CHAPTER VII.

ANTICIPATORY SKETCH OF THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY.

The psychology of the Greeks has to all appearance given the mere intellect an undue pre-eminence, if it has not even treated it as man's essential self. Whether the appearance is altogether sound might be a profitable inquiry for those who most criticise it. At any rate, a later psychology has taught us to regard man as at once a cognitive, an emotional, and a volitional being. It has arrived at this conclusion as it looked at the division that parted off the systems of science from the sphere of conduct and social life, and both from the inner life of sentiment, of love, admiration and reverence. And the inference was justifiable, in the same way as Plato's when, as he surveyed the triple sphere into which the outward world of his contemporary society was divided, he concluded a triplicity of the soul. If it was justifiable, it was also, as in his case, somewhat misleading. In the outward manifestation, where the letters are posted up on a gigantic scale, one tends to forget that they only spell one word. Their difference and distance seem increased, and we fail to note that, though there are three aspects, yet there is only one power or soul, which exhibits itself under one or other of the three tones or modes. In the actual human being, cognition is always of some emotional interest and always leads up to some practical result. From different points of view one or other is occasionally declared to be primary and original; the others derivative and secondary. At any rate we may say that in the ordinary human being who is still in the garden of preparation and has not yet stepped forth on one of the separate routes of life, his knowledge, his emotional and his active life are in a tolerable harmony, and that each in its little development is constantly followed by the other.

But with the outward differentiation an inward went hand in hand. In some cases the intellectual or scientific, in others the emotional, in others the active faculties became predominant. Human nature in order to attain all its completeness had first of all, as it were, to lose its life in order to gain it. The individual had to sacrifice part of his all-sided development in order that he might gain it again, and in a larger measure, through the medium of society. This process is the process of civilisation: the long and, as it often seems, weary road by which man can only realise himself by self-sacrifice: can only reach unity through the way of diversity, and must die to live. It is a process in which it is but too easy to notice only one stage and speak of it as if it were the whole. It is possible sometimes to identify civilisation with the material increase in the means of producing enjoyment, or with the progress of scientific teaching as to the laws of those material phenomena on which material civilisation is largely dependent. It is possible sometimes to take as its test the stores of artistic works, and the extension of a lively and delicate love of all that is beautiful and tasteful. One may identify it with a high-toned moral life, and with an orderly social system. Or one may maintain that the real civilisation of a country presupposes a lofty conception and reverent attitude to the supreme source of all that is good, and true, and beautiful.

The question is important as bearing on the relation of philosophy to the special sciences. Philosophy is sometimes identified with the sum of sciences: sometimes with their complete unification. Philosophy, says a modern, is knowledge completely unified. It is of course to some extent a question of words in what sense a term is to be defined. And no one will dispute that the scientific element is in point of form the most conspicuous aspect of philosophy. Yet if we look at the historical use of the term, one or two considerations suggest themselves. Philosophy, said an ancient, is the knowledge of things human and divine. Again and again, it has claimed for its task to be a guide and chart of human life--to reveal the form of good and of beauty. But to do this, it must be more than a mere science, or than a mere system of the sciences. Again, it has been urged by modern critics that Kant at last discovered for philosophy her true province--the study of the conditions and principles of human knowledge. But though epistemology is all-important, the science of knowledge is not identical with philosophy: nor did Kant himself think it was. Rather his view is on the whole in accord with what he has called the 'world's (as opposed to the scholar's) conception of philosophy[1],' as the science of the bearing of all ascertainable truths on the essential aims of human reason--_teleologia humanae rationis_,--in accord, too, with the world's conception of the philosopher as no mere logician, but the legislator of human reason.

This, it need hardly be added, is the conception of philosophy which is implicitly the basis of Hegel's use. Let us hear Schelling. 'A philosophy which in its principle is not already religion is no true philosophy[2].'

Or again, as to the place of Ethics: 'Morality is Godlike disposition, an uplifting above the influence of the concrete into the realm of the utterly universal. Philosophy is a like elevation, and for that reason intimately one with morality, not through subordination, but through essential and inner likeness[3].' But, again, it has more than once been felt that philosophy is kindred with Art. It has been said--not as a compliment--that philosophy is only a form of gratifying the aesthetic instincts. Schopenhauer has suggested--as a novelty--that the true way to philosophy was not by science, but through Art. And Schelling before him had--while asserting the inner identity of the two--even gone so far as to assert[4] that 'Art is the sole, true and eternal organon as well as the ostensible evidence of philosophy.'

