Back Aa

Religion and Science from Galileo to Bergson

CHAPTER X REACTIONS IN PHILOSOPHY   Vicissitudes of Idealism.—At the beginning of the last chapter we noticed the early collapse of idealism in Germany. But the prophets of Romanticism, when they were no longer honoured at home, found an hospitable reception elsewhere, and especially in England. Indeed, even before the prestige of idealism had begun to decline in Germany, Englishmen had been introduced to it by the writings and translations of S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834) and Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). These two popularisers of German ideas were littérateurs rather than professional philosophers, but for that very reason their vogue and influence were the wider. Coleridge.—Coleridge was in spirit a genuine Romanticist; being, as were some of the most notable of the German school—e.g., Goethe and Schiller—a poet as well as a philosopher. In his Biographia Literaria he has left behind the story of his intellectual and spiritual development. He acknowledges his debt to Kant, to the Romanticists, and in particular to Schelling, whose "intuitionism" was naturally congenial to him. Coleridge was never able to embody his philosophical creed in any single work; he does not seem to have possessed the necessary power of application. He was unfortunate in being a man of weak[Pg 99] character, and his ineffectiveness struck his contemporaries. But in spite of these disadvantages—his sentimentality, the lack of clearness of his thought, his weakness for opium—he certainly exercised an important influence, especially in the realm of theology. His ideas, though vague, were calculated to awaken the speculative habit, and, introduced as they were, to a wide circle, were fruitful and stimulating. English theology had been, in the eighteenth century, of an arid kind, and the English philosophical tradition lacked, for the most part, appreciation of those deeper aspects of reality which had appealed to German thinkers. Coleridge, by introducing German speculation to his countrymen, was able "to free theology of some of its narrowness, and to deepen and enlarge the spiritual outlook of his age."[48] Thomas Carlyle.—Carlyle was a man of a very different temper, whose attitude towards Coleridge was "half contemptuous, half compassionate." A typically Carlylean characterisation of him may be found in the Life of Sterling: "He was thought to hold—he alone in England—the key of German and other Transcendentalisms.... A sublime man, who alone in those dark days escaped from black materialisms and revolutionary deluges with God, Freedom, Immortality, still his. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer; but to the rising spirits of the young generation he sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma...." "The good man ... gave you the idea of a life[Pg 100] that had been full of sufferings ... the deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength.... He spoke as if preaching—preaching earnestly and hopelessly the weightiest things." Carlyle himself had all the character and industry that Coleridge lacked, and it was another side of German idealism that had appealed to him. The Scotchman was of the same fibre and stock as that other half-Scotchman, Kant. Here was the source from which he had drawn his inspiration. We see in Carlyle the same moral earnestness, the same "toughness" of thought, the same absence of "sentimental moonshine." From Kant, too, he derives a vigorous independence of thought, a religious respect for individuality, a horror of shams and affectation. Kant was a true child of the Reformation, and Carlyle is a genuine disciple. In a single important respect, however, he differed from (and improved upon) his master. Kant lacked, or at least did not display, the saving grace of humour; in Carlyle this quality looks out from every page—keen, satirical, sometimes bitter, sometimes grotesque; he ridiculed his own generation, its vices, its prejudices, its superstitions. Sartor Resartus.—For our purpose, Sartor Resartus—that profound and humorous book—is Carlyle's masterpiece: here all the characteristic Kantian doctrines may be found. The "philosophy of clothes"—which is the quaint title behind which Kantian idealism is made to[Pg 101] masquerade—starts from the thought that just as an acquaintance with his clothes will not reveal to us the man, so an acquaintance with phenomena (which is all that science can claim to give us) cannot reveal to us the real ground of existence, which remains an inscrutable mystery. We must "look on clothes till they become transparent," if we could understand reality. "To the eye of vulgar Logic what is man? An omnivorous biped that wears breeches. To the eye of pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition." And so with Nature; to science it is a mechanism, to the understanding heart it is "the living garment of God." "It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a Vesture; which indeed they are: the Time-Vesture of the Eternal.... The whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing...." The visible world is but a symbol of a profound and awful reality; and all Nature's products, in their degree, symbols as well: but of these, man is the highest. "The true Shekinah is Man: where else is the God's Presence manifested, not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as in our fellow-man?" This leads up to the essential doctrine of the Kantian system: that man is a creature of two worlds, who has a foot in either; hence in the phenomenal world he can never find satisfaction. "Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe[Pg 102] undertake, in jointstock company, to make one Shoeblack Happy? They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two, for the Shoeblack also has a Soul quite other than his Stomach...." "There is in man a Higher than Love of happiness: he can do without happiness and instead thereof find Blessedness! has it not been to preach forth this same Higher that sages and martyrs ... have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony to the God-like that is in man?" Carlyle's Influence.