UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.
Class
STUDIES IN
EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
STUDIES IN
EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
BY
JAMES LINDSAY, D.D.
AUTHOR OF
RECENT ADVANCES IN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION,'
AND OTHER WORKS
William Blackwood and Sons
Edinburgh and London
1909
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
7
BENERAL
TO
<MY WIFE.
197694
PREFACE.
PROBABLY the most unifying link of these STUDIES
-whether the study happens to be ancient,
mediaeval, or modern, whether it be metaphysical,
psychological, or ethical will be found to be a
certain spiritualistic element or idealistic tendency.
It was the presence of such a spiritualistic element
or tendency that mainly determined the choice of
the subjects. Most of the Papers have appeared
in German, French, American, and British philo-
sophical or theological journals. To the editors
of these journals I would express the indebtedness
usual in such cases. But I owe more than cus-
tomary gratitude to Professor Dr L. Stein, editor
of the Archiv fur systematische Philosophic and
of the Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophic, for
permission to reprint any of the double series of
Articles which appeared in these important philo-
sophical journals. Other journals that favoured
me by publishing Papers here reprinted were the
Vlll PREFACE.
Bibliotheea Sacra and the Princeton Theological
Review, while in four other journals some parts
of certain chapters appeared. To the executive
of the Aristotelian Society, London, I am in-
debted for permission to reprint the Paper (now
revised) on Bonatelli a permission granted some
years ago, but only now taken advantage of. Of
the Papers that have already appeared, not one
is now issued without revision or modification ;
and, in some instances, enlargement to some slight
extent has been the result. There were other
Papers I should have liked to include, but, for
various reasons, I have not been able to insert
them in the present volume. In the chapter on
Origen as Christian philosopher, I have drawn
largely from my former Paper on that thinker, as
I wished him to have place in this philosophic
succession.
JAMES LINDSAY.
ANNICK LODGE,
IRVINE, February 1909.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. (INTRODUCTORY.)
THE PLACE AND WORTH OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY.
fAGE
Unsatisfactory attitude of Histories of Philosophy Greek
Thought and Oriental Philosophy The Philosophy of
the Chinese On Hindu Thought The Vedanta and
Sankhya Philosophies Brahmanic Philosophy Bud-
dhist Metaphysics Brahmanic monism and Hindu
pessimism Zoroastrian thought and theodicy
Eastern mysticism Egyptian speculative ideas
Worth of Eastern Thought for European Philosophy
The Universality of Philosophy .... i
CHAPTER II.
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON SUBSTANCE AND EFFICIENT
CAUSATION.
Relations of Substance and Causality The Substance con-
cept in Greek Philosophy Plato on Substance Plato
on Ideas Aristotle on Substance Aristotle's Meta-
physics His relations to Plato in respect of Substance
Self-activity in Aristotle Plato on Causation His
Creationism Plato's Ultimate Cause Aristotle on
Causation His Prime Mover Efficient Cause in Aris-
totle His relations to Plato in respect of Causation . 14
X CONTENTS.
CHAPTER III.
GREEK PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
The Greek mind and its religious workings Vague Spiritism
and the Orphic songs Xenophanes and the principle
of unity Greek mythology Naturalism Polytheism
Monotheistic tendency Syncretism Ethical influ-
ence of the Greek tragedians The Eleatics The Ionic
philosophers Heraclitus and Xenophanes Anaxa-
goras and Socrates Teleological reasonings and psy-
chological mode of Socrates Plato's ontological
archetypes Plato on mythology His philosophy of
religion Plato on soul, good, and society Aristotle's
Deity His Prime Mover His self-activity, dualism,
and doctrine of Finality Philo's hierarchy of beings
Stoical efforts after unity Greek religious ideal and
belief in Fate Criticism by Xenophanes Plato's idea
of the Good His view of Matter Aristotle on Reality
His relations to Plato His Oversoul and Cosmology
Philo's mediating Logos Elevated thought of Plot-
inus Summarising of the discussion Christian The-
ology and Greek Philosophy . . 28
CHAPTER IV.
THE ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF MARCUS AURELIUS.
The Stoic philosophy Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
Character of his practical ethics His view of organic
unity His doctrine of Providence His individualism
His treatment of evil His views of Deity and of the
soul Relations of God and man Aurelius on reason
Stoic fatalism and optimism Stoic theory of virtue
Emphasis of Aurelius on the good will Quietistic tend-
encies The Future life Stoic stress on formal prin-
ciple of ethical law Defects of Stoicism Its relative
merits Its false attitude to life Its relation to
Christian thought ...... 4*
CONTENTS. XI
CHAPTER V.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL DOCTRINE OF THE LOGOS.
Importance of the Logos doctrine Its cosmological and
metaphysical character The Logos of the Stoics and
Philo The Logos in theological thinking The Logos
of Justin Martyr The thought of the great Apologists
Logos doctrine and historic developments Athena-
goras on the Logos Clement, Origen, and Athanasius
Christian thought on the Logos Full significance
of the Conception The Spermatic Word Uttered
Reason Logos in early and in modern philosophy
Real trend of Logos speculation . 53
CHAPTER VI.
GNOSTICISM AS A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
History and significance of Gnosticism Its relations to
Christianity and Hellenism Its genesis and method
Its true nature Its Gnosis^ its aspirations and beliefs
Its theodicy and soteriology Judaic, Pagan, and
Hellenic forms System of Basilides : its psychology
and metaphysics Its doctrine of the Absolute and
evolutionary conceptions Character of its religious
philosophy System of Valentinus His Deity and
Demiurgus Comparison with Basilides Relation of
Clement to both Worth of Gnostic speculative
endeavours . . . . . . . . 65
CHAPTER VII.
AUGUSTINE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
Character of Augustine's philosophy of history Its merits
and defects Influence on subsequent development Its
ethical bearing and import Divine fore-knowledge and
Xli CONTENTS.
human free-will Augustine's relations to Plato Platon-
ists and the Incarnation Augustine on Creation and
Time Views of evil Augustine's psychology Rela-
tion to Manichasism Further discussion of evil His
philosophical theory of the will The Fall, Sin, Free-
will, Virtue Mutability of the creature Dualism of
Augustine's position Providence and the growth of
nations Augustine's ethical philosophy Problem of
evil and the Universe Final synthesis Spiritual
Monism . . . 78
CHAPTER VIII.
ORIGEN AS CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHER.
Comprehensiveness of Origen's thought His knowledge
and his Theism His Spiritualistic monism His Cos-
mogony Divine transcendence Logos and Eternal
Generation of the Son His treatment of Creation
Relations of Divine and Human Origen's psychology
His views of cognition His eschatological ideas
His indebtedness to Greek philosophy Plato's idealism
Freedom Origen's ethical philosophy His services
to thought His rare personality .... 92
CHAPTER IX.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLOTINUS.
Features of the system of Plotinus Founder of Neo-Platon-
ism Character of that philosophy His philosophy of
the One The Plotinic triad The Good Transcend-
ence of Deity World-Soul of Plotinus His treatment
of matter The microcosm Spiritualism of Plotinus
His analysis of consciousness Views of the soul,
and of thought Relations to Idealism and Materialism
Views of the World and God His conceptions of
CONTENTS. Xlll
Freedom His treatment of cognition His mysticism
and asceticism His influence on the history of
speculation . . . . . . . .105
CHAPTER X.
SCHOLASTIC AND MEDLEVAL PHILOSOPHY.
Scholastic Philosophy in Histories of Philosophy Distinction
of Scholasticism from Mediaeval Philosophy Nature of
Scholastic Philosophy Its method Its philosophical
synthesis Anselm and Abelard Aquinas and Duns
Scotus Realist and Nominalist contentions Signifi-
cance of the controversy Hobbes and Locke The
Conceptualist position Individualism of Roscellinus
Problem of Thomism and Scotism Ockam and intel-
ligible species Significance of Ockam Developments
of Scholasticism Thought of Scotus Erigena, of An-
selm, and of Albertus Magnus Merits and defects of
Scholastic Philosophy 1 1 7
CHAPTER XI.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF AQUINAS.
The genius for system in Aquinas His relations to Aristotle
Character and method of his philosophy His
demonstration of the Infinite His views of God and
Revelation The category of Causality His treatment
of the Ontological argument His doctrine of the First
Efficient Cause His view of Creation and the world of
effects His degrees of Divine intelligibility His doc-
trine of Substance His view of the soul His psy-
chology His treatment of the Will His presentation
of grace His conceptions of Freedom His views of
evil Optimism of Aquinas His philosophy of know-
ledge Aspects of Providence Realism, rationalism,
dialecticism, and mysticism of Aquinas His influence
on European thought . . . . . .128
XIV CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XII.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF WYCLIF.
Wyclif's philosophic claims Neglect by Histories of Philo-
sophy Wyclif's Logica Nominalism and Ockam i-
Singulars and universals Wyclifs Platonism His
Thomist tendency His extreme Realism Significance
of Wyclifs positions Attitude of his philosophical adver-
saries Epistemological issues Conceptualism Atti-
tude of Albertus Magnus Wyclif on the Incarnation
On God On Freedom On Creation His treatment
of the Infinite Pantheistic dangers Determinism and
Contingency Predestination Transubstantiation
Wyclifs views of evil, matter, space, time Philosophic
merits of Wyclif . . . . . . .145
CHAPTER XIII.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA.
Metaphysical setting of Spinoza's philosophy His doctrines
of God, Substance, and Causality Personality An-
thropomorphism Extension and thought Spinoza's
psychology Attributes and modes Grandeur of
Spinoza's conceptions Their lack of consistency Deus
sive natura Spinoza's monism Criticism of his har-
monisation of attributes and modes with substance
His ontological position Natura naturata Lack of
ethical quality Metaphysical basis of ethics His
scheme too intellectualistic His teachings on Immor-
tality Treatment of evil Ethical versus cognitive
activity Spinoza on the passions On the self On
love Fatal mistake of his philosophy Disregard of
finite individuality His indebtedness His influence
Merits and defects of his system . . . . 154
CONTENTS. XV
CHAPTER XIV.
LESSING'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Founder of modern Philosophy of Religion His distinctive
position Divine Education of the Race Defects of '
Lessing's conceptions Historic Religions Religion
and its Records Spirit of free inquiry The " Enlight-
enment " Bibliolatry Fragments of Reimarus
Character of Lessing's thinking Quest of Truth
Deity and Revelation Human Development Relation
to the Fathers and Schoolmen Eternal truths of reason
Accidental truths of history Evolution and Lessing's '
theory His stress on Individuality Personality Im-
mortality Determinism Monism, Deism, Pantheism
Development and Providence Aspects of the Trinity
and other Christian doctrines Character of his
religio-philosophical thought . . . . .171
CHAPTER XV.
KANT'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Kant's religious philosophy His personality His view of
the existence of God Defective treatment of theistic
proofs The Ontological argument Views of Hegel
The Cosmological proof Kant's treatment of principle
of efficient causation Better view of Leibniz World-
contingency considered The Teleological argument
The Moral proof Kant's Deity too external Genetic
point of view overlooked Religion reduced to terms
of morality Defects and positive merits of Kant
Divorce of theoretic and practical reason Ethic too
individualistic Defective emotional treatment Deistic
setting His handling of problems of evil and redemp-
tion The Kingdom of God Results of schismatic
treatment of rational faculty Worth of Kant's three
Critiques His conception of Revelation Views of
XVI CONTENTS.
God, freedom, and the historic element Inadequacy
of Kant's philosophy of religion His one-sided moral
stress Meritorious side of his work His place
supreme among modern ethicists . . . .184
CHAPTER XVI.
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM : HEGEL
AND BERKELEY.
Nature and claims of Idealism Its imperishable service
Idealism of Hegelian type Its injustice to the
individual self Hegelian idealism an evolution Its
treatment of freedom, evil, and responsibility Nature
of the Absolute experience, and of the world unity
Categories of substance and spirit Hegelian Logic
Hegelian metaphysics Will and Thought Emphasis
on reason Dogmatism of Neo - Hegelianism Its
organic whole of thought Faults of the system
Superiority of Theistic Idealism Hegelian treatment
of the Categories Experience and reality Hegelian
injustice to Personality One-sided Ethical Idealism
Knowledge of the Absolute Merits and defects of
Ethicism Abstract Idealism and ethical Idealism
Infinite worth of human life Absoluteness of the
Divine Being Speculative impulse and moral valua-
tion Theistic Idealism and the Absolute Hegelian
philosophy of immanence The independence of the
self Question of limitation Inclusive character of
Personality True nature of self-consciousness Im-
plications of personality The Universe as spiritual
Hegelian epistemology The Real and the Ideal
Knowledge and reality Sense-perceptions and spirit-
ual perceptions The world as mental construction
Features of Theistic Idealism Unity of Spiritualistic
monism God and the external world The world of
selves The Absolute Life in time Real and formal
freedom Critical idealism of Neo-Kantism Its un-
CONTENTS. XV11
satisfactoriness Defects of Absolute Idealism Sub-
jective Idealism of Berkeley Its shortcomings
Nature of spirit-knowledge Disposal of the cognitive
problem Further criticism of Berkeley Faults of
philosophic systems in respect of Divine Personality
Views of Lotze, Biedermann, and Green Nature
and cosmic mind Relationship of God and man . 207
CHAPTER XVII.
FRENCH PHILOSOPHY^ IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Its return to Spiritualism Philosophical Traditionalism
Comte on positive social science Comte and Hegel
Sociology Law of the three states Humanity in -
Comte's system Comte's method of elimination
Merits and defects of Comte's treatment Spiritualism
of Maine de Biran Eclecticism of Cousin Psy-
chology of Cousin and Jouffroy Positions of Vacherot
and Caro Spiritualism of Simon, Saisset, and Janet
Liberty philosophies of Secretan, Renouvier, and
Ravaisson Contingency theory of Boutroux Ren-
ouvier's Criticisme Its philosophic influence Its
merits Treatment of the category of Relation
Renouvier 's theory of knowledge Defects of his
Personalism Composite character of his system
His neo-critical theory wanting Bergson, Lachelier,
Poincare Fouillee's idees-forces Character of Fouil-
lee's conceptions Further discussion of Caro Guyau,
Cournot, Milhaud, Durkheim Hold of Eclecticism in
France Criticism of the philosophy of the century . 238
CHAPTER XVIII.
ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Italian philosophy in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Galaxy of Italian philosophers at dawn of nineteenth
century Philosophy in Central Italy Philosophy in
XV111 CONTENTS.
Southern Italy Philosophy in Northern Italy Philo-
sophy in second half of nineteenth century Vast
activity of Italian philosophers in the last three de-
cades of the century Diverse forms of Italian philo-
sophic thought Place of Positivism in Italy Mamiani
and Francesco Bonatelli Influence of Bonatelli's
Spiritualism Bonatelli's psychological merits His
metaphysical training His introduction of German
thought into Italy His treatment of perception, of
sensibility and intellect, and of conscience and thought
Attitude towards pure idealism and dualistic realism
Its unsatisfactoriness Relations to Lotze Bonatelli
and Lotze both defective Prius of all things Onto-
logical laws Bonatelli's doctrine of the will German
psychologists Italian philosophy of will Psycho-
logists on will and impulse Volition Recent psy-
chology Bonatelli on First Cause Dynamic and
mechanical causes Knowing and being Bonatelli
on the transcendent activity of the Absolute . . 254
CHAPTER XIX.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPAIN.
Philosophy in Mediaeval Spain Averroism Philosophic
positions of Averroes Maimonides Raymond Lully
Raymond of Sabunde Philosophy among the
Jesuits Bannez and Molina Dominicans and Fran-
ciscans Fonseca and Suarez Metaphysical system
of Suarez Relations of Suarez and Aquinas Suarez
on substance, existence, and the Absolute Real con-
cern of the Jesuit philosophers Moral philosophy of
Quevedo Thomism and Scotism Churchly-Scholastic
philosophers in beginning of nineteenth century
Fundamental Philosophy of Balmez His method
psychological His philosophic criticism Criterion
of Balmez His views of certitude His eclectic
Spiritualism His doctrine of First Cause His con-
CONTENTS. XIX
ception of the Trinity Extension and time The
Infinite The divisibility of matter Balmez on exist-
ence and essence His ethical positions Spanish
philosophy in second half of nineteenth century
Scholastic philosophers School of Sanz del Rio
Krause, Hegel, and Kant The most recent Spanish
philosophical writers Character of the Spanish
Weltanschauung . . . . . . .270
CHAPTER XX.
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME.
Need of metaphysical interest Metaphysical thought in
Europe Metaphysics and Reality Evolution and
Teleology Primary position of Metaphysics Meta-
physics and Ethics Metaphysics as science Meta-
physics and Theology Metaphysical theory of ex-
perience Metaphysics and the Whole Monistic
tendency Reason and the World-Whole Substance
Self-activity The World-Ground Concept of the
Absolute The Absolute Spirit Unity of world-
grounding principle Absoluteness of Deity Experi-
ence and the transcendent Knowledge and the
Absolute Determination of the Infinite Absolute
truth Bradley and Caird Science and Metaphysics
Spirit and Nature God and world Scientific
metaphysics Homogeneity of God and the world
Method of metaphysics Sciences of Nature
Haeckel's monism Shortcomings of Scientific monism
Spiritualistic monism God as Fulness of thought
and being Synthetic mode of inquiry Metaphysical
view of the world Pluralism and Monism Question
of ultimates The Absolute Personality Immanence
and transcendence Freedom of Deity The Religious
Consciousness The Future Life Immortality
Spinoza and Hegel The Belief in God Persistence
and permanence of the soul Implications of spirit
XX CONTENTS.
Theistic metaphysical needs Lotze Bergson
Metaphysical thought of Europe . . . . 285
CHAPTER XXI.
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME.
Psychological developments touching the soul Starting-
point of psychology The self and psychic processes
Bosanquet Interdependence of the faculties
Rational psychology Humian and Kantian psycho-
logies Fichte's ego Maine de Biran's ego Psy-
chology and Religion Genetic method Psychology
and metaphysics Content and process Wundt's law
of spiritual energy Miinsterberg's treatment of the
soul Psycho - physical views of Wundt Need of
illuminated thinking Nature of psychological ex-
perience Aristotle, Kant, and Schleiermacher Sub-
jective experiences of religion Explication of the
psychical nature Immediateness of spiritual life
Psychological insight of Augustine Deeper psycho-
logical scrutinies Relations of body and mind The
Materialistic theory The theory of Parallelism The
Interaction theory The Dualism only relative
Spiritual psychology Activity of consciousness The
Nature of Mental Activity Functional psychology
Teleological character of self-activity Ideational con-
tents of Mysticism Psychological view of mysticism
Indivisibility of the soul The soul in newer psy-
chology Epistemology and psychology The soul as
cosmic fact . . . . . . . .312
CHAPTER XXII.
ETHICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME.
Development of the Science of Ethics Ethical recon-
struction Ethics and scientific advances Morality as
non-rational Morality as objectively valid Hartmann,
CONTENTS. XXI
Sidgwick, and Moore Metaphysical basis of ethics
Ethicists and the Good The Right and the Good
Autonomy of the moral ideal The moral act Objec-
tive reference of the Good Fouillee on obligation
Metaphysic of morals Empiricism in ethics Superi-
ority of metaphysical treatment Defective British
method Ethics and the totality of things Sidgwick
and Stephen Ethics and the special sciences Ethics
and psychology Ethics and the Ideal Ethics as
conditioned by metaphysics Ethics as science of
conduct only Ethics of the Real Ethical develop-
ment a real progress Faults of Utilitarianism
Spencer's Hedonism Sidgwick's Universalistic Hedon-
ism Green's idealistic ethics Category of moral ob-
ligation Bentham, Mill, Spencer Originality of the
ethical consciousness Social aspects of Stephen and
Gizycki Freedom as ethical postulate Evolutionary
considerations Wundt's evolutionism Herbart's treat- '
ment of morality Theories of value Meinong and
Ehrenfels Metaphysical implications Morality as a
Totality Ethics of universal character . . . 336
INDEX OF AUTHORS AND SUBJECTS . . . -359
OF THE
UNIVERSITY
OF
STUDIES IN
EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY,
CHAPTER I.
THE PLACE AND WORTH OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY.
AN idea, is only too current, even in Histories of Philo-
sophy, that Oriental Philosophy has but little to say for
itself. Even a thinker like Wundt has recently, like so
many another before, struck a beginning for ethical
philosophy only from the Greeks among the ancients.
So, too, Windelband begins with the Greeks, content
merely to remark that there were " some tendencies
among the peoples of the Orient" towards philosophy,
and that these have been " only recently disclosed." Yet
we are not without signs that our Western Philosophy
shall soon no more suppose that the Orientals had no
ethical philosophy of their own, and shall no more
neglect the Weltanschauungen of the thinkers of ancient
India and Persia, the splendid intellectual structures of
the Vedas and the Avesta. Without doubt, Oriental
thought awaits such fuller justice at the hands of our
more developed Occidental sympathies when the rather
A
2 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
belated treatment of the Oxford School shall, in such
matters, be surpassed. Dr E. Caird permits himself to
say that, while there is " a theological philosophy of
India" earlier in development than Greek philosophy,
yet " the thought of India, though often subtle and pro-
found, is unmethodical," and does "not conduce to
distinct and adequate thinking." But there is always
something forced and artificial when the solidarity of
mankind becomes a thing neglected or despised. We
cannot neglect the moral ideal, vast and tormenting,
which the immense and mysterious Orient discloses to
us, even though that ideal left humanity all unquiet and
unfree. Eastern Philosophy, no doubt India alone
excepted identified far too easily philosophical theories
with doctrines of religion, and even in India the connec-
tion of philosophy with religion was close. There it was,
in fact, either a speculative development of these doc-
trines, or it was an instrument fashioned to oppose them.
It is therefore evident that philosophy, strictly so called,
can scarcely be said to have had its birthplace, in this
full sense, in the East. But it is a grievous mistake on
that ground to pass over Oriental Philosophy as of no
account. Deussen has set a notable example of better
things, but the prevailing habit of thought will be recti-
fied only after much time. Not a form of polytheistic or
pantheistic thought but flourished on Indian soil, so
vigorous was the reflective spirit there. Because the
construction of philosophical systems is so much more
marked in the mental energy and mobility of Greek
thought, we must not be deluded into the notion that
Oriental Philosophy has not much to teach the Occi-
PLACE AND WORTH OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY. 3
dental mind. Oriental dreaming and inactive Quietism
did not keep the speculative ideas of the Oriental peoples
from having much that was fruitful for the History of
Philosophy. These must be garnered into the treasuries
of philosophic wisdom. Already in the philosophy of
India we meet many notions that recur in later historical
developments. And, in truth, India has a vast history of
philosophy all its own. Besides which, if philosophy be
said to be only where thought is free of the dominant
religion, is it always sufficiently realised how free and
independent much of the Indian philosophical thought
was ? Lacking the clearness and massiveness of Greek
thought, of Indian philosophy one may yet very well
maintain that it, with its speculative freedom and variety,
transcended that of Greece in height no small achieve-
ment. We are Occidentals, and have seen but in part.
Besides, we must do justice to Oriental Philosophy at
the outset of any history of intellectual development, in
order that the Graeco-Oriental Philosophy of the Alex-
andria of the Ptolemies may take its proper place in, and
relation to, the historical development. No difficulty in
translating Oriental mysticism and dreaming into terms
of Occidental thought must keep these things from being
done. Philosophy, taking thus its rise in the East, will
remark the comparative absence of genuine speculative
philosophy among the Chinese, whose Spiritism remained
vague, indefinite, and uninspiring. I say "comparative,"
for it is a clear, however common, mistake to suppose
there is no speculative philosophy of the Chinese. As in
India, so in China that philosophy was due to a need of
viewing the World-whole born of certain religious wants.
4 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
That philosophy followed an a priori method the mode
of Descartes rather than of Bacon and the lines of
Oriental theory have here gone out in the study of nature
in ways that are striking enough. It is not too much to
say that there has been a speculative theism of China,
which, spite of the blendings of materialism and agnosti-
cism, has held to Divine Unity, however abstractly. For
the Divine order of the universe was ontologically con-
ceived in Chinese thought. Then it will allow Hindu
philosophy, so expressive, in its wide and varied range,
of the highly speculative character of the Hindu mind, to
declare the infinite and eternal excellence of God. For
in the unity and perfection of the Godhead does the
Oriental find deepest delight. The early intrusion of
the speculative element is, in fact, the surprising thing.
Only after many strange glorifications was it destined to
reach the generalisation of a Central One, self-existent,
Lord of the multiform creation. Finely does this specu-
lative element shine out in the deep and subtle idealistic
philosophy of the Upanishads, which, however, often
describe the nature of Deity in ways too purely negative.
The idea of God as the Unknown and Unknowable an
idea which has played so large a part in modern thought
and writing was no product of the Alexandrian time.
It is much less a creation of Herbert Spencer. It lies far
back in Oriental Philosophy. But that philosophy had
a deeper idea in relation to God. He was for it the
Absolute and Unconditioned. Such conceptions the
Alexandrian School long afterwards sought to reduce
to harmonious and intelligible relation to other truths
by its theory of emanations an hypothesis perpetually
PLACE AND WORTH OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY. 5
present to Oriental speculation. Enough now to say
that ancient emanative theory was strong just where
modern evolution is weak, and weak just where modern
evolution is strong that is to say, emanative theory
was strong in its hold on the forceful Supreme Power,
and weak in its grasp of the processes of develop-
ment. God was for Oriental thought the All, outside
Whom there could be nothing by way of limiting Him.
And so it took too easily a pantheistic tinge. Take the
Vedanta and the Sankhya philosophies, chief of the
ancient Indian philosophical systems. In the Vedantic
philosophy, so potent and well - developed, we find a
speculative form of conceiving Deity, which may be taken
as that of a pantheistic system at once mystical and
idealistic. In its speculative development, Vedantic
philosophy bears the true impress of Oriental thought
in its too light esteem for activity, its quietism, and its
insufficient account of moral law. The Vedanta is reli-
gion as well as philosophy. The highest truth, according
to the Vedanta, is that there is One, and only One,
Eternal Being, to which there is no second. Indian
theology is based on the foregoing conception of the
highest verity, which finds expression in such sayings as
" I am Brahma," " Thou art that," &c. Indian thinkers
do not allow this to mean a denial of the finite, to which,
in its manifoldness and differentiations, they allow valid-
ity so soon as they come down from the philosophical
altitudes whereon they realise their identity with the
Brahma. The One and Sole Ultimate Reality is the
Brahma: all the universe is Brahma; and nothing has
any independent being, divorced from Brahma. This
6 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
so it is contended is not to be taken as implying that
man, in Indian thought, loses altogether his individuality,
or quits his hold on the reality of the world. Though
the Brahma is the Infinite, and, as such, alone has real
being, though the world is Maya, or illusion, and in-
dividual souls are not allowed real existence, yet Indian
idealistic thinkers tell us it was never meant to deny all
reality to the universe, or to cast doubt on the existence
of man, who, as thinker and critic of all that is illusory,
cannot be himself illusory. Possibly Western thought
should give larger attention to these reassuring aspects.
The conception of the Brahma is, without doubt, the
fundamental postulate ; but Western thought is prone to
feel left by the monism of the Brahmanic philosophy
with but one vast blank void. Though transmigration
is here so complete as to include cosmic as well as
individual cycles, yet the Brahmins philosophically in-
troduced the law of causality into the spiritual world,
and made each transmigration the result of the previous
life. Hence the conception came to wear the rigour, the
universality, and the invariability of Fate. The tone of
the Vedas may be taken as that of an optimistic polythe-
ism, that of the Upanishads as a pessimistic pantheism.
In the case of the former, philosophy arose as a natural
product of practical religious needs viewed in their rela-
tion to the world -order In sacrifice and prayer, for
example, they felt the whole order of the world to be a
dependent one. Vedantic philosophy is a system as
monistic as Sankhya philosophy was dualistic, with
Nature and Soul as the terms of the antithesis. The
Sankhya system held the conquest of desire to be the
PLACE AND WORTH OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY. 7
way of salvation from bondage to matter. The Sankhya
philosophy denies a Soul supreme over all, such as the
World-Soul of the Upanishads. The Upanishads have,
for their fundamental note, the identity of the individual
soul with the World-Soul, whose character, as God, they
regard as incomprehensible. To the Sankhya doctrine,
matter stands on one side, while it sees an infinite number
of individual souls, without attributes, and known only
in a negative way, on the other side. This stress on
eternal matter gives Sankhya philosophy a realistic char-
acter. Buddhism denied the substantial character of the
individual soul in a way which did not Sankhya philo-
sophy, even though the dualism and pessimism of this
latter philosophy were founts whence Buddhism flowed.
In the groundwork of both Sankhya and Buddhist meta-
physics, the primary substance of things manifests itself
by the direct development of the world and contingent
existences, without any direction or interposition of a
Divine and personal Agent. Buddhism simply dispensed
with the essentially metaphysical teachings of the Upani-
shads about a World-Soul, and the need of the soul's
union with that World-Soul in order to salvation. The
Buddhist mode of salvation was one in which every man
could work out salvation for himself without reference to
God or gods, great or small. The Brahmanic way of
salvation was negatived by the Buddhist dissolution of
Deity the eternal Brahma or personal Creator of the
world who, as the great Self, vanished with the entire
heresy of individuality. 'Tis on moral virtue Buddhism
relies : renunciation, as the path to service, is its aim.
Buddhist philosophy has, in whole, its own points of
8 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
peculiar interest, such as its eternal system of moral
retribution or Karma, its instinct for the avoidance of
evil, its rejection of a super-phenomenal ego, its belief in
moral causation, and its hope to rob evil of all power here
or hereafter by the moulding of life and character. For
the soul is yet allowed in Buddhist thought some moral
kernel of its own. The points of contrast between such
Orientalism and Hebraism are very evident, but we are
not here concerned to go into these. We are only deal-
ing with the place and suggestiveness of the study of
Oriental philosophy. And in such study the Oriental
mind of to-day must be no more neglected than the
Oriental mind of the past.
Beautiful is the way in which Nature appeals to the
Hindu mind as God's image, the abode within whose
beauty and sweetness the Immanent Spirit dwells. But
it is, to Western thought, not so wise, as might be wished,
that Hindu philosophers have not thought more highly
of objective existence and the world of appearances.
Hence we see India present too many phenomena of
world - flight and pessimistic world - conceptions. The
importance of maintaining right basic religio- philoso-
phical conceptions has been impressively taught the
world by these philosophers. The fatal one-sidedness of
Brahmanic monism has found its nemesis in the dualism,
asceticism, pessimism, and political dependence of the
Hindu nations. But it is more pleasing to reflect that,
even when the Infinite has baffled the heights of Hindu
speculation, Vedic sages are found to have seen, in all the
forces and phenomena of Nature, the inworking light of
Deity. So great, indeed, becomes the pressure of the
PLACE AND WORTH OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY. 9
Infinite that the Hindu view of man is in danger of
growing indistinct and unsatisfying.
In the Zoroastrian religion, we find the teachings of
the Avesta different from Hindu thought in respect of the
Divine Being, ethically and spiritually conceived. Its
religious ideals enshrined the significance of the personal,
alike in Deity and in man, in a striking way, contrastive
with Indian thought. Despite the hostility of the rival
kingdoms of Ahura- Mazda and Ahriman, the former is
represented as so good and great a God and Creator that
we are brought by Zarathustra very near to a monothe-
istic conclusion or termination of the conflict, which is
all but illimitable in time. Ahura-Mazda, the omniscient
Lord, is in Persian thought conceived as King, his king-
dom being the good kingdom. In its faith in the ultim-
ate triumph of the good, Persian thought outstripped the
thought of Hinduism ; indeed, the Persian theodicy is
without a peer in ancient thought. The philosophy of
the ancient Persians was no strict system ; we yet find
within its dualism the most marked the world has seen
elements of an interesting philosophical character in
themselves, and of importance for their influence on
religious thought in subsequent times. Its enshrined
Deity, Ahura-Mazda, causer of all causes, was a Deity
more spiritual and free of pagan anthropomorphism than
the early Jewish Yahveh as sometimes represented. In
Him was centred all conceivable good. Mere abstrac-
tions, if you like, but very real and significant to that
early time were the conceptions attained of the love, law,
and power of Deity. Iranian thought held that this
Good God could not prevent the evolution of evil in the
10 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
beings He created. Existence to it implied polarity;
there could be no good without corresponding evil. It
left its distinctive ethical principle in a relation too
external, with a strange neglect of interior moral perfec-
tion. But Iranian thought, too, has its surprises. For
it discovers a capacity for refined definition, which we
are only too apt to think peculiar to the Occidental mind.
It does so in certain ways for which it has been possible
to claim a rational priority in respect of Greek specula-
tive thought. And the moral interest of Zoroastrian
thought surpasses the speculative.
To translate the vague and dreamy products of the
Oriental mind into terms of Western thought may not be
always easy; but, because the Eastern mind lacks the
Greek love and power of definition, it by no means follows
that European thought must wrap itself within itself,
and refuse all community of thought with the Eastern
mind. That mind may sometimes bring us needful re-
minder that there are truths which lie beyond the reach
of precise definition, and that these may yet be truths to
live by. To be true in life may sometimes be even more
necessary than to be accurate in thought. Diverse as
these Eastern modes of theological thought may be, the
spirit of religion which is one can yet exist in all. It
said much for Justin Martyr that he believed the seed of
the Logos to exist in every race of man. Crude, con-
fused, and inarticulate as the expressions of Eastern faith
may often be, Western thought may yet discern in them
elements of moral and spiritual character underlying
every variety of credal expression. The worth of the
eternal over the evanescent, the presence of immanent
PLACE AND WORTH OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY. II
Deity in every part of the universe, these and such-like
truths shine out impressively for us in Eastern especi-
ally Hindu thought. Near of kin to Hindu intoxication
with Nature is the Oriental's conception of the Eternal
Spirit as supremely revealed in man's own spirit. The
philosophic defects of Oriental conception and presenta-
tion will by contrast carry much suggestive teaching for
the Occidental mind. It is the total religious experience
of human nature Eastern as well as Western that
philosophy of religion has to explain ; and, in so explain-
ing it, it has its own part to play in keeping the couplet
true
" One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost."
Too intently veiled in mystery was the philosophic
teaching of the Egyptians to call for much attention
in this connection. With them and other such ancient
peoples as the Babylonians, Assyrians, and Phoeni-
cians, speculative elements are but few, and need not
detain us. And yet, surely no one can make a
careful study of Egyptian religion, for example, without
feeling that great speculative ideas, like the Divine Unity,
and the Demiurgical Mind or Logos idea, developed by
Plato and the Neo-Platonists, were present at least to the
esoteric Egyptian mind. Enough, however, has been
said to show how unwarranted is the customary philoso-
phical neglect of Oriental philosophy, despite the sug-
gestive character of its essential ideas. Surely justice
can very well be done to the Greek mind, as an inde-
pendent growth, with products all its own, without
sharing this customary philosophical neglect of Eastern
12 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
thought, with all the suggestive character of its essential
ideas. Why should we forget the stimulating influences
which the Greek mind received from Eastern thought?
Why should we overlook that the philosophic products
of Greece undoubtedly incorporated within themselves
Oriental notions and ideas, so that these neglected
sources really are matres cogitationum nostrarum? Why,
I would further ask, does Western thought so readily
strive to enter into the fulness and inventiveness of Greek
thought, and remain so easily content with a merely
curious, somewhat idle, interest in Eastern thought ?
Why forget that in Greece, as in India and China, the
laws of philosophical development were similar philo-
sophy here also being a product of religious needs, and
the strifes and conflicts out of which new forms of religion
arose ? The answer is, of course, found in the historic
circumstances, moral evolution, and political development
which connect us, as Westerners, so much more in our
European past with the philosophy of Greece. Windel-
band tells us in a footnote that Oriental philosophisings
remain " so remote from the course of European philo-
sophy, which is a complete unity in itself," that, in his
view, there is no occasion to " enter upon them." This
is at least in keeping with what the Latin poet said of
Europe as audax Japeti genus. But there is surely in all
this no sufficient reason for remaining content with an
incapacity to make ourselves at home with different
thought-conditions and influences than those which have
dominated European progress. Philosophy has surely a
yet more universal note to strike than this merely Euro-
pean one. It cannot, surely, forget that, woven of one
PLACE AND WORTH OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY. 13
warp and woof throughout as is the universe of thought,
not without Asiatic philosophy can it be made perfect.
Indeed, it cannot well stop even there, for a reasonable
apprehension of the World -whole is a world -historical
phenomenon or appearance, characteristic of all cultured
peoples whatsoever. Not in Greece alone, but every-
where that man has attained to a certain measure of
culture, has he philosophised or thought upon the World-
whole. Religion has been the point of departure. Philo-
sophy is the fairest flower of universal human reason, and
never the special preserve of any favoured nation or
people, whether Eastern or Western.
CHAPTER II.
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON SUBSTANCE AND
EFFICIENT CAUSATION.
OF these two oldest categories of thought, substance
and causality, the relation may first be briefly noted.
Substance is cause at rest, as cause is substance in
operation. We cannot conceive change, in its begin-
nings, without cause ; but without substance, change,
in its very idea, would be meaningless and absurd. A
cause must be a substance, or being, in energy ; but a
substance need not be an active cause. In short, sub-
stance stands to cause in the relation of source to
condition. Hence Hegel took substance to be cause of
the modes, and modes to be the effects of the substance.
Without causality, event or occurrence, there would be
none. On the other hand, change need not make up
the whole of reality, may indeed be only the visible or
exterior side of things ; one may still ask as to the ulti-
mate elements, whereof things are composed, whether
they may not have in themselves sufficient reason for
their being and for the law of their combinations. Even
if we do not see the substance of the world to be
necessary, it does not yet follow that it may not be
necessary. If the ultimate elements elude us in their
UNIVERSITY )
/
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON SUBSTANCE. 15
noumenal or substantial aspects, a permanent sub-
stratum of all existence may yet be postulated, as a
necessity of thought. As Greek philosophy began with
the search for substantial being the permanent element
behind the continual change of phenomena, so it ended
with the same quest : the quest of a primary substance
we find steadily pursued by Anaximenes, Diogenes of
Apollonia, Heraclitus, Anaximander, Anaxagoras, and
Xenophanes. Not all of these early philosophers held
the permanent substance to be one : plurality of sub-
stances was already held in pronounced form by the
Atomist philosophers ; in this earliest stage, the Atomism
of Leucippus was the final reply to Thales at that time
possible. But it is the answer of Plato and Aristotle
that is now to occupy us, for they both perceived that
philosophy must have an absolute foundation. Plato
poured a new technical and philosophical significance
into the term ovo-ia, as he did into so many others. To
Plato, ovaia par excellence is substance in the sense of
that intermediary between ideas and things which may
perhaps be best described as the principle of the realisa-
tion of form in matter, however far from the language of
Plato such a mode of speaking may be. But his doctrine
of primary substances, variously named as these are, is
abstruse and lacking in explication. Essential being or
ovaia is his postulation for that which holds together
elements of the soul known as "the same" and "the
other " (Timczus, 35 A). As used by Plato, ovaia was a
special characteristic of the Ideas the real existences
(TO, OVTO) as distinguished from earthly appearances (TO,
<j>a(,v6[jLva). Thus it comes about that Plato's ' ideas '
16 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
may be viewed as substances, since they were to him not
only the real existents, but the causes of all things, and
eternal. In the Timczus, Plato speaks of an element or
substance that underlies all things, but this primitive
matter has no substantiality of its own, reality being
reserved for the Ideas. He separates the form or quality
from matter, and hypostatises it in the Idea. But these
hypostatised or metaphysical entities seem only to afford
another instance of the principle that " entia multipli-
cantur praeter necessitatem." Still, the pertinent fact
remains that this substantial existence of the ideas is
postulated in the Timcem (51 D). The one substance
for Plato is, therefore, the Idea, which is sole reality.
Matter is for him the fjurj ov or non-being, yet he has for
it a method of participating in Ideas. His conception
is not free from difficulties of dualistic character, since
matter exerts a limiting influence on the Idea, as though
it were something external to it. His explication is not
free from halting insight and obscurity, and the mistake
of Platonism was to identify the negative or non-being
with matter, or, at any rate, space. Such non-being is
really the negation of substance, since it has no positive
principle of existence in itself. The impersonal character
of the Supreme Idea the Idea of Good in Plato is to
be kept in view. But this is in keeping with his original
assumption of some sort of primordial matter, as sub-
stratum of all motion and all becoming in fact, nurse
and mother of all becoming. This substratum Plato
treats as seat of everything, yet no proper account of it
is given ; it seems to mean, with him, being conditioned
by space, yet mere space cannot be conceived as a
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON SUBSTANCE. I/
substance. Substance, to Plato, must be a perfectly
determinate object of knowledge, and yet the substratum
is less known than its changeful states or aspects, and so
his phenomenal world is left, as to its reality, in some-
what ambiguous and not very real state. And yet,
Being in the full sense of the word is declared in the
Sophist (248 E) to be inconceivable without motion,
life, soul, mind, while reality is claimed in the Republic
(477 A) only for such objects as bear the essential charac-
teristics of mind. Reality or substantiality belongs to
things, in the end, only as it is imparted to them by
mind creative. To this result the Parmenides largely
contributes. This substantial interpretation of Platonic
idea has not been followed by Lotze, who took the notion
of " Law " to be equivalent to that of " Idea," and who
acutely represented Plato's ideas as no supra-sensible
realities or substances, but universal laws, which have
not existence like things, but which, nevertheless, as
externally self-identical in significance, rule the operation
of things. Natorp follows Lotze in taking the Idea to be
a law, not a thing, though he has a position not quite
that of Lotze. Passages in Philebus (16 D, 64 B), Par-
menides, and the/ Thecztetus, are taken in support of this
view. But it seems scarcely necessary to read into Plato
the clearness and consistency of the modern mind, and
his treatment of the Ideas must remain susceptible to
easy attack.
It is really with Aristotle that the substance concept
begins. Substance is, to Aristotle, Being in the full
sense of the term. From substance in general he passes
to the study of sensible substance and substance super-
B
18 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
sensible. But Aristotle's simplest conception of sub-
stance is ToSe TI ov that which simply exists, as existing
by itself, and without other things. This roSe TI is
simply the individual of the concrete world, and such
things as its figure, quality, quantity, &c., which are
inherent in it, are termed its accidents.
But Aristotle calls the substance TI ICTTIV, just that it
may stand out against 71-00-09, TTOLOS eVrtz/. [See Categ.,
iii. 16 ; Meta., v. and vii.] Aristotle's first substance being,
as we have just seen, the individual subsisting in itself
ToSe Ti or that which neither exists in a subject
nor is affirmed of a subject, Aristotle takes for his
second substance that which, not being in a subject
(vTrorceifjievov), may be affirmed of different subjects, to
indicate their species or kind. The difficulty of defin-
ing substance Aristotle discusses in the seventh book of
the Metaphysics, showing how its elements cannot be
substances, and yet how, on the other hand, they cannot
be anything but substances (Meta., vii. 13). He deter-
mines only with difficulty that substance should be defined
only as to its form, and not its matter [Meta., vii. n].
He, in fact, leaves the subject inadequately defined, here
or elsewhere, though he is not without inclination to take
as highest substance that which is most simple, not real-
ising that our ultimate must be the most complex and
concrete, as that into which all else runs back for expli-
cation. Aristotle speaks of vTro/cei/jLevrj v\ij, as conveying
his conception of what was true of the material world,
but not of the ultimate ovaia, or Deity. But what marks
the v7TOKeifj,evov as substance is, in Aristotle, its independ-
ence (TT/OCOTT/ ovo-ia) as a composite formed of the union of
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON SUBSTANCE. 19
essence or form with matter or v\rj. Aristotle is unhap-
pily perplexing in his use of the term ovcria, even when
attention is restricted to the nature of things alone,
without regard to their existence. Substance to him was
equivalent to TO elvcu\ first of the categories, it was
distinguished from all attributes or properties (o-v/jLfiepy-
KOTO) [Meta., i.] In his divergence from Plato, Aristotle
makes ovcria not universal, but something individual and
concrete. Sometimes it signifies the mixture of matter
and form, at other times it is, as the substrate, taken to
be pure indeterminate matter. He strongly condemns
Plato's making the ' idea/ as substance, exist apart from
that of which it is the substance and essence. Plato's
* ideas ' are not, to Aristotle, real substances or ovaicu,
taking ovcria to mean that which exists by itself. But
for Aristotle, no less than for Plato, the general idea
was essence of the particular, and was ovcria so far
as that meant essence. What Aristotle did reject
was, any Platonic claim of right for ideas as existent
apart from things, in which, as their form, they were
immanent or inherent. If the relation of form to
matter was, in Plato, that of reality to non-being,
these two were, to Aristotle, correlative terms, whose
union constituted Being. But his precise fault here
was in not seeing how fully they were correlative
with each other, so that the world of experience cannot
be cleft by making so essential a division as he did
between form and matter. In the metaphysics of
Aristotle, matter does not exist of itself or independently
of form ; it is in itself unknowable, and can be separated
from form only through mental abstraction. Form is
20 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
the Mpytta which brings forth the real out of indeter-
minate potentiality. Matter is not non-being, as with
Plato : it has a tendency towards that whereof form is
the reality : motion is that which connects form and
matter as moments of one existence. The great gift
of Aristotle to the discussion of the substance problem
was the doctrine of substance as a self-active principle
the assertion of absolute reality, that is, absolute
self-activity, as for him the absolute, which is primal
presupposition of all knowledge. Essence, thing, or
substance is, to Aristotle, that which admits of all
change, in which respect he is closely followed by
Lotze (Lotze's Metaphysics, vol. i. p. 74, Eng. edn.)
Such essence is designated TO ri eV by Aristotle, and
is defined by form in its most complete sense. Having
so dealt with Being or substance, Aristotle is ready to
deal with the subject of Cause. We therefore pass to
the treatment by Plato and Aristotle of the problem of
efficient causation. In the reasonings of Plato and
Aristotle there is an underlying assumption of causality.
Existence is energy to Aristotle ; to Plato it is intel-
lect (z/ou?), but intellect which holds in itself all the
ideas of the universe in their causal significance. Plato
and Aristotle alike placed being beyond thought
beyond knowledge. Plato, however, reaches a more
practical result, when, feeling the inadequateness of
the concept of substantiality or existence, he lays it
down in the Sophist that the being of things is nothing
but their power (8iW/u9). Plato saw, before Aristotle,
that, in the regress of movements, there must be a first
term. The intellect (z/ou?), which is existence to Plato,
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON SUBSTANCE. 21
is something which holds in itself all the ideas of the
universe in their causal significance. The psychology of
Plato presupposed mind wherever there was motion, and
so he was led to postulate Deity as Prime Mover of the
universe, with subordinate or deputed deities. (See the
Timceus, 41 B and 42.) Between the Primal Cause and
ordinary mortals Plato set these inferior or subordinate
deities, apparently, as a way of accounting for the short-
comings of the world. (See the Timcem, 41 C.) But a
more important consideration, in the present connection,
is that Plato expressly recognises the dependence of the
world upon a cause beyond itself Travrl yap aSvvarov
%a>pl? alriov <yev(riv ar^elv. (See Timceus, 28 A and B.)
Plato, in the second book of the Republic, already treats
in express terms of the Divine causality. He goes on, in
the sixth book, to give his thoughts more precise form,
when he explicitly says the Good is not mere existence
ovaia but transcends it in dignity and power. In the
seventh book, he affirms the Good to be cause of all that
is bright and beautiful in the worlds of the visible and
the invisible first and most profound of efficient causes.
Despising the outward and phenomenal, Plato rises to
the recognition of a Supreme Cause, as real and infinite
essence, indeed, but yet transcendently abstract and
ideal. Created things are taken (sixth book of the
Republic) as Plato's starting-point only that he may rise
above them (eV ap^v avwrroOeTov e viroOeo-ea)? lova-a),
and, making them " fulcrum " for his flight, advance to
the Primary Cause which, as universal principle, is out-
side and above the point of departure /*e%/H rov avv-
rroderov eVt rrjv rov rravros ap^rjv Iwv. (See the Republic,
22 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
vi., 511 B.) In the tenth book of the Republic, Plato
distinctly claims for God that He is First Author or
Creator Qvrovpyos of all things. In the Philebus, with
its theory of being, we find Plato speaking of a Supreme
Intelligence 1/01)9 Oelos which is declared to be cause of
all things. This supra-mundane principle is for him de-
termining cause atria of all things. In the Philebus,
indeed, Plato feels the pressure of the causal axiom in con-
nection with all things as derived: he holds everything
which comes into being to come of necessity into being
through a cause avay/caiov ivai,, rravra ra ^i^vo^va Sid
riva alriav yiyveo-dai,' THW? yap av %&>pl<? rovrwv ryiyvoiro ;
(See Philebus, 26 E.) This general Cause of the existence of
the universe, as we know it, deserves, in Plato's view, to
be regarded as the Reason of the world. (See Philebus,
30 A.) Still, we have to pass from the Philebus to Tim&us
and the Laws for any full development of cosmological
theory. There Plato voices the difficulty of finding the
" Author " (77-0*77x779) and " Father " (irarr^p) of the world,
which already means the quest for an Efficient Cause.
(See Timaus, 29 A.) In Timczus also, Plato introduces
the idea of Conditions (as supplementary) %vvai,rlai to
the cause proper (atria), an idea which was afterwards
to receive alike important support and criticism. This
idea of necessary cause (TO gvvainov) was to Plato that of
something without which true cause would not be cause.
No very rigorous sense need be imposed upon passages of
bold Creationism in the Timczus, wherein we find the
creative personality and deliberate activity of the Demi-
urge. Enough that we have God dwelt upon as Personal
Creator or Efficient Cause, Plato recognising that that
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON SUBSTANCE. 23
which becomes necessarily, becomes under the influence
of a Cause. It lacks necessary being; it comes into
existence in answer to a sufficient reason. But the
Efficient Cause of Plato is Artificer rather than Creator,
imposing, according to law, form on pre-existent sub-
stance, although one can hardly doubt that, in a deeper
way, the real quest of Plato is for an Ultimate Cause,
that is, principle of life and motion in other words, of
all Ionic manifestations of ceaseless process. And, in-
deed, if we take, say, the Republic, Timceus, Sophist, and
Statesman, all together, one can hardly help feeling that,
in his religious metaphysics, Plato had deep and real
hold on a producing Being in the Supreme Creator who
is for him world-principle, so that his metaphysical con-
ceptions can hardly be denied the possession of true
dynamic force. Again, in the Phczdrus, God is, as Per-
sonal Spirit, cause of the world's order and design
eternal cause, it is said, of eternal movement. We must
be content to remark that Divine causal idea clearly
appears in such other works of Plato as the Sophist and
the Statesman, in both of which the Deity is spoken of as
Father, Artificer, and Generator. So, too, causal idea
recurs in Thecztetus, Laws, and Phado. In the cosmo-
logical reasonings of the Laws, for example, Plato founds
upon the necessity of a rational cause to the actual state
of things, setting out, in so doing, from the idea of
motion. So, too, in the tenth book of the Laws, we
have the principle of the Self-Mover propounded. Against
this, however, Aristotle properly urged that a Self-Mover
is ex vi termini impossible. We are now in a position to
affirm, on the general question, that God is always and
24 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
everywhere, to Plato, Organiser of the World and Con-
server of its eternal youth, immediate Cause of nature
and self-moved principle, on which all cosmic movements
depend. Such is Plato's Eternal an essentially fixed
quantity throned high above, and inaccessible to, all
change, and in Whom the idea of Prime-Mover is already
present. It may be remarked, in this connection, that,
although Plato has given less perfected and precise theory
as to Primal Cause than we find in Aristotle, it does yet
by no means follow that Plato is, to our modern ideas,
less exalted, in his relative theological conceptions, than
the great Stagirite. But, in our present connection, we
can but regret that, in his grand emphasis on ethical
ends, Plato fell short of any final or satisfying treatment
of the problem of causation or real efficiency. Plato's
interest passed from the metaphysical question of effi-
cient causes into the ethical quest of the Good, or the
search, after a Final Cause. The moral purposiveness
of man grew in its hold upon Plato, until it effected this
result of displacing efficient by final Cause. This some-
what tangential movement of Plato's thought is hardly
to be deemed satisfactory, for the method and the result
are not, strictly taken, really philosophical.
While the earlier thinkers of Greece were prone to
accept change simply as a fact, Aristotle had surer grasp
on the true idea of cause, as something that must be
uncaused or self -caused. The Platonists saw that
change must be referred to that which does not change,
but they did not have a like apprehension of how truly
causative or originative Primal Reality must be how
little it could be mere inactive being. They were too
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON SUBSTANCE. 25
content to rest in the Supreme Idea, rather than in
definitely postulated Efficient Cause. This Primal
Reality of the universe, with its eternal energy, is, in
nature, absolute and self- originative Reason, for such is
Aristotle's view of ultimate Causation. In his Physics,
Aristotle lays it down that nothing which is moved
moves itself airav TO icwovpevov dvdy/cr) VTTO TWOS
Kivelo-6ai. (Phys., vii. i.) And, again, he designates
efficient cause more precisely as moving cause TO 8' oOev
TI Kivrjo-is. (Phys., ii. 7.) In the plainest terms, Aristotle
postulates, in the twelfth book of his Metaphysics, a First
Cause, without which the world would not exist. In
formulating his four kinds of cause, Aristotle gave effi-
cient Cause (dp%r) TTJS /cwqa-eaxi) or "moving" Cause (TO
KivrjTucov) the form it was substantially to wear through
the Middle Ages. Every movement argues a moving
Cause, and such moving Cause must be actual being
no mere potentiality. Only such actual being can exert
that evepyeia which means the movement here involved.
As Aristotle reads the order, law, and progress of the
phenomenal universe, the First Cause or Prime Mover
is to him such evepyeia. He is content with no essence
ovo-ia of things in abstracto, but seeks that evepyeia by
which their activity is expressed. As the series of moving
Causes cannot be endless, his First Cause or Prime
Motor (TT/DWTOZ/ KIVQVV aKivrjTov} is taken that he may
escape from the finitude of the actual. The unmoved
and "motionless cause of motion" is God. It will be
observed that Aristotle allows to Deity no relation to
the world save the motion which He communicates to it,
and thus He remains in a state of separation from it.
26 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
His relation is one of pure transcendence ; Deity does
not appear as active and interested Cause of the life of
the world. But it should be noticed that Aristotle, in
holding to the independence of that Divine Reason which
is the primary source of all energy, and maintaining its
separation from the world, does not view the action of
the Primal Cause Divine Reason upon the world-
process as mechanical, but rather regards the self-activity
of each and every part as having been provided for,
through immanent energy which has been communicated
to them.
Thus, then, we see the result of Aristotle's large concern
with <f>v(n,<; an interest so different from that of Plato
in final Cause in a quite astonishing search after
the attainment of Causes, and the maintenance of a
scientific conception of the world. In his Physics, Aris-
totle argues, in a deep and basal fashion, that movement
cannot be self-caused, in the case of extended substance,
and further, that motion must be without beginning and
quite continuous. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle makes
movement consist of possibility passing into actuality,
and takes the source of movement to be completely real-
ised actuality. In other words, it is form pure and
without admixture of matter. But efficient cause, in
his Metaphysics, often means a substance prior in time
to the effect, whereas he elsewhere uses efficient cause
as merely conditioning the effect, and not precedent to it
in respect of time. It should be observed how important
was Aristotle's distinction between self - act ivity />wws
actus and potency. It opens the way for distinguishing
between the Primal Ground of things complete in itself
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON SUBSTANCE. 27
and not moved and the nature of things themselves, as
conditioned in character and evolutional in law. So far
as it goes, Aristotle's insight was great, but it was, of
course, halting in its issue. For his system was un-
doubtedly statical in character, and he neither felt the
need nor saw the mode of relating the Primal Ground
to the world of imperfection that is. No doubt, he may
have meant to improve upon Platonic Idea by such
external Cause as he invoked to convert possibility into
actuality, but, however his hold on the facts of experience
may have been greater, his method was yet too external
to produce satisfactory results. So that, although Aris-
totle did so much for the subject of Causation, the
influence of Plato's ideas overbore much of the effect
properly to have been expected. For, too much was
allowed to formal cause, so that efficient as well as
material and final causes were left in the shade. And,
of course, the imperfection of his idea of causation is to
be noted, no less than his meritorious treatment, since he
is even prepared to drop the notion of sequence, and does
not regard cause as an antecedent with determining
power. Causality only throws the explanation back
upon an antecedent that continually flees us, and the
only escape is by taking causality itself up into some
form of self-activity, as the only category that explains
itself. Aristotle has not dealt with the problem of
efficient Cause or Principle as satisfactorily related to
the world, but at least he gave invaluable aid and such
a noteworthy contribution towards the solution of the
problem as to be of imperishable memory.
28
CHAPTER III.
GREEK PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
RECOGNISING the religio-philosophical developments of
ancient India, we yet find the beginnings of philosophy
of religion first most truly laid in Greece. Here the
separateness and systematised character of philosophi-
cal reflection are, no doubt, observable as never before.
Religion attained to new self- consciousness in Greece,
so that philosophical religion, in deeper, more reflec-
tive sense, appears. The Greek mind has greater
mobility and constructive energy in the systematising
of thought than was possessed by the Eastern mind,
with its inactive, quietistic tendencies. Its free,
creative spirit is finely seen in the construction of
Greek religious conceptions and beliefs. But this is
not to say that the Greek development was free from
a stage of vague and unreflecting Spiritism. The ex-
ternal cast of the popular religion of Greece roused
philosophical thought only by the antagonism it pro-
voked to the absurdities contained in its legends of
the gods. For here that which was first was not
even though it concerned the gods that which was
heavenly, but very much the reverse. A higher philo-
sophic influence seems to have been exerted on early
GREEK PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 2Q
Greek thought by the Orphic songs or legends, with
their blendings of the earthly and the heavenly and
their cosmogonic character. Greek search for a single
principle, whence the cosmic order had been derived
or evolved, was henceforth natural and intelligible.
Nature to the Greek more than half revealed the soul
within.
The thought of an absolute principle of unity first
took clearly defined form in Xenophanes, who repre-
sents Eleatic Monism, naming his One Being God,
and viewing Him as rational. He combats prevailing
Polytheism, and the anthropomorphic conceptions of
Homer and Hesiod. A striking feature of Greek re-
ligious development is its lack of organised unity, its
absence of anything like unified tradition of funda-
mentally religious type. The sensuous forms and im-
aginative symbols of Greek mythology, as found in the
poets, presented a naturalism so gross and crude that
it could not but prove an easy prey to the critical
shafts of developing reflection. In the polytheism of
Greek religion the gods were not only humanised,
but were terribly human capricious, jealous, lawless,
partial, and immoral. The religion of the Greek was
mainly a religion of this world, for it was here he
sought, for the most part, his compensations. And the
gods must have been very troublesome to him, for so
jealous were they of human success or prosperity that
they must needs be avenging themselves on human
vjSpis. But in this connection the great trouble is that
things were left by Greek thought in so impersonal
a condition that the sense of personality was so
30 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
ill -defined. Perhaps the best feature in the crude
anthropomorphism of Greek mythology is the fact that
their gods were social and happy. In fact, the entire
humanity of the Greeks seemed to be reflected in
their gods. The deities of their pantheon seem con-
structed after human patterns of beauty, intelligence,
and strength. Their gods are men, in fact; super-
human they are, only they are superior in courage or
virtue to men. Free from dread and joyous was Greek
life ; for a Homer the divine lay in the human ; in
Homer and Hesiod faith in Justice survives. The
idealisation of man played a large part in the
religious thought of Homer. As pointing toward
monotheistic unity, we have, even in Homeric times,
the conception of Zeus as Father of gods and men.
But syncretism was already well on its way, and
Homeric religion is that of the cultured few rather
than that of the people. Its outlook on the future
life was one of gloom. In ^schylus there is realised
no conscious antagonism to the popular belief in the
order of the gods above. He has his plea for Zeus
as pattern and protector of righteousness. Sophocles
admits a more humanly operative rational element.
Euripides is staggered before the difficulty of recon-
ciling divine justice with human deed and doom. His
pessimistic thought - world opened out on the whole
life of his time, and he stands strongly marked by his
rejection of the polytheistic religion, his recognition of
the possibility and necessity of a scientific conception
of the world, and his adherence to a moral ideal. The
strife between pvOos and \6yos assumes in Euripides
GREEK PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 31
its sharpest form. But Euripides not only helped to
destroy the fair world of mythology, but was also, in
some real sense, pathfinder for man's free personality
over against the weight of authority. Beyond all naive
conditions Euripides calls to the life of reflection, to
whose rational ideal of life he remains true, recognis-
ing, with fine cosmopolite sense, that thus the race
moves out of darkness into light. The Greek tragedians,
in fact, raised the conception of the gods towards the
ideal of perfect ethical Spirit in their efforts to purge
of anthropomorphic defect. Taking all that has now
been advanced, it becomes evident how inevitable was
the antagonism that should follow philosophical reflec-
tion on such mythologic crudities and errors as have
been adverted to.
Coming back to Xenophanes, we may remark that
his sole Deity is raised above multiplicity and change,
and is perfectly self-sufficing. The abstract monism of
the Eleatics concerned itself, metaphysically, with the
being rather than the origin of things. But it was on
the origin of things that the Ionic philosophers fixed
their attention, and Heraclitus voiced their origin, flux,
change, and decay. Hylozoistic in principle as his
theory was, Heraclitus emphasises the ceaseless flux of
things the restless activity of nature the passing
of things or their universal movement (iravra pel). A
subtle, all -pervasive motion underlies this change the
exhaustless energy of the Divine Reason itself. But
the goal of Heraclitus could not but prove a sceptical
one, since the only criterion of being lay in the
momentary sensible apprehension of the individual, and
32 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
fixed knowledge was not to be thought of. Heraclitus
was, however, really complementary, not antagonistic,
to Xenophanes, as Plato was swift to see. But the
teleological reasonings of Socrates helped Plato to this
synthesis; for Socrates held that what exists for a use-
ful end must be product of intelligence, in which, as
in organic structure, parts serve the whole. Anax-
agoras, no doubt, had already suggested mind as
mover of matter, holding that all things were in
chaos till reason came to arrange them, but the ideal-
istic character of his suggestion was not sustained in
his too mechanical mode of explication. Thus the
pre-eminence he postulated for Mind became lost in
the physical working; still, the idealistic or immaterial
principle had been brought into view, which was to
prove ultimate gain. To Socrates there was a Divine
Wisdom or Reason that fashioned and upheld the
universal or cosmic order, and by him and his fol-
lowers the rational element in Greek mythology was
apprehended. The rational system of truth at which
Socrates aimed was sought to be educed in psycho-
logical manner, the principle of this system being to
him generically active within the human consciousness.
Plato passed beyond this psychological state into the
ontologic, the idea becoming to him an ontological
archetype. The defect here was that Platonism tended
to make these archetypes external and independent
entities, lying apart from the creative mind. Plato,
noblest of pioneers in the sphere of the philosophy of
religion, vindicates the character of the gods as ab-
solutely good, and maintains the Divine nature to be
GREEK PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 33
ultimate source of all goodness, truth, and beauty.
In his later works the leading religious thought is
just that of the Divine Mind, of which the human
mind is taken to be, in some sort, a reflection. The
gods of mythology were, to Plato, creatures of imagin-
ation, and ethically mischievous ; and it was his firm
belief in the ontological and necessary priority of
reason to matter that made him hold to the soul as
immortal. The Divine nature he takes to transcend
the sensible, and in his philosophy of religion he
postulates such a transcendence for Deity as makes a
certain spiritual monotheism. His was the pregnant
conception that in the goodness of God was to be
found the reason for the creation of the world. But
he failed to carry out this conception as due to self-
manifesting Deity, not Deity manifested as something
without, and so he missed bridging over the chasm
between the real and the phenomenal. The dignity of
the soul, the idea of the good, the conception of the
ideal society, also received treatment of abiding worth
at Plato's hands, for the sweep of his vision claimed
for itself all time and all existence.
In the same line of conception as to Deity, Aristotle,
with certain features of his own, follows ; God being
to him self-sufficient, contemplative, and alone. His
positing a Deity who lives a life of such pure con-
templation is no more free from criticism than Plato's
position, which he criticised. Such pure thought does
not get beyond itself to determine anything else. God
is to Aristotle an eternal activity complete in itself,
and contemplation is to him " the best and happiest
c
34 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
of activities." The obvious trouble in God's whole
activity being thus contemplation, is to understand
how He has to do with this changing and finite
world. Aristotle conceives the world as really de-
pendent upon God, and in need of Him, who is to
Aristotle its Prime Mover, the original cause of all
existence. But this Prime Mover turns out on ex-
amination to be so rather in respect of logical priority
than as first in time in His unbeginning beginning.
Aristotle endeavours, not very satisfactorily, to combine
immanent and transcendent views in his conception of
Deity, as a reaction from the transcendent universal-
ism of Plato. But it was a great achievement that
Aristotle not only made pure self -activity actus purus
the primal ground, but also took things to be a
dual synthesis of self- activity and potence. Following
Anaxagoras, Aristotle transformed his purus actus into
reason or abstract intelligence, which could not offer
any satisfactory basis of mediation between the world
and its Ultimate Ground. His recognition of the
immanent end of every object raised his doctrine of
finality far above the utilitarian teleology of later
philosophers. What Aristotle had to say as to the
union of the individual and the universal, and as to
the function of the living soul in educing philosophy
and science from experience within a social order, is
of enduring interest.
Now, it will readily be seen that the point to which we
have been brought by the thought of Aristotle is one
which leaves a breach, to the healing of which the efforts
of later Greek speculation were directed. Hence we
GREEK PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 35
have Philo's hierarchy of beings bridging the dualism
between God and matter, and those emanational at-
tempts to mediate between the One and the many which
are characteristic of the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus and
Proclus. Before these endeavours we have, of course,
the attempts of Stoicism to find unity in self-conscious
thought itself, which took itself to be in perfect harmony
or oneness with God as the principle of the universe, and
troubled itself nothing about the world of matter or par-
ticular objects and events. Hardly are we called to
follow out here these later systems of Greek thought,
wherein speculative thought became subordinated to
practical ethics, and the rendering of the individual
sufficient unto himself became accounted a thing of fun-
damental value, in spite of the fact that such strength
was too isolated for general result. We are only con-
cerned now with the religious ideal of the Greeks in the
most characteristically Greek forms and periods. That
religious ideal we have seen to be the outcome of the
highest type of polytheistic thought the result of de-
velopment that tended to an always greater unity. Never
was the persistent Greek belief in Fate, as that to which
gods, no less than men, are subject, without some under-
lying feeling of protest. And, indeed, Fate itself became
less conceived as hard external necessity and assumed
more the character of rational law. The elements of a
perfectly assured world-order lay behind the impersonal
guise of what seemed only blind and irrational Fate.
The Furies turned at last to graciousness. The worlds
of men and of gods were personal.
It is a pleasing religious development in some ways
36 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
inspiring even we have before us, from the beginnings
of incisive criticism of the popular religious thought by
Xenophanes up to the new philosophy of religion pro-
pounded by Plato, with the humanity, beauty, purity,
truth, and freedom by which that religion was marked.
For it should be noted what a growing conception marked
all this Greek development of the human soul as Divine
alike in nature and in destiny, and as of peerless worth
in its rational and spiritual life. Highest to Plato was the
idea of the Good this all-ruling idea was to him absolute
reality. Plato's conception of life is, no doubt, shot
through with religion, for his is an entirely religious one,
but his conception is yet a characteristically Greek one.
