For the philosophy stands or falls with the conception of an Absolute.
Whether a philosophy of absolutes is theoretically sound or unsound is none of my present concern. But that philosophical absolutism may be practically as dangerous as matter of fact political absolutism history testifies. The situation puts in relief what finally is at issue between a theory which is pinned to a belief in an Absolute beyond history and behind experience, and one which is frankly experimental. For any philosophy which is not consistently experimental will always traffic in absolutes no matter in how disguised a form. In German political philosophy, the traffic is without mask.
III
THE GERMANIC PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
The unity of the German people longed for and dreamed of after 1807 became an established fact through the war of 1870 with France. It is easy to a.s.sign symbolic significance to this fact. Ever since the time of the French Revolution--if not before--German thought has taken shape in conflict with ideas that were characteristically French and in sharp and conscious ant.i.thesis to them. Rousseau"s deification of Nature was the occasion for the development of the conception of Culture. His condemnation of science and art as socially corrupting and socially divisive worked across the Rhine to produce the notion that science and art are the forces which moralize and unify humanity. The cosmopolitanism of the French Enlightenment was transformed by German thinkers into a self-conscious a.s.sertion of nationalism. The abstract Rights of Man of the French Revolution were set in ant.i.thesis to the principle of the rights of the citizen secured to him solely by the power of the politically organized nation. The deliberate breach of the revolutionary philosophy with the past, the attempt (foreshadowed in the philosophy of Descartes) to make a _tabula rasa_ of the fortuitous a.s.semblage of traditions and inst.i.tutions which history offers, in order to subst.i.tute a social structure built upon Reason, was envisaged as the _fons et origo_ of all evil. That history is itself incarnate reason; that history is infinitely more rational than the formal abstracting and generalizing reason of individuals; that individual mind becomes rational only through the absorption and a.s.similation of the universal reason embodied in historic inst.i.tutions and historic development, became the articles of faith of the German intellectual creed. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that for almost a century the characteristic philosophy of Germany has been a philosophy of history even when not such in apparent form.
Yet the meaning of this appeal to history is lost unless we bear in mind that the Enlightenment after all transmitted to Germany, from medieval thought, its foundation principle. The appeal was not from reason to experience, but from a.n.a.lytic thought (henceforth condemned to be merely "Understanding"--"_Verstand_") to an absolute and universal Reason (_Vernunft_) partially revealed in nature and more adequately manifested in human history as an organic process. Recourse to history was required because not of any empirical lessons it has to teach, nor yet because history bequeathes to us stubborn inst.i.tutions which must be reckoned with, but because history is the dynamic and evolving realization of immanent reason. The contrast of the German att.i.tude with that of Edmund Burke is instructive. The latter had the same profound hostility to cutting loose from the past. But his objection was not that the past is an embodiment of transcendent reason, but that its inst.i.tutions are an "inheritance" bequeathed to us from the "collected wisdom" of our forefathers. The continuity of political life centers not about an inner evolving Idea, but about "our hearths, our sepulchers and our altars."
He has the same suspicion of abstract rights of man. But his appeal is to experience and to practical consequences. Since "circ.u.mstances give in reality to every principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect," there is no soundness in any principle when "it stands stripped of every relation in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction."
According to the German view, the English protested because of interference with empirically established rights and privileges; the Germans, because they perceived in the Revolution a radical error as to the nature and work of reason. In point of fact, the Germans never made that break with tradition, political or religious, of which the French Revolution is an emphatic symbol. I have already referred to Kant"s disposition to regard church dogmas (of which, as dogmas, he disapproved) as vehicles of eternal spiritual truths--husks to preserve an inner grain. All of the great German idealists gave further expression to this disposition. To Hegel, for example, the substance of the doctrines of Protestant Christianity is identical with the truths of absolute philosophy, except that in religion they are expressed in a form not adequate to their meaning, the form, namely, of imaginative thought in which most men live. The disposition to philosophize Christianity is too widely shown in Germany to be dismissed as a cowardly desire at accommodation with things established. It shows rather an intellectual piety among a people where freedom of thought and conscience had been achieved without a violent political upheaval. Hegel finds that the characteristic weakness of Romance thought was an inner split, an inability to reconcile the spiritual and absolute essence of reality with which religion deals with the detailed work of intelligence in science and politics. The Germans, on the contrary, "were predestined to be the bearers of the Christian principle and to carry out the Idea as the absolutely Rational end." They accomplished this, not by a flight away from the secular world, but by realizing that the Christian principle is in itself that of the unity of the subjective and the objective, the spiritual and the worldly. The "spirit finds the goal of its struggle, its harmony, in that very sphere which it made the object of its resistance,--it finds that secular pursuits are a spiritual occupation";--a discovery, surely, which unites simplicity with comprehensiveness and one which does not lead to criticism of the secular pursuits carried on. Whatever is to be said of this as philosophy, it expresses, in a way, the quality of German life and thought. More than other countries, Germany has had the fortune to preserve as food for its imaginative life and as emotional sanction the great ideas of the past. It has carried over their reinforcement into the pursuit of science and into politics--into the very things which in other countries, notably in the Latin countries, have been used as weapons of attack upon tradition.
