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Religion and Science from Galileo to Bergson

CHAPTER VII THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT   Kant and After.—With Kant the hey-day of rationalism terminated. He had put an end to the superficial psychology upon which it rested. For the rationalists, the life of the mind had consisted in intellectual ideas; but a more careful analysis indicated the presence of deeper-lying elements, which had hitherto been disregarded; there existed other important constituents besides the intellectual. Kant's criticism of "pure reason" did much to discredit the old view; and by founding his philosophy upon the non-intellectual "moral consciousness," he heightened the prestige of feeling as against reason (in the narrow and limited sense of that word). Thus Kant is not undeservedly called the father of a philosophy which succeeded him, and which was based upon the idea of the supremacy of feeling. But, at the same time, that title is more accurate as an estimate of another philosopher of rather different characteristics. Rousseau.—Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a man of unique genius whose figure occupies a prominent position not only in the annals of philosophy, but in social, political, and literary history. Even more than Voltaire was he responsible for sowing seeds of thought which bore fruit in the events of the[Pg 63] Revolution. And indeed, it is as the author of the notorious Contrat Social that he is most widely known. Rousseau's "Sensibility."—Rousseau was one of those philosophers whose character is the formative element which gives shape to their doctrines. His was a profoundly emotional temperament. He left behind him an invaluable document which lays bare all the psychological sources of his philosophy. The Confessions reveal to us a man highly sensitive and morbidly introspective, the slave of unreasoning impulses and passions. In the eyes of some short-sighted persons, these first-hand revelations will obscure or cast doubt upon the capacity and genius of the man, for they do little to prejudice opinion in his favour. He Defies the Zeitgeist.—Rousseau's profound originality lies in his having dared to dispute a dogma to which the prestige of an axiom then attached. He endeavoured to undermine the popular faith in scientific and philosophic culture. He went right back to Pascal, who, a century before, had raised the question as to the value of scientific knowledge for personal life, by proclaiming "The whole of philosophy is not worth an hour's study." Rousseau's first philosophical work was occasioned by the offer of a prize on the part of a provincial academy for a thesis on the problem "Whether the restoration of the sciences and arts has contributed to purify manners?" "The question pierced Rousseau's soul like a flash of lightning." He felt (he tells us) that he saw a new world, and felt a new man; he saw no longer the world of culture, of science, of philosophy (which he felt to be as artificial as it was ineffective and vain), but the real world of personality, of living[Pg 64] feeling, of the inner life. It flashed upon him that it was the primitive and elementary feelings, the great and simple relations of life, which gave to existence its value. The rest was superficial and irrelevant. Rousseau and Religion.—The intellectualist is ever the aristocrat.[25] Voltaire and the philosophers of the "enlightenment" spoke of the unenlightened multitude as la canaille. Its beliefs were superstitions. Rousseau knew that the things which men have in common are more vital than those in which they differ, and the primitive instincts of the race which we all share, are the most important part of our nature. Among these primitive instincts, indomitable and irrepressible, is the instinct of religion. Thus Rousseau transferred the religious problem from the sphere of external observation and explanation of the world (to which the rationalists had promoted or degraded it), back to inner personal feeling. This marked an epoch in the philosophy of religion. Moreover, Rousseau was able to write in a convincing fashion of religion, because (and here he differed from the intellectuals of his day) he had personal experience of what it meant. Hence wherever he alludes to religion his language has the ring of sincerity; it is always spontaneous, and sometimes it is passionate and poetic. His religious experience took the form of nature-mysticism, undogmatic (because non-intellectualist), but rich and deep: "I can find no more worthy adoration of God than the silent admiration which the contemplation of His works begets in us, and which cannot be expressed by[Pg 65] any prescribed acts.... In my room I pray seldomer and more coldly; but the sight of a beautiful landscape moves me, I cannot tell why. I once read of a certain bishop, who, when visiting in his diocese, encountered an old woman whose only prayers consisted in a sigh 'Oh!' The bishop said to her, 'Good mother, always pray like that; your prayer is worth more than ours.' My prayer is of that kind."[26] Here we have one form of the religious spirit; for the mystic it is always true that "there is neither speech nor language." The mystic and the dogmatist stand at opposite poles, for dogmatism is always an attempt at definition even when that which is to be defined is indefinable; and here is to be found the common denominator between Kant and Rousseau. The former, by his analysis of reason, discredited dogmatism: the latter, by his apotheosis of feeling, contributed towards the same result. Romanticism in Germany.