Page images
PDF
EPUB

which was foreign to the eighteenth century. DAVID STRAUSS and his Leben Jesu, BAUR, the celebrated historian of primitive Christianity and the founder of the historical school of Tübingen, MICHELET, ROSENKRANZ, ERDMANN, PRANTL, ZELLER, KUNO FISCHER, the brilliant interpreters of ancient and modern thought, come from Hegel.1 The conception that philosophies and religions are different stages of one and the same development; the hypothesis that an unconscious reason creates and transforms languages; the ideas of, and even the expressions, genesis, evolution, process, the logic of history, and many others, which have become common-places in the political, relig ious, and scientific press, are products of the Hegelian

movement.

1 For the literature, see § 3. Outside of Germany and the Northern countries, where it was taught by Monrad and Lyng at Christiania, and by Borelius at Lund (Sweden), the Hegelian philosophy was especially popular in Italy, where Véra, professor at Naples, acted as its chief interpreter. In France it influenced the sociological theories of Proudhon and Pierre Leroux, the first phase (manière) of V. Cousin (§ 71), and, above all, the idealism of Vacherot (La métaphysique et la science, Paris, 1852 ; 2d ed., 1862; La science et la conscience, Paris, 1872, etc.). Vacherot, who in some respects resembles the eclectics (§ 71), wholly differs from them in that he absolutely denies the personality of God. According to Vacherot, God is the ideal to which things aspire, and exists only in so far as he is thought, while the world is the real infinity. "Eliminate man," he adds, "and God no longer exists; no humanity, no thought, no ideal, no God, since God exists only for the thinking being." La métaphysique et la science, 2d ed., vol. III., Conclusion. [Representatives of the Hegelian movement in England: J. H. Stirling (see p. 496, note 3), T. H. Green (Works, 3 vols., London and New York, 1885-88; Prolegomena to Ethics, 1883), F. H. Bradley (Ethical Studies, 1876; Principles of Logic, 18833; Appearance and Reality, 1894), J. Caird (Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 1880), E. Caird (see p. 434, n. 2), B. Bosanquet (Logic, 2 vols., 1888), W. Wallace (see p. 497, n. 3), etc.; in America, W. T. Harris, Editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, founded 1867. — TR.]

What discredited Hegelianism and philosophy itself— for there was a time when the two terms were employed synonymously was the material errors which necessarily followed from its exclusively a-prioristic method; was the authoritative tone which it assumed towards the leaders of modern science, Copernicus, Newton, and Lavoisier; was its presumptuous attempt to withdraw the hypotheses of metaphysics from the supreme jurisdiction of facts. If the philosophical mind (die spekulative Vernunft) perceives truth by an immediate and instinctive intuition, whereas experience discovers it step by step only, then its oracles, precisely because they are immediate, i. e., unproved, and wholly unaccounted for, need the counter-signature of experience in order to have the force of laws in the scientific sphere. The immediate and spontaneous, as Hegel himself declares, is never definitive, but the starting-point of an evolution. Hence, a priori speculation, as he conceives and pursues it, cannot be the final form of science, but should, at the very least, be verified by experience, and, in case of need, be corrected by criticism. Moreover, the defects of the Hegelian method and the errors of fact following from it are due to the rationalistic prejudice of which the system is the classical expression. According to Hegel, the absolute is idea, thought, reason, and nothing but that; whence he concludes that the idea, or, as the School says, the form, is also the content, the matter, of things. When he assumes that the ideal world of science can be deduced from reason alone, it is because, according to him, the real world, the world of beings, is derived from reason and reason alone. Now the absolute, or at least — since the absolute is unknowable as such the primary phenomenon (das Urphänomen) is not thought, intelligence, reason, but will. Thought is a mode of the cre

1 See §§ 68 and 71.

It

ative activity of things; it is not their principle.1 follows that the knowledge of things does not come from pure thought, but from thought supported and governed by experience.

§ 67. Herbart 2

Kant, the master, protested against the absolute idealism of his "false disciples," and opposed to it his ideo-realism, which distinguishes between the form and the matter of our knowledge, considering the form alone as given a priori, and the content, the matter, as solely and necessarily furnished by the outer and inner sense. Reason produces a priori the categories of quality, quantity, causality, and measure, which are indispensable to the knowledge of nature; but it cannot produce a priori the ideas of iron, light, pleasure, and pain, which experience alone supplies. Experience has its a priori conditions, which pure sensationalism erroneously denies; but experience alone gives us complete and concrete ideas properly so-called, while the categories, which reason produces a priori, are not, strictly speaking, ideas, but mere frames for our ideas: which is an entirely different thing. Schelling himself concedes that, in the last analysis, everything comes from experience, although experience presupposes a priori conditions without

1 According to the Christian dogma itself, which Hegel professes to translate into philosophical language, the λóyos is created and is not the "Father."

