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 ESSAYS 
 
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 PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM 
 
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ESSAYS 
 
 m 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 ANDREW SETH and K. B. HALDANE 
 
 WITH A PREFACE BY 
 
 EDWARD CAIED 
 
 ^S^ 
 
 01^ trf; 
 
 UNIVEESITY 
 
 LONDON 
 
 LONGMANS, GEEEN, AND CO. 
 
 1883 
 
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 Joyp/ 
 
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY 
 
 OF 
 
 THOMAS HILL GEEEN 
 
 WHTTB'S PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHnK)SOPHY 
 IN THE OXIVERSnV OP OXFORD 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I 'AUK 
 
 PKEFACE 1 
 
 By Edward Caird, M.A., LL.D., Professor of Moral 
 Philosophy in the University of Glasgow. 
 
 I. PHILOSOPHY AS CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES . 8 
 By Andrew Seth, M.A., Assistant to the Professor of 
 Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinhiirgh, 
 and late Hihbert Scholar. 
 
 II. THE RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY TO SCIENCE . 41 
 
 By R. B. Haldane, M^A., Barrister-at-Law, and J. S. 
 Haldane, M.A. 
 
 III. LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE . . 67 
 
 By Bernard Bosanquet, M.A., Felloiv and late Tutor of 
 University College, Oxford. 
 
 IV. THE HISTORICA.L METHOD 102 
 
 By W. R. Sorlby, B.A. (Camb.), M.A. (Edin.) Scholar 
 of Trinity College^ Cambridge, arid Shaio Fellow of the 
 University of Edinburgh. 
 
 V. THE RATIONALITY OF HISTORY .... 126 
 By D. G. Ritchie, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Jesus 
 College, and Lecturer of Balliol College, Oxford. 
 
 VI. THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART 169 
 
 By W. P. I^K, M.A., Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. 
 
 VII. THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 187 
 
 By Henry Jones, M.A., late Clark Fellow of the Uni- 
 versity of Glasgoto. 
 
 VIII. THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE .... 214 
 
 By James Bonar, M.A., Balliol College, Oxford. 
 
 IX. I'ESSIMISM AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS 24G 
 By T. B. Kilpatrick, M.A., B.D. 
 
ITIVEHSIT 
 ESSAYS 
 
 IN 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL CEITICISM. 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The various contributors to a volume of Essays such as the 
 present may naturally be supposed to be animated by some 
 common purpose or tendency ; and I have been requested to 
 say a few words to indicate how far such a common purpose 
 or tendency exists. 
 
 In the first place, then, I have to state that the Essays 
 have been written quite independently by their several 
 authors, and that any agreement which exists among them 
 is due, not to an intention to advocate any special philo- 
 sophical theory, but rather to a certain community of opinion 
 in relation to the general principle and method of philo- 
 sophy. In other words, it may be described as an agreement 
 as to the direction in which inquiry may most fruitfully be 
 prosecuted, rather than a concurrence in any definite results 
 that have as yet been attained by it. Such an agreement is 
 consistent with great and even vital differences. For any 
 idea that has a principle of growth in it, any idea that takes 
 hold of man's spiritual life on many sides, is certain, as it 
 developss, to produce wide divergencies, and even to call 
 forth much antagonism and conflict between its supporters. 
 A doctrine that passes unchanged from hand to hand, is by 
 that very fact shown to have exhausted its inherent force ; 
 and those ideas have been the most fruitful both in religion 
 and philosophy, which, accepted as a common starting-point, 
 have given rise to the most far-reaching controversy^ Never- 
 
2 PRELACE. 
 
 theless, so lon<^ as in such controversy it remains possible to 
 appeal to one principle, so long as the differences are due to 
 the various development of one way of thinking in different 
 minds, the division and opposition is a sign of lifie, and may 
 be expected ultimately to be overcome by the same spiritual 
 energy which has produced it. 
 
 The writers of this volume agree in believing that the 
 line of investigation which philosophy must follow, or in 
 which it may be expected to make most important contri- 
 butions to the intellectual life of man, is that which was 
 opened up by Kant, and for the successful prosecution of 
 which no one has done so much as Hegel. Such a statement 
 of their philosophical creed, however, would be misleading, 
 if it were not further explained and limited. For a refe- 
 rence to definite names is in philosophy often taken to imply 
 a kind of discipleship which cannot be acknowledged by 
 those who believe that the history of philosophy is a living 
 development, and who, therefore, are adherents of a school 
 only in the sense that they trace the last steps of that 
 development in a particular way. The work of Kant and 
 Hegel, like the work of earlier philosophers, can have no 
 speculative value except for those who are able critically to 
 reproduce it, and so to assist in the sifting process by which 
 its permanent meaning is separated from the accidents of 
 its first expression. And such reproduction, again, is not 
 possible except for those who are impelled by the very teach- 
 ing they have received to give it a fresh expression and a 
 new application. Valuable as may be the history of thought, 
 the literal importation of Kant and Hegel into another 
 country and time would not be possible if it were desirable, 
 or desirable if it were possible. The mere change of time 
 and place, if there were nothing more, implies new questions 
 and a new attitude of mind in those whom the writer 
 addresses, which would make a bare reproduction unmean- 
 ing. Moreover, this change of the mental atmosphere and 
 environment is itself part of a development which must 
 affect the doctrine also, if it is no mere dead tradition, but 
 a seed of new intellectual life. Anyone who writes about 
 philosophy must have his work judged, not by its relation to 
 the intellectual wants of a past generation, but by its power 
 to meet the wants of the present time — wants which arise 
 out of the advance of science, and the new currents of in- 
 
PREFACE. 3 
 
 flnence wliicli are transforming man's social and religious lite. 
 What he owes to previous writers is, so to speak, a concern 
 of his own, with which his readers have directly nothing to 
 do, and for which they need not care. For them the only 
 question of interest is, whether in the writer they have 
 immediately to deal with, there is a living source of light 
 which is original in the sense that, whatever may be its 
 history, it carries its evidence in itself. And this evidence 
 must lie in its power to meet the questions of the day, and 
 in the form in which they arise in that day. A volume of 
 Essays such as the present, touching on so many important 
 topics, can be only a small contribution to that critical re- 
 construction of knowledge which every time has to accom- 
 plish for itself. But it will, I believe, serve the purpose of 
 its writers, if it shows in some degree how the principles of 
 an idealistic philosophy may be brought to bear on the 
 various problems of science, of ethics, and of religion, which 
 are now pressing upon us. 
 
 A better indication of the spirit and aims with which the 
 writers of this volume have written, than can be given in 
 any such general statement as the above, may be found in 
 their wish to dedicate it to the memory of Professor Green ; 
 an author who, more perhaps than any recent writer on 
 philosophy, has shown that it is possible to combine a 
 thorough appropriation of the results of past speculation 
 with the freshness and spontaneity of an original mind. To 
 Professor Green philosophy was not a study of the words of 
 men that are gone, but a life transmitted from them to 
 him — a life expressing itself with that power and authority 
 which belongs to one who speaks from his own experience, 
 and never to 'the scribes ' who speak from tradition. It 
 may be permitted to one who had the privilege of a long and 
 unbroken friendship with him to take this opportunity of 
 saying a few words on his general character, as well as on 
 the special loss which philosophy has sustained in his death. 
 
 Those friends who can look back on Professor Green's 
 life with the intimate knowledge of contemporaries cannot 
 fail to be struck with the evidence of consistency and un- 
 swerving truth to himself, which it presents. His fellow- 
 students at the University were specially impressed by two 
 features of bis character, which then stood out with the 
 greater clearness from their contrast with the usual ten- 
 
 B 2 
 
4 raEFACE. 
 
 dencies of joutli. The first was the distinctness with which 
 he lived by conviction and not by impulse. No man could 
 be less pedantic ; he had, indeed, a kind of humorous grasp 
 of character and situation which made pedantrj^ always im- 
 possible to him. But it seemed to be for him a moral 
 impossibility to act at all, unless he had thought out his 
 course and come to clearness of decision regarding it. 
 Hence at times his manner might quench or repel the ready 
 fire of immediate youthful sympathy in those around him, 
 and might seem to keep even those who were most intimate 
 with him at a distance from his life. Really, however, no 
 one was more capable of friendship, and he was one with 
 whom every tie which he bad once formed only grew 
 stronger with time, and was unaffected even by absence and 
 want of intercourse. 
 
 The other characteristic was the intensity of his political 
 and intellectual interests. In this respect his character 
 seemed to invert the usual order of development. What is 
 called the * enthusiasm of humanity,' or at least a sympathy 
 with great intellectual and political movements, was with 
 him a primary, and one might almost say an instinctive, 
 passion ; and it was rather out of this and, as it were, under 
 its shadow, that for the most part his personal feelings and 
 affections grew up. Hence he was, in some sense, intel- 
 lectually old in his youth, and he seemed to become younger 
 at heart— less restrained and self-centred, and more open to 
 individual interests— as he grew older. 
 
 He was, in the best sense, a democrat of the democrats. 
 I use this word for want of a better, but what I mean is, 
 that from a somewhat exclusive interest in the essentials of 
 humanity — in the spiritual experiences in which all men 
 are alike — and from a natural disregard for the outward differ- 
 ences of rank and position and even of culture, by which 
 these essentials are invested and concealed, his sympathies 
 were always with the many rather than with the few. He 
 was strongly inclined to the idea that there is an * instinct 
 of reason ' in the movement of popular sentiment, which 
 is often wiser than the opinion of the so-called educated 
 classes. The belief in the essential equality of men might, 
 indeed, be said to be one of the things most deeply rooted in 
 bis character, though it showed itself not in any readiness 
 to echo the commonplaces of Radicalism, but rather in an 
 
PREFACE. 5 
 
 habitual direction of thought and interest to practical schemes 
 for 'levelling up' the inequalities of human lot, and giving to 
 the many the opportunities of the fev^. This characteristic 
 
 * note ' of his mind is expressed by his last published writing 
 — an Address to the Weslejan Literary Societj^ of Oxford, 
 
 * On the vrork to be done by the new Oxford High School,' 
 which ends with the following words : — * Our High School then 
 may fairly claim to be helping forward the time when every 
 Oxford citizen will have open to him at least the precious 
 companionship of the best books in his own language, and 
 the knowledge necessary to make him really independent ; 
 when all who have a special taste for learning will have open 
 to them what has hitherto been unpleasantly called '' the 
 education of gentlemen." I confess to hoping for a time 
 w^hen that phrase will have lost its meaning, because the 
 sort of education which alone makes the gentleman in any 
 true sense will be within reach of all. As it was the aspira- 
 tion of Moses that all the Lord's people should be prophets, 
 so with all seriousness and reverence we may hope and pray 
 for a condition of English society in which all honest citizens 
 will recognise themselves, and be recognised by each other, 
 as gentlemen. If for Oxford our High School contributes 
 in its measure, as I believe it will, to win this blessed result, 
 some sacrifice of labour and money — even that most difficult 
 sacrifice, the sacrifice of party spirit — may fairly be asked 
 for its support.' 
 
 In philosophy Professor Green's whole work was devoted 
 to the development of the results of the Kantian criticism of 
 knowledge and morals. To Hegel he latterly stood in a 
 somewhat doubtful relation ; for while, in the main, he 
 accepted Hegel's criticism of Kant, and held also that 
 something like Hegel's idealism must be the result of the 
 development of Kantian principles rightly understood, he 
 yet regarded the actual Hegelian system with a certain 
 suspicion as something too ambitious, or, at least, premature. 
 * It must all be done over again,' he once said, meaning that 
 the first development of idealistic thought in Germany had 
 in some degree anticipated what can be the secure result 
 only of wider knowledge and more complete reflexion. This 
 attitude of mind was, indeed, characteristic of one who 
 scarcely felt that he had a scientific right to any principle 
 which he had not submitted to a testing process of yearKS, 
 
6 PREFACE. 
 
 and who never satisfied himself — as men of idealistic ten- 
 dencies are too apt to satisfy themselves —with an intuitive 
 grasp of any comprehensive idea, until he had vindicated 
 every element of it by the hard toil of an exhaustive re- 
 flexion. Hence he was almost painful in the constancy of 
 his recurrence to certain fundamental thoughts, which he 
 never seemed to have sufficiently verified and explained, and 
 which he was ever ready to reconsider in the light of new 
 objections, even those that might seem to be comparatively 
 unimportant to others. In this he showed how a deep faith 
 in certain principles may be united with the questioning 
 temper of science, and even with a scrupulous scepticism 
 which is ever ready to go back to the beginning, that it may 
 exhaust everything that can be said against them. For such 
 a mind there must always be a wide division between faith 
 and reason, or (what in philosophy comes to the same thing) 
 between a principle and its development into a system. Its 
 appropriate activity must be rather to lay and to try the 
 foundations than to build the superstructure. But it is the 
 result of such work, and of such work alone, to secure that 
 the foundations are immovably fixed on the rock. 
 
 Professor Green's great influence on the life of the Uni- 
 versity and the City of Oxford, to which so many testimonies 
 have been given since his death, was not due to any of the 
 usual sources of popularity. Wanting in superficial readi- 
 ness of sympathy, wanting also in the sanguine flow of 
 animal spirits, and by constitutional reserve often prevented 
 from expressing what he felt and wished to express, he yet 
 gradually created in those around him a sense of security in 
 trusting him which was due to the transparent purity of his 
 aims and to the entire absence of personal assumption and 
 petty ambition. It was due, it may be added, to the secret 
 fire of ethical enthusiasm, which gradually made itself felt 
 through the unpretending simplicity and business-like direct- 
 ness of his manner. His very reticence and unwillingness to 
 speak, except upon knowledge and from necessity, gave an 
 additional, and sometimes an almost overpowering, weight to 
 his words when he did speak. And in later years the conscious- 
 ness of the success of his work, both speculative and practical, 
 (however he might underestimate it), and also the conscious- 
 ness of the sympathy, which he found in his home and in a 
 widening circle of friends who understood him, seemed to 
 
PREFACE. 7 
 
 soften tlie streiigtli of his character and give him greater 
 freedom in the use of his powers. There are not a few among 
 the Oxford men of the last fifteen years to whom, as was once 
 said of another teacher, ' his existence was one of the things 
 that gave reality to the distinction between good and evil.' 
 The loss of such an educative influence cannot be easily 
 replaced ; but, so far as his literary work is concerned, there 
 is reason to believe that his forthcoming volume upon Ethics, 
 though not quite completed, will prove a better representation 
 of his thought and aims to those who were not immediately 
 brought in contact with him than anything from his pen 
 that has as yet been given to the world. 
 
 Edward Caied. 
 
 'uhivsksitt; 
 
ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 I. 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AS CRITICTSM OF CATEGORIES. 
 
 A HUNDRED years have passed since Kant, in a note to the 
 Preface of the first ' Critique,' declared his age to be pre- 
 eminently the age of an all-embracing criticism, and pro- 
 ceeded therewith to sketch the outlines of what he called 
 the critical philosophy. The latter has grown to be a great 
 fact even in that dim general consciousness in which 
 humanity keeps record of the deeds of its past. But a 
 hundred years have apparently not been long enough for 
 commentators and critics to make clear to a perplexed 
 public the exact import of what Kant came to teach. And 
 if Kant had survived to dip into the literature of the 
 centennial and see the different doctrines with which he is 
 credited, one can fancy the indignant disclaimers that would 
 have filled the literary journals. The agreement is general 
 that Kant's contribution to philosophy forms a bridge 
 between one period of thought and another; but opinion is 
 sadly divided as to the true philosophic succession. Hence 
 it is probably better, in any treatment which aims at philo- 
 sophical persuasion, to regard Kant not so much with 
 reference to the systems of which his own has been the 
 germ as with reference to the whole period which he closed. 
 If we get in this way to see what notions it was that he 
 destroyed, then we may possibly reach a certain unanimity 
 about Jhe principles and outlines of the new philosophy. 
 When we know on what ground we stand, and what things 
 are definitely left behind, we are in a position to work for 
 the needs of our own time, taking help where it is to be 
 found, but without entangling ourselves in the details of any 
 particular post-Kantian development. 
 
 An unexceptionable clue to the way in which Kant was 
 accustomed to regard his own philosophic work is furnished 
 by the use he makes of the term criticism. Criticism, as 
 
PHILOSOPHY AS CllITICISM OF CATEGORIES. 9 
 
 everyone knows, is generally mentioned by Kant in con- 
 nection with dogmatism and scepticism, as a third and 
 more excellent way, capable of leading us out of contra- 
 diction and doubt into a reasoned certainty. The term thus 
 contains, it may be said, Kant's own account of his relation 
 to his predecessors. That account — often repeated in the 
 Kantian writings — bears a striking similarity at first sight 
 to Locke's description of his discovery that most of the 
 questions that perplex mankind have their source in the 
 want of * a survey of our own understandings.' ' Were the 
 capacities of our understandings well considered, the extent 
 of our knowledge once discovered, and the horizon found 
 which sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark 
 parts of things — between what is and what is not com- 
 prehensible by us — men would perhaps with less scruple 
 acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ 
 their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and 
 satisfaction in the other ' (' Essay,' Book I. chap. i. § 7). 
 But Locke's aim was practical, not professionally philo- 
 sophical ; and, being an Englishman, he had not been much 
 troubled by the metaphysical system-builders. Kant, on 
 the other hand, has the latter continually before his mind ; 
 * the celebrated Wolff' in particular had made a deep im- 
 pression upon him. But he perceived that not one of the 
 metaphysicians was able to establish his system as against 
 the equally plausible constructions of others, or in the face 
 of the sceptical objections brought against such systems in 
 general. The disputes of the Schools seemed best likened 
 to the bloodless and unceasing combats of the heroes in 
 Walhalla. A scepticism like David Hume's appeared the 
 natural end of these ineffectual efforts to extend our 
 knowledge. Profoundly convinced, however, that scepticism 
 is not a permanent state for human reason, Kant tried to 
 formulate to himself the necessary causes of the failure of 
 the best meant of these attempts to construct a philosophy. 
 This is how he differentiates his own work from Hume's. 
 Hume, he says, was satisfied with establishing the fact of 
 an actual failure on the part of metaphysics, but he did not 
 show conclusively how this must be so. Hence in the general 
 discredit which he threw upon the human faculties he in- 
 volved much of the knowledge of the natural world which 
 no one disputes, but which it is impossible to vindicate on 
 
10 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CPvITICISM. 
 
 the principles of Humian scepticism. Besides, though an 
 effectual solvent of preceding systems, Hume's method 
 oflPers no guarantee that other philosophers will not arise, 
 more subtle and persuasive, winning many to accept their 
 constructions, and calling for a second Hume to repeat the 
 work of demolition. What is essential is to set the bounds 
 between our necessary knowledge and our equally necessary 
 ignorance. We must submit to critical evaluation, not facta 
 of reason, but reason itself. Proof must be had not merely 
 of limitation or finitude in general, but of a determinate 
 boundary line that shuts off knowledge from the field of the 
 unknown and unknowable. That is, we demonstrate on 
 ground of principle not only our ignorance in respect to this 
 or that subject, but in respect to all possible questions of a 
 certain class. There is no room for conjecture. In this 
 region of complete certitude alone can reason take up its 
 abode ; and to mark out the firm * island ' of truth is the 
 task of criticisyn} 
 
 All the conclusions of the system -builders are vitiated, 
 Kant explains, by the fact that they have not submitted the 
 conceptions and principles which they employ to a pre- 
 liminary criticism in order to discover the range of their 
 validity. Conceptions which are familiar to us from daily 
 use we assume to be of universal applicability, without 
 considering what are the conditions of our present ex- 
 perience, and whether these conditions may not be of 
 essential import in determining for conceptions the range of 
 their application. Conceptions quite unimpeachable under 
 these conditions may be quite unmeaning when these con- 
 ditions are removed. Metaphysic which is oblivious to such 
 considerations Kant calls dogmatic. Thus, when philoso- 
 phers conclude that the soul is immortal because it is a 
 substantial unit and therefore indiscerptible, their argument 
 is altogether in the air, for they have omitted to consider 
 whether such a conception as substance can have any 
 meaning except as applied to a composite object in space. 
 Similarly, when Locke attempts to prove the existence of 
 God by the ' evident demonstration that from eternity there 
 has been something,' he is importing the conceptions of 
 time and causality into the relations between God and the 
 
 ' Cf. Kant's ' Methodcnlehrc' at the The special reference is to the second 
 end of the Critique of Pure Reason. section of the first chapter. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AS CPJTICISM OF CATEGORIES. 11 
 
 universe, without reflecting whether time and causality are 
 available ideas when we venture beyond the context of our 
 sense-experience. 
 
 Nothing could well be more satisfactory than this. 
 But in such an undertaking everything depends upon, the 
 thoroughness with which the idea of criticism is applied ; and 
 Kant unfortunately left the most fundamental conception of 
 all uncriticised. He dogmatically assumed the conception 
 of the mind as acted upon by something external to it. In 
 other words, the mechanical category of reciprocity, which 
 psychology and ordinary thought may justifiably employ for 
 their own purposes, was taken by him as an adequate or 
 philosophic representation of the relation of the knowing 
 mind to the objective world. The distinction between mind 
 and the world, which is valid only from a certain point of 
 view, he took as an absolute separation. He took it, to use 
 a current phrase, abstractly — that is to say, as a mere fact, 
 a fact standing by itself and true in any reference. And of 
 course when two things are completely separate, they can 
 only be brought together by a bond which is mechanical, 
 external, and accidental to the real nature of both. 
 
 Hence it comes (in spite of the inferior position to which ^ 
 Kant explicitly relegates empirical psychology) that the 
 ' Critique of Pure Eeason ' sets out from a psychological 
 standpoint and never fairly gets beyond it. ' In what other 
 fashion is it to be supposed that the knowing faculty could 
 be roused to exercise, if not by objects which affect our 
 senses ? ' Kant hardly waits to hear the answer, so much 
 does it seem to him a matter of course. Such a self- 
 revelation is too naive to be got rid of by saying that this 
 sentence in the first paragraph of the Introduction expresses 
 no more than a provisional adoption of the standpoint of 
 ordinary thought, in order to negate it and rise above it by 
 the progressive criticism of the remainder of the book. That 
 this point of view is negated and surmounted in the ' Critique,' 
 I do not in the least doubt ; but it is just as certain that Kant 
 did not mean to express here a merely provisional standpoint 
 from which he could intelligibly launch his own universe 
 upon the reader. The passage may be matched by many J 
 others taken from any stage of Kant's speculations. They 
 recur too often to be explained otherwise than by the ad- 
 mission that, while his new method is the conclusive refu- 
 
12 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPlirCAL CRITICISM. 
 
 tcition of the claims of psychology to function as philosophy, 
 Kant himself never consciously called in question the funda- 
 mental presupposition of psychological philosophy, much less 
 subjected it to the criticism which his principles demanded. 
 
 Many untenable Kantian distinctions to which students — 
 and especially students trained in English philosophy — take 
 exception at the outset, are connected in principle with this 
 initial psychological dualism. Such are, for example, the 
 sheer distinction drawn between the form and the matter of 
 experience, between a priori and a posteriori, and the equally 
 abstract way in which Kant uses universality and necessity 
 as the criteria of formal or perfectly pure cognition. Since 
 the whole of Kant's scheme of thought appears to rest upon 
 these distinctions, it is not to be wondered at if many con- 
 clude that the rest of the system must be entirely in the air. 
 It is not the less true, however, that this is a case in which 
 the pyramid does not stand upon its apparent base. 
 
 Such disjunctions in Kant are due to the effort of reflec- 
 tion to escape from the unlimited contingency of the Humian 
 position, while retaining the ultimate presupposition of the 
 unrelatedness of mind and things, from which the scepticism 
 of the earlier thinker resulted. What the mind learns from 
 things must necessarily, on this hypothesis, be so many bare 
 facts or atoms of impression cohering simply as they have 
 been accidentally massed in the piecemeal process of acquisi- 
 tion. Kant is forward to endorse Hume's conclusion on this 
 point; that 'experience' cannot yield universality and neces- 
 sity, is the ground common to both Kant and Hume which 
 furnishes the starting-point of the ' Critique.' On the one 
 hand, Kant found himself faced by this assumption, on the 
 other, by the existence of judgments continually made, and 
 whole sciences constructed, whose universal and necessary 
 application it would be mere affectation to deny. The lines 
 of his own theory were virtually settled by these two admis- 
 sions. If the necessity which we find in experience is con- 
 fessedly not derivable from the atomic data furnished to the 
 mind by things, then it must be infused into these data by 
 the action of the mind itself. We have thus the spectacle 
 of experience as the product of an interaction taking place 
 between ' the mind ' and things. The element contributed 
 by the action of things Kant calls the matter of experience ; 
 the contribution of the mind he calls the form. On his own 
 
PHn^OSOPHY AS CRITICISM OF CATEGOPJES. 13 
 
 principles the * matter ' ought to he pure matter or unlimited 
 contingency, containing in itself no germ of methodical 
 arrangement, while the ' forms ' of the mind should compel 
 this mass into order and system. But it is of course im«« 
 possible for Kant to maintain himself at the point of view of 
 a distinction which in this shape simply does not exist. 
 He is forced to admit that, for the particular applications of 
 the general forms or laws imposed on experience by the mind, 
 we remain dependent upon things. But, in such cases, if the 
 particular application is given in the matter, then a fortiori 
 the law or principle in its general form must be so given. 
 It must be possible, by an ordinary process of generalisation 
 and abstraction, to formulate in its generality the principle 
 which the specific instances exemplify. In other words, 
 Kant admits that what is ' given * to the mind is not pure 
 matter, not mere particulars, but matter already formed, 
 particulars already universal ised, that is to say, related to 
 one another, and characterised by these relations. The task 
 of the knower is simply to read off, or at most laboriously 
 to bring to light, what is there complete before him in his 
 material. There is not the slightest doubt that, when we 
 remain at the point of view of the abstract distinction be- 
 tween mind and the world which we have signalised in 
 Kant, empiricists are correct in insisting tliat not the matter 
 of his experience only, bat the form as well, is derived. by the 
 individual from the world with which he is set in relation. 
 The mind is not the seat of universals and the world a 
 jumble of particulars, the former being superimposed upon 
 the latter for the production of knowledge. Neither mind 
 nor the world lias any existence as so conceived. How, for 
 example, can the unfilled mind of the child be regarded as 
 creatively producing order in a chaos of pelting impressions, 
 or what do we mean by postulating a mind at all in such a 
 case ? If they prove nothing else, such considerations prove 
 the complete impossibility of treating knowledge from a 
 psychological standpoint. We conclude, therefore, that 
 matter and form are shifting distinctions, relative to the 
 point of view from which they are contemplated ; and the 
 same is true of the world and the mind, of which opposition, 
 indeed, the other is only another form. From the standpoint 
 of a theory of knowledge it will be found that the mind and 
 the world are in a sense convertible terras. We may talk 
 
14 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CmTICISM. 
 
 indifferently of the one or of the other ; the content of our 
 notion remains in both cases the same. 
 