It imports a high sense of man's connection with the All
an exalted union of the human with the Divine. But
it obviously is not a religion of restoration, of renewal, of
consolatory power, lacking, as it does, real personal
relation. It falls far short of being revelational in any
historic sense. Plato is not a physician to the sick ; his
philosophy is that of the whole, sound man. But be-
tween God and man there is no real communion. On a
metaphysical view, religion is to him speculation and
nothing else in God is pure and immutable essence
found. On a moral view, God is to him the ideal of
moral perfection the good and righteous Spirit. Plato's
moral kingdom is concerned with justice rather than
love, but the justice is tempered with mildness and
mercy. Matter is to him that which resists the action
of God, and causes evil to be present in the world. Such
a view of matter as non-pliant and impenetrable before
the Divine Mind we can, of course, by no means accept.
GREEK PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 37
Plotinus was able later to affirm the unreality of matter,
in spite of the part it plays among real things.
Aristotle, like Plato, thought our understanding of life
must depend oaour insight into the great world of reality,
for the content of human existence is gained through its
connection with the All. Like Plato, he highly esteems
form, and indeed he makes of the relation of form and
matter something which rules all reality and constitutes
the core of all life. But whereas Plato rent the world in
twain by his severance of essence and reality, this sever-
ance was to Aristotle an intolerable schism, and he
sought to steer his philosophic course toward apprehen-
sion of the unity of reality. Reality is for him the
essence found in the actual phenomena. Aristotle does
not, like Plato, set out from the idea, and work to the
data of experience. Starting from the data of experience,
Aristotle rises from the actual or empirical to the ulti-
mate or universal. The synthetic and progressive pro-
cedure of Plato is in Aristotle replaced by analytic and
regressive tendencies. Plato excels by the richness of
his ideas and the spiritualistic character of his thought.
Aristotle excels in his combined hold on the rational
form-elements and the empirical data that fill these out.
For Aristotle, with his monistic tendency, there is a
Divine Oversoul, which is the source of the world as a
realm of reason, and which is the originating cause of the
eternal world movement. Thus the world does not wear
to thought so contrastive and opposed a look as on the
Platonic view. But it is, for all that, a very weak position
Aristotle takes in assigning to God only the place of
Prime Mover of the world, sustaining to it relations only
38 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
in virtue of the motion He communicates. We miss
those Ideas in the divine mind which are archetypes of
created things ; we are certainly not brought near to God,
since God is here separated from the world, to which He
communicates movement. Nevertheless, his cosmology
must be allowed to have more consistency than that of
Plato.
In Philo, the Logos mediates between transcendent
Deity and man. But the Logos conception is in Philo
a vacillating and imperfect one, not reaching up to real
personal result. But the merit must be freely accorded^
to Philo of having linked the best of Old Testament
thought to the best of Greek philosophical thinking, in
his conception of God, who is not only One, but the
Good. The profound expression given to the Platonic
philosophy by Plotinus meant, of course, a great gain in
elevation. This is saying much, if we remember how
great had been the elevation of Plato's teaching
how (in the Republic) he had taught the idea of the
good to be regarded as cause of all science and
truth, and had insisted on the good as far exceeding
essence in dignity and power. But the transcendence of
his Deity, the inapprehensibleness of His nature, kept
his omnipresence from being so felt that men could
partake in the wealth of spiritual life. This despite the
stimulating and elevating effect of his conception of the
One, the Ineffable. No doubt his affirmation of mystical
ecstasy meant a certain unity of man with God, as in-
volved in emotional response. But the lack remained in
respect of the process being one amenable to the scrutin-
ising view of reason. Reason was a too transitional
GREEK PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 39
term in the process of return to God by ecstatic eleva-
tion, and the mysticism involved was a turning of the
back upon experience. The thought of Plotinus has the
merit, of course, of ridding us of anthropomorphism, but
the price paid is a dear one the dethronement of reason :
dear, because a God unknowable can be of no service or
interest either to faith or to philosophy. If philosophy
could be content thus, it would have learnt and gained
nothing. While the conception of God remained in
Greek philosophy, as it culminated in Plotinus, very
much of an abstraction, or limiting concept, it became in
Philo a living reality.
Thus we are now in a position to mark the character of
that development which constitutes the Greek philosophy
of religion. We have seen the character of their early
gods, their humanised or anthropomorphic deities,
whose worship was yet the precursor of the worship of
spiritual principle. We have noted the growth of sub-
jective reflection from the philosophy of Anaxagoras
onward. Very noticeable in Socrates is this emphasis
on moral reason. In Plato the pre-eminence of ideas
or reason we have observed to be conspicuous. His
religion is ethical and mystical rather than metaphysical.
Aristotle's stress on pure reason, after our own particular
fashion, we have also pointed out. We have taken
account, also, of the developing idea of unity as early
conceived under the notion of Fate, which cast its dark
impersonal shadow over the throne of Zeus himself. Be-
sides which, monotheistic tendency was seen in the more
or less conscious gropings after more spiritual principle.
Nor have we failed to make some passing recognition
40 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
of their religion as that of beauty the Divine being to
them the eternally beautiful. We have seen the purifica-
tion of Greek mythology by their poets and philosophers.
Add to all these things that we have reckoned with the
meditation and systematisation which they gave to eternal
truths, principles, and ideas through their great philo-
sophic thinkers, and it will be evident how extraordinarily
great was the contribution of Greek philosophy of religion
to the world's religious development. The greatness of
that contribution has been enhanced by the persistent
influence exerted by Greek systems and ideas on all
subsequent generations. But this is said without sharing
the defective and one-sided views of those among whom
are distinguished philosophical names who treat early
Christian Theology as only a weak reflex of Greek Philo-
sophy, and quite fail to realise the nobly creative and
independent power of early spiritual thinkers like Aris-
tides, Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Clement, and
Origen. When we are called to deal with the relations
of Greek Philosophy to early Christian Theology, Suum
Cuique must be our motto, if we have insight enough to
perceive how real and great were the power and portion
of that Theology in itself, as they are revealed in its
historical development.
CHAPTER IV.
THE ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF MARCUS AURELIUS.
A SIGNIFICANT circumstance was the fact that the Stoic
philosophy, in the eventide of its existence, produced
three men of such nobility of mind as Seneca, Epictetus,
and Marcus Aurelius. In their more developed type of
thought, Stoicism was best represented. In their hands,
indeed, Stoicism became the noblest of imperfect ethical
theories. Marcus Aurelius was the last of the significant
Stoics one, too, in whom pagan ethical philosophy
reached its greatest depth, and its finest flowering.
The Stoicism of the time had become an eclectic
religious movement, and the old pantheism of the school
had given way, it seems not too much to say, to thought
of more theistic tendency. Abandonment to the Will of
Deity, and impregnable concentration or entrenchment
in one's self, despite the moral and intellectual loneliness
which such individuality may involve, are the assiduous
inculcations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. In him
the Stoical synthesis of pantheism and individualism
reaches its highest. His Meditations the last great
product of Stoicism had a certain inner and mystical
affinity with the Neo-Platonism that should follow a
result not to be wondered at when philosophy became, in
42 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
the Emperor's mystic speculation, so largely concerned
with the affairs of practical life. The enforcement of
virtuous life has precedence, with him, over subtle specu-
lation as to the origin of things. For interest had been
transferred from metaphysical speculation to practical
ethics. For all that, his system is not without meta-
physical foundation: this is found in its theory of Nature,
as moral support and guide. His discussions of ethical
problems are neither systematic nor exhaustive there is
no attempt to make them so. His work is not an intel-
lectual system of the Universe : the ethical philosophy it
presents does not derive from being part of a philosoph-
ical system which offers itself as an organic whole. There
is, however, this fundamental conception underlying all
his teaching, namely, that all things form one whole,
and constitute a unity. This is in accord with the essen-
tially monistic character of Stoicism. He teaches that
this whole is so wisely ordered that the wisdom of each
part lies, after the Stoic teleology, in seeking the good of
the whole. Hence the Emperor can say " All parts of
the Universe are interwoven and tied together with a
sacred bond. And no one thing is foreign or unrelated
to another. This general connection gives unity and
ornament to the world. For the world, take it altogether,
is but one." 1 The unity and the ideal significance of
things he grasps, after the Stoical fashion, which was
impelled to these under the demands of reason. But, of
course, this universal reason in things is still too much
an abstract potentiality. Again he says " If thou didst
ever see a hand cut off, or a foot, or a head lying any-
1 vii. 9.
ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF MARCUS AURELIUS. 43
where apart from the rest of the body, such does a man
make himself, as far as he can, who is not content with
what happens, and separates himself from others, or does
anything selfish. If you have detached yourself from the
natural unity for you were made by Nature a part, but
now you have cut yourself off yet, in your case, there is
this beautiful provision, that it is in your power again to
unite yourself." * Of course, the trouble is, that Stoical
thought leaves this organic unity of mankind a thing too
abstract, subjective, and purely ideal. Once more says
Aurelius " He that frets himself because things do not
happen just as he would have them, and secedes and
separates himself from the law of universal nature, is but
a sort of ulcer of the world, never considering that the
same cause which produced the displeasing accident
made him too. And lastly, he that is selfish, and cuts off
his own soul from the universal soul of all rational beings,
is a kind of voluntary outlaw." 2 We thus see the world
to be objectively conceived by Aurelius as a unified thing
a cosmos to which all belong. But the unifying
power remains too mysterious in his thought, and we
are not shown how man, as part, may become reconciled
with the whole. Still, this unity of the world was strik-
ingly conceived by him as giving unity to man's life, all
the parts or members of the one body being most closely
connected. The alternative is always present to him
" either Providence or atoms rule the Universe." 3 He
has his own position clearly defined, however, in his pref-
erence for Providence, with its boundless possibilities
and hopes, rather than chance, with its attendant resig-
1 viii. 34. 2 iv. 29. 3 iv. 3.
44 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
nation. He shares the Stoical belief in Divine Power as
having given us all we need. Very beautiful is the com-
pleteness of his contentment with all things " All things
are harmonious to me which are harmonious to thee, O
Universe. Nothing is for me too early or too late which
is in due time for thee. All is fruit to me which thy
seasons, O Nature, bear. From thee are all things, and
in thee all, and all return to thee. The poet says, ' Dear
City of Cecrops ! " Shall I not say, ' Dear City of
God ' ? " * His view of man's duty, therefore, is to live
agreeably to the course of Nature, and harmoniously
with other men. His individualism, so virtuous and
strongly marked, takes a prevailing optimism for granted,
and puts itself into harmony with the ethical cosmos.
For all that, he keenly feels the impotence of man, borne
along on the world's current. But, of course, the fact
of evil is a trouble in face of the Providence to which
reference has been made. But Stoical courage simply
refused to admit the fact, and took the world for perfect.
Such evil as there might be must be for the general good.
This is precisely one of the defects of the moral philo-
sophy of Aurelius, that the reality of the antagonism of
evil to the good is not more decisively felt, and so, too,
with respect to the reality of righteousness. A heart that
should beat more violently in sympathy with practical
triumphs of righteousness, than the philosophy of Aure-
lius compelled, was something that could come only by
that teaching being transcended. Sincere as Stoical
thought always remained, it seems lacking in thorough-
ness here. It could not, and did not, feel, in any adequate
1 iv. 23.
ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF MARCUS AURELIUS. 45
manner, the difficulty of reconciling the pessimistic
aspects of the world with its faith in the perfection of the
universe. Hence hope springs not eternal in its breast.
Resignation is to it the whole of virtue, be it to goodness
or to necessity.
The Deity that, for the Emperor, rules and pervades
all things is one that might very well suggest the Deity
of monotheism. Only, acquiescence in the Divine will
here partakes too much of indifference to what may
occur, and acceptance of what must, as though it were
some fate which neither divinity nor humanity can
change. For, though Marcus Aurelius, like Epictetus
and Seneca, attains some sense of the personality of
Deity, yet it is by no means uniform or persistent.
To the ethical philosophy of Aurelius, the soul was
indestructible the dominant and guiding principle of
life. In its principle of reason, he found the secret of
man's relationship to man, no less than to God, the
universal reason. Hence he can say, " Though we are
not just of the same flesh and blood, yet our minds are
nearly related." l This brotherhood of man, says Aure-
lius, will lead us not only to strive for the common good,
but to pity and forgive. Man is to him the crown of
nature. Yet the nature of man is to him social, but his
social eagerness to serve mankind is not such as to make
him break unrestrainedly with the cosmic claims which
are so central in his thought. Here, too, there is a
prominent element of resignation before the injustice of
men. Man's relation to the Deity is, in Stoical ethics,
of fundamental importance. They make God and reason
1 ii. I.'
46 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
finely identical, and our true good, therefore, lies in
conformity with the mind and will of Deity. The
life of reason is, therefore, that whereon Aurelius insists.
Reason is to him the judgment-forming power, and can
subject all passion. " Hold in honour your opinionative
faculty, for this alone is able to prevent any opinion from
originating in your guiding principle that is contrary to
Nature, or the proper constitution of a rational crea-
ture." 1 For, in Stoical thought, a rational nature is
subjectively conceived to belong to all. Not only that,
but as a rational being, man is expected to rise above
himself beyond his own individuality. Tis in keeping
with such a nature the Emperor says, " If any man is
able to convince me, and show me that I do not think or
act right, I will gladly change, for I seek the truth, by
which no man was ever injured. But he is injured who
abides in his error and ignorance." Such, then, is the
Emperor's firmly enounced doctrine of humanity, with
the dignity and duty that pertain to every man, and every
man's work. Dutiful and sincere we must be, and there
must be no acting a part, in our going beyond the self.
And if, according to Stoic fatalism, everything is neces-
sarily determined, the determination is along lines that
must be optimistically conceived. So the nobility of the
Emperor, in keeping with this, says, " It is not seemly
that I, who willingly have brought sorrow to none, should
permit myself to be sad."
When we turn to the Stoic theory of virtue, as
represented in Aurelius, we find the inwardness of
virtue remarkable, and it is absolutely self-sufficing.
1 iii. 9.
ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF MARCUS AURELIUS. 47
Virtue is to him primarily cosmic : it is something
due to the universe or God. We are free to be
moved only from within : the calm which is conse-
quent on just and virtuous action makes just, righteous
action that in which our inner reasoning alone finds
rest. The good man is lord of his own life : he is
such a king among men, by reason of virtue, as had
never before been dreamed. Virtue is to him superior
to life's varying fortunes. Thus arose the conception
of the impossible wise man of Stoical thought. And
the impossibility of the realisation led to its becoming
tempered, in the later developments, with practical and
practicable forms and insistences.
The Emperor's inculcations contain very much that
is undoubtedly excellent, as to the wisdom of life.
Powerless were the darts of destiny against the inner
refuge of Aurelius, with his lofty tranquillity of mind,
and deep quickening of soul. Such an ethical view
of the world as his need not be opposed to an intel-
lectual one, but the ethical one was more deeply
satisfying. The good will, in its detached exercise,
was for him supreme virtue, but with the formal self-
consistency of this will he was too well content. The
chief fault I should find with it is that it leads too
much to passive and quietistic excellences, and has
too few insistences on the active forth - puttings of
heroic virtue. I mean, we can easily fear disturbance
too much, and carry the limits of prudence too far.
It seems to us more important to have the soul cul-
tivate the plenitude of its own energy and power for
the performance of actively and generously heroic
48 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
virtue. We need not too readily fear the world -city
and its claims. The good will is the great thing, but
not as a mere internal state, rather as something which
goes forth in labour for the whole, from morning until
evening. When the soul is too exclusively thrown
back upon itself, there are attendant dangers of pride
and self-confidence. Still, quietistic excesses apart, the
insistence on the importance of being, rather than
knowing or doing, has its own value. Those petty
and untoward things, towards which Stoicism fosters a
contemptuous disregard, may, under higher and more
positive ethical law, become sources of joy, strength,
and worth. But it is only just to the Stoical view to
remember that its indifference to outward things was
only a relative indifference as compared with the ab-
solute renunciation of ideal moral life and was even
essentially religious, since the outward things were
taken to be at the disposal of Deity, in whose wisdom
we must confide.
The Stoical theory of good and evil both alike ab-
solute came to be modified, and room and place
found for things as human and actually existent. The
egoistic and altruistic tendencies were not perfectly
harmonised, the stress remaining mainly on the former,
and the essentially social character of virtue being
imperfectly drawn, even though a certain utilitarian
interest and tendency are far from wanting in the
teaching of Aurelius.
The future life is left in uncertainty by the Emperor,
though he seems not without some sense of the con-
tinuance of life after death. He scarcely ever touches
ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF MARCUS AURELIUS. 49
on the question. He prefers to centre attention on
the life of the present. Every day may be his last,
yet other-worldliness he has none. "Though you were
to live three thousand, or, if you please, thirty thousand
years, yet remember that no man can lose any other
life than that which he now lives, neither is he pos-
sessed of any other than that which he loses." 1 But
his reasoning is as noble as it is peculiar, in this con-
nection, for, just because we have but this all too brief
life, we must the more be careful to live it well.
" Hark ye, friend; you have been a burgher of this
great city, what matter though you have lived in it
five years or three ; if you have observed the laws < of
the corporation, the length or shortness of the time
makes no difference." 2
It will be seen, from all that has now been advanced,
that the ethical philosophy of Stoics, like the Emperor,
came short in this, that it set out from the formal
principle of ethical law, and never got the length of-
the real principle on which goodness, right, and duty
must depend. Its whole conception of the principle
remains too abstractly conceived : the right, the good,
the ideal, must be chosen for their own sakes, but
still it is not brought out wherein the right, the good,
the ideal do actually consist. The clearest we can
gain is its emphasis on the good will, as a state in
itself, and apart from all things outside of it which
is certainly a noble ideal. Its theory of virtue never
transcends itself. The virtue remains defective, in
that it consists too much in outward action, to the
1 ii. 14. 2 xii. 36.
D
50 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
neglect or disparagement of such interior dispositions
as charity, beneficence, tenderness, and spontaneous
love. And, when it is introspective, its self-questioning
is too persistent, and lacks inspiration from without.
It forgets how exterior and universal in its aims moral
effort must be, no man living for himself, or being
complete in himself. In this way of thinking, there is
the tendency, too, to retire too readily from the world,
and to sacrifice too little to save and improve it.
True individuality comes not of the soul's repression,
but by its advance in the service of thought and life.
The soul grows cosmic, not by abstraction of itself
from the world, but by claiming all things as its own.
At any rate, 'tis but a cold and soul - desolating ideal
to which it can attain, by dint of proud and self-
reliant will. Virtue thus becomes easily too personal
and subjective. In Marcus Aureliua, however, appears
at times a tenderness which transcends Stoicism proper.
The ethical philosophy of Stoicism, at its highest, had
need to be lifted into the sphere of personality, and
the realm of ends rational ends for which alone self-
denial or renunciation is necessary. But then it will
have passed out of the twilight of abstraction into the
sphere of noonday the light of real principles, prin-
ciples of love that concern persons, human and divine.
We are not now concerned to follow it thither. It
is enough now to note how far Stoic speculation can
carry us.
With Aurelius, as with Epictetus, man's own self-
development is that with which nothing in the shape
of outward circumstance must be allowed to interfere.
ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF MARCUS AURELIUS. 51
But he overlooks too largely the warfare within, no
less than without. Man's inner world is more than
Stoical calm, and there are higher things to be said
than the Emperor has known. Nor is destiny, from a
higher view -point, merely the cross-grained thing it
seemed to these Stoic philosophers. Still, high credit
must be given to Stoical thought for the way in which
it advanced on Aristotle, and anticipated later and
higher thought, in teaching the will of man to con-
form in virtue of its free internal dispositions to
the outer limitations imposed on man's power. Its
modified determinism made strength of will the prime
requisite of man's adjustment to the world's order, and
of his control of passion. The unique triumph of the
will's perfect self-mastery before all exterior issues, and
the priceless worth of the will's inward or inherent
goodness, were great and valid ideals to set before
men. But they must not be so conceived that the
isolated inner life shall be loosened from the effort
after universality.
A graver and more severe law is required than the
Stoical obedience to the law of nature and reason,
even though we admit the value of the sacrifice of
desire to this Stoical subordination to Nature's law.
The life of pure reason is, to Stoical thought, the true
life, for the rational is, for it, as we have seen, the
real. But such life of pure reason can never be the
true, the ideal, life; for not apathy or indifference is
our need, but always more and fuller life. This false
attitude to life is a grave defect of Stoicism : its aloof-
ness and contempt were a default of life. Life is the
OF THE
UNIVERSITY
52 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
one thing needful ; life laughs to scorn oppositions,
troubles, losses, failures, and makes them minister to
its own progress and development. Life must be at
once intense and expansive, so shall it be generous
and fruitful. Of such life the law is, to him that
hath shall be given. But it is sad to see so noble a
soul as that of the Emperor unable to project his own
serene rationality into the system of the world as a
universal principle, and to behold him equally unable
to carry forward his own sublime adherence to moral
ideal into faith in eternal moral ideal at the core and
centre of a world that seemed to be its contradiction.
To the Emperor Marcus Aurelius must be accorded
high, though discriminating, praise for his contribution
towards the imperishable glory of Stoical ethics, in his
setting forth of the intrinsic worth of moral personality,
the triumph of man's self -conquest, the actualism of
energetic fulfilment of duty in midst of his scheme of
lofty idealism, the fundamental place of Divine order
or law; for these, and such like insistences, made the
Emperor the important connecting-link he was between
pagan and Christian thought. The emphasis of an
Aurelius on the inwardness of self, and the interior
certitude of moral virtue, was a foreshadowing of the
teachings of an Augustine.
53
CHAPTER V.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL DOCTRINE OF THE LOGOS.
EQUALLY in philosophy and in theology the doctrine of
the Logos has been of prime importance. Yet that
importance is still found, frequently, appreciated in very
inadequate manner. It is usually said that, as matter of
history, the doctrine took ontological rise in the idealism
of Plato, forming the mediating principle between the
transcendent world and the world of phenomena. This
is true, only if we remember that it had already been
employed by Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, as a principle of
reason or law, to explain the order of the world. It
gradually worked its way into a central position in philo-
sophical thinking. The philosophical Logos was essen-
tially cosmological and metaphysical. The Stoics took
all activity to imply a Logos or spiritual principle. As
operative principle of the world, the Logos was to them
anima mundi. Philo, again, adopted this Stoic use of the
word Logos, whereby it denoted a rational principle
immanent in nature and in man, although he derived the
contents of the term more from Plato. Philo's Logos is,
in fact, like the early Greek z/oO?; "the constitutions of
all other things " are supposed to be found in the Logos.
Thus the philosophical Logos is reason absolutely, or
54 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
absolute idea, a strong enough Idealism. In the same
way, the term Logos became the constructive norm of
theological thinking. It is evident that the Logos prin-
ciple had a history in Greek philosophy ere it came to be
Christologised in the Church. The application of the
term Logos to the interpretation of the Person of Jesus,
in the Gospel of St John, does not at all carry with it
that the doctrine was in any full or adequate fashion
realised, even where this Gospel might be known. Had
it been so fully grasped, it would have sufficed to dis-
sipate all notions of external being or imperfect deity or
separate nature, in respect of the Logos. It is easy to
see how thought tended quite readily to associate the
title Logos, so suggestive of reason ruling in the universe,
with the idea of Christ as a cosmic force, and to come
short of apprehending the real personality of the Logos.
St John's Gospel opposes certain positions of Gnosticism
by its identification of the Jesus of history with the
mediating Logos of Greek philosophy. For the Logos
figured in the Gnostic writings, where it appeared as an
aeon distinct from Christ. The philosophical Logos
meant the Reason, St John's Logos was the Word, and
to him it meant a distinct hypostasis or personality.
Subsisting in God, as being or hypostasis, was the In-
finite Thought reflection and counterpart of God which
is, in fact, the Logos. The Logos was to Philo, however,
distinct from God, and subordinate to him, being, in fact,
placed by Philo outside the Divine sphere. St John is
again distinctive in identifying the Logos with the Mes-
sianic idea. Furthermore, St John lays his main stress
on the incarnation of the Logos, an idea wholly wanting
PHILOSOPHICAL DOCTRINE OF THE LOGOS. 55
to Philo. Philo is dualistic, John is not ; matter is to
Philo evil, to John divine. While the creation of the
world was all that Philo sought through the Logos, St
John claimed, in addition, its redemption. From all
which it is evident that the doctrine of the Logos what-
ever may have been the case as to the term itself was
not derived by St John from Philo, being so essentially
different from his.
It is matter for some surprise, no doubt, that the Logos
doctrine is not more in evidence in post-Apostolic Fathers
anterior to Justin Martyr, and for some regret that not
more material is available for the guidance of our conclu-
sions. Justin makes evident the influence of Plato, and
says he wishes to be Christian, " not because the teach-
ings of Plato are different from those of Christ, but be-
cause they are not in all points like." x Justin shows, no
doubt, the influence of Platonic and Stoic modes of
thinking in connection with his Logos ideas, but not so
much can be drawn from this as has frequently been
done. It would be easy to name recent philosophical
writers who have shown no real insight into the creative
intelligence that led men like Justin to take the Stoic
idea of the Logos, and find the Divine reason, immanent
in nature and in man, to be incarnated in Jesus Christ,
in the manner of the great Apologists. What insight is
there in supposing, as these philosophic writers have been
well content to do, that the Christian thought of these
Apologists was but a pale reflection of Greek philosophic
thought, without independent and creative power? As
Justin says, when blaming Plato for lack of spiritual
1 Second Apology of Justin, xiii.
$6 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
understanding, " It is not, then, that we hold the same
opinions as others, but that all speak in imitation of
ours." x The Apologists really set out to prove Christian-
ity a reasonable religion, and God's reason they found
revealed in the Logos. Greek thinkers they certainly
were, and not lacking in independent power.
The cosmological aspect of the problem holds Justin at
the outset, but the ethical or mediatorial interest of
the Logos principle also attracted him. The function
of the Logos was mediatorial, and, in its revealings of the
Father ,to men, it linked the two worlds human and
Divine. To Justin, indeed, the Logos had been revealed
in creation, in humanity, in history, in Greek philosophy,
in Old Testament revelation, and, most perfectly, in
Christ. In the Logos are the unity and harmony of
the world guaranteed. Writers like Justin are sometimes
quoted as suggesting the view that the Logos was but an
"aspect" of the Divine. No doubt, the Son is often
spoken of by Justin in terms that suggest an emanation
or product of the Father's essence: he holds the Son
to be " numerically distinct" from the Father; 2 but
the word " aspect " might easily obscure the fact that
Justin, nevertheless, holds Him to be God ; 3 in power
"indivisible and inseparable from the Father"; 4 "in
will " not distinct from Him. 5 Justin does not, however,
make the Logos a personal totality in Himself, and apart
from the Father. The whole Logos having become in-
carnate in Christ, there is a superiority in Him over all
previous teachers, to Justin, in respect of completeness
1 First Apology of Justin, Ix. 2 Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 129.
5 Ibid., 126. 4 Ibid., 128. 5 Ibid., 56.
PHILOSOPHICAL DOCTRINE OF THE LOGOS. 57
and finality. Christianity is to Justin the true philosophy
as well as the perfect religion. As a Platonic trans-
cendentalist, Justin carried his idea of the Logos as
reason far out into sympathetic relation towards pagan
philosophy and faith. In such discussion, it is to be
remembered that the doctrine of the Logos is meta-
physical rather than historical. Not Jesus pre-exists
before His advent, but the Logos the Christ or Eternal
Son. This metaphysical and speculative character of
Greek Christian thought ran up into the transcendental
metaphysics of the Councils of Nice and Chalcedon.
'Tis a common mistake of our time to suppose that this
philosophical conception of the Logos drew thought off
from the historic Jesus, and gave an alien development to
His religion. But this is to fail to see that the Logos
idea as a principle or means of revelation was the very
idea which made the Christian religion reasonable to
minds that had been steeped in the wisdom of Greek
philosophy.
Athenagoras brought into clearer view the personal
existence of the Logos prior to the Creation. He says,
" God's Son is the Logos of the Father, in idea and in
operation," and further that the Logos is "the first
product of the Father, not as having been brought into
existence," but because " He came forth to be the idea
and energising power of all material things." 1 Athena-
goras thus repels the idea that the Logos first acquires
personal existence in connection with the Creation.
This, of course, while he recognises His operation
therein.
. l Apology, x.
58 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
When we come to Clement, we find the doctrine of the
Logos centre and support of his whole system. He held
that the Logos equal with, but distinct from, the Father
was manifested throughout the history of the world,
and finally incarnated in Jesus Christ. Greek philosophy
to him " purges the soul and prepares it beforehand for
the reception of faith." The Lord Himself is to Clement
the living Logos the " Hortatory Word," in the high
theological sense of the term " Word." The inner mind
of God is revealed in the Word, according to Clement,
for He is the full revelation of the Father. Clement
does not follow Justin and others who founding on the
ambiguity of the term Logos, as meaning both reason and
speech had distinguished the "immanent Word" the
Reason which is in God from the "exterior Word,"
which meant the Word as Revealer. To Clement,
thought and word are, in God, one. Clement held to
the immanence of the Divine Word in the universe a
doctrine which became typical of Greek theology. The
Pre-incarnate Word, in his view, prepared the world for
the teaching of the Logos. This view of Deity as the
secret force of Creation has been found strongly ac-
cordant with the advances of science.
In the strong hands of Origen, the Logos doctrine
became marked by his teaching as to the eternal genera-
tion of the Son who was regarded as eternally a distinct
personal Being. This added strength to the Logos doc-
trine, putting it on firmer metaphysical basis by taking
the Son more completely out of the category of created
beings, and rejecting all Sabellian theories of a temporal
evolution. Origen also opposed all emanation theories,
PHILOSOPHICAL DOCTRINE OF THE LOGOS. 59
and held a difference of essence in the Son from the
Father. The Son was not, however, of any created
essence. 'Twas thus Origen subordinated the Son to
the Father, who alone had absoluteness and self-exist-
ence. The Logos doctrine was central in the Christology
of Athanasius, and, in its Origenistic form, became the
mainstay of the Nicene Christology. In Athanasius the
cosmological idea of Christ, as eternal and necessary
principle of mediation between God and all created
things, outruns the soteriological aspect of Christ as
Saviour of men. To him the Logos mediator must be
essentially Divine "very God of very God," else the
cleft between finite and infinite could not be removed.
It must be evident, from what has already been
advanced, and without carrying out our statement into
further detail, that the unique triumph of Christian specu-
lative genius was to make the Logos no mere external
and subordinate, but an immanent personal principle in
the very nature of the Absolute. For, as Hatch properly
enough remarks, a transcendent Deity became incom-
municable the more the conception of His transcendence
was developed ; hence the need of such intermediate
Logos. As such, it could mediate between God and the
world. The discovery of Christian reflection was thus
the great one that reason is rooted in personality.
Personality, that is to say, was seen to be an immanent
category of the Divine Logos or the primal Being.
Identical in essence with God, the Logos becomes thus
distinct from God. For He has thus an origin, as
God has not. The Logos principle was incarnated in
the personality of Jesus. The unity between the
60 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Divine Spirit and the human was thus from the outset
assured, and is due to the Logos being the immanent
principle of the soul of man. But, of course, it was
still imperfectly apprehended, and had to fight against
counter-dualistic influences issuing from Neo-Platonism.
It is this ideal principle of the Logos that overcomes
the dualism of actual life. It makes a knowledge of
the Absolute possible. It gives a rational mediation to
the world process. Only through the ideal Mediator,
in whom it centres, can a sinful race be ushered upon
a spiritual life that is infinite. The emanational and
mediational features of later Greek speculation signifi-
cantly wore a quasi -personal aspect, which fact makes
it the more necessary to realise the significance, in the
new Christianity, of the category of personality. Of
course, earlier impersonal and abstract elements could
still less yield advance. So we see this importance of
the Divine Word or Logos felt in theological reflection
in the manner already set out from Justin onwards,
so that from this time the eternal immanent self-
evolution of the Logos comes into view as capable of
offering resistance to Greek ideas of dualism. Sympa-
thetic as men like Clement and Origen were towards
Greek philosophy, it still remained to them more a
propaedeutic than a dominating influence. It sought
to make the moral faith of religion rational, to satisfy
the intellect as religion satisfied the heart and will.
In modern philosophy the Logos principle still has
place, being none other than the principle of self-
consciousness the principle of innermost life and
consciousness or, as increasingly conceived, of living
PHILOSOPHICAL DOCTRINE OF THE LOGOS. 6l
spirit. The Logos is the immanent principle of our
spiritual being. And it is the principle which makes
possible to us a rational conception of the nature of
absolute Being. By it absolute and relative are
brought together. The Logos of God has come down
to men as ideal Mediator and Redeemer of the race.
The historic Logos has thus become the medium of
the highest spiritual revelation to men. The Logos
was the Crown of antecedent religious evolution, and,
as the Divine Logos, formed the living bond of union
between the first Creation and the second.
We have now followed the development of the
Logos doctrine from the dim apprehension of it by
Heraclitus, as the reason of the world, up to its
modern significance. It was this Logos doctrine of
Heraclitus which the Stoics chose to make central.
After them Justin Martyr is found speaking of the
" Spermatic Word." This \6<yos o-TrepfjLaTifcos was by
them held to be the vital principle of all formative
forces being, indeed, the creative Reason in its active
and productive power. So from Justin onwards we
find this Divine World-Reason fully embodied and
revealed in Jesus as the Logos, whose personality has
in consequence supreme and all-conquering effect or
power of impression. To Justin the " Spermatic
Word " was, in some sort, a racial revelation ; but he
found the whole Word or full Logos in Jesus Christ
a second God. The same conceptions of the Logos
that we find in Justin occur in Philo, but the former
does more justice to the all-important category of per-
sonality. The Logos is to Philo not only Divine
62 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Reason resting in itself, but also " uttered Reason."
For the Universal Logos carries in it the distinction
between the thought of God in itself and that same
thought when it has become objective. The Logos
is, to Philo, constitutive principle of human indi-
viduality. Now, it was precisely this doctrine of the
Logos, with the new significance it bore in Christianity,
that began to bridge over the chasm between God
and the sensible world, which Greek dualism had left.
It was a doctrine whose origin was laid by Origen
in the Son of God as eternally begotten of the Father,
To him it was no emanation, says Harnack, but an
effluence of the nature, due to an internally necessary
act of will a view which certainly does not lack in
subordinationism. But, for Origen, the world finds
its unity in the Logos, Mediator between God and
the world, and complete manifestation of the hidden
Deity. 1 Even with the Stoics, the doctrine had this
religious significance, that man in his essence was
taken to be kindred with God. Philo started from
the Stoic idea of the Logos as basis of his teaching
on the subject, connecting it, however, with the
Platonic doctrine of ideas, with the Aristotelian z/oO?,
and with the Hebrew Wisdom. For Philo, the Logos
is the Mediator that establishes the connection between
the transcendent Deity and the world set over against
Him. For him, man arrives at union with God by
means of the Logos, whom to know is to realise
man's destined end and way. For Philo, the Logos
is * Reason ' rather than ' Word,' and metaphysical
1 De Princip. , i. 2, 4-8.
PHILOSOPHICAL DOCTRINE OF THE LOGOS. 63
rather than personal, for personality was not as yet
defined. But the Logos was, strictly taken, not a
person to Philo, but a tertium quid which was more
than merely a spiritual principle. The shortcoming of
the Greek mode of treating the Logos idea, as compared
with modern methods starting from man's self-con-
scious spirit, was that it rested the whole case too
much on thought or knowledge alone. It left too
much aside the world of man's concrete moral in-
terests and duties for a pale reflective ideal. Modern
thought cannot follow the ancient mode of simply
seeking to connect God and the world ; it must first
know man, find out God, and make certain of the
reality of the world, before proceeding to their co-
relation. The significant influence of philosophy on
early theological thought really consisted in the way
in which the philosophical idea of the Logos worked
itself into, and operated upon, the theology of that
time. But this must not be taken in any exaggerated
form or sense that fails to recognise the creative and
independent power and intelligence of the early Christian
Apologists, working in perfectly reasonable and natural
direction upon the materials existing to their hands.
They recognised the necessity that Christianity should
plant firm foot in the existing intellectual world of
Greece and Rome. The Logos might be but a prin-
ciple, or an idea, but it represented to the Greek
the principle of revelation the means whereby God
gained access to, and contact with, His world. And,
to Philo, the Logos was the archetype of human
reason, which latter, by reason of the Logos, made
64 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
the ascent to God. If we take the development down
to Athanasius, inclusively, it seems as though the centre
of gravity of the Logos doctrine lay, not in the his-
torical Christ, but rather in the eternal Logos as being
the eternal divine spirit of the Incarnate Lord. Even
when we turn to Irenseus, we find him resting the
case for Christianity on the fact that the Divine
Logos became man in Christ, in order to effect the
unity of man and God. In opposition to Gnostic
dualism, Irenseus put forward his strong claim for
Christ, laying stress on man's union with God in
advance of the Apologists rather than on knowledge
of God, even while he, too, retained the philosophical
idea of the Logos,
It has been charged against the Logos speculation
that it has been apt to sit loosely to particular historic
events and occurrences. But however this may have
incidentally been, it has not been shown to be in any
wise essential. In the historical development, the
point from which thought actually set out was the
identifying of the Pre-Incarnate Lord with the Logos.
But we can by no means agree with the position of
those who to the historic Logos or God- Man assign
only a transitory and contingent significance, reserving
an essential and abiding significance for the ideal God-
Man or Eternal Logos. On the contrary, religion
centres not merely in the Logos, but in the Absolute
God-Man, who is for ever First-born of many brethren,
the Consummator of all things, and the Head of the
Church redeemed, which receives out of His Divine
fulness for evermore.
CHAPTER VI.
GNOSTICISM AS A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
THE history of Gnosticism runs up to the end of the
second century, and is most instructive. Recent re-
search has shown that it may be most wisely taken as
but a single phase in a much wider movement. We
are here concerned with it in its religious significance
under the influence of Greek speculation, and in the
interests of philosophical monism. The theology of the
Gnostic sects was set in a fantastic cosmogony, rather
than embodied in a reasoned system ; they professed
an esoteric doctrine or Gnosis ; the most characteristic
feature of their later teaching was, belief in a sub-
ordinate agent, the Demiurge, by whom the visible
creation had taken place.
Gnosticism is to be distinguished from Christian
teachings on the one hand, and Hellenistic influences
on the other. We need not, like Irenaeus, regard it as
something only evil, for it not only proved a half-way
house for some on the road to Christianity, but com-
pelled to a Christian philosophy of religion. Nor was
the Gnostic movement the artificial thing Bousset has
lately made it out to be. Their method was syncre-
tistic ; they inclined to mix mythology with philosophy ;
E
66 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
and the result could by no possibility prove a satisfying
philosophy of religion. They, however, made the need
for it felt, and in some sense paved the way for it.
Great was the clash of ideas in that early time Jewish,
Greek, Syrian, Babylonian, and Persian and there is
little need for wonder, therefore, that Gnosticism was
a strange compound. Gnosticism was, in fact, an
eclectic philosophy issuing out of this ferment a
ferment increased by the desire to explain Oriental
systems and cults. Anterior to Christianity, Gnosti-
cism was open to the influences of Persia, Babylonia,
and India, and was influenced by the ferment of Ori-
ental religions, which resulted in a religious syncretism
running into very different extremes. But its final out-
come is seen in the Manichaean System, while a pre-
dominantly dualistic character marks its entire history.
It was on this primary dualism that Greek philosophy
acted.
The Gnostics have been styled the " first Christian
theologians," but with doubtful propriety. For, though
their indirect usefulness was so great in bestirring the
Church to a rational comprehension of her tenets, yet
it would be rather inappropriate to apply the phrase
as has sometimes been done to men who, if they had
had their way, would have seriously imperilled, not to
say absolutely destroyed, the distinctive life and char-
acter of Christianity. Indeed, the weapons that with-
stood and vanquished Gnosticism were drawn from the
very armoury of Christianity, so that to speak of their
somewhat fantastic attempts in the light mentioned
seems rather a misuse of language. Gnosticism took
GNOSTICISM AS A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 67
its distinctive character from the fact that these en-
deavours were made, under the ruling ideas of sin and
salvation, with a view to relate the ideas of Greek
philosophy with the myths of Oriental religions. The
crude mythologies had a philosophical value put upon
them that imparted a change of character to the whole
Gnostic movement. It was rather in spite of the
Gnostics, than by their aid, that Christianity pro-
claimed and perfected its doctrines of the one morally
perfect and omniscient God, of moral evil, of a real
Incarnation, and of an ethical redemption. And not
from the facts and doctrines of New Testament time
did these " first Christian theologians " pretend to derive
the elements of that Gnosis which, amid much that was
commendable, freely admitted the vagaries and errors of
sheer intellectual arrogance, and exalted them into the
knowledge that was to dethrone faith.
The finest feature of Gnostic theology was, after
every deduction for error, its aspiration after a the-
ology that should really embrace a world -view com-
prehensive and broad. They pursued the ontological
problem sought how the finite and material came
from, and coexisted with, the infinite and spiritual.
The Absolute Being was thus a main object of their
thought. They set out from the Platonic axiom that
God is good, and nothing but good. It was with
them a fundamental belief that the Creator of the
world is not God, the Supreme Being. That Creator
is either a subordinate agent, or an inferior being.
He may be evil, or He may not be unfriendly. He
is the Demiurge, and so not that God who sent a
68 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Redeemer into the world. And the Redeemer, so sent,
was not a real incarnation of the Divine, but One
whom they viewed after a Docetic fashion. He was
One, that is, no longer unique whose humanity was
no longer real. But again, the moral problem held the
Gnostics. They wondered how the world, in which so
much evil prevails, could come from a good Creator.
They therefore sought a theodicy, and turned their
attention to the origin of evil. They set an ethical
dualism between spirit and body setting, in fact,
nature and spirit in absolute opposition to each other.
They bridged the gulf between the transcendent Deity
and the world of matter by a vast succession of spirit-
ual powers or ^Eons. Like the Platonists and Greek
schools generally, they thought not of man as making
his own evil. Evil must come, they thought, from
matter, and must, in fact, be the work of that being
who created a material world. This belief is a char-
acteristic and persistent feature of Gnostic theology.
There is nothing Christian about it, and it is not even
Platonic. For the Platonist was confident enough that
evil was not to be explained through a God.
Another prevailing feature of Gnostic theology was
its making salvation consist of enlightenment or know-
ledge rather than faith. In their hands Redemption
lost both its universality and its moral character.
Their theology assumed for its Gnosis a higher worth
than the Pistis of the Church. Their pretensions on
behalf of their Gnosis were like those of Philo, who
claimed to have a secret lore that came by way of oral
tradition. They represented Christ to have given an
GNOSTICISM AS A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 69
esoteric teaching to His apostles, different from the
teachings of the Church to the people. Yet their
position, taken all in all, should perhaps be looked
upon as supranaturalist, rather than rationalistic.
The two great divisions of original Gnosticism were
the Jewish and the Pagan. Judaic Gnosticism was
the first to come into contact with Christianity, but
the pagan Gnosticism was most influential in its results
upon it. For Christianity, though a living power,
needed a philosophy. Basilides, Valentinus, Marcion,
Tatian, and Bardaisan would give it one on a Gnostic
basis. But the Gnosticism of Basilides and Valentinus
was not the pure Hellenism it has often been repre-
sented to be : their Gnosticism is much more Oriental
is, in fact, Orientalism masked in Hellenism. Judaic
Gnosticism we find pluming itself upon a hidden
wisdom, special illumination, and exclusive mysteries.
Theirs was an exclusiveness of an intellectual sort. On
the other hand, the apostolic insistence is on mystery
that is no longer mystery, but made open and mani-
fest. Judaic Gnosticism attributed to angels what be-
longed to the Logos, the Eternal Son. Besides these
vague mystical speculations and esoteric teachings,
there inhered in this incipient Gnosticism a baleful
ascetic tendency. From the Judaic form of Gnostic-
ism, the transition toward later Gnostic doctrine is
marked by Cerinthus. Cerinthus attributed creation to
an angelic Demiurge, and paved the way by his angel-
ology for the coming of that time when a later Gnos-
ticism should transform the angels of Cerinthus into
ideal powers or JEons.
70 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
When we come to Hellenic Gnosticism, we find
fantastic attempts to solve the problems raised by
philosophy by means of a mystical interpretation of
the Scriptures. These attempts were results of the
working of Christianity upon the speculative tendencies
of the Greek mind, with its inherent craving for intel-
lectual clearness. Gnosticism was, in fact, essentially
a philosophy of religion, whose starting-point was the
ultimate principle of things, even the Deity who was
raised beyond all thought and expression, and from
whom all things were deduced. The Gnostics believed
in revelation in a general sense, and adhered to the
reality of the revelation given in the Scriptures, albeit
they rejected portions of these writings as due to in-
ferior agencies than God. By Hellenic Gnosticism the
Divine authority of the Old Testament was admitted,
but it was viewed as containing a hidden philosophy,
by which account was taken of the liberation of spirit
from the bondage of nature. The allegorising method
was resorted to, so that the contents of the Old Testa-
ment were interpreted as symbols of this hidden truth.
For dreams of a Messianic kingdom they substituted a
mystical philosophy with a whole series of vague per-
sonified spiritual abstractions. And the same method
was applied by Hellenic Gnosticism to the New Testa-
ment. To it the inner light, on which it prided itself,
was necessary to such Gnosis or illumination as was
supposed to give true mystical interpretation of the
sacred record. The Gnostics' problem was to explain
the relation of the God of pure monotheism to the
world and to man.
GNOSTICISM AS A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 71
The two great representatives of Hellenic Gnosticism
were Basilides and Valentinus, the latter a less con-
sistent thinker than the former. The great work of
Basilides is the Exegetica in twenty-four books. But
his teachings are also preserved in the writings of his
son and chief disciple, Isidore. Origen tells us he
also composed odes. The cardinal fact for Basilides
is the suffering of the world. In the Basilidian system,
the universality of suffering is base, and the extinction
of suffering is goal. He uttered the paradox that " the
martyrs suffer for their sins," because to him it
seemed better to take suffering as a consequence of
sin or inherited tendency to sin, rather than admit
the Divine constitution of the world to be evil.
Basilides has a philosophical purpose : the mystery of
suffering the burden of existence weighs upon him :
he would justify the ways of God to men. And here
we come upon the keystone of the Basilidian system,
which is the law of transmigration. Transmigration is
to help the complete purification of the soul. Basilides
lays down that the soul has previously sinned in
another life, and bears its punishment here. Despite
his fatal bondage of rebirth, man's will is in this life
free. Salvation is therefore possible to him, but only
the elect are saved. The system of Basilides is of
markedly dualistic character in its theories of nature,
of man, and of the intermediate agencies between God
and the world. In the Basilidian psychology, the soul,
in the ordinary sense of that term, can hardly be said
to exist. But the metaphysic of Basilides affords
firmer ground, for there is no doubt as to his postula-
72 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
tion of a God, albeit a God of the most abstract and
remote character. The obvious fault of this procedure
is, that it assumes the idea of God without showing
how that idea is necessarily presupposed by the con-
tents of experience. The Absolute is for Basilides un-
predicable, unknowable, inconceivable, and the energy
of his expressions could not be surpassed. In fact,
the complete transcendence and absolute inscrutability
of God could not be expressed with more complete
disregard of the logical consequences than we find in
Basilides. This doctrine of the absolute transcendence
the complete incomprehensibleness of Deity, as set
forth by Basilides, had a great influence on the Christian
philosophers of the Alexandrian schools. Hence we
find Clement able to say that God is " beyond the One
and higher than the Monad itself." Basilides makes
much of negation. " Not-Being-God " is his name for
Deity. He speaks of absolute existence as absolute
nothing, in a way which anticipates Hegel. The " Not-
Being- God " deposited an ideal cosmic germ or trans-
cendental cosmic seed, which constituted at the same
time the aggregate forms of the actual world. He
says "the God that was not, made the world that
was not, out of what was not." The God so con-
ceived as "the God that was not" was the logical
result of the negative movement from the world to
God. It was in danger of making God a purely inde-
terminate being, of whom nothing could be known or
said a kind of deification of negativity. Yet Basilides
held the world to be infinitely complex, and he meant
God to be infinitely determinate. The truth is, our
GNOSTICISM AS A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 73
knowledge of God is always relative and partial, but
it is true and valid, so far as it goes. We know Him
in a most real way, as the self-conscious, self- origin-
ating, and self-manifesting Deity. Basilides strove to
preserve the absolute perfection of God, and would not
allow to Him thought, perception, or will, with this
end in view. A mistaken and unnecessary denial, of
course, which would empty the notion of God of real
meaning for us. How the actual existence of the world
became evolved, however, Basilides does not tell us.
We must " ask no question as to whence." The actual
world, as flowing from an ideal world laid down by an
ideal Deity, seems to us rather fictitious. But some
things in the evolutionary process of Basilides are
made clear. The primal seed mass, in which all entities
are stored up, acts without exterior aid or control.
And again, the whole is a process of ascent. " All
things press," he says, " from below upward, from the
worse to the better. Nor among things superior is
any so senseless as to descend below." Thus does the
process of evolution run by differentiation and selec-
tion, the only law on each unit being that imposed by
its own nature. Starting with the notion of the
Trinity, as found in the baptismal formula, Basilides
develops his philosophy of religion with the aid of
two ideas, the Sonship and the Evangel. The Sonship
is, with him, deposited in the cosmic germ. But it
cannot remain there. It must be restored to its fellow-
ship with the Father. Its evolution is the history of
the world-process. It is, moreover, a collective germ,
carrying the seeds of many sons in itself. He has
74 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
before his view the Son in the bosom of the Father,
the Son by whom worlds were made, and the Son who
is the historic Christ. There is little of a Docetic
character, it must be said, in his religious philosophy.
The Evangel is the knowledge of things supramundane
and celestial. It is, in fact, the fourfold wisdom of
knowing the Father, the " Not-Being-God," the Son, and
the Holy Spirit. It is a philosophy of religion made
up of elements, Gnostic, Buddhist, and Christian, the
last-named forming, in his own belief, the chief factor
in his system. The scheme is meant to show how
power came to men whereby they could become sons
of God. But it is deeply tinctured with Buddhist con-
ceptions, though partaking of historic character, and
of such clearness of definition and formulation, as
Buddhism never knew. The Gnostic philosophies were,
in fact, pagan, but they taught men some things which
are too easily forgotten. One of these was, that the
origin of evil may and should be inquired into. Another
was, that the pre-existence of the soul is a truth not
to be easily left behind, as is evidenced by the late-
ness of the poet who has dared proclaim that the
"soul that rises with us" hath had "elsewhere its
setting," and " cometh from afar." As for Valentinus,
he held the Original Father to be before any created
being. In the same negative fashion he made Him
the sole Uncreated, without time, without place, without
any of whom He sought counsel. He is the unnameable,
incomprehensible, and unbegotten God. He calls this
Divine Being also the Depth. This shows how he con-
ceived the infinite fulness of the Divine nature, as
GNOSTICISM AS A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 75
something of which positive predications could not be
made. This transcendent fulness keeps God from being
defined in a way which reminds one of Spinoza. The
Pleroma or Fulness of the Divine Life was, accord-
ing to Valentinus, constituted by a series of thirty
supernatural powers or ^Eons. Man is a creation of the
Demiurgus. Jesus came into the world to free men
from their subjection to the Demiurgus, but all men do
not share this redemption. The Gnostics have received
the spirit from Jesus. They rise beyond faith to the
Gnosis. In the Gnosis they learn the mysteries of the
Pleroma, and are free from the law of the Demiurgus.
Valentinus has sometimes been taken as less consistent
and influential in his thought than Basilides, but it does
not lack in comprehensiveness. The saner elements of
the Valentinian philosophy are drawn from Platonic
sources. But the fantastic elements superadded detract
from its value as a scientific system.
Clement of Alexandria championed the cause of
orthodoxy against Basilides and Valentinus. In his
Stromata he sets forth what he conceives to be the
position of the true Gnostic, who is for him the mature
or well-advanced Christian, whose "whole life," he
says, " is a holy festival." His true Gnostic or perfect
Christian he took to be quite superior to the ordinary
believer. His Gnostic is exempt from natural passion,
is superior to pain and pleasure, is one with the will
of God, and is in a blissful state of pure love. So
strong is his mystical tendency. Yet there is little of
system in Clement's setting forth of the truth, which
retains a broadly practical vein. The distinctive feature
76 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
of Gnosticism is, as we have seen, its making a specu-
lative religious view of the world or religious know-
ledge of the world-process take the place of a prac-
tical doctrine of Christian salvation. As against the
Gnosticism of Basilides and Valentinus, the Christian
thought of that early time held to a universe created
in love by the one Infinite Deity, and not by any rival
power or subsidiary creator. The Person of Jesus
could simply not be adjusted to the conception of
such a subordinate power, or to endless genealogies
of aeons and emanations from the Godhead. The specu-
lative vagaries of Gnosticism are thus in reality a strik-
ing tribute to the unique and exceptional character of
the Person of Christ. So, too, the Christian thought
of the period held that evil by no means inheres in
matter, but is to be traced to the will of responsible
creatures. This, because the world was taken to be
originally and essentially good. Nor did that thought
share the Gnostic despair as to the great mass of men,
for to it the many would, in the Word made flesh, find
redemption. But the shortcomings of the Gnostic
speculations, in these and like respects, did not keep
them from being of great service to the development
of Christian philosophy. They brought into view and
prominence the final problems of life, as well as the
question of origins. They gave them answers which,
by very reason of their being only partial and inade-
quate, led to fuller and more satisfying formulation and
explication. They had the merit to draw attention to
the use of exegetical methods of dealing with the New
Testament, albeit their own methods of use were ex-
GNOSTICISM AS A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 77
tremely arbitrary, when not something worse. The
lasting service which Gnosticism, as a philosophy of
religion, rendered was, to impel the Church to set forth
a true Gnosticism over against that which it considered
false, and this while maintaining the positive historical
character of Christianity. Thus, from the contents of
simple and practical Christian belief, a Christian the-
ology eventually resulted. That theology was drawn out
after such ideas of scientific method as then prevailed.
CHAPTER VII.
AUGUSTINE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
NOT without good reason did Ozanam pronounce Augus-
tine's great work, De Civitate Dei, " the first genuine
effort to produce a philosophy of history." For, though
not a philosophy of history in the strict and proper sense,
it yet more nearly approximates to a philosophy of
history than any work of ancient or mediaeval times.
Not Tacitus, not Thucydides, not Aristotle, nor even
Plato, but Augustine, first conceived a true law of pro-
gress in human history and society. His philosophy of
history as an unfolding of Divinely-ordained plan may be
discounted because it proceeds from religious postulates
rather than by the sheer and sole principle of develop-
ment. But it nevertheless represents history in whole as
guided by principles and marked by stages ; and proof of
such Divine plan is all we can yet attain by our more
scientific methods of studying historical phenomena.
Too theological, however, it neglects secondary causes,
and depreciates secular life and culture. Written to
defend the City of God against the calumnies of her foes,
Augustine spent about thirteen years over his great
undertaking, whereby, in twenty-two books, he sought to
justify the ways of God in ordering the course of human
AUGUSTINE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 79
history. We do not now mean to look at this massive
work in its whole proportions and historico-theological
aspects, but to concentrate attention upon those parts of
most significant ethical import and bearing. His treatise
is really a cosmology. Augustine stood forth to defend
the new faith both in respect of fact and of ideal. Most
learned, noble, and influential of all his works, the " City
of God " leads up, in its great argument, to the contem-
plation of that city which should not only survive the
changes and revolutions of time, but even acquire new
power and energy, until the time when it would pass into
the sphere of new, Sabbatic, and eternal rest. Augus-
tine's teaching, so wide in the range of its speculative
treatment, has influenced the development of Christian
philosophy more largely than that of any other thinker.
Imperfect his philosophy of history might be, but it was
both great in design and suggestive in idea. To him
there are not many wisdoms, but one, in which, he says,
are infinite treasures of things intellectual. These treas-
ures he would set forth in the growth of humanity.
So early as Book V. the perplexing problem of the
relation of the Divine fore-knowledge to the human will
emerges. Here Augustine holds that the religious mind
abides by both the free-agency of man and the fore-know-
ledge of God. He has already said that our wills are
included in the order of causes embraced by the Divine
fore-knowledge ; and, in the precedence he gives will over
intelligence, he is apt to take away from the freedom he
had psychologically bestowed on will. To deny the pre-
science of Deity is to him sure proof of insanity. Divine
prescience and human freedom form to him an antinomy,
80 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
since both can be proved, and both are to be believed.
He contends that this compatibility of man's freedom of
will with Divine fore-knowledge does not mean agree-
ment with blind fate. Augustine does not deny that
natural causes are efficient ; they run back at last into
the will of God. \ Man's will is to Augustine a cause in
the order of nature. It is the effective cause of human
works. The only efficient causes are the voluntary in the
y domain of spirit. God has fore-knowledge of the effects
of every cause consequently of the effects of the human
will. " He draws this fine conclusion " Therefore we are
by no means compelled, either, retaining the prescience
of God, to take away the freedom of the will, or, retain-
ing the freedom of the will, to deny that He is prescient
of future things, which is impious. But we embrace
both. The former, that we may believe well ; the latter,
\ that we may live well."
Having, in Book VII., commended the teaching of
Varro, in respect of its theistic tendency, and also criti-
cised it for its final pantheistic issue, he proceeds, in
Book VIII., to point out the shortcomings and incom-
petence of Neo-Platonism, animadverting on its spiritual-
ism, particularly with regard to its demonology. But
Augustine has high opinion of Plato, to whom he appeals
against the Platonists. Quidquid a Platone dicitur, vivit in
Augustino. The method is more to Plato, the results are
dearer to Augustine. In Augustine there are fewer
shadows and phantoms ; for the sun has risen. He
commends Plato for his teaching as to God and goodness.
God is to Augustine at once the principle of truth and
the principle of being. " If, then, Plato has declared the
AUGUSTINE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 81
wise man to be one who imitates, loves, and knows this
God, and shares in His blessedness, why should we
consult the rest ? " It was in the fact of the Incarnation
that the philosophers found a stumbling-block, which
most of all separated them from Augustine. Augustine
is prone to think their pride especially in the case of
Porphyry kept them from liking the humiliation and
ethical sacrifice involved in it. He holds all our trouble
to spring from the will, and to him, therefore, the Incar-
nation and Sacrifice of Christ offer that restoring power
which the will needs, and for which the Platonist seeks
in vain. If the Platonists had understood the Incar-
nation, they would have found in it " the highest example
of grace " (Book X., ch. 29) in other words, it would
have been to them the satisfaction of moral needs that
men had long felt.
When, in Book XL, Augustine proceeds to deal with
the Creation, he finely anticipates those moral arguments
whereby the beauty of the universe is set in relation to
the spirituality of its Creator. Noteworthy also is the
way Augustine, in touching on the question of time, takes
account of its objective correlate changes in the ex-
ternal world a factor not to be lost sight of when we
estimate a theory of time like that of Kant. Augustine
follows Plato in treating time as having been created a
rather daring idea to propound. In his doctrine of Crea-
tion, Augustine steers clear alike of Platonic positings of
primary matter, and of Neo-Platonic emanationism. He
diverges from Plato in making creation without inter-
mediate agency. He treats creation as from nothing.
This nothing is one with unreality. So at least it appears
82 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
in Augustine's theoretic treatment, and in the theology
which followed him. Yet it does seem a valid criticism
to say that the nothing is, in his actual dealings with it,
not the unreal thing it appears, but is, in fact, highly
real, although negatively so. That is to say, the nothing,
in some very real sort, does enter into the nature of the
creature. Evil is to Augustine, as to Plato, merely the
negation of good ; it disappears when things are viewed
as a whole. One important result of this reality of the
nothing undoubtedly is, that we are saved from giving up
creation as an unthinkable mystery, as men have been so
often wont to do. To no such agnostic position did
Augustine, in any real or actual way, drive men, what-
ever his modes of phraseology might tend to do. For
Augustine's own thought clearly found in the nothing
or the reality of the negative that which for him ex-
plained much. This reality of the negative or non-being
is to be held by us without ascribing to it any positive
nature or constructive categories whatsoever, if we would
stand on sure philosophic ground. In this eleventh book,
Augustine further brings out that the Creation was the
revelation of the Divine Goodness. Man is encompassed
by the works of God, who is never without witness in the
world. Man is, psychologically, according to Augustine
the greatest master of psychological analysis in the
ancient world made up of threefold powers a power of
Memory or unified self-consciousness, a power of Intelli-
gence or contemplation, and a deliberative capacity of
Will. Important these are as showing that Augustine
understood the will to be no isolated thing apart from its
environings.
AUGUSTINE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 83
Now are we brought up to Book XII., wherein the
origin of evil is dealt with. To this subject Augustine
passes after giving a fine anticipation of the modern
theory of the struggle for existence and the law of natural
selection. Augustine had thrown off Manichaeism, but
the great problem it raised he never threw off. That
problem was just the relation of evil or negation to God
or the Absolute. In this twelfth book, as in certain other
parts of his writings, the subject finds rich speculative
treatment. He laid foundations, in fact, for a true gnosis
of non-being. The Manichasan doctrine of the positive
nature and eternity of evil is explicitly rejected by Augus-
tine. In Book XI. Augustine had already said that
" there is no nature of evil, but the loss of the good is
called evil." Here, in Book XII., he views evil as spring-
ing up "when the will, turning from the better of two
alternatives," chooses some " inferior thing." Such false
choosing is, in Augustine's view, a fault, and " every fault
injures the nature, and is consequently contrary to the
nature." It is desire of the " inferior thing" which has \
made the will evil, not the fact that his will was a nature.
" For if a nature is the cause of an evil will, what else
can we say than that evil arises from good, or that good
is the cause of evil ? " Evil is, with Augustine, a defect
rather than an effect. He views it as " result" of a "defi-
cient" cause, not an "efficient" cause "a negative rather
than a positive factor in our moral history." It is
defection from the good that is the cause of evil. Evil, as
defection from the highest perfection, is essentially a
retrogression towards imperfection and nothingness. An
evil will, Augustine maintains, has no efficient cause. Its ,
84 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
falling away, or deficiency, he means, is to be sought
within the will itself, without any exterior origination.
In these views of Augustine we must, however, be on our
guard against viewing evil as something unreal. Even
taking evil as defect, it is surely none the less opposition
to the will of the Infinite opposition which is of the
essence of sin. Goodness has no need of evil. Its only
postulate is the possibility of evil. Evil has no positive
cause outside the will that turns to it. God is here to
Augustine " the highest essence, that which supremely
is," and an evil action is movement away from Him
therefore towards nothingness.
* These things bring us to the consideration of Augus-
tine's philosophical theory of the will. He finds the
source of evil in man's will as free. For the very notion
of will, to him, implies freedom. The evil of the will he
ascribes to "moral perversity," for to him the will is
self-moved, and free in its possibilities of choosing the
good. The question of the nature of the individual and
his environment comes into new prominence under
Augustine's treatment of the will. It is the abiding merit
of Augustine, in his philosophy of voluntary action, to
have brought in a new conception of the will, contrastive
with that which had prevailed in the old Greek philo-
sophy. This conception of free-will is a dominant note
in the writings of Augustine, elsewhere no less than here,
so that in him the will gains quite a new primacy.
^ In Book XIV. he graphically describes the two rival
cities the City of God and the earthly city both of
them founded in love. But the former springs from love
of God, the latter is grounded in love of self. Earlier in
AUGUSTINE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 85
this book he has shown how all vice whatsoever springs
from misdirection of the will from the evil working of
the mind, and not from the flesh. This insistence on sin,
as springing from the mind, not from the body, is very
explicit in Augustine. It is man's will that has suffered
serious injury. And the will is source and substance of
the life that is spiritual : Voluntas est quippe in omnibus :
imo omnes nihil aliud quam voluntates sunt. The Fall in-
volved, on its negative side, a loss of that instinctive
choosing of the good from love of God, which alone
constitutes true freedom of will, in the view of Augustine.
The Fall broke the unity of the human race, and rent it
into two cities or societies. Virtue is declared by him to
be " the art of living rightly and well " the capability of
the will for the good, strengthened by the practice of the
will in well-doing. In Book XIX., Augustine shows how
many and conflicting were the theories of the Supreme
Good. Varro had alleged as many as 288 sects to exist in
consequence of divergent opinions on the Summum bonum.
The ideal life cannot find room, Augustine shows, in
the strife which exists even among the cardinal virtues of
these philosophic sects. But the City of God will use
whatever there is of good in the earthly order. Our life
will be redeemed in the motive which inspires it. Says
Augustine " While there can be life of some kind with-
out virtue, there cannot be virtue without life." " That
which gives blessed life to man is not derived from man,
but is something above him." All purely human virtues,
if they bear no relation to God, are, in Augustine's
view, vices rather than virtues a narrow, depressing
view.
86 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
In Book XXII., Augustine maintains that "evil had
never been," were it not that the " mutable nature " mut-
able, though good " brought evil upon itself by sin." It
is this mutability of the creature which is, in Augustine's
view, the negative cause of evil. Not that mutability is
itself evil, but that the contingency which it implies
means for us a liability to evil. The mutability of the
creature is, for the deep vision of Augustine, the root-
possibility of evil. And, in speaking of the beatific vision,
Augustine asserts that the last freedom of the will shall
consist in a free-will by which the creature cannot sin
" not able to sin," even as our free-will is in this life one
" able not to sin." But this emphasis on evil has not kept
Augustine from setting forth man's splendid capacity for
progress, and the amazing advances he has made.
We have now presented, in as succinct a form as pos-
sible, the main ethical issues raised in Augustine's great
work, in justification of what was said at the outset as to
its importance for subsequent philosophical development.
The pity is from a philosophical point of view that
Augustine's work ends in an eternal dualism and irre-
concilable antagonism. Philosophy craves some more
satisfying teleological end of the world-process, even the
supremacy of the good, wherein God shall be seen to be
all in all. But this, of course, must be sought without
underestimating the power of evil, or the misery of man's
will, or the force of the struggle whereby the godless
world shall be overcome, in the teleological movement
whereby things tend towards that which is better. But the
reality of evil can be faced without giving way to absolute
and Parsee-like dualism, in which the unity of being shall
AUGUSTINE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 87
be violently rent and broken. Still, Augustine has the
merit to have anticipated Herder in the way in which he
finely set forth the impossibility of the God of order,
beauty, and regularity, having left without the regulating
laws of His Providence the growth, vicissitudes, and
decay of nations. It seems to me a virtue, in the early
treatment of evil by Augustine, that he laid so much
stress on the principle of evil. That keeps its results or
effects from being unduly turned to pessimistic account.
In the spirit of Augustine, we account it needless still to
confound evil with imperfection and development, or
to regard evil as necessary to being that is relative.
