# The Limits of Evolution/Essay 3

LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
MONISM MOVING TOWARD PLURALISM, THROUGH AGNOSTICISM AND ITS SELF-DISSOLUTION
In Germany, the central home of modern thought, there began, about the year 1865, a philosophical movement, or a group of related movements, of a more novel and striking character than any since the time of Kant and his four chief successors, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Herbart. It has not yet entirely run its course, for two of its inaugurators are still (1900) living and productive, while the third, though he passed away a quarter of a century ago, left behind him a decided influence. The movement is indicative of the prevailing Zeitgeist, and worth our study as an expression of the tone of current culture. Our chief interest in it, however, will be for its significant drift beyond its own prepossessions, and toward a deeper view, through its own inner dialectical dissolution. ​
In the total stream of this movement there are discernible three main currents, the idealistic, the materialistic, and the agnostic, — or “critical,” as its adherents prefer to name the last. This division, however, is not distinctive of the period, being merely the continuation of a world-old divergence in doctrine. But it is distinctive of the new situation that these several views are all defended from standpoints more or less empirical. The rallying-cry of “Back to Kant!” with which the movement began, was soon succeeded by a more adventurous cry of “Beyond Kant!” This “Beyond,” owing mainly to the predominant interest in the theories of evolution and natural selection, was construed as lying in the region indicated by the empirical method of which these theories are the extolled result. In the case of materialism, to be sure, this empiricism is natural and nowise unexpected; but the occurrence of it in the case of idealism and of agnosticism, after Kant’s day and in his own land, and among thinkers long given to the study of his works, is a genuine surprise. That the very principles of the Critique of Pure Reason, the historic stronghold of the a priori, should suffer the complete transformation of being made to support a posteriori philosophy, is a performance not far from astonishing. Yet it was managed, and constitutes the distinguishing feat of the school calling themselves Neo-Kantians. ​
Each of these three main currents has had a leading representative. There are thus three men who command our attention, as in their several ways typical of the dominant intellectual interests of their time, — Eduard von Hartmann, Eugen Dühring, and Friedrich Albert Lange. The first stands for such idealism as is now in vogue, derived in a long line of degeneration from Hegel, through such “left-wing” adherents as Strauss and Arnold Ruge, Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach, and from Kant through the distorting medium of Schopenhauer. The second represents materialism, with the singular trait of blending with the legitimate line of its empirical defences certain remarkable elements of a transcendental logic. The third illustrates agnosticism, with the additional and peculiar interest of being the Neo-Kantian par excellence.
Hartmann was born in Berlin, in 1842, the son of a general in the Prussian army, in which he held a commission himself till disease that left him a permanent cripple turned him aside into the career of letters. Dühring, also born in Berlin, in 1833, began his career in the Prussian department of justice, but ​was erelong compelled to abandon this, through loss of his sight. In spite of his blindness, however, he has kept up the most copious production and publication. In contrast to Hartmann, who leads the quiet life of a man of letters well-to-do, he has tasted no little of the bitterness of the human lot. For many years he won much reputation as a privat-docent at the University of Berlin; but in 1877 he was dismissed from this office on account of his persistent and galling attacks on some of the scientific and philosophical performances of certain of his colleagues, particularly Helmholtz, and since then he has remained in the comparative quiet of private life. Lange, born near Solingen, in 1828, made his university course chiefly at Bonn, where his principal interest seemed to be in philology and pedagogics. He then passed some years in practical life, partly as bookseller, partly as secretary of the Duisburg chamber of commerce. Later, he was made professor of philosophy at Zurich, where, in his case too, disease left its lasting marks in the effects of a surgical operation that nearly cost him his life. In 1872, he was called from Zurich to Marburg, but died there, in 1875, after prolonged sufferings, in the bloom of his intellectual powers, to the unceasing regret of that large body of his younger ​countrymen who were beginning to see in him a philosophic force of far-reaching effect.
Though the three men were so considerably separated in years, they began to act upon the public almost simultaneously. Lange’s History of Materialism, so noted in its later form, first appeared in 1865; Dühring’s first important work, the Natural Dialectic, was published the same year; while Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious came first from the press in 1868. The main lines of their several theories we are now to trace and endeavour to value.
I
In opening a study of Hartmann and his large circle of readers, we come at once upon the sphere of an influence whose reach in the present “enlightened public” of Germany it is impossible to overlook; I refer, of course, to Schopenhauer. Hartmann is generally and justly recognised as the mental heir of Schopenhauer, in direct succession. His so-called system, however, is far inferior in intellectual quality to that of his predecessor. He differs from Schopenhauer in giving to the empirical a great predominance over the a priori method, and in his doctrine concerning the nature of the Absolute. The former fact expresses his deference to the " stupendous ​achievements” of recent science; the latter, his ambition to frame a system that should blend in a single higher unity whatever of preceding theory he knew — Schopenhauer’s pessimism and sundry idealistic gleanings and fragments, no doubt also first suggested by Schopenhauer, but in detail borrowed largely from Schelling and the “left-wing” adherents of Hegel.
Schopenhauer, seizing upon Kant's doctrine of the ex mente origin of Nature, and the consequently phenomenal character of the world, asked the question that cannot but rise upon Kant’s results. What, then, is this “Thing-in-itself,” assumed as the source of the sensations that our a priori reason coordinates into a cosmos? He felt the force of Kant’s arguments for the limitation of knowledge to the world of experience, the force of the contradictions into which reason was apparently shown to fall when attempting to apply its categories to a Thing-in-itself supposed to lie beyond that region. But he also felt the necessity of the Thing-in-itself, of an Absolute, in order to the relativity which, according to Kant, was an essential feature of knowledge. He perceived, too, the chasm that separated Kant’s doctrines of the will and of the intellect. ​Accordingly, he proposed to remedy both defects of the Kantian theory at once, by the doctrine that reason is only theoretical and the will not phenomenal but noumenal. In short, he comes to the dogma that the Absolute is simply Will, or what might more fitly be called Desire — a darkling, dumb out-striving, in itself unconscious, whose impulsions, under a perpetual thwarting from some mysterious Check, give rise to what we call consciousness.
The whole of being was thus reduced to terms of inner or subjective life. There was the dark undertow of the ever-heaving Desire, and woven over it the shining image-world of Perception: the universe was summed up as Will and Representation, Of this Will we knew nothing, save that it was insatiable; the forms of consciousness were not its expression, but its repression — its negation. Ever the higher these rose in the ascending evolution of Nature, in reaction against its wilder and wilder throbbings, ever the more bitterly must their necessary finitude thwart the infinity of its blind desire. Universal life was thus, from its own conditions and essence, foredoomed to misery. Its core was ​anguish, its outlook was despair. And all the facts of existence, from wheresoever taken in the ascending levels of consciousness, confirmed but too darkly this haggard prophecy of a priori thought: everywhere the overplus of pain, everywhere illusion dispelled in disappointment. There was, and could be, but one avenue of escape — death and oblivion.
Upon this fact rose the whole structure of ethics. The “whole duty of man” was simply: Suppress the will to live. All moral feeling was summarised in Pity, and all moral action in ascetic living, to the end that, the tone of life being perpetually lowered, the Will might slowly sink into quiescence, and so life itself at last fade out into the repose and silence of annihilation.
Such was the philosophy, no doubt at bottom theoretically hollow, but still wearing on its surface a certain tragic fascination, that stirred Hartmann to attempt a new composition of similar tone on the ancient theme of Man. In the minds of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, let it be noted in passing, the philosophic problem takes for its leading question a phase of Kant’s “What may I hope for?” The chief concern for them is. What is life all worth? They are both possessed by a profound sense of the misery of existence; but while, under Schopenhauer’s treatment, the pessimistic strain seems to sound out only at the close, and appears ​to issue from conditions that bear solely on the purely theoretical question of the origin of experience, there can hardly be any doubt that with Hartmann the pessimism was first, and the hypothesis of the Unconscious an afterthought to explain it. His problem has the look of being this: Given misery as the sum of existence, what must be presupposed in order to account for it?
The method and the contents of his solution both show what a weight empirical evidence has with him, in contrast with dialectical. He professes a certain allegiance to the latter, and also makes free resort to a priori deduction of a somewhat antiquated type; but his general drift to fact, induction, and analogy is the patent and distinguishing feature of his book. As the explanation of his problem, and, indeed, of life itself, he seizes upon a striking but occult class of facts in physiological and psychological history. There is given directly in our experience, he says, the manifest presence of an unconscious agency. He refers in this to the class of experiences com​monly grouped under the term “reflex action”: facts of somnambulism, trance, clairvoyance, memory independent of conscious perception, and instinctive knowledge — all those “unconscious modifications,” in short, the emphasising of which formed such a memorable dissonance in the thinking of Sir William Hamilton. The recognition of “unconscious ideation” he traces clearly, too, to Leibnitz, to Kant, to Schelling, and to Schopenhauer. The Unconscious is actually here with us, Hartmann holds: there is a something beneath our consciousness, that performs for us, even when consciousness is suspended, all that is most characteristic of life, and that, too, with a swift and infallible surety and precision. What less can we do, then, than accept this Unconscious as the one absolute reality? We accept, and so come by the Philosophy of the Unconscious.
Just here, however, Hartmann is confronted by the warning of Kant. On grounds of a critical determination of the limits of reason, Kantianism forbids the philosopher to undertake the discussion of an object thus removed beyond the bounds of possible experience. This warning must first of all be silenced. So Hartmann now provides a metaphysics to meet the Kantian thesis that knowledge can only be of the phenomenal. Here he unavoidably leaves his favourite basis of facts, and resorts to hypotheses purely ​a priori. He proceeds in the light of the supposed contradiction involved in any transcendent Thing-in-itself — an assumed background, as it were, hid behind the vision-world of experience, this phenomenon rising thus between the Thing and the mind, and so veiling it. Hence he proposes as the remedy the bringing of the Absolute within the veil of the phenomenon, and, so to speak, between it and the mind, to lie there as if an originative tissue, connecting the two as it begets them. In other words, he makes the Absolute, construed as his Unconscious, the immanent source of two concomitant streams of appearance: the one objective, the sensible world itself, the other subjective, the stream of the conscious perceptions of the world. These two streams, as both flowing from the one Unconscious under identically corresponding conditions, are in incessant counterpart. Thus knowledge, though not a copy from natural objects, is an exact counter-image to them, engendered from a common source. Consciousness and Nature are both pure show (Schein). The world is an “objective apparition” (ein objectiver Schein), perception is a duplicate “subjective apparition” (ein subjectiver Schein) and both are exhaled from the depths of the Unconscious: phenomenal existence is thus doubled throughout. Space, Time, and the Causal Nexus are also duplicated, as well as the items they contain or connect. ​All, instead of being merely subjective, are objective also.