Philosophy, therefore, is one of a triad in which the human spirit has tried to raise itself above its limitations and to become god-like. And philosophy is the climax; Art the lowest; Religion in the mean. But this does not mean that Religion supersedes Art, and that Philosophy supersedes religion; or, if we retain the term 'supersede,' we must add that the superseded is not left behind and passed aside: it is rather an integral constituent of what takes its place. Philosophy is true and adequate only as it has given expression to all that religion had or aimed at. So, too, Religion is not the destruction of Art: though here the attitude may often seem to be more obviously negative. A religion which has no place for art is, again, no true religion. And thus again, Philosophy becomes a reconciler of Art and Religion: of the visible ideal and the invisible God. Art, on the other hand, is a foretaste and a prophecy of religion and philosophy.

But Art, Religion, and Philosophy, again, rest upon, grow out of, and are the fulfilment of an ethical society-a state of human life where an ordered commonwealth in outward visibility is animated and sustained by the spirit of freedom and self-realisation. And that public objective existence of social humanity in its turn reposes on the will and intelligence of human beings, of souls which in various relations of discipline and interaction with their environment have become free-agents, and have risen to be more than portions of the physical world, sympathetic with its changes, and become awake to themselves and their surroundings. Such is the mental or spiritual life as it rises to full sense of its power, recognises its kindred with the general life, carries out that kindred in its social organisation, and at length through the strength social union gives floats boldly in the empyrean of spiritual life, in art, religion, and philosophy.

But, what about the special relationship of philosophy to the sciences? Undoubtedly the philosophers of the early years of the century have used lordly language in reference to the sciences. They have asserted--from Fichte downwards--that the philosophical construction, of the universe must justify itself to itself--must be consistent, continuous, and coherent--and that it had not to wait for experience to give it confirmation. Even the cautious Kant[5] had gone so far as to assert that the 'understanding gives us nature'--i. e. as he explains, _natura formaliter spectata_, viz., the order and regularity in the phenomena--that it is the source of the laws of nature and of its formal unity. The so-called proofs of natural laws are only instances and exemplifications, which no more _prove_ them, than we prove that 6 x 4 = 24, because 6 yards of cloth at 4s. must be paid for by 24 shillings. To assert that this instance is no proof, is not to reject experience--still less to refuse respect to the new discoveries of science. But it is unquestionably to assert that there is something prior to the sciences--prior, i. e. in the sense that Kant speaks of the _a priori,_ something which is fundamental to them, and constitutes them what they are--something which is assumed as real if their syntheses (and every scientific truth is a synthesis) are to be possible. The analysis and exhibition in its organic completeness of this Kantian _a priori_ is the theme of the Hegelian Logic.

The Philosophy of Nature stands in the Hegelian system between Logic and Mental or Spiritual Philosophy. Man--intelligent, moral, religious and artistic man--rests upon the basis of natural existence: he is the child of the earth, the offspring of natural organisation. But Nature itself--such is the hypothesis of the system--is only intelligible as the reflex of that _a priori_ which has been exhibited in Logic. The whole scheme by which the natural world is scientifically held together, apprehended by ordinary consciousness and elaborated by mathematical analysis, presupposes the organism of the categories--these fundamental habits of thought or form of conception which are the framework of the existence we know. Yet Nature never shows this intelligible world--the Idea--in its purity and entirety. In the half-literal, half-figurative phrases of Hegel, Nature shows the Idea beside itself, out of its mind, alienated, _non compos mentis._ 'It is a mad world, my masters,' 'The impotence of nature_--Ohnmacht der Natur_[6]--is a frequent phrase, by which he indicates the a-logical, if not illogical, character of the physical world. Here we come across the negation of mind: chance plays its part: contingency is everywhere. If you expect that the physical universe will _display_ unquestioning obedience to the laws of reason and of the higher logic, you will be disappointed. What you _see_ is fragmentary, chaotic, irregular. To the bodily sense--even when that sense has been rendered more penetrating by all the many material and methodical aids of advanced civilisation--the Idea is in the natural world presented only in traces, indications, portions, which it requires a well-prepared mind to descry, still more to unite. Yet at the same time the indications of that unity are everywhere, and the hypothesis of the logical scheme or organisation of the Idea is the only theory which seems fully to correspond with the data. Nature[7], says Hegel, is the Idea as it shows itself in sense-perception, not as it shows itself in thought. In thought a clear all-comprehending total; in sense a baffling fragment. The Idea--the unity of life and knowledge--is everywhere in nature, but nowhere clearly, or whole, or otherwise than a glimpse; not a logical scheme or compact theory. Nature is the sensible in which the intelligible is bound--the reality which is the vehicle of the ideal. But the ideal treasure is held in rough and fragile receptacles which half disclose and half conceal the light within. Nature in short contains, but disguised, the idea, in fainter and clearer evidences: it is the function of man, by his scientific intelligence and ethical work, building up a social organisation, to provide the ground on which the ultimate significance and true foundation of the world may be deciphered, guessed, or believed, or imaginatively presented. The verification of the guess or deciphering, of course, lies in its adequacy to explain and colligate the facts. The true method and true conception is that which needs no subsequent adjustments--no epicycles to make it work--which is no mere hypothesis useful for subjective arrangement, but issues with uncontrollable force and self-evidence from the facts.

