CHAPTER I.

THE CRISIS IN NATURAL SCIENCE.

During the past twenty years a revolution has been working in physical science. Within the last ten it has come to the surface, and is now rapidly spreading into all departments of mental activity.

Although its centre is to be found in the doctrine of the “Correlation of Forces,” it would be a narrow view that counted only the expounders of this doctrine, numerous as they are; the spirit of this movement inspires a heterogeneous multitude—Carpenter, Grove, Mayer, Faraday, Thompson, Tyndall and Helmholtz; Herbert Spencer, Stuart Mill, Buckle, Draper, Lewes, Lecky, Max Müller, Marsh, Liebig, Darwin and Agassiz; these names, selected at random, are suggested on account of the extensive circulation of their books. Every day the press announces some new name in this field of research.

What is the character of the old which is displaced, and of the new which gets established?

By way of preliminary, it must be remarked that there are observable in modern times three general phases of culture, more or less historic.

The first phase is thoroughly dogmatic: it accepts as of like validity metaphysical abstractions, and empirical observations. It has not arrived at such a degree of clearness as to perceive contradictions between form and content. For the most part, it is characterized by a reverence for external authority. With the revival of learning commences the protest of spirit against this phase. Descartes and Lord Bacon begin the contest, and are followed by the many—Locke, Newton, Leibnitz, Clark, and the rest. All are animated with the spirit of that time—to come to the matter in hand without so much mediation. Thought wishes to rid itself of its fetters; religious sentiment, to get rid of forms. This reaction against the former stage, which has been called by Hegel the metaphysical, finds a kind of climax in the intellectual movement just preceding the French revolution. Thought no longer is contented to say “Cogito, ergo sum,” abstractly, but applies the doctrine in all directions, “I think; in that deed, I am.” “I am a man only in so far as I think. In so far as I think, I am an essence. What I get from others is not mine. What I can comprehend, or dissolve in my reason, that is mine.” It looks around and spies institutions—“clothes of spirit,” as Herr Teufelsdroeck calls them. “What are you doing here, you sniveling priest?” says Voltaire: “you are imposing delusions upon society for your own aggrandizement. _I_ had no part or lot in making the church; _cogito, ergo sum_; I will only have over me what I put there!”

“I see that all these complications of society are artificial,” adds Rousseau; “man has made them; they are not good, and let us tear them down and make anew.” These utterances echo all over France and Europe. “The state is merely a machine by which the few exploiter the many”—“off with crowns!” Thereupon they snatch off the crown of poor Louis, and his head follows with it. “Reason” is enthroned and dethroned. Thirty years of war satiates at length this negative second period, and the third phase begins. Its characteristic is to be constructive, not to accept the heritage of the past with passivity, nor wantonly to destroy, but to realize itself in the world of objectivity—the world of laws and institutions.

The first appearance of the second phase of consciousness is characterized by the grossest inconsistencies. It says in general, (see D’Holbach’s “Système de la Nature”): “The immediate, only, is true; what we know by our senses, alone has reality; all is matter and force.” But in this utterance it is unconscious that matter and force are purely general concepts, and not objects of immediate consciousness. What we see and feel is not matter or force in general, but only some special form. The self-refutation of this phase may be exhibited as follows:

I. “What is known is known through the senses: it is matter and force.”

II. But by the senses, the particular only is perceived, and this can never be _matter_, but merely a _form_. The general is a mediated result, and not an object of the senses.

III. Hence, in positing matter and force as the content of sensuous knowing, they unwittingly assert mediation to be the content of immediateness.

The decline of this period of science results from the perception of the contradiction involved. Kant was the first to show this; his labors in this field may be summed up thus:

The universal and necessary is not an empirical result. (General laws cannot be sensuously perceived.) The constitution of the mind itself, furnishes the ground for it:—first, we have an _a priori_ basis (time and space) necessarily presupposed as the condition of all sensuous perception; and then we have categories presupposed as the basis of every generalization whatever. Utter any general proposition: for example the one above quoted—“all is matter and force”—and you merely posit two categories—Inherence and Causality—as objectively valid. In all universal and necessary propositions we announce only the subjective conditions of experience, and not anything in and for itself true (i. e. applicable to things in themselves).

At once the popular side of this doctrine began to take effect. “We know only phenomena; the true object in itself we do not know.”

This doctrine of phenomenal knowing was outgrown in Germany at the commencement of the present century. In 1791—ten years after the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason—the deep spirit of Fichte began to generalize Kant’s labors, and soon he announced the legitimate results of the doctrine. Schelling and Hegel completed the work of transforming what Kant had left in a negative state, into an affirmative system of truth. The following is an outline of the refutation of Kantian scepticism:

I. Kant reduces all objective knowledge to phenomenal: we furnish the form of knowing, and hence whatever we announce in general concerning it—and all that we call science has, of course, the form of generality—is merely our subjective forms, and does not belong to the thing in itself.

II. This granted, say the later philosophers, it follows that the subjective swallows up all and becomes itself the universal (subject and object of itself), and hence Reason is the true substance of the universe. Spinoza’s _substance_ is thus seen to become _subject_. We partake of God as intellectually seeing, and we see only God as object, which Malebranche and Berkeley held with other Platonists.

1. The categories (e. g. Unity, Reality, Causality, Existence, etc.) being merely subjective, or given by the constitution of the mind itself—for such universals are presupposed by all experience, and hence not derived from it—it follows:

2. If we abstract what we know to be subjective, that we abstract all possibility of a thing in itself, too. For “existence” is a category, and hence if subjective, we may reasonably conclude that nothing objective can have existence.

