DAVID HUME.—David Hume, a Scotsman, better known, at least in his own times, as the historian of England than as a philosopher, nevertheless well merits consideration in the latter category. David Hume believes in nothing, and, in consequence, it may be said that he is not a philosopher; he has no philosophic system. He has no philosophic system, it is true; but he is a critic of philosophy, and therefore he philosophizes. Matter has no existence; as we know nothing about it, we should not say it exists. But we ourselves, we exist. All that we can know about that is that in us there is a succession of ideas, of representations; but we, but I, what is that? Of that we know nothing. We are present at a series of pictures, and we may call their totality the ego; but we do not grasp ourselves as a thing of unity, as an individual. We are the spectators of an inward dramatic piece behind which we can see no author. There is no more reason to believe in oneself than in the external world.

INNATE IDEAS.—As for innate ideas, they are simply general ideas, which are general delusions. We believe, for instance, that every effect has a cause, or, to express it more correctly, that everything has a cause. What do we know about it? What do we see? That one thing follows another, succeeds to another. What tells us that the latter proceeds from the former, that the thing B must necessarily come, owing to the thing A existing? We believe it because every time the thing A has been, the thing B has come. Well, let us say that every time A has been (thus far) B has come; and say no more. There are regular successions, but we are completely ignorant whether there are causes for them.

THE LIBERTY AND MORALITY OF HUME.—It results from this that for Hume there is no liberty. Very obviously; for when we believe ourselves free, it is because we believe we can fix upon ourselves as a cause. Now the word "cause" means nothing. We are a succession of phenomena very absolutely determined. The proof is that we foresee and nearly always accurately (and we could always foresee accurately if we completely knew the character of the persons and the influences acting on them) what people we know will do, which would be impossible if they did as they wished. And I, at the very moment when I am absolutely sure I am doing such and such a thing because I desired to, I see my friend smile as he says: "I was sure you would do that. See, I wrote it down on this piece of paper." He understood me as a necessity, when I felt myself to be free. And he, reciprocally, will believe himself free in doing a thing I would have wagered to a certainty that he would not fail to do.

What system of morality can Hume have with these principles? First of all, he protests against those who should deduce from his principles the immorality of his system. Take care, said he wittily (just like Spinoza, by the way), it is the partisans of free-will who are immoral. No doubt! It is when there is liberty that there is no responsibility. I am not responsible for my actions if they have no connection in me with anything durable or constant. I have committed murder. Truly it is by chance, if it was by an entirely isolated determination, entirely detached from the rest of my character, and momentary; and I am only infinitesimally responsible. But if all my actions are linked together, are conditional upon one another, dependent on one another, if I have committed murder it is because I am an assassin at every moment of my life or nearly so, and then, oh! how responsible I am!

Note that this is the line taken up by judges, since they make careful investigation of the antecedents of the accused. They find him all the more culpable if he has always shown bad instincts.—Therefore they find him the more responsible, the more he has been compelled by necessity.—Yes.

Hume then does not believe himself "foreclosed" in morality; he does not believe he is forbidden by his principles to have a system of morality and he has one. It is a morality of sentiment. We have in us the instinct of happiness and we seek happiness; but we have also in us an instinct of goodwill which tends to make us seek the general happiness, and reason tells us that there is conciliation or rather concordance between these two instincts, because it is only in the general happiness that we find our particular happiness.

THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL: REID; STEWART.—The Scottish School (end of the eighteenth century) was pre-eminently a school of men who attached themselves to common sense and were excellent moralists. We must at any rate mention Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. They were bent especially on opposing the transcendent idealism of Berkeley and the scepticism of David Hume, also in some measure Locke's doctrine of the blank sheet. They reconstituted the human mind and even the world (which had been so to speak driven off in vapour by their predecessors), much as they were in the time of Descartes. Let us believe, they said, in the reality of the external world; let us believe that there are causes and effects; let us believe there is an ego, a human person whom we directly apprehend, and who is a cause; let us believe that we are free and that we are responsible because we are free, etc. They were, pre-eminently, excellent describers of states of the soul, admirable psychological moralists and they were the ancestors of the highly remarkable pleiad of English psychologists of the nineteenth century.



CHAPTER V

FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Voltaire a Disciple of Locke.

Rousseau a Freethinking Christian, but deeply Imbued with Religious Sentiments.

Diderot a Capricious Materialist.

D'Holbach and Helvetius Avowed Materialists.

Condillac a Philosopher of Sensations.

VOLTAIRE; ROUSSEAU.—The French philosophy of the eighteenth century, fairly feeble it must be avowed, seemed as if dominated by the English philosophy, excepting Berkeley, but especially by Locke and David Hume, more particularly Locke, who was the intellectual deity of those Frenchmen of that epoch who were interested in philosophy.

Whenever Voltaire dealt with philosophy, he was only the echo of Locke whose depths he failed to fathom, and to whom he has done some injury, for reading Locke only through Voltaire has led to the belief that Locke was superficial.

Rousseau was both the disciple and adversary of Hobbes, as often occurs, and dealt out to the public the doctrines of Hobbes in an inverted form, making the state of nature angelic instead of infernal, and putting the government of all by all in the place of government by one, invariably reaching the same point with a simple difference of form; for if Hobbes argued for despotism exercised by one over all, Rousseau argued for the despotism of all over each. In Emile, he was incontestably inspired by the ideas of Locke on education in some degree, but in my opinion less than has been asserted. On nearly all sides it has been asserted that Rousseau exercised great influence over Kant. I know that Kant felt infinite admiration for Rousseau, but of the influence of Rousseau upon Kant I have never been able to discover a trace.