Political development tells a somewhat similar tale. The painful transition from feudalism to the modern era was, for the most part, accomplished recently in Germany, and accomplished under the guidance of established political authorities instead of by revolt against them.
Under their supervision, and mainly at their initiative, Germany has pa.s.sed in less than a century to the regime of modern capitalistic compet.i.tive enterprise, moderated by the State, out of the dominion of those local and guild restrictions which so long held economic activity in corporate bonds. The governing powers themselves secured to members of the State what seems, at least to Germans, to be a satisfying degree of political freedom. Along with this absence of internal disturbance and revolution, we must put the fact that every step in the development of Germany as a unified political power has been effected by war with some of the neighbors by which it is hemmed in. There stands the unfolding sequence: 1815 (not to go back to Frederick the Great), 1864, 1866, 1870. And the significant thing about these wars is not that external territory was annexed as their consequence, but the rebound of external struggle upon the achieving of internal unity. No wonder the German imagination has been impressed with the idea of an organic evolution from within, which takes the form of a unity achieved through conflict and the conquest of an opposing principle.
Such scattering comments as these prove nothing. But they suggest why German thought has been peculiarly sensitive to the idea of historic continuity; why it has been p.r.o.ne to seek for an original implicit essence which has progressively unfolded itself in a single development.
It would take much more than an hour to give even a superficial account of the growth of the historical sciences and historic methods of Germany during the first half of the eighteenth century. It would involve an account of the creation of philology, and the philological methods which go by the name of higher criticism; of their extension to archeology; of the historic schools of jurisprudence and political economy, as well as of the ways in which such men as Niebuhr, Mommsen and Ranke remade the methods of studying the past. I can only say here that Germany developed such an effective historical technique that even mediocre men achieved respectable results; and, much more significantly, that when Taine made the remark (quoted earlier) that we owe to the Germany of the half century before 1830 all our distinctively modern ideas, his remarks apply above all to the disciplines concerned with the historical development of mankind.
The bases of this philosophy are already before us. Even in Kant we find the idea of a single continuous development of humanity, as a progress from a reign of natural instinct to a final freedom won through adherence to the law of reason. Fichte sketched the stages already traversed on this road and located the point at which mankind now stands. In his later writings, the significance of history as the realization of the absolute purpose is increasingly emphasized. History is the continuous life of a divine Ego by which it realizes in fact what it is in idea or destiny. Its phases are successive stages in the founding of the Kingdom of G.o.d on earth. It and it only is the revelation of the Absolute. Along with this growing deification of history is the increased significance attached to nationalism in general and the German nation in particular. The State is the concrete individual interposed between generic humanity and particular beings. In his words, the national folk is the channel of divine life as it pours into particular finite human beings. He says:
"While cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose of the existence of humanity be actually realized in humanity, patriotism is the will that this end be first realized in the particular nation to which we ourselves belong, and that this achievement _thence_ spread over the entire race."
Since the State is an organ of divinity, patriotism is religion. As the Germans are the only truly religious people, they alone are truly capable of patriotism. Other peoples are products of external causes; they have no self-formed Self, but only an acquired self due to general convention. In Germany there is a self which is self-wrought and self-owned. The very fact that Germany for centuries has had no external unity proves that its selfhood is metaphysical, not a gift of circ.u.mstance. This conception of the German mission has been combined with a kind of anthropological metaphysics which has become the rage in Germany. The Germans alone of all existing European nations are a pure race. They alone have preserved unalloyed the original divine deposit.