3. Hence, since one category has no preference over another, and we cannot give one of them objectivity without granting it to all others, it follows that there can be no talk of _noumena_, or of things in themselves, _existing_ beyond the reach of the mind, for such talk merely applies what it pronounces to be subjective categories, (existence) while at the same time it denies the validity of their application.

III. But since we remove the supposed “_noumena_,” the so-called phenomena are not opposed any longer to a correlate beyond the intelligence, and the _noumenon_ proves to be _mind itself_.

An obvious corollary from this is, that by the self-determination of mind in pure thinking we shall find the fundamental laws of all phenomena.

Though the Kantian doctrine soon gave place in Germany to deeper insights, it found its way slowly to other countries. Comte and Sir Wm. Hamilton have made the negative results very widely known—the former, in natural science; the latter, in literature and philosophy. Most of the writers named at the beginning are more or less imbued with Comte’s doctrines, while a few follow Hamilton. For rhetorical purposes, the Hamiltonian statement is far superior to all others; for practical purposes, the Comtian. The physicist wishing to give his undivided attention to empirical observation, desires an excuse for neglecting pure thinking; he therefore refers to the well-known result of philosophy, that we cannot know anything of ultimate causes—we are limited to phenomena and laws. Although it must be conceded that this consolation is somewhat similar to that of the ostrich, who cunningly conceals his head in the sand when annoyed by the hunters, yet great benefit has thereby accrued to science through the undivided zeal of the investigators thus consoled.

When, however, a sufficiently large collection has been made, and the laws are sought for in the chaotic mass of observations, then _thought_ must be had. Thought is the only crucible capable of dissolving “the many into the one.” Tycho Brahe served a good purpose in collecting observations, but a Kepler was required to discern the celestial harmony involved therein.

This discovery of laws and relations, or of relative unities, proceeds to the final stage of science, which is that of the _absolute comprehension_.

Thus modern science, commencing with the close of the metaphysical epoch, has three stages or phases:

I. The first rests on mere isolated facts of experience; accepts the first phase of things, or that which comes directly before it, and hence may be termed the stage of _immediateness_.

II. The second relates its thoughts to one another and compares them; it developes inequalities; tests one through another, and discovers dependencies everywhere; since it learns that the first phase of objects is phenomenal, and depends upon somewhat lying beyond it; since it denies truth to the immediate, it may be termed the stage of _mediation_.

III. A final stage which considers a phenomenon in its totality, and thus seizes it in its _noumenon_, and is the stage of the _comprehension_.

To resume: the _first_ is that of sensuous knowing; the _second_, that of reflection (the understanding); the _third_, that of the reason (or the speculative stage).

In the sensuous knowing, we have crude, undigested masses all co-ordinated; each is in and for itself, and perfectly valid without the others. But as soon as reflection enters, dissolution is at work. Each is thought in sharp contrast with the rest; contradictions arise on every hand. The third stage finds its way out of these quarrelsome abstractions, and arrives at a synthetic unity, at a system, wherein the antagonisms are seen to form an organism.

The first stage of the development closes with attempts on all hands to put the results in an encyclopædiacal form. Humboldt’s Cosmos is a good example of this tendency, manifested so widely. Matter, masses, and _functions_ are the subjects of investigation.

Reflection investigates _functions_ and seizes the abstract category of force, and straightway we are in the second stage. Matter, as such, loses its interest, and “correlation of forces” absorbs all attention.

Force is an arrogant category and will not be co-ordinated with matter; if admitted, we are led to a pure dynamism. This will become evident as follows:

I. Force implies confinement (to give it direction); it demands, likewise, an “occasion,” or soliciting force to call it into activity.

II. But it cannot be confined except by force; its occasion must be a force likewise.

III. Thus, since its confinement and “occasion” are forces, force can only act upon forces—upon matter only in so far as that is a force. Its nature requires confinement in order to manifest it, and hence it cannot act or exist except in unity with other forces which likewise have the same dependence upon it that it has upon them. _Hence a force has no independent subsistence, but is only an element of a combination of opposed forces_, which combination is a unity existing in an opposed manner (or composed of forces in a state of tension). This deeper unity which we come upon as the ground of force is properly named _law_.

From this, two corollaries are to be drawn: (1.) That matter is merely a name for various forces, as resistance, attraction and repulsion, etc. (2.) That force is no ultimate category, but, upon reflection, is seen to rest upon law as a deeper category (not law as a mere similarity of phenomena, but as a true unity underlying phenomenal multiplicity).

From the nature of the category of force we see that whoever adopts it as the ultimate, embarks on an ocean of dualism, and instead of “seeing everywhere the one and all” as did Xenophanes, he will see everywhere the self opposed, the contradictory.

The crisis which science has now reached is of this nature. The second stage is at its commencement with the great bulk of scientific men.

To illustrate the self-nugatory character ascribed to this stage we shall adduce some of the most prominent positions of Herbert Spencer, whom we regard as the ablest exponent of this movement. These contradictions are not to be deprecated, as though they indicated a decline of thought; on the contrary, they show an increased activity, (though in the stage of mere reflection,) and give us good omens for the future. The era of stupid mechanical thinkers is over, and we have entered upon the active, _chemical_ stage of thought, wherein the thinker is trained to consciousness concerning his abstract categories, which, as Hegel says, “drive him around in their whirling circle.”

Now that the body of scientific men are turned in this direction, we behold a vast upheaval towards philosophic thought; and this is entirely unlike the isolated phenomenon (hitherto observed in history) of a single group of men lifted above the surrounding darkness of their age into clearness. We do not have such a phenomenon in our time; it is the spirit of the nineteenth century to move by masses.