DIDEROT; HELVETIUS; D'HOLBACH.—It was particularly on David Hume that Diderot depended. The difference, which is great, is that David Hume in his scepticism remained a grave, reserved man, well-bred and discreet, and was only a sceptic, whilst Diderot was violent in denial and a man of paradoxes and jests, both impertinent and cynical.

It is almost ridiculous in a summary history of philosophy to name as sub-Diderots, if one may so express it, Helvetius and D'Holbach, who were merely wits believing themselves philosophers, and who were not always wits.

CONDILLAC.—Condillac belongs to another category. He was a very serious philosopher and a vigorous thinker. An exaggerated disciple of Locke, while the latter admitted sensation and reflection as the origin of ideas, Condillac admitted only pure sensation and transformed sensation—that is to say, sensation transforming itself. The definition of man that he deduces from these principles is very celebrated and it is interesting: "The ego of each man is only the collection of the sensations that he feels and of those his memory recalls; it is the consciousness of what he is combined with the recollection of what he has been." To Condillac, the idea is a sensation which has fixed itself and which has been renewed and vivified by others; desire is a sensation which wishes to be repeated and seeks what opportunity offers for its renewal, and the will itself is only the most potent of desires. Condillac was voluntarily and systematically limited, but his system is well knit and presented in admirably clear and precise language.



CHAPTER VI

KANT

Kant Reconstructed all Philosophy by Supporting it on Morality.

KNOWLEDGE.—Kant, born at Koenigsberg in 1724, was professor there all his life and died there in 1804. Nothing happened to him except the possession of genius. He had commenced with the theological philosophy in use in his country, that of Wolf, which on broad lines was that of Leibnitz. But he early read David Hume, and the train of thought of the sceptical Scotsman at least gave him the idea of submitting all philosophic ideas to a severe and close criticism.

He first of all asked himself what the true value is of our knowledge and what knowledge is. We believe generally that it is the things which give us the knowledge that we have of them. But, rather, is it not we who impose on things the forms of our mind and is not the knowledge that we believe we have of things only the knowledge which we take of the laws of our mind by applying it to things? This is what is most probable. We perceive the things by moulds, so to speak, which are in ourselves and which give them their shapes and they would be shapeless and chaotic were it otherwise. Consequently, it is necessary to distinguish the matter and the form of our knowledge: the matter of the knowledge is the things themselves. The form of our knowledge is ourselves: "Our experimental knowledge is a compound of what we receive from impressions and of what our individual faculty of knowing draws from itself on the occasion of these impressions."

SENSIBILITY; UNDERSTANDING; REASON.—Those who believe that all we think proceeds from the senses are therefore wrong; so too are those wrong who believe that all we think proceeds from ourselves. To say, Matter is an appearance, and to say, Ideas are appearances, are equally false doctrines. Now we know by sensibility, by understanding, and by reason. By sensibility we receive the impression of phenomena; by the understanding we impose on these impressions their forms, and link them up together; by reason we give ourselves general ideas of things—universal ones, going beyond or believing they go beyond the data, even when linked up and systematized.

Let us analyse sensibility, understanding, and reason. Sensibility already has the forms it imposes on things. These forms are time and space. Time and space are not given us by matter like colour, smell, taste, or sound; they are not perceived by the senses; they are therefore the forms of our sensibility: we can feel only according to time and space, by lodging what we feel in space and time; these are the conditions of sensibility. Phenomena are thus perceived by us under the laws of space and of time. What do they become in us? They are seized by the understanding, which also has its forms, its powers of classification, of arrangement, and of connection. Its forms or powers, or, putting it more exactly, its active forms are, for example, the conception of quantity being always equal: through all phenomena the quantity of substance remains always the same; the conception of causality: everything has a cause and every cause has an effect and it is ever thus. Those are the conditions of our understanding, those without which we do not understand and the forms which within us we impose on all things in order to understand them.

It is thus that we know the world; which is tantamount to stating that the world exists, so far as we are concerned, only so long as we think so. Reason would go further: it would seize the most general, the universal, beyond experience, beyond the limited and restricted systematizations established by the understanding; to know, for instance, the first cause of all causes, the last and collective end, so to speak, of all purposes; to know "why is there something?" and "in view of what end is there something?" in fact, to answer all the questions of infinity and eternity. Be sure that it cannot. How could it? It only operates, can only operate, on the data of experience and the systematizations of the understanding, which classify experience but do not go beyond it. Only operating upon that, having nothing except that as matter, how could it itself go beyond experience? It cannot. It is only (a highly important fact, and one which must on no account be forgotten)—it is only a sign, merely a witness. It is the sign that the human spirit has need of the absolute; it is itself that need; without that it would not exist; it is the witness of our invincible insistence on knowing and of our tendency to estimate that we know nothing if we only know something; it is itself that insistence and that tendency: without that it would not exist. Let us pause there for the moment. Man knows of nature only those impressions which he receives from it, co-ordinated by the forms of sensibility, and further the ideas of it which he preserves co-ordinated by the forms of his understanding. This is very little. It is all, if we consider only pure reason.