 A similar criticism applies to the criteria of universality 
 and necessity as employed by Kant. No sooner are the 
 words uttered than people begin to ransack their minds in 
 order to discover whether, as a matter of fact, they ever 
 make such judgments as are here attributed to them. The 
 absolute necessariness which Kant affirms of certain judg- 
 ments becomes a species of mystic quality. Some thinkers 
 persuade themselves that they recognise this quality in the 
 judgments in question ; others, more cautious, maintain that 
 whatever stringency the judgments possess may be suffi- 
 ciently accounted for without resorting to what they brand 
 as an 'intuition.' Thus, when a conscientious associationist 
 like Mill comes forward and denies that he finds any absolute 
 universality and necessity whatever in his experience, Kant's 
 argument is brought to a complete standstill. The question 
 of fact on which he builds being denied, there is no common 
 ground between him and his opponent. Few things can be 
 imagined more unfortunate than this reduction of the con- 
 troversy between Kant and empiricism to a discussion about 
 the existence or non-existence of some mystical necessity in 
 the propositions of geometry. Yet this actually happened in 
 the earlier stages of Kantian study in England. Wherever 
 ' intuitions ' come into play, the point in dispute is referred 
 to a merely subjective test, and controversy necessarily 
 fritters itself away into a bandying of 'yes' and 'no' from the 
 opposite sides. No one who has learned Kant's lesson so as 
 to profit by it, should have any hesitation in finding Mill's 
 hypothetical theory of demonstration to be truer in concep- 
 tion than any theory which insists on a difference of kind 
 between the necessity of geometrical and that of any other 
 propositions. All necessity is hypothetical or relative, and 
 simply expresses the dependence of one thing upon another. 
 No truth is necessary except in relation to certain conditions, 
 which being fulfilled, the truth always holds good. The more 
 general or simple the conditions on which any truth depends, 
 the wider is the range of its validity ; and truths which, like 
 those of 'geometry, depend only on the most rudimentary 
 elements or conditions of experience, will of course be univer- 
 sally and necessarily valid /or all experience depending on these 
 conditions. This, as every student ought to know, is the only 
 
PTITLOSOPIIY AS CPtlTlOISM OF CATEGORIES. 15 
 
 necessity which Kant's theory eventually leads him ho attri- 
 bute to the propositions of geometry. It is the more un- 
 fortunate that he should seem to base his argumentation 
 upon the assertion of an abstract or absolute necessity. But 
 this is only one of many instances in which the true sense of 
 Kantian terms must be defined by the completed theory. 
 Necessity of the latter type is not so much doubtful in fact 
 as it is contradictory in notion. 'Necessity' invariably 
 raises the question ' why ? ', and the answer must consist in 
 showing the conditions. Something may be necessary in 
 relation to conditions which are themselves of limited appli- 
 cation ; in that case we never speak of it as necessary unless 
 when these conditions are themselves under consideration. 
 When we speak of anything as being necessary in a pre- 
 eminent sense, we mean that our assertion depends for its 
 validity on nothing more than the system of conditions on 
 which experience is founded. There is no abstract opposi- 
 tion, therefore, between the necessary and the contingent, 
 such as Kant presents us with ; the difference is not one of 
 kind but of degree. 
 
 This interpretation of necessity is particularly worth keep- 
 ing in mind in connection with the Kantian categories or 
 conceptions of the understanding ; for Kant's treatment of 
 these so-called a priori elements as the contribution of the 
 mind has again led him into false issues — or at least it has 
 led many of his followers and opponents. It is supposed, for 
 example, that the whole question turns upon the mental 
 origin of certain conceptions, and this, as has been seen, is a 
 fact which may very properly be denied. It appears to be 
 forgotten amid the pros and cons of such an argument, that 
 mental origin is in itself no clue to the function of a concep- 
 tion or the range of its validity, unless we connect our asser- 
 tion with a whole theory as to the nature of experience in 
 general. This, it must be allowed, Kant has not neglected 
 to do ; and his ultimate proof of the necessity of conceptions 
 like substance and cause is simply that without them ex- 
 perience would be impossible. They are the most general 
 principles on which we find a concatenated universe to 
 depend. Their mental origin falls in such a deduction com- 
 pletely into the background ; and Kant is only obliged to 
 assert it because of the absolute opposition which he set up 
 between the necessary and the contingent, and the pre- 
 
IG KSSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CPJTICISM. 
 
 supposition witli which lie started that experience can give 
 us nothing but contingency. The conceptions derive their 
 necessity from their relation to experience as a whole. Kant 
 proceeds, indeed, to describe the conceptions in this relation 
 as modes of mental combination, according to which the Ego 
 lays out the variety poured in upon it from without. As 
 nothing can come within experience except so far as it fits 
 itself into the structure of the mental mould, the necessary 
 validity for experience of these combining multiples is evident. 
 But nothing is gained by isolating these conditions, princi- 
 ples, or categories from the experience in which they are 
 disclosed to us, and hypostatising them as faculties or modes 
 of faculties — methods of action inherent in the mind. On 
 the contrary, this is essentially a mischievous step; for when 
 we talk thus, we are inevitably held to refer to the individual 
 mind, and the difficulties, or rather absurdities, of such a 
 position have already come under our notice. It is to be 
 regretted, therefore, that Kant frequently described his un- 
 dertaking as a criticism of faculties, instead of keeping by 
 the more comprehensive and less misleading title (which, as 
 we have seen, he also employs) of a criticism of conceptions. 
 Unfortunately this is not merely a verbal inconsistency ; it re- 
 presents two widely different views of the critical philosophy. 
 Kant's general scheme is sufficiently well known to render 
 any minute account of it superfluous in this connection. It 
 was framed, as has been seen, to account for the fact of 
 universal and necessary judgments, and its form was con- 
 ditioned by the previous acceptance of Hume's fundamental 
 assumptions. Kant's way out of the difficulty wa.s contained 
 in what he called his Copernican change of standpoint. If 
 there is no necessity to. be got by waiting on the world of 
 things, let us try what success attends us if objects are made 
 to wait upon us for their most general determinations. The 
 form or ' ground-plan ' of experience which Kant discovers in 
 following out this idea, consists of twelve categories, concep- 
 tions, or methods of combination, according to which the 
 matter of sense is arranged in the perceptive or imaginative 
 spectra of space and time, the process of arrangement being 
 ultimately guided by three ideals of intellectual complete- 
 ness, and being referable at every point to the unity of the 
 transcendental Ego. Or, in Kant's psychological language, 
 the mind is furnished, first, with the a priori forms of space 
 
nilLOSOPIIY AS CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES. 17 
 
 and time in wliicli all its impressions must be received ; and 
 secondly, with twelve principles of intellectual synthesis, by 
 submission to which the impressions of sense first become 
 objects in a world of related things. The relations of space 
 and of objects in space,^ as dependent upon the nature of the 
 mind-form and of the mind-imposed laws of combination, 
 may thus evidently be known with complete certainty. "We 
 are in a position, so far as these points are concerned, to 
 anticipate experience ; universality and necessity are saved. 
 But the counter-stroke is obvious. We anticipate experi- 
 ence — and to that extent, as Kant paradoxically puts it, 
 legislate for nature — simply because it is our own necessity, 
 and not the necessity of things, which is reflected back to us 
 from the face of this mind-shaped world. We purchase the 
 sense of certainty in our knowledge at the cost of being told 
 that our knowledge is not in a strict sense real knowledge 
 at all. The world of real objects (improperly so called, 
 inasmuch as they never are objects) on which Kant repre- 
 sents us as waiting for the matter of our experience, 
 is necessarily cut off from us by the constitution of our 
 powers of knowing. Here Kant draws the line which he 
 said Hume neglected to draw — the line dividing the region 
 of complete certitude from that of necessary and eternal 
 ignorance. The first region is the field of phenomena, related 
 to one another in space and time — the context of possible 
 experience, consisting of the mind-manipulated data of 
 sense. The second, from which our faculties debar us, is 
 the world of thinga-in- themselves, considered not merely 
 as the unknown region where our sense-experience takes 
 its rise, but as a world in which room may possibly be found 
 for such non-spatial entities as God and the soul, and 
 the asj)ects of human life which seem to depend on these 
 ideas. 
 
 The nature of these results determines the special sense 
 which the term criticism assumes in Kant's hands. The 
 term originally describes merely the method of procedure, 
 but it naturally becomes descriptive also of the definite view 
 of the universe to which his method leads him. The critical 
 
 ' Time, Kant proves in the' Ilofutii- of time and space Leing necessary, the 
 tion of Idealism/ is knowablo only in limitation of knowledge is correctly de- 
 relation to space. He says elsewhere scribed in the text as limitation to the 
 that inner sense receives its whole fill- contents of space, 
 ing from outer sense. The correlation 
 
18 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 philosopher, accordingly, is one who clearly apprehends what 
 is implied in calling the deduction of the categories transcen- 
 dental, A transcendental deduction is one undertaken solely 
 with reference to experience — one which leaves us, therefore, 
 completely without justification for employing the deduced 
 conceptions in any other reference. And if it be considered 
 that experience in this connection implies for Kant the rela- 
 tion of the mind to an unknown object — means, in fact, the 
 application of the categories to the matter derived from that 
 object — it is evident that when the latter element falls away, 
 the conceptions must become so many empty words. Expe- 
 rience so conceived is called sense-experience, in order to 
 describe our partially receptive attitude and the compound 
 character of our knowledge. It yields us a knowledge only 
 of material things and their changes, and the attempt to 
 gain any other species of knowledge by means of the cate- 
 gories Kaiiij compares to the flapping of wings in the unsup- 
 porting void. Criticism means, then, the recognition of this 
 limitation, and it pronounces experience so limited to be 
 merely phenomenal in character. Experience actual and 
 possible represents, in other words, not things as they are in 
 themselves, but only a certain relation of the human mind 
 towards the world of reality. Our ignorance in this respect 
 is inevitable and final ; and if there are other avenues by 
 which — in the case of the Self and Grod — we may penetrate 
 to noumenal existence, yet the conviction we reach is not 
 such that we can rightly speak of it as knowledge. All 
 knowledge remains in the Kantian scheme phenomenal — 
 phenomenal in the sense that there is a reality behind, which 
 we do not know. 
 
 If now it be asked, by what right Kant draws the line 
 exactly where he does, and cuts off from knowledge every- 
 thing but a spatial world of interacting substances, the 
 answer must be that his conclusion depends ultimately on 
 his uncritical acceptance of the dualistic assumption of pre- 
 ceding philosophy. We express the same thing in another 
 form, when we say that the result is due to the attempt to 
 construct a theory of knowledge from the standpoint of 
 psychology. This standpoint brings with it the distinction 
 between ' sense,' as the source of knowledge, and ' under- 
 standing,' as a faculty of ' comparing, connecting, and sepa- 
 rating,' the material supplied by sense. This is Locke's 
 
UNIVERSIT 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AS CPvITICISM OF CATEGORl 
 
 distinction, and it is Kant's too.' Kant minimises the 
 tribution of sense ; he speaks of it on occasion as a mere blur, 
 and in itself no better than nothing at all. But the amount 
 referred to sense does not affect the principle of the distinc- 
 tion ; so far as it is made in this form at all, its consequences 
 will be essentially the same — either with Hume, the denial 
 that (so far as we know) any real world exists, or with Kant, 
 the denial that such a world can ever be revealed to us by 
 knowledge. Hence the importance of observing that the 
 distinction is not a deduction from the theory of knowledge, 
 but a presupposition drawn from another sphere. The divi- 
 sion of the mind into receptivity and spontaneity is the mere 
 correlate of that view of the universe from which the Kantian 
 criticism was ultimately destined to set us free — the view 
 which represents the relation of the world to consciousness 
 as a case of interaction between two substances. The effect 
 of the distinction on the form of the Kantian theory appears 
 in the separation of the Esthetic from the Analytic, and the 
 hard and fast line drawn in consequence between space and 
 time as forms of sensibility and the categories as functions of 
 the understanding. Kant gets the perceptive forms in the 
 Esthetic by an independent set of arguments, vv^hile in the 
 first part of the Analytic his categories seem to drop at his 
 feet as pure intellectual conceptions. Hence the categories 
 do not appear to him as limited or inadequate in their own 
 nature, but because of their subsequent association with sense 
 and its forms. It would be nearer the truth to say that 
 the Kantian categories are themselves the reason why the 
 world appears to us in space ; space is merely the abstraction 
 or the ghost of the world of interacting substances which 
 these categories present us with. If the Kantian categories 
 can give us nothing beyond a world of material things, the 
 defect is in their own intellectual quality and not in any 
 limitation extraneously attached to them. They are bonds 
 of connection, yet they may be said to leave the elements 
 
 guage looks like a reminiscence of this 
 pilSf^age, when he speaks of impressions 
 
 ' As it happens, Kant's phraseology 
 in. the opening paragraph of the Intro- 
 duction corresponds exactly with Locke's 
 account of knowledge given in Book II. 
 chap. xii. of the Essay. ' The materials 
 Ijeing such as he has no power over, 
 either to create or destroy, all that a 
 man can do is either to unite them to- 
 getlier, or to set them one l)y another, 
 or wholly separate them.' Kant's Ian- 
 
 producing ideas, and rousing * the faculty 
 of the understanding to compare, connect, 
 and separate these, and so to work up the 
 raw material of sensuous impressions 
 i n to a k nowl edge of obj ect s.' Of co u rs e 
 Kant's 'raw material ' turns out after- 
 wards not to mean so much as Locke's 
 ' simple ideas.' 
 
 c 2 
 
20 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 they connect still independent of one another. The cate- 
 gories of quantity, while in one sense they express a connec- 
 tion between all things, express even more emphatically the 
 complete indifference of every individual point to its neigh- 
 bours ; and though the categories of relation — summed up, 
 as they are, in reciprocity — undoubtedly express a system of 
 elements in which this mutual indifference is overcome, yet 
 the individuals brought into connection are not seen to have 
 any necessary relation to one another in the sense of being 
 members together of one whole. The individuals appear 
 endlessly determined by their relations to one another, but 
 there is involved in this very endlessness an unavoidable 
 sense of contingency. If we are to have a real whole and 
 real parts — parts, that is, whose existence can be understood 
 only through the whole that determines them — we must have 
 recourse to other categories than these. But the imperfect 
 relatedness just referred to is the essential mark of what we 
 call the world of sense ; and for a theory of knowledge, if it 
 retain the term sensible world, that world is definable simply 
 by this characteristic, and not by an imaginary reference of 
 its contents to an impressing cause. It is defined, in other 
 words, by the categories that constitute it, and by the re- 
 lation of these categories to the other modes in which the 
 mind endeavours to harmonise the world. With reference 
 / to Kant, then, the point to be insisted on is, that the cate- 
 ^ gories which he offers as the only categories are inherently 
 inadequate to express a synthesis more intimate than the 
 mutual relatedness + mutual externality of things in space. 
 The world, therefore, necessarily presents this aspect when 
 viewed solely by their light. They are not got independently 
 of sense (we might reply to Kant) and afterwards immersed 
 in it ; they are the categories of sense. Their true deduc- 
 tion is not from the table of logical judgments ; it is given in 
 the ' system of principles ' in the second part of the Analytic, 
 where they are proved to be the ultimate conditions on which 
 a coherent sense-experience depends. In Kant's technical 
 language, the categories do not require to be schematised, 
 because apart from schematisation they do not exist even 
 as conceptions. The conception of substance, for example, 
 means just that relation of a permanent to shifting (or con- 
 ceivably shifting) attributes which is familiar to us in the 
 sensible world. The logical relation of subject and predicate, 
 
PHILOSOPHY AS CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES. 21 
 
 which Kant seems to say is the pure category before it is 
 soiled by sense, is merely the image of this real relation 
 expressed in language.^ 
 
 There is thus no justification for a separation of space 
 from the categories, space being simply the ultimate appear- 
 ance of a world constructed oti these categories alone. When 
 this is admitted, the mere fact that we perceive things in 
 space is no imputation upon the reality of our knowledge. 
 In itself space is no limitation ; it is an intellectual bond, it 
 is one point of view from which we may represent the world 
 as one. This mode of knowledge becomes limited and unreal 
 only when it claims to be the ultimate aspect from which the 
 universe is to be regarded. The nature of space affords no 
 grounds then for a division of knowledge into absolutely 
 phenomenal and absolutely noumenal, such as we find in 
 Kant. The so-called phenomenal world of sense is as real 
 as the so-called noumenal world of ethics, that is to say, its 
 account of the universe is as legitimate so far as it goes ; 
 but to claim for either an absolute truth is the essential mark 
 of dogmatism, whether the claim be advanced by the man of 
 science or by the metaphysician. Both are accounts which 
 the mind gives to itself of the world, relatively justified points 
 of view from which experience may be rationalised. It is 
 the province of a theory of knowledge to point out the rela- 
 tion of the one point of view to the other, and, in general, 
 while showing the partial and abstract nature of any par- 
 ticular point of view, to show at the same time how it is 
 related to the ultimate or concrete conception of the universe 
 which alone admits of being thought out without self-con- 
 tradiction. The opposition between phenomenal and nou- 
 menal worlds is thus replaced by one between more abstract 
 and more concrete points of view. That is to say, the oppo- 
 sition itself is no longer of the rigid or absolute nature which 
 it was before. The truth of the one point of view does not 
 interfere with the truth of the other ; the higher may rather 
 be regarded as the completion or fulfilment of the lower. 
 
 Let us now see how far Kant helps us towards such a 
 philosophic conception. Reasons have been given for dis- 
 allowing his absolute limitation of knowledge by erecting 
 
 ' The relation of the table of logical matter of forced interpretation) is thus 
 judgments to the Kantian categuries seen to be rever8ed. 
 (where it actually exists and is not a 
 
22 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CrilTICISM. 
 
 behind it a realm of unknowables. These unknowables are 
 simply the impressing things of preceding philosophy, un- 
 critically assumed, and removed into a somewhat deeper 
 obscurity. But the theory which derives knowledge from 
 impressions is essentially a physiological theory which we, as 
 spectators, form of the rise of knowledge in an organised 
 individual placed in relation to a world which we already 
 describe under all the categories of knowledge. What we 
 observe is, strictly, an interaction between two things which 
 are themselves objects in a known world. And if we afterwards 
 extend inferentially to our own case the conclusions which 
 our observations suggest, we are still simply repeating the 
 picture of a known environment acting on a known organism. 
 The relation is between phenomenal things and a phenomenal 
 organism in which they set up affections, not between a tran- 
 scendent or metempirical somewhat and intelligence as such. 
 In other words, when we have framed our notion of the world, 
 and of our own position as individuals in it, we can give even 
 to such a misleading metaphor as impression a certain in- 
 telligible meaning ; but to step outside of the world of know- 
 ledge altogether and characterise it by reference to something 
 beyond itself — this is the type of all impossibility. Yet it is 
 no less than this that Kant and the neo-Kantians undertake 
 to do when they pronounce our knowledge phenomenal, im- 
 plying by that term the existence of something hidden from 
 us in its own transcendency. While adhering, therefore, in 
 the fullest ma.nner to Kant's position that the categories are 
 only of immanent use for the organisation of experience, we 
 deny altogether that the existence of transcendent entities 
 may be justly inferred from such a statement. Only to those 
 who are haunted by the ghosts of the old metaphysic can the 
 proposition appear in the light of a limitation of human 
 reason ; to others adhesion to Kant's position, so far as it 
 asserts immanence, becomes a matter of course. What they 
 combat in Kant's scheme is the assumption that his twelve 
 categories are the only categories implied in our experience, 
 and the belief, corresponding to this assumption, that they 
 give a completely coherent and exhaustive account of that 
 experience. 
 
 Kant himself, however, is prone to confess that expe- 
 rience is not exhausted by these categories, if by experience 
 is understood the whole life of man. The world of ethical 
 
I 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AS CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES. 23 
 
 action (to take his own crucial instance) remains completely 
 unintelligible when viewed from the standpoint of mechanism. 
 Determination by ends is the characteristic feature of this 
 world ; and action so determined cannot be understood, 
 Kant says, except under the idea of freedom. That is to 
 say, the attempt to explain it by the categories of natural 
 causality is equivalent to a denial of the existence of the facts 
 in question. Such a procedure means that in our levelling 
 zeal we obliterate the specific difference of two sets of facts ; 
 whereas in reality the difference is the fundamental feature 
 of the case which calls upon us for a rationale of its possi- 
 bility. Now it is matter of common knowledge that for 
 Kant himself moral experience was the reality. In the 
 Preface to the ' Critique of Practical Reason ' he speaks of 
 the idea of freedom as the ' topstone of the whole edifice of a 
 system of pure reason, speculative as well as practical ; and 
 no attentive reader of the first Critique can fail to notice the 
 vista ever and anon opened up of a world of supersensible 
 reality into which we are eventually to be carried by the 
 march of the argument. The whole critical scheme of sense- 
 experience is thereby invested with a palpably preparatory 
 character. Kant fully recognises, and indeed enforces, this 
 aspect of his work when he comes to review its scope and 
 method in the Preface to the second edition. The whole 
 investigation is there represented as merely ' making room ' 
 for the extension of our knowledge on the basis of practical 
 data ; criticism simply fulfils the function of ' a police force ' 
 in keeping the unregulated activity of the speculative reason 
 within bounds. It might well seem, then, as if, in going on 
 to treat the presuppositions of morality, we were merely 
 passing from one sphere of rational experience to another. 
 Kant's method, too, is essentially the same in all the three 
 Critiques. It is an analysis of certain experiences with 
 a view to determine the conditions of their possibility^ One 
 would expect, therefore, that the different sets of con- 
 ceptions to which his analysis leads him, would be treated 
 impartially, and on their own merits, or looked at merely in 
 their relation to one another as parts of one rational expla- 
 nation of experience. If there is no flaw in onr deduction 
 of the conceptions, it seems very like stultifying the tran- 
 scendental method to talk of differences between them in 
 respect of objective truth or validity. Kant, however, as is 
 
24 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CPITICISM. 
 
 well known, draws a variety of such distinctions. Thus, in 
 the * Critique of Judgment ' he finds the idea of organisation 
 to be as essential to a complete account of nature as he had 
 previously found the conception of substance to be for a 
 narrower range of experience. Yet he arbitrarily holds the 
 former to be of merely regulative utility — a fiction or con- 
 trivance of the mind to aid it in investigation — while the 
 latter is allowed to be constitutive of nature as such. And so 
 again Kant restricts the terms experience and knowledge to 
 the sense-phenomena of the first Critique, while the pre- 
 suppositions of ethical experience are made at most matters 
 of rational belief or moral certainty. It is impossible to 
 decorate the one with pre-eminent titles without a correspond- 
 ing disparagement of the others. The term experience is in 
 these circumstances a question-begging epithet. When such 
 distinctions are drawn, it inevitably tends to make men 
 regard the ' Critique of Pure Reason ' as alone embodying 
 Kant's substantive theory of the world. The categories of 
 life, of beauty, and of morality come to be looked on as 
 appendices of a more or less uncertain character, the accep- 
 tance or rejection of which does not interfere with the 
 finality of the categories of sense. This is unquestionably 
 the form in which Kantian results are most widely cur- 
 rent at present. It is a form for which Kant himself is 
 chiefly responsible, through his habit of ^ isolating ' differ- 
 ent spheres of experience for the purposes of his analysis, 
 and neglecting afterwards to exhibit their organic relation 
 to one another. None the less is it a form which ignores 
 explicit intimations like those quoted above from the two 
 Prefaces, and one which is based on that very notion of the 
 relation of mind to reality which Kant came to destroy. 
 After all, too much stress has probably been laid upon the 
 difference of nomenclature which Kant adopts, and it ought 
 to be remembered that though he refuses to call his moral 
 faith knowledge, he yet holds that it, and it alone, brings 
 him into contact with reality. 
 
