Hegel himself believed that he had permanently effected that reconciliation of the orthodox creed with the cognition of Ultimate Reality at which his dialectic aimed. In all such attempts at reconciliation three great questions are chiefly concerned: (1) the Being of G.o.d; (2) the nature of man; (3) the actual and the ideally satisfactory relations between the two. But, as might have been expected, a period of wild, irregular, and confused contention met the attempt to establish this claim. In this conflict of more or less noisy and popular as well as of thoughtful and scholastic philosophy, Hegelians of various degrees of fidelity, anti-Hegelians of various degrees of hostility, and ultra-Hegelians of various degrees of eccentricity, all took a valiant and conspicuous part. We cannot follow its history; but we can learn its lesson. Polemical philosophy, as distinguished from quiet, reflective, and critical but constructive philosophy involves a most uneconomical use of mental force. Yet out of this period of conflict, and in a measure as its result, there came a period of improved relations between science and philosophy and between philosophy and theology, which was the dawn, toward the close of the nineteenth century, of that better illumined day into the middle of which we hope that we are proceeding.
Before leaving this idealistic movement in Germany, and elsewhere as influenced largely by German philosophy, one other name deserves mention. This name is that of Lotze, who combined elements from many previous thinkers with those derived from his own studies and thoughts,--the conceptions of mechanism as applied to physical existences and to psychical life, with the search for some monistic Principle that shall satisfy the aesthetical and ethical, as well as the scientific demands of the human mind. This variety of interests and of culture led to the result of his making important contributions to psychology, logic, metaphysics, and aesthetics. If we find his system of thinking--as I think we must--lacking in certain important elements of consistency and obscured in places by doubts as to his real meaning, this does not prevent us from a.s.signing to Lotze a position which, for versatility of interests, genial quality of reflection and criticism, suggestiveness of thought and charm of style, is second to no other in the history of nineteenth century philosophical development.
In France and in England the first quarter of the last century was far from being productive of great thinkers or great thoughts in the sphere of philosophy. De Biran (1766-1824), in several important respects the forerunner of modern psychology, after revolting from his earlier complacent acceptance of the vagaries of Condillac and Cabanis, made the discovery that the "immediate consciousness of self-activity is the primitive and fundamental principle of human cognition." Meantime it was only a little group of Academicians who were being introduced, in a somewhat superficial way, to the thoughts of the Scottish and the German idealistic Schools by Royer-Collard, Jouffroy, Cousin, and others. A more independent and characteristic movement was that inaugurated by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who, having felt the marked influence of Saint-Simon when he was only a boy of twenty, in a letter to his friend Valat, in the year 1824, declares: "I shall devote my whole life and all my powers to the founding of positive philosophy." In spite of the impossibility of harmonizing with this point of view the vague and mystical elements which characterize the later thought of Comte, or with its carrying into effect the not altogether intelligent recognition of the synthetic activity of the mind (_tout se reduit toujours a lier_) and certain hints as to "first principles;" and in spite of the small positive contribution to philosophy which Comtism could claim to have made; it has in a way represented the value of two ideas. These are (1) the necessity for philosophy of studying the actual historical forces which have been at work and which are displayed in the facts of history; and (2) the determination not to go by mere unsupported speculation beyond experience in order to discover knowable Reality. There is, however, a kind of subtle irony in the fact that the word "Positivism"
should have come to stand so largely for _negative_ conclusions, in the very spheres of philosophy, morals, and religion where _affirmative_ conclusions are so much desired and sought.
That philosophy in Great Britain was in a nearly complete condition of decadence during the first half or three quarters of the nineteenth century was the combined testimony of writers from such different points of view as Carlyle, Sir William Hamilton, and John Stuart Mill. And yet these very names are also witnesses to the fact that this decadence was not quite complete. In the first quarter of the century Coleridge, although he had failed, on account of weakness both of mind and of character, in his attempt to reconcile religion to the thought of his own age, on the basis of the Kantian distinction between reason and the intellect, had sowed certain seed-thoughts which became fertile in the soil of minds more vigorous, logical, and practical than his own. This was, perhaps, especially true in America, where inquirers after truth were seeking for something more satisfactory than the French skepticism of the revolutionary and following period. Carlyle"s mocking sarcasm was also not without wholesome effect.
