Chapter XXXIV: Section D: RELIGIOUS WORK. (Hall 1, September 24, 3 p. m.) (7)

I. The problems which the critical philosophy undertook definitively to solve may be divided into three classes. The first is the epistemological problem, or the problem offered by human knowledge--its essential nature, its fixed limitations, if such there be, and its ontological validity. It was this problem which Kant brought to the front in such a manner that certain subsequent writers on philosophy have claimed it to be, not only the primary and most important branch of philosophical discipline, but to comprise the sum-total of what human reflection and critical thought can successfully compass. "We call philosophy self-knowledge," says one of these writers. "The theory of knowledge is the true _prima philosophia_," says another. Kant himself regarded it as the most imperative demand of reason to establish a science that shall "determine _a priori_ the possibility, the principles, and the extent of all cognitions." The burden of the epistemological problem has pressed heavily upon the thought of the nineteenth century; the different attitudes toward this problem, and its different alleged solutions, have been most influential factors in determining the philosophical discussions, divisions, schools, and permanent or transitory achievements of the century.

In the epistemological problem as offered by the Kantian philosophy of cognition there is involved the subordinate but highly important question as to the proper method of philosophy. Is the method of criticism, as that method was employed in the three Critiques of Kant, the exclusive, the sole appropriate and productive way of advancing human philosophical thought? I do not think that the experience of the nineteenth century warrants an affirmative answer to this question of method. This experience has certainly, however, resulted in demonstrating the need of a more thorough, consistent, and fundamental use of the critical method than that in which it was employed by Kant. And this improved use of the critical method has induced a more profound study of the psychology of cognition, and of the historical development of philosophy in the branch of epistemology. More especially, however, it has led to the reinstatement of the value-judgments, as means of cognition, in their right relations of harmony with the judgments of fact and of law.

The second of the greater problems which the critical philosophy of the eighteenth handed on to the nineteenth century is the ontological problem. This problem, even far more than the epistemological, has excited the intensest interest, and called for the profoundest thought, of reflective minds during the last hundred years. This problem engages in the inquiry as to what Reality is; for to define philosophy from the ontological point of view renders it "the rational science of reality;" or, at least, "the science of the supreme and most important realities." In spite of the fact that the period immediately following the conclusion of the Kantian criticism was the age when the people were singing

"_Da die Metaphysik vor Kurzem unbeerbt abging,_
_Werden die Dinge an sich jetzo sub hasta verkauft,_"

the cultivation of the ontological problem, and the growth of systematic metaphysics in the nineteenth century, had never previously been surpassed. In spite of, or rather because of, the fact that Kant left the ancient body of metaphysics so dismembered and discredited, and his own ontological structure, in such hopeless confusion, all the several buildings both of Idealism and of Realism either rose quickly or were erected upon the foundations made bare by the critical philosophy.

But especially unsatisfactory to the thought of the first quarter of the nineteenth century was the Kantian position with reference to the problem in which, after all, both the few who cultivate philosophy and the multitude who share in its fruits are always most truly interested; and this is the ethico-religious problem. In the judgment of the generation which followed him, Kant had achieved for those who accepted his points of view, his method of philosophizing, and his results, much greater success in "removing knowledge" than in "finding room for faith." For he seemed to have left the positive truths of Ethics so involved in the negative positions of his critique of knowledge as greatly to endanger them; and to have entangled the conceptions of religion with those of morality in a manner to throw doubt upon them both.

The breach between the human cognitive faculties and the ontological doctrines and conceptions on which morality and religion had been supposed to rest firmly, the elaborately argued distrust and skepticism which had been aimed against the ability of human reason to reach reality, and the consequent danger which threatened the most precious judgments of worth and the ontological value of ethical and æsthetical sentiments, could not remain unnoticed, or fail to promote ceaseless and earnest efforts to heal it. The hitherto accepted solutions of the problems of cognition, of being, and of man's ethico-religious experience, could not survive the critical philosophy. But the solutions which the critical philosophy itself offered could not fail to excite opposition and to stimulate further criticism. Moreover, certain factors in human nature, certain interests in human social life, and certain needs of humanity, not fully recognized and indeed scarcely noticed by criticism, could not fail to revive and to enforce their ancient, perennial, and valid claims.

In a word, Kant left the main problems of philosophy involved in numerous contradictions. The result of his penetrating but excessive analysis was unwarrantably to contrast sense with understanding; to divide reason as constitutive from reason as regulative; to divorce the moral law from our concrete experience of the results of good and bad conduct, true morality from many of the noblest desires and sentiments, and to set in opposition phenomena and noumena, order and freedom, knowledge and faith, science and religion. Now the highest aim of philosophy is reconciliation. What wonder, then, that the beginning of the last century felt the stimulus of the unreconciled condition of the problems of philosophy at the end of the preceding century! The greatest, most stimulating inheritance of the philosophy of the nineteenth century from the philosophy of the eighteenth century was the "post-Kantian problems."

