II

We have now reached the turning-point in the history of modern philosophy. Five years after Hume’s death appeared the great treatise (1781) of the Königsberg professor, Immanuel Kant. This treatise, the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, was the product of the lifelong thought of its celebrated author, one of the greatest intellects of all time. The problem attacked by Kant was the old problem, the problem of the universal of thought and the particular of sense; or, to give it its wider signification, of the alogical and the logical in knowledge or experience. But he attacked it from a new standpoint, from the standpoint won by the thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Descartes had definitely broken away from the philosophical traditions of the Greeks and of the schoolmen, and had, with his cogito ergo sum, brought philosophy to the bed-rock of self-consciousness, though without grasping the implications of his own thought. As a consequence he fell back upon “clear and distinct ideas” as a test of truth, and placed in the forefront of his system certain dead abstractions, substance and accident, mind and matter, etc., as its principles. The British school, as we have seen, had reduced the philosophical problem to one of psychology. The individual mind considered as an independent existence over against an equally independent material world were the principles from which it started. The crisis arrived when Berkeley on the one side and Hume on the other destroyed the assumption of an independent material substance and an independent mental substance respectively.

In Kant the two lines of thought, that of Great Britain and that of the Continent, met together. The careful study of both lines of thinkers enabled the genius of Kant to restate the philosophic problem and to place its solution firmly on a new basis. Kant once for all brought philosophy back to self-consciousness as the ultimate principle and ground of its problem. He once again brought it back from being to knowing. And he not merely stated the problem in greater definiteness and completeness than had ever been done before, but he discussed it in all its bearings with a view of arriving at a solution. To this new way of looking at the philosophical problem he gave the name of “theory of knowledge,” and the method he employed in its solution he called “criticism.” The test of truth for him was not, as with Descartes, the loose and ineffectual one of “clear and distinct ideas” in the mind, but the necessity of thought as involved in the self-consistency of consciousness-in-general. He thus, at a stroke, raised philosophic discussion to a higher level. Neither the substances and attributes of the Continental metaphysicians, nor the psychological analysis of the British thinkers, proved satisfactory to Kant as a starting-point. The primary problem was the analysis of the conditions of knowledge itself as such – in other words, philosophy implied for Kant primarily an inquiry into the meaning of reality.

Kant was, of course, not the first to catch a glimpse of the true problem of philosophy. Plato, and still more Aristotle, in the ancient world, had great and, in the latter case, sustained flashes of insight in this connection, and the same may be said in the modern world of Spinoza. But the great merit of Kant, and what constitutes him an epoch-making figure in philosophy, is the fact that he was the first thinker to clearly grasp the principle, and never to lose sight of it throughout his investigations. It is not that Kant himself was altogether free, on the one hand, from the abstractions of the Continental schools, or, on the other, from the too psychological point of view of the British school. He assumed “things-in-themselves” as the basis of the object world (of external reality), while the perceiving Subject often appears to coincide for him with the individual mind, the “empirical ego,” as it is sometimes termed. But, in spite of his backslidings, Kant, in the main, holds fast the position that all that is, that reality, in the fullest sense of the word, implies consciousness, possible or actual.

The influence of Kant and his great work showed itself after a few years of polemical discussion in the works of Kant’s successors, foremost amongst whom were Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc. Fichte would have none of Kant’s things-in-themselves. He recognised clearly what Kant also recognised, although he sometimes faltered, at least in his exposition, namely, that there is nothing out-side Consciousness, which is another way of saying there is nothing outside the Ego which all consciousness implies. Here, again, Fichte emphasised a point on which Kant had expressed himself dubiously. Fichte was careful to point out the now familiar distinction between the Ego as subject of all consciousness, the “Moi premier et eternal,” as M. Jaurès has it, and the Ego as object of this consciousness, the individual object-self or personal mind with which it is identified in ordinary thought.

Fichte thus fixes and defines the philosophical ground taken up by Kant. He shows that the time-honoured problem of the One and the Many, of the Universal of thought and the Particular of sense, can be only properly understood, much less solved, from this new point of view, that of the method of the “transcendental philosophy,” as it was called. Fichte’s one-time coadjutor and one-time successor in the great philosophical movement with which we are dealing. Schelling, introduced a modification into the Fichteian system. The unconditioned principle at the root of all Consciousness or Experience he found neither in the experiencing Subject (Ego) nor in the experienced Object (perceived world) as such, but in the element of identity between them, that in which each side of this transcendental equation participated. This principle of Indifference, as Schelling termed it, i.e. the common element in the Ego experiencing and that which it experiences, was for Schelling the Absolute, viz., the ultimate principle of all reality. Schelling sometimes identifies, or hints at the identification of, this principle with Will or Energy.