Language is the expression of the national soul, and only the Germans have kept their native speech in its purity. In like vein, Hegel attributes the inner disharmony characteristic of Romance peoples to the fact that they are of mixed Germanic and Latin blood. A purely artificial cult of race has so flourished in Germany that many social movements--like anti-Semitism--and some of Germany"s political ambitions cannot be understood apart from the mystic identification of Race, Culture and the State. In the light of actual science, this is so mythological that the remark of an American periodical that race means a number of people reading the same newspapers is sober scientific fact compared with it.[101:A]
[101:A] Chamberlain, for example, holds that Jesus must have been of Teutonic birth--a perfect logical conclusion from the received philosophy of the State and religion. Quite aware that there is much Slav blood in northern Germany and Romance blood in southern Germany, he explains that while with other peoples crossing produces a mongrel race, the potency of the German blood is such that cross-breeding strengthens it. While at one time he explains the historic strength of the Jew on the ground that he has kept his race pure, another place he allows his indignation at the Jews to lead him to include them among the most mongrel of all peoples. To one thing he remains consistent: By the very essence of race, the Semites represent a metaphysical principle inherently hostile to the grand Germanic principle. It perhaps seems absurd to dignify the vagaries of this garrulous writer, but according to all report the volumes in which such expressions occur, "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century," has had august approval and much vogue.
At the beginning of history Fichte placed an "_Urvolk_." His account of it seems an attempt to rationalize at one stroke the legends of the Golden Age, the Biblical account of man before the Fall and Rousseau"s primitive "state of nature." The _Urvolk_ lived in a paradise of innocence, a paradise without knowledge, labor or art. The philosophy which demands such a Folk is comparatively simple. Except as a manifestation of Absolute Reason, humanity could not exist at all. Yet in the first stage of the manifestation, Reason could not have been appropriated by the self-conscious effort of man. It existed without consciousness of itself, for it was given, not, like all true self-consciousness, won by morally creative struggle. Rational in substance, in form it was but feeling or instinct. In a sense, all subsequent history is but a return to this primitive condition. But "humanity must make the journey on its own feet; by its own strength it must bring itself back to that state in which it was once without its own cooperating labor... . If humanity does not recreate its own true being, it has no real life." While philosophy compels us to a.s.sume a Normal People who, by "the mere fact of their existence, without science and art, found themselves in a state of perfectly developed reason,"
there is no ground for not admitting the existence at the same time of "timid and rude earth-born savages." Thus the original state of humanity would have been one of the greatest possible inequality, being divided between the Normal Folk existing as a manifestation of Reason and the wild and savage races of barbarism.
In his later period of inflamed patriotism this innocuous speculation grew a sting. He had determined that the present age--the Europe of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution--is the age of liberation from the external authority in which Reason had presented itself in the second age. Hence it is inherently negative: "an age of absolute indifference toward the Truth, an age of entire and unrestrained licentiousness." But the further evolution of the Divine Idea demands a Folk which has retained the primitive principle of Reason, which may redeem, therefore, the corrupt and rebellious modes of humanity elsewhere existing. Since the Germans are this saving remnant, they are the _Urvolk_, the Normal Nation, of the modern period. From this point on, idealization of past Germanic history and appeal to the nation to realize its unique calling by victory over Napoleon blend.
The Fichtean scaffolding tumbled, but these ideas persisted. I doubt if it is possible to exaggerate the extent to which German history has been systematically idealized for the last hundred years. Technically speaking, the Romantic movement may have pa.s.sed away and an age of scientific history dawned. Actually the detailed facts have been depicted by use of the palette of Romanticism. s.p.a.ce permits but one ill.u.s.tration which would be but a literary curiosity were it not fairly typical. Tacitus called his account of the northern barbarians Germania--an unfortunate t.i.tle in view of later developments. The characteristics a.s.signed by him to the German tribes are such as any anthropologist could duplicate from any warlike barbaric tribe. Yet over and over again these traits (which Tacitus idealized as Cooper, say, idealized the North American Indian traits) are made the basis of the philosophic history of the German people. The Germans, for example, had that psychological experience now known as mana, manitou, tabu, etc.