II. The lines of the movement of philosophical thought and the principal contributory influences which belong to the nineteenth century may be roughly divided into two classes; namely, (1) those which tended in the direction of carrying to the utmost extreme the negative and destructive criticism of Kant, and (2) those which, either mainly favoring or mainly antagonizing the conclusions of the Kantian criticism, endeavored to place the positive answer to all three of these great problems of philosophy upon more comprehensive, scientifically defensible, and permanently sure foundations. The one class so far completed the attempt to remove the knowledge at which philosophy aims as, by the end of the first half of the century, to have left no rational ground for any kind of faith. The other class had not, even by the end of the second half of the century, as yet agreed upon any one scheme for harmonizing the various theories of knowledge, of reality, and of the ground of morality and religion. There appeared, however,--especially during the last two decades of the century,--certain signs of convergence upon positions, to occupy which is favorable for agreement upon such a scheme, and which now promise a new constructive era for philosophy. The terminus of the destructive movement has been reached in our present-day positivism and philosophical skepticism. For this movement there would appear to be no more beyond in the same direction. The terminus of the other movement can only be somewhat dimly descried. It may perhaps be predicted with a reasonable degree of confidence as some form of ontological Idealism (if we may use such a phrase) that shall be at once more thoroughly grounded in man's total experience, as interpreted by modern science, and also more satisfactory to human ethical, æsthetical, and religious ideals, than any form of systematic philosophy has hitherto been. But to say even this much is perhaps unduly to anticipate.

If we attempt to fathom and estimate the force of the various streams of influence which have shaped the history of the philosophical development of the nineteenth century, I think there can be no doubt that the profoundest and the most powerful is the one influence which must be recognized and reckoned with in all the centuries. This influence is humanity's undying interest in its moral, civil, and religious ideals, and in the civil and religious institutions which give a faithful but temporary expression to these ideals. In the long run, every fragmentary or systematic attempt at the solution of the problem of philosophy must sustain the test of an ability to contribute something of value to the realization of these ideals. The test which the past century has proposed for its own thinkers, and for its various schools of philosophy, is by far the severest which has ever been proposed. For the most part unostentatiously and in large measure silently, the thoughtful few and the comparatively thoughtless multitude have been contributing, either destructively or constructively, to the effort at satisfaction for the rising spiritual life of man. And if in some vague but impressive manner we speak of this thirst for spiritual satisfaction as characteristic of any period of human history, we may say, I believe, that it has been peculiarly characteristic and especially powerful as an influence during the last hundred years. The opinions, sentiments, and ideals which shape the development of the institutions of the church and state, and the freer activities of the same opinions, sentiments, and ideals, have been in this century, as they have been in every century, the principal factors in determining the character of its philosophical development.

But a more definite and visible kind of influence has constantly proceeded from the centres of the higher education. The universities--especially of Germany, next, perhaps of Scotland, but also of England and the United States, and even in less degree of France and Italy--have both fostered and shaped the evolution of critical and reflective thought, and of its product as philosophy. In Germany during the eighteenth century the greater universities had been emancipating themselves from the stricter forms of political and court favoritism and of ecclesiastical protection and control. This emancipation had already operated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it continued more and more to operate throughout this century, for participation in that free thought whose spirit is absolutely essential to the flourishing of true philosophy. All the other colleges and universities can scarcely repay the debt which modern philosophy owes to the universities of Germany. The institutions of the higher education which are moulded after this spirit, and which have a generous share of this spirit, have everywhere been _schools of thought_ as well as schools of learning and research. Without the increasing numbers and growing encouragement of such centres for the cultivation of the discipline of critical and reflective thinking, it is difficult to conjecture how much the philosophical development of the nineteenth century would have lost. _Libertas docendi_ and _Academische Freiheit_--without these philosophy has one of its wings fatally wounded or severely clipped.

Not all the philosophy of the last century, however, was born and developed in academical centres and under academical influences. In Germany, Great Britain, and France, the various so-called "Academies" or other unacademical associations of men of scientific interests and attainments--notably, the Berlin Academy, which has been called "the seat of an anti-scholastic popular philosophy"--were during the first half of the nineteenth century contributing by their conspicuous failures as well as by their less conspicuous successes, important factors to the constructive new thought of the latter half of the nineteenth century. In general, although these men decried system and were themselves inadequately prepared to treat the problems of philosophy, whether from the historical or the speculative and critical point of view, they cannot be wholly neglected in estimating its development. Clever reasoning, and witty and epigrammatic writing on scientific or other allied subjects, cannot indeed be called _philosophy_ in the stricter meaning of the word. But this so-called "popular philosophy" has greatly helped in a way to free thought from its too close bondage to scholastic tradition. And even the despite of philosophy, and sneering references to its "barrenness," which formerly characterized the meetings and the writings of this class of its critics, but which now are happily much less frequent, have been on the whole both a valuable check and a stimulus to her devotees. He would be too narrow and sour a disciple of scholastic metaphysics and systematic philosophy, who, because of the levity or scorning of "outsiders," should refuse them all credit. Indeed, the lesson of the close of the nineteenth century may well enough be the motto for the beginning of the twentieth century: _In philosophy--since to philosophize is natural and inevitable for all rational beings--there really are no outsiders._

In this connection it is most interesting to notice how men of the type just referred to, were at the end of the eighteenth century found grouped around such thinkers as Mendelssohn, Lessing, F. Nicolai,--representing a somewhat decided reaction from the French realism to the German idealism. The work of the Academicians in the criticism of Kant was carried forward by Jacobi, who, at the time of his death, was the pensioned president of the Academy at Munich. Some of these same critics of the Kantian philosophy showed a rather decided preference for the "commonsense" philosophy of the Scottish School.

