Idealism as a practical creed; being the lectures on philosophy and modern life delivered before the University of Sydney

Front matter

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THE LIBRARY

Preface

AVere it not to take too great a liberty, I should dedicate this book to the Australian people ; for my memory of their kindness will not fade, and I would fain let them know that I am grateful. I have dedicated it to one who labours continually for their welfare, and to the memory of a great Idealist — his Teacher and my own.

The book consists of lectures delivered before the University of Sydney. But the written must differ from the spoken word, and I have recast the lectures and added to them.

The University, Glasgow, May, 1909.

Contents

PAGE

L The Tools and the Task .... 1

III. Freedom : Then the Ear . . . .67

I. The Tools And The Task

In taking up the task with which you have entrusted and honoured me, and inviting you to consider the bearing of philosophy upon modern life, I am reminded of the first words addressed by Hegel to his students in Heidelberg. It was in October of 1816. The Napoleonic wars had just closed with the battle of Waterloo. Germany had risen triumphant from those ' fatal fields, on which her sons were taught a base submission.' She had ' saved her Nationality,' as Hegel said, ' the basis and essence of the best life ' ; and she could now turn her mind to the arts of peace, and labour to fulfil the higher laws. Philosophy might once more engage the attention and the good-will of men. She might again lift up her voice grown so silent, and a world which had become well-nigh deaf to her might again be willing to listen. The spirit of the time immersed in matters temporal, its whole powers engaged in a fearful strife for the outward means of life, might now turn its thoughts inwards upon itself and take possession of the riches of its own content. The Church might now raise its head side by side with the secular State, which hitherto had swallowed up all interests. Side by side with the Kingdom of the World, towards which had streamed the thoughts and strivings of men, the Kingdom of God might become once more an object of contemplation ; and along with the political and other interests of the outer life, science, the free rational life of Spirit, might again break out into blossom.

Speaking for those whose lives had matured amidst the storms, Hegel congratulated the students that their youth had fallen at a time when they could devote it to Truth, and the undisturbed pursuit of knowledge. ' I hope,' he said, ' that I may deserve and win your confidence. But I make no claim upon you, save that, before all else, you put your trust in knowledge, and in yourselves. The first condition of philosophy is courage towards the truth, faith in the might of mind. Man, because he is mind, may dare, nay, must dare to think himself worthy of what is highest. The greatness and the power of mind he cannot esteem enough. But if he be armed with this faith nothing will prove so hard or stubborn as not to yield itself up to him. The inner being and essence of the Universe, at first hidden and shut up within itself, has no force with which to withstand the courage that will know. It must evolve itself before our eyes, and lay out for our use its treasures and its depths.'

It is not for little men to take upon their lips the language of heroes ; yet we can profit by their example and believe in their cause. And it has seemed to me that there is an analogy, not too remote, between your present circumstances as a people, and those of the Prussia of Hegel's day. You, too, have been long engaged in an absorbing struggle with outward and secular things. You have been striving, not without some measure of success, to tame a vast continent to your use, and to establish therein an independent and self- sufficient State worthy of that from which you have sprung, gathering yourselves together in these years, amidst many troubles, into a single people, conscious of one political life. If the task has taxed all your strength and claimed all your powers, and if the spirit of your people has been so immersed in it as to leave little of the leisure or the mood for aught else, who can marvel or blame? To live well, man must first live. Nevertheless the order of time is not in all respects the order of causes ; and there is a most true sense in which the great things of life must be sought first, and all other things only as addenda and secondary consequences. And I may, perhaps, be permitted to echo the philosopher's hope, that for you, too, the time has come when you can with a more serious intent and a more deliberate purpose devote yourselves to the contemplation of the world within yourselves, the world in which ideals are the only powers. Then you will strive to comprehend and employ more fully, and less wastefully.

the greatest of all the energies of the world, namely, those which reside within a people's character.

It is to this contemplation that I venture to invite you in these lectures on Philosophy and Modern Life ; and it is in this broad sense that I understand philosophy. I do not conceive it as a technical discipline of the schools, nor as a succession of systems of abstract thought, each in turn professing a rounded comj)leteness and refuted and overturned by the one which follows. Philosophy is an attitude of mind, rather than a doctrine. It is the experience of the world becoming reflective, and endeavouring to comprehend itself. Hence a final philosophic theory is not to be attained, and a fixed system is not to be sought. Experience changes and grows, for it is a process ; and a completed doctrine of an evolving process, a static theory of a dynamic reality, must prove false. We can at best but catch its trend and try to discern its greater laws.