 If we now return to Kant's account of the phenomenal 
 nature of our knowledge, and abstract altogether from the 
 illegitimate reference of our sense-objects to the transcen- 
 dental thing-in-itself , another meaning of the phenomenality 
 of sense-experience begins to emerge. The opposition is no 
 longer between the world of sense and its unknown correlate 
 
PinLOSOPHY AS CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES. 25 
 
 (or cause), but between the world of sense as nature or the 
 realm of causal necessity, and the 'intelligible world,' as 
 Kant calls it, or the realm of ends, in which the will deter- 
 mines itself by its own law. Noumenal personality and 
 freedom are reached in the notion of the self-legislative and 
 self-obedient will. The condemnation of phenomenality 
 comes upon the world of sense because of the contrast 
 which its externality of connected part and part offers to 
 the self-centred finality of a conception like the self-deter- 
 mining will. If this is not the meaning of phenomenality 
 which is most prominent in the ' Critique of Pure Reason,' 
 still it is continually appearing there also ; and in proportion 
 as it comes into the foreground, the other reference of objects 
 to their transcendental correlates tends to lose its importance 
 and almost to disappear. Anyone may convince himself of 
 this by turning to Kant's official chapter ' On the ground of 
 the division of all objects into phenomena and noumena.' 
 He will find that the conception of noumena or nbn- sensuous 
 objects is there defined as a ' GrenzbegrifF,' a limitative con- 
 ception, or, more exactly, as a conception which sets bounds 
 to the sphere of sense (ein die Sinnlichkeit in Schranken set- 
 zender Begriff). The conception is problematical, Kant says, 
 inasmuch as it does not give us a knowledge of intelligible 
 or non-sensuous objects as actually existing, but merely 
 affirms their possibility. Its utility lies in the fact that by it 
 we prevent sense-knowledge from laying claim to the whole of 
 reality. Evidently it would be unfair to interpret the term 
 problematical here as if Kant meant by using it to throw 
 doubt on the actual existence of what he sometimes calls ' the 
 non-sensuous cause ' of our ideas. ' In what other fashion 
 is it to be supposed that the knowing faculty should be 
 roused to exercise,' he might repeat, ' if not by objects which 
 affect our senses ? ' The question of the origin of the matter 
 of sense remains for Kant just where it was, but he is speak- 
 ing here in quite another connection, and that problem has 
 fallen out of view for the time. He is engaged in limiting 
 sense so as to ' make room ' for the mundus intelUgihilis which 
 he is afterwards to produce as guaranteed by the practical 
 reason. It is the existence of freedom and its implicates 
 that is declared to be, in the meantime, merely problematical. 
 The phrase intelligible world is never used by Kant, so far 
 as I know, except of the world of ethically determined 
 
26 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 agents — an additional proof that we are right in attributing 
 to him here a point of view which judges the inadequacy of 
 sense not bj reference to a somewhat beyond the confines 
 of intelligible experience altogether, but by reference to a 
 higher phase of experience itself. The lower point of view 
 is not, strictly speaking, abolished by the higher, but it is 
 perceived that to try to take the sensible world absolutely or 
 by itself would be to render it unintelligible. Isolated in this 
 way, the world of interacting substances would have all the 
 irrationality of a series that cannot be summed, of multi- 
 plicity without unity, of externality without internality. It 
 is impossible, in Kant's language, to treat nature as an end 
 in itself, as something there on its own account ; yet reason 
 demands this notion of the self-sufficing and self-justifying, 
 as that in which alone it can rest. Kant recognises that it 
 is only intelligence, and especially intelligence in its moral 
 aspect, that supplies the lacking notion ; nature itself, he 
 says, assumes a unity which does not otherwise belong to it, 
 and becomes a ' realm ' or system, when viewed in relation 
 to rational beings as its ends.^ 
 
 It is thus on account of its incomplete and self-less 
 character that the mundus sensihilis appears phenomenal, 
 when regarded from the standpoint of the intelligible world. 
 And reason is compelled, Kant says, to pass beyond the 
 phenomenal and occupy such a standpoint, ' if we are not to 
 deny to man the consciousness of himself as intelligence, i.e., 
 as rational and through reason active, which is to say, a 
 free cause.' ^ The importance of the change in the point 
 of view can hardly be over-estimated. Self-consciousness is 
 here put forward explicitly as the one noumenon to which all 
 phenomena are referred, and by which they are, as it were, 
 judged and declared to be phenomenal. This is the real Co- 
 pernican change of standpoint which Kant effected, or at 
 least which he puts us in the way of effecting ; and it must 
 be pronounced fundamental, seeing that it reverses the whole 
 notion of reality on which the old metaphysic was built. The 
 dominating categories of philosophy in the present day are 
 still, it is to be feared, those of inner and outer, substance and 
 quality, or in their latest and most imposing garb, noumenon 
 
 ' Of. Gmndlegung zur Metaphysik ^ ]Ycrke, IV. 306. The expression 
 
 der Sittcn. Wcrke, IV. 286 (eel. Harten- * Stundpunkt ' is used by Kant himself, 
 stein). ■ 
 
PHILOSOPHY AS CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES. 27 
 
 and phenomenon. And these are so interpreted as to repre- 
 sent the intellect clinging round the outside of things, getting 
 to know only the surface of the world, and pining and wailing 
 for the revelation of that intense reality, the ' support of 
 accidents,' which yet is unrevealable, and mocks our cries. A 
 true metaphysic teaches that if we so conduct ourselves, we 
 do in very truth ' pine for what is not.' This unapproachable 
 reality is entirely a fiction of the mind; there is nothing trans- 
 cendent, no unknowable, if we once see that a phenomenal 
 world is a permissible phrase only when taken to mean some- 
 thing in which reason cannot rest, and that the ultimate 
 noumenon is to be found in self-consciousness, or in the notion 
 of knowledge and its corollaries. The centre of the world lies 
 then in our own nature as self-conscious beings, and in that 
 life with our fellows which, in different aspects, constitutes 
 alike the secular and the divine community. The spirit 
 fostered by physical science, and the mood familiar to all of 
 us — the mood which weighs man's paltry life and its concerns 
 against the * pomp of worlds ' and the measureless fields of 
 space — is in reality less philosophical than that of the poet 
 and humanist to whom this pomp is barren save as the back- 
 ground of the human drama. Ordinary people get most of 
 their metaphysics through religion or through poetry, and 
 they probably often come nearer the truth in that way than 
 if they went to the professed philosophers. 
 
 Kant's ethics are part therefore of the strength and not 
 of the weakness of their author. They are not to be re- 
 garded as a calling in of faith to repair the breaches of 
 knowledge ; on the contrary, they are founded on Kant's 
 deepest philosophical conceptions. But for all that, the 
 superstructure contains much questionable material ; and as 
 we are not engaged in a process of hermeneutics, it is essen- 
 tial to arrive for ourselves at a general notion of how the 
 ethical point of view stands related to the mechanical. This 
 will serve as an illustration of the main thesis of the essay, 
 the distinction of categories or points of view. It is at the 
 same time the more necessary in the present case as Kant 
 has expressed the relation chiefly by negations, and has left 
 the sensible and intelligible systems separated by an appar- 
 ently impassable gulf. The positive predicate of freedom 
 which he applies to the ethical world is, on the other hand, 
 so ambiguous, and to men of scientific training so ominous, 
 
28 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 that it has been more productive of misconception than of 
 enlightenment. It may be said at once, then, that if Kant's 
 account of freedom contains anything which seems to lift 
 man, as it were, out of all the influences and surroundings 
 that make him what he is, and from this height makes him 
 hurl a decisive and solely self-originated fiat into the strife of 
 motives beneath — then, undoubtedly, this idea is not only at 
 variance with the teaching of physical and social science, but 
 is fatal to all rational connection in the universe. But the 
 self in such a conception is a bare unit, an abstraction which 
 has no existence in fact. So long as we take up with such 
 notions of the self, we must inevitably seem to be battered 
 about by the shocks of circumstance. The man whose self 
 could be emptied of all its contents and reduced to this atomic 
 condition would be, in a strict sense, no more than the moving 
 point which exemplifies the composition of forces. In re- 
 ducing the abstract self to this position, and so abolishing it, 
 determinism is entirely within its rights ; it is in vain that 
 the upholders of ' free-will ' try to save for this self even a 
 power of directing attention on one motive rather than 
 another. But happily the real self is not this ghost of 
 argumentative fancy. A man cannot be separated from the 
 world which lies about him from his infancy — and long before 
 it — moulding him after its own image, and supplying him 
 with all sorts of permanent motives in the shape of creeds 
 and laws, customs and prejudices, creating, in a word, the 
 concrete personality we are held to refer to when, in ordinary 
 speech, we name this or the other individual. The self- 
 conscious individual is not something identical with himself 
 alone, and different from everything else ; he is not even 
 exclusive as one thing in nature is exclusive of other things. 
 The whole past and the whole present are transformed, as it 
 were, by self-consciousness into its own nature. A man's 
 motives do not seem to him, therefore, to come to him from 
 without ; they are the suggestions of his good or evil self. 
 And if he reviews his past experience, when his self, as others 
 might sa}', was in the making, he cannot himself take this 
 external view. It is impossible to him because it abolishes 
 the one presupposition from which he cannot depart; it 
 abolishes himself. Much rather he will say that he has 
 made himself what he is ; he identifies himself necessarily 
 with all his past, and of every deed he can say ' Alone I did 
 
PIIILOSOPHY AS CIIITICISM OF CATEGORIES. 29 
 
 it.' In short, thougli the external view with its tabulation 
 of motives may be useful for statistical purposes, and may 
 yield scientific results that are not to be despised, it is abso- 
 lutely valueless in ethics or the explanation of moral experi- 
 ence as such. The presupposition of ethical action, as of 
 intelligence generally, is the Ego. It is true that, as ex- 
 plained above, we do not suppose the Ego in action to bring 
 an inexplicable force into play any more than we suppose it, 
 as intellect, to add any determinations to things which were 
 not there already. But just as any metaphysic which does 
 not base itself on self-consciousness, as the fundamental pre- 
 supposition and the supreme category of thought, is forced 
 openly or tacitly to deny the conscious life, so a science of 
 ethics which does not assume as its basis the self-determina- 
 tion of the rational being, remains outside of moral experi- 
 ence altogether. Moral experience consists entirely in this 
 self-reference ; if this be destroyed the whole ethical point of 
 view vanishes. Let us contrast with this the point of view 
 of physical science from which we started. From this 
 standpoint every moral action is simply an event, and as an 
 event forms a term in a series of mechanical transformations. 
 This is certainly one way of regarding the actions in question ; 
 they are such events, and for science that is the legitimate 
 and true method of treating them. All that we contend is 
 that the scientific explanation does not exhaust their signifi- 
 cance ; so far as they are actions, that is, related to the 
 moral consciousness, it gives no account of them at all. The 
 world of ethics is superimposed therefore upon that of 
 science, not as contradicting it, but as introducing a totally 
 new order of conceptions, by which actions which are for 
 science mere factual units in a series, become elements in a 
 life guided by the notion of end or ought. Their sole ethical 
 meaning is in relation to this ideally judging consciousness, 
 and to that extent they cease to be facts conditioned by 
 other facts. The ethical consciousness identifies itself with 
 each of its actions, and each therefore is immediately re- 
 ferred to the standard of duty. Ethically, that is to say, the 
 action is not referred backward in time to the circumstances 
 and predispositions of which, as. motives, it is the legitimate 
 outcome ; but the man brings his action face to face with a 
 ' Thou shalt,' which he finds within him,* and according to 
 
 ' The ' matter ' which the law commands, depends of course upon his social 
 
30 ESSAYS IN rniLOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 its conformity or want of conformit}^ with this law he ap- 
 proves or condemns his conduct. The former method of 
 looking at his actions is appropriate to a spectator — a 
 psychologist, a statistician, a scientific educator, &c. — but 
 not to the man himself. As soon as an individual begins to 
 seek excuses for his fault by showing how ' natural ' it was 
 in the circumstances, he has fallen from the ethical point of 
 view. He is assuming the position of a spectator or scientific 
 observer, and however justifiable this standpoint may be for 
 others, it certainly means the destruction of the ethical con- 
 sciousness in him who deliberately adopts it in his own 
 regard. The proper category of ethics is not cause and effect, 
 bat end, with its correlative obligation. 
 
 The world of ethical ends, however, is only one of the 
 conceptions or points of view by which reason makes the world 
 intelligible to itself ; and by treating it as the sole antithesis 
 of the world of sense, Kant ran the risk, as was hinted above, 
 of falling into a fresh dualism. It is not even well to 
 speak of the one as 'intelligible' by pre-eminence, lest the 
 sensible world lose its reference to consciousness altogether. 
 We might do worse than recall in this connection Kant's 
 demonstration of the intellectual elements in sense-experi- 
 ence. We do not get ' facts ' given to us in the mechanical 
 scheme of science, and in ethics a point of view from which 
 to regard this factual world. Bare facts in this sense have 
 no existence save for an abstract thought which conceives 
 them as the pegs on which relations may be hung. The 
 process of knowledge does not consist in the discovery of such 
 individua, but in the progressive overthrowal of such ideas 
 of the nature of the actual. In this process the scientific 
 account of things forms one of the ways in which the mind 
 seeks to present the world as an intelligible whole ; it is a 
 theorising of the world, and, as it turns out, the theorising is 
 incomplete and ultimately contradicts itself. Such considera- 
 tions prepare us to expect a progress by more gradual stages 
 from the less to the more complete conception of the universe 
 than is found in Kant's great leap from mechanism to 
 morality. Here again Kant helps us on the way. The 
 ' Critique of Judgment,' according to his own account of it, 
 
 environment and his past ; but the involved in the most rudimentary notion 
 * form ' of law exists wherever conscious- of society, 
 ness exists, since riglits and duties are 
 
PHILOSOPHY AS CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES. 31 
 
 is intended to bridge over the gulf between the world of the 
 understanding, outlined in the first Critique, and the world of 
 reason or of free determination, outlined in the second. There 
 is as usual much that is artificial in the scheme of faculties 
 with which Kant connects his investigation. So far as we 
 are concerned here, the best method of approaching the 
 ' Critique of Judgment ' is simply by reference to the aspects 
 of nature which it endeavours to explain. Its importance lies 
 in its recognition of certain points of view which are con- 
 tinually recurring in our contemplation of the world, but 
 which find no place in the critical idea of nature. These 
 are the aesthetic and the teleological judgment of things, or, 
 in less technical language, the phenomena of beauty and of 
 organisation.^ 
 
 The weakness of the book lies in the presupposition on 
 which it proceeds, that the record of objectivity has been 
 definitively closed in the first Critique. In other words, Kant 
 believes knowledge to be limited by the imagination ; nothing 
 is real (in the domain of knowledge) unless what can be con- 
 structed in relations of space. Now the ' Critique of Judgment ' 
 consists virtually in the production of two sets of negative in- 
 stances ; a living body and an object considered as beautiful are 
 not exhausted in the space-relations which constitute them. 
 Imagination knows only parts that are external to one another, 
 and to that extent independent of one another ; but in the 
 organism this externality and independence disappear. The 
 parts are only parts through the whole of which they are 
 parts. Part and whole acquire, in fact, a meaning in which 
 their necessary correlation is for the first time apparent — a 
 correlation or union so intimate as to be inadequately ex- 
 pressed by terms which contain, like part and whole, a 
 quantitative suggestion. Similarly the category of cause 
 breaks down when applied to the organism, for all the parts 
 are mutually cause and effect; and the organism as a whole 
 is at once its own cause and its own effect {causa sui). It 
 organises itself. In all this Kant's description of organic 
 phenomena is unexceptionable ; he pleads the case well 
 against himself. But unfortunately the negative instances 
 he produces did not lead to a recasting of his theory. They 
 
 ' To avoid confusion, the signifi- notion of the world, is not touched upon 
 cance of the aesthetic judgment, or of in the present essay, 
 the categories of art, for our ultimate 
 
32 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CHITICISM. 
 
 only led to a fresh distinction. The new aspects of natare 
 could not be recognised as constitutive or objectively valid, 
 but they might be accepted as regulative points of view for 
 the investigation of phenomena. But as there is no ground 
 for this distinction except in presuppositions which have 
 been shown to be irrelevant, we shall make no scruple of 
 ignoring it, and treating the relation of organism to mechan- 
 ism not as subjectivity to objectivity but as a more adequate 
 to a less adequate interpretation of the same facts. 
 
 It must be observed that the notion of organism given 
 above constitutes no assertion of the existence of a vital force 
 as a separate cause of the phenomena of life. This is the 
 kind of deduction which metaphysicians of the kind that 
 have brought the name into disrepute were quick to draw. 
 But it is easy to see that by explanations of this sort we are 
 just setting up a duplicate of the thing to be explained, or 
 in other words, hypostatising it as its own cause. Besides, 
 when the physiologist comes to close quarters with a 
 living body, he finds everywhere a mechanism of parts 
 connected with one another and communicating with the 
 surrounding world. Motion is handed on from one member 
 of this system to another without the intervention of any 
 other than mechanical contrivances; and so far from a 
 necessity arising for a transcendent cause, there is nowhere 
 a gap to be found in the circle of mechanical motions where 
 its introduction could be effected. The physiologist, in short, 
 in describing the action of the different parts of the organism, 
 is in precisely the same position as the psychologist in giving 
 an account of mental states and processes. The empirical 
 psychologist analyses the most complex states into their 
 elements, and builds up ethical and religious sentiment out 
 of simple desires and aversions, and all by a process essen- 
 tially mechanical, without any reference to the unity of the 
 conscious life for which these states exist. Just as the 
 psychologist has neither occasion nor right to consider any 
 special power which he calls the Ego, so the physiologist in 
 the case of the organism. He works within the conditions of 
 organic existence, as the psychologist within those of con- 
 sciousness, but neither requires for the purposes of his 
 special science to make any explicit reference to these con- 
 ditions. Hence it comes that physiology, so far as it treats 
 the living body as a whole, represents it as merely a mecha- 
 
PiriLOSOPIIY AS CRITICISM OF CATEGORim^v/ §13 '-'-^ 
 
 nical conjunction of parts in space. The abstraction is iiM======^ 
 
 only defensible but necessary ; none the less, however, is it 
 a complete abstraction from the si^^nificance of the same 
 parts viewed as members of a living system. Viewed organi- 
 cally, or in their relation to the whole, they are seen to be 
 mutually implicative, and, within certain liriits, mutually 
 creative. The presuppositions of mechanism are so far over- 
 thrown that at the organic standpoint the mutual exclusive- 
 ness of the parts disappears ; the organism, qyid organism, is 
 not in space at all. If we persist, therefore, in looking at the 
 parts abstractly or in their separateness, and if we tender this 
 as the complete account of them, we are leaving out of sight 
 the very fact which constitutes the phenomenon to be ex- 
 plained.^ 
 
 So far from mechanism being objective and the notion, of 
 organism only subjective, we should be compelled, if we were 
 in the way of talking in this strain, to reverse the relation. 
 For even as applied to so-called mechanical things, if the 
 category of causality be thought out into reciprocity, and if 
 reciprocity be conceived as complete, the result is that we 
 arrive at a closed circle of perfect mutual conditionedness, in 
 which all play of actual causality is brought to a standstill. 
 The universe becomes like the sleeping palace of Dornroschen : 
 there is no point where movement might be introduced into 
 this dead picture. We sublate in this way the conceptions 
 with which we started, and only find the contradiction solved 
 for us (at least temporarily) in the notion of the organism. 
 
 If the categories of reciprocity and abstract individuality 
 fail us in speaking of the living body, still less will they serve 
 us when we come to treat of conscious individuals and what 
 is called the social organism. Step by step we have combated 
 the intellectual vice of abstraction, but it is when we reach 
 self-consciousness that the nature of this fault becomes fully 
 a-pparent. When we examine the conceptions of ordinary 
 and scientific thought in the light thrown upon them by that 
 supreme category of which they are all the imperfect reflec- 
 tions, the whole series of stages from which the individual 
 knower views the world appears as a gradual deliverance from 
 an abstract individualism, or, as Spinoza said, from the 
 imaginative thought that insists on taking the individual as 
 a thing by itself. When we reach the only true individual, 
 
 ^^B' Cf. the working out of this point iu the second essay of this volume, pp 62-60. 
 
 I 
 
34 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 the self-conscious being, we find that individuality is not the 
 exclusive thing we had imagined it to be. The self is indi- 
 vidual only to the extent that it is at the same time universal. 
 It knows itself, i.e., it is itself, just because it includes within 
 its knowledge not only one particular self, as an object in 
 space and time, but also a whole intelligible world embracing 
 many such selves. A mere individual, supposed for a moment 
 possible, would be a self-less point ; and it was the assump- 
 tion of the reality of such self-less points that led us into 
 contradiction at a lower stage. In the notion of the self we 
 find that what is outside of, or different from, a man in the 
 narrow sense, yet enters into and constitutes his self in such 
 a way that, without it, he would cease to be anything more 
 than the imaginary point just referred to. The individual is 
 individualised only by his relations to the totality of the in- 
 telligible world. In a more restricted sense, his individuality 
 is constituted by the social organism of which he is a member ; 
 he cannot be an individual except so far as he is a member 
 of society. If this is the relation of society to the individual, 
 it is at once apparent how false any theory must be which 
 tries to take the individual as a mere individual, and regards 
 society as an aggregate of such beings combined together 
 for mutual advantage. The doctrine of laissez-faire and the 
 theory of the police-state are immediate deductions from the 
 individualistic premisses. It is natural from such a point of 
 view that the State should be treated as a mechanism external 
 to the individuals, and constructed by them merely that they 
 may live at ease and enjoy their goods. But the logic of 
 practice refutes both these principles. The economic doctrine 
 has been largely modified even by those who promulgated it, 
 little as their professed philosophical principles give them a 
 right to do so ; and the external view of the State is refuted 
 not only by its practical action in numberless spheres of life, 
 but by every patriotic emotion that passes over individuals 
 or peoples. If the State is the artificial aggregate it is 
 represented as being, how shall we explain Shakespeare's 
 impassioned apostrophe to • 
 
 This happy breed of men, this little world, 
 
 This precious stone set in the silver sea . . . 
 
 This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England . . . 
 
 This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land. 
 
 This little ivorkl- a more felicitous phrase could hardly be de- 
 
i 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AS CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES. 35 
 
 sired to describe what the true State must always be to its 
 citizens. The State is not Leviathan, as Ilobbes supposed, 
 swallowing up the individual, but the ethical cosmos into 
 which he is born, and by which his relation to the wider 
 cosmos of universal experience is mediated. These, however, 
 are considerations which are insisted upon elsewhere in the 
 present volume, and which are being recognised, one is glad 
 to see, in other quarters, even though it be as yet without a 
 consciousness of their ultimate philosophical bearing. Still 
 we are not entitled to depart from individualistic metaphysics 
 in one point unless we recognise the fallaciousness of its method 
 everywhere. We need not fear by so doing to sacrifice what 
 are called the rights of individuality. Socialism, for ex- 
 ample, is the recoil from individualism, not the refutation of 
 it. Individualism and socialism are alike refuted by the 
 true notion of self-consciousness, which combines all-inclu- 
 siveness with intensest concentration in a way which might 
 have seemed impossible, had we been engaged in an abstract 
 argument and not simply in an analysis of concrete reality. 
 While this notion is held fast, the members in whom the 
 social organism is realised will not cease to know themselves 
 as personalities, and to demand that the free play of their 
 lives be not sacrificed to imaginary needs of the body ]}olitic. 
 Our whole criticism of categories thus leads us up to the 
 notion of self- consciousness or knowledge. Here we may 
 connect ourselves for the last time with Kant. The short- 
 comings of his theory of knowledge have been, somewhat 
 severely criticised in the earlier part of the essay. It has 
 been seen that he vitiated his analysis to a great extent by 
 confusing a psychological or a spectator's account of the 
 growth of knowledge with a transcendental analysis of its 
 conditions. It has also been shown how the presuppositions 
 that sprang from this confusion prevented him from seeing 
 the mutual relations of the categories in their true light as 
 simply stages or phases of explanation (of greater or less 
 abstractness) which necessarily supersede one another in the 
 development of knowledge. But in spite of the absolute 
 line which Kant drew at reciprocity, he explicitly announced 
 he emancipation of the category of categories — the unity of 
 pperception — from the dominion of the conceptions which 
 were its own creatures. It can be compassed, he says, by 
 none of them ; it can be known only through itself. Know- 
 
 i> 2 
 
36 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CraTIClSM. 
 
 ledge is related as such to au universally synthetic principle 
 which calls itself ^ 1/ and which is described by Kant as the 
 transcendental Ego to distinguish it from the empirical con- 
 sciousnesses which constitute, as it were, the matter of this 
 formal unity. Kant's view of this unity as merely logical 
 and merely human prevented him from recognishig that he 
 had found the true noumenon here as well as in the ethical 
 sphere. Nevertheless his assertion of the unity of the sub- 
 ject as the ultimate principle of thought leads directly to the 
 conception of knowledge as necessarily organic to a subject, 
 and as constituting in this form the complete Fact from which 
 all so-called facts are only abstractions. Here the line 
 between dogmatism and criticism may be drawn withont 
 prejudice to Kant's essential meaning. Dogmatism, or the 
 use of uncriticised conceptions, means practically the un- 
 questioning application of the categories of mechanism to the 
 relation between consciousness and things. Mind and matter 
 are hypostatised, and the category of reciprocity is employed 
 to describe their union in knowledge. How far Kant was him- 
 self a dogmatist in this sense has been already considered ; at 
 all events the whole of modern philosophy before Kant is based 
 upon this conception. ' In order to make his theory work,' 
 says Professor Eraser in his recent notice of Locke in the 
 ' Encyclopsedia Britannica,' ^he (Locke) begins by assuming 
 a hypothetical duality beneath phenomena — some phenomena 
 referable to external things, others referable to the con- 
 scious self — and in fact confesses that this dual experience is 
 the ultimate fact, the denial of which would make it impos- 
 sible to speak about the growth and constitution of our 
 thoughts.' It is to be noted that what is spoken of is not a 
 duality with reference to knowledge— in which case know- 
 ledge itself would be the ultimate fact ; there is an assump- 
 tion of two facts or things out of whose (contingent) relation 
 to one another a third fact arises as something additional. 
 The derivative fact acts as a kind of mirror in which actuality, 
 consisting of the first two facts, is reflected. Now if we start 
 with the notion of a self- existent self (an entity which, what- 
 ever it is, cannot by any chance be a self) and a self-existent 
 world, it is easy to make a watershed of experience in the 
 fashion indicated, and so to appear to establish the hypo- 
 thetical duality with which we started. This, as Professor 
 Eraser says, is what Locke did; and all psychological 
 
PHILOSOPHY AS CRITICISM OF CATEGOHIES. 37 
 
 philosophy does so still. As it becomes more acute, specula- 
 tion is necessarily led, as idealism or materialism, to dissolve 
 one of these substances into a series of changes in the other, 
 while scepticism calmly points out to both disputants that 
 the arguments which apply in the one case apply in the 
 other also. But idealism, materialism, and Humism have 
 meaning only with reference to the assumption of a duality 
 of self- existing substances to which experience is referred as 
 to its causes. They exist as the denial of one of the factors, 
 or as the assertion of the impossibility of proving either, but 
 they do not attack the abstraction on which this hypothesis 
 of dual existence was originally founded. Hume is a sceptic 
 because he cannot prove either mind or matter to be real in 
 the sense in which Cartesian and Lockian metaphysics under- 
 stood reality. But if such realities are no more than fictions 
 of abstract thought, then a sceptical disproof of our knowledge 
 of them is so far from being a final disproof of the possibility 
 of any real knowledge that it is rather to be taken as indis- 
 pensably preliminary to the attainment of a true notion of 
 what reality is. 
 