But both inside and outside of the Universities and Academies the scientific spirit and acquisitions of the nineteenth century have most profoundly, and on the whole favorably, affected the development of its philosophy. In the wider meaning of the word, "science,"--the meaning, namely, in which science = _Wissenschaft_,--philosophy aims to be scientific; and science can never be indifferent to philosophy. In their common aim at a rational and unitary system of principles, which shall explain and give its due significance to the totality of human experience, science and philosophy can never remain long in antagonism; they ought never even temporarily to be divided in interests, or in the spirit which leads each generously to recognize the importance of the other. The early part of the last century was, indeed, too much under the influence of that almost exclusively speculative _Natur-philosophie_, of which Schelling and Hegel were the most prominent exponents. On the other hand, the conception of nature as a vast interconnected and unitary system of a rational order, unfolding itself in accordance with teleological principles,--however manifold and obscure,--is a noble conception and not destined to pass away.

On the continent--at least in France, where it had attained its highest development--the scientific spirit was, at the close of the eighteenth century, on the whole opposed to systematization. The impulse to both science and philosophy during both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, over the entire continent of Europe, was chiefly due to the epoch-making work of that greatest of all titles in the modern scientific development of the Western World, the _Principia_ of Newton. In mathematics and the physical sciences, during the early third or half of the last century, Great Britain also has a roll of distinguished names which compares most favorably with that of either France or Germany. But in England, France, and the United States, during the whole century, science has lacked the breadth and philosophic spirit which it had in Germany during the first three quarters of this period. During all that time the German man of science was, as a rule, a scholar, an investigator, a teacher, _and a philosopher_. Science and philosophy thrived better, however, in Scotland than elsewhere outside of Germany, so far as their relations in interdependence were concerned. Into the Scottish universities Playfair introduced some of the continental suggestions toward the end of the eighteenth century, so that there was less of exclusiveness and unfriendly rivalry between science and philosophy; and both profited thereby. In the United States, during the first half or more of the century, so dominant were the theological and practical interests and influences that there was little free development of either science or philosophy,--if we interpret the one as the equivalent of _Wissenschaft_ and understand the other in the stricter meaning of the word.

The history of the development of the scientific spirit and of the achievements of the particular sciences is not the theme of this paper. To trace in detail, or even in its large outlines, the reciprocal influence of science and philosophy during the past hundred years, would itself require far more than the space allotted to me. It must suffice to say that the various advances in the efforts of the particular sciences to enlarge and to define the conceptions and principles employed to portray the Being of the World in its totality, have somewhat steadily grown more and more completely metaphysical, and more and more of positive importance for the reconstruction of systematic philosophy. The latter has not simply been disciplined by science, compelled to improve its method, and to examine all its previous claims. But philosophy has also been greatly enriched by science with respect to its material awaiting synthesis, and it has been not a little profited by the unsuccessful attempts of the current scientific theories to give themselves a truly satisfactory account of that Ultimate Reality which, to understand the better, is no unworthy aim of their combined efforts.

During the nineteenth century science has seen many important additions to that Ideal of Nature and her processes, to form which in a unitary and harmonizing but comprehensive way is the philosophical goal of science. The gross mechanical conception of nature which prevailed in the earlier part of the eighteenth century has long since been abandoned, as quite inadequate to our experience with her facts, forces, and laws. The kinetic view, which began with Huygens, Euler, and Ampère, and which was so amplified by Lord Kelvin and Clerk-Maxwell in England, and by Helmholtz and others in Germany, on account of its success in explaining the phenomena of light, of gases, etc., very naturally led to the attempt to develop a kinetic theory, a doctrine of energetics, which should explain all phenomena. But the conception of "that which moves," the experience of important and persistent qualitative _differentiae_, and the need of assuming ends and purposes served by the movement, are troublesome obstacles in the way of giving such a completeness to this theory of the Being of the World. Yet again the amazing success which the theory of evolution has shown in explaining the phenomena with which the various biological sciences concern themselves, has lent favor during the latter half of the century to the vitalistic and genetic view of nature. For all our most elaborate and advanced kinetic theories seem utterly to fail us as explanatory when we, through the higher powers of the microscope, stand wondering and face to face with the evolution of a single living cell. But from such a view of the essential Being of the World as evolution suggests to the psycho-physical theory of nature is not an impassable gulf. And thus, under its growing wealth of knowledge, science may be leading up to an Ideal of the Ultimate Reality, in which philosophy will gratefully and gladly coincide. At any rate, the modern conception of nature and the modern conception of God are not so far apart from each other, as either of these conceptions is now removed from the conceptions covered by the same terms, some centuries gone by.