PRACTICAL REASON.—But there is perhaps another reason, or another aspect of reason—to wit, practical reason. What is practical reason? Something in us tells us: you should act, and you should act in such a way; you should act rightly; this is not right, so do not do it; that is right, do it. As a fact this is uncontestable. What is the explanation? From what data of experience, from what systematization of the understanding has our mind borrowed this? Where has it got it? Does nature yield obedience to a "you ought"? Not at all. It exists, and it develops and it goes its way, according to our way of seeing it in time and space, and that is all. Does the understanding furnish the idea of "you ought"? By no means; it gives us ideas of quantity, of quality, of cause and effect, etc., and that is all; there is no "you ought" in all that. Therefore this "you ought" is purely human; it is the only principle which comes exactly from ourselves only. It might therefore well be the very foundation of us.—It may be an illusion.—No doubt, but it is highly remarkable that it exists, though nothing gives it birth or is of a nature to give it birth. An illusion is a weakness of the senses or an error of logic and is thus explained; but an illusion in itself and by itself and only proceeding from itself is most singular and not to be explained as an illusion. Hence it remains that it is a reality, a reality of our nature, and given the coercive force of its voice and act, it is the most real reality there is in us.

THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE.—Thus, at least, thought Kant, and he said: There is a practical reason which does not go beyond experience and does not seek to go beyond it; but which does not depend on it, is absolutely separated from it, and is its own (human) experience by itself. This practical reason says to us: you ought to do good. The crowd call it conscience; I call it in a general way practical reason, and I call it the categorical imperative when I take it in its principle, without taking into account the applications which I foresee. Why this name? To distinguish it clearly; for we feel ourselves commanded by other things than it, but not in the same way. We feel ourselves commanded by prudence, for instance, which tells us: do not run down that staircase if you do not wish to break your neck; we feel ourselves commanded by the conventions which say: be polite if you do not wish men to leave you severely alone, etc. But conscience does not say if to us: it says bluntly "you ought" without consideration of what may or may not happen, and it is even part of its character to scorn all consideration of consequences. It would tell us: run down that staircase to save that child even at the risk of breaking your neck. Because of that I call all the other commandments made to us hypothetical imperatives and that of conscience, alone, the categorical or absolute imperative. Here is a definite result.

MORALITY, THE LAW OF MAN.—Yet reflect: if the foregoing be true, morality is the very law of man, his especial law, as the law of the tree is to spread in roots and branches. Well. But for man to be able to obey his law he must be free, must be able to do what he wishes. That is certain. Then it must be believed that we are free, for were we not, we could not obey our law; and the moral law would be absurd. The moral law is the sign that we are free. Compared to this, all the other proofs of freedom are worthless or weak. We are free because we must be so in order to do the good which our law commands us to do.

Let us examine further. I do what is right in order to obey the law; but, when I have done it, I have the idea that it would be unjust that I should be punished for it, or that I should not be rewarded for it, that it would be unjust were there not concordance between right and happiness. As it happens, virtue is seldom rewarded in this world and often is even punished; it draws misfortune or evil on him who practises it. Would not that be the sign that there are two worlds of which we see only one? Would not that be the sign that virtue unrewarded here will be rewarded elsewhere in order that there should not be injustice? It is highly probable that this is so.

But for that it is necessary that the soul be immortal. It is so, since it is necessary that it should be. The moral law is accomplished and consummated in rewards or penalties beyond the grave, which pre-suppose the immortality of the soul. All the other proofs of the immortality of the soul are worthless or feeble beside this one which demonstrates that were there no immortality of the soul there would be no morality.

GOD.—And, finally, if justice is one day to be done, this supposes a Judge. It is neither ourselves who in another life will do justice to ourselves nor yet some force of circumstances which will do it to us. It is necessary to have an intelligence conceiving justice and a will to realise it. God is this intelligence and this will.

All the other proofs of God are weak or worthless beside this one. The existence of God has been deduced from the idea of God: if we have the idea of God, it is necessary that He should exist. A weak proof, for we can have an idea which does not correspond with an object. The existence of God has been deduced from the idea of causality; for all that is, a cause is necessary, this cause is God. A weak proof, for things being as they are, there is necessity for ... cause; but a cause and a single cause, why? There could be a series of causes to infinity and thus the cause of the world could be the world itself. The existence of God has been deduced from the idea of design well carried out. The composition, the ordering of this world is admired; this world is well made; it is like a clock. The clock supposes a clock-maker; the fine composition of the world supposes an intelligence which conceived a work to be made and which made it. Perhaps; but this consideration only leads to the idea of a manipulation of matter, of a demiurge, as the Greeks said, of an architect, but not to the idea of a Creator; it may even lead only to the idea of several architects and the Greeks perfectly possessed the idea of a fine artistic order existing in the world when they believed in a great number of deities. This proof also is therefore weak, although Kant always treats it with respect.

The sole convincing proof is the existence of the moral law in the heart of man. For the moral law to be accomplished, for it not to be merely a tyrant over man, for it to be realised in all its fullness, weighing on man here but rewarding him infinitely elsewhere, which means there is justice in all that, it is necessary that somewhere there should be an absolute realizer of justice. God must exist for the world to be moral.

Why is it necessary for the world to be moral? Because an immoral world with even a single moral being in it would be a very strange thing.

Thus, whilst the majority of philosophers deduced human liberty from God, and the spirituality of the soul from human liberty, the immortality of the soul from human spirituality, and morality from human immortality, Kant starts from morality as from the incontestable fact, and from morality deduces liberty, and from liberty spirituality, and God from the immortality of the soul with the consequent realization of justice.

He has effected an extraordinarily powerful reversal of the argument generally employed.

THE INFLUENCE OF KANT.—The influence of Kant has been incomparable or, if you will, comparable only to those of Plato, Zeno, and Epicurus. Half at least of the European philosophy of the nineteenth century has proceeded from him and is closely connected with him. Even in our own day, pragmatism, as it is called—that is, the doctrine which lays down that morality is the measure of truth and that an idea is true only if it be morally useful—is perhaps an alteration of Kantism, a Kantian heresy, but entirely penetrated with and, as it were, excited by the spirit of Kant.