—In spite of Carlyle's strange literary mannerisms and his grotesquely Germanic phrases, his writings had great attractiveness for those of his contemporaries who felt themselves smothered by the materialism and utilitarianism of early Victorian England. He was able to re-vitalise idealism amongst them. Moreover he appealed strongly to those to whom the Coleridgean speculations were uncongenial. The strongly developed moral element, both in his writings and in his own somewhat stern and austere personality—what Taine called his "puritanism"—appealed strongly to a certain side of English feeling. His countrymen felt that his was a native genius that they could understand. In fact we may say that the influence of Carlyle, especially among the young and generous minded, has been incalculable in extent and invaluable in quality. Spiritual life in England stands under a deep obligation to him. Romanticism at Oxford.—Englishmen were thus not entire strangers to German idealism, which had possessed its interpreters in the earlier half of the nineteenth century. Not, however, until it had experienced a decline in Germany (a reaction which occupied our attention in the last chapter), did[Pg 103] Romanticism become naturalised in England by being adopted in academic circles. Among the most notable of English idealists was T. H. Green—fellow and tutor of Balliol College, Oxford. In this thinker we have a widely different type of mind from that of either Coleridge or Carlyle. He was a thinker rather than a poet or a prophet, and he belonged to what we have noticed as the intellectualist—i.e. Hegelian—wing of Romanticism. Green's chief work was his Prolegomena to Ethics (published posthumously in 1883), where arguments, which were familiar to those acquainted with Hegel, presented themselves. Green begins with an analysis of experience, and leads to the conclusion that Nature—if by it we mean "the connected order of experience"—implies "something other than itself, as the condition of its being what it is." And "of that 'something' we are entitled to say, positively, that it is a self-distinguishing consciousness" (section 52). If these conclusions be valid, the bottom falls out of Naturalism, for if nature "implies something other than itself," it does not stand alone; and that nature does stand alone is the beginning and end of all naturalist theory. And, furthermore, this "something other than itself," which Nature involves, is "a self-distinguishing consciousness"; i.e. something to which we can attribute personality. Green and Spencer contrasted.—This theory has only to be compared with that of Herbert Spencer for a fundamental difference to declare itself. The two systems do indeed adopt as axiomatic the conception of the uniformity and unity of nature, which works in accordance with a single law. But Spencer saw in that law the expression of a blind force, an unknowable[Pg 104] power, of which it would be no more and no less true to say that it was "spiritual" than that it was "material." But for Green the law was the expression of a spiritual principal analogous to our own intelligence—a manifestation (to use theological language) of God. F. H. Bradley.—Undoubtedly the most notable of English Hegelians is F. H. Bradley, whose metaphysical essay, Appearance and Reality, was a work of genuine originality. The book is not of a type to make much appeal outside academic circles, though it is written in an easy and attractive style: its results may seem, to the unsophisticated reader, somewhat too ambiguous. "Ultimate Doubts" is the title of the last chapter, and "It costs us little to find that in the end Reality is inscrutable," is a remark not uncharacteristic of the author. Yet this really profound thinker and acute reasoner played an important part in helping to discredit that negative dogmatism which was so much in vogue during his own lifetime. He pointed out the limits beyond which natural science could not transgress without lapsing into "dogmatic superstition." "Too often the science of mere Nature, forgetting its own limits and false to its true aims, attempts to speak about first principles. It becomes transcendent, and offers us a dogmatic and uncritical metaphysics" (p. 284). Though the fault has not always been on the side of the scientists: "Metaphysics itself, by its interference with physical science, has induced that to act, as it thinks, in self-defence, and has led it, in so doing, to become metaphysical. And this interference of metaphysics I would admit and deplore, as the result[Pg 105] and the parent of most injurious misunderstanding.... So long as natural science keeps merely to the sphere of phenomena and the laws of their occurrence, metaphysics has no right to a single word of criticism" (p. 285). This critical handling of the problem of the relations of science and philosophy did much to draw attention to the confusion of thought lying at the base of much popular materialism. It began to be realised that the principles of physical science are only fruitful of good results in the sphere properly belonging to them; and that the uncritical use of these principles results in a hybrid philosophy, which is neither sound science nor rational metaphysics. A. J. Balfour.—Before Bradley's essay was published, a somewhat similar line of criticism had been developed by Mr. A. J. Balfour in his Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879). Its title sounds unpromising, but the book voiced a demand for a rational philosophy of science which was practically non-existent at that time; and consequently, in the absence of any adequate examination of the principles of science, uncritical dogmatism flourished quite unchallenged. Balfour, elsewhere, indicates the objects with which he wrote the book—to elicit from the disciples of natural science a rationale of their method: "A full and systematic attempt, first to enumerate, and then to justify, the presuppositions on which all science finally rests, has, it seems to me, still to be made. After the critical examination which I desiderate has been thoroughly carried out, it may appear that at the very root of our scientific system of belief lie problems of which no satisfactory solution has yet been devised."