There is one of the positive sciences, however, with which the development of philosophy during the last century has been particularly allied. This science is psychology. To speak of its history is not the theme of this paper. But it should be noted in passing how the development of psychology has brought into connection with the physical and biological sciences the development of philosophy. This union, whether it be for better or for worse,--and, on the whole, I believe it to be for better rather than for worse,--has been in a very special way the result of the last century. In tracing its details we should have to speak of the dependence of certain branches of psychology on physiology, and upon Sir Charles Bell's discovery of the difference between the sensory and the motor nerves. This discovery was the contribution of the beginning of the century to an entire line of discoveries, which have ended at the close of the century with putting the localization of cerebral function upon a firm experimental basis. Of scarcely less importance has been the cellular theory as applied (1838) by Matthias Schleiden, a pupil of Fries in philosophy, to plants, and by Theodor Schwann about the same time to animal organisms. To these must be added the researches of Johannes Müller (1801-1858), the great biologist, a listener to Hegel's lectures, whose law of _specific energies_ brings him into connection with psychology and, through psychology, to philosophy. Even more true is this of Helmholtz, whose _Lehre von den Tonempfindungen_ (1862) and _Physiologische Optik_ (1867) placed him in even closer, though still mediate, relations to philosophy. But perhaps especially Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887), whose researches in psycho-physics laid the foundations of whatever, either as psychology or as philosophy, goes under this name; and whether the doctrine have reference to the relation of man's mind and body, or to the wider relations of spirit and matter.

In my judgment it cannot be affirmed that the attempts of the latter half of the nineteenth century to develop an experimental science of psychology in independence of philosophical criticism and metaphysical assumption, or the claims of this science to have thrown any wholly new light upon the statement, or upon the solution of philosophical problems, have been largely successful. But certain more definitely psychological questions have been to a commendable degree better analyzed and elucidated; the new experimental methods, where confined within their legitimate sphere, have been amply justified; and certain _quasi_-metaphysical views respecting the nature of the human mind, and even, if you will, the nature of the Spirit in general--have been placed in a more favorable and scientifically engaging attitude toward speculative philosophy. This seems to me to be especially true with respect to two problems in which both empirical psychology and philosophy have a common and profound interest. These are (1) the complex synthesis of mental functions involved in every act of true cognition, together with the bearing which the psychology of cognition has upon epistemological problems; and (2) the yet more complex and profound analysis, from the psychological point of view, of what it is to be a self-conscious and self-determining Will, a true Self, together with the bearing which the psychology of selfhood has upon all the problems of ethics, æsthetics, and religion.

The more obvious and easily traceable influences which have operated to incite and direct the philosophical development of the nineteenth century are, of course, dependent upon the teachings and writings of philosophers, and the schools of philosophy which they have founded. To speak of these influences even in outline would be to write a manual of the history of philosophy during that hundred of years, which has been of all others by far the most fruitful in material results, whatever estimate may be put upon the separate or combined values of the individual thinkers and their so-called schools. No fewer than seven or eight relatively independent or partially antagonistic movements, which may be traced back either directly or more indirectly to the critical philosophy, and to the form in which the problems of philosophy were left by Kant, sprung up during the century. In Germany chiefly, there arose the Faith-philosophy, the Romantic School, and Rational Idealism; in France, Eclecticism and Positivism (if, indeed, the latter can be called _a_ philosophy); in Scotland, a naïve and crude form of Realism, which served well for the time as an antagonist of a skeptical idealism, but which itself contributed to an improved form of Idealism; and in the United States, or rather in New England, a peculiar kind of Transcendentalism of the sentimental type. But all these movements of thought, and others lying somewhere midway between, in a pair composed of any two, together with a steadfast remainder of almost every sort of Dogmatism, and all degrees and kinds of Skepticism, have been intermixed and contending with one another, in all these countries. Such has been the varied, undefinable, and yet intensely stimulating and interesting character of the development of systematic and scholastic philosophy, during the nineteenth century.

The early opposition to Kant in Germany was, in the main, twofold:--both to his peculiar extreme analysis with its philosophical conclusions, and also to all systematic as distinguished from a more popular and literary form of philosophizing. Toward the close of the eighteenth century a group of men had been writing upon philosophical questions in a spirit and method quite foreign to that held in respect by the critical philosophy. It is not wholly without significance that Lessing, whose aim had been to use common sense and literary skill in clearing up obscure ideas and improving and illumining the life of man, died in the very year of the appearance of Kant's _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_. Of this class of men an historian dealing with this period has said, "There is hardly one who does not quote somewhere or other Pope's saying, 'The proper study of mankind is man.'" To this class belong Hamann (1730-1788), the inspirer of Herder and Jacobi. The former, who was essentially a poet and a friend of Goethe, controverted Kant with regard to his doctrine of reason, his antithesis between the individual and the race, and his schism between things as empirically known and the known unity in the Ground of their being and becoming. Herder's path to truth was highly colored with flowers of rhetoric; but the promise was that he would lead men back to the heavenly city. Jacobi, too, with due allowance made for the injury wrought by his divorce of the two philosophies,--that of faith and that of science,--and his excessive estimate of the value-judgments which repose in the mist of a feeling-faith, added something of worth by way of exposing the barrenness of the Kantian doctrine of an unknowable "Thing-in-itself."

From men like Fr. Schlegel (1772-1829), whose valid protest against the sharp separation of speculative philosophy from the æsthetical, social, and ethical life, assumed the "standpoint of irony," little real result in the discovery of truth could be expected. But Schleiermacher (1768-1834), in spite of that mixture of unfused elements which has made his philosophy "a rendezvous for the most diverse systems," contributed valuable factors to the century's philosophical development, both of a negative and of a positive character. This thinker was peculiarly fortunate in the enrichment of the conception of experience as warranting a justifiable confidence in the ontological value of ethical, æsthetical, and religious sentiment and ideas; but he was most unfortunate in reviving and perpetuating the unjustifiable Kantian distinction between cognition and faith in the field of experience. On the whole, therefore, the Faith-philosophy and the Romantic School can easily be said to have contributed more than a negative and modifying influence to the development of the philosophy of the nineteenth century. Its more modern revival toward the close of the same century, and its continued hold upon certain minds of the present day, are evidences of the positive but partial truth which its tenets, however vaguely and unsystematically, continue to maintain in an æsthetically and practically attractive way.