Quite mistaken is the view of those who think evil
must in some way work for the good. Evil is no
part of God's eternal purpose, and in itself does not
directly contribute thereto. Augustine, in Book XXII. ,
expressly reminds us that God did not deprive the angels
of their freedom of will, although He foreknew that they
would fall. All that our relativity ought, in this connec-
tion, to be made to bear is the tendency, the proneness,
the liability to evil. We come far short of probing the
problem of evil, if we treat it simply as the pressure of
our own finitude. We must pierce to its issues of pro-
found moral significance ; for these moral aspects do not
allow us to rest in evil as simply inevitable. In the
metaphysical aspect, it should not be forgotten that our
imperfection is evil in a sense which here belongs essen-
tially to the finite universe. As one has well said, " A
universe without it is no longer a universe distinct from
God, but would be nothing but the universe taken back
again into the absolute being of God." The problem of
88 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
moral evil grows most luminous in Augustine's hands
when set in relation to the element of choice and the free
causality of man, and in these respects one might very
well claim him as a precursor of the ethical theism of
to-day. For the existence of moral evil, justification
may be found in the fact of freedom. Freedom without
the possibility of evil is not thinkable. There is not a
little true ethical philosophy in Augustine's contention
that our action grows morally evil, as we reject the ideal
good which is the law of our being and choose to drop
into a lower than our normal orbit. This is not to make
evil only shortcoming in respect of such ideal, or to treat
it as mere mistaken course, and not also spiritual dis-
order and rebellion. It was none other than John Stuart
Mill who said that "good is gradually gaining ground
from evil, yet gaining it so visibly, at considerable in-
tervals, as to promise the very distant, but not uncertain,
final victory of good," and who declared that "to do
something during life, on even the humblest scale if
nothing more is within reach, towards bringing this con-
summation ever so little nearer, is the most animating
and invigorating thought which can inspire a human
creature." Confessedly the darkest of all enigmas is the
problem of evil, and Augustine has an abiding title to
gratitude in that he has striven to deal with it, as with
other such problems as the fore-knowledge of God and
free-will. There is no unwisdom like that which, either in
philosophy or theology, sits down before these problems as
insoluble. The speculative impulse in man refuses to be
so silenced. The old problem of the fore-knowledge of
God, discussed by Augustine, is still with us, threatening
AUGUSTINE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 89
to swamp the human, on the one side, or, on the other,
to limit the Divine. In another of his works, Augustine
points out, what is here worth remembering, that the
Divine fore -knowledge is knowledge rather than fore-
knowledge. His knowledge is without succession, and
is fore-knowledge only from the human standpoint, not
from the Divine. It is in this connection that freedom
appears so necessary. For moral command and moral
responsibility are quite meaningless, if we are not really
free, and lords in this respect of our own destiny. Be-
sides, in retaining for God absolute knowledge and ab-
solute will, we are really and in effect attributing evil to
Him, since we are then His slaves, and not His free
children. In the end a final and complete reconciliation
of the Divine and the human here lies beyond us, even
though we have made many points of advance in appre-
hension of the problem since Augustine's day. We have
not yet been able to rid ourselves of the irrationality of a
universe in which evil finds a place. Not even the philo-
sophy of Hegel has brought us deliverance. The prob-
lem of evil we still have on our hands, and we cannot
be brought to view evil as good in the making. That
way of thinking is simply the fallacious result of an
abstract way of viewing the rise of moral evil a way
quite out of harmony with its connection with a world
of real and concrete persons. We are here, in fact,
brought back very much to Augustine's position, wherein
we find the really good to be the good will or self, and
the really evil will to be the evil will or self. However
evil may be overruled for good, and beneficent result
brought out of it, it is a most fallacious procedure to
90 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
overlook that it never is, nor can be, any part of the
plan, purpose, or appointment of the Eternal. It comes
at last to this, that the true moral personality of man
must be maintained, and the standing difficulty is to
reconcile this with the absolute perfection of Deity. The
way of harmony and reconciliation is to be found alone
in that spiritual unity which is the result of our feeling
that " Our wills are ours, to make them Thine." This is
a possible concrete spiritual unity which we may realise
in God, so that for us spiritual coherence in the universe
may be found. No doubt, the ultimate unification, of
which we speak, demands ethical qualities and is impos-
sible to mere thought. The purely intellectual or specu-
lative element will not suffice, and it is precisely on this
rock that all-sufficing intellectual systems of philosophy
come to grief. The dearly-won unity, which is already
ours, we can hold fast in the confidence that a final
synthesis assuredly awaits us, albeit it lies in advance of
even our latest philosophies of human history. What
wonder, then, that it lay beyond reach of " the first phil-
osophy of history " ? The development of humanity,
Augustine took to be analogous to that of the individual,
but not without being aware that, in the case of the
former, age tends to perfection, not to weakness. But,
if the speculative terminus of our problem may not be
fully reached, the issues so running up into the future, at
least the final judgment must be a teleological one. Our
look must be forward cast, for the spiritual monism we
seek must not only unify by its principle, and bind all
things in one, but must yield a philosophy of history,
AUGUSTINE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 91
which shall furnish a clue and a solution to the course
of the vast evolutionary movement, and in which the
glory of the spiritual and the material the City of God
and the earthly city shall be blended in one ineffable
and harmonious splendour.
CHAPTER VIII.
ORIGEN AS CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHER.
ORIGEN rose to the height of representing the Christian
world-view in a comprehensive system. The work of
Origen, both in Theology and in Ethics, possesses a
peculiar value for our age. He furnishes us with an
example of living interest in the speculative problems
of Christianity. He shows how we may retain dogma,
while finding place for a larger and freer use of reason.
Origen is in spirit very modern, with large, positive,
and direct end in view, to which all refuting of scepti-
cism is but preparatory. Foreshadowings of modern
efforts to reconcile science and faith are found in
Pantsenus and Clement, the latter of whom is not
behind Origen in this respect. The same object in-
spired Origen, whose eclectic spirit sought to harmonise
Christianity with Philosophy, in pursuance of the aims
of Pantaenus and Clement, and to destroy Gnosticism.
Not less remarkable than the breadth and thorough-
ness of Origen's system was the moral earnestness that
pervaded it. He would have men traverse the whole
circuit of knowledge ; in fact, he ran up the whole
gamut of the knowledge of his time in a way that was
without parallel, but he failed not to keep before him,
ORIGEN AS CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHER. 93
as life's main pursuit, the ends of moral perfection and
the Christian ideal. He offered unaffected welcome to
all knowledge and all science, in the high faith that
these could only serve the great final ends of truth.
Origen was a mighty reconciler of antagonistic views,
a wondrous harmoniser of opposites, but his concilia-
tions were ever made that thereby he might, in his
own bold and courageous way, lead up to higher truth.
The Hellenic impulse for knowledge made the theoretic
needs of Origen so great, that Theology was for him a
necessity. Christianity was to him the highest philo-
sophy. Not but what Christian doctrine relies upon
its own evidence. Origen maintains it does so.
But, so doing, he holds it finds foundation deeper far
than all the dialectics of the Greeks. It should be
borne in mind how transitional the time was. Ideas,
principles, and tendency are what we find in Origen
rather than definitely articulated system. God to him
was incorporeal, spaceless, timeless, unchangeable, as
we shall presently see. Ardent theist he was; one of
his great principles was the unity of creation as
answering to the thought of God of God as infinitely
good and just. In fact, to a mind like Origen's, all
things, in heaven above and the earth beneath, must
be reduced to organic unity. But this unity Origen
reached, along the lines of the Incarnation, in a way
that the Neo-Platonist philosophers never knew. And
another principle, like unto this in its greatness, was
the power of moral self-determination on the part of
rational beings. We have still no grander conception
open to us than just this of the vast unity of things,
94 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
not only in relation to, but even in dependence on, the
free action of the individual. What dualism exists is
for Origen fruit of finite will at war with the Infinite
Will, and therefore not a necessary antagonism at all.
In fact, he, in a metaphysical direction, spiritualised
or idealised the corporeal world, so that it became, in
his hands, pierced through and through with spiritual
agency and function. It is, in fact, a prime virtue in
Origen that for him deeper or more ultimate reality,
than that which belongs to the sphere of personality
and its relations, there is none. A spiritualistic monism
his philosophy thus was, and, as such, of deep interest
for the spiritual thought of to-day, which feels the
necessity, in some sort, of being so too. For there is
no ground why reason should not always have more
to say on the things of faith. Origen opposed the
pantheism and fatalism of his time; self, the world,
and God were for him the ultimates of all religious
philosophy. They were for him the great ultimates of
reality and of knowledge, but they were not all known
in like ways. The cosmogony of Origen, says Hatch,
was really a theodicy. For Origen the soul has a
spiritual sense of its own, which must be trained.
Hence the fine spirituality of Origen's conceptions of
the unseen world. Origen started from the conception
of God as a spiritual and unchangeable Being, Creator
of all things in fact, endlessly creative. Unfolded
and revealed He is from eternity in the Divine Logos.
Ineffable and incomprehensible is God above wisdom
and being. He is, to Origen, a Being " Whose nature
cannot be grasped or seen by the power of any human
ORIGEN AS CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHER. 95
understanding, even the purest and brightest." 1 God
is to Origen an absolute, incorporeal unity. He is
without limit. Space and time are shut out from His
being. The Omnipotent is He, but not yet so as un-
affected by His goodness and His wisdom. The abso-
lute immateriality and transcendent nature of the one
God, with all the implications of personality, were
exhibited by Origen with clearness and fulness that
command the sincere admiration of to-day. 2 Not
that Origen did not take his own way of compromising
the Divine transcendence, for clear as he kept the
personality of God, he hesitated not to qualify the
Divine Infinitude. The Divine power could not for
him be infinite, else it could not understand itself.
Nor could the Divine knowledge be infinite, else it
could not be comprehended. These unsatisfactory
positions of Origen spring from an undue anthropo-
morphism on his part. They are the result of his con-
founding the Infinite with the Indefinite or wholly
undefined. Origen's notion that God can no more be
infinite, if He form a conception of Himself, is really
absurd, since the very definiteness of Deity makes Him
comprehensible to the Divine intellect.
The Logos was with Origen an historic Person. He
was the Divine Son, and, as such, subordinate, but the
subordination is of office and person, rather than of
essence, at least in his intention. Perfect Image of
the Father was He, in Whom had been hid the
treasures of wisdom and knowledge. It was, in fact,
the capital doctrine of the Alexandrian theology that
1 De Princ., i. i, 5. 2 Ibld., 6.
96 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
God had become Man. The Logos is for Origen the
compendium of the Divine, world-creative ideas. For
him both speculative and religious needs are met in
the Incarnation. All creation has its being in Christ.
In Him, too, is the life of humanity, by its very con-
stitution. He is the perfect manifestation of the
hidden Deity. It is the aim of Origen to avoid, in
speaking of the Son, all emanative or partitive theories.
Origen represents God as begetting the eternal Son,
the Logos, in an eternal manner, and, through Him,
the world of free spirits. " The God and Father of
all things is not the only being that is great in our
judgment, for He has imparted (a share) of Himself and
His greatness to His Only- Begotten and First-born of
every creature, in order that He, being the Image of
the Invisible God, might preserve, even in His great-
ness, the Image of the Father." x The Logos is the
Archetype of all things. He fills, He permeates, the
whole creation. Of paramount importance is the rela-
tion of the soul to the Logos. In Trinitarian matters,
Origen held, as we have seen, to the eternal generation
of the Son, whose perfect manhood and perfect Godhead
he upheld, even if we should not always find him speak-
ing quite the language of late catholicity. Like the
union of iron and fire in a furnace is to him the union
of these natures in Christ. 2 The real personality alike
of Father and Son is what Origen most strove to
exhibit. He advanced upon Clement in his clear and
vigorous assertion of the hypostatical distinction of the
Son. But it cannot be said that Origen's mode of
1 DC Princ., i. I, 6. 2 Ibid., ii. 6, 6.
ORIGEN AS CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHER. 97
speaking of the Son's subordination to the Father is
always free from reproach. The Son is but a " Second
God." l He really brings not out, with sufficient clear-
ness or explicitness, in every case, the subordination
as being of person, not of nature or essence. For
Origen regards not the Son as God in the absolute
and primary sense, and the eternal generation does
not carry with it for the Son the essence of the God-
head in this absolute and eternal sense. The Father
is for him the fountain-head of Deity. Now, in so
making the Father the Monad in this absolute and
original sense, Origen was really lending countenance
to a developmental mode of representing Deity that
cannot consort with a thoroughgoing doctrine of eternal
Trinity. No doubt Origen was scared by Sabellianism
in his shortcoming with respect to the consubstantiality
of the Son with the Father, but we are here just to
learn to know when to be scared and when not. With
his doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, Origen
was unable to unite the ideas of consubstantiality and
immanent necessity in such wise that the absolute
essence of the Godhead is seen to belong to the Son
no less than to the Father. Hence to Origen the Son
is God in a derived sense, the Father being sole primal
and absolute One. If Origen did not bring forth the
full truth as to the Trinity, he at least paved the way
for those who should come after and supplement
Origenistic defects.
As for Creation, it is for Origen without beginning,
being, in fact, eternal and necessary. This is required
1 C. Cetsuniy v. 39.
G
98 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
by Divine omnipotence and goodness. For if God be
eternally omnipotent, then, in Origen's view, there
must from eternity have been that on which He could
exercise His power, and so no less in the case of His
goodness. 1 From eternity there must have been created
being. Besides, a change would have taken place in
God, if the world had had a beginning in time. There
has, then, never been a time in which a world did not
exist. 2 The world, for Origen, is made up of spirit
and matter, and matter is never found without qualities,
although it may be notionally so conceived. 3 Origen
cannot understand how distinguished men should have
lent themselves to the opinion that matter is the result
of chance rather than of its being formed by God
Himself. 4
Of Christ as Redeemer Origen may not always satis-
factorily conceive, yet he insists on Jesus as the bond
of union between God and mankind, " From Him
there began the union of the Divine with the human
nature, in order that the human, by communion with
the Divine, might rise to be Divine, not in Jesus
alone, but in all those who not only believe, but enter
upon the life which Jesus taught." 5 He ascribes to
Christ's death a significance, not alone for this world,
but for all worlds of creatures. Strenuous as Origen is
for the freedom of man's will, he yet holds that man's
part in his salvation is vastly less than God's, " the
first and chief cause of the work." 6 Rational beings
1 De Princ., i. 2, 10. 2 Ibid., iii. 5, 3.
3 Ibid., ii. i, 4 ; also iv. 34. 4 Ibid., ii. I, 4.
6 C. Celsum, iii. 28; also vii. 17. 6 De Princ., iii. I, 18.
ORIGEN AS CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHER. 99
are what they make themselves, vessels for honour or
dishonour. 1 " All rational creatures are of one nature ; "
God has made them, God is just. 2 Created beings
make themselves what they are through their choice of
good or evil, in the exercise of their freedom of will. 3
He retains, in verbal ways, the Pauline distinction
between "soul" and "spirit"; but his psychology is
really dichotomous, soul for him existing somewhere
between "flesh" and "mind" or "spirit." The spirit-
ual nature of man's soul Origen deduces from the very
nature and range of human cognition. Man has a kin-
ship with God, in virtue of which he desires and can
know the truth. We know as we progressively become
like God. "It is one thing to see, and another to
know : to see and to be seen is a property of bodies :
to know and to be known, an attribute of intellectual
being." 4 In truly Platonic fashion, Origen makes the
reality of the idea of the good a postulate of primary
importance. He grounds the speculative in the prac-
tical : he who would reach true knowledge must pass
to it from faith through philosophy. Man cannot be
merely body, else God were the same. For man has
knowledge of God, and the corporeal can know nothing
higher than the corporeal. 5 "We are of opinion that
every rational creature, without any distinction, receives
a share of Him "the Holy Spirit. 6 Origen shrank not
from the extreme individualism which led him to adopt
the theory of the pre-existence of souls, oblivious of all
considerations of race unity and connection.
1 De Princ., iii. i, 21. 2 Ibid., iii. 5, 4. 3 Ibid., ii. 9, 6.
4 Ibid., i. i, 8. 6 Ibid., i. I, 7. 6 Ibid., ii. 7, 2.
100 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
For Origen, Nature exists only for sinful men, clothed
upon with the world of sense, and it will cease to be
when these have found their way back to the bosom
of the good. For, though Origen's eschatological ideas
hold to future retribution, they view it as having ameli-
orative intent, so that at last evil will fade away, and
good far-off accrue to all. 1 Origen argues to the im-
mortality of the soul from the way in which our know-
ing and thinking substance persists in its desire and
power to know God and truth. 2 To the fact of resur-
rection he holds, but the resurrected body is to him a
body spiritual and ethereal. Origen so far spiritualises
the conception of the resurrection that he will not hear
of our appearing in the resurrection in identity of sub-
stance. For him there will be a final restoration for
all who have fallen away from God, and he takes the
Apocatastasis to be universal. 3 But this Restorationism
Origen held in distinctly esoteric fashion. 4 It has not
always been observed that his cosmological and psy-
chological speculations are really interwoven with his
Ethics.
Origen held the study of Greek philosophy a necessity
for the vindication of the faith and the meeting of the
sceptical. Into the study of the Greek philosophy he
boldly plunged, donning the philosopher's mantle. He
made his study of Platonic and Stoical philosophy more
thorough under the guidance of Ammonius Saccas. As
the circle of the sciences was, with the Greeks, a pre-
paration for philosophy, so Greek philosophy was itself,
1 De Princ., i. 6, 2 ; C. Celsum, v. 15. 2 De Princ., iv. 36.
Ibid., i. 6, 3 ; ii. 10, 3. 4 C. Cehum, vi. 26.
ORIGEN AS CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHER. IOI
to Origen, a preparation for Christianity. The idealism
of Plato, paramount for three preceding centuries, abid-
ingly impressed Origen. But, however absolute Origen's
idealism might be, it was an idealism that stirred to
action. He believed in God's care for the individual
finite being no less than for the whole of things. His
optimism was large and wellnigh unmeasured. Origen's
psychology found place for the Platonic theory of the
pre- existent soul, which he held in the imperfect form
that life here is a state of punishment. Intellect will
always reassert itself, and the worth of the cardinal
Greek virtues practical wisdom, self-control, righteous-
ness, and courage was recognised by Origen, who be-
lieved their attainment the result only of much culture
and introspection. Origen's ethical advance was made
on distinctively Christian grounds. He holds by in-
determinism, at the same time adopting a theory of
Providence accordant with the doctrine of Predestin-
ation. For him freedom is necessary to virtue, and
good and evil are based by him on this freedom. He
runs the differences of the world back into freedom ;
ethical quality determines everything, according to the
use made of freedom ; freedom is thus source of all
differences in souls. But in what does freedom con-
sist ? With Origen, it is the spirit that judges between
evil and good, and in such judging is freedom found. 1
The origin of moral evil Origen finds in the fact of
free-will. He traces error of judgment, as of conduct,
to perversity of will. Whether in matters of good or
evil, man's will is for Origen the ultimate efficient.
1 De Princ., iii. 1-5.
102 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
But reason and will are not distinguished, as might
be wished, by Origen. Reason seems to have ruled
for him over all external incitements, and it may well
have been that he took choice to be a function of the
reason. With Origen ethics meant life, and not merely
theory. The ethical determination of the will was in
his view of supreme moment. Not in God's inability,
but in our wayward wills, lies our hindrance. 1 Ethical
influences Origen finds everywhere, so that his emphasis
on moral conduct could not have been surpassed. We
fall from good through the freedom of our will, where-
fore our will must be rooted and grounded in love of
the Good, yea, of God. 2 Sooner than impair the
freedom of our will, God was pleased to restrict His
own prescience. With Origen, who so emphasised the
moral end of philosophy, the development of ethical
philosophy seems to have passed more to the Western
mind. Perhaps Origen allowed the mantle of the
Platonist to obscure his Christian distinctiveness, and
permitted an excessive idealism to cover the world
of actual and concrete reality. His unfruitful mode
of allegorising Scripture was due to this idealising
tendency. But there is no mistaking his nobility as
an ethical philosopher: the eye of the pure in heart
can for him alone discern the truth. "By this divine
sense, therefore, not of the eyes, but of a pure heart,
which is the mind, God may be seen by those who
are worthy." 3 Origen's theory of knowledge had more
1 C. Cetsum, vi. 57.
2 De Princ.> i. 5, 3 ; i. 6, 3 ; ii. I, 2 ; ii. 4, 3.
3 Ibid., i. I, 9 ; so also C. Celsum, vi. 69.
ORIGEN AS CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHER. 103
than theoretic character it bore, in fact, a mystical
aspect that carried in it an ethical relation. It did so
in virtue of Origen's ftt<r#if<r*t 6ela that Divine sense
which denotes the consciousness of man in its higher
cognitive activity which made the Christian contents
the subject of our freest knowledge. For the human
soul or finite reason can unify itself with the Xoyo?,
finding true knowledge in such intercourse as results
from this unification. Origen's entire defence of
Christianity, on its human or subjective side, may be
said to have centred in the saying of Jesus, so beau-
tiful and pregnant : " If any man willeth to do His
will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it be of
God, or whether I speak from Myself" (John vii. 17).
Origen tried to understand the manifoldness of the
world from an ethical standpoint, so that the con-
gruence of the natural with the spiritual might be
seen. Our concluding reflections on this study of the
philosophical theology and ethics of Origen are of all
the Church universal owes to Origen as the most
comprehensive of ancient Christian thinkers one whose
influence was lasting, wide, and deep. On Gnosticism,
on the relations of faith and knowledge, on psycho-
logical, cosmological, and practical religious problems,
he shed a new and great light, whereby the absolutely
rational character and the peculiarly ethical modes of
Christianity have for ever been made clear. He is a
living inspiration, because his spirit and principles we
can still share, even when we can by no means accept
his opinions; can welcome all science, all knowledge,
believing it can only serve the great final ends of the
104 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
truth. We can cultivate a spirit of inquiry, broad and
catholic as his; can seek, like him, that finest breadth
of thought which is so rationally constructive as to
bring the treasures of thought, past, present, and to
come, into relation and subjection to the mind of
Christ. The fine speculative bent of Origen by no
means kept him from holding firm and fast to essential
truths and historic facts of Christianity.
Seeds of thought sown by Origen, which might not
always be accordant with each other, were unified in
his rich, strong, and striking personality. The love of
truth truth in all its depth, objectivity, and ampli-
tude was for Origen first passion and last in all
rational beings, and therefore was it he sought an
all-sided, Christian world-view of knowledge or yvwo-is.
He sought, indeed, as Harnack says, the sphere "of
clear knowledge and inward intellectual assent eman-
ating from love to God." We must, with him, widen
faith to cover all the facts of life, reality, experience;
must take all knowledge and all science as in some
sort revealing God to us ; must find, in the Son of
God Incarnate, the key to all creation, all history, all
life, since in Him all things are ours, and He is God's.
CHAPTER IX.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLOTINUS.
FOR constructive power, impressive skill, daring bold-
ness, sustained nobility, and imposing beauty, the
system of Plotinus has hardly ever been surpassed.
Pantheistic his philosophy is not : the One and the All
are not identical in his system : the One is transcendent,
not immanent, though impersonal and unconscious : all
things wait upon the One, but the One depends not
upon all or any of them. Rather his system seems to
constitute a theism of transcendental type, but with a
method of mystical, as well as rational, character. Still,
it is easy to see how this system has often been re-
garded as pantheistic, for, in that ecstasy whereby mind
knows the Infinite, the mind seems to become absorbed
in the Infinite Intelligence, and the soul loosened from
individual consciousness. His was the creative spirit
that called Neo- Platonism into being. And Neo-
Platonism was destined to vanquish every philosophical
system that should array itself against it. Whatever
was best in Plato and Aristotle was seized and assimi-
lated by Plotinus, the influence of the former on his
mental upbuilding being specially great. To the teach-
ings of these philosophers Plotinus imparted new vitality
106 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
and interest. His three hypostases, indeed, subsumed
distinctive principles of Stoicism, Peripateticism, and
Platonism. There fell to the lot of Plotinus an environ-
ment rich in elements for an intellectual nature. For
it was an environment charged with elements inherited
from second-century materialism and mysticism, natural-
ism and hedonism, moralism and spiritualism. Founder
of the Neo-Platonic school he became under these con-
ditions. And its philosophy is essentially a philosophy
of religion. He proved his power by piercing direct
to the metaphysical heart of Plato's system, that he
might rend it in pieces for the feeding of his thought.
Plotinus, however, differs from Plato in setting the One
above all ideas. It is his " philosophy of the One" that
proves so fascinating an element of his teaching. But
the Absolute One remains a bare and extreme unity,
and is not conceived by him as a unity of differences.
Indeed, in this emphasis on the unity of pure or abstract
being the idea of diversity disappears, and recourse is
vainly had to a world-soul for reconcilement of the
one and the many. It is characteristic of Plotinus
that the ideas have a distinct existence in the Divine
Reason. The One, the Ineffable or the Spiritual, is, as
the unity of all things, unfolded in intellectual, and
afterwards in sensuous, terms. The categories used by
Plotinus in respect of the second element in the Plotinic
trinity, which is Intelligence image of the One were
being, rest, motion, identity, and difference. The pref-
erences of Plotinus lie towards pure, abstract specula-
tion. He holds by the essence of God as the absolutely
One and unchangeable. He, the One, has neither Form,
THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLOTINUS. 107
nor Will, nor Thought, nor Being. God, as the One, is
to him source and spring of all good. The Plotinic
triad runs back to Plato the Primal One to the Platonic
idea of the good, mind and soul to the Demiurgus [and
world-soul of Plato. The Primal Good is a principle of
absolute and indivisible unity. First Cause He is, but
only in an abstract, metaphysical sense. The whole
cosmological thought of Plotinus takes a teleological
form. Reason is rooted in this highest or Ultimate
Good as its principle. The One, whose nature we thus
seek, is not anything that exists. His One, as the
Power of all things, is yet, and therefore, none of them.
As the absolute unity, his One is the cause of all exist-
ence, and must therefore go before it. In fact, the
" First " is to Plotinus raised above all determinations,
so that we cannot strictly predicate anything here. A
great demerit this of the system, since this supreme
abstraction of the unity of existence, away from exist-
ence itself, robs it of all relation to the things it creates.
It is the negation of all contents. The One and Good
is placed beyond thought, though it is the first prin-
ciple of things. For, Plotinus holds the One to be
Plato's rayaObv, which in reality is " above good." To
this Absolute Good all reason and life aspire. All
things are drawn to God a God who is Goodness
without love. And our aspiring is through the soul
not the seeking of the outward eye. The One is seen
with " the eyes of the soul," when it is turned away
from other sights. His philosophy of the One affirms
the transcendent character and inapprehensible nature
of God in a decided way. He is transcendent, as
108 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
beyond all being and knowing. He the One is
ineffable, because without predicates. It really amounts
to this, that the One is set above all contention. Not
known of knowledge, the One is known through some-
thing higher. It is known in the breaking of the bonds
of sense, in rising, by Divine Secopia and contemplation
of " the intelligible beauty," from Matter to Spirit, from
Soul to Reason, and from Reason to the One. This
treatment of God as the inapprehensible One proved
the very destruction of reason, though it was meant as
its apotheosis. For it proceeded too much by the
way of mystic abstraction, and insulated the Deity to
such an extent that there was loss of real sense of man's
being in God, and of God's being in man. The trans-
cendence had its truth, but it was not the whole truth
which this mode of thinking was shadowing forth. It
had the merit, however, to emphasise reason as the
great constructive power. God, as Ground of the world,
is, when we come to anthropomorphic modes of speech,
mind or rational spirit. Soul is one and many. The
World-soul is chief of all souls. This World-soul is an
attempt to join, by its mediation, the sensible and the
ideal worlds. No longer needful, if God be taken as no
abstract unity, but the One Spirit revealed in nature
and in man. There is a plurality of souls, for they are
increasing. But these individual souls are not mere
parts of the universal soul, for this latter is present,
is whole and entire, in all particular or individual souls.
Man's knowing soul runs back to spirit. The human
was but an appanage of the world-soul, and here, as
elsewhere in Neo-Platonism, its psychology runs into
THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLOTINUS. 109
a theological mould. Tis the body alone that is affected
by emotions of pleasure or pain : the soul does no more
than perceive what takes place in the body. The soul's
perception of such painful or pleasurable states is quite
passionless. Matter is no corporeal mass beside the
One, but is, in fact, bodiless or immaterial such is
the metaphysically indeterminate position of Plotinus.
Matter was his root difficulty, and proved chief obstacle
to the unity he sought. He could but reduce it to its
lowest terms, which is not to do away with its troublous
presence. Matter is still with him, and is, in fact,
eternal : it is never wholly done away in the thought
of Plotinus. He took, in the last resort, a mediate
view of matter, paving the way for the Manichaeism
of Augustine. The microcosm the world within is
first object of care to Plotinus ; the macrocosm or
world without is but the reflex of what we so find in
ourselves. The world is just a mirror, in which we see
reality reflected. " But," says Plotinus, " you see the
mirror, and you do not see matter." Mind or thought
is thus to Plotinus the great reality. His spiritualism
is reached by an introspective method of his own, easily
distinguishable from Plato's method of analogy, and
Aristotle's metaphysical method of interpreting the
world. Plotinus is, however, much more at one with
Plato and Aristotle in result than in method : he makes
common cause with them in upholding spiritualism, only
he is able to put the case for spiritualism in fuller form
and clearer view than was possible to either of them.
And how does he reach this higher result ? By a more
rigid insistence on the realisation of inner personality,
110 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
and on the significance of bur self-identity. Plotinus
has the great merit to have been the first philosopher
to give precise and explicit account of such concepts as
consciousness and self-consciousness. He makes such
direct analysis of consciousness as neither Plato nor
Aristotle had done, so advancing upon them by ex-
hibiting a distinctive development of subjective interest
and faculty. But indeed he is too subjective : he
abstracts from a single side of our whole life, and makes
an objective law for things out of this very abstraction.
Nature is for him real only so far as it is soul. This
means further inadequacy on the part of Plotinus, for
such an idealising mode of dealing with Nature would
soon rule out all real natural science, and land us in the
dreamy and mysterious. The soul is the self, and can
by no possibility be material. The soul is the product of
spirit its nearest result, and its activity renders matter
corporeal. How matter can so proceed from the soul
is more than Plotinus explains. He merely says it
comes out of it, as Being comes out of Non-Being.
Since soul so works upon matter, everything in the
world of sense is this soul or spirit. Hence Plotinus
is able to spiritualise the corporeal world, to idealise
the Universe. Soul is, in fact, the central core of his
system : everything, within and without us, is soul, and
the trouble is just to make soul capable of explaining
all the antitheses to be found in different spheres of
being. It is, he holds, the fault of man of his descent
into finitude that the soul has fallen from the universal
nature that belongs to it. The outer, or material, is
for him but as shadow of substance, or husk of kernel :
OF THE
UNIVERSITY
OF
C^Lh
PHILOSOPHY OF PLOTINUS. Ill
the substance or kernel is the hidden spiritual, or ideal.
His spiritual monism would keep the unity in the soul
of the whole, and yet provide for the reality of particular
souls. The immateriality of the soul he at least defends
by arguments, drawn from wider reach than Plato or
Aristotle had known, and inclusive of feeling, as well
as thought. When he comes to deal with the nature
of thought thought which to him is motion he is able
to maintain its incorporeal character in ways that form
striking anticipations of modern philosophy. The ad-
vance of redemption from reality as given is the basal
thought of Plotinus : his conceptual knowledge worked
its way, as we have seen, through the different world-
materials body, soul, spirit up to the presentiment of
the World-Soul. Plotinus comes within near psycho-
logical view of modern idealistic methods, which yet
elude his grasp. A real unity, however, he did attain
by an idealism of his own. Besides which, it may be
said that Neo-Platonism minus its mysticism was, in
many of its leading aspects, a precursor of modern
Idealism. A tolerably pure form of rationalism it was,
with a subtle dialectic of its own. Plotinus relies on the
divisibility of corporeal substance, and the unity of
consciousness for the working out of his argument
against materialism. He does not, however, separate
between consciousness and its objects in any such
absolute fashion as that of Cartesianism, for he allows
to the soul, in some sort, divisibility and extension.
As for personality, it does not seem as though individual
personality were so truly provided for as it might appear
in the system of Plotinus, since it rather seems lost in the
112 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
necessary movement of the universal life of spirit. For
there can be no doubt that, in the system of Plotinus
emanational in effect in the end there is a procession of
all things from the Absolute, and an inclusion of all
things in Him. Yet did not Plotinus wish the world
viewed as an emanation from God, with the loss of sub-
stance attendant thereon. We return to Him by ecstatic
elevation. The goal of Plotinus for individual personality
appears to be merely that indeterminateness in which
there is an unconscious unifying with the World-Ground,
or a sinking into the All-One. For the finite spirit must
put off all that belongs to it in this ascent to immediate
experience of the Absolute One. But this is no more
religion as a total reconsecration of all things earthly and
human. Not only the so-called materialism of the Stoics
does Plotinus vanquish, but also their fatalism. But his
spiritualistic doctrine of free-will is not that of the
moderns, holding to it as a fact of consciousness ; rather
it is a Platonising mode of conceiving the soul free as it
truly realises the conditions of its own spiritual existence
that is to say, suffers no subjection at the instance of
body or matter. For matter, though only an indeter-
minate element, and denied real being, is yet regarded as
a cause of evil, and a limitation. < If our wills were not
free, thinks Plotinus, we should not be ourselves, but
would be borne along by the universal movement. But
free-will does not hang very consistently in his system.
Nor is his definition of matter very satisfactory: he
thinks about it as does Plato : it is a universal sub-
stratum ; is void of form and absolutely indefinite ; has
no reality, but is merely the possibility of being, and is,
THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLOTINUS. 113
in fact, evil. He strove to solve the problem of physical
evil by accounting for it in a variety of ways. He knew
the world to be by no means perfect, and yet it was the
world of the One, therefore the only possible world. He
stood opposed to the Gnostic view of the world as evil,
and at a stray time came within sight of evil as due to
self-will, with, however, no consistent result. On the
widest issue, we may say that in nothing is the philo-
sophic genius of Plotinus more discernible than just in
the way he concentrates his forces on the issues of spirit-
ualism, as opposed to materialism. It is his abiding
merit to have put the case for spiritualism with skill and
force that had not before been equalled. This need not
blind us to the defects of his mysticism, which tended to
obscure the movements of thought, and turn it aside from
reality and experience. Cognition becomes, with Plotinus,
too little an appropriation of objective truth, too much
something effected within the soul by a certain interior
contemplation. And when, rising from self-contempla-
tion, man attains to the contemplation of the One, he
loses thought and self-consciousness, and a state of
ecstasy supervenes. This is human cognition at its
highest, in the Plotinian view. To this end mystical
asceticism becomes essential. This somewhat unnatural
feature of Neo-Platonism an asceticism directed really
against corporeal nature as something in itself evil
made it incapable of effecting the moral regeneration of
Paganism. In his vision of the hidden and ineffable
Beauty, Plotinus undoubtedly tends to despise the
thought in which he had before taken delight, because of
the movement which such thought involves. With great
H
114 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
power, Plotinus insists on the need to find, and recognise,
beauty within ourselves, so that thus we may rise to the
recognition of " the intelligible beauty." Such beauty is
hid but from the soul that is by self-will blinded. We
need hardly, however, deny, although saying these things,
a place to meditation, or the mystic gaze of contempla-
tion, on which Plotinus lays so much stress, for reason
may be fully present where thought is least active in its
search or out-goings. In such contemplation the soul is
still distinguished from her object, while in ecstasy, or
union with God, she is one with it. Such ecstasy trans-
cends reason, and is the ultimate principle of all cer-
tainty. For, only in so becoming One with the Absolute
do we transcend the dualisms that hinder knowledge.
Such ecstasy we cannot command : we can only purify
and prepare ourselves for it. 'Tis in virtue of such teach-
ings that Plotinus is sometimes spoken of as the Mystic
par excellence. The baneful result accrues when the mys-
tical or ecstatic elevation becomes the negation of reason,
and there is no doubt that this tendency was a real result
of the teaching of Plotinus. Grave dangers lurk in the
path of such direct vision as Plotinus inculcates. Short
of these dangers even, the solitude he contemplates for
us as what he calls a flight of the alone to the Alone
is apt to be rather unfruitful. Besides which, it is a graft
on his philosophy a graft from his religion and must
be treated as such from a philosophic point of view. But
the ecstatic and subjective experience was by no means
either fount or foundation of his philosophy, as has often
been imagined. Virtue, with Plotinus, is " obedience to
reason," and the highest good is reached in being entirely
THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLOTINUS. 115
turned to reason, and " likeness to God." He follows
Plato in holding to the doctrine of metempsychosis ; only
the purest souls are, in the future life, merged in God.
The influence of Plotinus on subsequent speculation
has been great. It pervaded the Middle Ages, and
pierced through the Renaissance. Senses there are in
which he is metaphysical precursor of Spinoza, and of
Spencer, whose Unknowable is declared in less self-con-
sistent terms than that of Plotinus. This is not, of
course, to say that Plotinus has conceived or defined,
with adequate or satisfying definiteness, his primal One
which, in fact, he has not done. But Plotinus has
continued to be an original spring of philosophic thought
and impulse all through the history of speculation. The
philosophy of Plotinus has the great merit of magnifying
the constructive power of reason. It has the further
virtue of emphasising that, as all thought involves duality
or difference, so God must precede and transcend all
thought, or, in other words, it had the merit of carrying
the conception of God beyond all anthropomorphic
modes of expression to an Absolute, in which all thought
is transcended, and all consciousness lost. But such an
unknown God would be of little interest, since He could
give no guidance to thought, and the entire movement
of mind towards Him would wear an abortive and illogi-
cal aspect. So the Infinite must come into real relation
to us. And to the Neo-Platonist, it seemed necessary to
draw himself off from matter as an obstructive medium.
His upward ascent from matter is in keeping with the
native aspiration of the human mind. So the philosophy
of Plotinus was able to give distinctness and elevation to
Il6 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
the Platonic philosophy. Where the philosophy of
Plotinus seemed most to lack, was in its need of nearer
and kindlier contact both with the moral problem of the
world and with the social difficulty. Surely we may say
that no philosophy can afford either to shut off God from
the light of the world, or to shut off the light, that is in
the world, from God. The Divine Life, in its unfoldings,
enfolds our lives, so that, in making us partakers of its
own nature, the Divine purpose in these lives may freely
and surely move to its accomplishment.
CHAPTER X.
SCHOLASTIC AND MEDIAEVAL PHILOSOPHY.
THE threefold cord of speculation which runs through
the Scholastic Age is of far deeper import and more
lasting interest than philosophical students have gener-
ally understood, and may therefore bear some consider-
ation. Some explanation if not justification for this
fact is to be found in the scant attention accorded to
scholastic philosophy in earlier manuals or histories of
philosophy. This defect is gradually becoming remedied,
so that now, as not for two centuries at least, is realised
the importance of studying the scholastic philosophy,
with its abiding effects for good and for evil. In that
study reckoning must be made of philosophic forces
that were historically contributory to the scholastic
outcome, and not merely of elements that were logic-
ally consistent or harmonious with it. The modern
contempt for scholasticism has been an affectation in-
herited from the Renaissance. The philosophy of
scholasticism should be understood as really not the
same thing as mediaeval philosophy. The ruling mind
for mediaeval philosophy is Augustine, whose Christian
philosophy catches up the seeds of thought sown by
Origen and Plotinus. The new line of development
Il8 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
struck by Augustine started from his stress on the
principle of inwardness or inner experience the Inner-
lichkeit of the Germans. The determinative thing for
mediaeval philosophy was the welcome it accorded to
Aristotelianism, whose dialectics were its life-blood.
Scholastic philosophy may be taken to centre in great
schoolmen of the thirteenth century like Albertus,
Aquinas, and Duns Scotus, while mediaeval thought
was so wide in range as to include even such forms of
anti-scholastic teaching as were distinctly pantheistic.
Mediaeval philosophy comprehended not only scholasti-
cism, but also Neo- Platonic tendencies exemplified in
mysticism, and comprised much more besides. Schol-
asticism is no more than one, and that perhaps the
strongest, of the philosophical schools of the mediaeval
period. Scholastic philosophy of the thirteenth century
was not only grounded in twelfth century thought, but
even ran back to the ninth century monistic realism
of John the Scot, as expounded in the De Divisione
Naturcz. Scholasticism is the doctrine of the church
scientifically apprehended and set forth. But scholasti-
cism, as generally understood, is less a system than a
chaotic compound of all the systems a compound
marked by a preference for judgments over facts, and
for authority before free reason. Necessarily deductive
was its method : from dogmatic premises it loved to
forge its endless train of syllogisms : under these arid
and angular syllogistic forms, however, reason managed
to insinuate itself. The scholastic movement sprang
from the fact that faith, willing to justify itself at the
bar of reason, exemplified the Anselmic saying "Fides
SCHOLASTIC AND MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY. 119
queer ens intellectwn" and sought to present its doctrines
free of absurdity. There was a distinctiveness of
scholasticism that lay hid in its peculiar union of
philosophy and theology : to it, theology went before
philosophy "fides prcecedens intellectum " : philosophy
followed in the steps of theology, and justified it to
men. For a philosophical synthesis was reached where-
by the great Doctors of the West held, despite all
individual originality, a certain body of doctrine in
common a body which is of the essence of scholasti-
cism. But scholasticism, even in its early develop-
ments, was stoutly opposed by Abelard, who claimed
self-evident validity for the fundamental position that
rational insight must prepare the way for faith, since
faith cannot otherwise be sure of its truth. Of course,
Anselm the real founder of scholasticism insisted
that the mind of man should develop itself after the
manner and spirit of science, spite of the fact that
certitude came by another mode that, namely, of faith.
But the aim of Anselm, walking in the steps of Augus-
tine, was quite other than that of Abelard, for while
Anselm aimed only to make the truths held by faith
comprehensible to the intellect, Abelard started with
thought or reason as the norm and test of truth, so
proceeding in what would be accounted a more rational-
istic fashion. In the schools it became the business
of reason to vindicate theology as science. The dog-
mata of positive religion were to Anselm matters of
necessary deduction. By Aquinas all hope was given
up of proving Church dogmas by reason ; he declared
them not contrary to, but above, reason, whereas Scotus
120 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
was prone to make religion independent of reason.
By Ockam all beyond experience was claimed for the
sphere of faith.
The Realist and Nominalist Controversy which sprang
up in the Scholastic Age soon ceased to be one of
merely logical import. The discussion was one in which
mediaeval Europe was torn : rival theologies were
fiercely pitted against each other: and kings and
emperors were ranged in hostile camps. The Nominal-
ist overthrow of universals seemed to leave an open
door for rank materialism, wherein the universal deity
and the universal principles of morality should no
more be found. The Realist contention for the reality
of universals reality being taken as one and the same
tended, on the other hand, to favour pantheism,
especially in the scientific direction, which Abelard
was not slow to point out. There was, besides, the
negative transcendentalism or mystic agnosticism of
Dionysius, whose pantheistic and positivist tendencies
were by no means unlit by faith and aspiration. The
dominant thought of the time took substances to be
more real, the more universal they were. Now the
interest of that controversial time abides for the reason
that the problem was both real and far-reaching in its
issues. Inquiries of our own time like that of the origin
of species are but new phases of the problem as to
universals a parte rei, and these inquiries are found in
fields of philology as well as in those of physical science.
Is* It was Abelard who insisted that universals can neither
be things, on the one hand, nor words on the other,
and who, with his stress on conceptual thought, gathered
SCHOLASTIC AND MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY. 121
up into himself the different strands of thought in the
time. It is with the nature of these universals in the
mind that we are philosophically concerned. We still
want to know whether, in its general reasonings, it is
thing or idea or name which is present to the mind.
We know how wisely Hobbes by Leibniz styled plus
quam nominalis has written on the subject, and how much
more acutely Locke wrote than his critics have always
understood. Words, no doubt, have a purely symbolic
meaning for us, but they must bear a signification and
represent an idea. But both idea and name must be
brought into accord with things things as they really
are. It is the name which holds together the resem-
blances between particular things. Thus all the elements
are necessary, each in its place. It was easy, before
the Conceptualist position was reached, for Realist and
Nominalist to demolish each other's position, just as
it is still easy for the Idealist and the Materialist each
to destroy the other's ground, without suspecting the
while that a position may be assumed which not only
preserves what is true in each, but also retains in a
true form what they each deny. Universals as entities
were to Aquinas fictitious, for to him, after Aristotle,
individuals alone exist. Yet he did not hold to the
Nominalist contention, that universals are mere names,
representing no ideas in the mind or in things exterior
to it. For ideas were to him archetypal of things
created, and so were eternally existent in the Divine
mind. General terms, too, had for him a certain real
existence. It is in Roscellinus that the individualism
is boldly taken which sees the truly real only in the
122 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
individual thing. The whole tendency of scholasticism
was towards exhaustion in an arid Nominalism. What
vital energy the later Nominalism had, went towards
the fostering of natural science. Even the relation of
God to morality came, in the Scholastic Age, to be
involved in the controversy. But let it first be noted
that Hugo of St Victor led, in the twelfth century, a
remarkable mystical movement of ascent towards God.
He denied a knowledge of the essence of God, but
held to the a posteriori argument for Deity, making
particular use of the evidence of the rational soul. The
real problem about which Thomists and Scotists were
at variance was the nature of God. In the Divine
nature, will had a primary place with the Scotists.
Will was not determined by intellect, but determined
itself. To the Thomists, will and reason are so united
in God as to be incapable of disharmony, reason
supplying the guiding light of will. So to the Scotists
the moral law is grounded in the will of God, and is
upheld, but not as uncertainly, by His fiat, arbitrary
as this may appear. It is to them good just because
God has willed and enjoined it. Not reason, but
groundless will, thus determines the good. The
Thomists, on the other hand, clear the moral law of
this sort of contingency, and ground it so necessarily
in the nature of deity that it is quite impossible to
conceive its being other than it is. What God com-
mands He commands, with Thomas, because it is good,
and seen by Him to be so. Not that either Aquinas
or Scotus regarded universals from a Nominalist point
of view, that distinction such as it was being reserved
SCHOLASTIC AND MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY. 123
for William Ockam. Both Thomas and Duns Scotus
held, each in his own way, to the doctrine of intel-
ligible species, by which a copy of the object was sup-
posed, in the process of knowledge, to arise and be
seen by the soul. But the powerful personality of
Ockam, wittiest of the schoolmen according to Hooker,
swept aside the theory of intelligible species as a need-
less doubling of the subject, the supposed copy in the
mind being, in his view, no more than that sign for it
which is found in our idea of it. Ockam, in fact,
scattered seeds that should afterwards rise in an ideal-
ism, both epistemological and psychological. To Ockam
the unity and existence of God were incapable of dem-
onstration : he viewed the necessity for a First Cause
in a purely hypothetical light. Ockam it was who set
forth the opposition between dogma and reason so that,
with him, an irreparable breach took place between
philosophy and theology. Scholasticism may then be
said to have played its part, and made an end of itself.
It only remained for Dante, as poet of Thomism, to
sing the swan-song of scholasticism. There can be no
doubt that Duns Scotus, doughty champion of Divine
and human freedom and precursor of modern sceptic-
ism, is a great name as thinker in mediaeval philosophy,
with a truly Scottish repugnance to what he deemed
the servility of Aquinas before Aristotle. Yet it is the
merit of Aquinas to have been far more coherent, sys-
tematic, and logically consistent than Augustine or
Anselm, and his ethical doctrine touching the will is
much more developed than that of Aristotle. Hardly
any limit was set by Duns to the range and freedom
124 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
of the critical intellect, despite the fact that his faith
rested on authority. For him the individual is ultima
rcalitas. We can hardly choose but lean to the side
of Aquinas, in the view he took of the Divine nature
and moral law, since to us God is the absolute reason,
and morality an embodiment of that reason. To ground
moral law, as does Ockam, arbitrarily in the enactment
of God's will, so that even if what is right had been
wrong, and what is wrong had been right, it would
have been our duty to obey, because it was commanded
is utterly to fail of perceiving how the necessary and
universal truths of reason are grounded in God and
His absolute reason. In Him law is eternal as the
absolute reason. His command is in virtue of eternal
law. His the Divine reason is over all His works.
From the days of Origen to our own, the difficulty has
just been to get thought to allow that larger say to
reason in the things of faith which becomes it as that
on which universal and necessary truths and principles
depend. Scholasticism made the effort to reconcile
faith and knowledge, and assumed at length the form
of thinking that the faith of the church is absolute
truth. Scholasticism succeeded in transcending Aris-
totelian dualism by its complete subordination of all other
beings to God. It overpassed Aristotelian inquiry as to
how God is ultimate cause of the world by declaring
the glory of God to be the end of the world process.
On the foremost level of learning and spiritual force
stood Scotus Erigena. He, paving the way in the ninth
century for Anselm's movement, held true religion for
true philosophy, and true philosophy for true religion,
SCHOLASTIC AND MEDIAEVAL PHILOSOPHY. 125
and, starting from the primary unity of all things, he
straightway unfolded a system of constructive thought
that made for majestic pantheism. His thought is
subtle, poetic, vague. Under all phenomena and all
diversities, the one real thing for him is God, whose
intelligence embraces all things. God is thus the most
universal being in a way that accords well with his re-
tention of the Neo-Platonic idealism. Among his Neo-
Platonic traits are intuition, mysticism, and universal
redemption. In Scotus Erigena we find remarkable anti-
cipations of the Schellingian doctrine of potence. In
Scotus Erigena, too, we have a precursor of Spinoza and
Hegel, as Ockam is a forerunner of Luther and Melanch-
thon. Erigena's principle was, Auctoritas ex ratione pro-
cessit. He made one thing of philosophy and theology,
and that one thing was philosophy, just as Anselm, on
the other hand, made one of these twain, but that one
was theology. No legacy of mediaeval realism is more
characteristic than the Anselmic mode of putting the
Ontological argument for the Being of God far more
capable of forceful presentation than Anselm himself
knew. Its form in the Proslogion of Anselm was that
of presenting the idea of God in the human mind as
necessarily involving the reality of that idea. God is, in
the Anselmic presentation, " That than which nothing
greater can be thought," and Anselm is able on occasion
to insist that to nothing else can the structure of his
reasoning be applied. The capabilities of the argument
have been well made manifest in the ontological specula-
tions of, and since, Hegel. The importance of setting
forth the conception of an absolute being as a necessity
126 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
of thought of showing that such a being as he pre-sup-
posed must be thought was not realised by Anselm.
He strangely failed to urge, as against Gaunilo, what a
necessary conception is that of the most real being, and
how free that conception is from arbitrariness and con-
tradictoriness. Imperfect in dialectical adroitness as his
argument might be, Anselm yet did a great service to
thought by his endeavour to give truth held by faith a
scientific form. A deeper sense of the difficulties in-
volved in setting forth such truths on rational grounds is
found in Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, owing
to the teachings of experience and deeper study of Aris-
totle. Already to Scotus Erigena, God had been the
One Creative Source of all things ; in this One Cause,
" primordial causes " immutably subsist ; independently
of Him, the universe does not exist, but He exists in all
things. Nature is constituted by the eternal archetypes
of things. Erigena's thought, so metaphysical in
character, already meant the triumph of the universal.
Albertus, later, put the notion of Infinite Being in place
of Prime Mover.
Mediaeval philosophy strangely failed to see the unsat-
isfactoriness of its treatment of logic as something purely
formal and dissociate from reality. Hence the school-
men did not realise that they turned the Christian
dogmas into so many logical puzzles. This they did,
despite the fact that they meant to apply reason to the
data of revelation, and to find out necessary truth, of
which God should be to them basis. The discredit, into
which their system fell, sprang out of this divorce from
reality and experience, into which the verbal subtleties
SCHOLASTIC AND MEDIAEVAL PHILOSOPHY. I2/
of the system betrayed them. The thought of Europe
speedily left behind thinkers like Suarez and others, who
in modified ways vainly clung to the old methods and
principles. Philosophy had need of a freer atmosphere,
in which the only authority should be that of reason.
The method of scholasticism was that of subtracting the
irrational elements from religion. It regarded religion as
a Divine revelation ; it started with a system of dogmas ;
it was a rationalised Catholicism. We have seen how,
in Duns Scotus and William Ockam, the efforts of the
age of the scholastics to reconcile religion and philo-
sophy ended really in their complete disparity being
recognised. A sorrowful result was this conclusion of
the endeavour to prove and maintain the unity of truth,
religious and philosophical. For all that, we hold to
the view that the modern contempt of scholasticism is
exceedingly misplaced. Current thoughtlessness allows
the scholastic spirit of speculative depth and inquisitive-
ness, its unmeasured confidence in the powers of the
intellect, its transmitted wealth of principles, elements,
and terms, all to pass into the inheritance of to-day with
rarely a word of grateful acknowledgment. Dogmatic in
character, no doubt, the thought of that epoch was, but
not without fruitful issues for dialectical thought, for
theological formulation, and for ethical teaching and
pronouncement. To it we may well apply those words
of Dante that speak of magnificences yet to be known, so
that the foes thereof shall not be able to keep silent
" Le sue magnificenze conosciute
Saranno ancora si, che i suoi nimici
Non ne potran tener le lingue mute."
128
CHAPTER XI.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF AQUINAS.
THE vastest and most systematic genius of the Middle
Ages was Saint Thomas Aquinas. His architectonic work,
the Summa Theologica, embodies the whole philosophy
of that epoch, expounded in the spirit of the time. That
spirit was the spirit of Aristotle. Aquinas became the
best representative of Scholasticism. Rosmini, who, in
his Teodicea, speaks of Aquinas as chief among Italian
philosophers, set himself to perfect the philosophy of
Aquinas by purging it of this Aristotelian leaven, with
the pantheistic-materialistic tendency it bore. Aquinas,
however, had borne so great respect to the teachings of
Aristotle that only when they came into tolerably clear
antagonism to Christian truth did he deviate from them.
It is thus easy to see why Thomism as a system lacked
in logical completeness, acute and massive as it was.
But Aquinas is not to be thought of as a mere repro-
ducer of Aristotle, as is sometimes said ; rather is it true
to say that, with the aid of Aristotle and the fathers, he
brought forth a philosophy all his own. For such fathers
as Athanasius, Basil, the Gregories, Chrysostom, Ambrose,
Augustine, were all used by Aquinas, whose Aristotelian-
ism is brightened with an effluence of Platonic eleva-
THE PHILOSOPHY OF AQUINAS. 129
tion, and touched with the charm of Socratic method.
Aquinas gave system to the teaching of the Fathers, the
Areopagite, and the Lombard, doing for them, in reduc-
ing them to scientific form, what Aristotle had done for
the Greeks, Egyptians, and Pythagoreans. Aquinas was,
as we have just indicated, conversant with Plato and
Aristotle, but also with the Alexandrians and Arabians.
He includes substantially the whole teaching of his great
predecessor, Augustine, whose De Civitate Dei was, in
spite of its defects, the nearest approach to the Summa
Theologica.
The procedure of philosophy that of a rational ascent
which Augustine had so well described, is set forth by
Aquinas also. Those who come to Aquinas will, as it
has been put, find " their intellectual food cooked for
them." The fulness of his contents, the fineness of his
distinctions, the depth of his thought, and the sharp-
sighted clearness of his judgments, all mark him out
as the great thinker he was. His aim was to shape
philosophy so that its support should be gained for the
upholding of Christian truth or doctrine.
As a philosopher, Aquinas sets out from a principle
from which he never seems to deviate namely, the
principle of the demonstration of the infinite by means
of the finite. Aquinas declares that reason can perceive
and prove God through His works, for the existence of
God is demonstrated by its effects the invisible God is
seen in His visible effects. And, indeed, Aquinas, after
Albertus Magnus, gives final expression to the distinction
between natural and revealed theology ; natural theology
simply signifying the doctrine of God, as established
I
130 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
without revelation, to be found in the philosophy of
Aristotle. In the case of natural religion, Aquinas took
reason to be parallel with revelation in its working ;
whereas, in revealed religion, reason has merely ancillary
functions, and works in subordination to revelation.
God is an ineffable Being, in the view of Aquinas, and is
raised above human knowledge. God is to Aquinas, as
he has said, after Aristotle, the Prime Motor. This need
for a First Cause is curiously based by Aquinas upon the
impossibility of an infinite series of successive events,
rather than upon deductions based on the universal
science of nature. He holds we must advance from finite
effect to infinite cause ; for, though such effect may not
reveal the entire cause, it can yet prove that it exists.
Aquinas clung to the absoluteness of Deity, and did not
fail to separate Him wholly from all created things. He
held that all beings are not purely possible, but there is
something which is necessary.
But indeed it was rather the externality of finite things
to God, and their quasi independence of him, that Aquinas
emphasised, making the category of causality the key-
stone of his thought. Of the alternatives of the School-
men, Aquinas preferred to lay stress on the universalia in
re, and so laid stress on the creaturely essence, that the
hold of Divine immanence was loosened. He, in fact,
displaced the ontological argument of Anselm, that he
might set up the Divine Existence in a posteriori fashion,
since he thought the argument, to be complete, must be,
at one and the same time, a priori and a posteriori. The
reason lay in his accounting God the only being at once
ideal and real, or Whose ideality was identical with
THE PHILOSOPHY OF AQUINAS. 131
reality. God was to him actuspurus, the absolutely reason-
able substance, in Whom will is subordinate to reason.
Two forms of being are found by Aquinas in God
real being and ideal being, the former viewing God in
Himself, the latter regarding Him as archetypal idea.
This distinction of being in God is afterwards found in
Rosmini, but is not due to him. Aquinas holds it im-
possible to know ideal being in God, without knowing
His real being. He holds we cannot know God in His
essence, but only through His effects. The trend of the
thought of Aquinas is unfavourable to ontologism, which
has sometimes professed to shield itself behind his
authority. Man's knowledge of God, according to
Aquinas, is analogical in character. Being and essence
are not distinguished in God : His essence is His being,
says the Summa. By being he means the actuality of
every form or nature. Essence and existence being thus
the same in God, as the First Efficient Cause, the act
as it is said of existing is derived, in the case of second-
ary efficient causes, from this First Efficient Cause.
Being, he thinks, is, in this First Cause, intelligence
itself. God is to him distinguished as the self-existent
being a necessarily existing essence. This metaphysical
essence of Deity is root and foundation of His specific
attributes, as we shall see.
As God alone is being by His essence, for that His
essence is His being, so every creature is being by par-
ticipation, and its essence is not its being. The Divine
immensity is, to Saint Thomas, an absolute attribute,
the totality of the Divine essence not being something
commensurable with totality of place. God is in His
132 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Word : the Word is God : the Word God is the Idea.
For the word, Aquinas expressly says, conceived in the
mind, represents all that we actually comprehend. In
God there is a unique Idea, and this Idea is God Himself.
The idea is the divine essence with Saint Thomas, which
all things imitate, in so far as they are good.
As to the world, Aquinas says reason cannot apodic-
tically show that the world was made in time. The
eternity of creation he does not affirm, though he does
not think it can be refuted, so repugnant to reason is a
beginning of created things. He allows that the philo-
sophers have been able to recognise the first thing, but
denies that they have, independently of faith and by use
of their reason, been able to demonstrate that creation
took place in time. Saint Thomas avers that the most
universal causes produce the most universal effects, and
the most universal effect, he thinks, is being. There is
no impression which the mind more fundamentally
gathers, in the view of Aquinas, from the object than
that of being.
This idea of being is the first of all first principles, and
may be expressed in the negative formula, " Being is not
not-being." Then being, he argues, must be the proper
effect of the first and most universal cause, which is God.
Creation is to him properly the work of God, Who pro-
duces being absolutely. And the visible world is created
after ideas that are externally existent in the Divine Mind,
such ideas being of the essence of God yea, being, in
fact, God. But the separateness of God from the crea-
tion has to be softened down, and this is effected by
Aquinas through insisting on God as being in all things
THE PHILOSOPHY OF AQUINAS. 133
by His presence and power. When his First Cause
which, we have seen, he conceives as actus purus has
been obtained, he must needs endow Him with attributes
which will explain particular effects in nature and in
man. He makes God one, personal, spiritual ; clothes
Him with perfect goodness, truth, will, intelligence, love,
and other attributes. The world of effects, he thinks, is
yet like Him, though they are distinct ; for the effect re-
sembles the cause, and the cause is, in sense, in the effect.
Aquinas starts from created beings in his mode of
rising to God. He has a stringent definition of creation
as " a production of a thing according to its whole sub-
stance" (productio alicujus rei secundum suam totam sub-
stantiam), to which is significantly added, " nothing being
presupposed, whether created or increate " (nullo praposito,
quod sit vel increatum vel ab aliquo creatum). Creation,
that is to say, is the production of being in itself, inde-
pendently of matter as subject. He distinguishes causality
which is creative from causality which is merely altera-
tive. He recognises non-being as before being. Creation
is to Aquinas the "primary action" (prima actio), pos-
sible to the "primary agent" (agens primum) alone.
Material form for him depends on primary matter, being
consequent on the change produced by efficient cause.
And Aquinas has much to say of the rapports between
substance and its accidents, and of form as that by which
a thing is what it is. God, as pure actuality, is infinite
form, not being limited by matter. Intelligence, he
expressly says, knows being absolutely, and without
distinction of time. The processes whereby reason, as
the active force of the soul, rises, for Aquinas, to God,
134 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
are those of causality (causalitatis), excellence or eminence
(excellences or eminenticz), and negation (negationis). All
goodness and perfection for Aquinas exist pre-eminently
in God. Not always free from danger, however, is his
mode of speaking, as for example, when he makes God
simply the actuality of all things and separates poten-
tiality from Him, or when he tends to identify thought
and being. Being he expressly regards as itself the most
perfect of all things, in virtue of its actuality ; being itself
is to him the actuality of all things, and even of their
ideas. He holds a doctrine of final causes, wherein all
things are directed to their end by a supreme and intel-
ligent Being.
Aquinas holds to two degrees of Divine intelligibility :
the first degree comes to us by natural light, and to the
second degree we are guided by supernatural illumina-
tion. This distinction has a very fundamental place with
Aquinas, and he thinks our confused and unpractised
vision has need to grow in the use of the latter or higher
light. So it, no doubt, has, but his former position that
God, as Creator and Lord, is known through the things
that are made, is one which seems rather to exceed the
view possible to modern philosophy of religion, so deeply
affected by Kantian and post-Kantian agnosticism. The
light of human reason he holds to be a participation
in the uncreated light of Divine reason; he takes the
first principle to be known naturally, such knowledge
being of God as the Author of Nature; and he regards
this principle as the source of all human science and
knowledge. It is on such a strong and assured founda-
tion he will build his philosophical edifice.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF AQUINAS. 135
God, having put within the soul its intellectual light,
its knowledge of those first principles, which are the germs
of the sciences, is, par excellence, the cause of human
science in his view. Divine Reason is for him the law
of all created things, and such law is eternal. To
Aquinas, substance means being which exists in itself,
and not in another as its subject. Substantia est res cujus
naturce debetur esse non in alio. For viroKeifievov he uses
suppositum rather than substratum. Substantial form is
to him that which constitutes matter in its primary
being, the form being that by which a thing is what it
is. In virtue of God's intelligence, His life is, for Aquinas,
as for Aristotle, immortal and eternal. And the human
soul, which is for Aquinas most perfect of all the forms
which matter is capable of receiving, is, in his view, also
immortal, being the sole form which survives the dissolu-
tion of its corporeal organisation. The soul is to him a
being proper, an immortal substance, which comes not
by generation, but proceeds from God by creation.
Aquinas, in his threefold view of substance, held all
essences save God to be made up of matter and form.
The human soul, as immaterial substance, was, to him,
conditioned as to its existence through its essence. It
is important to observe, before we pass from these
aspects, that Aquinas expressly holds intelligence to
know being absolutely, and without distinction of time.
Therein he has his points of contact with the thought of
Augustine and of Dante.
We cannot dwell on the amazing comprehensiveness
and subtlety of the religious and metaphysical philosophy
of x\quinas: we have his ethical philosophy also to ex-
136 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
amine, but it can be best understood when his whole
system of thought is kept in full view. The whole is to
him always present in the part, but it is his philosophy
in whole we shall most connectedly find from a broad
survey of its parts. It may at this point be fitly recalled
that his Summa is not only the Christian religion
thrown into scientific form, but is also the orderly
exposition of what a man should be. Hence the vision
of the Divine Essence, of Whom he treats with such
theologic power and fulness, is for him that perfect
blessedness which he takes to be the ultimate end of man.
God also, as absolute activity of thought and will, he
takes to act for an end, which everything in the world
subserves.
The high dignity of man is found by Aquinas mainly
in his will, only there is this trouble, that man is apt,
in the thought of Aquinas, not to carry sufficient
answer, in his original spiritual constitution, to the
commands of supreme will imposed upon him. He is
more scientific than Augustine or Anselm in his treat-
ment of the will a treatment closely related to other
parts of his philosophy. Though his psychology is so
largely drawn from Aristotle, yet his theory of the will
has the merit to be much more complete than Aris-
totle's, and has exerted large influence on European
philosophy. He sets, as we have seen, the Divine will
in a relation of dependence on the Divine intellect.
So, in respect of man's nature likewise, Aquinas held
the far-reaching doctrine that intellect is supreme; to
him what reason approved, will obeyed. The good is
commanded by God, in his view, because it is good,
THE PHILOSOPHY OF AQUINAS. 137
and recognised by His wisdom to be so. He holds
will, as a rational power, to be due to God. God
both makes and moves it, but only to the willing of
the good.
With fine clearness the Angelic Doctor says that
God moves the will of man as universal mover and
without this universal motion man cannot will any-
thing, but at the same time man determines himself
under application of his reason to a particular volition.
Sometimes God moves men, he thinks, to a deter-
minate particular volition of good, such being the case,
in his view, of those whom God moves by His grace.
But, even then, the grace, though premoving, is not
predetermining. And grace, it may be said, is, in the
system of Aquinas, rather apt to wear an external and
accidental character, and to assume the form of power
that is mechanical rather than vital in its cast.
Aquinas holds the object to which the will tends, to
be presented by the intellect, and not by the will itself.
Intellect is necessary in order to will, hence intellect is
for him higher. Will, however, can direct intellect, and
will is lord of its own life. By his theory of physical
premotion, our free acts are foreseen and predeter-
mined. If God wills our actions to be what they are,
He yet wills them to be free. ^ The will of God pre-
destinates, but necessity is not imposed on events,
neither is contingency removed. Aquinas can say that
this or that particular action of a determinate char-
acter is not owing to any other agency than the
will itself (non est ab alio determinants, sed ab ipsa
voluntate) .
138 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Perhaps one ought to say that freedom, as it is
found in Aquinas, seems to exist rather too verbally,
and not to be sufficiently real. He is apt to appear
as though trying to retain freedom and determinism
at one and the same time. There is no lack of stress
on freedom, as, for example, when he says the being
is free that can rule its own action, for he is free who
is the cause of himself; whereas that which is, by a
sort of necessity, driven to action, is, he holds, in a
state incompatible with freedom. Yet, though man's
turning to God is ascribed by him to free-will, this
turning of the will is declared impossible unless God
Himself so turn it. So that, on the one hand, Aquinas
in the clearest manner declares movement of the will
to be nothing less than inclination of the will itself
towards the thing wished. On the other hand, he
affirms that God alone can change the will, for that
He alone is cause of the power of inclination cause,
in fact, of the will, which He alone can efficaciously
move.
On which it may be remarked that the will may, no
doubt, be moved by itself as intrinsic cause, and may
yet be open to be moved by God in His grace as ex-
trinsic cause, so that there is no real inconsistency.
And yet it seems not easy to hold the presentation of
Aquinas to be quite unambiguous, and this more or
less equivocal character of freedom in his hands is
more surprising in view of his genuine doctrine of
Creation, with the distinctness of the world from God
which it involves.