 Such a notion is attainable only through a transcendental 
 analysis of knowledge — an analysis, that is, which shall 
 regard knowledge simply as it is in itself, without any pre- 
 suppositions of existences which give rise to it. An analysis 
 of this sort, so far as it remains true to its transcendental 
 standpoint, will not be tempted to substantiate the conditions 
 of knowledge apart from the' synthesis in which it finds 
 them. It will simply relate them to one another as different 
 elements in, or better perhaps, as different aspects of, the 
 one concrete reality. This is why Kant's treatment of the 
 ' I think ' is so different from Descartes' procedure with his 
 ' Cogifco.' Kant, like Descartes, finds the presupposition of 
 knowledge and of intelligible existence in an ' I think ' ; but 
 he never forgets that it is only in relation to the world, or 
 as the synthesis of intelligible elements, that the self exists 
 or can have a meaning. A world without this unifying 
 principle would fall asunder into unrelated particulars ; the 
 synthetic principle itself, apart from the world which it unifies, 
 would be no more than the barren identity, 1 = 1. Even this 
 consciousness of self-identity is reached only through the 
 synthesis of objects to which it stands in relation. This 
 necessity of correlation may be treated without injus.tice as 
 
38 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 the fundamental feature of the transcendental method. So 
 far is it from being a figure of speech that the self exists 
 only through the world and vice versa, that we might say with 
 equal truth the self is the world and the world is the self. 
 The relation between them is that of a subject to its predicate 
 when the predication is supposed to be exhaustive. The subject 
 is identical with its completed predicate without remainder. 
 So the self and the world are only two sides of the same 
 reality ; they are the same intelligible world looked at from 
 two opposite points of view. But, finally, it must not be for- 
 gotten that it is only from the point of view of the self or 
 subject that the identity can be grasped ; this, therefore, is 
 the ultimate point of view which unifies the whole. 
 
 It will easily be understood that, in speaking thus of the 
 self of knowledge, abstraction is made from any particular 
 self in experience. No one who has mastered Kant's dis- 
 tinction between the transcendental and the empirical Ego 
 is likely to have any difficulty here. At the same time, the 
 theory of knowledge makes no assertion of the existence of 
 the transcendental self otherwise than as the form of these 
 empirical individuals. To raise the question of existence in 
 this shape is to fall back once more into mechanical or spatial 
 categories, and to treat the ultimate synthesis of thought as 
 if it were a thing that could exist here or there. Separate 
 facts, however, are the type of reality only to that abstract 
 thought which has faced us in every sphere. The trans- 
 cendental self, as the implicate of all experience, is, for a 
 theory of knowledge, simply the necessary point of view 
 from which the universe can be unified, that is, from which 
 it becomes an universe. 
 
 Thus the Kantian criticism with its claim to map out 
 knowledge and ignorance has assumed under our hands the 
 less pretentious form of a criticism of categories. The at- 
 tempt is no longer made to determine the validity of reason 
 as such ; the trustworthiness of knowledge is and must be 
 an assumption. But this does not mean that every reasoned 
 conclusion is true. Knowledge is not a collection of facts 
 known as such once for all, and to which we afterwards add 
 other facts, extending our knowledge as we might extend an 
 estate by adding acre to acre. This is not a true picture 
 of the march of knowledge. On the contrary, every advance 
 of science is a partial refutation of what we supposed we 
 
PHILOSOI>HY AS CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES. 39 
 
 knew ; we undertake in every new scientific theory a criticism 
 and rectification of the conceptions on which the old was 
 constructed. On the largest scale the advance of knowledge 
 is neither more nor less than a progressive criticism of its 
 own conceptions. And, as we have seen, this is not all. 
 Besides the continual self-criticism carried on by the indi- 
 vidual sciences, there is the criticism which one science or 
 department of inquiry passes upon another. The science of 
 life cannot move hand or foot without the category of 
 development, which in its biological acceptation is foreign to 
 the inorganic world ; and the science of conduct is founded 
 upon the notion of duty, of which the whole world of nature 
 knows nothing. But so long as this mutual criticism is left 
 in the hands of the separate sciences themselves, it tends to 
 degenerate into a strife in which there is no umpire. Philo- 
 sophy, as theory of knowledge, can alone arbitrate between 
 the combatants, by showing the relation of the different 
 points of view to one another, and allowing to each a sphere 
 of relative justification. When physical science, for ex- 
 ample, begins to formulate its own results and to put them 
 forward as an adequate theory of the universe, it is for philo- 
 sophy to step in and show how these results depend entirely 
 upon preconceptions drawn from a certain stage of know- 
 ledge and found to be refuted in the further progress of 
 thought. Philosophy in the capacity of a science of thought 
 should possess a complete survey of its categories and of their 
 dialectical connection ; but this ' Wissenschaft der Logik ' 
 will probably never be completely written. In the mean- 
 time it is perhaps better if philosophy, as critic of the 
 sciences, is content to derive its matter from them and to 
 prophesy in part. Examples of this progress and connection 
 among conceptions or points of view have been given in the 
 preceding pages, and whether we apply to them the name 
 dialectic or not is of little matter. This critical office in 
 which philosophy acts, as it were, as the watch-dog of know- 
 ledge is important enough not to compromise the dignity 
 even of the queen of the sciences. She is critic not only of 
 the special sciences, but especially of all metaphysics and 
 systems of philosophy. 
 
 Most men of science believe that metaphysics consists in 
 the elaboration of transcendent entities like an extraneous 
 Deity, or Mr. Spencer's Unknowable, or the Comtian noumena. 
 
40 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 But the theory of knowledge teaches us that all such con- 
 structions in the void have their genesis in a belief that the 
 substance is something different from all its qualities, or that 
 the cause is not identical with the sum of its effects. We 
 learn, on the contrary, that cause and effect, substance and 
 quality, and aU similar conceptions are not names for two 
 different things, but necessary aspects of the same object, 
 and that therefore, when we are dealing, not with limited 
 objects, but with the universe as the synthesis of all objects, 
 it is a mere repetition to invent a cause of this synthesis. 
 To be delivered from bad metaphysics is the first step and 
 the most important one towards the true conception of the 
 science. True metaphysic lies, as we have tried to show, in 
 that criticism of experience which aims at developing out of 
 the material of science and of life the completed notion of 
 experience itself. 
 
 Andeew Seth. 
 
41 
 
 II. 
 
 THE RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY TO SCIENCE, 
 
 While the Berkeleian reduction of esse to percipi has become 
 matter of common knowledge among educated men, students 
 of philosophy have of late years grown familiar with a line 
 of criticism of an order more penetrative if more pre- 
 tentious. The point of this criticism may be defined in its 
 own somewhat uncouth language, as a claim to have 
 exhibited even the simplest phases of sensation as possible 
 only through the operation of an intelligible synthesis which 
 cannot itself be made an object of experience, because only 
 through it is experience possible. And just as the Berkeleian 
 principle has come to be regarded as amounting to little 
 more than a rather barren truism, so the criticism of ex- 
 perience is often treated with a considerable decrease of 
 respect arising from its vagueness. But while both principles 
 suffer from the too great generality of their terms, they may 
 claim, each in its own way, to have effected in speculative 
 thinking revolutions of a sufficiently definite character. The 
 influence of Berkeleian empiricism without and within the 
 field of philosophy is currently and adequately recognised. 
 It is the object of these pages briefly to sketch out one 
 branch of the case on behalf of the theory of knowledge. 
 
 Kant gave a new significance to the old question whether 
 knowledge was limited by imagination, that is, actual or pos- 
 sible presentation under the forms of space or time. Experi- 
 ence for bim implied two elements equally radical and logically 
 independent of each other, but of which it was a gross mis- 
 understanding to speak as separable in any other sense. In 
 the constitution of experience it was implied that transcen- 
 dental thought (thought which itself could never as such 
 become the object of experience) should operate as a synthetic 
 activity in the pure forms of space and time. Only through 
 
42 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 sucli a logical combination was the real constituted, and 
 except in space and time there could be no real. It followed 
 from this that knowledge was for Kant limited by imagination, 
 or in other words, that what could not be represented as 
 constituted by relations of space or time was not real. But 
 the real, or experience, was only an element in Kant's system. 
 There was at the other extreme the moral universe of which 
 it was the characteristic that it ought to be but was not — 
 that it must remain an unrealizable creature of reason. 
 Obviously the universe, that is, every possible object of know- 
 ledge in the wider meaning of the word, was not exhausted 
 by these two conceptions. Between them came the subject 
 matter of what Kant called the criticism of judgment — those 
 aesthetic and (in the Aristotelian sense) teleological relations 
 of which it was the characteristic that while they could not 
 be expressed in terms of space or time, they were yet real in 
 the sense that the real universe of perception necessarily 
 suggested them to thought, and never was, as a matter of 
 fact, conceived wholly apart from them. 
 
 Kant's meaning may perhaps best be illustrated by a 
 reference to another part of his system. Experience is, for 
 him, constituted in twelve fundamental modes of the synthesis 
 of thought. But there is no object in experience which can 
 be conceived as constituted in one or more of these modes to 
 the exclusion of the rest. They are only logically separable. 
 When we say of something that it is a cause or a substance, 
 we are simply abstracting, for the purpose of clearness of 
 individual knowledge, from its other relations. That which 
 in one reference presents itself as cause or substance, in 
 others presents itself as quantity or quality. But just 
 because finite mind {i.e. for Kant, mind which has by making 
 itself its own object, or becoming self-conscious, limited itself 
 in space and time after the fashion of objects in general) is 
 incapable of attending to any other than a limited aspect of 
 its object at one time, we speaJc as though the object were 
 only a cause or a substance, a quantity or a quality. Atten- 
 tion is in short concentrated on one relation in actual or 
 possible perception, to the exclusion of others. So it is with 
 the sesthetic and teleological aspects of things. It is true 
 that they exist only for thought or judgment in the meaning 
 in v^hich it is distinguished from actual or possible percep- 
 tion, and cannot be realised in space and time, but they are 
 
I 
 
 THE RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY TO SCIENCE. 43 
 
 just as inseparable from the object of perception as are those 
 other categories which are abstracted from when we concen- 
 trate attention upon an object in a particular relation in 
 perception. For Kant, then, the relation of reciprocity, as 
 the most concrete of the categories, is the highest relation 
 of reality. Teleological and aesthetic significance belong to 
 objects only in so far as they have been invested with these 
 features by the subjective operation of thought. In the 
 w^orld of real experience there is nothing higher than 
 mechanism, and the mechanical aspects of organised bodies 
 are the highest aspects which experimental science can 
 recognise. Yet such is the constitution of knowledge, that 
 we cannot but regard the world as though it were also consti- 
 tuted by such relations as those of beauty and organisation, 
 relations not less real than its mechanical aspects. 
 
 So far as it goes, it is difl&cult to impeach this reasoning. 
 Apart from their aesthetic and teleological aspects, objects 
 are not objects at all, but mere abstractions. It is im- 
 possible to conceive a universe which should be constituted 
 out of relations of a nature exclusively mechanical. On the 
 possibility, for example, of our conceiving what we call an 
 organism as that in which the whole, while indistinguish- 
 able from its parts, yet determines them, depends, as we 
 shall find later on, the possibility of our knowledge of 
 some of the most common features of nature, the features 
 which embrace what we call life. Therefore we may 
 take it that the question whether there are or are not 
 relations higher than those of mechanical arrangement in 
 space and time is identical with the question whether the 
 world as we know it does or does not exist. But when it 
 passes beyond this general proposition, Kant's doctrine 
 becomes eminently unsatisfactory. It is not easy to see why 
 the higher relations should be treated by him as merely 
 subjective, while those of mathematics and physics are 
 regarded as in reality constitutive of objects. For, as we 
 have seen, objects are no more to be conceived as constituted 
 exclusively by the one sort than by the other. Nor is it 
 intelligible to speak of their aesthetic and teleological aspects 
 as existing merely in the percipient mind. For mind as 
 percipient, for Kant, creates the objective universe which it 
 perceives, and is not itself an object of perception. No 
 doubt mind, when it makes itself its own object, does become 
 
44 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 an object of perception, limited, like all individual objects, 
 by time and space relations, but in tliis aspect mind is 
 conceived in quite a different reference from that in which 
 it is taken to be tlie creative synthesis of transcendental 
 thought. Accordingly, to speak of certain relations of 
 things as existent only for the subject is to use language 
 which, upon Kantian principles, is either meaningless or 
 contradictory. That mind as the object of experience 
 cannot be the subject of knowledge, Hume and the 
 physiologists have shown, by disproving upon this hypo- 
 thesis, the reality of the objective universe. On the other 
 hand, Kant has proved that if even the illusion of an 
 objective universe is real, the subject in knowledge can 
 never be an object disclosed in experience, or, what is the 
 same thing, be a finite individual. It is therefore im- 
 possible for the consistent Kantian to distinguish the 
 characteristics of the object into such as really belong to it, 
 and such as really exist only in the mind. 
 
 The truth is that the terms in which Kant put to himself 
 the problem of knowledge were never divested of a psycho- 
 logical reference. For him the process of knowing, not- 
 withstanding the new departure in his conception of its 
 position, was always more or less conceived as a process 
 taking place between two objects of experience. It was not 
 until after his time that the principle which he had laid 
 down as against Hume and the physiologists was worked 
 out to its full development. The fully developed theory 
 need here be only briefly characterised. The fundamental 
 fact beyond which we cannot get is the fact of self-con- 
 sciousness. This fact contains within itself elements which, 
 while inseparable in existence, are yet distinguishable in 
 thought. We find a self limited by an objective universe. 
 But the one cannot be separated from the other, and we come 
 to find that, although it is only as apparently external to and 
 independent of one another that these two elements can be 
 made objects of knowledge, they must yet be assigned to 
 a common position as moments in a higher synthesis of 
 thought. But this synthesis can never become an object, 
 Le, conscious of itself, save under this form of limitation. 
 
 Such a theory is not a theory of creation, much less of 
 origin in time, but simply an analysis of the fundamental 
 unity of knowledge. In becoming conscious of itself thought 
 
THE RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY TO SCIENCE. 45 
 
 finds itself limited bj itself in space and time as one of 
 many individuals, and as such the process of knowledge so 
 far as known, i.e. as real, is a finite subjective process. But 
 even finite self-conscious knowledge is potentially infinite, 
 i.e. is, in ultimate analysis, thought, not as presented to itself 
 in self-consciousness, but as identical with the creative 
 synthesis. For such a doctrine there can be no real dis- 
 tinction, as with Kant, between the forms of space and time 
 and the categories of thought; space and time can be 
 nothing else than the fundamental forms of the limitation 
 which the self finds confronting it in consciousness. And 
 the other categories, themselves in a like sense the objective 
 relations of intelligence, must be looked upon as phases 
 differing from the fundamental characteristics of externality 
 not in kind but in degree. 
 
 From such a point of view we should expect to find that 
 the process of conscious knowledge exhibited certain charac- 
 teristics — characteristics of a kind of which Kant was in 
 some measure actually aware. We should expect, from the 
 nature of its limitation, to find knowledge to be a process in 
 which certain relations or aspects of its objects are actually 
 under known conditions present to consciousness, while 
 others, which are ^potentially present, and in that sense 
 equally real, tire abstracted from. An illustration of this is 
 the distinction drawn in mathematical physics between 
 kinetics and kinematics. The latter science looks at ob- 
 jects from the point of view (in the language of the theory 
 of knowledge under the categories) of change of position. 
 Kinetics, on the other hand, brings in the conception of 
 force as producing such change of position. It brings in an 
 entirely new series of relations or categories, without which 
 its subject matter would be as unintelligible to the physicist 
 as is colour to the blind. But no physicist really supposes. 
 that he is dealing with anything else than a metaphysical 
 abstraction as distinguished from a real object in a purely 
 kinematical investigation. His abstraction no more ex- 
 hausts the reality which it represents symbolically, than 
 does the abstraction of the pure mathematician when he 
 speaks of a straight line or of the numerator of a differential 
 coefficient. In the same way we shall find — what appa- 
 rently is not so clearly understood by materialists or spiri- 
 tualists — that the categories of mechanism do not exhaust 
 
46 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 reality in its aspect of life: But it is time to turn to another 
 side of this subject. 
 
 As we have seen, the term mind has a double significance. 
 It may mean that which is in analysis found to be the ulti- 
 mate reality to which all existence is referable. This was 
 the view of mind which was known to the Greeks, and which 
 Kant found to be the true way out of the dilemma put by 
 Hume, In this sense, mind is not a substance or individual 
 object of experience, but the creative synthesis of thought 
 which, just because it is that which constitutes experience, 
 cannot as such be made an object of experience. We infer it 
 as the only possible explanation of the fact of experience, and 
 we conclude further that it manifests itself in fundamental 
 modes, which definitely differ from one another, but which 
 mutually imply each other and are related in a dialectical 
 development. Such a development is, of course, no affair of 
 space and time, for space and time are themselves, as has 
 already been stated, but two of its stages. In the other 
 meaning of the term, mind is conceived as it appears, as its 
 own object — having transformed its nature and become a 
 definite part of experience. In this aspect it is the subject 
 matter of empirical psychology, and falls under that distinc- 
 tion between subject and object, which, as a relation created 
 by thought, really falls within it. It is in this way that 
 mind is at the same time creator and created, at once 
 infinite and yet a finite self. Our subjective knowledge is 
 ever attended with that consciousness of limitation which 
 points to its infinite nature. To treat mind as an ordinary 
 object of investigation is to abstract from the very fact that 
 only for mind do objects exist at all. The more definitely 
 intelligence is brought like other matters into consciousness 
 by abstraction, the further is the result from the reality, 
 however much we may have gained for ordinary purposes. 
 
 These remarks may, for the present, in some degree 
 serve to explain what is meant when it is said that the 
 process of finite or conscious knowledge is essentially a 
 process of abstraction, and that whether its method be looked 
 at on its inductive or its deductive side. It necessitates 
 the isolation of definite relations presented by its object 
 through the application to that object of a general concep- 
 tion. In the case of certain branches of natural science, 
 these general conceptions are chiefly those which make pos- 
 
THE RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY TO SCIENCE. 47 
 
 sible the appreheDsion of mechanical arrangement in space 
 and time of parts external to and exclusive of one another, 
 and the principal aim of these departments of natural 
 science is to regard nature simply from this point of view. 
 But it is one thing to take such a course for the purpose of 
 advancing knowledge, and quite another to say that because, 
 for a certain point of view, the object can only be regarded 
 as if it existed in a certain way, therefore it exists in the 
 world of fact only in that way. No doubt we can bring to 
 reflection upon the object a particular category only be- 
 cause through that category the object is created in per- 
 ception or (to pass beyond Kant) exists. But this does not 
 mean that the object is constituted through that category 
 alone. As we shall find later on, the failure to appreciate 
 this distinction has been a fertile source of difficulty in 
 science. The blunder amounts to the confusion of a differ- 
 ence which exists only for individual knowledge, with a 
 supposed difference in reality or objective knowledge. A 
 familiar example of this mistake is the notion that causation, 
 or the unvarying sequence of two independent facts, is a 
 distinct process in time, taking place as a fact complete in 
 itself. Causation is in truth but an abstract way of looking 
 at a phenomenon, which is what it is quite as much through 
 the relation of identity or of substance and accident. There 
 is no such fact in nature as an unvarying succession of two 
 unconnected events as cause and effect. If we examine 
 such a supposed relationship we find that it resolves itself 
 into a case of identity, in which the effect is simply the 
 sum of its conditions. On the other hand, if we try to pre- 
 sent the occurrence to ourselves merely as a case of identity, 
 we find that we have excluded an essential element, that of 
 change in time. Causation and substantiality are abstract 
 categories or limited ways of thinking of things in know- 
 ledge, rather than independent ways of existence in. nature. 
 A like criticism applies to the famous distinction between 
 the discrete and the continuous aspects of quantity, the dis- 
 tinction which gave rise to the familiar puzzle, first solved by 
 Aristotle, of Achilles and the Tortoise. All such distinc- 
 tions are not only legitimate, but the absolutely necessary 
 outcome of reflection. But, although they are only possible 
 because reality or objective knowledge presents phases of 
 which these are abstractions, such phases are necessarily 
 
48 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 related to and imply one another, and are incapable of any 
 such separation or independence as appears in the abstrac- 
 tions of self-conscious reflection. The task of these pages 
 is to try to exhibit some of the consequences to scientific 
 conceptions which have resulted from a failure to appreciate 
 this deduction from the theory of knowledge. 
 
 The boundlessly varying expanse of nature presents for 
 reflection a sort of scale of modes of existence. Here we 
 have the inorganic world, of which the distinguishing 
 feature is the chemical arrangements and processes among 
 parts that seem generally to determine each other as 
 at once causes and effects in a relation of reciprocity. 
 Again, there is present to consciousness a world of organisa- 
 tion in which what is characteristic is apparently the 
 determination of parts by a whole which is not a cause 
 distinct from them, but some principle or tendency which 
 will not allow itself to be exhibited as any relation of these 
 parts in space and time. Under another phase there are 
 disclosed to us as facts of experience phenomena of conscious 
 life. Now it is not to be supposed that such distinct phases 
 are so many absolutely independent and- distinct ways of 
 existence lying side by side. The extreme antithesis to this 
 view is that which follows from the theory of knowledge as 
 expounded by Kant. As we have already seen, objective 
 nature consisted, for Kant, only in those aspects of bodies 
 which embraced the mathematical and physical relations of 
 things, and stopped short with the categories of substance, 
 cause, and reciprocity. All those other aspects of nature 
 which relate to its sesthetic and teleological characteristics, 
 were for him merely subjective creations of the percipient 
 mind. From such a point of view, the aspects under which 
 bodies appear as external to one another in space, as con- 
 nected with one another, or as consisting of parts connected 
 as substances, causes, or mutual determinants, constitute 
 one kind of knowledge. The other aspects are not qualities 
 separable as objects in space and tim.e from the first kind, 
 but different sorts of knowledge, the categories of which 
 cannot be applied to the aspects which nature presents in its 
 more immediate reference. Thus we can no more express 
 the properti( s of a body qua organised in terms of the 
 categories of mechanism, than we can express the properties 
 of a stone in terms of the categories of moral judgment. 
 
THE RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY TO SCIENCE. 40 
 
 The practical significance of Kant's teaching may be 
 ilhistrated very clearly in its bearing on the phenomena of 
 consciousness. V/hen we perceive around us other organisa- 
 tions akin to those which we associate with ourselves, we 
 attribute to them those psychical accompaniments of whicli 
 we are conscious as somehow making up in association with 
 our bodies our existence as human beings. These psychical 
 phenomena we do not jperceive as external qualities, but 
 naturally attribute in a way which does not present to us an} 
 obscurity until we come to reflect upon it. What then are 
 these phenomena, and how are they bound up with the 
 physical phenomena which precede them? The pure 
 * Naturforscher ' who strives to attain to the astronomical 
 knowledge of nature of Laplace's ideal spirit, and who, 
 limiting his categories to those of mechanism, strives to 
 explain and express nature simply in terms of these 
 categories, says that the two sets of phenomena are causally 
 related in that the one set invariably accompanies the other. 
 It is no matter that he denies any attempt to find a nexus, 
 and confines himself to a simple assertion of the sequence of 
 two sets of events ; he none the less employs the category 
 of causality and interprets his facts as a common case of 
 cause and effect. Just because he makes the unproved 
 assumption of the applicability of this category, an assump- 
 tion which can only be weighed in the proper balance from 
 the standpoint of a theory of knowledge, Kant calls him a 
 dogmatist. Now the special view taken by Kant himself of 
 this relation, following as it does from his principles, is very 
 different. For him the phenomena of consciousness are 
 perceived in time only, and by inner sense, a sense which is 
 conceived by him as distinct from the outer sense by which 
 external nature is perceived. Therefore it is for Kant a 
 gross fallacy to speak of the phenomena of the one sense 
 as causally connected with the phenomena of the other 
 sense. The category of causality only applies to the deter- 
 mination of phenomena belonging to the same sense. 
 It is only phenomena of the same sense which are deter- 
 mined by creative synthesis in the relations of sequence 
 and co-existence, and consequently finite intelligence cannot 
 attribute these categories of sequence and co-existence to the 
 phenomena of different kinds of knowledge, however closely 
 they may appear to be related. It is what Kant would call 
 
 E 
 
50 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 a mistaken assumption of the dogmatist (i.e, the person who 
 applies categories without having duly examined into their 
 applicability), to speak of consciousness as the effect, 
 sequent, or concomitant of physiological phenomena, or as 
 the other side or manifestation of an unknowable substance 
 or thing in itself.^ But, it may be asked, must not the 
 phenomena of conscious life, those of sensation for example, 
 if they exist at all, be forms, or modifications of forms, of 
 onergy ? Certainly so, if these so-called phenomena are 
 brought under the categories of mechanism, that is to say, 
 regarded as, like energy, something actually or possibly per- 
 ceived as existing in space and time. But in reality there 
 can arise no question in regard to the conservation of energy 
 or any other physical law. For we are at once relieved from 
 the dilemma that there must either be an exception to the 
 uniformity of such a principle or not, so soon as we under- 
 stand that such a dilemma arises from our assumption that 
 we are dealing with the case of phenomena related in the 
 same way as the phenomena which come under, because they 
 are constituted through, the categories of substance, causality 
 and reciprocity. No doubt we perceive other conscious 
 beings. But in the case of mind and body, when we talk of 
 these as distinct, we do not perceive two independent ex- 
 istences of a physiological structure and of psychical 
 phenomena. The phenomena of self-consciousness are pre- 
 sented in knowledge in a different way, not as external 
 phenomena, and not as existing with parts, and in relation 
 to other phenomena in the multiplicity of space and time. 
 In our perception of conscious beings outside us, we rather 
 interpret the physical facts which we perceive by higher 
 categories than their own, and as so interpreted their ex- 
 istence in externality is abstracted from. No doubt we can, 
 and for the advancement of knowledge must, at times re- 
 gard other persons and even our bodies simply as physical or 
 mechanical arrangements. Butin so doing we have abstracted 
 fromapoint of viewfrom which they appear to us as something 
 more, and so appear in a way not less real than the way of 
 their physical or mechanical aspects. For unreflecting per- 
 ception, psychical and physical phenomena are naturally 
 associated. But the distinction between them is implicitly 
 present in the simplest cases, and becoming in reflection at 
 
 > Cf. note on page 61. 
 