But it was Sir William Hamilton and John Stuart Mill whose thoughts exercised a more powerful formative influence over the minds of the younger men. The one was the flower of the Scottish Realism, the other of the movement started by Bentham and the elder Mill.
That the Scottish Realism should end by such a combination with the skepticism of the critical philosophy as is implied in Hamilton"s law of the relativity of all knowledge, is one of the most curious and interesting turns in the history of modern philosophy. And when this law was so interpreted by Dean Mansel in its application to the fundamental cognitions of religion as to lay the foundations upon which the most imposing structure of agnosticism was built by Herbert Spencer, surely the entire swing around the circle, from Kant to Kant again, has been made complete. The attempt of Hamilton failed, as every similar attempt must always fail. Neither speculative philosophy nor religious faith is satisfied with an abstract conception, about the correlate of which in Reality nothing is known or ever can be known. But every important attempt of this sort serves the double purpose of stimulating other efforts to reconstruct the answer to the problem of philosophy, on a basis of positive experience of an enlarged type; and also of acting as a real, if only temporary practical support to certain value-judgments which the faiths of morality, art, and religion both implicate and, in a measure, validate.
The influence of John Stuart Mill, as it was exerted not only in his conduct of life while a servant of the East India Company, but also in his writings on Logic, Politics, and Philosophy, was, on the whole, a valuable contribution to his generation. In the additions which he made to the Utilitarianism of Bentham we have done, I believe, all that ever can be done in defense of this principle of ethics. And his posthumous confessions of faith in the ontological value of certain great conceptions of religion are the more valuable because of the nature of the man, and of the experience which is their source. Perhaps the most permanent contribution which Mill made to the development of philosophy proper, outside of the sphere of logic, ethics, and politics, was his vigorous polemical criticism of Hamilton"s claim for the necessity of faith in an "Unconditioned" whose conception is "only a fasciculus of negations of the Conditioned in its opposite extremes, and bound together merely by the aid of language and their common character of incomprehensibility."
The history of the development of philosophy in America during the nineteenth century, as during the preceding century, has been characterized in the main by three princ.i.p.al tendencies. These may be called the theological, the social, and the eclectic. From the beginning down to the present time the religious influence and the interest in political and social problems have been dominant. And yet withal, the student of these problems in the atmosphere of this country likes, in a way, to do his own thinking and to make his own choices of the thoughts that seem to him true and best fitted for the best form of life. In spite of the fact that the different streams of European thought have flowed in upon us somewhat freely, there has been comparatively little either of the adherence to schools of European philosophy or of the attempt to develop a national school. Doubtless the influence of English and Scottish thinking upon the academical circles of America was greatest for more than one hundred and fifty years after the gift in 1714 by Governor Yale of a copy of Locke"s Essay to the college which bore his name,--and especially upon the reflections and published works of Jonathan Edwards touching the fundamental problems of epistemology, ethics, and religion. During the early part of this century these views awakened antagonism from such writers as Dana, Whedon, Hazard, Nathaniel Taylor, Jeremiah Day, Henry P. Tappan, and other opponents of the Edwardean theology, and also from such advocates of so-called "free-thinking," as had derived their _motifs_ and their views from English deistical writers like Shaftesbury, or from the skepticism of Hume.
A more definite philosophical movement, however, which had established itself somewhat firmly in scholastic centres by the year 1825, and which maintained itself for more than half a century, went back to the arrival in this country of John Witherspoon, in 1768, to be the president of Princeton, bringing with him a library of three hundred books. It was the appeal of the Scottish School to the "plain man"s consciousness" and to so-called "common sense," which was relied upon to controvert all forms of philosophy which seemed to threaten the foundations of religion and of the ethics of politics and sociology. But even during this period, which was characterized by relatively little independent thinking in scholastic circles, a more p.r.o.nounced productivity was shown by such writers as Francis Wayland, and others; but, perhaps, especially by Laurens P. Hickok, whose works on psychology and cosmology deserve especial recognition: while in psychology, as related to philosophical problems, the princ.i.p.al names of this period are undoubtedly the presidents of Yale and Princeton,--Noah Porter and James McCosh,--both of whom (but especially the former) had their views modified by the more scientific psychology of Europe and the profounder thinking of Germany.