Schelling’s contemporary (but in the order of thought his successor), Hegel, propounded the thesis that, not the subject of Consciousness, as with Fichte, nor an indefinite element of Identity, implicit alike in subject and object, as with Schelling, but Thought itself, the Concept, or, as Hegel prefers to term it, following Plato, the Idea, is the Absolute to which all things may be reduced. Like Plato’s supreme idea of the “Good,” Hegel’s “Idea” at once embraced within itself all reality under the forms of the logical concept, and is the supreme end and purpose of all reality. In Hegel’s system the assumption postulated by Plato at Athens in the fourth century B.C. first received its final and complete development. For Hegel the forms of thought taken in their totality are absolute. The absolute Subject, the “I” of Fichte and the “Absolute Identity” of Schelling themselves are thus mere modes of the process of the self-thinking of thought. Thought, or the categories of logic, are, for Hegel, all in all. Hence his system has been termed Panlogism, or, more correctly, from the point of view of euphony, Pallogism.

The antithesis, in the great German philosophic movement dating from Kant to Hegel, is typically represented by the metaphysic of Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer the logical, the thought-element in reality, was subordinate and derivative. The true Absolute, of which Reality was the expression, and the thought-element, in Reality a mere form of this expression, was that which we term, in its highest phenomenal manifestation, i.e. in ourselves, Will. It is this Will, the “will-to-live,” which expands itself and recognises itself in the real world with its infinity of particulars. The logical forms by which the understanding apprehends these particulars of sense are merely the products of the primal Will for the purpose of its own recognition of itself. As is well known, Schopenhauer’s pessimism assumed that the complete recognition by itself of the Will would lead to the renunciation of life altogether as futile, worthless, and evil.

We have seen now how the old problem formulated by the ancient Greeks of the One and the Many, the abiding thought-form of the Intellect, and the infinite flux of the particulars of Sense, remained still a problem for the thinkers of the great German philosophical movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and received diverse solutions at their hands. The point of view from which the problem is treated is, however, not the same. For Plato, Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, and the ancients generally, hypostatised these elements or aspects of reality, that is, they treated them as, in themselves, independent realities. Plato’s ideas were reals in themselves. Aristotle, also, although aware of the fallacy in Plato’s doctrine, and in spite of marvellous insights at times, did not consistently maintain his grasp of the wider point of view reached in modern times by the German classical philosophy. This wider point of view consists in regarding the whole problem of metaphysic as having its root in Consciousness. All that is, it was recognised by Kant and his successors, is but in and for consciousness, of which self-consciousness is the apex. There are no substances and attributes existing in vacuo, but only as modifications of consciousness, possible or actual. This point of view the ancients never succeeded in reaching, with the exception, perhaps, of Aristotle, and even he, as stated, failed to retain it, and slid back into what may be termed the old abstract-metaphysical attitude proper to his time. Since Kant, it is impossible for any serious thinker to philosophise on the lines of the older metaphysics, whatever material he may draw from them. The new standpoint has to be reckoned with by everyone who aspires to be a metaphysician.

Leaving out, for the sake of brevity, all that is intermediate, we will now turn to the consideration of the position of philosophy as regards this its main problem, in the present day, more especially in this country. This still turns mainly on the relation of the Alogical to the Logical, of the flux of sense-particulars (the matter of sense) to the abiding concepts which give it meaning (the pure forms of thought). Therewith is connected the problem of the relation of the indeterminate, the Potential, to the determinate, the Actual, both alike being elements of the real world in time.

The problem is to find a formula of explanation satisfactory to reflective thought, employing the self-consistency of Consciousness as a test, which shall explain the meaning of Reality, or, which is the same thing, of Experience. We, as individual minds, are born into a common experience, “consciousness-in-general,” as Kant termed it. The task of philosophy as metaphysic is to re-read this Experience, to analyse it, and to restate it in the terms of reflective thought.

There are two main currents in the metaphysic of the present day: (1) there is the old Hegelian Pallogism for which Thought is the ultimate principle of Reality, all Reality being in the last resort the interweaving of thought-forms – concepts or categories. The sense-element in the Real is but Thought in its lowest and barest expression, from which we can trace it upwards till we arrive at Thought in its fullest, conceived as the Absolute and immanent Reason of the world-order. The modern work in which this point of view receives its best literary expression, is Lord Haldane’s Pathway of Reality. The old Hegelian principle is subjected here to an admirable recasting in modern English literary form.

(2) This pan-logical standpoint, or Intellectualism, as it is now the fashion to call it, in its various manifestations, is confronted by its opposite, the alogical standpoint. While we can confidently recommend Lord Haldane’s book as the best all-round English exposition in modern terms of the Hegelian Logism, it is difficult to fix upon any one statement of Alogism, understanding by this the doctrine of those who regard the alogical principle of the world, Will-energy, the eternal flux of the content of time, the particulars of sense, in a word, the alogical in Reality, as the ultimate rather than the logical – it is difficult, I say, to name any single book or presentation of this point of view – as representative, notwithstanding that it may be regarded as the growing theory in modern philosophy.

There is a movement very popular in Oxford of recent years, which calls itself Pragmatism, that would identify reality and truth with the serviceable, with that which most adequately subserves a given dominant purpose. This, it will be seen, is little more than a present-day adaptation of the doctrine of Schopenhauer, in which Reality or Experience, with its logical forms, is simply the expression of the means by which the infinite Will-to-live manifests itself. In the newer form of the doctrine the consistency of the older statement of it seems wanting. It is, indeed, somewhat difficult to arrive at any positive or constructive doctrine from a perusal of the works of the late Professor James, of Harvard, or of Mr Schiller, of Oxford, who may be regarded as the two leading exponents of “Pragmatism.” Whether their followers will make headway, or remain the small academic sect they are at present, remains to be seen.

