"V-NRLF 
 
 $B Sit, in 
 
1 
 
 ^HIS book gives the unprofessional reader a succinct 
 ■*■ notion of the development of classic German 
 philosophy from Kant to E[egel. Technical details are 
 omitted, while the ideas that are significant for the 
 history of culture are emphasized. 
 
 It shows how German thought took shape in the 
 struggle for German nationality against the Napoleonic 
 menace, and how profoundly that crisis affected the 
 philosophy of morals, of the state, and of history which 
 has since that time penetrated into the common con- 
 sciousness of Germany. 
 
 Incidentally it makes clear how superficial is the 
 current accounting for the contemporary attitude of 
 intellectual Germany by reference to Nietzsche, etc., 
 since that attitude is shown to have its basis in the 
 older idealistic philosophy. 
 
Charles Edward Rugh 
 lflfi7-1958 
 
 educaxioi; [ - . 
 
 Professor of Education I 
 University of California 
 
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 
 AND POLITICS 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN DEWEY 
 
 Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 1915 
 
6*7?/ 
 
 tone. 
 
 OB7. 
 
 Copyright, 1915, 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND .COMPANY 
 
 
 THE QUINN A 80DEN CO. PRESS 
 RAHWAY, N. J. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The will of John Calvin McNair established a 
 Foundation at the University of North Carolina 
 upon which public lectures are to be given from 
 time to time to the members of the University. 
 This book contains three lectures which were given 
 in February of this year upon this Foundation. It 
 is a pleasure to acknowledge the many courtesies 
 enjoyed during my brief stay at Chapel Hill, the 
 seat of the University. 
 
 J. D. 
 
 Columbia University, 
 
 New York City, April, 1915. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I German Philosophy : The Two Worlds 3 
 
 II German Moral and Political Phi- 
 losophy 47 
 
 III The Germanic Philosophy of History 91 
 
 Index 133 
 
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND 
 POLITICS 
 
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY: THE TWO 
 WORLDS 
 
 The nature of the influence of general ideas 
 upon practical affairs is a troubled question. 
 Mind dislikes to find itself a pilgrim in an alien 
 world. A discovery that the belief in the influ- 
 ence of thought upon action is an illusion would 
 leave men profoundly saddened with themselves 
 and with the world. Were it not that the doctrine 
 forbids any discovery influencing affairs — since the 
 discovery would be an idea — we should say that 
 the discovery of the wholly ex post facto and idle 
 character of ideas would profoundly influence sub- 
 sequent affairs. The strange thing is that when 
 men had least control over nature and their own 
 affairs, they were most sure of the efficacy of 
 thought. The doctrine that nature does nothing 
 in vain, that it is directed by purpose, was not 
 engrafted by scholasticism upon science ; it formu- 
 lates an instinctive tendency. And if the doctrine 
 8 
 
4/ 1 ••' " THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 be fallacious, its pathos has a noble quality. It 
 testifies to the longing of human thought for a 
 world of its own texture. Yet just in the degree 
 in which men, by means of inventions and political 
 arrangements, have found ways of making their 
 thoughts effective, they have come to question 
 whether any thinking is efficacious. Our notions 
 in physical science tend to reduce mind to a bare 
 spectator of a machine-like nature grinding its 
 unrelenting way. The vogue of evolutionary ideas 
 has led many to regard intelligence as a deposit 
 from history, not as a force in its making. We look 
 backward rather than forward ; and when we look 
 forward we seem to see but a further unrolling 
 of a panorama long ago rolled up on a cosmic 
 reel. Even Bergson, who, to a casual reader, ap- 
 pears to reveal vast unexplored vistas of genuinely 
 novel possibilities, turns out, upon careful study, 
 to regard intellect (everything which in the past 
 has gone by the name of observation and reflec- 
 tion) as but an evolutionary deposit whose im- 
 portance is confined to the conservation of a life 
 already achieved, and bids us trust to instinct, or 
 something akin to instinct, for the future: — as if 
 there were hope and consolation in bidding us trust 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 5 
 
 to that which, in any case, we cannot intelligently 
 direct or control. 
 
 I do not see that the school of history which 
 finds Bergson mystic and romantic, which prides 
 itself upon its hard-headed and scientific character, 
 comes out at a different place. I refer to the doc- 
 trine of the economic interpretation of history in 
 its extreme form — which, so its adherents tell us, 
 is its only logical form. It is easy to follow them 
 when they tell us that past historians have ig- 
 nored the great part played by economic forces, 
 and that descriptions and explanations have been 
 correspondingly superficial. When one reflects 
 that the great problems of the present day are 
 those attending economic reorganization, one 
 might even take the doctrine as a half-hearted con- 
 fession that historians are really engaged in con- 
 struing the past in terms of the problems and 
 interests of an impending future, instead of re- 
 porting a past in order to discover some mathe- 
 matical curve which future events are bound to 
 describe. But no; our strictly scientific economic 
 interpreters will have it that economic forces pre- 
 sent an inevitable evolution, of which state and 
 church, art and literature, science and philosophy 
 
6 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 are by-products. It is useless to suggest that 
 while modern industry has given an immense stim- 
 ulus to scientific inquiry, yet nevertheless the in- 
 dustrial revolution of the eighteenth century 
 comes after the scientific revolution of the seven- 
 teenth. The dogma forbids any connection. 
 
 But when we note that Marx gave it away that 
 his materialistic interpretation of history was but 
 the Hegelian idealistic dialectic turned upside 
 down, we may grow wary. Is it, after all, history 
 we are dealing with or another philosophy of his- 
 tory? And when we discover that the great im- 
 portance of the doctrine is urged upon us, when 
 we find that we are told that the general recog- 
 nition of its truth helps us out of our present 
 troubles and indicates a path for future effort, we 
 positively take heart. These writers do not seem 
 to mean just what they say. Like the rest of us, 
 they are human, and infected with a belief that 
 ideas, even highly abstract theories, are of efficacy 
 in the conduct of human affairs influencing the 
 history which is yet to be. 
 
 I have, however, no intention of entering upon 
 this controversy, much less of trying to settle it. 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 7 
 
 These remarks are but preliminary to a considera- 
 tion of some of the practical affiliations of por- 
 tions of the modern history of philosophical 
 thought with practical social affairs. And if I set 
 forth my own position in the controversy in ques- 
 tion, the statement is frankly a personal one, in- 
 tended to make known the prepossessions with 
 which I approach the discussion of the political 
 bearings of one phase of modern philosophy. I 
 do not believe, then, that pure ideas, or pure 
 thought, ever exercised any influence upon human 
 action. I believe that very much of what has 
 been presented as philosophic reflection is in effect 
 simply an idealization, for the sake of emotional 
 satisfaction, of the brutely given state of affairs, 
 and is not a genuine discovery of the practical 
 influence of ideas. In other words, I believe it 
 to be esthetic in type even when sadly lacking in 
 esthetic form. And I believe it is easy to exag- 
 gerate the practical influence of even »the more 
 vital and genuine ideas of which I am about to 
 speak. 
 
 But I also believe that there are no such things 
 as pure ideas or pure reason. Every tiving 
 thought represents a gesture made toward the 
 
8 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 world, an attitude taken to some practical situa- 
 tion in which we are implicated. Most of these 
 gestures are ephemeral; they reveal the state of 
 him who makes them rather than effect a significant 
 alteration of conditions. But at some times they 
 are congenial to a situation in which men in masses 
 are acting and suffering. They supply a model 
 for the attitudes of others; they condense into a 
 dramatic type of action. They then form what 
 we call the " great " systems of thought. Not all 
 ideas perish with the momentary response. They 
 are voiced and others hear; they are written and 
 others read. Education, formal and informal, em- 
 bodies them not so much in other men's minds as 
 in their permanent dispositions of action. They 
 are in the blood, and afford sustenance to conduct ; 
 they are in the muscles and men strike or retire. 
 Even emotional and esthetic systems may breed 
 a disposition toward the world and take overt 
 effect. The reactions thus engendered are, indeed, 
 superficial as compared with those in which more 
 primitive instincts are embodied. The business of 
 eating and drinking, buying and selling, marry- 
 ing and being given in marriage, making war and 
 peace, gets somehow carried on along with any and 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 9 
 
 every system of ideas which the world has known. 
 But how, and when and where and for what men 
 do even these things is tremendously affected by 
 the abstract ideas which get into circulation. 
 
 I take it that I may seem to be engaged in an 
 emphatic urging of the obvious. However it may 
 be with a few specialized schools of men, almost 
 everybody takes it as a matter of course that ideas 
 influence action and help determine the subsequent 
 course of events. Yet there is a purpose in this 
 insistence. Most persons draw the line at a certain 
 kind of general ideas. They are especially prone 
 to regard the ideas which constitute philosophic 
 theories as practically innocuous — as more or less 
 amiable speculations significant at the most for 
 moments of leisure, in moments of relief from pre- 
 occupation with affairs. Above all, men take the 
 particular general ideas which happen to affect 
 their own conduct of life as normal and inevitable. 
 Pray what other ideas would any sensible man 
 have ? They forget the extent to which these ideas 
 originated as parts of a remote and technical 
 theoretical system, which by multitudes of non- 
 reflective channels has infiltrated into their habits 
 
10 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 of imagination and behavior. An expert intel- 
 lectual anatomist, my friends, might dissect you 
 and find Platonic and Aristotelian tissues, organs 
 from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, 
 Locke and Descartes, in the make-up of the 
 ideas by which you are habitually swayed, and 
 find, indeed, that they and other thinkers of whose 
 names you have never heard constitute a larger 
 part of your mental structure than does the Calvin 
 or Kant, Darwin or Spencer, Hegel or Emerson, 
 Bergson or Browning to whom you yield conscious 
 allegiance. 
 
 Philosophers themselves are naturally chiefly re- 
 sponsible for the ordinary estimate of their own 
 influence, or lack of influence. They have been 
 taken mostly at their own word as to what they 
 were doing, and what for the most part they have 
 pretended to do is radically different from what 
 they have actually done. They are quite negligible 
 as seers and reporters of ultimate reality, or the 
 essential natures of things. And it is in this 
 aspect that they have mostly fancied seeing them- 
 selves. Their actual office has been quite other. 
 They have told about nature and life and society 
 in terms of collective human desire and aspiration 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 11 
 
 as these were determined by contemporary dif- 
 ficulties and struggles. 
 
 I have spoken thus far as if the influence of 
 general ideas upon action were likely to be bene- 
 ficial. It goes against the grain to attribute evil 
 to the workings of intelligence. But we might 
 as well face the dilemma. What is called pure 
 thought, thought freed from the empirical contin- 
 gencies of life, would, even if it existed, be irrel- 
 evant to the guidance of action. For the latter 
 always operates amid the circumstance of contin- 
 gencies. And thinking which is colored by time 
 and place must always be of a mixed quality. In 
 part, it will detect and hold fast to more perma- 
 nent tendencies and arrangements ; in part, it will 
 take the limitations of its own period as neces- 
 sary and universal — even as intrinsically desir- 
 able. 
 
 The traits which give thinking effectiveness for 
 the good give it also potency for harm. A phys- 
 ical catastrophe, an earthquake or conflagration, 
 acts only where it happens. While its effects en- 
 dure, it passes away. But it is of the nature of 
 ideas to be abstract: that is to say, severed from 
 the circumstances of their origin, and through 
 
12 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 embodiment in language capable of operating in 
 remote climes and alien situations. Time heals 
 physical ravages, but it may only accentuate the 
 evils of an intellectual catastrophe — for by no 
 lesser name can we call a systematic intellectual 
 error. To one who is professionally preoccupied 
 with philosophy there is much in its history which 
 is profoundly depressing. He sees ideas which 
 were not only natural but useful in their native 
 time and place, figuring in foreign contexts so 
 as to formulate defects as virtues and to give 
 rational sanction to brute facts, and to oppose 
 alleged eternal truths to progress. He sees move- 
 ments which might have passed away with change 
 of circumstance as casually as they arose, acquire 
 persistence and dignity because thought has taken 
 cognizance of them and given them intellectual 
 names. The witness of history is that to think 
 in general and abstract terms is dangerous; it 
 elevates ideas beyond the situations in which they 
 were born and charges them with we know not what 
 menace for the future. And in the past the danger 
 has been the greater because philosophers have 
 so largely purported to be concerned not with con- 
 temporary problems of living, but with essen- 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 13 
 
 tial Truth and Reality viewed under the form of 
 eternity. 
 
 In bringing these general considerations to a 
 close, I face an embarrassment. I must choose 
 some particular period of intellectual history for 
 more concrete illustration of the mutual relation- 
 ship of philosophy and practical social affairs — 
 which latter, for the sake of brevity, I term 
 Politics. One is tempted to choose Plato. For 
 in spite of the mystic and transcendental coloring 
 of his thought, it was he who defined philosophy as 
 the science of the State, or the most complete and 
 organized whole known to man; it is no accident 
 that his chief work is termed the " Republic." In 
 modern times, we are struck by the fact that Eng- 
 lish philosophy from Bacon to John Stuart Mill 
 has been cultivated by men of affairs rather than 
 by professors, and with a direct outlook upon so- 
 cial interests. In France, the great period of phi- 
 losophy, the period of les philosophes, was the time 
 in which were forged the ideas which connect in 
 particular with the French Revolution and in gen- 
 eral with the conceptions which spread so rapidly 
 through the civilized world, of the indefinite per- 
 fectibility of humanity, the rights of man, and the 
 
14 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 promotion of a society as wide as humanity, based 
 upon allegiance to reason. 
 
 Somewhat arbitrarily I have, however, selected 
 some aspects of classic German thought for my 
 illustrative material. Partly, I suppose, because 
 one is piqued by the apparent challenge which its 
 highly technical, professorial and predominantly 
 a priori character offers to the proposition that 
 there is close connection between abstract thought 
 and the tendencies of collective life. More to the 
 point, probably, is the fact that the heroic age 
 of German thought lies almost within the last cen- 
 tury, while the creative period of continental 
 thought lies largely in the eighteenth century, and 
 that of British thought still earlier. It was Taine, 
 the Frenchman, who said that all the leading ideas 
 of the present day were produced in Germany be- 
 tween 1780 and 1830. Above all, the Germans, 
 as we say, have philosophy in their blood. Such 
 phrases generally mean something not about 
 hereditary qualities, but about the social condi- 
 tions under which ideas propagate and circulate. 
 
 Now Germany is the modern state which pro- 
 vides the greatest facilities for general ideas to 
 take effect through social inculcation. Its sys- 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 15 
 
 tem of education is adapted to that end. 
 Higher schools and universities in Germany are 
 really, not just nominally, under the control 
 of the state and part of the state life. In 
 spite of freedom of academic instruction when 
 once a teacher is installed in office, the political 
 authorities have always taken a hand, at critical 
 junctures, in determining the selection of teachers 
 in subjects that had a direct bearing upon 
 political policies. Moreover, one of the chief func- 
 tions of the universities is the preparation of 
 future state officials. Legislative activity is dis- 
 tinctly subordinate to that of administration con- 
 ducted by a trained civil service, or, if you please, 
 bureaucracy. Membership in this bureaucracy is 
 dependent upon university training. Philosophy, 
 both directly and indirectly, plays an unusually 
 large role in the training. The faculty of law does 
 not chiefly aim at the preparation of practicing 
 lawyers. Philosophies of jurisprudence are essen- 
 tial parts of the law teaching ; and every one of the 
 classic philosophers took a hand in writing a phi- 
 losophy of Law and of the State. Moreover, in 
 the theological faculties, which are also organic 
 parts of state-controlled institutions, the theology 
 
16 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 and higher criticism of Protestant Germany have 
 been developed, and developed also in close con- 
 nection with philosophical systems — like those of 
 Kant, Schleiermacher and Hegel. In short, the 
 educational and administrative agencies of Ger- 
 many provide ready-made channels through which 
 philosophic ideas may flow on their way to prac- 
 tical affairs. 
 
 Political public opinion hardly exists in Ger- 
 many in the sense in which it obtains in France, 
 Great Britain or this country. So far as it ex- 
 ists, the universities may be said to be its chief 
 organs. They, rather than the newspapers, 
 crystallize it and give it articulate expression. In- 
 stead of expressing surprise at the characteristic 
 utterances of university men with reference to the 
 great war, we should then rather turn to the past 
 history in which the ideas now uttered were gen- 
 erated. 
 
 In an account of German intellectual history 
 sufficiently extensive we should have to go back 
 at least to Luther. Fortunately, for our pur- 
 poses, what he actually did and taught is not so 
 important as the more recent tradition concerning 
 his peculiarly Germanic status and office. All 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 17 
 
 peoples are proud of all their great men. Germany 
 is proud of Luther as its greatest national hero. 
 But while most nations are proud of their great 
 men, Germany is proud of itself rather for pro- 
 ducing Luther. It finds him as a Germanic prod- 
 uct quite natural — nay, inevitable. A belief in 
 the universal character of his genius thus nat- 
 urally is converted into a belief of the essentially 
 universal quality of the people who produced 
 him. 
 
 Heine was not disposed by birth or tempera- 
 ment to overestimate the significance of Luther. 
 But here is what he said: 
 
 " Luther is not only the greatest but the most 
 German man in our history. . . . He possessed 
 qualities that we seldom see associated — nay, that 
 we usually find in the most hostile antagonism. 
 He was at once a dreamy mystic and a practical 
 man of action. . . . He was both a cold scholastic 
 word-sifter and an inspired God-drunk prophet. 
 . . . He was full of the awful reverence of God, 
 full of self-sacrificing devotion to the Holy Spirit, 
 he could lose himself entirely in pure spirituality. 
 Yet he was fully acquainted with the glories of 
 this earth ; he knew how estimable they are ; it was 
 his lips that uttered the famous maxim — 
 
18 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 " ' Who loves not woman, wine and song, 
 Remains a fool his whole life long.' 
 