The Kantian doctrine — that Space, Time, and Causation are merely subjective — being thus disposed of, its corollary of the empirical limitation of knowledge likewise falls away, and Hartmann assumes he may proceed with his metaphysical programme. First, however, the method of philosophy must be more precisely accentuated. How can knowledge of the Absolute, which (as the Unconscious) lies wholly beyond our consciousness, ever arise? By virtue of two facts, replies Hartmann: our “mystic sense of union with the Unconscious,” and that uniformity of Nature which constitutes the basis of induction. The organon of philosophy has thus two factors, Mystic and Induction. From the former come all the clues to knowledge, the mysterious “suggestions” of the Unconscious itself; from the latter, the verification of the clues, as they are followed into the complicated system of experience. It is by induction alone that philosophy distinguishes itself from religion; for religion and philosophy both alike take their origin from the mystic of the “suggestions,” though religion keeps these mysterious whisperings in the obscure but kindred form of myth, while philosophy, following the self-revelation of Nature in induction, lays them bare in their clear and literal truth.
By the light of this method, now, the Unconscious ​so far reveals its real nature that we know it is something infallibly and infinitely intelligent. Strictly, it is not the Unconscious, but rather the Subconscious, the Unbeknown (das Unbewusste). In its infallible infinite-swiftness of perception, however, as experience testifies of it, there is a transcendent type of the flashing inspirations of genius. It is therefore not self-conscious; its intelligence is clairvoyant, and has no “large discourse of reason, seeing the end in the beginning.” But as intelligent energy, it must contain grounds for the two constituents that we find present in all intelligent activity within experience — will and representation; and here is the point at which to correct and complete Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the Absolute. Will is not the Absolute: for will as well as representation is part of conscious experience; will is itself phenomenal. Rather are will and representation the two coordinate primal manifestations of the one Unconscious; and we thus get an inductive basis for Will and Idea as metaphysical realities, both unconscious, however, — factors inherent in the being of the Unconscious.
Here in the Unconscious, too, is the truth of Schelling’s famous Neutrum — the something neither subject nor object, that he set up for the Absolute; and no longer, Hartmann thinks, a target for Hegel’s “the ​Absolute popping up as if shot out of a pistol,” since it is now construed in terms vouched for by actual experience. Moreover, the conception is here found that will embosom the system of Hegel himself: the “logical Idea” (das logische Idee) falls as a mere constituent into the vaster being of the Unconscious. For what is the Unconscious, as revealed in experience, but that which works by the incessant interplay of representation and will? And just as will in its essence is only blind Struggle, so is representation in its essence nothing other than luminous Idea — the all-embracing logical bond that grasps the vague of sensation into distinct objects, and these objects again into genera, and these genera at last into a single organised whole of being. The Unconscious, then, is primordially Will and Idea; and from the connexion of these arises the twofold world of finitude, pouring forth from the Unconscious in the counterpart streams of object and subject, of sensible world and conscious perception. ​
Hartmann is now at length well ashore on the familiar coasts of Schopenhauerland. This World-child of clairvoyant virgin Idea and darkling brutal Will is no product of far-sighted love, endowed with an exhaustless future of joy. It is the offspring of violation, of a chance burst of passion, and its being carries in it the germs of misery ever expanding. This gloomy theme Hartmann now pursues statistically over all the provinces of experience, seeking to prove that suffering everywhere outbalances happiness, that “he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” the pitch of anguish rising higher and higher as Nature ascends in the scale of consciousness, and especially as man enlarges and quickens that intelligence whose chief result, from the nature of the case, must be the keener and keener sense of the deceitfulness of life.
Nor, continues Hartmann, let any one hope to evade this conclusion by theories of possible compensation. Men no doubt usually live in one of Three Stages of Illusion in regard to this essential misery of life. They either think that even in this world the sum of joy so far exceeds the sum of sorrow as to make existence here substantially good; or, if sobered out of this by inexorable experience, they take refuge in the Hereafter, in the prospect of an endless opportunity beyond the grave, — a refuge of lies, for the one Unconscious is the sole basis ​of consciousness, there is no indestructible self, death is simply subsidence into the absolute vague, and immortality is therefore a delusion; or, finally, surrendering both of these dreams, they resort to the future, and indulge in the illusion of hope, — this world can yet be made the abode of happiness, and let us make it so. But, admonishes Hartmann, all these fancies ignore the contradiction that lies in the very heart of existence; there is but one plain moral in the drama of experience, and that is the utter hopelessness of life. The world may not, indeed, be the worst world possible, but its being is certainly worse than its not being. It were better if the world had never come to be. Ethics consequently is summed up in the single precept, Make an end of it!
For the Will being in its essence but wild unrest, both metaphysics and experience teach that the only way of escape from the misery inherent in life is to bring the Will to quiescence; or rather, speaking plainly, to blot it out. And in consciousness, seat though this is of sorrow while it lasts, we have the light to the one sure way of deliverance; as consciousness is the preparation for the rescue of the Idea from the clutch of the Will. The way of salvation is the way of annihilation. Our sole intelligent desire, won in the bitter school of experience, is the longing for release from struggle, the wish to be delivered from this delusive Maya of consciousness ​and to pass into motionless Nirvâna. Hasten, then, the day when the pitch of misery shall have brought the race to the saving anguish of despair, and mankind in united and complete renunciation shall execute a universal auto da fé, by final self-immolation ending the tragedy of existence forever!
Nevertheless, while this is the sum of its theory, ethics may have the important practical question to settle, How shall we make an end of things the surest and soonest? There is here indeed no duty, there is no such thing as duty; there is simply a possible satisfaction of the desire for release from misery. But to this end there may be an alternative of means. We may each promote the end, either by an indirect and negative or else by a direct and positive agency. By following the traditional standards of virtue, we may advance society in order, peace, prosperity, and apparent welfare, the indirect though real outcome of which is however but the profounder despair; or we may by passion, fraud, and violence heighten the rising flood of misery directly. Which each will do is in fact a matter of ​temperament and circumstance. For pessimism does nothing actively to promote what traditional ethics would brand as immorality; it merely leaves the so-called morality or immorality to be dealt with by the fate inherent in existence. The interaction of both is the compound force that drives the universe surely to the desired dissolution.
Moreover, the negative or indirect method of pessimist ethics gives rise to problems of history, of politics, of religion; for one theory of these matters, put in practice, may promote the final catastrophe more surely and swiftly than another. Thus pessimism has its Philosophy of History, in which history appears as the evolution of the Three Stages of Illusion mentioned above. The great scene of the first stage was the pagan world, typical in which was the Hellenic joy in sensuous life, and the Roman glory in conquest and organisation. The scene of the second is Christendom, so far as it is untouched by decay of its essential dogmas. The scene of the third is the modern world of “enlightenment,” of “advanced” thinking, of political and economic reorganisation in the interest of “the good time coming.” Following this is the surely predestined disillusion that is to lead to the final dissolution.
Pessimism has also its Philosophy of Politics. Its ideal polity is a “strong government,” based on the ​theory of socialism and administered in the socialistic interest to the remotest detail.
Finally, pessimism has, as a rounded philosophy must have, its Philosophy of Religion. According to this, religion is the consecration in myth and mystery of the meaning that philosophy puts rationally. Religion therefore undergoes an evolution side by side with the development of philosophy. Accordingly pessimism sees all religions arrayed in two successive groups, — the Religions of Illusion and the Religion of Disillusion. The former break up again in accordance with the Three Stages. Paganism is the religion of the first stage; Christianity, untainted by rationalism, the religion of the second; “free religion,” “liberal Christianity,” the “positive religion,” “ethical culture,” the “church of humanity,” — all the manifold experiments at making a “religion” whose interest is to be centred in this world alone, — constitute the religion of the third. Over against all these stands Hartmann’s “religion of the future,” the Religion of Intelligence (die Religion des Geistes), as he likes to call it, whose priests are to celebrate the doctrine, solemnise the rites, and inspire the devotees of the great Nirvâna — the eternal Silence and Blank.
These are the main lines of the theory that enlists the adhesion of the throng of jaded or faded ​sentimentalists who make up the body of Hartmann’s admirers. In contrast with the Germany that responded to the sober and invigorating views of a Kant, a Fichte, or a Hegel, these people are a curious and disheartening study. Apart from the revulsion that minds of moral vigour must feel at such results, the lack of critical logic exposed in the acceptance of such a net of contradictions is a telling evidence of the decline in theoretical tone among the “cultivated classes.” Limp as this doctrine hangs, with its astonishing attempt to construe the Absolute by means of pictorial thought, by adjustments of components set in serial concomitance (the duplicate worlds of object and subject), by a temporal antecedence to the world of Nature (the Unconscious in its “privacy,” before the world arose), in short, by means of categories in reality mechanical, flung on the screen of Space and Time, — to say nothing of its vain struggles to bridge the chasm between consciousness and the Unconscious, of its Absolute at once unconscious and conscious, of its proving the reality of transcendent knowledge by the immanence of the Unconscious in the duplicate worlds and therefore in the world of cognition, when it had already assumed this transcendency of knowledge to establish the existence of the Unconscious, — despite all this, there seems to be a sufficient multitude to whom it gives a satisfaction, and who are even will​ing to do battle, at least on field of paper and under fire of ink, for the high privilege of a general self-annihilation in the considerably distant future.
It is true, however, and encouraging, that this class of minds does not form the whole of the German or other public; that authority goes by weight and not by numbers; and that Germans of the higher and more thorough order of culture early discerned the bubble, and pricked it without ado. On the other hand, it would be materially unjust to take leave of Hartmann and Schopenhauer without emphatically acknowledging the service they have both rendered by so completely unveiling the pessimism latent in any theory that represents the Eternal as impersonal. They cast a light far back of their own work, and illuminate for our instruction the void which confronts us, in the systems of their greater predecessors, when we look for a doctrine of the Real that answers to our need of a Personal God.