The admirers of Kant strove earnestly and with varied success to remedy the defects of his system. Among the earlier, less celebrated and yet important members of this group, were K. G. Reinhold (1758-1823), and Maimon (died, 1800). The former, like Descartes, in that he was educated by the Jesuits, began the attempt, after rejecting some of the arbitrary distinctions of Kant and his barren and self-contradictory "Thing-in-itself," to unify the critical philosophy by reducing it to some one principle. The latter really transcended Kant in his philosophical skepticism, and anticipated the Hamiltonian form of the so-called principle of relativity. Fries (1773-1843), and Hermes (1775-1831)--the latter of whom saw in empirical psychology the only true propædeutic to philosophy--should be mentioned in this connection. In the same group was another, both mathematician and philosopher, who strove more successfully than others of this group to accept the critical standpoint of Kant and yet to transcend his negative conclusions with regard to a theory of knowledge. I refer to Bolzano (Prague, 1781-1848), who stands in the same line of succession with Fries and Hermes, and whose works on the _Science of Religion_ (4 vols. 1834) and his _Science of Knowledge_ (4 vols. 1837) are noteworthy contributions to epistemological doctrine. In the latter we have developed at great length the important thought that the illative character of propositional judgments implies an objective relation; and that in all truths the subject-idea must be objective. In the work on religion there is found as thoroughly dispassionate and rational a defense of Catholic doctrine as exists anywhere in philosophical literature. The limited influence of these works, due in part to their bulk and their technical character, is on the whole, I think, sincerely to be regretted.

It was, however, chiefly that remarkable series of philosophers which may be grouped under the rubric of a "rational Idealism," who filled so full and made so rich the philosophical life of Germany during the first half of the last century; whose philosophical thoughts and systems have spread over the entire Western World, and who are most potent influences in shaping the development of philosophy down to the present hour. Of these we need do little more than that we can do--mention their names. At their head, in time, stands Fichte, who--although Kant is reported to have complained of this disciple because he lied about him so much--really divined a truth which seems to be hovering in the clouds above the master's head, but which, if the critical philosophy truly meant to teach it, needed helpful deliverance in order to appear in perfectly clear light. Fichte, although he divined this truth, did not, however, free it from internal confusion and self-contradiction. It _is_ his truth, nevertheless, that in the Self, as a self-positing and self-determining activity, must somehow be found the Ground of all experience and of all Reality.

The important note which Schelling sounded was the demand that philosophy should recognize "Nature" as belonging to the sphere of Reality, and as requiring a measure of reflective thought which should in some sort put it on equal terms with the Ego, for the construction of our conception of the Being of the World. To Schelling it seemed impossible to deduce, as Fichte had done, all the rich concrete development of the world of things from the subjective needs and constitutional forms of functioning which belong to the finite Self. And, indeed, the doctrine which limits the origin, existence, and value of all that is known about this sphere of experience to these needs, and which finds the sufficient account of all experience with nature in these forms of functioning, must always seem inadequate and even grotesque in the sight of the natural sciences. Both Nature and Spirit, thought Schelling, must be allowed to claim actual existence and equally real value; while at the same time philosophy must reconcile the seeming opposition of their claims and unite them in an harmonious and self-explanatory way. In some common substratum, in which, to adopt Hegel's sarcastic criticism, as in the darkness of the night "all cows are black,"--that is in the Absolute, as an Identical Basis of Differences,--the reconciliation was to be accomplished.

But the constructive idealistic movement, in which Fichte and Schelling bore so important a part, could not be satisfied with the positions reached by either of these two philosophers. Neither the physical and psychological sciences, nor the speculative interests of religion, ethics, art, and social life, permitted this movement to stop at this point. In all the subsequent developments of philosophy during the first half or three quarters of the nineteenth century, undoubtedly the influence of Hegel was greatest of all individual thinkers. His _motif_ and plan are revealed in his letter of November 2, 1800, to Schelling, namely, to transform what had hitherto been an ideal into a thoroughly elaborate system. And in spite of his obvious obscurities of thought and style, there is real ground for his claim to be the champion of the common consciousness. It is undoubtedly in Hegel's _Phänomenologie des Geistes_ (1807), that the distinctive features of the philosophy of the first half of the last century most clearly define themselves. The forces of reflection now abandon the abstract analytic method and positions of the Kantian Critique, and concentrate themselves upon the study of man's spiritual life as an historical evolution, in a more concrete, face-to-face manner. Two important and, in the main, valid assumptions underlie and guide this reflective study: (1) The Ultimate Reality, or principle of all realities, is Mind or Spirit, which is to be recognized and known in its essence, not by analysis into its formal elements (the categories), but as a living development; (2) those formal elements, or categories to which Kant gave validity merely as constitutional forms of the functioning of the human understanding, represent, the rather, the essential structure of Reality.