 He was a complete man, I might say an absolute 
 man, in whom there was no discord between matter 
 and spirit. To call him a spiritualist would be 
 as erroneous as to call him a sensualist. . . . 
 Eternal praise to the man whom we have to thank 
 for the deliverance of our most precious posses- 
 
 And again speaking of Luther's work : 
 
 " Thus was established in Germany spiritual 
 freedom, or as it is called, freedom of thought. 
 Thought became a right and the decisions of rea- 
 son legitimate." 
 
 The specific correctness of the above is of slight 
 importance as compared with the universality of 
 the tradition which made these ideas peculiarly 
 Germanic, and Luther, therefore, a genuine na- 
 tional hero and type. 
 
 It is, however, with Kant that I commence. In 
 Protestant Germany his name is almost always 
 associated with that of Luther. That he brought 
 to consciousness the true meaning of the Lutheran 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 19 
 
 reformation is a commonplace of the German his- 
 torian. One can hardly convey a sense of the 
 unique position he occupies in the German thought 
 of the last two generations. It is not that every 
 philosopher is a Kantian, or that the professed 
 Kantians stick literally to his text. Far from it. 
 But Kant must always be reckoned with. No posi- 
 tion unlike his should be taken up till Kant has 
 been reverently disposed of, and the new position 
 evaluated in his terms. To scoff at him is fair 
 sacrilege. In a genuine sense, he marks the end 
 of the older age. He if the transition to distinc- 
 tively modern thought. 
 
 One shrinks at the attempt to compress even his 
 leading ideas into an hour. Fortunately for me, 
 few who read my attempt will have sufficient 
 acquaintance with the tomes of Kantian in- 
 terpretation and exposition to appreciate the full 
 enormity of my offense. For I cannot avoid the 
 effort to seize from out his highly technical writ- 
 ings a single idea and to label that his germinal 
 idea. For only in this way can we get a clew to 
 those general ideas with which Germany char- 
 acteristically prefers to connect the aspirations 
 and convictions that animate its deeds. 
 
20 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 Adventuring without further preface into this 
 field, I find that Kant's decisive contribution is the 
 idea of a dual legislation of reason by which are 
 marked off two distinct realms — that of science 
 and that of morals. Each of these two realms has 
 its own final and authoritative constitution: On 
 one hand, there is the world of sense, the world 
 of phenomena in space and time in which science 
 is at home ; on the other hand, is the supersensible, 
 the noumenal world, the world of moral duty and 
 moral freedom. 
 
 Every cultivated man is familiar with the con- 
 flict of science and religion, brute fact and ideal 
 purpose, what is and what ought to be, necessity 
 and freedom. In the domain of science causal de- 
 pendence is sovereign; while freedom is lord of 
 moral action. It is the proud boast of those who 
 are Kantian in spirit that Kant discovered laws 
 deep in the very nature of things and of human 
 experience whose recognition puts an end forever 
 to all possibility of conflict. 
 
 In principle, the discovery is as simple as its 
 application is far-reaching. Both science and 
 moral obligation exist. Analysis shows that each 
 is based upon laws supplied by one and the same 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 21 
 
 reason (of which, as he is fond of saying, reason 
 is the legislator) ; but laws of such a nature that 
 their respective jurisdictions can never compete. 
 The material for the legislation of reason in the 
 natural world is sense. In this sensible world of 
 space and time, causal necessity reigns : such is the 
 decree of reason itself. Every attempt to find 
 freedom, to locate ideals, to draw support for 
 man's moral aspirations in nature, is predoomed to 
 failure. The effort of reason to do these things is 
 contrary to the very nature of reason itself: it 
 is self-contradictory, suicidal. 
 
 When one considers the extent in which religion 
 has been bound up with belief in miracles, or de- 
 partures from the order of nature ; when one notes 
 how support for morals has been sought in natural 
 law; how morals have been tied up with man's 
 natural tendencies to seek happiness and with 
 consequences in the way of reward of virtue and 
 punishment of vice ; how history has been explained 
 as a play of moral forces — in short, the extent to 
 which both the grounds and the sanctions for 
 morality have been sought within the time and 
 space world, one realizes the scope of the revolu- 
 tion wrought by Kant, provided his philosophy be 
 
22 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 true. Add to this the fact that men in the past 
 have not taken seriously the idea that every exist- 
 ence in space, every event in time, is connected by 
 bonds of causal necessity with other existences and 
 events, and consequently have had no motive for 
 the systematic pursuit of science. How is the late 
 appearance of science in human history to be ac- 
 counted for? How are we to understand the com- 
 paratively slight influence which science still has 
 upon the conduct of life? Men, when they have not 
 consciously looked upon nature as a scene of ca- 
 price, have failed to bring home to themselves that 
 nature is a scene of the legislative activity of rea- 
 son in the material of sense. This fact the Kantian 
 philosophy brings home to man once for all; it 
 brings it home not as a pious wish, nor as a pre- 
 carious hope confirmed empirically here and there 
 by victories won by a Galileo or a Newton, but as 
 an indubitable fact necessary to the existence of 
 any cognitive experience at all. The reign of law 
 in nature is the work of the same reason which 
 proceeds empirically and haltingly to the discov- 
 ery of law here and there. Thus the acceptance 
 of the Kantian philosophy not only frees man at 
 a single stroke from superstition, sentimentalism 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 23 
 
 and moral and theological romanticism, but gives 
 at the same stroke authorization and stimulation 
 to the detailed efforts of man to wrest from nature 
 her secrets of causal law. What sparse groups of 
 men of natural science had been doing for the 
 three preceding centuries, Kant proclaimed to be 
 the manifestation of the essential constitution 
 of man as a knowing being. For those who accept 
 the Kantian philosophy, it) is accordingly the 
 magna charta of scientific work: the adequate 
 formulation of the constitution which directs and 
 justifies their scientific inquiries. It is a truism 
 to say that among the Germans as nowhere else has 
 developed a positive reverence for science. In what 
 other land does one find in the organic law men- 
 tion of Science, and read in its constitution an 
 express provision that " Science and its teaching 
 are free " ? 
 
 But this expresses only half of Kant's work. 
 Reason is itself supersensible. Giving law to the 
 material of sense and so constituting nature, it 
 is in itself above sense and nature, as a sovereign 
 is above his subjects. The supersensible world is 
 thus a more congenial field for its legislative activ- 
 ity than the physical world of space and time. 
 
24 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 But is any such field open to human experience? 
 Has not Kant himself closed and locked the gates 
 in his assertion that the entire operation of man's 
 knowing powers is confined to the realm of sense 
 in which causal necessity dominates? Yes, as far 
 as knowledge is concerned. No, as far as moral 
 obligation is concerned. The fact of duty, the 
 existence of a categorical command to act thus and 
 so, no matter what the pressure of physical sur- 
 roundings or the incitation of animal inclinations, 
 is as much a fact as the existence of knowledge 
 of the physical world. Such a command cannot 
 proceed from nature. What is cannot introduce 
 man to what ought to be, and thus impose its 
 own opposite upon him. Nature only enmeshes 
 men in its relentless machine-like movement. The 
 very existence of a command in man to act for 
 the sake of what ought to be — no matter what 
 actually is — is thus of itself final proof of the 
 operation of supersensible reason within human 
 experience: not, indeed, within theoretical or cog- 
 nitive experience, but within moral experience. 
 
 The moral law, the law of obligation, thus pro- 
 ceeds from a source in man above reason. It is 
 token of his membership as a moral being in a 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 25 
 
 kingdom of absolute ends above nature. But it 
 is also directed to something in man which is 
 equally above nature: it appeals to and demands 
 freedom. Reason is incapable of anything so irra- 
 tional, so self-contradictory, as imposing a law 
 of action to which no faculty of action corre- 
 sponds. The freedom of the moral will is the 
 answer to the unqualified demand of duty. It is 
 not open to man to accept or reject this truth as 
 he may see fit. It is a principle of reason which 
 is involved in every exercise of reason. In denying 
 it in name, man none the less acknowledges it in 
 fact. Only men already sophisticated by vice who 
 are seeking an excuse for their viciousness ever 
 try to deny, even in words, the response which 
 freedom makes to the voice of duty. Since, how- 
 ever, freedom is an absolute stranger to the natural 
 and sensible world, man's possession of moral free- 
 dom is the final sign and seal of his membership 
 in a supersensible world. The existence of an 
 ideal or spiritual realm with its own laws is thus 
 certified to by the fact of man's own citizenship 
 within it. But, once more, this citizenship and 
 this certification are solely moral. Scientific or in- 
 tellectual warrant for it is impossible or self- 
 
26 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 contradictory, for science works by the law of 
 causal necessity with respect to what is, igno- 
 rant of any law of freedom referring to what 
 should be. 
 
 With the doors to the supersensible world now 
 open, it is but a short step to religion. Of the 
 negative traits of true religion we may be sure 
 in advance. It will not be based upon intellectual 
 grounds. Proofs of the existence of God, of the 
 creation of nature, of the existence of an imma- 
 terial soul from the standpoint of knowledge are 
 all of them impossible. They transgress the limits 
 of knowledge, since that is confined to the sensible 
 world of time and space. Neither will true reli- 
 gion be based upon historic facts such as those 
 of Jewish history or the life of Jesus or the author- 
 ity of a historic institution like a church. For 
 all historic facts as such fall within the realm of 
 time which is sensibly conditioned. From the 
 points of view of natural theology and historic 
 religions Kant was greeted by his contemporaries 
 as the " all-shattering." Quite otherwise is it, 
 however, as to moral proofs of religious ideas and 
 ideals. In Kant's own words : " I have found it 
 necessary to deny knowledge of God, freedom and 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 27 
 
 immortality in order to find a place for faith " — 
 faith being a moral act. 
 
 Then he proceeds to reinterpret in terms of the 
 sensuous natural principle and the ideal rational 
 principle the main doctrines of Lutheran Prot- 
 estantism. The doctrines of incarnation, original 
 sin, atonement, justification by faith and sanctifi- 
 cation, while baseless literally and historically, are 
 symbols of the dual nature of man, as phenomenal 
 and noumenal. And while Kant scourges ecclesi- 
 astical religions so far as they have relied upon 
 ceremonies and external authority, upon external 
 rewards and punishments, yet he ascribes transi- 
 tional value to them in that they have symbolized 
 ultimate moral truths. Although dogmas are but 
 the external vesture of inner truths, yet it may 
 be good for us " to continue to pay reverence to 
 the outward vesture since that has served to bring 
 to general acceptance a doctrine which really rests 
 upon an authority within the soul of man, and 
 which, therefore, needs no miracle to commend it." 
 
 It is a precarious undertaking to single out 
 some one thing in German philosophy as of typical 
 importance in understanding German national life. 
 Yet I am committed to the venture. My convic- 
 
28 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 tion is that we have its root idea in the doctrine of 
 I Kant concerning the two realms, one outer, phys- 
 ical and necessary, the other inner, ideal and free. 
 To this we must add that, in spite of their sep- 
 arateness and independence, the primacy always 
 lies with the inner. As compared with this, the 
 philosophy of a Nietzsche, to which so many resort 
 at the present time for explanation of what seems 
 to them otherwise inexplicable, is but a superficial 
 and transitory wave of opinion. Surely the chief 
 mark of distinctively German civilization is its 
 combination of self-conscious idealism with unsur- 
 passed technical efficiency and organization in the 
 varied fields of action. If this is not a realization 
 in fact of what is found in Kant, I am totally at 
 loss for a name by which to characterize it. I do 
 not mean that conscious adherence to the philoso- 
 phy of Kant has been the cause of the marvelous 
 advances made in Germany in the natural sciences 
 and in the systematic application of the fruits of 
 intelligence to industry, trade, commerce, military 
 affairs, education, civic administration and indus- 
 trial organization. Such a claim would be absurd. 
 But I do mean, primarily, that Kant detected and 
 formulated the direction in which the German 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 29 
 
 genius was moving, so that his philosophy is of 
 immense prophetic significance; and, secondarily, 
 that his formulation has furnished a banner and a 
 conscious creed which in solid and definite fashion 
 has intensified and deepened the work actually un- 
 dertaken. 
 
 In bringing to an imaginative synthesis what 
 might have remained an immense diversity 
 of enterprises, Kantianism has helped formulate 
 a sense of a national mission and destiny. Over 
 and above this, his formulation and its influence 
 aids us to understand why the German conscious- 
 ness has never been swamped by its technical ef- 
 ficiency and devotion, but has remained self- 
 consciously, not to say self-righteously, idealistic. 
 Such a work as Germany has undertaken might 
 well seem calculated to generate attachment to a 
 positivistic or even materialistic philosophy and 
 to a utilitarian ethics. But no; the teaching of 
 Kant had put mechanism forever in its subordinate 
 place at the very time it inculcated devotion to 
 mechanism in its place. Above and beyond as an 
 end, for the sake of which all technical achieve- 
 ments, all promotion of health, wealth and happi- 
 ness, exist, lies the realm of inner freedom, of the 
 
SO THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 ideal and the supersensible. The more the Ger- 
 mans accomplish in the way of material conquest, 
 the more they are conscious of fulfilling an ideal 
 mission; every external conquest affords the 
 greater warrant for dwelling in an inner region 
 where mechanism does not intrude. Thus it turns 
 out that while the Germans have been, to employ 
 a catchword of recent thought, the most technically 
 pragmatic of all peoples in their actual conduct 
 of affairs, there is no people so hostile to the spirit 
 of a pragmatic philosophy. 
 
 The combination of devotion to mechanism and 
 organization in outward affairs and of loyalty to 
 freedom and consciousness in the inner realm has 
 its obvious attractions. Realized in the common 
 temper of a people it might well seem invincible. 
 Ended is the paralysis of action arising from the 
 split between science and useful achievements on 
 one side and spiritual and ideal aspirations on 
 the other. Each feeds and reinforces the other. 
 Freedom of soul and subordination of action dwell 
 in harmony. Obedience, definite subjection and 
 control, detailed organization is the lesson en- 
 forced by the rule of causal necessity in the outer 
 world of space and time in which action takes 
 
THE TWO WORLDS SI 
 
 place. Unlimited freedom, the heightening of con- 
 sciousness for its own sake, sheer reveling in noble 
 ideals, the law of the inner world. What more can 
 mortal man ask? 
 
 It would not be difficult, I imagine, to fill the 
 three hours devoted to these lectures with quota- 
 tions from representative German authors to the 
 effect that supreme regard for the inner meaning 
 of things, reverence for inner truth in disregard 
 of external consequences of advantage or disad- 
 vantage, is the distinguishing mark of the German 
 spirit as against, say, the externality of the Latin 
 spirit or the utilitarianism of Anglo-Saxondom. 
 I content myself with one quotation, a quota- 
 tion which also indicates the same inclina- 
 tion to treat historic facts as symbolic of great 
 truths which is found in Kant's treatment of 
 church dogmas. Speaking of the Germanic lan- 
 guages, an historian of German civilization says: 
 
 " While all other Indo-European languages al- 
 low a wide liberty in placing the accent and make 
 external considerations, such as the quantity of 
 the syllables and euphony, of deciding influence, 
 the Germanic tribes show a remarkable and inten- 
 tional transition to an internal principle of ac- 
 
32 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 centuation. ... Of all related peoples the Ger- 
 manic alone puts the accent on the root syllable 
 of the word, that is, on the part that gives it its 
 meaning. There is hardly an ethnological fact 
 extant which gives so much food for thought as 
 this. What leads these people to give up a habit 
 which must have been so old that it had become 
 instinctive, and to evolve out of their own minds 
 a principle which indicates a power of discrimina- 
 tion far in advance of anything we are used to 
 attribute to the lower stages of civilization? Cir- 
 cumstances of which we are not now aware must 
 have compelled them to distinguish the inner es- 
 sence of things from their external form, and must 
 have taught them to appreciate the former as of 
 higher, indeed as of sole, importance. It is this 
 accentuation of the real substance of things, the 
 ever-powerful desire to discover this real substance, 
 and the ever-present impulse to give expression 
 to this inner reality which has become the con- 
 trolling trait of the Germanic soul. Hence the 
 conviction gained by countless unfruitful efforts, 
 that reason alone will never get at the true founda- 
 tion of things ; hence the thoroughness of German 
 science; hence a great many of the qualities that 
 explain Germanic successes and failures; hence, 
 perhaps, a certain stubbornness and obstinacy, the 
 unwillingness to give up a conviction once formed ; 
 hence the tendency to mysticism; hence that con- 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 33 
 
 tinuous struggle which marks the history of Ger- 
 man art, — the struggle to give to the contents 
 powerful and adequate expression, and to satisfy 
 at the same time the requirements of esthetic ele- 
 gance and beauty, a struggle in which the victory 
 is ever on the side of truth, though it be homely, 
 over beauty of form whenever it appears deceitful ; 
 hence the part played by music as the only ex- 
 pression of those imponderable vibrations of the 
 soul for which language seems to have no words ; 
 hence the faith of the German in his mission among 
 the nations as a bringer of truth, as a recognizer 
 of the real value of things as against the hollow 
 shell of beautiful form, as the doer of right deeds 
 for their own sake and not for any reward beyond 
 the natural outcome of the deed itself." 
 
