The World's Greatest Books — Volume 14 — Philosophy and Economics
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Title: The World's Greatest Books — Volume 14 — Philosophy and Economics
Editor: Arthur Mee
J. A. Hammerton
Release date: April 6, 2008 [eBook #25009]
Most recently updated: January 3, 2021
Language: English
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[Illustration: Plato]
THE WORLD'S
GREATEST
BOOKS
JOINT EDITORS
ARTHUR MEE
Editor and Founder of the Book of Knowledge
J. A. HAMMERTON
Editor of Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopaedia
VOL. XIV
PHILOSOPHY
(CONTINUED)
ECONOMICS
WM. H. WISE & CO.
_Table of Contents_
PORTRAIT OF PLATO _Frontispiece_
PHILOSOPHY (_continued_)
HEGEL, G.W.F. PAGE
The Philosophy of History 1
HUME, DAVID
Essays, Moral and Political 13
KANT, IMMANUEL
The Critique of Pure Reason 24
The Critique of Practical Reason 34
LEWES, GEORGE HENRY
A History of Philosophy 45
LOCKE, JOHN
Concerning the Human Understanding 56
MONTAIGNE
Essays 64
PLATO
The Apology, or Defence of Socrates 75
The Republic 84
SCHOPENHAUER
The World as Will and Idea 99
SENECA, L. ANNAEUS
On Benefits 109
SPENCER, HERBERT
Education 120
Principles of Biology 133
Principles of Sociology 145
SPINOZA, BENEDICT DE
Ethics 160
ECONOMICS
BELLAMY, EDWARD
Looking Backward 173
BENTHAM, JEREMY
Principles of Morals and Legislation 186
BLOCH, JEAN
The Future of War 199
BURKE, EDMUND
Reflections on the Revolution in France 212
COMTE, AUGUSTE
A Course of Positive Philosophy 224
GEORGE, HENRY
Progress and Poverty 238
HOBBES, THOMAS
The Leviathan 249
MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLO
The Prince 261
MALTHUS, T.R.
On the Principle of Population 270
MARX, KARL
Capital: A Critical Analysis 282
MILL, JOHN STUART
Principles of Political Economy 294
MONTESQUIEU
The Spirit of Laws 306
MORE, SIR THOMAS
Utopia Nowhere Land 315
PAINE, THOMAS
The Rights of Man 324
ROUSSEAU, JEAN JACQUES
The Social Contract 337
SMITH, ADAM
Wealth of Nations 350
* * * * *
A Complete Index of THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOKS will be found at the end
of Volume XX.
_Acknowledgment_
Acknowledgment and thanks for permission to use the following selections
are herewith tendered to Houghton, Mifflin & Company, Boston, for
"Looking Backward," by Edward Bellamy; to Ginn & Company, Boston, for
the International School of Peace, for "The Future of War," by Jean
Bloch; and to Doubleday, Page & Company, New York, for "Progress and
Poverty," by Henry George.
_Philosophy_
HEGEL
The Philosophy of History
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, at
Stuttgart, the capital of Wuertemburg, in which state his father
occupied a humble position in government service. He was educated
at Tuebingen for the ministry, and while there was, in private, a
diligent student of Kant and Rousseau. In 1805 he was Professor
Extraordinarius at the University of Jena, and in 1807 he gave the
world the first of his great works, the "Phenomenology." It was not
until 1816 that Hegel's growing fame as a writer secured for him a
professorship at Heidelberg, but, after two years, he exchanged it
for one at Berlin, where he remained until his death on November
14, 1831. On October 22, 1818, he began his famous lectures. "Our
business and vocation," he remarked to his listeners, "is to
cherish the philosophical development of the substantial foundation
which has renewed its youth and increased its strength." Although
the lectures on the "Philosophy of History" and on the "Philosophy
of Religion" (Vol. XIII) were delivered during this period, they
were not published until a year after his death, when his collected
works were issued.
_I.--In the East Began History_
Universal or world-history travels from east to west, for Europe is
absolutely the end of history, Asia the beginning. The history of the
world has an east in an absolute sense, for, although the earth forms a
sphere, history describes no orbit round it, but has, on the contrary, a
determinate orient--_viz._, Asia. Here rises the outward visible sun,
and in the west it sinks down; here also rises the sun of
self-consciousness. The history of the world is a discipline of the
uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a universal
principle and conferring a subjective freedom. The East knew, and to
this day knows, freedom only for one; the Greek and Roman world knew
that some are free; the German world knows that all are free. The first
political form, therefore, that we see in history is despotism; the
second democracy and aristocracy; and the third monarchy.
The first phase--that with which we have to begin--is the East.
Unreflected consciousness--substantial, objective, spiritual
existence--forms the basis; to which the subjective will first sustains
a relation in the form of faith, confidence, obedience. In the political
life of the East we find realised national freedom, developing itself
without advancing to subjective freedom. It is the childhood of history.
In the gorgeous edifices of the Oriental empires we find all national
ordinances and arrangements, but in such a way that individuals remain
as mere accidents. These revolve round a centre, round the sovereign,
who as patriarch stands (not as despot, in the sense of the Roman
imperial constitution) at the head. For he has to enforce the moral and
substantial; he has to uphold those essential ordinances which are
already established; so that what among us belongs entirely to
subjective freedom, here proceeds from the entire and general body of
the state.
The glory of the Oriental conception is the one individual as the
substantial being to which all belongs, so that no other individual has
a separate existence, or mirrors himself in his subjective freedom. All
the riches of imagination and nature are appropriated to that dominant
existence in which subjective freedom is essentially merged; the latter
looks for its dignity not in itself but in the absolute object. All the
elements of a complete state--even subjectivity--may be found there, but
not yet harmonised with the grand substantial being. For outside the one
power--before which nothing can maintain an independent existence--there
is only revolting caprice, which, beyond the limits of the central
power, moves at will without purpose or result.
Accordingly we find the wild herds breaking out from the upland,
falling upon the countries in question and laying them waste, or
settling down in them and giving up their wild life; but in all cases
lost resultlessly in the central substance.
This phase of substantiality, since it has not taken up its antithesis
into itself and overcome it, directly divides itself into two elements.
On the one side we see duration, stability--empires belonging, as it
were, to mere Space (as distinguished from Time); unhistorical history,
as, for example, in China, the state based on the family relation. Yet
the states in question, without undergoing any change in themselves, or
in the principle of their existence, are constantly changing their
opinion towards each other. They are in ceaseless conflict, which brings
on rapid destruction. The opposing principle of individuality enters
into these conflicting relations; but it is itself as yet only
unconscious, merely natural universality--light which is not yet the
light of the personal soul. This history, too, is for the most part
really unhistorical, for it is only the repetition of the same majestic
ruin.
The new element which, in the shape of bravery, prowess, magnanimity,
occupies the place of the previous despotic pomp goes through the same
cycle of decline and subsidence. And this subsidence, therefore, is not
really such; for through all this restless change no advance has been
made. History passes at this point--and only outwardly, that is, without
connection with the previous phase--to Central Asia. To carry on the
comparison with the individual man, this would be the boyhood of
history, no longer manifesting the repose and trustfulness of the child,
but boisterous and turbulent.
_II.--Greece, Rome and Christianity_
The Greek world may, then, be compared to the season of adolescence, for
here we have individualities shaping themselves. This is the second
main principle in human history. Morality is, as in Asia, a principle,
but it is morality impressed on individuality, and consequently denoting
the free volition of individuals. Here, then, is the union of the moral
with the subjective will, or the kingdom of beautiful freedom, for the
idea is united with a plastic form. It is not yet regarded abstractly,
but intimately bound up with the real, as in a beautiful work of art;
the sensible bears the stamp and expression of the spiritual. The
kingdom is consequently true harmony; it is a world of the most charming
but perishable, or quickly passing, bloom; it is the natural,
unreflecting observance of what is becoming--not yet true morality. The
individual will of the subject adopts without reflection the conduct and
habit prescribed by justice and the laws. The individual is, therefore,
in unconscious unity with the idea--the social weal.
The third phase is the realm of abstract universality (in which the
social aim absorbs all individual aims); it is the Roman state, the
severe labours of the manhood of history. For true manhood acts neither
in accordance with the caprice of a despot nor in obedience to a
graceful caprice of its own. It works for a general aim, one in which
the individual perishes and realises his own private object only in that
general aim. The state begins to have an abstract existence and to
develop itself for a definite object, in accomplishing which its members
have indeed a share, but not a complete and concrete one (calling their
whole being into play). Free individuals are sacrificed to the severe
demands of the national ends, to which they must surrender themselves in
this service of abstract generalisation. The Roman state is not a
repetition of such a state of individuals as was the Athenian _polis_.
The geniality and joy of soul that existed there have given place to
harsh and rigorous toil. The interest of history is detached from
individuals.
But when, subsequently, in the historical development, individuality
gains the ascendant, and the breaking up of the community into its
component atoms can be restrained only by external compulsion, then the
subjective might of individual despotism comes forward to play its part.
The individual is led to seek consolation for the loss of his freedom in
exercising and developing his private rights. In the next place, the
pain inflicted by despotism begins to be felt, and spirit, driven back
into its utmost depths, leaves the godless world, seeks for a harmony in
itself, and begins now an inner life--a complete concrete subjectivity,
which at the same time possesses a substantiality that is not grounded
in mere external existence.
Within the soul, therefore, arises the spiritual solution of the
struggle, in the fact that the individual personality, instead of
following its own capricious choice, is purified and elevated into
universality--a subjectivity that of its own free will adopts principles
tending to the good of all, reaches, in fact, a divine personality. To
the worldly empire this spiritual one wears a predominant aspect of
opposition, as the empire of subjectivity that has attained to the
knowledge of itself--itself in its essential nature--the empire of
spirit in its full sense.
The Christian community found itself in the Roman world, but as it was
secluded from this state, and did not hold the emperor for its absolute
sovereign, it was the object of persecution. Then was manifested its
inward liberty in the steadfastness with which sufferings were borne. As
regards its relation to the truth, the fathers of the Church built up
the dogma, but a chief element was furnished by the previous development
of philosophy. Just as Philo found a deeper import shadowed forth in the
Mosaic record and idealised what he considered the bare shell of the
narrative, so also did the Christians treat their records.
It was through the Christian religion that the absolute idea of God, in
if true conception, attained consciousness. Here man, too, finds
himself comprehended in his true nature, given in the specific
conception of "the Son." Man, finite when regarded for himself, is yet
at the same time the image of God and a fountain of infinity in himself.
Consequently he has his true home in a super-sensuous world--an infinite
subjectivity, gained only by a rupture with mere natural existence and
volition. This is religious self-consciousness.
The first abstract principles are won by the instrumentality of the
Christian religion for the secular state. First, under Christianity
slavery is impossible; for man as man--in the abstract essence of his
nature--is contemplated in God; each unit of mankind is an object of the
grace of God and of the divine purpose. Utterly excluding all
speciality, therefore, man, in and for himself--in his simple quality of
man--has infinite value; and this infinite value abolishes, _ipso
facto_, all particularity attaching to birth or country.
The other, the second principle, regards the subjectivity of man in its
bearing on chance. Humanity has this sphere of free spirituality in and
for itself, and everything else must proceed from it. The place
appropriated to the abode and presence of the Divine Spirit--the sphere
in question--is spiritual subjectivity, and is constituted the place in
which all contingency is amenable. It follows, thence, that what we
observe among the Greeks as a form of customary morality cannot maintain
its position in the Christian world. For that morality is spontaneous,
unreflected wont; while the Christian principle is independent
subjectivity--the soil on which grows the True.
Now, an unreflected morality cannot continue to hold its ground against
the principle of subjective freedom. Now the principle of absolute
freedom in God makes its appearance. Man no longer sustains the relation
of dependence, but of love--in the consciousness that he is a partaker
in the Divine existence.
_III.--The Germanic World_
The German world appears at this point of development--the fourth phase
of world history. The old age of nature is weakness; but this of spirit
is its perfect maturity and strength, in which it returns to unity with
itself, but in its fully developed character as spirit.
The Greeks and Romans had reached maturity within ere they directed
their energies outwards. The Germans, on the contrary, began with
self-diffusion, deluging the world, and breaking down in their course
the hollow political fabrics of the civilised nations. Only then did
their development begin, kindled by a foreign culture, a foreign
religion, polity, and legislation. The process of culture they underwent
consisted in taking up foreign elements into their own national life.
The German world took up the Roman culture and religion in their
completed form. The Christian religion which it adopted had received
from councils and fathers of the Church--who possessed the whole
culture, and in particular the philosophy of the Greek and Roman
world--a perfected dogmatic system. The Church, too, had a completely
developed hierarchy. To the native tongue of the Germans the Church
likewise opposed one perfectly developed--the Latin. In art and
philosophy a similar alien influence predominated. The same principle
holds good in regard to the form of the secular sovereignty. Gothic and
other chiefs gave themselves the name of Roman patricians. Thus,
superficially, the German world appears to be a continuation of the
Roman. But there dwelt in it an entirely new spirit--the free spirit
which reposes on itself.
The three periods of this world will have to be treated accordingly.
The first period begins with the appearance of the German nations in the
Roman Empire. The Christian world presents itself as Christendom--one
mass of which, the spiritual and the secular, form only different
aspects. This epoch extends to Charlemagne. In the second period the
Church develops for itself a theocracy and the state a feudal monarchy.
Charlemagne had formed an alliance with the Holy See against the
Lombards and the factions of the nobles in Rome. A union thus arose
between the spiritual and the secular power, and a kingdom of heaven on
earth promised to follow in the wake of this conciliation. But just at
this time, instead of a spiritual kingdom of heaven, the inwardness of
the Christian principle wears the appearance of being altogether
directed outwards, and leaving its proper sphere.
Christian freedom is perverted to its very opposite, both in a religious
and secular respect; on the one hand to the severest bondage, on the
other to the most immoral excess--a barbarous intensity of every
passion. The first half of the sixteenth century marks the beginning of
the third period. Secularity appears now as gaining a consciousness of
its intrinsic worth; it becomes aware that it possesses a value of its
own in the morality, rectitude, probity, and activity of man. The
consciousness of independent validity is aroused through the restoration
of Christian freedom.
The Christian principle has now passed through the terrible discipline
of culture, and it first attains truth and reality through the
Reformation. This third period extends to our own times. The principle
of free spirit is here made the banner of the world, and from this
principle are evolved the universal axioms of reason. Formal
thought--the understanding--had been already developed, but thought
received its true material first with the Reformation. From that Epoch
thought began to gain a culture properly its' own; principles were
derived from it which were to be the norm for the constitution of the
state. Political life was now to be consciously regulated by reason.
Customary morality, traditional usage, lost their validity; the various
claims insisted upon must prove their legitimacy as based on rational
principles.
These epochs may be compared with the earlier empires. In the German
aeon, as the realm of totality, we see the earlier epochs resumed.
Charlemagne's time may be compared with the Persian Empire; it is the
period of substantive unity, this unity having its foundation in the
inner man, the heart, and both in the spiritual and the secular still
abiding in its simplicity. To the Greek world and its merely ideal unity
the time preceding Charles V. answers; where real unity no longer
exists, because all phases of particularity have become fixed in
privileges and peculiar rights As, in the interior of the realms
themselves, the different estates of the realm, with their several
claims, are isolated, so do the various states in their foreign aspects
occupy a merely external relation one to another. A diplomatic policy
arises which, in the interest of a European balance of power, unites
them with and against each other. It is the time in which the world
becomes clear and manifest to all (discovery of America).
So, too, does consciousness gain clearness in the super-sensuous world,
and respecting it. Substantial objective religion brings itself to
sensuous clearness in the sensuous element (Christian art), and also
becomes clear to itself in the element of inmost truth. We may compare
this time with that of Pericles. The introversion of spirit begins
(Socrates--Luther), though Pericles is wanting in this epoch. Charles V.
possesses enormous possibilities in point of outward appliances, and
appears absolute in his power; but the inner spirit of Pericles, and
therefore the absolute means of establishing a free sovereignty, is not
in him. This is the epoch when spirit becomes clear to itself in
separations occurring in the realm of reality; now the distinct elements
of the German world manifest their essential nature.
The third epoch may be compared to the Roman world. The authority of
national aim is acknowledged, and privileges melt away before the common
object of the state.
_IV.--Modern Times_
Spirit at last perceives that nature--the world--must be an embodiment
of reason. An interest in the contemplation and comprehension of the
present world became universal. Thus experimental science became the
science of the world; for experimental science involves, on the one
hand, the observation of phenomena; on the other hand, also the
discovery of the law, the essential being, the hidden force, that causes
those phenomena--thus reducing the data supplied by observation to their
simple principles. Intellectual consciousness was first extricated by
Descartes from that sophistry of thought which unsettles everything. As
it was the purely German nations among whom the principle of spirit
first manifested itself, so it was by the Romanic nations that the
abstract idea was first comprehended.
Experimental science, therefore, very soon made its way among them, in
common with the Protestant English, but especially among the Italians.
It seemed to men as if God had but just created the moon and stars,
plants and animals; as if the laws of the universe were now established
for the first time; for only then did they feel a real interest in the
universe when they recognised their own reason in the reason that
pervades it. The human eye became clear, perception quick, thought
active and interpretative. The discovery of the laws of nature enabled
men to contend against the monstrous superstition of the time, as also
against all notions of mighty alien powers which magic alone could
conquer.
The independent authority of subjectivity was maintained against belief
founded on authority, and the laws of nature were recognised as the only
bond connecting phenomena with phenomena. Man is at home in nature, and
that alone passes for truth in which he finds himself at home; he is
free through the acquaintance he has gained with nature.
Nor was thought less vigorously directed to the spiritual side. Right
and social morality came to be looked upon as having their foundation in
the actual present will of man, whereas formerly it was referred only to
the command of God enjoined _ab extra_, written in the Old or New
Testament, or appearing in the form of particular right, as opposed to
that based on general principles, in old parchments as _privilegia_, or
in international compacts. Luther had secured to mankind spiritual
freedom, and the reconciliation of the objective and the subjective in
the concrete. He had triumphantly established the position that man's
eternal destiny must be wrought out in himself. But the import of that
which is to take place in him--what truth is to become vital to him--was
taken for granted by Luther, as something already given, something
revealed by religion. Now the principle was set up that this import must
be capable of actual investigation, and that to this basis of inward
demonstration every dogma must be referred.
This is the point which consciousness has attained, and these are the
principal phases of that form in which the principle of freedom has
realised itself, for the history of the world is nothing but the
development of the idea of freedom. But objective freedom--the laws of
"real" freedom--demands the subjugation of the mere contingent will, for
this is in its nature formal. If the objective is in itself rational,
human insight and conviction must correspond with the reason which it
embodies, and then we have the other essential element--subjective
freedom--also realised. We have confined ourselves to the consideration
of that progress of the idea which has led to this consummation.
Philosophy concerns itself only with the glory of the idea mirroring
itself in the history of the world, and with the development which the
idea has passed through in realising itself--_i.e._, the idea of
freedom, whose reality is the consciousness of freedom and nothing short
of it.