They identified their G.o.ds, in Tacitus" phrase, with "that mystery which they perceive by experiencing sacred fear." This turns out to be the germinal deposit of spiritual-mindedness which later showed itself in Luther and in the peculiar genius of the Germans for religious experience.
The following words are from no less an authority than Pfleiderer:
"Cannot we recognize in this point that truly German characteristic of _Innerlichkeit_ which scorns to fix for sensuous perception the divine something which makes itself felt in the depths of the sensitive soul, which scorns to drag down the sublime mystery of the unknowable to the vulgar distinctness of earthly things? The fact that the Germans attached but little importance to religious ceremonies accords with this view."
To others, this sense of mystery is a prophetic antic.i.p.ation of the Kantian thing-in-itself.
A similar treatment has been accorded to the personal and voluntary bond by which individuals attached themselves to a chieftain. Thus early was marked out the fidelity or loyalty, _Treue_, which is uniquely Germanic--although some warlike tribes among our Indians carried the system still further. I can allow myself but one more example of the way in which the philosophic sophistication of history has worked. No historian can be unconscious of the extent to which European culture has been genuinely European--the extent to which it derives itself from a common heritage of the ancient world and the extent to which intermixtures and borrowings of culture have gone on ever since. As to Germany, however, these obvious facts have to be accommodated to the doctrine of an original racial deposit steadily evolving from within.
The method is simple. As respects Germany, these cultural borrowings and crosses represent the intrinsic universality of its genius. Through this universality, the German spirit finds itself at home everywhere.
Consequently, it consciously appropriates and a.s.similates what other peoples have produced by a kind of blind unconscious instinct. Thus it was German thought which revealed the truth of h.e.l.lenic culture, and rescued essential Christianity from its Romanized petrifaction. The principle of Reason which French enlightenment laid hold of only in its negative and destructive aspect, the German spirit grasped in its positive and constructive form. Shakespeare happened to be born in England, but only the Germans have apprehended him in his spiritual universality so that he is now more his own than he is England"s--and so on. But with respect to other peoples, similar borrowings reveal only their lack of inner and essential selfhood. While Luther is universal because he is German, Shakespeare is universal because he is not English.
I have intimated that Fichte"s actual influence was limited. But his basic ideas of the State and of history were absorbed in the philosophy of Hegel, and Hegel for a considerable period absolutely dominated German thinking. To set forth the ground principles of his "absolute idealism" would be only to repeat what has already been said. Its chief difference, aside from Hegel"s encyclopedic knowledge, his greater concrete historic interest and his more conservative temperament, is his bottomless scorn for an Idea, an Absolute, which merely ought to be and which is only going to be realized after a period of time. "The Actual is the Rational and the Rational _is_ the Actual"--and the actual means the actuating force and movement of things. It is customary to call him an Idealist. In one sense of much abused terms, he is the greatest realist known to philosophy. He might be called a Brutalist. In the inquiry Bourdon carried on in Germany a few years ago (published under the t.i.tle of the "German Enigma"), he records a conversation with a German who deplores the tendency of the Germans to forsake the solid bone of things in behalf of a romantic shadow. As against this he appeals to the realistic sense of Hegel, who, "in opposition to the idealism which had lifted Germany on wings, arrayed and marshaled the maxims of an unflinching realism. He had formulae for the justification of facts whatever they might be. That which _is_, he would say, is reason realized. And what did he teach? That the hour has sounded for the third act in the drama of humanity, and that the German opportunity is not far off... . I could show you throughout the nineteenth century the torrent of political and social ideas which had their source here."
I have said that the essential points of the Fichtean philosophy of history were taken up into the Hegelian system. This a.s.similation involved, however, a rectification of an inconsistency between the earlier and the later moral theories of Fichte. In his earlier ethical writings, emphasis fell upon conscious moral personality--upon the deliberate identification by the individual will of its career and destiny with the purpose of the Absolute. In his later patriotic philosophy, he a.s.serts that the organized nation is the channel by which a finite ego acquires moral personality, since the nation alone transmits to individuals the generic principle of G.o.d working in humanity. At the same time he appeals to the resolute will and consciously chosen self-sacrifice of individuals to overthrow the enemy and re-establish the Prussian state. When Hegel writes that victory has been obtained, the war of Independence has been successfully waged. The necessity of emphasizing individual self-a.s.sertion had given way to the need of subordinating the individual to the established state in order to check the disintegrating tendencies of liberalism.