It was Germany"s influence, however, both directly and indirectly through Coleridge and a few other English writers, that caused a ferment of impressions and ideas which, in their effort to work themselves clear, resulted in what is known as New England "Transcendentalism." In America this movement can scarcely be called definitely philosophical; much less can it be said to have resulted in a system, or even in a school, of philosophy. It must also be said to have been "inspired but not borrowed" from abroad. Its princ.i.p.al, if not sole, literary survival is to be found in the works of Emerson. As expounded by him, it is not precisely Pantheism--certainly not a consistent and critical development of the pantheistic theory of the Being of the World; it is, rather, a vague, poetical, and pantheistical Idealism of a decidedly mystical type.
The introduction of German philosophy proper, in its nature form, and essential being, to the few interested seriously in critical and reflective thinking upon the ultimate problems of nature and of human life, began with the founding of the _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, in 1867, under the direction of William T. Harris, then Superintendent of Schools in this city.
With the work of Darwin, and his predecessors and successors, there began a mighty movement of thought which, although it is primarily scientific and more definitely available in biological science, has already exercised, and is doubtless destined to exercise in the future, an enormous influence upon philosophy. Indeed, we are already in the midst of the preliminary confusions and contentions, but most fruitful considerations and discoveries belonging to a so-called philosophy of evolution.
This development has, in the sphere of systematic philosophy, reached its highest expression in the voluminous works produced through the latter half of the nineteenth century by Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose recent death seems to mark the close of the period we have under consideration. The metaphysical a.s.sumptions and ontological value of the system of Spencer, as he wished it to be understood and interpreted, have perhaps, though not unnaturally, been quite too much submerged in the more obvious expressions of its agnostic positivism. In its psychology, however, the a.s.sumption of "some underlying substance in contrast to all changing forms," distinguishes it from a pure positivism in a very radical way. But more especially in philosophy, the metaphysical postulate of a mysterious Unity of Force that somehow manages to reveal itself, and the law of its operations, to the developed cognition of the nineteenth century philosopher, however much it seems to involve the system in internal contradictions, certainly forbids that we should identify it with the positivism of Auguste Comte.
In our judgment, however, it is in his ethical good sense and integrity of judgment,--a good sense and integrity which commits to ethics rather than to sociology the task of determining the highest type of human life,--and in basing the conditions for the prevalence and the development of the highest type of life upon ethical principles and upon the adherence to ethical ideas, that Herbert Spencer will be found most clearly ent.i.tled to a lasting honor.
III. The third number of our difficult tasks is to summarize the princ.i.p.al results, to inventory the net profits, as it were, of the development of philosophy during the nineteenth century. This task is made the more difficult by the heterogeneous nature and as yet uncla.s.sified condition of the development. With the quickening and diversifying of all kinds and means of intercourse, there has come the breaking down of national schools and idiosyncrasies of method and of thought. In philosophy, Germany, France, Great Britain, and indeed, Italy, have come to intermingle their streams of influence; and from all these countries these streams have been flowing in upon America. In psychology, especially, as well as in all the other sciences, but also to some degree in philosophy, returning streams of influence from America have, during the last decade or two, been felt in Europe itself.
It must also be admitted that the attempts at a reconstruction of systematic philosophy which have followed the rapid disintegration of the Hegelian system, and the enormous acc.u.mulations of new material due to the extension of historical studies and of the particular sciences,--including especially the so-called "new psychology,"--have not as yet been fruitful of large results. In philosophy, as in art, politics, and even scientific theory, the spirit and the opportunity of the time are more favorable to the gathering of material and to the projecting of a bewildering variety of new opinions, or old opinions put forth under new names, than to that candid, patient, and prolonged reflection and balancing of judgment which a worthy system-building inexorably requires. The age of breaking up the old, without a.s.similating the new, has not yet pa.s.sed away. And whatever is new, startling, large, even monstrous, has in many quarters the seeming preference, in philosophy"s building as in other architecture. To the confusion which reigns even in scholastic circles, contributions have been arriving from the outside, from philosophers like Nietzsche, and from men great in literature like Tolstoi. Nor has the matter been helped by the more recent extreme developments of positivism and skepticism, which often enough, without any consciousness of their origin and without the respect for morality and religion which Kant always evinced, really go back to the critical philosophy.