 The division established between the outer 
 realm, in which of course acts fall, and the inner 
 realm of consciousness explains what is otherwise 
 so paradoxical to a foreigner in German writings : 
 The constant assertion that Germany brought to 
 the world the conscious recognition of the prin- 
 ciple of freedom coupled with the assertion of the 
 relative incompetency of the German folk en 
 masse for political self-direction. To one sat- 
 urated by the English tradition which identifies 
 
34 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 freedom with power to act upon one's ideas, to 
 make one's purposes effective in regulation of 
 public affairs, the combination seems self-con- 
 tradictory. To the German it is natural. Read- 
 ers who have been led by newspaper quotations 
 to regard Bernhardi as preaching simply a gospel 
 of superior force will find in his writings a con- 
 tinual assertion that the German spirit is the spirit 
 of freedom, of complete intellectual self-determina- 
 tion ; that the Germans have " always been the 
 standard bearers of free thought." We find him 
 supporting his teachings not by appeal to 
 Nietzsche, but by the Kantian distinction between 
 the " empirical and rational ego." 
 It is Bernhardi who says : 
 
 " Two great movements were born from the Ger- 
 man intellectual life, on which, henceforth, all the 
 intellectual and moral progress of mankind must 
 rest: — The Reformation and the critical philoso- 
 phy. The Reformation that broke the intellectual 
 yoke imposed by the Church, which checked all 
 free progress; and the Critique of Pure Reason 
 which put a stop to the caprice of philosophic 
 speculation by defining for the human mind the 
 limitations of its capacities for knowledge, and at 
 the same time pointed out the way in which knowl- 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 35 
 
 edge is really possible. On this substructure was 
 developed the intellectual life of our time, whose 
 deepest significance consists in the attempt to 
 reconcile the result of free inquiry with the reli- 
 gious needs of the heart, and thus to lay a founda- 
 tion for the harmonious organization of mankind. 
 . . . The German nation not only laid the founda- 
 tions of this great struggle for a harmonious devel- 
 opment of humanity but took the lead in it. We 
 are thus incurring an obligation for the future 
 from which we cannot shrink. We must be pre- 
 pared to be the leader in this campaign which is 
 being fought for the highest stake that has been 
 offered to human efforts. . . . To no nation ex- 
 cept the German has it been given to enjoy in its 
 inner self ■ that which is given to mankind as a 
 whole.' . . . It is this quality which especially fits 
 us for leadership in the intellectual domain and 
 imposes upon us the obligation to maintain that 
 position." * 
 
 More significant than the words themselves 
 are their occasion and the occupation of the one 
 who utters them. Outside of Germany, cavalry 
 generals who employ philosophy to bring home 
 practical lessons are, I think, rare. Outside of 
 
 •Bernhardi, "Germany and the Next War," pp. 73-74. 
 Italics not in the original text. 
 
36 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 Germany, it would be hard to find an audience 
 where an appeal for military preparedness would 
 be reinforced by allusions to the Critique of Pure 
 Reason. 
 
 Yet only by taking such statements seriously 
 can one understand the temper in which opinion 
 in Germany meets a national crisis. When the 
 philosopher Eucken (who received a Nobel prize 
 for contributing to the idealistic literature of the 
 world) justifies the part taken by Germany in a 
 world war because the Germans alone do not repre- 
 sent a particularistic and nationalistic spirit, but 
 embody the " universalism n of humanity itself, he 
 utters a conviction bred in German thought by 
 the ruling interpretation of German philosophic 
 idealism. By the side of this motif the glorifica- 
 tion of war as a biologic necessity, forced by in- 
 crease of population, is a secondary detail, giving 
 a totally false impression when isolated from its 
 context. The main thing is that Germany, more 
 than any other nation, in a sense alone of all na- 
 tions, embodies the essential principle of humanity : 
 freedom of spirit, combined with thorough and de- 
 tailed work in the outer sphere where reigns causal 
 law, where obedience, discipline and subordina- 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 37 
 
 tion are the necessities of successful organization. 
 It is perhaps worth while to recall that Kant lived, 
 taught and died in Konigsberg; and that Konigs- 
 berg was the chief city of east Prussia, an island 
 still cut off in his early years from western 
 Prussia, a titular capital for the Prussian kings 
 where they went for their coronations. His life- 
 work in philosophy coincides essentially with the 
 political work of Frederick the Great, the king 
 who combined a regime of freedom of thought and 
 complete religious toleration with the most ex- 
 traordinary display known in history of adminis- 
 trative and military efficiency. Fortunately for 
 our present purposes, Kant, in one of his minor 
 essays, has touched upon this combination and 
 stated its philosophy in terms of his own thought. 
 The essay in question is that entitled " What is 
 the Enlightenment ? " His reply in substance is 
 that it is the coming of age on the part of human- 
 ity: the transition from a state of minority or 
 infancy wherein man does not dare to think freely 
 to that period of majority or maturity in which 
 mankind dares to use its own power of under- 
 standing. The growth of this power of free use 
 of reason is the sole hope of progress in human 
 
38 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 affairs. External revolutions which are not the 
 natural expression of an inner or intellectual revo- 
 lution are of little significance. Genuine growth 
 is found in the slow growth of science and philoso- 
 phy and in the gradual diffusion throughout the 
 mass of the discoveries and conclusions of those 
 who are superior in intelligence. True freedom 
 is inner freedom, freedom of thought together 
 with the liberty consequent upon it of teaching and 
 publication. To check this rational freedom " is 
 a sin against the very nature of man, the primary 
 law of which consists in just the advance in ra- 
 tional enlightenment." 
 
 In contrast with this realm of inner freedom 
 stands that of civil and political action, the prin- 
 ciple of which is obedience or subordination to 
 constituted authority. Kant illustrates the na- 
 ture of the two by the position of a military sub- 
 ordinate who is given an order to execute which 
 his reason tells him is unwise. His sole duty in 
 the realm of practice is to obey — to do his duty. 
 But as a member not of the State but of the king- 
 dom of science, he has the right of free inquiry 
 and publication. Later he might write upon 
 the campaign in which this event took place and 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 39 
 
 point out, upon intellectual grounds, the mistake 
 involved in the order. No wonder that Kant pro- 
 claims that the age of the enlightenment is the 
 age of Frederick the Great. Yet we should do 
 injustice to Kant if we inferred that he expected 
 this dualism of spheres of action, with its twofold 
 moral law of freedom and obedience, to endure 
 forever. By the exercise of freedom of thought, 
 and by its publication and the education which 
 should make its results permeate the whole state, 
 the habits of a nation will finally become elevated 
 to rationality, and the spread of reason will make 
 it possible for the government to treat men, not as 
 cogs in a machine, but in accord with the dignity 
 of rational creatures. 
 
 Before leaving this theme, I must point out one 
 aspect of the work of reason thus far passed over. 
 Nature, the sensible world of space and time, is, 
 as a knowable object, constituted by the legisla- 
 tive work of reason, although constituted out of 
 a non-rational sensible stuff. This determining 
 work of reason forms not merely the Idealism of 
 the Kantian philosophy but determines its em- 
 phasis upon the a priori. The functions of reason 
 through which nature is rendered a knowable ob- 
 
40 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 ject cannot be derived from experience, for they 
 are necessary to the existence of experience. The 
 details of this a priori apparatus lie far outside 
 our present concern. Suffice it to say that as 
 compared with some of his successors, Kant was 
 an economical soul and got along with only two 
 a priori forms and twelve a priori categories. The 
 mental habitudes generated by attachment to a 
 priori categories cannot however be entirely neg- 
 lected in even such a cursory discussion as the 
 present. 
 
 If one were to follow the suggestion involved 
 in the lately quoted passage as to the significant 
 symbolism of the place of the accent in German 
 speech, one might discourse upon the deep mean- 
 ing of the Capitalization of Nouns in the written 
 form of the German language, together with the 
 richness of the language in abstract nouns. One 
 might fancy that the dignity of the common noun 
 substantive, expressing as it does the universal 
 or generic, has bred an intellectual deference. 
 One may fancy a whole nation of readers rever- 
 ently bowing their heads at each successively cap- 
 italized word. In such fashion one might arrive 
 at a picture, not without its truth, of what it 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 41 
 
 means to be devoted to a priori rational princi- 
 ples. 
 
 A number of times during the course of the 
 world war I have heard someone remark that 
 he would not so much mind what the Germans 
 did if it were not for the reasons assigned in its 
 justification. But to rationalize such a tangled 
 skein as human experience is a difficult task. If 
 one is in possession of antecedent rational con- 
 cepts which are legislative for experience, the task 
 is much simplified. It only remains to subsume 
 each empirical event under its proper category. 
 If the outsider does not see the applicability of 
 the concept to the event, it may be argued that 
 his blindness shows his ineptness for truly uni- 
 versal thinking. He is probably a crass empiric 
 who thinks in terms of material consequences in- 
 stead of upon the basis of antecedent informing 
 principles of reason. 
 
 Thus it has come about that no moral, social 
 or political question is adequately discussed in Ger- 
 many until the matter in hand has been properly 
 deduced from an exhaustive determination of its 
 fundamental Begriff or Wesen. Or if the material 
 is too obviously empirical to allow of such deduc- 
 
42 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 tion, it must at least be placed under its appro- 
 priate rational form. What a convenience, what 
 a resource, nay, what a weapon is the Kantian 
 distinction of a priori rational form and a pos- 
 teriori empirical matter. Le.t the latter be as 
 brutely diversified, as chaotic as you please. 
 There always exists a form of unity under which 
 it may be brought. If the empirical facts are 
 recalcitrant, so much the worse for them. It only 
 shows how empirical they are. To put them under 
 a rational form is but to subdue their irrational 
 opposition to reason, or to invade their lukewarm 
 neutrality. Any violence done them is more than 
 indemnified by the favor of bringing them under 
 the sway of a priori reason, the incarnation of 
 the Absolute on earth. 
 
 Yet there are certain disadvantages attached 
 to a priori categories. They have a certain rigid- 
 ity, appalling to those who have not learned to 
 identify stiffness with force. Empirical matters 
 are subject to revision. The strongest belief that 
 claims the support of experience is subject to 
 modification when experience testifies against it. 
 But an a priori conception is not open to adverse 
 evidence. There is no court having jurisdiction. 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 43 
 
 If, then, an unfortunate mortal should happen to 
 be imposed upon so that he was led to regard a 
 prejudice or predilection as an a priori truth, con- 
 trary experience would have a tendency to make 
 him the more obstinate in his belief. History 
 proves what a dangerous thing it has been for 
 men, when they try to impose their will upon 
 other men, to think of themselves as special in- 
 struments and organs of Deity. The danger is 
 equally great when an a priori Reason is substi- 
 tuted for a Divine Providence. Empirically 
 grounded truths do not have a wide scope; they 
 do not inspire such violent loyalty to themselves 
 as ideas supposed to proceed directly from reason 
 itself. But they are discussable; they have a 
 humane and social quality, while truths of pure 
 reason have a paradoxical way, in the end, of es- 
 caping from the arbitrament of reasoning. They 
 evade the logic of experience, only to become, in the 
 phrase of a recent writer, the spoil of a " logic 
 of fanaticism." Weapons forged in the smithy 
 of the Absolute become brutal and cruel when 
 confronted by merely human resistance. 
 
 The stiffly constrained character of an a priori 
 Reason manifests itself in another way. A cate- 
 
44 THE TWO WORLDS 
 
 gory of pure reason is suspiciously like a pigeon- 
 hole. An American writer, speaking before the 
 present war, remarked with witty exaggeration 
 that " Germany is a monstrous set of pigeonholes, 
 and every mother's son of a German is pigeoned in 
 his respective hole — tagged, labeled and ticketed. 
 Germany is a huge human check-room, and the 
 government carries the checks in its pocket." 
 John Locke's deepest objection to the older form 
 of the a priori philosophy, the doctrine of innate 
 ideas, was the readiness with which such ideas 
 become strongholds behind which authority shel- 
 ters itself from questioning. And John Morley 
 pointed out long ago the undoubted historic fact 
 that the whole modern liberal social and political 
 movement has allied itself with philosophic em- 
 piricism. It is hard here, as everywhere, to disen- 
 tangle cause and effect. But one can at least say 
 with considerable assurance that a hierarchically 
 ordered and subordered State will feel an affinity 
 for a philosophy of fixed categories, while a flexible 
 democratic society will, in its crude empiricism, 
 exhibit loose ends. 
 
 There is a story to the effect that the good 
 townspeople of Konigsberg were accustomed to 
 
THE TWO WORLDS 45 
 
 their watches by the time at which Kant passed 
 upon his walks — so uniform was he. Yielding to 
 the Teutonic temptation to find an inner meaning 
 in the outer event, one may wonder whether Ger- 
 man thought has not since Kant's time set its 
 intellectual and spiritual clocks by the Kantian 
 standard: the separation of the inner and the 
 outer, with its lesson of freedom and idealism in 
 one realm, and of mechanism, efficiency and organ- 
 ization in the other. A German professor of phi- 
 losophy has said that while the Latins live in the 
 present moment, the Germans live in the infinite 
 and ineffable. His accusation (though I am not 
 sure he meant it as such) is not completely justi- 
 fied. But it does seem to be true that the Germans, 
 more readily than other peoples, can withdraw 
 themselves from the exigencies and contingencies 
 of life into a region of Irmerlichkeit which at least 
 seems boundless ; and which can rarely be success- 
 fully uttered save through music, and a frail and 
 tender poetry, sometimes domestic, sometimes 
 lyric, but always full of mysterious charm. But 
 technical ideas, ideas about means and instru- 
 ments, can readily be externalized because the 
 outer world is in truth their abiding home. 
 
n 
 
 GERMAN MORAL AND POLITICAL 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 It is difficult to select sentences from Kant 
 which are intelligible to those not trained in his 
 vocabulary, unless the selection is accompanied by 
 an almost word-by-word commentary. His writ- 
 ings have proved an admirable terrain for the dis- 
 play of German Grundlichkeit. But I venture 
 upon the quotation of one sentence which may 
 serve the purpose of at once recalling the main 
 lesson of the previous lecture and furnishing a 
 transition to the theme of the present hour. 
 
 " Even if an immeasurable gulf is fixed between 
 the sensible realm of the concept of nature and 
 the supersensible realm of the concept of freedom, 
 so that it is not possible to go from the first to 
 the second (at least by means of the theoretical 
 use of reason) any more than if they were two 
 separate worlds of which the first could have no 
 influence upon the second, — yet the second is 
 47 
 
48 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 meant to have an influence upon the first. The 
 concept of freedom is meant to actualize in the 
 world of sense the purpose proposed by its 
 laws." ... 
 
 That is, the relation between the world of space 
 and time where physical causality reigns and the 
 moral world of freedom and duty is not a sym- 
 metrical one. The former cannot intrude into 
 the latter. But it is the very nature of moral 
 legislation that it is meant to influence the world 
 of sense; its object is to realize the purposes of 
 free rational action within the sense world. This 
 fact fixes the chief features of Kant's philosophy 
 of Morals and of the State. 
 
 It is a claim of the admirers of Kant that he 
 first brought to recognition the true and infinite 
 nature of the principle of Personality. On one 
 side, the individual is homo phenomenon — a part 
 of the scheme of nature, governed by its laws as 
 much as any stone or plant. But in virtue of 
 his citizenship in the kingdom of supersensible 
 Laws and Ends, he is elevated to true universality. 
 He is no longer a mere occurrence. He is a Per- 
 son — one in whom the purpose of Humanity is in- 
 carnate. In English and American writings the 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 49 
 
 terms subjective and subjectivism usually carry 
 with them a disparaging color. Quite otherwise 
 is it in German literature. This sets the age of 
 subjectivism, whose commencement, roughly speak- 
 ing, coincides with the influence of Kantian 
 thought, in sharp opposition to the age of individ- 
 ualism, as well as to a prior period of subordina- 
 tion to external authority. Individualism means 
 isolation; it means external relations of human 
 beings with one another and with the world; it 
 looks at things quantitatively, in terms of wholes 
 and parts. Subjectivism means recognition of the 
 principle of free personality: the self as creative, 
 occupied not with an external world which limits it 
 from without, but, through its own self-conscious- 
 ness, finding a world within itself; and having 
 found the universal within itself, setting to work to 
 recreate itself in what had been the external world, 
 and by its own creative expansion in industry, art 
 and politics to transform what had been mere lim- 
 iting material into a work of its own. Free as was 
 Kant from the sentimental, the mystic and the 
 romantic phases of this Subjectivism, we shall do 
 well to bear it in mind in thinking of his ethical 
 theory. Personality means that man as a rational 
 
50 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 being does not receive the end which forms the 
 law of his action from without, whether from Na- 
 ture, the State or from God, but from his own 
 self. Morality is autonomous; man, humanity, is 
 an end in itself. Obedience to the self-imposed 
 law will transform the sensible world (within 
 which falls all social ties so far as they spring 
 from natural instinct desire) into a form appro- 
 priate to universal reason. Thus we may para- 
 phrase the sentence quoted from Kant. 
 
 The gospel of duty has an invigorating ring. 
 It is easy to present it as the most noble and sub- 
 lime of all moral doctrines. What is more worthy 
 of humanity, what better marks the separation of 
 man from brute, than the will to subordinate selfish 
 desire and individual inclination to the commands 
 of stern and lofty duty ? And if the idea of com- 
 mand (which inevitably goes with the notion of 
 duty) carries a sinister suggestion of legal au- 
 thority, pains and penalties and of subservience 
 to an external authority who issues the commands, 
 Kant seems to have provided a final corrective in 
 insisting that duty is self-imposed. Moral com- 
 mands are imposed by the higher, supranatural 
 self upon the lower empirical self, by the rational 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 51 
 
 self upon the self of passions and inclinations. 
 German philosophy is attached to antitheses and 
 their reconciliation in a higher synthesis. The 
 Kantian principle of Duty is a striking case of 
 the reconciliation of the seemingly conflicting 
 ideas of freedom and authority. 
 
 Unfortunately, however, the balance cannot be 
 maintained in practice. Kant's faithful logic 
 compels him to insist that the concept of duty is 
 empty and formal. It tells men that to do their 
 duty is their supreme law of action, but is silent 
 as to what men's duties specifically are. Kant, 
 moreover, insists, as he is in logic bound to do, 
 that the motive which measures duty is wholly 
 inner ; it is purely a matter of inner consciousness 
 C To admit that consequences can be taken into ac- 
 l count in deciding what duty is in a particular case 
 \ would be to make concessions to the empirical and 
 /sensible world which are fatal to the scheme. The 
 combination of these two features of pure 
 internality and pure formalism leads, in a 
 world where men's acts take place wholly in the 
 external and empirical region, to serious conse- 
 quences. 
 
 The dangerous character of these consequences 
 
 I 
 
52 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 may perhaps be best gathered indirectly by means 
 of a quotation. 
 