Haym has said that Hegel"s "Philosophy of Law" had for its task the exhibition as the perfect work of Absolute Reason up to date of the "practical and political condition existing in Prussia in 1821." This was meant as a hostile attack. But Hegel himself should have been the last to object. With his scorn for an Ideal so impotent that its realization must depend upon the effort of private selves, an Absolute so inconsequential that it must wait upon the accidents of future time for manifestation, he sticks in politics more than elsewhere to the conviction that the actual _is_ the rational. "The task of philosophy is to comprehend that which is, for that which is, is Reason." Alleged philosophies which try to tell what the State should be or even what a state ought in the future to come to be, are idle fantasies. Such attempts come too late. Human wisdom is like "the bird of Minerva which takes its flight only at the close of day."[110:A] It comes, after the issue, to acknowledge what has happened. "The State is the rational in itself and for itself. Its substantial unity is an absolute end in itself. To it belongs supreme right in respect to individuals whose first duty is--just to be members of the State." ... The State "is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State." It is a commonplace of idealistic theism that nature is a manifestation of G.o.d. But Hegel says that nature is only an externalized, unconscious and so incomplete expression. The State has more, not less, objective reality than physical nature, for it is a realization of Absolute spirit in the realm of consciousness. The doctrine presents an extreme form of the idea, not of the divine right of kings, but of the divine right of States. "The march of G.o.d in history is the cause of the existence of states; their foundation is the power of reason realizing itself as will. Every state, whatever it be, partic.i.p.ates in the divine essence. The State is not the work of human art; only Reason could produce it." The State is G.o.d on earth.
[110:A] Marx said of the historic schools of politics, law and economics that to them, as Jehovah to Moses on Mt. Sinai, the divine showed but its posterior side.
His depreciation of the individual as an individual appears in every theme of his Philosophy of Right and History. At first sight, his theory of great world heroes seems inconsistent with his disregard of individuals. While the morality of most men consists simply in a.s.similating into their own habits the customs already found in the inst.i.tutions about them, great men initiate new historic epochs. They derive "their purposes and their calling not from the calm regular course of things sanctioned by the existing order, but from a concealed fount, from that inner spirit hidden beneath the surface, which, striking the outer world as a sh.e.l.l, bursts it to pieces." The heroes are thus the exception which proves the rule. They are world characters; while they seem to be seeking personal interests they are really acting as organs of a universal will, of G.o.d in his further march. In his identification with the Absolute, the world-hero can have but one aim to which "he is devoted regardless of all else. Such men may even treat other great and sacred interests inconsiderately... . But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower--crush to pieces many an object in its path." We are not surprised to see that Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon are the characters he prefers to cite. One can only regret that he died before his contemplative piety could behold Bismarck.
A large part of the intellectual machinery by which Hegel overcame the remnants of individualism found in prior philosophy came from the idea of organic development which had been active in German thought since the time of Herder. In his chief work ("Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity"), written in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Herder holds that history is a progressive education of humanity. This idea, had from Lessing, is combined with the idea of Leibniz that change is evolution, by means of an internal force, of powers originally implicit in existence, and with the idea of Spinoza of an all-comprehensive substance. This idea of organic growth was then applied to language, literature and inst.i.tutions. It soon obtained reinforcement from the rising science of biology. Long before the days of Darwin or Spencer, the idea of evolution had been a commonplace of German thought with respect to everything concerning the history of humanity. The notion was set in sharp ant.i.thesis to the conception of "making" or manufacturing inst.i.tutions and const.i.tutions, which was treated as one of the fallacies of the French philosophy of the Enlightenment. A combination of this notion of universal organic growth with the technique of prior idealism may fairly be said to have determined Hegel"s whole philosophy. While Leibniz and Herder had emphasized the notion of harmony as an essential factor of the working of organic forces, Hegel took from Fichte the notion of a unity or synthesis arrived at by "positing," and overcoming an opposite. Struggle for existence (or realization) was thus an "organic" part of German thinking long before the teaching of Darwin, who, in fact, is usually treated by German writers as giving a rather superficial empirical expression to an idea which they had already grasped in its universal speculative form. It is characteristic of the extent in which Hegel thought in terms of struggle and overcoming that after stating why it was as yet impossible to include the Americas in his philosophy of history, and after saying that in the future the burden of world history will reveal itself there, he surmises that it may take the form of a "contest" between North and South America. No philosopher has ever thought so consistently and so wholly in terms of strife and overcoming as Hegel. When he says the "world history is the world judgment" he means judgment in the sense of a.s.size, and judgment as victory of one and defeat of another--victory being the final proof that the world spirit has now pa.s.sed from one nation to take up its residence in another. To be defeated in a way which causes the nation to take a secondary position among nations is a sign that divine judgment has been pa.s.sed upon it. When a recent German writer argues that for Germany to surrender any territory which it has conquered during the present war would be sacrilegious, since it would be to refuse to acknowledge the workings of G.o.d in human history, he speaks quite in the Hegelian vein.