CHAPTER VII

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: GERMANY

The great reconstructors of the world, analogous to the first philosophers of antiquity.

Great general systems: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc.

FICHTE.—Fichte, embarrassed by what remained of experience in the ideas of Kant, by the part, restricted though it was, which Kant left to things in the external world, completely suppressed the external world, like Berkeley, and affirmed the existence of the human ego alone. Kant said that the world furnished us with the matter of the idea and that we furnished the form. According to Fichte, form and matter alike came from us. What then is sensation? It is nothing except the pause of the ego encountering what is not self, the impact of the ego against what limits it.—But then the external world does exist, for how could our mind be encountered by nothing and there be an impact of our mind against nothing?—But this non-self that encounters self is precisely a product of self, a product of the imagination which creates an object, which projects outside us an appearance before which we pause as before something real which should be outside us.

This theory is very difficult to understand, but indicates a very fine effort of the mind.

Yet outside ourselves is there anything? There is pure spirit, God. What is God? For Fichte He is moral order (a very evident recollection of Kant). Morality is God and God is morality. We are in God, and it is the whole of religion, when we do our duty without any regard to the consequences of our actions; we are outside God, and it is atheism, when we act in view of what results our actions may have. And thus morality and religion run into one another, and religion is only morality in its plenitude and complete morality is the whole of religion. "The holy, the beautiful, and the good are the immediate apparition [if it could be] in us of the essence of God."

SCHELLING.—Schelling desired to correct what, according to him, was too radical in the idealism of Fichte. He restored the external world; for him the non-ego and the ego both exist and the two are nature, nature which is the object in the world regarded by man, the subject when it regards man, subject and object according to the case; in itself and in its totality neither subject nor object, but absolute, unlimited, indeterminate. Confronting this world (that is nature and man) there is another world which is God. God is the infinite and the perfect, and particularly the perfect and infinite will. The world that we know is a debasement from that without our being able to conceive how the perfect can be degraded, and how an emanation of the perfect can be imperfect and how the non-being can come out of being, since relatively to the infinite, the finite has no existence, and relatively to perfection, the imperfect is nothing.

It appears however that it is thus, and that the world is an emanation of God in which He degrades Himself and a degradation of God such that it opposes itself to Him as nothing to everything. It is a fall. The fall of man in the Scriptures may give an idea, however distant, of that.

HEGEL.—Hegel, a contemporary of Schelling, and often in contradiction to him, is the philosopher of "becoming" and of the idea which always "becomes" something. The essence of all is the idea, but the idea in progress; the idea makes itself a thing according to a rational law which is inherent in it, and the thing makes itself an idea in the sense that the idea contemplating the thing it has become thinks it and fills itself with it in order to become yet another thing, always following the rational law; and this very evolution, all this evolution, all this becoming, is that absolute for which we are always searching behind things, at the root of things, and which is in the things themselves.

The rationally active is everything; and activity and reality are synonyms, and all reality is active, and what is not active is not real, and what is not active has no existence.

Let not this activity be regarded as always advancing forward; the becoming is not a river which flows; activity is activity and retro-activity. The cause is cause of the effect, but also the effect is cause of its cause. In fact the cause would not be cause if it had no effect; it is therefore, thanks to its effect, because of its effect, that the cause is cause; and therefore the effect is the cause of the cause as much as the cause is cause of the effect.

A government is the effect of the character of a people, and the character of a people is the effect also of its government; my son proceeds from me, but he reacts on me, and because I am his father I have the character which I gave him, more pronounced than before, etc.

Hence, all effect is cause as all cause is effect, which everybody has recognized, but in addition all effect is cause of its cause and in consequence, to speak in common language, all effect is cause forward and backward, and the line of causes and effects is not a straight line but a circle.

THE DEISM OF HEGEL.—God disappears from all that. No, Hegel is very formally a deist, but he sees God in the total of things and not outside things, yet distinct. In what way distinct? In this, that God is the totality of things considered not in themselves but in the spirit that animates them and the force that urges them, and because the soul is of necessity in the body, united to the body, that is no reason why it should not be distinct from it. And having taken up this position, Hegel is a deist and even accepts proofs of the existence of God which are regarded by some as hackneyed. He accepts them, only holding them not exactly as proofs, but as reasons for belief, and as highly faithful descriptions of the necessary elevation of the soul to God. For example, the ancient philosophers proved the existence of God by the contemplation of the marvels of the universe: "That is not a 'proof,'" said Hegel, "that is not a proof, but it is a great reason for belief; for it is an exposition, a very exact although incomplete account rendered of the fact that by contemplation of the world the human mind rises to God." Now this fact is of singular importance: it indicates that it is impossible to think strongly without thinking of God. "When the passage [although insufficiently logical] from the finite to the infinite does not take place, it may be said that there is no thought." Now this is a reason for belief.'

After the same fashion, the philosophers have said "from the moment that we imagine God, the reason is that He is." Kant ridiculed this proof. Granted, it is not an invincible proof, but this fact alone that we cannot imagine God without affirming His existence indicates a tendency of our mind which is to relate finite thought to infinite thought and not to admit an imperfect thought which should not have its source in a perfect thought; and that is rather an invincible belief than a proof, but that this belief is invincible and necessary in itself is an extremely commanding proof, although a relative one.

HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.—The philosophy of the human mind and political philosophy according to Hegel are these. Primitive man is mind, reason, conscience, but he is so only potentially, as the philosophers express it; that is to say, he is so only in that he is capable of becoming so. Really, practically, he is only instincts: he is egoist like the animals [it should be said like the greater part of the animals], and follows his egoistical appetites. Society, in whatever manner it has managed to constitute itself, transforms him and his "becoming" commences. From the sexual instinct it makes marriage, from capture it forms regulated proprietorship, out of defence against violence it makes legal punishment, etc. Hence-forth, and all his evolution tends to that, man proceeds to substitute in himself the general will for the particular will; he tends to disindividualize himself. The general will, founded upon general utility, is that the man be married, father, head of a family, good husband, good father, good relative, good citizen. All that man ought to be in consideration of the general will which he has put in the place of his own, and which he has made his own will. That is the first advance.

It is realized (always imperfectly) in the smallest societies, in the cities, in the little Greek republics, for example.

Here is the second advance. By war, by conquest, by annexations, by more gentle means when possible, the stronger cities subdue the weaker, and the great State is created. The great State has a more important part than the city; it continues to substitute the general will for the particular wills; but, in addition, it is an idea, a great civilizing idea, benevolent, elevating, aggrandizing, to which private interests must and should be sacrificed. Such were the Romans who considered themselves, not without reason, as the legislators and civilizers of the world.

THE IDEAL FORM OF STATE.—Putting aside for a while the continuation of this subject, what political form should the great State take to conform to its destiny? Assuredly the monarchical form; for the republican form is always too individualist. To Hegel, the Greeks and even the Romans seem to have conceded too much to individual liberty or to the interests of class, of caste; they possessed an imperfect idea of the rights and functions of the State. The ideal form of the State is monarchy. It is necessary for the State to be contracted, gathered up, and personified in a prince who can be personally loved, who can be reverenced, which is precisely what is needed. These great States are only really great if they possess strong cohesion; it is therefore necessary that they should be nationalities, as it is called—that is, that they should be inwardly very united and highly homogeneous by community of race, religion, customs, language, etc. The idea to be realized by a State can only be accomplished if there be a sufficient community of ideas in the people constituting it. However the great State will be able to, and even ought to, conquer and annex the small ones in order to become stronger and more capable, being stronger, of realizing its idea. Only this should be done merely when it is certain or clearly apparent that it represents an idea as against a people which does not, or that it presents a better, greater, and nobler idea than that represented by the people it attacks.

WAR.—But, as each people will always find its own idea finer than that of another, how is this to be recognized?—By victory itself. It is victory which proves that a people ... was stronger than another!—Not only stronger materially but representing a greater, more practical, more fruitful idea than the other; for it is precisely the idea which supports a people and renders it strong. Thus, victory is the sign of the moral superiority of a people, and in consequence force indicates where right is and is indistinguishable from right itself, and we must not say as may already perhaps have been said: "Might excels right," but "Might is right" or "Right is might."

For example [Hegel might have said], France was "apparently" within her rights in endeavouring to conquer Europe from 1792 to 1815; for she represented an idea, the revolutionary idea, which she might consider, and which many besides the French did consider, an advance and a civilizing idea; but she was beaten, which proves that the idea was false; and before this demonstration by events is it not true that the republican or Caesarian idea is inferior to that of traditional monarchy? Hegel would certainly have reasoned thus on this point.

Therefore war is eternal and must be so. It is history itself, being the condition of history; it is even the evolution of humanity, being the condition of that evolution; there-fore, it is divine. Only it is purifying itself; formerly men only fought, or practically always, from ambition; now wars are waged for principles, to effect the triumph of an idea which has a future, and which contains the future, over one that is out of date and decayed. The future will see a succession of the triumphs of might which, by definition, will be triumphs of right and which will be triumphs of increasingly fine ideas over ideas that are barbarous and justly condemned to perish.

Hegel has exercised great influence on the ideas of the German people both in internal and external politics.

ART, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION.—The ideas of Hegel on art, science, and religion are the following: Under the shelter of the State which is necessary for their peaceful development in security and liberty, science, literature, art, and religion pursue aims not superior to but other than those of the State. They seek, without detaching the individual from the society, to unite him to the whole world. Science makes him know all it can of nature and its laws; literature, by studying man in himself and in his relations with the world, imbues him with the sentiment of the possible concordance of the individual with the universe; the arts make him love creation by unravelling and bringing into the light and into relief all that is beautiful in it relatively to man, and all that in consequence should render it lovely, respected, and dear to him; religion, finally, seeks to be a bond between all men and a bond between all men and God; it sketches the plan of universal brotherhood which is ideally the last state of humanity, a state which no doubt it will never attain, but which it is essential it should imagine and believe to be possible, without which it always would be drawn towards animality more and much more than it is.

The Hegelian philosophy has exercised an immense influence throughout Europe not only on philosophic studies, but on history, art, and literature. It may be regarded as the last "universal system" and as the most daring that has been attempted by the human mind.

SCHOPENHAUER.—Schopenhauer was the philosopher of the will. Persuaded, like Leibnitz, that man is an epitome and a picture of the world, and that the world resembles us (which is hypothetical), he takes up the thought of Leibnitz, changing and transforming it thus: All the universe is not thought, but all the universe is will; thought is only an accident of the will which appears in the superior animals; but the will, which is the foundation of man, is the foundation of all; the universe is a compound of wills that act. All beings are wills which possess organs conformed to their purpose. It is the will to be which gave claws to the lion, tusks to the boar, and intelligence to man, because he was the most unarmed of animals, just as to one who becomes blind it gives extraordinarily sensitive and powerful sense of hearing, smell, and touch. Plants strive towards light by their tops and towards moisture by their roots; the seed turns itself in the earth to send forth its stalk upwards and its rootlet downward. In minerals there are "constant tendencies" which are nothing but obscure wills; what we currently term weight, fluidity, impenetrability, electricity, chemical affinities, are nothing but natural wills or inconscient wills. Because of this, the diverse wills opposing and clashing with one another, the world is a war of all against all and of everything literally against everything; and the world is a scene of carnage.

