are heard of in the philosophy of the logical intellect. The _subtilitas naturae_[4] far surpasses the refinements of the practical intellect: and if the latter is ever to overcome or be equal to the former, it must, so to speak, wait patiently upon it, as a handmaiden upon the hands of her mistress. Such a trained and disciplined intellect which has conquered nature by obedience is what the philosophers at the beginning of this century called _reason_[5]. It is in life as much as in our mind. It comes not by self-assertion, by the attempt to force our ends and views on nature, but by feeling and thinking ourselves in and along with nature. Or, briefly, it breaks down the middle wall of partition by which man had treated nature as a mere world of _objects_--things to be used and to minister to his pleasure--but always alien to him, always mere matter to be manipulated _ab extra._ Yet even to get full use and enjoyment out of a thing it is well to be in closer community with it, and on terms of friendly acquaintance. The function of this fuller reason cannot be performed without something analogous to sympathy and imagination. Sympathy, which realises the inner unity of the so-called 'thing' with ourselves: imagination, which sets it in the full circumstances of those relationships which the practical intelligence is inclined to abstract from and to neglect. Yet only something _analogous_ to sympathy and imagination: if, as may well be the case, we attach to these terms any association of irregular or mere emotional operation. The imagination in question is the 'scientific' imagination--the power of wide large vision which sets the object fully in reality, and is not content with a mere name or abstract face of a fact--a name which represents a fact no doubt, but represents it, as many such 'agents' or deputies do, in a hard and wooden spirit. The sympathy in question is the transcending of the antithesis between subjective and objective; not a fantastic or fortuitous choice of one or a few out of many on whom to lavish locked-up stores of affection, but the full recognition of unity as pervading differences, and reducing them to no more than aspects in correlation.

What has been said of sympathy and imagination, as the allies and ministers of reason, might be extended and applied to humour, to wit, to irony. These also it may be said--and with the same qualifications--are essential to a philosopher in the highest sense. The humour, viz., which strides over the barriers set up by institution and convention between the high and the humble, and sees man's superficial distinctions overpowered by a half-grim, half-jubilant _Ananke_,--which notes how human proposal is overcome, not without grace, by divine and natural disposal, how the deep inner identity in all estates breaks triumphantly through the fences of custom and deliberate intention. The wit, which upsets the hardened fixity of classes and groups, flits from one to another, shows glimpses of affinity between remote provinces of idea, and all this, without laboured and artificial search for analogies, though to the slower-following practical mind, hampered by its solid limits, these leaps from province to province seem paradoxical and whimsical. The irony, which notes the tragicomedy of life under its apparent regularity of prose,--which detects the vanity of all efforts to check the flux of vitality and make the volatile permanent; which contrasts the apparent with the real, the obviously and officiously meant with the truly desired and willed, and shows how diplomatically-close design is dissipated in a jest, or the soul bent on many years of enjoyment is plunged into torment. Thus, in a way, imagination, sympathy, wit, humour, irony and paradox are elements that go to the making of a philosopher: but in the serenity of reasoned wisdom they lose their frolicsome and fantastic mood, and fill their minor place with sober cheer. Wedded to the lord of wisdom, the Muse of poesy and wit loses her sprightly laugh and her dancing step, becoming a subdued, yet gracious matron, who, with her offspring, sheds gleams of brightness and warmth and colour in the somewhat austere household. Yet still the free maiden of poesy, in the open fields where the shadow of reflective thought has not yet fallen, has the greater charm; and a certain jealousy not unfrequently reigns between the married sister and the virgin yet untamed.

But though poetry and the allied arts of words were very helpful to philosophy--witness the services which, though in widely different ways, Goethe and Schiller rendered to the higher thinking of Germany--even more stimulative and fruitful was the research into nature and history. Nature _and_ history: but they lie closer together than the conjunction suggests. It is true that in recent times we have been forcibly taught to separate civil from natural history, if we have not even been further taught that the latter is an improper application of the term. But when Aristotle said that 'Poetry is more philosophical than History' he was probably not restricting his remark to the story of nations and states; even as when Bacon set history as the field of memory beside the fields of imagination and reasoning, he was not solely referring to the records of the human past. The distinction between natural and civil history is no doubt for practical education a distinction of supreme importance. But it is so, because in this scholastic phase the conception of both, under these comprehensive names, was superficial and abstract. Natural history meant only the classificatory description of animals, plants, and minerals: civil history the tale composed to string together the succession of human actions on the public and national field of life.