 " While the French people in savage revolt 
 against spiritual and secular despotism had broken 
 their chains and proclaimed their rights, another 
 quite different revolution was working in Prussia 
 — the revolution of duty. The assertion of the 
 rights of the individual leads ultimately to indi- 
 vidual irresponsibility and to a repudiation of the 
 State. Immanuel Kant, the founder of the critical 
 philosophy, taught, in opposition to this view, the 
 gospel of moral duty, and Scharnhorst grasped 
 the idea of universal military service. By calling 
 upon which individual to sacrifice property and 
 life for the good of the community, he gave the 
 clearest expression to the idea of the State, and 
 created a sound basis on which the claims to indi- 
 vidual rights might rest." * 
 
 The sudden jump, by means of only a comma, 
 from the gospel of moral duty to universal mili- 
 tary service is much more logical than the shock 
 which it gives to an American reader would indi- 
 cate. I do not mean, of course, that Kant's 
 teaching was the cause of Prussia's adoption of 
 universal military service and of the thorough- 
 
 * Bernhardi, " Germany and the Next War," pp. 63-64. 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 53 
 
 going subordination of individual happiness and 
 liberty of action to that capitalized entity, the 
 State. But I do mean that when the practical 
 political situation called for universal military 
 service in order to support and expand the exist- 
 ing state, the gospel of a Duty devoid of con- 
 tent naturally lent itself to the consecration and 
 idealization of such specific duties as the existing 
 national order might prescribe. The sense of 
 duty must gets its subject-matter somewhere, and 
 unless subjectivism was to revert to anarchic or 
 romantic individualism (which is hardly in the 
 spirit of obedience to authoritative law) its appro- 
 priate subject-matter lies in the commands of a 
 superior. Concretely what the State commands 
 is the congenial outer filling of a purely inner 
 sense of duty. That the despotism of Frederick 
 the Great and of the Hohenzollerns who remained 
 true to his policy was at least that hitherto un- 
 known thing, an enlightened despotism, made the 
 identification easier. Individuals have at all times, 
 in epochs of stress, offered their supreme sacrifice 
 to their country's good. In Germany this sacri- 
 fice in times of peace as well as of war has been 
 systematically reinforced by an inner mystic sense 
 
54 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 of a Duty elevating men to the plane of the uni- 
 versal and eternal. 
 
 h In short, the sublime gospel of duty has its de- 
 fects. Outside of the theological and the Kantian 
 moral traditions, men have generally agreed that 
 duties are relative to ends. Not the obligation, 
 but some purpose, some good, which the fulfill- 
 ment of duty realizes, is the principle of morals. 
 The business of reason is to see that the end, the 
 good, for which one acts is a reasonable one — 
 that is to say, as wide and as equitable in its 
 working out as the situation permits. Morals 
 which are based upon consideration of good and 
 evil consequences not only allow, g but imperiously 
 demand the exercise of a discriminating intelli- 
 gence. A gospel of duty separated from empirical 
 purposes and results tends to gag intelligence. It 
 substitutes for the work of reason displayed in 
 a wide and distributed survey of consequences in 
 order to determine where duty lies an inner con- 
 sciousness, empty of content, which clothes with 
 the form of rationality the demands of existing 
 social authorities. A consciousness which is 
 not based upon and checked by consideration of 
 actual results upon human welfare is none 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 55 
 
 the less socially irresponsible because labeled 
 Reason. 
 
 Professor Eucken represents a type of idealistic 
 philosophy which is hardly acceptable to strict 
 Kantians. Yet only where the fundamental Kant- 
 ian ideas were current would such ethical ideas as 
 the following flourish: 
 
 " When justice is cdnsidered as a mere means 
 of securing man's welfare, and is treated accord- 
 ingly — whether it be the welfare of individuals or 
 of society as a whole makes no essential difference 
 — it loses all its characteristic features. No 
 longer can it compel us to see life from its own 
 standpoint; no longer can it change the existing 
 condition of things; no longer can it sway our 
 hearts with the force of a primitive passion, and 
 oppose to all consideration of consequences an 
 irresistible spiritual compulsion. It degenerates 
 rather into the complaisant servant of utility; it 
 adopts herself to her demands, and in so doing 
 suffers inward annihilation. It can maintain itself 
 only when it comes as a unique revelation of the 
 Spiritual Life within our human world, as a lofty 
 Presence transcending all considerations of ex- 
 pediency." * 
 
 • Eucken, " The Meaning and Value of Life," translated 
 by Gibson, p. 104. 
 
56 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 * Such writing is capable of arousing emotional 
 reverberations in the breasts of many persons. 
 But they are emotions which, if given headway, 
 smother intelligence, and undermine its responsi- 
 bility for promoting the actual goods of life. If 
 justice loses all its characteristic features when 
 regarded as a means (the word " mere " inserted 
 before " means " speaks volumes ) of the welfare 
 of society as a whole, then there is no objective 
 and responsible criterion for justice at all. A 
 justice which, irrespective of the determination 
 of social well-being, proclaims itself as an irre- 
 sistible spiritual impulsion possessed! of the 
 force of a primitive passion, is nothing but 
 a primitive passion clothed with a spiritual title 
 so that it is protected from having to render an 
 account of itself. During an ordinary course of 
 things, it passes for but an emotional indulgence ; 
 in a time of stress and strain, it exhibits itself 
 as surrender of intelligence to passion. 
 
 The passage (from Bernhardi) quoted earlier 
 puts the German principle of duty in opposition 
 to the French principle of rights — a favorite con- 
 trast in German thought. Men like Jeremy Ben- 
 tham also found the Revolutionary Rights of Man 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 57 
 
 doctrinaire and conducing to tyranny rather than 
 to freedom. These Rights were a priori, like Duty, 
 being derived from the supposed nature or essence 
 of man, instead of being adopted as empirical ex- 
 pedients to further progress and happiness. But 
 the conception of duty is one-sided, expressing 
 command on one side and obedience on the other, 
 while rights are at least reciprocal. Rights are 
 social and sociable in accord with the spirit of 
 French philosophy. Put in a less abstract form 
 than the revolutionary theory stated them, they 
 are things to be discussed and measured. They 
 admit of more and less, of compromise and ad- 
 justment. So also does the characteristic moral 
 contribution of English thought — intelligent self- 
 interest. This is hardly an ultimate idea. But 
 at least it evokes a picture of merchants bargain- 
 ing, while the categorical imperative calls up the 
 drill sergeant. Trafficking ethics, in which each 
 
 gives up something which he wants toget some- 
 thing which he wants more, is not the noblest kind 
 of morals, but at least it is socially responsible 
 as far as it goes. " Give so that it may be given 
 to you in return " has at least some tendency to 
 bring men together; it promotes agreement. It 
 
58 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 requires deliberation and discussion. This is 
 just what the authoritative voice of a superior 
 will not tolerate; it is the one unforgiveable 
 sin. 
 
 The morals of bargaining, exchange, the mutual 
 satisfaction of wants may be outlived in some 
 remote future, but up to the present they 
 play an important part in life. To me there is 
 something uncanny in the scorn which German 
 ethics, in behalf of an unsullied moral idealism, 
 pours upon a theory which takes cognizance of 
 practical motives. In a highly esthetic people 
 one might understand the display of contempt. 
 But when an aggressive and commercial nation 
 carries on commerce and war simply from 
 the motive of obedience to duty, there is awakened 
 an unpleasant suspicion of a suppressed " psychic 
 •^ complex." When Nietzsche says, " Man does not 
 desire happiness ; only the Englishman does that," 
 we laugh at the fair hit. But persons who pro- 
 fess no regard for happiness as a test of action 
 have an unfortunate way of living up to their 
 principle by making others wwhappy. I should 
 entertain some suspicion of the complete sincerity 
 of those who profess disregard for their own hap- 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 59 
 
 piness, but I should be quite certain of their sin- 
 cerity when it comes to a question of my hap- 
 piness. 
 
 Within the Kantian philosophy of morals there 
 is an idea which conducts necessarily to a philoso- 
 phy of society and the State. Leibniz was the 
 great German source of the philosophy of the en- 
 lightenment. Harmony was the dominant thought 
 of this philosophy; the harmony of nature with 
 itself and with intelligence ; the harmony of nature 
 with the moral ends of humanity. Although Kant 
 was a true son of the enlightenment, his doctrine of 
 the radically dual nature of the legislation of Rea- 
 son put an end to its complacent optimism. Ac- 
 cording to Kant, morality is in no way a work of 
 nature. It is the achievement of the self-conscious 
 reason of man through conquest of nature. The 
 ideal of a final harmony remains, but it is an ideal 
 to be won through a battle with the natural forces 
 of man. His breach with the enlightenment is 
 nowhere as marked as in his denial that man is by 
 nature good. On the contrary, man is by nature 
 evil — that is, his philosophical rendering of the 
 doctrine of original sin. Not that the passions, 
 appetites and senses are of themselves evil, but they 
 
60 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 tend to usurp the sovereignty of duty as the mo- 
 tivating force of human action. Hence morality 
 is a ceaseless battle to transform all the natural 
 desires of man into willing servants of the law 
 and purpose of reason. 
 
 Even the kindly and sociable instincts of man, 
 in which so many have sought the basis of both 
 morality and organized society, fall under Kant's 
 condemnation. As natural desires, they aspire to 
 an illegitimate control in man's motives. They are 
 parts of human self-love: the unlawful tendency 
 to make happiness the controlling purpose of ac- 
 tion. The natural relations of man to man are 
 those of an unsocial sociableness. On the one 
 hand, men are forced together by natural ties* 
 Only in social relations can individuals develop 
 their capacities. But no sooner do they come 
 together than disintegrating tendencies set in. 
 Union with his fellows give a stimulus to vanity, 
 avarice and gaining power over others — traits 
 which cannot show in themselves in individuals 
 when they are isolated. This mutual antagonism 
 is, however, more of a force in evolving man from 
 savagery to civilization than are the kindly and 
 sociable instincts. 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 61 
 
 " Without these unlovely qualities which set 
 man over against man in strife, individuals would 
 have lived on in perfect harmony, contentment and 
 mutual love, with all their distinctive abilities 
 latent and undeveloped." 
 
 In short, they would have remained in Rous- 
 seau's paradise of a state of nature, and 
 
 " perhaps Rousseau was right when he preferred 
 the savage state to the state of civilization pro- 
 vided we leave out of account the last stage to 
 which our species is yet destined to rise." 
 
 But since the condition of civilization is but an 
 intermediary between the natural state and the 
 truly or rational moral condition to which man 
 is to rise, Rousseau was wrong. 
 
 " Thanks then be to nature for the unsociable- 
 ness, the spiteful competition of vanity, the in- 
 satiate desires for power and gain." 
 
 These quotations, selected from Kant's little 
 essay on an " Idea for a Universal History," are 
 precious for understanding two of the most char- 
 acteristic traits of subsequent German thought, 
 the distinctions made between Society and the 
 
62 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 State and between Civilization and Culture. Much 
 of the trouble which has been experienced in re- 
 spect to the recent use of Kultur might have been 
 allayed by a knowledge that Kultur has little in 
 common with the English word " culture " save 
 a likeness in sound. Kultur is sharply antithetical 
 to civilization in its meaning. Civilization is a 
 natural and largely unconscious or involuntary 
 growth. It is, so to speak, a by-product of the 
 needs engendered when people live close together. 
 It is external, in short. Culture, on the other, 
 is deliberate and conscious. It is a fruit not of 
 men's natural motives, but of natural motives 
 which have been transformed by the inner spirit. 
 Kant made the distinction when he said that Rous- 
 seau was not so far wrong in preferring savagery 
 to civilization, since civilization meant simply 
 social decencies and elegancies and outward pro- 
 prieties, while morality, that is, the rule of the 
 end of Reason, is necessary to culture. And the 
 real significance of the term " culture " becomes 
 more obvious when he adds that it involves the 
 slow toil of education of the Inner Life, and that 
 the attainment of culture on the part of an indi- 
 vidual depends upon long effort by the com- 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 63 
 
 munity to which he belongs. It is not primarily 
 an individual trait or possession, but a conquest of 
 the community won through devotion to " duty." 
 In recent German literature, Culture has been 
 given even a more sharply technical distinc- 
 tion from Civilization and one which emphasizes 
 even more its collective and nationalistic char- 
 acter. Civilization as external and uncontrolled 
 by self-conscious purpose includes such things as 
 language in its more spontaneous colloquial ex- 
 pression, trade, conventional manners or etiquette, 
 and the police activities of government. Kultwr 
 comprises language used for purposes of higher 
 literature; commerce pursued not as means of 
 enriching individuals but as a condition of the de- 
 velopment of national life; art, philosophy (espe- 
 cially in that untranslatable thing, the " Welt- 
 Anschauung ") ; science, religion, and the activities 
 of the state in the nurture and expansion of the 
 other forms of national genius, that is, its activi- 
 ties in education and the army. The legislation 
 of Bismarck with reference to certain Roman 
 Catholic orders is nicknamed Kultwr-kampf, for 
 it was conceived as embodying a struggle between 
 two radically different philosophies of life, the Ro- 
 
64 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 man, or Italian, and the true Germanic, not simply 
 as a measure of political expediency. Thus it is 
 that a trading and military post like Kiao-Chou 
 is officially spoken of as a " monument of Teu- 
 tonic Kultur." The war now raging is conceived 
 of as an outer manifestation of a great spiritual 
 struggle, in which what is really at stake is the 
 supreme value of the Germanic attitude in phi- 
 losophy, science and social questions generally, the 
 " specifically German habits of feeling and think- 
 ing." 
 
 Very similar motives are at work in the dis- 
 tinction between society and the State, which is 
 almost a commonplace of German thought. In 
 English and American writings the State is al- 
 most always used to denote society in its more 
 organized aspects, or it may be identified with 
 government as a special agency operating for the 
 collective interests of men in association. But in 
 German literature society is a technical term and 
 means something empirical and, so to speak, ex- 
 ternal ; while the State, if not avowedly something 
 mystic and transcendental, is at least a moral 
 entity, the creation of self-conscious reason operat- 
 ing in behalf of the spiritual and ideal interests 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 65 
 
 of its members. Its function is cultural, educa- 
 tive. Even when it intervenes in material interests, 
 as it does in regulating lawsuits, poor laws, pro- 
 tective tariffs, etc., etc., its action has ultimately 
 an ethical significance: its purpose is the further- 
 ing of an ideal community. The same thing is 
 to be said of wars when they are really national 
 wars, and not merely dynastic or accidental. 
 
 Society is an expression of man's egoistic na- 
 ture; his natural seeking for personal advantage 
 and profit. Its typical manifestation is in com- 
 petitive economic struggle and in the struggle for 
 honor and recognized social status. These have 
 their proper place ; but with respect even to them 
 it is the duty of the State to intervene so that 
 the struggle may contribute to ideal ends which 
 alone are universal. Hence the significance of 
 the force or power of the State. Unlike other 
 forms of force, it has a sort of sacred import, for 
 it represents force consecrated to the assertion 
 and expansion of final goods which are spiritual, 
 moral, rational. These absolute ends can be 
 maintained only in struggle against man's individ- 
 ualistic ends. Conquest through conflict is the 
 law of morals everywhere. 
 
66 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 In Kant we find only the beginnings of this 
 political philosophy. He is still held back by the 
 individualism of the eighteenth century. Every- 
 thing legal and political is conceived by him as 
 external and hence outside the strictly moral realm 
 of inner motivation. Yet he is not content to leave 
 the State and its law as a wholly unmoral matter. 
 The natural motives of man are, according to 
 Kant (evidently following Hobbes), love of 
 power, love of gain, love of glory. These motives 
 are egoistic; they issue in strife — in the war of 
 all against all. While such a state of affairs does 
 not and cannot invade the inner realm of duty, 
 the realm of the moral motive, it evidently pre- 
 sents a regime in which the conquest of the world 
 of sense by the law of reason cannot be effected. 
 Man in his rational or universal capacity must, 
 therefore, will an outward order of harmony in 
 which it is at least possible for acts dictated by 
 rational freedom to get a footing. Such an outer 
 order is the State. Its province is not to promote 
 moral freedom directly — only the moral will can 
 do that. But its business is to hinder the hin- 
 drances to freedom: to establish a social condi- 
 tion of outward order in which truly moral 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 67 
 
 acts may gradually evolve a kingdom of human- 
 ity. Thus while the State does not have a 
 directly moral scope of action (since the coer- 
 cion of motive is a moral absurdity), it does 
 have a moral basis and an ultimate moral func- 
 tion. 
 
 It is the law of reason, " holy and inviolable," 
 which impels man to the institution of the State, 
 not natural sociability, much less considerations of 
 expediency. And so necessary is the State to hu- 
 manity's realization of its moral purpose that 
 there can be no right of revolution. The over- 
 throw and execution of the sovereign (Kant evi- 
 dently had the French Revolution and Louis XVI 
 in mind ) is " an immortal and inexpiable sin like 
 the sin against the Holy Ghost spoken of by 
 theologians, which can never be forgiven in this 
 world or in the next." 
 
 Kant was enough of a child of the eighteenth 
 century to be cosmopolitan, not nationalistic, in 
 his feeling. Since humanity as a whole, in its 
 universality, alone truly corresponds to the uni- 
 versality of reason, he upheld the ideal of an ulti- 
 mate republican federation of states; he was one 
 of the first to proclaim the possibility of endur- 
 
68 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 ing peace among nations on the basis of such a 
 federated union of mankind. 
 
 The threatened domination of Europe by Na- 
 poleon following on the wars waged by republican 
 France put an end, however, to cosmopolitanism. 
 Since Germany was the greatest sufferer from 
 these wars, and since it was obvious that the lack 
 of national unity, the division of Germany into 
 a multitude of petty states, was the great source of 
 her weakness; since it was equally obvious that 
 Prussia, the one strong and centralized power 
 among the German states, was the only thing 
 which saved them all from national extinction, 
 subsequent political philosophy in Germany res- 
 cued the idea of the State from the somewhat 
 ambiguous moral position in which Kant had left 
 it. Since a state which is an absolute moral neces- 
 sity and whose actions are nevertheless lacking in 
 inherent moral quality is an anomaly, the doctrine 
 almost calls for a theory which shall make the 
 State the supreme moral entity. 
 