In spite of all this, however, the last two decades or more have shown certain hopeful tendencies and notable achievements, looking toward the reconstruction of systematic philosophy. In this attempt to bring order out of confusion, to enable calm, prolonged, and reflective thinking to build into its structure the riches of the new material which the evolution of the race has secured, a place of honor ought to be given to France, where so much has been done of late to blend with clearness of style and independence of thought that calm reflective and critical judgment which looks all sides of human experience sympathetically but bravely in the face. In psychology Ribot, and in philosophy, Fouillee, Renouvier, Secretan, and others, deserve grateful recognition. No friend of philosophy can, I think, fail to recognize the probable benefits to be derived from that movement with which such names as Mach and Ostwald in Germany are connected, and which is sounding the call to the men of science to clear up the really distressing obscurity and confusion which has so long clung to their fundamental conceptions; and to examine anew the significance of their a.s.sumptions, with a view to the construction of a new and improved doctrine of the Being of the World. And if to these names we add those of the numerous distinguished investigators of psychology as pedagogic to philosophy, and, in philosophy, of Deussen, Eucken, von Hartmann, Riehl, Wundt, and others, we may well affirm that new light will continue to break forth from that country which so powerfully aroused the whole Western World at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In Great Britain the name and works of Thomas Hill Green have influenced the attempts at a reconstruction of systematic philosophy in a manner to satisfy at one and the same time both the facts and laws of science and the aesthetical, ethical, and religious ideals of the age, in a very considerable degree.
And in this attempt, both as it expresses itself in theoretical psychology and in the various branches of philosophical discipline, writers like Bradley, Fraser, Flint, Hodgson, Seth, Stout, Ward, and others, have taken a conspicuous part. Nor are there wanting in Holland, Italy, and even in Sweden and Russia, thinkers equally worthy of recognition, and recognized, in however limited and unworthy fashion, in their own land. The names of those in America who have labored most faithfully, and succeeded best, in this enormous task of reconstructing philosophy in a systematic way, and upon a basis of history and of modern science, I do not need to mention; they are known, or they surely ought to be known, to us all.
In attempting to summarize the gains of philosophy during the last hundred years, we should remind ourselves that progress in philosophy does not consist in the final settlement, and so in the "solving" of any of its great problems. Indeed, the relations of philosophy to its grounds in experience, and the nature of its method and of its ideal, are such that its progress can never be expected to put an end to itself. But the content of the total experience of humanity has been greatly enriched during the last century; and the critical and reflective thought of trained minds has been led toward a more profound and comprehensive theory of Reality, and toward a doctrine of values that shall be more available for the improvement of man"s political, social, and religious life.
In view of this truth respecting the limitations of systematic philosophy, I think we may hold that certain negative results, which are customarily adduced as unfavorable to the claims of philosophical progress, are really signs of improvement during the latter half of the nineteenth century. One is an increased spirit of reserve and caution, and an increased modesty of claims. This result is perhaps significant of riper wisdom and more trustworthy maturity. Kant believed himself to have established for philosophy a system of apodeictic conclusions, which were as completely forever to have displaced the old dogmatism as Copernicus had displaced the Ptolemaic astronomy. But the steady pressure of historical and scientific studies has made it increasingly difficult for any sane thinker to claim for any system of thinking such demonstrable validity. May we not hope that the students of the particular sciences, to whom philosophy owes so much of its enforced sanity and sane modesty, will themselves soon share freely of the philosophic spirit with regard to their own metaphysics and ethical and religious standpoints, touching the Ultimate Reality? Even when the recoil from the overweening self-satisfaction and cra.s.s complacency of the earlier part of the last century takes the form of melancholy, or of acute sadness, or even of a mild despair of philosophy, I am not sure that the last state of that man is not better than the first.