In respect of the Divine relation to evil, Aquinas
THE PHILOSOPHY OF AQUINAS. 139
teaches that the sinful act is both being and act, and
that God is, no doubt, the cause of all action considered
as act. But then, says Saint Thomas, sin is more than
being and act; it is a defect a defect springing from
free-will as its cause, and not to be referred to God.
That is to say, he makes God the cause of the act
where there is sin, but not the cause of sin, since He
is not the cause of the defect which there is in the
act. His view of the character of evil is thus negative.
His treatment of the emotions was striking beyond
anything produced by Medievalism ; the passions he
refers to the body, and divides them into two great
types, the concupiscent and the irascible. The various
forms and degrees of these passions he suggestively treats.
The optimism of Aquinas was of more moderate
character than that of Leibniz, or Malebranche, or
Rosmini. As against the strong optimism of Abelard,
Aquinas held that God could create another world
better than this present one, but could not create one
better adapted to the end for which this world has
been made. It is by the end in view, he thinks, the
order adopted must be judged. Divine Wisdom is
limited to a determined order, only as the end chosen
requires the best particular means of attaining it.
The soul itself is, in the Summa, viewed as
already indicated as the substantial form of a physical
organic body endowed with rational life. This was
in accordance with the theory of the Scholastics as to
a radical substratum called materia prima primary
matter. Aquinas, like Albertus, made matter itself the
principle of individuation, in which he was opposed
140 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
by Duns Scotus. His doctrine of the soul must wear
to us a very materialistic aspect, unless it be carefully
remembered that this substantial form was taken to
be immaterial and perfectly simple. He expressly says
that the human soul, which is called intellect or mind,
is something incorporeal and self- subsisting. Although
the intellectual soul has no matter, he says, from
which it is constituted, yet it is form of a certain
matter. The intellectual individual reaches his com-
pleted individuality in the exercise of reason and free-
will. So the rational soul, he thinks, is properly said
to have being, and to have been created or made.
For being made (fieri) ends in being. Not from pre-
existing corporeal matter could it have been made, or
it would then be corporeal; and not from pre-existing
spiritual matter, as in that case spiritual substances
would be mutually transformed; therefore he holds it
could only have been by creation. To him the soul,
as immaterial, was immortal, and could not be con-
ceived as otherwise. Man is to him the intermediate
link between material life and spiritual or immaterial
activity.
In his philosophy of knowledge, Aquinas makes man's
cognitive power like the soul from which it emanates
partake of a double character, material and im-
material. All knowledge begins for him from the data
of sensuous perception. He distinctly says that our
knowledge comes first from the senses, but maintains
this does not mean that our sense - cognition is the
complete and perfect cause of our knowledge, but
rather that it supplies the material of the cause. He
[E PHILOSOPHY OF AQUINAS. 141
discards the notion of innate ideas. The intellectual
faculty consisted of the active intellect (intellectus agens)
and the passive intellect (intellectus possibilis). Aquinas
held to the objective value of our knowledge in the
most complete manner. The universe was for him
mirrored ideally and immaterially in the mind of
man, just as the likeness of a person is on a photo-
graphic plate. Such, in brief, was his epistemological
position.
What men call Fate, Saint Thomas considers to be
nothing but Divine Providence in its meanings and
effects. Things which here seem done by accident
are, he holds, to be referred to some preordaining
cause, which is Divine Providence. After Boethius,
he speaks of Providence as the Lord of the universe
Himself, directing all things according to His eternal
plan (divina ratio in summo omnium principe constituta,
qua cuncta disponit). But he does not allow that one
is attributing things human to fate, because one may
choose to call the will and power of Deity itself by
the name of Fate. One must say, however, that his
own stress on Divine causality in second causes is apt
to make Providence appear no more than fate in some
sort, a circumstance which seems due to the influence
of Arabian interpreters like Avicenna. And yet it
seems due to him to say that as against the Arabian
philosophers, Aquinas is not without strivings to
recognise the efficiency of the second causes through
which Deity works. His deterministic leanings were
seen in his postulation of influence on interior con-
straint or inclination.
142 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
We may now make some remarks on features of this
imposing philosophy of the Middle Ages. Its realistic
character is obvious, the real being for Aquinas the
rational. He completed, in a Christian sense, the
work of Aristotle. He vindicated the superiority of
the contemplative life, as Aristotle had done, making
the contemplation of God the vision of His being or
essence at once highest good and highest truth. We
have in Aquinas a fusion of dialectics and mysticism.
To dialectics we owe his system, with its theory of
the superiority of intellect to will, and its organic con-
nection of dogmas. To mysticism were due alike its
base in love, and its apex in the beatific vision of
God. His thought had been affected by the mystical
agnosticism of Dionysius the Areopagite, on which he
made some notable advances. His mind had suffered
a strange cleavage whereby the Divine and the earthly
became parted into two quite separate worlds. This
dualism was due to an ecclesiastical supernaturalism
so strong as to prove able to lay the foundation of his
system on this dualistic basis.
The bold character of his ontology strikes the mind,
which finds the match of it only in Hegel. Less
direct, and less pantheistic, was his view of creation
as emanating from God, than that of his master,
Albertus Magnus, and so he represented the active
will of Deity as that which, as Thought, wills and
creates. The idea of order, as a ruling idea of the
Middle Ages, finds in him its most symmetrical and
proportionate expression. He develops it into a great
living system, connecting the most manifold and
THE PHILOSOPHY OF AQUINAS. 143
diverse interests, so that therefrom he, with systema-
tising genius, builds up an all-embracing world -view.
Christianity he brings into closer relation with science
and culture, as these then existed. For grace comes
to perfect nature, not to destroy it (gratia naturam non
tollit sed perficit). A leader of the Christendom of his
own time Aquinas was, making truth the quest of his
comprehensive mode of thinking. For the most part,
he made knowledge and theoretic reason precede will
and practical reason, and this rational element is a
very precious feature in Thomistic philosophy. The
being of God, the grounding of the world in Him, and
the soul's immortality, are to Aquinas truths already
discoverable by reason. The unity of the Divine
essence reason can receive, but it is otherwise with
the triplicity of the Divine Persons. Reason is to him
the precursor of faith, and with the independence of
the former he joins its subordination to the truth of
Christian revelation. Reason can at least overthrow
objections to such revelation, even though its truths
are above reason, and not established by means of it.
Perhaps one should not err in estimating the elevation
of his life, and his mild persistency in his immense
task, as greater than his elevation above his own time.
But it is certainly a tribute to his realising in himself
the highest developed thought of his time, that the
mighty Dante sits so closely to the thought of the
Angelic Doctor.
There can hardly be a doubt that the defensive
attitude of Aquinas towards Platonism bore him
further towards empiricism than would otherwise have
144 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
been the case. The influence of Aquinas on the sub-
sequent history of religious thought was undoubtedly
great, and has lived on into the dogmatic thought of
to-day even in the Protestant world. This was largely
the result of Melanchthon's having taken up posi-
tions in sympathy with the Aristotelianism of Aquinas.
Among subsequent thinkers influenced by Aquinas must
be reckoned Spinoza, whose ethical and metaphysical
philosophy owed much to ideas derived from the
Angelic Doctor. For the place of Aquinas in the
history of ethics is certainly not less important than
his significance for the history of religious thought.
In fine, one can think of no higher tribute to his
work than is found in the fact that the greatest need
of the world to-day is just that of an Aquinas to do
for its vast body of synthetic knowledge what the
Angelic Doctor did for that of the Middle Ages.
145
CHAPTER XII.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF WYCLIF.
IT is a sufficiently new and startling idea to most
minds, even among the cultured, that Wyclif also was
among the philosophers. He has not been so num-
bered. Our famous historians of philosophy Haure"au,
Windelband, Erdmann, Weber, Ueberweg, Tennemann,
Schwegler, Falckenberg, Hoffding have not discovered
Wyclif, one of the most famous schoolmen of his time.
Famous, indeed, as pure Logician, as Metaphysician, as
Philosopher, and as Theologian. Only too well has
the persecuting spirit succeeded in sinking his thought
into oblivion. But accepted modes of thought are not
always justified. No English name before Wyclif
brought forth a philosophy more bold or broad. It is
not quite creditable to English scholars that it has
been so much left to foreign scholars like Drs Lechler,
Boehringer, Buddensieg, Beer, and Loserth to do
Wyclif justice. To the painstaking thought and scholar-
ship of M. H. Dziewicki, of the University of Cracow,
Austria, in his editings of the Latin works of this
philosopher for the Wyclif Society, is greatly due the
possibility of our now reaching some true and helpful
understanding of Wyclif s system of thought.
146 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Let us then go back five centuries, and look into the
mind of this young Oxford philosopher. We find it
full of thoughts that made him the sworn foe of Nominal-
ism, which erstwhile had no less a name than William
Ockam as that of its doughty champion. The Logica
of Wyclif leaves aside argumentation and syllogisms,
vital as these appeared to the Scholastics, his desire to
counteract Nominalism, and give a realistic turn to
Logic, being the reason. Now, to these Nominalists
no general term is anything but an empty sound a
flatus vocis, as they termed it. That is to say, the
general term has no meaning apart from the singulars
to which it refers. The singulars, therefore, to which
this term refers, are the only real things in the world.
But it is, of course, much too bold a thing for Nominal-
ists to say that resemblances or likenesses between
persons or things are not denoted by these general
terms, and, so far, they have to step down from their
Nominalist pedestal. For it is evidently absurd to say
that only singulars do exist in the world. To some
extent every singular is its universal. This, while it
retains its own distinctive individuality or peculiarity.
Wyclif was fond of the mystery of the Trinity as an
illustration. What the Father is so Wyclif holds-
is the Son, and is the Holy Spirit. Yet the Father is
not the Son. Nor is the Spirit the Father. In such
ways Wyclif sought to strengthen his position to the
men of that time. He is Thomist in tendency, but his
Platonism is prone to carry him away from Aquinas.
Wyclif's thoughts and doctrines fantastic as many of
them must seem to the men of to-day are drawn out
THE PHILOSOPHY OF WYCLIF. 147
with great care, strength, and amazing logical exactitude ;
he is, in fact, a logician before all. But one with a
metaphysical creed, and who is determined to demon-
strate the existence of universals. His Realism was of
extreme character. Small wonder that the logicians of
to-day hold all real existence to be necessarily singular,
and yet reject Realism, the general notion not being, to
them, of any metaphysical significance. The conflict
between Nominalism and Realism was indeed the basal
one in mediaeval philosophy, and the influence; of
Aristotle, though he was by no means a Nominalist,
proved paramount in drawing off thought in a Nominalist
direction, which so well harmonised with the interest of
Science and exact knowledge of the concrete. For
there can hardly be a doubt that mediaeval thinking
showed a tendency to identify the real with that which
was merely abstract or logically existent, so that at last a
Nominalistic type of thought is seen to prevail. The
Realism of Wyclif took things to be as we know them
to be as they exist in our minds, and was thus fore-
runner of such Idealism as that of Berkeley and the
German Transcendentalists of recent times. What,
then, is the essential position involved in this philo-
sophical standpoint ? It is, as Dziewicki properly points
out, that to be is to be perceived ; that matter is nothing
apart from the knower ; that it exists as, and when, we
know it ; that the non-ego is posited by the ego, and
becomes one with it ; and that the external world is
known by us only as a modification of ourselves, said
world being, in fact, only such modification. Wyclif
shares Scholastic subservience to the categories of
148 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Aristotle, and we to-day, after all that has been said
both for and against the Aristotelian scheme, still wait
to know how these categoric principles determine
thought, the while they do not of necessity come into
consciousness.
The opponents of Wyclif, on the other hand, held
that things are not as we know them. Their position
thus anticipated, in important ways, the philosophy of
Locke, the materialism of the eighteenth century, and
the Empiricism and Positivism of to-day. The position
is possible to these representatives of thought in virtue
of the self-contradictions into which our knowledge at
many points falls. Now it must be said there is truth
both in the position of Wyclif and in that of his
adversaries. For while, between thoughts and things
things which give rise to our ideas and thoughts some
resemblance must exist, yet we may not go so far as to
postulate identity between things and our knowledge
of them. Wyclif s place is with those who stand for
knowledge in its basal character and worth. But any
proper definition of knowledge, or discussion of its
nature, there is not, for the day of epistemology was
not yet. We may not carry the conflict so far as did
he, but we can do no otherwise than admit that it
has been due to this " Doctor Evangelicus " and those
who have followed on his lines, that the foundations of
truth stand sure. We may very well grant to Realism
the truth of the types and classes, the genera and species,
of science, without denying some wholesome force to the
Nominalist contention that our conventional general
propositions stand in need of the corrective influence
THE PHILOSOPHY OF WYCLIF. 149
exerted by individual things. The Nominalist contention
as to the symbolic use of language we may admit, but
we deny the Nominalist insistence on a particular image
or a pictorial representation. The Conceptualist position
is certainly to be preferred, whereby general terms and
relations can be thought or conceived by mind, and
general terms do represent ideas in the mind and qualities
exterior to it. The need and place for all these forms of
thought Realistic, Nominalistic, and Conceptualist
were eventually disclosed when writers like Albertus
Magnus showed how universals are ante res in the Divine
or archetypal mind; are, at the same time, in rebus in
respect of their common nature ; and are, likewise, post
res as abstracted from things by the mind. Wyclif s
hyper-realism comes out in his treatment of the Incarna-
nation, wherein the Word is declared to have taken
on Himself, not the nature of a man, but the communis
humanitas, so that He became communis homo the man.
But theological implications we do not here pursue.
Wyclif has his own thoughts of God and of freedom.
We ought, according to Wyclif, rather to say that God
is, than that He was, before the world, eternity being,
with Him, anterior to the creative moment by nature,
not in respect of time. Wyclif reminds one of the
Lotzean conception of God, not as conceived in time,
but as the Founder of Time. To Him, as raised above
the succession of moments in virtue of His Eternal
Absoluteness, the beginning and the end are one.
Certainly we cannot make time the form of His life,
but must rather make Deity the seat of time. The meta-
physical tendency of Wyclif is again seen in his dis-
150 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
position to discuss questions like the cessation of non-
entity at Creation, and the Lordship of Deity anterior
to the Creation. To-day, it may be remarked, we are
still positing creative energy in Deity that annuls non-
being, and calls forth, as the Logos, creaturely existence
out of this sphere of non-being. In dealing with the
Infinite, we find Wyclif haunted with that quantitative
infinite, which has shown such wonderful persistence in
philosophy from Aristotle's day to our own. He thinks
that, analogically, all things, God and His creatures, are
identical. Omnia sunt idem in entitate, he affirms. His
realism goes far beyond the position of those who hold to
analogical identity, but regard such identity as not real
because analogical. God is to Wyclif identical with the
creature in respect that they are both being. But
Wyclif has his answer for those who think he identifies
God with the creature, and makes substance to be acci-
dent. His answer is, in effect, that that which is being
in the case of God cannot be logically concluded to be
the same with that which we call being in the creature.
God is to Wyclif the absolute Cause, and the mysterious
Source of all things. Wyclif found it hard to steer
clear of the dangers of Pantheistic tendency in the use
he makes of the conception of Transcendent Being, as
something common to God and the creature, and he
eludes the danger only by great logical adroitness and
argumentative subtlety.
In Wyclif's theory of Freedom the conception of
possibility bulked largely. So largely, that at last in
his peculiar use of it, as applied to God, he was driven
to a hard determinism, while still upholding Free-will
THE PHILOSOPHY OF WYCLIF. 151
as a dogma. In treating of the contingent, Wyclif
held all indetermination to have its ultimate cause in
God. Necessity and contingency are not absolutely
opposed, in the view of Wyclif. It is, however, vain
to try to evade the lines being sharply drawn between
these two. Wyclif's doctrines of Necessity were anathe-
matised by the Council of Constanz in 1415, for the
temper of that time was such at least as could find no
delight in bold paradox. Wyclif s thought, like that of
some thinkers still, seems to fail to realise the implica-
tions of our being free and finite agents in a moral
system of things. It does so because due scope is not
allowed to the free self-determination of man, the
causative agency of God so haunting it. No one who
thoroughly understands what rational free agency in-
volves would set our peccability, our liability to sin, in
such close relation to God's Absolute Causality as
Wyclif does, but would relate it more to our own free
choice or volition. Wyclif strongly adhered, in his
Trialogus, &c., to the Augustinian doctrine of pre-
destination, and tried to save freedom by saying that
God cannot bring us to merit or the opposite unless we
also will. Wyclif's strenuous opposition to Transub-
stantiation arose from his unwillingness to accept a
metaphysical theory implying that an accident could
exist without a subject.
Wyclif has his theory also touching God's relation to
evil. He thinks God cannot make man commit moral
evil, but, the sin taking place, He can make such fact of
evil to be good, for the sin is true, and therefore, in
Wyclif s view, good. A rather specious interpretation,
152 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
in our view, since the result or inference, as existing
good, is credited to Deity, to whom, however, the pre-
miss is not attached. Whatever exists must be good,
Wyclif thinks, so that evil practically ceases to be evil
and has become good a position which is not without
parallels in our own generation, though happily these are
few.
Wyclifs theories of matter, space, and time are full
of points of curious interest. He does not hold to the
ordinary Scholastic dualism of form and matter. Matter
and form are not absolute, separable realities, in his
view ; he postulates a sort of trinity matter, form, and
compound in which all are different, though in a sense
identical. He regards matter as eternal, and thinks
matter and form should be treated qualitatively, rather
than as quantitative parts. It is, of course, quite feasible
to conceive matter as eternal, and yet retain creation as
necessary to give it form. In the matter of time,
Wyclif holds it also to be eternal. Time is everywhere,
he thinks, and is eternal as the world. The word " is,"
with him, means eternity, being really significant of all
time. Time needs a before and an after, and these are
found only in movement, without which, thinks Wyclif,
there is no time. But movement would be constituted,
in his view, by the flight of imagination itself. Space is
real, but only as peopled with corporeal substance.
We have now rapidly surveyed the claims of Wyclif
always so rational, always so critical to be a great
philosopher, no less than a great religious reformer.
Little wonder if his merits, in the former respect, have
been so shamefully ignored, when even his work, in the
THE PHILOSOPHY OF WYCLIF. 153
latter aspect, has suffered so much neglect. There is no
disputing the fact that the significance of Wyclif for the
Reformation has not been truly comprehended or ade-
quately recognised by Protestant Theology. It is, there-
fore, less surprising that a like fate has befallen his claims
as a realistic philosopher. Yet as a philosopher he was,
in his day, second to none, says Vaughan, while Shirley
classed him with Duns Scotus, Ockam, and Bradwardine,
as one of the " four great schoolmen of the fourteenth
century." To do some justice to neglected names or
factors in history is always one of the noblest and most
pleasing of tasks, and we may, therefore, be sure that
fuller justice shall yet be meted out to one whom Milton
styled " the divine and admirable Wyclif." Admirable,
indeed, he is, alike as man, religionist, reformer, and
philosopher one who, in many ways, suffered the reward
of them that are in marked advance of their time.
I
154
CHAPTER XIII.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA.
ONLY certain features of the philosophy of the great
and admirable Spinoza, that more especially call for
criticism, will be noticed in this chapter. It is pecul-
iarly difficult to estimate Spinoza, or write of him at
all, because so much depends on the standpoint from
which we view him. It has been lately claimed for
Spinoza that he is much less metaphysician than has
been generally supposed, his metaphysic being really
incidental to his work as ethical philosopher. But, if
one chose to maintain the reverse view, it seems to
me there would be much to substantiate that position.
At any rate, there does not really seem to be any getting
away from the importance of the metaphysical setting
of Spinoza's ethical work.
^To Spinoza, with doctrine less rooted in Cartesian-
ism than has usually been supposed, God is Substance
the is of all things. God, as so-called causa sui, is
universal existence. But his God is not the being that
determines itself, only being that is without determin-
ation. That is to say, God, to Spinoza, is being itself
as fact, not as unproved postulate. God is ens abso-
lute infinitum being absolutely infinite. Substance is
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA. 155
the fundamental concept of the whole philosophy of
Spinoza, and all our knowledge is reduced by him to
the relations of causality. No other substance can
there be than this Immanent Causality: God is the
only self-subsistent, independent, and self-contained
Being: He holds all causality within Himself. But
Spinoza's substance is not opposed to spirit, since it
may be said to carry within it all the immanent energies
and functions of spirit. Yet the higher absolute of
spirit, not substance, he fails consciously to reach. The
oneness and infinitude of substance are unfalteringly
set forth in his consistent and complete Pantheism. 1
The world is to Spinoza but the necessary consequence
of the nature of God, and his affirmation of substance
is reached only by negation of the negative and unreal
things of finite existence. Substance is the sole and
efficient cause of all things.
The ethical philosophy of Spinoza expressly and en-
tirely excludes personality from its conception of God.
"God is an extended thing," extension being "an
attribute" of His. The Divine extension is infinite.
God, the extended, is indivisible. Anthropomorphism
Spinoza abhors, because every being would make the
Ultimate Reality after its own likeness. So moral and
personal qualities, powers of intellect and will, as we
know them, have no place in his idea of God. Yet,
alongside this, we have, strangely enough, the fact
that the totality of being in its essential and eternal
aspects has, for him, consciousness or thought. God
is yet, for him, in fact, consciousness per se, eternal, all-
1 Eth., i. 1-14.
156 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
embracing, self-sufficing. His consciousness may be
cognised by our reason. But it is, to Spinoza, not
analogous to our own consciousness, which is but a
" mode," and, as such, finite, dependent, transitory.
Extension and thought or consciousness disparate
attributes by which the one substance is known to us
are rated by Spinoza metaphysically higher than
finite things, which are but modes, while the former
are the attributes. These two Divine attributes, ex-
tension and thought, are harmonised in the unity of
the substance which they reveal ; they are also parallel
in their development. Things exist, for him, only in
God as the modes of His reality. God or substance
the ens infinitum is, to Spinoza, essentially active
(cogitans), being, in fact, activity itself. In the fact
that Spinoza's conception is thus dynamic, rather than
static, he appears the more unsatisfactory in his results.
In ascribing Divine power and infinite intellect (intel-
lectus infinitus) to Deity, Spinoza makes his God as un-
intelligible as possible to us by declaring will and intellect
in Him to be other than known to us. 1 On the side
of thought, God is ens absolute indeterminatum absolutely
indeterminate thought. Yet he can speak of God loving
Himself "with infinite intellectual love." 2 Spinoza
says his not ascribing qualities like will and reason, in
the sense in which we know them, to Deity, is, that
the Divine may not be confused with human nature.
There is thus, to Spinoza, nothing outside God as sub-
stance, and all valid transference of human qualities,
like reason and will, to God is wholly done away.
l tk.,i. 31. 2 lbid., v. 35.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA. 157
From all which it is evident that God is, in some sense,
mind. But God as Infinite Personality Spinoza does
not know. His positing mind or thought (cogitatio)
for God shows how hard it is to get away from postu-
lating powers in God that are characteristic of man.
The same is true of the Infinite love, of which man's
love is part. His psychology, however, is deductive;
the science of the soul is deduced from the nature of
God, rather than sought by internal observation. All
science is to him rational and deductive. Say, if you
will, that Spinoza's substance is not being in abstracto,
but an essence, which as ens entium persists behind
thought and extension. The fact remains that his
whole ascription of metaphysical attributes to this
essence suffers from the lack of essential moral quali-
ties. God can have neither love nor aversion. 1 Spinoza
makes so much of the Divinity without Whom nothing
can be or be thought that he cannot do justly by us,
or the relative manifestations of the Divine. This,
although the modes are supposed to be infinite as the
attributes. Not but what there is an imposing intel-
lectual grandeur in those conceptions of Divinity we
have been considering, but we have still to inquire as
to their intellectual consistency. Of their grandeur
there is no doubt, for is not He the universal conscious-
ness or true existence, with substance in eternity and
modes in time ? But as to consistency ? How does
the changeless and indeterminate background of sub-
stance or identical unitary Being explain or comport
with the changeful modes and transient qualities of the
1 Eth., v. 17.
158 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
world we see? The unity of the world its absolute
unity may be a fine phrase to conjure with, but we
want a unity that will explicate the relation of the
finite elements to the whole in which they stand, and
be more than merely verbal. Of course, Spinoza gets
beyond such an abstract unity in the concrete whole
gained by his Deus sive natura, when he boldly identifies
God and Nature. This monistic principle takes his
idealism beyond the dualism then current. He had
started out from Cartesian basis, and directed his en-
deavour towards reconciling the oppositions of ideal
thought and real being, of materia cogitans and extensa,
at the immense cost of postulating a single substance !
His Platonising power exalted uncreated substance to
the rank of absolute being, of which matter and mind,
as relative, were but attributes through which it is
manifested. But what we miss is a rational grounding of
the attributes and modes in the nature of his absolute.
God was the only " free cause," the All-Real, making
a Whole of Nature, in which He was necessarily ex-
pressed. 1 But the ontologic unity of Spinoza cannot
be taken as satisfactory, with its static conditions or
relations, and its absorption of the relative and individ-
ual. His solution lends itself too easily to a materialistic
interpretation, for if matter and spirit be run into one
substance, it is only too easy to make spirit but a
quality of matter. A God is not so easily got out of
the Spinozan substance, for God and the world are
concepts that cannot be logically harmonised in such
fashion. Of course, it would be to feed ourselves on a
l Eth., i. Def. 7.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA. 159
delusion to suppose we had reached a real unity when
we had made God, or substance, simply the sum of
finite manifestations. But the harmonisation of the
attributes (attributa) and modes (modi) with the one only
substance (substantia) is only effected by Spinoza by the
peculiar and unexpected fashion in which he claims
reality for these different ways in which substance
necessarily expresses God. The unity of his Absolute
of infinite qualitative content is curiously drawn from
an aggregate of heterogeneous realities, each infinite in
kind. One cannot choose but admire, however, the
masterliness of his statement that God is a Being,
" each one " of Whose attributes exhibits or " expresses
eternal and infinite essence " or nature. 1 Spinoza is
untroubled as to consistency, in holding to the worth
of the finite world and the modes, the absolute sub-
stance Deus sive substantia notwithstanding, for, in
Spinoza's view, these changeful aspects do not import
unreality. They could not be unreal to him, seeing
they are viewed as necessary. And yet we are obliged
to hold he has really dissolved them, without meaning
to do so, in the ultimate and abstract conception of
being being absolutely indeterminate (non determinate^
from which no way appears back to the concrete.
There is a distinct lack of formative principle or nexus*
How we are to get back from the eternal and infinite
to the finite modes does not at all appear. The
mechanical is left by Spinoza's rationalism, whose ideal
of knowledge is geometry, in undisputed possession of
the field. Things are in God, and stay there. 2 He is
1 Eth.,1 Def. 6. 2 Ibid v i. 18.
160 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
their immanent, but not their transitive cause (causa
immanens, non vero transiens). 1 And, while so remain-
ing in God, things are yet supposed to proceed from
Him a confused representation. All knowledge, to
Spinoza, involves the knowledge of God. His onto-
logical position aimed at establishing the s//-existence
and eternity of Nature, rather than the existence of
God. Individual or finite things are nothing by them-
selves, exist only in God, being but modi of the infinite
substance. No proper relation of the Divine causality
to them is shown. Spinoza's grounding cosmical exist-
ence in the nature of Deity is indefensible; in his
theory of extreme ethical necessitation he appears to
be without notion of self-conscious volition in Deity;
he does not see that this would not yet make such
volitional action matter of absolute contingency or in-
difference to Deity. If God is to him the only free
Cause, that does not mean that God has freedom in
the free-will sense, for God has no more will than He
has understanding. These both belong to the world
or the natura naturata. Again, Spinoza has no hold on
the points of contact between the Divine intelligence
and the human, and so he makes an absurd and irrational
break between them. Nor is it apparent how so vari-
able and transient a mode as the human spirit can so
wondrously know the infinite as did Spinoza. But the
important thing, from an ethical point of view, is, that
the universe given us by Spinoza, with his immanent
cause or monistic principle, is, as yet, perfectly non-
moral in character, a metaphysical essence in tremen-
1 Eth., i. 1 8 and i. 29, Schol.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA. l6l
dous need of the infusion of ethical quality. Can any
ethical redemption be found for it by Spinoza ? Ethical
distinction is found by him in the essential nature of
things, whereby the good stands in essence distinguished
from the bad a purely axiomatic affair to the intellect-
ualistic morals of our geometrical philosopher. One
cannot choose but admire Spinoza's deep perception
of the metaphysical basis of ethics, for the severance
of ethics from metaphysics, so common in British and
American thought, cannot hope to win lasting respect ;
but one feels the terrible void in Spinoza's ethics created
by the absence of living personal centres human and
divine of ethical quality, in which living sources, ethical
thought, feeling, and purpose reside. Nothing, how-
ever, is wanting to the scientific rigour with which
Spinoza works out 1 his intellectualistic scheme of
morals, whereby man is at length led up, in the blessed-
ness of his active emotions, to the pure impulse of
knowledge or the ancient Secopua. Perhaps there is
nothing finer in Spinoza than his admirable insistence
on our living the universal life of reason as our
highest good our seeking before all "the intel-
lectual love of God," amid the illusions of sense
and things finite. Spinoza transfers his own sublime
thirst for knowledge to the race, finds the essence of
man's soul in reason, and places the essence of reason in
thought. Evil is to him that which hinders or prevents
the perfecting of the soul in reason. But the perfection
of Spinoza is a purely quantitative thing a defect from
which Kant should bring deliverance. Notwithstanding
1 Eth., iii. iv. and v.
L
162 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
the fact that all existence appears to the reason of
Spinoza " under the form of eternity," he is yet able to
put forward an ethic, and duties are not allowed to dis-
appear as we might have thought. There is still to be
striving after what Spinoza calls perfection. For him
the first and only foundation for virtue is knowledge. 1
Certitude is, to him, found in clear ideas, which " are
as necessarily true as the ideas of God." To his resolu-
tion of ethical activity into cognitive activity we shall
return later. Enough now to remark that our growing
knowledge or progressive virtue ceases to wear its grad-
ual character when he comes to speak of our sharing
in " the intellectual love of God," for God and we are
become strangely one in the infinite love common to
Him and to us. Clearly, though psychological acuteness
is in the main characteristic of Spinoza, psychological
consistency has here been to him no jewel.
Spinoza's ethical teachings on immortality 2 must
always remain at a distance from men's real apprehen-
sion, the temporal relation having no place in it, and the
personal aspect of it being so indistinct. All conscious-
ness of the finite self, as such, has in fact vanished. The
persistence of reason, however, he maintains, but it is an
immortality speculative and impersonal. Sentimus experi-
murque nos ceternos esse; and we are eternal here in life,
and not merely after death. This eternity of mind means
timelessness. No wonder, therefore, " a free man thinks
of nothing so little as of death, his wisdom is a medita-
tion not of death, but qf life." 3 For the "intellectual love
1 Eth., iv. 22. 2 Ibid., v. 3 Ibid., iv. 67.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA. 163
of God" can never perish, save only "in so far as it
is related to the body."
The lack of moral quality, to which we have adverted,
is seen in Spinoza's treatment of evil. It cannot, of
course, be denied as within the natura naturata, but is
explained as mere illusion, so little have its moral quali-
ties and relations been appreciated. Our philosopher
does not shrink from the rather barefaced acknowledg-
ment of the consequence of his moral attitude "no
action considered in itself alone is either good or evil." l
He means they are, according to his system, necessary,
and neither good nor bad. This is certainly to sit loosely
enough to moral distinctions of any thoroughgoing char-
acter, but is not surprising in one whose ethic exists or
has place at all only in virtue of what we may call an
interesting inconsistency. " Under the form of eternity,"
we should see him dissipate for us all moral duties and
judgments of good and evil, which " rest " only " on
comparison." His intellectualistic morals may conduct
us to eo>pta, with its calm and passionless bliss, but they
belong not to the world of real life and imperative ethical
endeavour. His whole position 2 is one which makes the
good something merely relative to every man, and to
every man's desire. Doubtless he advances to the notion
of a true or highest good for the individual man, and for
his advantage taken in whole, but such supreme good is
still relative to the individual. And Spinoza believes
that man does entirely according to his knowledge.
What he knows, that he does so active, in his view, is
knowledge or reason. The pale intellectual cast of the
1 Eth., iv. 59. 2 See Part iv. of the Ethics.
164 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
good, with him, is seen in the fact that it is but a modus
cogitandi an act of judgment. A bad action he views as
only a wrong judgment, and an act is bad, by compari-
son, only because of its defect or want of being. Man's
evil is, in his view, due to want of knowledge man's
knowledge of what makes for his own welfare ; and to
think one's own weal is, to his mind, to will or desire it.
But in so making ethics a mere accompaniment and
consequent of knowledge, Spinoza is, in our view, doing
a most unwarrantable and defective thing. Life is
assuredly more than thought or knowledge, and reality
requires more than to satisfy the demands of formal
reason. We can by no means consent to resolve ethics
into a pale residuum of the life of contemplative reason,
for man's life is shot through with ethical conflicts and
strivings, and the world is entangled in this warfare.
Spinoza seems to be haunted by the delusion of intellect-
ualism one still current that knowledge is here power,
whereas it is simply a condition of power. No impulses
of pure knowledge will suffice for the overcoming of the
passions, however impressively the knowledge be set
forth. Knowledge avails only as yoked to the strength
of will or the ethical force of character, which is the
dominant factor in the process of ethical triumph. This
undue exaltation of knowledge gives an air of abstract-
ness and artificiality to Spinoza's whole ethical treatment,
which is by no means congruent with reality as embodied
in ethical life and conflict.
And so as to the passions. Spinoza's analysis of the
phenomena of feeling and passion is very powerful and
complete. He derives all the passions from desire. The
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA. 165
whole conception of Spinoza with what I may call its
amazing actualism is coloured by his view of man as
so rooted in nature that "a man is necessarily always
subject to passions," and cannot free himself from
the domination of nature. Surely thin is the moral
idealism in such a system, with its identification of the
possible with the actual. There is no real freedom here ;
morality is product of the actual ; and knowledge pales
its ineffectual fires before the gusts and swayings of
passion. 'Tis undisguised fact that only in and through
God are evil actions here possible. But to Spinoza evil
simply did not exist for God, but was mere ens rationis.
What a strange reversal of all experience that Spinoza
holds, not that men will not seek or do the good they
know, but that the trouble springs solely from the fact
that they do not know their true good. The truth is,
Spinoza's ethical treatment is physical rather than moral
a sufficiently serious blemish. Spinoza's doctrine of
the self and its love is neither a very congruous nor a
very true one. He gives no answer to the inquiry, how
the God, Who is the immanent centre and source of all
things, is to be harmonised with a finite nature, which is
its own centre. His whole thought is shrouded in an
atmosphere of universal determinism, and his "supremely
perfect Being " turns out to be no more than the mechan-
ical Cause of nature taken as impersonal and unethical.
In the same way, he fails to show how the finite mind, at
one time but an evanescent mode of the infinite sub-
stance, has, at another time, become no illusory exist-
ence, but a nature laden with an individuality that is
indestructible, and destined for blessedness and perfec-
166 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
tion in God. Spinoza's ethic is really one of pure self-
assertion and self-seeking, and is marked by a strange
incapacity to do justice to the negative elements of
self-denial and self-sacrifice. 1 He has no understanding
of the development of the higher life of spirit through
conflict with the lower life of flesh, but, for aught that
appears, is anti-ascetic throughout. Happiness is, for
him, found in the life that is rational and free found
in virtue, to which happiness need not be sacrificed.
" Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue
itself."
No more can we admit his doctrine of love, so often
lauded as lofty and disinterested, to be the satisfactory
thing it appears. Says Spinoza " He who loves God
must not endeavour to have God love him in return." '
It is all very well to say that he means " the impure
element vanishes from self-seeking when the self we seek
is that whose essence is reason and the knowledge and
love of God," and that God is so loved because " the
taint of subjectivity is so absolutely obliterated." The
fact remains that the words imply more and other than
this. They imply an extreme of the very self-sufficiency
which is supposed to have vanished. That man is so
sufficient unto himself as not to need the gracious love of
God, whereby his blessedness and perfection shall be
attained, is surely far from having removed " the stigma
of selfishness." An altruism so perfect and entire seems
but a new form of selfishness, so supreme in its choice of
self that it hath no need even of God or His love. If it is
God that is loved, it appears absurd to affect indifference
1 Eth. t iii. 6, 7 ; Hi. 9 ; iv. 22. 2 Ibid., v. 19.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA. 167
to His return of love, since, in loving Him, it is impos-
sible not to be conscious that He, the All-Good, does and
must love us. It is thus strange and really egoistic, that
our love must wear such guise of disinterestedness as to
care not whether the God we love has any appreciation
of the outgoings of our virtuous affection. Such indiffer-
ence is compatible with our love to God only if and when
the God we love is an abstract ideal or an impersonal
abstraction. In that event, the God we love can do so
little for us that we can well afford to expect no recipro-
cating love, the object being incapable of emotion. And
such, indeed, is Spinoza's God, one without affections,
neither loving nor hating, and so without power of return.
But, in truth, Spinoza's saying is pathological, sympto-
matic of the condition of one who has made fatal mistake
in missing the personality of God. His position draws
intelligibility from the circumstance that, in his view,
God, the Absolute, loves no one, and so to desire that
God love us would be to desire that God be no more
Himself in fact, inconsistent. It is an intellectual love,
we are told, without blindness and without passion a
faint reflection of the love with which God loves Himself.
But we may ask What vitality belongs to it ? Is it free
from self-deception ? Is it void of the peril of hypocrisy?
The geometrical way, consummately perfect in its kind,
can never satisfyingly deal with vital terms and interests.
Love's relations must be personalised at both ends of the
scale of being human and Divine. Failure to see this
marks Spinoza's ethical shortcoming. The only virtue
or merit of the saying lies in its attestation to Spinoza's
passionate devotion to truth as truth to reality as it is,
168 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
whatever aspect it may wear. Philosophically, however, the
disregard of the finite individuality of the subject, which
his words imply, is inconsistent with the delight in pure
self-complacency which he inculcates. " The mind's
intellectual love of God," says Spinoza, " is the very love
wherewith God loves Himself, not in so far as He is
infinite, but in so far as He can be expressed by the
essence of the human mind, considered under the form of
eternity ; that is, the mind's intellectual love of God is
part of the infinite love wherewith God loves Himself." l
When the positive element or character of the finite is so
abstracted, then does finite existence actually vanish, and
God really becomes all in all. Such is the result of his
identification of God and man. The reality of the finite,
and the worth of experience, are neither adequately re-
garded nor explained by Spinoza, whether we take the
metaphysical or the ethical parts of his treatment.
It seems to me vain to attempt to palliate what Hegel
called the " acosmism " of Spinoza, his making the
Absolute " only rigid substance, not yet Spirit," or at
least to claim justice in Spinoza to the reality of the
finite. To say that for Spinoza there is no absolute
dualism between substance and mode, between real and
phenomenal ; to urge that the reality of the individual is
guaranteed in the relativity of the mode, because sub-
stance or God means with Spinoza existence itself, and
the individual cannot fall outside but must be included
within such existence or being ; this is to make insist-
ences so hopelessly dominated by the idea of a merely
quantitative whole or still undifferentiated unity 2 as to
1 Eth., v. 36. 2 Ibid., i. 15, 16, 25, 29.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA. 169
show that there is yet no real appreciation of the problem
of the reality of the finite here in question. Reality may,
no doubt, be spoken of as substance or its modes, but the
modes have little enough in common with primary sub-
stance. Hence the connection between finite and infinite
must remain very loose. The absence of intrinsic worth
or reality in the Spinozan finite is the real objection, and
it abides. The form in which his finite as a wretchedly
limited and necessary manifestation or expression of
substance exists, cannot be made satisfactory. Indeed,
it was by the negation of all that is finite that Spinoza
rose to his conception of substance, which absolute sub-
stance yet exists as manifested in an infinity of attributes
and modes.
It is interesting to note how great has been Spinoza's
influence on subsequent speculation. One may regard
this as the more surprising, considering his confused
methods and unclear modes of speech. His influence on
Goethe, Hegel, and Schleiermacher is undoubted, and
Schelling reproduced no small part of Spinoza. If we
note these as amongst the many influences that have
gone forth from Spinoza, we may with equal interest
recall of how many influences he in his turn was the
result not merely, or even chiefly, of Cartesianism, but
also of the later Schoolmen, of mediaeval Jewish Platon-
ists and Aristotelians, of Giordano Bruno, and, on his
ethical side, of the Stoics. In fact, there are not wanting
those who rank him with the Stoics and Epictetus, and
treat his work as only so much moral theology. Cer-
tainly, it is more than doubtful if he remained as true, in
his attempts to improve on Descartes, to Idealism as
I/O STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
were Geulincx and Malebranche. He is too prone to
vacillate between phenomenalism and realism, and even
comes near being too well content with an atheistic
monism. Enormous energy and, on the whole, splendid
consistency of thought mark the development of his
system, viewed from his own standpoint, and there is an
engaging fearlessness in disclosing his final convictions.
One hardly needs to remark the fine scientific rigour and
security with which his thought moves towards the
recognition and elucidation of fact, without play of sub-
jective fancy. There is no hesitation, no vacillation, in
his laying bare the modern world. A spiritual and divine
world it is, to his great credit be it said a world of
science, and not merely of scholastic conceptions albeit
thought or knowledge does not give to us, as it gave to
him, the whole of ethics and of the wisdom of life. For
his fine pedagogic influence we are grateful to Spinoza,
although a critical study leaves him no more to us than
a schoolmaster to bring us to some better form of ideal-
ism than his own. /
I/I
CHAPTER XIV.
LESSING'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
LESSING is a figure of quite surpassing interest, if it
were only for the fact that in him that great modern
outgrowth known as German literature took its rise.
He laid the foundations of Germany's intellectual life,
freeing its culture from the fetters of theology. But
our interest here centres in Lessing as one who may
be fairly regarded as, in some sense, the founder of
Philosophy of Religion in modern times. No doubt
the natural theology of his age still held him in some
ways, but he first applied the notion of a progressive
historical development to the interpretation of positive
religions. The evolutional character of religion, the
idea of revelation as a progressive training of the
human race, and the conception of Christianity as but
marking one great stage in the Divine education of
mankind, such was Lessing's discovery. No doubt his
originality has been often exaggerated, many of his
ideas having been anticipated by amongst others
Origen, Nicholas of Cusa, and Leibniz. From Leibniz
he learned the notion of development, which he so
applied in the historic sphere as to deepen the view
of history. Spinoza he deeply studied, not, however,
STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
attaching himself strictly to his system. But never
before Lessing had this great progressive idea of the
Divine education of the race been advanced with such
strength of thought and charm of style. Much indeed
it was to have it in days when men were driven to
Deism for lack of any more spiritual theology. The
conception of Lessing is, that in God's great school-
book of Time, each of the historic religions is a lesson
set for humanity's learning. This involves the non-
finality of any one of them. Lessing not only held
that " what we call education in the individual is
revelation in the race," but, after working out his
thesis that "education is revelation" and "revelation
education," asks whether there is not for this purpose
eternity before us (" 1st nicht die ganze Ewigkeit
mein ? ")
Lessing works out his conception with a tendency too
intellectual ; his thought is too circumscribed, moving
within Judaism and Christianity ; what he aimed at is
still our need, but on more comprehensive range. In
his Nathan the Wise Lessing really seeks to inveigh
against the bigoted adherence to a dominant religion,
and against religious creed without correspondent life,
going so far even as to identify religion with morality.
This too exclusive stress on morality, to the neglect of
truly religious world -view, is a defect or one-sidedness
found not only in Lessing, but also in Kant and the
prevailing thought of the time. But his aim, no doubt,
was to insist on right doing for its own sake, as a
counteractive to undue theological insistence on the
doctrine of reward and punishment. Lessing's accept-
LESSING'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 173
ance of revelation yet left him in the end like his age
with only natural religion, for religion would become
independent of even the New Testament. The historic
religions would really become but forms of the one
universal religion of humanity. In all this historic
development, the ego or individual factor is, to
Lessing, pure mind, and not nature, as might be
wrongly supposed.
Religion is to Lessing always a thing anterior to its
records, and it is this inner truth of religion which
alone gives worth to its records or traditions. To dis-
tinguish the form from the spirit, and to discriminate
between essential and non-essential such was Lessing's
theological aim. And this is not always easy : he makes
Nathan say
" To find the first true ring,
It was as great a puzzle as for us
To find the one true faith."
The complete sincerity and independence of Lessing
kept him from ever accepting truth on mere authority,
and without the sanction of his whole nature. It is
this strength of his moral nature which saves the clear
reflective work of Lessing from coldness. Hence he
is never a mere self-satisfied destroyer, but remains
a spirit essentially religious and reverent, and keenly
alive to the sway of cosmopolitan reason. He carries
the Reformational spirit of free inquiry to its legiti-
mate influence on literature, philosophy, and religious
criticism.
Not against Christianity itself, of course, but only
against prevailing types of Lutheran orthodoxy, were
174 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
the arrows of Lessing's criticism directed. He had a
complete triumph over Goetze and others, and suffered
in prestige perhaps more in the house of his friends,
when Nicolai, head of the so-called Party of Enlighten-
ment (Aufkldrung), allowed the bright religion of reason
to grow into a dull rationalism. Lessing's letters on
Goetze and Bibliolatry do not, however, make pleasant
reading, the current of controversial feeling is so strongly
present in them. Amid the controversial elements occur
clear and characteristic insistences like the following :
the letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not re-
ligion ; there was religion before there was a Bible, and
Christianity before evangelists and apostles had written ;
the whole truth of the Christian religion cannot possibly
depend upon these writings; if they were lost, the re-
ligion taught by them might still subsist ; the scriptural
traditions are to be explained from the internal truth of
religion. Such were Lessing's insistences, poured forth
from a spirit scornful of those defences of the faith
which he felt were enough to betray any cause.
With rare and noble courage Lessing published the
Fragments of Reimarus, in scorn of consequence. In
them what may be called the esoteric doctrines of that
prodigy of learning, Reimarus, were set forth, in vin-
dication of the sacredness of reason, and the supremacy
of conscience, as against the pretensions of the ortho-
doxy of the time. As for Lessing himself, he was more
critic than systematic philosopher and theologian, de-
vising more than doing, and discovering weak positions
more than defending strong ones. That is to say, he
suggests and inspires more than he directly or system-
LESSING'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 175
atically teaches. His work is unified by the idea of
progressive humanity, by his keen interest in truth, and
by his unfailing spiritual aim. The germinant and posi-
tive elements of his teaching have made his influence
on subsequent thought great, as witness Hegel, Goethe,
Heine, and many others. Hardly any of his passages
has aroused more interest than that which, occurring
in one of his controversial writings in 1778, contains
the declaration that, if God offered him truth in the
one hand, and in the other nothing but the ever-active
impulse for truth, Lessing would choose to wander in
error in order to win truth, rather than possess and
enjoy it. However much it may have been praised,
or however much it may attract and fascinate one,
it is impossible to give it approval in any unqualified
way.
For, what is truth that the honest seeker after it
should be so much afraid of its possession ? Why not
be more careful to maintain the honesty and sincerity
implied in our professed search for its acquirement ?
What but the possession of the truth gives to life its
peerless value, objective truth being there to be sought ?
Life is surely possession as well as progression : it can
be no mere seeking and becoming, with never a find-
ing and being something positive and definite : it is a
progress in, and not merely towards, the truth. Life is
attainment as well as advancement, and the advance-
ment lies through attainment. Besides, we need not
fear that the truth will be so easily possessed, that
our possession of it will be so easily completed. Our
possession of it is never complete and once for all.
STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Lessing needlessly exaggerates a great truth, namely,
that the truth does not exist for us till we learn to
love and believe it. It should be noted that Male-
branche and Richter both uttered similar sentiments
to Lessing, so impressed, apparently, were they with
the fact that true being is dynamic rather than static.
Lessing had no love for such orthodox conceptions
of Deity as that of an extra-mundane, personal Cause
of the world, and confessed he knew only w /cal
irav, not thereby, however, committing himself to
thoroughgoing Spinozism. Lessing held to the com-
plete rationality of Revelation, which goes not beyond
reason as such. He held that the very nature of a
Revelation calls for a certain submission of reason, but
reason therein only expresses a just conviction of its
own limitations. Reason is to Lessing a thing of be-
coming, and the form of Revelation is necessary to it
as the integument of the truths of reason. The fact
that it contains truth transcending our reason is to
Lessing an argument in its favour not an objection.
" What would it be if it revealed nothing ? " Gradual
and progressive must revelation be, assuming some ex-
ternal and authoritative form, but not to be identified
with any of its positive forms. Eternal truths, in-
dependent of historical evidence, form the sum of
religion to Lessing. It will be seen how little Lessing
attempts account of the manner, and even possibility,
of Revelation. Even the Christian religion was for
him destined to pass like the Jewish, and indeed
Lessing sits lightly to all positive religions.
It seems a somewhat absurdly large claim Lessing
LESSINGS PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 177
makes for human development, when, introductory to his
Education of the Human Race, he asks: "Why will we
not rather see in all the positive religions nothing but
the order of march in which the human understanding
in every place could solely and alone develop itself,
and is still to develop itself further, than either smile
or be angry at any one of them ? " For he tends to
find in the nature and development of man the founda-
tion of the positive religions. His also is the idea that
revelation makes known, much earlier, truths that would
later be discovered by developed reason, but this idea
is not new, being, in fact, derived from the Fathers
and Schoolmen ; only, it is given stronger and more
pronounced form by Lessing. One must hold it for a
somewhat absurd and mistaken idea, for truths dis-
coverable by man's own thinking could clearly be no
substitute for the historical action of God. Such a
mode of thinking was made possible by the tendency
to put truth or doctrine as thought by men in the
place of God's historic self-revealings. Such a fore-
shortening of human development might be no ad-
vantage, but very much the reverse; and, in any case,
truths which man could himself have ultimately found
without going beyond the terms of nature have no
real claim to be called Revelation. We must account
it as of the essence of Revelation that it deals with
the secret things not discoverable by man that be-
long to God, and relate to Him.
But to Lessing, Revelation had no such intrinsic
value, and carried with it no such absolute necessity:
it could be dropped whenever it had served its edu-
M
178 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
cative purpose. In his view, that positive religion was
best which had in it the least number of additions to
natural religion, Lessing, like Kant, being infected too
much with the abstract dualism of "positive" and
" natural " so characteristic of the philosophy of the
Enlightenment. History was to him but the record of
"Enlightenment." But the Enlightenment (^4 ufkldrung)
was marked by an incapacity for understanding the real
significance of history, and in the way he used the
opposition between eternal truths of reason and acci-
dental truths of history Lessing himself cannot be
said to have transcended this incapacity. Only later
was this opposition to receive clearer marking off and
treatment.
The theory of the education of the race, as put forward
by Lessing, has, no doubt, been thrown into the shade by
the theory of evolution, with which, however, it may be
said to be in substantial agreement. Lessing's theory
had the virtue to be historical, while the evolution theory
has not always the merit of making a satisfactory thing
of the facts connected with degeneracy. Lessing's con-
ception of education with its fatherly character of God,
its great educational purposes for the race, and its
eternity to work in was indeed a great one, teaching
how that which is in part is being continually done away,
that that which is perfect may come. It certainly gave
a new clue to the understanding alike of Revelation and
Inspiration, and the strongly-marked ethical character of
the whole process in each of its three great stages or
periods deserves especial notice.
Lessing laid enormous stress on Individuality, and
LESSING'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 179
makes it a kind of moral basis for man's life that every
one should act in the direction of his individual perfec-
tion. But, while standing thus, in intuitive fashion,
for transcendent Individualism, Lessing, no more than
Herder, succeeded in giving it a speculative grounding.
But the endless life for this perfection was the strange
one of transmigration, for the Platonic teachings about
transmigrations of the soul seem to have been quite
accepted by Lessing. The position of Lessing as to
man's personality was expressly this, " If I am, God is
also ; He may be separated from me, but not I from
Him." Probably Lessing did not feel how true is the
converse also, that if God is not lacks personality I
am not, and cannot pretend to personality. The immor-
tality of the soul like the unity of God was a truth, in
Lessing's view, capable of demonstration. But as to
immortality, he thinks we can dispense with the New
Testament, just as, in the doctrine of the unity of God,
he thinks we can dispense with the Old.
Lessing held with a strange tenacity to Determinism,
loving necessity, it is often said, almost as dearly as did
Spinoza. And he volunteered what must seem to us
the rather astonishing opinion that "determinism has
nothing to fear from the side of morals." But perhaps
it were wiser not to take his isolated sayings too seriously.
A kind of ideal Monism is what we find in Lessing, in
whom thought is more spiritualised than in Spinoza,
chiefly through the individualistic teaching of Leibniz.
If Lessing's earlier leanings were towards Deism, it seems
as though his later experiences tended to Pantheism.
Pantheist, however, he is not, albeit Spinoza so deeply
180 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
influences him, for that influence is more on the historico-
critical side than on the philosophical. His Deity was
not without supernatural cast, although set also in natural
relations ; and the free and conscious Spirit, Who to him
represented Eternal Providence, was able to determine
His own ends. Development, as Lessing expounds it,
need not, therefore, exclude Providence. Lessing even
deals, in speculative fashion, with the doctrine of the
Trinity, after the examples of Augustine, Aquinas, and
Melanchthon, offering what to him appears a philoso-
phical equivalent. Lessing understands the Trinity in
the sense of immanent distinctions. His own perfec-
tions are conceived by Deity in twofold fashion : both
as single, and as united in Himself as their sum. God's
thinking means creation, His ideas are actualities, and
His creation flows from His conceiving His perfections
singly. When He conceives them as united, then
creates He the Son of God, His own eternal image ;
and then becomes the Holy Spirit, the bond between
Father and Son.
On what are known as Mediational aspects of truth,
Lessing has little to say, his views being predominantly
ethical. Indeed, he is rather meagre in what he has to
say of the Person of Christ in His whole historic relations,
although he does deal with the Satisfaction of Christ and
Original Sin. On the Resurrection of our Lord, Lessing
has something to say. One of the Fragments of Reim-
arus published by him attacks the resurrection history,
and Lessing agrees so far that the Gospel accounts can-
not be rid of contradictions. But he does not on that
account treat the resurrection as unhistorical. "Who,"
LESSING'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 181
he asks, " has ever ventured to draw the same inference
in profane history? If Livy, Polybius, Dionysius, and
Tacitus relate the very same event, it may be the very
same battle, the very same siege, each one differing so
much in the details that those of the one completely give
the lie to those of the other, has any one for that reason
ever denied the event itself in which they agree ? " Ad-
mitting thus the fact, Lessing does not yet seem to have
seen its bearing upon religious experience or theological
truth. The circumstance is, no doubt, interesting also
as showing that Lessing did not always accept the con-
clusions of Reimarus, the publication of whose Fragments
he yet thought would serve the interests of investigation
and inquiry into truth. If less subtle, Lessing was cer-
tainly more candid than Baur in this matter. It was a
pity that Lessing had not more to say on these historic
relations of Christ, for then he might have had oppor-
tunity to cast light over the "foul broad ditch," as he
was pleased to term it, of the distinction between acci-
dental truths of history and the necessary truths of
reason. He might even have seen in Christ's life, not
an accident of history, but a deliberately purposed embodi-
ment of truth for all time might, in fact, have seen
history become religion in Him. Lessing as many,
with less excuse, have done after him shows a strange
lack of perception in respect of the stability and enrich-
ment that accrue to the idea from the historic fact. On
the other hand, it is an equal error when they who cling
to historic fact are so wedded to it as to lose sense of the
truth that it is never more than symbol, representative of
the process or idea.
182 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Eternal recompenses, promised in the New Testament
as rewards of virtue, are to Lessing only means of educa-
tion, destined to gradual disuse ; virtue will at last in
the stage of purity of heart be loved for its own sake,
and practised for no mere heavenly rewards. That is
the time to which Lessing looks forward, when, in the
invisible march of Eternal Providence, the " Christianity
of reason " shall have come, and men will do the good
because it is the good. How much that was both needful
and wholesome in these insistences needs no pointing
out, whether one agrees with Lessing in the entirety of
his teachings or not. The insight and pregnancy of
the expression which Lessing has, in such ways of looking
out upon the future, given to his religious conviction
have been very expressly noted by Zeller. 1
The analytic clearness of Lessing's writings has been
already noticed, but this is not to say that his work was
always marked by self-consistency. It was much that
his deep soul, and clear, comprehensive intellect, shunned
the dry and arid Deism of his time, but more that he
should have put forward such positive truths as he did,
like so many germinal seeds of thought. Highly charac-
teristic of the German spirit is his work, with its pre-
eminent clearness and candour. Dogmatism of belief is
what he opposes, the religion of the letter as against that
of the spirit. The votary of Enlightenment (Aufklarung),
his enlightenment yet leads him to Christianity as the
religion of humanity at its highest, Christian truths being
for him truths for reason. Lessing was a powerful pre-
cursor of Hegel, alike in his developmental treatment of
1 E. Zeller, Vortrdge und Abhandlungen (1877), vol. ii.
LESSING'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 183
the positive religions and in his speculative treatment of
dogmas like the Trinity. He gave the basal thought of
Hegel's philosophy of religion in his theory of the educa-
tion of the race, while the foundation for Kant's doctrine
of ethics was laid in Lessing's insistences on the gospel
of pure morality. If Lessing be held as estranged from
positive Christianity, the degree of his alienation is
matter on which there is still no complete agreement.
What is beyond dispute is Lessing's significance for the
Philosophy of Religion as a great seminal thinker.
Prophet and harbinger he was of a more truly enlightened
time than his own, and if the world has not even yet got
beyond the faith of authority, that is no reason why we
cannot heartily appreciate what the universal thoughts of
Lessing did for the immediate and important future.
i8 4
CHAPTER XV.
KANT'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
THE philosophy of Religion propounded by the immortal
Kant must be pronounced a thing fearfully and wonder-
fully made. Interesting and ingenious in the highest
degree, it yields at almost every turn the contradictory
and unsatisfactory. It is only intended now to glance at
certain points in his philosophy of religion, more especi-
ally in relation to his rejection of theistic proofs, and his
welcome of that moral presentation on which he greatly
leaned. We know how largely determined the character
of Kant's philosophy of religion was by atavistic influ-
ences, combined with those of the pietism and rational-
ism of the Germany of the eighteenth century. His own
personality was contributive of that love of liberty in
harmony with law which led him to lay supreme stress
on the will to do good. Kant's conception of religion,
subjectively viewed, as given in his Religion within the
Limits of Pure Reason, is by no means a satisfactory
and adequate one, either in respect of man's religious
history, or in regard to the content of religion itself, when
he says it is " the cognition of all our duties as divine
commands." The moral and practical certainty of con-
viction which for him constituted religion sprang, of
KANT'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 185
course, from the moral law. We do not forget, in our
critical references to Kant, that Kuno Fischer properly
pointed out how, though Kant might have varied in his
thinkings about the knowableness or demonstrability of
God, "there was not a moment in the course of the
development of his philosophical convictions when he
denied, or even only doubted, the reality of God." Zeller,
too, testifies to the way in which Kant at every time held
to the Being of God (das Dasein Gottes). Most important
of all is Kant's own view of the matter, that "it is indeed
necessary to be convinced of the existence of God, but it
is not equally necessary to demonstrate it." Kant's
arguments did avail against a Deity that stood in external
and mechanical relation to the world. But such is not
the God of the theistic philosophy of to-day, Who, as
self-conscious and personal Spirit, is at once immanent
and transcendent. Far from complete or final, the
theistic proofs yet meet a need of reason. The argument
for the Divine existence is a vast and complex, synthetic
one a whole of many parts and the force is in the
whole, not in any of the parts, each of which has yet its
place and value.
The Ontological argument did not at all receive
from Kant the effective treatment which even many
philosophers have supposed. Kant missed seeing that
Being is given, not predicated, in the affirmation of this
argument. He sets out under the misapprehension that
Anselm asserted that what exists in intellects exists also
in re, whereas Anselm maintained that existence is of
necessity in the concept of God. There was truth
behind the existential judgment of this argument which
186 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Kant never saw. 'Twas a rasher thing than he supposed
to say that is always is merely the copula of a judgment.
Hegel did much better when he found the highest proof
for the truth of a concept in its being a necessity to
thought, and concluded therefrom to its necessity of
being. Kant has the merit, however, to have cut away
defective metaphysics at certain well-known and tolerably
obvious points, but he was wrong in supposing that
what we necessarily think, and think as necessarily
existing, has no title to validity. It is no question of
mere conceiving, it is one of necessary thinking. To
say that "existence cannot be clawed" out of thought
is obvious enough and beyond challenge in the case of
mere imagining, but that is not thinking at all in the
sense of this argument. It is thought dealing with the
real the existent, and the necessarily existent. The
truth is, Kant's position is both illogical and irrational.
To deny the passage to existence from necessary thought
of necessary existence would be a more astounding feat
of intellectual confusion than Kant dreamed. To what
meaningless confusion would thought, in its ultimate
principles and working, be reduced, if it should be held
as Anselm deemed impossible (nequit Eum non esse
cogitare) that God can be " conceived as non-existent,"
and this argument treated in the fictitious Kantian
mode. The idea of this argument should never have
been classed with those born of individual fancy, and
its uniqueness and solitariness lost sight of. But the
standpoint of mere abstract thinking assumed by Kant
in respect of the relation of ideality involved is too low
to be conclusive. Still, that we have even Kant's
KANT'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 187
argument about a hundred dollars in concept being
accounted as good as a hundred dollars in purse, re-
peated as though it had some vestige of value, is
warrant for recalling how Benno Erdmann described its
use by Kant as barbarous. Hegel rightly urged that,
in dealing with God, we are treating of an object
wholly different in kind from any hundred dollars, and
that, in fact, no particular notion or representation
whatsoever is comparable to the case of the concept of
God. Hegel further thought it would be strange, if the
concrete totality, which we call God, should not be rich
enough to include so poor a category of being as that
here involved. Thought itself seems to demand an
ultimate unity of things, and this argument is but an
effort to give logical form to our belief in such an
Ultimate. God is the Ultimate which thought so
demands is the ultimate concrete totality. There is
in Him a principle which gives unity to the discrete
multiplicity of the world. This is more and other than
making Him a mere name for the All. But the weak-
ness of the Ontological argument, taken by itself,
remains in the fact that it can lay no determinate
quality on this Being, Who is above all reality, to jus-
tify our marking Him off as God.
The Cosmological argument was to Kant a mere
begging of the question one in which a First Cause
for all that is " contingent " was sought in an "abso-
lutely necessary " Being. Such an overstepping of the
sense-world to make said inference Kant could not
approve. No more could he accept the conclusion to a
First Cause from the impossibility of an infinite series
188 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
of causes or conditions, since, of course, we cannot
make such a transfer of subjective principle to things
objective. When we make such a transfer, Kant thinks
it a iLerdpao-is eis d\\o 76^09, and, as such, to be dis-
credited. But Hegel, properly as we think, declares
that if thought cannot go out beyond the sense-world, it
were more needful to show how thought ever found its
way into the sense-world. The truth is, there was no
real warrant for Kant's assuming that causality cannot
carry us beyond the impressions of sensuous experience.
On such a view, where, it is always pertinent to ask,
would be Kant's own warrant for taking causality to be
even subjectively necessary ? The very existence of non-
empirical necessary ideas is proof that the kingdom of
reason is not of this world. Kant's stress on the infinite
series of causes is really irrelevant, the question being
strictly one of the warrant for a First Cause, as deter-
mined by the lack of self-existent and necessary being on
the part of the universe. Kant's objection to transfer
of thought necessity to a necessity of existence certainly
lacks in daring, consistency, and insight, for what
thought or reason must of necessity think is to be taken
as true is elsewhere, in Kant's own teaching, so taken
as true. There may, of course, still be raised the ques-
tion whether the world can be an effect of anything out-
side itself, but the real question is for a Ground of the
possibility of all finite things. It boots nothing that Kant,
with his restricted causality i.e., to sensible experience
would have deemed an intra-mundane Cause illusory :
modern science and modern thought have taught us to
pass from phenomena to their supersensuous ground.
KANT'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 189
Kant had already found the non-sensuous cause of our
sensations in a transcendental object, even though this
object was to him a mere nescio quid. He accounted
such a non-empirical causality necessary. To this object
he refers our whole possible perceptions. Should the
action of this transcendental cause be phenomenised, the
results will be in perfect accord with the laws of
empirical causation a position which finds precise
parallel in Hume. Kant denies significance to the prin-
ciple of efficient causation in the sensuous world. But,
with its subjective origin, he, unlike Hume, claims for
the principle an objective value as related to objects of
sensible experience. Kant, no doubt, admitted the need
of something which is Cause of this phenomenal world,
but, strangely enough, this same Kant, who recognised
the principle of efficient causation in assuming the trans-
cendental object, declines to find this primal and self-
subsistent Cause in God. Our thought is not now
content without reaching the ultimate Ground of these
sense-phenomena. The spiritual character of the in-
finite and all-causing Force is thus brought into view.
But when we thus enter the realm of spirit, purely
physical and mechanical categories cannot have place,
and so the Cosmological argument does not set them
to do metaphysical and for them impossible feats.
Because principles transcend the sensuous sphere, they
are not therefore to be treated in Kantian mode as only
subjective. Kant, however, felt the inevitable character
of the question as to the source (Ursprung) of the
Unconditioned, for the world, as finite world, cannot
be its own Ground, and cannot be the cause of spirit.
190 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Only in God, as prime source and ultimate sustainer,
is its want 6'peft? found. Of course, the real strength
of the argument is drawn, as Leibniz properly divined,
from the contingency of the world. This world of
experience is not a perfect cosmos. It is not wholly
rational and necessary, and so we must recognise the
contingent. This contingent or dependent character of
the world is evidenced in Nature, both as unified Whole,
under the most complete generalisations known to
science, and as viewed singly in any of its parts. We
know limitation as surely as we know being. Every-
thing is, in its turn, conditioned by something else, and
is made what it is by its relations to other things. The
number of relations is indefinite, and the complete
rationality of such relations, as a system, is past finding
out. While an underlying nexus of force makes every-
thing also causal in its turn, yet there is no trace of
existence, independent and non-conditioned. Parts of
existential phenomena, everywhere throughout the uni-
verse, depend upon other parts not less dependent. No
aggregation of these dependent existences can possibly
make an independent and non-conditioned universe.
Clearly, a universe so finite and dependent must have its
Cause or Ground beyond itself. In whole, it must have
an independent, self-existent Cause, as necessary correlate
of its finitude.
The Teleological argument Kant treated not fairly, when
he did not allow it to rest content with evidencing in-
telligence. Kant quite failed to appreciate how synthetic
is the mode of this proof, building up from the prin-
ciple of sufficient reason in a way distinguished from the
KANTS PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 191
ontological and cosmological proofs. In his Critique
of Judgment, Kant failed to keep in mind that the a
posteriori argument need not give infinity of intelligence,
but only intelligence in the Primal Cause of all things.
