The Romanticists were the exponents of an absolute sentimentalism. And they did not prove it, but like good sentimentalists they felt it.

[Sidenote: Hegelianism, or the Absolute Spirit as Dialectic.]

- 179. Hegel, the master of the new idealism, set himself the task of construing spirit in terms as consecutive as those of Fichte, and as comprehensive as those of the Romanticists. Like Plato, he found in dialectic the supreme manifestation of the spiritual life. There is a certain flow of ideas which determines the meaning of experience, and is the truth of truths. But the mark of the new prophet is this: the flow of ideas itself is _a process of self-correction due to a sense of error_. Thus bare sensation is abstract and bare thought is abstract.

The real, however, is not merely the concrete in which they are united, but the very process in the course of which through knowledge of abstraction thought arrives at the concrete. The principle of negation is the very life of thought, and it is _the life of thought_, rather than the outcome of thought, which is reality. The most general form of the dialectical process contains three moments: the moment of _thesis_, in which affirmation is made; the moment of _ant.i.thesis_, in which the opposite a.s.serts itself; and the moment of _synthesis_, in which a reconciliation is effected in a new thesis. Thus thought is the progressive overcoming of contradiction; not the state of freedom from contradiction, but the act of escaping it. Such processes are more familiar in the moral life. Morality consists, so even common-sense a.s.serts, in the overcoming of evil. Character is the resistance of temptation; goodness, a growth in grace through discipline. Of such, for Hegel, is the very kingdom of heaven. It is the task of the philosopher, a task to which Hegel applies himself most a.s.siduously, to a.n.a.lyze the battle and the victory upon which spiritual being nourishes itself. And since the deeper processes are those of thought, the Hegelian philosophy centres in an ordering of notions, a demonstration of that necessary progression of thought which, in its whole dynamical logical history, const.i.tutes the _absolute idea_.

[Sidenote: The Hegelian Philosophy of Nature and History.]

- 180. The Hegelian philosophy, with its emphasis upon difference, antagonism, and development, is peculiarly qualified to be a philosophy of nature and history. Those principles of spiritual development which logic defines are conceived as incarnate in the evolution of the world.

Nature, as the very ant.i.thesis to spirit, is now understood to be the foil of spirit. In nature spirit alienates itself in order to return enriched. The stages of nature are the preparation for the reviving of a spirituality that has been deliberately forfeited. The Romanticists, whether philosophers like Sch.e.l.ling or poets like Goethe and Wordsworth, were led by their feeling for the beauty of nature to attribute to it a much deeper and more direct spiritual significance. But Hegel and the Romanticists alike are truly expressed in Emerson's belief that the spiritual interpretation of nature is the "true science."

"The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow of s.p.a.ce was strown with these flowers we call suns and moons and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and G.o.ds; for in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought."[364:5]

The new awakening of spirit which is for Hegel the consummation of the natural evolution, begins with the individual or _subjective_ spirit, and develops into the social or _objective_ spirit, which is morality and history. History is a veritable dialectic of nations, in the course of which the consciousness of individual liberty is developed, and coordinated with the unity of the state. The highest stage of spirit incarnate is that of _absolute_ spirit, embracing art, religion, and philosophy. In art the absolute idea obtains expression in sensuous existence, more perfectly in cla.s.sical than in the symbolic art of the Orient, but most perfectly in the romantic art of the modern period. In religion the absolute idea is expressed in the imagination through worship. In Oriental pantheism, the individual is overwhelmed by his sense of the universal; in Greek religion, G.o.d is but a higher man; while in Christianity G.o.d and man are perfectly united in Christ.

Finally, in philosophy the absolute idea reaches its highest possible expression in articulate thought.

[Sidenote: Resume. Failure of Absolute Idealism to Solve the Problem of Evil.]