In connection with this improvement in spirit, we may also note an improvement in the method of philosophy. The purely speculative method, with its intensely interesting but indefensible disregard of concrete facts, and of the conclusions of the particular sciences, is no longer in favor even among the most ardent devotees and advocates of the superiority of philosophy to those sciences. At the same time, philosophy may quite properly continue to maintain its position of independent critic, as well as of docile pupil, toward the particular sciences.
In the same connection must be mentioned the hopeful fact that the last two or three decades have shown a decided improvement in the relations of philosophy toward the positive sciences. There are plain signs of late that the att.i.tude of antagonism, or of neglect, which prevailed so largely during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, is to be replaced by one of friendship and mutual helpfulness. And, indeed, science and philosophy cannot long or greatly flourish without reciprocal aid, if by science we mean a true _Wissenschaft_ and if we also mean to base philosophy upon our total experience. For science and philosophy are really engaged upon the same task,--to _understand and to appreciate the totality of man"s_ _experience_. They, therefore, have essential and permanent relations of dependence for material, for inspiration and correction, and for other forms of helpfulness. While, then, their respective spheres have been more clearly delimited during the last century, their interdependence has been more forcefully exhibited. Both of them have been developing a systematic exposition of the universe. Both of them desire to enlarge and deepen the conception of the Being of the World, as made known to the totality of human experience, in its Unity of nature and significance. We cannot believe that the end of the nineteenth century would sustain the charge which Fontenelle made in the closing years of the seventeenth century: "_L"Academie des Sciences ne prend la nature que par pet.i.tes parcelles_." Science itself now bids us regard the Universe as a dynamical Unity, teleologically conceived, because in a process of evolution under the control of immanent ideas. Philosophy a.s.sumes the same point of view, rather at the beginning than at the end of defining its purpose; and so feels a certain glad leap at its heart-strings, and an impulse to hold out the hand to science, when it hears such an utterance as that of Poincare: _Ce n"est pas le mechanisme le vrai, le seul but; c"est l"unite_.
Shall we not say, then, that this double-faced but wholly true lesson has been learned: namely, that the so-called philosophy of nature has no sound foundation and no safeguard against vagaries of every sort, unless it follows the lead of the positive sciences of nature; but that the sciences themselves can never afford a full satisfaction to the legitimate aspirations of human reason unless they, too, contribute to the philosophy of nature--writ large and conceived of as a real-ideal Unity.
That nature, as known and knowable by man, is a great artist, and that man"s aesthetical consciousness may be trusted as having a certain ontological value, is the postulate properly derived from the considerations advanced in the latest, and in some respects the most satisfactory, of the three Critiques of Kant. The ideal way of looking at natural phenomena which so delighted the mind of Goethe has now been placed on broad and sound foundations by the fruitful industries of many workmen,--such as Karl Ernst von Baer and Charles Darwin,--whose morphological and evolutionary conceptions of the universe have transformed the current conceptions of cosmic processes. But the world of physical and natural phenomena has thereby been rendered not less, but more, of a Cosmos, an orderly totality.
In addition to these more general but somewhat vague evaluations of the progress of philosophy during the nineteenth century, we are certainly called upon to face the question whether, after all, any advance has been made toward the more satisfactory solution of the definite problems which the Kantian criticism left unsolved. To this question I believe an affirmative answer may be given in accordance with the facts of history.
It will be remembered that the first of these problems was the epistemological. Certainly no little improvement has been made in the psychology of cognition. We can no longer repeat the mistakes of Kant, either with respect to the uncritical a.s.sumptions he makes regarding the origin of knowledge in the so-called "faculties" of the human mind or regarding the a.n.a.lysis of those faculties and their interdependent relations. It is not the Scottish philosophy alone which has led to the conclusion that, in the word of the late Professor Adamson, "What are called acts or states of consciousness are _not_ rightly conceived of as having for their objects their own modes of existence as ways in which a subject is modified." And in the larger manner both science and philosophy, in their negations and their affirmations, and even in their points of view, have better grounds for the faith of human reason in its power progressively to master the knowledge of Reality than was the case a hundred years ago. Nor has the skepticism of the same era, whether by shallow scoffing at repeated failures, or by pious sighs over the limitations of human reason, or by critical a.n.a.lysis of the cognitive faculties "according to well-established principles," succeeded in limiting our speculative pretensions to the sphere of possible experience,--in the Kantian meaning both of "principles" and of "experience." But what both science and philosophy are compelled to agree upon as a common underlying principle is this: The proof of the most fundamental presuppositions, as well as of the latest more scientifically established conclusions, of both science and philosophy, is the a.s.sistance they afford in the satisfactory explanation of the totality of racial experience.