 Fichte marks the beginning of the transforma- 
 tion; and, in his writings, it is easy to detect a 
 marked difference of attitude toward the national- 
 istic state before and after 1806, when in the battle 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 69 
 
 of Jena Germany went down to inglorious defeat. 
 From the time of Fichte, the German philosophy 
 of the State blends with its philosophy of his- 
 tory, so that my reservation of the latter topic for 
 the next section is somewhat arbitrary, and I shall 
 not try rigidly to maintain the division of themes. 
 
 I have already mentioned the fact that Kant 
 relaxes the separation of the moral realm of free- 
 dom from the sensuous realm of nature sufficiently 
 to assert that the former is meant to influence the 
 latter and finally to subjugate it. By means of 
 the little crack thus introduced into nature, Fichte 
 rewrites the Kantian philosophy. The world of 
 sense must be regarded from the very start as 
 material which the free, rational, moral Ego has 
 created in order to have material for its own ade- 
 quate realization of will. Fichte had a longing 
 for an absolute unity which did not afflict Kant, 
 to whom, save for the concession just referred to, 
 a complete separation of the two operations of 
 legislative reason sufficed. Fichte was also an 
 ardently active soul, whose very temperament as- 
 sured him of the subordination of theoretical 
 knowledge to moral action. 
 
 It would be as difficult to give, in short space, 
 
70 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 an adequate sketch of Fichte's philosophy as of 
 Kant's. To him, however, reason was the expres- 
 sion of the will, not (as with Kant) the will an 
 application of reason to action. " Im Anfang 
 war die That " is good Fichteanism. While 
 Kant continued the usual significance of the term 
 Reason (with only such modifications as the ra- 
 tionalism of his century had made current), Fichte 
 began the transformation which consummated in 
 later German idealism. If the world of nature 
 and of human relations is an expression of reason, 
 then reason must be the sort of thing, and have 
 the sort of attributes by means of which the world 
 may be construed, no matter how far away this 
 conception of reason takes us from the usual 
 meaning of the term. To Fichte the formula 
 which best described such aspects of the world and 
 of life as he was interested in was effort at self- 
 realization through struggle with difficulties and 
 overcoming opposition. Hence his formula for 
 reason was a Will which, having " posited " itself, 
 then " posited " its antithesis in order, through 
 further action subjugating this opposite, to con- 
 quer its own freedom. 
 
 The doctrine of the primacy of the Deed, and 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 71 
 
 of the Duty to achieve freedom through moral self- 
 assertion against obstacles (which, after all, are 
 there only to further this self-assertion) was one 
 which could, with more or less plausibility, be de- 
 rived from Kant. More to our present point, it 
 was a doctrine which could be preached with noble 
 moral fervor in connection with the difficulties and 
 needs of a divided and conquered Germany. Fichte 
 saw himself as the continuator of the work of 
 Luther and Kant. His final " science of knowl- 
 edge " brought the German people alone of the 
 peoples of the world into the possession of the idea 
 and ideal of absolute freedom. Hence the peculiar 
 destiny of the German scholar and the German 
 State. It was the duty and mission of German 
 science and philosophy to contribute to the cause 
 of the spiritual emancipation of humanity. Kant 
 had already taught that the acts of men were to 
 become gradually permeated by a spirit of ration- 
 ality till there should be an equation of inner 
 freedom of mind and outer freedom of action. 
 Fichte's doctrine demanded an acceleration of the 
 process. Men who have attained to a conscious- 
 ness of the absolute freedom and self -activity must 
 necessarily desire to see around them similar free 
 
72 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 beings. The scholar who is truly a scholar not 
 merely knows, but he knows the nature of knowl- 
 edge — its place and function as a manifestation 
 of the Absolute. Hence he is, in a peculiar sense, 
 the direct manifestation of God in the world — the 
 true priest. And his priestly function consists 
 in bringing other men to recognize moral free- 
 dom in its creative operation. Such is the 
 dignity of education as conducted by those who 
 have attained true philosophic insight. 
 
 Fichte made a specific application of this idea 
 to his own country and time. The humiliating 
 condition of contemporary Germany was due to 
 the prevalence of egoism, selfishness and particular- 
 ism: to the fact that men had lowered themselves 
 to the plane of sensuous life. The fall was the 
 worse because the Germans, more than any other 
 people, were by nature and history conscious of 
 the ideal and spiritual principle, the principle of 
 freedom, lying at the very basis of all things. The 
 key to the political regeneration of Germany 
 was to be found in a moral and spiritual regen- 
 eration effected by means of education. The 
 key, amid political division, to political unity was 
 to be sought in devotion to moral unity. In this 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 73 
 
 spirit Fichte preached his " Addresses to the Ger- 
 man Nation." In this spirit he collaborated in 
 the foundation of the University of Berlin, and 
 zealously promoted all the educational reforms in- 
 troduced by Stein and Humboldt into Prussian life. 
 The conception of the State as an essential 
 moral Being charged with an indispensable moral 
 function lay close to these ideas. Education is 
 the means of the advancement of humanity toward 
 realization of its divine perfection. Education is 
 the work of the State. The syllogism completes 
 itself. But in order that the State may carry on 
 its educational or moral mission it must not only 
 possess organization and commensurate power, but 
 it must also control the conditions which secure 
 the possibility offered to the individuals composing 
 it. To adopt Aristotle's phrase, men must live 
 before they can live nobly. The primary condi- 
 tion of a secure life is that everyone be able to 
 live by his own labor. Without this, moral self- 
 determination is a mockery. The business of the 
 State, outside of its educational mission, is con- 
 cerned with property, and this business means in- 
 suring property to everyone as well as protecting 
 him in what he already possesses. Moreover, prop- 
 
74 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 erty is not mere physical possession. It has a 
 profound moral significance, for it means the sub- 
 jugation of physical things to will. It is a neces- 
 sary part of the realization of moral personality: 
 the conquest of the non-ego by the ego. Since 
 property does not mean mere appropriation, but is 
 a right recognized and validated by society itself, 
 property has a social basis and aim. It is an 
 expression not of individual egotism but of the uni- 
 versal will. Hence it is essential to the very idea 
 of property and of the State that all the members 
 of society have an equal opportunity for prop- 
 erty. Hence it is the duty of the State to secure 
 to its every member the right to work and the 
 reward of his work. 
 
 The outcome, as expressed in his essay on " The 
 Closed Industrial State," is State Socialism, based 
 on moral and idealistic grounds, not on economic 
 considerations. In order that men may have a 
 real opportunity to develop their moral person- 
 alities, their right to labor and to adequate living, 
 in return for their labor must be assured. This 
 cannot happen in a competitive society. Industry 
 must be completely regulated by the State if these 
 indispensable rights to labor and resulting com- 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 75 
 
 fort and security of life as means to moral voli- 
 tion are to be achieved. But a state engaged in 
 unrestricted foreign trade will leave its working- 
 men at the mercy of foreign conditions. It must 
 therefore regulate or even eliminate foreign com- 
 merce so far as is necessary to secure its own citi- 
 zens. The ultimate goal is a universal state as 
 wide as humanity, and a state in which each in- 
 dividual will act freely, without state-secured 
 rights and state-imposed obligations. But before 
 this cosmopolitan and philosophically anarchic 
 condition can be reached, we must pass through 
 a period of the nationalistic closed state. Thus 
 at the end a wide gulf separates Fichte from Kant. 
 The moral individualism of the latter has become 
 an ethical socialism. Only in and by means of a 
 circle of egos or personalities does a human being 
 attain the moral reason and freedom which Kant 
 bestowed upon him as his birthright. Only 
 through the educational activities of the State and 
 its complete regulation of the industrial activities 
 of its members does the potential moral freedom of 
 individuals become an established reality. 
 
 If I have devoted so much space to Fichte it 
 is not because of his direct influence upon 
 
76 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 affairs or even upon thought. He did not found 
 a school. His system was at once too personal 
 and too formal. Nevertheless, he expressed ideas 
 which, removed from their special context in his 
 system, were taken up into the thought of culti- 
 vated Germany. Heine, speaking of the vogue of 
 systems of thought, says with profound truth that 
 " nations have an instinctive presentiment of what 
 they require to fulfill their mission." 
 
 And Fichte's thought infiltrated through many 
 crevices. Rodbertus and Lasalle, the socialists, 
 were, for example, profoundly affected by him. 
 When the latter was prosecuted in a criminal suit 
 for his " Programme of Workingmen," his reply 
 was that his programme was a distinctively philo- 
 sophic utterance, and hence protected by the con- 
 stitutional provision for freedom of science and its 
 teaching. And this is his philosophy of the 
 State: 
 
 " The State is the unity and cooperation of 
 individuals in a moral whole. . . . The ultimate 
 and intrinsic end of the State is, therefore, to 
 further the positive unfolding, the progressive de- 
 velopment of human life. Its function is to work 
 out the true end of man; that is to say, the full 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 77 
 
 degree of culture of which human nature is capa- 
 ble." 
 
 And he quotes with approval the words: 
 
 " The concept of the State must be broadened 
 so as to make the State the contrivance whereby 
 all human virtue is to be realized to the full." 
 
 And if he differs from Fichte, it is but in the 
 assertion that since the laboring class is the one 
 to whom the need most directly appeals, it is work- 
 ingmen who must take the lead in the development 
 of the true functions of the State. 
 
 Pantheism is a philosophic nickname which 
 should be sparingly employed; so also should the 
 term Monism. To call Fichte's system an ethical 
 pantheism and monism is not to say much that is 
 enlightening. But with free interpretation, the 
 designation may be highly significant in refer- 
 ence to the spiritual temper of the Germany of 
 the first part of the nineteenth century. For it 
 gives a key to the presentiment of what Germany 
 needed to fulfill its mission. 
 
 It is a commonplace of. German historians that 
 its unity and expansion to a great state powerful 
 
78 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 externally, prosperous internally, was wrought, 
 unlike that of any other people, from within out- 
 ward. In Lange's words, " our national develop- 
 ment started from the most ideal and approxi- 
 mated more and more to the real." Hegel and 
 Heine agree that in Germany the French Revo- 
 lution and the Napoleonic career were paralleled 
 by a philosophic revolution and an intellectual 
 empire. You recall the bitter word that, when 
 Napoleon was finally conquered and Europe par- 
 titioned, to Germany was assigned the kingdom of 
 the clouds. But this aerial and tenuous kingdom 
 became a mighty power, working with and in the 
 statesmen of Prussia and the scholars of Germany 
 to found a kingdom on the solid earth. Spiritual 
 and ideal Germany made common cause with 
 realistic and practical Prussia. As says Von 
 Sybel, the historian of the " Founding of the Ger- 
 man Empire " : 
 
 " Germany had been ruined through its own 
 disintegration and had dragged Prussia with it 
 into the abyss. It was well known that the wild 
 fancies of the Conqueror hovered about the utter 
 annihilation of Prussia; if this should take place, 
 then east as well as west of the Elbe, not only 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 79 
 
 political independence, but every trace of a Ger- 
 man spirit, the German language and customs, 
 German art and learning — everything would be 
 wiped out by the foreigners. But this fatal 
 danger was perceived just at the time when every- 
 body had been looking up to Kant and Schiller, 
 had been admiring Faust, the world-embracing 
 masterpiece of Goethe's, and had recognized that 
 Alexander von Humboldt's cosmological studies 
 and Niebuhr's " Roman History " had created 
 a new era in European science and learning. In 
 such intellectual attainments the Germans felt that 
 they were far superior to the vanquisher of the 
 world and his great nation; and so the political 
 interests of Prussia and the salvation of the Ger- 
 man nationality exactly coincided. Schleier- 
 macher's patriotic sermons, Fichte's stirring ad- 
 dresses to the German people, Humboldt's glorious 
 founding of the Berlin University, served to aug- 
 ment the resisting power of Prussia, while 
 Scharnhorst's recruits and militia were devoted 
 to the defense of German honor and German cus- 
 toms. Everyone felt that German nationality 
 was lost if Prussia did not come to its rescue, and 
 that, too, there was no safety possible for Prussia 
 unless all Germany was free. 
 
 " What a remarkable providence it was that 
 brought together, as in the Middle Ages, on this 
 ancient colonial ground, a throng of the most 
 
80 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 energetic men from all districts of Germany. For 
 neither Stein nor his follower, Hardenberg, nor 
 the generals, Scharnhorst, Bluecher and Gneisenau, 
 nor the authors, Niebuhr, Fichte and K. F. 
 Eichorn, nor many others who might be men- 
 tioned, were born in Prussia; yet because their 
 thoughts centered in Germany, they had become 
 loyal Prussians. The name Germany had been 
 blotted from the political map of Europe, but 
 never had so many hearts thrilled at the thought 
 of being German. 
 
 " Thus on the most eastern frontier of German 
 life, in the midst of troubles which seemed hope- 
 less, the idea of German unity, which had lain 
 dormant for centuries, now sprang up in a new 
 birth. At first this idea was held exclusively by 
 the great men of the times and remained the in- 
 valuable possession of the cultivated classes; but 
 once started it spread far and wide among the 
 younger generation. . . . But it was easier to de- 
 feat the mighty Napoleon than to bend the Ger- 
 man sentiments of dualism and individualism to 
 the spirit of national unity." 
 
 What I have called the ethical pantheism and 
 monistic idealism of Fichte (a type of philosophy 
 reigning almost unchallenged in Germany till al- 
 most the middle of the century) was an effective 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 81 
 
 weapon in fighting and winning this more difficult 
 battle. In his volume on the " Romantic School 
 in Germany," Brandes quotes from the diary of 
 Hoffman a passage written in 1809. 
 
 " Seized by a strange fancy at the ball on the 
 6th, I imagine myself looking at my own Ego 
 through a kaleidoscope. All the forms moving 
 around me are Egos and annoy me by what they 
 do and leave undone." 
 
 It is a temptation to find in this passage a 
 symbol both of German philosophy and of the 
 temper of Germany at the time. Its outer de- 
 feats, its weakness in the world of action, had 
 developed an exasperated introspection. This 
 outer weakness, coinciding, as Von Sybel points 
 out, with the bloom of Germany in art, philosophy, 
 history, philology and philosophy, made the Ego 
 of Germany the noblest contemporary object of 
 contemplation, yet one surrounded with other 
 national Egos who offended by what they did 
 and what they did not do. Patriotism, national 
 feeling, national consciousness are common enough 
 facts. But nowhere save in Germany, in the ear- 
 lier nineteenth century, have these sentiments and 
 
82 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 impulses been transformed by deliberate nurture 
 into a mystic cult. This was the time when the 
 idea of the Volks-seele, the Volks-geist, was born ; 
 and the idea lost no time in becoming a fact. Not 
 merely poetry was affected by it, but philology, 
 history and jurisprudence. The so-called historic 
 school is its offspring. The science of social psy- 
 chology derives from it at one remove. The soul, 
 however, needed a body, and (quite in accord with 
 German idealism) it formed a body for itself — the 
 German State as a unified Empire. 
 
 While the idealistic period came first, it is im- 
 portant to bear in mind the kind of idealism it 
 was. At this point the pantheistic allusion be- 
 comes significant. The idealism in question was 
 not an idealism of another world but of this 
 world, and especially of the State. The embodi- 
 ment of the divine and absolute will and ideal is 
 the existing world of nature and of men. Espe- 
 cially is the human ego the authorized and cre- 
 ative agent of absolute purpose. The significance 
 of German philosophy was precisely to make 
 men aware of their nature and destiny as the 
 direct and active representatives of absolute and 
 creative purpose. 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 83 
 
 If I again quote Heine, it is because, with his 
 contempt for technical philosophy, he had an inti- 
 mate sense of its human meaning. Of German 
 pantheistic idealism, he wrote in 1833 while it was 
 still in its prime: 
 
 " God is identical with the world. . . . But he 
 manifests himself most gloriously in man, who 
 feels and thinks at the same time, who is capable 
 of distinguishing his own individuality from ob- 
 jective nature, whose intellect already bears 
 within itself the ideas that present themselves to 
 him in the phenomenal world. In man Deity 
 reaches self-consciousness, and this self-conscious- 
 ness God again reveals through man. But this 
 revelation does not take place in and through 
 individual man, but in and through collective hu- 
 manity . . . which comprehends and represents 
 in idea and in reality the whole God-universe. . . . 
 It is an error to suppose that this religion leads 
 men to indifference. On the contrary, the con- 
 sciousness of his divinity will inspire man with 
 enthusiasm for its manifestation, and from this 
 moment the really noble achievements of true hero- 
 ism glorify the earth." 
 
 In one respect, Heine was a false prophet. He 
 thought that this philosophy would in the end 
 
84 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 accrue to the profit of the radical, the republican 
 and revolutionary party in Germany. The his- 
 tory of German liberalism is a complicated matter. 
 Suffice it in general to say that the honey the 
 libertarians hived was appropriated in the end by 
 the party of authority. In Heine's assurance 
 that these ideas would in due time issue in action 
 he was profoundly right. His essay closes with 
 burning words, from which I extract the fol- 
 lowing : 
 
 " It seems to me that a methodical people, such 
 as we, must begin with the reformation, must then 
 occupy ourselves with systems of philosophy, and 
 only after their completion pass to the political 
 revolution. . . . Then will appear Kantians, as 
 little tolerant of piety in the world of deeds as 
 in the world of ideas, who will mercilessly upturn 
 with sword and axe the soil of our European life 
 to extirpate the last remnants of the past. Then 
 will come upon the scene armed Fichteans, whose 
 fanaticism of will is to be restrained neither by 
 fear nor self-interest, for they live in the spirit. 
 . . . Most of all to be feared would be the phi- 
 losophers of nature,* were they actively to min- 
 
 * He refers to the followers of Schelling, who as matter 
 of fact had little vogue. But his words may not unjustly 
 be transferred to the naturalistic schools, which have since 
 affected German thought. 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 85 
 
 gle. . . . For if the hand of the Kantian strikes 
 with strong unerring blow; if the Fichtean cour- 
 ageously defies every danger, since for him danger 
 has in reality no existence; — the Philosopher of 
 Nature will be terrible in that he has allied him- 
 self with the primitive powers of nature, in that 
 he can conjure up the demoniac forces of old 
 German pantheism; and having done so, aroused 
 in him that ancient Germanic eagerness whicR 
 combats for the joy of the combat itself. . . . 
 Smile not at my counsel as at the counsel of a 
 dreamer. . . . The thought precedes the deed as 
 the lightning the thunder. . . . The hour will 
 come. As on the steps of an amphitheater, the 
 nations will group themselves around Germany to 
 witness the terrible combat." 
 