- 181. Such is absolute idealism approached from the stand-point of antecedent metaphysics. It is the most elaborate and subtle provision for antagonistic differences within unity that the speculative mind of man has as yet been able to make. It is the last and most thorough attempt to resolve individual and universal, temporal and eternal, natural and ideal, good and evil, into an absolute unity in which the universal, eternal, ideal, and good shall dominate, and in which all terms shall be related with such necessity as obtains in the definitions and theorems of geometry. There is to be some absolute meaning which is rational to the uttermost and the necessary ground of all the incidents of existence. Thought could undertake no more ambitious and exacting task. Nor is it evident after all that absolute idealism enjoys any better success in this task than absolute realism. The difference between them becomes much less marked when we reflect that the former, like the latter, must reserve the predicate of being for the unity of the whole. Even though evil and contradiction belong to the essence of things, move in the secret heart of a spiritual universe, the reality is not these in their severalty, but that life within which they fall, the story within which they "earn a place." And if absolute idealism has defined a new perfection, it has at the same time defined a new imperfection. The perfection is rich in contrast, and thus inclusive of both the lights and shades of experience; but the perfection belongs only to the composition of these elements within a single view. It is not necessary to such perfection that the evil should ever be viewed in isolation. The idealist employs the a.n.a.logy of the drama or the picture whose very significance requires the balance of opposing forces; or the a.n.a.logy of the symphony in which a higher musical quality is realized through the resolution of discord into harmony. But none of these unities requires any element whatsoever that does not partake of its beauty. It is quite irrelevant to the drama that the hero should himself have his own view of events with no understanding of their dramatic value, as it is irrelevant to the picture that an unbalanced fragment of it should dwell apart, or to the symphony that the discord should be heard without the harmony. One may multiply without end the internal differences and antagonisms that contribute to the internal meaning, and be as far as ever from understanding the external detachment of experiences that are not rational or good in themselves.

And it is precisely this kind of fact that precipitates the whole problem. We do not judge of sin and error from experiences in which they conduct to goodness and truth, but from experiences in which they are stark and unresolved.

In view of such considerations many idealists have been willing to confess their inability to solve this problem. To quote a recent expositor of Hegel,

"We need not, after all, be surprised at the apparently insoluble problem which confronts us. For the question has developed into the old difficulty of the origin of evil, which has always baffled both theologians and philosophers. An idealism which declares that the universe is in reality perfect, can find, as most forms of popular idealism do, an escape from the difficulties of the existence of evil, by declaring that the universe is as yet only growing towards its ideal perfection. But this refuge disappears with the reality of time, and we are left with an awkward difference between what philosophy tells us must be, and what our life tells us actually is."[368:6]

If the philosophy of eternal perfection persists in its fundamental doctrine in spite of this irreconcilable conflict with life, it is because it is believed that that doctrine _must_ be true. Let us turn, then, to its more constructive and compelling argument.

[Sidenote: The Constructive Argument for Absolute Idealism is Based upon the Subjectivistic Theory of Knowledge.]

- 182. The proof of absolute idealism is supposed by the majority of its exponents to follow from the problem of epistemology, and more particularly from the manifest dependence of truth upon the knowing mind. In its initial phase absolute idealism is indistinguishable from subjectivism. Like that philosophy it finds that the object of knowledge is inseparable from the state of knowledge throughout the whole range of experience. Since the knower can never escape himself, it may be set down as an elementary fact that reality (at any rate whatever reality can be known or even talked about) owes its being to mind.

Thus Green, the English neo-Hegelian, maintains that "an object which no consciousness presented to itself would not be an object at all," and wonders that this principle is not generally taken for granted and made the starting-point for philosophy.[369:7] However, unless the very term "object" is intended to imply presence to a subject, this principle is by no means self-evident, and must be traced to its sources.

We have already followed the fortunes of that empirical subjectivism which issues from the relativity of perception. At the very dawn of philosophy it was observed that what is seen, heard, or otherwise experienced through the senses, depends not only upon the use of sense-organs, but upon the special point of view occupied by each individual sentient being. It was therefore concluded that the perceptual world belonged to the human knower with his limitations and perspective, rather than to being itself. It was this epistemological principle upon which Berkeley founded his empirical idealism. Believing knowledge to consist essentially in perception, and believing perception to be subjective, he had to choose between the relegation of being to a region inaccessible to knowledge, and the definition of being in terms of subjectivity. To avoid scepticism he accepted the latter alternative.