The truth is that will is an evil and is the evil. What is needed for happiness is to kill the will, to destroy the wish to be.—But this would be the end of existence?—And in fact to be no more or not to be at all is the true happiness and it would be necessary to blow up the whole world in an explosion for it to escape unhappiness. At least, as Buddhism desired and, in some degree, though less, Christianity also, it is necessary to make an approach to death by a kind of reduction to the absolute minimum of will, by detachment and renunciation pushed as far as can be.

NIETZSCHE.—A very respectful but highly independent and untractable pupil of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche "turns Schopenhauer inside out" as it were, saying: Yes, assuredly the will to be is everything; but precisely because of that it is essential not to oppose but to follow it and to follow it as far as it will lead us. But is it not true that it will lead to suffering? Be sure of that, but in suffering there is an intoxication of pain which is quite comprehensible; for it is the intoxication of the will in action; and this intoxication is an enjoyment too and in any case a good thing; for it is the end to which we are urged by our nature composed of will and of hunger for existence. Now wisdom, like happiness, is to follow our nature. The happiness and wisdom of man is to obey his will for power, as the wisdom and happiness of water is to flow towards the sea.

From these ideas is derived a morality of violence which can be legitimately regarded as immoral and which, in any case, is neither Buddhist nor Christian, but which is susceptible of several interpretations, all the more so because Nietzsche, who was a poet, never fails, whilst always artistically very fine, to fall into plenty of contradictions.



CHAPTER VIII

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: ENGLAND

The Doctrines of Evolution and of Transformism: Lamarck (French), Darwin, Spencer.

TRANSFORMISM AND EVOLUTION.—The great philosophic invention of the English of the nineteenth century has been the idea, based on a wide knowledge of natural history, that there never was creation. The animal species had been considered by all the philosophers (except Epicurus and the Epicureans) as being created once and for all and remaining invariable. Nothing of the kind. Matter, eternally fruitful, has transformed itself first into plants, then into lower animals, then into higher animals, then into man; our ancestor is the fish; tracing back yet more remotely, our ancestor is the plant. Transformation (hence the name transformism), discrimination and separation of species, the strongest individuals of each kind alone surviving and creating descendants in their image which constitute a species; evolution (hence the name evolutionism) of living nature thus operating from the lowest types to the highest and therefore the most complicated; there is nothing but that in the world.

LAMARCK; DARWIN; SPENCER.—The Frenchman Lamarck in the eighteenth century had already conceived this idea; Darwin, purely a naturalist, set it forth clearly, Spencer again stated it and drew from it consequences of general philosophy. Thus, to Spencer, the evolutionist theory contains no immorality. On the contrary, the progressive transformation of the human species is an ascent towards morality; from egoism is born altruism because the species, seeking its best law and its best condition of happiness, perceives a greater happiness in altruism; seeking its best law and its best condition of happiness, perceives that a greater happiness lies in order, regular life, social life, etc.; so that humanity raises itself to a higher and yet higher morality by the mere fact of adapting itself better to the conditions of the life of humanity. Morality develops physiologically as the germ becomes the stem and the bud becomes the flower.

As for religion it is the domain of the unknowable. That is not to assert that it is nothing. On the contrary it is something formidable and immense. It is the feeling that something, apart from all that we know, surpasses us and that we shall never know it. Now this feeling at the same time maintains us in a humility highly favourable to the health of the soul and also in a serene confidence in the mysterious being who presides over universal evolution and who, no doubt, is the all-powerful and eternal soul of it.



CHAPTER IX

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: FRANCE

The Eclectic School: Victor Cousin.

The Positivist School: Auguste Comte.

The Kantist School: Renouvier.

Independent and Complex Positivists: Taine, Renan.

LAROMIGUIERE: ROYER-COLLARD.—Emerging from the school of Condillac, France saw Laromiguiere who was a sort of softened Condillac, less trenchant, and not insensible to the influence of Rousseau; but he was little more than a clear and elegant professor of philosophy. Royer-Collard introduced into France the Scottish philosophy (Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart) and did not depart from it or go beyond it; but he set it forth with magnificent authority and with a remarkable invention of clear and magisterial formulae.

MAINE DE BIRAN.—Maine de Biran was a renovator. He attached himself to Descartes linking the chain anew that had for so long been interrupted. He devoted his attention to the notion of ego. In full reaction from the "sensualism" of Condillac, he restored a due activity to the ego; he made it a force not restricted to the reception of sensations, which transform themselves, but one which seized upon, elaborated, linked together, and combined them. For him then, as for Descartes, but from a fresh point of view, the voluntary deed is the primitive deed of the soul and the will is the foundation of man. Also, the will is not all man; man has, so to say, three lives superimposed but very closely inter-united and which cannot do without one another: the life of sensation, the life of will, and the life of love. The life of sensation is almost passive, with a commencement of activity which consists in classifying and organizing the sensations; the life of will is properly speaking the "human" life; the life of love is the life of activity and yet again of will, but which unites the human with the divine life. By the ingenious and profound subtlety of his analyses, Maine de Biran has placed himself in the front rank of French thinkers and, in any case, he is one of the most original.