His procedure really amounted to deriving the prin-
ciple of finality in nature from the a priori concepts of
morality. His initial error is to have connected nature
with freedom as necessary to produce finality. His
ultimate error was to have found in finality no objective
result, but only a subjective necessity. The subjective
necessity had its home only in Kant's imagination. We
might as reasonably argue against the evidences of will,
purpose, and design in other human beings. Trendel-
enburg properly pointed out that the object itself is, after
all, needed, according to Kant himself, to say when this
wholly subjective principle of finality is required. It was
a gratuitous assumption on Kant's part to suppose that
the argument was to carry us to a transcendental object,
instead of merely bringing us, experientially, into con-
tact with the Divine Mind or Intelligence. Kant's ob-
jection to this proof as yielding only an Architect, not
an absolute and originative Creator, is not at all to the
point, since this proof is only concerned, in its strict
and proper sense, with the order, purpose, and harmony
of the world as due to reason or intelligence. Kant had
been better employed in doing something to transcend
Kantian dualism of inner and outer, instead of leaving
Hegel's higher view of Nature to do this for him.
Kant's criticism of the traditional proofs is thus far
less damaging than has often been supposed, and
philosophers have allowed themselves to be imposed
192 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
upon to a needless and not altogether creditable extent.
Turn we now to his treatment of the Moral Proof. In
his Critique of Judgment, Kant has it that for this
world, with such end as it bears, a Moral Author or
God is to be acknowledged. And in his Critique of
Pure Reason, he says : " Belief in God and in another
world is so interwoven with my moral nature (Gesin-
nung), that the former can no more vanish than the latter
can ever be torn from me. The only point to be here
kept in mind is that this act of faith of the intellect
assumes the existence (Voraussetzung) of moral dis-
positions. If we leave them aside and suppose a mind
quite indifferent with respect to moral laws, then the
inquiry raised by reason becomes merely a subject for
speculation, supportable, as such, by strong arguments
from analogy, but not by such that to them the most
stubborn scepticism must yield." Conscience as the
touchstone of revelation was, indeed, finely set forth by
Kant, and the final outcome of his philosophy is a moral
interpretation of the universe.
This does not keep us from thinking his Deity stands,
both in his Metaphysics of Ethics and his Critique
of Practical Reason, in a relation to ethics which is too
external, and even superficial. His moral postulates
were not postulates of life, but of philosophy. And yet,
in rejecting merely intellectual grounds of theological
belief, he was really falling back upon the vital interests
of religious life. Religion becomes, in fact, purely a
matter of faith with Kant, and such faith is strangely
left without the support that intellect might be expected
to render. Kant fails to put his moralistic proof under
RANTS PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 193
the law of historic development, with the growing moral
insight which such development brings, under working
of that law of moral freedom which distinguishes the
life of man's spirit from that of nature. This genetic
point of view must be kept in mind, if we are to overpass
Kant's standpoint, and to observe how far we are from
being able to presuppose morality and its commands
to be given as a priori content of the purely practical
reason. Kant had a quite too great horror of bringing
in the will of God to explain moral law, for why should
we conceive such laws as other than reflecting, and
harmonising with, the Divine nature ? The ultimate
sources of morality were by him inadequately conceived.
He almost expunges rather than explains moral obliga-
tion, and only introduces Deity when he is in straits
to effect an adjustment of the natural and moral elements
involved. Also, the large part played by happiness, in
Kant's thought, has been made more clear, with the
effect of making our regret more keen at the place he
gave eudsemonistic considerations in his system.
It is a great merit in Kant to have done so much
for the moralistic theory of religion, guarding it as the
apple of his eye in his Religion within the Limits of
Pure Reason. But, with all its fine moral postulates,
his philosophy of religion strangely fails of any adequate
treatment of the knowledge of God in speculative or
metaphysical ways. Religion cannot be so reduced to
terms of morality. At the same time, the merit is his
to have preserved the worth of personality by his fine
postulations for the moral consciousness. For the range
of Kant's practical reason is ethical rather than religious.
194 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
It is not to be supposed that we can in any wise impose
the moral law upon ourselves, when the ethical idea
in us is, in its absolute power and worth, to be run
back and grounded in the Absolute Moral Ideal. Kant
failed to keep the moral reason from becoming too
abstract and humanistic ; he might have kept the prin-
ciple of moral autonomy and subsumed it properly under
religion, had he adequately conceived the nature of man's
soul. Kant strangely missed seeing the theoretic char-
acter of the moral proof, as drawn from Divine mani-
festation in moral law, else he would not have set it
upon a separate plane from the other theistic proofs.
He further failed to appreciate that such belief in God, as
the moral proof really brings to us, must be shot through
with elements of reason far beyond his imaginings.
The mistakes or misconceptions of Kant, however,
do not blind us to his great positive merits. He rightly
found the norms of morality in man's rational and
spiritual nature. Detached errors, such as we have been
pointing out, need not detract from appreciation of his
work in whole, and in its higher qualities. How truly
congruous is moral law with the essential nature of man
was strikingly brought out by Kant, who nobly set it
above ephemeral utilities. To conscience Kant gives
back the Absolute, which he had taken away from
reason. But it must, of course, never be forgotten that
Kant never really transcends the dualism of experience,
never really effects a higher synthesis between form and
matter, between duty and inclination, between moral
ideas of a really religious origin and moral ideas of
judicial type. No doubt, he declares that no con-
KANTS PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 195
tradiction remains, but that is not to take away the
duality to carry the synthesis beyond the sphere of
mere feeling. It was left for Fichte to continue and
complete the work of Kant in this respect. The moral
reason, as ideal, Kant rightly takes to be autonomous
self-legislating in the sphere of morals. But, between
the moral reason and the Absolute, he has made an
impassable chasm, so that morality and religion are un-
bridged. The noumenal world he had made a Grenzbegriff
a regulative concept marking out the limits of our
knowledge.
But now he tells us that what the moral ideal the
moral consciousness demands, must be true and may
be known. Certainly his practical divorce or separation
of these two kinds of reason the theoretic and the
practical is unwarrantably great, even though he might
himself acknowledge them to be, in the last resort,
one. The notions of necessity and universality in moral
action appear cold and bare in Kant's thought, which
needs light and warmth from the synthetic processes
and unifying powers of the mind. I do not complain
so much of the individualistic character of his ethical
thoughts as is done by those whose chief care is for social
ethics. For the individual must do that only which
he could make a universal norm. And the individual
must work out his own ethical salvation, it seems to me,
first of all in an individualistic way. That is beginning,
no doubt, rather than end, but it is a needful beginning,
and secured, as such, by Kant without yielding to what
is subjective, aimless, and capricious. Besides which,
it is to be noted how much Kant had got away from
196 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
needs of the individual, in his later enunciations of the
moral postulates, to the moral needs of the universe.
But Kant was not very consistent in his use of the
postulates, and so does not always increase the weight
of his reasoning. Kant's ethical depth and purity lead
him up to high appreciation of the religion which takes
all its duties as Divine commands. A too legalistic
conception, however. Also, it seems to me to have
been for individual experience a suggestive view that
Kant took, when he found in great religious truths or
doctrines something to be repeated as ethical processes
in the inner lives of good men. But the ethical must
get beyond this individual aspect. History and ex-
perience alike show the need of human development for
man's apprehension of the full content of the moral law
of Kant. Kant's philosophy of religion was marked by
lack of historic sense when he took the history of religion
to start only with Christianity, which for him began the
universal. But his philosophical conceptions are, in
the religious sphere, lacking in warmth and vitality, and
do not carry him beyond the icy region of the moral
reason. His religion stands unredeemed by a single
grand infusion or dash of Schleiermacherian feeling.
This is the more remarkable, inasmuch as Kant left the
moral law as, in reality, something felt, rather than
intellectually apprehended or grasped. Some more ade-
quate recognition of feeling should thus have been easy
to him.
Even Spinoza does more justice to the affections than
Kant, notwithstanding that Spinoza's own love of God
is a still too intellectual thing. Not, of course, that it is
KANT'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 197
meant to represent Kant as wholly wanting in recog-
nition of emotional experience or affectional power, but
that his treatment is wholly insufficient. He has, for
example, a noble and interesting passage, in Religion
within the Limits of Pure Reason, in which he says that
spiritual edification can scarcely be anything save " the
ethical effect wrought upon our inner man by devotion."
After showing that " this effect cannot be the mental
movement or emotion (for this is already involved in
the conception of devotion)," he goes on to point out
that " edification must therefore be understood to mean
the Ethical Purchase that devotion takes upon the actual
amendment and building up of the moral characters of
mankind." The significant words follow: " A structure
of this sort can only then succeed when systematically
gone about : firm principles, fashioned after well-under-
stood conceptions, are, first of all, to be laid deep into
the foundations of the heart ; from these, sentiments
corresponding to the weight and magnitude of our
several duties must rise, and be watched and protected
against the snares and wiles of appetite and passion,
thus uprearing and upbuilding a new man a Temple of
God." And this great penetrating thinker adds, " Evi-
dently this edifice can advance but slowly, but still some
traces of superstructure ought to be perceptible." Every
one must stand with Kant, in his rejection of spurious
devotion, whereby man, in the noblest part of him, is
weakened, not strengthened. But Kant's Deistic setting
made mystical elements of religion quite foreign to him.
Faith in God is, in Religion within the Limits of
Pure Reason, held to be necessary to the belief in the
198 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
triumph of good. Not with what is called total
depravity, but with a tendency to evil in man's nature,
does Kant concern himself. The reality of evil is for
Kant ever menacing the sure advance of the moral life.
But this postulate of faith in the Divine avails not in the
end, for Kant's consuming zeal for human freedom leads
him at last to look merely to an infinite process for the
vanquishing of evil, without, that is to say, Divine
assistance. This is no perfect triumph of good, but a
prolongation of the struggle. And indeed it is a fault of
Kant that he is so prone to make the good so much
a thing merely regulative or potential. Further, Kant's
moralism centres man too much in himself in marked
contrast with religion hence it is so easy for Kant to
make much of evil, with its moral culpability, and take no
real account of sin. Man's discordant relations to God
are terra incognita to Kant, man's discord being, in Kant,
only with himself. Kant would not be troubled by
exterior punishments : what he does not like is self-
condemnation, for that would affect our cheerfulness and
arrest our moral energy. He thinks radical evil in us
carries with it guilt, in respect of which we are liable
to punishment, at once necessary and morally hurtful.
Harmony is restored, thinks Kant, by the idea of the
Son of God or God-pleasing humanity. Our actuality
is thus replaced by something better or higher, God
regarding us in the light of this idea rather than accord-
ing to our actual works.
But this replacement Kant works out in no satisfactory
way. He leads us, no doubt, into a realm of desire for
goodness, but, in his desire to escape atoning elements,
KANT'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 199
conducts to no actualisation. Redemption is not, with
him, a question of the Christ suffering for man's sins, but
of man redeeming himself by the suffering of his own
better or higher being. Reconciliation exists for us, in
Kant, only in the shape of self-redemption by means of
our own moral volition. The idea of humanity well-
pleasing to God is obviously too far removed from our
actuality to influence our moral renewal to any great
extent. What Kant fails to take any due and proper
account of, is the fact of the loss of moral strength
entailed by guilt not being in any proper way or sense
atoned for. Peace of conscience and joy in God are
thereby rendered inchoate and imperfect. Kant's whole
treatment here is interesting for the way in which it
foreshadows the Christian redemption in principle, but
it is presage and nothing more, his ideal Christ an ideal
and nothing more. The value of Kant's thought con-
tinues, however, to be that he taught men to find the
highest good, not along the pathway of knowledge pure
and simple, but rather along the lines of moral activity
the moral disciplines of the will.
One of the most valuable features of Religion within
the Limits of Pure Reason is its thought of the Kingdom
of God, which has since been so fruitfully developed. It
was a most pregnant and suggestive thing for Kant to
say there is nothing good in the world save a good will
alone. It is now better understood, however, that will
never is without an intellectual element, nor intellection
without will, if only the desire and will to know. The
good will, as we know it, is never blind in its strivings
after the moral ideal, but always illumined by intellectual
200 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
idea and conception. Kant, with all the excellences of
his brilliant threefold analysis of reason, was yet, in his
schismatic treatment of rational faculty, far from any
adequate appreciation of the grand ultimates of religious
thought and experience. Even the ethical and sesthetical
moments, on which Kant laid such emphasis, lead us at
last to a perfect and synthetic unity in the religious Ideal,
of which there is in Kant no sufficiently firm, full, and
steadfast apprehension and appreciation. There is al-
ways more in man, as really rational and religious, than
is perfectly explicable in terms of reason, but Kant had
only a very inadequate appreciation of this fact. Such
being the case, it was more easy for Kant to fail of seeing
the impossibility that the rich content and development
of religion could spring out of so formal a principle as
that of moral reason. A more distinctive place, and a
more specific and peculiar function, must be claimed for
religion than to be subsumed under ethics.
Still, Kant's work was, for his time, transcendently
great. Only, the excess of purely moral reason in his
religion transforms it into a defect, for the element of
reason is neither properly fused with, nor related to,
historical and experiential elements in his system. The
error which still lives on in high places must be left
behind of thinking the Kant of the Critique of Practical
Reason corrector of an earlier Kant of the Pure Reason,
the error of thinking an absolute dogmatism (that of the
categorical imperative) was, in Kant, the transformation
of a radical nihilism. For Kant was, before everything,
and at every stage of his career, a moralistic philosopher,
and by no means became so only at close of his lengthy
KANT'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 201
inquiries. Kant never got beyond the need of a Deus ex
machind itself a proof, surely, that the theoretic and the
practical reason had never been properly related and
harmonised. Reason must be treated as one, and its
sweep and sway taken as universal, but the rationality
must be seen of giving full scope and play to the function-
ings of the emotional and volitional sides of our nature.
For these latter have their own light and worth even for
the reason, since life is deeper than intellect, and gives
to reason so much of its zest and interest. Kant properly
held knowledge to be coextensive with empirical science
of nature, and, as such, incompetent to deal with theolo-
gical truths, which must rest on faith. Faith he alleged
to be a function of the human spirit not less original and
significant than logical thinking.
The whole three Critiques of Kant really furnish only
building materials for an enduring philosophic edifice,
and must not be taken as the structure itself. His
Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason, which has
importance as giving us, far more than has been recog-
nised, his philosophy of religion, is a fruit or result of his
entire criticism of reason, though insufficient and unsatis-
factory in consequence. In the matter of revelation,
Kant approximates to Lessing, to whom, be it said, he
owed much, and from whom he might have learned more.
The necessity of revelation lay, for Kant, in what he
called the " radical evil " dwelling in human nature. He
posits the principles of indwelling good and evil as ground
of perpetual moral conflict. Evil is so unquestionable a
fact in human experience that Kant does not hesitate to
make it the initial point of his philosophy of religion.
202 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
But the ideal of the good whose triumph and kingdom
are secured by the sacrifice of Christ is that whereto
Kant would bring man. Whatever is needful for the
realising of this moral ideal is held, in his philosophy of
religion, to be true. Thus, at the behest of conscience,
the Absolute is, in a sense, restored to reason. Not,
indeed, as immediately given in experience, but only
necessary postulate. It was in speculative blindness that
Kant, Samson-like, brought down the whole temple of
metaphysical knowledge of God. His philosophy of
religion has paid a heavy penalty for this destructiveness.
His moral postulates, as mere moral necessities, can no-
wise compensate the loss of any knowledge of God as
transcendent Being.
Adequacy of a philosophy of religion on such a purely
moralistic theory is a patent impossibility. If religion
could be reduced to the position of mere appendix to
morality, as in Kant, we might be found going on, with
Fichte, to make of God no more than the moral order of
the world. Weber indeed remarks that the real God of
Kant is Freedom in the service of the ideal. But Kant
never reached a real freedom ; freedom's relation to
natural causation he did not properly understand; the
true idea of freedom could not stand open to him, since
the vital connection of religion and morality was not
apprehended by him. Jesus is, to Kant, but the exemplar
of the ideal just spoken of, and highest representative of
humanity. And this ideal springs out of our rational
being. But the weakness of Kant's philosophy of religion
lies primarily in the tendency to resolve religion into the
service of the moral ideal the fulfilment of moral duty
KANT'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 203
and action oblivious of the fact that religion, in the
first instance, does not consist in such exterior action,
but in attitudes of will and states of feeling. Kant, in
the same manner as Lessing, underestimated and mis-
conceived the value of the historic element its true place
and relation. He quite and strangely failed to relate
it to the immanent Divine principle in us, which he
expressly recognised. Religion within the Limits of
Pure Reason can only be an unsatisfactory a priori
construction if the Kantian mode of dispensing with
historic mediation is to be adopted.
Yet one can sympathise with his sense of the evils of
historic Christianity, and it is easy to see how true
religion, as universal, becomes contrasted with historic
faiths that only partially represent it. Full of interest
and significance is Kant's philosophy of religion, even
though it be unsatisfactory in many respects. Chief of
the unsatisfactory aspects is Kant's strange failure to find
room for the consciousness of God absolute principle of
all reality, and most concrete object of our thought
within the human consciousness, and so to raise the
individual, in his religion, for ever far above himself and
his own purely individualistic references and tendencies.
Besides, it has been the approach of ethical Deity to man
that has most surely guaranteed, even at mediational cost,
the moral power Kant seeks.
Widely contrastive is Kant's thought to that of Spinoza,
with his faith in an eternal order, and his absolute cer-
tainty of the substance unveiled to the scrutiny of reason.
Kant's faith is in moral law the power which enables us
sublimely to transcend sense, and the power by which
204 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Kant would build up the spiritual world he had destroyed.
He lays this Divine Moral Order upon us with resistless
might, making us treat it as absolutely real, absolutely
Divine and Moral. For it is to our conscience his God
reveals Himself. Kant's faith is a fine thing, as an active
postulate or a free spiritual construction, yet never can
we bring ourselves to believe that only in this one par-
ticular way has God revealed Himself, and not also in
the superb workings of theoretic reason and speculative
insight. Such reason is also God's gift, and [indeed is
there any higher ? True, it is not self-sufficing, but must
be linked to the light of conscience ; but reason and con-
science so united as, in the complex being called man,
they should always be they will jointly bear us to
heights otherwise unattainable and unattained. We can-
not therefore acquiesce in the one-sidedness of Kant's
moral stress. Excellent as it is in many ways in itself,
it is neither true nor just in its relation to the revelations
of reason or intellect or rather, in its independence of
them.
A satisfying philosophy of religion is possible only
when, to the moral elements emphasised by Kant, justice
is done to the emotional elements of Schleiermacher, and
to the claims of objective truth represented by Hegel.
Not without reason was it that a well-known German
religious philosopher once remarked that the Kantian
mode of treating religion was to make it merely a sort of
dry-nurse to morality, to be shown to the door as soon as
morality got stronger upon her legs. Kant, no doubt,
has the merit, in his critico-speculative way, to make the
moral faith of reason appear as a rational grounding of
KANT'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 205
religion, in which more than in Hegel reason appears
in its practical and not simply theoretic aspect. But the
two aspects are sundered far too completely, and set forth
in far too abstract and one-sided fashion. His practical
reason, as the Critique of Practical Reason clearly shows,
gives itself its own laws, and the constitution and neces-
sity of our own nature are left us as the only ground of
obligation. This although Kant says the moral law is
for all beings, even for the Supreme Intelligence. How
subjective and relative our moral consciousness must,
in value, be, when we are practically left as our own
law-givers, is obvious.
It still abides the great merit of Kant to have sounded
the supreme worth of the moral life in the way he did.
The postulates of the practical reason are, with Kant, not
really arbitrary, but are demands of reason itself in our
efforts to realise moral end. In this self-attesting experi-
ence rather than in any metaphysical reality whether
spirit, matter, or substance does Kant seek a principle
of unity, and find a new ideal. And no more powerful
influence, for the ethicising of its conceptions, has been
exercised on subsequent philosophy of religion than that
exercised by Kant. It was quite in the spirit of Kant
that Schleiermacher declined to make religion a thing of
knowledge, even the highest knowledge. How entirely is
the atmosphere that of Kant, when Martineau is found
affirming that "we are entitled to say that conscience
reveals the living God, because it finds neither content to
its aspirations nor victory in its strife till it touches His
infinitude and goes forth from His embrace." But Mar-
tineau profits by Kant's mistakes when he goes on to say
206 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
how sickly and desolate moral ideals are, that are nothing
else, and to deduce therefrom the need of religion, as
carrying us far beyond the power of moral reason alone.
Kant has borne the palm among modern ethicists, and
has given to modern theistic philosophy its most vitalising
influences, after every deduction is made for the defects
of his presentation. This is Kant's enduring title to
gratitude in the sphere of the philosophy of religion. It
is, of course, a different thing from the worth of his
system itself, but it is something sufficiently great.
207
CHAPTER XVI.
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM I HEGEL AND
BERKELEY.
IN the following chapter I have tried, as far as possible,
to avoid names and deal with arguments. There can
be little doubt that some form of idealism is destined
to be the philosophy that shall prevail. Some interest-
ing questions arise. Will that form be Hegelian ideal-
ism ? Or must we not look to a more developed form
of Theistic Idealism ? What, in such an event, will
be its attitude to Idealism of the Hegelian type ? We
shall do some negative work first, and then pass up to
more constructive effort. Idealism, whether of a Hegel
or a Berkeley, seeks to interpret the Universe after the
analogy of conscious life, and regards conscious experi-
ence as for us the great reality. Wisely enough, for
in no other way can we know or find ultimate reality.
Although the Agnostic position that we only know
that we can nothing know, may still remain a possi-
bility, it is so poor a possibility that the philo-
sophic mind at least will never long rest in it.
The great gift of idealism to modern philosophic
thought has been the reality of the ego the indi-
vidual self or spirit. The imperishable service of
208 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Idealism has been to make Materialism for ever im-
possible to overpass the Dualism of mind and matter,
in its triumphant assertion of spirit, or a supreme self-
conscious principle as ground of all existence. This is
a great deliverance, and it is impossible to rate it too
highly. The logical priority of mind or spirit ; the
thorough dependence of matter on spiritual conditions;
these grand insistences of modern idealism we must
not fail duly to appreciate, because there are other
problems to which idealism can give no answer. But
our appreciation need not imply endorsement of every
form of absolute and unqualified denial of any sort of
independent reality to the world of matter, with utter
and uncritical disregard of the part played by the object
in making our thought constructions possible or worth-
ful. Philosophical idealism of Hegelian type is true, so
far as it goes, but it cannot carry us far enough. We
seek not to destroy nor to refute it : we only supple-
ment and perfect it, leading it on stepping - stones of
its dead self to higher issues than those of which it is
itself capable. That is to say, taken as a philosophy,
we do not view Hegelian idealism as a perfect whole:
it is a good foundation, but is no satisfying superstruc-
ture or finished fabric. The rock on which this form of
idealism is shattered is its inability to offer any philo-
sophical warrant or justification for its passage from
the " spiritual self," or " the unifying, constitutive
power of thought," to the world of other selves the
inability to do this individual self any more justice than
is implied in making it a mere stage or moment in the
evolutionary process. For a doctrine of evolution, it
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 209
need not be said, the idealism of Hegel essentially is.
What we are now saying is, that the idealist principle
that of the spirit or ego does not avail to philosophi-
cally explain the world of many selves or society, how-
ever needful society may be for our self-realisation.
When the philosophical kingdom has suffered this
violence at the hands of the Hegelian philosopher, we
soon find that no just or adequate treatment has been
measured out to the great facts of human freedom,
remorse, and moral responsibility, and that the same
result holds good in respect of the ancient and im-
portant problem of evil. It is vain to load the system
with a strain it is plainly unable to bear. As often as
it has been strained by sanguine disciples, it has snapped
and lost credit even for that which, in less extravagant
hands, it might have helped thought to accomplish.
This is the unwisdom of philosophers who will have it
accomplish all or nothing, who treat the Absolute ex-
perience as something thought out rather than eternally
self-possessed, and who court for the system the doom
of rejection. That theistic unity of the world which
we seek is one in which we must maintain a relative
independence for the self and for the world while we
seek to combine and unify them. For what things the
self, as idealistic, knows, it yet knows only as having
discovered, and not created them. An idealism that
shall be too abstract and intellectual is an effective
barrier to such unity being attained. For it leaves us
with only an abstract unity, into which the real differ-
ences that exist can never be taken up. The unity of
the world must be a unity like that of our own individual
o
210 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
life. And this, as we know, is the unity of consciously
realised end and purpose. The world is not the separate
thing from us which we, in our abstract thinking, are
so prone to make it. It is true that the unity which
we seek is not to be sought by looking for some static
substance that lies behind all things. And yet we, for
our part, are not so fearful of the word " substance,"
with its parti-coloured significance, as to flee it alto-
gether. We do not believe any perfect metaphysic of
experience to be possible, but it shall bring forth its
speculative construction of reality by means of the
category of substance. We have not got away from
the category when, instead of substance, we have pre-
ferred to speak of an Absolute Subject or the Absolute
Experience, the ultimate reality or substantia being still
Absolute or Unconditioned Being. But substance may
be, and is, an infinitely more vital thing than the
static existence which reality appears to us in our pro-
cesses of abstract thought. Such thought is purely
instrumental, and has action for its true end and issue.
Ultimate substance or reality is activity, not passivity
or static existence. Hence spirit is better than the
substance category, in the end. The static being
which abstract thought loves to ascribe to the Absolute
is a nullity to be shunned. As an ideal for thought
we may still keep it, but we must not allow it to mis-
lead us.
We willingly grant that the Hegelian Logic should,
in fairness, be viewed only in connection with the
Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit, and as
having to do with the forms of pure thinking rather
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 211
than with concrete experience. By this fair and
reasonable procedure we reach self-active mind as the
final principle of thought. A very valuable result, it
must be said, for theistic philosophy. But, so doing,
and granting what has just been said, we do not get
rid of the developmental view of God in the Hegelian
system, nor of the mischief wrought of Hegelian meta-
physic in construing the Universe so much in terms
of the cognitive aspects of experience, to the neglect of
those which are volitional and emotional. The vice of
Hegelian idealism, as represented by some of its most
noted recent expounders, lies just in this, that it makes
thought constitutive of reality instead of interpretative
of it, and, in so doing, gives the categories of thought
an unwarranted place in the interpretation of the
Universe. Hegel himself expressly holds that thought
discloses the constitution of reality : for him, the truth
is essentially in knowledge, thought is essentially ob-
jective. Thought is for us also, in an important sense,
the great reality ; but the thought of man may not
make or evolve the world of reality; its function is to
interpret the world as actually given to it; the com-
bining unity of self-consciousness conditions that world
of reality for us, but does not create it or impart to it
objectivity. When we have just blamed Hegelian
idealism for its practical neglect of the volitional,
moral, and social aspects in favour of an insistence
on the abstract and intellectual, we have not done so
in forgetfulness of the good things spoken by Hegel of
spirit as will. But these can only be taken as Hegel
clearly meant them in the light of the principles
212 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
embedded in his theoretic system, since on these
Hegel's treatment of the will is based. No good can
come of the confusion adopted by some of the latest
Hegelian exponents, of making "thought" do duty in
Deity for the synthesis of thought and will. We are
open-minded enough to admit a certain force in these
endeavours to make Hegel mean by thought, not ab-
stract cognition, but the active life of mind itself, yet the
question remains as to his warrant for making the unity
of our being consist in thought. It remains, as Hegel's
immortal merit, that he brought to men an altogether
new sense of the power of thought or reason the
invaluable complement of the Kantian moralism. "The
Infinite Spirit," Neo - Hegelianism tells us, "contains,
in the very idea of its nature, organic relation to the
finite ; " and again, " the idea of God contains in itself,
as a necessary element of it, the existence of finite
spirits ; " and yet again, " the nature of God would be
imperfect if it did not contain in it relation to a finite
world." But how can such a priori dogmatism as to
the necessitation of the Divine Being be justified ? Or
why deify the world by making the Divine Nature or
Being so dependent upon it ? And why, as the system
elsewhere, in keeping with this, does, make ourselves
but parts and fragments of this one Infinite Spirit,
which is the Sole Being and the containing Whole?
Hegelian idealism rejects as preposterous the charge
that, in virtue of its organic whole of thought, it de-
stroys the self-activity of individual subject and identifies
humanity with God, and there is apparently no reason
to doubt that it is entitled to do so from the standpoint
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 213
of thought and its "intelligible system." But why
may it not be otherwise from the point of view of
reality or experience ? Granted that the individual is
part of an organic whole, and ought to comprehend in
thought what the whole is, yet there is neither room
nor reason for the purely evasive mode in which this
abstract and intellectual idealism deals with what may
be due to the individual man, as not existing simply
for the organic whole, but as at the same time having
worth in himself, and being at the same time an end
in himself. There is thus a sense in which the individual
is a whole as well as a part. The individual part, as
part of reality, may well cry out, should he find very
real sides of his nature sacrificed on the shrine of
"organic" metaphor. The truth is, that neither in
its dealing with philosophical developments, nor in its
evolution of religion, nor in its handling of physical
processes, can the Hegelian system bring satisfaction
to any one who is deeply versed in modern knowledge.
An "intelligible system" it may very well be, but it is
a system with the radical vice of having no sufficient
care that its every part shall contain experience and
nothing else. This, too, while the analysis of experi-
ence, in its full concrete character or contents, is the
precise demand made of every Philosophy by modern
metaphysical thought. The Theistic Idealism which
we seek is concerned to >avoid any idealism in which
the "I," with its tendencies and moods, and the ex-
ternal world, as something given, do not appear. But
in Hegelian Idealism, as we find it to-day, the " I "
and the World are not two elements with any sort of in-
214 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
dependent existence : they are merely two differences
of a fundamental unity. That is to say, a real identity
radiates through all plurality and difference. Conscious-
ness is certainly our ultimate, but it does not give much
impression of endeavour to do justice by empiric reality
to have the ceaseless and facile iteration that the world
has no independent being, but is merely a phase of
the mind. Our individuality becomes at length lost
in the Whole; but, related as all things are in the
universe as a system which is one and rational, we
cannot consent to things being thus thrown into one
homogeneous heap. For the reality of the ego or self
is one of the metaphysical presuppositions of the Theistic
Idealism we are here concerned to maintain. In all
this we are seeing the result of the categories being
thrown into an " intellectual " system as though they
were real and concrete. The result comes of treating
the categories as a timeless conscious whole, with
which, as a whole of knowledge, finite being can come
into no conceivable relation save as it simply forms
one of its component parts. When Hegel tells us that
the real is the rational, we cannot but feel how much
more it had been to the purpose to remember the
senses in which the real is the individual. For he
has not lightened for us the mystery of the individual
and of things existent in time. Certainly the universe
is more than a mathematical theorem; 'tis a thing
instinct with life and vital possibilities such that no
setting forth of Hegelian Logic can possibly exhaust
these. For speculative thought must take reality, not
as it should be to the dialectical movement of thought,
but as it is empirically presented to it. Hegelian ideal-
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 215
ism, even in the recent form wherein experience is
substituted for thought, is an outworn method; for
reality is not to be so identified with experience, and
this type of idealism has not yet found a concept large
enough to be adequate to the whole nature of things.
With the Whole, or the Universe, God, as self-con-
scious Being, must not be identified: He has the
freedom, and the distinctness, of Absolute Personality.
To human personality with all the mystery that en-
compasses the path of our personal responsibility
Hegelian idealism can do no manner of justice. It can
only treat it as illusion, more or less, and on this rock
of personality which it is persistently unable to ap-
preciate save as related to "reflection" the system is
shattered and we fall into the hands of grim necessity.
Contrasted with these excessive intellectualistic tend-
encies of Hegelian idealism, we find a moralism of to-day
that leans towards minimising thought until it becomes
one-sidedly ethical. The Theistic Idealism we pursue
may be obscured in this way also. For the universe
must be intelligible to thought, since it is the revelation
of reason the expression of rational thought. Such
ethical idealism arrays, in a way hardly to be com-
mended, the volitional and moral and social aspects
of man's life against those of thought. It does so
because it regards these aspects as things that take
us further along the path of truth. No doubt, every
ethical elevation takes us somewhat along the path
of truth, but does it effect this in separation from
thought or knowledge or reason ? There should not
be even the semblance of such separation. In the
strength of the contrast it employs between the two
216 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
sets of elements, such ethical idealism is not happy.
It becomes lop-sided in so lifting the ethical impulse to
obey out of relation to intellectual interest. Rather
should intellectual interest give depth and base to moral-
ism. Quite consistently with this, the absolute experi-
ence must mean the fulfilment of moral ideas no less
than the answer to rational questions. It is quite
possible to insist on the knowledge of the Absolute as a
knowledge only for us, in such a way that our doctrine of
relativity will come perilously near making our Absolute
an unknowable thing-in-itself. We have no right to
forget that there is a truth in the Hegelian contention
that the ultimate reality of the universe is thought. We
may not forget this because Hegelian epistemological
failings erroneously make that thought too abstract and
dissociate from being. If matter or world exists only for
mind, we are well warranted in inferring a Mind for
which the world, with all that therein is, exists if, that
is, we are idealist enough. Nor is ethical idealism quite
fortunate in its account of our knowledge of the Absolute.
From the Hegelian side, it is admitted that the Absolute
cannot be completely comprehended, but is held that it
must not be urged that the Absolute cannot be compre-
hended at all as it is in itself, for this would be the same
as saying that there is for us no Absolute. Our know-
ledge of the Absolute must be held to be a real knowledge
of the Absolute. Its relativity is sometimes pressed to a
degree which makes us careful to maintain its reality.
Though the Absolute, in its completeness, is a whole, of
which we are but parts, yet we can know the Absolute in
a way that is valid and real so far as it goes. The ethical
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 2I/
idealist must not, then, in a too strongly antithetic way,
contend that the truth is for God alone, for man, too,
has the truth, and it is precisely the priceless possession
of the truth that makes man what he is. Idealists we
must be content to remain, in that the universe is hidden
from us by the veil of our ideas. The ethicist is right
enough in insisting that the truth at which man arrives
must not be held in unfruitful mode of intellect alone
must be translated into action. He is right in his con-
tention that logical forms of argumentation must be
made to fit in with the data of actual experience, the
facts of real life. He is wrong only when he falters in
following the sway of reason and the sweep of thought
till these are really universal. Corrective and supple-
mentary of an abstract idealism, then, we may take
ethical idealism to be. An idealism must be ours in
which reason and knowledge are the same in kind,
though not in extent, as they are in God an idealism so
intellectual that no bar or limit is placed to knowledge
or man's receptiveness of the Divine. We find a great
truth in the affirmation of idealism, that reality is a
spiritual whole, even the truth that our moral ideals and
ethical functions transcend mere reason and its necessary
relations. Philosophy has too often forgotten that God,
as the Absolute Being, exists before all our thought and
argumentation about Him, and that, when we do seek
Him, it is sheerly from the impulse wrought in us of
nature's revelations and those interior revelations that
come through feeling and reflection. Being and worth,
in and for Himself, we must certainly postulate for God,
and not make Him of worth only for man or man's life.
2l8 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
There is no occasion to deny if we defer the infinite
value and significance of human life, nor do we call in
question the nobility of ethical zeal for the primacy of
duty. But does not the absoluteness of His being and
self-revelation exceed our experience, so that experience
cannot simply be its measure ? And when it is implied
that God is of no practical account for man, unless man
first find himself of infinite account, what a subjective
criterion is set up ! Assuredly we have no direct know-
ledge of human life as of infinite worth, and we see our
suicides, therefore, lightly throw it away. Man is bound
to know no less than to make moral estimate. True as
it is that only as we value life do we reach out to a
Higher than we, we yet cannot narrowly reason to God
from the sentiments and verdicts of the moral life alone.
We must have God, before the infinite value and signifi-
cance can be ours that spring from our being consciously
related to Him. What I deny is, the right to proscribe
the speculative impulse in man on whom rests an im-
perious obligation to seek truth for its own sake, whether
it ministers to the magnifying of man's life or not.
Thought is never to be sacrificed before a purely moral
interest or human valuation. An intellectual interest has
here its own power to deepen moral earnestness. What
we have now seen, then, is how Idealism may assume an
unsatisfactory development, either after a one-sidedly
intellectual, or a one-sidedly ethical, type. But, for all
that, there seems no good reason why these two lines
of idealistic thought should not be drawn more closely
together ; such drawing together seems just the need of
our time, and will be an augury of philosophic good.
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 219
The Theistic Idealism which we seek constructively to
present is one constituted by the ideals of the Absolute
entering into us, and being reaffirmed by us, as our
ideals. For the Absolute is never the unrelated : a
philosophical truism to say, it is yet a truism which
Kant, Hamilton, and Spencer have made it necessary to
repeat. The Absolute life enters into our life : the
Absolute ideals become our ideals : the Absolute reason
and consciousness are constitutive, as such, of our finite
reason and self-consciousness. No sooner has this been
said than Hegelian idealism, as a philosophy of imman-
ence, proceeds to treat our finite selves as mere reproduc-
tions of the Infinite life. It does so for the reason that
it has busied itself with the problem of our knowing the
external world, and thinks it has reached a consciousness
that is universal attained a knowledge that is complete.
But it has reached its objectively constituted experience
at strange cost of the part played by finite minds in the
whole matter. No unitary self-consciousness at which
Hegelian idealism may have arrived can for a moment
be admitted as that of the universe, so long as so im-
portant a part of existence is omitted as is involved in
these neglected finite minds. We are in a social world
as truly as we are in a physical world, Hegelian Logic
notwithstanding. Our individual self or ego is not simply
part of the universal or absolute consciousness, for a real
yet relative independence is precisely what must be
maintained for the separate self. Not that the self can
have an independence of Deity in any absolute sense or
in any way final, since God is its active Ground. But
how, it will be asked, if God is its active Ground, can it
220 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
be independent and free ? Now, it certainly could not be
so under such teaching as that of Royce and others, who
make our freedom frankly a " part" of the Divine free-
dom, and our consciousness a " portion " of the Divine
consciousness. But it can be so in the sense that God
wills for it the delegated freedom and independence of a
selfhood which not even He will violate : it can be so in
the sense of free and voluntary being, which none beside
itself can, in quite the same respects, be : it can be so in
the mutual commerce and social co-operation of two
spirits, the finite and the Infinite. Is this to place a
limitation on God's life ? Why then prefer to impose on
Him the limitation rather that He shall not be free to
delegate so much to His creatures ? My finiteness and
limitation remain, just because I am not merged in the
universal consciousness or absolute experience. The
truth is, the trouble arises from the unreality of looking
at foundational truth or ultimate reality from the mere
standpoint of abstract thought, and even that thought as
it treats part of reality for whole. For so we fail to treat
reality as the process which it really is, and deal with it
as in essence merely a static fact. Such process or
movement, which sums up ultimate reality for us, can be
known or thought by us, even though it can never wholly
or actually come into our thought-experience. We come
back to say that the unity of the world is that of a com-
mon end, just as conscious end makes the unity of our
individual life. The trouble is, to find how God can
have a conscious life inclusive of ours, and yet distinct
from it. If we hold Him to be distinct in His being
from ours even by the whole diameter of being we
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 221
may yet advantageously remember in this connection
that, in the reaches of all higher relations, personality
wears an inclusive rather than an exclusive aspect. All
true persons thus come to be thus comprehended in per-
sonality of which it can be said, " I in thee and thou in
me," as we say of the all-inclusive Reality. This, too,
without a pantheistic issue. We can at least strive to
do justice by the facts of personality. And when the
mystery of the Divine Personality presses in closely upon
us, we can profitably recall how it has been said to be
part of human wisdom to be willing to be ignorant of
some things with equanimity. But that can only be
after speculative thought has done its best. If, now, we
are made to participate in the common end which makes
up the unity of the world, it shows that our lives, howso-
ever individual they be, are of an essentially social
nature. But, if the finite self be of so social a nature,
by what right shall we assume the Absolute Self to be
so different ? I do not find it necessary to say, as some
have done, that God is not self-consciousness alone, nor
personality alone, but a social being. So to speak is, I
think, to misconceive self-consciousness and personality.
Self-consciousness is so far from being concerned with
self alone that only in the larger or social unity of the
world is the self realised. The self need not be treated,
and, in fact, ought not to be treated, as foreign to every
other self, even though every self has, as such, a certain
immediateness of experience which is inviolable. Nor is
personality, however it may pertain or belong to the
individual subject, something that is attained otherwise
than through the social whole into which it enters.
222 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Perfect, and free from becoming, as God's self-conscious-
ness and personality may be, there seems no reason or
need to read into them an absence of social nature or
capability which we disclaim for these in ourselves. Nor
do I feel the need, as some have lately done, to bring in
the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in order to solve the
difficulties in which we are left by idealism. Already we
have no reason to doubt that Perfect Being internally
personalised and externally individuated may embrace
a plurality of distinctive and personal manifestations.
There seems, therefore, no need to insist, in the way
sometimes done, that personality our highest category
is inadequate to explain the multitude of selves, and
that we must call in the aid of the " superpersonal unity'
and the " multipersonal " found in the Trinity. Rather
it is our conception of what is involved in " simple "
personality that seems in need of rectification, as in
itself wearing social character and implications.
The universe, then, we take to be in its core and inmost
essence spiritual, for that which is fundamentally present
in, and manifested throughout, the Universe, is spirit.
Such spirit is, as we have seen, more than simply ration-
ality, though rationality is so important a part of it.
With Hegel we have taken spirit to be the prius, by
which the world is posited. But we do not, with him,
make the Absolute Life, in its infinitely rich fulness, the
result of the self-estrangement of the Absolute Spirit in
Nature. Our Idealism takes most gratefully from the
Hegelian hand the spiritual principle pre-supposed in
Knowledge, and the spiritual principle made manifest in
nature and, further, the spiritual principle from which
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 223
they are both derived, this last being an inference from
the correspondence and inter-relation of the other two.
But the Deity, related to them as their free cause, we set
above nature and man, as distinct from them, nor simply
reproduced in them. The Hegelian epistemology, which,
in its theoretic nakedness, has nothing better to say than
that indeterminate reality passes over (as the determinate
existence) into determinateness in our knowledge, we
reject as painfully crude and unsatisfying.
We have seen, then, that reality is spiritual, and pro-
vides the real ideal, which is the true ideal. Funda-
mental reality, that is to say, is spiritual, the universe
being ultimately grounded in reason, and based on
rational thought. The Ideal is such basal reality for
us, just because it is more than something merely sub-
jective. The fundamentally Real of the Universe is for
us just that archetypal Ideal which had its home in the
mind of God. The physically real is but the mani-
festation of the spiritually ideal. The eternal laws and
principles of reason, whereby the ideal so passes into
the real, are all grounded in God. Thus in His light
we see light. If there be a spiritual realism in all this,
it is a realism that is, in fact, ideal. The world of real
things is not a world of mere things, but of things that
are to us an expression of the Ideal Mind. But this
means not a Hegelian mode of treating the world as,
in Schopenhauer's phrase, a "crystallised syllogism,"
as though logic were originative of Nature not simply
interpretative of it. Hegel's " Absolute Ideal " is power-
less to create the world of actuality, for "without
matter," as Kant said, "categories are empty." The
224 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
"Absolute Idea" is, in its self -evolution, of all things
most inane, because it figures as thought "the im-
personal life of thought," as it has been termed with-
out a live Thinker. The search of Neo-Hegelianism for
a principle of unity, and its sympathy with evolution-
ary conception, have rendered plausible a presentation
in which things subsist without substance and originate
without cause. But idealistic philosophers are not
wanting who have discriminated beyond such a view,
and recognised the unattained ideal of knowledge, in
virtue of which, knowledge can never be the full ex-
pression of reality. The Hegelian identity of thought
and existence has been quite outgrown by modern
thought, which perceives that, while the Absolute may
be revealed to us in the reality that we know, we
cannot without absurdity postulate that there is no
more Absolute than that which is known or thought
by us. To treat all existence of the Absolute, beyond
what has been " thought " by us, as non - existent, is
clearly absurd. In our knowledge of reality, there
always is such a periphery of indefiniteness as leaves
an infinite progress possible to us. Our knowledge
implicates existence or reality beyond knowledge itself
as a process. The cognitive subject cannot fail to
recognise that that of which he has knowledge exists
without him, and cannot be one with his own mental
state. Such dualism is essential to any theory of
knowledge. It is the transcendent Real which is thus
implicate in his knowledge. And the Ideal is this
Real : the Ideal is the ultimate and transcendent
Reality. God is thus not a result brought forth of
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 225
man's developing intellect, as though He were a pure
product of man's reason, for whose discovery and in-
terpretation philosophy is sole competent organ. For,
as our knowledge of the physical world comes, only
by the world having been before us, and now making
itself known through acting on our sensorium, so we
know God only because He, too, has been before us
in His active self-revealings in the universe, and now
makes Himself known to us through our rational and
spiritual susceptibilities. Both our sense - perceptions
and our spiritual perceptions are subject to definite
growth, as required by modern psychology. This out-
ward acting of world and Deity must be kept before
the mind as presupposition of all science and all know-
ledge. Their existences and actings or processes are
the constant presupposition and necessary complement
of my whole conscious experience. So far as the
material world of sense-experience is concerned, bodies
and their operations must, I hold, exist independently
of our sensations of extension, motion, and resistance,
and matter must be credited with agency in virtue of
its primary properties. The world cannot be allowed
to be a mere system of possibilities of sensation, as
with Mill and Berkeley, for our experience is of objec-
tive things, and not merely of sensations ; it cannot
even be admitted to exist, as with the Neo- Hegelians,
only for experience, since our knowledge is precisely
such as testifies to extra - mental reality. Our percep-
tions vary, however, independently of the objects, and
are conditioned by the powers and view- points of the
observer. But this does not keep one from regarding
p
226 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
our knowledge of the real or inner being of the
phenomena of the material world as psychical or
mental. It does not keep one from holding that the
mind does not simply " copy " the world so impressed
upon it, but, as active, sets its own seal upon the
world of reality, and takes view of it which is its
own. It does not keep facts fixed for us. I thus do
not merely think of the Absolute as ground of all
unity, root of all being, and condition of all conscious-
ness, for God neither exists nor comes into being only
through my subjective thinking or my ratiocinated
knowledge of Him. He antecedently exists and acts
upon me in the various lines of His self -revealing to
my thought and life. This is wholly compatible with
my being idealist enough to find the world, as known
only through my powers of mind or idea, in the end
a mental construction. Empirical reality, in its time-
priority of existence, conditions my mental construc-
tion in its logical priority. The higher or spiritual
perceptions of the Absolute Spirit give me a knowledge
which is knowledge by every law of thought and every
principle of fundamental Reason. For me, therefore,
a true Idealism is the true philosophy, but it is a
Theistic Idealism, and neither a lop-sided Intellectual-
istic Idealism, nor an exaggerated Ethical Idealism.
I call this Theism idealistic, both because it traces
matter, originatively, to spirit, and because it makes
spirit or conscious experience that through which alone
created matter is known by us. The world is related
to spirit in perception, and the only rational inference
or interpretation is, that the world stands related in
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 227
its totality to an original Mind or Thinker, Who, as
Absolute, is constitutive of the whole. But our Ideal-
ism is theistic because, eschewing the merely abstract
unity of pantheistic conception whereby finite things
are treated simply as elements or parts within a whole,
it preserves that relative separateness and distinctness
of things which are especially manifest in the case of
the external world and man's conscious spirit. We say
* relative" separateness and distinctness, for our Theism
seeks to retain the concept of parts mutually related
within one vast whole. Our Theism relates both the
external world and man's spirit to the creative power
or agency of God, which calls them into being and
gives them direction. Hence the theistic conception
of the constant dependence of the creature no mere
pantheistic simulacrum upon God, Who has given us
being of our own. Through this larger, more funda-
mental Reality, we find our way to unity, even the
unity of a spiritualistic Monism, and escape the en-
snaring meshes of the Dualism of mind and matter.
This Monism is very different from that of the
Spinozist or the present-day Materialist, for it is the
doctrine of the Infinite Spirit of God as the one
underlying Reality. This Spirit, as a unitary Being,
forms the ground and principle of all other being.
This Eternal Spirit is also the possibility of the inter-
actions between individual beings and things : in a
metaphysical sense, is Soul and Substance of all
things; but such Monism is to be understood as, at
the same time, ethical, that is to say, fully retentive
of human freedom and responsibility. But our Ideal-
228 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
ism finds no difficulty in such interaction as is herein
presupposed, or in the constant reciprocity between
subject and object. In the case of the external world,
God is in the world no less than He is over it. In
the material world God is made manifest, so that
through it we know Him in His objective reality.
This world of matter we take not as foreign to our
spiritualistic nature, for we know it only as conform
to our intelligence. It cannot, in respect of its ex-
istences and processes, be disparate and discontinuous
with our conscious life, with which, in fact, it forms
one whole. Even here there is the unity of subject
and object amid all apparent duality. So the dis-
tinction between the immanence of Deity and His
transcendence grows not into a separation, for then
should we be left with nothing but an abstraction on
our hands. In the case of the conscious spirit of
man, we postulate a relative and substantial independ-
ence for it, God being immanent in man, yet tran-
scending his finite spirit in such wise that man's
freedom and responsibility are not impaired. Our self-
hood is inviolable, as such, but not yet as originally
independent of God. My life is unitary and self-
contained, but it is yet essentially related to other
lives. Each of these lives is marked by the unity of
knowing the others to be in nature like itself. As
opposed to human selves, God has a unity of con-
sciousness within Himself, but not in such wise that
it stands unrelated to these human selves. The how
of God's being immanent in, and at the same time
externally related to, our human spirits, belongs to the
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 229
inquiry into our metaphysical and ethical experience.
Enough to say that more perfect adjustments are
therein ethically possible to us. Theistic Idealism
avoids the Hegelian mode of identifying God with
man, so that the growth of man's spirit is taken to
be the growth of the Divine consciousness. For the
reality of human experience would then be our only
Absolute, obviously a very insufficient one. Theistic
Idealism, of course, recognises that the Absolute Life
is a process in the sense of progressively realising its
purpose in time, but it does not confound this with
God's coming to know Himself. More mysterious, no
doubt, in its working, is this case of the self, than
that other of the external world, in consequence of
the free play of personality in this mutual commerce
of two spirits, the finite and the Infinite, but the
interaction is not less real, and is more inspiring.
Not merely formal, but real, freedom or independence
of the ego must be maintained, for our personality is
grounded in freedom. Our personality has no other
content than the content of freedom, and formal free-
dom must always press on towards the end of real or
material freedom. Herein lies a great defect of Neo-
Hegelianism, which professedly makes much of free-
dom ; its freedom is, and can only be, a merely formal
immediacy bringing with it no real freedom for the
individual subject. Better, however, than Martineau's
total rejection of Idealism, is an idealistic position,
chastened and tempered by the claims of empiric
reality which preceded all conceptual thought; recog-
nising that there is reality, vast, illimitable, beyond my
230 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
ken, though the what of such reality may be hid from
me. So the survey from my idealistic watch-tower
leaves me not with the cherished and delusive notion
that there is no reality beyond what I perceive. The
critico- idealistic methods of Neo-Kantists like Cohen,
Natorp, and Kinkel are no more satisfactory than
those of Neo- Hegelians. Cohea not only flouts the
weakness of Kant in respect of the given, but has
presented thought - processes as producing, from their
activity alone, their content. The judgments of pure
thought function, with Cohen, as determining moments
in the construction of the world of knowledge. His
attitude towards the given is unreasonable and full of
contradictions. The content of thought is, for Cohen,
unity, and not matter or stuff. Natorp goes so far as
to hold the thought of the content, and the content
which forms the object of knowledge, to be thought
itself so reducing us to an empty abstraction. In
keeping with all this, Kinkel declares that thought
must have no source or origin outside of itself. A
doctrine of absolute relativity is the final result. A
thorough comparison of Cohen's thought- world with
that of Hegel is very suggestive, even though Cohen
repudiates Hegel. Far too much Hegel left thought,
in his system, the only substance, so that reason
figures too largely as devoid of energy. But reason
without energy soon sinks into nothingness. Just as
little, on the other hand, does will act, in its free
deeds, without reason or thought. A true psychology
and a true metaphysic of the self are here a prime
need. It remains the incurable defect of Absolute
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 231
Idealism that thought is so over-weighted as to result
in a too complete suppression of energy.
I have said nothing of any aims which Materialism
may have in the way of providing the unity we seek,
for the Materialism of to-day infallibly lands us in
subjective idealism, and can by no consistent possibility
do anything to help us. The remarkable subjective
idealism of Berkeley brought in the idea and power of
God to account for our sensations and to escape the
conception of matter, doing so in a way we cannot
accept. For God and other selves, though implicitly
assumed by Berkeley, are no more immediately ex-
perienced by us than is the world of matter. The
imperilled existence of finite spirits in Berkeley's system
was admitted by himself : we have no " immediate evi-
dence " or " demonstrative knowledge " of their exist-
ence, he thinks. And so he was driven to bring in
Deity as maintainer of that intercourse between spirits,
" whereby they are able to perceive the existence of
each other." The Berkeleyan difficulty of bridging the
chasm that separates us from other personalities is one
that is keenly felt in Neo-Hegelianism, to which objec-
tively valid knowledge of the physical world appears much
more easy than a like knowledge of other personalities.
The only way found is by an appeal to common-sense,
which cannot help assuming and acknowledging other
personal individuals. But is this to be regarded as
satisfactory ? And why should physical objects be more
valid, objectively, for me than personal objects ? Surely
I am entitled to find the personalities of my fellows as
clearly and validly conceived as anything I can think
232 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
or know about physical objects. The only thing, of
course, which can be said against that is, that man as
spirit is not known by what he is, but by what he does.
The spirit of a man we know only as we are of it : we
know it in virtue of its activity or its movement, and
that, of course, is to know it in a subjective fashion
rather than as an object. There is still the question,
whether men are known only as pure spirits. The truth
seems to be, that the essentially social nature of the
self is that which is really not understood and kept in
mind. The epistemological difficulty disappears, and is
no more existent, when that is understood, in the case
of other personalities than of physical bodies. The
cognitive problem the impassable chasm vanishes
when, in proper pursuance of the idealistic position,
other selves are not set up as entities outside the self,
but viewed as objects lying within the consciousness
of a unified self. Berkeley had to face the fact that
God and finite spirits can be conceived as existing in-
dependently of our conceptions of them, but he certainly
did not, and could not, prove that the world may not
be conceived as existing in the same independent
fashion. This, although all our data for such a belief
are mental. He, in fact, wraps himself up in the world
of his own conscious ideas, and begs the question again
and again. The world is for him neither cause of our
sensations nor counterpart of our ideas, and we are
left so much in a sphere of mere assertion as to the
non-existence of the world, that we hardly wonder
Hume should have said Berkeley's positions admitted
of no answer and produced no conviction. He must
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 233
again have recourse to an Infinite Spirit to find suffi-
cient explanation of all the appearances in Nature. But
we can see how naturally Berkeley took the position
he did. If a thing's esse is its percipi, the human mind
" exists not always " : things must therefore be " nowhere
when we perceive them not," or they must exist as
" ideas in the mind of God." So, then, we cannot
admit the world to be the unreal thing Berkeley made
it, in so reducing it to terms of our own sensations,
for we do not emulate his pathetically splendid scep-
ticism in respect of the most powerful spontaneous
beliefs of humanity. But neither can our Idealism view
it as a world of matter divorced from, or independent
of spirit. As for the creative process, its rationality
may not lie open to us, but that is just to say we are
finite, and that there are things of which we may know
the that without knowing the how. As for our finite
selves known to each other, we are in such knowledge
already on the way to transcendence, and have over-
passed experience.
Nothing is more vital to a proper treatment of Theistic
Idealism than that a fundamental place be found for
Personality, alike on its Divine and its human side. I
confess to finding Personality rarely treated in any
fashion calculated to impart any vitality to philosophical
Theism ! In only too many of the systems of the
greatest philosophers, Personality, on its Divine side,
is too much a mere side issue, or a kind of afterthought,
a useful vivifier of irredeemable abstractness ! Lotze's
presentation of Divine Personality may not at all points
claim our adherence, and the difficulties may be so
234 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
great as to prevent the elaboration of a perfectly satis-
fying theory, but these considerations do not in the
least extenuate or justify weak philosophic temporisings
with what ought always to have been felt to be essential
to Theism of any vital sort. I am quite ready to admit
that, from the side of science no less than that of philo-
sophy, it is harder than ever to retain the personality
of God. An infinite person seems to ordinary philo-
sophical usage a contradiction in terms, while modern
science contemplates the universe as inimitably vast, con-
tinuous, inter-related. Such an Universe the Infinite
Personality must be able to fill and to form. Evolu-
tionary science, often viewed as inimical to personality
in Deity, must, in its teleological reference, be held to
point to mind or personality in God. I will only say
this, that the objections urged against Personality in
God by philosophers, of any school whatsoever, quite
fail to convince or satisfy me, even when they are not
quite wanting in logical force. And the reason is
obvious. We are here dealing with elements that belong
to the larger logic of life, against which verbal quibblings
do not avail. To the believer in the Absolute Per-
sonality, nothing has yet been advanced from any quarter
that need keep him from holding to real and vital per-
sonality stripped of all its accidental limitations in
God. It were easy to name philosophers of to-day who
exhibit a truly wonderful and precise knowledge of what
possibilities of being do not exist for Deity, when shorn
of this, that, and the other human quality. But what
wonder if the world remains unconvinced ? Has not
the dogmatism of philosophy here run wild ? What
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 235
does Divine Personality really involve ? It involves that
God is the great Thinker, the supreme Wilier, and the
Sovereign affectional Moralist, all in One I mean, in
a conscious unity. These elements of intelligence,
affectional or moral goodness, and will, are constitutive
of Divine Personality, as we know or apprehend it.
God is, as Personality, not mere cause of the world,
but subject as well. The effect of recent discussions is
to make one adhere more firmly to Lotze on one point,
namely, that perfect personality exists in God only, and
that talk of His being superpersonal must be discarded,
on demand of the religious instincts and aspirations.
We have had philosophers even maintaining the finitude
of God, as a way of preserving His personality, and
theological people have been found commending them
for so doing. These things are due to failure to tran-
scend a merely quantitative way of apprehending per-
sonality, without entering into its intensive infinity its
spiritual and ethical implications. Personality in Deity,
it must be remembered, is, before all things, ethical,
and must be deeply apprehended in its ethical bearings
and relations if it is to be grasped and understood at
all. Any state of mind indicative of servitude to for-
mal logic will make little headway in solving the diffi-
culties of Infinite Personality. It is personality that
will understand, construe, and interpret personality, and
it is along the heights of ethical and achieved per-
sonality that we must learn, in surer than the logician's
way, the power and possibilities of personality on its
Divine side. The vitality of the universe, and the
immanence of the life of Deity, are truths which have
236 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
been much more vividly realised in our time, but confi-
dence in the personality of God has, in really enlight-
ened quarters, been thereby quickened, not quenched.
No disclaimer of impersonality could be more complete
than that of the newer philosophical Theism. There
has been no lack of conceiving God through the world
of finite experience, and such knowledge or conception
of Him is true as far as it goes. For, though He be
for us the Absolute Being, and, as such, a self-evident
principle of reason, yet our knowledge of Him arises
only on occasion of our experientially knowing Him in
His objective reality. This is not to say that there
may not be advantage, such as Biedermann suggests,
in beginning within the logico-metaphysical idea of the
absoluteness of God's Being, rather than with the
empirical idea of man. When Green asks us to become
all that the Eternal Consciousness is, he evidently
expects us to perform the psychological feat of know-
ing all that the Eternal Consciousness already is.
A psychology of the Eternal Consciousness we certainly
do not meditate, for predicates applicable in our finite
case do not hold for the all-embracing conscious-
ness ; but we assert that the knowledge of the Infinite
Spirit must be knowledge from the inside, that is, of
a subjective character, the Universe being the result
of His own creative knowing and willing. God, then,
as the Absolute Personal Spirit must be clearly affirmed.
Of such pure spirit, indeed, we can affirm but little,
except, with Hegel, its freedom, that is to say, its self-
movement or activity. Such absolute Spirit we can
truly know only in a dynamic fashion, not ontologically ;
that is to say, we know this spirit as we are of it. Such
A CONSTRUCTIVE ESSAY IN IDEALISM. 237
is the nature of spirit-knowledge. Through this resolu-
tion of His personality into freedom or self-originating
movement we arrive, through His creative results or
processes, at Him Who is uncreate. From Him the
physical universe must, as objective reality, still be
distinguished. It is the result of the objective activity
of the Absolute : its ether, its matter, its energy exist
for the mind, not for the senses. Nature may supply
the materials, but mind is the great world-builder.
Nature is the expression of cosmic mind : it cannot be
understood without thought and reason, and what can
only so be understood must itself be reason and thought.
However distinct from consciousness we make matter
or the physical world, we yet know matter only in terms
of our conscious experience, basing our knowledge of
its qualities upon our sensational experiences. What-
ever reality nature or the physical world may represent
to God's experience, it still stands distinguished from
Him. A like distinctness of existence must be postulated
for ourselves, though made in His likeness. The funda-
mental reality of the Universe can only be spirit : its
highest energy can be no other than that of spirit : the
Absolute Being can be no less than personal spirit, for
impersonal spirit were a contradiction in terms : the
personal and self-conscious alone can love. The religious
relation is thus one which involves recognition, on our
part, of a real relationship between God and man.
Though we know even God in and through our finite
experience, yet this does not imply that we make God
only an element in experience, or evolve Him out of
experience, or fail to realise how small a part we know
of Him His absolute Being and working.
CHAPTER XVII.
FRENCH PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
FRENCH philosophy in the nineteenth century, while
making its own all rich material like that furnished by
Kant and Hegel, has not failed to maintain its own
continuous character and distinctive features. Its
Cartesian spirit has been as clearly manifest in the
nineteenth as in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
A dominant spiritualism pervaded the philosophy of the
seventeenth century, wherein speculative reason had
finally cast off Scholasticism. Materialism and Sensism
found vogue in the eighteenth century. The philo-
sophy of the nineteenth century in France is a return
to the spiritualism of the seventeenth century. In
the first half of the nineteenth century, philosophy in
France was largely concerned with questions of social
reform and political philosophy. These were often
courageously and suggestively dealt with. Philo-
sophical Traditionalism, as represented by De Maistre
and De Bonald, Lamennais, and Ballanche, looked
on the critical spirit as one of danger. They urged,
in ways extravagant enough, submission to the Church.
Tradition, authority, and social life they set up as
counteractives to individualism and anarchy. The
FRENCH PHILOSOPHY IN IQTH CENTURY. 239
Abbe Gratry set forth his views on the knowledge of
God and the soul, and on historical philosophy, in
interesting, able, and valuable presentations. Saint
Simon proclaimed a collectivism of his own, and the
need for a learned and skilful clergy. Fourier pro-
pounded his "phalansteries," and dreamed dreams of
an harmonious society wherein organisation should
beget a happiness perfect and complete. Then came
Comte denouncing all these endeavours as vitiated by
the fact that an all-convincing social science a science
of practical politics had not first been formulated.
It was on the heights of such positive social science
Comte hoped to gain a view- point which should em-
brace not only the good in the eighteenth century
philosophy, as handed on by Condorcet, but also what-
ever of truth might reside in it after the damaging
assaults of De Maistre on its negative character.
Comte thus became the completer of Descartes, who
had done so much to foster the positive spirit. A
reform in philosophic method was the fundamental
notion of Positivism. It was precisely Comte who first
understood the scientific issues and realised the changed
conditions of philosophy. He saw that philosophy may
no more seclude herself in abstract thought, and con-
struct theories to which facts must bend. Comte,
realising the proud security whence the positive sciences
now scrutinise the results of speculative philosophy,
makes the creation of a positive social science con-
stitute the fundamental unity of the whole philosophi-
cal system. The conception of a social evolution
of humanity as a developing organism is set forth by
240 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Comte in the Positive Politics, but had already been
dimly apprehended by Condorcet. The historic evo-
lution set forth by Comte is in marked contrast to
Hegel's, since it is external an exterior procession in
fact in place of the Hegelian development of spirit
from within. A positive theory of knowledge could
not, in his view, be separated from this new science
of his, with its not very pleasing name of Sociology.
To every branch of knowledge he would apply one
and the same method. And the method is no sooner
found than the philosophy is formed. The utter in-
adequacy of his so-called law of the three states has
been repeatedly shown, whereby he magnified into a
supposed general and primary law certain phenomena
of secondary and particular significance. Now, it is
obvious that, in treating the transcendental as inacces-
sible to the intellect, Comte made his system defective
and incomplete. He saw but one side of the shield,
as Spencer has seen the other. And it is a logical
weakness to treat humanity as an organism without
extending the organic idea to the medium and condi-
tions under which the social life of humanity is developed.
Man or mind individual Comte would construe through
humanity, rather than humanity through individual
mind. The individual is for him only an " abstraction,"
and exists only through universal humanity. Humanity
is for him supreme moral end, but he certainly unfolded
no proper and universally related moral system. What-
ever difficulties may attend the pursuit of an absolute
philosophy, these we certainly prefer to a system which,
like that of Comte, deceives itself as to what is Divine,
FRENCH PHILOSOPHY IN ipTH CENTURY. 241
disbelieves the relatedness of the universe that stands
over against man, and destroys its unity by treating
the part as the whole. Even precursors of the positive
philosophy, like Descartes and Bacon, were not able
to resist the craving for an " absolute " knowledge.
Comte proceeds by the method of elimination ; he
eliminates the theology resident in historical religion,
and retains cult and ritual. An artificial and idealised
abstraction is the result. Among those he most deeply
influenced were Littre and Hippolyte Taine, the latter
a thorough experimentalist and evolutionist of Spencer-
ian type. Vain and preposterous as have been the at-
tempts to take Comte's system in lieu of the great
philosophies of the absolute, these attempts derogate
not from the highly meritorious services Comte rendered.
These are evidenced by the fact that over the broad
realms of philosophical, historical, and scientific research
the spirit of his doctrine may everywhere be found to-day
as a deep, pervasive influence. Its great merit lies in
its insistence on the objectivity of the true on the fact
that truth is found in nature and in history, not in the
introspections of the ego. But it remains, of course,
strange that a philosophy calling itself "positive " should
mainly represent for us conclusions that are negative.
For no one in the century, perhaps, may be so truly
claimed the merit of having propounded a new system
as for Comte.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, philo-
sophy in France presents a somewhat striking contrast
to what we see in the first half of the century. This
is in respect of the fact that it presents no school so
242 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
dominating and centralising in influence as Eclecticism
was about the year 1830. Now the influence of Kant
is felt, and now that of Leibniz and Schelling. At other
times evolutionary tendencies are manifest, due to the
theories of Lamarck and Spencer, while at yet other
points of time Comtean influences come into view.
To this we shall return later.
It was as succeeding the destructive and passionate
criticism of the eighteenth century that Maine de Biran
became one of the founders of Spiritualism in France.
Theirs was a spiritualism becoming enough, no doubt,
but lacking in the ferment of life. In the hands of Biran
and Royer-Collard it soon became an official spiritualism.
Maine de Biran did not profess to find the absolute.
He kept sure foothold on experience. De Biran, in some
respects precursor of modern psychology, propounded
"the immediate consciousness of self-activity" as "the
primitive and fundamental principle of human cognition."
He distrusted the idea of substance, which, in the philo-
sophy of Descartes, had tended towards pantheism. He
made for himself, in the end, a kind of via media between
Stoicism and Christianity. The former he supposed
to make too much of man's will, and the latter too little.
His acute analyses overpassed sensationalism by bring-
ing out the place and importance of the will.