II
When we turn now to Dühring, we find ourselves suddenly in the opposite extreme of the emotional climate. Dühring is materialist, but he is optimist still more. Indeed, it seems not unlikely that he is optimist before he is materialist, just as Hartmann ​is pessimist first and expounder of the Unconscious afterward. In talcing him as the representative of materialism, I have purposely passed by names far more widely known, — those of Moleschott, Büchner, and Carl Vogt, for instance, — not only because these are all men of popular rather than of severe methods, having far less weight in the scientific world than he, but because he is a man of far more scope, of really thorough attainments, of positive originality, and of a certain delicacy of intellectual perception characteristic of the true thinker. Haeckel, who by his extravagant ardour in advocating atheistic evolution, his vast knowledge of biological details, and his high repute among his associates in science, fills so large a place in the minds of most readers as a representative of materialism, must be counted out, according to his own public and repeated protests, as not intending or teaching materialism at all, but a monism ​of “substance at once conscious and material,” so that everything is for him “ensouled.” Besides, even were his protests disregarded, he would here have to give way to Dühring, on the ground of not concerning himself seriously with the philosophic foundations of materialism, but only with such of its phenomenal details as belong more especially to organic existence.
Dühring names his system the Philosophy of the Actual. This title sounds almost like a direct challenge to Hartmann, as much as to say, “No mystical Subconscious, no incognisable Background here!” And to have this really so is Dühring’s first and last endeavour. The Absolute for him is just this world of sense, taken literally as we find it; briefly and frankly, matter. As we perceive and think it, so it is — extended, figured, resistant, moving, a total of separate units collected into a figured whole, and into a uniformity of processes, by mechanical causation; in short, a variable constant, a changeless substantive whole undergoing by changeless laws ceaseless changes in form and in detail.
This striking conception of an indissoluble polar union between Permanence and Change is according to Dühring the vital nerve of the Actual, and the key to its entire philosophy. But this polar ​coherence, he thinks, is only possible by the Actual’s consisting of certain primitive elements, definite in size, figure, and number, subject to definite laws of combination and change of combination. The permanent in the Actual is thus (1) Atoms, (2) Types, or the primitive Kinds of the atoms, the origin of species in Nature, and (3) Laws, determining the possible combinations of the types and the order of succession in these combinations. The variable, on the other hand, is the series of changing combinations as they actually occur; these amount simply to a change in the form of the Actual, in its parts and in its whole. The evolution of this form moves toward a certain result, which, as necessarily evolved from the primitive conditions and therefore involved in them, may be regarded, though only in the sense of a mechanical destination, as the Final Purpose of the World.
The Actual, then, taken in its entire career and being, presents the form of a self-completing system of relations. In other words, there is a Logic of Nature, inherent in the world itself. To reproduce this logic in the form of our knowledge is the aim and sum of science; to reproduce it not only so, but also in disposition and life, is the sum of philosophy. Philosophy being thus the aim and ​the distilled result of all the sciences, its method and organon must be identical with theirs. The method is hypothesis, verified by experimental induction and criticised by thought. The organon is the imagination checked by the understanding, and the understanding checked by dialectic. The imagination gives us the requisite hypotheses; the understanding tests and settles their rival claims, dialectic purging it from the illusory contradictions into which it naturally runs when facing the problems of ultimate reality. These problems all concern the notion of infinity, either in the form of the infinitely great or the infinitely small; and the contradictions, seemingly unavoidable, to which they give rise, are in truth, says Dühring, mere illusions, springing from the lack of a First Principle that has genuine reality. These contradictions, he continues, formed the basis of Kant’s boasted dialectic, by which he is thought to have exposed the illusion hiding in our very faculties. Kant would have it that these contradictions issue from the inmost nature of the understanding itself, when it presumes to grapple with things as they are; but their appearance in the form of his famous “antinomies” was in fact owing to his imperfect conception of the origin of knowledge, and his consequent falsification of Nature into a mere phenomenon.
With this assertion, Dühring confronts Kant’s ​standing challenge, “How can you make out that perceptions and thoughts are true of the Real, when from the nature of the case they must be products of our a priori cognition, and therefore shut in to the perpetual contemplation of themselves?” “By searching in the right place,” Dühring answers in substance, “and finding that ‘common root’ of sense and understanding of which you yourself, Kant, have more than rarely spoken, but the investigation of which you have found it so much easier to evade.” What sort of “criticism of reason” is it, he goes on in effect, that stops with thrusting experience into the limbo of an abstraction called the a priori, and never asking what the Prius thus implied must be? Man brings his perceptive and thinking organisation into the world with him, doubtless; but from whence? Whence indeed, if not from the bosom of Nature? Let us but once think the Actual as the Actual — as a continuous whole, unfolding toward its Final Purpose — with man and his conscious organism verily in it, and the reality of knowledge becomes intelligible enough. For consciousness is then no longer an imprinted copy of things, as the truth-cancelling and unthinkable theory of dualism makes it, but becomes instead a new setting of them, pushed forth from the same original stock. Man thus inherits the contents and the logical system of Nature by direct ​transmission, and consciousness, while remaining self-converse, becomes self-converse in which the process of the world is reënacted.
Not only do we reach in this way the reality of knowledge, but we discover at the same time the ground for the occurrence of contradictions in it, and the principles of a dialectic that will solve them. This Natural Dialectic, proceeds Dühring in his treatise with that title, moves in the following manner. Knowledge, though identical with the Actual in contents, differs from it in form; it is, in fact, just the translation of these contents from the form of object into that of subject, from the form of being into that of knowing. Now, a leading trait of this subjectivity is its sense of possibility — of the power to use the active synthesis that works in Nature, and that now in mind works as the secret of its thinking, with an indefinite freedom. In short, it possesses imagination. As a consequence, it falls under the illusion of the false-infinite (Spinoza’s infinitum imaginationis), and assumes that the principles of its logical synthesis — space, time, and causation — are as infinite in the object-world as they ever appear to be in itself. But to suppose causation, time, and space to be really infinite would strip the Actual of the quality of an absolute, and thus annul reality altogether. ​
For, first, the chain of causation cannot in fact run backwards infinitely, but must at some time or other have absolutely begun; and it must break off its retrograde in logic as well as in time — must cease in respect to “grounds” as well as in reference to “causes.” For real causation belongs only to events and change, not to Being and identity, and hence there must come a point where the questions What caused it and Why are finally silenced, else there would be nothing absolute; whereas the underived necessity of Being, and of its elements mid laws, is the first condition for a rational view of the world.
Secondly, it is quite as clear that real time cannot be infinite ; for real time is nothing but the total duration of causal changes, and to suppose this infinite would, reckoning backwards, make the beginning of causation, just now established, close an infinite duration.
Finally, real space is manifestly just the extent of the sum-total of atoms; and this must be finite, because the number of atoms is necessarily definite; for, if it were not, the Actual of perception, as a series of changes by definite combination, would be impossible.
Real or objective space, time, and causation are thus all finite; the persuasion that they are infinite, with all the consequent array of counter​part propositions contradicting the foregoing, is an illusion arising from neglect of the differences between object and subject. Subjective space, time, and causation have, to be sure, a quasi-infinity;
yet our authentic thought, even about them, dissolves this illusion, and agrees with reality, as soon as the understanding brings its dialectic to bear. Here, then, concludes Dühring, the whole Kantian fog-bank of “antinomies” is explained and scattered. One series of Kant’s pairs of counter-judgments is entirely true; the other comes from the false-infinite, and is the work of the imagination, uncritically mistaken by Kant for the understanding.
From this point onward, then, the metaphysics of the Actual may freely proceed. The Actual as absolute, as to its veritable Being, is eternal; time and causation apply, not to its inmost existence, but only to its processional changes. Nevertheless, this differentiation is just as necessarily involved in its nature as its abiding identity. The system of changes called the sensible world must accordingly, at some instant or other, have strictly begun. Thenceforward the Actual, poured in its entirety into these changes, moves in a gradually varying, many-branching Figure, whose elementary components are of constant dimensions and number, but whose shape is undergoing incessant alteration, giving rise, from epoch to epoch, to forms of ​existence constantly new. The series of element-combinations is not recurrent, and the world-whole moves, not in a circuit, but in a continual advance. This movement is carried forward by the Logic of Nature, that is, by the combined action of causation, space, and time, which are its only ultimate principles. Hence real causation is the transfer of motion by the impact of extended parts, and the evolution of the world proceeds by the single principle of mechanism. Strictly, then, universal logic is simply a Mechanics of Nature. This cosmic principle unfolds itself, primarily, in two auxiliary ones, — the Law of Difference and the Law of Definite Number. The logic of the universe, bearing onward in obedience to these, must move, however, to a definite result, the above-named Final Purpose of the World: this real logic must play the form inherent in it out to completion. Thus the universe moves to a self-predestined close, and is therefore under a third and final law, — the Law of the Whole.
These three laws, now, are the Open Sesame to all philosophy, theoretical or practical. They are, for instance, the secret of that Natural Dialectic ​which is to purge our understanding of its subjective illusions. Exactly as the Law of Sufficient Reason must limit itself, as we just now saw, by the real and higher Law of Causation, so that the universe-process may strictly begin, so must the other subjective logical principle, the Law of Contradiction, be construed not to exclude, but to include, the Law of Natural Antagonism; otherwise the Mechanics of Nature would be impossible.
The three laws teach us, too, not only to recognise the presence of continuity throughout existence, but how to interpret it with precision, and not to obliterate difference in our anxiety to establish identity. The Law of Difference and the Law of Definite Number not only provide for the movement of Nature through the determinate steps of the inorganic and the organic, but also for the ascent by a specifically new element from the lifeless to the living, then from the plant to the animal, and finally from animal to man, with his rational consciousness. The whole, to be sure, must be developed through the single principle of mechanism, but the now favourite doctrine of the “persistence of force” violates the essential principle that specific differences — primitive Types — ​inhere in the primordial being of the Actual, and is therefore false. So, too, the Darwinian pseudo-law of the “struggle for life,” with its unsocial corollary of the supreme right of the strongest, must be rejected, not simply as striking at the root of ethics, but as violating the Law of the Whole. Species can arise neither by the transfer of a mere identity of force nor by any number of “survivals” of what merely is or has been, but must come from Kinds in the primitive constitution of the Actual.
At this juncture, however, Dühring feels called upon to reconcile the fact of ascending differences with his principle of mechanical continuity, and to explain, moreover, the original transit from identity to difference — from the primal repose of the Actual to its unresting career of causation. But after manifold attempts, which all imply the unmechanical hypothesis of a conscious primal purpose in his Absolute, he finally takes refuge in the “mechanics of the future,” which is sure some day to unravel the mystery.