In the evolution of the ontological problem, as compared with the form in which it was left by the critical philosophy, the past century has also made some notable advances. To deny this would be to discredit the development of human knowledge so far as to say that we know no more about what nature is, and man is, than was known a hundred years ago. To say this, however, would not be to speak truth of fact. And here we may not unnaturally grow somewhat impatient with that metaphysical fallacy which places an impa.s.sable gulf between Reality and Experience. No reality is, of course, cognizable or believable by man which does not somehow show its presence in his total experience. But no growth of experience is possible without involving increase of knowledge representing Reality. For Reality is no absent and dead, or statical, Ding-an-Sich. Cognition itself is a commerce of realities. And are there not plain signs that the more thoughtful men of science are becoming less averse to the recognition of the truth of ontological philosophy; namely, that the deeper meaning of their own studies is grasped only when they recognize that they are ever face to face with what they call Energy and we call Will, and with what they call laws and we call Mind as significant of the progressive realization of immanent ideas. This Ultimate Reality is so profound that neither science nor philosophy will ever sound all its depths, and so comprehensive as more than to justify all the categories of both.
Probably, on the whole, there has been less progress made toward a satisfactory solution of the problems offered by the value-judgments of ethics and religion, in the form in which these problems were left by the critical philosophy. The century has ill.u.s.trated the truth of Falckenberg"s statement: "In periods which have given birth to a skeptical philosophy, one never looks in vain for the complementary phenomenon of mysticism." Twice during the century the so-called "faith-philosophy," or philosophy of feeling, has been borne to the front, to raise a bulwark against the advancing hosts of agnostics--occasioned in the first period by the negations of the Kantian criticism, and in the second by the positive conclusions of the physical and biological sciences. This form of protesting against the neglect or disparagement of important factors which belong to man"s aesthetical, ethical, and religious experience, is reasonable and must be heard. But the extravagances with which these neglected factors have been posited and appraised, to the neglect of the more definitively scientific and strictly logical, is to be deplored. The great work before the philosophy of the present age is the reconciliation of the historical and scientific conceptions of the Universe with the legitimate sentiments and ideals of art, morality, and religion. But surely neither rationalism nor "faith-philosophy" is justified in pouring out the living child with the muddy water of the bath.
IV. The attempt to survey the present situation of philosophy, and to predict its immediate future, is embarra.s.sed by the fact that we are all immersed in it, are a part of its spirit and present form. But if nearness has its embarra.s.sments, it has also its benefits. Those who are amidst the tides of life may know better, in a way, how these tides are tending and what is their present strength, than do those who survey them from distant, cool, and exalted heights. "_Fur jeden einzelnen bildet der Vater und der Sohn eine greifbare Kette von Lebensereignungen und Erfahrungen._" The very intensely vital and formative but unformed condition of systematic philosophy--its protoplasmic character--contains promises of a new life. If we may believe the view of Hegel that the systematizing of the thought of any age marks the time when the peculiar living thought of that age is pa.s.sing into a period of decay, we may certainly claim for our present age the prospect of a prolonged vitality.
The nineteenth century has left us with a vast widening of the horizon,--outward into s.p.a.ce, backward in time, inward toward the secrets of life, and downward into the depths of Reality. With this there has been an increase in the profundity of the conviction of the spiritual unity of the race. In the consideration of all of its problems in the immediate future and in the coming century--so far as we can see forward into this century--philosophy will have to reckon with certain marked characteristics of the human spirit which form at the same time inspiring stimuli and limiting conditions of its endeavors and achievements. Chief among these are the greater and more firmly established principles of the positive sciences, and the prevalence of the historical spirit and method in the investigation of all manner of problems. These influences have given shape to the conception which, although it is as yet by no means in its final or even in thoroughly self-consistent form, is destined powerfully to affect our philosophical as well as our scientific theories. This conception is that of Development. But philosophy, considered as the product of critical and reflective thinking over the more ultimate problems of nature and of human life, is itself a development. And it is now, more than ever before, a development interdependently connected with all the other great developments.