Maine de Biran was followed by his devoted disciple
Cousin, famed for his wide Eclecticism. Other founders
of spiritualism were such disciples of Cousin as Jouffroy,
Saisset, Vacherot, Janet, Gamier, Ravaisson, Jules
Simon, Damiron, Franck, and brilliant essayists like
Caro and Bersot. Cousin's method is eclectic, but
FRENCH PHILOSOPHY IN IQTH CENTURY. 243
spiritualism is the soul of his system. His morality is
exactly that of spiritualism, mediate and traditional.
His Eclecticism was clearly not that of piecing together
parts of other systems ; that is just what it was not. It
professed to base itself on observation and induction,
to arrive at unity " solely by the aid of the experimental
method." Of course, this method, in resting on obser-
vation that is complete, will include the truth in other
and less complete systems ; therefore does Cousin choose
to call his method eclectic. So his Eclecticism has to
do with the teachings of historical philosophy, whose
psychological relations he clearly perceived, as well as
with the facts of consciousness. And, as matter of fact,
he soon brought into his brilliant teachings for he was
the most influential French philosopher of the century
elements that stood in irreconcilable contradiction to
each other. The truth is, he was unable to abide faithful
to his own method, and to carry analysis to its furthest
possibilities.
Eclectic spiritualism waned after Cousin, and the de-
cline of metaphysics of the school of Cousin has paved
the way for the cult of science. Even Jouffroy, with
soul athirst for certitude, did not find in the teachings
of his master perfect satisfaction. Jouffroy made man
the centre of his philosophical studies, and made will
central in man. Man is a free force; to him there is
an order universal and impersonal in God; all morality
for him consists in respect for this universal order.
The psychology of Cousin and Jouffroy, based on obser-
vation by means of consciousness and reflection, was
used in support of a spiritualistic metaphysic.
244 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Vacherot sat loosely to Eclecticism, and was not
afraid to deal with the metaphysical problems in the
attempt to found a new spiritualistic school. The
idea of perfection, the conception of the infinite, the
notion of the ideal, were all handled by Vacherot, who
held perfection to be incompatible with real existence.
Vacherot had a spiritualistic bent, and, after Cousin,
tended to give an ontological turn to psychology. It
has been, for him, rather unsympathetically put that
" the idea of perfection is God, but that perfection has
no existence." Caro has dealt with Vacherot's positions
in severely critical fashion, leaving him only a shadowy
Deity a figment of the imagination. The infinite is,
with Vacherot, simply the all the all or nothing.
The Deity of Vacherot's idealism is, when developed,
merely an ideal one : he cleaves to the notion of a
perfect Deity who does not really exist, for a true God
cannot, with him, be living and real! The personality
of Deity Vacherot, in short, denies: God, as the ideal
of all things, exists for him only as He is thought : the
real infinity is the world. Caro contends, on the other
hand, that a God who does not exist is no God at all.
As against Vacherot's contention that he yet guards
the objective reality of Deity as perfectly independent
of the mind, Caro retorts that Vacherot's God as the
Supreme Ideal is a purely abstract and subjective con-
ception, the mere product of human reason, the pure
and simple result of our own intellectual operations.
Jules Simon treated natural religion in theistic
fashion, doing so in a powerful manner.
Saisset rendered manifest how the personality of God
FRENCH PHILOSOPHY IN IQTH CENTURY. 245
is maintained by pantheism always and only at the
expense of personality in man.
Paul Janet was a steadfast supporter of Eclecticism,
and laid down a morality which was a variation on the
motives of Kantian duty, coupled with a doctrine of final
causes. He headed French spiritualism in his time.
Damiron, as a moralist of the school of Cousin, re-
jected a priori every system that did not comport with
faith in the beautiful, in God, and in the future life.
From various sides we see metaphysical speculation
gradually asserting itself in the latter half of the century
against both Eclectic and Positivist tendencies. We
have the philosophies of liberty propounded by Secretan,
Renouvier, and Ravaisson, and the contingency theory
of Boutroux. Ravaisson sought to establish an aesthetic
morality, based on the identity of the good with the
beautiful. Influenced by Aristotle, Leibniz, and Schel-
ling, he showed philosophical leanings to a metaphysical
knowledge in which real being, or the absolute, is dis-
closed by an intuition of the reason. By such disclosure
reason becomes linked to the absolute as true principle
of all existence, beauty, and knowledge.
Again, Secretan took up for the main principle of his
philosophy the idea of God's absolute liberty, and
founded thereupon an argument for liberty in man. The
problems of evil and of Divine personality did not escape
him. But his pleadings for liberty constituted his
deepest influence on French philosophic thought. Under
Kantian inspiration, teachings like those of Lachelier
and Boutroux have displayed idealistic tendencies.
Boutroux has set forth the philosophy of contingency
246 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
with great power, and made his influence felt beyond the
bounds of France. This is a form of philosophic con-
ception with which the twentieth century will have to
reckon. Boutroux takes cognisance of the postulates
and results of the positive sciences, and seeks to do
full justice to reality. He makes fine insistence on the
value of the History of Philosophy, whose " great doc-
trines have in them a principle of life." Renouvier was
at once idealist and phenomenalist, and proved an able
philosopher. Renouvier stood out as severe critic of
eclectic spiritualism. He blamed its method or rather
its lack of method even more than its conclusions.
Renouvier postulates a beginning for the world, holds the
ascending series or infinite regress of causes to have had
a first term, takes liberty and contingency to pertain to
the world of phenomena, and thinks man's liberty and
personality capable of being critically established. For
Renouvier is nothing if not critical. His system he calls
" Criticisme." It leans at points to Leibnizianism. His
stand for individual freedom is a bold one. Pantheism
and fatalism he would avoid by a rigid exclusion of the
idea of substance. Conscience is for him the revelation
of the absolute, and the main stress of his ethical teach-
ing lies on duty. This form of Neo-Kantism has exerted
great influence on French philosophic thought, under
Renouvier, Brochard, Pillon, and Dauriac. As " Critic-
isme," it may be allowed to have made, in certain critical
respects, an advance (as idealistic phenomenalism) on
the older metaphysics. A system of Personalism, his
thought, no doubt, is in its more positive and construc-
tive aspects. He modifies and supplements Kantian
FRENCH PHILOSOPHY IN IQTH CENTURY. 247
criticism by subsuming all the categories under the prin-
ciple of the relativity of knowledge, and by making them
all modes of the category of relation. Expressly he
holds Relation itself to be " the most general relation
which all other relations presuppose," and consequently
to be " the first of the categories." It was as rejecting
the Unconditioned, substance, and noumena, as so many
" intellectual fictions," that Renouvier regarded it as
necessary to represent the total synthesis of phenomena
under the aspect of Personality. He thought the
Kantian philosophy was " practically bent upon the
ruin of the person," all whose modes are phenomenal.
This he says because of Kant's adherence to the realism
of substance and the noumenon. Renouvier's theory of
knowledge rejected all notions of the infinite, of sub-
stance, of thing-in-itself, and confined knowledge to the
limits of the knowing mind, where it was purely repre-
sentative. The person, with his modes of consciousness,
was for Renouvier ultimate fact. His phenomenal
knowledge, he thought, can know real relations, and
therefore true existence. For knowledge must be judged
by what the person can know, and not by what, on
critical hypothesis, he can not know. Outside con-
sciousness there was, to Renouvier's idealistic phenom-
enalism, nothing; but the phenomenal series was not
supposed to give certainty, which came only through
rational belief. Renouvier's belief in the person as a
real knowing subject is less a moral postulate, as with
Kant, than an epistemological one. His personalism is
developed on the intellectual side, to the neglect of the
ethical aspects. His belief is drawn from the relations
248 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
of our consciousness to objects in a phenomenal world.
For Renouvier, " no objective representation can be more
than subjectively objective " ; and we have merely ideas
roused in us by the presence of objects or bodies, but no
real perception of bodies in themselves. A kind of
natural belief makes them known to us. The thought of
Renouvier, setting out from Kantian base, developed, in
the manner now indicated, in the direction of pure rela-
tivism, but his system suffered so many influences that it
became fantastic and composite, and somewhat hetero-
geneous in its answers. His thought somewhat strangely
failed to perceive that purely relative values imply
absolutes which must be, in some sort, known as the
foundation of said relativisms. Renouvier sought a
synthesis of Kant and Hume, sought to purify Kantian
system by the pluralism and phenomenalism which were
the result of Hume's rigid analysis of experience. The
noumenon or thing-in-itself is thus, as we have seen, not
allowed to appear in Renouvier's neo-criticism. The
law of phenomena is for him the a priori element in
experience, in which respect Renouvier does not seem
quite so logical as Hume. Critical and suggestive as
parts of the neo-critical theory are, one cannot regard
such a mixed system as satisfactory.
Boutroux and Poincare" have stood for the indeter-
minism which has been so marked a feature of the
" neo-critical " school. Bergson is spiritualistic in his
metaphysics. Poincare holds that science would not be
justified as it is, in its conclusions, " if it did not reveal
to us something of the nature of reality." To him the
real is the objective, that is, community among thinking
FRENCH PHILOSOPHY IN IQTH CENTURY. 249
beings. Ravaisson, Lachelier, and Boutroux all oppose
to the " demi- spiritualism " of Eclecticism that true
spiritualism to which matter itself is immaterial, and
nature is explicable by mind. Fouille"e has propounded
a system of philosophy which has the great merit of
being broad, comprehensive, and consistent. Its domin-
ating idea is that of the idees-forces. In his view, an idea
is not a mere reproduction or representation in the mind
of some object outside itself, but is at the same time a
force working for its own realisation. In this way ideas
are real factors in our mental evolution, for they condi-
tion actual changes wrought within us. Not only so,
but they have consequential effects on the world without
us, as we give them outlet in our outward actions. The
bold and striking conception of Fouillee is that the idea
is a form of volition as well as of thought : it is, on his
precise showing, no longer a form, but an act, conscious
of its own direction, quality, and intensity. We see
what an important law is thus suggested by his idees-
forces, though, of course, it remains to be seen whether
it will prove an adequate foundation for the vast super-
structure he has sought to rear thereupon. It is on this
basis Fouillee tries to rear a monism of idees-forces that
shall overpass any propounded by idealism or material-
ism. For critical skill, constructive power, modernness
of spirit, and metaphysical acumen, the philosophical
work of Fouillee deserves great praise, whatever may be
its final appraisement. He has shown a most worthy
conception of philosophy as the study of " reality itself
both as fact and consciousness " reality " not immobile
and as if crystallised in the past," but " in the process of
250 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
becoming" and determining "the future." Fouille"e and
Renouvier have done more than any other thinkers, in
the latter half of the nineteenth century, for philosophy
in France, Fouillee by his idea-forces opposing merely
mechanical views of the universe, and Renouvier oppos-
ing the unintelligible as being, in fact, the self-contra-
dictory. Fouillee rejects the philosophy of contingency,
which Renouvier accepts. Dauriac also has ably de-
fended contingency against Fouillee's attacks. Hardly
behind Fouillee and Renouvier has been Caro, in respect
of his brilliant exposition and defence of spiritualistic
philosophy. The highest problems of thought he, not
always without a certain hardness, confronted and
treated with a rare power of philosophical polemic.
Caro is a striking and beautiful philosophic personality,
maintaining his positions with singular skill, lucidity,
and grace. These positions range themselves round
such subjects as God, the soul, the future life, and duty.
The God for Whom, as a spiritualistic philosopher, he
contends, must be a God living, intelligent, and loving.
Only such a God carries for him real perfection the
perfection of thought and love. Reason is able to con-
ceive such a Deity, he holds, and the religious conscience
can approve Him, not blind Necessity. One of the most
recent French metaphysical treatments is the " creative
evolution " of Bergson, from the standpoint of the
modern scientific view of the world. Its synthesis is
too abstract, merely psychological, and lacking in reality. 1
Guyau took for his main idea that of life life as a
principle of natural power, expansion, and fruitfulness.
1 On Bergson. see also chap. xx. p. 310.
FRENCH PHILOSOPHY IN IQTH CENTURY. 251
He strove to show how, in this way, the individual and
the social points of view might be reconciled. Guyau
possessed great depth of feeling and charm of style.
That able and distinguished thinker, Cournot, has sought
to base his philosophy on a group of fundamental ideas
gleaned from the various sciences such ideas as order,
chance, probability. He seeks not certainties in his
philosophy. Cournot's caution and freedom from dog-
matic certitude have militated against the power and
prevalence of his teachings. His "infinite probability'*
is in striking contrast to Comte. Milhaud has made " a
kind of normal objectivity" the quest of science, and
applied the same criterion to religion itself. Durkheim,
greatly influenced by Comtist ideas, adopts practically
the position that God is society, and that, in desiring
Him, we are only seeking to attain the highest realisation
of ourselves. God does not disappear in humanity, rather
humanity discovers God in itself, and fervently worships
Him for very reason that it has found Him there.
Having completed this brief review of French philo-
sophical developments in the nineteenth century, it only
remains to be said that the official philosophy in France
is still mainly Eclecticism. Its nearest danger is that of
being content to teach. Its most serious lack has been
fruitful development, and that is serious enough for a
philosophy. An eclectic philosophy that shall be com-
prehensive enough for this time must, I decidedly think,
be one that shall reconcile and do justice, in its vast
synthesis, to those three great philosophic types, or
fundamental philosophic methods, represented by what
I shall call Naturalism, Rationalism, and Moralism.
252 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Cartesianism thought to solve the problem of the
universe by clearness of thought. In opposition to
Cartesianism, the sensationalism of Condillac thought
to find all the knowledge possible to us through the
correct interpretation of our sensations. The moralism
or Neo-Kantianism of Renouvier teaches the supreme
worth of conscience and its revelations. What I main-
tain is, that the Eclecticism of France must find room to
do justice to all three spheres or types of reality: (i) to
the world of empiric reality, mediated through the
senses ; (2) the world of abstract truth, to which we are
brought through the forms and processes of thought ;
(3) the world of ideal values, revealed to us in the im-
peratives of conscience. How hard it is to get the justice
we desiderate for all these three spheres of truth or
reality, the history of philosophy is a standing witness.
Yet an Eclecticism that shall neglect any one of these
three factors is instantly open to damaging assaults in
the interests of the neglected factors. Happily, in most
recent years, some of these desiderata are being met, as
in the philosophy of the sciences by Bergson, the classic
rationalism of Hamelin, and the philosophy of action of
Olle-Laprune. The weakness of French philosophy in
the nineteenth century arose from its bifurcated move-
ment its tendency critical and its tendency reconstruc-
tive. And not only so, but in France, as elsewhere, we
find at the close of the nineteenth century, philosophies
rather than philosophy. There the rich and fruitful re-
sults of the philosophical specialists awaited some unify-
ing power or process, whereby the lost sense of totality
should be brought back to men's minds, and the unity of
FRENCH PHILOSOPHY IN IQTH CENTURY. 253
knowledge be restored in a rich and comprehensive
philosophy. French philosophy of the future must,
perforce, partake less of a merely national character, and
more form part like other national philosophies of
European philosophical development. To that develop-
ment it has already contributed its peculiar share of
clearness of idea, lucidity of expression, precision of
statement, positiveness of spirit, fruitfulness of method,
richness of principle, acuteness of thought, and wealth of
system. Perhaps we shall await, with most interest, the
fortunes of critical idealism and the philosophy of con-
tingency in France during the twentieth century.
254
CHAPTER XVIII.
ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
ITALIAN philosophy in the nineteenth century forms an
interesting record. To do it justice, it is necessary to
remember how, when philosophy revived in Italy in
the seventeenth century, the subjectivism of Descartes
and Malebranche, and the Sensism of Locke, and still
more of Condillac, became there the prevailing influ-
ences. The eighteenth century was a time of re-
cuperation for Italian thought, which was led by
jurists like Giannone ; metaphysicians like Vico, founder
of the philosophy of history in its modern treatment;
and legalists and economists like Beccaria with his
immense services to justice and humanity Filangieri,
Genovesi who inaugurated doubt, criticism, and ob-
servation in Italian philosophy, but without leaving
any great, original system and Galiani. At dawn of
the nineteenth century we have Ventura, making philo-
sophy, after Aquinas, dependent on Revelation ; Gioja,
like Condillac, finding, in an empirical mood, the true
revelation in the facts of the world ; the influential
Romagnosi, with strongly marked legalist and intui-
tionalist tendencies and principles; Galluppi, a con-
ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY IN I9TH CENTURY. 255
siderable philosopher, with clearly - defined realistic
tendencies ; the great Rosmini, with his leanings to
idealism, and his emphasis on being as the universal
and all - embracing idea ; the powerful Gioberti, with
judgments framed after an ontologistic cast ; the ad-
mirable Mamiani, with an ontologism cast in more
realistic mould ; Vera, with vigour and independence
enough to impart some vitality to Hegelian thought
in Italy; Franchi, with his powerful rationalism and
opposition to official idealism ; and Ferrari, with his
positivist and practical conclusions. These, with such
other names as De Grazia the eclectic, Collecchi, and
Borrelli, the influence of which last on the philo-
sophical development of Southern Italy was not of
the happiest kind, cover pretty well the first half of
the nineteenth century. A period, let it be said, in
which we find philosophy in Central Italy marked by
constant empirical tendency, while the tendency in
Northern Italy was idealistic. But the influence of
Ferrari, Franchi, and Mamiani ran on into the second
half of the century. Early in the second half of the
century must be noted the Thomist philosophy of
Liberatore. During the last three decades of the
century, the philosophical activity of Italy was great.
Gabelli, by the clearness of his thought and the fresh-
ness of its form; Villari, distinguished by his learned
historic researches ; Spaventa, by his metaphysic, and
criticism of Kantian concepts ; Siciliani, by his posi-
tivist predilections ; Cantoni, by his eminent Neo-
Kantian endeavours; Lombroso, by his important legal
and positivist inquiries ; Ardigo the Italian Spencer,
256 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
as one may call him by his pronounced and system-
atic positivism; Conti, by his services to sound meta-
physics ; Angiulli, by his positive and experimental
methods ; Labanca, by his finely inclusive dialectic ;
Corleo, by his ingenious philosophy of identity ; De
Sarlo, by his lucid and critical labours, these have
been among the influences which have made Italian
thought in the nineteenth century a rich and varied
treasure-house of philosophical activity. Nor do they
by any means exhaust the influences, for there have
been (the Herbartian) Labriola, Mariano, Ragnisco,
Sergi, Cesca, Peccenini, Di Giovanni, Valdarnini,
Peyretti, Morselli, Trivero, Croce, Vailati, and many
others besides. Chief among the forms of the Italian
treasure-house of thought are the Positivist idea, the
Neo - Kantian view, the Evolutional view, and theories
that turn on the voluntaristic aspect of Reality. Posi-
tivism has been more slowly overpassed in Italy than
in any other country. It suited the genius of the
Italian mind, and it found there favouring conditions.
Pluming itself upon being a philosophy of fact, it did
not see how it essentially failed to recognise the
fundamental concept of Evolution, in not admitting
the process. Mamiani seems to be the thinker to whom
Francesco Bonatelli, who is now specially to occupy
our attention, most approximated in his Platonising
tendencies. This Platonising tendency is quite undis-
guised in Mamiani: in Plato's light he is continually
seeing things clearly; but Mamiani is really more real-
istic in the cast of his thought than the ontologists,
and holds that we know directly finite relations, and
ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY IN I9TH CENTURY. 257
also arrive at ideas immediately connected with Absolute
Reality.
It is a particular purpose of this chapter to give some
account of the place and influence of Francesco Bona-
telli in Italian Philosophy of the second half of the
nineteenth century. For it seemed to me that Bonatelli
deserves to be better known among us. His volumes
are now so largely out of print, and his work is so
scattered over Journals and Transactions, as to make
this chapter more needful and desirable. In the en-
deavour to make him known, I have been greatly helped
by the able and interesting paper on Bonatelli published
by Professor Francesco de Sarlo, of Florence. In the
period just mentioned, Bonatelli was the most strenuous
representative of spiritualism. At a time when such
treatment had not found vogue in Italy, it was his merit
to treat psychological questions in a method analytical
and positive, in the sense of a genuine observation of
facts. He was reared in the school of metaphysicians
who adorned Italy in the second quarter of the nine-
teenth century, and who with the exceptions of Rosmini
and Galluppi showed little interest in the analysis and
accurate observation of internal facts. Now, critical
penetration and analytic attitude are marks of Bona-
telli's work. He had made himself conversant with the
German philosophy of his time. Hence he was a prime
factor in introducing Italy to the knowledge of the funda-
mental ideas of German thinkers like Herbart, Fortlage,
Trendelenburg, and Lotze. Just in his time, and under
the impulses given by Herbart, Beneke, and others, was
instituted that movement of psychological research which
258 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
has since reached the height of its development through
the influences of a Helmholtz, a Lotze, a Wundt, and
others. Bonatelli first transplanted empiric psychology
to Italy, and introduced the taste for exact observation
of internal facts. A marked feature of his work was the
tendency to set forth, in form precise and clear, the
phenomena of conscience. Not less outstanding seems
to have been the moral nobility of the man than his
intellectual eminence, so that his work partakes of the
nature of a deep and convinced effort to rectify the
dominant philosophical currents of his time. Strong
he was in his insistence on the fundamental difference
between sensibility and intellect. The objectivity of
extension, of movements, of time, and so forth, he ad-
mitted. Feeling he was not disposed to treat as a form
of knowledge. To perception he attributed the exclusive
function of conceiving the real concrete. He left to
thought, as object, the world of the idea. In general,
Bonatelli seems to have followed the views of Herbart
and Lotze. But, in their tendency to oppose feeling
and intellect, Bonatelli diverges from them, for, accord-
ing to him, it is only through thought that we arrive
at the knowledge of that which is. In connection with
these mutual influences of feeling and ideation, I would
only recall how strongly Lotze has, in his metaphysic,
linked ideas with some particular vital feeling. Change
the feeling, and there is no roadway to the ideas con-
nected therewith. The line which Bonatelli, on the
other hand, pursues, seems to me a sufficiently strange
and striking one. The antithesis between thought and
feeling, now so frequent, he does not follow. In a word,
ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY IN IpTH CENTURY. 259
he makes conscience the equivalent of thought. He takes
conscience to be the first that knows ; but there is no true
and proper conscience without thought. Conscience is to
him essentially an act of affirmation, a true judgment, but
there can be no such conscience without something being
presented in fact, without thinking. That is, no doubt,
a strange procedure which identifies conscience with the
act of judging, but the objection to conscience being re-
duced to a judging act is taken to be due to a mechanical
conception of judgment. I do not propose to state in
extenso the grounds on which Bonatelli maintains these
positions, for there are other points I wish to notice.
Enough to remark that it has been claimed for this
identification of conscience with an act of thinking, that
it renders the whole cognitive process intelligible, the
fixed point required as ultimate term of reference being
found in the act of conscience, which is already an act
of cognition.
A cardinal point with Bonatelli is the distinction of
sensitive perception from that which is intellectual. The
basis of sensitive perception he finds in sensation. I do
not propose to go into his positions as to projection and
objectivisation. It must suffice to say that the elabora-
tion of thought carries with itself, as an instinctive and
rational belief, the conviction that what is affirmed is
true and exists independently of the subject. That is to
say, objective validity is inherent in every elaboration of
thought, as such. Bonatelli also deals with the import-
ant modern problem of the worth of perception. He
takes it to be the precise function of thought to reflect
reality. Not so with sensibility, which has for its task
260 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
to constitute reality in union with the objective element.
The determination of the peculiar nature of this objective
element he holds to be the real question. In making for
the worth of perception, Bonatelli seems to steer his way
between the Scylla of a purely idealistic view and the
Charybdis of a dualistic realism that treats the primary
qualities of bodies as objective. He takes the thing to
be but the law or formula of all the perceptive possibil-
ities, obviously a tolerably idealistic view in respect of
the fact that objective reality figures as a truth or prin-
ciple. On the other hand, he insists that such law is not
something merely thinkable, but is a force effective, real,
and independent of us, in this world of time, space, and
movement. I am inclined to agree with Professor de
Sarlo in thinking it impossible for Bonatelli's spiritualism
to remain in equilibrium between these two modes of
conception. For it seems most pertinent to ask how
Bonatelli's law can be something other than merely
thinkable ; how it can present those characters of sub-
sistence, reality, and particularisation which are inherent
in our apprehension of real and particular existences;
and how space, time, and movement are to be treated
as things in themselves. Bonatelli himself recognises
these distinctive features of true perception perception
of the real. He seems to me to have adopted these
positions, with this unsatisfactory result, because sensible
of the drawbacks to a purely idealistic view while cling-
ing to a desire to do justice by the real, to which he has
given no proper effect.
I pass, however, to touch on Bonatelli's views of the
characteristics of thought. He is critical of Lotze's
ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY IN IQTH CENTURY. 261
position in making thought consist in the living activity
of reference. Bonatelli holds this to be so far true, but
thinks it fails to determine that essential, in the character
of thought, which we call affirmation. Ideas, psycho-
logically considered, are only consolidated judgments,
with language as their cement, and are neither intui-
tively discerned nor beheld, but solely thought. They
are thought in two ways, Bonatelli thinks : implicitly,
or with conscious feeling that the system of judgments
in which they consist will be capable of being turned
to use, and, explicitly, or by affirming these judgments
anew. When we come to the objective existence of
ideas, a form of existence is not to be claimed for them
equal to that of concrete realities. In which connection
I would say, Perhaps not ; but thought must be conform
to reality just as perception is ; I find no valid reason
for holding otherwise than that the object determines
our thought, in which case our thought, as rational,
seems to me as real as anything can be. But to return.
After the Lotzean mode, the form of the existence of
ideas consists in their worth or value they are of the
possibility of the essence modes they are of appre-
hending that in which we seek the essences of things.
They need not be merely subjective. All our science is
based on faith in the objectivity of the idea. Laws,
essences, types, are substantially idea. I would remark
that, on the Lotzean view, however, the complete
human subjectivity of all our knowledge is unam-
biguously maintained. And it appears to me that
Bonatelli was pursued by the same sense of difficulty
that seems to have haunted Lotze, causing the latter to
262 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
say that " thought and existence certainly seem to be so
connected as that they both follow the same supreme
laws ; which laws are, as regards existence, laws of the
being and becoming of all things and events, and, as
regards thought, laws of a truth which must be taken
account of in every connection of ideas." So that here
again we seem to have in Bonatelli as indeed in Lotze
a mediate view, and one not particularly thorough-
going with either of them. Ideal entities are, in the
Bonatellian view, determinations of conscience, then
thoughts and nothing more, having an existence only
in our minds. Bonatelli emphasises the fact that
religious philosophers have posited for ideas a place
and substantial foundation in Deity Himself. Hence
accrue to them the characters of mentality, absolute-
ness, immutability, independence of time and of all
finite thought. He lays stress on the sense these
philosophers have had of the insufficiency of the order
of ideality or possibility, in consequence of which they
postulate an absolute Prius as the true and absolute
reality in virtue of which conception they identify the
ideal absolute with the absolute that is real. Every-
thing knowable thus comes to be considered as that
which is known by the Absolute Mind. In all this we
have but Bonatelli's way of representing those modern
endeavours to find the unity of thought and being
which have found large favour amongst ourselves. In
these, we take God to be the Absolute which rational
thought is necessitated to think the Infinite Mind, the
Prius of all thought as of all things, through Whom we
are able to think God. Such a notion of Deity is, no
ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY IN IQTH CENTURY. 263
doubt, very incomplete. It does not yield the God
of Theism ; it does not even suffice to exclude Pan-
theism. But it bears in its bosom, as a necessary datum
of consciousness, proof of the validity of its objective
existence, all merely logical proofs notwithstanding. It
takes us beyond the finite and contingent, and that is
much. It rectifies the mistakes of Kant. It posits
Being as given, not predicated, in its idea of God. It
recognises the neglected volitional element in the
assertion of the actuality of its infinite ideal by spirit.
It claims reality for what has been found a necessity of
thought, a datum of feeling, and a necessary offspring of
reason. For it disallows a world of reality different
from the world as it is to thought, and to which thought-
conditions do not apply. To revert to Bonatelli.
Thought as thought has a limit. Its limit is logical
necessity, whose negative aspect mainly comes into
view as unthinkableness. Then there is the question
as to whether logical necessity is a fact. Thought, as
being essentially reason, accepts no bond which does
not justify itself to reason. Thus we see that logical
necessity, taken in the negative aspect of which we have
spoken, is simply a mark or sign of that higher or
rational necessity, in virtue of which laws ontological
and ideal rule at once thought and being. Of course,
it is not impossible to think the absurd. We may not
be able to figure a quadrilateral triangle, but we can
think it well enough, for the contention of Bonatelli
is that, in the thought of a concept, we have but two
known elements and the relation in which they have
to be placed. When one thinks in this contradictory
264 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
way, says Bonatelli, his thought as a function of the
spirit is active, but the practical result is nil, for his
concept has held in it two judgments, one of which
may be the negation of the other. Hence springs a new
proof of the objectivity of the idea ; for to true thought
there always corresponds an object independently of the
exercise of the subjective function of thinking, while to
false thought there corresponds no such object. But, of
course, thought may be harmonious as a thinking act,
and not represent concrete reality : in which case we
are not to think the objective reality remains no more
than a possibility ; the important point is, that the object
is here able to become real, while in the other case the
case of false thought no such result is possible.
Bonatelli's doctrine of the will corresponds to his
theory of knowledge: the will is, with him, an irre-
ducible activity, as thought, in its originality, is a
function sui generis. He seems to postulate a continuity
in the unfolding of the different forms of human activity
relating to the volitional act, in such wise that desire
and will are presented rather as differentiations of a
single process than as heterogeneous functions of the
spirit. This reminds one of the tendency of some recent
German psychologists to distinguish between will as
ruled by feeling and will that is predominantly swayed
by thought. It seems to me that thus may arise in ex-
perience a duality at times so strong as to give point
and meaning to Goethe's saying
" Zwei Seelen wohnen ach ! in meiner Brust."
Italian philosophy, however, takes the matter differently
ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY IN IQTH CENTURY. 265
from Bonatelli, and is content to find in desire and
will only this in common, that they are alike principles
of activity. Bonatelli reduces them to a process of
psychic mechanism, in which the various constitutive
elements are necessarily united, will being a free
activity shot through with intelligence. The root of
desire is feeling, that of volition is judgment : in desire
we act in a particular way according to our psycho-
physiological constitution, in will we are in our action
illumined by reason. Desire consists essentially in
impulse, will in a decree of the intellect transmuted
effectually into fact. To these positions of Bonatelli it
seems well to add that of psychologists who have in-
sisted on impulse as a knowing of only a single motive
or possibility, whereas will in its proper sense develops
through motives and possibilities various. It is a
position of Bonatelli that, if we do not wish liberty to
mean caprice, and if we do not want will to break the law
of causality, then we must admit (in our treatment of
volition) reason and the cause of the volition. Bonatelli
maintains that, in a single volitional act, there is im-
plicitly involved an infinity of other volitional acts,
such infinite series being included or shut up in a single
volition relatively ultimate. The true character of
volition, according to Bonatelli, is to will willing the
volition of the volition up to the infinity of a given
thing. His purpose, in this very strange method,
apparently is to run the volitional process back into a
ratiocinative one par excellence. That is to say, he wishes
to show that, in willing we follow really the pathway of
reason, no matter how little the volitional act may be
266 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
reducible to a single reasoning. I think one may allow
that recent psychology accords with this so far at least,
that it yields larger recognition to the intimate psycho-
logical connection of the phenomena of volition with
ideas or cognition, sometimes even holding the volitional
process to consist simply and entirely in the prevalence
of the motive idea, whatever it may happen to be.
Bonatelli takes the decision to be always derived from
other antecedent affirmations, the specific character of
the volitional act consisting in this, that it renders
practical what was simply a theoretic position. Bonatelli
finds it necessary to admit a First Cause as giving
reason to all the series, and order to all the facts. The
finite and dependent human being, although for him a
prototype of causality, remains but a secondary cause.
I certainly think Bonatelli justified in this demand, that
things be reduced to intelligibility ; such demand is a
rational necessity, not to be overridden by scientific con-
ception of law : even Spencerian thought feels obliged
to admit such First Cause, in view of the law and order
of the phenomenal world, as a necessary datum of con-
sciousness a cause, however, which that thought, in
the most inconsequential fashion, would make utterly
unlike ourselves ; such a bond of real unity as Bonatelli
seeks in God is not to be denied us, I hold, in virtue
of any blind mechanical necessity. We are thus only
being true to experience in its highest and most rational
necessities. Bonatelli thinks we can, by reflection, form
a certain notion of the characters which ought to be
present in a real First Cause. Mechanical causes he
dismisses as insufficient, these being merely intermediary
ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY IN IQTH CENTURY. 267
terms. Certainly he is right ; experience outruns the
mechanical; spirit and spontaneity have not been
banished they have not even been touched by the law
of causation in the physical sphere. A Dynamic Cause
is Bonatelli's primary demand, such that from it the
whole series of secondary causes may take start. In this
I take Bonatelli to be entirely justified, for any scientific
interpretation of phenomena must be inadequate so long
as power, creative or formative, is excluded from our
notion of causation. Power, and no mere antecedence,
is what the metaphysical idea of cause proclaims. This
notion of efficient power or force is retained by the
human mind, in its idea of cause, in the most natural
and instinctive manner. When Kant restricted the
validity of the principle of causality to the sensuous
world, he overlooked how synthetic thought is of itself,
and how unwarranted his denial was of every sort of
causality but that which finds play within the range of
experience. Such a Dynamic Cause as Bonatelli pos-
tulates would be one whose power should work through
all Nature, and not be resident in single objects. The
sheer impotence of science, then, is certainly implied
in this coming of metaphysics to the rescue, that the
causal concept may not mean the mere succession of
antecedents and consequents, but the relation of phe-
nomena to that which is real. Philosophical thought
knows no finer progress than that which has been made
towards establishing the principle that the secret and
ground of our knowing is just real being in other
words, that all true knowing is fundamentally knowledge
of real being. Rational Will must pertain to the First
268 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Cause, for, Bonatelli asserts, we have no other way of
representing a true cause than by the attribution of will.
In this connection I may recall how impossible it
admittedly is for philosophical thought to explain the
way in which causal action works or comes into force.
It has just had to accept the fact of efficient causation,
and to postulate, as ultimate Ground or immanent Cause
of the world, an Infinite Spirit Whose Will is supreme.
The core of the causal concept is to be found in the
determination of its ontological significance. Will is
the one true cause of which we have any knowledge.
But this type of cause operates ab extra in a way that
must not be transferred to the working of immanent
Deity. No good reason has been advanced why we may
not infer, not only causation in God, the self-related
causality, but also Infinite Will as necessary fundamental
cause of all things. The thought and force of the world
would harmoniously centre in such a Supreme Mind as
the free First Cause and the self - determining Will,
Whose self-determining causality conditions, from the
centre of the cosmos outwards, every other cause. There
can be no complete causality, as I maintain, but the
causality of self-consciousness, for there is no other form
of being that is free. No sooner have we Will as cause,
efficient, final, and formal, than, declares Bonatelli, the
Prime Cause can present no other characters than those
of personality and creative skill. On which position
I remark that such a causal agent must be Intelligence,
supreme, personal, and free. A spiritual Absolute appears
to me the presupposition of natural causation and
mechanism. The transcendent activity of such Absolute
ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY IN IQTH CENTURY. 269
is the ultimate rationale of the world. Cosmical sub-
stance is neither mind nor spirit. We are led at last to
something higher than the mere category of causality,
to existence unconditioned save by the laws and resources
of its own personal being. We are further led to a world
that is founded in freedom, and are delivered from the
nightmare of mechanical necessity.
270
CHAPTER XIX.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPAIN.
IT cannot be said that Spain has taken the place in the
History of Philosophy which she has done in the history
of letters and arts, and in political history. Even in these
latter aspects Spain has been, from time immemorial,
lacking ; for, in the days of her primacy, ideals of liberty
and freedom of thought were crushed out. It cannot,
however, be forgotten that Isidore of Seville helped to
introduce Aristotelianism into Mediaeval Theology, nor
what a seat of early Arabian learning Spain was, and
continued to be, long after Avicenna. The rendezvous,
in the tenth century, of the most diverse races, Spain
remained till the thirteenth century the theatre of an
intense movement of ideas. Avicebron, a Spanish Jew
of the eleventh century, bore noted influence. Among
the Arabs of Spain were Avempace, who died in 1138,
and Abubacer, whose death was in 1185, both of mys-
tical tendency. They, with Averroes, carried on, after
Avicenna's death in 1036, the work and renown of the
Arabian philosophy, which had declined in the Orient.
Born at Cordova in 1126, Averroes proved a great com-
mentator on Aristotle the philosopher /car' e%oxn v to
the Arabic philosophers and lived till 1198. Averroes
I
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPAIN. 271
held to the eternity and potentiality of matter, which,
for his cosmic dualism, was an universal power contain-
ing in a germinal way all forms. The Prime Mover
simply drew forth or called out the active forces of this
eternal matter, or developed the form involved in the
matter. He also set forth the emanation and hierarchic
subordination of the spheres, the first sphere having been
set in motion by the Prime Motor, and each sphere
having been endowed with an intelligence of its own,
which is its form. Last of planetary intelligences is
human intelligence a form immaterial, eternal, im-
personal, objective. A form of teaching dangerous as
denying our personal individuality. A disciple of Aver-
roes, Moses Maimonides, most famous Jewish philosopher
of the Middle Ages, essayed to reconcile Aristotelianism
with Judaism. Born at Cordova in 1135, he pursued his
aim of showing the supreme end of religion and science
alike to be true knowledge of God, though persecuted by
fanatical sections of his own countrymen until his death
in 1204. Maimonides by no means blindly follows Arabic
Aristotelian system. Last great representative of the
Jewish philosophy, Maimonides rejected the eternity of
matter, and treated human intelligence as individuated
and separate.
Raymond Lully and Raymond of Sabunde owed to
Spain little more than their birthplace, but Lully's in-
fluence long remained behind him. Lully was born in
the Isle of Majorca in 1235, and, after early love of
pleasure, developed in mature years devout piety; he
engaged in continuous attack on Averroism. In the
interests of Lully were included literary and artistic, as
2/2 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
well as philosophical, affairs indeed, there is reason for
regarding him as the most brilliant Catalan writer of the
Middle Ages. In his theosophist tendencies, Lully pro-
ceeded, in deductive fashion, to what he supposed was, by
means of his ars magna, an exposition of all truth, not
realising that such a purely deductive method was
chimerical and delusive. Raymond of Sabunde, a
Spanish physician who became professor of theology at
Toulouse, followed the logical method of Lully in his
Theologia Naturalis, which, aiming to unite the soul with
/ God, is marked by theosophic tendencies. It was in the
sixteenth century that a remarkable and autonomous
movement of ideas took place in Spain, having its rise
among the Dominicans at the University of Salamanca.
But free philosophic inquiry was greatly blighted in
Spain practically the greatest Power in Europe for
most of the sixteenth century by the rank flowering of
the Inquisition, and the introduction in 1502 of the
\censorship of the press. Philosophy among the Jesuits,
who established themselves in Spain about the year
1548, was at first pretty much pure reaction against
Protestantism. The Dominican, Bannez, who was born
at Valladolid in 1527, put forward the doctrine of
" physical premotion " as part of the teaching of Aquinas.
Louis Molina, who had studied under Petrus Fonseca,
the Lusitanian Aristotle, defended in his theory de
scientid media the semi - Pelagian views of the Jesuits
against Dominican attacks. The Dominicans had be-
come Thomists, as their antagonists, the Franciscans,
were Scotists. Thus it will be seen how far the activity
of the Jesuit philosophers in Spain was, by the middle
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPAIN. 273
of the sixteenth century, from overlooking philosophical
interests. Fonseca (1548-1597), the Aristotle of Coimbra,
led the way in commentating on the work of Aristotle,
at the College there, the close of such commentary work
resting with Balthazar Alvarez. The most famous of
these Jesuit philosophers was Fr. Suarez (doctor eximius),
born at Granada in 1548. His great philosophical work,
Disputationes Metaphysics, is one of the most clear and
complete repertoires of the metaphysical teaching of the
time, dealing with being, substance, accident, cause, and
effect in detailed form. This was no commentary, but
an original treatment of being, categories, and causes.
Suarez, clear, acute, and expressive as a thinker, is the
most eclectic of the Spanish Scholastics. His philosophy
essayed an interpretation of the scholastic synthesis with
conspicuous success. He is no mere follower of the great
Aquinas, but it was his signal merit to recall the teach-
ings of Aquinas to an age that sorely needed such re-
minder. From Aquinas he differs by rejecting the real
distinction of essence and existence, denying the differ-
ence between them which Aquinas had drawn. It is
interesting to note that, of the laws of thought, Suarez
says that they are, at the same time, the determining
principles of the essence and nature of things. Suarez
takes unity, goodness, and truth, to be universal properties
of all that exists. He disagrees with Aquinas when the
latter maintains that the soul gives to the human body
not merely humanity, but also corporeity. Suarez thinks
happiness or beatitude is constituted by an act of the
will the resultant love ; whereas Aquinas had contended
that an act of intelligence namely, contemplation is
s
274 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
the thing required. On many minor points, indeed,
Suarez really agrees with Scotus, but he is still so far
under traditional constraint as to be with Aquinas on
weightier matters of philosophic import. Not a little
striking was the failure of the Spanish movement in
philosophy during the sixteenth century to impress itself
in more durable forms, and more extended limits, than the
Iberian peninsula, but it was yet in itself a sufficiently
striking philosophic revival a return to the great sys-
tematisings of the thirteenth century, and, above all, to
Thomism. Suarez was, however, a great name in
Spain's philosophical history, representing, as he does,
the final effort of expiring philosophy. To Suarez, " sub-
stance stands under the accidents in such a way that it
itself does not require a similar support." His view of
the existence of things is such that he holds the sciences,
in speaking by themselves, not to suppose the actual
existence of their objects, since this is accidental, so far
as concerns the reason or eternal ideas of science.
This position was taken because of the Scholastic view
that the concepts we form of things would remain for
ever true, did the things themselves not exist, and that
knowledge or science rests on the perception of the in-
trinsic truth of our concepts. The Infinite, he thinks,
cannot be more precisely defined than as that which can
have nothing more of the perfect in it. Suarez opposed
the notion of an immediate knowledge of the Absolute,
for to him the Divine Essence could not be so contem-
plated without a knowledge of all the Divine perfections.
To Suarez the claims of moral law rested upon those
dictates of natural reason which appeared to him in-
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPAIN. 275
trinsically necessary, and independent of all volition,
even of that which was Divine. The power of Emperors \
Suarez held to be derived from the Pope, and such rulers
he regarded as not without responsibility to those ruled ;
hence it is not altogether surprising that it was his fortune
to be considered a republican by Philip II. of Spain, and
to have his writings burnt by the Parliament of Paris.
But the real concern of the Jesuit philosophers was with
religion not secular politics to which, as the spiritual
order of things, they bore, in such a century as the
eighteenth, noble and impressive witness. Here, how- /
ever, we have been concerned only with their thought
developments in the sixteenth century, and at the open-
ing of the seventeenth.
From the brief after-bloom on the Iberian branch of
Scholasticism, we have passed to the beginning of the
seventeenth century, to which period must be referred
the treatises on moral philosophy by the famous Spanish
writer, Quevedo. That century dawned amid Jesuitical
controversies that tended to sink Scholasticism into
always greater disrepute. There came the age of the
lesser men : Suarez died at Lisbon in 1617, to be followed
by the inferior lights of Alphonsus, Mendoza, and Gonza-
lez, in historic sequence. With no lack of metaphysical
subtlety, the controversy between the Dominicans as
Thomists and the Franciscans as Scotists was continued
down to the eighteenth century, the fundamental diver-
gence remaining the dissolution by Scotism of that unity
of faith and science of theology and philosophy in
which Scholasticism had found peculiar pleasure. But
intellectual torpidity came at length to both parties, and
276 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
in the eighteenth century Spain was given over to philo-
sophe legislation and sway, with more material than
mental progress. In the nineteenth century, the
Churchly-Scholastic Philosophy had most representatives
in Spain. Among these may be reckoned Francisco
Alvarado, J. L. Balmez, Donoso Cortes, Zeferino
Gonzalez, Orti y Lara, J. J. Urrabura, and others.
One of the chief aims of the present chapter is to speak
of the great nineteenth century representative of neo-
Scholasticism which Spain furnished in the metaphysic-
ian Balmez, who can scarcely be said to have come to
his own. Born at Vich in Catalonia in 1810, he became
professor of mathematics for some time in the college of
his native town, and his mathematical predilections were
not without influence upon the form of his philosophical
expositions. His death took place in 1848. Whatever
defects may mark his philosophy, it cannot be denied a
highly honourable place among spiritualistic influences
and movements in the nineteenth century. In our pres-
ent connection it claims the attention due to the most
notable philosophical presentation that has appeared in
Spain for some centuries. This was his Fundamental
Philosophy, wherein he follows the ancient division into
logic, metaphysics, and ethics, and ranges over such
subjects as certitude, sensations, space and time, ideas
and being, unity and number, infinity and substance,
necessity and causality. His method throughout is really
psychologic without, however, giving to psychology
any special place or treatment and at times, as, for
example, in his rejection of Kant's objections to the in-
tuition of the ego, under paralogisms of the pure reason,
I
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPAIN. 277
his psychological force is quite remarkable. The philo-
sopher of Vich is not of the dry-as-dust type, but always
vital, and alive to all religious ideas and political interests
of his time. Capable on occasion, it must even be said,
of playing the part of violent partisan. Severely critical
he was of contemporaneous philosophy; found nothing
original in the Scottish School; viewed the philosophic
teachers of his time as humble disciples of Cousin ;
regarded Cousin himself as mere follower of Hegel and
Schelling; fought doughtily against the sensualistic
philosophy of Condillac ; cherished a great and sympa-
thetic regard for seventeenth century metaphysicians like
Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz; was generally just
towards the great philosophers of antiquity ; and proved
of Scholasticism critic as well as disciple. Balmez
summons to his aid common -sense as a criterion an
absolutely infallible criterion whose marks, as given in
his great work on Fundamental Philosophy, are the follow-
ing: such a tendency towards assent as the mind can
neither resist nor dispense with ; a certitude so absolute
as to be valid for the whole human race ; a submission of
every truth to the examination of reason ; and the satis-
faction of some great law of life, sentient, intellectual, or
moral, as the object of every truth of common -sense.
The claims Balmez makes for his common-sense one can-
not but regard as impossible and extravagant. He invests
it with a force which is irresistible, without giving us its
titles to reason or its proofs in experience. The influence
of Reid and the Scottish School is very apparent in his
theory of certitude and the part played by common-sense.
Certitude is for Balmez a fact to be explained rather than
278 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
established; its triple criteria he finds in conscience,
evidence, and common-sense. " Certitude," says Balmez, 1
"does not originate in reflection ; the spontaneous product
of man's nature, it is inherent in the working of the
intellectual and sensitive faculties." "The Creator, in
calling beings out of nothing, gave them their faculties in
accord with the place they occupy in the scale of creation.
Now, being, as intelligent, had need of belief." "Certi-
tude exists independently of all systems: theories live,
and will exist, without influencing this fact." " Philo-
sophy has for its role the examination of the grounds of
certainty, with the view of knowing more thoroughly the
human mind, and the laws which rule it, but without
flattering itself that it can change the nature of things."
Thus, for Balmez, certainty of the strongest kind springs
from natural instinct the irresistible force of nature ; an
immovable adhesion resting upon evidence, it is yet the
result of an involuntary impulsion, never the product of a
series of reasonings.
We may not call his system original, for it is an
eclectic spiritualism, and not sufficiently free of sub-
servient relation to theological dogmas. His theological
preoccupations seriously hamper his philosophical
freedom and independence. He is too prone to justify
Christian mysteries, and too little happy in the attempt.
Avoiding the subordination of reason to faith as in
Scholasticism, and the necessary conformity of reason
and faith found in the seventeenth century, Balmez is
yet prone to confound these territories, and to appro-
priate the dogmas and mysteries of religion, in order the
1 Fimdamcntal Philosophy, Book I., chap. iii.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPAIN. 279
better to defend them. But he is not alive to perils
involved in such confusion, alike from the philosophical
and the theological sides. He does not realise the
virtue of interrogating reason, and mayhap convincing
one's self, rather than asking of her answers to all
facts, wherewith to confound one's adversaries. Hence
he will make logical demonstration of all religion ; will
show a revelation to be possible, and necessary ; and
will prove the place of authority in these matters, not
realising sufficiently that reason cannot be dispensed
from making her own particular examination of these
dogmas.
Balmez refers to the conception of First Cause,
hoping by the principle of causality to demonstrate the
existence of God. He refers to Saint Thomas Aquinas,
who held that Being is, in the First Cause, intelligence
itself. Aquinas maintains that all effects pre-existing
in God, as in their Cause, must be in Him in a manner
intelligible, since they are not other than His intelli-
gence. For Balmez, God, as Universal Cause, contains
in Himself, virtually and in highest degree, all real and
possible beings, and he maintains that causality must
be origin and principle of the representation of Him.
The agreement of the effect with the cause is to Balmez
no mere logical or successional affair, but implies the
idea of a producing force or activity. Far from being an
inert mass, the corporeal world presents to his view an
activity of prodigious power.
Balmez sees in the doctrine of the Trinity the
" sublime type " of the necessary distinction of subject
and object to "the most profound intelligence." But
280 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
his explication was not happy, being of a sort that would
leave one for choice polytheism or pantheism.
Balmez held the idea of extension to be inseparable
from that of body, but he did not, like Descartes, make
extension the essence of body itself. Space is to Balmez
abstract extension extension possible and unlimited.
With some leanings towards the position of Leibniz,
Balmez remains at the state of conjecture as to whether
we can know the real essence of matter. He introduces,
into his discussion of space and extension, certain mathe-
matical categories of ideas. Real time, for him, does
not exist save in things, ideal time being, for him, an
abstraction. Indefinite time is but indefinite possi-
bility of succession in things. The notion of time
Balmez traces to the principle of contradiction, holding
that a thing cannot both be and not be simultaneously,
which can scarcely be held to be a simplification of time,
after all. For attention may be fixed either on the
simultaneity, on the one hand, or on the contrast of
being and not being, on the other. The power and
validity of memory, as marking the before and the after,
must surely be taken into fuller account, or if any
prefer the different contents of feeling which mark con-
tinuous duration.
Balmez takes the infinite to be distinguished from the
indefinite, as Descartes also had done. The infinite is
negative in appearance only. Everything, taken in itself
and in abstraction from all other things, can be con-
ceived as infinite, that is to say, as disengaged from
the limitations proper to it. But this relative kind of
infinite is an object of conception, rather than of ex-
x/
UNIVERSITY
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SFAIN. 281
perience. Balmez 1 has said, as touching the difficulties
of the assumed divisibility of matter or finite space into
infinite parts, that there are " absurdities in the supposi-
tion of infinite divisibility, and absurdities if we suppose
the opposite ; obscurities if we admit unextended points,
obscurities if we deny them. Victorious in attack, reason
is unable to set up an opinion, and helpless to defend
one. And yet, reason cannot be in conflict with itself.
Two contradictories would, if proved, be the absolute
negation of reason. The contradiction is, therefore,
only apparent ; but who shall untie for us the knot ? "
But we may very well hold that no possibilities, so far
as Infinite Being is concerned, lead to any proved con-
tradiction, but only to a demonstration that our con-
ceptions of finite and infinite, in their relations to each
other, are based on insufficient data. They may be true,
so far as they go, but they remain incomplete and in-
adequate. But the recognition of the partial character
of the truths we know is a very different thing from a
proved contradiction, and there seems no good reason
why the limited powers of our understanding or reason
should not be recognised without our running up into
the position of proved contradictions. The speculative
reason or impulse can be thus allowed to do its best or
highest, without being in any way proscribed.
Again, Balmez holds the idea of being to be determined
by the idea of substance. To him the name of sub-
stance pertains to God, implying, as it does, only the
permanence of being. But if, in belonging to God, it
does so in a sense that forbids the inherence of Deity in
1 Fundamental Philosophy ', Book III., chap. xxiv.
282 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
all other beings, it does not yet imply any making His
independence absolute which things pantheism fails to
understand. Material substance is the object of neces-
sary belief. The substance of the ego manifests itself
directly to the conscience in all interior phenomena.
Existence is for Balmez the act which gives being to
substance, or it may be taken as that by which essence
exists. Balmez takes the idea of existence to repre-
sent pure reality, while to him the idea of essence is
that which determines and specifies said reality.
Essence is that which constitutes a thing, what it is,
as distinguished from everything else, and the essences
of all things are to be found in God. Existence
belongs to the order of the real, essence to the order
of the ideal ; the distinction he holds to belong to the
realm of ideas, not of reality.
In his ethical position, Balmez takes conscience to
be essentially active, as in sensibility, and, above all,
in liberty. Liberty, in independent beings, supposes a
law. This law, he thinks, does not emanate from the
arbitrary will of God, and has not its principle in
Deity save as metaphysical truths themselves have. It
is the representation of that moral order which is the
co-ordination of the creatures with God, according to
their degree of perfection. The principle of morality
Balmez takes to be the love of God, and of all things
that God loves, in the same order as He loves them.
The theory, which wrongly makes duty rest on a senti-
ment, the love of God, and subordinates it to empirical
and incomplete knowledge of the universal order, is yet
an elevated one, derived from Malebranche. For Male-
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPAIN. 283
branche had said that 'tis the Divine love that moves
us "the same love wherewith God loves Himself and
the things He has made." But Malebranche was with-
out any conception of a life wherein sense is transmuted
into thought, and passion transformed into duty.
Among philosophic writers of Scholastic sympathies in
more recent years may be named Gonzalez de Arintero,
Marcelino Arnaiz, A. Gomez Izquierdo, to mention no
others. Of Donoso Cortes, who led the reaction against
modern philosophy in the latter part of the nineteenth
century, it should be said that he represented strict
Catholicism. This spirit of narrow Catholic orthodoxy
was also shared by Orti y Lara, professor of meta-
physics in the University of Madrid. Materialistic
philosophies, like that of Pedro Mata, worked in oppo-
sition to the philosophies already mentioned, while
Positivism and Spiritualism increased in the latter part
of the nineteenth century. These materialistic and
positivistic tendencies have been ably combated by
various philosophic writers presently to be described.
J. Sanz del Rio, who studied under Krause's disciples,
Roeder and Leonhardi, exerted, during the second half
of the nineteenth century, an astonishing influence in
Spain. He founded, in fact, a philosophical school
which still exerts powerful influence through such repre-
sentatives as Professors Frederico de Castro, Nicolaus
Salmeron, Giner de los Rios, and Gonzalez Serrano.
When, however, the Hegelian and Kantian philoso-
phies became better known in Spain, the Krausean
philosophy suffered in consequence, even though it
seemed to correspond more with the Spanish mind in
284 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
general. Next to Krause, Hegel is the philosopher
who has attracted most attention in Spain. In recent
years, not a little philosophical activity has been shown
in Spain. Meliton Martin has proved an able and
genial philosopher ; A. Gomez Izquierdo has been noted
for his researches in historical philosophy, and his
editorial labours for the Cultura Espafwla; Marcelino
Arnaiz has attempted a synthesis of contemporaneous
psychology with that of Augustine and Aquinas, and,
while following Scholastic lines in his psychological
studies, has yet founded on experience; Martinez Nunez
has combated the theories of modern mechanists ;
Gonzalez de Arintero has assailed materialism and
positivism, and given an able presentation from the
Thomist point of view; P. A. Lemos has opposed
scientific positivism ; besides whom are Rubio y Diaz,
A. Lopez Munoz, M. P. Olmedo, E. A. de Besson, and
many others. But, after all allowances for the philo-
sophical merits of Spain, it must be said that the Spanish
Weltanschauung still remains too nationally self-contained,
and too greatly lacking in objectivity.
2 8 5
CHAPTER XX.
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME.
OF no one thing does the thought of our time stand
more in need than of a revived interest in Metaphysics.
A scared Ritschlianism has fled before metaphysics : the
almost universal attitude of the scientist towards meta-
physics is that of the scorner : much even of the ethical
philosophy of the time has grown squeamish before meta-
physic. However, signs of quickened interest in meta-
physics have not been wanting. In the recent speculative
thought of Germany, metaphysical boldness has not been
wanting, as witness the works of Eucken, Busse, Kiilpe,
Thiele, Wundt, Paulsen, Rolfes, and others that might
be named. In England, we have had the great meta-
physical works of Drs Shadworth Hodgson, Bradley, and
Ward, while America has rendered important service
through Profs. Bowne, Ladd, Howison, Royce, Fullerton,
and others. To which must be added the labours of
Renouvier, Fouillee, Boutroux, Pillon, Dauriac, &c., in
France; of Spaventa, Conti, De Sarlo, &c., in Italy; of
Hoffding in Denmark; of Tiberghien, D. Mercier, D.
Nys, &c., in Belgium ; of Rauwenhof, Land, G. Hey-
mans, P. H. Ritter, in Holland; of Balmez, de Arintero,
Martinez Nunez, and others in Spain.
286 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Subjective and individual moments will inevitably enter
into the treatment of metaphysics charged as it is with
inquiries into the real unity of the universe, its goal and
its ground, the nature of man's soul, and other such
matters and the need presses that metaphysics go out
in search of objective materials. I mean, we cannot keep
too close to palpitating Reality. For Metaphysics is just
the philosophy of the Real. The mind's healthy instinct
for reality must be maintained in our quest for the highest
categories. The metaphysician's sphere is the realm of
the categories the realm of reality but it is not alone
that of the intellect; it is also the realm of conscious
and explicit moral illuminativeness. The adequate hypo-
thesis the all-comprehending concept will thus be no
vain abstraction. Shunning the atmosphere of illusion,
metaphysics must take primary account in a way not
always done of Evolution as principle of becoming, and
must show the end which Evolution subserves in com-
pelling thought to recognise the necessity of teleology or
the fact of purpose in nature. The need of our time is to
maintain the primary position of Metaphysics, whereby,
as presupposition of the special problems of Ethics, Psy-
chology, and Logic, it must take precedence of them,
and profoundly affect their direction and treatment, even
while Metaphysics may receive, from their detailed out-
working, fulness of form and content.
Never, I believe, was the need for a true metaphysic
more deeply felt, Ritschl, Comte, and Littre notwith-
standing. Not a little of the metaphysic of recent times
has been but a metaphysical abortion, with a theory of
evolution almost all-embracing, but evolving no possible
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 287
communion with Deity. The metaphysic we crave will
ground its laws, not in any molecular movements of
things physical, nor even in any mere volitions of the
Will Divine, but in the Divine Nature or Essence. An
ethical metaphysic it must be, with the metaphysical
attributes of its Deity all keyed up to the eternal ethical
essence of which we speak. For the Unconditioned
Being with whom we have to do is One wholly ethical
in His nature. But I do not mean to suggest, in saying
this, any pursuance of metaphysics merely for the satis-
faction of ethical needs, and apart from the sheer in-
tellectual worth and discipline of metaphysic itself. The
science of metaphysics we to-day most deeply need, that
it may determine for us what can and what cannot be
known of being and the laws of being a priori, in other
words, from those necessities of the mind, or laws of
being, which, though first revealed to us by experience,
must yet have pre-existed, in order to make experience
itself possible. Chastened and critical, the metaphysic
of the time is such that Paulsen has said, "There is
to-day probably not a metaphysician who believes that
he has the key to unlock the mysteries of the world."
But, for all that, I think we do well to remind ourselves
that, when we think we have done with metaphysics, we
are whether we understand it or not having done with
Deity.
Nor can any thoroughgoing metaphysic do without
theology, as its touchstone and support, even though the
need exists in no servile fashion or unduly dependent
form. It must, as metaphysic, deal with the reality of
things as mirrored in thought ; but if that which theology
288 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
teaches is true, metaphysical truth cannot be unaffected
by it. For metaphysics must seek the whole truth dis-
coverable by, and in, experience. Metaphysical treat-
ment has, in like manner, its own peculiar light to shed
on the basal problems of theology. The problem of
metaphysics is found in the world opened to our view
by the vast and varied constructive activity involved in
experience. Of that activity in its whole range or extent
metaphysics is critical. It is concerned with the total
sum of experience, not merely individual experience.
For it embraces all being and knowing ontology and
epistemology and a complete theory of experience
in the sense just indicated would mean a metaphysic
that should be perfect. Metaphysical knowledge aims
at reality, as that is given to us in outer and inner
experience ; it wants not only coherent system, but
truth.
Experience marks the limits of scientific knowledge.
Metaphysics grasps the inner essence of reality, the last
ground of being. Being may be one or many may be
found in the Real or in the Ideal. The metaphysical
view of the world, which comprehends the world of
becoming, also takes various forms. Metaphysics seeks
a connection with the Whole, and the unity of the Ideal
and the Real. Metaphysics must needs be a metaphysic
of Spirit no less than of Nature, for reality is a unified
whole. It is for metaphysical science to show wherein
reality as Whole has its final ground. Speculative
thought asserts that there is such a Whole. We call
it Idea: Reason demands this All-ness the Whole.
The metaphysical need now is to keep the Whole in
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 289
view. The task of metaphysics lies in the deepening,
expounding, and interpreting, of experience. The meta-
physic of experience, in its possibility, necessity, and
reality, must be scientifically comprehended. No one
who reflects on the magnitude of the difficulties in the
way of metaphysical science, will think slightingly of
metaphysical attempts at solution. So great is the task
that metaphysics must be always on the way to the
solution, never at the end of it. The History of Philo-
sophy proves there is here a really significant progress
or development. We acknowledge the impossibility of
a metaphysic of the transcendent, or the impossibility
of an absolute metaphysic, but a monistic tendency in
metaphysics recognises a transcendent causality.
By virtue of a necessity of reason, or a necessary in-
ference of reason, we raise ourselves from the manifold-
ness of appearances to the thought of a final unity, an
Ultimate Ground, a Primal Cause, in other words, to
the conception of the World-Whole, and of the ultimate
world-elements. We cannot possibly represent an in-
tuition of these ultimate metaphysical objects. This All-
ness the Whole is, in an especial sense, the demand
of Reason. This All is God. To-day, as in the days of
Aristotle, metaphysics has to do with reality taken in
whole, inquiring into the principles of all 'reality.'
Aristotle rightly took metaphysics to be concerned with
the real and objective principles of all being, and not
with mere formal conditions of cognition. Its central
task is to determine the principles of ' substance.' For
the notion of substance as " a sort of Kantian Ding-an-
sich" is one from which we simply cannot get away.
T
290 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
The old and troublous category of substance has had
its truth transferred to the conception of self - activity
as fundamental fact. This self - activity is no arch-
juggler. It is the metaphysical answer of to-day to
the old queries as to Ding-an-sich, Being, or Substance.
This just means activity which carries its primal im-
pulse in its own bosom. Not Kant alone, but also
Fichte, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann, each in his own
way, had some sense of the implied truth, which is
simply that of the indissoluble connection of the inner
actual self with the exterior and essential.
This notion of substance is simply fundamental in our
cognitive experience. It springs up in experience every
time my self-activity is inhibited by anything whatsoever.
It is but the inevitable making real of that which I must
so interpret in terms of my real self. It is thus an ulti-
mate in experience, beyond or behind which you cannot
further go. And, when thought passes up to higher
matters, there too one may find place and room for the
notion of substance in a conception of the World-Ground
so sought. Thus the Aristotelian doctrine of substance
as a self- active principle, though not without its short-
comings, is a really philosophical one. Descartes and
Spinoza both missed it ; not so Leibniz, when he sought
to restore dynamic categories for the static relations in
which these thinkers had left matters. We can even
overpass Aristotelian insight, and rise from subjective
intelligence to the energy of self-conscious personality
when we ascend to the idea of the Absolute Personality.
In such ways we retain the notion of substance, rather
than flux or stream of being, while we at the same time
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 291
avoid the Spinozan conception of its kaleidoscopically
changing performances, which yet could not prove
ground of a real yet advancing development. But
the substance conception has thus yielded to that of
spirit.
But we are not done with difficulties. No sooner do
we try to determine the Absolute as Absolute Spirit than
we carry over to this conception of the Absolute the
analogy of the human life of spirit. But in this we come
only to analogies of consciousness, and the advance of
thinking the Absolute in an absolute way remains actually
unfulfilled unfulfilled for metaphysics as exact science.
Spirit is, in us, a unity of the manifold, and is the an-
tithesis of mechanism. We, by virtue of our independ-
ence, are exalted above the changing manifoldness of
our life of representation. So God rules the world, and
is exalted above it. What metaphysic does is to deter-
mine the concept of the Absolute the Unconditioned or
Absolute Being after Time, Space, and Causality, and
to raise itself, through Causality, Space, and Time, to
the idea of unity and of the whole, of the infinite and
the eternal.
It is this unity which forms the basis of speculation.
The question of the essence and the quality of the Eternal
Being is indeed the question. The Eternal Being must
be not only original and necessary, it must also remain
what it is an essence, a self-existing essence. The Spirit
of this essence is the Absolute Spirit. So metaphysics,
as a science of the Absolute, has the need to seek to
present, so far as it can, an Absolute as ground of the
possibility of all subjective and objective being as indeed
292 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
the highest, all-embracing, subjective-objective principle.
A real God who makes His existence known in concrete
manifestations stands in no kind of contradiction to the
idea of a world - grounding principle. The idea of an
absolute unity is determined in itself, without as yet a
concrete to be represented. Such an Absolute as this
involves is but existential counterpart of the unity of
experience, and only in course of metaphysical inquiry
is its nature determined as real, or causal, or personal.
The essence which represents this absolute unity must
in the end be personal. So we understand the world-
grounding principle. Metaphysics apprehends this prin-
ciple only as an original unity, only as self-conscious
unity, which is the eternal and primal cause of all con-
sciousness. A Schopenhauer represents this unity, as for
him the concrete monism represented by Absolute Will :
a Lotze conceives the unity in a way which has been
blamed for being much too abstract the inner essence
of the unity not being defined under the form of the
Absolute Personality.
It may very well be asked whether we can really think
anything more concrete or more reasonable under the
notion of Absolute Will than under the conception of
Absolute Personality a world-informing Person. What
is needed is, that we press beyond the metaphysics of
self -consciousness in Deity to the metaphysics of the
eternal ethical essence of God, the central Personality,
Who is real and universal ground of possibility to all
beings and things. In such an absoluteness of Deity I
find the objective of my being and thought. I take such
Absolute to be ground of all unity, root of all being, and
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 293
condition of all consciousness. I affirm a synthesis of
my thought and such transcendent Absolute as, for me,
something which meets all the higher integrations of my
life and thought meets, confirms, and completes them.
I thus find the Absolute peering in upon me through
every pore of the universe. Why not make one thing
of all reality, of all experience, whether possible or
actual ? Why should not the transcendent, too, be
experience, not something in itself erected outside ex-
perience ? In the conception of an absolute experience,
the transcendent will, of course, be included, the tran-
scendent being transcendent only in respect of my finite
and relative experience.
To such an absolute experience I ascribe intensive in-
finity, and, while making experience thus one, hold reality
always to transcend vastly our finite experience. I can-
not believe we are left only with the world and ourselves
on our hands, and no knowledge of the Absolute. Of
the Absolute I claim a true knowledge. Not, of course,
a perfect knowledge, but yet a real knowledge. Know-
ledge, to be knowledge at all, must be no merely sub-
jective thing, but the apprehension of reality. It can, of
course, only be a knowledge " for us," but it is know-
ledge of the Absolute the Absolute as it is. The
Absolute is what it reveals itself as being, and is an
infinite deal beyond what is cognised. The universe is
a thing instinct with life and vital possibilities, and, in
its interpretation, it would be the despair and negation
of all thought to make the Absolute an unknowable
thing - in - itself. Because my life and my thought
enter into the all - embracing life of the Absolute, that
294 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Absolute can be for me no unknowable thing- in -
itself, for that were an impossible and contradictory
conception.