But at any rate, he goes on to say, our three laws lead us steadily and securely to the needed completing term in the theory of the world, by settling the supreme question of the character and value of life. This question he discusses in his work entitled The Worth of Life. He solves the ​problem in the optimistic sense, by means of the principle of compensation: Existence is unquestionably marred by evil, by real evil; but its dominant tone, its resistless tendency, its net result, is genuinely good. And this solution does not rest on any merely subjective accidents of temperament, but directly on the objective principles of existence itself. It is found, in short, in the Law of Difference and the Law of the Whole, and in the essential necessity, the inevitableness, of the being of the Actual.
Existence, if it is to be understood, must be judged, not by the morbid cravings of sentimentalism fed on fantasy, but by sound sentiment which is founded on clear comprehension. When we once see distinctly into the nature of the world, and adjust our tone and conduct to that, we shall find a sufficient comfort in life; there is a bracing satisfaction in the discriminating insight into that which must be. Existence has, too, a charm, in itself, and the secret of it lies in that very variety, or difference, which constitutes the principle of its movement. Moreover, life mounts in differentiation, and the increased objective good of the higher levels of consciousness outweighs the increase of subjective susceptibility to pain. Further, contrast not only heightens pleasure, but is the source of it: the sense of resistance overcome ​is the very root of joy; evil is the requisite foil for the reaction essential to life.
Still profounder elements of good — subtle, pervasive, even mystic — are contributed by the Law of the Whole. Not only does the ascent of life to higher and higher levels point clearly to the greater fulness of existence as part of the Final Purpose, and so give play to the “influence of the ideal” in the encouraging prospect of the future, but our inseparable union with the Whole, our direct descent from Nature, and our reproduction of its life in ours, impart to us a certain Cosmic Emotion — Dühring calls it der universelle Affect — which, stirring at the foundations of our being, fills us with a dumb sense of the oneness of all things, and by forces coming from beneath consciousness, nay, from the beginnings of the world, binds us to the totality of existence with an attachment that no sum of ills can utterly destroy. It is from this Cosmic Emotion that the inborn love of life and the instinct of self-preservation arise. Our joy in the landscape comes from it; also our delight in art; our capacity for poetry; our bent to science and philosophy, by which we would figure to ourselves the form of this treasured All. It is, finally, the source and the reality of the set of feelings consecrated by the name of religion. To deny the worth of life is therefore to put ourselves in con​flict with the elemental forces of our being, which will subdue us in spite of our struggles.
Nevertheless, Dühring continues, though life is essentially good, there is real evil in it, and one condition of its good is that we shall rise to higher good by the spring from overcoming the evil: the world makes itself better through us as channels. In this fact we pass from theory to practice, finding in it the basis of ethics. The first principle of ethics follows from the law that contributes so much to the excellence of the Actual — the Law of the Whole. The highest practical precept is, Act with supreme reference to the Whole. But inasmuch as we are members not only of the Absolute Whole, but of the lesser whole called society, we can only act in and through that. Accordingly, first in the order of his practical theories comes Dühring’s sociology.
His writings in this field are voluminous, especially in political economy, in which he adopts and develops the views of our countryman Carey. Carey, he thinks, has revolutionised this subject. The doctrines involved in the free-trade view, especially the principle of unrestricted competition, he considers a deification of mean self-interest. They strike at the foundation of rational ethics — the supreme moral authority of the Whole. Away with them, then, and substitute instead the doctrines of benignant coöperation! This sentiment is carried ​out in a corresponding Philosophy of Politics, in which Dühring develops an extreme socialism. That the social whole, however, is conceived in the sense of a dominant atomism, very presently appears. The “whole” aimed at is simply a greater mass of force, to give effect to the caprices of that style of “enlightened” individual who so ignores the great historic whole as to see in the organic institutions of reason — the family, the state, the church — nothing but barriers to the career of humanity.
The end of government, Dühring holds, is “to enhance the charm of life”; and here, unfortunately, in settling the practical test of enhancement, he is betrayed into destroying the profound principle on which he rested his case for the worth of life — that we must be guided by objective values, and ignore the outcries of subjective caprice. It appears to him that hitherto there has been no considerable political or social wisdom in the world. Social organisation, as well as political, ought now to undergo a complete re-creation, with the aim of giving the greatest possible range for each individual to act according to his own views of what regard for the whole requires. For example, all governments armed with force are to be done away. In their stead is to come voluntary association. Democratic communes are everywhere to replace organic states. There is to be no centralisation, no one ​great Commune, but numbers of little communes, to suit the convenience of individual preference. There is to be universal "equality," and women—a redeeming stroke of justice—are to share in all the vocations, offices, emoluments (and the few burdens) of society, equally with men. Instead of compulsory wedlock, there is to come voluntary union from love, the bond to cease when the passion ceases.
​A suitable Philosophy of Religion closes the general view. Religion, Dühring maintains, is really nothing but the “Cosmic Emotion.” Historic religions are only superstitious misconceptions of this profound pulse of the universe; they are all to disappear, as essentially worthless pseudo-philosophies. The “society of the future” will neither worship nor sublimely hope: the Philosophy of the Actual has dispensed with immortality as well as with God. For, to say nothing of the predestined catastrophe of the universe, the individual consciousness must cease at death. There is for conscious beings no common basis in the cosmic whole of the Actual; each conscious being is a perfectly self-enclosed circuit. Nor is there any individual basis of consciousness except the body. An individual consciousness is merely a definite “situation” — one specific combination — of the world-atoms. Death is its dissolution, and is therefore final extinction.
The system which opened with such keen vigour of theoretic purpose, and which, as contrasted with Hartmann’s, exhibits so many points of a higher, firmer-knit, and subtler intelligence, has ended in a moral atomism as it began in a physical — in utter social dissolution. It is, however, only paying the penalty of inadequacy in its theoretical principle. Its root of irrationality is identical with the irrational ​principle in Hartmann’s theory — the undertaking to construe the absolute with the categories of the relative, to think the eternal in relations of time and space and motion.
It is a notable merit in Dühring that he himself, and with no light emphasis, lays down the principle here implied; but his conception of absolute being forces him fatally to contradict it. He will have the chain of causation once on a time begin. But a beginning is necessarily a point in time, and a point in time is necessarily related to a before as well as to an after. Dühring consequently finds it impossible even to state his beginning of change without referring it to a supposed rest preceding it; in no other way can he make room for a continuous mechanical nexus in the whole of his Actual. The Actual is thus necessarily brought wholly under time; time and causation are carried back, whether or no, into “Being and identity,” and Dühring is asserting in one breath that the absolute is not subject to relative categories, and yet is so. After his scruples about time and causation, it is remarkable that he manifests no hesitancy in applying space to his absolute. He maintains real space to be finite, and thus annuls his absolute once more. For so, his total Actual has a limited extent; but an extent, like a beginning, must be defined by something other than itself, is unthinkable except ​in contrast to a beyond, and therefore the absolute, as really extended, is undeniably made relative. Should it be replied that this relativity is fallacious because it is only a relation to unreality, as real space is finite, and so the pretended beyond on which the Actual is said to depend is a pure illusion, the empty “infinite of the imagination”: then we should have the worse case, that the Actual has to be relative to this phantasmal act of consciousness ; and we should end in the contradiction, that the absolute is conditioned by its own unreal product. So impossible is it to define the Real except in terms of thought.
The insufficiency of the Actual exposes itself still further, when Dühring comes to discuss the origin of consciousness and the reach of knowledge. He takes a fatal step when he seeks the “common root” of sense and understanding in a time-and-space prius, ignoring the fact that he has given no answer but bald denial to the Kantian doctrine of the ideality of space and time; and that, until the supports of this doctrine are removed, there can be no use of these elements to locate a root of consciousness: to search for the prius of something, in a region still presumably the result of that something, is an industry not likely to be largely rewarded. Dühring’s entire dialectic, like the part of it shown in his attempted refutation of the Kantian antinomies, rests on the assumption, which ​he does not argue, that there is a space, a time, and a causal progression distinct from the thoughts to which we give those names — an assumption which he may have hoped to warrant by establishing afterwards a mechanical transit from mere vitality to consciousness. From any serious attempt at establishing such a transit, however, his clear insight into the limitation of the “persistence of force” prevented him from making.
But, as with other partial philosophies, it is in the practical sphere that the self-contradiction in his principle shows at its worst. This principle compels him at the outset of his ethics to set up the supreme authority of the Whole, but its lack of ethical substance brings him at the end to bare individualism. At first we feel as if he had failed to draw from it the high consequences of which it seemed capable. Why, we say, should he sink from the stern ethics of devotion to the Whole into this wretched atomism of private caprice? But we have here the genuine drift of his scheme; for real morality is impossible on a pessimistic basis, and Dühring’s principle, in spite of his subtle and imaginative plea for it, is optimistic only by illusion. The very Whole which he makes the ground and the sovereign object of our duty is in fact but a monstrous Power, whose self-centred “Final Purpose” is the burial of the moral life, while yet only on its threshold, in a ​hopeless oblivion. The yearnings of her offspring, imparted to them by her “Cosmic Emotion,” Nature does not share. She brings them forth, “to laugh and weep, to suffer and rejoice” for a season, then to pass to the Abyss, whereto she also, with her latest and highest, too surely is speeding.
Life upon such terms is essentially worthless, let it be painted in what bewitching colours it may. The resistless drift of such a theory is either to despair, as in the case of the frank pessimism of a Hartmann, or else to illusions of reconstructing the future in behalf of capricious desire. We cannot hope for the abiding: let us then turn to the satisfactions of the hour! In effect, the professed hedonism of Dühring’s theory is at the last pure egoism. Covering the horror in the depths of life with an optimistic gloze upon the surface, Actualism can have no final precept but to cultivate the Whole so far, and only so far, as it may be means to the greatest sum of individual enjoyment: therefore, “whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is neither wisdom nor device nor knowledge in the grave — and thither thou goest.”
III
We have now seen monism, in two of its most strongly contrasted forms, undergo dissolution by the inner necessities of its own logic. Pseudo-idealism ​and intellectualised materialism have alike brought monism to a reductio ad absurdum when they faced those problems of practice which are the touchstone of all philosophy. It was only natural that metaphysics of this order should give way, then, to an agnostic interpretation of the critical principle, and that philosophy should at length undertake a return to Kant, in the hope of some sounder development from his doctrines. We have next to see how this renewed agnosticism, in its aim to be completely rigorous, also comes to self-dismemberment, and supplants itself against its own intent.
In passing thus to Lange, it is not surprising to find him animated by the desire to lay a better foundation for ethics than either pseudo-idealism or materialism has proved able to build. His History of Materialism is not properly a history, but a philosophy buttressed by history, in which, by exhibiting materialism in the utmost possibilities that ages of restatement have been able to give it, he aims to expose its deficiencies exhaustively, and to assign the true weight which its principle and the principle of idealism respectively should have in a rational theory.