Philosophy, in order to adapt itself to the spirit of the age, must welcome and cultivate the freest critical inquiry into its own methods and results, and must cheerfully submit itself to the demand for evidences which has its roots in the common and essential experience of the race. Moreover, the growth of the spirit of democracy, which, on the one hand, is distinctly unfavorable to any system of philosophy whose tenets and formulas seem to have only an academic validity or a merely esoteric value, and which, on the other hand, requires for its satisfaction a more tenable, helpful, and universally applicable theory of life and reality, cannot fail, in my judgment, to influence favorably the development of philosophy. In the union of the speculative and the practical; in the harmonizing of the interests of the positive sciences, with their judgments of fact and law, and the interests of art, morality, and religion, with their value-judgments and ideals; in the synthesis of the truths of Realism and Idealism, as they have existed hitherto and now exist in separateness or antagonism; in a union that is not accomplished by a shallow eclecticism, but by a sincere attempt to base philosophy upon the totality of human experience;--in such a union as this must we look for the real progress of philosophy in the coming century.
Just now there seem to be two somewhat heterogeneous and not altogether well-defined tendencies toward the reconstruction of systematic philosophy, both of which are powerful and represent real truths conquered by ages of intellectual industry and conflict. These two, however, need to be internally harmonized, in order to obtain a satisfactory statement of the development of the last century. They may be called the evolutionary and the idealistic. The one tendency lays emphasis on mechanism, the other on spirit. Yet it is most interesting to notice how many of the early workmen in the investigation of the principle of the conservation and correlation of energy took their point of departure from distinctly teleological and spiritual conceptions. "I was led," said Colding,--to take an extreme case,--at the Natural Science Congress at Innsbruck, 1869, "to the idea of the constancy of national forces by the religious conception of life." And even Moleschott, in his _Autobiography_, posthumously published, declares: "I myself was well aware that the whole conception might be converted; for since all matter is a bearer of force, endowed with force or penetrated with spirit, it would be just as correct to call it a spiritualistic conception." On the other hand, the modern, better instructed Idealism is much inclined, both from the psychological and from the more purely philosophical points of view, to regard with duly profound respect all the facts and laws of that mechanism of Reality, which certainly is not merely the dependent construction of the human mind functioning according to a const.i.tution that excludes it from Reality, but is rather the ever increasingly more trustworthy revealer of Reality. This tendency to a union of the claims of both Realism and Idealism is profoundly influencing the solution of each one of these problems which the Kantian criticism left to the philosophy of the nineteenth century.
In respect of the epistemological problem, philosophy--as I have already said--is not likely again to repeat the mistakes either of Kant or of the dogmatism which his criticism so effectually overthrew. It was a wise remark of the physician Johann Benjamin Erhard, in a letter dated May 19, 1794, _a propos_ of Fichte: "The philosophy which _proceeds_ from a _single_ fundamental principle, and pretends to deduce everything from it, is and always will remain a piece of artificial sophistry: only that philosophy which _ascends_ to the highest principle and exhibits everything else in perfect harmony with it, is the true one." This at least ought--one would say--to have been made clear by the century of discussion over the epistemological problem, since Kant. You cannot _deduce_ the Idea from the Reality, or the Reality from the Idea. The problem of knowledge is not, as Fichte held in the form of a fundamental a.s.sumption, an alternative of this sort. The Idea _and_ Reality are, the rather already there, and to be recognized as in a living unity, in every cognitive experience. Psychology is constantly adding something toward the problem of cognition as a problem in synthesis; and is then in a way contributing to the better scientific understanding of the philosophical postulate which is the confidence of human reason in its ability, by the harmonious use of all its powers, progressively to reach a better and fuller knowledge of Reality.