[49][Pg 106] Thus Balfour drew attention to the fact that the common-sense philosophy of naturalism rested upon a tacit agreement to overlook certain important problems which are the indispensable preliminaries to any thinking which can be called critical, or lay claim to be regarded as philosophy in the strict sense. That some of these problems seem artificial, and the questions raised by them gratuitous, to the eye of "common sense" is an irrelevant consideration, for "nothing stands more in need of demonstration than the obvious." Naturalism Checked.—Thus Bradley and Balfour between them, merely by adopting a critical attitude, created an embarrassing situation for naturalism. Between them these writers administered a serious check to that naively uncritical dogmatism which, backed by the prestige of natural science, had sought to impose itself on the world as a new orthodoxy less liberal, in some ways, than the old. Nor did they stop short at negative criticism, but substituted (according to the idealistic tradition) a spiritual view of reality for the mechanistic materialism that had become so popular. Appearance and Reality is a book of which the trend might seem too obscure, but it ends with a note that is definite enough: "Outside of spirit there is not, and there cannot be, any reality; and, the more that anything is spiritual, so much the more is it veritably real," are Bradley's closing words. As for Balfour, he leads his readers up to a point which he describes as "the threshold of Christian Theology." And having propounded the perplexities in which the "common sense" philosophy (on which naturalism depends) is involved, he says: [Pg 107]"I do not believe that any escape from them (the perplexities) is possible, unless we are prepared to bring to the study of the world the presupposition that it was the work of a rational Being, who made it intelligible, and at the same time made us, in however feeble a fashion, able to understand it."[50] Revival of Idealism in Germany. Lotze.—We have perhaps dwelt at too great length upon the backwash of the idealistic wave in England, for idealism is not a native philosophy amongst us; possibly, because we are not metaphysically-minded in the same sense as are the purer Teutonic breed. And it is time to pass on to pay a brief tribute to the work of a German philosopher who accepted the mechanical theory in its totality, without sacrificing what we may call the spiritual values of existence. Hermann Lotze (1817-1881) was inclined to feel that the weakness of Romanticism lay in a tendency to despise or overlook what Kant had called "the fertile bathos of experience." The Romanticists had too often neglected natural science, which, in the shape of naturalistic materialism, had its revenge by destroying them. Büchner was the Nemesis of an idealism which was at once vague and sentimental. Lotze's "Microcosmos."—Lotze's attitude and method are conspicuous in his well-known work, which took him eight years to complete (1856-1864)—the Microcosmos. After guiding his readers "through the realms of natural phenomena and historical evolution," thus constructing a sufficiently stable basis out of facts—he leads them on to an ideal world composed of what he calls "values." His position may thus be summarised: The world[Pg 108] presents itself to the observer in three aspects—(1) The world of individual "things," which are bewildering and intricate; (2) the laws (i.e., "laws of nature") which the human intellect has discovered among them, thus finding regularity and order; (3) the "values" which the human soul applies to things, and which it is the human task to cultivate. This world of ideals or values (3) is that for the sake of which the worlds of phenomena and law (1 and 2) exist. These (1 and 2) constitute respectively the material in which, and the forms through which, the world of "values" is to be realised.[51] Thus phenomena and law are the raw material out of which "values" are created; and these "values" themselves constitute (in the eyes of Lotze) a higher reality. Thus the central doctrine of his system is that the truly Real is what has supreme worth: it is worth that creates reality. The paradoxicality of this may make it difficult to accept; but Lotze is only expressing in his own way the fundamental thesis of all forms of idealism, that "the ideal is the real"; that the world of phenomena is secondary to and dependent upon a "world of spirit," or an "ideal world." Lotze himself in the introduction to the Microcosmos, expresses what is at once the foundation and the kernel of his system: he says it is his purpose to show "how absolutely universal is the extent, and at the same time how completely subordinate the significance, of the mission which mechanism has to fulfil in the structure of the world." (E.T., p. xvi.) Mechanism is universal, because it is the raw material, so to speak, out of which reality is to be made. That[Pg 109] reality can be expressed in terms of mechanism is true, just as a poem can be described as a scrap of paper scratched upon with a pen; but this reduction of reality to its lowest terms, ends by emptying reality of content. Mechanism is a universal feature, but it is a subordinate feature, of reality. Nature requires, if we are to arrive at the truth about it, not only to be described and analysed, but also interpreted in the light of the idea of value or worth. Lotze and Theology.—Lotze's theories exercised an important influence upon the development in Germany and elsewhere of a type of theology known as Ritschlianism. Albrecht Ritschl, a disciple of Lotze, attempted to dissociate religion from metaphysics, and to base it upon "judgments of value." Christian dogma, for instance, is an attempt to express, in philosophical terms, the unique value to humanity of the moral and religious consciousness of Christ. So far as a dogma is faithful to that central idea, and makes a genuine attempt to express it, so far—and so far only—is it true. This type of theology, uniting itself with certain philosophical tendencies which will engage our attention later, became the basis of what was known as the Modernist movement in the Roman Catholic Church. Conclusions.—Thus in the nineteenth century, in England (and indeed on the continent also) the idealistic attitude, though it sometimes might seem compromised, was never submerged; in spite of the materialistic outlook of an age only too preoccupied with scientific discovery and commercial expansion. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 110] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.