Another recent exponent of the Alogical as the ultimate principle of real existence is M. Henri Bergson, who, in his work, L’Evolution Créatrice, seeks to show that the logical forms in which Reality clothes itself for the perceiving consciousness, and still more for the reflective consciousness, are secondary makeshifts, hiding rather than revealing the true nature of the Real. The inner meaning of Conscious Reality, of Life and evolution, cannot be expressed in any logical formula. It is beyond logic, the thought-categories under which reality is fixed for us, are but its mask. For Bergson, therefore, the logical, the conceptual side of things, is something unessential to their real nature, which is to be looked for in the infinite and indivisible flux of sensible particulars in time rather than in the universal concepts which seem to give them their meaning and without which they would appear to have no reality in any comprehensible sense.

Bergson’s doctrine has attracted considerable attention in this country lately, and we have taken him as a typical illustration of a direction of modern philosophic development; but his doctrine, like others that occupy the same general stand-point, seems open to the objection that it ignores the thought-element that obtains in the barest sense-perception that can enter into Consciousness at all, as object, i.e. as reality. The moment we fix a given perception as this object, we can distinguish in it the thought-category, otherwise, we could not distinguish it as object at all. It would seem surely as impossible to construct Reality out of a mere alogical flux of time-content as it is to construct it out of a mere bundle of logical forms (as the orthodox Hegelian would do). This has been pointed out by the present writer, in The Roots of Reality, in which justice is sought to be done to both of these antagonistic positions. The point of view taken is that in the possibility of Consciousness as such, both the Logical and the Alogical alike have their roots and constitute the two elements in all Reality – but that taken per se either falls short of Reality, inasmuch as it is an abstract element merely, and not real, i.e. is not an independent whole, which only obtains in the inseparable unity of these two elements. The alogical and the logical are indicated as the lowest or most abstract terms into which Reality, i.e. consciousness as a systematic whole, can be analysed. To these two factors every content of consciousness may be reduced. Every real has a universal (logical) and a particular (alogical) side. The one cannot be deduced from the other or merged into the other. The thinker who would deduce the logical from the alogical side of given Reality is on this view equally at fault with the thinker who would regard the alogical, as is the case with Hegel, as no more than a low stage of the logical. That out of which both alike emerge, if I may use a metaphor, is the principle of Consciousness. In the unity of Consciousness alone have they subsistence and significance. For this view the world is not mere Reason (logic), neither is it mere spontaneous Flux.

In the foregoing very brief sketch it has been impossible to do much more than trace in the barest outline the historic evolution of one of the main problems of philosophic thought. I have been unable to follow even this out into some of its leading bearings – e.g. as exhibited in that antithesis of Will and Intellect which has played such an important part in the speculative thought of the last two or three generations. In the present essay I have had to content myself with indicating the historic development of the antithesis of the One and the Many, the Universal and the Particular, in its more immediate form as problem. Again, the desire for conciseness has induced me for the most part to omit calling attention to parallels Otherwise, I might have shown the close analogy in many respects traceable between the present Oxford movement of “Pragmatism” and the mid-nineteenth century philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, or the century-end thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, and many similar correspondences.

It may be remarked in conclusion, that the task of modern philosophy is not merely to discover entirely new problems or even entirely new solutions of old problems – Aristotle in the ancient world, for that matter, left few problems and few possible solutions entirely untouched – but rather to open out new aspects of old problems, and new formulations of solutions of those problems which in a cruder form may be by no means unfamiliar to the student of the history of philosophic thought.

The original thinker shows himself mainly in the adaptation to the modern outlook and the recasting, in the light of modern knowledge, of problems, and attempted solutions of those problems, which in other guises have presented themselves in, it may be, various periods of history.

The aim of philosophy is to formulate the conditions and the meaning of Reality in the terms of reflective thought, in a systematic guise that must prove satisfactory to the mind when adequately grasped. As yet, only a very few of the foremost thinkers of the world’s history have succeeded in even approaching this ideal. Completely actualised it has never been as yet. The history of philosophy shows us the varying fortunes of the quest for the foregoing ideal in the evolution of reflective thought. But given the accomplishment of this task of philosophy, given the formulation of a completely satisfactory system of explanation of Reality, would speculative thought necessarily become stationary and cease to have a development? By no means. Such a system could, at best, only be completely satisfactory to the age in which it was formulated. Sooner or later, and sooner rather than later, though the main positions might remain unshaken, the form in which they were expressed would cease to appeal to the new age new facets of the old truths would have to be recognised and emphasised – while their applications and the details of their working-out in the original statement would necessarily become belated by the progress of knowledge, and hence require indefinite modification as time went on. Hence the problems of life and destiny – first and foremost the central one as to the meaning of our Experience, the significance of what we term Reality – even though the general lines of their solution were acknowledged once for all, must inevitably continue to occupy their place in the progressive intellectual life of mankind.