What Hegel has called the 'impotence of nature,' Schopenhauer has styled the irrational Will, and it is from that end, so to speak, that Schopenhauer's philosophy begins. Nature--the basis of all things--the fundamental prius--is an irresistible and irregular appetite or craving to be, to do, to live,--but an _appetitus_ or _nisus_ which ascends from grade to grade--from mere mechanical forces acting in movement up to the highest form of animal activity. But as this 'Will' or blind lust of being and instinct of life gets above the inorganic world, and manifests itself in the animal organism, there emerges a new order of existence--the intellect, or the ideal world. Seen from the underside, indeed, all that has appeared now in the animal is a brain and a nerve-system--a new species of matter. But there is another side to the Mind which has thus awakened out of the sleep of natural forces. This intellect is unaware and can never be made aware that it is a child of nature: it acknowledges no superior, and no beginning or end in time. Its natal day is infinitely beyond the age when the cosmic process began its race; before stars gathered their masses of luminosity, and the earth received the first germs of life. As the genius of Art, it arrests the toiling struggle of existence to produce new forms and destroy old ones; it sets free in typical forms of eternal beauty the great ideas that nature vainly seeks to embody, and as moral and religious life its aim is to annihilate the craving and the lust for more and ever more being and to enter in passionless and calm union with the One-and-All.

Thus it is, if not absurd, at least misleading, to speak of Hegel's system as Panlogism. Strictly speaking, it is only of the Logic that this is the proper name: there, unquestionably, reason is all and in all. Yet to hold that reason is the very life and centre of things is for philosophy the cardinal article--the postulate which must inspire her first and last steps and guide her throughout. But the Logical Idea, if put at the beginning, is at first only put as a presupposition, which it is the task of human intelligence to work out and organise. If it be the key which is to explain nature and render it intelligible, it is a key which has only been gained in the process--the long process--by which man has risen from his natural origin--never however parting company with it--to survey and comprehend himself and his setting. The faculty of 'pure thinking,' which is the pre-condition of Logical study, is the result of a gradual development in which animal sense has grown, and metamorphosed, and worked itself up to be a free intelligence and a good will capable of discerning and fulfilling the universal and the eternal. Thus in the Logic the system constructs the pure Idea--the ideal timeless organisation of thoughts or λόγοι on which all knowledge of reality rests--the diamond net which suffers nothing to escape its meshes: in the Philosophy of Nature it tries to put together in unity and continuity the phases and partial aspects which the physical universe presents in graduated exemplification of the central truth: and in the Philosophy of Mind it traces the steps by which a merely natural being becomes the moral and aesthetic idealist in whom man approaches deity.

It is indeed Hegel's fundamental axiom that actuality is reasonable. But the actuality is not the appearance--the temporary phases--the succession of event: it is the appearance rooted in its essence--the succession concentrated (yet not lost) in its unity. There is room for much so-called irrationality within these ranges. For, when human beings pronounce something irrational, they only mean that their practical intelligence would have adopted other methods to arrive at certain conclusions. They judge, in fact, by their limited understandings and not _ex ordine universi._ Hegel's doctrine is after all only another way of stating the maintenance of the fittest; and it is liable to the v same misconception by those who employ their personal aims as the standards of judgment.