That the history of the world, with all the changing scenes which its
annals present, is this true process of development and the realisation
of spirit--this is the true _Theodikaia_, the justification of God in
history. The spirit of man may be reconciled with the course of
universal history only by perception of this truth--that all which has
happened, all that happens daily, is not only not without God, but is
essentially His work.
DAVID HUME
Essays, Moral and Political
David Hume, the Scottish philosopher and historian, was born at
Edinburgh, April 26, 1711, and was educated at the college there.
He tried law and business without liking either, and at the age of
23 went to France, where he wandered about for a while occupied
with dreams of philosophy. In 1739 he published the first part of
his "Treatise on Human Nature." The book set an army of
philosophers at work trying either to refute what he had said or
continue lines that he had suggested, and out of them were created
both the Scotch and German schools of metaphysicians. Hume's
"Essays, Moral and Political," appeared in 1741-42, and followed
closely upon what he described as the "dead-born" "Treatise on
Human Nature," the success of the former going a long way towards
compensating him for the failure of the latter. In the
advertisement to a posthumous edition Hume complains that
controversialists had confined their attacks to the crude, earlier
treatise, and expressed the desire that for the future the "Essays"
might alone be regarded as containing his philosophical sentiments
and principles. In the "Essays" Hume brings to bear the results of
his criticism upon the problems of current speculative discussion.
The argument against miracles is still often discussed; and the
work is well worthy of the author whom many regard as the greatest
thinker of his time. In 1751 he published his "Inquiry Into the
Principles of Morals," which is one of the clearest expositions of
the leading principles of what is termed the utilitarian system.
Hume died on August 25, 1776.
_I.--Doubts Concerning the Understanding_
All the objects of human reason or inquiry may naturally be divided into
two kinds--to wit, _relations of ideas_ and _matters of fact_. Of the
first kind are the sciences of geometry, algebra, and arithmetic, and,
in short, every affirmation which is either intuitively or
demonstratively certain. "That the square of the hypotenuse is equal to
the squares of the two sides" is a proposition which expresses a
relation between these figures. "That three times five is equal to the
half of thirty" expresses a relation between these numbers.
Propositions of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of
thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the
universe. Though there never were a circle or triangle in nature, the
truths demonstrated by Euclid would for ever retain their certainty and
evidence.
Matters of fact, which are the second objects of human reason, are not
ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth,
however great, of a like nature with the foregoing. The contrary of
every matter of fact is still possible, because it can never imply a
contradiction, and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and
distinctness as if ever so conformable to reality. "That the sun will
not rise to-morrow" is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies
no more contradiction, than the affirmative that "it will rise." We
should in vain, therefore, attempt to demonstrate its falsehood. Were it
demonstratively false, it would imply a contradiction, and could never
be distinctly conceived by the mind.
It may, therefore, be a subject worthy of curiosity to inquire what is
the nature of that evidence which assures us of any real existence of
matters of fact beyond the present testimony of our senses, or the
records of our memory. All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to
be founded on the relation of _cause_ and _effect_. If we would satisfy
ourselves, therefore, concerning the nature of that evidence which
assures us of matters of fact, we must inquire how we arrive at the
knowledge of cause and effect.
I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition which admits of no
exception, that the knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance,
attained by reasonings _a priori_, but arises entirely from experience.
To convince us that all the laws of nature, and all the operations of
bodies without exception, are known only by experience, the following
reflections may perhaps suffice. Were any object presented to us, and
were we required to pronounce concerning the effect which will result
from it, without consulting past observation, after what manner, I
beseech you, must the mind proceed in this operation? It must invent or
imagine some event, which it ascribes to the object as its effect; and
it is plain that this invention must be entirely arbitrary. The mind can
never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause by the most
accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is totally different
from the cause, and, consequently, can never be discovered in it.
A stone or piece of metal raised into the air and left without any
support immediately falls. But, to consider the matter _a priori_, is
there anything we discover in this situation which can beget the idea of
a downward rather than an upward, or any other motion, in the stone or
metal?
In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It
could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause, and the first
invention or conception of it, _a priori_, must be entirely arbitrary.
And, even after it is suggested, the conjunction of it with the cause
must appear equally arbitrary, since there are always many other effects
which to reason must seem fully as consistent and natural. In vain,
therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any
cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience.
Hence, we may discover the reason why no philosopher who is rational and
modest has ever pretended to assign the ultimate cause of any natural
operation, or to show distinctly the action of that power which produces
any single effect in the universe.
I say, then, that even after we have experience of the operations of
cause and effect, our conclusions from that experience are _not_ founded
on reasoning, or any process of the understanding.
The bread which I formerly ate nourished me; that is, a body of such
sensible qualities was at that time endued with such secret powers; but
does it follow that other bread must also nourish me at another time,
and that like sensible qualities must always be attended with like
secret powers? The consequence seems nowise necessary. At least, it must
be acknowledged that there is here a consequence drawn by the mind, that
there is a certain step taken; a process of thought, and an inference
which wants to be explained.
These two propositions are far from being the same: "I have found that
such an object has always been attended with such an effect," and: "I
foresee that other objects, which are in appearance similar, will be
attended with similar effects." I shall allow, if you please, that the
one proposition may justly be inferred from the other; I know, in fact,
that it always is inferred. But you must confess that the inference is
not intuitive; neither is it demonstrative. Of what nature is it, then?
To say it is experimental is begging the question. For all inferences
from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will
resemble the past, and that similar powers will be conjoined with
similar sensible qualities.
If there be any suspicion that the course of nature may change, and that
the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless,
and can give rise to no inference or conclusion. It is impossible,
therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance
of the past to the future, since all these arguments are founded on the
supposition of that resemblance. Let the course of things be allowed
hitherto ever so regular, that alone, without some new argument or
inference, proves not that for the future it will continue so. In vain
do you pretend to have learned the nature of bodies from your past
experience. Their secret nature, and consequently all their effects and
influence, may change without any change in their sensible qualities.
This happens sometimes, and with regard to some objects. Why may it not
happen always, and with regard to all objects? What logic, what process
of argument, secures you against this supposition? My practice, you say,
refutes my doubts. But you mistake the purport of my question. As an
agent, I am quite satisfied on the point; but as a philosopher, who has
some share of curiosity, I will not say scepticism, I want to learn the
foundation of this inference.
All inferences from experience are effects of custom, not of reasoning.
We have already observed that nature has established connections among
particular ideas, and that no sooner one idea occurs to our thoughts
than it introduces its correlative, and carries our attention towards it
by a gentle and insensible movement. These principles of connection or
association we have reduced to three--namely, _resemblance_,
_contiguity_, and _causation_, which are the only bonds that unite our
thoughts together and beget that regular train of reflection or
discourse which, in a greater or less degree, takes place among mankind.
Now, here arises a question on which the solution of the present
difficulty will depend. Does it happen in all these relations that when
one of the objects is presented to the senses or memory the mind is not
only carried to the conception of the correlative, but reaches a
steadier and stronger conception of it than otherwise it would have been
able to attain? This seems to be the case with that belief which arises
from the relation of cause and effect. And I shall add that it is
conformable to the ordinary wisdom of nature to secure so necessary an
act of the mind by some instinct or mechanical tendency, which may be
infallible in its operations, may discover itself at the first
appearance of life and thought, and may be independent of all the
laboured deductions of the understanding.
_II.--On Miracles_
A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. In such conclusions
as are founded on an infallible experience he expects the event with the
last degree of assurance, and regards his past experience as a full
_proof_ of the future existence of that event.
In other cases he proceeds with more caution. He weighs the opposite
experiments. He considers which side is supported by the greatest number
of experiments; to that side he inclines with doubt and hesitation, and
when at last he fixes his judgment, the evidence exceeds not what we
properly call _probability_. All probability, then, supposes an
opposition of experiments and observations, where the one side is found
to overbalance the other, and to produce a degree of evidence
proportioned to the superiority.
When the fact attested is such a one as has seldom fallen under our
observation, here is a contest of two possible experiences, of which the
one destroys the other as far as its force goes, and the superior can
only operate on the mind by the force which remains. The very same
principle of experience which gives us a certain degree of assurance in
the testimony of witnesses gives us also, in this case, another degree
of assurance against the fact which they endeavour to establish, from
which consideration there necessarily arises a counterpoise, and mutual
destruction of belief and authority.
But in order to increase the probability against the testimony of
witnesses, let us suppose that the fact which they affirm, instead of
being only marvellous, is really miraculous; and suppose also that the
testimony, considered apart and in itself, amounts to an entire proof,
of which the strongest must prevail, but still with a diminution of its
force in proportion to that of its antagonist.
A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and
unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a
miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument
from experience can possibly be imagined. Why is it more than probable
that all men must die; that lead cannot of itself remain suspended in
the air; that fire consumes wood, and is extinguished by water; unless
it be that these events are found agreeable to the laws of nature, and
there is required a violation of these laws, or, in other words, a
miracle, to prevent them?
Nothing is esteemed a miracle if it ever happen in the common course of
nature. It is no miracle that a man seemingly in good health should die
on a sudden, because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any
other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle
that a dead man should come to life, because that has never been
observed in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a uniform
experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not
merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof,
there is here a direct and full _proof_, from the nature of the fact,
against the existence of any miracle; nor can such a proof be destroyed,
or the miracle rendered credible, but by an opposite proof which is
superior.
The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our
attention) "that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle
unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more
miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish; and even in
that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior
only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force which
remains after deducting the inferior."
There surely never was a greater number of miracles ascribed to one
person than those which were lately said to have been wrought in France
upon the tomb of Abbe Paris, the famous Jansenist, with whose sanctity
the people were so long deluded. The curing of the sick, giving hearing
to the deaf and sight to the blind, were everywhere talked of as the
usual effects of that holy sepulchre. But, what is more extraordinary,
many of the miracles were immediately proved upon the spot before judges
of unquestioned integrity, attested by witnesses of credit and
distinction, in a learned age, and in the most eminent theatre that is
now in the world.
Nor is this all; a relation of them was published and dispersed
everywhere; nor were the Jesuits--though a learned body, supported by
the civil magistrate and determined enemies to those opinions in whose
favour the miracles were said to have been wrought--ever able distinctly
to refute or detect them. Where shall we find such a number of
circumstances agreeing to the corroboration of one fact? And what have
we to oppose to such a cloud of witnesses but the absolute impossibility
or miraculous nature of the events which they relate? And this surely,
in the eyes of all reasonable people, will alone be regarded as a
sufficient refutation.
Suppose that all the historians who treat of England should agree that
on January 1, 1600, Queen Elizabeth died; that both before and after her
death she was seen by her physicians and the whole court, as is usual
with persons of her rank; that her successor was acknowledged and
proclaimed by the Parliament; and that, after being interred a month,
she again appeared, resumed the throne, and governed England for three
years; I must confess that I should be surprised at the concurrence of
so many odd circumstances, but should not have the least inclination to
believe so miraculous an event. I should not doubt of her pretended
death, and of those other public circumstances that followed it; I
should only assert it to have been pretended, and that it neither was,
nor possibly could be, real.
You would in vain object to me the difficulty and almost impossibility
of deceiving the world in an affair of such consequence; the wisdom and
solid judgment of that renowned queen; with the little or no advantage
which she could reap from so poor an artifice. All this might astonish
me; but I would still reply that the knavery and folly of men are such
common phenomena that I should rather believe the most extraordinary
events to arise from their concurrence than admit of so signal a
violation of the laws of nature.
Our most holy religion is founded on _faith_, not on reason; and it is a
sure method of exposing it to put it to such a trial as it is by no
means fitted to endure. To make this more evident, let us examine those
miracles related in the Pentateuch, which we shall examine as the
production of a mere human writer and historian. Here, then, we are
first to consider a book, presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant
people, written in an age when they were still more barbarous, and in
all probability long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by
no concurring testimony, and resembling those fabulous accounts which
every nation gives of its origin.
Upon reading this book we find it full of prodigies and miracles. It
gives an account of a state of the world and of human nature entirely
different from the present; of our fall from that state; of the age of
man extended to near a thousand years; of the destruction of the world
by a deluge; of the arbitrary choice of one people as the favourites of
Heaven, and that people the countrymen of the author; of their
deliverance from bondage by prodigies the most astonishing imaginable. I
desire anyone to lay his hand upon his heart, and, after a serious
consideration, declare whether he thinks that the falsehood of such a
book, supported by such a testimony, would be more extraordinary and
miraculous than the miracles it relates, which is, however, necessary to
make it be received according to the measures of probability above
established.
_III.--Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State_
I was lately engaged in conversation with a friend who loves sceptical
paradoxes. To my expression of the opinion that a wise magistrate can
justly be jealous of certain tenets of philosophy such as those of
Epicurus, which, denying a divine existence, and consequently a
Providence and a future state, seem to loosen the ties of morality, he
replied as follows.
"If Epicurus had been accused before the people he could easily have
defended his cause and proved his principles of philosophy to be as
salutary as those of his adversaries. And, if you please, I shall
suppose myself Epicurus for a moment, and make you stand for the
Athenian people."
EPICURUS: I come hither, O ye Athenians, to justify in your assembly
what I maintained in my school, and I find myself impeached by furious
antagonists instead of reasoning with calm and dispassionate inquirers.
By my accusers it is acknowledged that the chief or sole argument for a
divine existence (which I never questioned) is derived from the order of
nature; where there appear such marks of intelligence and design that
you think it extravagant to assign for its cause either chance or the
blind and unguided force of matter. You allow that this is an argument
drawn from effects to causes. From the order of the work you infer that
there must have been project and forethought in the workman. If you
cannot make out this point, you allow that your conclusion fails, and
you pretend not to establish the conclusion in a greater latitude than
the phenomena of nature will justify. These are your concessions. I
desire you to mark the consequences.
When we infer any particular cause from an effect we must proportion the
one to the other, and can never be allowed to ascribe to the cause any
qualities but what are sufficient to produce the effect. A body of ten
ounces raised in a scale may serve as a proof that the counterbalancing
weight exceeds ten ounces, but never that it exceeds a hundred.
The same rule holds whether the cause assigned be brute, unconscious
matter or a rational, intelligent being. If the cause be known only by
the effect, we never ought to ascribe to it any qualities beyond what
are precisely requisite to produce the effect. Nor can we return back
from the cause and infer other effects from it beyond those by which
alone it is known to us.
Allowing, therefore, the gods to be the authors of the existence, or
order, of the universe, it follows that they possess that precise degree
of power, intelligence, and benevolence which appears in their
workmanship; but we can never be allowed to mount up from the universe,
the effect, to Jupiter, the cause, and then descend downwards to infer
any new effect from that cause. The knowledge of the cause being derived
solely from the effect, they must be exactly adjusted to each other; and
the one can never refer to anything farther.
I deny a Providence, you say, and Supreme Governor of the world, who
guides the course of events and punishes the vicious with infamy and
disappointment, and rewards the virtuous with honour and success in all
their undertakings. But surely I deny not the course of events itself,
which lies open to everyone's inquiry and examination. I acknowledge
that, in the present order of things, virtue is attended with more peace
of mind than vice, and meets with a more favourable reception from the
world. I am sensible that, according to the past experience of mankind,
friendship is the chief joy of human life, and moderation the only
source of tranquillity and happiness. I never balance between the
virtuous and the vicious life, but am sensible that, to a well-disposed
mind, every advantage is on the side of the former. And what can you say
more, allowing all your suppositions and reasonings?
IMMANUEL KANT
The Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant, the most celebrated of German metaphysicians, was
born at Koenigsberg on April 22, 1724, and died on February 12,
1804. Taking his degree at Koenigsberg, he speedily entered on a
professional career, which he quietly and strenuously pursued for
over thirty years. Though his lectures were limited to the topics
with which he was concerned as professor of logic and philosophy,
his versatility is evidenced by the fact that he was offered the
chair of poetry, which he declined. His lasting reputation began
with the publication, in 1781, of his wonderful "Critique of Pure
Reason" ("Kritik der reinen Vernunft"). Within twelve years of its
appearance it was expounded in all the leading universities, and
even penetrated into the schools of the Church of Rome. Kant was
the first European thinker who definitely grasped the conception of
a critical philosophy, though he was doubtless aided by the
tendency of Locke's psychology. He did much to counteract the
sceptical influence of Hume. The main object of his "Critique of
Pure Reason" is to separate the necessary and universal in the
realm of knowledge from the merely experimental or empirical. This
little version of Kant's celebrated work has been prepared from the
German text.
_I.--Knowledge Transcendental: AEsthetic_
Experience is something of which we are conscious. It is the first
result of our comprehension, but it is not the limit of our
understanding, since it stimulates our faculty of reason, but does not
satisfy its desire for knowledge. While all our knowledge may begin with
sensible impressions or experience, there is an element in it which does
not rise from this source, but transcends it. That knowledge is
transcendental which is occupied not so much with mere outward objects
as with our manner of knowing those objects, that is to say, with our _a
priori_ concepts of them. All our knowledge is either _a priori_ or _a
posteriori_. That is _a posteriori_ knowledge which is derived from
sensible experience as including sensible impressions or states; while
_a priori_ knowledge is that which is not thus gained, but consists of
whatever is universal or necessary. A complete "Transcendental
Philosophy" would be a systematic exposition of all that is _a priori_
in human knowledge, or of "all the principles of pure reason." But a
"Critique of Pure Reason" cannot include all this. It can do little more
than deal with the synthetic element or quality in _a priori_ knowledge,
as distinguished from the analytic element.
We perceive objects through our sensibility which furnishes us, as our
faculty of receptivity, with those intuitions that become translated
into thought by means of the understanding. This is the origin of our
conceptions, or ideas. I denominate as _matter_ that which in a
phenomenon corresponds to sensation; while I call _form_ that quality of
matter which presents it in a perceived order. Only matter is presented
to our minds _a posteriori_; as to form, this must inevitably exist in
the mind _a priori_, and therefore it can be considered apart from all
sensation.
Pure representation, entirely apart from sensation, in a transcendental
signification, forms the pure intuition of the mind, existing in it as a
mere form of sensibility. Transcendental aesthetic is the science of all
the principles of sensibility. But transcendental logic is the science
of the principles of pure thought. In studying the former we shall find
that there are two pure forms of sensuous intuition, namely, space and
time.
Are space and time actual entities? Or are they only relations of
things? Space is simply the form of all the phenomena of external
senses; that is, it is the subjective condition of the sensibility under
which alone external intuition is possible. Thus, the form of all
phenomena may exist _a priori_ in the soul as a pure intuition previous
to all experience. So we can only speak of space and of extended
objects from the standpoint of human reason. But when we have abstracted
all the forms perceived by our sensibility, there remains a pure
intuition which we call space. Therefore our discussion teaches us the
objective validity of space with regard to all that can appear before us
externally as an object; but equally the subjective ideality of space,
with regard to things if they are considered in themselves by our
reason, that is, without taking into account the nature of our
sensibility.