We have seen in an earlier chapter the advances which Lessing, Kant, and above all Herder, made in this direction[6]. Emphasising in their several ways the great dictum of Spinoza that human passions, and the whole scheme of human life, are _res naturales, quae communes naturae leges sequuntur_, they gave to history a higher, more philosophical, more scientific scope than what the name used to connote. Neither in Spinoza himself, nor in these his followers, did this insistence on the unity of nature at all lead them to neglect the difference--almost equivalent, it may be said, in the end to an _Imperium in imperio_--by which rational man marks himself off to a special kindred with the divine[7]. We have seen too what Schelling did to show that history, if in one aspect it be the product of free human volitions, is, in another and as he thought a superior aspect, the realm subject to a divine or natural necessity. The whole tendency of this epoch of thought--the tendency which entitles it above all to the name of speculative--is its impulse to over-ride this distinction between Nature and History; to over-ride it, however, not in the sense of simply ignoring or denying it, but of carrying it up into a unity which would do justice to both, without exclusively favouring either, and hardly without clipping both of any extravagant claims. The distinction remains,--no longer an abrupt division, but now tempered and mellowed by the presence of a paramount unity. Nature now has a real history: no longer a mere factitious aggregate of classified facts, it is the phenomenon of a 'latent process,' due to a 'latent schematism,' and a 'form' or principle of organisation. Classification does not cease: but it ceases to be an end in itself, and becomes only subordinate or auxiliary to a higher scientific end. The main theme is to construe the complete cycle of life-change and the complete organisation of life-state from the evidence pieced out and put together from the various orders, classes, and species of living creatures. And on the other side the mere tale or narrative of history, with its gossip of personalities, and its accidents of war and intrigue, tends to become insignificant in the presence of the great popular life, in its deep and subtle connexion with agencies of nature hitherto unsurmised, in its dependence upon necessities and uniformities which envelope or rather permeate and constitute the human will. It is not indeed that the force of great personalities has come to be treated as a quantity we may neglect. The force of the great leader, of the genius, of the hero, is not less admirable to the wise philosophical historian to-day than it ever was to his story-telling predecessor. But he flatters himself that he understands better, and can better take account of, the conditions which make the genius and the hero possible. Achilles still counts for more than a thousand common soldiers, and Homer himself is not merely the composite image by which a long tradition has fused into a dim pictorial unity the countless bards who sang for ages on the isles of Greece and the coasts of Ionia. Yet we feel sure that Achilles did what he did, because of the race he sprang from, the inspiration he felt around him, the companionship in body and spirit of his peers. We feel that the hero derives his strength from earth and air, from the spiritual and material substance in which he draws his breath. True, we cannot explain him, as if he and his heroisms were a mere product of mathematical and mechanical forces. But where we once recognise that behind the single visible deed and agent there is a spiritual nature--an underlying agency--which, unperceived, keeps the hearth-fire of public life burning in the celestial temple of Vesta, we can at least see that though genius is a marvel and a mystery, yet it is according to law, and no mere will-o'-the-wisp.

But when we say that the actions and sayings even of the foremost individuals are to be comprehended only in the light of universal forces and laws, there is an error which is only too ready to substitute itself for the truth. It soon appears for example that, among the general causes which control the development of civilisation and the acts of individuals, the economical condition is of great and prominent effect. And, above all, it is easily measurable, and subject to palpable standards (such as statistics of exports and imports, &c.). It was natural therefore that a school of historico-social philosophers should arise who maintained that the economical state of a given society was the fundamental principle or form of its life, of which all other phases of its civilisation, religious, aesthetic, &c., were only variable dependent functions. This view, which comes out in the socialist theory of Marx, is clearly the exaggeration or abstract statement of a partial truth into a pseudo-complete theory. The truth is one which found expression as early as Plato. It is this: that in the economical system of a society we find the first and somewhat external or mechanical suggestion of the organism to which the state is yet to grow. In the economic law of reciprocity there is a 'certain faint image' of the principle of social organisation or political life. But when we go beyond, and interpret this first phase to mean the original foundation, we are stating a figment which has a plausibility only when by the economic state we mean a great deal more than abstractly economic facts include. And this again arises because it is really impossible to carry out thoroughly the abstraction of one aspect of social life from the others. There are no purely economic facts which are independent of other social influences,--of ideals, e. g. moral or aesthetic,--ideals which nobody would call economic, though they never quite part company from economical conditions.