THE RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY TO SCIENCE. 51 
 
 once explicit, demands an abstract judgment as to its 
 nature.^ 
 
 The phenomena of self-consciousness are thus not facts 
 of external nature coming under the categories of mechanism. 
 Kant arrives at a similar result with regard to the pheno- 
 mena of teleology. We do, as a matter of fact, find nature 
 presenting the aspect of organisation as life and growth. 
 How is this aspect to be explained ? The dogmatist pro- 
 pounds the dilemma that it must be regarded either as the 
 manifestation of a special vital principle, a possible object of 
 external perception, or as a complicated case of mechanical 
 arrangement. And the scientific dogmatist properly rejects 
 the first hypothesis in favour of the second. But for Kant 
 there is no such difficulty. The categories of teleology 
 belong, as we have seen, to a kind of knowledge quite distinct 
 from external perception, that which he terms the faculty 
 of judgment. While we must think of objects as if they 
 existed under teleological relations, we do not find them so 
 existing in external perception. The general knowledge of 
 nature or experience is no doubt made up of both kinds of 
 knowledge. But the relations which are the objects of the 
 one kind do not exist as external facts alongside of the re- 
 lations which are presented in the other. Life and growth 
 are not processes taking place in space in the same sense as 
 the interaction of molecules. In our general knowledge of 
 nature there are two distinct classes of relations which are 
 not reducible to each other. Therefore, to try to explain 
 organisation as a mechanical arrangement is to hypostatise 
 an abstraction — the mechanical aspect of what appears for 
 the unreflecting consciousness as an organised body. 
 
 We shall return to this subject presently, but at this point 
 it is necessary slightly to correct the general form of the 
 statement. We have been applying not the detailed principles 
 of what we have seen to be the more developed theory of 
 knowledge, but those of the Kantian criticism. But the 
 fallacies in question have the same explanation for Kant and 
 for his more modern successors. For Kant they arise from 
 the applications of the categories of one kind of know- 
 ledge to the subject matter of another. For the more fully 
 
 * Cf. the late Professor Cliiford's irreparable loss in the absence of an 
 
 theory of ejects. It is perhaps not too acquaintance with Kant's real teaching 
 
 much to say that recent philosophical about the nature of knowledge on the 
 
 thought in this country buffered an part of this brilliantly original thinker. 
 
 E.2 
 
52 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 developed theory the same misapplication is the explanation, 
 the difference lying in this, that the distinction between the 
 sorts of knowledge is not even for finite thought the insuper- 
 able distinction between kinds which we find in Kant, but a 
 distinction of degree. The fundamental relations or cate- 
 gories in knowledge being conceived as dialectically implied 
 by each other, we see more readily how it is that in nature 
 organisation and growth exhibit for reflection mechanical 
 aspects, and how consciousness comes to be so naturally 
 associated with organisation. From the relations of pure 
 mathematics up to those of self-consciousness we have a chain 
 of aspects of nature not one of which is reducible to another, 
 but which are yet inseparably united together in thought. 
 If the Kantian analysis with its distinctions between inner 
 and outer sense and spheres of knowledge is from its accom- 
 modation to psychological tendencies more readily intelligible, 
 it is a less adequate explanation of the continuity of the 
 phases of nature. But whether or not we can arrange these 
 phases systematically or exhibit the categories as a system, 
 is for the purposes of practical criticism of categories irrele- 
 vant. If we can affirm that upon the principles which are the 
 foundation of the point of view of these pages, the nature 
 of thought must be generally such as necessitates the 
 deductions we have indicated, it does not concern us to go 
 further. 
 
 We are now in a position to illustrate the argument of 
 the preceding pages by a critical examination of such crucial 
 scientific conceptions as that of organisation and the cognate 
 idea of development. These ideas are derived from the 
 phenomena of what is called life. Now life, like beauty, is 
 one of those ultimate facts in experience which we may try 
 to explain but cannot get rid of. And it follows from what 
 has been said that it is a mistake to regard it as realised in 
 certain objects to the exclusion of others. The distinction 
 between what lives and what is mechanical substance is a 
 distinction of point of view and not of objects in space. No 
 doubt we speak of such a distinction as if it existed between 
 objects ; but this is due not to perception but to reflection. 
 When we see a house and a man we may certainly dis- 
 tinguish them as inanimate and animate. But this only 
 means that the man is natur,aJly_considered in a waj' in 
 which the house is not. Looked at merely as objects in 
 
THE RELATION OF PIIILOSOPIIY TO SCIENCE. O^i 
 
 space there is really no distinction between them. Both 
 are regarded as mechanical arrangements, and in the case of 
 neither is the reality exhausted. On the other hand, looked 
 at exclusively as a living being, the man in a sense has 
 ceased to be an object in space. In perception there are 
 involved many points of view which only reflection dis- 
 tinguishes. As we have seen, it is not only a legitimate 
 but a necessary procedure to consider things in an abstract 
 reference. And this is just what physiology, as conceived 
 by the majority of scientific men, does in regard to organi- 
 sation. It abstracts from the point of view of life, and 
 treats the organism as merely an exceedingly complicated 
 mechanical arrangement, employing the category of causality 
 to the exclusion of higher categories. No doubt physiology 
 through this abstraction succeeds in advancing knowledge 
 as it could not otherwise be advanced, for it in this way 
 becomes an exact science, i.e, a science proceeding by 
 measurement. But at the same time it gets into difficulties 
 by the inadequacy of its category to its object, and it is forced 
 either to admit that there is a limit to the extent of its 
 explanations or to deny the reality of the supposed facts. 
 An illustration of the strength and weakness of the physio- 
 logical method may be found in the following description. 
 An electrical stimulus is applied to the tongue by means of 
 the electrodes of an induction machine. A flow of saliva 
 into the mouth is observed to follow the stimulation. This 
 circumstance is capable of a lucid mechanical explanation. 
 An impulse is conveyed from the part stimulated along an 
 afferent nerve to a group of nerve-cells in the medulla 
 oblongata. The effect of this is suddenly to release nerve- 
 energy stored up in these cells and cause it to be discharged 
 along efferent nerves leading to the salivary glands. The 
 stimulus thus applied to the gland-cells causes them to do 
 work in secreting the saliva observed to flow into the mouth. 
 The physiologist thus finds here a delicate mechanism con- 
 sisting of nerves, nerve-cells, and gland-cells, and he traces 
 a causal series commencing with the stimulation of the 
 afferent nerve and ending with the secretion of saliva by 
 the gland. He has a purely mechanical problem before him 
 apparently indistinguishable from any other mechanical 
 problem, starting as he does with the conception of a series 
 of parts existing outside of and independent of one another. 
 
54 ESSAYS IN PinLOSOPinCAL CRITICISM. 
 
 Each of these independent things is successivelj considered 
 first as effect and then as cause, or, in another mechanical 
 aspect, it is considered that energy is passed on from the 
 initial stimulus through several internal processes back 
 again to the outside world. It is true that the organism is 
 of such a nature that this energy in its passage liberates a 
 great deal of additional energy, but this does not afPect the 
 explanation. Perfectly satisfactory as is what we have got 
 here so far as it goes, it is yet, when the facts are examined 
 more closely, seen to fall short of them. The category 
 employed is adequate to the investigation of the case of a 
 simple mechanical arrangement, but not to the case of that 
 arrangement considered as a normal function of the organism 
 to which it belongs. A purely physiological account of the 
 action of the organism simply traces energy from the sur- 
 roundings through the organism and out to the surroundings 
 again. If this is to be taken to be a fall account of the 
 process it is inadequate, for it ignores the fact, characteristic 
 of life, that the energy spent by the organism on its sur- 
 roundings is not dissipated at random on these surroundings, 
 but is so directed as to cause them to give back again to 
 the organism, sooner or later, just as much energy as the 
 organism has previously expended. In other words, the 
 distinguishing feature of vital activity is self-preservation, 
 or the conservation of the organism in a state of functional 
 activity ; and this is just as true of the most complicated 
 actions of the human body as of the movement of the 
 amoeba towards a source of nourishment , 
 
 But besides this characteristic a living structure has a 
 capacity of adapting itself to an infinite number of changing 
 circumstances, which is wholly unintelligible upon any con- 
 ceivable mechanical ' scheme.' How, for instance, is the 
 process to be explained by which in the case of a newt there 
 grows a new hand in the place of one which has been 
 amputated? By the amputation the vital activity of the 
 animal is hindered. Accordingly, in order that its 
 functional arrangements may be kept in action, it is 
 necessary that the hindrance arising from the mutilation 
 should be overcome by provision being made for the carrying 
 out of the function of the lost limb. What happens is that 
 the cells of all sorts of tissue in the stump of the limb soon 
 begin to divide, and gradually group themselves so as to 
 
THE liELATIOX OF nilLOSOPIIY TO SCIENCE. 55 
 
 form a bud of embryonic tissue. This bud, as a matter of 
 fact, gradually grows into the form of theh)sthand, the cells 
 gradually so modifying themselves as to form, all in their 
 l^roper places, bone, connective tissue, epithelium, nerve and 
 muscle, until at last a proper hand occupies the place of the 
 old one. Every cell performs its appropriate duty until the 
 whole business is accurately finished without fail. Is it con- 
 ceivable that each of the thousands of separately existing 
 cells concerned in the process should have a mechanism 
 within it, which would cause it in spite of all obstacles to 
 take up the position, and undergo the modification requisite 
 for the proper performance of its work in the newly 
 developed hand? Or is it conceivable that mechanical 
 pressure of any kind should cause the bud to grow into a 
 perfect hana ? The alternative hypothesis is that each cell 
 is directly determined in its action simply by what it has to 
 do in order that the vital activity of the newt may be re- 
 stored to its normal condition. 
 
 The fact is that every part of the organism must be con- 
 ceived as actually or potentially acting on and being acted 
 on by the other parts and by the environment, so as to form 
 with them a self-conserving system. There is nothing short 
 of this implied in saying that the parts of the organism can 
 adapt themselves to one another and to the surroundings. 
 And in this light we must correct the description which went 
 no further than the assertion of a relation of cause and effect. 
 
 The action of a muscle upon a joint seems at first impres- 
 sion a simple case of a merely causal relation. Bat in the 
 living body the action of the muscle is controlled by nervous 
 impulses proceeding from ganglion cells in a nervous centre, 
 and these ganglion cells act upon the surroundings through 
 the muscle as part of a self-conserving system. The action 
 of the muscle has a purpose in relation to the life of the 
 individual of which it is a part, and is not thrown away at 
 random upon the surroundings. In reality the muscle is 
 determined by, just as much as it determines the surround- 
 ings. But this feature of the facts is abstracted from when 
 joint and muscle are considered separately from their sur- 
 roundings. Such an abstraction is at times necessary for 
 the purposes of science, but we must not suppose that it is 
 adequate to the reality. 
 
 The first matter which is of consequence here is that 
 
56 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 whether or not the point of view is necessarily other than 
 mechanical, it has at least changed. The conception of the 
 nerve, muscle, and joint as separate and independent parts, 
 respectively related merely as cause and effect, has given 
 place to. a conception which takes them as in conjunction 
 I with their environment making up a process of reciprocal 
 determination, and recognises that no explanation can be 
 sufficient which fails to do this. In short there has been a 
 transition from the category of causality to the less abstract, 
 though still mechanical, category of reciprocity. Bat is it 
 possible to stop here ? In every true case of reciprocal 
 action the interacting bodies are considered as still external 
 to and independent of one another. In the case of a plane- 
 tary system, for which the appropriate conception is reci- 
 procity, any planet can be detached from the system, and 
 yet remain for the most part what it was before. It has an 
 existence independent of its relation to other planets and 
 the centi-e of the system, a relation which is after all un- 
 essential to it. But it is different in the case of the system 
 of life. If a sea-anemone is cut in two, the parts do not 
 simply heal up and form two halves. They either die, or 
 else each half buds out and changes into a new and perfect 
 whole. A single cell of some of the lowest compound or- 
 ganisms will, if detached, instead of living an independent 
 life, reproduce the whole organism. In the higher animals 
 this power appears only in the reproductive cells, but there 
 are everywhere traces of a tendency in each living cell when 
 isolated to reproduce the whole organism of which it formed 
 a part. It would thus appear that the parts of an organism 
 cannot be considered simply as so many independent units, 
 which happen to be aggregated in a system in which each 
 determines the other. It is on the contrary the essential 
 feature of each part that it is a member of an ideal whole, 
 which can only be defined by saying that it realises itself in 
 its parts, and that the parts are only what they are in so far 
 as they realise it. In fine the relations of life are nob 
 capable of redaction to the relations of mechanism. 
 
 The difficulty is one which has long been familiar to men 
 of science, and attempts have frequently been made to 
 minimise it. So long as science is regarded as made up 
 properl}^ only of the results of observation and experiment, 
 and abstract conceptions are admitted only for the purpose of 
 
THE RELATION OF PIIILOSOrilY TO SCIENCE. 57 
 
 facilitating the acquisition of these results, the inadequacy 
 of the mechanical standpoint is not practically important. 
 But it always happens that after a time observers begin to 
 generalise and seek to obtain a systematic view of their work 
 as an entirety. And then it is that trouble arises. , If, for 
 example, we seek to conceive biological relations as cases of 
 the interaction of atoms or molecules, we find it necessary 
 to resort to some such hypothesis as that these atoms or 
 molecules are endowed with consciousness, and we come face 
 to face with the contradictions which, as we have seen, per- 
 plex those who try to bring consciousness within the cate- 
 gories of things in space. If, on the other hand, we turn 
 to the old conception of external design or supernatural 
 intervention, we not only commit a like error, but find our- 
 selves wholly unable to reconcile this new notion with the 
 context of experience. Now on the theory of knowledge 
 such difficulties arise simply from a misapplication of cate- 
 gories. Whether we treat life as a case of the interaction of 
 molecules, or as the manifestation of a special vital force, 
 we are alike dogmatically applying mechanical categories 
 to phenomena to which thej^ are not adequate. The 
 phenomena of life exist for consciousness in a point of view 
 distinct from that of the phenomena of mechanism, in the 
 same sense as is the point of view under which the world is 
 perceived as beautiful or as morally good. This is a result 
 of the nature of knowledge, and it follows from it that life 
 can never be reduced to mechanism. In a way the classes 
 of facts which are constituted through each special kind of 
 relation may be looked upon as exhibiting a sort of endless 
 series the limits of which are the relations of the next higher 
 and the next lower order. And these limits are asymptotic in 
 a sense more profound than that of the mathematician. For 
 there can be absolutely no evolution in time of one of such 
 relations out of another. We can, for example, conceive the 
 vital relation as less and less apparent until we do not seem 
 to distinguish it from a mechanical arrangement. But we 
 can never hope to find a case of ahiogenesis as a matter of 
 fact, any more than we can really construct the moral con- 
 sciousness upon physical principles. Only the suppression of 
 a point of view which is yet implicitly there enables us to 
 imagine that we do so. It is quite legitimate to suppose 
 that the universe has become what it is from a state of 
 
58 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 existence as a mass of incandescent vapour. Bat in sucli 
 a conception we have already got implicitly present all the 
 categories which we afterwards find prominent. The idea 
 of a mass of vapour as an object existing in merely me- 
 chanical relations, and without reference to a percipient con- 
 sciousness, would be a meaningless abstraction. At least 
 such an object is only an object for knowledge, and with 
 
 . knowledge is present, whether in clear consciousness or not, 
 the whole series of the categories of knowledge. 
 
 In the conception of the environment of the organism 
 there is implied the higher class of relations. In a sense 
 the surroundings of the organism just as much as its own 
 structure are implicated in its life. What is really implied 
 in such words as ' function,' ' purpose,' ' means,' and ' end ' 
 is that we are looking at the organism, not as acted on by 
 things outside it, but as in teleological connection with that 
 which is different from, but not existent independently of it- 
 We have in fact discarded those categories of mechanism 
 which were found so useful in a different kind of enquiry in 
 reference to the phenomena of life. When we have reached 
 a standpoint from which we refuse to separate the individual 
 
 ^ organism from its surroundings and from its relation to 
 other individuals, we see how the species may itself be 
 looked upon as a compound organism, or as a member of 
 which each individual attains its true significance. And we 
 begin to comprehend the meaning of the death of the indi- 
 vidual, an event which otherwise appears arbitrary and 
 unintelligible. 
 
 These corsiderations may serve to throw some light on 
 an idea which is wider than that of organisation, the idea of 
 development. Now the first point which falls to be made in 
 connection with this idea, is that it cannot be expressed as a 
 simple result of action from without. As we have seen, it is 
 not correct to separate the surroundings in thought from the 
 organism, and treat them as independent things, for the 
 organism only realises itself in its surroundings. It is not 
 the case that the * fittest ' survive after the fashion in which 
 the roundest shot only reach the bottom of the sloping 
 board used by shotmakers to eliminate those that are im- 
 perfect. Development is in all cases the realisation of what 
 
 ! was not there at the beginning of the process. Yet the 
 resulting difference is not conceived as impressed from 
 
THE RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY TO SCIENCE. 59 
 
 without, but as freely produced from within itself by that 
 which developes. A little consideration shows that such 
 branches of biological science as embryology and mor- 
 phology become possible only through the conception of de- 
 velopment. For the uneducated observer the examination 
 of the sections of an embryo in different stages of progress 
 brings no light. For him the points of difference are as 
 striking as the points of similarity, and there is no indi- 
 cation of continuity. But in the case of a trained embryo- 
 logist this is not so. Such an observer at once recognises 
 the sections as exhibiting the stages of a progress in which 
 there becomes only more fully realised in change something 
 which remains identical, notwithstanding the alteration of 
 all that from a merely mechanical point of view constitutes 
 its existence. 
 
 Again, when the botanist says that leaves, petals, sta- 
 mens, carpels, &c., are organs which are morphologically 
 identical, he means something more than a mere similarity 
 in appearance. Were nothing more than this signified, then 
 assuredly Cuvier would have been right in maintaining that 
 the idea of morphological identity was trivial and gave no 
 new light. The differences were in that case just as real as 
 the identity, and there would be no justification for empha- 
 sizing the one more than the other. But for the modern 
 comparative morphologist stamen and leaf are none the less 
 identical because of a difference which is felt to present no 
 real hindrance. For he brings with him to his problem the 
 conception of development. 
 
 If there were no point of view higher than that of 
 mechanism, such conceptions as those which have now been 
 briefly examined would be meaningless. But it is just be- 
 cause there is such a point of view, possible by reason of 
 the fact that the phenomena which it embraces are consti- 
 tuted through higher categories than those of spatial and 
 temporal arrangement, that as science advances men are 
 driven back to the use of these higher conceptions in spite 
 of their attempts to dispense with them. For such attempts 
 lose their meaning as soon as it is recognised that to 
 abandon them in no sense implies the admission of an ex- 
 ception to the uniformity of nature. The man who insists on 
 regarding organisation and development as mechanical, and 
 the man who insists on the existence of supra-mechanical 
 
60 ESSAYS IN' PIIILOSOPIIieAL CRTTICISM. 
 
 substances and causes, are alike dogmatists, whose prin- 
 ciples are really untrue to those facts of common sense with 
 which science and philosophy alike must start. If, then, a 
 critical examination of categories can reconcile the truth 
 which lies at the bottom of each point of view, and without 
 for a moment seeking to intrude into the domain of obser- 
 vation and experiment, yet throw light on conceptions which 
 are necessarily used in obtaining and arranging the results 
 so reached, surely such a criticism becomes a matter of the 
 last importance. We shall show later that the method of such 
 an investigation, so far from being that of a priori reason- 
 ing, is not distinguishable in principle from the method of 
 science. Meanwhile it is desirable to say that it is in no 
 reference such an attempt to rationalise nature as would 
 sometimes seem to have been the real purpose of that some- 
 what unintelligible treatise the * Naturphilosophie ' of Hegel. 
 The theory of knowledge does not seek, as Hegel seems to 
 have thought (whether or not he really meant it), to deduce 
 nature from intelligence. Nor does the critical point of 
 view find in nature a fossilisation of intelligence in which 
 the categories of thought are strewn about, severally realised 
 in things external to one another. It does not concern us 
 even to consider the possibility of an attempt which lies far 
 away from our purpose, or even to put the question whether 
 it does not itself imply first such a misapplication of cate- 
 gories as on Hegelian principles is inadmissible. What we 
 have to do is merely to show from the nature of intelligence 
 how certain different points of view are actually or poten- 
 tially present in the simplest state of consciousness, and to 
 correct scientific conceptions when they confound one of 
 these points of view with another. 
 
 So far as the scope of this essay permitted, its method 
 has been exemplified by the examination, in the light of a 
 certain view of knowledge, of the scientific conceptions of 
 organisation and development. It is obvious that the same 
 principle of criticism applies to the conceptions of many 
 other departments of inquiry which do not lie within the 
 scope of these pages. But it may not be amiss at least to 
 mention one or two of these. It is a mistaken application 
 of categories which, for example, gives rise to the controversy 
 about free Avill and necessity. So soon as it is recognised 
 that volition is really not to be looked upon as a process 
 
THE RELATION OF PIIIL030PITV TO SCIEX 
 
 
 taking place in space,^ tlie dilemma that it mnst eithe 
 caused or uncaused disappears. Will. and motive are not 
 independent external existences related as cause and effect. 
 They are phenomena of a higher point of view whose rela- 
 tion is rather that of reason and consequent. A like criti- 
 cism applies to the idea of the state as a mere aggregate of 
 isolated individuals. A less abstract category would prove 
 more adequate to the facts in embracing, in the conception 
 of the individual, his determination by the social organism 
 of which he is a member. And iu the light of such a con- 
 ception the shortcomings of the abstractedly individualistic 
 doctrines of the Manchester school in political economy be- 
 come apparent. But it is not merely in its application to 
 aspects of the universe higher than those of mechanism that 
 this process of correction is important. It is no doubt quite 
 correct to lay stress upon the mathematico -physical rela- 
 tions of matter, and to reason from them iu an abstract 
 
 • The qiiestion of the relation of 
 will and moti\-e is not strictly relevant, 
 but it is so important as ilhistrative of 
 the necessity of examining the facts of 
 experience in the light of a criricism of 
 categories, tliat it is desirable to am- 
 plify the reference in the text. It may 
 be objected that the relation, though 
 not one of externality in space, may yet 
 well be one of sxiccession in time. This 
 objection will hardly, however, be raised 
 by anyone who has acceded to the 
 earlier stages of the argument. Space 
 and time are not things separable from, 
 or independent of, one another. Viewed 
 in such a light they are merely abstract 
 figments. Tlie relations of externality 
 and succession, of outside-one-another- 
 ness and after-one-another-ne.«;s, imply 
 each other in the same way as identity 
 implies difference or substantiality im- 
 plies ttiusation. They exist only in 
 co-ordination as contributing to the 
 constitution of a highly concrete reiility 
 which they do not exhavst, however 
 essential to it in certain aspects. This 
 is the strength of the contention of 
 Czolbe and Ueberweg, that the pheno- 
 mena of consciousness (which we prefer, 
 from the standpoint of this essay, to 
 sp«>ak of as psychological r:\ther than 
 as psychicj\l) must be regarded as ex- 
 tended in space. It follows that there 
 is no such thing as a succession in time 
 which is not the successi<m of events in 
 
 space. It may be convenient for the 
 purpose of explanation to abstract from 
 the spatial aspects of such a concrete suc- 
 cession (cf. the procedure at pp. 49, 50), 
 Init for no other purpose is it legitimate. 
 Kant made the mistiike of taking such 
 an abstraction for an independent ex- 
 istence in his separation from outer 
 sense of inner sense as apprehension 
 under the form of time only. The dif- 
 ferences in the different points of view 
 or aspects which are co-ordinated in the 
 consciousness of nature and of self are, 
 as has been shown, differences not of 
 kind but of degree, and each degree is 
 to that below it, as tc'Aos or fjrm to 
 matter (cf. Aristotle's doctrine in the 
 De Anima). To separate, as Kant does, 
 inner and outer sense, i.e., mind and 
 matter, or to regard, as Hegel appa- 
 rently does, the different categories as 
 existing in isolation or externality to 
 one another in nature, is to apply the 
 category of reciprocity, where, in fact, 
 the highest categories are rather re- 
 quisite to the state of the cjise. Thus 
 it is that the po-nt of view of succession 
 can never be adequate to the investi- 
 gation of motive and volition. The 
 general point of view in which the phe- 
 nomena of consciousness are presented 
 to us is higher than, jtist because it is 
 the relative completion of, that in which 
 we conceive ourselves as organisms in 
 nature. 
 
62 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 reference. But even such appropriate abstractions wlien 
 liypostatised in thought into real existences, share the 
 general fate of all other abstractions, and give rise to con- 
 tradictory conclusions. We can no more consistently re- 
 present, to ourselves matter as constituted by the reciprocal 
 determination of points of attraction and repulsion in space, 
 than we can conceive matter and energy as independent 
 existences. Such abstract conceptions, however great their 
 value as regulative, i.e. for the purpose of advance in know- 
 ledge, are not adequate as descriptions of a reality which is 
 essentially concrete and inexhaustible in its properties. 
 
 That the principle which has now been dwelt on at some 
 length has not received more attention in the past is no 
 doubt due in great measure to the faulty manner in which 
 it was presented by Kant. Kant's great mistake was, as 
 has already more than once been pointed out, the assumption 
 that the sphere of imagination was co-extensive with that 
 of knowledge up to and including the relations of mechanism, 
 and that all beyond this, that which was for him the subject 
 of judgment as distinguished from perception, was unreal. 
 Such a doctrine was the necessary result of the distinction 
 of the categories as modes of potential synthesis from space 
 and time as the forms in which they created the real. But 
 for a more advanced theory of knowledge, space and time 
 become themselves indistinguishable in kind from other 
 relations in experience, and consequently the different 
 aspects of experience are regarded as differing not in kind 
 but in degree. All that is is seen to exist in necessary 
 relationship and implication, and such lines of demarcation 
 in thinsfs as lanijuaofe indicates are seen to be fictions of 
 finite knowledge, properly created only for the purposes of 
 its own advancement. One result of such a point of view is 
 the impossibility of attempting a philosophical classification 
 of the sciences. No doubt a classification is conceivable 
 which should arrange the subject matter of knowledge ac- 
 cordirg as the relations of which it consisted approximated 
 to or rose above the relations of simple externality and 
 succession. But such a classification could never coincide 
 with those distinctions between the sciences which actually 
 exist. As has already incidentally appeared, the sciences 
 are defined quite as much by convenience as by the cate- 
 gories which they employ, and it constantly happens that 
 
THE RELATION OF PIIILOSOrilY TO SCIENCE. 63 
 
 one science employs several distinct sorts of categories and 
 overlaps the sphere of another. If the sciences are to be 
 classified at all, it must be simply with reference to their 
 positions in advancing finite reflection and without any hope 
 of throwing light on the nature of things. This must 
 remain the case so long as self -consciousness remains finite; 
 in other words, it is a necessary result of the constitution of 
 knowledge. 
 