Although the phenomenon of nationalism was very recent when Hegel wrote, indeed practically contemporary with his own day, he writes in nationalistic terms the entire history of humanity. The State is the Individual of history: it is to history what a given man is to biography. History gives us the progressive realization or evolution of the Absolute, moving from one National Individual to another. It is law, the universal, which makes the State a State, for law is reason, not as mere subjective reflection, but in its manifestation as supreme over and in particulars. On this account, Hegel"s statement that the fundamental principle of history is the progressive realization of freedom does not mean what an uninstructed English reader would naturally take it to mean. Freedom is always understood in terms of Reason. Its expression in history means that Thought has progressively become conscious of itself; that is, has made itself its own object. Freedom is the _consciousness_ of freedom. Liberty of action has little to do with it. Obviously it is only in the German idealistic system--particularly in the system of Hegel himself--that this has fully taken place. Meantime, when citizens of a state (especially of the state in which this philosophic insight has been achieved) take the laws of their state as their own ends and motives of action, they attain the best possible subst.i.tute for a reason which is its own object. They appropriate as their own personal reason the objective and absolute Reason embodied perforce in law and custom.
After this detour, we are led back to the fact that the Germans possess the greatest freedom yet attained by humanity, for the Prussian political organization most fully exemplifies Law, or the Universal, organizing under and within itself all particular arrangements of social and personal life. Some other peoples--particularly the Latin--have thought they could _make_ const.i.tutions, or at least that the form of their const.i.tution was a matter of choice. But this is merely setting up the private conceit of individuals against the work of Absolute Reason, and thus marks the disintegration of a state rather than its existence.
Other peoples have tried to found the government on the consent of the governed, unwitting of the fact that it is the government, the _specific_ realization of Reason, which makes a state out of what is otherwise an anarchic ma.s.s of individuals. Other peoples have made a parliament or representative body the essential thing in government; in philosophic reality this is only a consultative body, having as its main function communication between cla.s.ses (which are indispensable to an "organic" state) and the real government. The chief function of parliament is to give the opinion of the social cla.s.ses an opportunity to feel it is being considered and to enable the real government to take advantage of whatever wisdom may chance to be expressed. Hegel seems quite prophetic when he says: "By virtue of this partic.i.p.ation subjective liberty and conceit, with their general opinion, can show themselves palpably efficacious and enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to count for something." Finally, the State becomes wholly and completely an organized Individual only in its external relations, its relations to other states. As his philosophy of history ignores the past in seizing upon the national state as the unit and focus of history, so it ignores all future possibility of a genuinely international federation to which isolated nationalism shall be subordinated. Bernhardi writes wholly in the Hegelian sense when he says that to expand the idea of the State into the idea of humanity is a Utopian error, for it would exclude the essential principle of life, struggle.
Philosophical justification of war follows inevitably from a philosophy of history composed in nationalistic terms. History is the movement, the march of G.o.d on earth through time. Only one nation at a time can be the latest and hence the fullest realization of G.o.d. The movement of G.o.d in history is thus particularly manifest in those changes by which unique place pa.s.ses from one nation to another. War is the signally visible occurrence of such a flight of the divine spirit in its onward movement.