Time is not empirically conceived of; that is, it is not experimentally
apprehended. Time is a necessary representation on which all intuitions
are dependent, and the representation of time to the mind is thus given
_a priori._ In it alone can phenomena be apprehended. These may vanish,
but time cannot be put aside.
Time is not something existing by itself independently, but is the
formal condition _a priori_ of all phenomena. If we deduct our own
peculiar sensibility, then the idea of time disappears indeed, because
it is not inherent in any object, but only in the subject which
perceives that object. Space and time are essential _a priori_ ideas,
and they are the necessary conditions of all particular perceptions.
From the latter and their objects we can, in imagination, without
exception, abstract; from the former we cannot.
Space and time are therefore to be regarded as the necessary _a priori_
pre-conditions of the possibility and reality of all phenomena. It is
clear that transcendental aesthetic can obtain only these two elements,
space and time, because all other concepts belong to the senses and
pre-suppose experience, and so imply something empirical. For example,
the concept of motion pre-supposes something moving, but in space
regarded alone there is nothing that moves; therefore, whatever moves
must be recognised by experience, and is a purely empirical datum.
_II.--Transcendental Logic_
Our knowledge is derived from two fundamental sources of the
consciousness. The first is the faculty of receptivity of impressions;
the second, the faculty of cognition of an object by means of these
impressions or representations, this second power being sometimes styled
spontaneity of concepts. By the first, an object is given to us; by the
second it is thought of in the mind. Thus intuition and concepts
constitute the elements of our entire knowledge, for neither intuition
without concepts, nor concepts without intuition, can yield any
knowledge whatever. Hence arise two branches of science, aesthetic and
logic, the former being the science of the rules of sensibility; the
latter, the science of the rules of the understanding.
Logic can be treated in two directions: either as logic of the general
use of the understanding, or of some particular use of it. The former
includes the rules of thought, without which there can be no use of the
understanding; but it has no regard to the objects to which the
understanding is applied. This is elementary logic. But logic of the
understanding in some particular use includes rules of correct thought
in relation to special classes of objects; and this latter logic is
generally taught in schools as preliminary to the study of sciences.
Thus, general logic takes no account of any of the contents of
knowledge, but is limited simply to the consideration of the forms of
thought. But we are constrained by anticipation to form an idea of a
logical science which has to deal not only with pure thought, but also
has to determine the origin, validity, and extent of the knowledge to
which intuitions relate, and this science might be styled transcendental
logic.
In transcendental aesthetic we isolated the faculty of sensibility. So in
transcendental logic we isolate the understanding, concentrating our
consideration on that element of thought which has its source simply in
the understanding. But transcendental logic must be divided into
transcendental analytic and transcendental dialectic. The former is a
logic of truth, and is intended to furnish a canon of criticism. When
logic is used to judge not analytically, but to judge synthetically of
objects in general, it is called transcendental dialectic, which serves
as a protection against sophistical fallacy.
ANALYTIC OF PURE CONCEPTS
The understanding may be defined as the faculty of judging. The function
of thought in a judgment can be brought under four heads, each with
three subdivisions.
1. Quantity of judgments: Universal, particular, singular.
2. Quality: Affirmative, negative, infinite.
3. Relation: Categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive.
4. Modality: Problematical, assertory, apodictic [above contradiction].
If we examine each of these forms of judgment we discover that in every
one is involved some peculiar idea which is its essential
characteristic. Thus, a singular judgment, in which the subject of
discourse is a single object, involves obviously the special idea of
oneness, or unity. A particular judgment, relating to several objects,
implies the idea of plurality, and discriminates between the several
objects. Now, the whole list of these ideas will constitute the complete
classification of the fundamental conceptions of the understanding,
regarded as the faculty which judges, and these may be called
categories.
1. Of Quantity: Unity, plurality, totality.
2. Of Quality: Reality, negation, limitation.
3. Of Relation: Substance and accident, cause and effect, action and
reaction.
4. Of Modality: Possibility--impossibility, existence--non-existence,
necessity--contingence.
These, then, are the fundamental, primary, or native conceptions of the
understanding, which flow from, or constitute the mechanism of, its
nature; are inseparable from its activity; and are hence, for human
thought, universal and necessary, or _a priori_. These categories are
"pure" conceptions of the understanding, inasmuch as they are
independent of all that is contingent in sense.
TRANSCENDENTAL DIALECTIC
A distinction is usually made between what is immediately known and what
is only inferred. It is immediately known that in a figure bounded by
three straight lines there are three angles, but that these angles
together are equal to two right angles is only inferred. In every
syllogism is first a fundamental proposition; secondly, another deduced
from it; and, thirdly, the consequence.
In the use of pure reason its concepts, or transcendental ideas, aim at
unity of all conditions of thought. So all transcendental ideas may be
arranged in three classes; the first containing the unity of the
thinking subject; the second, the unity of the conditions of phenomena
observed; the third, the unity of the objective conditions of thought.
This classification becomes clear if we note that the thinking subject
is the object-matter of psychology; while the system of all phenomena
(the world) is the object-matter of cosmology; and the Being of all
Beings (God) is the object-matter of theology.
Hence we perceive that pure reason supplies three transcendental ideas,
namely, the idea of a transcendental science of the soul (_psychologia
rationalis_); of a transcendental science of the world (_cosmologia
rationalis_); and, lastly, of a transcendental science of God
(_theologia transcendentalis_). It is the glory of transcendental
idealism that by it the mind ascends in the series of conditions till
it reaches the unconditioned, that is, the principles. We thus progress
from our knowledge of self to a knowledge of the world, and through it
to a knowledge of the Supreme Being.
_III.--The Antinomies of Pure Reason_
Transcendental reason attempts to reconcile conflicting assertions.
There are four of these antinomies, or conflicts.
FIRST ANTINOMY. Thesis. The world has a beginning in time, and is also
limited in regard to space. Proof. Were the world without a
time-beginning we should have to ascribe a present limit to that which
can have no limit, which is absurd. Again, were the world not limited in
regard to space, it must be conceived as an infinite whole, yet it is
impossible thus to conceive it.
Antithesis. The world has neither beginning in time, nor limit in space,
but in both regards is infinite. Proof. The world must have existed from
eternity, or it could never exist at all. If we imagine it had a
beginning, we must imagine an anterior time when nothing was. But in
such time the origin of anything is impossible. At no moment could any
cause for such a beginning exist.
SECOND ANTINOMY. Thesis. Every composite substance in the world is
composed of simple parts. This thesis seems scarcely to require proof.
No one can deny that a composite substance consists of parts, and that
these parts, if themselves composite, must consist of others less
composite, till at length we come, by compulsion of thought, to the
conception of the absolutely simple as that wherein the substantial
consists.
Antithesis. No composite thing in the world consists of simple parts,
and nothing simple exists anywhere in the world. Proof. Each simple part
implied in the thesis must be in space. But this condition is a
positive disproof of their possibility. A simple substance would have
to occupy a simple portion of space; but space has no simple parts. The
supposition of such a part is the supposition, not of space, but of the
negation of space. A simple substance, in existing and occupying any
portion of space, must contain a real multiplicity of parts external to
each other, _i.e._, it must contradict its own nature, which is absurd.
THIRD ANTINOMY. Thesis. The causality of natural law is insufficient for
the explanation of all the phenomena of the universe. For this end
another kind of causality must be assumed, whose attribute is freedom.
Proof. All so-called natural causes are effects of preceding causes,
forming a regressive series of indefinite extent, with no first
beginning. So we never arrive at an adequate cause of any phenomenon.
Yet natural law has for its central demand that nothing shall happen
without such a cause.
Antithesis. All events in the universe occur under the exclusive
operation of natural laws, and there is no such thing as freedom. Proof.
The idea of a free cause is an absurdity. For it contradicts the very
law of causation itself, which demands that every event shall be in
orderly sequence with some preceding event. Now, free causation is such
an event, being the active beginning of a series of phenomena. Yet the
action of the supposed free cause must be imagined as independent of all
connection with any previous event. It is without law or reason, and
would be the blind realisation of confusion and lawlessness. Therefore
transcendental freedom is a violation of the law of causation, and is in
conflict with all experience. We must of necessity acquiesce in the
explanation of all phenomena by the operation of natural law, and thus
transcendental freedom must be pronounced a fallacy.
FOURTH ANTINOMY. Thesis. Some form of absolutely necessary existence
belongs to the world, whether as its part or as its cause. Proof.
Phenomenal existence is serial, mutable, consistent. Every event is
contingent upon a preceding condition. The conditioned pre-supposes, for
its complete explanation, the unconditioned. The whole of past time,
since it contains the whole of all past conditions, must of necessity
contain the unconditioned or also "absolutely necessary."
Antithesis. There is no absolutely necessary existence, whether in the
world as its part, or outside of it as its cause. Proof. Of
unconditionally necessary existence within the world there can be none.
The assumption of a first unconditioned link in the chain of cosmical
conditions is self-contradictory. For such link or cause, being in time,
must be subject to the law of all temporal existence, and so be
determined--contrary to the original assumption--by another link or
cause before it.
The supposition of an absolutely necessary cause of the world, existing
without the world, also destroys itself. For, being outside the world,
it is not in time. And yet, to act as a cause, it must be in time. This
supposition is therefore absurd.
The theses in these four antinomies constitute the teaching of
philosophical dogmatism. The antitheses constitute doctrines of
philosophical empiricism.
_IV.--Criticism of the Chief Arguments for the Existence of God_
The ontological argument aims at asserting the possibility of conceiving
the idea of an _ens realissimum_, of being possessed of all reality. But
the idea of existence and the fact of existence are two very different
things. Whatever I conceive, or sensibly imagine, I necessarily conceive
as though it were existing. Though my pocket be empty, I may conceive it
to contain a "hundred thalers." If I conceive them there, I can only
conceive them as actually existing there. But, alas, the fact that I am
under this necessity of so conceiving by no means carries with it a
necessity that the coins should really be in my pocket. That can only be
determined by experience.
The cosmological argument contends that if anything exists, there must
also exist an absolutely necessary being. Now, at least I myself exist.
Hence there exists an absolutely necessary being. The argument coincides
with that by which the thesis of the fourth antinomy is supposed. The
objections to it are summed up in the proof of the antithesis of the
fourth antimony. As soon as we have recognised the true conception of
causality, we have already transcended the sensible world.
The physico-theological or teleological argument is what is often styled
the argument from design. It proceeds not from general, but particular
experience. Nature discloses manifold signs of wise intention and
harmonious order, and these are held to betoken a divine designer. This
argument deserves always to be treated with respect. It is the oldest
and clearest of all proofs, and best adapted to convince the reason of
the mass of mankind. It animates us in our study of nature. And it were
not only a cheerless, but an altogether vain task to attempt to detract
from the persuasive authority of this proof. There is nought to urge
against its rationality and its utility.
All arguments, however, to prove the existence of God must, in order to
be theoretically valid, start from specifically and exclusively sensible
or phenomenal data, must employ only the conceptions of pure physical
science, and must end with demonstrating in sensible experience an
object congruous with, or corresponding to, the idea of God. But this
requirement cannot be met, for, scientifically speaking, the existence
of an absolutely necessary God cannot be either proved or disproved.
Hence room is left for faith in any moral proofs that may present
themselves to us, apart from science. With this subject ethics, the
science of practice or of practical reason, will have to deal.
The Critique of Practical Reason
Kant's "Critique of Practical Reason" ("Kritik der praktischen
Vernunft"), published in 1788, is one of the most striking
disquisitions in the whole range of German metaphysical literature.
One of its paragraphs has alone sufficed to render it famous. The
passage concerning the starry heavens and the moral law as the two
transcendently overwhelming phenomena of the universe is, perhaps,
more frequently quoted than any other written by a German author.
This is the treatise which forms the central focus of Kant's
thinking. It stands midway between the "Critique of Pure Reason"
and the "Critique of Judgment." Herein Kant takes up the position
of a vindicator of the truth of Christianity, approaching his proof
of its validity and authority by first establishing positive
affirmations of the immortality of the soul and the existence of
God. It also includes a theory of happiness, and an argument
concerning the _summum bonum_ of life, the special aim being to
demonstrate that man should not simply seek to be happy, but
should, by absolute obedience to the moral law, seek to become
worthy of that happiness which God can bestow.
_I.--Analytic of Practical Reason_
Practical principles are propositions containing a general determination
of the will. They are maxims, or subjective propositions, when
expressing the will of an individual; objective, when they are valid
expressions of the will of rational beings generally.
Practical principles which pre-suppose an object of desire are
empirical, or experimental, and supply no practical laws. Reason, in the
scope of a practical law, influences the will not by the medium of
pleasure or pain. All rational beings necessarily wish for happiness,
but they are not all agreed either as to the means to attain it, or as
to the objects of their enjoyment of it. Thus, subjective practical
principles can only be reckoned as maxims, never as law.
A rational being ought not to conceive that his individual maxims are
calculated to constitute universal laws, and to become the basis of
universal legislation. To discover any law which would bring all men
into harmony is absolutely impossible.
One of the problems of practical reason is to find the law which can
necessarily determine the will, assuming that the will is free. The
solution of this problem is to be found in action according to the moral
law. We should so act that the maxim of our will can always be valid as
a principle of universal legislation. Experience shows how the moral
consciousness determines freedom of the will.
Suppose that someone affirms of his inclination for sensual pleasure
that he cannot possibly resist temptation to indulgence. If a gallows
were erected at the place where he is tempted, on which he should be
hanged immediately after satiating his passions, would he not be able to
control his inclination? We need not long doubt what would be his
answer.
But ask him, if his sovereign commanded him to bear false witness
against an honourable man, under penalty of death, whether he would hold
it possible to conquer his love of life. He might not venture to say
what he would choose, but he would certainly admit that it is possible
to make choice. Thus, he judges that he can choose to do a thing because
he is conscious of moral obligation, and he thus recognises for himself
a freedom of will of which, but for the moral law, he would never have
been conscious.
We obtain the exact opposite of the principle of morality if we adopt
the principle of personal private happiness as the determining motive of
the will. This contradiction is not only logical, but also practical.
For morality would be totally destroyed were not the voice of reason as
clear and penetrating in relation to the will, even to the most ordinary
men.
If one of your friends, after bearing false witness against you,
attempted to justify his base conduct by enumerating the advantages
which he had thus secured for himself and the happiness he had gained,
and by declaring that thus he performed a true human duty, you would
either laugh him to scorn or turn from him in horror. And yet, if a man
acts for his own selfish ends, you have not the slightest objection to
such behaviour.
MORALITY AND HAPPINESS
The maxim of self-love simply advises; the law of morality commands.
There is a vast difference between what we are advised and what we are
obliged to do. No practical laws can be based on the principle of
happiness, even on that of universal happiness, for the knowledge of
this happiness rests on merely empirical or experimental data, every
man's ideas of it being conditioned only on his individual opinion.
Therefore, this principle of happiness cannot prescribe rules for all
rational beings.
But the moral law demands prompt obedience from everyone, and thus even
the most ordinary intelligence can discern what should be done. Everyone
has power to comply with the dictates of morality, but even with regard
to any single aim it is not easy to satisfy the vague precept of
happiness. Nothing could be more absurd than a command that everyone
should make himself happy, for one never commands anyone to do what he
inevitably wishes to do. Finally, in the idea of our practical reason,
there is something which accompanies the violation of a moral
law--namely, its demerit, with the consciousness that punishment is a
natural consequence. Therefore, punishment should be connected in the
idea of practical reason with crime, as a consequence of the crime, by
the principles of moral legislation.
ANALYSIS OF PRINCIPLES
The practical material principles of determination constituting the
basis of morality may be thus classified.
_1. Subjective_
External: Education; the civil constitution. Internal: Physical feeling;
moral feeling.
_2. Objective_
Internal: Perfection. External: Will of God.
The subjective elements are all experimental, or empirical, and cannot
supply the universal principle of morality, though they are expounded in
that sense by such writers as Montaigne, Mandeville, Epicurus, and
Hutcheson.
But the objective elements, as enunciated and expounded by Wolf and the
Stoics, and by Crusius and other theological moralists, are founded on
reason, for absolute perfection as a quality of things (that is, God
Himself) can only be thought of by rational concepts.
The conception of perfection in a practical sense is the adequacy of a
thing for various ends. As a human quality (and so internal) this is
simply talent, and what completes it is skill. But supreme perfection in
substance, that is, God Himself, and therefore external (considered
practically), is the adequacy of this being for all purposes. All these
principles above classified are material, and so can never furnish the
supreme moral law. For even the Divine will can supply a motive in the
human mind because of the expectation of happiness from it.
Therefore, the formal practical principle of the pure reason insists
that the mere form of a universal legislation must constitute the
ultimate determining principle of the will. Here is the only possible
practical principle which is sufficient to furnish categorical
imperatives, that is, practical laws which make action a duty.
It follows from this analytic that pure reason can be practical. It can
determine the will independently of all merely experimental elements.
There is a remarkable contrast between the working of the pure
speculative reason and that of the pure practical reason. In the
former--as was shown in the treatise on that subject--a pure, sensible
intuition of time and space made knowledge possible, though only of
objects of the senses.
On the contrary, the moral law brings before us a fact absolutely
inexplicable from any of the data of the world of sense. And the entire
range of our theoretical use of reason indicates a pure world of
understanding, which even positively determines it, and enables us to
know something of it--namely, a law.
We must observe the distinction between the laws of a system of nature
to which the will is subject, and of a system of nature which is subject
to the will. In the former, the objects cause the ideas which determine
the will; in the latter, the objects are caused by the will. Hence,
causality of the will has its determining principle exclusively in the
faculty of pure reason, which may, therefore, also be called a pure
practical reason.
The moral law is a law of the causality through freedom, and therefore
of the possibility of a super-sensible system of nature. It determines
the will by imposing on its maxim the condition of a universal
legislative form, and thus it is able for the first time to impart
practical reality to reason, which otherwise would continue to be
transcendent when seeking to proceed speculatively with its ideas.
Thus the moral law induces a stupendous change. It changes the
transcendent use of reason into the immanent use. And in result reason
itself becomes, by its ideas, an efficient cause in the field of
experience.
HUME AND SCEPTICISM
It may be said of David Hume that he initiated the attack on pure
reason. My own labours in the investigation of this subject were
occasioned by his sceptical teaching, for his assault made them
necessary. He argued that without experience it is impossible to know
the difference between one thing and another; that is, we can know _a
priori_, and, therefore, the notion of a cause is fictitious and
illusory, arising only from the habit of observing certain things
associated with each in succession of connections.
On such principles we can never come to any conclusion as to causes and
effects. We can never predict a consequence from any of the known
attributes of things. We can never say of any event that it must
_necessarily_ have followed from another; that is, that it must have had
an antecedent cause. And we could never lay down a rule derived even
from the greatest number of observations. Hence we must trust entirely
to blind chance, abolishing all reason, and such a surrender establishes
scepticism in an impregnable citadel.