But among the Greeks with whom this theory of perception originated, it drew its meaning in large part from the distinction between perception and reason. Thus we read in Plato's "Sophist":

"And you would allow that we partic.i.p.ate in generation with the body, and by perception; but we partic.i.p.ate with the soul by thought in true essence, and essence you would affirm to be always the same and immutable, whereas generation varies."[370:8]

It is conceived that although in perception man is condemned to a knowledge conditioned by the affections and station of his body, he may nevertheless escape himself and lay hold on the "true essence" of things, by virtue of thought. In other words, knowledge, in contradistinction to "opinion," is not made by the subject, but is the soul's partic.i.p.ation in the eternal natures of things. In the moment of insight the varying course of the individual thinker coincides with the unvarying truth; but in that moment the individual thinker is enn.o.bled through being a.s.similated to the truth, while the truth is no more, no less, the truth than before.

[Sidenote: The Principle of Subjectivism Extended to Reason.]

- 183. In absolute idealism, the principle of subjectivism is extended to reason itself. This extension seems to have been originally due to moral and religious interests. From the moral stand-point the contemplation of the truth is a _state_, and the highest state of the individual life. The religious interest unifies the individual life and directs attention to its spiritual development. Among the Greeks of the middle period life was as yet viewed objectively as the fulfilment of capacities, and knowledge was regarded as perfection of function, the exercise of the highest of human prerogatives. But as moral and religious interests became more absorbing, the individual lived more and more in his own self-consciousness. Even before the Christian era the Greek philosophers themselves were preoccupied with the task of winning a state of inner serenity. Thus the Stoics and Epicureans came to look upon knowledge as a means to the attainment of an inner freedom from distress and bondage to the world. In other words, the very reason was regarded as an activity of the self, and its fruits were valued for their enhancement of the welfare of the self. And if this be true of the Stoics and the Epicureans, it is still more clearly true of the neo-Platonists of the Christian era, who mediate between the ancient and mediaeval worlds.

[Sidenote: Emphasis on Self-consciousness in Early Christian Philosophy.]

- 184. It is well known that the early period of Christianity was a period of the most vivid self-consciousness. The individual believed that his natural and social environment was alien to his deeper spiritual interests. He therefore withdrew into himself. He believed himself to have but one duty, the salvation of his soul; and that duty required him to search his innermost springs of action in order to uproot any that might compromise him with the world and turn him from G.o.d. The drama of life was enacted within the circle of his own self-consciousness. Citizenship, bodily health, all forms of appreciation and knowledge, were identified in the parts they played here. In short the Christian consciousness, although renunciation was its deepest motive, was reflexive and centripetal to a degree hitherto unknown among the European peoples. And when with St. Augustine theoretical interests once more vigorously a.s.serted themselves, this new emphasis was in the very foreground. St. Augustine wished to begin his system of thought with a first indubitable certainty, and selected neither being nor ideas, but _self_. St. Augustine's genius was primarily religious, and the "Confessions," in which he records the story of his hard winning of peace and right relations with G.o.d, is his most intimate book. How faithfully does he represent himself, and the blend of paganism and Christianity which was distinctive of his age, when in his systematic writings he draws upon religion for his knowledge of truth! In all my living, he argues, whether I sin or turn to G.o.d, whether I doubt or believe, whether I know or am ignorant, in all _I know that I am I_. Each and every state of my consciousness is a state of my self, and as such, sure evidence of my self's existence. If one were to follow St. Augustine's reflections further, one would find him reasoning from his own finite and evil self to an infinite and perfect Self, which centres like his in the conviction that I am I, but is endowed with all power and all worth. One would find him reflecting upon the possible union with G.o.d through the exaltation of the human self-consciousness. But this conception of G.o.d as the perfect self is so much a prophecy of things to come, that more than a dozen centuries elapsed before it was explicitly formulated by the post-Kantians. We must follow its more gradual development in the philosophies of Descartes and Kant.

[Sidenote: Descartes's Argument for the Independence of the Thinking Self.]

- 185. When at the close of the sixteenth century the Frenchman, Rene Descartes, sought to construct philosophy anew and upon secure foundations, he too selected as the initial certainty of thought the thinker's knowledge of himself. This principle now received its cla.s.sic formulation in the proposition, _Cogito ergo sum_--"I think, hence I am." The argument does not differ essentially from that of St.