2 [Briefer philosophical writings, etc., published by G. Hartenstein, 3 vols., Leipsic, 1842; complete works, ed. by G. Hartenstein, 12 vols., Leipsic, 1850 ff.; complete works, ed. by K. Kehrbach, Langensalza, 1882 ff.; pedagogical works, ed. by O. Willmann, 2 vols., 2d ed., Leipsic, 1877. Cf. G. Hartenstein, Die Probleme und Grundlehren der allgemeinen Metaphysik, Leipsic, 1836; J. Kaftan, Sollen und Sein (a critique of Herbart), Leipsic, 1872; J. Capesius, Die Metaphysik Herbart's, Leipsic, 1878; Th. Ribot, La psychologie alle. mande contemporaine, Paris, 1879; Engl. tr. by Baldwin, 1886. - TR.]

which it would be impossible. That is, in truth, the real teaching of Kant.

A number of thinkers, and particularly JOHANN FRIEDRICH HERBART (1776–1841), professor at Königsberg and Göttingen, followed the master. They occupied a position between Hegel, whose star sank in 1830, and Locke, whose empiricism, which had been temporarily checked by the idealism of the Restoration, only to reappear, more powerful than ever, as positivism, after the setting of the Hegelian sun. The most important philosophical writings of Herbart are: Allgemeine Metaphysik1 and Psychologie als Wissenschaft, neu gegründet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik, und Mathematik.? What especially characterizes them is their systematic opposition to the principles, method, and conclusions of Hegel. Things are not merely our thoughts, as idealism holds; they exist really and independently of the reason which thinks them (realism in the modern sense). Hence, the problem of philosophy is not to construct the universe, but to accept it as it exists, and to explain its mechanism, so far as that can be done. Observation and experience form the indispensable foundation of speculation. A philosophy not based on the positive data of science is hollow. It has merely the import of a poem, and we cannot concede to it any scientific value. Herbart restores to philosophy the boundaries which Kantian criticism had declared impassable.

Philosophy is defined as the elaboration of the concepts which underlie the different sciences.3 Such general ideas are not free from contradictions, and should therefore be revised. This work is the real business of the metaphysician.

1 Complete Works (Hartenstein), vols. III. and IV.

2 Works, vols. V. and VI. Cf. Willm, op. cit., vol. IV. [His Lehr buch der Psychologie has been translated by M. K. Smith, 1891.]

• Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie, vol. I., ch. 2.

4 For example, the ideas of cause, space, and the ego.

The contradictions which philosophy is asked to resolve have been ascertained by the Eleatics, the Sceptics, and Hegel. But Zeno of Elea, instead of resolving them, considered them insoluble, and hence inferred that nothing real corresponds to them. The Sceptics saw in this a reason for repudiating metaphysics. Hegel, at last, does not deny that our ideas are contradictory, but by a tour de force unheard of in the history of philosophy, accepts the contradiction without reserve, and declares that it forms the very essence of thought and being. That is, he pretends to dispense with the principle of contradiction. But we cannot, with impunity, violate the law which has governed human thought from the very beginning, and we shall have to reckon with it as long as reason is reason. The Hegelian paradox is not a solution. Scepticism has its raison d'être ; it is even necessary, in a certain measure; it forms the starting-point, in the history of thought, of the great philoso phies (Socrates, Descartes, Kant). But to remain sceptical is to give proof of the incompetence of speculation. Doubt in its most absolute form, scepticism extended even to the existence of things, is refuted by one of the most simple reflections. Though it may be doubted that things exist, it is beyond doubt that they appear to exist. This appearance (phenomenon) is absolutely certain, and the most obstinate sceptic cannot doubt it. The phenomenon exists. If nothing existed, nothing could appear to exist. But, though we assume what is evident, namely, the existence of things, it is not so certain that they are what we think they are, that they exist as they are thought (Ænesidemus, Sextus), that they are in time and space, connected by the tie of causality (Hume, Kant). This doubt, founded, as it is, on the contradictions and obscurities which even the most superficial reflection can discover in our ideas, is perfectly legitimate, provided it provokes philosophical thought.

« PreviousContinue »