—This strong movement of feeling, created on the one hand by Kant's Critique, and by the mysticism of Rousseau, took different forms in the two countries to which these two philosophers belonged. In France the new philosophy became the hot-bed of revolutionary ideas; whereas in Germany it found vent in a ferment of speculative systems, and in an outcrop of artistic production. It produced the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and the prose and poetry of Goethe and Schiller. "It was the age of 'beautiful souls' and of 'noble hearts'; men believed themselves capable of the highest things; the immediate needs of the heart were set over against reason ... under many successive forms Romanticism prevailed in literature, effecting[Pg 66] the re-birth of human fancy after the long labour of intellect."[27] The Goal of Philosophy.—Philosophic young Germany had set itself an ambitious programme. Kant, indeed, had cleared the ground for them, but his warnings that an eagle cannot soar beyond the atmosphere which supports it, were disregarded. The philosophy of Kant himself was felt by the successors to be lacking in the idea of totality—in the conception of a whole. His division of existence into Appearance and Reality seemed to indicate a certain lack of finish in his philosophy; and they set themselves to explore the root of reality which to Kant seemed undiscoverable, but in which the sensuous and super-sensuous worlds are united, and from which they have emerged. This task became and remained the grand problem of philosophy for a whole generation of thinkers. All externality, isolation, and division were to disappear, all existence must be shown to be but degrees and phases of the one infinite reality. Spinoza's work had to be done again in the light of increased psychological knowledge. Fichte.—Of the thinkers who addressed themselves to this ambitious task, only two need be considered here; and these are chosen because they attacked the problem from different directions. In the first place, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who had been the first to lay down the programme of thought with explicitness, realised and admitted that the task which philosophy had set itself was beyond the powers of any logical train of thought. The "higher unity" of existence, the demonstration of which was the goal of philosophy, could be reached[Pg 67] only by a process of intellectual intuition,[28] it must be guessed or divined; for it presents itself (and this is a characteristically "Romanticist" idea) to the human mind in the immediacy of feeling, and not by discursive thought. It was of the essence of Fichte's philosophy, as it had been of Spinoza's, that a point may be attained where the mind feels itself to be at one with the truly real, and only when this point is reached—i.e. sub specie aeternitatis, will it arrive at and retain the conviction of the universal order and unity of existence. From this standpoint, and from this alone, does it become possible to grasp "the meaning of those dualities and contrasts which we find around and in us, the differences of self and not-self, of mind and matter, of subject and object, of appearance and reality, of truth and semblance." Hegel.—It has been said, perhaps with justice, that "philosophy is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct." The remark might seem, at least in the eyes of some, to be particularly applicable to the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Not because his arguments are bad, but because he attempted to establish by strict logic the conclusions which Fichte sought to reach by means of intuition, and which perhaps are only attainable by that method. Hegel attempted to climb, by a strict process of reasoning, to the position from which the Fichtean landscape might spread itself below as a[Pg 68] logical whole: he claimed to be a reasoner as well as a seer. And thereby he may be said to have furnished "the programme of thought for a certain class of intellects which will never die out." Thus Hegel was something of a hybrid, and may be described as a rationalistic-romanticist. Nor are his arguments the easiest to understand. "The only thing that is certain," writes a commentator who stands at an opposite philosophical pole, "is that whatever you may say of his procedure, some one will accuse you of misunderstanding it. I make no claim to understanding it; I treat it merely impressionistically."[29] And this is all we can do here. Hegel's Method.—Hegel proceeds by means of what he calls the Dialectical Method. He understands by "dialectic" (1) a property of all our thoughts in virtue of which, each particular thought necessarily passes over into another; and also (2) a property of things, in virtue of which every particular thing necessarily belongs to, or is related to, all other things. A thing "by itself" is nothing. Hence a similarity or parallelism between the method of thought and the nature of things. Logic is of the nature of things. The way in which thought reaches truth is also the way in which things exist. Hegel expressed this in his well-known saying "the real is the rational, and the rational is the real." Perhaps more poetically or obscurely the same proposition is expressed by declaring: "When we think existence, existence thinks in us," and "The pulse of existence itself beats in our thinking." Hegel's logic may, in fact, be described as an attempt to conceive the movement of thought as being at the[Pg 69] same time the law of the universe. Logic (to repeat what we said before) is of the nature of things: reality is rational, and what is rational is real. Thus logic for Hegel did not mean (as it meant for Kant) the forms or laws of thought: it signified the very core of reality. For all that Kant knew, reality might or might not be rational: all he asserted was that the human mind rationalised reality (or parts of it). For Hegel, logic or reason was the living and moving spirit of the world. The essence of reality and the essence of thought were one. The absolute reality was spirit.[30] Hegelianism.