In spite of these true thoughts, fault was justly found by the particular sciences with both the speculative method of Hegel, which consists in the smooth, harmonious, and systematic arrangement of conceptions in logical or ideal relations to one another; and also with the result, which reduces the Being of the World to terms of thought and dialectical processes merely, and neglects or overlooks the other aspects of racial experience. Therefore, the idealistic movement could not remain satisfied with the Hegelian dialectic. Especially did both the religious and the philosophical party revolt against the important thought underlying Hegel's philosophy of religion; namely, that "the more philosophy approximates to a complete development, the more it exhibits the same need, the same interest, and the same content, as religion itself." This, as they interpreted it, meant the absorption of religion in philosophy.

Next after Hegel, among the great names of this period, stand the names of Herbart and Schopenhauer. The former contributes in an important way to the proper conception of the task and the method of philosophy, and influences greatly the development of psychology, both as a science that is pedagogic to philosophy, and as laying the basis for pedagogical principles and practice. But Herbart commits again the ancient fallacy, under the spell of which so much of the Kantian criticism was bound; and which identifies contradictions that belong to the imperfect or illusory conceptions of individual thinkers with insoluble antinomies inherent in reason itself. In spite of the little worth and misleading character of his view of perception, and the quite complete inadequacy of the method by which, at a single leap, he reaches the one all-explanatory principle of his philosophy, Schopenhauer made a most important contribution to the reflective thought of the century. It is true, as Kuno Fischer has said, that it seems to have occurred to Schopenhauer only twenty-five years after he had propounded his theory, that will, as it appears in consciousness, is as truly phenomenal as is intellect. It is also true that his theory of knowledge and his conception of Reality, as measured by their power to satisfy and explain our total experience, are inflicted with irreconcilable contradictions. Neither can we accord firm confidence or high praise to the "Way of Salvation" which somehow Will can attain to follow by æsthetic contemplation and ascetic self-denial. Yet the philosophy of Schopenhauer rightly insists upon our Idealistic construction of Reality having regard to aspects of experience which his predecessors had quite too much neglected; and even its spiteful and exaggerated reminders of the facts which contradict the tendency of all Idealism to construct a smooth, regular, and altogether pleasing conception of the Being of the World, have been of great benefit to the development of the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In estimating the thoughts and the products of modern Idealism we ought not to forget the larger multitude of thoughtful men, both in Germany and elsewhere, who have contributed toward shaping the course of reflection in the attempt to answer the problems which the critical philosophy left to the nineteenth century. It is a singular comment upon the caprices of fame that, in philosophy as in science, politics, and art, some of those who have really reasoned most soundly and acutely, if not also effectively upon these problems, are little known even by name in the history of the philosophical development of the century. Among the earlier members of this group, did space permit, we should wish to mention Berger, Solger, Steffens, and others, who strove to reconcile the positions of a subjective idealism with a realistic but pantheistic conception of the Being of the World. There are others, who like Weisse, I. H. Fichte, C. P. Fischer, and Braniss, more or less bitterly or moderately and reasonably, opposed the method and the conclusions of the Hegelian dialectic. Still another group earned for themselves the supposedly opprobrious but decidedly vague title of "Dualists," by rejecting what they conceived to be the pantheism of Hegel. Still others, like Fries and Beneke and their successors, strove to parallel philosophy with the particular sciences by grounding it in an empirical but scientific psychology; and thus they instituted a line of closely connected development, to which reference has already been made.

Hegel himself believed that he had permanently effected that reconciliation of the orthodox creed with the cognition of Ultimate Reality at which his dialectic aimed. In all such attempts at reconciliation three great questions are chiefly concerned: (1) the Being of God; (2) the nature of man; (3) the actual and the ideally satisfactory relations between the two. But, as might have been expected, a period of wild, irregular, and confused contention met the attempt to establish this claim. In this conflict of more or less noisy and popular as well as of thoughtful and scholastic philosophy, Hegelians of various degrees of fidelity, anti-Hegelians of various degrees of hostility, and ultra-Hegelians of various degrees of eccentricity, all took a valiant and conspicuous part. We cannot follow its history; but we can learn its lesson. Polemical philosophy, as distinguished from quiet, reflective, and critical but constructive philosophy involves a most uneconomical use of mental force. Yet out of this period of conflict, and in a measure as its result, there came a period of improved relations between science and philosophy and between philosophy and theology, which was the dawn, toward the close of the nineteenth century, of that better illumined day into the middle of which we hope that we are proceeding.

Before leaving this idealistic movement in Germany, and elsewhere as influenced largely by German philosophy, one other name deserves mention. This name is that of Lotze, who combined elements from many previous thinkers with those derived from his own studies and thoughts,--the conceptions of mechanism as applied to physical existences and to psychical life, with the search for some monistic Principle that shall satisfy the æsthetical and ethical, as well as the scientific demands of the human mind. This variety of interests and of culture led to the result of his making important contributions to psychology, logic, metaphysics, and æsthetics. If we find his system of thinking--as I think we must--lacking in certain important elements of consistency and obscured in places by doubts as to his real meaning, this does not prevent us from assigning to Lotze a position which, for versatility of interests, genial quality of reflection and criticism, suggestiveness of thought and charm of style, is second to no other in the history of nineteenth century philosophical development.