So too there is reason--there is the Idea--in Nature. But it is there only for the artist, the religious man, and the philosopher; and they see it respectively by the eye of genius, by the power of faith, by the thought of reason. They see it from the standpoint of the absolute_--sub specie quadam aeternitatis._ It is therefore a recalcitrant matter in which Nature presents the Idea: or, if recalcitrant suggests a positive opposition, let us say rather a realm in which the Idea fails to come out whole and clear, where unity has to be forced upon and read into the facts. Science, says one writer, is an ideal construction: it implies an abstraction from irregularities and inequalities: it smoothes and sublimates the rough and imperfect material into a more rounded and perfect whole. Its object, which it terms a reality, is a non-sensible, imperceptible reality: what one might as well call an ideality, were it not that here again the popular imagination twists the word into a subjective sense to mean the private and personal ideas of the student.

But the obvious individual reality never quite in its obviousness equals the 'golden mediocrity' of the ideal. Its myriad grapes must be crushed to yield the wine of the spirit.

'It's a lifelong toil till our lump be leavened'

--till the ore be transformed into the fine gold. But the gold is there, and in the great laboratory of _natura_ _naturans_ is the principle and agent of its own purification. 'Nature is made better by no mean, but nature makes that mean'--for nature is spirit in disguise.

It is on this side that a certain analogy of Hegel's and Schelling's philosophy of nature with the Romantic school comes out. Nature is felt, as it were, to be spirit-haunted, to give glimpses of a solidarity, a design, a providentiality, which runs counter to that general outward indifference in which part seems to have settled beside part, each utterly indifferent to the other. Romance is the unexpected coincidence, the sudden jumping together of what seemed set worlds apart and utterly alien. It was the sense of this Romance which wove its wild legends of nymph and cobold, of faun and river-god, of imp and fairy, wielding the powers of the elements and guiding the life of even the so-called inanimate world. But it is no less the theme of the fairy tale of science. Even in the austere demonstrations of geometry, and the constructions of mechanics, the un-looked-for slips upon us with gipsy tread. Who has not--in his early studies of mathematics--been fain to marvel at the almost unexpected consilience of property with property in a figure, suddenly placing in almost 'eery' relief the conjunction of what was apparently poles asunder? It is not a mere form of words to speak of beautiful properties of a conic section or a curve. Custom perhaps has blunted our sense for the symmetries of celestial dynamics, but they are none the less admirable, because we are otherwise engrossed. To the first generation of our century the phenomena of chemistry, magnetism and electricity appealed--as they have never since done--with a tangible demonstration of that _appetitus ad invicem,_ that instinct of union Bacon speaks of; and this time in a higher form than in mere mechanism. Polarity--the bifurcation of reality into a pair of opposites which yet sought their complement in each other--eternally dividing only eternally to unite, and thus only to exist--became a process pressed into general service. Lastly, what more admirable than that adaptation of the individual to the environment--and of the environment to the individual--of the organs in him to his total, and of his total to his organs. One in all and All in one: one life in perpetual transformation, animals, plants, and earth and air; one organism, developing in absolute coherence. This was the vision which the genius of Schelling and his contemporaries saw--the same vision which, by accumulation of facts and pictorial history, Darwin and his disciples have impressed in some measure even on the dullest.

But there is a profound difference between the spirit of a Philosophy of Nature and the aggregate of the physical sciences. Each science takes the particular quarry which accident or providence has assigned to it, and does its best to 'put out' every piece of rock it contains. But it seldom goes, unless by constraint, and in these days of specialisation it does so less and less, to examine the neighbouring excavation, and see if there be any connexion between the strata. Even within its own domain it is ashamed to put forward too much parade of system. Its method is often like that of the showman in the travelling menagerie: 'And now, please pass to the next carriage.' It respects the compartmental arrangement into which it finds the world broken up, and often thinks it has deserved well if it has filled the compartment fuller than before, or succeeded in creating a few sub-compartments within the old bounds. Even the so-called mental and moral sciences when they lose their philosophical character tend to imitate these features. Yet in every science there is an outlook and an outlet, for whosoever has the will and the power, to emerge from his narrow domain on the open fields and free prospect into the first fountains and last great ocean of being. Always, and not least in our own day, the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist, the psychologist, the sociologist, and the economist, have made their special field a platform where they might discourse _de omnibus rebus,_ and become for the nonce philosophers and metaphysicians. It would be a silly intolerance and a misconception of the situation to exclaim _Ne sutor ultra crepidam_. In the organic system of things 'each "moment" even independent of the whole is the whole; and to see this is to penetrate to the heart of the thing.' We need hardly go to Hegel to be told that to know one thing thoroughly well is to know all things. The finite, which we inertly rest content with, would, if we were in full sympathy with it, open up its heart and show us the infinite. And yet if the specialist when he rises from his shoe-making, with a heart full of the faith that 'there is nothing like leather,' should proclaim his discovery of it in regions where it was hitherto unsurmised, one may smile incredulous and be no cynic.