This task of self- contemplation and self-comprehension is not one which man can take up or let alone as it best pleases himself. It is a necessity which chooses, and is not chosen. At a certain stage of the evolution of man's rational nature, reflexion arises inevitably. It becomes the urgent condition of further development. The future can be faced only in the light of the past which only reflexion recovers ; and the individual, or a nation, can achieve a new triumph only if it has learnt the lessons of its own deeds. Reflexion must succeed action and set free its meaning, if better action is to follow.

We can not be deterred from this reflexion by the fact that our experience is ever wider than our thoughts concerning it ; and that, in the end, many of our deeper motives lie hidden and our purposes remain blind. Man is destined by his very greatness to pursue ends he cannot adequately achieve and to ask questions he cannot fully answer. But a little light is better than total darkness. And philosophy, even although she seems, as Kant said, to have failed to strike a sure path, as the natural sciences have done, but ' has kept groping about, and groping too, amongst mere ideas,' remains an enterprise which man cannot set aside. If he cannot answer her problems because they exceed his powers, neither can he forego the attempt, for these problems spring from the very nature of his reason.

The despair of philosophy has sprung in part from its own pretensions. It has isolated itself too much : it has distinguished itself too proudly from the ordinary reflexion of thoughtful men. Like Elijah, it has 'been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts,' and borne unheeded testimony in times hard of hearing for the unseen world of mind. But it has exaggerated its loneliness and cried out, ' I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.' It has forgotten the companionship of reflective men who have never worn its garb, and yet have not bowed their knees unto Baal, nor kissed him. Yet these are many. Even in a people like yours to whom the secular interests of the passing day are engrossing, and in whom the pulse of action beats high, as it needs must in a young nation, there are not a few whom these interests do not satisfy. They turn their minds inwards and seek to know something of the world of things that are spiritual, in which, after all, is the true dwelling-place of man. ' They are men who convince themselves of the existence of the eternal, of the necessary, of the universal, and who seek to form conceptions which cannot fail them, yea, which are not disturbed, but rather confirmed, by the contemplation of that which passes away.'

Pre-eminent amongst such men — philosophers disturbed and often even repelled by ' philosophy ' — are the poets. I admit the diflference between philosophy and poetry, and acknowledge that the quarrel of art with the spirit which must dissect before it reconstructs is undying. Yet in the end philosophy is at one with poetry. It sets the apparent in sharper contrast with the real. It wars with the particular, dwells amongst contradictions, it refutes, argues, confutes and demonstrates, as poetry never does, except when it forgets its mission, as sometimes it may.^ But their goal is the same,

^ For instance in the later poems of Browning.

even though the one reaches it by an inspired flight, while the other must hew its way, and drag its steps. They are one in their deeper purpose, and both are alien, down to the marrow of their being, to the spirit which reduces life into a platitude by emptying it of its ideal meaning. When the man of the world puts ' one passion in the place of another — business, inclinations, amusements, hobbies, and proves them all one after another only to cry out that " all is vanity," ' both poetry and philosophy find his speech 'blasphemous.' The world has for both of them ' a magic value,' for it has been steeped in thought, and they have felt the harmony of its spiritual music. In speaking of philosophy, therefore, I would have you renounce the shibboleths of the schools ; and, in order to understand its significance for modern life, learn of everyone who has sought ' the higher nature in nature itself,' or have vindicated the living against the dead and mechanical.

To extend the meaning of our subject in this manner is evidently to despair of treating more than its rim. I shall, therefore, try to limit it on another side, and I shall do so in a more arbitrary way. In these lectures I shall dwell, almost exclusively, with that particular form of philosophy which is most in touch with our modern life and most akin to the poetry in which that life has found its best expression. This form goes by the name of Idealism, and, more technically, of 'Objective,' or 'Absolute' Idealism. It is usually identified — in one sense too much and in another too little — with the theory of Hegel : too much, in that this way of looking at life belongs not more to Hegel than it does to Plato or Aristotle, or even to Spinoza ; too little, in that our debt to Hegel, the debt of the general mind of our times, is most inadequately recognized.