 In my preoccupation with Heine, I seem to have 
 wandered somewhat from our immediate topic: the 
 connection of the idealistic philosophy with the 
 development and organization of the national 
 state of Germany. But the necessity of the or- 
 ganized State to care for the moral interests of 
 mankind was an inherent part of Fichte's thought. 
 At first, what state was a matter of indifference. 
 In fact his sympathies were largely French and 
 republican. Before Jena, he writes: 
 
86 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 " What is the nation for a truly civilized Chris- 
 tian European ? In a general way, Europe itself. 
 More particularly at any time the State which is 
 at the head of civilization. . . . With this cos- 
 mopolitan sense, we can be tranquil before the 
 vicissitudes and catastrophes of history." 
 
 In 1807 he writes : 
 
 " The distinction between Prussia and the rest 
 of Germany is external, arbitrary and fortuitous. 
 The distinction between Germany and the rest of 
 Europe is founded in nature." 
 
 The seeming gulf between the two ideas is easily 
 bridged. The " Addresses on the Fundamental 
 Features of the Present Age " had taught that the 
 end of humanity on earth is the establishment 
 of a kingdom in which all relations of humanity 
 are determined with freedom or according to Rea- 
 son — according to Reason as conceived by the 
 Fichtean formula. In his " Addresses to the 
 German Nation," in 1807-08, the unique mission 
 of Germany in the establishment of this kingdom 
 is urged as a motive for securing national unity 
 and the overthrow of the conqueror. The Ger- 
 mans are the sole people who recognize the prin- 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 87 
 
 ciples of spiritual freedom, of freedom won by 
 action in accord with reason. Faithfulness to this 
 mission will " elevate the German name to that of 
 the most glorious among all the peoples, making 
 this Nation the regenerator, and restorer of the 
 world." He personifies their ancestors speaking 
 to them, and saying : " We in our time 
 saved Germany from the Roman World Empire." 
 But " yours is the greater fortune. You 
 may establish once for all the Kingdom of 
 the Spirit and of Reason, bringing to naught 
 corporeal might as the ruling thing in the world." 
 And this antithesis of the Germanic and the 
 Roman principles has become a commonplace in 
 the German imagination. Moreover, for Germany 
 to win is no selfish gain. It is an advantage to all 
 nations. " The great promise of a kingdom of 
 right reason and truth on earth must not become a 
 vain and empty phantom ; the present iron age is 
 but a transition to a better estate." Hence the 
 concluding words : " There is no middle road : If 
 you sink, so sinks humanity entire with you, with- 
 out hope of future restoration." 
 
 The premises of the historic syllogism are plain. 
 First, the German Luther who saved for mankind 
 
88 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 the principle of spiritual freedom against Latin 
 externalism ; then Kant and Fichte, who wrought 
 out the principle into a final philosophy of science, 
 morals and the State; as conclusion, the German 
 nation organized in order to win the world to rec- 
 ognition of the principle, and thereby to establish 
 the rule of freedom and science in humanity as a 
 whole. The Germans are patient; they have a 
 long memory. Ideas produced when Germany was 
 divided and broken were retained and cherished 
 after it became a unified State of supreme military 
 power, and one yielding to no other people in 
 industrial and commercial prosperity. In the 
 grosser sense of the words, Germany has not held 
 that might makes right. But it has been in- 
 structed by a long line of philosophers that it is 
 the business of ideal right to gather might to itself 
 in order that it may cease to be merely ideal. The 
 State represents exactly this incarnation of ideal 
 law and right in effective might. The military 
 arm is part of this moral embodiment. Let senti- 
 mentalists sing the praises of an ideal to which 
 no actual force corresponds. Prussian faith in 
 the reality and enforcement among men of the 
 ideal is of a more solid character. As past history 
 
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 89 
 
 is the record of the gradual realization in the Ger- 
 manic State of the divine idea, future history 
 must uphold and expand what has been accom- 
 plished. Diplomacy is the veiled display of law 
 clothed with force in behalf of this realization, 
 and war is its overt manifestation. That war 
 demands self-sacrifice is but the more convincing 
 proof of its profound morality. It is the final 
 seal of devotion to the extension of the kingdom of 
 the Absolute on earth. 
 
 For the philosophy stands or falls with the con- 
 ception of an Absolute. Whether a philosophy 
 of absolutes is theoretically sound or unsound is 
 none of my present concern. But that philosoph- 
 ical absolutism may be practically as dangerous as 
 matter of fact political absolutism history testi- 
 fies. The situation puts in relief what finally is 
 at issue between a theory which is pinned to a 
 belief in an Absolute beyond history and behind 
 experience, and one which is frankly experimental. 
 For any philosophy which is not consistently ex- 
 perimental will always traffic in absolutes no 
 matter in how disguised a form. In German po- 
 litical philosophy, the traffic is without mask. 
 
m 
 
 THE GERMANIC PHILOSOPHY OF 
 HISTORY 
 
 The unity of the German people longed for and 
 dreamed of after 1807 became an established fact 
 through the war of 1870 with France. It is easy 
 to assign symbolic significance to this fact. Ever 
 since the time of the French Revolution — if not be- 
 fore — German thought has taken shape in conflict 
 with ideas that were characteristically French and 
 in sharp and conscious antithesis to them. Rous- 
 seau's deification of Nature was the occasion for 
 the development of the conception of Culture. 
 His condemnation of science and art as socially 
 corrupting and socially divisive worked across the 
 Rhine to produce the notion that science and 
 art are the forces which moralize and unify hu- 
 manity. The cosmopolitanism of the French En- 
 lightenment was transformed by German thinkers 
 into a self-conscious assertion of nationalism. 
 The abstract Rights of Man of the French Revo- 
 91 
 
92 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 lution were set in antithesis to the principle of 
 the rights of the citizen secured to him solely by 
 the power of the politically organized nation. The 
 deliberate breach of the revolutionary philosophy 
 with the past, the attempt (foreshadowed in the 
 philosophy of Descartes) to make a tabula rasa 
 of the fortuitous assemblage of traditions and 
 institutions which history offers, in order to sub- 
 stitute a social structure built upon Reason, was 
 envisaged as the fons et origo of all evil. That 
 history is itself incarnate reason; that history is 
 infinitely more rational than the formal abstract- 
 ing and generalizing reason of individuals; that 
 individual mind becomes rational only through the 
 absorption and assimilation of the universal rea- 
 son embodied in historic institutions and historic 
 development, became the articles of faith of the 
 German intellectual creed. It is hardly an exag- 
 geration to say that for almost a century the 
 characteristic philosophy of Germany has been a 
 philosophy of history even when not such in ap- 
 parent form. 
 
 Yet the meaning of this appeal to history is lost 
 unless we bear in mind that the Enlightenment 
 after all transmitted to Germany, from medieval 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 93 
 
 thought, its foundation principle. The appeal was 
 not from reason to experience, but from analytic 
 thought (henceforth condemned to be merely " Un- 
 derstanding " — " Verstand") to an absolute and 
 universal Reason (Vernunft) partially revealed in 
 nature and more adequately manifested in human 
 history as an organic process. Recourse to his- 
 tory was required because not of any empirical 
 lessons it has to teach, nor yet because history be- 
 queathes to us stubborn institutions which must 
 be reckoned with, but because history is the 
 dynamic and evolving realization of immanent 
 reason. The contrast of the German attitude with 
 that of Edmund Burke is instructive. The latter 
 had the same profound hostility to cutting loose 
 from the past. But his objection was not that 
 the past is an embodiment of transcendent reason, 
 but that its institutions are an " inheritance " be- 
 queathed to us from the " collected wisdom " of 
 our forefathers. The continuity of political life 
 centers not about an inner evolving Idea, but 
 about " our hearths, our sepulchers and our al- 
 tars." He has the same suspicion of abstract 
 rights of man. But his appeal is to experience 
 and to practical consequences. Since " circum- 
 
94 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 stances give in reality to every principle its dis- 
 tinguishing color and discriminating effect," there 
 is no soundness in any principle when " it stands 
 stripped of every relation in all the nakedness and 
 solitude of metaphysical abstraction." 
 
 According to the German view, the English pro- 
 tested because of interference with empirically 
 established rights and privileges; the Germans, 
 because they perceived in the Revolution a radical 
 error as to the nature and work of reason. In 
 point of fact, the Germans never made that break 
 with tradition, political or religious, of which the 
 French Revolution is an emphatic symbol. I have 
 already referred to Kant's disposition to regard 
 church dogmas (of which, as dogmas, he disap- 
 proved) as vehicles of eternal spiritual truths — 
 husks to preserve an inner grain. All of the 
 great German idealists gave further expression to 
 this disposition. To Hegel, for example, the sub- 
 stance of the doctrines of Protestant Christianity 
 is identical with the truths of absolute philosophy, 
 except that in religion they are expressed in a 
 form not adequate to their meaning, the form, 
 namely, of imaginative thought in which most men 
 live. The disposition to philosophize Christianity 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 95 
 
 is too widely shown in Germany to be dismissed 
 as a cowardly desire at accommodation with things 
 established. It shows rather an intellectual piety 
 among a people where freedom of thought and 
 conscience had been achieved without a violent 
 political upheaval. Hegel finds that the char- 
 acteristic weakness of Romance thought was an 
 inner split, an inability to reconcile the spiritual 
 and absolute essence of reality with which religion 
 deals with the detailed work of intelligence in 
 science and politics. The Germans, on the con- 
 trary, " were predestined to be the bearers of the 
 Christian principle and to carry out the Idea as 
 the absolutely Rational end." They accomplished 
 this, not by a flight away from the secular world, 
 but by realizing that the Christian principle is 
 in itself that of the unity of the subjective and 
 the objective, the spiritual and the worldly. The 
 " spirit finds the goal of its struggle, its harmony, 
 in that very sphere which it made the object of its 
 resistance, — it finds that secular pursuits are a 
 spiritual occupation " ; — a discovery, surely, which 
 unites simplicity with comprehensiveness and one 
 which does not lead to criticism of the secular pur- 
 suits carried on. Whatever is to be said of this 
 
96 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 as philosophy, it expresses, in a way, the quality 
 of German life and thought. More than other 
 countries, Germany has had the fortune to pre- 
 serve as food for its imaginative life and as emo- 
 tional sanction the great ideas of the past. It 
 has carried over their reinforcement into the pur- 
 suit of science and into politics — into the very 
 things which in other countries, notably in the 
 Latin countries, have been used as weapons of 
 attack upon tradition. 
 
 Political development tells a somewhat similar 
 tale. The painful transition from feudalism to 
 the modern era was, for the most part, accom- 
 plished recently in Germany, and accomplished 
 under the guidance of established political au- 
 thorities instead of by revolt against them. 
 Under their supervision, and mainly at their ini- 
 tiative, Germany has passed in less than a century 
 to the regime of modern capitalistic competitive 
 enterprise, moderated by the State, out of the do- 
 minion of those local and guild restrictions which 
 so long held economic activity in corporate bonds. 
 The governing powers themselves secured to 
 members of the State what seems, at least 
 to Germans, to be a satisfying degree of po- 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 97 
 
 litical freedom. Along with this absence of internal 
 disturbance and revolution, we must put the fact 
 that every step in the development of Germany 
 as a unified political power has been effected by 
 war with some of the neighbors by which it is 
 hemmed in. There stands the unfolding sequence : 
 1815 (not to go back to Frederick the Great), 
 1864, 1866, 1870. And the significant thing about 
 these wars is not that external territory was 
 annexed as their consequence, but the rebound 
 of external struggle upon the achieving of in- 
 ternal unity. No wonder the German imagination 
 has been impressed with the idea of an organic 
 evolution from within, which takes the form of a 
 unity achieved through conflict and the conquest 
 of an opposing principle. 
 
 Such scattering comments as these prove noth- 
 ing. But they suggest why German thought has 
 been peculiarly sensitive to the idea of historic 
 continuity; why it has been prone to seek for 
 an original implicit essence which has progressively 
 unfolded itself in a single development. It would 
 take much more than an hour to give even a super- 
 ficial account of the growth of the historical sci- 
 ences and historic methods of Germany during 
 
98 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 the first half of the eighteenth century. It would 
 involve an account of the creation of philology, 
 and the philological methods which go by the 
 name of higher criticism; of their extension to 
 archeology; of the historic schools of jurispru- 
 dence and political economy, as well as of the 
 ways in which such men as Niebuhr, Mommsen 
 and Ranke remade the methods of studying the 
 past. I can only say here that Germany devel- 
 oped such an effective historical technique that 
 even mediocre men achieved respectable results; 
 and, much more significantly, that when Taine 
 made the remark (quoted earlier) that we owe to 
 the Germany of the half century before 1830 all 
 our distinctively modern ideas, his remarks apply 
 above all to the disciplines concerned with the his- 
 torical development of mankind. 
 
 The bases of this philosophy are already before 
 us. Even in Kant we find the idea of a single 
 continuous development of humanity, as a progress 
 from a reign of natural instinct to a final freedom 
 won through adherence to the law of reason. 
 Fichte sketched the stages already traversed on 
 this road and located the point at which mankind 
 now stands. In his later writings, the significance 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 99 
 
 of history as the realization of the absolute pur- 
 pose is increasingly emphasized. History is the 
 continuous life of a divine Ego by which it realizes 
 in fact what it is in idea or destiny. Its phases 
 are successive stages in the founding of the King- 
 dom of God on earth. It and it only is the revela- 
 tion of the Absolute. Along with this growing 
 deification of history is the increased significance 
 attached to nationalism in general and the Ger- 
 man nation in particular. The State is the con- 
 crete individual interposed between generic hu- 
 manity and particular beings. In his words, the 
 national folk is the channel of divine life as it 
 pours into particular finite human beings. He 
 says: 
 
 " While cosmopolitanism is the dominant will 
 that the purpose of the existence of humanity 
 be actually realized in humanity, patriotism is 
 the will that this end be first realized in the par- 
 ticular nation to which we ourselves belong, and 
 that this achievement thence spread over the entire 
 
 Since the State is an organ of divinity, patri- 
 otism is religion. As the Germans are the 
 
100 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 only truly religious people, they alone are truly 
 capable of patriotism. Other peoples are products 
 of external causes ; they have no self-formed Self, 
 but only an acquired self due to general conven- 
 tion. In Germany there is a self which is self- 
 wrought and self-owned. The very fact that Ger- 
 many for centuries has had no external unity 
 proves that its selfhood is metaphysical, not a 
 gift of circumstance. This conception of the 
 German mission has been combined with a kind 
 of anthropological metaphysics which has become 
 the rage in Germany. The Germans alone of all 
 existing European nations are a pure race. They 
 alone have preserved unalloyed the original divine 
 deposit. Language is the expression of the na- 
 tional soul, and only the Germans have kept their 
 native speech in its purity. In like vein, Hegel 
 attributes the inner disharmony characteristic of 
 Romance peoples to the fact that they are of 
 mixed Germanic and Latin blood. A purely arti- 
 ficial cult of race has so flourished in Germany 
 that many social movements — like anti-Semitism 
 — and some of Germany's political ambitions can- 
 not be understood apart from the mystic identi- 
 fication of Race, Culture and the State. In the 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 101 
 
 light of actual science, this is so mythological that 
 the remark of an American periodical that race 
 means a number of people reading the same 
 newspapers is sober scientific fact compared 
 with it.* 
 
 At the beginning of history Fichte placed an 
 " Urvolk." His account of it seems an attempt 
 to rationalize at one stroke the legends of the 
 Golden Age, the Biblical account of man before 
 the Fall and Rousseau's primitive " state of na- 
 ture." The Urvolk lived in a paradise of inno- 
 cence, a paradise without knowledge, labor or art. 
 
 * Chamberlain, for example, holds that Jesus must have 
 been of Teutonic birth — a perfect logical conclusion from 
 the received philosophy of the State and religion. Quite 
 aware that there is much Slav blood in northern Germany 
 and Romance blood in southern Germany, he explains that 
 while with other peoples crossing produces a mongrel race, 
 the potency of the German blood is such that cross-breeding 
 strengthens it. While at one time he explains the historic 
 strength of the Jew on the ground that he has kept his 
 race pure, another place he allows his indignation at the 
 Jews to lead him to include them among the most mongrel 
 of all peoples. To one thing he remains consistent: By the 
 very essence of race, the Semites represent a metaphysical 
 principle inherently hostile to the grand Germanic principle. 
 It p«rhaps seems absurd to dignify the vagaries of this 
 garrulous writer, but according to all report the volumes 
 in which such expressions occur, "The Foundations of the 
 Nineteenth Century," has had august approval and much 
 vogue. 
 
102 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 The philosophy which demands such a Folk is com- 
 paratively simple. Except as a manifestation of 
 Absolute Reason, humanity could not exist at all. 
 Yet in the first stage of the manifestation, Reason 
 could not have been appropriated by the self- 
 conscious effort of man. It existed without con- 
 sciousness of itself, for it was given, not, like all 
 true self-consciousness, won by morally creative 
 struggle. Rational in substance, in form it was 
 but feeling or instinct. In a sense, all subsequent 
 history is but a return to this primitive condition. 
 But " humanity must make the journey on its own 
 feet ; by its own strength it must bring itself back 
 to that state in which it was once without its own 
 cooperating labor. . . . If humanity does not re- 
 create its own true being, it has no real life." 
 