Mathematics escaped Hume, because he considered that its propositions
were analytical, proceeding from one determination to another, by reason
of identity contained in each. But this is not really so, for, on the
contrary, they are synthetical, the results depending ultimately on the
assent of observers as witnesses to the universality of propositions. So
Hume's empiricism leads inevitably to scepticism even in this realm.
My investigations led me to the conclusion that the objects with which
we are familiar are by no means things in themselves, but are simply
phenomena, connected in a certain way with experience. So that without
contradiction they cannot be separated from that connection. Only by
that experience can they be recognised. I was able to prove the
objective reality of the concept of cause in regard to objects of
experience, and to demonstrate its origin from pure understanding,
without experimental or empirical sources.
Thus, I first destroyed the source of scepticism, and then the resulting
scepticism itself. And thus was subverted the thorough doubt as to
whatever theoretic reason claims to perceive, as well as the claim of
Hume that the concept of causality involved something absolutely
unthinkable.
GOOD AND EVIL
By a concept of practical reason, I understand the representation to the
mind of an object as an effect possible to be produced through freedom.
The only objects of practical reason are _good_ and _evil_. For by
"good" we understand an object necessarily abhorred, the principle of
reason actuating the mind in each case.
In the common use of language we uniformly distinguish between the
"good" and the "pleasant," the "evil" and the "unpleasant," good and
evil being judged by reason alone. The judgment on the relation, of
means to ends certainly belongs to reason. But "good" or "evil" always
implies only a reference to the "will," as resolved by the law of
reason, to make something its object.
Thus good and evil properly relate to actions, not to personal
sensations. So, if anything is to be reckoned simply good or evil, it
can only be so estimated by the way of acting. Hence, only the maxim of
the will, and consequently the person himself, can be called good or
evil, not the thing itself.
The Stoic was right, even though he might be laughed at, who during
violent attacks of gout exclaimed, "Pain, I will never admit that thou
art an evil!" What he felt was indeed what we call a bad thing; but he
had no reason to admit that any evil attached thereby to himself, for
the pain did not in the least detract from his personal worth, but only
from that of his condition. If a single lie had been on his conscience
it would have humiliated his soul; but pain seemed only to elevate it,
when he was not conscious of having deserved it as a punishment for any
unjust deed.
The rule of judgment subject to the laws of pure practical reason is
this: Ask yourself whether if the action you propose were to happen by a
natural system of law, of which you were yourself a part, you could
regard it as possible by your own will? In fact, everyone does decide by
this rule whether actions are morally good or evil.
_II.--Dialectic of Practical Reason_
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
Pure practical reason postulates the immortality of the soul, for reason
in the pure and practical sense aims at the perfect good (_summum
bonum_), and this perfect good is only possible on the supposition of
the soul's immortality. It is the moral law which determines the will,
and, in this will, the perfect harmony of the mind with the moral law,
is the supreme condition of the _summum bonum_. The principle of the
moral destination of our nature--that only by endless progress can we
come into full harmony with the moral law--is of the greatest use, not
only for fortifying the speculative reason, but also with respect to
religion. In default of this, either the moral law is degraded from its
holiness, being represented as indulging our convenience, or else men
strain after an unattainable aim, hoping to gain absolute holiness of
will, thus losing themselves in fanatical theosophic dreams utterly
contradicting self-knowledge.
For a rational, but finite, being the only possibility is an endless
progression from the lower to the higher degrees of perfection. The
Infinite Being, to whom the time-condition is nothing, sees in this
endless succession the perfect harmony with the moral law.
THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
The pure practical reason must also postulate the existence of God as
the necessary condition of the attainment of the _summum bonum_. As the
perfect good can only be promoted by accordance of the will with the
moral law, so also this _summum bonum_ is possible only through the
supremacy of an Infinite Being possessed of causality harmonising with
morality. But the postulate of the highest derived good (sometimes
denominated the best world) coincides with the postulate of a highest
original good, or of the existence of God.
We now perceive why the Greeks could never solve their problem of the
possibility of the _summum bonum_, because they made the freedom of the
human will the only and all-sufficient ground of happiness, imagining
there was no need for the existence of God for that end. Christianity
alone affords an idea of the _summum bonum_ which answers fully to the
requirement of practical reason. That idea is the Kingdom of God.
The holiness which the Christian law requires makes essential an
infinite progress. But just for that very reason it justifies in man the
hope of endless existence. And it is only from an Infinite Supreme
Being, morally perfect, holy, good, and with an omnipotent will, that we
can hope, by accord with His will, to attain the _summum bonum_, which
the moral law enjoins on us as our duty to seek ever to attain.
The moral law does not enjoin on us to render ourselves happy, but
instructs us how to become worthy of happiness. Morality must never be
regarded as a doctrine of happiness, or direction how to become happy,
its province being to inculcate the rational condition of happiness, not
the means of attaining it. God's design in creating the world is not
primarily the happiness of the rational beings in it, but the _summum
bonum_, which super-adds another condition to that desire of human
beings, namely, the condition of deserving such happiness. That is to
say, the morality of rational beings is a condition which alone includes
the rule by observing which they can hope to participate in happiness at
the hand of an all-wise Creator.
The highest happiness can only be conceived as possible under conditions
harmonising with the divine holiness. Thus they are right who make the
glory of God the chief end of creation. For beyond all else that can be
conceived, that glorifies God which is the most estimable thing in the
whole world, honour for His command and obedience to His law, when to
this is added His glorious design to crown so beauteous an order of
things with happiness corresponding.
CONCLUSION
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and
awe--the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me. I need
not search for them, and vaguely guess concerning them, as if they were
veiled in darkness or hidden in the infinite altitude. I see them before
me, and link them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.
The former begins from the spot I occupy in the outer world of sense,
and enlarges my connection with it to a boundless extent with worlds
upon worlds and systems of systems.
The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and places me
in a truly infinite world traceable only by the understanding, with
which I perceive I am in a universal and necessary connection, as I am
also thereby with all those visible worlds.
This view infinitely elevates my value as an intelligence by my
personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of
the animal and even the whole material world, and reaching by destiny
into the infinite.
But though admiration may stimulate inquiry, it cannot compensate for
the want of it. The contemplation of the world, beginning with the most
magnificent spectacle possible, ended in astrology; and morality,
beginning with the noblest attribute of human nature, ended in
superstition. But after reason was applied to careful examination of the
phenomena of nature a clear and unchangeable insight was secured into
the system of the world. We may entertain the hope of a like good result
in treating of the moral capacities of our nature by the help of the
moral judgment of reason.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
A History of Philosophy
George Henry Lewes, born in London on April 18, 1817, was the
grandson of a famous Covent Garden comedian. As an actor,
philosopher, novelist, critic, dramatist, journalist, man of
science, Lewes played many parts in the life of his time, and some
of them he played very well. George Eliot owed him a great deal; he
turned her genius away from pure speculation, and directed it to
its true province--fiction. Lewes was, in fact, an excellent
critic, and it is by his splendid critical work, the "Biographical
History of Philosophy," that he is now best remembered. In this
remarkable book, which appeared in 1845-46, Lewes the novelist and
the journalist collaborates with Lewes the philosopher and man of
science. He has the rare art of making an abstruse subject clear
and attractive; he does not give a dry summary of the ideas of the
great thinkers, but depicts the living man and relates his way of
life to his way of thinking. The result is that in his hands
metaphysic becomes as interesting as history did in the hands of
Macaulay.
_I.--The Early Thinkers_
It is the object of the present work to show how philosophy became a
positive science; to indicate by what methods the human mind was enabled
to conquer its present modicum of certain knowledge. The boldest and the
grandest speculations came first. Man needed the stimulus of some higher
reward than that of merely tracing the laws of phenomena. Nothing but a
solution of the mystery of the universe could content him. Astronomy was
derived from astrology: chemistry from alchemy, and physiology from
auguries. The position occupied by philosophy in the history of mankind
is that of the great initiative to positive science. It was the forlorn
hope of mankind, and though it perished in its efforts, it did not
perish without having led the way to victory.
Thales, who was born at Miletus, in Asia Minor, and flourished in 585
B.C., is justly considered the father of Greek speculation. The step he
took was small but decisive. He opened the physiological inquiry into
the constitution of the universe. Seeing around him constant
transformations--birth and death, change of shape, of size, and of mode
of being, he could not regard any one of these variable states of
existence as existence itself. He therefore asked, What is the beginning
of things? Finding that all things were nourished by moisture, he
declared that moisture was the principle of everything. He was mistaken,
of course, but he was the first man to furnish a formula from which to
reason deductively.
Anaximenes (550 B.C.) pursued the method of Thales, but he was not
convinced of the truth of his master's doctrine. He thought that the air
was the prime, universal element, from which all things were produced
and into which all things were resolved. Diogenes of Apollonia adopted
the idea of Anaximenes, but gave a deeper significance to it. The older
thinker conceived the vital air as a kind of soul; the younger man
conceived the soul as a kind of air--an invisible force, permeating and
actuating everything. This attribution of intelligence to the primal
power or matter was certainly a progress in speculation; but another
line of thought was struck out by Anaximander of Miletus, who had been a
friend of Thales. He was passionately addicted to mathematics, and a
great many inventions are ascribed to him; among others, the sun-dial
and the geographical map.
In his view, any one single thing could not be all things, and in his
famous saying, "The infinite is the origin of all things," he introduced
into metaphysics an abstract conception in place of the inadequate
concrete principles of Thales and his disciples. Pythagoras was a
contemporary of Anaximander, and, like him, one of the great founders of
mathematics. He held that the only permanent reality in the cosmos was
the principle of order and harmony, which prevented the universe from
becoming a blank, unintelligible chaos; and he expressed this idea in
his mystic doctrine: "Numbers are the cause of the material existence of
things." The movement which he spread by means of a vast, secret
confraternity ended, however, in a barren symbolism, and it is
impossible to trace what relation his strange theories of the
transmigration of souls and the music of the spheres have to his general
system of thought.
Far more influence on the progress of speculation was exercised by
Xenophanes of Colophon. Driven by the Persian invasion of 546 B.C. to
earn his living as a wandering minstrel, he developed the ideas of
Anaximander, and founded the school of great philosophic poets, to which
Parmenides, Empedocles and Lucretius belong. He is the grand monotheist,
and he has published his doctrines in his verses:
There is one God alone, the greatest of spirits and mortals,
Neither in body to mankind resembling, neither in ideas.
Shelley's line: "The One remains, the Many change and pass," sums up the
teaching of the line of thinkers which culminated in Plato. In their
view, knowledge derived from the senses was fallacious because it
touched only the diverse and changing appearances of things; absolute
knowledge of the one abiding spiritual reality could, they held, only be
obtained by the exercise of spiritual faculty of reason, which, unlike
the animal power of sense, is the same in all men. One of the
philosophers of this school, Zeno of Elea, was the inventor of the
dialectic method of logic, which Socrates and Plato used with so
tremendous an effect.
Anaxagoras, however, attempted to reconcile the evidence of the sense
with the dictates of the reason. He was the first philosopher to settle
in Athens, and Pericles, Euripides, and Socrates were among his pupils.
He was extraordinarily modern in many of his ideas. He held that the
matter of knowledge was derived through the senses, but that reason
regulated and verified it, and he carried this dualism into his
conception of the universe, which he represented as a manifestation of a
Divine intelligence, acting through invariable laws, but in no way
confused with the matter acted on.
His successor, Democritus, adopted his theory of the origin of
knowledge, and by applying it to the problem of the One and the Many,
produced the most striking of ancient anticipations of modern science.
He regarded the world as something made up of invisible particles, each
absolutely similar to the other; these formed the essential unity which
could be grasped only by the reason, but by their various combinations
and arrangements they brought about the apparent multiplicity of objects
which the senses perceived. Such was the foundation of the atomic theory
of Democritus. He conceived the atom as a centre of force, and not as a
particle having weight and material qualities. As, however, his
hypothesis was purely a metaphysical one, it did not lead to any of the
discoveries which have followed on the establishment of the modern
scientific theory, which was arrived at in a different way, and has a
different signification. Democritus also threw out in vague outline the
idea of gravitation. But this was not science: it was guess-work; it
afforded no ground on which the fabric of verified knowledge could be
erected, and no sure method of obtaining this knowledge.
_II.--The School of Socrates_
It was against the vain and premature hypotheses of the physiologists of
his day that the greatest and noblest intellect in Greece revolted.
Socrates was the knight-errant of philosophy.
It was his confessed aim and purpose to withdraw the mind from the
contemplation of the phenomena of nature, and fix it on its own
phenomena. "I have not leisure for physical speculations," he said, with
characteristic irony, "and I will tell you why: I am not yet able,
according to the Delphic inscription, to _know myself_, and it seems to
me very ridiculous, while ignorant of myself, to inquire into what I am
not concerned in." Weary of disputes about the origin of the universe,
he turned to the one field in which the current method of abstract
reasoning could be fruitfully applied--the field of ethics.
Living in an age of wild sophistry, he endeavoured to steady and
enlighten the conscience of men by establishing right principles of
conduct. His method of proceeding by definitions and analogy has been
misapplied, but in his hands it was a powerful instrument in discovering
and marking out a new field of inquiry. His religious genius, the ideal
character of his ethics, and the heroic character of his life, have been
his great titles to fame, but it is his method which gives him his high
position in the history of philosophy.
The method of Socrates was adopted and enlarged by the most famous of
all ancient writers. Aristocles, surnamed Plato (the broad-browed), was
a brilliant young Athenian aristocrat who turned from poetry to
philosophy on meeting, in his twentieth year, with Socrates. After
travelling abroad in search of knowledge, he returned to Athens and
founded his world-renowned Academy there in 387 B.C. With vast learning
and puissant method, he created an influence which is not yet extinct
Plato was the culminating point of Greek philosophy.
In his works all the various and conflicting tendencies of preceding
eras were collected under one method. This method was doubtless the
method of Socrates, but much extended and improved. Socrates relied on
definitions and analogical reasoning as the principles of investigation.
Plato used these arts, but he added to them the more scientific
processes of analysis, generalisation, and classification.
In regard to his system of thought, Plato was a realist. He believed
that ideas have a real existence, and that material things are only
copies of the realities existing in the ideal world. He held that
beauty, goodness, and wisdom are spiritual realities, from which all
things beautiful, good, and wise derive their existence.
In his philosophy the universe is divided into the celestial region of
ideas and the mundane region of material phenomena, answering to the
modern conception of heaven and earth. As the phenomena of matter are
but copies of ideas (not, as some suppose, the bodily realisation of
them), there arises a question: How do ideas become matter? Plato gives
two different explanations. In the "Republic" he says that God, instead
of perpetually creating individual things, created a distinct type
(idea) for each thing, and from this type all objects of the class are
made. But in a later work, the "Timaeus," Plato takes another view of the
origin of the world. Types are conceived as having existed from all
eternity, and God, in fashioning cosmos out of chaos, fashioned it after
the model of these eternal types.
Plato's conception of heaven and earth as two distinct regions is
completed by his conception of the double nature of the soul; or,
rather, of two souls, one rational and the other sensitive. The
sensitive soul awakens the divine reminiscences of the rational soul;
and the rational soul, by detecting the One in the Many, preserves man
from the scepticism inevitably resulting from mere sense-knowledge.
Aristotle, who was born in 384 B.C., was Plato's pupil. He, however,
completely broke away from his master's theory. He maintained that
individual objects alone exist. But if only individual objects exist,
only by the senses can they be known; and if we have only
sense-knowledge, how can we arrive at the general truths on which both
philosophy and science are founded? This was the problem which had led
Plato to claim for ideas, or types of general truths, a higher origin
than the intermittent and varying data of the senses.
Aristotle held that it could be solved in a natural way without the
conception of an ideal world. In his view, ideas were obtained by
induction. Sensation is the basis of all knowledge. But we have another
faculty besides that of sensation; we have memory. Having perceived many
objects, we remember our perceptions, and this enables us to discern
wherein things differ and wherein they agree. Then, by means of the art
of induction, we arrive at ideas. Aristotle's theory of induction is
clearly explained by him: "Experience furnishes the principles of every
science. Thus astronomy is grounded on observation. For if we were to
observe properly the phenomena of the heavens, we might demonstrate the
laws which regulate them. The same applies to other sciences." Had he
always held before his eyes this conception of science, he would have
anticipated Bacon--he would have been the Father of Positive Science.
But he could not confine himself to experience, as there was not
sufficient experience accumulated in his age from which to generalise
with any effect. So he turned to logic as an instrument for
investigating the mystery of existence, and by bringing physics and
metaphysics together again, he paved the way for a new era--the era of
scepticism.
All the wisdom of the ancient world was powerless against the sceptics.
Faith in truth was extinct; faith in human nature was gone; philosophy
was impossible. And, though the influence of Socrates continued to be
felt in the field of ethics, the ethics of the Greeks were at best
narrow and egotistical. What a light was poured upon all questions of
morality by that one divine axiom, "Love your enemy." No Greek ever
attained the sublimity of such a point of view. Still, the progress made
by the Greeks was immense, and they must ever occupy in the history of
humanity an honourable place.
_III.--Philosophy and Science_
Francis Bacon is the father of experimental philosophy. He owes his
title to his method. Many philosophers, ancient and modern, had
cursorily referred to observation and experiment as furnishing the
materials of physical knowledge; but no one before him had attempted to
systematise the true method of discovery.
He begins his great work by examining into the permanent causes of
error, as these were likely to be operative even after the reformation
of science. For this reason he calls them idols, or false appearances
(from the Greek, _eidolon_), and he divides them into four classes: the
idols of the tribe, or the causes of error due to the general defects of
the human mind; the idols of the den, which spring from weaknesses
peculiar to the character of the individual student; the idols of the
forum, which arise out of the intercourse of society and the power that
words sometimes have of governing thought; and, finally, the idols of
the theatre, which men of great learning pursue when they follow the
systems of famous but mistaken thinkers.
After this preliminary discussion, Bacon goes on to describe the methods
of inductive science. The first step consists in preparing a history of
the phenomena to be explained in all their modifications and varieties.
This history must include not merely such facts as spontaneously offer
themselves, but all experiments instituted for the sake of discovery. It
must be composed with great care; the facts should be accurately related
and distinctly arranged, and their authenticity diligently examined;
those that rest on doubtful evidence should not be rejected, but noted
as uncertain, with the grounds of the judgment so formed. This last part
of the method, says Bacon, is very necessary, for facts often appear
incredible only because we are ill-informed, and they cease to seem
marvellous when our knowledge is further extended.
When this record of facts, this "natural history," is completed, an
attempt may then be made to discover, by a comparison of the various
facts, the cause of the phenomena. Here it is of the utmost importance
to bear in mind that all facts have not the same value. There are, as
Bacon points out, twenty-seven species of facts, and he concludes that
in any science where facts cannot be tested by experiment there can be
no conclusive evidence.
Thus it will be seen that Bacon's method was a system of specific rules.
He did not merely tell men to make observations and experiments; he
taught them how observations and experiments ought to be made.