But, although this limitation of the meaning of ' philosophy ' is arbitrary, it is less arbitrary than it seems, and there are better reasons than at first appear for hard dealing with rival theories. In the first place, it is not clear that they exist as living doctrines. Idealism has for a considerable time engaged the reflective thought of Europe, and especially of

Germany and Great Britain, as no other doctrine has done. The proof is two-fold. On the one hand, those thinkers who reject it are not able to get away from it. They propound no rival theory of their own, but maintain a precarious existence by living on the defects of Idealism, and by indicating — which is not difficult — the problems which it has left unsolved. On the other hand, the principles of this philosophy have entered deeply into the theoretical and practical life of our times. Its main hypotheses are being illustrated and made good in the sciences, especially in those which are biological and human ; they are illumined in the greatest modern poetry, from Lessing and Goethe to Wordsworth and Browning ; and they circulate in the arteries of our social and political life. There is a certain unanimity of endeavour and community of aspiration amongst the poets, philosophers and reforming spirits of our times : they all make for Idealism. And there is far less discrepancy amongst the conclusions of the philosophers themselves than at first appears ; for it is the way of philosophers, as it is of

-J\v^\> 14 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED theologians and politicians, to make much of their differences.

If, however, I can do little justice to one side of our subject and must narrow down the meaning of ' Philosophy ' in this way, I can do still less justice to the ' Modern Life ' upon which it bears. Man's life, even when most simple and rudimentary, is the most complex thing in the world. In him the scattered rays of natural existence are gathered together : even as a physical being and mere organism ' he is the consummation of the scheme of things.' And when we turn to his mind, the mind which he is, we find that it is always the counterpart of his whole world. No element or item of the power or the beauty of the world comes to have existence for him at all, except it enter through the portals of his spirit. The scheme of things, the whole furniture of his heaven and earth, the multitudinous objects of his thoughts and purposes, are facts of his experience, the content, nay, the substance of his soul. His world, be it narrow or wide, rich or poor, is focussed in his spirit, and the one measures the other. Its reality passes Id to him as meaning ; it is transmuted by his rational nature into sensibility, feeling, thought, volition : and if he thus comprises his world what more need be said to mark his intrinsic complexity ? I need not attempt to show how that complexity is further complicated by the reflexion of one man's life into another's, so as to form that most wondrous of all manifestations of the power of man's nature, namely, human society.

These, then, are the two facts whose interaction we have to consider in these lectures.

I may illustrate the connexion of Philosophy with Modern Life by an incident in the history of both. There is a tradition, which is substantially true, that while the guns of Napoleon the First were roaring around Jena, Hegel, the founder of the modern form of Idealism, was seen sitting at the window of his lodgings in that city, writing his Phaenomenology of Spirit — a work which, with Aristotle's Metaphysics, ranks as one of the most adventurous voyages ever made in the world of mind. At that time no less significant business could well be conceived than that on which this solitary man was silently engaged, amidst the dreadful pudder of the disastrous battle. But it is not easy to decide what is great and what is small in human affairs. If we look back now, from the vantage ground of a new century, we shall justly hesitate before resolving which has meant most for mankind, whether it was the thought of the philosopher or the armed hosts of the devastating conqueror. ' Beware,' says Emerson, ' when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.'^

I do not mean to suggest that the history of the world has been made either by battles or by books : though there are some books which mean more than most battles. The writing of the Phaenomenology, like the battle of Jena, was only a picturesque moment in a vast movement which had long been preparing. Significajice belongs to that w^hich is in the^

^ Crisis.

context of the world, not to that which stands isolate and singular. No thinker is great and no man is potent in action save by virtue of the might of his times : as no word has meaning, and no musical note or architectural curve has beauty, except in its place. Great men appear in great ages, and they are creatures of what they create. They come in ' the fulness of time,' their messengers sent before their face, into a world which is waiting for them. They are the consequences of vast upheavals, products of the world's stress and strain, pushed upwards from beneath by the pressure of mute social forces which have been long mustering. For this reason great men come, not singly as a rule, but in groups, like highest peaks in a mountainous region. The greatest of them does not stand alone, nor does he rise abruptly from the level plain. His base is on the table-land of some vast public emotion, and around him are

companions less in magnitude only than himself. At such a time we behold a whole people

'from the depth

Fresh as the morning star ' ;

and find

' in rudest men Self-sacrifice the firmest; generous love And continence of mind, and sense of right, Uppermost in the midst of fiercest strife.'

Prelude, ix.

All alike, men of thought and men of action, the mighty and the lowly, are at such periods quickened as by some new spiritual force. The earth has circled round as if in its sleep, and a new spring has broken upon mankind. Some new conception shoots forth its rays and enlightens men to larger issues.