 'While philosophy compels us to assume a Normal 
 People who, by " the mere fact of their existence, 
 without science and art, found themselves in a 
 state of perfectly developed reason," there is no 
 ground for not admitting the existence at the same 
 
 \ time of " timid and rude earth-born savages." 
 Thus the original state of humanity would have 
 been one of the greatest possible inequality, being 
 divided between the Normal Folk existing as a 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 103 
 
 manifestation of Reason and the wild and savage 
 races of barbarism. 
 
 In his later period of inflamed patriotism this 
 innocuous speculation grew a sting. He had de- 
 termined that the present age — the Europe of the 
 Enlightenment and the French Revolution — is the 
 age of liberation from the external authority in 
 which Reason had presented itself in the second 
 age. Hence it is inherently negative : " an age of 
 absolute indifference toward the Truth, an age 
 of entire and unrestrained licentiousness." But 
 the further evolution of the Divine Idea demands 
 a Folk which has retained the primitive principle 
 of Reason, which may redeem, therefore, the 
 corrupt and rebellious modes of humanity else- 
 where existing. Since the Germans are this 
 saving remnant, they are the Urvolk, the Nor- 
 mal Nation, of the modern period. From this 
 point on, idealization of past Germanic 
 history and appeal to the nation to realize 
 its unique calling by victory over Napoleon 
 blend. 
 
 The Fichtean scaffolding tumbled, but these 
 ideas persisted. I doubt if it is possible to exag- 
 gerate the extent to which German history has 
 
104 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 been systematically idealized for the last hundred 
 years. Technically speaking, the Romantic move- 
 ment may have passed away and an age of scien- 
 tific history dawned. Actually the detailed facts 
 have been depicted by use of the palette of Ro- 
 manticism. Space permits but one illustration 
 which would be but a literary curiosity were it 
 not fairly typical. Tacitus called his account of 
 the northern barbarians Germania — an unfortu- 
 nate title in view of later developments. The 
 characteristics assigned by him to the German 
 tribes are such as any anthropologist could dupli- 
 cate from any warlike barbaric tribe. Yet over 
 and over again these traits (which Tacitus ideal- 
 ized as Cooper, say, idealized the North American 
 Indian traits) are made the basis of the philo- 
 sophic history of the German people. The Ger- 
 mans, for example, had that psychological ex- 
 perience now known as mana, manitou, tabu, etc. 
 They identified their gods, in Tacitus' phrase, 
 with " that mystery which they perceive by ex- 
 periencing sacred fear." This turns out to be 
 the germinal deposit of spiritual-mindedness which 
 later showed itself in Luther and in the peculiar 
 genius of the Germans for religious experience. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 105 
 
 The following words are from no less an author- 
 ity than Pfleiderer: 
 
 " Cannot we recognize in this point that truly 
 German characteristic of Iimerlichkeit which 
 scorns to fix for sensuous perception the divine 
 something which makes itself felt in the depths of 
 the sensitive soul, which scorns to drag down the 
 sublime mystery of the unknowable to the vulgar 
 distinctness of earthly things? The fact that the 
 Germans attached but little importance to reli- 
 gious ceremonies accords with this view." 
 
 To others, this sense of mystery is a prophetic 
 anticipation of the Kantian thing-in-itself. 
 
 A similar treatment has been accorded to the 
 personal and voluntary bond by which individuals 
 attached themselves to a chieftain. Thus early 
 was marked out the fidelity or loyalty, Treue, 
 which is uniquely Germanic — although some war- 
 like tribes among our Indians carried the system 
 still further. I can allow myself but one more 
 example of the way in which the philosophic so- 
 phistication of history has worked. No historian 
 can be unconscious of the extent to which Eu- \ 
 ropean culture has been genuinely European — I 
 the extent to which it derives itself from a common 
 
106 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 heritage of the ancient world and the extent to 
 which intermixtures and borrowings of culture 
 have gone on ever since. As to Germany, how- 
 ever, these obvious facts have to be accommodated 
 to the doctrine of an original racial deposit stead- 
 ily evolving from within. 
 
 4 The method is simple. As respects Germany, 
 ese cultural borrowings and crosses represent 
 the intrinsic universality of its genius. Through 
 this universality, the German spirit finds itself 
 at home everywhere. Consequently, it consciously 
 appropriates and assimilates what other peoples 
 have produced by a kind of blind unconscious in- 
 stinct. Thus it was German thought which re- 
 vealed the truth of Hellenic culture, and rescued 
 essential Christianity from its Romanized petri- 
 faction. The principle of Reason which French 
 enlightenment laid hold of only in its negative and 
 destructive aspect, the German spirit grasped in 
 its positive and constructive form. Shakespeare 
 happened to be born in England, but only the 
 Germans have apprehended him in his spiritual 
 universality so that he is now more his own than 
 he is England's — and so on. But with respect to 
 other peoples, similar borrowings reveal only their 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 107 
 
 lack of inner and essential selfhood. While Luther 
 is universal because he is German, Shakespeare is 
 universal because he is not English. 
 
 I have intimated that Fichte's actual influence 
 was limited. But his basic ideas of the State and 
 of history were absorbed in the philosophy of 
 Hegel, and Hegel for a considerable period abso- 
 lutely dominated German thinking. To set forth 
 the ground principles of his " absolute idealism " 
 would be only to repeat what has already been 
 said. Its chief difference, aside from Hegel's en- 
 cyclopedic knowledge, his greater concrete his- 
 toric interest and his more conservative tempera- 
 ment, is his bottomless scorn for an Idea, an Ab- 
 solute, which merely ought to be and which is only 
 going to be realized after a period of time. " The 
 Actual it the Rational and the Rational t* the 
 Actual " — and the actual means the actuating 
 force and movement of things. It is customary to 
 call him an Idealist. In one sense of much abused 
 terms, he is the greatest reaUst known to phi- 
 losophy. He might be called a Brutalist. In the 
 inquiry Bourdon carried on in Germany a few 
 years ago (published under the title of the " Ger- 
 man Enigma "), he records a conversation with a 
 
108 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 German who deplores the tendency of the Germans 
 to forsake the solid bone of things in behalf of 
 a romantic shadow. As against this he appeals 
 to the realistic sense of Hegel, who, " in opposi- 
 tion to the idealism which had lifted Germany on 
 wings, arrayed and marshaled the maxims of an 
 unflinching realism. He had formulas for the justi- 
 fication of facts whatever they might be. That 
 which is, he would say, is reason realized. And 
 what did he teach? That the hour has sounded 
 for the third act in the drama of humanity, and 
 that the German opportunity is not far off. ... 
 I could show you throughout the nineteenth cen- 
 tury the torrent of political and social ideas which 
 had their source here." 
 
 I have said that the essential points of the 
 Fichtean philosophy of history were taken up into 
 the Hegelian system. This assimilation involved, 
 however, a rectification of an inconsistency be- 
 tween the earlier and the later moral theories of 
 Fichte. In his earlier ethical writings, em- 
 phasis fell upon conscious moral personality — 
 upon the deliberate identification by the individual 
 will of its career and destiny with the purpose of 
 the Absolute. In his later patriotic philosophy, 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 109 
 
 1 he asserts that the organized nation is the channel 
 by which a finite ego acquires moral personality, 
 since the nation alone transmits to individuals the 
 generic principle of God working in humanity. At 
 the same time he appeals to the resolute will and 
 consciously chosen self-sacrifice of individuals to 
 overthrow the enemy and re-establish the Prussian 
 state. When Hegel writes that victory has been 
 obtained, the war of Independence has been suc- 
 cessfully waged. The necessity of emphasizing 
 individual self-assertion had given way to the need 
 of subordinating the individual to the established 
 state in order to check the disintegrating tend- 
 encies of liberalism. 
 
 Haym has said that Hegel's " Philosophy of 
 Law " had for its task the exhibition as the per- 
 fect work of Absolute Reason up to date of the 
 " practical and political condition existing in 
 Prussia in 1821." This was meant as a hostile 
 attack. But Hegel himself should have been the 
 last to object. With his scorn for an Ideal so 
 impotent that its realization must depend upon 
 the effort of private selves, an Absolute so incon- 
 sequential that it must wait upon the accidents of 
 future time for manifestation, he sticks in politics 
 
110 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 more than elsewhere to the conviction that the 
 actual If the rational. " The task of philosophy 
 is to comprehend that which is, for that which is, 
 is Reason." Alleged philosophies which try to 
 tell what the State should be or even what a state 
 ought in the future to come to be, are idle fan- 
 tasies. Such attempts come too late. Human 
 wisdom is like the bird of Minerva which takes its 
 flight only at the close of day." * It comes, after 
 the issue, to acknowledge what has happened. 
 " The State is the rational in itself and for itself. 
 Its substantial unity is an absolute end in itself. 
 To it belongs supreme right in respect to individ- 
 uals whose first duty is — just to be members of 
 the State." . . . The State " is the absolute real- 
 ity and the individual himself has objective exist- 
 ence, truth and morality only in his capacity as 
 a member oi; the State." It is a commonplace of 
 idealistic theism that nature is a manifestation of 
 God. But Hegel says that nature is only an ex- 
 ternalized, unconscious and so incomplete expres- 
 sion. The State has more, not less, objective real- 
 
 *Marx said of the historic schools of politics, law and 
 economics that to them, as Jehovah to Moses on Mt. Sinai, 
 the divine showed but its posterior side. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 111 
 
 ity than physical nature, for it is a realization of 
 Absolute spirit in the realm of consciousness. The 
 doctrine presents an extreme form of the idea, not 
 of the divine right of kings, but of the divine right 
 of States. " The march of God in history is the 
 cause of the existence of states; their foundation 
 is the power of reason realizing itself as will. 
 Every state, whatever it be, participates in the 
 divine essence. The State is not the work of 
 human art; only Reason could produce it." The 
 State is God on earth. 
 
 * His depreciation of the individual as an indi- 
 vidual appears in every theme of his Philosophy 
 of Right and History. At first sight, his theory 
 of great world heroes seems inconsistent with his 
 disregard of individuals. While the morality of 
 most men consists simply in assimilating into their 
 own habits the customs already found in the insti- 
 tutions about them, great men initiate new his- 
 toric epochs. They derive " their purposes and 
 their calling not from the calm regular course of 
 things sanctioned by the existing order, but from 
 a concealed fount, from that inner spirit hidden 
 beneath the surface, which, striking the outer 
 world as a shell, bursts it to pieces." The heroes 
 
112 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 are thus the exception which proves the rule. They 
 are world characters ; while they seem to be seek- 
 ing personal interests they are really acting as 
 organs of a universal will, of God in his further 
 march. In his identification with the Absolute, 
 the world-hero can have but one aim to which " he 
 is devoted regardless of all else. Such men may 
 even treat other great and sacred interests incon- 
 siderately. . . . But so mighty a form must tram- 
 ple down many an innocent flower — crush to pieces 
 many an object in its path." We are not sur- 
 prised to see that Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon 
 are the characters he prefers to cite. One can only 
 regret that he died before his contemplative piety 
 could behold Bismarck. 
 
 A large part of the intellectual machinery by 
 which Hegel overcame the remnants of individ- 
 ualism found in prior philosophy came from the 
 idea of organic development which had been active 
 in German thought since the time of Herder. In 
 his chief work (" Ideas for a Philosophy of the 
 History of Humanity "), written in the closing 
 decades of the eighteenth century, Herder holds 
 that history is a progressive education of human- 
 ity. This idea, had from Lessing, is combined 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 113 
 
 with the idea of Leibniz that change is evolution, 
 by means of an internal force, of powers originally 
 implicit in existence, and with the idea of Spinoza 
 of an all-comprehensive substance. This idea of 
 organic growth was then applied to language, 
 literature and institutions. It soon obtained rein- 
 forcement from the rising science of biology. 
 Long before the days of Darwin or Spencer, the 
 idea of evolution had been a commonplace of Ger- 
 man thought with respect to everything concern- 
 ing the history of humanity. The notion was 
 set in sharp antithesis to the conception of " mak- 
 ing" or manufacturing institutions and constitu- 
 tions, which was treated as one of the fallacies of 
 the French philosophy of the Enlightenment. A 
 combination of this notion of universal organic 
 growth with the technique of prior idealism may 
 fairly be said to have determined Hegel's whole 
 philosophy. While Leibniz and Herder had em- 
 phasized the notion of harmony as an essential 
 factor of the working of organic forces, Hegel 
 took from Fichte the notion of a unity or syn- 
 thesis arrived at by " positing," and overcoming 
 an opposite. Struggle for existence (or realiza- 
 tion) was thus an "organic" part of German 
 
114 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 thinking long before the teaching of Darwin, who, 
 in fact, is usually treated by German writers as 
 giving a rather superficial empirical expression 
 to an idea which they had already grasped in its 
 universal speculative form. It is characteristic of 
 the extent in which Hegel thought in terms of 
 struggle and overcoming that after stating why 
 it was as yet impossible to include the Americas 
 in his philosophy of history, and after saying 
 that in the future the burden of world history will 
 reveal itself there, he surmises that it may take the 
 form of a " contest " between North and South 
 America. No philosopher has ever thought so 
 consistently and so wholly in terms of strife and 
 overcoming as Hegel. When he says the " world 
 history is the world judgment " he means judg- 
 ment in the sense of assize, and judgment as 
 victory of one and defeat of another — victory 
 being the final proof that the world spirit has now 
 passed from one nation to take up its residence in 
 another. To be defeated in a way which causes 
 the nation to take a secondary position among 
 nations is a sign that divine judgment has been 
 passed upon it. When a recent German writer 
 argues that for Germany to surrender any terri- 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 115 
 
 tory which it has conquered during the present 
 war would be sacrilegious, since it would be to 
 refuse to acknowledge the workings of God in 
 human history, he speaks quite in the Hegelian 
 vein. 
 
 Although the phenomenon of nationalism was 
 very recent when Hegel wrote, indeed practically 
 contemporary with his own day, he writes in na- 
 tionalistic terms the entire history of humanity. 
 The State is the Individual of history ; it is to his- 
 tory what a given man is to biography. History 
 gives us the progressive realization or evolution of 
 the Absolute, moving from one National Individual 
 to another. It is law, the universal, which makes 
 the State a State, for law is reason, not as mere 
 subjective reflection, but in its manifestation as 
 supreme over and in particulars. On this account, 
 Hegel's statement that the fundamental principle 
 of history is the progressive realization of free- 
 dom does not mean what an uninstructed English 
 reader would naturally take it to mean. Freedom 
 is always understood in terms of Reason. Its ex- 
 pression in history means that Thought has pro- 
 gressively become conscious of itself; that is, has 
 made itself its own object. Freedom is the conr 
 
116 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 sciousness of freedom. Liberty of action has little 
 to do with it. Obviously it is only in the German 
 idealistic system — particularly in the system of 
 Hegel himself — that this has fully taken place. 
 Meantime, when citizens of a state (especially of 
 the state in which this philosophic insight has been 
 achieved) take the laws of their state as their own 
 ends and motives of action, they attain the best 
 possible substitute for a reason which is its own 
 object. They appropriate as their own personal 
 reason the objective and absolute Reason em- 
 bodied perforce in law and custom. 
 
 After this detour, we are led back to the fact 
 that the Germans possess the greatest freedom yet 
 attained by humanity, for the Prussian political 
 organization most fully exemplifies Law, or the 
 Universal, organizing under and within itself all 
 particular arrangements of social and personal 
 life. Some other peoples — particularly the Latin 
 — have thought they could make constitutions, or 
 at least that the form of their constitution was 
 a matter of choice. But this is merely setting up 
 the private conceit of individuals against the work 
 of Absolute Reason, and thus marks the disin- 
 tegration of a state rather than its existence. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 117 
 
 Other peoples have tried to found the government 
 on the consent of the governed, unwitting of the 
 fact that it is the government, the specific realiza- 
 tion of Reason, which makes a state out of what 
 is otherwise an anarchic mass of individuals. Other 
 peoples have made a parliament or representative 
 body the essential thing in government; in philo- 
 sophic reality this is only a consultative body, 
 having as its main function communication between 
 classes (which are indispensable to an " organic " 
 state) and the real government. The chief func- 
 tion of parliament is to give the opinion of the 
 social classes an opportunity to feel it is being 
 considered and to enable the real government to 
 take advantage of whatever wisdom may chance to 
 be expressed. Hegel seems quite prophetic when 
 he says: "By virtue of this participation subjec- 
 tive liberty and conceit, with their general opinion, 
 can show themselves palpably efficacious and enjoy 
 the satisfaction of feeling themselves to count for 
 something." Finally, the State becomes wholly 
 and completely an organized Individual only in its 
 external relations, its relations to other states. As 
 his philosophy of history ignores the past in seiz- 
 ing upon the national state as the unit and focus 
 
118 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 of history, so it ignores all future possibility of 
 a genuinely international federation to which iso- 
 lated nationalism shall be subordinated. Bern- 
 hardi writes wholly in the Hegelian sense when he 
 says that to expand the idea of the State into the 
 idea of humanity is a Utopian error, for it would 
 exclude the essential principle of life, struggle. 
 
 Philosophical justification of war follows inevi- 
 tably from a philosophy of history composed in 
 nationalistic terms. History is the movement, the 
 march of God on earth through time. Only one 
 nation at a time can be the latest and hence the 
 fullest realization of God. The movement of God 
 in history is thus particularly manifest in those 
 changes by which unique place passes from one 
 nation to another. War is the signally visible 
 occurrence of such a flight of the divine spirit in 
 its onward movement. The idea that friendly in- 
 tercourse among all the peoples of the earth is a 
 legitimate aim of human effort is in basic con- 
 tradiction of such a philosophy. War is explicit 
 realization of " dialectic," of the negation by 
 which a higher synthesis of reason is assured. It 
 effectively displays the " irony of the divine Idea." 
 It is to national life what the winds are to the sea, 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 119 
 
 " preserving mankind from the corruption en- 
 gendered by immobility." War is the most ef- 
 fective preacher of the vanity of all merely finite 
 interests ; it puts an end to that selfish egoism of 
 the individual by which he would claim his life and 
 his property as his own or as his family's. Inter- 
 national law is not properly law; it expresses 
 simply certain usages which are accepted so long 
 as they do not come into conflict with the purpose 
 of a state — a purpose which always gives the 
 supreme law of national life. Particularly against 
 the absolute right of the " present bearer of the 
 world spirit, the spirits of the other nations are 
 absolutely without right. The latter, just like 
 the nations whose epochs have passed, count no 
 longer in universal history." Since they are al- 
 ready passed over from the standpoint of the 
 divine idea, war can do no more than exhibit the 
 fact that their day has come and gone. World 
 history is the world's judgment seat. 
 