A glance at the History of Metaphysics will show how
far from easy is the task of which we have spoken at such
length. The weightiest task of the present consists in
the determination of the Infinite, but the conception of
the really efficient which we to-day have, mediated only
through Causality, springs from what affects the human
mind. This conception will always mean an imperfect
one as to the essence of God, but one by no means
fundamentally false. If one thinks of God as perfectly
unrelated to the individual, and quite isolated from the
human subject, one has a fundamentally false conception
of God. But it is impossible to apprehend the essence
of God in such a fashion. " Metaphysics," says Koenig,
" seeks to bring reality to absolute conceptions, while the
concrete sciences content themselves with notions rela-
tively perfect." Yet the metaphysician will not hold his
own positions to be absolute truths, for he knows that
these must become modified by later insights of the
understanding. This does not drive us to Bradley's
criterion of the truth namely, self-consistency and does
not bring us to treat truth as one of the things, that is to
say, appearances, which more or less exist. But it will
make us feel that the absolute truth is with God is
His.
Kant called metaphysics the science which advances
from the knowledge of the sensible to the knowledge of
the supersensible by means of reason. Reason demands
the Whole, but reason does not demand form and unity
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 295
here, matter and manifoldness there. It demands the
closed, harmonious Whole, while the principle of unity
perpetually rules. Metaphysics holds the office of censor
in the kingdom of the sciences. The scientific interest
culminates in the metaphysical interest, to which a
unitary conception of the world is necessary. This
metaphysical interest has been needlessly confounded
with that which is religious by Dr E. Caird and others.
The metaphysics of Criticism teaches us to apprehend
the world and all its products as appearances, that is to
say, mere representations. Kant was contented with
scientific investigation and representation of the know-
ledge of experience, and gave, no doubt, an impulse to
science in the narrow sense of the term. But, on
Bradley's criterion, all experience must prove itself
unreal. Bradley has no satisfactory solution to give of
the problem how degrees of reality are possible, how
what is not real has only more or less reality falls into
the kingdom of reality. With Bradley, no individual
moment of experience is in itself real. All reality con-
sists in psychic experience, and the relative is only real
in the measure in which it is absolute. Drs Bradley and
E. Caird cannot be said to solve the metaphysical
problem at all. For the difficulty remains, wherein the
difference between the degrees of reality consists, and
how this difference is in general to be apprehended.
From " shallow pantheism " and undifferentiated unity
we are not yet delivered.
The contempt of metaphysics so common in our time
we can neither share nor excuse. We see in the tran-
scendent a domain of abiding hypotheses. These hypo-
296 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
theses are scientifically necessary. In their right use
and proportional valuation we catch sight of the essence
of scientific modes of view. The despisers of meta-
physics in the interest of science see in the completion
of experience which metaphysic offers nothing but " mere
subjective play without value," in fact " an altogether
purposeless, yea, foolish venture." For to them the
rationalising of experience is the end neither of science
nor of philosophy. To them science is only the one-
sided mechanical inquiry into nature. They do not
perceive how impossible it is for human thinking to stop
at the scientifically known, without pressing on to an
interest in the whole in the connection of things. They
take it for the task of science to measure, not to value
to discover, not to explain. But a metaphysical view of
the world seeks to explain or to rationalise it. And yet
our metaphysics must not wear a too rationalistic char-
acter, for man not only enjoys reason but is related to
the higher order of things by virtue of that peculiarly
qualified metaphysical element or part of his being which
we call the spirit. The metaphysical completion of
experience arises out of the problem of the unity of the
world. The end of the scientific method is not a deter-
minate personal relation to things, but the knowledge of
their ground and connection. Metaphysics determines
the last ground of the world-connection as spirit. But
the Absolute Spirit is not a merely abstract monistic
principle. It is not necessary that metaphysic solve the
difference between spirit and nature in an abstract unity.
To metaphysics, the world -connection is that of the
world of immanent spirit. But this is not to break down
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 297
all relation to what transcends the world. It is as spirit
that man is raised above nature, and possesses the capa-
bility of looking into the higher order of things.
We are compelled to no modes of thought wherein the
world is absurdly deified, and set above God. For if the
universe be, in some sort, His environment, He must yet
be free to transcend it. The increasing need of meta-
physics, in respect of method, is to be thoroughly scien-
tific. Like the other sciences, it is a theoretic discipline.
Herbart viewed philosophy as science because of the
comprehensibility of experience. Science, on the other
hand, until she grows philosophical, remains a mere
bureau of registration. One may very well affirm that
experience is the indispensable foundation of knowledge.
Metaphysics, in so far as it is science, does not conduct
us beyond experience. Scientific metaphysics has only
to do with our world of experience, not with an ens extra-
mundanum, but intensively metaphysic leads us beyond
experience. Intensively it does so, for no one has a right
to lay narrower pretensions on metaphysics than on the
other sciences. Metaphysics, like the other sciences,
serves a theoretic need. " Man," says Schopenhauer,
" is a metaphysical animal." Metaphysic springs out of
the scientific endeavour to know the most universal trains
or courses of the world-connection.
The proper presupposition of metaphysics is the homo-
geneity of God and the world. Its principle is, being
that is grounded in itself. Metaphysic determines for
its main fact the world as whole : it rests entirely upon
experience, and moves towards the world-whole. It
embraces the world as totality. Metaphysical insight
298 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
advances with every ascent of human culture, and has
for its presupposition that world-knowledge consists not
of parts that contradict each other. What divides meta-
physics from the other sciences is not its method, but
only the universality of its task. For metaphysics is
indeed a science, and the crown of all sciences. But it
is not science, in the same sense as the particular
sciences. It is the inquiry after the Real. The greatest
scientific performances owe their origin to this specu-
lative activity of reason. Natural science is a discipline
of hypotheses. The divinatory element of inquiry rules
in the hypothesis, and just through such hypotheses
through, that is to say, speculative thought comes to
things new and radiant light. The speculative method,
properly conceived, is related to experience. Only in
experience as a whole only in the Absolute itself is
full reality to be found.
The Absolute is the totality of being. Busse properly
says, " The Absolute cannot be the Absolute, cannot,
that is, be the totality of all the real, without its content,
as the totality of all the real, being perceived, and with-
out the totality of all the real being perceived as its
content." Thought is, but it does not exhaust reality.
Thought is reality, but not the Absolute. The weightiest
truths in the sciences of Nature are reached through
thinking experience. We have the sciences of Nature
and those of Spirit, and we perceive that in the course
of time they must realise the one science. For all truth
is ultimately one. We would even know God, Who,
absolutely taken, is the only real. Man is not only an
individual, but a self-conscious individual a person.
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 299
The selfhood of the individual will is real. The Absolute
and the individual are at base and bottom one. Real
unity has, in our metaphysical views, not been reached,
but monism is an undoubted metaphysical advance.
Monism may be taken to be a necessity of thought. But
the unity so sought is not one that comes of effacing
deep or even basal differences, but merely a unity that
runs back into identity of source or oneness of originative
Reality.
The whole demand of the human spirit is for such a
unity as spiritual monism implies, and consequently a
rational metaphysic will cleave to a spiritualistic theory
of reality. Some kind of a unity the being of the world
must remain for us a unity resembling that of the self.
Reason, i.e., the categories in their entirety, is what our
philosophy of nature must explain. The unity amid all
the manifoldness of scientific forms of life and other
phenomena is nothing but the unity of ideas or of the
thinking self. Such a desire for unity is, without doubt,
the master impulse of modern thought. But this means
something very different from the monism of Haeckel,
who has not, in fact, reached a strictly monistic doctrine.
The attractiveness of his theory lies in its apparent con-
gruity, while what really happens is that the philoso-
phical kingdom is taken by violence and attributes most
diverse in character are forced together and declared
correlative aspects or sides of one thing. The theory
practically takes sentience or materiality, as they exist
in us and puzzle us, and rounds on us by telling us we
shall find these co-existing in every cell and molecule,
where they are but sides or aspects of one thing. As if
300 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
this new mode of stating the case were an explanation
of it!
I do not take the conception of extended substance to
be fundamental in monism. Extension, Spinoza forgot,
is too subjective a quality to be erected into an inde-
pendent attribute apart from experience. The unitary
character of being we cannot escape, postulating, as we
do, absolute spirit as the self-existent principle of all
things. There is nothing irrational in the supposition
of a spiritual substratum a continuous, permanent,
unitary soul-substance, distinct from and higher than the
physical organism, but co-related and interacting with it
in fact, such a supposition is the most rational we
know. The fact is, soul is impossible to our knowledge
save as a realisation of spiritual potency, and such reali-
sation must be rooted in an immanent spiritual principle
as its world-ground. Thus the dualistic process becomes
transcended, and receives final expression in terms of
soul or spirit.
The truth is, scientific monism to-day not only persists
in making the psychical depend on the physical, but is so
radically lacking in epistemological understanding as to
make matter its ultimate rather than mind or conscious-
ness. It strangely fails to see that, in making mind
depend on matter rather than create it as Idealism
fundamentally asserts it bars its own way to the
monism it desires to reach. It must stoop to pass
through the lowly gateway of epistemological science,
and so learn that man knows all he does only in the
medium of consciousness, his knowledge moving always
within the sphere of human thoughts and ideas. In its
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 301
contentment with the relative, it never attempts to define
the transcendent, to which, in its ultimate forces, atoms,
energy, ether, &c., it is brought, or to seek some form of
spiritualistic monism, with an ideal Absolute, for the
world as grounded in such ideal Reality. It never
occurs to such monism that one may very well take its
world-forces, not as facts, but only as transcendental
hypotheses, however likely these may be. It compre-
hends the absolutely real far less than it dreams, in its
study of the world's phenomena of motion. For its
mechanical philosophy of Nature does not reflect what
need and room remain for some non-spatial and non-
perceptible element to enter as causal factor of the
problem. Only in such an element do we find an effi-
cient cause for these world-movements. Dr James Ward
has clearly shown how impossible is a complete mechani-
cal system of the universe, to the great gain of meta-
physical inquiry.
I find no foothold here for rationality till the physical
is so transcended, and a spiritualistic monism reached in
which the manifold forces and disconnected elements are
unified by no merely abstract entity. Then we have
passed from the realm of epistemology into the sphere of
metaphysics. " It is the Absolute," as Busse rightly re-
marks, "which is active around us and within us, in our
inner life as in all other essences, but whose workings rise
not all up into our consciousness." So, then, we are
confronted with the question, How can these workings
be, except on the supposition of theistic representations ?
We cannot sensibly view God in His essence, but we can
think Him, and, thinking Him, take hold of Him. But,
302 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
in order to do this, we must seek Him and constantly
advance in the knowledge and living conception of Him.
The fulness and the fulfilment of thought is God. He is
the whole possibility of thought. He is also the entire
fulness of possible being. God is a real, indivisible, and
sole essence the whole fulness of thought. His unity
must be perfect. God alone is One ; with this One we
can first begin to speak of being. It need not be denied,
though we are speaking of the Absolute, that there is a
sense in which our Absolute is relative. Each age or
stage finds its own Absolute forms, that is, its own
ideal or conception of the Absolute, which is, in this
sense, relative.
Although we can find no such perfect essence, as
thought is necessitated to think, in reality, yet the
thought of the most real essence of all proceeds from
what is empirically given. Says Thiele, " Not only the
philosophy of an Aristotle, or a Kant, or a Herbart, but
also that of a Plato, or a Fichte, or a Hegel, rests finally
on what is empirically given." Our method of inquiry is
the synthetic, which is so valuable and indispensable for
the knowledge of real events. The metaphysical inter-
pretation and working up of the inner and outer facts of
experience will give a conception of the world and its
connection, in which subject and object, thought and
being, spirit and nature, present a unity, and, in this
unity, the essence of the world. Such a unity meta-
physical thought must seek. The metaphysical view of
the world sees the given world not merely from the
standpoint of scientific method, but demands, for the
setting forth of the deepest essence of the world, the
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 303
acknowledgment of a Divine World-Ground. God is the
First, and He gives to everything its true, full worth.
In His essence, in His unity, we must find the fulness of
thought and perfection itself.
Not that the human will is identical with the Divine,
but that with pluralism we must unite monism, for
pluralism possesses not the same worth of reality as does
monism. Lotzean doctrine joins a real pluralism to a
deeper monism. Man is free. Free-will is pluralistic.
But free-will must be connected with the conception of a
theodicy, and this last is monistic. Morality demands
an ethical end a God ; and it is quite evident that God
cannot be originator of sin. Man is a cause, but God as
Absolute Causality is true cause of all being the cause of
all causes, the soul of all souls. But yet the will is free,
and our selfhood is not mere appearance. Every free
action is fruit, ontologically, of reason and will of
reason's purpose and will's energy. The informing
power of creative reason alone determines will, and to
deny liberty is to negate will. God is free and unbound,
but God in His action makes Himself dependent on
human relation or behaviour. Yet God has His own
life.
The puzzle has been said to be the mode of an activity
so pure, self-conscious, and free, not its reality. If the
mode of it be " inconceivable," we are told there is an
end to it as a solution. But is not this an extraordinary
attitude to assume ? Do we treat all ultimates in such a
fashion ? For we are here dealing with an ultimate,
such pure, free self-activity being but our present-day
equivalent for the thinking substance of Descartes, and
304 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
the purus actus of Aristotle. What indeed are ultimates
but just facts the most illuminating facts whose modes
we yet may not know ? A spiritualistic monism is
certainly warranted in maintaining that there is only one
principle of being, even that primal form of self-activity
which we have postulated. Neither religious thought
nor true metaphysic must for a moment falter in claiming
for God all the possibilities so involved in Absolute
Personality, working in perfect freedom. Philosophy
and religion are both fatuous and blind, if they do not
see that just upon the basis of such divine possibilities
must rest the whole religious superstructure of fact,
doctrine, and ideal.
Philosophy, for all that has now been said, joins with
religion in maintaining that no mere Being of transcend-
ent order is sufficient to set up religion for us. Such a
Being has not yet worth or value for us. So comes it
that, by His spiritual power and working, He must enter
into real relation with us. A higher world He sets up
within the world we see, and, above all, within the life
of man. Bradley inveighs against an " empty transcend-
ence," but what transcendence can be more empty than
that he has left himself after reducing the world of ap-
pearance to illusion ? But again, by others it is said,
such transcendence as there is, is only an inference from
immanence, and so is a " secondary " consideration.
Now, no doubt, God pervades the universe as we know
it. But, by what right shall we make immanence, rather
than transcendence, the real note of the Divine relation-
ship ? By what right shall we make events of one order
an order " deriving from Divine necessity " ? Because
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 305
God is in the world, and all things are through Him and
to Him, are we therefore to deny that He is before all
things, for that He was before them ? And is the order
of events so necessitated that His volitional working no
more raises Him above and beyond the world ? For our
relative finite experience the transcendence remains so
real, and, in view of the just demands of thought, so
necessary, that we must claim for it the primacy, and
refuse to make it only a " secondary " consideration.
Why forget that the transcendence is implicated in the
whole texture of experience, and that the positive content
of experience can carry us further than is often imagined
in the way of intelligent apprehension of the nature of
the transcendent ? No reason is there why the Divine
Life should be a segregated thing, as in some deistic sort,
instead of the Divine Personality being for us renewed or
rejuvenated in the life universal.
Certain forms of idealism have held that a world with-
out God is irrational, and that a God without the world
would be equally irrational. It is perhaps enough that
we do not know the one without the other ; but we can,
and must, think of God as having a life of His own, and
existing in and for Himself. Working in freedom, He
works in, but also upon, the world. Not from the outside
only does He work, for He is ever within the universe.
But He is free to work upon it, as also above it, in His
transcendent love and power. These things make His
self - revealings possible. And the possibilities must be
infinitely great, as He is infinitely free so to work. Hence
arise spiritual facts, events, transactions, in the historic
field. The presence of God in the universe, then, does
u
306 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
not keep us from distinguishing Him from the universe,
and maintaining for Him, as supramundane and self-
existing subject, an existence in and for Himself. Till
then, He is not God.
The religious consciousness renders here, in our view,
the highest service towards the clarifying of philosophical
thought, when it shows how much the religious interest
owes to this very transcendence of Deity ; since it is in
the ceaseless interaction of immanence and transcendence
that our spiritual life becomes filled with its deepest and
richest contents. And, indeed, we ask, Must we cast the
religious consciousness into the abyss, as the price we
pay for immanence ? Such a procedure is not in the line
of our philosophy. True metaphysic makes no such
demand, when most true to its own principles. The
truth is, a supplementing or completing of one-sidedness
is here the real need. Time was when, in Oriental
thought, transcendence assumed overbalancing propor-
tions, and the world side receded ; while the same result
happened to Occidental thought, but in less theoretic and
more practical form.
But now we see immanence overbalancing, alike on
the sides of man and of the world ; while the Divine
is shunted always more. What is really needful and
perfectly practicable is, to do justice to both these
moments, or to seek out some higher conscious unity
which shall mean the harmony or agreement of both.
God must not be reduced to complete subservience to
a "scientific" conception of His relation to the universe,
in which free and exceptional initiative shall be denied
Him.
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 307
On the question of the future life, metaphysics declares
a scientifically demonstrable knowledge of its necessity to
be by no means possible, but asserts it to be a reasonable
belief. This faith is no enemy which speculative thought
has to combat and conquer. One defends the faith in im-
mortality metaphysically through the proof which springs
out of the singleness or simplicity and immateriality of
the soul. This argument no metaphysic can destroy.
Goethe's word, " Kein Wesen kann zu Nichts zerfallen,"
has become an axiom. If one tries to grasp spirit as the
finest sublimate of the corporeal organisation, why should
spirit go under? The Eternal Spirit of the universe
expresses its own infinite life in our countless immortali-
ties. Theistically, the love that is in Deity knows no
limit to the lives it must needs endow with the capacity
to love. The immediate philosophically grounded con-
sequence of the faith in immortality is the hypothesis or
acceptance of a new world. " Personal being," as Eucken
rightly says, " is not a mere appropriation of a given
world, but it is the expression and breaking through of a
new world, new within the life of the spirit." Spinoza's
eternity of the mind was lacking in individual elements.
To Hegel, immortality was but the vague ideal possibility
of thought to eternity, meant, that is to say, the eternity
of thought. But this immortality has found neither self-
conscious personality nor self-conscious actual thought.
We have need to think our essence as being. Also, to
distinguish our being, as transient, from an unknown,
absolutely non - transient essence. Yet we must also
require the positive striving after ideal perfection, in the
consciousness of the infinite worth of the human person-
308 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
ality. The hope of immortality indeed enjoys a position
of solidarity with the belief in God. Finite beings as we
are, we are unique and individual in our differences, and
this unique and finite individuality must run on into
God's eternal purpose. The individuality, which is
essential to our present and purposeful lives, finds, and
only can find, its full and perfect scope in a life linked to
God, whose meaning is genuinely continuous with that
of our present life. It is in virtue of its union and com-
munion with God that our life finds individual and
immortal expression. The universe itself, as not devoid
of meaning, moves in its energies to a spiritual goal com-
mensurate with its struggle and travail.
We cannot escape belief in the persistence and per-
manence of the soul. Metaphysical thought regards the
future life as not other than the life that now is ; here and
now eternal life is ours, in the midst of time. In and
through the life that is, we know the life that is to come.
It is thus much more sure and real to us than its mere
revelation to us from without would have made it. It
weakens none of the grounds of our belief that there is
a metaphysic which treats the belief as a chimera.
Fashioner of our frame, and Father of our spirit, in God,
as so related to us, we have the ground of all our hope of
immortality. Our knowledge of that life may be small ;
our vision of its possibilities may be dim ; but such
knowledge is ours as may be adequate for this life, and
we are not God. To our knowledge we add a sure and
strong outreaching hope, whose light of immortality
glows and burns within us the more brightly as we make
the "life more abundant "our own. In this endeavour
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 309
we have the invaluable support and aid of true philo-
sophy, which teaches religion to claim that she be sought
for her own intrinsic value, as more than all the world
beside. For that is an aim with which philosophy must
thoroughly sympathise. Never shall those problems of
God, freedom, and immortality, towards which religion
continually runs out, be solved by the highest thought or
culture without the aid of metaphysic. The empiric life
of the soul hath need of the creative powers of the mind ;
for truth is one, and reality is one, though known from
different sides of approach. The idea and essence of
religion, its relation to other domains, its theory of the
universe and of reality, its conception and ideal of life,
these all require the aid of a true, a theistic metaphysic.
The Absolute is the Absolute, and we do not at any rate
know any reason why we should faint or stagger before
His eternal and illimitable purposes. Metaphysics plants
its feet on primal certainties of being here. Our life shall
on and upward go, and man is still, as always, right in
thinking he was not made to die, as among the implica-
tions of spirit. Theistic doctrine, with its concern for the
conception of personal being, accords better than any other
form of theology with practical and experiential interests
and demands, but a satisfactory theistic metaphysics can
only come from full account being made of all we know
of the universe in other ways, and full justice being done
to the results of theoretic knowledge. This shows how
much remains to be done in the metaphysical field.
Take, for example, so great a metaphysician as Lotze.
Remarkable for his power of thought and the richness of
its content, Lotze has yet plenty of room in his system
310 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
for contradictions and half-truths. Yet his singularly
sharp and eclectic mind has enriched thought with much
that makes for metaphysical progress. It is the meta-
physical need of our time to bring such systematised
truth to harmony, which it will do by purging out the
leaven of contradiction, garnering the truth amid obscu-
rities of thought, and setting it in consistent and harmo-
nious relations. His views on such matters as monism,
freedom, immanence, the soul, self -consciousness, sub-
stance, the individual, the one and the many, are among
the numerous points on which his thought still deserves
attention. Or take the recent metaphysics of Bergson.
His theories of memory, instinct, personality, mind and
body, time abstract and time actually passed, reality or
existence as activity in evolving life, the nature and vital
functions of intelligence, spatial unreality, &c., suggest
points of view worth consideration, but open to question
as too abstract at times (e.g., liberty), too psychological,
too little ethical.
From these inquiries and scrutinies there must eventu-
ally accrue great gain both to philosophy and theology,
and the need abides that they be pursued with enthusiasm
and thoroughness born of full belief in their value. The
fact is being always more recognised that the need is for
a metaphysic that shall be empirically well grounded, and
steadily rear its superstructure on basis of fact. In spite
of the unmetaphysical spirit which to-day makes meta-
physics a discipline despised and rejected of men, we
must hold fast, in more purely factual ways, to the attain-
ment of metaphysical conclusions. For though there are
the signs of quickened interest indicated at the beginning
METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 311
of this chapter, still it must not be forgotten that even in
Germany, classic land of metaphysical thought, meta-
physical speculation is to-day rather more languid than
it should be, and the same is yet more true of countries
like France, Spain, Holland, and Italy. The revived
metaphysical interest of Britain and America is the more
surprising, since abstruse metaphysical thought comes
not so naturally to these countries, so deeply immersed
in concerns of the practical life. Great need remains
that properly metaphysical subjects of inquiry be prose-
cuted such as Ultimate reality and the significance of
the world on the basis of exhaustive study of nature and
human life. For metaphysical insight, for the future,
must be based on the universal culture of our time : every
advance in universal culture particularly the advances
in the sciences of nature will carry some modifying
power or influence for metaphysics. To come into such
perfect harmony or touch with the culture of his own
time is the highest the metaphysician can do.
" Wer den Besten seiner Zeit genug gethan
Der hat gelebt fur alle Zeiten ! "
Transcending present interest and reality, we must press
on to know to what the whole world tends; what we
ourselves are, and why we do exist; yea, and for what
reasons we bear ourselves as we now do.
312
CHAPTER XXI.
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME.
PSYCHOLOGICAL developments have, in our time, been
many, but none higher than those which are concerned
with the soul. The soul has been made the base of
religion in virtue of its peculiar depth and essence
the peculiar experiences and implications of the inner life.
The thought of our time is prone to find the first and the
final religious evidence in the psychological sphere in
that spiritual sense wherein the soul is seen in the
splendid and significant functionings of faith. Psy-
chology sets out from consciousness, which makes for
reality the great difference of awareness, and is a general
and indispensable pre-condition of value. We are now
to take the soul where psychologising philosophers are
mainly content to leave it. We are concerned with
it only in its highest reaches, where its ideal function-
ings are left by formal psychology undeveloped and un-
touched. The psychology of the soul is here taken to
embrace all inner operations not alone the cognitive
powers, but all psychic processes that are volitional and
emotional as well though we are to deal only with
some of the higher aspects of psychic experience. In
so doing, we accept, of course, the teachings of modern
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 313
psychology as to the evolution of the soul from Plato
and Aristotle onwards, and proceed upon them. We
agree, with Fiske, that the Platonic view of the soul
as a spiritual substance an effluence incarnated under
certain conditions in perishable forms of matter is
" most consonant with our present state of knowledge,"
but, for all that, we must hear modern psychology's
statement of the case. We are quite content to agree
with Professor James that mind and world have been
evolved together, and in consequence are something
of "a mutual fit." Soul is the last term of an evolving
series, and highest synthesis of mechanism, life, and
spirit. It evidences itself in complete psychic processes,
in pulses of life wherein feeling, thought, and will are
all concerned. As such, it is that " simple and per-
manent spiritual being" which, as James remarks, has
" combining medium " as its chief function. For man
is more than a mass of states: he is these in com-
bination : his experience is unified one. The modern
conception of the self has taken the place of the teach-
ings of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Wolff, and
Baumgarten, as to soul or substance.
We may begin by accepting such a valuation of the
soul as Bosanquet has given when he says, " We have
to remember that, after all, the soul, the contents of
the soul as we know it, form an individual system full
of character and personality ; that it is quite as charac-
teristically individual and belonging to itself as the body
is, and certainly at a higher level ; and that, while its
constituent elements include of course the qualities of
the body, they include also a whole world of other
314 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
qualities and relations." But our primitive experience
is unitary, and it is when we speak of our experience
in its unitary and personal self-hood that we talk of
the soul. True psychology maintains the unity of the
soul, as result of countless subtle and ceaseless psycho-
physical processes. It thus makes of the soul no mere
mosaic, after the old " faculty psychology" conceptions,
composed of so many separatist and distinctive parts.
This unity of the soul, as monistic, is fundamental in
modern psychology, and has led to a true sense of the
interdependence of the faculties will, thought, and emo-
tion. And if there be physiologists who will have none
of the soul and psychic dispositions because they hold
these to be metaphysical, that is no reason why we
should not hold to the soul and its processes as alone
explaining the facts of our deeper experience. The
" qualities and relations " of psychic experience are ex-
plained by rational psychology, which, for any full and
thorough carrying out of this purpose, seems to need the
soul as immaterial essence. This need not mean the
unity of the soul, as a special being, assumed, as with
Lotze, at the outset, nor the prefacing psychology with
metaphysics, as with Herbart.
The psychology of the soul is concerned with the
knowledge of the soul's nature, the laws of its develop-
ment, and its relations to its environment. A purely
empirical treatment is not, and cannot be, satisfying.
Psychology need not be made metaphysical, but its
results may be allowed to cast light on the soul itself
on soul, not merely on a soul. The fine ideality of
the soul leads it to seek nothing less than an absolute
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 315
life, which clearly can never be a thing realised. For
the soul is always marked by potentiality : its activity
is ever that of spiritual potence on the way to actuality.
But this does not lead to the Humian psychology in its
vain search for an ego abstracted from all mental life,
nor to the Kantian psychology in its failure to find any
real soul or self in experience. Kant's logical concept
of unity is both transcendent and indeterminate in
nature and reality, and in no way satisfactorily con-
nected with the judging activity in experience, wherein
soul or self is asserted. It was an unreal ego, a
" merely logical subject," conscious of itself only as a
faculty of conjoining elements into intuitions. Man
not only combines, but judges judges his consolidated
experience in the light of moral law. It is, of course,
not overlooked that Kant recognised in man a power
that elevates him above himself a power which only
the understanding can conceive a power which, rightly
enough, he took to be that of personality. But Kant
lacks in not realising the sphere of spirituality open
to us as higher than such personality. The ethical
consciousness of Fichte revolted against Kant's evapora-
tion of our personality into an unreal ego an unsub-
stantial "act of synthesis "; and it is Fichte's crowning
merit to have set up the ego as indissolubly " subject-
object."
Beyond our individual personality stretches the world
of souls, which severally depend on some common ground
and process. No abstract and barely logical unity is
this central ground and unifying process : it is the
Absolute Life, centre of all souls Life of our life, and
316 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Soul of our souls. Bradleyan and Ritschlian thought
alike have their self-appointed limitations writ large
here. In what is called the Oversoul, we shall find
due, yet regulative, outlet for the affectional part of
our nature, in the fellowship of what Prof. James is
pleased to call the 'Great Companion 'the Absolute
Mind. Hence we find Maine de Biran, the ' philosopher
of inner experience,' saying that "in the psychological
aspect, or as regards cognition, the soul draws all from
itself, or from the Ego, by reflection ; but in the moral
aspect, as regards the perfection to be hoped for, the
good to be obtained, or the object in life to be aimed
at, the soul draws all and receives all from without
not from the external world and sensations, but from
the purely intellectual world above, of which God is
the centre." This may, no doubt, be still too intel-
lectual. But it is interesting to find Biran, later, saying
of three kinds of temperament in the intellect or soul,
that there is a group of those " who are illumined by the
unique and unchanging light which religion affords."
Apropos of Biran, it is interesting to find, from some
manuscripts of his, only recently edited, that this philo-
sopher, to whom existence was known in and through
the activity of the ego, expressly notes, wellnigh a
century ago, the tendency so frequent in our time to
confound " the psychological origin of ideas " with the
metaphysics of existence. Much interesting discussion
has lately taken place as to the relations of psychology
to religion, or the founding of religion upon psychology.
Religion is, without doubt, an essentially psychological
study, its phenomena being purely psychical. Now, it
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 317
must, for all that, be said that, though psychology has a
large part to play in the scientific treatment of religion,
it is pure lack of clear thinking which has thought a
psychologic grounding of religion is all we need, and
that metaphysics can be dispensed with. There are
questions of transcendental, and not merely genetic,
moment of experience content, and not merely ex-
perience origin involved, and it must be noted how
truly we are metaphysicians in life and in thought.
Psychology cannot walk very far without treading upon
problems of metaphysical and epistemological character,
and psychology is no more without its presuppositions
or hypotheses than any other science. Certainly the
what the nature of the soul must be stated in terms
of the how its genesis and growth ; but the soul is
not known until its present use and function, with their
teleological bearings, have been set forth. The soul's
relations to reality are such that the world-problem
cannot be set aside, and no more can a metaphysic be
dispensed with. Psychology cannot teach us in any
direct fashion about God or His dispositions towards us,
since these come not within the range of observation.
Psychology has plenty still left to do in the way of
setting forth the individual workings of religion in the
soul or human experience, and the historic developments
of soul-life in all noteworthy relations and aspects, with-
out subsuming metaphysics under psychology. But the
content of spiritual life, and its creative forces, are
not to be confused with their conditioning processes,
however true it may be that experienced content and
experiencing process can never be sundered. It is pre-
318 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
cisely such creative forces Wundt seems to have had
in view in formulating his law of increase of spiritual
energy, which he, in fact, opposes to the law of con-
servation of energy. And if there be, indeed, no limit
to the increase of spiritual being, there may lie therein
some compensation for those disadvantages, which
Lotze so finely set out, of psychological doctrine in
comparison with scientific doctrines of energy.
Yet must it not be forgotten that all perceptual
activity involved is, in its forward-looking and selective
character, a thing of quality in the psychologic sphere,
however we may seem to speak in quantitative terms.
And what indeed may not be so perceptually present
will, in the sphere of the soul, be furnished by the
spiritual imagination that picturing faculty which the
Germans call Einbildungskraft in its power to give
vividness to religious realities or relations. We are, of
course, as far as may be from agreeing with Miinsterberg
in dropping the soul from psychology, for the soul or
subject is certainly no purely logical fiction, without
unity or permanence. Rather is the soul for us a
growing vital unity, its unity of aim and purpose the
foundation of our real personal identity. This self-
unified, self-identical principle which we call the soul
is one which not only springs up in experience, but
gives to it unity, and not only persists in experience,
but progresses with it. For we certainly do not mean
to say that consciousness has had no history, but is in
its manifestations an unique and inexplicable fact of
awareness. This is a very different result from the
merely hypostatised abstractions of thought and feeling,
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 319
so dear to a psychologist like Miinsterberg, which have
left the real worlds of instinct and impulse both higher
and lower so far behind. But of this Miinstersberg
is by no means unaware, for it is just he who has said
that "this is the point which even philosophers so easily
overlook ; as soon as we speak of psychical objects, of
ideas and feelings and volitions, as contents of conscious-
ness, we speak of an artificial transformation to which
the categories of real life no longer apply." That is just
the trouble, that he has carried the psychic states of
psychology to so remote a distance from any " real life "
that we know a divorce of psychological truth from
mental reality for which there is no scientific necessity
or warrant. Is psychological theory unlike all true
scientific theory not to find its base in the "real"
world, whose facts give the theories their value?
The soul, in the high spiritual sense, may be ever
so difficult to define, or may completely elude or
transcend definition ; but its distinctive power, place,
and working can be quite clearly realised and acted
upon. For, as Stuckenberg properly remarks, " to make
a theory of the essence of the soul the principle for
the explanation of its operations, is both unphilosophical
and unscientific. No more in mind than in nature
have we a knowledge of the substance otherwise than
from its operations." Certainly the essence of mind
in the broad sense already indicated or soul is no
more inscrutable than, in the same sort of inquiry, is
matter. Of course, the supposed essence of soul must
remain mere postulate, and not " dominate the entire
investigation." There is no reason why our psychology
320 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
should not take full account of the psycho-physical views
of Wundt, who recognises the centralised unity of our
inner life and its unlimited capacity for growth. Then
we may go on to inquire into the process whereby,
leaving the lower levels on which formal psychology
has been content to deal with the soul's ascent, the
soul is seen to reach its highest centre. For, though
we may take all psychological facts to be necessarily
processes, we shall still need that inter-connection of
all individual psychical experiences which is for Wundt
the soul or ego. And the saying of Heraclitus we shall
find to be as true as it is ancient, that, though you
trod every path, you could not find the limits of the
soul, so deep is its essence. The same thing would
doubtless have been said by Emerson, who would have
traced his own most illuminated thinking to the domina-
tion of the soul over the senses and the understanding.
Much of the discursive thinking of philosophical writers
to-day is not greatly illumined, and cannot be, because it
is carried on at a level to which the soul does not descend
because, while the speculative impulse must, at every
cost, be maintained in full power and meridian splendour,
its work is not carried on, so to speak, in the soul's ir-
radiating presence. Consequently, the lack of illumin-
ated thinking is chief lack of the philosophical thought
of the time. For in such thought, the lack of full experi-
ence of reality, and of the whole truth of life, is often
betrayed, and that to a painful degree. 'Tis a lack for
which nothing can compensate. The soul must be re-
stored to her place and rights ; she must sit as queen of
the psychologic realm. Mind must obey her behests;
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 321
intellect must fulfil the pleasure of her will. It is, of
course, as far as may be from being suggested that
reasoning processes do not mingle with the soul's
functionings ; they do so at every step ; but the spiritual
sense is, for all that, perfectly to be distinguished from
all mere processes of reasoning. For psychological ex-
perience is immediate, and consists of processes that are
subjective, though objective in content. If the mystical
consciousness be deemed as real as the consciousness
that is rational, that does not keep philosophy from being
of great religious help and value. Soul, in the spiritual
sense, is a vast reservoir of energies locked up from us by
our strangely blind consent. Our dialectic may vigor-
ously lay about in valleys or plains of sheer mentality,
but that mentality would immeasurably gain in height-
ened vision, if it made the ascent of true union with
soul. The light of the soul must sit behind the reasoning
and perceptive powers, to guide them with her counsel
and bring them to her glory. Psychological study of the
soul, as it figures in religious experience, tends to enlarge
our estimate of the powers of the human mind. Why
not realise more deeply the unity and reality of the
soul as set forth in modern psychological teachings
as to the self and learn, in more vitalised experience,
that to be, that is, to grow in height and breadth
and depth of soul, is of more pressing moment, and
more enduring value, than to know or discuss or per-
form ? For such spiritual being cannot but illumine
our thinking, and carry it to higher planes of thought
and perception than those of the merely logical under-
standing.
322 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
But, of course, such being does not dispense the soul
from effort the effort to fulfil every new and present
duty; it only gives new light for such fulfilment. The
higher knowledge of God, and the super-terrestrial out-
look upon man's life, are really to be sought in developed
life of the soul, wherein the immediate consciousness of
God and of His enveloping presence gives new eleva-
tion to thought, and deeper insight to speculative power.
Both Kant and Aristotle have here been greatly over-
passed, in the matter of original and penetrating
psychological analysis. But Kant and Schleiermacher
paved the way for study of the subjective experiences
of religion. Hence the inquiries of James, Starbuck,
Leuba, and Coe, which, however, lack on the epistemo-
logical side. The presence and operation of the Eternal
Spirit within us have awakened new and diviner emotions
and ideals than either Kantian or Aristotelian reason
knew. These higher regions of the soul's life are the
most difficult for psychology, and the frequent limitations
of psychological treatment here spring from the inability
to seize the processes, and not merely reckon the pro-
ducts. The superficial aspects are, of course, easily
enough abstracted and defined, but it is another matter
to surprise the secret of the soul's deepest workings.
The limits of the soul, it seems safe to say, are never
found, and no psychological analysis can ever be really
exhaustive. Ours is a perpetual becoming, and surface
impressions of the soul which is our own we certainly
get, but never full soundings of the sub-conscious deeps
that lie behind. Man is one, and man is spirit, and it is
as such a spirit that man must be raised to full spiritual
endowment and the height of true soul-vision. To pierce
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 323
to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit was beyond the
power of Aristotelian psychology, and spiritual psychology
came to the rescue. If, therefore, we still speak of soul
soul and spirit in their union being essential to life it
must not be in forgetfulness of the fact that, to a spiritual
psychology, the spirit is supreme. The psychical nature
in its widest reaches marks the life of the soul organ of
science and philosophy ; but the spirit is marked by that
highest of faculties known as God-consciousness. If we
would see the importance of explications of the nature
and relations of the soul, we have only to turn to the
vague generalities on the soul, found in a discussion such
as Haldane's Gifford Lectures, where the soul is represented
as " merely the highest aspect in which the man appears
in everyday experience ! "
The spirit or soul in the all-inclusive and most spiritual
sense is distinguished from the reflective understanding
in virtue of the immediateness of such spiritual life. This
is the rich result of the spiritualisation or internal appro-
priation of the not-self by the expanding soul or ego.
And, even without any outside compulsion, the knowing
soul or ego has an initiative of its own in the higher
phases of knowledge. The cognitive spiritual mind, as
subject, is receptive of spiritual truth according to its
own categories and laws. The life of the spirit wears an
intellectual aspect, but its spiritual intelligence is distinct
from, and higher than, mere intellectual insight and pro-
cess. In consequence of which, only the intellect that is
spiritually illuminated will really be in a position to
understand or explore the highest realities thought,
consciousness, life, truth, destiny.
The clear psychological insight of Augustine enabled
324 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
him, twelve centuries before Descartes, to perceive great
things of the soul. Augustine recognised the simplicity
of the soul, and its activity, as an entirety, in all actions,
such activity of the soul depending upon the ceaseless
action of God. Also, the self-certainty of the ego, as the
point of departure of all certainty, was clearly brought
out by him. But, with this whole or entire activity of
the soul, Augustine recognised its limitations in know-
ledge due to the soul's finitude, its subjection to the law
of development, and its falling within the range of the
hampering noetic consequences of moral evil. Accord-
ingly, he early and clearly saw the need, in order to the
attainment of higher knowledge and certitude, of the
whole soul or self being surrendered to its quest. Om-
niscience was not to him, as to certain modern philo-
sophers, the soul's foible. It still needs to be more fully
realised how much shortcoming and failure lies behind
present - day philosophising about life and its higher
problems, because these are dealt with as though they
were exclusively intellectual, and did not really depend
on added spiritual illuminativeness. And thus it often
remains all unperceived how the deepest clues, or nearest
solutions, of such problems will be found within the dis-
tinctively spiritual sphere will be opened to the deep
and subtle perceptions of the intellectual-spiritual thinker,
and to him alone. But the spiritual instincts, for all
that, do greatly require the accentuating, confirming,
and sustaining aids of philosophical thought and inquiry.
These will help us pass beyond the mere subjectivity in
which psychology might leave us. Psychology, like
every special science, has to do with experience, and
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 325
must not, if it would, get away from the facts of its
selected range or point of view. The soul, as seat of
living knowledge, of faith, and of belief, is more open to
the scrutiny of modern psychological methods, in respect
of the nature and genesis of these states of mind, than
has been quite fully realised. The conscious life of man,
at his more developed spiritual stages, has peculiar
content of its own, which, in the essential continuity of
being, is capable of fuller psychologic inquiry than it has
yet received. In this realm of the soul of free and
spiritual personality there is a world of observation and
induction affecting our description of the nature and
working of the soul, which psychological examination is
far from having conquered. For the psychological stand-
point at once claims the universality of religion, and
objective psychology studies the permanent sentiments
of religion. But, even more than these inquiries and
aspects, we are here concerned to maintain for the soul
its worth and reality its growth, sensibility, and astonish-
ing power, so finely set forth long ago by Socrates in his
Apology, and by St Augustine in his De Animd.
Aristotle made soul the form of the body a too objec-
tive psychologic attitude, identifying mind with life.
Aquinas expressly took the soul to be something in-
corporeal, and self- subsisting. External stimuli and
environing conditions have an influence which Aristotle
did not know. The soul may, no doubt, choose to be a
fount of creative power, but only as living subject related
to its environment, which saves from the too purely sub-
jective psychology of Descartes, divorced as it was from
concrete reality.
326 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Here may fitly be noticed those psychological develop-
ments which concern the relation of body and mind, or
the two series of processes, the psychical and the physical,
as matter of supreme philosophic interest since the days
of Descartes. These inquiries are keenly pursued to-day
from various points of view. There is the impossible
materialistic theory, as we shall term it, in which the
physical processes are treated as the cause of the psychic
processes. Attractively as the defence of such position
has been presented, there are grave initial difficulties.
If physical causes produce their physical effects, the
latter equalising the former, must we not then conclude
that the psychic effects flowing from these same physical
causes must be strangely superfluous or unbalanced
effects ? Or are we to say they are altogether uncaused ?
Are the inner psychic sources, such as feeling and desire,
not creative of psychic effects, speech for example ? We
may, as on the theory of parallelism, hold there is no
causal relation between the physical and the psychical.
The two fields are then closed against each other : there
is, in each case, an unbroken causal nexus. A theory
which claims the support of Wundt, Riehl, Hoffding,
Paulsen, Jodl, Stout, Ebbinghaus, and Miinsterberg is
deserving of all attention. But the principle of causality
has been shown to be no obstacle to the relation of mind
and body, which are left in so unrelated and artificial
a form by parallelism in fact, suspended in the air.
Parallelism is no fact of experience, but only a theory
for the interpretation of facts. But one may well allow
the theory to be one with the advantage of clearness in its
issue, and scientific pretensions in its favour, though not
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 327
without important biological and psychological conse-
quences for the soul and its life. But the interaction
theory seems to me the most natural conception of the
relation between spirit and body, and corresponds better
with the logical need of thought to view the world as a
unified whole. The interaction theory avoids absurd and
paradoxical issues, and is in closer agreement with ideal-
istic metaphysics and an ideal conception of the world.
The real strength of the interaction theory is never ap-
parent until its difficulties have been faced and its con-
tentions properly set forth. It gives a better account
of the facts no small token of superiority. There is,
of course, the stupendous difficulty as to causal inter-
action between two apparently disparate series, but the
disparateness is by no means absolute, and the difficulty
can be very reasonably resolved in entire consistency with
the law of the conservation of energy. In fact, the
difficulty is due to misconception of that law, for the
quantitative relations of these causal connections is all
there is any need to maintain. As a result, interaction
has been shown to contradict no known law, rightly
interpreted, and to be, at the same time, in happy accord
with the testimony of experience. These results are due
to thinkers like Lotze, Sigwart, Erhardt, Wentscher,
Rehmke, Kiilpe, Busse, Stumpf, Bradley, Ward, James,
Taylor. No doubt, there is the difficulty, in dealing
with the psychic phenomena, that modes of consciousness
and forms of material energy seem incommensurable.
But it must not be overlooked that it is not necessary
to the interaction theory to maintain that the psychic
phenomena create the physical changes, but merely that
328 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
the latter cannot occur without the former. The psychic
state is a cause in the sense that the physical movement
requires it as an element or factor. The how of the
physical change so caused may be hidden from us, but
this is not more puzzling than other cases where we do
not know the how. In this connection I may be per-
mitted to express doubt whether the psychic phenomena
as possible forms of energy not in the mechanical foot-
pound sense have ever had full consideration made of
them. What if they are not only forms of energy but of
the most real energy ? What is our consciousness when
you have abstracted from it all that is energetic ?
What if our inability or reluctance to do justice to these
intensive forms of purposive human activity be born only
of scientific habitudes of mind ? It is so much easier to
do scientific justice to the physical than to the psychical
phenomena. More serious, to my mind, than the question
of the incommensurableness of the two series of forms
of energy is the consideration whether, in adopting the
interaction theory, we may not come short of doing
justice to the perfect spontaneity of mind. Yet I do not
myself feel this difficulty to an extent that prevents my
accepting that theory as a reasonable and even necessary
postulation. It is only as mistake that states of con-
sciousness are taken to be incapable of producing changes
in the physical world. The relation of mind and body
flatly contradicts the idea that physical occurrences can
be due only to physical causes. There is to me nothing
inconceivable in transeunt action. The psycho-physical
organism called man unites in himself these two kinds of
existence, but he does so in ways whereby their relation
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 329
is a very intimate one one of function or interpretation
or meaning, rather than of difference of ontological
character. The dualism exists only in relative sense
that is, in functional sense ; for experience is one in
regard to reality, and is organic throughout. One of
our modern gains has just been the evolution of the
psychical, in the psychological sense of the term, and all
experience or reality may be taken as psychical in respect
of end or value. Psychologically, however, we are not
concerned with the ultimate reality of soul or self, but
only with its place and function in the world of selves.
The unique, persistent, and related character of the soul
or self has been more clearly and fully explicated in our
time than ever before, psychology, as science, having to
do with this relating of the differential.
A nameless power and inexplicable laws attend the
soul, and wait upon its silent conclusions and unspoken
deliverances ; and these things are not less true, although
text-book psychology is ignorant of them, and formal
psychology acknowledges them not. They belong to a
psychology too transcendental and spiritual for the dis-
cursive treatment of the logical understanding, in the
outer circles of power. The soul is always active; in
its most heroic frames and feats the soul is never
passive. At lower levels, "this element of activity"
has, as Hoffding says, been, "in all intellection," the
thing dwelt upon " chiefly " in modern psychology.
This activity, implied in consciousness, pertains to all
experience, which even runs up into consciousness of
the activity of consciousness. The external world has
its own determinate order, but that does not keep
330 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
human thinking from being self -determining in the
directive influences of its own thought-activities. Psycho-
logy has not yet determined the precise nature of mental
activity, whether it consists of mere change, of impulse or
conation, or better of development, but such activity
has its ideal measure. This activity in the highest
spiritual sphere is in perfect keeping with the teach-
ings of what is to-day termed functional psychology.
Functional psychology tries to do justice to the im-
mediate self and its inner self -initiated movements.
So doing, it lays stress on the conative aspects of
consciousness the end-positing or teleological char-
acter of our spiritual self- activity. The categories of
functional psychology are therefore dynamic rather
than static, but their teleological tendencies must be
stated in sufficiently spiritual terms. Mystical states
have often been described as though they were void of
ideational content. Many of the mystics have, no doubt,
written as though their states of blessedness, peace, and
love were, psychologically viewed, void of ideational con-
tents. But were they really so void as they themselves
thought ? Surely not always. For is not the idea of
God so fruitful, that its presence in the mind, and its
influence upon the stream of consciousness, may make
our perceptions of Him, or of truths that relate to Him,
more than our awareness takes full account of? Hence,
do we not find that, when the soul is described as most
lost in God, God is still conceived as a Being of positive
qualities love, wisdom, power, goodness Whose qualities
the soul surely apprehends ? We must not forget how
what some psychologists have termed "relative inatten-
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 331
tion " keeps us little aware of our own states, and little
able correctly to describe them. We dare not say that,
in these higher insights or experiences, cognitive con-
sciousness has ceased to exist. Besides, mystics are not
wholly wanting rare though they be who have been
wise enough to perceive or recognise that "emotion is
valueless when it stops in itself, and becomes nothing
more than merely emotional experience;" and that
actions or states, " without attendant perception and
reflection," cannot possibly be good. In such cases,
the function of "the perceptive and judging powers"
in the higher life of the soul has been explicitly ac-
knowledged. This fact has been wellnigh universally
overlooked, when mystical experience has been treated.
The psychology of mysticism shows the mystic life to
be a progress rather than a state, albeit it owes much
to sub-conscious aims and ideas.
We can learn, from mystic deliverances about the soul,
the benefits accruing to our mental peace, to our sense of
intellectual unity and power, and to a finely universalised
regard for the will of God as law of all life and action,
without lending the least countenance to indolent quiet-
isms or the vacuities of an idle piety. The inward-
mindedness of the mystics, their sabbatic resting of the
soul in itself and in thought of its Divine ally, their
holding of the attention upon God, and their quiet con-
templative vision of the Unseen these are things we in
our measure must share, albeit we strive better to under-
stand how often these seeming passivities are, in psycho-
logic truth, potent forms of activity. The tendential
ideas present therein are surely of great psychological
332 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
importance and value. There is surely great lack of
delicate perception and fine taste in comparing the in-
fluence of God's presence on the consciousness of the
mystical soul with the control exercised by the hypnotiser
over his subjects. We can surely welcome the unification
of the soul with God or of the human will with the
Divine without accepting an identification, in which all
differences have disappeared. For the human soul or self
is just such a growth or process as is required for this
no static, self-identical substance.
The finite soul, though it be but a segment of being,
is one and indivisible. But the soul, in its indivisibility,
has too often been conceived as a separable entity in
ways that explained nothing, because they made of it a
mere abstraction, void of content. A spiritual psychology
cannot rest in racial or phylogenetic aspects of the soul,
though these have their necessary value. Goethe has
very well said, " If during our lifetime we see that per-
formed by others to which we ourselves felt an earlier
call, but had been obliged to give up, with much besides,
then the beautiful feeling enters the mind, that only man-
kind together is the true man, and that the individual can
only be joyous and happy when he has the courage to feel
himself in the whole." But, while the soul feels humanity
to be thus essentially one, it yet cannot but be sensitive
to that largest of aspects in which God is the spiritual
environment or objective complement of the soul's uni-
tary activity and experience, and is, in some sort, the
base and support of racial developments and communal
connections as well, through their grounding and growth
in the immanent God. Our psychology will, then, be
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 333
both spiritual and rational, with light of its own to shed
for any empirical psychology that may be large-minded
enough to receive it. And if, with James, our psychology
is content to find a substantial principle of unity like the
soul " superfluous," that is only because such psychology
is in the unstable equilibrium of a merely natural and
truncated science.
We do not think of the soul or spiritual personality as
a substantial entity so much as a process forever resulting
in self-conscious spiritual activity. For its nature is such
that it grows from latency into life, and from possibility
into actuality. But its psychical states or events are
meaningless save as they are modes or modifications of
mind, soul, or self states or events in and through which
the soul has its awareness. The soul's principle of actu-
ality or rational spontaneity causes it to transcend the
phenomenal causal order. Its free, spiritual personality
is, to newer psychology, a true union of parts of thought,
emotion, and will whose abiding marks are unity and
identity. In each and all of its activities, the whole per-
sonality is present. Our psychological experience is an
experience of ourselves as knowing, in which an ultimate
principle in the self knows the soul or ego to be no mere
formal unity or Bewusstsein iiberhaupt. The true soul or
ego cannot be, as with James, a mere stream of "passing
thought," but a dynamic unity or centre, which is more
than any psychological continuity of fleeting thoughts.
The existence of psychological data, and our psycho-
logical recognition of them, would be devoid of meaning,
did we not presuppose a soul or ego which perceives the
data, and reflects upon them. To make the "passing
334 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
thought " the only knower must be to leave us epistemo-
logically unsatisfied. For nothing can be true in epis-
temology which is false in psychology. The finite soul
has its own unique experience, and is proximate initiating
centre of its own deeds. Hyper-empirical is the soul or
self in the unity of its active, conditioning aspects ; in its
aspect as conditioned, it is, of course, empirical. The
universe is not alien to us ; and there is a wider self
a social organism of which the soul forms part, which,
too, has its spiritual matrix in immanent Deity. All
history and social culture are, in fact, conditioned by the
hyper-empirical presuppositions of such active spiritual
selves or centres. The presence, activity, and aspiring
power of the soul constitute a cosmic fact as real as any
with which science has to do a fact second to none in
significant reach and inherent inspiration. In its aspira-
tions and ideals, the soul finds a vital contact with God,
and wonders not that unexplored depths are in Deity
when our own "subliminal self" remains so much of a
silent land. In all this we see how modern psychology
has replaced the older psychology, with its soul or self
as independent entity at start, by teachings like those of
Wundt and other psychologists who make of the unity of
the soul a problem.
The creative spiritual energy works as a transcendent
and judging element in our personality, raising it above
itself, and leading it to judge itself in respect of attain-
ment and of shortcoming. Thus does the soul, as de-
termined by the Divine or creative Spirit, work out its
world-destiny as a quasi-independent entity or activity,
with endless power of conscious choice. It is not on
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 335
the plane of the psychic volitions of the soul, but what
is so often overlooked above the level of merely con-
scious personality at the level, namely, of the spirit
or spiritual nature of man, as free, and transcendent,
and open to the Creative Spirit, that true freedom is
realised.
7
ir> if
"So schafF ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit,
Und wirke der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid."
he redemption of the soul lies just in its becoming,
in its turn, creative active sharer in those cosmic move-
ments of the Eternal and Absolute Spirit which mean
the salvation of the world. The soul would remain
spiritually incomplete, did it not come into vital rela-
tion with this larger whole.
336
CHAPTER XXII.
ETHICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME.
THE development of the science of ethics is now seen
to be a necessity of the advancing growth of the ethical
consciousness, or of developing personality. The de-
velopment has proceeded from the individual to society
rather than in reverse fashion. There is seen to be not
merely an evolution of morality, but also a development
of the moral judgment or power of ethical appreciation
and formulation. There have not only been higher
ethical standards reached objectively, but also, subjec-
tively, higher degrees of ethical realisation. More clear
has it always become that the ontological conditions of
this moral evolution alone can be taken to afford the
light necessary for its true interpretation, even though
current ethical teaching has been so far from doing any
manner of justice to these conditions. The underlying
needs and processes of ethical reconstruction have grown
always more apparent from works like those of Spencer,
Janet, Stephen, Gizycki, and many others. The special
scientific requirement in the shape of ethical sympathy
and spirit has been more generally recognised, so that
the study appears in this respect to ask only what is
accounted a reasonable and necessary demand in every
ETHICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 337
other scientific pursuit. Always clearer does it grow
that ethical philosophy is one of the most susceptible
things in the universe, receiving, as matter of fact, the
impact of all the scientific advances of the time. Em-
bryonic morality every human being may be said to
carry within himself, that is, in his own conscience;
hence the vastness of morality, which is confined to no
temples made with hands. Such moral beginnings man
is here to perfect, and no seeming indifference of Nature
to such moral interests must damp his ardour in the
least. To moral consciousness with its certitudes as
to virtue he must still cleave. Ethics has in our time
assumed a most conglomerate character : it has become
a compound of elements psychological, evolutionary,
biological, and sociological. One of the most significant
ethical developments of our time has been the tendency
to which Dr Rashdall has properly drawn attention
on the part of speculative thinkers, to treat Morality as
non - rational, and moral obligation as mere subjective
experience of man's mind. Not only thinkers of natural-
istic leanings like Simmel, Hoffding, and others, regard
morality as feeling of little or no objective significance,
but even Professor James participates in this ethical
reduction to feeling. On the other hand, Von Hart-
mann is found asserting the objectively valid character
of morality, because he sees that it makes for the true
end of the universe. Hartmann's ethical principle is,
that the ends of the Unconscious are to be made the
ends of our own consciousness. For him there is a
real world, and a real world-process ; and, the develop-
ment of consciousness being the end of the activity of
Y
338 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
the Unconscious, its working must be towards the
emancipation of the intellect from the will. Such an
ethical foundation is, no doubt, very abstract, but
Hartmann really holds to the reality of ethics, every
moral act of ours being, in his view, conducive to the
true ultimate end of the universe. Morality is at least
not delusive. For us, the end of the universe can be
no other than the good, whose ultimate and unanalys-
able character has been so forcibly represented by the
late Prof. Sidgwick and Mr G. E. Moore. Sidgwick
really treated the good in highly abstract fashion, and
with some lack of philosophical thoroughness. The
simple irreducible idea of the good belongs so little to
either Sidgwick or Moore that, to say nothing of Plato,
it is the precise position of such rationalist moralists as
Cudworth and Price. The answer to the inquiry as to
the good was, for them, a tautology, for to them good
was good, just as time was time, and space was space.
But Mr Moore objects to Professor M'Kenzie's resting
ethics on a metaphysical basis, and making the good
depend on it? being real, because the good is " unique in
kind," and " unaffected by any conclusions we may reach
about the nature of reality." Now, we need not deny the
distinctive quality of ethical truths, nor the independence
of the moral judgment, in true and proper sense. But
this is not to say that there are no metaphysical postu-
lates or presuppositions involved. It is not to say that
"no truth about what is real" can have any bearing
upon the good. A thing, to be good, it is maintained,
need not be involved in the constitution of reality,
whether that of the real self or the rational universe.
ETHICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 339
But there is surely, in all this, a serious overlooking of
the criterion of the good, as something that must be
determined by the laws and ideals of reason. There is
lack of insight into the fact that the good is not quite so
deep and unanalysable a notion as has been contended,
for it presupposes the true, and the knowledge of it is
founded on being. The good has been too abstractly
conceived by Mr Moore also, as the seeking of an object,
rather than the serving of a being or beings, with which
latter ethical character is primarily concerned. The
good, resting upon the true, is our rational end. Hence
Kant held that there is nothing, either within the world
or out of it, which is good without qualification, save a
good will. Rightly enough, since the good raises life to
the plane of a timeless reality. Ethicists must not too
readily assume their "good" even with the addition
"in itself" to be something really ultimate and un-
analysable. Nor must they confound the being " unique
in kind," on the part of ethical good, with its absolute
unrelatedness to truth or reality, else ethics may become
a science of the visionary and unreal. The ideal is the
fundamental reality, so that metaphysical presuppositions
cannot be so easily got away from. When we are told
that " good is good and nothing else whatever," as some-
thing which the ethicist has " established," and are yet
told in almost the same breath that such fundamental
truths of ethics are " self-evident," in the sense that no
reason can be given for them, we feel that a somewhat
irrational cast is given to ethics. The ethical philosopher
can, in the ways we have been describing, easily make
the good and its recognition much too axiomatic an affair
340 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
for any but a rarefied atmosphere far removed from life
and its vital interests. Our interest in ethical method, as
such, need not, and should not, blind us to primal concern
with ethical beings their characters, choices, volitions,
self-determinations. Moral distinctions exist for such
beings as rational, for only bad psychology grounds these
in feeling rather than in reason. Feeling presupposes
reality present to consciousness or thought, and ethical
feeling presupposes knowledge of moral distinctions.
There has been a somewhat prevalent tendency in the
ethical thought of our time to shunt the question of the
right in favour of the question of the good, on account of
the less abstract, more fundamental character of the
latter. The former is, however, of great importance in
relation to human volition. Sidgwick very admirably
pointed out their difference when he said that the ' right '
involved the idea of an authoritative prescription to do a
thing, whereas the ' good,' as conceived by us, leaves us
waiting for some standard, whereby we may estimate the
relative values of different goods. But the ethical idea of
the * right,' with its conformity to prescribed law or
standard, has been gradually felt to go not so deep, and
to prove not so adequate and concrete, as the conception
of the ' good ' or of Worth as ethical end. But it
must, for all that, be admitted that not all the attempts
that have been made to determine the universal validity
of the concept of the good of moral value have issued
in any universally recognised result. Good that is moral
is one with the right : the right is unique good. Ethical
theories remain as diverse as those which are metaphysical,
partly as result of varying historical points of view, and
ETHICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 341
partly as consequence of personal ideals of different philo-
sophers. But the autonomy of the moral ideal must not
be lost sight of or the individual will not do what, in the
exercise of his moral consciousness, he sees to be right,
as for him the ethically supreme. Philosophical ethic is
concerned with the purity of the moral act obtained
through reverence for the law, as revealed in reason,
without admixture of any foreign or heterogeneous
element whatsoever. Its autonomous acts are spontan-
eous and independent. Its law is, doubtless, abstract,
but it nevertheless regards man as essentially constituted
for the practice of virtue, and capable of realising this
destiny in virtue of his freedom. For inner freedom is
the first requisite of moral action. Hence it recognises
an ideal element in the performance of natural duty, and
calls man to ideal conduct without particular thought
of divine command or supernatural sanction as ethically
best for himself and for humanity. Ethical personality
is thus built up in a self-development that is not selfish
not free from self-repression. This connection with
personality or the movement of life shows how concrete
in content the moral act really is. Even if we take the
good to be the strictly ethical element, morality will still
lie in the will to Good, which, in the ethical man,
becomes, to use Carneri's phrase, a second nature his
sense of duty being joy in duty. Man's unconditional
good can never, as Green well showed, be completely
defined, for the moral ideal seems to elude perfect defini-
tion. This does not keep us from being able to realise,
in large measure, the moral ends, purposes, powers, and
possibilities open to us. The direction and aim of these
342 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
moral endeavours should be found in being rather than in
doing, in character rather than in conduct, in will-direc-
tion rather than in acts. This, without forgetting that
the Good has its objective reference, as pertaining to a
world-order on which it is dependent, no less than its
subjective side or reference possesses, that is to say, an
ideational, no less than an affective content. Nor is the
concept of the good, however primary in ethics, to keep
justice from being done to other notions, such as duty,
virtue, freedom. It is really a case of these latter de-
pending, in their teleological reference, for their very
meaning, force, and justification, on the good as ethical
end. One is not readily inclined to follow Fouillee, who
has recently relegated obligation to a quite subordinate
position, as no longer an ultimate and irreducible cate-
gory. It seems to me the ought of obligation is capable
of more and higher objectivisation than Fouillee sup-
poses, and absolute values we are not quite content so
lightly to dismiss from ethics. But we are quite willing
to admit that the concept of worth or value the
attractive power of the Good may, with the growth and
elevation of the ethical personality, replace, at least to a
very large extent, the ethics of obligation.
The independence of ethics, in regard of the world-
view, has been especially felt since Kant. We are not
content, however, with a mere science of conduct, which
is not such as to be, at the same time, a metaphysic
of morals. The metaphysical treatment of ethics is also
scientific is the science of ethics par excellence. For
such a method takes up into itself all that belongs to
ethics as a purely natural science, all the inescapable
ETHICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 343
natural sanctions of human conduct, and all the natural
vindications of morality found in human experience and
history. It simply takes all the grist so brought to the
metaphysical mill, and seeks to co-ordinate all the
ethical issues involved, so that the life of God, so far
as manifested in its inspiring influence, sustaining
power, and quickening impulses, in human lives, shall
not be needlessly obscured, or thoughtlessly ignored.
For it knows we may as well try rid ourselves of our
own shadow as think to frame a science of ethics
irrespective of metaphysical beliefs beliefs in the ulti-
mate nature of the universe and of man. The true
scientific method must, in such a science as that of
ethics, be that which is most conformable to the
character and condition of the facts with which it has
to do. A merely descriptive treatment of ethics may
do well enough for ethical treatment of man at dull
levels and conventional stages, but is quite incapable
of producing a really inspiring ethic, because it has no
power to explain man at his ethical highest. Of
course, the advocates of ethics as a strictly scientific
discipline are quite content with these levels " the
findings of common-sense" since "there is no tran-
scending common-sense," even in such a sphere as the
ethical. But ethical ideal can never be satisfied by
empiricism in such cases as, for example, those of the
artist or the martyr, wherein the ideal transcends,
beyond doubt, the empirical standpoint. Man, in such
cases, in not found in the moral warfare at his own
charges, but is armed with the pledges of that Infinite
Moral Spirit, in Whom, behind the moral order as its
344 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
Guarantor and Author, his faith is rooted and grounded.
Thus we see the superiority of the metaphysical treat-
ment of ethics over that which is merely scientific
cares only for given facts, without due regard to their
ultimate philosophical interpretation. Ethics is quite
independent of metaphysical inquiry, so far as descrip-
tion of facts touching moral phenomena is concerned,
but the case stands otherwise when we come to con-
sider their value, and the nature of the reality that
lies behind such phenomena. Nothing is more certain
than the influence of certain metaphysical conceptions
upon our ethical theories, and upon the sort of categories
and terms we shall use for construing and classifying
ethical facts. What is to hinder, if it be taken other-
wise, our employing merely naturalistic categories for
man and his moral characteristics, in complete dis-
regard of the true ontologic significance of his per-
sonality and his real relation to the universe ? The
nature of man, and of that reality which constitutes
his environment, can by no possibility be left uncon-
sidered in any rational treatment of ethics. But
nothing in such necessary metaphysical reference need
in the least weaken the insistence that ethics be
drawn from, and conform to, the truth of things.
German method is much superior to British method
here, when the former puts metaphysical bases and
implications in the fore-court of system, for the post-
ponement of these till "after" seems both unnecessary
and unscientific. There is no system of ethics which
is. not affiliated to a metaphysic of some sort, just
as there is no system of metaphysics which does not
ETHICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 345
carry with it an ethic of its own. Paulsen is un-
doubtedly right in his contention that a man's Weltan-
schauung is not without relation to, and influence upon,
his moral conduct. If, on the other hand, we take
the world, with Plato, to exist through and for the
good, we shall have ideal elements in our lives. If we
have ideal elements in our lives if we cultivate a
good will and ideal aims we shall find the world
reflecting our idealistic conceptions. For there is a
truth behind the contention of Fichte that our philo-
sophy or world-view is conditioned by what we are.