This matter is worth looking at for a moment longer ; for, unless I err, we are in the afternoon of sucli a day, in the ppw^p-of^a conception of -;io*'- -^ which both Hegel and Napoleon, each in his own fashion, were prime exponents. It will .^;^-^ ^ help us to understand ourselves, and to realize the magic power of great thoughts. For they have great consequences ; nay, they rule the world. Its actions are their offspring.

It is the unique quality of rational beings that, in great things as in small, they act from ideas. Man's impulses are never blind, nor are even those desires animal which are most akin to the beast's. Rays of light from the intelligence strike upon them and pierce their texture, and, like clouds, they catch new hues of meaning and of beauty. Through their relation to mind the passions become capable of an excess of evil, as they never are in the brute ; and, for the same„--^vvA^<i\AaUe^ reason, they are capable of being ^^jietrfied to the service of holy causes. Man is always pursuing ends, great or small. It is the idea of that which seems to him desirable, not his mere muscles, or nerves, or bare sense and impulse, which carries him to his every act. Only on that account is he free and responsible ; only because the deed was first in his intelligence does he appropriate it to himself and say ' I did it. '

That the root of the idea which brings the act lay in his blind passions, or the dark movements of his impulses, and secret needs of his uncomprehended disposition and organic frame, need not and can not be denied. There is moral as well as merely psychological truth in the saying, that there is nothing in the intellect which was not already in the senses.

But there is truth also in its converse — that there is nothing in the senses which was not already in the intelligence. The wliole truth lies in neither of these sayings ; for there is no ' before ' and ' after ' in the case. No sense or impulse exists in man, bare of all intelligence ; and no intelligence which is not suffused with sense. 'Even for the basest sensualist what is sense but the implement of phantasy ; the vessel it drinks out of ? ' Man is not a machine, nor machine-made, of parts outside of parts. The conflict within him, so-called, of passion with reason, has both passion and reason on both sides. Ends of action, base or high, alternate before his mind, attracting and repelling ; and all the ends alike are ideas weighted with impulse and so carry to their mark. And it is this, the presence of the ideal element in every act of man, his pursuit of purposes, mean or noble, which he has set before himself, that distinguishes him abruptly from the brute, and leaves him the promise of being free. If at any time a man urges ' It was my passion, and not I, which did the act,' he has deprived himself of the privilege of being human. His excuse is hardly ever true : when it is, his fellows do not hold him to his deeds.

Man picks his way in life. He selects the strands of his purposes from the multitudinous elements of a close-woven world of social and physical environment. He is free only to the extent of his purposes. Where they are narrow and near, his liberty is limited. But it expands with his comprehension of his world, and is fullest when the better trend and tendencies of his time have passed into his life and become his intelligent will.

These considerations, however, only bring forth anew the power of ideas ; for they imply that the master of his time is the man who has understood it ; even as it is the man who comprehends the energies of nature who can link them to his purposes. Its powers become his conceptions. There is no break or division whatsoever between the stuff of thought and thought itself, between fact and its meaning.

'Nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean : so, o'er the art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes.'

Man Jiiids his true ideas : his makiug of them is the finding. Every valid invention is also a discovery. The ideas which have power over the world, are the powers of the world ; and the poet, philosopher or statesman only sets them free. Hence, when man's history is truly written, written from within, what we shall read is not of the succession of one Royal House to another — of the House of Hanover to the House of Stuart, or of the House of Stuart to the Tudors and Plantagenets : we shall witness, rather, the succession of dynasties of ideas, liberated, set on the throne of the age of which they are the natural rulers, by the great minds which have caught the first glimpse of them. For generations, and sometimes for centuries together, such conceptions direct the thoughts and purposes of the general mind ; and they do so with a power so absolute that their presence is often not suspected, for they have insinuated themselves into the very disposition of the men whom they control.

Such absolute, such subtle dominion is exercised by the idea of Evolution in our own day. There is no science, from Geology to Theology, which does not contemplate the object of its enquiry in its light. The old static, rigid, cataclysmic way of regarding objects is well-nigh obsolete. We do not consider that we understand anything rightly — nor plant, nor animal, nor man, nor even the fixed strata of the earth's crust, or the planet itself — till we can indicate its place in a process. The whole order of Nature is in movement for modern science. On the level of biology, and thence upwards, it is a grand march, the process onwards of one inexhaustible life, multitudinous in its energy, within which every individual form has its own particular place. Poetry and philosophy, and even theology when it has the courage of its cause, take up the tale of natural science and continue it. They proclaim that the whole scheme of Spirit is also in movement : the psychologist, moralist and sociologist but mark its steps, explaining, or striving to explain, all things by what they were and are about to be. Thus the history of mankind presents itself, through the medium of this conception of development, which finds the past in the present and first of all the future, as the gradual unveiling of a purpose which is universal and therefore omnipresent, — a purpose which overcomes the discrete distinctions of time even while maintaining them, and, like the Snake of the Ancients, is coiled around the changing order of the world of reality, and has neither beginning nor end.