Augustine, but it now finds a place in a systematic and critical metaphysics. In that my thinking is certain of itself, says Descartes, in that I know myself before I know aught else, my self can never be dependent for its being upon anything else that I may come to know. A thinking self, with its knowledge and its volition, is quite capable of subsisting of itself. Such is, indeed, not the case with a finite self, for all finitude is significant of limitation, and in recognizing my limitations I postulate the infinite being or G.o.d. But the relation of my self to a physical world is quite without necessity. Human nature, with soul and body conjoined, is a combination of two substances, neither of which is a necessary consequence of the other. As a result of this combination the soul is to some extent affected by the body, and the body is to some extent directed by the soul; but the body could conceivably be an automaton, as the soul could conceivably be, and will in another life become, a free spirit. The consequences of this dualism for epistemology are very grave. If knowledge be the activity of a self-subsistent thinking spirit, how can it reveal the nature of an external world? The natural order is now literally "external." It is true that the whole body of exact science, that mechanical system to which Descartes attached so much importance, falls within the range of the soul's own thinking. But what a.s.surance is there that it refers to a province of its own--a physical world in s.p.a.ce? Descartes can only suppose that "clear and distinct" ideas must be trusted as faithful representations. It is true the external world makes its presence known directly, when it breaks in upon the soul in sense-perception. But Descartes's rationalism and love of mathematics forbade his attaching importance to this criterion. Real nature, that exactly definable and predictable order of moving bodies defined in physics, is not known through sense-perception, but through thought. Its necessities are the necessities of reason. Descartes finds himself, then, in the perplexing position of seeking an internal criterion for an external world. The problem of knowledge so stated sets going the whole epistemological movement of the eighteenth century, from Locke through Berkeley and Hume to Kant. And the issue of this development is the absolute idealism of Kant's successors.

[Sidenote: Empirical Reaction of the English Philosophers.]

- 186. Of the English philosophers who prepare the way for the epistemology of Kant, Hume is the most radical and momentous. It was he who roused Kant from his "dogmatic slumbers" to the task of the "Critical Philosophy." Hume is one of the two possible consequences of Descartes. One who attaches greater importance to the rational necessities of science than to its external reference, is not unwilling that nature should be swallowed up in mind. With Malebranche, Descartes's immediate successor in France, nature is thus provided for within the archetypal mind of G.o.d. With the English philosophers, on the other hand, externality is made the very mark of nature, and as a consequence sense-perception becomes the criterion of scientific truth.

This empirical theory of knowledge, inaugurated and developed by Locke and Berkeley, culminates in Hume's designation of the _impression_ as the distinguishing element of nature, at once making up its content and certifying to its externality. The processes of nature are successions of impressions; and the laws of nature are their uniformities, or the expectations of uniformity which their repet.i.tions engender. Hume does not hesitate to draw the logical conclusion. If the final mark of truth is the presence to sense of the individual element, then science can consist only of items of information and probable generalizations concerning their sequences. The effect is observed to follow upon the cause in fact, but there is no understanding of its necessity; therefore no absolute certainty attaches to the future effects of any cause.

[Sidenote: To Save Exact Science Kant Makes it Dependent on Mind.]

- 187. But what has become of the dream of the mathematical physicist?

Is the whole system of Newton, that brilliant triumph of the mechanical method, unfounded and dogmatic? It is the logical instability of this body of knowledge, made manifest in the well-founded scepticism of Hume, that rouses Kant to a reexamination of the whole foundation of natural science. The general outline of his a.n.a.lysis has been developed above.

It is of importance here to understand its relations to the problem of Descartes. Contrary to the view of the English philosophers, natural science is, says Kant, the work of the mind. The certainty of the causal relation is due to the human inability to think otherwise. Hume is mistaken in supposing that mere sensation gives us any knowledge of nature. The very least experience of objects involves the employment of principles which are furnished by the mind. Without the employment of such principles, or in bare sensation, there is no intelligible meaning whatsoever. But once admit the employment of such principles and formulate them systematically, and the whole Newtonian order of nature is seen to follow from them. Furthermore, since these principles or categories are the conditions of human experience, are the very instruments of knowledge, they are valid wherever there is any experience or knowledge. There is but one way to make anything at all out of nature, and that is to conceive it as an order of necessary events in s.p.a.ce and time. Newtonian science is part of such a general conception, and is therefore necessary if knowledge is to be possible at all, even the least. Thus Kant turns upon Hume, and shuts him up to the choice between the utter abnegation of all knowledge, including the knowledge of his own scepticism, and the acceptance of the whole body of exact science.