Why should the sphere of ethics be unreasonably
narrowed by being dissociated from the sense of meta-
physical unity and spiritual relationship with the Abso-
lute Ground of all existence ? A real science of ethics
must surely take account of the totality of things, in
order to an apprehension of an ethical world. Not
even the aboriginally moral Being or ethical Deity need
be excluded, since consideration of that reality, which
constitutes man's moral environment, and is objective
complement of man's spiritual being, is necessary to
any thorough handling of the subject. Of course, when
the Absolute is so ethically conceived, the standpoint
of mere metaphysic is already transcended, so that
ethics cannot be derived from it But the point to be
remembered is, that the basis of ethics lies in the
metaphysical relation of the finite to the Absolute in
the sense explained in the present chapter. Is there
nothing savouring of the grotesque in current ethical
modes of treating the presence and working of the Ab-
solute Ethical Personality as unconsidered trifles, with
346 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
no light to shed on ethical processes of inquiry ? Such
a product may be ethical science, but it is science grown
mechanical rather than vital, and science no longer
conformable in method to the truth and reality which
it investigates. Sidgwick and Stephen reduce it to
mere working ethical rules. This is not to say that
such ethical science may not be among the rich data
which it is the business of metaphysic to interpret,
but it is to affirm that the ultimate problems of ethics
must be viewed in the light of Reality taken in whole,
that is, on the ethical side of metaphysics. For even
those who make of ethics only a science of conduct
show the halting and unsatisfactory character of their
scientific treatment by having to append acknow-
ledgments of the place of morality as an element in
a larger whole as set in, and related to, cosmic pro-
cesses and order. Certainly, this is not ethics in the
highest ; there is always something not thoroughgoing
about such a procedure. The case of ethics is very
different from that of other particular sciences, where
metaphysical presuppositions may be involved : the
difference lies in the fact that particular metaphysical
theories of the nature of knowledge or of reality
whether the reality of mind or of matter are con-
tinually capable of being used, and are used, for the
overthrow of the fundamental assumptions of ethical
science. The special sciences simply assume the ulti-
mate principles of metaphysics, without feeling any call
to validate or investigate them, but the dependence of
ethics in its percipience of Reality behind moral
phenomena is too great for it not to need the help
ETHICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 347
which a true metaphysic can supply. This by no
means implies that ethics is a purely derivative science,
but is meant to assert for ethics a relation to meta-
physics other than that sustained by any of the par-
ticular that is, natural sciences. The metaphysic we
hold will have though L. Stephen had no perception
of the fact a very different influence for our ethics
than it will have for our physical sciences. The busi-
ness of ethics is with the " Ought " consciousness, not
merely the " Is " consciousness, and the " ought " is
for man other and higher than it was. The abstraction,
in short, with which the special sciences draw off
particular parts or aspects of reality from the rest of
it can only, with far greater difficulty, and with much
less satisfactoriness, be practised in the case of ethical
science. The part abstracted is here so large and so
closely inwoven with the Whole of Reality, that, to all
intents and purposes, it cannot be adequately dealt
with in severance from metaphysical postulates or
prolegomena. It is impossible to agree with Taylor
and others who make ethics a merely empirical science,
based upon the broader science of psychology. This
is not to say that psychological method must not have
larger place in ethics, as Ladd and others have pro-
perly insisted, but such ethical psychology will consist
of ethical analysis rather than of strictly psychological
analysis, with its greater exactness. The laws of moral
action may surely be taken as immanent ends or ideals
of humanity, supplying, as such, psychological founda-
tion for ethics as a science. Ethics can, and must,
analyse for us the moral consciousness, must deliver it
348 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
from all distressing inconsistencies, and must improve
and perfect it. In so doing, ethics must have a philo-
sophic basis, and realise, as clearly as may be, the
relations in which we stand to the Universe as a
whole. So doing, ethics becomes supremely rational ;
and such it must become, for ethics has not even a
beginning without thought. Ethical science has not
only to do with the given, but with the Ideal which
reaches out far beyond our empirical knowledge. This,
because of the dynamic character of man. This concern
with the Ideal takes us ultimately into the ontological
sphere, to which psychological bearings are at last
driven. In the sphere of metaphysical presuppositions,
ethics must reckon not only with the developments of
the human self or personality, but also with the meta-
physics of the Absolute Being the metaphysical
Urgrund of Whom knowledge is indeed relative, but
Who is yet self-revealing. So, too, has ethics to do
with the metaphysics of the world the Ursache
wherein the true and essential being of nature will be
found in spirit, carrying with it the implicate of pur-
posiveness, and not in any mere mechanism of nature.
Metaphysics is thus metaphysic of spirit no less than
of nature. Nature does not exist alone, and spirit is
certainly not something which nature can annex as her
own. Metaphysics, as science of the nature of reality,
conditions the perfected results of ethics, and that to
a greater degree than it does the results of the other
sciences. For, alike in matter and in method, ethical
science differs from the physical sciences. These latter
may, in respect of their results, be tributary to ethics,
ETHICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 349
but ethics is, in primary aim, quite independent of
them. The natural phenomena, with which the physical
sciences are concerned, are, in respect of their causes,
really opposed to those phenomena of will and moral
value, with which ethics has to do. Of course, ethics
may call itself scientific, and pursue only the end of
conduct, in its study of that end-positing activity which
is the distinguishing mark of the ethical spirit. Viewing
itself thus as purely empirical science, it will confine
its interests to psychological descriptions of emotional
and ethical processes and developments, thus remaining
purely and frankly anthropocentric. Caring not to
seek the metaphysical Ground of morality in the Abso-
lute, it must be content to ignore the fact that, to
every determinate ethical activity or direction, there
corresponds a determinate metaphysical position. For
the two disciplines stand in closest correspondence
with each other, and if we rid ethics of all depend-
ence upon metaphysics, it will only be to leave ethics
in a realm of subjective representations, and not of
realities. But ethics consists not of mere Ideal, but is
Reality as well Reality resting on metaphysical pre-
suppositions. The gleaming Ideal is, of course, the
everlasting Real; the Absolute Being remains the
source of Ethical Ideal in us ideal set up within us
by the moral law. Man is always related to the Ideal,
such Ideal being for him the norm or law discerned
with more or less clearness. Ethics enters with our
sense of responsibility for the realisation of the Ideal.
I am the ethical being I am just because I am the
rational and responsible being I claim to be. A concrete
350 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
moral life may be mine, but I must needs pursue the
unity of a rational and self-consistent moral ideal.
That is not something unreal and purely imaginary ;
it is, in fact, part of me, is the most real of realities.
An advancing Ideal is that whereof we speak, some-
thing that is fruit of our ethical development, and not
fixed and absolute. We postulate a progressive develop-
ment for morality, for we hold no moral ideal to be
final in the sense of stationary. Finality in a sense, no
doubt, does pertain to that ideal, but not in the sense
of anything so ultimate as to preclude further pro-
gress. Ethics is one of the world's real factors, and,
to be redeemed from sheer phenomenalism and possible
illusionism, must have metaphysical postulates, these
latter to be established in as firm and scientific a manner
as possible. This metaphysical grounding gives to ethics
or morality its unconditional character, and keeps it
from being reduced to the realm of subjective judgments.
One cannot help feeling some surprise alike that ethicists
have so often been slow to perceive the fallacious identi-
fication of ethical character with mere constitutional
motive or natural impulse in hedonistic theories, and
to realise what a resolution of ethical right into a mere
amiable desire to please or make happy is involved in
Utilitarianism, with its unsatisfactoriness as to motives.
Spencer, when taking a psychological point of view, is
frankly hedonistic, pleasure being for him the final aim
of all activity. But he wants pleasure to somebody,
and a maximum of pleasure. He takes length and
breadth of life as his criterion of the end, not seeing
how little pleasure makes for true fulness of life.
ETHICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 351
Pleasurable feeling, as accompaniment of the attain-
ment of desirable ends, is no warranty for hedonistic
ethics making pleasure the sole object of desire. "Uni-
form conjunction in experience " does not create identity.
The bases on which even Sidgwick sought to rest his
Universalistic Hedonism or Utilitarianism were by no
means strong, largely because of his treatment of the
Good in abstraction from the nature of the beings for
whom it should be good. Sidgwick's Utilitarianism was
of a halting kind, especially on the evolutional side, and
came short of the idealistic ethics of Green, with its
insistence upon goodness of will or character as ethical
end. Utilitarianism, indeed, with its faulty account of
the genesis and development of our moral ideas, and
its degradation of virtue to the position of means rather
than end, carries so many unsatisfactory and even, one
feels tempted to say, ignoble implications, that it has
lost ethical caste more than in the nineteenth century.
Proposing the well-being of mankind for its end, its
end is yet curiously sought in virtue of its hedonistic
element by reduction of society in general to interested
motives or considerations. The ethics of expediency of
prudence and the satisfying of merely human ends
stands as far removed as ever it did from what has been
termed "the ethics of infinite and mysterious obligation."
It is enough for us to hold by an ultimate category
(ultimate for practical purposes, even if not conceptually
so) of moral obligation, as that which may be regarded
as fundamental in ethical conception. It is plain that
therein is the ideal perceived by us, and that such ideal
binds itself upon us as being divine in its origin, and as
352 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
being identical with divine purpose for us. For, is not
man's own ideal really one with the idea or purpose of
Deity for him ? Does not arbitrariness disappear from
morality when conceived as something that reveals the
moral ideals of man to be in harmony with the purpose
of God for him, as partaker of the Divine Nature? The
ethics of infinite obligation, howbeit they wear a unique
character and are set in a background of mystery, still
stand high above those of utilitarian need and prudence.
For the ethical phenomena remain insufficiently ac-
counted for by Utilitarianism, whose vision moves in too
limited a sphere of the subjective and the emotional. It
is still true that the right is no sooner discerned than
obligation supervenes. For us the obligation comes with
the enlightenment of reason under the development of
self -consciousness. The main use of the Utilitarian
theory is as a godsend to social and political philo-
sophers, who have no difficulty in making capital out of
as many sophistical applications as possible of its prin-
ciple of the greatest happiness of the greatest number
a principle whose unsatisfactoriness has been well shown
by Spencer. Why cannot pleasure or happiness be re-
placed by the greatest good of the greatest number by
the well-being of society? In reality, perfection of ac-
tivity as constitutive principle of the good need not
conflict with, or exclude, happiness as but another aspect
of the matter. There is no need to deny a place to
pleasure as efficient cause in human activity, since wis-
dom's ways are pleasantness, but not a choice of pleasure.
Conventional sanctions and miserable utilities are poor
substitutes for unconditional morality and moral eleva-
ETHICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 353
tion, even when evolutionary considerations are added
by Spencer to the Utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill.
Mill quite unnecessarily denied the ethical significance
and value of self-development, without which ethics, in
any true sense, were impossible. The further develop-
ment of altruistic principle, and the justice due to claims
of society, have no need of such denial. The ethics of
self-sacrifice needs only a severance from the psychology
of self-seeking or psychological hedonism. Strictly
speaking, psychological hedonism, as a mere quality of
psychological activity, is not moral at all : it is only in
its material aspect, as pertaining to the thing desired,
that pleasure assumes any proper ethical place. No
racial accumulations of utility-experiences can satisfac-
torily explain, on Spencerian evolutional theory, man's
consciousness of duty or moral law. A moral basis to
begin with is always wanting. Surely the standing
marvel of ethics is just the originality of ethical con-
sciousness, with the all-inclusive character of the moral
judgment. Institutional appeal by evolutionary ethics is
vain, and constitutes a grand vvrepov irporepov. Stephen
has duly shown the ethical atomism of Spencer's in-
dividualistic positions, and has declared for morality,
not as evolved conduct, but as something related to the
good or welfare of the social organism. Gizycki, too,
has taken the good of society or the general welfare to be
the right final end of life. But the truth is, that ethical
science cannot, by any collectivist considerations, really
validate for us the ideas of virtue, of duty, or of good,
for in the end we have but an inexpugnable conviction of
their sovereignty over us. No evolutionary considera-
z
354 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
tions can keep me from being in ethical character just
what I make myself; they do not affect my power so to
realise myself in virtue of the freedom of my will. A
true freedom cannot but belong to the very nature of our
spiritual self-activity, the fact of the self being part of a
series nowise destroying such freedom, as the determinist
is prone to suppose. We are free, but we are so as we
become free. Our freedom is fact, yet it is achieved : it is
the freedom of the ripe, self-conscious will; it lies in
moral perfection, wherein our very capacity of free and
responsible choice becomes strengthened. Freedom, as
Siebeck has properly insisted, remains an ideal never
wholly realised, but reaching on even into a realm of
freedom lying beyond the world. The freedom and in-
dependence of ethical life must be maintained against
deterministic monisms of every sort, and an ethical basis
found, not in psychology but in metaphysics, for freedom
and objective moral law. For freedom is the postulate
of moral judgment, and the moral judgment consists of
insight, while prudential judgments are merely matters of
foresight. Ethics moves in the sphere of the abstract,
whose principles are continually actualised in our con-
crete personality, swayed by the sublimity and ideality of
moral law. But the objectivity of moral law is some-
thing to be learned in all the vast experience of life, just
as the great objectivities of the arts and the sciences are
learned. Hence evolutionary considerations are not
without their interest and value, albeit ethics, as a nor-
mative discipline, reaps no real gain for the validity of
its norms from such considerations. In that respect we
agree with Kiilpe. The results of current evolutionary
ETHICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 355
ethics, in whatsoever respects unsatisfactory, are at least
suggestive of progress in method as in ethical spirit, and
have helped to put ethics on the highly useful track of
tracing out historic morality, the evolution of moral ideals
and institutions, in a scientific manner. Evolutionary
ethic has shown psychological analysis of the nature and
authority of conscience vain, save as full account is taken
of the growth of conscience in the race as in the in-
dividual. Wundt has shown the value of evolutionism
very well in his law of the heterogony of purpose, wherein
unforeseen sources of new ideas of purpose spring up, so
that altruistic developments may accrue from egoistic
motions or beginnings. Wundt's differentiation of the
stages in the evolution of moral ideas is a fine exemplifi-
cation of valuable application of evolutionary doctrine
in ethics, but one that is not above question, both as to
whether original moral elements are not at times assumed
rather than discovered, and as to whether real norms
have been extracted from empirical ethics. The modify-
ing effects of evolutional view are too palpable to be
denied, and, in the tendency they have fostered to seek
a non-hedonistic basis for ethics, they must be reckoned
with by every one who would put ethics on a scientific
basis. But it is still too soon to forecast the ultimate
conclusions of the activity in subjective psychology, in
physiology of the nervous system, and in evolutionary
interpretation of ethical problems. Herbart made moral-
ity not something pertaining to the essential nature of an
object, but merely a judgment of value. This judgment
of value finds its standard of comparison in the ideas of
inner freedom, perfection, and benevolence. The moral
356 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY.
judgment is a kind of esteem or estimate of value; the
judgment of value has its subjective and its objective
aspects ; and the need has, in the ethical as in other
spheres, arisen for an universal theory of value. Broad
beginnings in investigating the subject of value were
made by Brentano and Lotze. In our own day, the
Austrian philosophers, Meinong and Ehrenfels, have
carried out the idea of Herbart's judgments of taste or
determinations of value into more comprehensive sphere
of treatment, and the universal theory of value is seen
to be one of no merely psychological character. By
Ehrenfels value is taken to mean the relation of a thing
to desire, and he tends to set feeling all feeling being to
him feeling of value and irrational impulse above our
ends as determined by reason, in a rather unsatisfactory
way. Meinong gives more place to rational reflection;
he, in fact, tends to give knowledge and the desire for
it in abstracto rather too large a place ; he recognises an
element of judgment in every estimate of value ; but to
him the appreciation of value partakes of the nature of
feeling rather than of judgment. Such feeling, however,
he takes to be no element detached from, or independent
of, content. The subjective aspect of value is that em-
phasised by Meinong, as being the aspect with which we
are concerned from the psychological point of view.
Meinong's subjectivism does not, however, keep him
from distinguishing the objective fact of value itself from
the merely subjective appreciation of value the Werth
from the Werthhaltung. But a merely individualistic
psychological point of view is by no means a final or
unsurpassable one, since moral personality calls, in its
ETHICAL DEVELOPMENTS OF OUR TIME. 357
explication, for more. Theory of value must ultimately
drive us to implications, in short, of more metaphysical
character, as Prof. J. S. Mackenzie has had the merit to
recognise. But the whole question of these judgments
of worth or value throws us back upon the metaphysical
relations of ethics, since these judgments are transcend-
ental, and have their ultimate validity tested by meta-
physics.
In fine, all the strands of ethical thought, whether they
be those of good, of duty, or of virtue, lead us at last to
view morality as a totality, a totality to which all these
lines of ethical thought converge, and in which they are
conserved. The unconditional character of morality
shines out from the concepts of law and duty. Virtue
is not going to be superseded in our modern world, but, as
embodied in moral personality, will keep in proper check
the too exclusively social character of present-day ethics.
Nor will the good be sought as merely formal and
abstract thing, but as the making of actual life into an
ascent towards those unattained ideals which belong to
the City of God. Moral faith in these ideals is the con-
cern of ethics in the highest, for its prime concern is
with character, of which conduct is but the resultant.
It is precisely in the consciousness of such moral faith
that ethics stretches out " lame hands of faith " to meta-
physics. Only an ethic, which is bound to an historic
world-view, can build up ethics of universal character
an ethic that shall not see, in the myriad quantitative
forms in which ethical life appears, nothing that can be
called progress, and nothing that is absolute.
INDEX.
Absolute, the, 4, 67, 72, 83, 106, 112,
114-115, 158-159, 167-168, 194-195,
2O2, 2O9, 2IO, 2l6, 219, 224, 226-227,
242, 245-246, 262, 268, 274, 291-294,
298-299, 301-302, 345, 349
Absoluteness of God, the, 87, 95, 125,
149, 158, 167, 203, 217-218, 234, 236-
237, 262, 290-294, 296, 304, 316, 345,
348
Abubacer, 270
Accident, 133, 150-151, 273-274
Acosmism, 168
Activity, 2IO, 252, 264-265, 272, 279,
282, 287, 303, 310, 318, 324, 328-333,
349-350. 352-353, 3555 Absolute, 136,
156, 225, 268, 301 ; philosophical, 255,
261, 284; spiritual, 140, 199
Actualism, 48, 165, 198-199, 223, 263,
333, 354, 357
JEons, 68-69, 75-76
^schylus, 30
Esthetics, 200, 245
Agnosticism, 4, 82, 120, 134, 142, 207
Ahriman, 9
Ahura-Mazda, 9
Albertus Magnus. 118, 126, 129, 139, 142,
149
Alexandria, 3-4, 72, 75, 95, 129
Allegorising, 70, 102
Alphonsus, 275
Altruism, 166, 353, 355
Alvarado, Francisco, 276
Alvarez, Balthazar, 273
Ambrose, 128
America, 285, 311
American ethics, 161
Ammonius Saccas, 100
Analogy, 109, 131, 150, 192, 207, 291
Anaxagoras, 15, 39, 53
Anaximander, 15
Anaximenes, 15
Angiulli, 256
Anselm, 118-119, 123-126, 136, 185-186
Anthropomorphism, 9, 29-30, 39, 95, 108,
US, 155
Apocatastasis, 100
Apollonia, 15
Apologists, the, 40, 55-56, 63-64
Aquinas, 118, 121-124, 126, 128-144,
254, 273, 279, 284, 325 ; on Creation,
I3 2 -I33; ontology, 142; philosophy,
128, 135, 140; psychology, 136; the
soul, 135, 140; his Summa, 128-129,
I3i> 136, 139
Arabia, 129, 141, 270-271
Archetypes, 32, 38, 63, 96, 12 1, 126, 131,
149, 223
Ardigo, 255
Areopagite, the, 129, 142
Aristides, 40
Aristotelianism, 270-271
Aristotle, 51, 78, 105, 109-111, 118, 121,
123-124, 126, 128-130, 135-136, 142,
144, H7-I49, 169, 273, 289-290, 302,
304, 313, 322, 325; the Categories,
18 ; Causation, 20-27 ; Cosmology, 38 ;
Deity, 33-34; Form, 18-19; Matter,
18-20 ; Metaphysics, 18-19, 25-27 ;
Physics, 25-26 ; Prime Mover, 25-26,
34, 37 ; Reality, 37 ; Substance, 17-20
Arnaiz, Marcelino, 283-284
Arts, 354
Asceticism, 8, 113, 166
Asiatic philosophy, 1-3, 13
Assyrians, II
Atavism, 184
Athanasius, 59, 64, 128
Atheistic monism, 170
Athenagoras, 40, 57
Atomism, 15, 353
Attributes, 131, 133, 156-159, 169, 287,
299, 300
INDEX.
Aufklarung, 174, 178, 182
Augustine, 52, 78, 80-82, 109, 117-118,
123, 128-129, 135-136, 151, 284, 323-
325 ; ethics, 78-79 ; evil, 83-87 ; fore-
knowledge, 79-80, 88-89; psychology,
79, 82, 323-324 ; the will, 84-85, 324
Austria, 145
Austrian philosophers Brentano, 356 ;
Dziewicki, 145 ; Ehrenfels, 356 ; Mei-
nong, 356
Avempace, 270
Averroes, 270
Averroism, 271
Avesta, i, 9
Avicebron, 270
Avicenna, 141, 270
Awareness, 312, 318, 330, 333
Babylonians, II, 66
Bacon, 4, 241
Ballanche, 238
Balmez, J. L., 276-282, 285
Bannez, 272
Bardaisan, 69
Basil, 128
Basilides, 69, 75 ; Absolute, 72 ; psycho-
logy? 7 1 > suffering, 71 ; transmigration,
71
Baumgarten, 313
Baur, 181
Beauty, 40, 87, 108, 113-114
Beccaria, 254
Beer, Dr, 145
Being, 67, 72-74, 94, 106-107, no, 112,
125-126, 130-132, 134, 140, 143, 149,
155, 157-158, 185, 187, 210, 212, 217,
222, 227, 236-237, 245, 262, 267, 273,
276, 279, 280-281, 287-289, 291, 297-
298, 300, 302, 304, 307, 313, 339, 341,
345
Belgium, 285
Belief, 192, 194, 232-233, 247-248, 259,
278, 282, 306, 308, 310, 343
Beneke, 257
Bentham, 353
Bergson, 248, 250, 252
Berkeley, 147, 207, 225, 231-233, 313
Bersot, 242
Bible, 174
Bibliolatry, 174
Biedermann, 236
Biology, 327, 337
Body, mind and, 313, 325, 326-329
Boehringer, 145
Boethius, 141
Bonatelli, Francesco, 256-269
Borrelli, 255
Bosanquet, 313
Bousset, 65
Boutroux, 245-246, 248-249, 285
Bowne, 285
Bradley, Dr, 285, 294-295, 304, 316, 327
Bradwardine, 153
Brahma, 5, 6
Brahmanic philosophy, 5-8
Brentano, F., 356
Britain, 311
British ethics, 161, 344
Brochard, 246
Bruno, Giordano, 169
Buddensieg, 145
Buddhism, 7-8, 74
Busse, 285, 298, 301, 327
Caird, Dr E., 2, 295
Cantoni, 255
Carneri, 341
Caro, 242, 244, 250
Cartesianism, in, 154, 158, 169,238, 252
Catalan, 272
Catalonia, 276
Categories, 18-19, i6, 147-148, 187, 189,
210-21 1, 214, 222-223, 247, 273, 280,
286, 290, 299, 323, 330, 342, 344, 351
Catholicism, 127, 283
Causality, 6, 8, 14, 20-21, 27, 130, 133-
134, 141, 155, 188-189, 265-269, 276,
279, 289, 291, 294, 301, 326
Causation, 20-27, 80-83, I26 , I3 I 3 2 '
133, 138, 165, 267-268, 273
Cause, Absolute, 150-151, 155, 160, 176,
190, 268, 303
Cerinthus, 69
Certitude, 162, 243, 247, 251, 276-278,
324, 337
Cesca, 256
Chalcedon, Council of, 57
China, 12
Chinese thought, 3-4
Christ, Person of, 76, 98, 180-181
Christendom, 143
Christian Theology, 40, 77, 129, 222
Christian thought, 52, 65
Christianity, 172-174, 182, 242
Christology, 54, 59, 95-97
Chrysostom, 128
Churchly- Scholastic Philosophy, 276, 283-
284
City of God, 84-85, 91, 357
Clement, 40, 58, 60, 72, 75, 92
Coe, 322
Cognition, 99, 103, 113, 140, 162, 184,
211, 224, 232, 242, 259, 289, 290, 316,
323, 330
INDEX.
Cohen, 230
Coimbra, 273
Collecchi, 255
Comte, 239-240, 251, 286
Conceptualism, in, 120-121, 149, 229
Condillac, 252, 254, 277
Condorcet, 239-240
Conscience, 192, 194, 199, 202, 204-205,
246, 250, 252, 258-259, 262, 282, 337,
355
Consciousness, 110-112, 115, 155-157,
162, 203, 214, 219-220, 226, 232, 242-
243, 247-249, 263, 266, 291-293, 300-
301, 312, 318-319, 321, 323, 327-329,
33, 337, 357 ; God -consciousness, 203,
219-220, 228, 236, 306, 322-323 ; moral
consciousness, 193, 195, 307, 315, 321,
337, 347, 353
Conservation of energy, 318, 327
Constanz, Council of, 151
Conti, 256, 285
Contingency, 86, 137, 151, 190, 245-246,
263
Cordova, 270-271
Corleo, 256
Corporeity, 307, 310, 313, 325-329
Cortes, Donoso, 276, 283
Cosmic order, 6, 24, 29, 32, 43, 45, 47,
50, 54, 72-73, * 60, 237, 250, 269, 271,
334-335
Cosmogony, 29, 65, 94
Cosmology, 22-23, 53, 5^, 59, 100, 103,
107, 187-190
Cournot, 251
Cousin, 242-243, 245, 277
Cracow, 145
Creationism, 21-22, 33, 57-58, 65, 67, 81-
82, 94, 96-98, 126, 132-133, 138-140,
142, 149-150, 152, 250, 278
Criticism, 295 ; Neo-, 246-248
Critique of Judgment, 192
Critique of Practical Reason, 192, 2OO,
205
Critique of Pure Reason, 192, 200
Croce, 256
Cudworth, 338
Cultura Espaiiola, 284
Cusa, 171
Damiron, 242, 245
Dante, 123, 127, 135, 143
Dauriac, 246, 250, 285
De Anima, 325
De Arintero, Gonzalez, 283-285
De Besson, E. A., 284
De Biran, Maine, 242, 316
De Castro, Frederico, 283
De Civitate Dei, 78, 129
De Divisione Naturae, 1 18
De Grazia, 255
De Sarlo, 256-257, 285
Deism, 172, 179, 182, 197, 305
De los Rios, Giner, 283
De Maistre, 238-239
Del Rio, J. Sanz, 283
Demiurge, II, 22, 65, 67, 69, 75, 107
Demonology, 80
Denmark, 285
Descartes, 4, 169, 239, 241-242, 254, 277,
280, 290, 302, 313, 324-326
Desire, 164, 264-265, 351, 356
Destiny, 51, 323
Determinism, 51, 138, 141, 150, 165, 179,
354
Deus ex machina, 201
Deits sive Natura, 158
Deus sive Substantia, 159
Deussen, 2
Development, 78-79, 87, 90, 97, 102, lio,
117, 166, 171, 173, 177, 182, 185, 193,
196, 200, 211, 213, 251, 275, 289, 291,
317, 324, 326, 336-337, 348-352
Di Giovanni, 256
Dialecticism, 126-127, 142, 214, 256, 321 ;
Greek, 93, 118
Diaz, Rubio y, 284
Diogenes of Apollonia, 15
Dionysius, 120, 142, 181
Disputationes Metaphysics, 273
Divisibility, ill. 332; of matter, 281
Docetism, 68, 74
Dogma, 92, 119, 126-127, 150, 278
Dogmatism, 182, 200, 212, 234, 251
Dominicans, 272, 275
Dualism, 6-9, 16, 35, 60-61, 66, 68, 71, 86,
94, 114-115, 124, 142, 152, 158, 168,
191, 194, 208, 224, 228, 264, 271, 300,
329
Duns Scotus, 118-119, 122-123, 127, 139,
Durkheim, 251
Duty, 341-342, 353, 357
Dziewicki, M. H., 145, 147
Eastern thought, 2-3, IO-I2
Ebbinghaus, 326
Eclecticism, Cousin's, 242-243 ; French,
242, 244-245, 249, 251-252; Gnostic,
66 ; Italian, 255 ; Lotze's, 310 ; Origen's,
92 ; Spanish, 273, 278
Ecstasy, 105, 112-114
Education, Divine, 171-172, 177-178
Efficient causation, 20-27, 80 83, IOI,
131, 133, 189, 301, 352
362
INDEX.
Ego, 8, 173, 207, 209, 214, 241, 315-316,
320, 323
Egoism, 167, 355
Egyptian thought, II, 129
Ehrenfels, 356
Eleatics, 29, 31
Emanations, 4-5, 35, 58, 60, 62, 76, 81,
96, 112, 142, 271
Emerson, 320
Emotions, the, 197, 204, 211, 349
Empiricism, 143, 148, 189, 200, 214,
226, 229, 252, 254-255, 258, 282, 302,
3H, 33 J , 334, 343
Energy, 20, 25-26, 28, 230, 237, 301, 318,
327-328, 334
England, 285
Enlightenment, the, 174, 178, 182
Epictetus, 41, 45, 50, 169
Epistemology, 123, 141, 148, 216, 223,
232, 247, 288, 300-301, 317, 322, 333
Erdmann, Benno, 187
Erdmann, J. E., 145
Erhardt, 327
Erigena, Scotus, 118, 124-126
Eschatology, 100
Essence, 19-21, 59, 84, 97, 106, 122, 131-
132, 134, 136, 142, 157, 160-161, 166,
261, 273-274, 280, 282, 287-288, 291-
292, 294, 301-303, 307, 314, 319-320
Ethical Deity, 203, 244, 287
Ethical dualism, 68
Ethical interests, 24, 47, 79, 86, 194, 247,
287, 340
Ethical law, 10, 49
Ethical monism, 227
Ethical philosophy, 49-50, 102, 135
Ethical spirit, 31, 101, 161-162, 178, 197,
292, 349, 355
Ethical theism, 88, 193-194
Ethical theory, 41-42, 47, 88, 102, 127,
193, 246, 340, 344
Ethics, 276, 286, 336-357 ; Augustine's,
79-89; empirical, 343, 347*349, 35 l '
355; evolutionary, 336-337, 342-343,
351-355 ; Green's, 341, 351 ; history of,
H4, 357 j individualistic, 195-196 ;
Kant's, 192-200, 339, 342 ; method of,
161, 336-337, 343, 345-349; meta-
physics and, 343-349, 357 ; Origan's,
92, 101-102; practical, 35, 42, 47, 164,
351 ; psychology and, 347-348; scien-
tific, 336, 342-344, 346-349, 353, 355 5
social, 195, 219-222, 232, 238-239, 251,
334, 352-353, 357; Spinoza's, 160-161,
164, 167-168; Stoical, 51, 52
Eucken, 285, 307
Euripides, 30-31
Europe, 127, 272
Europe, Mediaeval, 120
European philosophy, 10, 12, 127, 136,253
Evil, 8-10, 44, 48, 67-68, 76, 82, 139, 151,
164-165, 198, 201, 209, 245 ; origin of,
83-84, 86-87, 89, 101, 113; negative
character of, 139, 324
Evolution, of ethics, 336-337, 342-343,
35.!-355 5 of evil, 9-10, 82-87, 89; of
mind, 249, 329 ; of religion, 61, 171,
177-178, 213; of world, 73, 91, 178,
208, 224, 234, 239, 250, 256, 286 ; of
soul, 313
Evolutionism, 241-242, 355
Exegetica, 71, 76
Experience, 126, 165, 168, 181, 188-190,
194, 196, 200-201, 209-211, 213-214,
2l6-2l8, 22O-22I, 225, 229, 233, 236-
237, 242, 248, 264, 266-267, 287-290,
293, 295-298, 300, 302, 305, 313, 316-
318, 321, 329, 343
Experimentalism, 241, 243, 256
Extension, in, 155-156, 225, 258, 280,
300
Falckenberg, 145
Fall, the, 85
Fatalism, 46, 94, 112, 246
Fate, 35, 39, 141
Fathers, the post-Apostolic, 55, 128-129,
177
Feeling, 196, 258, 263-265, 280, 319, 337,
340, 350, 356
Ferrari, 255
Fichte, 195, 202, 290, 302, 315, 345
Filangieri, 254
Final Cause, 24, 34, 134, 191, 245
First Cause, 21-26, 107, 123, 130-131, 133,
187-188, 266-268, 279, 289
Fiske, 313
Florence, 257
Fonseca, Petrus, 272-273
Fore-knowledge, Divine, 79-80, 88-89
Form, 15-16, 19, 106, 133, 135, 139-140,
152, 169, 294, 325
Fortlage, 257
Fouillee, 249-250, 285, 342
Fourier, 239
France, 238, 242, 250-253, 285, 311
Franchi, 255
Franciscans, 272, 275
Franck, 242
Freedom, 84, 88-89, 101-102, 137-138,
149-150, 160, 165, 193, 198, 202, 209,
220, 227-229, 236, 269, 304-305, 309-
310, 341-342, 354-355
Freewill, 84, 87, 112, 150, 303
INDEX.
French Eclecticism, 242, 244-245, 249, 251
French philosophy, 238-253
Fullerton, 285
Functional psychology, 329-330
Fundamental Philosophy, 276-277
Future Life, the, 48, 250, 306-309
Gabelli, 255
Galiani, 254
Galluppi, 254, 257
Gamier, 242
Gaunilo, 126
Genetic method, the, 193, 316-317, 325,
351
Genovesi, 254
Geometry, 159, 161, 167
German literature, 171
German method, 344
German philosophy, 257
German psychology. 264
German spirit, 182
German transcendentalism, 147
Germany, 184, 285, 311
Geulincx, 170
Giannone, 254
Gioberti, 255
Gioja, 254
Gizycki, 353
Gnosis, 65, 67-68, 70, 75, 104
Gnosticism, 54, 64, 65-77, 103, 113;
Clement on, 75-76; Hellenic, 70-73;
Judaic, 69 ; Pagan, 69, 74
Goethe, 169, 175, 264, 307, 332
Goetze, 174
Gonzalez, 275
Gonzalez, Zeferino, 276
Good, the, 16, 21, 24, 33, 36, 38, 44, 48,
49, 82-85, 107, 136, 163, 198, 202, 338-
342, 351-353, 357
Gospel, the, 180, 183
Grace, 137-138, 143
Granada, 273
Gratry, 239
Greece, 63
Greek thought, 2-3, 10-12, 28-29, 35 38-
39, 60, 65-67, loo, 129
Greek tragedy, 30-31
Green, 236, 341, 35 1
Gregories, the, 128
Guyau, 250
Haeckel, 299
Haldane, 323
Hamelin, 252
Hamilton, 219
Happiness, 166, 193, 273, 352
Harnack, 62, 104
Hartmann, 290, 337-338
Hatch, 59, 94
Haureau, 145
Hebraism, 8
Hedonism, 106, 35<>35i 353. 355
Hegel, 14, 72, 89, 125, 142, 168-169, 175,
182-183, 187-188, 191, 204, 207, 211-
212, 214, 222-223, 230, 236, 238, 240,
277, 283, 302, 307
Hegelianism, 255, 283
Heine, 175
Hellenism, 65, 69, 93
Helmholtz, 258
Heraclitus, 15, 31-32, 53, 61, 320
Herbart, 256, 257-258, 297, 302, 355-356
Herder, 87, 178
Hesiod, 29-30
Heterogony, 355
Heymans, G., 285
Hindu thought, 4-5, 8-9, II
Historical philosophy, I, 3, 145, 239, 243,
246, 270, 274, 284, 289, 294
History, 171, 173, 177-178, 180-181, 184,
193, 196, 200, 203, 241, 254-255, 270,
305, 3i7-3i8, 340, 343, 355, 357
Hobbes, 121
Hodgson, Dr Shad worth, 285
Hoffding, 145, 285, 326, 329, 337
Holland, 285, 311
Homer, 29-30
Hooker, 123
Howison, 285
Hugo of St Victor, 122
Hume, 232, 248, 315
Hylozoism, 31
Hypnotism, 331
Hypostasis, 16, 54, 96, 106
Iberia, 274-275
Ideal, the, 35, 36, 49, 63, 88, 93, 130-131,
167, 186, I94-I95> 199-200, 202, 219,
223-224, 244, 252, 263, 282, 288, 304,
327, 339-341, 343, 345, 348-351
Idealism, 52, 101, 123, 125, 165, 169, 170,
207-209, 217, 226, 229, 233, 244-245,
249, 255, 260, 300, 305, 345 ; Berke-
ley's, 147, 231 ; ethical, 216-217, 226 ;
Hegelian, 207-215, 219-224, 229-230;
Neo-Kantian, 230, 253 ; Origen's, 101-
102 ; Plato's, 53, 101 ; of Plotinus, IIO-
in ; theistic, 207, 213-215, 219-237
Idealist, the, 121 ; ideality of, 314, 354
Ideas, 15-17, 19, 27, 38, 93, 132, 141,
162, 194, 216-217, 232, 249, 261, 270,
274, 276, 280, 282, 300, 316, 319, 351,
Ideation, 258, 330, 342
INDEX.
Imagination, 318
Immanence, 19, 26, 34, 55, 58-61, 130,
160, 165, 185, 203, 219, 228, 235, 268,
296, 300, 304, 306, 310, 332, 334, 347
Immortality, 100, 143, 162, 179, 250,
306-309
Impulse, 265, 330, 356
Incarnation, 56, 58-59, 64, 67, 8l, 93,
96, 104, 149
Indeterminism, 101, 248
India, i, 12, 66
Indian thought, 2-3, 5, 8-9
Individualism, 41, 44, 99, 121, 163, 178-
179, 203, 238, 353, 356
Individuality, 46, 50, 62, 119, 140, 146,
165, 1 68, 179, 214, 271, 298-299, 308
Individuation, 139, 222, 271
Infinite, the, 6, 8, 95, 105, 115, 126, 129-
13, 15, 154, 157, I59-I60, 169, 212,
219-220, 227, 229, 233-234, 236, 244,
268, 274, 276, 280-281, 291, 294, 343
Infinitude, 95
Infinity, 235, 244, 293
Jnnerlichkeit, 118
Inquisition, the, 272
Inspiration, 178
Intellect, 137, 140-141, 155-156, 192, 200,
217, 225, 240, 258, 286, 321, 329, 338
Intellectualism, 163-164, 167-168, 172,
196, 199, 211, 213-215, 247, 316, 323
Intelligence, Divine, 160, 191, 268, 279
Intelligibility, Divine, 134, 156, 167
Interaction, theory of, 327-329
Intuition, 125, 245, 276, 289, 315
Iranian thought, 9-10
Irenseus, 64, 65
Isidore (son of Basilides), 71
Isidore of Seville, 270
Italian mind, 256
Italian philosophy, 254-269
Italian psychology, 258-259, 265
Italy, 254-256, 258, 285, 311; Central,
255 ; Northern, 255 ; Southern, 255
Izquierdo, A. Gomez, 283-284
James, Prof. Wm., 313, 316, 322, 327,
332-333, 337
Janet, 242, 336
esuits, the, 272-273, 275
esus, 76
ewish thought, 66, 69, 169. 176. 270-271
odl, 326
ohn, St, on Logos, 54-55
ouffroy, 242-243
Judaic Gnosticism, 69
Judaism, 69, 172, 271
Judgment, act of, 164, 186, 255, 259, 265,
334, 353-354 5 value, 252, 261, 342, 355-
Justice, 30.
Justin Martyr, 10, 40, 55-57, 60-61
Kant, 161, 172, 183-206, 212, 219, 223,
230, 238, 242, 247-248, 290, 294-295,
302, 315, 322, 339, 342 ; Cosmological
argument, 187-190; freedom, 198; meta-
physics, 1 86, 192 ; Moral proof, 192-
196; Ontological argument, 185-187;
philosophy of religion, 184, 193, 196,
201-203, 205-206; reason, 199
Kantianism, 134, 245, 247-248, 255, 283,
289, 322
Karma, 8
Kingdom of God, 199
Kinkel, 230
Knowledge, theory of, 89, 102-103, 122,
140, 148, 155, 160, 162-164, 170, 211,
214, 216, 222, 224, 230-231, 233, 240,
258, 264, 293-294, 356
Koenig, 294
Krause, 283-284
Krausean philosophy, 283
Kulpe, 285, 327, 354
Kuno Fischer, 185
Labanca, 256
Labriola, 256
Lachelier, 245, 249
Ladd, Prof. G. T., 285, 347
Lamarck, 242
Lamennais, 238
Land, 285
Lara, Orti y, 276, 283
Latin, 145
Law, 9, 17, 35, 51, 53, 78, 83, 124, 261-
262, 266, 277-278, 282, 318, 323-324,
327, 329, 341, 357
Lechler, 145
Leibniz, 121, 139, 171, 179, 189, 242,
245-246, 277, 280, 290, 313
Lemos, P. A., 284
Leonhardi, 283
Lessing, 171-183, 201
Leuba, 322
Leucippus, 15
Liberatore, 255
Liberty, 245-246, 265, 270, 282, 303
Life, 10, 47, 51-52, 85, 102, 163-164, 167,
175, 192, 196, 200, 206, 210, 214, 217-
218, 229, 233-234, 250, 277, 293, 305.
308, 310, 315, 319-320, 322-323, 340*
350, 357
Lisbon, 275
Littre, 241, 286
INDEX.
365
Livy, 181
Locke, 121, 148, 254, 313
Logic, 126, 145, 147, 150, 158, 186, 217,
226, 234-235, 263, 272, 276, 279, 286,
327; Hegelian, 210, 214, 219
Logica> 146
Logos, the, 10-11, 38, 53-64, 69, 94-96,
ISO
Lombard, the, 129
Lombroso, 255
Loser th, 145
Lotze, 17, 20, 149, 233, 235, 257-258, 260-
262, 292, 303, 309, 318, 327, 356
Love, Spinoza on, 156-157, 162, 165-167
Lusitania, 272
Luther, 125
Lutheranism, 173
Mackenzie, Prof. J. S., 338, 357
Madrid, 283
Maimonides, Moses, 271
Majorca, 271
Malebranche, 139, 170, 176, 254, 277,
282-283
Mamiani, 255-256
Manichaeism, 66, 83, 109
Marcion, 69
Marcus Aurelius, 45-46, 50, 52; ethical
philosophy of, 41-52
Mariano, 256
Martin, Meliton, 284
Martineau, 205, 229
Mata, Pedro, 283
Materialism, 4, 106, 111-113, 120, 158,
208, 231, 238, 249, 283-284, 326
Materialist, the, 121, 227
Mathematics, 214, 276, 280
Matter, 7, 16-20, 36-37, 98, 108-110, 112,
US, 133, 135. 139-140, 147, I5 2 !58,
208, 216, 225, 233, 237, 249, 271, 280,
294, 300
Maya, 6
Mechanism, 265-267, 268-269, 284, 291,
296, 301, 3I3 348
Medievalism, 139, 169
Mediaeval philosophy, 117-118, 123, 126,
147
Mediaeval theology, 270
Mediator, 56, 59-62, 203
Meinong, 356
Melanchthon, 125, 144
Mendoza, 275
Mercier, D., 285
Messianic Kingdom, 70
Metaphysics, 58, 107, 109, 126, 135, 147,
149, 154, 160-161, 210, 213-214, 230,
246, 248, 250, 255-267, 275-276,
283, 286-288, 292, 294-297, 299, 301-
302, 304, 306, 308, 310-311, 316-317,
3 2 7, 338, 342-344, 346-350, 357 ; Aris-
totle's, 18-19, 2 5-37; of Aurelius, 42 ;
of Basilides, 71-72; Bergson's, 248,
250, 310; Buddhist, 7 ; Cousin's, 243;
Kant's, 1 86, 192 ; Lotze's, 20, 309-310 ;
method of, 298, 304, 309 ; Plato's, 23 ;
science of, 289-298, 302 ; Spinoza's,
154, 161, 168 ; of Suarez, 273-275 ;
transcendental, 57, 309
Metempsychosis, 115
Middle Ages, 115, 128, 141-142, 144,
271-272
Milhaud, 251
Mill, J. S., 88, 225, 353
Milton, 153
Modern philosophy, 60, 63
Molina, Louis, 272
Monad, 72, 97
Monism, 65, 303, 310, 354 ; Brahmanic,
6, 8 ; Eleatic, 29, 31 ; of Fouillee,
249-250 ; Haeckel's, 299-300 ; Less-
ing's, 179; of Plotinus, no; scientific,
300-301; Spinoza's, 158, 160, 170;
spiritualistic, 90, 94, 227, 289, 292,
296, 299, 301, 304, 314 ; Stoical, 42
Monotheism, 9, 33, 39, 45, 70
Moore, G. E., 338
Moral act, 338, 341, 347
Moral end, 205, 240, 303, 340-342, 35 1
Moral ideal, 30, 36, 52, 163, 194, 195-
199, 202, 206, 217, 341, 349-350, 352-
355
Moral interest, 10, 122, 216, 218
Moral law, 5, 122, 124, 185, 192-194,
196, 203, 274, 315, 349, 353-354
Moral nature, 173, 192
Moral obligation, 193, 218, 337, 342, 351-
352
Moral philosophy, 275, 336-357
Moral postulates, 192-193, 196, 202, 204-
205, 247, 319, 354
Moral reason, 39, 124, 194-195, 2OCV
206
Moralism, 106, 120, 169, 192-200, 202,
212, 215-216, 235, 245, 354-355
Morality, religion and, 172, 183, 193-
194, 202, 204, 243, 245, 282, 303, 336-
338, 346, 349, 352-353, 355, 357
Morselli, 256
Motion, 20, 23, 25, in, 136, 225, 260,
301
Munoz, A. Lopez, 284
Miinsterberg, 318, 319, 326
Mutability, 86
Mysticism, 3, 38-39, 70, 75, 106, 108,
366
INDEX.
Ill, II3-II4, Il8, 122, 125, 142, 197,
330-331
Mythology, Greek, 29-33, 4O, 65, 67
Nathan the Wise, 172-173
Natorp, 17, 230
Natura naturata, 160, 163
Natural theology, 129-130, 171-172, 178,
244
Naturalism, 29, 106, 351, 337, 344
Nature, 6, 8, 134, 233, 237, 241, 249, 267,
288, 296-299, 301-302, 311, 337, 348;
Hegel on, 222 ; Origen, 100; Plotinus,
no
Neo-Criticism, Renouvier's, 246-248
Neo-Hegelianism, 212, 224-225, 229-231
Neo-Kantism, 230, 246, 248, 252-253,
255- 2 56
Neo-Platonism, n, 35, 60, 80-8 1, 93,
105-106, in, 113, 115, 118, 125
Neo-Scholasticism, 276
New Testament, 76, 173, 182
Nice, Council of, 57
Nicene Christology, 59
Nicholas of Cusa, 171
Nicolai, 174
Noetics, 324
Nominalism, 120-122, 147-149
Nominalist controversy, 120-122, 148-149
Noumenon, 247-248
Nunez, Martinez, 284-285
Nys, D., 285
Objectivity, 104, 113, 141, 175, 189,
204, 211, 228, 236-237, 241, 244, 248,
251, 258-261, 263-264, 271, 284-285,
289, 292, 321, 332, 336-337, 342, 345
354, 356
Occidentalism, 1-3, 10-11, 306
Ockam, William, 120, 123-125, 127,
146, 153
Old Testament, 70, 179
Olle-Laprune, 252
Olmedo, M. P., 284
Omnipotence, 95, 98
Ontology, 4, 53, 67, 236, 244, 263, 268,
287, 303, 336, 344, 348 ; of Aquinas,
142; Plato's, 32; Spinoza's, 158, 160 ;
ontological argument, 125, 185-187 ;
ontologism, 131, 255-256.
Optimism, 6, 44, 46, 101, 139
Orient, 2, 270
Oriental philosophy, 1-5, 8, 11-12, 306
Orientalism, 8, 12, 66-67, 6 9
Origen, 40, 60, 62, 71, 92-104, 117, 124,
171 ; ethics of, 92, 101-103; idealism
of, 101-102 ; psychology, 99-101
Orphicism, 29
Oversoul, 37, 316
Oxford, 2, 146
Ozanam, 78
Pagan thought, 52, 69, 74
Pantsenus, 92
Pantheism, 2, 5-6, 41, 80, 94, 105, 118,
120, 125, 142, 150, 155, 179, 221, 227,
242, 245-246, 280-282, 295
Parallelism, theory of, 326-327
Paris, 275
Parsee, 86
Passion, 46, 164-165, 167, 197, 283
Paulsen, 285, 287, 326, 344
Peccenini, 256
Pedagogics, 170
Pelagianism, 272
Perception, 161, 225, 248, 258-260, 274,
318, 321 ; sense, 140, 225-226 ; spir-
itual, 181, 225-226, 324, 330-331, 346
Perfection, 73, 83, 90, 93, 134, 161-162,
165-166, 179, 244, 250, 282, 303, 307,
352, 354-355
Peripateticism, 106
Persia, I
Persian thought, 9, 66
Personalism, 246-247
Personality, 22, 45, 50, 52, 54, 59-61,
90, 94, 96, 109, 1 1 1- 1 12, 157, 167.
179, 193, 215, 221-222, 229, 231, 235-
236, 244-247, 268, 290, 292, 304, 307,
310, 315, 341, 344-345, 354, 356
Pessimism, 6-8, 30, 45, 87
Peyretti, 256
Phenomenalism, 170, 188-189, 246-248,
267, 327-328, 350
Philip II., 275
Philo, 35, 38, 53-55, 61-63, 68
Philology, 1 20
Philosophy, Arabian, 129, 141, 270-271;
Chinese, 3-4 ; Eastern, 2-3, 10-12 ;
Egyptian, 1 1 ; French, 238-253 ; Ger-
man, 147, 182, 257, 264, 285, 311,
344; Greek, 1-3, 10-13,38-40; Indian,
2-3, 5, 8; Italian, 254-269, 285;
modern, 60, 63 ; organ of, 323 ; of
religion, 12-13, 33, 36, 39-40, 65-66,
70, 74, 77, 1 06, 134, 171, 183-184,
193, 196, 200-202, 206 ; Sankhya, 5-7 ;
universality of, 13 ; Upanishads, 4,
6-7 ; Vedanta, 5-6 ; Western, I, 6, 8,
10, 12.
Philosophy of history, 77-91
Philosophy of Nature, 210
Philosophy of Spirit^ 210
Phoenicians, n
INDEX.
367
Phylogenesis, 332
Physics, 25-26
Physiology, 314, 355
Pietism, 184
Pillon, 246, 285
Pistis, 68
Plato, ii. 55, 78, 80, 82, 105-107, 109-
iii, 129, 256, 302, 313, 338, 345; on
causation, 21-24; on Creation, 21-23;
Final Cause, 24; Form, 15-16, 19;
the Good, 16, 21, 24, 33, 36, 38 ;
idealism of, 53, 101 ; on Ideas, 15-17,
19, 27 ; Laws, 22-23 > on Matter, 16-
17, 20, 36; metaphysics, 23; myth-
ology* 33? ontology, 32-33; Par-
menides, 17; Phcedo, 23; Phcednts,
23 ; Philebus, 17, 22 ; philosophy of
religion, 33, 36 ; psychology, 21 ;
Reality, 36 ; religion, 36-39 ; Republic,
17, 21-23, 38; Sophist, 17, 20, 23;
soul, 33 ; Statesman, 23 ; substance,
15-17. 19-20 ; Theatetus, 17, 23 ;
Timaus, 15-16, 21-23.
Platonism, 16-17, I9> 3 2 > 38, 55. 62 > 6 7'
68, 75, 81, 99-102, 106-107, 112, 116,
128, 143, 146, 158, 169, 179, 256, 313
Plotinus, 35, 37, 38-39, 105-117; his
philosophy of the One, 106-108
Pluralism, 108, 214, 222, 248, 303
Poincare, 248
Political philosophy, 238-239, 275, 277,
352
Polybius, 181
Polytheism, 2, 6, 29, 30, 35, 280
Pope, the, 275
Porphyry, 81
Positive Politics, 240-241
Positivism, 120, 148, 239, 245, 255-256,
283-284
Potence, 125, 315
Prayer, 6
Predestination, 101, 137, 151
Pre-existence of the soul, 74, 99, 101
Price, 338
Prime-Mover, 21, 24, 25, 37, 126, 130,
271
Proclus, 35
Proslogion, 125
Protestantism, 272
Protestant theology, 153
Providence, 43, 87, 101, 141, 182
Psychology, 123, 225, 230, 236, 242-244,
250, 257, 260, 265, 276-277, 284, 286,
316, 318, 320, 322, 324, 326, 337,
347-350, 353, 355-356 ; of Aquinas,
136 ; of Anstotle, 322-323 ; of August-
ine, 79, 82, 136, 323-324; of Basilides,
71 ; of cognition, 266, 316; of Cousin
and Jouffroy, 243; empiric, 258, 314,
334 ; ethics and, 347-348 ; functional,
3 2 9-330; German, 264; Hume's, 315;
Italian, 258-259, 265 ; Kant's, 315 ;
metaphysics and, 317, 348; Neo-
Platonic, 108-109, IJI ; objective, 325 ;
Origen's, 99-101, 103; Pauline, 99;
rational, 314, 332 ; recent, 266 ; re-
ligion and, 316-317; of Socrates, 32;
of the soul, 312-325, 329-335 ; Spin-
oza's, 157, 162 ; spiritual, 323-325,
330-332; subjective, 254, 325, 355-
356 ; of volition, 266-267.
Ptolemies, 3
Pythagoreans, 129
Quevedo, 275
Quietism, 3, 5, 47-48, 331
Ragnisco, 256
Rashdall, Dr H., 337
Rationalism, in, 159, 174, 184, 199,
202, 214, 251-252, 255, 301, 338, 344,
348, 356
Rauwenhof, 285
Ravaisson, 242, 245, 249
Raymond Lully, 271
Raymond of Sabunde, 271-272
Real, the, 223-224, 248, 261, 267, 282,
286, 288, 298, 301, 319, 338
Realism, 120-121, 125, 147-150, 170, 223,
247, 254-255, 260
Realist controversy, 120-121, 142, 146,
149, 153
Reality, 16-20, 24-25, 36-37, 39, 94, in,
126, 155, 164, 167-169, 185, 203, 205,
207, 210-213, 216-217, 220, 223-224,
226-227, 229-230, 246, 248-249, 256-
257. 259-261, 263-264, 282, 286, 288-
289, 293, 295, 298-299, 301, 309, 317,
320, 323, 325, 338-339, 344-350.
Reason, 23, 33, 38-39, 42, 45-46, 51, 59,
61-62, 92, 102, 106-108, 114-115, 118-
119, 122, 124, 126-127, 130-136, 143,
I6l-l62, 164, 174, 176, 178, 184-185,
188, 193-194, 199-200, 205, 212, 217,
219, 223, 226, 230, 236, 244-245, 263,
265, 278-279, 28l, 288-289, 294, 298-
299, 303. 322, 338, 340-341, 356.
Redemption, 67-68, in, 125, 161, 199,
334
Reformation, the, 153, 173
Rehmke, 327
Reid, 277
Reimarus, 174, 180-181
Relations, 190, 212, 214, 217, 221, 237,
368
INDEX.
243, 247, 263, 267, 294, 296-297, 304,
308, 314, 344-345, 348, 356-357
Relativity, 87, 168, 216, 247-248, 293,
295, 300, 302, 348
Religion within the Limits of Pure
Reason, 184, 193, 197, 199, 201, 203
Religion. Assyrian, n ; Babylonian, n ;
centre of, 64, 320 ; Chinese, 3-4 ;
Egyptian, n ; evolution of, 61, 171,
177-178, 213 ; of Greece, 12, 28-32,
39-40 ; of India, 2, 5-8 ; of Jesuits,
275; Kant's, 184-206; Lessing's, 177-
178 ; morality and, 172 ; nature of,
203 ; Persian, 9-10 ; philosophy and,
12-13, 33, 36, 39-40, 65-66, 70, 74,
77, 106, 134, 171, 183-184, 193, 196,
200-202, 206 ; Phoenician, 1 1 ; Plato's,
36-39; psychology and, 316-317; uni-
versality of, 203
Renaissance, 115, 117
Renouvier, 245-248, 250, 252, 285
Restorationism, 100
Resurrection, 100, 180
Retribution, 100
Revealed theology, 129-130
Revelation, 36, 57, 61, 63, 70, 82, 126-
127, 130, 143, 172-173, 176-178, 192,
200, 217, 246, 254, 279, 308
Richter, 176
Riehl, 326
Right, the, 340-341
Ritschl, 286
Ritschlianism, 285, 316
Ritter, P. H., 285
Roeder, 283
Rolfes, 285
Romagnosi, 254
Rome, 63
Roscellinus, 121
Rosmini, 128, 131, 139, 255, 257
Royce, 220, 285
Royer-Collard, 242
Sabellianism, 58, 97
Sacrifice, 6, 51, 202
Saisset, 242, 245
Salmeron, Nicolaus, 283
Salvation, Brahmanic, 7 ; Buddhist, 7 ;
Gnostic, 68, 71 ; world, 335
Sankhya philosophy, 5-7
Schelling, 125, 169, 242, 245, 277
Schleiermacher, 169, 196, 204-205, 322
Scholasticism, 117-119, 122-124, 128,
146-147, 152, 238, 275, 277-278;
method of, 127 ; Spanish, 273, 275
Scholastic philosophy, Ii7-ii8,;i39, 273-
274
Schoolmen, the, 130, 145, 153, 169, 177
Schopenhauer, 223, 290, 292, 297
Schwegler, 145
Science, 135, 188, 239, 246, 248, 250-
252, 261, 267, 271, 275, 284, 288-289,
291, 294-298, 300, 302, 306, 316, 323-
324, 326, 328-329, 334, 336-337, 342-
344, 346-350, 354
Scotism, 122, 272, 274-275
Scottish School, the, 277
Scotus Erigena, 118, 124-126
Scriptures, the, 70, 102
Secretan, 245
Self, the, 7, 84, 89, 94, no, 162, 165-166,
207-209, 219, 221, 229-230, 232, 290,
299, 313, 315, 321, 329, 332
Self-activity, 26, 34, 211-212, 225-226,
236, 242, 289-290, 304, 330, 354
Self-consciousness, 60, no, 113, 211, 219,
221-222, 268, 292, 310, 352
Self-determination, 93, 151
Self-development, 50-51, 341, 353
Selfishness, 166, 353
Self-sacrifice, 166, 353
Seneca, 41, 45
Sensations, 189, 225, 232-233, 259, 276,
316
Sensationalism, 242, 252
Sensibility, 258, 282
Sensism, 238, 254
Sergi, 256
Serrano, Gonzalez, 283
Seville, 270
Shirley, 153
Siciliani, 255
Sidgwick, 338, 340, 346, 351
Siebeck, 354
Sigwart, 327
Simmel, 337
Simon, Jules, 242, 244-245
Simon, Saint, 239
Sin, 85, 139, 151 ; original, 80
Social ethics, 195, 219-222, 232, 238-239,
251, 334, 352-353, 357
Sociology, 239-240, 337
Socrates, Apology of, 325 ; method of,
129 ; moral reason, 39 ; psychological
mode, 32 ; rational element, 32 ; teleo-
logical reasonings, 32
Sophocles, 30
Soul, the, 6, 7, 33, 36, 45, 50, 71, 107-
III, 122, 135, 139-140, 157, 250, 273,
286, 300, 306, 308, 310, 312-325, 329-
Space, 95, 152, 260, 276, 280-281,
291
Spain, 270-272, 274-276, 283-285, 311
INDEX.
369
Spanish literature, 272, 275
Spanish mind, 283-284
Spanish philosophy, 270-284
Spaventa, 255, 285
Species, intelligible, 123 ; origin of, 120
Speculative Impulse, the, 88, 90, 99, 127,
162, 179, 202, 204, 218, 238, 281, 298,
320, 322.
Speculative philosophy, 2, 3, 4, 10, 50,
59, 65, 70, 92, 115, 210, 214, 221, 239,
288, 307
Spencer, 4, 115, 219, 240, 242, 255, 266,
336, 350, 352-353
-Spinoza, 115, 125, 144, 154-170, 171,
179-180, 196, 203, 227, 290-291, 300,
307; attributes, 156-159, 169; causal-
ity, J 55 J ethics, 160-161, 164, 167-
168; God, 154-159, 176; metaphysics,
154, 161, 168 ; modes, 156-160, 168-
169; monism, 158, 160, 170; onto-
logy, 158, 160; personality, 155, 157,
167 ; psychology-, 157, 162 ; substance,
154-159, 165, 158-169
Spirit, 99, 108, 158, 182, 185, 189, 193,
2OO, 2O7-2O8, 2IO-2II, 222, 226-227,
232, 236-237, 263-264, 269, 288, 291,
296-297, 3> 302, 313, 322-323, 334,
Spiritism, 3, 28
Spiritualism, 80-81, 85, 94, 106, 109,
112-113, 222, 238, 242-243, 245-246,
248, 249-250, 257, 260, 276, 278, 283,
315
Starbuck, 322
Stephen, L., 336, 346-347, 353
Stoicism, 35, 41-42, 50-52, 55, 100, 106,
242
.Stoics, the, 49, 51, 53, 61-62, 112, 169
Stout, DrG. F., 326
Stromata, 75
Stuckenberg, 319
Stumpf, 327
Suarez, 127, 273-275
Subconscious, the, 322, 331
Subjectivism, no, 114, 166, 184, 188-
189, 191, 218, 226, 231-232, 236, 244,
248, 254, 261, 290, 296, 300, 322, 324,
Subliminal self, the, 334, 349-350, 356
Subordinationism, 62, 96-97
Substance, 7, 14-20, 111-112, 120, 131,
133, J 35, HO, 150, 154-159, 165, 168-
169, 203, 210, 227, 242, 246-247, 269,
273-274, 276, 281-282, 289-291, 300,
302, 310, 313, 319, 332
Substratum, the, 16, 112, 139, 300
Suffering, 71, 199
Summa Thcologica, 128-129, 131, 136,
139
Summutn bonum, 85, 161, 199
Supranaturalism, 69
Syllogisms, 118, 146, 223
Symbolism, 121, 181
Syncretism, 30, 65-66
Syrian thought, 66 +
Tacitus, 78
Taine, Hippolyte, 241
Tatian, 69
Taylor, Prof. A. E., 327, 347
Teleology, 34, 42, 86, 90, 107, 234, 286,
3!7 33, 34 2 ; teleological argument,
the, 190-191
Tennemann, 145
Teodicea, 128
Testament, New, 76, 173, 182
Testament, Old, 70, 179
Thales, 15
Theism, Kant's, 184-192; Origen's, 93;
speculative, 4, 209, 227, 236, 263,
309
Theistic philosophy, 185, 211, 227; the-
istic tendency, 80, 105, 209, 301, 307
Theodicy, 9, 68, 94, 303
Theologia Naturalis, 272
Theology, 40, 63, 67, 82, 92-93, 129-130,
169, 171-172, 278, 287-288 ; Alexan-
drian, 95 ; Origen's, 103 ; Protestant,
153
Theophilus, 40
Thiele, 285, 302
Thomism, 122-123, I2 8, 143, 146, 255,
272, 274-275, 284
Thought, 107, 109, in, 113, 136, 142,
148, 151, 156, 161, 172, 186-188, 203,
208, 210-218, 220, 224, 226, 230, 249,
252, 258-259, 261-263, 267, 273, 287,
293, 298-299, 302-303, 305, 307, 323
Thucydides, 78
Tiberghien, 285
Time, 81, 94, 98, 132, 134, 149, 152,
162, 172, 181, 214, 226, 229-230,
258, 260, 262, 276, 280, 291, 308,
3io, 339
Toulouse, 272
Transcendence, 26, 33-34, 3 8 > 59, 62 , 68,
72, 95, 107-108, 150, 185, 202, 224,
228, 233, 289, 293, 295, 301, 304-306,
315
Transcendentalism, 57, 120, 147, 189,
191, 240, 317, 329
Transmigration, 6, 71, 179
Transubstantiation, 151
Trendelenburg, 257
2 A
370
INDEX.
Trialogus, 151
Trinity, the, 73, 96-97, 146, 152, 183,
222, 279; Plotinic, 106
Trivero, 256
True, the, 241
Truth, 104, 119, 127, 167, 173, 175-176,
178, 182, 217, 259, 262, 272, 274, 282,
287, 294, 298, 309-310, 319, 323, 338,
344
Ueberweg, 145
Ultimate Cause, 23, 189
Ultimate Reality, 5, 94, 155, 187, 207,
210, 216, 220, 224, 289, 303-304, 311,
339
Unconditioned, the, 4, 189, 210, 247,
287, 291
Unconscious, the, 337-338
Unity, of being, 106-107, I2 5> 2OO 2O 9>
214, 228, 230, 262, 291-292, 299, 306,
314-315, 320, 334, 345 ; Divine, 4, 59,
I43 57, 159, 179, 235, 262, 266, 292,
299, 302-303; organic, 93, 127, 139,
212-213, 239-240, 252-253, 292, 299,
302, 306, 318, 334; undifferentiated,
154, 168, 295; of the world, 42-43,
90, 99, 158, 187, 200, 209-210, 220-
221, 224, 226-227, 239, 243, 276, 286,
289, 291, 294-296, 299
Universalism, 125
Universality, 6, 13, 34, 43, 49, 51-52, 68,
112, 120, 130, 132, 161, 195, 200, 203,
217, 219, 271, 273, 279, 285, 297, 305,
Universals, 120-122, 124, 126, 130, 146,
147, 149
Universe, the, 42, 87, 89, no, 126, 141,
160, 190, 192, 207, 211, 214-215, 219,
222-223, 225, 234, 236-237, 241, 252,
282, 286, 293, 297-298, 301, 304-309,
334, 338, 344, 348
Upanishads, 4, 6-7
Urrabura, J. J., 276
Utilitarianism, 350-353
Vacherot, 242, 244
Vailati, 256
Valdarnini, 256
Valentinus, 69, 74-75
Valladolid, 272
Value-judgments, 252, 261, 342, 355-357
Varro, 80
Vaughan, 153
Vedanta philosophy, 5-6
Vedas, I, 6
Ventura, 254
Vich, 276-277
Vico, 254
Villari, 255
Virtue, 7, 46, 47, 49-50, 85, 114, 162,
166, 182, 337, 341-342, 351, 353, 357 ;
Greek, 101
Volition, 137, 160, 199, 211, 215, 249,
263-266, 275, 287, 305, 319, 340; psy-
chology of, 266, 334
Voluntarism, 256
Ward, Prof. J., 285, 301, 327
Weber, 145, 202
Weltanschammgi I, 345
Wentscher, 327
Western thought, I, 6, 8, 10, 12, 119
Will, 49-51, 79-80, 82, 84-85, 101-102,
112, 122, 136-138, 199, 2II-2I2, 242-
243, 264-265, 267-268, 303, 338-339,
354; Infinite, 94, 107, 155, 292
Windelband, I, 12, 145
Wisdom, 47, 162, 221 ; Hebrew, 62,
170
Wolff, 313
Word, the, 58, 62, 132 ; Spermatic, 61
World-Ground, 112, 188, 219, 290-292,
300, 303, 349
World-Soul, 7, 10-12, 94, 107-108, in
World- View, 92, 143, 172, 284, 342, 345,
World-Whole, 3, 13, 190, 288-289, 291,
294-297
Wundt, i, 258, 285, 318, 320, 326, 334,
Wyclif, 145-153; Society, 145
Xenophanes, 15, 29, 31-32, 36
Yahveh, 9
Zarathustra, 9
Zeller, 182, 185
Zeus, 30
Zoroastrian thought, 9-10
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