 It remains to be asked what the position of the theory 
 of knowledge is in relation to what is generally meant by 
 science. Its object is the fact of self-consciousness, and 
 this fact it must assume as something ultimate given to it, 
 just as all sciences assume their own objects. Now self- 
 consciousness presents the peculiarity that while ordinary 
 objects of knowledge fall wholly within the field of the 
 object as distinguished from the act of knowing, this one 
 only partially does so, inasmuch as it is at once knowledge 
 as presented to itself and the act of presentation. As the 
 act of thought can never as such be presented to thought as 
 an object, it follows that if the nature of thought is to be 
 investigated at all, it must be so by means of some method 
 which does not presuppose a distinction between knowledge 
 and its object. Such a method was attempted by Hegel, 
 with what degree of failure or success it is no part of the 
 business" of these pages to inquire. It is enough to point 
 out that for the purposes of a theory of knowledge such a 
 process of investigation as the Hegelian dialectic is not 
 necessary. What is essential is at the very most such a 
 method as what is understood in a general and not a philo- 
 logical reference as the Kantian, which from the nature of 
 experience sought to determine a conception of the nature 
 of knowledge that would explain it. It is no true objection 
 to say that such procedure is the procedure not of science 
 but of metaphysics. For the method of Kant was just the 
 method which is common to all branches of investigation, 
 the devising of a conception, and the acceptance or rejection 
 of that conception according as it does or does not upon 
 application explain the facts. This is the method of the 
 exact as well as of the non-exact sciences, and the point of 
 difference between the two classes is simply that in the 
 one the adequacy of the conception is determined by mea- 
 surement — that is, the comparison by intuition of spatial 
 
64 ESSAYS IN PIIILOSOPHICAT. CIIITICISM. 
 
 rnagnitudes, in the others it is not. Any objection which 
 . prevails against the method of the theory of knowledge 
 must likewise prevail not only against such branches of 
 inquiry as political economy, but also against a vast deal in 
 what are called the exact sciences that is not reducible to 
 measurement. The most prominent fallacy of the exploded 
 a priori reasoning of the old-fashioned metaphysics was 
 that it was applied to a class of objects in regard to which 
 the test of the adequacy of the conception ought to have 
 been an exact test. In the case of philosophy in its modern 
 acceptation, as in that of political economy and the kindred 
 sciences, the objection becomes irrelevant. 
 
 It is clear that if there be any truth in the reasoning of 
 the preceding pages, the theory of knowledge must have a 
 place assigned to it in relation to the whole body of 
 scientific inquiry. If science did nothing more than observe 
 and record the facts of nature, such a discipline might be 
 dispensed with. But science is concerned not merely with 
 facts but with reasoning about conceptions abstracted from 
 these facts, reasoning as to which, just because it deals with 
 abstractions symbolical of only one phase of the many- 
 phased reality, there can be no talk of verification. That 
 there is a tendency in all reasoning to hypostatise these 
 abstractions, to regard them not in their proper light as 
 simply fragments of thought, but as representing real 
 existences, is as obvious as it is natural. That this tendency 
 has led to all sorts of difficulties, as science has proceeded 
 out of the region of actual sense-perception, is matter of 
 historical knowledge. If, then, it is correct to say that 
 science is forced to go beyond what is immediate, it is 
 difficult to avoid the Cvmclusion of the necessity of a depart- 
 ment of inquiry which shall deal critically with the ab- 
 stractions of the inquirer, shall assign to them their true 
 position and value, and shall make clear the real nature of 
 scientific method. Such an inquiry can from its very 
 nature assume no other form than that of a theory of 
 knowledge. The question is not between philosophy and 
 no philosophy, but between philosophy and bad philosophy. 
 
 It is claimed on behalf of Kant and Hegel that they have 
 jointly elaborated the principles of knowledge. But this 
 does not mean either that to Kant and Hegel are we to look 
 for the whole truth, or that the inquiry is to be further de- 
 
THE RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY TO SCIENCE. 65 
 
 veloped through the study of German philosophy. No doubt 
 the pages both of the ' Kritiken ' and the ' Encyclopaedie ' con- 
 tain almost the only exposition of what we are in search of. 
 It may without much presumption be said that those who have 
 not mastered the lesson of Kant and Hegel, whether to accept 
 or to reject it, are not in a position to discuss the questions 
 they raise, any more than one who knows nothing of biology 
 would be entitled to discuss the theory of evolution. But 
 the days of philosophical systems are for the present at all 
 events gone by, and with them the days of devotion to mere 
 abstract thinking. The work of philosophy must now be the 
 a,pplication of what thought has won for itself to questions 
 of the kind which it has been here sought to indicate, and to 
 the cognate questions of other departments of knowledge. 
 No doubt there must often be great difficulty in determining 
 at what point a problem ceases to be properly one of scien<;e 
 and becomes one of knowledge. The history of the past 
 relations of science and philosophy has shown that so long as 
 the two spheres of inquiry remain in different hands — in the 
 hands of persons who are more or less ignorant of each others' 
 subjects — so long will science have cause to reject many of 
 the inferences of philosophy as the intrusion into her domain 
 of something akin to a priori reasoning. But it is no less 
 true that under these conditions the philosopher must have 
 equal cause to complain of the man of science, in that he 
 perpetually raises difficulties insoluble for himself in his own 
 department by the dogmatic application of mistaken cate- 
 gories. Such considerations point towards what seems to 
 be becoming the conclusion of the present time, that science 
 and philosophy can no longer be kept w^holly apart from one 
 another. The inquirer who is to do anything more than 
 simply observe and record, who desires to systematise his 
 results and to generalise from them, must have assimilated 
 the philosophical theory of experience. The philosopher, on 
 the other hand, must, to progress in the direction which the 
 time requires, have the problems which arise within experi- 
 ence before him as they can only come before the scientific 
 observer. But science is a wide subject, and philosophy if, 
 the most abstruse because the least immediate of studies, 
 is a narrow one. It would therefore seem that the work 
 of philosophy in the near future must pass into the hands of 
 specialists in science who are at the same time masters of 
 
6(5 ESSAYS IN PHILObOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 philosophical criticism. There is no finality in thought. 
 Progress is always relative, and this form of philosophical 
 advance can hardly be a permanent form. But for a time, 
 at least, the work would seem as though it must remain 
 in the hands of a new class of men. For such a class the 
 mastery of the critical investigations of Kant and Hegel, or 
 at least of conceptions which have been profoundly influenced 
 by these writers, will be absolutely essential. But such a 
 discipline can form simply a part, though not the least part, 
 of preparatory culture. 
 
 R. B. Haldane. 
 
 J. S. Haldake. 
 
 
G7 
 
 III. 
 
 LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 * The Science of Knowledge ' is a title which everyone con- 
 cedes to logic. But when we ask what it is that in virtue of 
 this title logic ought to be or to do, we gather the most 
 various answers both from the conception and from the exe- 
 cution of logical treatises. 
 
 The purpose of this essay is to illustrate the treatment 
 of logic as a systematic science, in contrast with the spirit of 
 compromise which prevails in modern philosophy, and is in 
 matters of science little better than a spirit of confusion. The 
 writer has selected a title which indicates, as he believes, the 
 nature of that science which Plato imagined and which 
 Aristotle formulated, when knowledge began to be distin- 
 guished from common sense and from instinct. 
 
 The philosophical idea of knowledge which these great 
 men created has been justified a thousandfold by the history 
 of science; and that the justification has not in the main 
 been owing to the labours of their interpreters, but to the 
 direct constructive efforts of countless minds, ignorant or 
 contemptuous of the forms which claimed the place of that 
 idea, is irrefragable proof that the nature of knowledge can 
 be known. The exhibition of this nature in a system of 
 stages or types, embodying the essential phases and the 
 ideals of knowledge, is the process which these pages are 
 intended rather to advocate than to realise.^ The purpose 
 
 ^ Among recent works the writer is cessary to mention, excepting that those 
 
 especially indebted to the logical trca- who, like the writer, believe Mr. Mill's 
 
 tises of the late Professor Lotze, and of position to have been fundamentally 
 
 Prof. Sigwart, and he has adopted the untenable, are the more bound to ac- 
 
 doctrine of hypothesis in induction from knowledge his services to logic, on 
 
 Princi'ples of Science, by the late Pro- which he probably had a more healthy 
 
 fessor Jevons, whose unfortunate death influence than any other logician since 
 
 is a great loss to independent thought Hegel. 
 in England. Older works it is unne- 
 
 F 2 
 
68 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 of this sketch is onlj to indicate the combined unity and 
 comprehensiveness which such a point of view may confer on 
 the treatment of logic, and to protest, by the way, against 
 certain compromises which really compromise the simplicity 
 and truth of logical science. 
 
 The present paper will conveniently fall into three sec- 
 tions. The first will be an attempt to determine the nature 
 and conditions of a science of knowledge, w^hile the two others 
 will be devoted to explaining the relation of logic when thus 
 conceived to metaphysics and the real world, and to the tra- 
 ditional types of formal logic with their modern offshoots. 
 
 1. A science of knowledge is not quite the same thing 
 with a science of thought, nor even with a science of thought 
 as thought. In order that the two should coincide, it would 
 be necessary to restrict the province of thought to the me- 
 diate and immediate judgment, when bond fide put forward 
 as knowledge, excluding all mental acts which do not, like 
 the judgment, claim to be the assertion of fact or truth. 
 Such restriction of thought as thought would not be war- 
 ranted by common language ; hardly, perhaps, by psycholog3% 
 The mental act Avhich corresponds to an imperative sentence 
 is a thought, but does not claim to be knowledge ; so, too, 
 is a conscious exertion of the abstract fancy, which judges, 
 •but claims for its judgments no positive connection with the 
 whole of experience, i.e. does not put them forward as true. 
 
 Our science then takes for its province only such thought 
 as claims to be knowledge, and that is, we may say at^once, 
 in every case, some form of the judgment, excluding the 
 acts of conscious fancy, and the lie or wilful error. Logic 
 has to do not with the moral lie, but only with the 'lie 
 in the mind ' which presents itself under the disguise of 
 knowledge. 
 
 When does thought claim to be knowledge? We say, 
 when it claims to correspond to fact ; and it is knowledge, 
 we believe, in as far, and only in as far, as it does correspond 
 to fact. Now ' fact,' whatever it may be, is beyond the con- 
 trol of the individual mind, and is discovered or constructed 
 by the process, primarily related to the individual mind, 
 which we call * experience.' 
 
 Experience is then the criterion of knowledge. But ex- 
 perience practically presents itself to us, not as a fixed 
 standard, but in a number of growing systems which we call 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 69 
 
 the special sciences ; and in each the correspondence of 
 thought to fact can only be judged by the relation of the 
 system to its material. This means, as the material is not 
 available for judgment till it is organised into knowledge, 
 that knowledge in each growing system is always in process 
 of passing judgment on itself, and nothing else can judge it. 
 
 So far, we are only saying what is admitted, we supposo, 
 ever since Kant ; that no general criterion can apply to the 
 material of knowledge, and that the reality of knowledge 
 depends on its material. 
 
 But these considerations bring us face to face with a 
 grave difficulty in the conception of a science of knowledge. 
 Prioiid facie, the relations which give thought its character 
 of certainty can only be investigated by the direct march of 
 experience, the direct inquiry whether this or that thought 
 is indeed true. 
 
 Few would now put forward the traditional Haws of 
 thought ' as a test of knowledge which will meet this em- 
 barrassment. It will be admitted that they are not false only 
 in as far as they are unmeaning. It will also be generally 
 admitted that the attempt to treat logic as an organ of 
 discovery is for similar reasons inevitably self-contradictory. 
 But we must observe upon a compromise which commended 
 itself to Mill, and is, in fact, a sort of parody of a true 
 treatment of logic. 
 
 We grant, it may be said, that logic can never tell us 
 whether the composition of cellulose is CgHjoO^ ; no doubt 
 we must obtain particular facts from those who know them ; 
 but of an inference at least logic is sovereign judge. If we 
 are supplied with premisses we can tell whether a conclusion 
 is rightly drawn from them, or what other conclusion would 
 be so. 
 
 But the distinction is untenable. An inference is a 
 judgment, though a judgment whose ground or reason is 
 explicitly set forth. Whether such a judgment is true as it 
 stands, i.e. for the reason which it sets out, or true only in 
 part, i.e. as a true conclusion from false premisses, is no 
 less a question of fact than is the truth of an immediate 
 judgment. The conditions required by formal logic for the 
 technical validity of a syllogism amount to" demanding that 
 the mediate judgment in which it consists shall be taken as 
 true. Unless it is true in fact it cannot be true as an in- 
 
70 ESSAYS IN PIIILOSOPIIICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 ference. It is said that a true conclusion may follow from 
 false premisses. But of course this is not the case if we 
 regard the conclusion as an inference, as a mediate judgment. 
 The assertion is that a certain rule connects this predicate 
 with this subject. The mere logician cannot say 'this is true; ' 
 and if he cannot say ' this is true/ he cannot say ' this 
 inference is valid.' He can only say ' it is stated in a form 
 which is appropriate to the exhibition of an adequate rule 
 for determining a subject by a predicate,' i.e, ' it is stated as 
 if it were valid.' 
 
 Who then is to answer the question whether, e.g., a 
 principle will bear the new application proposed to be put 
 upon itP Clearly the question can only be answered b}^ the 
 consequences of each new application to the entirety of the 
 science in question, i.e. by the limits which experience 
 dictates. 
 
 No doubt it may seem that an inference is bound by its 
 form, and that its form is accessible to the logician's 
 criticism. If thrown into another form, it may be said, the 
 inference becomes other, but it must stand by the defects of 
 the form which, as given, it presents. But this objection 
 rests on something like an equivocation. The true form, 
 that which has a real grasp of the matter and consists in 
 systematic thought-relations, is not in particular cases 
 accessible to the logician as such. All that h(». can reach is 
 the grammatical expression, and all the fallacies that he can 
 detect are those which occur, however rarely, from a con- 
 fusion of the import of sentences. 
 
 Truth and validity then cannot be separated ; validity is 
 only the truth of an explicitly conditioned judgment. Both 
 depend on the movement of experience. 
 
 How then can we save the conception of a science of 
 knowledge ? For the essence of knowledge is truth, and it 
 seems that the relation which constitutes truth cannot enter 
 into our science. 
 
 This issue, on which the whole possibility of logic rests, 
 is familiar to us in several forms. How is it possible that 
 we should know more than we have actually felt and seen ? 
 How can any judgment be more than descriptive ; which 
 amounts to asking, in other words. How synthetic judg- 
 ments are possible which are at once universal and 
 necessary ? All these issues are summed up in the question 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 71 
 
 to which we must now turn — ' What is the distinction between 
 the matter and the form of thought ? ' 
 
 The truth, it has been said, is the whole. No isolated 
 judgment, in its isolation, is necessary, or indeed has any 
 import. We may gather this from the admission that, in 
 order to see the necessity of any judgment, we must under- 
 stand the terms. This means no less than that we must 
 master a certain system in which the judgment which we 
 are to aj^prehend is bound up, and then we shall perceive 
 how unintelligible that part of our world, or it may be our 
 entire world, would become if we denied that judgment. 
 This is excellently illustrated by Whewell's account of 
 coming to feel that the contradictory of certain judgments 
 is inconceivable. Thus it is not to be demanded of a 
 science of knowledge that it should conjure certainty out of 
 nothing, or, on the other hand, embrace in itself the whole 
 range of special science. Logic does not arise till men are 
 convinced that knowledge is real ; it has no power or 
 authority over minds that should bond fide deny this reality. 
 (Not that we admit such denial to be possible.) It is only 
 when the difference between truth and error, between proof 
 and guesswork, has become the basis of civilisation, of the 
 practice of law courts and the predictions of science, that 
 attention is turned, as in the time of Plato, to the dis- 
 tinction between knowledge, common sense, and ignorance. 
 
 It was said above that truth lay in the correspondence 
 of thought to fact. It is now said that truth lies in the 
 entirety of experience. The two expressions are equivalent ; 
 a fact is that which experience as a whole compels us to 
 believe. If this were not so ; if facts were isolated as neither 
 a grain of sand nor anything else is isolated, then, as we may 
 partly fancy by the help of a violent abstraction, truth, 
 granting that there was to be truth, would consist in the 
 correspondence of each several thought to some archetype, 
 and there could be no inference,^ nor any but descrip- 
 tive judgments, nor any science of knowledge. There 
 would be none of those degrees of relation between each 
 judgment and the whole of what is known which constitute 
 the more and less of truth and certainty. There would be, 
 
 ' There might be generalisation generalise about. But no fact could be 
 about the isolated facts, if we suppose criticised, doubted, or inferred, 
 them to have enough community to 
 
72 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 that is, no distinction between the matter and the form of 
 thought. 
 
 But this is not so. Beginning with the sentence, the 
 linguistic equivalent of all living thought, men are led to 
 observe a certain structure which repeats itself, though not 
 without differences, in all mental operations that embody 
 knowledge. As this structure is freed from the accidents of 
 particular languages it is seen to be identical with that 
 systematic unity the more and less of which constitutes the 
 more and less of knowledge. This unity in its rudimentary 
 form is the judgment. A synthetic judgment a priori would 
 be a judgment, not tautologous, but yet so determining the 
 whole arrangement and cohesion of our experience that if 
 it were untrue we should have to give up the pretension 
 to connected intelligence. Whether any judgment can be 
 knovpn as having this character is doubtful ; but it is the 
 logical ideal to which every proved fact must approximate, and 
 is fairly realised in such judgments as those of which Whewell 
 naively maintained that we learn to find their contradictory in- 
 conceivable. We cannot, e.g., refuse to admit that a straight 
 line is the shortest way between two points. And why not ? 
 Because in attempting to deny it we make nonsense of our 
 idea of space. It is proved, like every first principle, by 
 being necessary to the conclusions drawn from it. Such 
 systematic unity in its various shapes and types, known to us 
 not so much by what we call them as by what they do for 
 our knowledge, is the form of thought. To understand this 
 unity in its different but kindred manifestations, to appre- 
 ciate the demands which in its various phases it makes upon 
 its material, and to formulate these demands as the logical 
 ideal of knowledge, is what we understand by the function 
 of logic as a science. The relation of logic to science then 
 is reflective and illustrative : it proposes not so much to 
 criticise as to interpret. We would not, however, lay it 
 down that no logician can be of service to science. Lookers 
 on see most of the game ; and it might well be that the 
 wider studies of Mill, Lotze, or Jevons might lead them to 
 fruitful considerations, not to speak of Lotze's eminence in 
 certain branches of science. But whatever is so done for 
 discovery by logic is done per accidens ; it is not as a logician 
 that the philosopher is of service, but as a scientist or 
 amateur. 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 73 
 
 In this purely narrative paper we may be permitted fur- 
 ther to give the bearings of this position by discussing the 
 relation of such a logic to metaphysic and to the formal 
 logic of tradition. 
 
 2. How is logic distinguished from metaphysic ? Logic 
 has been defined to be the science of thought as knowledge ; 
 metaphysic will be allowed to consist in the science of 
 reality as such. 
 
 I. The distinction cannot be that logic deals with the 
 intellect and metaphysic with something beyond or external 
 to the intellect. There are only two grounds on which such 
 a distinction can be proposed : — a. The restriction of logic to 
 a consideration of the shapes and figures of thinking without 
 reference to their connection with reality. But beside such 
 a logic as this there is room for a further science, about 
 which the question whether it dealt with the work of intellect 
 or not would arise over again; i.e. metaphysic is not treating 
 of something external to the intellect because it goes beyond 
 the range of ' formal ' logic. 
 
 yS. But there is also the well-known ground of a thorough- 
 going distinction between thought and existence. Meta- 
 physics may then be held to busy itself with ascertaining 
 what elements of experience are due to each of these factors, 
 and may state its guesses either about the world outside the 
 mind, or about the world as given in the nature of the mind, 
 as the outcome of its search for what is really real. In the 
 ■ second of these cases it may be identified with logic, and in 
 the first distinguished from logic, and both with equally little 
 ground. 
 
 11. It is idle, if not impossible,-^ separate logic from 
 metaphysics as the exhibition of a process from the exhibition 
 of its results ; that is, as a critical investigation of know- 
 ledge from a summary of its outcome to be taken as reality. 
 In science there is no such thing as a net result. Even in 
 dealing with data of number and extension, it is essential to 
 bear in mind the processes by which they have been obtained ; 
 otherwise we cannot know what they really represent. To 
 base processes on results is unavoidable ; it is a makeshift 
 which is needful for lengthened operations. But to exhibit 
 results apart from processes, except for the mere purpose of 
 abbreviation, is not to construct a science but to arrange a 
 vocabulary. Thus it will not do to expound the scheme of 
 
74 ESSAYS IN PIlILOSOPrilCAL CRITICISM. 
 
 ideas developed by logic as truths ready to hand and estab- 
 lished for ontological purposes. If logical ideas are to be 
 applied in ethics or in theology, they must be applied as 
 logical ideas, in the light of their deduction, not as a meta- 
 physical framework of things. 
 
 III. We are, therefore, forced to the conclusion that the 
 general science of reality cannot be distinguished from the 
 science of knowledge. Reality is the connection with the 
 Avhole, and logic is the science of this connection in general, 
 as direct science is in particular. But this conception will 
 undermine much of what is propounded as metaphysics. 
 Oiitological speculation will assume a less rigid form ; the 
 thing in itself will appear as a phantom of existence pro- 
 jectecl into vacancy l)y the understanding in its zeal to ex- 
 plain everything by something else. Monads or atoms will 
 not be demanded as metaphysical substrata, but will rest on 
 their merits as objects of possible experience. Cosmological 
 principles, e.g. the theory of space and time, and the wider 
 laws that appear in nature, may come to be treated on the 
 one hand in logic, as aflPecting the import of the entire scheme 
 of knowledge, on the other hand, ' empirically,' in the simple 
 inquiry as to what they are. And psychology, which now 
 wavers between the mind's intellectual work and its more 
 tangible conditions, would Yerj well bear a similar division; 
 the characteristic movement of thought, with distinctively 
 human emotion, would fall into the range of logic, ethics, 
 and anthroi^olog}^, while the purely animal mechanism of 
 thinking and feeling would belong to physiology. We do not 
 mean by this distinction to block the path for contributions 
 to philosophy from the inquiry into the mechanism of 
 consciousness. That the action of reason is varied and 
 limited in individual men by dependence upon an animal 
 mechanism is a belief now almost inevitable, whether true or 
 not. We expect inequalities and limitations in this matter, 
 as in the matters of health and physical endowments, which 
 indeed cannot be strictly distinguished from the mechanism 
 of consciousness. It need not be imagined that philosophy 
 has any vocation to protect the independence of reason and 
 the will against the consequences of being mechanically con- 
 ditioned. A far more difficult problem, and one that 
 includes the former, awaits philosophy on its own distinctive 
 ground ; namely the assignment of a ^ content ' for the 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 75 
 
 individual soul in determinin<j its motives. Granting com- 
 plete freedom to determine, from what source is any specific 
 free determination to be derived ? Such a problem as this 
 dwarfs the difficulties of a mechanism of consciousness into 
 insignificance, and presents itself in that direct consideration 
 of the body and matter of thought which is the true province 
 of mental science. 
 
 The view here indicated of the relation between logic and 
 metaphysics is subject to well-known and formidable diffi- 
 culties with which this essay cannot pretend to deal. The 
 writer, however, cannot for his own part conceive any diffi- 
 culties to be so formidable as those which attend the alter- 
 native method of a direct or uncritical metaphysic. By a 
 direct metaphysic we mean any method which seizes on this 
 or that element of experience as representing reality, guided 
 only by some conviction as to the source (in or out of the 
 intellect), or the character (universality, necessit}^, or the 
 like) of the required element. That any such science is no 
 better than a castle in the air is a proposition amply justifi- 
 able in theory : the limits of the present sketch and the 
 triteness of the subject may perhaps be our excuse if we 
 attempt an appeal to philosophical common sense. The 
 tree is known by its fruit. In a sense, no doubt, we must 
 admit the extraordinary vitality of direct ontological and 
 cosmological speculation. We may point, for instance, to 
 the curious precision with which Herbert Spencer illustrates 
 his idea of the dependence of phenomena upon an unknown 
 ground. Problems of the same class had an attraction for 
 Lotze, and received from the genius of Professor Clifford a 
 treatment as instructive as any of which they are capable. 
 The point which strikes an observer in theories of this class 
 is the absence of growth or development. One tendency 
 indeed is clearly discernible, and that is, the tendency to 
 assimilate the unknown reality to consciousness. But other- 
 wise the ideas suggested seem otiose. They have no pro- 
 gressive control over experience, contain no substance and 
 bulk of organised knowledge ; they form a series whose last 
 term is not distinctly more advanced than its first. These 
 observations would be unjustifiable if they could not be 
 brought to the test of history. But an appeal to history is 
 always fair. The contrast with logic will show in what sense 
 we make the appeal. 
 
76 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 Logic, as also language, but in a higher sense, may be 
 compared to the system of fortresses that secure a conquered 
 country. It follows the march of knowledge laboriously but 
 surely. The very aberrations and caprices of logic are 
 owing to the vastness of its material. The great movements 
 of culture and of science register themselves in periodical 
 reforms of the theory of knowledge ; every procedure and 
 principle, from numerical computation to evolution in the 
 realm of ideas, claims now and again to be the logical 
 method. And there is room for all. After each ' reform ' 
 the science recovers itself, and the new elements which were 
 to turn the logical world upside down, fall so naturally into 
 their place that we wonder how it was overlooked before. 
 