As Bacon was the father of modern science, so Rene Descartes was the
father of modern philosophy. Born in 1596, and perplexed by the movement
of scepticism produced by the Renaissance, the French thinker
endeavoured to find some ground of certainty in the fact that he at
least knew of his own existence. Hence his famous saying: _Cogito, ergo
sum_--"I think, therefore I exist." Consciousness, said he, is the basis
of all knowledge. The process then is simple: examine your
consciousness, and its clear replies will be science. Hence the vital
portion of his system lies in this axiom: "All clear ideas are true."
The fallacy in his system can be briefly exposed. Consciousness is, no
doubt, the ultimate ground of certainty of existence for _me_. But
though I am conscious of all that passes within myself, I am not
conscious of what passes in anything not myself. All that I can possibly
know of anything not myself lies in its effects upon me. Any other ideas
I may have in regard to the outside world are founded only on
inferences, and directly I leave the ground of consciousness for the
region of inference my knowledge becomes questionable.
It was this defect in Cartesianism which Baruch Spinoza, the great
Jewish thinker of Amsterdam, set out to rectify. Spinoza asked himself:
What was the reality which lies beneath all appearance? We see
everywhere transformations perishable and perishing, yet there must be
something beneath which is imperishable and immutable. What is it? In
Spinoza's view, the absolute existence is God. All that exists, exists
in and by God. Taking the words of St. Paul, "In Him we live and move
and have our being," as his motto, he undertook to trace the relations
of the world to God and to man, and those of man to society.
To John Locke, born at Wrington, in Somerset, in 1632, the problem
presented itself in another way. Instead of accepting the validity of
clear ideas, as Descartes and Spinoza did, he adopted the Baconian
method, and opened the inquiry into the origin and formation of ideas.
Separating himself from the philosophers who held that the mind was
capable of arriving at knowledge independent of experience, and from the
sceptics who maintained that the senses were the only channels of
information, he showed that ideas were derived from two
sources--sensation and reflection.
He was succeeded by George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, born at Kilcrin
in Kilkenny, in 1684. He defeated the sceptics on their own ground.
There is nothing in the world, he says, except our own sensations and
ideas. In order to exist for us, things have to be perceived by the
mind; therefore, everything, in order to exist, must exist in the mind
of God. But when Berkeley had proved that matter was figment, David
Hume, born in 1711, came forward and showed that mind was also an
illusion. You know nothing of matter, said Berkeley; you have only
perceptions and the ideas based thereon. You know nothing of mind,
replied Hume; you have only a succession of sensations and ideas.
Against Hume rose up in Germany a famous school of philosophers
beginning with Immanuel Kant, who was born in Prussia in 1724. Kant
attempted to prove that the human reason was not untrustworthy, as Hume
assumed, but limited, and that, within certain bounds, it was capable
of arriving at practical truths. Kant's disciples, however, were not
content with this modest restatement. Taking it too readily for granted
that Hume's objections had been overcome, they proceeded to revive that
unbounded faith in mere speculation which had been the distemper of the
Greek mind. Fichte and Schelling were the first thinkers of note to
attempt again to solve by logic the mystery of the universe.
But their works are now obscured by the achievement of Hegel, who began
to teach at Berlin in 1818. Hegel holds that the real universe is a
universe of ideas to which his philosophy is the key, but, as ideas
realise themselves in space and time, they come within the scope of the
man of science. It is said that all bad German systems of philosophy
when they die come to England. Hegelianism has certainly been very
fashionable in this country, and its influence is still observable in
academic circles.
Auguste Comte is the Bacon of the nineteenth century. It has been his
object to construct a _positive_ philosophy; that is to say, a doctrine
capable of embracing all the sciences, and, with them, all the problems
of social life. He holds that every branch of knowledge passes through
three stages: the supernatural, or fictitious; the metaphysical or
abstract; the positive or scientific. When the positive method is
adopted, then shall we again have one general doctrine, powerful because
general.
The metaphysicians have failed to penetrate to the causes of things, but
the men of science are succeeding in the humbler but far more useful
work of tracing some of the laws that govern the phenomena of nature,
and foreseeing their operations. It is only where the philosophers
started matters capable of _positive_ treatment that any advance has
been made in metaphysics. For the rest, philosophy leaves us in the
nineteenth century at precisely the same point at which we were in the
fifth. Thus is the circle completed.
JOHN LOCKE
Concerning the Human Understanding
John Locke was born at Wrington, Somersetshire, England, Aug. 29,
1632. He was educated at Westminster and at Christ Church, Oxford;
but his temperament rebelled against the system of education still
in vogue and the public disputations of the schools, which he
thought "invented for wrangling and ostentation rather than to
discover truth." It was his study of Descartes that first "gave him
a relish of philosophical things." From 1683 to 1689 he found it
prudent to sojourn in Holland. In the latter year he returned to
England, bringing with him the manuscript of the "Essay Concerning
Human Understanding," which appeared in the spring of 1690. Few
works of philosophy have made their way more rapidly than the
"Essay." Twenty editions appeared before 1700. The design of the
book, Locke explains in the introduction, is to inquire "into the
origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the
grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent." Locke died on
October 28, 1704.
_I.--The Nature of Simple Ideas_
"Idea" being that term which, I think, serves best to stand for
whatsoever is the object of the understanding. I have used it to express
whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is the
mind can be employed about in thinking. Let us, then, suppose the mind
to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters--without any ideas.
Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of
man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? To this, I answer
in one word--Experience; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from
that it ultimately derives itself.
Let anyone examine his own thoughts and thoroughly search his
understanding, and then let him tell me whether of all the original
ideas he has there are any other than of the objects of his senses, or
of the observations of his mind considered as objects of his
reflection. Though the qualities that affect our senses are, in the
things themselves, so united and blended that there is no separation, no
distance between them, yet it is plain the ideas they produce in the
mind enter by the senses simple and unmixed. For, though the sight and
touch often take in from the same object at the same time different
ideas, yet the simple ideas thus united in the same subject are as
perfectly distinct as those that come in by different senses; the
coldness and hardness which a man feels in a piece of ice being as
distinct ideas in the mind as the smell and whiteness of a lily, and
each of them being in itself uncompounded, contains nothing but one
uniform appearance, or conception, in the mind, and is not
distinguishable into different ideas.
When the understanding is once stored with these simple ideas, it has
the power to repeat, compare, and unite them even to an almost infinite
variety, and so can make at will new complex ideas. But it is not in the
power of any most exalted wit or enlarged understanding, by any
quickness or variety of thought, to invent or frame one new simple idea
in the mind, nor to destroy those that are there. I would have anyone
try to fancy any taste which had never affected his palate, or frame the
idea of a scent he had never smelt; and when he can do this, I will also
conclude that a blind man hath ideas of colours and a deaf man true,
distinct notions of sound.
There are some ideas which have admittance only through one sense which
is peculiarly adapted to receive them. Thus, light and colours come in
only by the eye, all kinds of noises by the ear, the tastes and smells
by the nose and palate. The most considerable of those belonging to the
touch are heat, cold, and solidity--which is the idea that belongs to
the body, whereby we conceive it to fill space.
Simple ideas of divers senses are the ideas of space or extension,
figure, rest, and motion, for these make perceivable impressions both
on the eyes and touch, and we can receive and convey into our minds the
ideas of the extension, figure, motion, and rest of bodies both by
seeing and feeling.
The mind, receiving the ideas mentioned in the foregoing from without,
when it turns its view inward upon itself and observes its own actions
about those ideas it has, takes from thence other ideas which are as
capable to be the objects of its contemplation as any of those it
received from foreign things. The two great and principal actions of the
mind which are most frequently considered, and which are so frequent
that everyone that pleases may take notice of them in himself, are these
two--Perception or Thinking, and Volition or Will. The power of thinking
is called the Understanding, and the power of volition is called the
Will. And these two powers, or abilities, in the mind are denominated
Faculties. Some of the modes of these simple ideas of reflection are
remembrance, discerning, reasoning, judging, knowledge, faith.
It has, further, pleased our wise Creator to annex to several objects
and to the ideas which we receive from them, as also to several of our
thoughts, a concomitant pleasure, and that in several objects to several
degrees, that those faculties which He has endowed us with might not
remain wholly idle and unemployed by us. Pain has the same efficacy and
use to set us on work that pleasure has, we being as ready to employ our
faculties to avoid that as to pursue this.
Existence and unity are two other ideas that are suggested to the
understanding by every object without and every idea within. Power,
also, is another of those simple ideas which we receive from sensation
and reflection; and, besides these, there is succession.
Nor let anyone think these too narrow bounds for the capacious mind of
man to expatiate in, which takes its flight farther than the stars and
cannot be confined by the limits of the world, that extends its
thoughts often even beyond the utmost expansion of matter and makes
excursions into that incomprehensible inane. Nor will it be so strange
to think these few simple ideas sufficient to employ the quickest
thought or largest capacity if we consider how many words may be made
out of the various composition of twenty-four letters; or if, going one
step farther, we will but reflect on the variety of combinations that
may be made with barely one of the above-mentioned ideas, _viz._,
number, whose stock is inexhaustible. And what a large and immense field
doth extension alone afford the mathematicians!
_II.--Of Idea-Producing Qualities_
The power to produce any idea in our mind I call Quality of the subject
wherein that power is. Qualities are, first, such as are utterly
inseparable from the body in what state soever it be. These I call
original or primary qualities, which I think we may observe to produce
simple ideas in us, _viz._, solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest,
and number.
Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in the objects
themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their
primary qualities, _i.e._, by the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of
their insensible parts. These secondary qualities are colours, sounds,
tastes, etc. From whence I think it is easy to draw this observation:
that the ideas of primary qualities of bodies are resemblances of them,
but the ideas produced in us by the secondary qualities have no
resemblance in them at all.
If anyone will consider that the same fire that at one distance produces
in us the sensation of warmth does, at a nearer approach, produce in us
the far different sensation of pain, let him bethink himself what reason
he has to say that his idea of warmth, which was produced in him by
fire, is actually in the fire; and his idea of pain which the same fire
produced in him in the same way, is not in the fire. The particular
bulk, number, figure, and motion of the parts of fire or snow are really
in them, whether anyone's senses perceive them or not; and, therefore,
they may be called real qualities, because they really exist in those
bodies. But light, heat, whiteness, or coldness are no more really in
them than sickness or pain is in manna. Take away the sensation of them;
let not the eyes see light or colours, nor the ears hear sounds; let the
palate not taste, nor the nose smell; and all colours, tastes, odours,
and sounds, as they are such particular ideas, vanish and cease, and are
reduced to their causes, _i.e._, bulk, figure, and motion of parts.
_III.--Various Faculties of the Mind_
What perception is everyone will know better by reflecting on what he
does himself when he sees, hears, feels, etc., or thinks, than by any
discourse of mine. This is certain, that whatever alterations are made
in the body, if they reach not the mind, whatever impressions are made
on the outward parts, if they are not taken notice of within, there is
no perception.
We ought further to consider concerning perception, that the ideas we
receive by sensation are often in grown people altered by the judgment
without our taking any notice of it. When we set before our eyes a round
globe of any uniform colour--_e.g._, gold, alabaster, or jet--it is
certain that the idea thereby imprinted in our mind is of a flat circle
variously shadowed with several degrees of light and brightness coming
to our eyes. But we having by use been accustomed to perceive what kind
of appearances convex bodies are wont to make in us, what alterations
are made in the reflections of light by the difference of the sensible
figures of bodies, the judgment presently, by an habitual custom, alters
the appearances into their causes; so that from that which is truly a
variety of shadow or colour collecting the figure, it makes it pass for
a mark of figure, and frames to itself the perception of a convex figure
and a uniform colour, when the idea we receive from thence is only a
plane variously coloured, as is evident in painting. Perception, then,
is the first operation of our intellectual faculties, and the inlet of
all knowledge into our minds.
The next faculty of the mind whereby it makes a further progress towards
knowledge is that which I call Retention, or the keeping of those simple
ideas which from sensation or reflection it hath received. This is done,
first, by keeping the idea which is brought into it for some time
actually in view, which is called Contemplation. The other way of
retention is the power to revive again in our minds those ideas which
after imprinting have disappeared, or have been, as it were, laid aside
out of sight; and thus we do when we conceive heat or light, yellow or
sweet, the object being removed. This is memory, which is, as it were,
the storehouse of our ideas.
Another faculty we may take notice of in our minds is that of
Discerning, and distinguishing between the several ideas it has. It is
not enough to have a confused perception of something in general. Unless
the mind had a distinct perception of different objects and their
qualities, it would be capable of very little knowledge, though the
bodies that affect us were as busy about us as they are now, and the
mind were continually employed in thinking. On this faculty of
distinguishing one thing from another depends the evidence and certainty
of several even very general propositions which have passed for innate
truths, because men, overlooking the true cause why those propositions
find universal assent, impute it wholly to native uniform impressions;
whereas it, in truth, depends upon this clear discerning faculty of the
mind, whereby it perceives two ideas to be the same or different.
The comparing of ideas one with another is the operation of the mind
upon which depends all that large tribe of ideas comprehended under
relations. The next operation is composition, whereby the mind puts
together several simple ideas and combines them into complex ones.
The use of words being to stand as outward marks of our internal ideas,
and those ideas being taken from particular things, if every particular
idea that we take in should have a distinct name, names must be endless.
To prevent this, the mind makes the particular ideas received from
particular objects to become general, which is done by considering them
as they are in the mind, and such appearances separate from all other
existences, and from the circumstances of real existence, as time,
place, or any other concomitant ideas. This is called Abstraction,
whereby ideas taken from particular being become general representatives
of all of the same kind. Thus, the same colour being observed to-day in
chalk or snow which the mind yesterday received from milk, it considers
that that appearance alone makes it a representative of all of that
kind; and having given it the name "whiteness," it by that sound
signifies the same quality wheresoever imagined or met with; and thus
universals, whether ideas or terms, are made.
As the mind is wholly passive in the reception of all its simple ideas,
so it exerts several acts of its own, whereby, out of its simple ideas,
as the materials and foundations of the rest the others are framed. And
I believe we shall find, if we observe the originals of our notions,
that even the most abstruse ideas, how remote soever they may seem from
sense, or from any operation of our minds, are yet only such as the
understanding frames to itself, by repeating and joining together ideas
that it had either from objects of sense or from its own operations
about them; so that even those large and abstract ideas are derived from
sensation or reflection, being no other than what the mind may and does
attain by the ordinary use of its own faculties.
_IV.--Knowledge of the Existence of Other Things_
It is the actual receiving of ideas from without that gives us notice of
the existence of other things, and makes us know that something does
exist at that time without us which causes that idea in us, though
perhaps we neither know nor consider how it does it. And this, though
not so certain as our own intuitive knowledge, or as the deductions of
our reason employed about the clear abstract ideas of our own minds, yet
deserves the name of knowledge.
It is plain that those perceptions are produced by exterior causes
affecting our senses for the following reasons.
Because those that want the organs of any sense never can have the ideas
belonging to that sense produced in their minds.
Because sometimes I find I cannot avoid having those ideas produced in
my mind; for as when my eyes are shut, or the windows fast, I can at
pleasure recall to my mind the ideas of light or the sun which former
sensations have lodged in my memory; so I can at pleasure lay by that
idea and take into my view that of a rose or taste of sugar. But if I
turn my eyes at noon towards the sun, I cannot avoid the ideas which the
light or sun produces in me. There is nobody who does not perceive the
difference in himself contemplating the sun as he has an idea of it in
his memory and actually looking upon it; and, therefore, he has certain
knowledge that they are not both memory or the actions of his mind and
fancies only within him, but that actual seeing has a cause without.
Add to this that many of those ideas are produced with pain, which
afterwards we remember without the least offence.
Lastly, our senses bear witness to the truth of each other's report
concerning the existence of sensible things without us.
MONTAIGNE
Essays
Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, one of the greatest masters
of the essay in all literature, was born at his family's ancestral
chateau near Bordeaux, in France, Feb. 28, 1533, and died on
September 13, 1592. His life was one of much suffering from
hereditary disease, which, however, he endured so philosophically
that little trace of his trials is apparent in his writings. His
father, who is said to have been of English descent, took special
pains with his early education, having had him taught Latin by a
German tutor before he learnt French, so that before he "left his
nurse's arms" he was a master of the ancient tongue and knew not a
word of his own. The first two of the three books of his celebrated
"Essays" were published in 1581 and the third in 1588. In 1582 he
visited Italy and was made a Roman citizen, and the next year he
was chosen Mayor of Bordeaux. Always a lover of books and a student
of men, his writings are a rich mine of scholarly wit and worldly
wisdom, consummate in the naturalness that conceals literary art.
Like most works of the time, they contain passages which modern
taste does not approve, but, taken as a whole, they are among the
most interesting of books of the kind.
_I.--Of Death, and How It Findeth a Man_
I was born between eleven of the clock and noon, the last of February,
1533, according to our computation, the year beginning on January 1. It
is but a fortnight since I was thirty-nine years old. I want at least as
much more of life. If in the meantime I should trouble my thoughts with
a matter so far from me as death, it were but folly. Of those renowned
in life I will lay a wager I will find more that have died before they
came to five-and-thirty years than after.
How many means and ways has death to surprise us! Who would ever have
imagined that a Duke of Brittany should have become stifled to death in
a throng of people, as whilom was a neighbour of mine at Lyons when
Pope Clement made his entrance there? Hast thou not seen one of our late
kings slain in the midst of his sports? and one of his ancestors die
miserably by the throw of a hog? AEschylus, fore-threatened by the fall
of a house, when he was most on his guard, was struck dead by the fall
of a tortoise-shell from the talons of a flying eagle. Another was
choked by a grape-pip. An emperor died from the scratch of a comb,
AEmilius Lepidus from hitting his foot against a door-sill, Anfidius from
stumbling against the door as he was entering the council chamber. Caius
Julius, a physician, while anointing a patient's eyes had his own closed
by death. And if among these examples I may add one of a brother of
mine, Captain St. Martin, playing at tennis, received a blow with a ball
a little above the right ear, and without any appearance of bruise or
hurt, never sitting or resting, died within six hours afterwards of an
apoplexy. These so frequent and ordinary examples being ever before our
eyes, why should it not continually seem to us that death is ever at
hand ready to take us by the throat?
What matter is it, will you say unto me, how and in what manner it is,
so long as a man do not trouble and vex himself therewith? It sufficeth
me to live at my ease, and the best recreation I can have that do I ever
take. It is uncertain where death looks for us: let us look for her
everywhere. The premeditation of death is a fore-thinking of liberty. He
who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is no evil in life
for him who has well conceived that the privation of life is no evil. I
am now, by the mercy of God, in such a taking that, without regret or
grieving at any worldly matter, I am prepared to dislodge whensoever He
shall please to call me. No man did ever prepare himself to quit the
world more simply and fully. The deadest deaths are the best.
* * * * *
Were I a composer of books I would keep a register of divers deaths,
which, in teaching me to die, should afterwards teach them to live.