The ontological problem will necessarily always remain the unsolved, in the sense of the very incompletely solved problem of philosophy. But as long as human experience develops, and as long as philosophy bestows upon experience the earnest and candid efforts of reflecting minds, the solution of the ontological problem will be approached, but never fully reached. That Being of the World which Kant, in the negative and critical part of his work, left as an X, unknown and unknowable, the last century has filled with a new and far richer content than it ever had before. Especially has this century changed the conception of the Unity of the Universe in such manner that it can never return again to its ancient form. On the one hand, this Unity cannot be made comprehensible in terms of any one scientific or philosophical principle or law. Science and philosophy are both moving farther and farther away from the hope of comprehending the variety and infinite manifoldness of the Absolute in terms of any one side or aspect of man"s complex experience. But, on the other hand, the confidence in this essential Unity is not diminished, but is the rather confirmed. As humanity itself develops, as the Selfhood of man grows in the experience of the world which is its own environment, and of the world within which it is its own true Self, humanity may reasonably hope to win an increased, and increasingly valid, cognition of the Being of the World as the Absolute Self.
Closely connected, and in a way essentially identical with the ontological problem, is that of the origin, validity, and rational value of the ideas of humanity. May it not be said that the nineteenth century transfers to the twentieth an increased interest in and a heightened appreciation of the so-called practical problems of philosophy. Science and philosophy certainly ought to combine--and are they not ready to combine?--in the effort to secure a more nearly satisfactory understanding and solution of the problems afforded by the aesthetical, ethical, and religious sentiments and ideals of the race. To philosophy this combination means that it shall be more fruitful than ever before in promoting the uplift and betterment of mankind. The fulfillment of the practical mission of philosophy involves the application of its conceptions and principles to education, politics, morals, as a matter of law and of custom, and to religion as matter both of rational faith and of the conduct of life.
How, then, can this brief and imperfect sketch of the outline of the development of philosophy in the nineteenth century better come to a close than by words of encouragement and of exhortation as well. There are, in my judgment, the plainest signs that the somewhat too destructive and even nihilistic tendencies of the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century have reached their limit; that the strife of science and philosophy, and of both with religion, is lessening, and is being rapidly displaced by the spirit of mutual fairness and reciprocal helpfulness; and that reasonable hopes of a new and a splendid era of reconstruction in philosophy may be entertained.
For I cannot agree with the _dictum_ of a recent writer on the subject, that "the sciences are coming less and less to admit of a synthesis, and not at all of a synthetic philosopher."
On the contrary, I hold that, with an increased confidence in the capacity of human reason to discover and validate the most secret and profound, as well as the most comprehensive, of truths, philosophy may well put aside some of its shyness and hesitancy, and may resume more of that audacity of imagination, sustained by ontological convictions, which characterized its work during the first half of the nineteenth century. And if the latter half of the twentieth century does for the constructions of the first half of the same century, what the latter half of the nineteenth century did for the first half of that century, this new criticism will only be to ill.u.s.trate the way in which the human spirit makes every form of its progress.
Therefore, a summons of all helpers, in critical but fraternal spirit, to this work of reconstruction, for which two generations of enormous advance in the positive sciences has gathered new material, and for the better accomplishment of which both the successes and the failures of the philosophy of the nineteenth century have prepared the men of the twentieth century, is the winsome and imperative voice of the hour.
SECTION A--METAPHYSICS
SECTION A--METAPHYSICS
(_Hall 6, September 21, 10 a. m._)
CHAIRMAN: PROFESSOR A. C. ARMSTRONG, Wesleyan University.
SPEAKERS: PROFESSOR A. E. TAYLOR, McGill University, Montreal.
PROFESSOR ALEXANDER T. ORMOND, Princeton University.
SECRETARY: PROFESSOR A. O. LOVEJOY, Washington University.
The Chairman of the Section, Professor A. C. Armstrong, of Wesleyan University, in opening the meeting referred to the continued vitality of metaphysics as shown by its repeated revivals after the many destructive attacks upon it in the later modern times: he congratulated the Section on the fact that the princ.i.p.al speakers were scholars who had made notable contributions to metaphysical theory.
THE RELATIONS BETWEEN METAPHYSICS AND THE OTHER SCIENCES
BY PROFESSOR ALFRED EDWARD TAYLOR