 The mention of a system of types or manifestations of 
 the unity of thought (p. 72) naturally raises the question 
 what the succession of forms can mean, and how it is war- 
 ranted. Let us take as an instance the idea of cause as an 
 antecedent in time, and as only one out of many possible 
 antecedents, to which a certain effect or consequent in time 
 may be due. To this idea corresponds the principle, ' The 
 same cause will always produce the same effect,' and the 
 idea may be set down as the idea of ' cause and eff'ect,' i.e. 
 of two things or events in a certain relation. No logical 
 system can leave this idea as it stands. It cannot fail to be 
 observed that cause is relative to effect no less than effect to 
 cause, and that this relativity is expressed in the conception 
 of a single necessary process, continuous in nature and 
 grounded on some law or reason. In such a process it is 
 clear that the given effect has always one cause, or rather 
 ' ground,' just as the same cause has always the same effect. 
 This idea might be described as that of convertible cause 
 and effect ; but the notion of cause and effect, as this and 
 that, is gone when they are reduced to process or ground, 
 because, in a continuous process, it is impossible to say 
 where cause ends and effect begins. For the purpose of 
 knowledge any part of such a process is sufficient to deter- 
 mine all the rest, and a modification of any part is impos- 
 sible without modification of the rest, whether related to the 
 former as effect or as cause. 
 
 But further ; everything that acts in the real world is 
 not onl}^ conditioned as cause by the receptivity of that on 
 which it acts, but is also conditioned as effect by the activity 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 77 
 
 of that other thing. In every moment the process branches 
 out by reaction into several processes, so that if we restrict 
 our attention to the single set of changes which first en- 
 gaged it, we neglect an essential characteristic of our world. 
 This characteristic is known as reciprocity or reaction ; 
 everything that modifies another is itself modified by the 
 same connection. We might go on to insist that where 
 action and reaction are in play we have pro tanto a system ; 
 but enough has been said for the mere purpose of illustra- 
 tion. Cause and effect, ground, reciprocity, system, are a 
 set of ideas which can hardly help making their appearance 
 in every attempt to systematise logic. In Mill we have an 
 alternation, if not a confusion, between cause and effect 
 proper, and the idea of process or reason in which cause is a 
 conception that includes the occurrence of the effect. The 
 further aspects of the idea are not specifically treated of by 
 Mill, though implied in his account of causes. Not that his 
 'reciprocal' causation has anything to do with reaction; it 
 only means cases where A gives rise to B, and B, subse- 
 quently, to A. 
 
 Why are these ideas to be arranged in a succession? 
 If the initial form is incomplete, inappropriate to the for- 
 mulation of experience, why introduce it into logic ? Or if 
 it is to come in because the individual mind passes through 
 it in learning science, why not catalogue and arrange in 
 order all the errors which a beginner may make in Euclid or 
 in grammar? These mistakes probably have a family re- 
 semblance and a natural sequence. Or is there som.e section 
 of rational experience in which it is best to regard cause and 
 effect as separate events ? In short, has the conception of 
 cause and effect any place in knowledge which cannot be 
 better filled by one of the subsequent conceptions, and if not, 
 why do we let it appear in logic ? 
 
 Whatever is a marked and uniform phase in the move- 
 ment of reason belongs to logic. It would, indeed, be rash 
 to deny that one or another well accredited stage of thought 
 may seem to lose vitality, and thenceforward to belong only 
 to history; and cause and effect have no specific province, as 
 have, for instance, number and extension. Yet examples of 
 such self-conquest on the part of reason should be accepted 
 with great caution. And even where it does take place, it 
 can only be effected by the substitution of some category that 
 
78 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 exhibits more clearly the nature of the old one. The imper- 
 fect or rudimentary logical forms have their various claims 
 to their position. They have a connection both with the 
 general movement of experience in science and history, and 
 with the progress of the individual mind within each science. 
 As long as the world presents itself to reason in ' things,' 
 reflection will fix on concrete conditions as the explanation 
 of changes that come after them. To say that ' the cause 
 of death was poisoning by strychnine,' or that ' the cause of a 
 railway accident was the breaking of a connecting-rod,' is a 
 way of speaking which has its truth in the necessary ab- 
 straction of common life. It is as true as to say, 'that 
 colour is really blue, but looks green by candle-light.' Cause, 
 like reality, is a temporary fixed point to help in determining 
 the bearing: of something^ else. Even if a more advanced 
 category were put in its place, an explanation of what was 
 superseded would have to be given, or that new category 
 would in turn be in danger of omitting what it should in- 
 clude. So much for the meaning of the logical succession 
 as regards the value of those forms whose earlier place in 
 the series seems to stamp them with incompleteness. Simpler 
 instances are those in which the ruder form has an obvious 
 use and an obvious limitation. Compare for instance the equa- 
 tion A= A with the judgment 'man is animal.' The truth 
 of every form is in its use, and its use determines its place in 
 the succession. 
 
 But how is the arrangement or succession which we may 
 adopt to be guaranteed ? Are we proposing in a concealed 
 way something that is not unlike the Hegelian dialectic ? The 
 first answer to all such questions must be ovk av OavpidaavfMi, 
 s'i fioi aKs-yfra/jiSLQ) ovtco ho^sLSv. We do not indeed bind our- 
 selves to any method, in the sense in which deduction, 
 induction, and dialectic are styled methods, but if the exami- 
 nation of logical material leads us to a quasi- dialectical 
 exhibition of its organism, we cannot help it. All we must 
 presuppose is, as has been said above, the existence of know- 
 ledge or the possibility of necessary synthetic judgments in 
 the sense there defined. Yet the censure of dialectic has 
 been carried so far that this simple postulate requires defence, 
 for in every synthetic judgment we have the phenomenon 
 which has been held to be the essence of dialectic, the self- 
 caused transition from idea to idea. Lotze's explanation of 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 79 
 
 the Hegelian movement, of an idea is too simple to be true ; 
 and is, we venture to think, inconsistent with the recogni- 
 tion of synthetic judgments. The notion that an idea may 
 be such as necessarily to turn into its opposite is, according 
 to this explanation, a mere confusion between the idea, which 
 is fixed, and the things falling under it, which are variable. 
 The criticism may be connected with Lotze's view of the 
 relation between judgment and idea, which cannot be 
 entered upon here. Now it may be conceded that the logical 
 term ' opposite ' in this context has little meaning, and may 
 be taken to have much ; and that the appearance of laying 
 no weight upon verification rightly tells against such con- 
 ceptions as this of dialectical movement. But if ideas do 
 not pass into each other, each in virtue of its own nature 
 being the ground of certain others, it is hard to see how a 
 system of ideas is possible, or how any synthetic judgment 
 can be true. The mental image of a triangle, as presented 
 by the pictorial fancy, contains no movement ; but the idea 
 of a triangle consists of active thonght, ranging between 
 limits set by the elements of its definition. The processes 
 of scrutinising our ideas, or of pushing a principle home, 
 are the means by which knowledge is made real; and we all 
 know what is meant by carr3'ing an idea too far. It canuot 
 seriously be objected that these are acts of the mind, and 
 not of the idea ; ideas in any genuine sense are acts or 
 movements of the mind. 
 
 Perhaps we get to the root of the matter by admitting 
 
 that if an idea on being pressed home turns into another, 
 
 some condition has been supplied which was passed over in 
 
 the first statement. If liberty on scrutiny turns out to be 
 
 necessity, this means that in the first estimate either present 
 
 conditions were neglected or absent conditions presupposed. 
 
 A true or adequate idea of liberty would not turn out to be 
 
 necessity. But is any idea, taken as we find it, properly 
 
 i.e, completely, stated ? Is it not the very postulate of 
 
 knowledge that the whole is necessary to the definition of 
 
 every part ; or, as in Lotze's excellent logic, that the defect 
 
 of each form is supplemented by its successor ? That an 
 
 Kp idea which gives a new result nnder a new condition does 
 
 m not thereby turn into another, but oiily receives an addition, 
 
 ^^or is endowed with a relation to another idea, is a distinction 
 
 ^kthat means nothing in the realm of thought. In no case is 
 
 I 
 
 r 
 
80 ESSAYS IN PHTLOSOPIIICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 the original idea lost, but all additions which are proved of 
 it must modify it in a greater or less degree. Experience 
 moves every idea through perpetual new conditions, and 
 this movement is the development of what the idea is, i.e. of 
 the synthetic judgments into which it can enter. That a 
 triangle, if the base is reduced to nothing, becomes a straight 
 line, or that freedom to act, without a reason for acting, is 
 blind chance or necessity, are considerations belonging to 
 similar movements. 
 
 Experience, in short, forces thought along certain lines 
 from partial to more complete notions. What name may be 
 given or what cause assigned to such an advance is in- 
 different for our purpose ; but such a progress from idea to 
 idea as expressed in synthetic judgments is all that needs to 
 be postulated for a succession of logical forms, and its power 
 to throw light on experience is the only guarantee that can 
 be offered. 
 
 We have then to see how the proposed treatment deals 
 with some of the main ideas of traditional logic. In this 
 discussion great part of the idea is due to Lotze, though his 
 view on the relation of judgment to concept does not com- 
 mend itself. 
 
 3. The title of formal logic ' is objectionable as implying 
 some other logic which is not formal ; e.g. a logic of truth, 
 or api)lied logic. Following the conviction that the science 
 of knowledge must, qua science, deal with form, we shall 
 eschew the title as tautologous. The following suggestions, 
 however, start from the ' formal ' logic of tradition as an 
 outline to be filled up. They will not look very like a con- 
 tribution to ontology. The writer's present purpose is only 
 to show how the science may master some of the elements 
 which at present make it chaotic. 
 
 We assumed that the subject-matter of logic was always 
 the judgment, whether mediate' or immediate. The object 
 is then to exhibit the forms characteristic of these acts in a 
 system depending on their respective value for knowledge. 
 The direct judgment bears an exceedingly close relation to 
 the mediate judgment or inference ; the distinction between 
 them might indeed be treated as purely external. Every 
 direct judgment that deserves the name must express an 
 inference, i.e. a conclusion with a reason ; and it might be 
 ur^^ed that the articulate expression of this reason in the 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 81 
 
 uiiddle term of a syllogism makes no difference in what is 
 actually thought. The fact, however, that a single judg- 
 ment may seem not to contain material for the subject of 
 the conclusion over and above the middle term, indicates, if 
 it does not furnish, the true distinction. It would no doubt 
 look ridiculous to analyse the judgment * All triangles have 
 their 3 angles = 2 right angles ' into the syllogism 
 
 ' All triangles have their 3 angles = 2 right angles.' 
 
 ' All triano'les are trianj^les.' 
 
 ' .-. All triangles have their angles = 2 right angles.' 
 But the absurdity looks greater than it is : it is not so unheard 
 of to say, ' All triangles, just because they are triangles, have 
 their three angles,' etc. The meaning of the judgment is 
 precisely that, and though all propositions could not, yet all 
 judgments of the higher class could, be analysed in this waj. 
 The true distinction between judgment and syllogism is in- 
 dicated by this absurdity, and is one of a class which charac- 
 terises forms of thinking. The direct judgment retains the 
 professed structure and import of the simplest or most 
 empirical enunciation, e.g, ' I hear,' while capable of carrying 
 a precisely drawn inference like the above geometrical truth. 
 All the thought forms have this elasticity of application ; 
 it might almost be said that an^^ of them can be forced upon 
 any matter. Their ideal import has a narrower range than 
 their intelligible use. But the express demand for a distinct 
 reason, as if in answer to the question, 'why?' is made by the 
 mediate judgment form or syllogism, thus bringing into 
 strong relief the inferential character which is latent in the 
 direct judgment. 
 
 The series of judgments would, perhaps, in a perfect 
 representation, be interrupted by syllogistic forms to explain 
 the transition from judgment to judgment ; ^ but for our 
 purpose it is better to arrange the judgments together and 
 observe upon inference later. 
 
 The categorical judgment is the real act of mind cor- 
 responding io a simple proposition, whether affirmative or 
 negative. ' The real act,' for the sentence is apt to disguise 
 the judgment, and grammar is often at cross purposes with 
 logical analysis, even if it uses a quasi-logical terminology. 
 
 ' This conception may be corupared in refusing to recognise a natural or 
 with the simpler dialectic of Lotze's necfs.sai-y advance from notion to no- 
 Metaj)hysic, Introduction, § xi. Lotze tion. 
 seems, however, to be over-cautious 
 
 G 
 
82 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CEITICISM. 
 
 The grammatical subject, or any subordinate grammatical 
 element, may often be the logical predicate. To interpret a 
 sentence is to elicit from it the logical judgment which it 
 is really intended to convey. 
 
 The sentence is the real unit of language ; the word by 
 itself, except when it has the power of the sentence by com- 
 pound structure, or is used as a verb by help of sign or tone 
 (a true interjectional use hardly comes under the head of 
 language), corresponds to no act of thought. It is doubtful 
 whether there is an exact Greek term for ' word.' Aristotle 
 has to use a periphrasis when he wants to refer to it in a 
 definition. No doubt he took his ovofia and prj^a to have 
 each its own meaning, but it does not follow that he thought 
 of them apart from possible judgments. Apart from any 
 sentence the meaning of a name could be nothing but a 
 mental image ; but we doubt whether even this exists in the 
 human consciousness apart from ideas which would need a 
 sentence to express them. 
 
 These remarks are introduced to illustrate the relation 
 of the concept to the judgment. Because the sentence can 
 be broken up into words, therefore it seems to be tliought 
 the judgment can be broken up into concepts. Now a con- 
 cept has unquestionably a common meaning in all judgments 
 that contain it ; but it need not therefore have any meaning 
 apart from each and all of these. ^i.Jgments. To think of 
 terms or significant words is to put them into judgments or 
 sentences ; only the word, having an existence and history as 
 a thing in sound and in print, impresses us as separable, but 
 reflection shows that its function is really to set up an intel- 
 lectual movement which it guides but does not include. In 
 short, a judgment cannot be cut in two so as to give two 
 fixed products like the printed words of the sentence ; we 
 may take ' the sun shines ' and cut out the verb, but the 
 truncated subject, when we turn the mind upon it, develops 
 other predications out of itself, and breaks up again into a 
 complete system of judgments. Nor are the original subject 
 and predicate, apart from the original judgment, ever quite 
 the same that they were in it. In ' the moon shines ' and 
 * the sun is hot ' we have, so to speak, not quite the same 
 cases under the rules prescribed by ' shines ' and ' sun ' re- 
 spectively, as we had in the original judgment, ' the sun 
 shines.' The judgment then is a single indivisible act, 
 
I 
 
 LOi?iIC AS TIIE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 83 
 
 though containing that distinction in identity on which 
 thought and, ultimately, consciousness depend. Subject and 
 predicate determine how predicate and subject are here and 
 now entering into thought. 
 
 But it may be asked, ' Where is the import by which they 
 determine each other, if thought is only in judgments, and 
 there is only one judgment in question, viz. that which is 
 being made ? ' Have not the terms after all a fixed, separable 
 import, like the shape or colour of a thing in space, which 
 they bring to the judgment in which they are combined, as 
 the phrase goes. There is a real difficulty in analysing the 
 act of judging, because of its fugitive nature and its numerous 
 grades of unity. To explain this question of the import we 
 must think of such forms as relative sentences or as the 
 syllogism itself. The unity is least, and the rigidity of sub- 
 ject and predicate greatest, in the judgment that compares 
 pure qualities, without attaching interest to them by any 
 further condition depending on either. ' Red is not green ' ; 
 such a judgment, however, with no further import, is purely 
 formal, and would never be made. If the judgment is taken 
 as defining red to be the danger-signal, it unites the two 
 qualities in a single and perfectly clear relation. Every 
 jndgment is really a conclusion, or at least a member of 
 some context of judgments. This will be clear in the sequel. 
 What has been saia on .he unity of the judgment applies 
 equally to the syllogifctui, as appears sufficiently from the 
 relation of the two. It is a corollary from this that they 
 are not in time. The apprehension of a sentence takes time ; 
 but a judgment, or proof qua proof, is complete in the 
 moment in which it is understood or ' seen through.' Con- 
 sciousness is in many ways conditioned by time ; but qua 
 consciousness, i.e. as regards what is known or felt, it is the 
 negation of time. 
 
 In scientific logic we ought to proceed at once to the 
 theory of the judgment. The term or equivalent of a name 
 has no place in logic apart from this theory. From quality 
 to causation, and from cause to idea, all the matter of con- 
 sciousness takes the form of the judgment. 
 
 One criticism must be made in this context on a concep- 
 tion which is usually treated under the head of terms. 
 Aristotle observed that in one sense a genus contains its 
 species, while in another, every species must contain its 
 
 « 2 
 
84 ESSAYS IN nilLOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 genus. ^ The contrast thus indicated has since been developed 
 as the difference between the intension and extension of a 
 concept. What we have to observe upon this doctrine is no 
 more than a warning that it cannot indicate two co-ordinate 
 and separable kinds of import. We might say that the 
 denotation is a consequence of the connotation, if this does 
 not imply that the connotation can be thought without the 
 denotation. To think in denotation (extension) only, would 
 be to think of individual things without knowing what we 
 are thinking of; to think in connotation (intension) would 
 be to think of relations without knowing what subjects are 
 determined by them. The latter is the more possible ab- 
 straction of the two, but is only to be found by a strained 
 interpretation. In * Goodness is praiseworthy,' the subject 
 is of course a quality that exists in instances, and though 
 we may sleepily pass over the term as a sound in its right 
 place, we cannot actively make the thought our own without 
 presenting to ourselves some sketch of the cases or forms in 
 which goodness is realised. 
 
 We shall see enough of this distinction in the perverted 
 forms of judgment which take a short cut to the logical ideal 
 by the route of abstract identity. We need only observe 
 before passing on, that in as far as the twofold meaning 
 represents more and less consciousness of number, both kinds 
 are often, perhaps usually, united ^fi the same judgment, 
 the subject being emphasized in re^|,^^ct of number (though 
 it must be a number of something) and the predicate in 
 respect of content or nature, e.g. Some M.P.'s are Protec- 
 tionists. It is important how many M.P.'s hold the doctrine 
 in question, but less important what fraction they form of 
 the general Protectionist party. 
 
 We spoke of a short cut to the logical ideal. The logical 
 ideal in its abstract form is simple identity. It claims to be 
 expressed in every affirmation, and as the barest expression 
 of this claim, the principle A is A has been set up as repre- 
 sentative of the judgment. And at every step in the deve- 
 lopment of the thought form we are met by the temptation to 
 take a short cut to the ideal A is A. That is to say, instead of 
 justifying an affirmation, by finding out a real resolution of 
 the difference between its elements, the tendency is simply to 
 leave the difference, as a material difference, out of sight, but 
 
 ' Cf. Treudelenberg'fi Selections from the Orgunon, § 24, note. 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 85 
 
 to save the assertion bj making it identify a set of indi- 
 viduals with themselves. All doctrines which put the 
 judgment on the level of an equation are of this nature. 
 They are attractive because they seem to furnish operations 
 of the mind in pursuit of truth which can be conducted 
 wholly on logical ground by the assistance of simple com- 
 putation, or, perhaps, of the calculus of probabilities. All 
 such processes, however valuable in themselves, have for 
 logic the character of arrested development. The demands 
 of the ideal are only to be satisfied by a progressive material 
 determination of the judgment, which must bite deeper and 
 deeper into its subject as it passes into a larger system. All 
 this, as we have amply seen, logic cannot do, but can only 
 follow the doing of it. 
 
 If it is assumed that to catalogue judgments after the 
 fashion of common text-books is insufficient, then two schemes 
 present themselves on which a series of judgments may be 
 based. To trace the advance of thought from the synthetic to 
 the analytic judgment, beginning with the qualitative percep- 
 tion and ending with the definition or perhaps with the exis- 
 tential judgment, is in many respects the safer plan. There 
 are grounds, however, which lead us to reject it, or at least to 
 modify it. Every judgment is essentially both synthetic and 
 analytic. The distinctions to be drawn could therefore be 
 nothing but distinctions of degree. And even these would 
 be disturbed by pyschological considerations tending to con- 
 fuse the absolutely and the relatively analytic or synthetic 
 judgment. Is not every new judgment synthetic and every 
 familiar judgment analytic, it might be asked. Or again, 
 is not, as Sigwart ingeniously contends, the direct reading 
 of perception in every case analytic, while only the judgment 
 which involves an inference is truly synthetic ? What in 
 short is to prevent us from seizing any form, of tautology as 
 the type of the analytic judgment? Now that analytic cha- 
 racter which justifies us in treating a thought form ns genuine 
 knowledge is not tautology, but a thorough mastery of dif- 
 ferences ; not obtained by abstraction, but by organisation 
 of material. In describing this process wholly in terms of 
 the categorical judgment, and subject to the above psycho- 
 logical difficulties, we should be neglecting a useful guide 
 which has been made serviceable by Lotze and others. If 
 the forms of judgment an? augmented by the inclusion ofth^ 
 
86 ESSAYS IN HlII.OSOPIIICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 hypothetical and disjunctive, we obtain at least the support 
 of a definite scheme in tracing the influence of the logical 
 ideal. And in spite of the elasticity of thought forms, to 
 which we shall find certain limits, this scheme will be of 
 great service in marking the phases of knowledge. 
 
 i. The series of judgments begins with the impersonal as 
 appropriately as it might end with the existential judgment. 
 The impersonal approximates to a purely synthetic chara.cter ; 
 the existential is all but absolutely analytic. The former 
 has a predicate but no subject, the latter a subject but no 
 predicate. The difference between them therefore depends 
 on the different functions of subject and predicate. The 
 predicate determines ; the subject is determined. The empty 
 place of a subject, its mere abstract position before a realis- 
 ing consciousness, may be determined in predication by an 
 event which we cannot or do not care to define or localise. 
 ' It is hot ' ; ' there is a sound.' Such a predication, floating 
 so to speak, attached only to experience in general, and not 
 tied down to any distinct relations, unless a simple ' now,' 
 might well embody the irpMrov vornxa, the act in which 
 thought and sense meet. That is, the sense material appears 
 in it with as slight an investiture of defining thought as is 
 consistent with its presentation to a human consciousness. 
 Whether the impersonal judgment preserves any such 
 moment, or can be shown to have in fact ever corresponded 
 to it, is a question for philology. The impersonal sentence 
 of our own language seems to be for the most part a result of 
 artificial abstraction ; it might, however, be urged that with- 
 out some genuine survivals there would have been no such 
 artificial products. But the result for logic is the same ; an 
 empty form, determined by a significant predicate, is, for 
 whatever reason, the scheme of the impersonal judgment. 
 Sometimes it is rhetorical, and little more than a gram- 
 matical device. ' There is a willow grows aslant a brook,' 
 throws the whole picture together, avoiding the break-up 
 that would be caused by treating any one feature as principal 
 subject. The true character of many such sentences is doubt- 
 ful ; compare ' It is I,' Ich bin es, I761) sIixl. Is the English 
 form impersonal? Often the logical subject is supplied by a 
 side wind : ' It is hot out there ; ' ' It grieves me to say it.' 
 And the general reference of the subject form makes it an 
 effective vehicle of negation. ^ There is none righteous,' ex- 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 87 
 
 presses the searching over experience and finding none, as con- 
 trasted with merely not finding them in some one place. It is 
 doubtful if any common trait marks the genuine impersonals ; 
 we hardly find, as we should expect, all the most indefinite 
 feelings represented in them, though some are, e.g., heat, cold, 
 and the like. The weather has in several languages a special 
 right to impersonals, perhaps because a subject was specially 
 hard to frame, or possibly because it was divine and not to 
 be spoken of. 
 
 The 'existential judgment' in a complete work would 
 close the account of the analytic judgment. We may dis- 
 miss it here, observing that it sets itself to make an abstract 
 form of predication into something sufficiently determinate 
 bo take the place of a predicate. This straining of the pre- 
 dicate form betrays itself in the tendency to change the 
 verb. Existence, then, as a predicate, borrows its meaning 
 from the subject. It determines the subject by the essen- 
 tials of its own definition, those essentials which fix its 
 place and value in experience. The judgment of existence, 
 tlierefore, need never be false, for every subject has some 
 such predicates that will fill up the form. It is false, or true 
 in the negative, when it is guided by some interest to deter- 
 mine a subject with relation to a standard not its own. If 
 a bank-note which ' exists ' in my imagination has been 
 alleged to be forthcoming to pay a debt, the answer ' it does 
 not exist' is justified — i.e, it has not the predicate which 
 belongs to such a bank-note as the context requires. 
 
 The predicate form in the ' existential judgment ' is the 
 abstraction of experience used as a determination, and 
 therefore is the result of conscious reflection ; the subject 
 form in the impersonal judgment is also the abstraction of 
 experience, but only as what is to be determined, and there- 
 fore not a reflective but an unconscious abstraction, as near 
 as may be to the abstractness of feeling. 
 
 ii. When the floating subject-form of the impersonal 
 judgment becomes restricted to some point or mark in expe- 
 rience by the explicit distinction of a relation — e.g. of limit 
 as between thing and thing, we have as the result, it might 
 be urged, the singular judgment of ' formal ' logic. But it 
 is usual to treat that singular judgment as a case of the 
 universal judgment, on the ground that its predicate is 
 tiTie of the whole subject. Now, apart from the artificial 
 
88 ESSAYS IN riirLOSOPIlIOAL CIUTICISM. 
 
 contrast of intension and extension, it is plain tliat in the 
 rudimentary singular judgment we do not find the predicate 
 referring to the whole subject in at all the same sense as 
 in a genuine universal judgment. What is the subject in 
 * This stone is iron ore ; ' or in ' This man (for which a 
 proper name may be substituted) is the criminal'? The sub- 
 ject is in the one case ' stone,' the other case ' man ' ; for 
 when we have applied a name we have committed ourselves 
 to some general significance of the name. A proper name, 
 too, is nearly equivalent to a phrase like 'this man,' Hhis 
 place.' The demonstrative pronoun, proper name, or other 
 purely formal limitation, supplies no universal link between 
 the subject so restricted and the predicate. We have, there- 
 fore, to find a form of judgment in which all that we really 
 know is a limited connection between the subject and pre- 
 dicate, and in which there is nothing to explain the limita- 
 tion. Such judgments may best be treated as ' particular,' 
 under which term should be included as its cases the sin- 
 gular and the plural judgment, the latter having the sign 
 ' some ' or any indication of the plural. The plural judg- 
 ment amounts to nothing but a summing up of singulars. 
 