VICTOR COUSIN AND HIS DISCIPLES.—Victor Cousin, who appears to have been influenced almost concurrently by Maine de Biran, Royer-Collard, and the German philosophy, yielded rapidly to a tendency which is characteristically French and is also, perhaps, good, and which consists in seeing "some good in all the opinions," and he was eclectic, that is, a borrower. His maxim, which he had no doubt read in Leibnitz, was that the systems are "true in what they affirm and false in what they deny." Starting thence, he rested upon both the English and German philosophy, correcting one by the other. Personally his tendency was to make metaphysics come from philosophy and to prove God by the human soul and the relations of God with the world by the relations of man with matter. To him God is always an augmented human soul. All philosophies, not to mention all religions, have rather an inclination to consider things thus: but this tendency is particularly marked in Cousin. In the course of his career, which was diversified, for he was at one time a professor and at another a statesman, he varied somewhat, because before 1830 he became very Hegelian, and after 1830 he harked back towards Descartes, endeavouring especially to make philosophic instruction a moral priesthood; highly cautious, very well-balanced, feeling great distrust of the unassailable temerities of the one and in sympathetic relations with the other. What has remained of this eclecticism is an excellent thing, the great regard for the history of philosophy, which had never been held in honour in France and which, since Cousin, has never ceased to be so.

The principal disciples of Cousin were Jouffroy, Damiron, Emile Saisset, and the great moralist Jules Simon, well-known because of the important political part he played.

LAMENNAIS.—Lamennais, long celebrated for his great book, Essay on Indifference in the Matter of Religion, then, when he had severed himself from Rome, by his Words of a Believer and other works of revolutionary spirit, was above all a publicist; but he was a philosopher, properly speaking, in his Sketch of a Philosophy. To him, God is neither the Creator, as understood by the early Christians, nor the Being from whom the world emanates, as others have thought. He has not created the world from nothing; but He has created it; He created it from Himself, He made it issue from His substance; and He made it issue by a purely voluntary act. He created it in His own image; it is not man alone who is in the image of God, but the whole world. The three Persons of God, that is, the three characteristics, power, intelligence, and love are found—diminished and disfigured indeed, but yet are to be found—in every being in the universe. They are especially our own three powers, under the form of will, reason, sympathy; they are also the three powers of society, under the forms of executive power, deliberation, and fraternity. Every being, individual or collective, has in it a principle of death if it cannot reproduce however imperfectly all the three terms of this trinity without the loss of one.

AUGUSTE COMTE.—Auguste Comte, a mathematician, versed also in all sciences, constructed a pre-eminently negative philosophy in spite of his great pretension to replace the negations of the eighteenth century by a positive doctrine; above all else he denied all authority and denied to metaphysics the right of existence. Metaphysics ought not to exist, do not exist, are a mere nothing. We know nothing, we can know nothing, about the commencement or the end of things, or yet their essence or their object; philosophy has always laid down as its task a general explanation of the universe; it is precisely this general explanation, all general explanation of the aggregate of things, which is impossible. This is the negative part of "positivism." It is the only one which has endured and which is the credo or rather the non credo of a fairly large number of minds.

The affirmative part of the ideas of Comte was this: what can be done is to make a classification of sciences and a philosophy of history. The classification of sciences according to Comte, proceeding from the most simple to the most complex—that is, from mathematics to astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology to end at sociology, is generally considered by the learned as interesting but arbitrary. The philosophy of history, according to Comte, is this: humanity passes through three states: theological, metaphysical, positive. The theological state (antiquity) consists in man explaining everything by continual miracles; the metaphysical state (modern times) consists in man explaining everything by ideas, which he still continues to consider somewhat as beings, by abstractions, entities, vital principle, attraction, gravitation, soul, faculty of the soul, etc. The positive state consists in that man explains and will explain all things, or rather limits himself and will limit himself to verifying them, by the links that he will see they have with one another, links he will content himself with observing and subsequently with controlling by experiment. Also there is always something of the succeeding state in the preceding state and the ancients did not ignore observation, and there is always something of the preceding state in the succeeding state and we have still theological and metaphysical habits of mind, theological and metaphysical "residues," and perhaps it will be always thus; but for theology to decline before metaphysics and metaphysics before science is progress.

Over and above this, Comte in the last portion of his life—as if to prove his doctrine of residues and to furnish an example—founded a sort of religion, a pseudo-religion, the religion of humanity. Humanity must be worshipped in its slow ascent towards intellectual and moral perfection (and, in consequence, we should specially worship humanity to come; but Comte might reply that humanity past and present is venerable because it bears in its womb the humanity of the future). The worship of this new religion is the commemoration and veneration of the dead. These last conceptions, fruits of the sensibility and of the imagination of Auguste Comte, have no relation with the basis of his doctrine.

RENOUVIER.—After him, by a vigorous reaction, Renouvier restored the philosophy of Kant, depriving it of its too symmetrical, too minutely systematic, too scholastic character and bringing it nearer to facts; from him was to come the doctrine already mentioned, "pragmatism," which measures the truth of every idea by the moral consequence that it contains.

TAINE.—Very different and attaching himself to the general ideas of Comte, Hippolyte Taine believed only in what has been observed, experimented, and demonstrated; but being also as familiar with Hegel as with Comte, with Spencer as with Condillac, he never doubted that the need of going beyond and escaping from oneself was also a fact, a human fact eternal among humanity, and of this fact he took account as of a fact observed and proved, saying if man is on one side a "fierce and lascivious gorilla," on the other side he is a mystic animal, and that in "a double nature, mysterious hymen," as Hugo wrote, lay the explanation of all the baseness in ideas and actions as well as all the sublimity in ideas and actions of humanity. Personally he was a Stoic and his practice was the continuous development of the intelligence regarded as the condition and guarantee of morality.