—Hegel's philosophy may be described as an attempt to reach the standpoint of religious mysticism by means of purely rational processes. It is the finding of rational grounds for supra-rational intuitions. The attempt is laudable, and, in the eyes of many, it was successful. And, as we shall see, Hegelianism had an important future, especially in England; nor, as a system of thought, is it yet extinct. Its central conception is that which, in one shape or another, will never cease to appeal to mankind—that existence is, at bottom, spiritual in character—that spirit is the only ultimate reality. That Hegelianism provides a rational basis for a spiritual religion is obvious enough; nor is it necessary to indicate the possibilities of linking up the Christian doctrine of the Logos with a philosophy for which Reason was the very core and ground of existence. Hegel may indeed be said to have laid the foundation of Christian theology afresh; or rather to have restored[Pg 70] what was best in the old theology, and given it the prestige of modernity. Religion and Philosophy.—In fact, for Hegel as for all rationalists whose attitude is also religious, religion and philosophy were two forms of the same thing. Religion contains philosophic truths under the form of imagination: philosophy contains religious truth under the form of reason. The difference is one of form only, not of content. This had not been the view of Rousseau, nor is it the deepest view; and it was not the view of a thinker of the Romantic school who did more than any individual among his predecessors to bring the religious problem to the point where it now stands. Schleiermacher.—While the sun of Romanticism was at its zenith, the spirit of Kant's critical philosophy was kept alive by a thinker of as deep spiritual and intellectual insight as Hegel himself. Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher (1768-1834) brought the religious problem down from those altitudes to which Romanticist metaphysics had raised it, to what Kant had called "the fertile bathos of experience." He approached religion from the side of inner experience, the point of view of psychology. The profound insight of Kant had already shown that this was the direction on which future thought would travel, by tracing back the religious problem to a personal need more clearly and penetratingly than ever before—a need set up by the incongruity of the real and the ideal. His View of Religious Ideas.—Just as Rousseau, owing to his own religious experience, was in a better position to attack the religious problem than the philosophers of the "enlightenment," so Schleiermacher[Pg 71] had the advantage of some Romanticists. As a boy, he had been put to school with the Moravians, and throughout his own life he never ceased to declare that the years spent among them had been of vital importance to the development of his views. In 1801 he writes: "My way of thinking has indeed no other foundation than my own peculiar character, my inborn mysticism, my education as it has been determined from within." And his own experience of religion established in him the conviction that the innermost life of men must be lived in feeling, and that this alone can bring man into immediate relation to the highest. His acceptance of Kant's criticism of reason led him to understand that intellectual concepts, in the religious sphere, (i.e. dogmas) must always be of secondary importance: experience comes first. And his profound originality lies just here, and it is just here that Schleiermacher stands out as the forerunner of the modern view. He it was who first made it evident that religious ideas derive their validity from that inner experience which they are an attempt to describe. If a dogma is an expression of an experience felt by man in his innermost life, it is a valid dogma, even if philosophic criticism hesitates to sanction it.[31] What Is Religion?—The distance of this position from that of the eighteenth century intellectualism which regarded religion either as a form of philosophy[Pg 72] or of superstition, is obvious. Schleiermacher attacks two intellectualist prejudices in particular: (1) That according to which religion is conceived of primarily as a doctrine (either revealed, or grounded on reason), and (2) That which regards religion as merely a means towards morality. Religion, according to Schleiermacher, has an existence independent of (though, no doubt, associated with) philosophy, superstition, or morality. Its essence consists neither in speculation nor in action, but in a certain type of feeling, of inner experience. Schleiermacher characterised this particular type of feeling as a feeling of dependence: the immediate consciousness that everything finite exists in and through the infinite, everything temporal in and through the eternal. That Schleiermacher should have described the specifically religious feeling in this particular way is comparatively irrelevant so far as our present purpose is concerned. The point of importance is that he was the first to recognise the independence of religion, to see in it a legitimate and natural form of human activity, which exists, not for the sake of knowledge or of morality, but for its own sake, and on its own account. Here, though Hegel took a different view, Schleiermacher is one in spirit with the Romantic school; indeed, he may be said to have drawn the logical conclusions of Romanticism. The independence and originality of religion is the necessary consequence of a philosophy which set itself against the unbalanced intellectualism of the "enlightenment." The permanent significance of Romanticism lies here: That it discredited once for all the notion that[Pg 73] there is only one road to reality—that of logic. It is not only philosophy, but religion and art that remove the veil which hides the supra-sensible world from us. And to close our eyes to the facts of religious experience, or to attempt to discredit them by the application of irrelevant terms such as "superstition," is not only to display ourselves as philistines, but also to forsake the highest traditions of science—veneration for experience, and the realms of fact. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 74] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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