In France and in England the first quarter of the last century was far from being productive of great thinkers or great thoughts in the sphere of philosophy. De Biran (1766-1824), in several important respects the forerunner of modern psychology, after revolting from his earlier complacent acceptance of the vagaries of Condillac and Cabanis, made the discovery that the "immediate consciousness of self-activity is the primitive and fundamental principle of human cognition." Meantime it was only a little group of Academicians who were being introduced, in a somewhat superficial way, to the thoughts of the Scottish and the German idealistic Schools by Royer-Collard, Jouffroy, Cousin, and others. A more independent and characteristic movement was that inaugurated by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who, having felt the marked influence of Saint-Simon when he was only a boy of twenty, in a letter to his friend Valat, in the year 1824, declares: "I shall devote my whole life and all my powers to the founding of positive philosophy." In spite of the impossibility of harmonizing with this point of view the vague and mystical elements which characterize the later thought of Comte, or with its carrying into effect the not altogether intelligent recognition of the synthetic activity of the mind (_tout se réduit toujours à lier_) and certain hints as to "first principles;" and in spite of the small positive contribution to philosophy which Comtism could claim to have made; it has in a way represented the value of two ideas. These are (1) the necessity for philosophy of studying the actual historical forces which have been at work and which are displayed in the facts of history; and (2) the determination not to go by mere unsupported speculation beyond experience in order to discover knowable Reality. There is, however, a kind of subtle irony in the fact that the word "Positivism" should have come to stand so largely for _negative_ conclusions, in the very spheres of philosophy, morals, and religion where _affirmative_ conclusions are so much desired and sought.

That philosophy in Great Britain was in a nearly complete condition of decadence during the first half or three quarters of the nineteenth century was the combined testimony of writers from such different points of view as Carlyle, Sir William Hamilton, and John Stuart Mill. And yet these very names are also witnesses to the fact that this decadence was not quite complete. In the first quarter of the century Coleridge, although he had failed, on account of weakness both of mind and of character, in his attempt to reconcile religion to the thought of his own age, on the basis of the Kantian distinction between reason and the intellect, had sowed certain seed-thoughts which became fertile in the soil of minds more vigorous, logical, and practical than his own. This was, perhaps, especially true in America, where inquirers after truth were seeking for something more satisfactory than the French skepticism of the revolutionary and following period. Carlyle's mocking sarcasm was also not without wholesome effect.

But it was Sir William Hamilton and John Stuart Mill whose thoughts exercised a more powerful formative influence over the minds of the younger men. The one was the flower of the Scottish Realism, the other of the movement started by Bentham and the elder Mill.

That the Scottish Realism should end by such a combination with the skepticism of the critical philosophy as is implied in Hamilton's law of the relativity of all knowledge, is one of the most curious and interesting turns in the history of modern philosophy. And when this law was so interpreted by Dean Mansel in its application to the fundamental cognitions of religion as to lay the foundations upon which the most imposing structure of agnosticism was built by Herbert Spencer, surely the entire swing around the circle, from Kant to Kant again, has been made complete. The attempt of Hamilton failed, as every similar attempt must always fail. Neither speculative philosophy nor religious faith is satisfied with an abstract conception, about the correlate of which in Reality nothing is known or ever can be known. But every important attempt of this sort serves the double purpose of stimulating other efforts to reconstruct the answer to the problem of philosophy, on a basis of positive experience of an enlarged type; and also of acting as a real, if only temporary practical support to certain value-judgments which the faiths of morality, art, and religion both implicate and, in a measure, validate.

The influence of John Stuart Mill, as it was exerted not only in his conduct of life while a servant of the East India Company, but also in his writings on Logic, Politics, and Philosophy, was, on the whole, a valuable contribution to his generation. In the additions which he made to the Utilitarianism of Bentham we have done, I believe, all that ever can be done in defense of this principle of ethics. And his posthumous confessions of faith in the ontological value of certain great conceptions of religion are the more valuable because of the nature of the man, and of the experience which is their source. Perhaps the most permanent contribution which Mill made to the development of philosophy proper, outside of the sphere of logic, ethics, and politics, was his vigorous polemical criticism of Hamilton's claim for the necessity of faith in an "Unconditioned" whose conception is "only a fasciculus of negations of the Conditioned in its opposite extremes, and bound together merely by the aid of language and their common character of incomprehensibility."

The history of the development of philosophy in America during the nineteenth century, as during the preceding century, has been characterized in the main by three principal tendencies. These may be called the theological, the social, and the eclectic. From the beginning down to the present time the religious influence and the interest in political and social problems have been dominant. And yet withal, the student of these problems in the atmosphere of this country likes, in a way, to do his own thinking and to make his own choices of the thoughts that seem to him true and best fitted for the best form of life. In spite of the fact that the different streams of European thought have flowed in upon us somewhat freely, there has been comparatively little either of the adherence to schools of European philosophy or of the attempt to develop a national school. Doubtless the influence of English and Scottish thinking upon the academical circles of America was greatest for more than one hundred and fifty years after the gift in 1714 by Governor Yale of a copy of Locke's Essay to the college which bore his name,--and especially upon the reflections and published works of Jonathan Edwards touching the fundamental problems of epistemology, ethics, and religion. During the early part of this century these views awakened antagonism from such writers as Dana, Whedon, Hazard, Nathaniel Taylor, Jeremiah Day, Henry P. Tappan, and other opponents of the Edwardean theology, and also from such advocates of so-called "free-thinking," as had derived their _motifs_ and their views from English deistical writers like Shaftesbury, or from the skepticism of Hume.