There must be sought, Lange begins, some higher standpoint than either materialism or current idealism affords; and this, he is convinced, is to be found in the doctrine of Kant, provided it be rigidly main​tained and consistently carried out. In his own words, “As a beaten army looks about for some strong position on which it may hope to rally, so now for some time the signal has been heard on all sides, Fall back on Kant! Still, not till recently has this retreat been really in earnest, and now it is found that Kant’s standpoint could never in strict justice be described as left below. To be sure, misconceptions of his meaning and the pressure of the impulse to metaphysical invention did for a while tempt his successors to endeavour the rupture of the strict limits he had drawn to speculation. But the sobering that has followed this metaphysical debauch has compelled a return to the abandoned position; and all the more, that men see themselves again confronted by the materialism which once, on Kant’s appearance, had fled and hardly left a trace.” Lange is deeply sensible of the deficiencies of materialism, but at the same time appreciates the truth of a certain phase in it, as against the pretences of what he takes for idealism. He says: “Materialism lacks for rapports with the highest functions of man’s intelligence. Contenting itself with the mere actual, it is, aside from the question of its theoretic admissibility, sterile for art and science, indifferent or else inclined to egoism in the relations of man to man.”
And yet, on the other hand, “the whole principle of modern philosophy, outside of our German ‘spell’ ​of romancing with notions (Begriffsromantik), involves, with scarce an exception worth naming, a strictly natural-scientific treatment of everything given us by sense. . . . Every falsification of fact is an assault upon the foundations of our intellectual life. As against the metaphysical poetising that arrogates the power to penetrate to the essence of Nature, and determine from mere conceptions that which experience alone can teach us, materialism as a counterpoise is therefore a real benefaction.” But on the other contrary again, idealism met a want that mere empiricism cannot supply. “The endeavour,” he adds, "is almost as universal to overcome the one-sidedness of the world-view arising from mere fact. . . . Man needs a supplementing of this by an ideal world created by himself, and in such free creations the highest and noblest functions of his mind unite.”
In these words Lange's general position already reveals itself. If Hartmann calls his view the Philosophy of the Unconscious, and Dühring his the Phillosophy of the Actual, Lange’s might in analogy be named the Philosophy of the Ideal. He prefers, however, to speak of the Ideal not as a philosophy, but only as a standpoint; because he wishes to include in philosophy not only the means for satisfying the craving after ideality, but the means for closing with the demand for certainty. The aim of ​philosophy, he holds, is not a doctrine, but a method; and philosophy itself, when precisely defined, is simply the critical determination of the limits of the main tendencies in our faculty of consciousness. These tendencies are two: the investigation of phenomena, and speculation upon assumed realities beyond them. Philosophy has thus two functions: the one negative, resulting in the critical dissolution of all the synthetical principles of cognition, and the stripping them of all competence to the absolute, leaving their outcome purely phenomenal; the other positive, affirming the right and the uses of the free exercise of the speculative bent, when taken no longer as knowledge but only as poesy.
The supports of this “Standpoint of the Ideal” are sought in a critique of the Critique of Pure Reason, or a sort of “new critique of reason,” whose ambition it is to bring to the needed consistent fulfilment what Lange regards as the first principle of Kant’s undertaking. This principle is assumed to be the rigid restriction of our knowledge to experience: we have a priori forms of cognition, but they become futile when applied beyond phenomena. That Kant himself regarded this as only the principle of his theoretical view is, to be sure, unquestionable; but his setting up the practical reason as in itself absolute was, Lange maintains, a direct violation of the principle, and was in fact rendered ​logically impossible by it. Will, like cognition, Lange holds to be merely phenomenon; we cannot, then, aver with Kant that we must be free, but only that we must think ourselves free.
But with this granted, Kant’s way of grounding ethics comes to an end, and we must seek, says Lange, to frame a right world-view by consistently carrying out our only initial certainty. We must return to the problem of the source and limits of cognition, where, fortunately, we can assume an a priori organisation as having been established by Kant. The elements, too, that Kant assigned to this organisation — Space, Time, Cause, and the rest — all belong there. But Kant's attempt to settle a priori the exact number of such forms was necessarily futile: there is no way to determine what the contents of our a priori endowment are except induction. Besides, the gradual progress of the natural sciences, particularly the modern physiology of the senses (in which the primary sensations — light, colour, heat, sound, taste, odour, etc. — have all been reduced to modes of motion), points clearly to the probable omission of an essential form from Kant’s list: Motion should take its place among the a priori forms of sense.
Indeed, one principal aim of any attempt at a reconstruction of the Critique of Pure Reason should be to bring its doctrine into thorough accord with ​the results of the latest natural science. This we can do by insisting, first, on a strict observance of the limits the Critique assigned to knowledge, and, secondly, on defining these more exactly, in accordance with the mechanical nature of sensation. In fact, we here arrive at the true import and value of materialism; for that the actual of experience is only explicable on mechanical principles is the clear outcome of the latest science, with which it only remains to set our theory of knowledge into agreement, in order at one stroke to give materialism its due, and yet its quietus as a scheme of interpreting the absolute.
For the world of actual experience, extended, moving, interacting in all its parts, and transmitting energy from part to part under the universal law of the “persistence of force,” is from beginning to end simply our conscious presentation (Vorstellung). The derivation of mind from actual matter is therefore impossible, as it would involve the absurdity of the object’s producing the subject whose testimony is the sole evidence that there is any object. And as for hypothetical matter — a conjectural substrate beneath the actual — that is shut out of the ques​tion by the limits of knowledge. Once we are certain that our objects are strictly ours, are but the framing of our sensations in our a priori forms, we are thenceforth confronted with the limiting notion called the thing-in-itself. The doubt, thence-forward ineradicable, of our power to pass this limit turns into certainty of our impotence to do so, when we find, as Kant shows us, that the attempt must cast reason into systematic contradictions.
Our knowledge, then, is confined strictly to the field of phenomena; to knowing, not what is, but only what exists relatively to us; and within this field it is further restricted to the tracing of mechanical causation. For, again by Kant’s showing, its highest category is action and reaction, and so all the terms conjoined by its synthesis must be extended objects of sense. Hence Du Bois-Reymond’s “limits of the knowledge of Nature” become the limits of all knowledge whatever. While, then, our philosophy thus falls into step with natural science, it indeed vindicates to materialism the entire province of Nature, but at the same time excludes materialism from explaining mind. Mind and Nature stand contrasted as subject and object; the object, as simply presentation to mind, requires mind as the ground of its existence, and so can never explain mind.
But the relativity of our knowledge, continues Lange with especial emphasis, reaches wider than ​Kant suspected, and its contradictions are profounder. The limiting thing-in-itself Kant assumed as a reality, or, at all events, he declined to doubt its existence; but to carry the a priori principle to its proper conclusion, we must now recognise the phenomenal nature of this notion itself. Our all-encompassing distinction between thing and conscious presentation, between noumenon and phenomenon, is itself a judgment a priori; in fact, an illusion of that order. The illusion arises from our constitutional tendency to put the positive pole of the category of relation — Substance, Cause, Agent — as if it were something additional to the system of experience, instead of merely a term within this. It is thus itself a contradiction, one not simply functional but organic, and therefore provokes to endless other contradictions.
And not only, let us steadfastly remember, is it an illusion; it is an illusion which, though we recognise, we can never dispel, — any more than that of the moon’s enlargement on the horizon, the bending of the stick when thrust into the water, or the apparition of the rainbow. But, like these, it will mislead only such minds as persist in the stolidity of the peasant; and just as the cited illusions, when comprehended, not only do not disturb our science, but continue to quicken the pleasure of existence by their variety and their beauty, so will this ground​dissonance of our nature, with the whole array of its derivative discords, serve when once mastered to enrich the diapason of life and raise it to orchestral fulness and harmony. The metaphysical passion, born of this illusion, is indeed worthless for knowledge, but it is precious for experience. In its immature stages, it burns to transcend the limits of experience, in the vain hope of bringing back knowledge of that mysterious Beyond; and so long as it has continued in this delusion, it has been the bane of the world. But when once freed from the error, it will become, with religion and poetry, the benign solvent of the ills of life. It springs from the same source as poetry and religion, and is, indeed, the strongest and most precious jet of the fountain. For it is the work of the imagination, in fact the highest and noblest work; while imagination comes from the illusion of the noumenon, and without this would not exist.
Although, then, we must hold fast by the actual for knowledge, for all the inspiration of life we must take refuge in the ideal. Phenomenal and noumenal — the actual and the ideal — together, and only together, make up the total of experience, of our vital Whole. In not less than this Whole are we to live, —
Im Ganzen, Guten, Treuen resolut zu leben, —
and the good and the true are to be sought for in the ​ideal; in the ideal, not only as vaguely rendered in the visions of poetry or the solemnities of religion, but far more as framed into organic epics of the mind, and turned upon action with all the force of systems, by metaphysical invention. Nor let it be supposed that our knowledge of the purely poetic character of speculation will paralyse its power over conduct. Though void of literal truth, its ethical truth is real; the conduct that it means is absolutely right. “A noble man,” to borrow Lange’s own words, “is not the least disturbed in his zeal for his ideals, though he be and must be told, and tells himself, that his ideal world, with all its settings of a God, immortal hopes, and eternal truths, is a mere imagination and no reality; these are all real for life, just because they are psychic ideals; they exist in the soul of man, and woe to him who casts doubt upon their power!”
Having thus cleared up the “Standpoint of the Ideal,” Lange next turns to the view it affords of practical philosophy. He touches first upon the question of the worth of life, where his settlement is this: Neither pessimism nor optimism is an absolute truth; the problem of evil, if we push for its radical solution, belongs to the transcendent world, of which we can know nothing. But applied to the world of experience, the doctrine of the Ideal gives an optimistic or pessimistic result, according as ​we consider life in its whole, with the ideal in it, or only in its part of actual stubborn fact. The mere fact, in itself, must always seem bad; but it must be remembered that this very badness is the shock of contrast with the ever present ideal; and, after all, the optimistic solution has to come from moral energy. Play into fact with aspiration after the ideal and enthusiasm for it, with the firm resolve to transform fact into a semblance of the ideal pattern, and the reward will come in a gentler tolerance of defect and a calmer contentment. “The freer our career in the metaphysical region, the more is our world-view pervaded by sentiment, and the more is it optimistic; but the more ethical, also, is its reaction on our doings and bent. We are not only to reconstruct the actual according to the ideal, but are to console ourselves for the perception of what actually is, by contemplating what ought to be and might be.”