So again there is occasionally a tendency to magnify the influence of what in the narrowest sense may be termed political systems. Forms of government, and titles of sovereignty are regarded as forces to which individuals--even the highest--must bow. But here again the exaggeration of a principle need not tempt us to rush with Tom Paine into the opposite extravagance that government and state-power are superfluities, or quasi-ornamental additions to a social fabric, which can do without them and, like other beasts of low organisation, can, when shorn of them, reproduce them with ease. And thus though we may dissent from the view that laws and constitutions are omnipotent, we may admit that in them the central unity and controlling principle of social life finds its dominant expression in great outlines. We shall not agree with him who said 'Let who will make the laws of a nation if I may make its ballads': because we know that the nation will in the end have the chief voice in determining what are to be its ballads no less than its laws. We shall not quite accept the dictum that the intellectual class which formulates ideas and sets up programmes of ideals gives the real lead to the process of civilisation; for we shall remember that real ideas are not formed by individuals, but are the slow work of concrete experience in the so-called inorganic masses, finding at length utterance through the lips of those appointed to that end by the natural and divine order. Yet we shall, on the other hand, see that the high things of the world are dependent on the lowly: that a song-maker is sometimes not less potent than a legislature: that pecuniary conditions are effective in the sanctuaries of religion and the high places of art: and that the noblest ideas of great thinkers draw their strength and life through roots that run unseen through very humble ground.

_La Raison_, says Leibniz, _est l'enchainement des vérités._[8] Truth linked into truth, and so made truer: truth, with which all things harmonise and nothing cries dissent: truth, which is neither the prerogative of the mere _demos_, nor of the intellectual aristocracy, but of that rarer unity which, when they can exercise several and mutually-tendered self-abnegation, is the real spirit of both: truth, thus conceived, is that king of life, that sun of Reason which lighteth every man. Truth--to use again the language of Leibniz,--which is not merely the aggregate of monads,--but the monad of monads, their mutual penetration and corrective completion, in that Idea-reality where they retain their individuality, but retain it in the fullness and fruition of the absolute which each essentially or implicitly is. This kingdom of suffering and yet triumphant truth is the true age of Reason--not outwardly-critical, individualistically-reforming, mere intellectual and abstract intelligence,--but intelligence, charged with emotion, full of reverence, reverent above all to the majesty of that divinity which, much disguised, and weather-beaten, like Glaucus of the sea, resides in common and natural humanity. This is the Reason of German idealism at the commencement of the century. To the clear-cut dogmas of the abstract intellect it savours of mysticism. If it is friendly to distinctions and constantly makes them, it is the pronounced enemy of hard and fast separations. Begin where you like, the reason of things, if you allow it to work, carries you round till you also see identity where you only saw difference, or effects where you only looked for causes. You begin, as the inductive logician, with the belief that the process is from the known to the unknown. You start with your basis of fact, as you called it. The nemesis of things forces you to admit that your facts were partly fictions which waited for the unknown to give them a truer and fuller reality. You talk at first of induction, as if it were a single and simple process, which out of facts builds up generalities and uniformities. You learn as you go on that the only induction that operates, except in cases which have been artificially simplified by supposing half the task done before you apply your experimental methods, is an induction of which the major part is deductive, and where your conclusion will be recurrently made your premiss. Your induction only works on the basis of a hypothesis, and must itself be linked in the 'concatenation of truths,'--a concatenation which is also a criticism and a correction.

[Footnote 1: 'We hold,' says the American Declaration of Independence (1776), 'these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' &c.]

[Footnote 2: Louis Blanc, _History of the Revolution_, vol. i.]

[Footnote 3: Hobbes, _Leviathan_, Part I. chaps. 2 and 3; and elsewhere. Schopenhauer, _Welt als Wille_, Book I. § 6.]

[Footnote 4: Bacon, _Novum Organum_, i. 10.]

[Footnote 5: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 400.]

[Footnote 6: See Chapter XII.]

[Footnote 7: Cf. _Ethica,_ iv. 37, Schol. I. contrasting _rerum externarum communis constitutio_ with _ipsa hominis natura, in se sola considerata._]

[Footnote 8: See the _Discours préliminaire_ to the _Theodicee_.]