 For a period Hegelian thought was almost su- 
 preme in Germany. Then its rule passed away 
 almost as rapidly as it had been achieved. After 
 various shiftings, the trend of philosophic thought 
 was definitely " Back to Kant." Kant's greater 
 
120 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 sobriety, the sharp distinction he drew between 
 the realm of phenomena and science and the 
 ideal noumenal world, commended him after the 
 unbridled pretensions of Hegelian absolutism. 
 For more than a generation Hegel was spoken of 
 with almost universal contempt. Nevertheless his 
 ideas, loosed from the technical apparatus with 
 which he surrounded them, persisted. Upon the 
 historical disciplines his influence was peculiarly 
 deep and abiding. He fixed the ideas of Fichte 
 and fastened them together with the pin of evolu- 
 tion. Since his day, histories of philosophy, or 
 religion, or institutions have all been treated as 
 developments through necessary stages of an inner 
 implicit idea or purpose according to an indwelling 
 law. And the idea of a peculiar mission and 
 destiny of German history has lost nothing in the 
 operation. Expressions which a bewildered world 
 has sought since the beginning of the war to ex- 
 plain through the influence of a Darwinian strug- 
 gle for existence and survival of the fittest, or 
 through the influence of a Nietzschean philosophy 
 of power, have their roots in the classic idealistic 
 philosophy culminating in Hegel. 
 
 Kant still remains the philosopher of Germany. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 121 
 
 The division of life between the world of sense and 
 of mechanism and the world of the supersensible 
 and purpose, the world of necessity and the world 
 of freedom, is more congenial than a complete 
 monism. The attempts of his successors to bridge 
 the gap and set up a wholly unified philosophy 
 failed, historically speaking. But, nevertheless, 
 they contributed an indispensable ingredient to 
 the contemporary German spirit; they helped 
 people the Kantian void of the supersensible with 
 the substantial figures of the State and its His- 
 torical Evolution and Mission. Kant bequeathed 
 to the world an intellect devoted to the congenial 
 task of discovering causal law in external nature, 
 and an inner intuition which, in spite of its sublim- 
 ity, had nothing to look at except the bare form 
 of an empty law of duty. Kant was kept busy in 
 proving the existence of this supernal but empty 
 region. Consequently he was not troubled by 
 being obliged to engage in the unremunerative task 
 of spending his time gazing into a blank void. His 
 successors were not so fortunate. The existence 
 of this ideal realm in which reason, purpose and 
 freedom are one was axiomatic to them ; they could 
 no longer busy themselves with proving its exist- 
 
122 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 ence. Some of them, called the Romanticists, filled 
 it with visions, more or less poetic, which frankly 
 drew their substance from an imagination inflamed 
 by emotional aspiration in revolt at the limita- 
 tions of outward action. Others, called the ideal- 
 istic philosophers, filled in the void, dark because 
 of excess of light, with less ghostly forms of Law 
 and the unfolding in History of Absolute Value 
 and Purpose. The two worlds of Kant were too 
 far away from each other. The later idealistic 
 world constructions crumbled; but their debris 
 supplied material with which to fill in the middle 
 regions between the Kantian worlds of sense and 
 of reason. This, I repeat, is their lasting con- 
 tribution to present German culture. Where 
 Kantianism has not received a filling in from 
 the philosophy of history and the State, it 
 has remained in Germany, as elsewhere, a 
 critique of the methodology of science; its 
 importance has been professional rather than 
 human. 
 
 In the first lecture we set out with the sug- 
 gestion of an inquiry into the influence of general 
 ideas upon practical affairs, upon those larger 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 123 
 
 practical affairs called politics. We appear to 
 have concluded with a conviction that (in the 
 instance before us at least) politics has rather 
 been the controlling factor in the formation of 
 philosophic ideas and in deciding their vogue. 
 Yet we are well within limits when we say that 
 ideas which were evoked in correspondence with 
 concrete social conditions served to articulate and 
 consolidate the latter. Even if we went so far as 
 to say that reigning philosophies simply reflect as 
 in a mirror contemporary social struggles, we 
 should have to add that seeing one's self in a 
 mirror is a definite practical aid in carrying on 
 one's undertaking to its completion. 
 
 When what a people sees in its intellectual 
 looking glass is its own organization and its own 
 historic evolution as an organic instrument of the 
 accomplishment of an Absolute Will and Law, the 
 articulating and consolidating efficacy of the re- 
 flection is immensely intensified. Outside of Ger- 
 many, the career of the German idealistic phi- 
 losophy has been mainly professional and literary. 
 It has exercised considerable influence upon the 
 teaching of philosophy in France, England and 
 this country. Beyond professorial circles, its in- 
 
124 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 fluence has been considerable in theological direc- 
 tions. Without doubt, it has modulated for many 
 persons the transition from a supernatural to a 
 spiritual religion; it has enabled them to give up 
 historical and miraculous elements as indifferent 
 accretions and to retain the moral substance and 
 emotional values of Christianity. But the Ger- 
 mans are quite right in feeling that only in Ger- 
 many is this form of idealistic thinking both in- 
 digenous and widely applied. 
 
 A crisis like the present forces upon thoughtful 
 persons a consideration of the value for the gen- 
 eral aims of civilization of a philosophy of the 
 a priori, the Absolute, and of their immanent evo- 
 lution through the medium of an experience which 
 as just experience is only a superficial and 
 negligible vehicle of transcendent Laws and 
 Ends. It forces a consideration of what type of 
 general ideas is available for the articulation and 
 guidance of our own life in case we find ourselves 
 looking upon the present world scene as an 
 a priori and an absolutistic philosophy gone into 
 bankruptcy. 
 
 In Europe, speaking generally, " Americanism " 
 is a synonym for crude empiricism and a ma- 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 125 
 
 tenalistic utilitarianism. It is no part of my pres- 
 ent task to try to show how largely this accusation 
 is due to misunderstanding. It is simpler to 
 inquire how far the charge points to the problem 
 which American life, and therefore philosophy in 
 America, must meet. It is difficult to see how any 
 a priori philosophy, or any systematic absolut- 
 ism, is to get a footing among us, at least beyond 
 narrow and professorial circles. Psychologists 
 talk about learning by the method of trial and 
 error or success. Our social organization com- 
 mits us to this philosophy of life. Our working 
 principle is to try: to find out by trying, and to 
 measure the worth of the ideas and theories tried 
 by the success with which they meet the test of 
 application in practice. Concrete consequences 
 rather than a priori rules supply our guiding prin- 
 ciples. Hegel found it " superficial and absurd to 
 regard as objects of choice " social constitutions ; 
 to him " they were necessary structures in the 
 path of development." To us they are the cumu- 
 lative result of a multitude of daily and ever- 
 renewed choices. 
 
 That such an experimental philosophy of life 
 means a dangerous experiment goes without say- 
 
126 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 ing. It permits, sooner or later it may require, 
 every alleged sacrosanct principle to submit to 
 ordeal by fire — to trial by service rendered. From 
 the standpoint of a priorism, it is hopelessly 
 anarchic ; it is doomed, a priori, to failure. From 
 its own standpoint, it is itself a theory to be tested 
 by experience. Now experiments are of all kinds, 
 varying from those generated by blind impulse and 
 appetite to those guided by intelligently formed 
 ideas. They are as diverse as the attempt of a 
 savage to get rain by sprinkling water and scat- 
 tering thistledown, and that control of electricity 
 in the laboratory from which issue wireless teleg- 
 raphy and rapid traction. Is it not likely that in 
 this distinction we have the key to the failure or 
 success of the experimental method generalized 
 into a philosophy of life, that is to say, of social 
 matters — the only application which procures 
 complete generalization ? 
 
 An experimental philosophy differs from em- 
 pirical philosophy as empiricism has been previ- 
 ously formulated. Historical empiricisms have 
 been stated in terms of precedents ; their general- 
 izations have been summaries of what has previ- 
 ously happened. The truth and falsity of these 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 127 
 
 generalizations depended then upon the accuracy 
 with which they catalogued, under appropriate 
 heads, a multiplicity of past occurrences. They 
 were perforce lacking in directive power except so 
 far as the future might be a routine repetition of 
 the past. In an experimental philosophy of life, 
 the question of the past, of precedents, of origins, 
 is quite subordinate to prevision, to guidance and 
 control amid future possibilities. Consequences 
 rather than antecedents measure the worth of 
 theories. Any scheme or project may have a fair 
 hearing provided it promise amelioration in the 
 future; and no theory or standard is so sacred 
 that it may be accepted simply on the basis of 
 past performance. 
 
 But this difference between a radically experi- 
 mental philosophy and an empiristic philosophy 
 only emphasizes the demand for careful and com- 
 prehensive reflection with respect to the ideas 
 which are to be tested in practice. If an a priori 
 philosophy has worked at all in Germany it is be- 
 cause it has been based on an a priori social con- 
 stitution — that is to say, on a state whose organ- 
 ization is such as to determine in advance the main 
 activities of classes of individuals, and to utilize 
 
128 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 their particular activities by linking them up with 
 one another in definite ways. It is a commonplace 
 to say that Germany is a monument to what can 
 be done by means of conscious method and organ- 
 ization. An experimental philosophy of life in 
 order to succeed must not set less store upon 
 methodic and organized intelligence, but more. 
 We must learn from Germany what methodic and 
 . organized work means. But instead of confining 
 intelligence to the technical means of realizing 
 ends which are predetermined by the State (or by 
 something called the historic Evolution of the 
 Idea), intelligence must, with us, devote itself as 
 well to construction of the ends to be acted upon. 
 The method of trial and error or success is 
 likely, if not directed by a trained and informed 
 imagination, to score an undue proportion of fail- 
 ures. There is no possibility of disguising the 
 fact that an experimental philosophy of life means 
 a hit-and-miss philosophy in the end. But it 
 means missing rather than hitting, if the aiming 
 is done in a happy-go-lucky way instead of by 
 bringing to bear all the resources of inquiry upon 
 locating the target, constructing propulsive ma- 
 chinery and figuring out the curve of trajectory. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 129 
 
 That this work is, after all, but hypothetical and 
 tentative till it issue from thought into action 
 does not mean that it might as well be random 
 guesswork; it means that we can do still better 
 next time if we are sufficiently attentive to the 
 causes of success and failure this time. 
 
 America is too new to afford a foundation for 
 an a priori philosophy; we have not the requisite 
 background of law, institutions and achieved social 
 organization. America is too new to render con- 
 genial to our imagination an evolutionary phi- 
 losophy of the German type. For our history is 
 too obviously future. Our country is too big 
 and too unformed, however, to enable us to trust 
 to an empirical philosophy of muddling along, 
 patching up here and there some old piece 
 of machinery which has broken down by reason 
 of its antiquity. We must have system, con- 
 structive method, springing from a widely in- 
 ventive imagination, a method checked up at each 
 turn by results achieved. We have said long 
 enough that America means opportunity ; we must 
 now begin to ask : Opportunity for what, and how 
 shall the opportunity be achieved ? I can but think 
 that the present European situation forces home 
 
130 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 upon us the need for constructive planning. I 
 can but think that while it gives no reason for 
 supposing that creative power attaches ex officio 
 to general ideas, it does encourage us to believe 
 that a philosophy which should articulate and con- 
 solidate the ideas to which our social practice com- 
 mits us would clarify and guide our future en- 
 deavor. 
 
 Time permits of but one illustration. The pres- 
 ent situation presents the spectacle of the break- 
 down of the whole philosophy of Nationalism, 
 political, racial and cultural. It is by the acci- 
 dent of position rather than any virtue of our 
 own that we are not sharers in the present demon- 
 stration of failure. We have borrowed the older 
 philosophy of isolated national sovereignty and 
 have lived upon it in a more or less half-hearted 
 way. In our internal constitution we are actu- 
 ally interracial and international. It remains to 
 see whether we have the courage to face this fact 
 and the wisdom to think out the plan of action 
 which it indicates. Arbitration treaties, interna- 
 tional judicial councils, schemes of international 
 disarmament, peace funds and peace movements, 
 are all well in their way. But the situation calls for 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 131 
 
 more radical thinking than that which terminates 
 in such proposals. We have to recognize that 
 furtherance of the depth and width of human in- 
 tercourse is the measure of civilization; and we 
 have to apply this fact without as well as within 
 our national life. We must make the accident 
 of our internal composition into an idea, an 
 idea upon which we may conduct our foreign as 
 well as our domestic policy. An international 
 judicial tribunal will break in the end upon the 
 principle of national sovereignty. 
 
 We have no right to cast stones at any warring 
 nation till we have asked ourselves whether we are 
 willing to forego this principle and to submit af- 
 fairs which limited imagination and sense have led 
 us to consider strictly national to an international 
 legislature. In and of itself, the idea of peace is 
 a negative idea; it is a police idea. There are 
 things more important than keeping one's body 
 whole and one's property intact. Disturbing the 
 peace is bad, not because peace is disturbed, but 
 because the fruitful processes of cooperation in 
 the great experiment of living together are dis- 
 turbed. It is futile to work for the negative end 
 of peace unless we are committed to the positive 
 
132 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 
 
 ideal which it cloaks: Promoting the efficacy of 
 human intercourse irrespective of class, racial, 
 geographical and national limits. Any philosophy 
 which should penetrate and particulate our present 
 social practice would find at work the forces which 
 unify human intercourse. An intelligent and 
 courageous philosophy of practice would devise 
 means by which the operation of these forces 
 would be extended and assured in the future. 
 An American philosophy of history must perforce 
 be a philosophy for its future, a future in which 
 freedom and fullness of human companionship is 
 the aim, and intelligent cooperative experimenta- 
 tion the method. 
 
 THE END 
 
INDEX 
 
 Absolutism, 89, 112, 115, 124 
 America, philosophy in, 123- 
 
 132 
 "Americanism," 124 
 Anti-Semitism, 100-101. 
 A priori, 39-44, 126, 129 
 Authority, 52-54 
 
 Bentham, 56 
 
 Bergsori, 4 
 
 Bernhardi, 34-35, 52, 118 
 
 Bourdon, 107-108 
 
 Burke, 93-94 
 
 Chamberlain, 101 n. 
 Cosmopolitanism, 67, 75, 85, 
 
 99 
 Culture, 91 
 
 Descartes, 92 
 
 Despotism enlightened, 53 
 Dialectic, 70, 118 
 Duty, 24, 50-57 
 
 Education, 14, 72, 73 
 Empiricism, 41, 43, 126-129 
 Enlightenment, the, 37-39, 59, 
 
 92, 103 
 Eucken, 36, 55 
 Evolution, 112 
 
 Fichte, 68-80, 85-87 
 
 Formalism, 51 
 
 Freedom, 18, 25, 30, 33-35, 47, 
 
 51, 71, 115. 
 French Revolution, 57, 94, 103 
 French thought, 52, 91-94, 95, 
 
 100 
 
 Germania, 104 
 
 Germany, 14-16, 28, 29-31, 32- 
 
 33, 36, 71, 78-81, 84-85, 88, 
 
 91-93, 94-98, 106-107 
 
 Haym, 107 
 
 Hegel, 94-95, 107-120, 125 
 
 Heine, 17, 18, 76, 83, 84-85 
 
 Herder, 112 
 
 History, 5-6, 59-67, 98-102, 
 
 107-119, 121 
 Hoffman, 81 
 
 Idealism, 28, 39, 70, 82, 107, 
 
 123, 130 
 Ideas and action, 3-15, 123- 
 
 132 
 Individualism, 49, 72 
 Intelligence, 54-56, 126-128 
 
 Jena, 68 
 
 Kant, 19-40, 47-58, 59-67, 119- 
 
 121 
 Kultur, 62-64 
 
 Lange, 78 
 Lasalle, 77 
 Law, 20-25, 116 
 Leibniz, 59, 112 
 Luther, 16, 27, 71, 87 
 
 Marx, 6, 110 n. 
 Militarism, 52 
 
 Napoleon, 67, 78-79 
 Nationalism, 67, 81, 86, 87, 
 
 115 
 Nietzsche, 28, 34, 58 
 
 133 
 
134 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Pantheism, 77, 82 
 Parliaments, 117 
 Personality, 48 
 Pfleiderer, 105 
 Philosophy, 7-18, 123-132 
 Property, 74 
 Psychology, Social, 82 
 
 Race, 100-101 
 Religion, 20-21, 26-27, 95 
 Rights, 52, 57 
 Romanticism, 81, 104, 122 
 Rousseau, 61, 91 
 
 Schelling, 82 n. 
 Scholar, 72 
 Science, 21-23, 28 
 Socialism, 74-75 
 Social motives, 60-61 
 
 Society, 64-65 
 
 State, 64-65, 66-67, 73-77, 110- 
 
 118 
 Subjectivism, 49, 81 
 Supersensible, 23-25 
 v. Sybel, 78-80 
 
 Tacitus, 104 
 Taine, 14 
 
 Universalism of Germany, 36, 
 
 106-107 
 Urvolk, 101-102 
 Utilitarianism, 57-58 
 
 Volk-seele, 82 
 
 War, 35-36, 89, 97, 118-120 
 World-herces, 112 
 
DEWEY AND TUFTS'S ETHICS 
 
 By John Dewey, Professor in Columbia University, and 
 James H. Tufts, Professor in the University of Chi- 
 cago. (American Science Series.) 618 pp. 8vo. $2.00. 
 
 G. H. Palmer, Professor in Harvard University; It is a 
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BERGSON'S CREATIVE EVOLUTION 
 
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