Philosophy then keeps open eye and ear--as far as may be no doubt for the finer shades and delicate details--but essentially for the music of humanity and the music of the spheres--for the general purpose and drift of all sciences--from mathematics to sociology--as they help to make clear the life of nature and further the emancipation of man. It will seem occasionally to over-emphasise the continuity of science and to make light of its distinctions: it will seem occasionally more anxious as to the order than as to the contents of the sciences: it will remind the sciences of the hypothetical and formal character of much of their method and some of their principles: and sometimes will treat as unimportant, results on which the mere scholar or dogmatist of science lays great weight. From his habit of dealing with the limitations and mutual implication of principles and conceptions, the philosopher will often be able--and perhaps only too willing--to point out cases where the mere specialist has allowed himself to attribute reality to his abstraction. He will tell the analyst of the astronomical motions that he must not take the distinction of centrifugal and centripetal force, into which mechanics disintegrate the planetary orbit, as if it really meant that the planet was pulled inward by one force and sent on spinning forward by another[8]. And the scientist, proud of his mathematics, will resent and laugh at the philosopher who lets fall a word about the planets moving in grand independence like 'blessed gods.' The philosopher will hint to the chemist that his formulae of composition and decomposition of bodies are, as he uses them, somewhat mythological, picturing water as atom of oxygen locked up with atom of hydrogen; and the chemist will go away muttering something about a fool who does not believe in the well-ascertained chemical truth that water is composed of these two gases. If the philosopher further hints that it is not the highest ideal of a chemical science to be content with enumerating fifty or sixty elements, and detecting their several properties and affinities[9]; that it would be well to find some principle of gradation, some unity or law which brought meaning into meaningless juxtaposition, the mere dogmatist, whose chemistry is his living and who shrinks from disendowment, will scent a propensity towards the heresy which sinks all elements in one. And yet, even among chemists, the instinct for law and unity begins to demand satisfaction.

A still richer store of amazing paradox and perplexing analogies awaits anyone who will turn over the volume in Hegel's _Werke_ (vii. i) and select the plums which lie thick in the lecture-notes. He will find a great deal--and probably more, the less he really knows of any of the subjects under discussion--that he cannot make head or tail of: language where he cannot guess whether it should be taken literally or figuratively. For Hegel seriously insists on the essential unity and identity of all the compartments of the physical universe; he will not keep time and space on one level, matter and motion on another, and senses, suns, plants, passions, all in their proper province. Going far beyond the theory which supposes that all the complex difference of organisation has grown up in endless, endless ages from a primitive indistinctness, so that the gap of time acts as a wall to keep early and late apart, Hegel insists upon their essential unity to-day. And that sounds hard--the herald of anarchy, of the collapse of the ordered polity of the scientific state. It is no doubt probable that Hegel, like other men, made mistakes; that he over-estimated the supposed discoveries of the day: that he indulged in false analogies, and that he was attracted by a daring paradox. All this has nothing to do with his main thesis: which is, that the natural realm is as it stands an a-logical realm where reason has gone beside itself, and yet containing an instrument--man, and that is mind--by which its rationality may be realised and restored. In that point at least he and Schopenhauer are at one.

[Footnote 1: Kant's _Kritik d. r. Vernunft_: Methodenl. Architektonik d. r. Vern.]

[Footnote 2: Schelling's Werke, v. 116.]

[Footnote 3: Ibid. v. 276.]

[Footnote 4: Ibid. iii. 267.]

[Footnote 5: Kant, _Kritik d. r. Vern.,_ Deduction of the Categories, Sect. III.]

[Footnote 6: _Encyclopaedie_, § 250.]

[Footnote 7: _Encycl._ Sect. 244 (_Logic,_ p. 379).]

[Footnote 8: _Encyclop._ §§ 266, 269; cf. the lecture-note as given in _Werke_ vii i. p. 97. A large number of paradoxical analogies from Hegel's _Naturphilosophie_ has been collected by Riehl in his _Philosophisher Criticismus_, ii. 2, 120.]

[Footnote 9: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. 419.]