The idea that friendly intercourse among all the peoples of the earth is a legitimate aim of human effort is in basic contradiction of such a philosophy. War is explicit realization of "dialectic," of the negation by which a higher synthesis of reason is a.s.sured. It effectively displays the "irony of the divine Idea." It is to national life what the winds are to the sea, "preserving mankind from the corruption engendered by immobility." War is the most effective preacher of the vanity of all merely finite interests; it puts an end to that selfish egoism of the individual by which he would claim his life and his property as his own or as his family"s. International law is not properly law; it expresses simply certain usages which are accepted so long as they do not come into conflict with the purpose of a state--a purpose which always gives the supreme law of national life.
Particularly against the absolute right of the "present bearer of the world spirit, the spirits of the other nations are absolutely without right. The latter, just like the nations whose epochs have pa.s.sed, count no longer in universal history." Since they are already pa.s.sed over from the standpoint of the divine idea, war can do no more than exhibit the fact that their day has come and gone. World history is the world"s judgment seat.
For a period Hegelian thought was almost supreme in Germany. Then its rule pa.s.sed away almost as rapidly as it had been achieved. After various shiftings, the trend of philosophic thought was definitely "Back to Kant." Kant"s greater sobriety, the sharp distinction he drew between the realm of phenomena and science and the ideal noumenal world, commended him after the unbridled pretensions of Hegelian absolutism.
For more than a generation Hegel was spoken of with almost universal contempt. Nevertheless his ideas, loosed from the technical apparatus with which he surrounded them, persisted. Upon the historical disciplines his influence was peculiarly deep and abiding. He fixed the ideas of Fichte and fastened them together with the pin of evolution.
Since his day, histories of philosophy, or religion, or inst.i.tutions have all been treated as developments through necessary stages of an inner implicit idea or purpose according to an indwelling law. And the idea of a peculiar mission and destiny of German history has lost nothing in the operation. Expressions which a bewildered world has sought since the beginning of the war to explain through the influence of a Darwinian struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, or through the influence of a Nietzschean philosophy of power, have their roots in the cla.s.sic idealistic philosophy culminating in Hegel.
Kant still remains the philosopher of Germany. The division of life between the world of sense and of mechanism and the world of the supersensible and purpose, the world of necessity and the world of freedom, is more congenial than a complete monism. The attempts of his successors to bridge the gap and set up a wholly unified philosophy failed, historically speaking. But, nevertheless, they contributed an indispensable ingredient to the contemporary German spirit; they helped people the Kantian void of the supersensible with the substantial figures of the State and its Historical Evolution and Mission. Kant bequeathed to the world an intellect devoted to the congenial task of discovering causal law in external nature, and an inner intuition which, in spite of its sublimity, had nothing to look at except the bare form of an empty law of duty. Kant was kept busy in proving the existence of this supernal but empty region. Consequently he was not troubled by being obliged to engage in the unremunerative task of spending his time gazing into a blank void. His successors were not so fortunate. The existence of this ideal realm in which reason, purpose and freedom are one was axiomatic to them; they could no longer busy themselves with proving its existence. Some of them, called the Romanticists, filled it with visions, more or less poetic, which frankly drew their substance from an imagination inflamed by emotional aspiration in revolt at the limitations of outward action. Others, called the idealistic philosophers, filled in the void, dark because of excess of light, with less ghostly forms of Law and the unfolding in History of Absolute Value and Purpose. The two worlds of Kant were too far away from each other.
The later idealistic world constructions crumbled; but their debris supplied material with which to fill in the middle regions between the Kantian worlds of sense and of reason. This, I repeat, is their lasting contribution to present German culture. Where Kantianism has not received a filling in from the philosophy of history and the State, it has remained in Germany, as elsewhere, a critique of the methodology of science; its importance has been professional rather than human.
In the first lecture we set out with the suggestion of an inquiry into the influence of general ideas upon practical affairs, upon those larger practical affairs called politics. We appear to have concluded with a conviction that (in the instance before us at least) politics has rather been the controlling factor in the formation of philosophic ideas and in deciding their vogue. Yet we are well within limits when we say that ideas which were evoked in correspondence with concrete social conditions served to articulate and consolidate the latter. Even if we went so far as to say that reigning philosophies simply reflect as in a mirror contemporary social struggles, we should have to add that seeing one"s self in a mirror is a definite practical aid in carrying on one"s undertaking to its completion.
When what a people sees in its intellectual looking gla.s.s is its own organization and its own historic evolution as an organic instrument of the accomplishment of an Absolute Will and Law, the articulating and consolidating efficacy of the reflection is immensely intensified.