Li a word, the Idea of Evolution is the lord of all our present thinking — the subtle presupposition which suffuses all our endeavour, whether in the sphere of knowledge or in that of social and moral practice. It is the author of our very temperament, and determines the mental disposition of our times. It has given to the modern age its characteristic ways of action, and unique features, making our era distinct and distinguishable amongst the ages of the world in all its thinking and striving, whether in science or in philosophy, in morals or in politics, in poetry or in religion.

Now, it is customary to attribute the first use of this Idea of Evolution to Charles Darwin.

In a narrow sense this is just. Darwin was the first to apply it in a great way in one particular field. He did so with such mastering power of observation and scientific imagination as to arrest the attention and compel the belief of the general mind. His success, in his own relatively confined department, facilitated the application of this idea to others, and gave to it concrete form and convincing force.

But the idea was working powerfully in the world before the days of Darwin. To trace it no further — to ignore its use by Aristotle, who is the source of so many of the ideas of modern science — the conception was not only familiar to the poet-philosophers of Germany, to Lessing and Goethe, to Kant and Hegel, to Fichte and Schelling and Schiller, it constituted, one may almost say, the medium through which they observed the world and by which they sought to arrange its phenomena in a rational order. In it, and in the Idealism which it implied for them, in one form or another, was their sole hope of overcoming the dualisms into which the world had fallen, and of breaking down the hard contradictions which harassed modern civilization.

But it is vain to seek the first beginnings of a great conception, not less vain than to seek to mark the first beginnings of the blossom of a tree, which is as old as the life that it expresses and adorns. There are no absolute origins in a continuous world. These poets and philosophers themselves found the conception of Evolution to their hand ; they only liberated it from the mass of modern history within which it was operative. When they arrived the world was already endeavouring to escape from the harsh contrasts and to break down the intolerable antagonisms of the Middle Age, which had set the next world against this, spirit against nature, the sacred against the secular. Men were already in revolt against a theology which mortified reason, a religion which sought to root out nature, and ' a social state in which men were held down and held asunder by fixed class divisions.' They were seeking enlargement : they would stretch their limbs and breathe freely in a world not all alien and unfriendly. Luther had spoken and Cromwell had fought. The banner of liberty had been unfurled, and it had become the symbol of many different rights yet to be made good for the lay and the common man. Instead of the plaintive ' feminine voice of mediaeval piety/ the voice as of a weary pilgrim and sojourner, longing in a vain and unsubstantial world for ' the native land, the patria of the soul/ a manlier cry is heard : ' Here, too, is our Home, for God is here ; and the true Shekina is in the soul of man.' 'Nature is not godless, nor is God unnatural.' The natural world is the symbol and vesture of a divine power ; and the natural relations of man to man are not vile and bestial, but capable of being smitten through and through with holiness, as a cloud is pierced with light.

Before this period, irreverence had crept into man's worship and blasphemy into his adorations. ' Nature in late centuries,' said Carlyle, ' was irreverently supposed to be dead, an old eight-day clock made many thousand years ago, and still ticking on, but as dead as brass, which the Maker at most sat looking at, in a distant, singuLar, and now plainly indeed, incredible manner. But now, I am happy to observe, she is everywhere asserting herself not to be dead brass at all, but alive and miraculous, celestial-infernal, with an emphasis that will again penetrate the thickest head in the planet by-and-by.' But Idealism cures irreverence, especially the Idealism of Love, which Christianity is. It lifts the lowly, it asserts the rights of the weak, and breaks the power of the strong. From of old the prophets of this creed were revolutionaries. ' Those who have turned the world upside down are come hither also.' And their successors in the modern world are engaged in the same task of levelling upwards, ' putting down the mighty from their seats, and exalting them of low degree ' ; dethroning the tyrannic state and the dogmatic church, and setting in their place a Sovereignty whose seat is in the heart of man, a Democracy which v/ould be just, and a Religion which would be free — free to find God everywhere.