But with nature thus conditioned by the necessities of thought, what has become of its externality? That, Kant admits, has indeed vanished. Kant does not attempt, as did Descartes, to hold that the nature which mind constructs and controls, exists also outside of mind. The nature that is known is on that very account phenomenal, anthropocentric--created by its cognitive conditions. Descartes was right in maintaining that sense-perception certifies to the existence of a world outside the mind, but mistaken in calling it nature and identifying it with the realm of science. In short, Kant acknowledges the external world, and names it the _thing-in-itself_; but insists that because it is outside of mind it is outside of knowledge. Thus is the certainty of science saved at the cost of its metaphysical validity. It is necessarily true, but only of a conditioned or dependent world. And in saving science Kant has at the same time prejudiced metaphysics in general. For the human or naturalistic way of knowing is left in sole possession of the field, with the higher interest of reasons in the ultimate nature of being, degraded to the rank of practical faith.

[Sidenote: The Post-Kantians Transform Kant's Mind-in-general into an Absolute Mind.]

- 188. The transformation of this critical and agnostic doctrine into absolute idealism is inevitable. The metaphysical interest was bound to avail itself of the speculative suggestiveness with which the Kantian philosophy abounds. The transformation turns upon Kant's a.s.sumption that whatever is constructed by the mind is on that account phenomenon or appearance. Kant has carried along the presumption that whatever is act or content of mind is on that account not _real_ object or _thing-in-itself_. We have seen that this is generally accepted as true of the relativities of sense-perception. But is it true of thought? The post-Kantian idealist maintains that _that depends upon the thought_.

The content of private individual thinking is in so far not real object; but it does not follow that this is true of such thinking as is universally valid. Now Kant has deduced his categories for thought in general. There are no empirical cases of thinking except the human thinkers; but the categories are not the property of any one human individual or any group of such individuals. They are the conditions of _experience in general_, and of every possibility of experience. The transition to absolute idealism is now readily made. _Thought in general_ becomes the _absolute mind_, and experience in general its content. The thing-in-itself drops out as having no meaning. The objectivity to which it testified is provided for in the completeness and self-sufficiency which is attributed to the absolute experience.

Indeed, an altogether new definition of subjective and objective replaces the old. The subjective is that which is only insufficiently thought, as in the case of relativity and error; the objective is that which is completely thought. Thus the natural order is indeed phenomenal; but only because the principles of science are not the highest principles of thought, and not because nature is the fruit of thought. Thus Hegel expresses his relation to Kant as follows:

"According to Kant, the things that we know about are _to us_ appearances only, and we can never know their essential nature, which belongs to another world, which we cannot approach. . . . The true statement of the case is as follows.

The things of which we have direct consciousness are mere phenomena, not for us only, but in their own nature; and the true and proper case of these things, finite as they are, is to have their existence founded not in themselves, but in the universal divine idea. This view of things, it is true, is as idealist as Kant's, but in contradistinction to the subjective idealism of the Critical Philosophy should be termed Absolute Idealism."[382:9]

[Sidenote: The Direct Argument. The Inference from the Finite Mind to the Infinite Mind.]

- 189. Absolute idealism is thus reached after a long and devious course of development. But the argument may be stated much more briefly. Plato, it will be remembered, found that experience tends ever to transcend itself. The thinker finds himself compelled to pursue the ideal of immutable and universal truth, and must identify the ultimate being with that ideal. Similarly Hegel says:

"That upward spring of the mind signifies that the being which the world has is only a semblance, no real being, no absolute truth; it signifies that beyond and above that appearance, truth abides in G.o.d, so that true being is another name for G.o.d."[382:10]

The further argument of absolute idealism differs from that of Plato in that the dependence of truth upon the mind is accepted as a first principle. The ideal with which experience is informed is now _the state of perfect knowledge_, rather than the system of absolute truth. The content of the state of perfect knowledge will indeed be the system of absolute truth, but none the less _content_, precisely as finite knowledge is the content of a finite mind. In pursuing the truth, I who pursue, aim to realize in myself a certain highest state of knowledge.