RENAN.—Renan, destined for the ecclesiastical profession and always preserving profound traces of his clerical education, was, nevertheless, a Positivist and believed only in science, hoping everything from it in youth and continuing to venerate it at least during his mature years. Thus formed, a "Christian Positivist," as has been said, as well as a poet above all else, he could not proscribe metaphysics and had a weakness for them with which perhaps he reproached himself. He extricated himself from this difficulty by declaring all metaphysical conceptions to be only "dreams," but sheltered, so to say, by this concession he had made and this precaution he had taken, he threw himself into the dream with all his heart and reconstituted God, the immortal soul, the future existence, eternity and creation, giving them new, unforeseen, and fascinating names. It was only the idea of Providence—that is, of the particular and circumstantial intervention of God in human affairs, which was intolerable to him and against which he always protested, quoting the phrase of Malebranche, "God does not act by particular wills." And yet he paid a compliment, which seems sincere, to the idea of grace, and if there be a particular and circumstantial intervention by God in human affairs, it is certainly grace according to all appearances.

He was above all an amateur of ideas, a dilettante in ideas, toying with them with infinite pleasure, like a superior Greek sophist, and in all French philosophy no one calls Plato to mind more than he does.

He possessed a charming mind, a very lofty character, and was a marvellous writer.

TO-DAY.—The living French philosophers whom we shall content ourselves with naming because they are living and receive contemporary criticism rather than that of history, are MM. Fouillee, Theodule Ribot, Liard, Durckheim, Izoulet, and Bergson.

THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY.—It is impossible to forecast in what direction philosophy will move. The summary history we have been able to trace sufficiently shows, as it seems to us, that it has no regular advance such that by seeing how it has progressed one can conjecture what path it will pursue. It seems in no sense to depend, or at all events, to depend remarkably little, at any period, on the general state of civilization around it, and even for those who believe in a philosophy of history there is not, as it appears to me, a philosophy of the history of philosophy. The only thing that can be affirmed is that philosophy will always exist in response to a need of the human mind, and that it will always be both an effort to gather scientific discoveries into some great general ideas and an effort to go beyond science and to seek as it can the meaning of the universal enigma; so that neither philosophy, properly speaking, nor even metaphysics will ever disappear. Nietzsche has said that life is valuable only as the instrument of knowledge. However eager humanity may be and become for branches of knowledge, it will be always passionately and indefatigably anxious about complete knowledge.



INDEX OF NAMES

A

Aelard Aenesidemus Agrippa Agrippa, Cornelius Ailly, Peter d' Albertus Magnus Alexander the Great Anaxagoras Anaximander Anselm, St. Antisthenes Apollodorus Arcesilaus Arete Aristippus Aristo Aristobulus Aristophanes Aristotle Arius Arnauld Atticus Augustine, St. Averroes Avicenna

B

Bacon, Francis Bacon, Roger Beaconsfield Bergson Berkeley Bonaventura, St. Bossuet Bruno, Giordano Brutus Buridan

C

Calvin Campanella Cardan Carneades Cato Champeaux, William of Charles the Bald Christina of Sweden Chrysippus Cicero Cleanthes Clement, St., of Alexandria Comte, Auguste Cnodillac Corneille Cousin, Victor Crantor Crates

D

Damiron Darwin Democritus Descartes Diderot Diogenes Durand de Saint-Pourcain Durckheim

E

Empedocles Epictetus Epicurus Euhemerus

F

Fenelon Fichte Fontenelle Fouillee Franklin

G

Gassendi Gerbert Gerson Gorgias

H

Harvey Havet, Ernest Hegel Hegesias Helvetius Heraclitus Herillus Hermarchus Hobbes, Thomas Holbach, d' Horace Hugo, Victor Hugo de Saint-Victor Hume, David

I

Iamblichus Izoulet

J

James I Jesus Christ Joan of Navarre Jouffroy Justinian

K

Kant

L

La Bruyere Lamarck Lamennais Laromiguiere Leibnitz Leo X Leucippus Liard Locke Louis XIV Lucian Lucretius Lulle, Raymond

M

Maine de Biran Malebranche Manes Marcus Aurelius Menippus Metrodorus Moderatus Moliere Montaigne Moses

N

Nemesius Nero Nicomachus Nietzsche

O

Ockham, William of Origen

P

Paracelsus Parmenides Pascal Paul, St. Pericles Philips the Fair Philo Pico della Mirandola Plato Pliny the Younger Plotinus Plutarch Poincare, Henri Polemo Polystratus Pomponazzo Porphyry Prodicus Protagoras Pyrrho Pythagoras

R

Reid, Thomas Renan Renouvier Reuchlin Ribot, Theodule Richard de Saint-Victor Roscelin Rousseau, J. J. Royer-Collard

S

Saisset, Emile Schelling Schopenhauer Scotus Erigena Seneca Servetus, Michael Sextus Empiricus Shakespeare Simon, Jules Socrates Spencer, Herbert Speusippus Spinoza Stewart, Dugald

T

Taine, Hippolyte Thales Theodosius Theophrastus Thomas Aquinas, St. Thrasea Timon

V

Vanini Vauvenargues Vico Villon Vincent of Beauvais Voltaire

W

William of Auvergne Wolf

X

Xenocrates Xenophanes Xenophon

Z

Zeno (of Citium) Zeno (of Elea) Zoroaster

THE END