My father in his household order had this, which I can commend, though I
in no way follow. Besides the day-book of household affairs, wherein are
registered at least expenses, payments, gifts, bargains, and sales that
require not a notary's hand to them--of which book a receiver had the
keeping--he appointed another journal-book to one of his servants, who
was his clerk, wherein he should orderly set down all occurences worthy
of the noting, and day by day register the memories of the history of
his house--a thing very pleasant to read when time began to wear out the
remembrance of them, and fit for us to pass the time withal, and to
resolve some doubts: when such and such a work was begun, when ended;
what way or course was taken, what accidents happened, how long it
continued; all our voyages and journeys, where, and how long we were
away from home; our marriages; who died, and when; the receiving of good
or bad tidings; who came, who went; changing or removing of household
officers, taking of new or discharging of old servants, and such
matters. An ancient custom, and a sound one, which I would have all men
use and bring into fashion again.
_II.--In My Library_
Intercourse with books comforts me in age and solaces me in
solitariness, eases me of weariness and rids me of tedious company. To
divert importunate thoughts there is no better way than recourse to
books. And though they perceive I on occasion forsake them, they never
mutiny or murmur, but welcome me always with the self-same visage.
I never travel, whether in peace or in war, without books. It is
wonderful what repose I find in the knowledge that they are at my elbow
to delight me when time shall serve. In this human peregrination this is
the best munition I have found.
At home I betake me somewhat oftener to my library. It is in the chief
approach to my house, so that under my eyes are my garden, my
base-court, my yard, and even the best rooms of my house. There, without
order or method, I can turn over and ransack now one book and now
another. Sometimes I muse, sometimes save; and walking up and down I
indite and register these my humours, these my conceits. It is placed in
a third storey of a tower. The lowermost is my chapel, the second a
chamber, where I often lie when I would be alone. Above is a
clothes-room. In this library, formerly the least useful room in all my
house, I pass the greatest part of my life's days, and most hours of the
day--I am never there of nights. Next it is a handsome, neat study,
large enough to have a fire in winter, and very pleasantly windowed.
If I feared not trouble more than cost I might easily join a convenient
gallery of a hundred paces long and twelve broad on each side of this
room, and upon the same floor, the walls being already of a convenient
height. Each retired place requireth a walk. If I sit long my thoughts
are prone to sleep. My mind goes not alone as if legs moved it. Those
who study without books are all in the same case.
My library is circular in shape, with no flat side save that in which
stand my table and chair. Thus around me at one look it offers the full
sight of all my books, set round about upon shelves, five ranks, one
above another. It has three bay windows, of a far-extending, rich, and
unobstructed prospect. The room is sixteen paces across.
In winter I am less constantly there, for my house being on a hill, no
part is more subject to all weathers than this. But this pleases me only
the more, both for the benefit of the exercise--which is a matter to be
taken into account--and because, being remote and of troublesome
access, it enables me the better to seclude myself from company that
would encroach upon my time. There is my seat, that is my throne.
My rule therein I endeavour to make absolute, that I may sequester that
only corner from all, whether wife, children, or acquaintances. For
elsewhere I have but a verbal and qualified authority, and miserable to
my mind is he who in his own home has nowhere to be to himself.
_III.--Of Inequality_
Plutarch somewhere says that he finds no such great difference between
beast and beast as between man and man. He speaks of the mind and
internal qualities. I could find in my heart to say there is more
difference between one man and another than between such a man and such
a beast; and that there are as many degrees of spirits as steps between
earth and heaven.
But concerning the estimation of men, it is marvellous that we ourselves
are the only things not esteemed for their proper qualities. We commend
a horse for his strength and speed, not for his trappings; a greyhound
for his swiftness, not his collar; a hawk for her wing, not for her
bells. Why do we not likewise esteem a man for that which is his own? He
has a goodly train of followers, a stately palace, so much rent coming
in, so much credit among men. Alas, all that is about him, not in him.
If you buy a horse you see him bare of saddle and cloths. When you judge
of a man, why consider his wrappings only? In a sword it is the quality
of the blade, not the value of the scabbard, to which you give heed. A
man should be judged by what he is himself, not by his appurtenances.
Let him lay aside his riches and external honours and show himself in
his shirt. Has he a sound body? What mind has he? Is it fair, capable,
and unpolluted, and happily equipped in all its parts? Is it a mind to
be settled, equable, contented, and courageous in any circumstances? Is
he--
A wise man, of himself commander high,
Whom want, nor death, nor bands can terrify,
Resolved t'affront desires, honours to scorn,
All in himself, close, round, and neatly borne,
Against whose front externals idly play,
And even fortune makes a lame essay?
Such a man is five hundred degrees beyond kingdoms and principalities;
himself is a kingdom unto himself. Compare with him the vulgar
troop--stupid, base, servile, warring, floating on the sea of passions,
depending wholly on others. There is more difference than between heaven
and earth, yet in a blindness of custom we take little or no account of
it. Whereas, if we consider a cottage and a king, a noble and a workman,
a rich man and a poor, we at once recognise disparity, although, as one
might say, they differ in nothing but their clothes.
An emperor, whose pomp so dazzles us in public, view him behind the
curtain is but an ordinary man, and peradventure viler and sillier than
the least of his subjects! Cowardice, irresolution, ambition, spite,
anger, envy, move and work in him as in another man. Fear, care, and
suspicion haunt him even in the midst of his armed troops. Does the
ague, the headache, or the gout spare him more than us? When age seizes
on his shoulders, can the tall yeoman of his guard rid him of it? His
bedstead encased with gold and pearls cannot allay the pinching pangs of
colic!
The flatterers of Alexander the Great assured him he was the son of
Jupiter, but being hurt one day, and the blood gushing from the wound,
"What think you of this?" said he to them. "Is not this blood of a
lively red hue, and merely human?" If a king have the ague or the gout
what avail his titles of majesty? But if he be a man of worth, royalty
and glorious titles will add but little to good fortune.
Truly, to see our princes all alone, sitting at their meat, though
beleaguered with talkers, whisperers, and gazing beholders, I have often
rather pitied than envied them. The honour we receive from those who
fear and stand in awe of us is no true honour. "Service holds few,
though many hold service."
Every man's manners and his mind
His fortune for him frame and find.
_IV.--Of the Use of Apparel_
I was devising in this chill-cold season whether the fashion of these
late-discovered nations to go naked be a custom forced by the hot
temperature of the air, as we say of the Indians and Moors, or whether
it be an original manner of mankind. My opinion is, that even as all
plants, trees, living creatures, are naturally furnished with protection
against all weathers, even so were we. But like those who by artificial
light quench the brightness of day, so we have spoilt our proper
covering by what we have borrowed. Nations under the same heaven and
climate as our own, or even colder, have no knowledge of clothes.
Moreover, the tenderest parts of us are ever bare and naked--our eyes,
face, mouth, nose, ears; and our country swains, like their forefathers,
go bare-breasted to their middles.
Had we been born needing petticoats and breeches nature would have armed
that which she has left to the battery of the seasons with some thicker
skin or hide, as she has our finger ends and the soles of our feet.
"How many men in Turkey go naked for devotion's sake?" a certain man
demanded of one of our loitering rogues whom in the depth of winter he
saw wandering up and down with nothing but his shirt about him, yet as
blithe and lusty as another that keeps himself muffled up to the ears in
furs. "And have not you, good sir," answered he, "your fate all bare?
Imagine I am all face."
The Italians say that when the Duke of Florence asked his fool how,
being so ill-clad, he could endure the cold, he replied, "Master, use
but my receipt, and put all the clothes you have on you, as I do all
mine, and you shall feel no more cold than I do."
King Massinissa, were it never so sharp weather, always went bareheaded.
So did the Emperor Severus. In the battle of the Egyptians and Persians,
Herodotus noticed that of those slain the Egyptians had skulls much
harder than the Persians, by reason that these go ever with their heads
covered with coifs and turbans, while those are from infancy shaven and
bareheaded. King Agesilaus wore his clothes alike winter and summer.
Suetonius says Caesar always marched at the head of his troops, and most
commonly bareheaded and on foot, whether the sun shone or whether it
rained. The like is reported of Hannibal.
Plato, for the better health and comfort of the body, earnestly
persuades that no man should ever give feet or head other cover than
nature had allotted them.
We Frenchmen are accustomed to array ourselves strangely in
parti-coloured suits (not I, for I seldom wear any but black and white,
like my father) to protect ourselves against the cold, but what should
we do in cold like that Captain Martyn du Bellay describes--frosts so
hard that the wine had to be chopped up with axes and shared to the
soldiers by weight?
_V.--Of Solitariness_
Let us leave apart the outworn comparison between a solitary and an
active life, and ask those who engage themselves "for the public good"
whether what they seek in these public charges is not, after all,
private commodity? Public or private, as I suppose, the end is the
same, to live better at ease. But a man does not always seek the best
way to come at it, and often supposes himself to have quit cares when he
has but changed them.
There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family
than in managing a state. Wheresoever the mind is buried, there lies
all. And though domestic occupations may be less important, they are not
less importunate.
Moreover, though we have freed ourselves from court or from market, we
have still the torments of ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and
unsatisfied desires. These follow us even into cloisters and schools of
philosophy. When Socrates was told that a certain man was none the
better for his travels, "I believe it well," said he, "for he took
himself with him."
If a man do not first get rid of what burthens his mind, moving from
place to place will not help him. It is not enough for a man to
sequester himself from people; he must seclude himself from himself. We
carry our fetters with us. Our evil is rooted in our mind, and the mind
cannot escape from itself. Therefore must it be reduced and brought into
itself, and that is the true solitariness, which may be enjoyed even in
the throng of peopled cities or kings' courts.
A man may, if he can, have wife, children, goods, health, but not so tie
himself to them that his felicity depends on them. We should reserve for
ourselves some place where we may, as it were, hoard up our true
liberty. Virtue is contented with itself, without discipline, words, or
deeds. Shake we off these violent holdfasts which engage us and estrange
us from ourselves. The greatest thing is for a man to know how to be his
own.
I esteem not Arcesilaus, the philosopher, less reformed because I know
him to have used household utensils of gold and silver, as the condition
of his fortune permitted. And knowing what slender hold accessory
comforts have, I omit not, in enjoying them, humbly to beseech God of
His mercy to make me content with myself and the goods I have in myself.
The wiser sort of men, having a strong and vigorous mind, may frame for
themselves an altogether spiritual life. But mine being common, I must
help to uphold myself by corporal comforts. And age having despoiled me
of some of these, I sharpen my appetite for those remaining. Glory,
which Pliny and Cicero propose to us, is far from my thoughts. "Glory
and rest are things that cannot squat on the same bench." Stay your mind
in assured and limited cogitations, wherein it best may please itself,
and having gained knowledge of true felicities, enjoy them, and rest
satisfied without wishing a further continuance either of life or of
name.
_VI.--Opinion in Good and Evil_
Men, saith an ancient Greek, are tormented by the opinion they have of
things, and not by things themselves. It were a great conquest of our
miserable human condition if any man could establish everywhere this
true proposition. For if evils lie only in our judgment, it is in our
power to condemn them or to turn them to good.
In death, what we principally fear is pain; as also poverty has nothing
to be feared for but what she casts upon us through hunger, thirst,
cold, and other miseries. I will willingly grant that pain is the worst
accident of our being; I hate and shun it as much as possible. But it is
in our power, if not to annul, at least to diminish it, with patience,
and though the body should be moved, yet to keep mind and reason in good
temper.
If it were not so, what has brought virtue, valour, magnanimity,
fortitude, into credit? If a man is not to lie on the hard ground, to
endure the heat of the scorching sun, to feed hungrily on a horse or an
ass, to see himself mangled and cut in pieces, to have a bullet plucked
out of his bones, to suffer incisions, his flesh to be stitched up,
cauterised, and searched--all incident to a martial man--how shall we
purchase the advantage and pre-eminence we so greedily seek over the
vulgar sort?
Moreover, this ought to comfort us, that naturally, if pain be violent
it is also short; if long, it is easier. Thou shall not feel it
over-long; if thou feel it over-much, it will either end itself or end
thee. Even as an enemy becomes more furious when we fly from him, so
does pain grow prouder if we tremble under it. It will stoop and yield
on better terms to him who makes head against it. In recoiling we draw
on the enemy. As the body is steadier and stronger to a charge if it
stand stiffly, so is the soul.
Weak-backed men, such as I am, feel a dash of a barber's razor more than
ten blows with a sword in the heat of fight. The painful throes of
childbearing, deemed by physicians and the word of God to be very great,
some nations make no account of. I omit to speak of the Lacedaemonian
women; come we to the Switzers of our infantry. Trudging and trotting
after their husbands, to-day you see them carry the child around their
neck which but yesterday they brought into the world.
How many examples have we not of contempt of pain and smart by that sex!
What can they not do, what will they not do, what fear they to do, so
they may but hope for some amendment of their beauty? To become slender
in waist, and to have a straight spagnolised body, what pinching, what
girding, what cingling will they not endure! Yea, sometimes with iron
plates, with whalebones, and other such trashy implements, that their
very skin and quick flesh is eaten in and consumed to the bones, whereby
they sometimes work their own death.
There is a certain effeminate and light opinion, and that no more in
sorrow than it is in pleasure, whereby we are so dainty tender that we
cannot abide to be stung of a bee, but must roar and cry out. This is
the total sum of all, that you be master of yourself.
PLATO
The Apology, or Defence of Socrates
Aristocles, the son of Ariston, whose birth name is almost
forgotten because the whole world knows him as Plato, was born at
Athens about the year 427 B.C. As he grew up he became a devoted
disciple of Socrates, and when the Athenian people had put the
master to death, the disciple gave up his life to expounding the
wisdom of his teacher. How much of that teaching was really
implicitly contained in the doctrines of Socrates, it is difficult
to say, since very definite developments evidently took place in
Plato's own views. Plato himself lived to the age of eighty, and
died, as he had for the most part lived, at Athens, in 347. When
Socrates was indicted for "corrupting the youth" of Athens and on
other corresponding charges, Plato was himself present at the
trial. We may believe that the "Apology" is substantially a
reproduction of the actual defence made by Socrates. The "judges"
in the Athenian court were practically the assembled body of free
Athenian citizens. When an adverse verdict was given, the accused
could propose a penalty as an alternative to that which had been
named by the accuser, and the court could choose between the two
penalties. Socrates was found guilty by a small majority of votes,
and sentence of death was passed, as set forth in the last section
of the "Apology."
_I.--The Official Indictment, and the Real Charges_
What my accusers have said, Athenians, has been most specious, but none
of it is true. The falsehood which most astonished me was that you must
beware of being beguiled by my consummate eloquence; for I am not
eloquent at all, unless speaking pure truth be eloquence. You will hear
me speak with adornments and without premeditation in my everyday
language, which many of you have heard. I am seventy years old, yet this
is my first appearance in the courts, and I have no experience of
forensic arts. All I ask is that you will take heed whether what I say
be just.
It is just that I should begin by defending myself against my accusers
from of old, in priority to Anytus and these other latter-day accusers.
For, skilful as these are, I fear those more--those who from your youth
have been untruthfully warning you against one Socrates, a wise man, who
speculates about everything in heaven and under the earth, and tries to
make the worse cause the better. Their charge is the craftier, because
you think that a man who does as they say has no thought for the gods. I
cannot name these gentlemen precisely, beyond indicating that one is a
writer of comedies; I cannot meet and refute them individually. However,
I must try to enter a brief defence. I think I know where my difficulty
will lie; but the issue will be as the gods choose.
Now, what is the basis of this charge, on which Meletus also relies?
"Socrates is an evil doer, a busybody, who pries into things in heaven
and under the earth, and teaches these same things to others." You all
saw the Socrates in the comedy of Aristophanes engaged in these
pursuits. I have nothing to say against such inquiries; but do not let
Meletus charge me with them, for I have no part nor lot in them. Many of
you have heard me talk, but never one on these subjects. Witness you
yourselves. From this you should be able to gauge the other things that
are said against me.
Equally untrue is the charge that I make a paid business of teaching my
neighbours. It is a fine thing to be able to impart knowledge, like
Gorgias, and Prodicus, and Hippias, who can go from city to city and
draw to converse with them young men who pay for the privilege instead
of enjoying their companions' society for nothing. I am told there is
one Evenus, a Parian, practising now, whose fee is five minas. It must
be delightful to possess such valuable knowledge and to impart it--if
they do possess it. I should like to do it myself, but I do not possess
the knowledge.
"Whence, then, comes the trouble, Socrates?" you will say; "if you have
been doing nothing unusual, how have these rumours and slanders arisen?"
I will tell you what I take to be the explanation. It is due to a
certain wisdom with which I seem to be endowed--not superhuman at all
like that of these gentlemen. I speak not arrogantly, but on the
evidence of the Oracle of Delphi, who told Chaerephon, a man known to
you, that there was no wiser man than Socrates. Now, I am not conscious
of possessing wisdom; but the God cannot lie. What did he mean?
Well, I tried to find out, by going to a man reputed wise, thinking to
prove that there were wiser men. But I found him not wise at all, though
he fancied himself so. I sought to show him this, but he was only very
much annoyed. I concluded that, after all, I was wiser than he in one
particular, because I was under no delusion that I possessed knowledge,
as he was. I tried all the men reputed wise, one after the other, and
made myself very unpopular, for the result was always the same. It was
the same with the poets as with the politicians, and with the craftsmen
as with the poets. The last did know something about their own
particular art, and therefore imagined that they knew all about
everything.
I went on, taking every opportunity of finding out whether people
reputed wise, and thinking themselves so, were wise in reality, and
pointing out that they were not. And because of my exposing the
ignorance of others, I have got this groundless reputation of having
knowledge myself, and have been made the object of many other calumnies.
And young gentlemen of position who have heard me follow my example, and
annoy people by exposing their ignorance; and this is all visited on me;
and I am called an ill-conditioned person who corrupts youth. To prove
which my calumniators have to fall back on charging me with prying into
all things in heaven and under the earth, and the rest of it.
_II.--The Cross-Examining of Meletus_
Such is my answer to the charges which have been poured into your ears
for a long time. Now let me defend myself against these later
accusations of Meletus and the rest--the virtuous patriot Meletus. I am
an evil-doer, a corrupter of youth, who pays no reverence to the gods
who the city reveres, but to strange daemons. Not I, but Meletus is the
evil-doer, who rashly makes accusations so frivolous, pretending much
concern for matters about which he has never troubled himself. Answer
me, Meletus. You think it of the utmost importance that our youth should
be made as excellent as possible.
MELETUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: Tell us, then, who is it that makes them better; for of
course, you know. You are silent. The laws, you say? The question was,
"Who?"
MELETUS: The judges; all the judges.
SOCRATES: In other words, all the Athenian people--everyone but me? And
I alone corrupt them? Truly, I am in an ill plight! But in the case of
all other animals, horses, for instance, there are only a few people who
are able to improve them. Your answer shows that you have never bestowed
attention on the care of young people. Next, tell me is it better for a
man to dwell among good citizens or bad? The good, since the bad will
injure him. I cannot, then, set about making bad citizens designedly. My
friend, no man designedly brings injury upon himself. If I corrupt them,
it must be undesignedly--reason good for admonishing and instructing me,
which you have not done; but not for bringing me into court, which you
have done! However, I corrupt them by teaching them not to believe in
the gods in whom the city believes, but in strange deities? Do I teach
that there are some gods, or that there are no gods at all?