The transition hence to ethics is natural and obvious: the highest ethical maxim is, Serve the Whole. But the Whole here intended is the entire complex of experience, with the active ideal in it. “Work upon fact with recognition of its stubborn reality, but in the light of the ideal,” is what the maxim means. We cannot know that we are free or immortal, but we cannot help assuming we are the one, and hoping we may be the other. And, ​on the other hand, we do know that in our relation with mechanical Nature, in whose domain, after all, the larger part of our action lies, we are not free; we know that time is exceeding short, and that enjoyment is for the most part hope deferred. The lesson of life is chiefly fortitude and resignation. Lange, however, has no personal drawings toward egoistic ethics, nor to hedonism, even in its most public or social form. He announces himself as in ethics the legitimate successor of Kant: he desires to act, and to have men act, from duty solely; to seek the ideal and serve it at all personal hazard, though with due regard to the imperfections of men and the obstinacy of fact.
Lange’s sociology follows the lines we should now expect. His doctrine of the Whole leads him to a pronounced socialism, but he would have this socialism a real one, in which organised society is to correct the aberrations of the individual with vigour. He sees, too, like Dühring, the import of political economy in a comprehensive practical philosophy, and some of his earlier writings were devoted to vigorous discussions in it. Free-trade and laissez-faire can find no place, of course, in the practical theory of the moralist of the Whole. Spontaneous “harmony of private interests,” like the talk of the Cobden school generally, is to him mere vagary, springing from a fatuous social optimism. In many ​essentials, however, he affiliates with Stuart Mill, while he derides Carey; whereby he fell into many an acrimonious dispute with Dühring, for the vitriol of whose sarcasm, too, he had but little relish.
On the religious question, Lange aims at a purely ethical position: one religion is to him as good as another, provided it does the work of consecrating the ideal and giving it practical influence with men. As for “rationalising” religion, let it be done, if it must be done in the interest of culture and taste, but beware of dreaming that in this way you are getting at truth! The Christian religion, for instance, we may retain in spirit, but in letter, no. Its entire ecclesiastical Symbol, in fact, whether cultus or creed, may freely stand as long as it can, provided it be understood to mean nothing but a mode, strictly symbolic, of enshrining the ideal as such.
It is impossible not to recognise the higher tone, both intellectual and moral, of Lange's general view as contrasted with that of either Hartmann or Dühring. The substitution of fortitude for despair on the one hand, and for mere enjoyment on the other, betokens a sounder moral feeling, while the standpoint of critical agnosticism is at least in so far more intellectual as it gives clear vision of the difficulties that must be radically removed before any doctrinal procedure can be validly begun. The ​adroit preservation, too, of the play of the ideal in the world of fact is evidence of quick susceptibility to imagination, and to its necessity and value in the conduct of life. In this respect, Lange reminds one of Stuart Mill, though with far greater ethical fervour, as Mill appears in his Three Essays on Religion. Like Mill, too, he will prove in the end to have been a man of feeling, even more than of intellect, determined in his judgments by the wants of the heart more than by the lights of the head. We cannot long conceal it from ourselves that his belief in the ethical energy of his “Ideal” is without foundation in his theoretic view ; that to talk of duty based on what we know to be pure fiction of the fantasy is a hollow mockery; that the only reason which agnosticism can put forward for acting under the ideal is the anodyne this offers for the otherwise insupportable pain of existence.
Nor are clear indications wanting that Lange forebodes the spectral nature of even this excuse — that he divines the foregone failure of a remedy applied in defiance of our knowledge that its essence is illusion. Vaihinger, himself a thinker who pushes the agnostic view to an extreme almost deserving the Scotch epithet of fey, says truly enough: ​“There breathes through this doctrine of Lange’s a strain of tragic resignation. . . . A lofty moral pathos speaks out in all that Lange teaches, and in his manner of teaching it.” He is like Carlyle, who, gazing upward at the silent stars rolling through the solemn and trackless night, and seeing there the image and type of all existence, could only ejaculate, “Ech, it’s a sad sight!” For him, life has reduced itself to the phenomenon of a phenomenon, to contradictions born of one fundamental contradiction, and that an illusion we can never dispel. The professed “new critique of reason” has ended in representing reason as essentially irrational; the self-harmonious turns out to be a thoroughgoing discord, our “organisation” is disorganisation.
Neither can all the seeming glow of the “ideal” blind us to the reach of this contradiction into Lange’s doctrine of action. The ideal is put forward as an end in itself; but in reality it is only viewed, and by the consistent agnostic can only be viewed, as a means to suppress weariness of life. So while Lange proclaims duty, his implicit principle is actually pleasure; he denounces egoism, but cannot surmount hedonism; he declares for the autonomy of ​the will, but his doctrine forces a strict heteronomy. He stands professedly for a stern socialism, the sovereignty of the Whole as the organisation of the ideal, but in his theory there lurks an utter social atomism: so many individual fantasies, so many systems of the ideal; and, for each, the sacred “duty” of meeting the antagonism of the countless other private illusions with becoming fortitude and resignation.
Beyond evasion, so long as conscious existence is, as Lange holds, shut in to mere appearance, its ghostliness cannot but betray itself in all its movements. If with Hartmann the universe becomes a colossal and shadowy Blind Tom, endowed with a clairvoyance whose infallible “intelligence” displays itself in striking through the reach of aeons with fatal precision at its own existence, and, with Dühring, a gigantic Automaton Chess-Player, matched against itself, moving with balanced “charm” to the checkmating of its own game, with Lange it fades into a phantom Panorama, in front of which sits man, a forlorn imbecile maundering over a Perhaps behind it, and shaking the flimsy rattle of the “ideal” in the fatuous persuasion that he is stilling the irrepressible sob in his heart. Let it do its best, agnostic philosophy cannot make of life anything but essential delirium, — with the shapes of its phantasmagory distinct enough, no ​doubt, and with a persistency in the recurrence of its wanderings that is even too fatal, but delirium still. In the wan light of “critical” thinking —
We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
It is no proper refutation of a theory, however, to show its evil practical results; the very question in our day is, Whether our being is not compact of evil? It is a just retort upon all such ethical reproaches to say, “Yes, our fate is heavy and our prospects are desperate; but what does that do toward disproving the fact?” It is true enough that Lange's ethical structure breaks down, and that the gap between it and his theory is a discredit to his logic, but his “critical” view is not to be displaced except by strictly theoretical means. His procedure must be forced to expose contradictions, or else both the procedure and its results must be accepted. But should it now prove to be self-contradictory, it will annul itself and its assumed principle. That such a contradiction is really involved in it, we may convince ourselves by the considerations which follow.
IV
Lange’s principle is, that the a priori nature of our cognition prohibits us from assuming that we can ​know by means of it things as they arc. This is but another way of saying that we are forbidden to assume it is anything more than a peculiarity of man. It is in effect represented as simply a limitation belonging to humanity. Whether its forms are those of possible other intelligences, of intelligence as such, we are told we can never know; and for the reason that we are shut in by the “limiting notion” of the thing-in-itself. This agnostic principle, now, Lange will carry out with unflinching comprehensiveness: it is extended to include even the fundamental distinction between our phenomenal world of experience and the noumenal Reality.
This aim of Lange comes from a genuine insight into the requirements of system. Not only is it true in general that a principle, to be such, must work in its sphere with unqualified universality, but, in this particular case, omitting from the compass of phenomenalism the contrast between consciousness and things would be fatal to the claims of phenomenalism as a principle. If the notion of the thing-in-itself be more than phenomenal, then there is a thing-in-itself, and in cognising the contrast in ​question, in putting the judgment There are things-in-themselves, we put a judgment of absolute validity, and see by the light of intelligence as such — with the eye common to all possible intelligences. This would force upon the agnostic the further perilous question. By which of our merely subjective categories, then, do we manage this astonishing achievement? The admission of this one noumenal judgment would open the entire agnostic mechanism of the a priori to the inroad of absolute knowing. So, by some means, this judgment must be reduced to a mere conjecture. It will not do to dissipate it wholly, for then another absolute judgment would arise in its place, namely. There are no things-in-themselves. But the validity of this would put an end to phenomenalism conclusively. If there are no things-in-themselves, then our cognition, call it “subjective” as long as we may, is the cognition of all there really is, by all the minds there are; the objects that we represent to ourselves in our normal activity are then the only objects, and our intelligence becomes itself the universal because the only intelligence.
Hence it is with the instinct of self-preservation that Lange draws the mentioned distinction back within the sphere of merely human consciousness. Even this distinction itself he will have us refrain from using as if referring to anything absolute. We ​must treat this also as phenomenal, and hence we cannot be sure if there is, or is not, a thing-in-itself. But he holds we cannot now silence the apprehension that there may be one. So the distinction remains, and the thing-in-itself becomes simply a notion, but a limiting notion. The antithetic formula Me and Not-me becomes the all-encompassing category, which therefore causes all our cognition to seem merely subjective, whether it be so in reality or not, and thus compels us to limit our certainty to phenomena. The agnostic force of the formula is accordingly rather increased than diminished: we have now not a single cognition remaining that can pretend to belong to intelligence as such. Except unluckily (let us, the readers, add in passing), this very last decision that condemns every other, — the goblin of certainty which haunts the steps of all agnosticism, and which it cannot lay! This Nemesis of phenomenalism will presently appear in a clearer form.
For it cannot longer be concealed, that in setting out upon his chosen path Lange was in fact moving towards a goal he little suspected and still less intended. He has decided that to validate the phenomenal limitation of knowledge he must make the thing-in-itself a mere form a priori. But we have ​the right to demand that he shall be in earnest with this apriority, and a form a priori means a principle from and in our consciousness organically and solely. To say that a notion is a priori is to say that its being a spontaneous thought of ours exhausts its existence completely; that the entire being of it is in a native energy of our consciousness, and that this elemental discharge from consciousness is the whole meaning of the corresponding name. For instance, our pure thoughts corresponding to the words “space,” “time,” “cause,” are upon the a priori theory exactly and utterly what Space, Time, and Cause respectively are. Anything short of this view would render apriority null. For if there were anything extra mentem to which, even possibly, the a priori elements corresponded, we could never then be certain that they originated in our consciousness at all — we should remain in a quandary as to whether they did or did not. Yet from our consciousness they must originate if they are to have that absolute universality, and that necessity of application to their objects, with which we incontestably think them. As a consistent Kantian, Lange must assent to this; and not simply assent to it, but proceed from it wholly and thoroughly. To make the thing-in-itself a genuine form a priori is therefore to exclude its existence in any other sense. But this annuls the desired phenomenalistic conjecture of its ​perhaps absolute existence; we have committed ourselves irretrievably to the judgment There are no things-in-themselves. Therewith, as shown already, an act of absolute cognition enters, and universal phenomenalism falls to the ground. The “critical” procedure has annulled its own principle. The Nemesis of all agnosticism, of which we caught a glimpse above, has for the a priori agnostic formed to itself a companion avenger.