Were I to know all truth I should indeed have ceased to be the finite individual who began the quest, but the evolution would be continuous and the character of self-consciousness would never have been lost. I may say, in short, that G.o.d or being, is my perfect cognitive self.

The argument for absolute idealism is a constructive interpretation of the subjectivistic contention that knowledge can never escape the circle of its own activity and states. To meet the demand for a final and standard truth, a demand which realism meets with its doctrine of a being independent of any mind, this philosophy defines a _standard mind_. The impossibility of defining objects in terms of relativity to a finite self, conducts dialectically to the conception of the _absolute self_. The sequel to my error or exclusiveness, is truth or inclusiveness. The outcome of the dialectic is determined by the symmetry of the ant.i.thesis. Thus, corrected experience implies a last correcting experience; partial cognition, complete cognition; empirical subject, transcendental subject; finite mind, an absolute mind. The following statement is taken from a contemporary exponent of the philosophy:

"What you and I lack, when we lament our human ignorance, is simply a certain desirable and logically possible state of mind, or type of experience; to wit, a state of mind in which we should wisely be able to say that we had fulfilled in experience what we now have merely in idea, namely, the knowledge, the immediate and felt presence, of what we now call the Absolute Reality. . . . There is an Absolute Experience for which the conception of an absolute reality, _i. e._, the conception of a system of ideal truth, is fulfilled by the very contents that get presented to this experience. This Absolute Experience is related to our experience as an organic whole to its own fragments. It is an experience which finds fulfilled all that the completest thought can conceive as genuinely possible. Herein lies its definition as an Absolute. For the Absolute Experience, as for ours, there are data, contents, facts. But these data, these contents, express, for the Absolute Experience, its own meaning, its thought, its ideas. Contents beyond these that it possesses, the Absolute Experience knows to be, in genuine truth, impossible. Hence its contents are indeed particular,--a selection from the world of bare or merely conceptual possibilities,--but they form a self-determined whole, than which nothing completer, more organic, more fulfilled, more transparent, or more complete in meaning, is concretely or genuinely possible. On the other hand, these contents are not foreign to those of our finite experience, but are inclusive of them in the unity of one life."[385:11]

[Sidenote: The Realistic Tendency in Absolute Idealism.]

- 190. As has been already intimated, at the opening of this chapter, the inclusion of the whole of reality within a single self is clearly a questionable proceeding. The need of avoiding the relativism of empirical idealism is evident. But if the very meaning of the self-consciousness be due to a certain selection and exclusion within the general field of experience, it is equally evident that the relativity of self-consciousness can never be overcome through appealing to a higher self. One must appeal _from_ the self to the realm of things as they are. Indeed, although the exponents of this philosophy use the language of spiritualism, and accept the idealistic epistemology, their absolute being tends ever to escape the special characters of the self.

And inasmuch as the absolute self is commonly set over against the finite or empirical self, as the standard and test of truth, it is the less distinguishable from the realist's order of independent beings.

[Sidenote: The Conception of Self-consciousness Central in the Ethics of Absolute Idealism. Kant.]

- 191. But however much absolute idealism may tend to abandon its idealism for the sake of its absolutism within the field of metaphysics, such is not the case within the field of ethics and religion. The conception of the self here receives a new emphasis. The same self-consciousness which admits to the highest truth is the evidence of man's practical dignity. In virtue of his immediate apprehension of the principles of selfhood, and his direct partic.i.p.ation in the life of spirit, man may be said to possess the innermost secret of the universe.

In order to achieve goodness he must therefore recognize and express _himself_. The Kantian philosophy is here again the starting-point. It was Kant who first gave adequate expression to the Christian idea of the moral self-consciousness.

"_Duty!_ Thou sublime and mighty name that dost embrace nothing charming or insinuating, but requirest submission, and yet seekest not to move the will by threatening aught that would arouse natural aversion or terror, but merely holdest forth a law which of itself finds entrance into the mind, . . . a law before which all inclinations are dumb, even though they secretly counterwork it; what origin is there worthy of thee, and where is to be found the root of thy n.o.ble descent which proudly rejects all kindred with the inclinations . . . ? It can be nothing less than a power which elevates man above himself, . . . a power which connects him with an order of things that only the understanding can conceive, with a world which at the same time commands the whole sensible world, and with it the empirically determinable existence of man in time, as well as the sum total of all ends."[387:12]