MELETUS: I say that you believe in no gods. You say the sun is a stone,
and the moon earth.
SOCRATES: Most excellent Meletus, everyone knows that Anaxagoras says
so; you can buy that information for a drachma! Do I really appear to
you to revere no gods?
MELETUS: No, no gods at all.
SOCRATES: Now, that is incredible! You must have manufactured this
riddle out of sheer wantonness, for in the indictment you charge me with
reverencing gods! Can anyone believe that there are human affairs, or
equine affairs, or instrumental affairs without believing that there are
men, or horses, or instruments? You say expressly that I believe in
daemonic affairs, therefore in daemons; but daemons are a sort of gods or
the offspring of gods. Therefore, you cannot possibly believe that I do
not believe in gods. Really, I have sufficiently answered the
indictment. If I am condemned, it will not be on the indictment of
Meletus, but on popular calumnies; which have condemned good men before
me, and assuredly I shall not be the last.
_III.--The Defence_
It may be suggested that I ought to be ashamed of practices which have
brought you in danger of death. Risk of death is not to be taken into
account in any action which really matters at all. If it ought to be,
the heroes before Troy were bad characters! Every man should stand to
his post, come life, come death. Should I have stood to my post and
faced death when on service at Potidaca, but have failed through fear of
death when the deity imposed on me a certain course of action? Whether
to die be evil or good, I know not, though many think they know it to be
evil. But to disobey authority, human or divine, I know to be evil; and
I will not do what I know to be evil to avoid what may in fact be a
good. Insomuch that if you now offer to set me free on condition that I
should cease from these pursuits on pain of death, I should reply: "Men
of Athens, I love and honour you, but I will obey the god rather than
you; and while I breathe and have the power I will not cease from the
pursuit of philosophy, or from exhorting and warning you as I have done
hitherto, against caring much for riches and nothing for the perfecting
of your souls. This is the bidding of the god. If to speak thus be to
corrupt youth, then I corrupt youth. But he who says I speak other
things than this talks vanity; and this I will do, though the penalty
were many deaths."
Do not murmur, but listen, for you will profit. If you put me to death,
you will harm yourselves more than me, for it is worse to do wrong than
to suffer it. You will not easily find another to serve as the gadfly
which rouses a noble horse--as I have done, being commissioned thereto
by the god. For that I have made no profit for myself from this course,
my poverty proves. If it seems absurd that I should meddle thus with
each man privately, but take no part in public affairs, that is because
of the divine or daemonic influence of which I have spoken, named also in
mockery by Meletus in the indictment. This is a voice which checks but
never urges me on. Indeed, had I meddled with politics, I should have
been dead long ago.
That I will prove by facts. When you chose to condemn the ten generals,
my phyle supplied the Prytanes, and I alone stood out against you. And
in the time of the thirty, I was ordered with four others to bring Leon
from Salamis to be executed, and I alone would not; and it may be that
my own life was saved only because that government was broken up. Judge,
then, if my life would not have been shorter, had I taken part in public
life.
But I have never posed as an instructor or taken money for giving
instruction. Anyone who chooses can question me and hear what I have to
say. People take pleasure in my society, because they like to hear those
exposed who deem themselves wise but are not. This duty the god has laid
on me by oracles and dreams and every mode of divine authority. If I am
corrupting or have corrupted youth, why do none of them bear witness
against me, or their fathers or brothers or other kinsmen? Many I see
around me who should do so if this charge were true; yet all are ready
to assist me.
This, and the like, is what I have to say in my defence. Perhaps some of
you, thinking how, in a like case with mine but less exigent, he has
sought the compassion of the court with tears and pleadings of his
children and kinsfolk, will be indignant that I do none of these things,
though I have three boys of my own. That is not out of disrespect to
you, but because I think it would be unbeseeming to me. Such displays,
as though death were something altogether terrifying, are to me
astonishing and degrading to our city in the sight of strangers, for
persons reputed to excel in anything, as in some respects I am held to
excel the generality.
But apart from credit, I count that we ought to inform and convince our
judges, not seek to sway them by entreaties; that they may judge rightly
according to the laws, and not by favor. For you are sworn. And how
should I persuade you to break your oath, who am charged by Meletus with
impiety. For by so doing, I should be persuading you to disbelief in the
gods, and making that very charge against myself. To you and to the god
I leave it, that I may be judged as shall be best for you and for me.
_IV.--After the Verdict_
Your condemnation does not grieve me for various reasons, one of which
is that I fully expected it. What surprises me is the small majority by
which it was carried. Evidently Meletus, if left to himself, would have
failed to win the few votes needed to save him from the fine. Well, the
sentence he fixes is death, and I have to propose an
alternative--presumably, the sentence I deserve. I have neglected all
the ordinary pursuits and ambitions of men--which would have been no
good either to me or to you--that I might benefit each man privately, by
persuading him to give attention to himself first--how to attain his own
best and wisest--and his mere affairs afterwards, and the city in like
manner. The proper reward is that I should be maintained in the
Prytaneum as a public benefactor.
You may think this merely a piece of insolence, but it is not so. I am
not conscious of having wronged any man. Time does not permit me to
prove my case, and I will not admit guilt by owning that I deserve
punishment by a fine. What have I to fear? The penalty fixed by Meletus,
as to which I do not know whether it is good or bad? Shall I, to escape
this, choose something which is certainly bad? Imprisonment, to be the
slave of the Eleven? A fine, to be a prisoner till I pay it?--which
comes to the same thing, as I cannot pay. Exile? If my fellow-citizens
cannot put up with me, how can I expect strangers to do so? The young
men will come to listen to me. If I repulse them, they will drive me
out; and if I do not their elders will drive me out, and I shall live
wandering from city to city.
Why cannot I go and hold my tongue, you may ask. That is the one thing
which I cannot do. That would be to disobey the god, and the life would
not be worth living, though you do not believe me. I might undertake to
pay a mina. However, as Plato and Crito and Apollodorus urge me to name
thirty minae, for which they will be security, I propose thirty minae.
* * * * *
Your enemies will reproach you, Athenians, for having put to death that
wise man Socrates. Yet you would have had but a short time to wait, for
I am old. I speak to those of you who have condemned me. I am condemned,
not for lack of argument, but because I have not chosen to plead after
the methods that would have been pleasant and flattering to you, but
degrading to me. There are things we may not do to escape death, for
baseness is worse than death, and swifter. Death has overtaken me, who
am old, but baseness my accusers, who are strong. Truth condemns them,
as you have condemned me, and each of us abides sentence, And for you
who have condemned me there will be a penalty swift and sure, and so I
take my leave of you.
But to you, my true judges, who voted for my acquittal, I would speak
while yet we may. I have to tell you that my warning daemon has in no way
withstood the course I have taken, and the reason, assuredly, is that I
have done what is best, gaining blessing, death being no evil at all.
For death is either only to cease from sensations altogether as in a
dreamless sleep, and that is no loss; or else it is a passing to another
place where all the dead are--the heroes, the poets, the wise men of
old. How priceless were it to hold converse with them and question them!
And surely the judges there pass no death-sentences!
But be you hopeful with regard to death, for to the good man, neither in
life nor in death is there anything that can harm him. And for me, I am
confident that it is better to die than to live. Therefore the daemon did
not check me, and I have no resentment against those who have caused my
death. And now we go, I to death and you to life; but which of us to the
better state, God knoweth alone.
The Republic
The wonderful series of dialogues in which Socrates takes the
leading part are at once the foundation and the crown of all
idealistic philosophy, and as literary masterpieces remain
unmatched. Certain of Plato's disciples would claim that his
highest achievement is "The Timaeus"; there are some who set their
affections on "The Phaedo"; but a general vote of all Platonists
would probably give the first position to "The Republic," and this
is undoubtedly the work which has had the widest general influence.
In "The Republic" itself Socrates is, professedly engaged in a
disputation, of which the object is to discover what Justice means;
and this leads to the description of the building up of that ideal
state or commonwealth from which the dialogue derives its title of
"The Republic."
_I.--How the Argument Arose_
I had gone with Glaucon to attend the celebration of the festival of
Bendis--the Thracian Artemis--a picturesque affair, and we were just
leaving, when Polemarchus insisted on carrying us off by main force to
the house of his father, Cephalus. There we found a small company
assembled. The old gentleman received us with hearty geniality; he is
ageing, but would not see any hardship in that, if you take age
good-humouredly. Of course, he owned that being wealthy makes a
difference, but not all the difference. The best of wealth is that you
need not do things which anger the gods and entail punishment in the
hereafter; you need not lie, or be in debt to gods or men. And this
consciousness of your own justice is a great consolation.
"But," said I, "what is justice? Is it always to speak the truth, and
always to let a man have his property? There are circumstances----"
"I must go," said he. "Polemarchus shall do the arguing."
This set us discussing the nature of justice. Glaucon took up the
cudgels, after a preliminary skirmish with Thrasymachus.
Assuming justice to be desirable--is it so for itself and by itself, or
only for its results; or both? The world at large puts it in the second
category as an inconvenient necessity. To suffer injustice is an evil,
and to protect themselves from that the weak combine to prevent
injustice from being done. But if anyone had the ring of Gyges, which
made him invisible, so that he could go his own way without let or
hindrance, he would get all the pleasures he could out of life without
troubling about the justice of it. Again, imagine on the one hand your
really consummate rogue who gets credit for all the virtues and is
surrounded by all the material factors of happiness; and, on the other
hand, a man of utter rectitude, on whom circumstances combine to fix the
stigma of iniquity. He will be rejected, scourged, crucified; while the
other is enjoying wealth, honour, everything, and can afford to make his
peace with the gods into the bargain.
Then Adeimantus took the field in support of his brother. "The poets,"
he said, "hold forth about the rewards of virtue here and hereafter. But
we see the unrighteous prospering mightily; and the religious mendicants
come to rich folks and offer to sell them indulgences on easy terms. A
keen-witted lad is bound to argue that it is only the appearance of
justice that is needed for prosperity; while the gods can be reconciled
cheaply. This dwelling on the temporal rewards of justice is fatal. What
we expect of you is to show us the inherent value of justice--justice
itself, not the appearance of it."
"Well argued," said I, "especially as you reject your own conclusion. I
can but try, though the task be hard. But my weak sight may enable me to
read large characters better than small. Justice is the virtue of the
state as well as of the individual; finding it in the state, the
greater, may help us to find it in the individual, the less."
_II.--The Socratic Utopia_
Society arises because different people are the better skilled to supply
different wants, and the wants of each are supplied by mutual
arrangement and division of labour. Wants multiply; the community grows;
it exchanges its own foreign products; merchants and markets are added
to the producers; and when folk begin to hire servants you have a
complete city or state living a life of simplicity. "A city of pigs,"
said Glaucon, "with no refinements." We will go on and develop every
luxury of civilisation. But then our city and its neighbours will be
wanting each other's lands. We must have soldiers. Our best guardians
will be a select band, those who are of the right temper and thoroughly
trained; fierce to foes but gentle to friends, like that true
philosopher, the dog, to whom knowledge is the test. The known are
friends, the unknown foes--knowledge begets gentleness.
So our guardians must be trained to knowledge; we must educate them.
Music and gymnastic, our national intellectual and physical training,
must be taught. Literature comes first, and really we teach things that
are not true before we teach things that are true--fables before facts.
But over these we must exercise a rigid censorship, excluding what is
essentially false.
We must have no stories which attribute harmful doings to the gods. God
must be represented as He is--the author of good always, of evil never;
also as having in him no variableness, neither shadow of turning. God
has no need of disguises. The lie in the soul--essential falsehood--is
to Him abhorrent, and He has no need of such deceptions as may be
innocent or even laudable for men. God must be shown always as utterly
true.
Similarly, we must not have stories which inspire dread of death; no
Achilles saying in the under-world that it were better to be a slave in
the flesh than Lord of the Shades. And again, no heroes--and gods still
less--giving way to frantic lamentations and uncontrolled emotions, even
uncontrolled laughter. Truth must be inculcated; medicinal untruths, so
to speak, are the prerogative of our rulers alone, and must be permitted
to no one else. Temperance, which means self-control and obedience to
authority, is essential, and is not always characteristic of Homer's
gods and heroes! We must exclude a long list of most unedifying passages
on this score. As for pictures of the afflictions of the righteous and
the prosperity of the unjust, we must wait, as we have not yet defined
justice. We turn to the poetical forms in which the stories should be
embodied.
The possible forms are the simply descriptive, the imitative, and the
mixture of the two: narrative drama, and narrative mixed with dialogue.
Our guardians ought to eschew imitation altogether, or at least to
imitate only the good and noble. The act of imitating an evil character
is demoralising, just as no self-respecting person will imitate the
lower animals, and so on. Imitation must be restricted within the
narrowest practicable limits.
But who are to be our actual rulers? The best of the elders, whose
firmness and consistency have stood the test of temptation. To them we
transfer the title of guardians, calling the younger men auxiliaries.
And we must try to induce everyone--guardians, soldiers, citizens--to
believe in one quite magnificent lie: that they were like the men in the
Cadmus myth, fashioned in the ground, their common mother.
"I don't wonder at your blushing," said Glaucon.
That they are brothers and sisters, but of different metals--gold,
silver, brass, iron; not necessarily of the same metal as their parents
in the flesh; and must take rank according to the metal whereof they are
made. No doubt it will take a generation or two to get them to believe
it.
And now our soldiers must pitch their camp for the defence of the city.
Soldiering is their business, not money-making. They must live in
common, supported efficiently by the state, having no private property.
The gold and silver in their souls is of God. For them, though not for
the other citizens, the earthly dross called gold is the accursed thing.
Once let them possess it, and they will cease to be guardians, and
become oppressors and tyrants.
III.--_Of Justice and Communism_
But now we have to look for justice. Find the other three cardinal
virtues first, and then justice will be distinguishable. Wisdom is in
the guardians; if they be wise, the whole state will be wise. Courage we
find in the soldiers; courage is the true estimate of danger, and that
has been ingrained in them by their education. Temperance, called
mastery of self, is really the mastery of the better over the baser
qualities; as in our state the better class controls the inferior.
Temperance would seem to lie in the harmonious inter-relation of the
different classes. Obviously, the remaining virtue of the state is the
constant performance of his own particular function in the state, and
not his neighbour's, by each member of the state. Let us see how that
works out in the individual.
Shall we not find that there are three several qualities in the
individual, each of which must in like manner do its own business, the
intellectual, the passionate or spirited, and the lustful? They must be
separate, because one part of a thing cannot be doing contradictory
things at the same time; your lusts bid you do what your intelligence
forbids; and the emotional quality is distinct from both desire and
reason, though in alliance with reason. Well, here you have wisdom and
courage in the intellectual and spiritual parts, temperance in their
mastery over desire; and justice is the virtue of the soul as a whole;
of each part never failing to perform its own function and that alone.
To ask, now, whether justice or injustice is the more profitable becomes
ridiculous.
Now we shall find that virtue is one, but that vice has several forms;
as there is but one form of perfect state--ours--whether it happens to
be called a monarchy if there be but one guardian, or an aristocracy if
there be more; and, as it has four principal imperfect forms, so there
are four main vices.
Here Glaucon and Adeimantus refused to let me go on; I had shirked a
serious difficulty. What about women and children? My saying that the
soldiers were to live in common might mean anything. What kind of
communism was I demanding? Well, there are two different questions: What
is desirable? And, What is possible? First, then, our defenders are our
watch-dogs. Glaucon knows all about dogs; we don't differentiate in the
case of males and females; the latter hunt with the pack. If women are
similarly to have the same employments as men, they must have the same
education in music and gymnastic. We must not mind ribald comments. But
should they share masculine employments? Do they differ from men in such
a way that they should not? Women bear children, and men beget them; but
apart from that the differences are really only in degrees of capacity,
not essential distinctions of quality; even as men differ among
themselves. The natures being the same, the education must be the same,
and the same careers must be open.
But a second and more alarming wave threatens us: Community of wives and
children. "You must prove both the possibility and desirability of
that." Men and women must be trained together and live together, but not
in licentiousness. They must be mated with the utmost care for
procreation, the best being paired at due seasons, nominally by lot, and
for the occasion. The offspring of the selected will have a common
nursery; the mothers will not know which were their own children.
Parentage will be permissible only between twenty-five and fifty-five,
and between twenty and forty. The children begotten in the same batch of
espousals will be brothers and sisters.
The absence of "mine" and "thine" will ensure unity, because it
abolishes the primary cause of discord; common maintenance by the state
removes all temptation either to meanness or cringing. Our guardians
will be uncommonly happy. As to practicability: communism is suitable
for war. The youngsters will be taken to watch any fighting; cowards
will be degraded; valour will be honoured, and death on the field, with
other supreme services to the state, will rank the hero among demigods.
Against Greeks war must be conducted as against our own kith and kin.
But as to the possibility of all this--this third threatening wave is
the most terrific of all.
_IV.--Of Philosophy in Rulers_
It will be possible then, and only then, when kings are philosophers or
philosophers kings. "You will be mobbed and pelted for such a
proposition." Still, it is the fact. The philosopher desires all
knowledge. You know that justice, beauty, good, and so on, are single,
though their presentation is multiplex and variable. Curiosity about the
multiplex particulars is not desire of knowledge, which is of the one
constant idea--of that which is, as ignorance is of that which is not.
What neither is nor is not, that which fluctuates and changes, is the
subject matter of opinion, a state between knowledge and ignorance.
Beauty is beauty always and everywhere; the things that look beautiful
may be ugly from another point of view. Experience of beautiful things,
curiosity about them, must be distinguished from knowledge of beauty;
the philosopher is not to be confounded with the connoisseur, not
knowledge with opinion. The philosopher is he who has in his mind the
perfect pattern of justice, beauty, truth; his is the knowledge of the
eternal; he contemplates all time and all existence; no praises are too
high for his character. "No doubt; still, if that is so, why do
professed philosophers always show themselves either fools or knaves in
ordinary affairs?" A ship's crew which does not understand that the art
of navigation demands a knowledge of the stars, will stigmatise a
properly qualified pilot as a star-gazing idiot, and will prevent him
from navigating. The world assumes that the philosopher's abstractions
are folly, and rejects his guidance. The philosopher is the best kind of
man; the corrupted philosopher is the worst; and the corrupted
influences brought to bear are irresistible to all but the very
strongest natures. The professional teachers of philosophy live not by
leading popular opinion, but by pandering to it; a bastard brood trick
themselves out as philosophers, while the true philosopher withdraws
himself from so gross a world. Small wonder that philosophy gets
discredited! Not in the soil of any existing state can philosophy grow
naturally; planted in a suitable state, her divinity will be apparent.
I need no longer hesitate to say that we must make our guardians
philosophers. The necessary combination of qualities is extremely rare.