Lange, however, is equal to the emergency; he has that dogged courage which does not realise its own defeat. He rallies on a new base, and this rally is the real explanation of his singular doctrine that the ground-form of consciousness, as he considers it, — this contrast between consciousness and noumenal Reality, — is an “organic contradiction.” He would evade the force of the above conclusion by showing that the “critical” thing-in-itself — the noumenon as pure category — is not the actual contents of that a priori notion which forms the "limiting" term in the relation Phenomenon-Noumenon. On the contrary, that limiting term is an hypostasis by consciousness, an imaginary “enrealising” — a putting as beyond, independent of, or plus consciousness — of its own system of internal categories appertaining to phenomenal objects. In short, it is a putting of the notions Substance, Cause, and Agent, as if they ​transcended conscious experience, and existed apart from it as its object and ground. The a priori category of substance and accident (subject and predicate), which, properly, only connects one composite phenomenon (called the “subject” of a judgment) with another phenomenon (called the “predicate”) so as to compose a new and fuller unity, lends its term “substance” for this purpose; the category of cause and effect, which, properly, connects one phenomenon with another so as to condition and determine the second's occurrence, lends similarly its term “cause”; and, in like manner, the category of agent and reagent, which, properly, connects phenomena into a system of mutual attraction and repulsion, lends its term “agent.”
Thus this triune hypostasis, by some a priori impulse which Lange does not attempt to explain, is projected beyond the limits of consciousness, and is thought as one term of the relation Phenomenon-Noumenon, while consciousness as a whole is taken as the complemental term, its “organisation” (as Lange calls it) being viewed as the reagent, its sum of phenomena as the effect of an interaction between it and the thing-in-itself, and as the predicate of this supposititious being. By this spontaneous contradiction of the strict nature of its categorical system, our consciousness, con​founding its own organic notions with the hypostatised notion of a thing-in-itself, sets a bound to its own certainty by an a priori illusion which, just because a priori, it can never dispel; though it learns by “criticism” to interpret the illusion correctly.
The justness of this analysis, so far as it goes, is evident enough. We doubtless have here the correct partial genealogy of the remarkable notion Thing-in-itself — in so far, that is, as this notion forms the basis of the common-sense dualism of mind and matter — and the exact genesis of all “critical” agnosticism. There is missing from the analysis, however, the very important fact, that the cooperation of the other a priori elements — Space and Time — with those actually mentioned, is what imparts to the “material-substance” interpretation of this notion its specific character and its chief plausibility. The infinity of Space and of Time, in contrast to the finitude of every sense-presentation, joined with our tendency to ignore the strictly supersensible elements in consciousness — the categories in their purity, and the pure Ideas — and to take our leisure in the familiar region where Time and Space render all things plain, makes it easy for us to suppose there is “abundant room” for “existence wholly out of consciousness” and, as the saying is, “independent” of it. This blun​der of mere inadvertence is no doubt stimulated by the incessant activity of the pure categories, but its primary provocative is that very deepest principle of our conscious life, the consciousness of our relation to other minds; and it is this principle which Lange’s analysis persistently overlooks.
This primal consciousness of our relation to others is the real secret of our belief in noumena, and contains their only true meaning; and it supplies the element which carelessly and wrongly united with Space and Time gives rise to a sensuous misinterpretation of things-in-themselves. This primal conscious principle Lange, as just noted, quite omits to investigate; and this omission is the central defect of his analysis of the noumenon. The oversight leaves his account of the nature and function of this notion seriously inadequate — a deficiency of which something further presently. By the misapplication of Space and Time to the thing-in-itself, we are prompted to think it extended and enduring; and this, even when we view it as the soul or as God. Here is the source of that mechanical psychology and that faultily anthropomorphic theology — we should call it zoomorphic, instead, if we spoke correctly — which have always been the bane of religion, the constant cause of religious scepticism and indifference. With the ​explanation here made, we get a clarifying account of that travesty of the noumenon which we oftenest understand by the thing-in-itself, and may now attend to the real meaning of Lange’s result.
The meaning is striking enough. For, in fact, our philosopher has unwittingly completed the proof of the absolute quality of human knowledge, and at the same time demonstrated the falsehood of materialism — not simply the impossibility of establishing this (which he had already done, as Kant had before him, merely from his agnostic standpoint), but its final impossibility, even as an hypothesis.
As to our real knowledge, he has now shown (1) that a bare thing-in-itself, a thing out of all relation to minds, does not exist; (2) that, even as notion, it is a self-contradiction, something whose sphere is solely within consciousness putting itself as if it were beyond it; (3) that, in spite of this, we continue, and must continue, to accept this illusion, which compels us to limit our knowledge to experience and to renounce all claims to its being absolute. That is to say, then, the sole cause of our doubting the rigorous validity of our knowledge, and reducing our cognition to the mere idiosyncrasy of one species out of an unknown number of possible orders of conscious beings, is an illusion whose genesis we know, a contradiction that we distinctly detect. Then, beyond dispute, our discrediting limitation of ​our cognitive faculty is an error, and we ought to correct it by disregarding its cause.
It is idle to say that we cannot do this because the illusion is organic, and will therefore continue to play upon us forever. When it is once detected, it is completely in our power, so far as concerns its affecting our judgment. The presence of organic illusions in our faculty of cognition, especially in its function of sense-perception, is an unquestionable fact, — the multiform phenomena of refraction, for instance, — but from the moment we know them as organic they cannot mislead us; because, to know them so, we must have traced them to an origin in the necessary laws of the function they affect. Thenceforward we learn to interpret them, — as signs, namely, of a complexity in our system of consciousness far richer and more various than we had suspected, signs of a far more intricate harmony of antagonisms than we had dreamed of; and the more wide-embracing their recurrences become, each time detected and corrected, the more do we gradually rise to the conception of the self-resource and self-sufficiency of our intelligence. The power of detecting and allowing for them comes just from their being organic, and depends upon that.
Therefore, precisely by the investigation through which Lange has led us, we are now in the position to assure ourselves of the reality, the absoluteness in ​quality, of our human intelligence. From the Kantian doctrine of the a priori carried to its genuine completion, as we have now seen it, we infer that the objects which present themselves in course of the normal and critical action of human consciousness are all that objects as objects can be; that beyond or beneath what completed human reason (moral, of course, as well as perceptive and reflective) finds in objects and their relations, or can and will find, there is nothing to be found; that our universe is the universe, which exists, so far as we know it, precisely as we know it, and indeed in and through our knowing it, though not merely by that. To state the case more technically, the cognition belonging to each mind is the indispensable condition of the existence of reality, though it is not the completely sufficient condition. If one asks. What then is this sufficient condition, the answer is. The consensus of the whole system of minds, including the Supreme Mind, or God.
The process which has led us to this result, and which might justifiably be called a Critique of all Scepticism, yields also the final impossibility of materialism in a still clearer way than we noticed before. We saw, some distance back, that the actual of sense could by no possibility be the source of consciousness, being, on the contrary, its mere phenomenon — its mere externalised presentation (picture-object) origi​nated from within. But the hypothetical potential of sense, the assumed subsensible substance called matter, we have now seen to be precisely that self-contradiction talked of as the physical thing-in-itself, and it therefore disappears from the real universe along with that illusion. We have, then, a definitive Critique of all Materialism.
By the path into which Lange has led us we therefore ascend from the agnostic-critical standpoint to the higher and invigorating one of a thorough, all-sided, and affirmative idealism. A few words must suffice to outline its general conception. The result is, in brief: Our normal consciousness has the trait of real universality, — it puts judgments which in the same circumstances every intelligence, and every order of intelligence, would put. The objects it perceives, and seen as it sees them when it sees to its full, are the same that from the same outlook all intelligences would perceive. For such objects are themselves but complexes of its judgments, and the mentioned circumstances and outlook are in fact part of the objects as perceived; they are not limitations imposed upon consciousness from without, but are particularisations of its own primordial processes. Or, to state the case inversely, the potential reach of normal human consciousness is the very thing meant by universality: intelligence as such is simply the fulfilment of human intelligence. ​The attempt to take the universe as beyond or apart from or plus consciousness has sublated itself into bringing the universe wholly within consciousness and coincident with it; and the ancient saying, Man the measure of all things, comes round again, but in a new and pregnant sense — a sense which in the last resort gets its meaning from the intrinsic harmony of human with divine cognition. Only, this universe-consciousness must be thought as it is, without omission or exaggeration of any of its contents, and, above all, by mastering the grounds of its existence and the method of its possibility.
What we have arrived at is this : All that is, comes within consciousness and lies open to it, — the literal all, — whether “starry heavens without” or “moral law within,” sensible system of Nature, with its bond of mechanical causation, or intelligible system of moral agency, with its bond of free allegiance constituting a “kingdom of Ends.” A world of spirits, a world of minds each self-active, with the Father of Spirits omnipresent to all — consciousness means that. In being conscious, we are conscious of a universe; wherein each of us, to put the case in a metaphor (inadequate, of course), is a single self-luminous but focal point, upon which the remaining whole of light is poured in rays that are reflected back and then returned again, and so on without end, each added return bringing rays in ​greater fulness from remoter and remoter confines, to be shed forth again, with increase, and farther and farther.
Consciousness and universe are in truth but two names for the same single and indissoluble Fact, named in the one case as if from within it, and in the other as if from without. Not that in every conscious focus all the contents of this universe are at any temporal moment imaged with the same clearness or reflected forth with the same energy as in every other; only that, dim or bright, strong or feeble, confused or distinct, the same Whole is in somewise always there. Nor is it to be overlooked, that, to the fulfilment of each mind’s universe-consciousness, it is essential that the consciousness be not simply a private but a social, an historic, and, in fact, an immortal consciousness.