A more definite philosophical movement, however, which had established itself somewhat firmly in scholastic centres by the year 1825, and which maintained itself for more than half a century, went back to the arrival in this country of John Witherspoon, in 1768, to be the president of Princeton, bringing with him a library of three hundred books. It was the appeal of the Scottish School to the "plain man's consciousness" and to so-called "common sense," which was relied upon to controvert all forms of philosophy which seemed to threaten the foundations of religion and of the ethics of politics and sociology. But even during this period, which was characterized by relatively little independent thinking in scholastic circles, a more pronounced productivity was shown by such writers as Francis Wayland, and others; but, perhaps, especially by Laurens P. Hickok, whose works on psychology and cosmology deserve especial recognition: while in psychology, as related to philosophical problems, the principal names of this period are undoubtedly the presidents of Yale and Princeton,--Noah Porter and James McCosh,--both of whom (but especially the former) had their views modified by the more scientific psychology of Europe and the profounder thinking of Germany.

It was Germany's influence, however, both directly and indirectly through Coleridge and a few other English writers, that caused a ferment of impressions and ideas which, in their effort to work themselves clear, resulted in what is known as New England "Transcendentalism." In America this movement can scarcely be called definitely philosophical; much less can it be said to have resulted in a system, or even in a school, of philosophy. It must also be said to have been "inspired but not borrowed" from abroad. Its principal, if not sole, literary survival is to be found in the works of Emerson. As expounded by him, it is not precisely Pantheism--certainly not a consistent and critical development of the pantheistic theory of the Being of the World; it is, rather, a vague, poetical, and pantheistical Idealism of a decidedly mystical type.

The introduction of German philosophy proper, in its nature form, and essential being, to the few interested seriously in critical and reflective thinking upon the ultimate problems of nature and of human life, began with the founding of the _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, in 1867, under the direction of William T. Harris, then Superintendent of Schools in this city.

With the work of Darwin, and his predecessors and successors, there began a mighty movement of thought which, although it is primarily scientific and more definitely available in biological science, has already exercised, and is doubtless destined to exercise in the future, an enormous influence upon philosophy. Indeed, we are already in the midst of the preliminary confusions and contentions, but most fruitful considerations and discoveries belonging to a so-called philosophy of evolution.

This development has, in the sphere of systematic philosophy, reached its highest expression in the voluminous works produced through the latter half of the nineteenth century by Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose recent death seems to mark the close of the period we have under consideration. The metaphysical assumptions and ontological value of the system of Spencer, as he wished it to be understood and interpreted, have perhaps, though not unnaturally, been quite too much submerged in the more obvious expressions of its agnostic positivism. In its psychology, however, the assumption of "some underlying substance in contrast to all changing forms," distinguishes it from a pure positivism in a very radical way. But more especially in philosophy, the metaphysical postulate of a mysterious Unity of Force that somehow manages to reveal itself, and the law of its operations, to the developed cognition of the nineteenth century philosopher, however much it seems to involve the system in internal contradictions, certainly forbids that we should identify it with the positivism of Auguste Comte. In our judgment, however, it is in his ethical good sense and integrity of judgment,--a good sense and integrity which commits to ethics rather than to sociology the task of determining the highest type of human life,--and in basing the conditions for the prevalence and the development of the highest type of life upon ethical principles and upon the adherence to ethical ideas, that Herbert Spencer will be found most clearly entitled to a lasting honor.

III. The third number of our difficult tasks is to summarize the principal results, to inventory the net profits, as it were, of the development of philosophy during the nineteenth century. This task is made the more difficult by the heterogeneous nature and as yet unclassified condition of the development. With the quickening and diversifying of all kinds and means of intercourse, there has come the breaking down of national schools and idiosyncrasies of method and of thought. In philosophy, Germany, France, Great Britain, and indeed, Italy, have come to intermingle their streams of influence; and from all these countries these streams have been flowing in upon America. In psychology, especially, as well as in all the other sciences, but also to some degree in philosophy, returning streams of influence from America have, during the last decade or two, been felt in Europe itself.

It must also be admitted that the attempts at a reconstruction of systematic philosophy which have followed the rapid disintegration of the Hegelian system, and the enormous accumulations of new material due to the extension of historical studies and of the particular sciences,--including especially the so-called "new psychology,"--have not as yet been fruitful of large results. In philosophy, as in art, politics, and even scientific theory, the spirit and the opportunity of the time are more favorable to the gathering of material and to the projecting of a bewildering variety of new opinions, or old opinions put forth under new names, than to that candid, patient, and prolonged reflection and balancing of judgment which a worthy system-building inexorably requires. The age of breaking up the old, without assimilating the new, has not yet passed away. And whatever is new, startling, large, even monstrous, has in many quarters the seeming preference, in philosophy's building as in other architecture. To the confusion which reigns even in scholastic circles, contributions have been arriving from the outside, from philosophers like Nietzsche, and from men great in literature like Tolstoi. Nor has the matter been helped by the more recent extreme developments of positivism and skepticism, which often enough, without any consciousness of their origin and without the respect for morality and religion which Kant always evinced, really go back to the critical philosophy.