Our test must be thorough, for the soul must be trained up by the
pursuit of all kinds of knowledge to the capacity for the pursuit of the
highest--higher than justice and wisdom--the idea of the good. "But what
is the good--pleasure, knowledge?" No. To see and distinguish material
things, the faculty of sight requires the medium of light, whose source
is the sun. The good is to the intellectual faculty what the sun is to
that of vision: it is the source and cause of truth, which is the light
whereby we perceive ideas; it is not truth nor the ideas, but above
them; their cause, as the sun is the source of light and the cause of
growth.
Again, as the material things with which the eye is concerned are in two
categories--the copies, reflections or shadows of things, and actual
things--correspondingly the things perceived by the intellect are in a
secondary region--as the mathematical--where everything is derived from
hypotheses which are assumed to be first principles; or in a supreme
region, in which hypotheses are orly the steps by which we ascend to the
real ultimate first principles themselves. And it will follow further
that the mind has four faculties appropriate to these four divisions,
which we call respectively pure reason (the highest), understanding,
conviction, and perception of shadows; the first pair being concerned
with being, the field of the intellect; the second pair with becoming,
the field of opinion.
_V.--Of Shadows and Realities_
Let me speak a parable. Humanity--ourselves--are as people dwelling ever
bound and fettered in a twilit cave, with our backs to the light. Behind
us is a parapet, and beyond the parapet a fire; all that we see is the
shadows thrown on the wall that faces us by figures passing along the
parapet behind us; all we hear is the echo of their voices. Now, if some
of us are turned round to face the light and look on the real figures,
they will be dazzled at first, and much more if they are taken out into
the light, and up to face the sun himself; but presently they will see
perfectly, and have all the joy thereof. Now send them back into the
cave, and they will be apparently much blinder than the folk who have
been there all the time, and their talk of what they have seen will be
taken for the babbling of fools, or worse. Small wonder that those who
have beheld the light have but little mind to return to the twilight
cave which is the common world. But remember--everyone in the cave
possesses the faculty of sight if only his eyes be turned to the light.
Loose the fetters of carnal desires which hold him with his back to the
light, and every man _may_ be converted and live. So we must select
those who are most capable of facing the light, and see to it that they
return to the cave, to give the cave-dwellers the benefit of their
knowledge. And if this be for them a hardship, we must bear in mind as
before, that the good of the whole is what matters, not whether one or
another may suffer hardship for the sake of the whole.
How, then, shall we train them to the passage from darkness to light?
For this, our education in music and gymnastic is wholly inadequate. We
must proceed first to the science of numbers, then of geometry, then of
astronomy. And after astronomy, there is the sister science of abstract
harmonics--not of audible sounds. All of which are but the prelude to
the ultimate supreme science of dialectic, which carries the
intelligence to the contemplation of the idea of the good, the ultimate
goal. And here to attempt further explanation would be vanity. This is
the science of the pure reason, the coping-stone of knowledge.
We saw long ago that our rulers must possess every endowment of mind and
body, all cultivated to the highest degree. From the select we must
again select, at twenty, those who are most fit for the next ten years'
course of education; and from them, at thirty, we shall choose those who
can, with confidence, be taken to face the light; who have been tested
and found absolutely steadfast, not shaken by having got beyond the
conventional view of things. We will give them five or six years of
philosophy; then fifteen years of responsible office in the state; and
at fifty they shall return to philosophy, subject to the call upon them
to take up the duties of rulership and of educating their successors.
_VI.--Of State Types and Individual Types_
Before this digression we were on the point of discussing the four
vitiated forms of the state, and the corresponding individual types. The
four types of state as we know them in Hellas, are: the Spartan, where
personal ambition and honour rule, which we call timocracy; the
oligarchical, where wealth rules; the democratic; and the arbitrary rule
of the individual, which we call tyranny. The comparison of this
last--the supremely unjust--with our own--the supremely just--will show
whether justice or injustice be the more desirable.
The perfect state degenerates to timocracy when the state's numerical
law of generation [an unsolved riddle] has not been properly observed,
and inferior offspring have entered in consequence into the ruling body.
The introduction of private property will cause them to assume towards
the commonalty the attitude, not of guardians, but of masters, and to be
at odds among themselves; also, in their education gymnastic will
acquire predominance over music. Ambition and party spirit become the
characteristic features. When, in an ill-ordered state a great man
withdraws from the corruption of politics into private life, we see the
corresponding individual type in the son of such a one, egged on by his
mother and flattering companions, to win back for himself at all costs
the prestige which his father had resigned; personal ambition becomes
his dominant characteristic.
Oligarchy is the next outcome of the introduction of private property;
riches outweigh virtue, love of money the love of honour, and the rich
procure for themselves the legal monopoly of political power. Here the
state becomes divided against itself--there is one state of the rich and
another of the poor--and the poor will be divided into the merely
incompetent and the actively dangerous or predatory. And your
corresponding individual is he whose father had won honours which had
not saved him from ultimate ruin; so that the son rejects ambition and
makes money his goal, till, for the sake of money, he will compass any
baseness, though still only under a cloak of respectability.
In the oligarchy the avaricious encourage and foster extravagance in
their neighbours. Men, ruined by money-lenders, turn on their moneyed
rulers, overthrow them, and give everyone a share in the government. The
result is that the state is not one, nor two, but diverse. Folk say what
they like and do what they like, and anyone is a statesman who will wave
the national flag. That is democracy. Such is the son of your miserly
oligarch; deprived of unnecessary pleasures, he is tempted to wild
dissipation. He has no education to help him to distinguish, and the
vices of dissipation assume the aspect and titles of virtue. He
fluctuates from one point of view to another--is one thing to-day and
another to-morrow.
And last we come to tyranny and the tyrannical man. Democratic license
develops into sheer anarchy. Jack is as good as his master. The
predatory population becomes demagogues; they squeeze the decent
citizens, and drive them to adopt oligarchical methods; then the friend
of the people appears; the protector, champion, and hero, by a familiar
process becomes a military autocrat, who himself battens, as must also
his mercenary soldiery, on the citizens; and our unhappy Demos finds
that it has jumped out of the reek into the fire. Now our democratical
man was swayed by the devices and moods of the moment; his son will be
swayed by the most irrational and most bestial of his appetites; be
bully and tyrant, while slave of his own lusts. Your thorough blackguard
of every species comes of this type, and the worst of all is he who
achieves the tyranny of a state. See, then, how, even as the tyrannic
state is the most utterly enslaved, so the tyrannic man is of all men
the least free; and, beyond all others, the tyrant of a state. He is
like a slave-owner, who is at the mercy of his slaves--the passions
which he must pamper, or die, yet cannot satisfy. Surely such an one is
the veriest slave--yea, the most wretched of men. It follows that he who
is the most complete opposite of the tyrant is the happiest--the
individual who corresponds to our state. Proclaim it, then, son of
Ariston, that the most just of men is he who is master of himself, and
is of all men the most miserable, whether gods and men recognise him or
no.
_VII.--Of the Happiness of the Just_
Now for a second proof. Three kinds of pleasure correspond to the three
elements of the soul--reason, spirit, desire. In each man one of the
three is in the ascendant. One counts knowledge vain in comparison with
the advantages of riches, another with those of honour; to the
philosopher only truth counts. But he is the only one of them who makes
his choice from experience of all three kinds. And he, the only
qualified judge, places the satisfaction of the spirit second, and of
desire lowest. And yet a third proof: I fancy the only quite real
pleasures are those of the philosopher. There is an intermediate state
between pleasure and pain. To pass into this from pleasure is painful,
and from pain is pleasurable. Now, the pleasures of the body are really
nothing more than reliefs from pains of one kind or another. And, next,
the pleasures of the soul, being of the eternal order, are necessarily
more real than those of the body, which are fleeting--in fact, mere
shadows of pleasure.
Much as I love and admire Homer, I think our regulations as to poetry
were particularly sound; but we must inquire further into the meaning of
imitation. We saw before that all particular things are the
presentations of some universal idea. There is one ultimate idea of bed,
or chair, or table. What the joiner makes is a copy of that. All ideas
are the creation of the master artificer, the demiurge; of his creations
all material things are copies. We can all create things in a way by
catching reflections of them in a mirror. But these are only copies of
particular things from one point of view, partial copies of copies of
the idea. Such precisely are the creations of the painter, and in like
manner of the poet. What they know and depict is not the realities, but
mere appearances. If the poets knew the realities they would have left
us something other than imitations of copies. Moreover, what they
imitate is not the highest but the lower; not the truth of reason, but
emotions of all sorts, which it should be our business not to excite but
to control and allay. So we continue to prohibit the poetry which is
imitation, however supreme, and allow only hymns to the gods, and
praises of great men. We must no more admit the allurements of poesy
than the attractions of ambition or of riches.
Greater far are the rewards of virtue than all we have yet shown; for an
immortal soul should heed nothing that is less than eternal. "What, is
the soul then immortal? Can you prove that?" Yes, of a surety. In all
things there is good and evil; a thing perishes of its own corruption,
not of the corruption of aught external to it. If disease or injury of
the body cannot corrupt the soul, _a fortiori_ they cannot slay it; but
injustice, the corruption of the soul, is not induced by injury to the
body. If, then, the soul be not destroyed by sin, nothing else can
destroy it, and it is immortal. The number of existing souls must then
be constant; none perish, none are added, for additional immortal souls
would have to come out of what is mortal, which is absurd. Now, hitherto
we have shown only that justice is in itself best for the soul, but now
we see that its rewards, too, are unspeakably great. The gods, to whom
the just are known, will reward them hereafter, if not here; and even in
this world they have the better lot in the long run. But of this nothing
is comparable to their rewards in the hereafter, revealed to us in the
mythos of Er, called the Armenian, whose body being slain in battle, his
soul was said to have returned to it from the under-world--renewing its
life--a messenger to men of what he had there beheld. For a thousand
years the souls, being judged, enjoyed or suffered a tenfold retribution
for all they had done of good or evil in this life, and some for a
second term, or it might be for terms without end. Then for the most
part they were given again, after the thousand years, a choice of
another lot on the earth, being guided therein by their experience in
their last life; and so, having drunk of the waters of forgetfulness,
came back to earth once more, unconscious of their past.
Let us, then, believing that the soul is indeed immortal, hold fast to
knowledge and justice, that it may be well with us both here and
hereafter.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
The World as Will and Idea
Arthur Schopenhauer, who was born at Dantzig, in Germany, Feb. 22,
1788, and died September 21, 1860, came of highly intellectual
antecedents, his mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, being a noted German
authoress. As an indefatigable student he migrated, according to
the fashion of his Fatherland, from one university to another, in
order to sit at the feet of various professors, and thus he
attended courses at Gottingen, Berlin, and Jena successively,
finally graduating at Jena in 1813. The winter of that year he
spent at Weimar, revelling in the society of Goethe, and also
enjoying intercourse with Maier, the profound Orientalist, who
indoctrinated him with those views of Indian mysticism which
greatly influenced his future philosophic disquisitions. After
writing and publishing a few slight treatises Schopenhauer sent
forth his great work, "The World as Will and Idea," which has
immortalized him. It appeared in 1819. During subsequent years,
when he resided in Frankfort, he wrote his volumes on "Will in
Nature," "The Freedom of the Will," "The Basis of Morals," and
"Parerga and Paralipomena." The keynote of Schopenhauer's
philosophy is that the sole essential reality in the universe is
the will, and that all visible and tangible phenomena are merely
subjective representations, or formal manifestations of that will
which is the only thing-in-itself that actually subsists. Thus he
stands among philosophers as the uncompromising antagonist of
Hegel, Fichte, Schelling and all the champions of the theory of
consciousness and absolute reason as the essential foundation of
the faculty of thought. The defect of his system is its tendency to
a sombre pessimism, but his literary style is magnificent and his
power of reasoning is exceptional. The epitome here given has been
prepared from the original German.
_I.--The World as Idea_
"The world is my idea," is a truth valid for every living creature,
though only man can consciously contemplate it. In doing so he attains
philosophical wisdom. No truth is more absolutely certain than that all
that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only
object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word,
idea. The world is idea.
This truth is by no means new; it lay by implication in the reflections
of Descartes; but Berkeley first distinctly enunciated it; while Kant
erred by ignoring it. So ancient is it that it was the fundamental
principle of the Indian Vedanta, as Sir William Jones points out. In one
aspect the world is idea; in the other aspect, the world is will.
That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject; and for
this subject all exists. But the world as idea consists of two essential
and inseparable halves. One half is the object, whose form consists of
time and space, and through these of multiplicity; but the other half is
the subject, lying not in space and time, for it subsists whole and
undivided in every reflecting being. Thus any single individual endowed
with the faculty of perception of the object, constitutes the whole
world of idea as completely as the millions in existence; but let this
single individual vanish, and the whole world as idea would disappear.
Each of these halves possesses meaning and existence only in and through
the other, appearing with and vanishing with it. Where the object begins
the subject ends. One of Kant's great merits is that he discovered that
the essential and universal forms of all objects--space, time,
causality--lie _a priori_ in our consciousness, for they may be
discovered and fully known from a consideration of the subject, without
any knowledge of the object.
Ideas of perception are distinct from abstract ideas. The former
comprehend the whole world of experience; the latter are concepts, and
are possessed by man alone amongst all creatures on earth; and the
capacity for these, distinguishing him from the lower animals, is called
reason.
Time and space can each be mentally presented separately from matter,
but matter cannot be thought of apart from time and space. The
combination of time and space in connection with matter constitutes
action, that is, causation. The law of causation arises from change,
that is from the fact that at the same part of space there is now one
thing and then another, and this succession must be the result of some
law of causality, seeing that there must be a determined part of space
and a determined part of space for the change. Causality thus combines
space with time.
Much vain controversy has arisen concerning the reality of the external
universe, owing to the fallacious notion that because perception arises
through the knowledge of causality, the relation of subject and object
is that of cause and effect. For this relation only subsists between
objects, that is between the immediate object and objects known
indirectly. The object always pre-supposes the subject, and so there can
be between those two no relation of reason and consequent. Therefore the
controversy between realistic dogmatism and doctrinal scepticism is
foolish. The former seeks to separate object and idea as cause and
effect, whereas these two are really one; the latter supposes that in
the idea we have only the effect, never the cause, and never know the
real being, but merely its action. The correction of both these
fallacies is the same, that object and idea are identical.
One of the most pressing of questions is, how certainty is to be
reached, how judgments are to be established, and wherein knowledge and
science consist. Reason is feminine in nature; it can only give after it
has received. Of Itself it possesses only the empty forms of its
operation. Knowledge is the result of reason, so that we cannot
accurately say that the lower animals know anything, but only that they
apprehend through the faculty of perception.
The greatest value of knowledge is that it can be communicated and
retained. This makes it inestimably important for practice. Rational or
abstract knowledge is that knowledge which is peculiar to the reason as
distinguished from the understanding. The use of reason is that it
substitutes abstract concepts for ideas of perception, and adopts them
as the guide of action.
The many-sided view of life which man, as distinguished from the lower
animals, possesses through reason, makes him stand to them as the
captain, equipped with chart, compass and quadrant, and with a knowledge
of navigation of the ocean, stands to the ignorant sailors under his
command.
Man lives two lives. Besides his life in the concrete is his life in the
abstract. In the former he struggles, suffers, and dies as do the mere
animal creatures. But in the abstract he quietly reflects on the plan of
the universe as does a captain of a ship on the chart. He becomes in
this abstract life of calm reasoning a deliberate observer of those
elements which previously moved and agitated his emotions. Withdrawing
into this serene contemplation he is like an actor who has played a part
on the stage and then withdraws and as one of the audience quietly looks
on at other actors energetically performing.
The result of this double life is that human serenity which furnishes so
vivid a contrast to the lack of reason in the brutes. Reason has won to
a wonderful extent the mastery over the animal nature. The climacteric
stage of the mere exercise of reason is displayed in Stoicism, an
ethical system which aims primarily not at virtue but at happiness,
although this theory inculcates that happiness can be attained only
through "ataraxia" (inward quietness or peace of mind), while this can
only be gained by virtue. In other words, Zeno, the founder of the Stoic
theory, sought to lift man up above the reach of pain and misery. But
this use of pure reason involves a painful paradox, seeing that for an
ultimate way of escape Stoicism is constrained to prescribe suicide.
When compared with the Stoic, how different appear the holy conquerors
of the world in Christianity, that sublime form of life which presents
to us a picture wherein we see blended perfect virtue and supreme
suffering.
_II.--The World as Will_
We are compelled to further inquiry, because we cannot be satisfied with
knowing that we have ideas, and that these are associated with certain
laws, the general expression of which is the principle of sufficient
reason. We wish to know the significance of our ideas. We ask whether
this world is nothing more than a mere idea, not worthy of our notice if
it is to pass by us like an empty dream or an airy vision, or whether it
is something more substantial.
We can surely never arrive at the nature of things from without. No
matter how assiduous our researches may be, we can never reach anything
beyond images and names. We resemble a man going round a castle seeking
vainly for an entrance and sometimes sketching the facades. And yet this
is the method followed by all philosophers before me.
The truth about man is that he is not a pure knowing subject, not a
winged cherub without a material body, contemplating the world from
without. For he is himself rooted in that world. That is to say, he
finds himself in the world as an _individual_ whose knowledge, which is
the essential basis of the whole world as idea, is yet ever communicated
through the medium of the body, whose sensations are the starting point
of the understanding of that world. His body is for him an idea like
every other idea, an object among objects. He only knows its actions as
he knows the changes in all other objects, and but for one aid to his
understanding of himself he would find this idea and object as strange
and incomprehensible as all others. That aid is _will_, which alone
furnishes the key to the riddle of himself, solves the problem of his
own existence, reveals to him the inner structure and significance of
his being, his action, and his movements.
The body is the immediate object of will; it may be called the
_objectivity of will_. Every true act of will is also instantly a
visible act of the body, and every impression on the body is also at
once an impression on the will. When it is opposed to the will it is
called pain, and when consonant with the will it is called pleasure. The
essential identity of body and will is shown by the fact that every
violent movement of the will, that is to say, every emotion, directly
agitates the body and interferes with its vital functions. So we may
legitimately say, My body is the objectivity of my will.
It is simply owing to this special relation to one body that the knowing
subject is an individual. Our knowing, being bound to individuality,
necessitates that each of us can only be one, and yet each of us can
know all. Hence arises the need for philosophy. The double knowledge
which each of us possesses of his own body is the key to the nature of
every phenomenon in the world. Nothing is either known to us or
thinkable by us except will and idea. If we examine the reality of the
body and its actions, we discover nothing beyond the fact that it is an
idea, except the will. With this double discovery reality is exhausted.
We can ascribe no other kind of reality to the material world. If we
maintain that it is something more than merely our idea, we must say
that in its inmost nature it is that which we discover in ourselves as
_will_. But the acts of will have always a ground or reason outside
themselves in motives, which, however, never determine more than how we
shall act at any given time or place under any given conditions or
circumstances. The will must have some manifestation, and the body is
that manifestation. By the movements of the body the will becomes
visible, and thus the body may be said to be the _objectification of the
will_
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