The satisfactory and convincing grounds for this conception, it is not in place to enter upon here with any detail. Let it for the occasion be enough to say that the interpretation of the facts of ordinary consciousness into their implying this Social Universal might be the business and achievement of a genuine and completed Critique of Reason. Such a critique would proceed to the adequate explanation not only of the a priori categories, of which since ​Kant’s day the world has heard so much, but of that residue of the noumenon which we noticed Lange leave unexamined. It would find the explanation of the categories, and the nature of the final noumenon, in a single active principle in consciousness, of which the vague notion Noumenon is only our confused native feeling. Our ordinary name for this principle is the moral consciousness, the consciousness in each mind of its own reality, integral and sacred, and of the equal reality of all others; but this is in fact rather the supreme theoretical principle, the spring of all intelligence, the master-light of all logic and all knowledge. The categories are the intrinsic modes in which this principle puts its activity forth. Though they appear so different to our first or natural view, they turn out on critical investigation to be expressions of one and the same single synthetical energy — simply forms of a necessary nexus between all possible terms of sense, which reduces these to the serviceable means of our reality as free intelligences. This principle, as blending in one energetic whole above the categories the two activities of absolute subject and absolute cause, is the one intelligible creative unity — the unity of the Person in its whole reality. The universe-consciousness thus passes from apparent mere Fact into a pure conscious Act. And this Act, as always determin​ing itself in view of a system of conscious subjects, embraces in its living process of self-definition for every self the whole world of other selves, and therein the Supreme Self, or God, and is thus strictly and truly personal, — is in the last analysis that order of intelligence which we call a Conscience.
It is plain, of course, that any proof of this depends upon the validity of the doctrine of a priori cognition; only by our proved possession of such cognition can there be any evidence that we are self-active realities. It is in this reference noteworthy, therefore, that Lange, as defender of agnosticism, sees he cannot afford to admit the theory upon which alone cognition strictly a priori can be established. Of course, to determine that its principles are indeed underived from its sensible objects, consciousness must be capable of an act in which it extricates itself from its world of things, and contemplates its cognitive equipment strictly per se, apart from actual application to objects; an act, accordingly, which transcends experience, and was consequently named by Kant “transcendental reflexion”; an act, moreover, which presupposes the power not only of using the apparatus of judgment upon objects that are not sensible at all, but of making judgments absolutely valid, since the decision that anything is organic in us must be a decision upon our real nature — our nature as it appears to the ​whole world of intelligences. This presupposition is radically at variance with Kant’s subsequent finis to his theoretical critique, by which he shut in knowledge to the world of sense, and with Lange’s acceptance and development of this. It is simply in keeping with this acceptance and development that Lange takes the ground, which otherwise would be quite surprising, that the contents of our a priori endowment can only be determined by induction. This position, however, is clearly a self-contradiction. For an induction, despite its formal generality, is always in its own value a particular judgment, always comes short of full universality; whereas, to establish the apriority of an element, we must show it to be strictly universal, or, in other words, necessary. It is evident, then, that Lange has here finally abandoned the standpoint proper to Kantianism, and, without so intending, has really gone back to the standpoint of Locke. There we may leave him and his followers to the thoroughgoing surgery of Hume.
A suflflcient cure, in fact, for all such agnostic and empirical tendencies might be found in a faithful study of Hume, not in the more literary and much mitigated form in which he appears in the Essays, but in his undiluted masterpiece, the Treatise of Human Nature. The very common neglect of the Treatise in behalf of the Essays is no doubt ​in great part owing to Hume’s own request, in the preface to the posthumous edition of the short “Pieces,” that the public would thenceforth look in these for the proper form of his philosophy. But in the Treatise he had written down and published what his genuine public, the keenest philosophic minds, have credited with a permanent significance of its own, quite apart from its author’s afterthought about it. This critical material, philosophic thought can never abandon.
In Part IV of the First Book of the Treatise, too often overlooked, Hume has supplied a key for the destruction of the empirical position and the agnosticism logically involved in it. There his diligent and penetrating reader will see he cannot longer stop with Hume’s doctrine, that experience gives only, but gives surely, the sensation of the present moment. He cannot but go on to discover, as Hume himself seems clearly to forebode, that without presupposing the abiding unity of personal identity, even the fleeting impression of the instant is impossible. This permanence of personal identity, however, Hume has by simply carrying out the rigorous logic of empiricism already done away with: it is nothing but a "deposit" from the “artificial idea” ​Causality; and this, empiricism has condemned as having no basis in fact — as being the creature of “fantasy.” Hence all perception — all experience, even to its simplest item — is itself dissipated and reduced to illusion.
The flat contradiction between this and the empirical principle, which derives its whole force from the assumed absoluteness of the single sensation, is obvious. Hume is thus the instrument of bringing about a curious result — that a principle should disappear by merely being taken in full earnest and carried out with unflinching consistency. What he has really done, and quite irrefutably, is to remove in this way the empirical principle finally; or, rather, he has simply let the principle dialectically remove itself. True is it indeed, that without an Abiding and Active in us the transitory and sensible is impossible. As the case has been forcibly put in a saying that deserves to become classic, “Our unconditioned universality is the ground of our existence,” — its ground, that is, at once its necessary condition and its sufficient reason.
* ↑ The essay is a revision of part of an article printed in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, January, 1883, with the title “Some Aspects of Recent German Philosophy.” Originally, it was a lecture before the Concord School of Philosophy, read in July, 1882.
* ↑ Prominent among the Neo-Kantians, after Lange, are Professors Cohen of Marburg, Bona Meyer of Bonn, Benno Erdmann of Kiel, and Dr. Hans Vaihinger of Strassburg. [Since the foregoing was written (1882), Dr. Vaihinger has become professor at Halle, and widely known as the author of the learned and acute Kant-Kommentar and the editor of Kantstudien.]
* ↑ His works already comprise no less than twenty octavo volumes, in the various departments of metaphysics, economics, sociology, mathematics, and criticism.
* ↑ The reader will easily recall his significant motto: “Speculative results by the inductive method of the natural sciences.”
* ↑ The reader must understand that this phrase represents Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Kant, rather than Kant’s own view. So, also, regarding much else that follows.
* ↑ Schopenhauer nowhere expressly admits the existence of this; rather, he continually evades it, putting forward the essential insatiability of the Will as the explanation of pain, and so of consciousness. But the implication seems tacitly and unavoidably present everywhere. So also, as Hartmann has rightly noted, is the implicit assumption that the Will is intrinsically conscious, after all.
* ↑ This is quite evident in the earlier editions of Hartmann’s first work, but becomes less and less so as the editions multiply and his thought gets more critical. In fact, in its latest form, his philosophy supplements this pessimism with a sort of concomitant optimism, operative in the present, while the effective pessimism is relegated to a remote future.
* ↑ E. von Hartmann: The Philosophy of the Unconscious. Translated by W. C. Coupland. London: Trübner and Co., 1883.
* ↑ A reminiscence here of Spinoza, or of Spinoza hegelised.
* ↑ Zekle crep’ up quite unbeknown. Lowell: The Courtin’.
* ↑ A one-sided and superficial construction is here put upon Hegel’s theory. Justice to Hegel requires us to remember that his Idea (Idee) is never represented as a bond merely “logical,” in contradistinction from the “will,” but always as the “negative” or “sublating” unity of intellect and will — a unity that takes up and solves the antinomy that appears between them when their distinction and contrast is taken abstractly; taken, that is, in neglect of their correlative union, and so viewed partially instead of in the whole. Hartmann’s leap, too, from idea as representation (Vorstellung) to the hegelian Idea (Idee) is, to say the least, a bit sudden and violent.
* ↑ Hartmann, like Schopenhauer, requires us here to make a refined distinction between this final “act of devotion” and suicide. Suicide, both say, is only an enraged and disappointed form of the “will to live.” The real difference, however, is that suicide, directly, fails to go far enough; nothing short of self-annihilation will answer. But it is difficult to see why, with their doctrine of individual transiency, suicide doesn’t “get there all the same.”
* ↑ Compare Professor Wundt’s article on “Philosophy in Germany,” in Mind, July, 1877.
* ↑ A writer more correctly to be compared with Dühring is Czolbe, of Königsberg, author of a naturalistic theory expounded in his Limits of Human Knowledge on the Basis of the Mechanical Principle, who died in 1873. But he did not, like Dühring, develop his views into a comprehensive philosophy, applied to all the provinces of life. He belonged, too, rather to the previous generation of thinkers than to this, and was known there as an opponent of Lotze. Lotze, gifted and influential as he was, I have also passed by, later in the essay, in the agnostic-idealist connexion, in spite of his acknowledged bearing on the position of Lange, mainly for reasons similar to those that led me to disregard Czolbe: he belongs to a movement earlier than the one here considered.
* ↑ In this he apparently presents a one-sided reflection from Hegel, with whom Identity and Difference are the elementary dynamic “moments” of the absolute Idea. But the relationship really goes back to Greek philosophy, in which Dühring seems much at home.
* ↑ Notice the reminiscence here of Leibnitz’s monadology.
* ↑ Dühring’s earliest book of mark was his Critical History of the General Principles of Mechanics, a work crowned by the University of Göttingen, and held, generally, in the highest esteem. It passed to its second edition in 1877. A third edition has recently appeared.
* ↑ That every occurrence must have a reason, and a reason sufficient to explain it.
* ↑ That no subject can have contradictory predicates.
* ↑ This seems, at a single happy stroke, to dispose of the attempt, common to Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Dühring, to explain consciousness as a phenomenon arising from the earlier and more real existence of the object, or “matter.”
* ↑ Dr. Hans Vaihinger: Hartmann, Dühring und Lange: ein kritischer Essay. Iserlohn, 1876. A book full of interest and of acute criticism, though marked by some agnostic extravagances. I have found it of admirable help in preparing this paper. [I ought now (1899) to add that Dr. (now Professor) Vaihinger seems in the course of years to have receded from his extremer negations, and to have become an idealist more after the type of Kant.]
* ↑ It deserves special notice, in passing, that this confusion of Kant’s Ding an sich, or thing-in-itself (something existing “on its own hook,” underived from other beings, independent of any one ego), with things as they are, is a very prevalent misconception of Kant. It is at the bottom not only of Neo-Kantianism, but of much other misinterpretation of him.
* ↑ How Schopenhauer the Epistemologist must have blessed Lange for this stroke, so masterfully repeating his own!
* ↑ Compare pp. 167 and 174, below, as referred to in their foot-notes.
* ↑ See p. 165, above.
* ↑ See p. 174, below.
* ↑ For a fuller proof of it, see the essay on “The Harmony of Determination and Freedom,” pp. 326-359, below.
* ↑ See pp. 165, 167, above.
* ↑ Treatise, p. 187 foll., edition of Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896. Compare, especially, the passage in the Appendix, pp. 635, 636.