Outside of Germany, the career of the German idealistic philosophy has been mainly professional and literary. It has exercised considerable influence upon the teaching of philosophy in France, England and this country. Beyond professorial circles, its influence has been considerable in theological directions. Without doubt, it has modulated for many persons the transition from a supernatural to a spiritual religion; it has enabled them to give up historical and miraculous elements as indifferent accretions and to retain the moral substance and emotional values of Christianity. But the Germans are quite right in feeling that only in Germany is this form of idealistic thinking both indigenous and widely applied.
A crisis like the present forces upon thoughtful persons a consideration of the value for the general aims of civilization of a philosophy of the _a priori_, the Absolute, and of their immanent evolution through the medium of an experience which as just experience is only a superficial and negligible vehicle of transcendent Laws and Ends. It forces a consideration of what type of general ideas is available for the articulation and guidance of our own life in case we find ourselves looking upon the present world scene as an _a priori_ and an absolutistic philosophy gone into bankruptcy.
In Europe, speaking generally, "Americanism" is a synonym for crude empiricism and a materialistic utilitarianism. It is no part of my present task to try to show how largely this accusation is due to misunderstanding. It is simpler to inquire how far the charge points to the problem which American life, and therefore philosophy in America, must meet. It is difficult to see how any _a priori_ philosophy, or any systematic absolutism, is to get a footing among us, at least beyond narrow and professorial circles. Psychologists talk about learning by the method of trial and error or success. Our social organization commits us to this philosophy of life. Our working principle is to try: to find out by trying, and to measure the worth of the ideas and theories tried by the success with which they meet the test of application in practice. Concrete consequences rather than _a priori_ rules supply our guiding principles. Hegel found it "superficial and absurd to regard as objects of choice" social const.i.tutions; to him "they were necessary structures in the path of development." To us they are the c.u.mulative result of a mult.i.tude of daily and ever-renewed choices.
That such an experimental philosophy of life means a dangerous experiment goes without saying. It permits, sooner or later it may require, every alleged sacrosanct principle to submit to ordeal by fire--to trial by service rendered. From the standpoint of _a priorism_, it is hopelessly anarchic; it is doomed, _a priori_, to failure. From its own standpoint, it is itself a theory to be tested by experience.
Now experiments are of all kinds, varying from those generated by blind impulse and appet.i.te to those guided by intelligently formed ideas. They are as diverse as the attempt of a savage to get rain by sprinkling water and scattering thistledown, and that control of electricity in the laboratory from which issue wireless telegraphy and rapid traction. Is it not likely that in this distinction we have the key to the failure or success of the experimental method generalized into a philosophy of life, that is to say, of social matters--the only application which procures complete generalization?
An experimental philosophy differs from empirical philosophy as empiricism has been previously formulated. Historical empiricisms have been stated in terms of precedents; their generalizations have been summaries of what has previously happened. The truth and falsity of these generalizations depended then upon the accuracy with which they catalogued, under appropriate heads, a multiplicity of past occurrences.
They were perforce lacking in directive power except so far as the future might be a routine repet.i.tion of the past. In an experimental philosophy of life, the question of the past, of precedents, of origins, is quite subordinate to prevision, to guidance and control amid future possibilities. Consequences rather than antecedents measure the worth of theories. Any scheme or project may have a fair hearing provided it promise amelioration in the future; and no theory or standard is so sacred that it may be accepted simply on the basis of past performance.
But this difference between a radically experimental philosophy and an empiristic philosophy only emphasizes the demand for careful and comprehensive reflection with respect to the ideas which are to be tested in practice. If an _a priori_ philosophy has worked at all in Germany it is because it has been based on an _a priori_ social const.i.tution--that is to say, on a state whose organization is such as to determine in advance the main activities of cla.s.ses of individuals, and to utilize their particular activities by linking them up with one another in definite ways. It is a commonplace to say that Germany is a monument to what can be done by means of conscious method and organization. An experimental philosophy of life in order to succeed must not set less store upon methodic and organized intelligence, but more. We must learn from Germany what methodic and organized work means.
But instead of confining intelligence to the technical means of realizing ends which are predetermined by the State (or by something called the historic Evolution of the Idea), intelligence must, with us, devote itself as well to construction of the ends to be acted upon.