 It is easy to make allowance for cases in which a prober 
 name (usually, as such, a mere ' chalk mark,' that minimum 
 of connotation which is a sine qua non of denotation) has 
 attained by adoption into language the rank of a significant 
 word. Compare such a phrase as ' the Rupert of debate.* 
 In ' Socrates was a martyr ' the predicate is thoroughly in 
 unity with the subject and grounded in it, and therefore the 
 judgment may rank with the universal, like the singular of 
 formal logic. 
 
 The particular judgment then is limited but not deter- 
 mined. The limitation, being accidental or external, inter- 
 feres with the movement of thought in the act of judging, 
 and so interferes with the logical ideal of complete unity in 
 its differences. However we describe its defects, it will be 
 admitted that such a judgment as * Some combinations of 
 tones are discordant,' cannot be left where it is ; it impera- 
 tively demands explanation. 
 
 From this point, besides the true road of logical deter- 
 mination, there are two divergent short cuts to the logical 
 ideal. First, we have the unfruitful attempt to exhibit an 
 identity in the judgment by placing an unexplained quanti- 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 89 
 
 tative definition on its predicate, with the help of logical 
 symbols of precision. Tliis is the quantification of the predi- 
 cate ; it does not share the practical certainty of numerical 
 computation, while it surrenders all attempt to strengthen 
 the grasp of thought upon its matter. 
 
 Secondly, we have a somewhat similar abstraction pur- 
 sued with method and success, when the repetition of similar 
 judgments is recorded by the help of number, and we either 
 tabulate the unexplained limitation precisely in statistics or 
 a ratio, or, if possible, remove it by the substitution of an 
 empirical ' all.' In the former case we are dealing with 
 statistics and the calculus of probabilities ; in the latter we 
 are applying, in the strictest sense, ' induction by simple 
 enumeration ' to the formation of a general judgment. The 
 general judgment, ' All A are B,' considered as an empirical 
 result, is not more than a statistical proposition, ' 100 per 
 cent, of A are B.' To this outgrowth of the particular judg- 
 ment belongs the ' numericall}^ precise argument,' which is 
 a device for getting a conclusion out of particular judgments 
 by a simple computation. 60 per cent, of A are B, 50 per 
 cent, of A are C, at least 10 per cent, of A are both B and C. 
 
 All these operations with the limit of the particular 
 judgment, having no bearing on its material determination, 
 are outside the true path of logic. It is to be observed, 
 however, that we are here at the root of no less a system 
 than the system of number, which arises out of two condi- 
 tions : repeated judgments about distinguishable things 
 comprehended under a single character, and indifference to 
 these distinctions beyond or within this character. Such 
 are precisely the conditions of the process from singular to 
 plural and general judgments. ' This tree is mine, this tree 
 is mine, and this tree is mine,' form a set of judgments to 
 note the repetition of which is to count. Number is distinc- 
 tion without a difference, and such is the distinction em- 
 bodied in the particular judgment, whether singular, ' This 
 man' (why *this'?), or plural, 'Some men' (why only 
 ' some ' ?). Notice that the use of number to mediate between 
 subject and predicate is different from its function where it 
 enters into a material relation as an essential note, e.g, in a 
 table of specific gravities, or the like. 
 
 iii. The general judgment * obtained by simple enumera- 
 
 ' Not Lotze's 'generelles Urtheil,' which more nearly equals 'generic ' than ' general. 
 
90 ESSAYS IN nilLOSOrillCAL CRITICISM. 
 
 tion is the formal goal of this method; it has really nothing but 
 a statistical value, and is not in a logical sense any advance 
 on a precise particular. Both imply ratios, and whether 
 the ratio is 100 or 50 per cent, makes in itself no logical 
 distinction. ' Half the books on that shelf are German ; ' ' All 
 the books on that shelf are octavos,' are judgments of just 
 similar import. 
 
 We may now take up the thread from p. 88 and ask how 
 else we can develope a particular judgment of the form, 
 ' Some combinations of tones are discordant.' Instead of 
 counting how many combinations or what proportion of 
 them are discordant, we may obviously ask under what 
 conditions, as yet unspecified, the predicate attaches. That 
 is to say, the limitation demands to be replaced by a 
 determination. From this point of view the particular 
 judgment may, as Lotze has pointed out, be taken as modal 
 (a tone combina,tion may be discordant) ; the transformation 
 seems verbal, though no doubt it has a certain merit in 
 guarding against the quantitative interpretation. 
 
 iv. The judgment which professes to be a completion of 
 the particular by introducing a determination adequate to 
 the limit may be called a universal judgment. All judg- 
 ments naturally tend to claim this character. The purely 
 statistical proposition demands so forcible an abstraction 
 from the ordinary habits of thought that it may be ques- 
 tioned whetlier we were right in admitting it .to express a 
 single judgment at all, and whether it should not rather 
 be analysed as a succession of predications attached to 
 an abstract and slightly defined subject. 'All English 
 Euphorbiacese are without petals ' may be merely a rapid 
 linguistic expression for ' the plants observed are such and 
 such (naming all the species) ; and the plants are all 
 without petals.' The judgment as first given undoubtedly 
 claims, in common usage, that the subject somehow explains 
 the predicate. 
 
 All natural judgments claim this ideal unity, whether 
 they have it explicitly or not. Common sense interprets the 
 subject of a judgment as the ground of the predicate, and 
 resents, at least in extreme cases, the superfluity of de- 
 termination snch as Aristotle would censure, e.g. in 'AH 
 isosceles triangles have their angles = 2 right angles.' But to 
 be thoroughly strict in applying such a principle would 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 9l 
 
 require us to surrender the natural freedom of the judgment, 
 i.e. to make every universal judgment convertible, as a 
 definition is. For if no more is made explicit in the subject 
 than is essential as the ground of the predicate, we 
 have Aristotle's commensurate predication, 'All organisms 
 breathe,' not * All men breathe.' It is well to remember 
 that such are the only predications which completely fulfil 
 our ideal of the universal judgment, viz. that the determi- 
 nation which is constituted by the subject name should be 
 the ground of the predicate ; but we may admit, in ac- 
 cordance with custom, and having other forms to fall back 
 upon, that any judgment is universal which justifies its 
 predicate by a cause or classification. Causes which are 
 not yet analysed out of plurality, and the arrangement of 
 genera and species ^ cover a wide extent of scientific ground. 
 They are the province of the universal proposition which is 
 not commensurate. 
 
 V. The form of the universal judgment is, strictly 
 speaking, empirical; it is the mere direct relation or in- 
 tuition (perception) of a simple sj^nthesis, ' It is so,' 
 weighted with inferential meaning by the inevitable tendency 
 of thought. It has therefore been suggested that the more 
 appropriate form for a true universal law or grounded 
 relation is to be found in the hypothetical judgment. There 
 is, of course, no doubt that whatever can be said in a 
 hypothetical judgment can be said in a categorical judgment, 
 and vice versa. But this elasticity of the thought form is 
 not to deter us from examining the conditions of use which 
 are indicated by its structure, and assigning it an ideal or 
 proper significance according to them. 
 
 In the first place, we may put aside the form, ' If A is 
 B, C is D,' on the ground that it is only suited to express a 
 mark, and not a true reason or logical antecedent. The 
 connection between the two clauses is disguised by the 
 change of subject ; and if the disguise is only accidental, 
 the judgment is easily remodelled ; if essential, then the 
 judgment cannot be self- explaining. Of the former case we 
 may take as an instance, ' If the barometer falls suddenly, 
 coal-mines are likely to be set on fire,' which on removing 
 
 ' Even here it is obviously the (9rcAz« w. is such a one of the Ophrydeae 
 ideal not merely to say Orchis macu- as has come to exist in this or that 
 J-afa is one of the Ophrydeae, but to say way. But this ideal is far off. 
 
92 ESSAYS IN PIlILOSOPIirCAL CRITICISM. 
 
 the disguise turns out to mean, ' If the air suddenly presses 
 h'ss, it is likely to let gas escape.' An Example of the latter 
 would be, ' If a curtain-shaped cloud is seen, a storm will 
 tal5:e place within thirty-six hours.' This is an empirical 
 prognostic which seems not easily reducible to the mani- 
 festation of any one cause or principle ; its disjointed form 
 is therefore appropriate, but it does not come up to our 
 ideal of a hypothetical judgment. 
 
 In the second place, of course each of the terms is meant 
 to contribute to the result. It is an abuse of the form, * If 
 A is B it is C,' to fill it up with, e.g., * If anyone is a man 
 he is mortal.' The type we look for is rather, ' If water is 
 hen ted under one atmosphere it will boil at 212° Fahren- 
 heit.' 
 
 The hypothetical judgment thus understood is a pure 
 expression of the interdependence of laws or relations. The 
 condition on which, a new relation follows is explicit, not, as 
 in the categorical judgment, implied in a concept. Never- 
 theless, within these limits, the relation of antecedent and 
 consequent may take various shapes. 
 
 They are, naturally, not convertible, and so far corre- 
 spond to the relation of cause and eflFect (friction to heat, 
 poison to death) ; or in simultaneous relations to any special 
 condition that carries a general consequent, i.e., 'If two 
 triangles are on the same base and between the same paral- 
 lels, they are equal to each other.' But obviously, if the 
 relation of dependence is quite pure, the antecedent and 
 consequent must become de facto convertible. 
 
 What connection is there between the relation of de- 
 pendence here in question and the actual facts of causation ? 
 Of course antecedent and consequent in the hypothetical 
 judgment are in no way dependent on succession in time. 
 The logical antecedent is often later in time : ' If a rock is 
 of vitreous texture it has passed through a state of fusion.' 
 But because knowledge is not in time, and can even make 
 time run back for purposes of inference, it does not follow 
 that conditions of time must be neglected in knowledge. 
 The system of interdependent truths which is the ideal of 
 science, aspires for itself to eternal validity, but this is not 
 to say that what they contain can take no account of the 
 order in time. Causation is just as well represented by the 
 nexus, * If a body has traversed such and such a space in a 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 93 
 
 certain time, it must liave traversed so much space in an 
 equal time immediately preceding,' as by the converse con- 
 nection. It is a trite remark that the order in time could 
 only exist for a consciousness out of time. 
 
 Logical antecedence then primarily embodies the idea of 
 a necessary interdependence between truths or laws, of which 
 connection the causal relation is only one case ; the case of 
 process in time. The idea of reciprocity or reaction is 
 equally well represented by antecedent and consequent when 
 the time relation is reduced to a logical present. 
 
 vi. The disjunction, of which the true form is always 
 ' A is either B or C, or &c.' not, ' Either A is B or C is D,' is 
 in part an advance upon the hypothetical judgment and in 
 part a divergence from its type. 
 
 First, it is the completed form of knowledge in respect of 
 its property of giving value to the negation or limit which 
 every judgment implies. Sigwart has maintained at length 
 that denial is secondary to assertion ; and he is right as long 
 as denial is restricted to that formal abstract negative 
 which corresponds to no real relation. Formal or pure 
 negation is, as he says, merely a judgment about a judg- 
 ment, the enunciation that a certain affirmative judgment 
 cannot be made. But we have to ask whether in actual 
 living thought this characteristic does suffice to prove a 
 priority of affirmation over negation. And we must reply 
 that every judgment is a judgment about a judgment (or 
 about several) ; though it may be granted for the sake of 
 illustration that the ideal judgment of quality approaches 
 asymptotically to a simple or primary relation, whose limit, 
 or negative character, has little or no interest. We do not 
 say ' that is red ' simply in order to deny that it is green ; at 
 least we do not as a rule, for of course it may happen that 
 we do. Still every judgment has a limit, i.e, involves a ne- 
 gation of other judgments, and so is a member in a tacit 
 disjunction. As the interest which occasions any categorical 
 judgment is progressively gratified, the disjunction under 
 which it stands comes more sharply into consciousness, till 
 with the satisfaction of the logical ideal it is made explicit 
 in the two degrees with which we are familiar, first as an 
 exhaustive and secondly as a mutually exclusive disjunction. 
 Negation thus acquires a more and more definite positive 
 import; and with the completion of a true disjunctive 
 
 k 
 
94 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 judgment, involving mntual exclusion, tlie difference of im- 
 port between affirmative and negative is formally and actually 
 abolished. And in living or actual thought all negation is 
 of this type, for it is fair in logic to assume that every 
 judgment is charged with an interest ; so that the denial 
 which is not in favour of any affirmation has no place in 
 knowledge. On the other hand, negation under a tacit dis- 
 junction is the genuine outcome of thought. 'That tower 
 is net vertical.' There could be no more direct expression 
 of a positive truth. ' Vertical ' expresses the line in which 
 gravity acts. The denial of verticality to a tall structure 
 generalises all directions in which it can diverge from the 
 line of gravity. The tacit disjunction is that the tower is 
 either vertical or has a tendency to instability. 
 
 The negative element in disjunction may be illustrated 
 by its equivalent hypotheticals. The exhaustive disjunction 
 is equivalent to a h^^pothetical with negative antecedent, or 
 to a repetition of such hypothetical if the members are more 
 than two. (This assumes that all the disjunctive members 
 are to be affirmative.) That is to say, the negation of B 
 must be known as the ground of C. 
 
 A disjunction, in order to be both exhaustive and exclu- 
 sive, requires the hypothetical with negative antecedent to 
 be supplemented by another with negative consequent. The 
 affirmation of B must be known as the ground of the nega- 
 tion of C. In short, the elements of the hypothetical must 
 each condition the other by its negation as well as by its affir- 
 mation. And this amounts to requiring complete reciprocity 
 between antecedent and consequent, which is only de facto 
 and not de jure in the form of the hypothetical judgments. 
 
 This latter is the true disjunctive form; for it is the form 
 prescribed by the logical ideal as embodied in the interest 
 which guides us in every judgment. The interest demands 
 that the negative of the judgment should be made explicit 
 in comparable predicates ; a review of comparable predicates 
 necessitates a ground of disjunction ; and a true ground of 
 disjunction must give mutually exclusive judgments. 
 
 We may notice in passing that we have nothing to do 
 with the negation of a disjunctive judgment. All intelligible 
 negation is under a disjunction, and in tracing the negative 
 from its implication in the categorical to its expression in the 
 disjunctive, we have exhausted its real import. 
 
LOGIC A& THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 95 
 
 Secondly, however, the disjunctive members are strictly 
 co-ordinate. Each of them conditions all the others, and 
 vice versa, but the positive relation of condition to conditioned 
 which thought seems to need, is here lost. Indeed the 
 equivalence of hypothetical judgments to a disjunction may, 
 for this reason, seem artificial. The reciprocal antecedent 
 and consequent to which we referred are related by negation 
 only, not by mediation of one positive principle through 
 another. But the fact is that the mediation of the whole 
 set of members is thrown back on the common subject, 
 which is drawn out into a system of judgments whose 
 precise relation is isinown. Thus each judgment is really 
 mediated by the entire system, not only its limits but its 
 positive ground being made thoroughly transparent. Here 
 we have the idea of a system, of whose possible states, 
 whether simultaneous or successive, each excludes all the 
 others ; and yet all alike go to constitute the system. 
 
 Such a system in the fullest sense is a notion, though 
 here again the form may be filled up with the most indif- 
 ferent empirical matter ; even if the technical rules are in 
 fact complied with, there may be no true self-explanation, and 
 so no mediation of the individual judgment. E.g. zoology 
 and all the concrete sciences of classification are only begin- 
 ning to hope that their generic arrangements may one day 
 be justified on intelligible principles. But the ideal is what 
 has been , described, and might be sufficiently illustrated 
 either from abstract knowledge or more concrete embodi- 
 ments of the notion. 
 
 Lastly, it has been observed that the calculus of proba- 
 bilities re?ts upon the disjunctive judgment. Nothing but a 
 disjunction can provide what the calculus demands, a speci- 
 fied number of alternatives, such that (granting the exist- 
 ence or occurrence of the general subject) one of them must 
 occur, and only one can. This is true, but not the whole 
 truth. Number, we said above, is a distinction without a 
 difference, and it is by such a distinction, i.e. as simple 
 units, that the given alternatives must be contrasted if the 
 method is to apply. This postulate is expressed by the 
 calculus in the requirement that there should be no ground 
 for anticipating any one alternative rather than any other. 
 Such a postulate is directly in contravention of the ideal of 
 the disjunctive judgment, which implies a necessary know- 
 
96 ESSAYS IN PinLOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 ledge of the conditions wliicli govern the realisation of each 
 alternative. Here then we have an arrested development of 
 knowledge ; w^hai the calculus really needs is a disjunction 
 grounded on counting. Knowledge need only go far enough 
 to assure mutual exclusiveness, and in different matters 
 different grades suffice for this. But otherwise it must 
 retain the character of the particular judgment, which as 
 we saw tends to the expression of a ratio. Such a ratio 
 takes stock of our existing knowledge ; it does not attempt 
 an addition to its matter. Counting is an operation which 
 presupposes a disjunction, but a formal and empty one ; and 
 this is the type of disjunction to which that must be reduced 
 on which the calculus rests. 
 
 Before concluding this essay with some short observa- 
 tions on the process of inference, it will be well to indicate 
 the standpoint to be adopted towards the main axioms or 
 principles employed in logic. The writer agrees with Mill's 
 comments upon abstract principles regarded as the founda- 
 tion of science, though he differs from Mill in his interpre- 
 tation of that experience from which they are drawn. Logic 
 is not founded on the laws of thought. They are abstractions 
 which express with more or less felicity the nature of that ex- 
 perience whose systematic working is the warrant of their 
 truth. Perhaps the most convenient treatment of these 
 principles is to exhibit them in some kind of series as supple- 
 menting one another. 
 
 The import of the three 'formal laws of thought,' and 
 their defects, are a very trite subject. Formulae so abstract 
 in expression may be interpreted much as we please; but if 
 we are at all strict it can hardly be denied that they are 
 limited to guaranteeing some kind of unity in the judgment, 
 and a purely empty reference to all things but the thing 
 denied for the negative. That virtue is either square or not 
 square may be true, but certainly is not interesting. 
 
 The postulate or principle of the ' uniformity of nature,' 
 developed by Mill into a recognition of the world as know- 
 able in various processes whose interaction constitutes it, at 
 least recognises the objective character ot* knowledge ; which 
 is further specified by order of time in the law of causation, 
 introducing the reflective conception of antecedent ' and in- 
 
 1 There is a curious uncertainty at- • invariable antecedent.' If analogous 
 taching to Mill's use of the phrase to invariable consequent it should mean 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 97 
 
 variable consequent {in time, not in the pure logical sense). 
 Finally, the relativity of cause to effect results in placing the 
 process in time on the same footing of a law with the system 
 of simultaneous relations. After this it only remains to point 
 out the ideal of knowledge as a system of interdependent laws, 
 in Mill's language the fewest assumptions, which being given, 
 the whole course of nature (and we add, experience as a 
 whole, including the higher world of art and religion), can be 
 deduced from them ; or rather explained by help of and in 
 accordance with them. 
 
 In passing to the discussion of inference, we are first met 
 by the theory of induction. What relation is to subsist 
 between the inductive methods or ' methods of observation 
 and experiment,' and the traditional forms of reasoning? 
 These methods are properly and adequately designated by 
 the second of these titles. They are strictly and essentially 
 methods of verification. The only postulate which they need 
 is little more than the laws of identity and contradiction 
 furnish. Every set of changes is what it is, and not what it 
 is not. In order to separate what it is from what it is not, 
 we must begin with a hypothesis as to what it is. Me- 
 chanical or simply progressive generalisation is a chimera, 
 except in as far as it consists in attaching predicates by 
 analogy to existing class conceptions, which then do the work 
 of read3^-made hypotheses. 
 
 In testing hypotheses we may deal with judgments of any 
 degree of generality or reflective structure. The methods of 
 experiment and observation in their simplest form deal with 
 framing and limiting the judgment of perception ; even in 
 this process the constant rectification of hypotheses may be 
 readily traced. In every case, however, the function of the 
 positive or affirmative instance is to suggest causes or confirm 
 them, that of the negative instance to suggest limitations of 
 the cause, or to confirm them. The positive instance is read 
 off into a judgment A is a ; A is the cause of a ; the negative 
 instance into the judgment ' What is not a is not caused by 
 A,' the contrapositive converse of the affirmative. The object 
 
 an antecedent A, which is never absent quent is found where the antecedent A 
 
 ■where a consequent a is present, just is found, so that the antecedent is in- 
 
 as invariable consequent means a conse- variable only in respect of always having 
 
 quent a, which is never absent when the that consequent. There is independent 
 
 antecedent A is present. But he seems ground for assuming that he felt at 
 
 to employ it simply as emphasizing the times the nntenability of his plur.ility 
 
 invariability with which the conse- of causes. 
 
98 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 of the methods is to bring these two judgments into agree- 
 ment as to the precise nature and limits of a and A. In all 
 judging there is such a limiting function, but in scientific 
 judging it grows into a whole process of analysis, directed to 
 finding the essence or law of a thing or process, and is of 
 preponderating importance. But the principle is always the 
 same : what is separable from a set of changes does not belong 
 to them, and what is not separable does belong to them. In 
 the first place then the methods of experiment and observa- 
 tion are guides to the judgment of perception, and appear 
 in inference only by the precisely determined judgments 
 which are obtained through them. But beyond this, the 
 principle that parts of the same process are inseparable will 
 ©ften appear in reflective reasoning. It then takes the form 
 of an idea that regulates the consequences to be expected 
 from any hypothetical cause ; such consequences as belong to 
 that cause will be inseparable from it or vary with it {i.e. 
 follow it more and less), such as do not, will not. An argu- 
 ment of this reflective class is Mr. Darwin's, that variation 
 under domestication depends more on the nature of the 
 organism than on the conditions to which it is subjected, 
 because the variations are not, with any degree of regularity, 
 like under like conditions, and unlike under unlike conditions. 
 That is to say, the presumed efi^ect of the conditions accord- 
 ing to the principle of which we are speaking is not that 
 observed ; the result does not vary with the conditions, and 
 therefore is to a greater extent attributable to the only other 
 cause in operation. It is separated from the conditions, 
 does not belong to the process which they, as conditions, set 
 up. There is no method of * induction ' that will apply to 
 arguments like this. The special results to be presumed 
 from the conditions, and with them the probability that 
 the observed results * belong ' or do not * belong ' to the con- 
 ditions mainly, are material questions to be settled by de- 
 ductive reasoning ; the principle of the ' method ' has here 
 a regulative function ordering us to eliminate from each 
 causal process what cannot be deduced from it, and to find a 
 cause from which it can be deduced. 
 
 We are here brought face to face witi^ "the relation of 
 induction to deduction, and a few words on this must close 
 the present essay. 
 
 Sigvvart and Jevons are agreed that inducti<)n is essen- 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 99 
 
 tially deduction regarded inversely. Not that it is the 
 inverse of deduction in the sense that we rise from particulars 
 to universals by induction, and descend from universals to 
 particulars by deduction. This is just what they do not 
 mean. And so far they seem to be in the right. 
 
 All induction is, according to this view, to be assimilated 
 to Mill's ' Deductive Method,' only that for the first step, 
 which, according to Mill, involves or may involve 'direct in- 
 duction,' the framing of a hypothesis will always, and in all 
 cases, be substituted. It must strike the reader of Mill that 
 his treatment of direct induction contrasts unfavourably with 
 the clear account of the use of hypothesis. Perhaps the 
 crux of generalisation, as distinct from observation and 
 experiment, was never thoroughly faced by him. Though 
 even in observation and experiment we cannot really escape 
 the demand for framing and testing hypotheses ; few intel- 
 lectual occupations involve making, testing, and rejecting 
 so many hypotheses as microscopical observation with a 
 high power. 
 
 Induction then is the process of coming to understand or 
 see through causal and all synthetic relations, and those 
 more obscure analogies which constitute natural kinds. 
 Multiplying instances does not increase evidence, except 
 by decreasing the probability of error, and providing the 
 wonderful facilities of suggestion which belong to a com- 
 plete conspectus of phenomena. But the principle which 
 we see in the instance is a hypothesis ; and it is verified 
 by the agreement of its deduced consequence with observed 
 facts, though only established in proportion as we are con- 
 vinced that the verified results could not be deduced from 
 any other principle. 
 
 True as this explanation appears to be, it may be doubted 
 whether its authors perceive its full importance for logical 
 theory. We have here a form of deduction in which the truth 
 of the premisses follows from the truth of the conclusion ! The 
 whole context of conclusions is, indeed, required for the pur- 
 pose ; no one is sufficient alone. But all this is opposed to 
 our ordinary ideas of deductive knowledge. In that, we are 
 accustomed to suppose, the premisses must be taken as certain 
 and the conclusion must receive its certainty from them. And 
 it is true that any one conclusion would be given by almost 
 any premisses, and can therefore do little to substantiate 
 
 H 2 
 
100 KSSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAT> CRITICISM. 
 
 the truth of those premisses that do give it. Still, it is abso- 
 lutely clear that every verified result is pro tanto a confirma- 
 tion of any principles from which it is deducible ; and those 
 principles are finally established from which alone all verified 
 results allow themselves to be deduced. 
 
 Thus, that is true which will organise experience as a 
 system, and the organisation is always in form deductive ; 
 but this does not mean that certainty is derived from generals 
 to particulars. It is their systematic union that gives cer- 
 tainty both to premisses and to conclusions. The hypothesis, 
 with its tentative deduction, soon begins to add probability 
 to unverified results ; true or false, what has explained so 
 much is likely to explain more. The deduction of the 
 purest kind, say geometrical for instance, seems almost 
 beyond winning a practical increase of trustworthiness for 
 elementary principles by new applications, even if verified ; 
 yet if we proposed to cut ofi* all verified conclusions from 
 geometry, we should find that there are no premisses so 
 necessary as not to gain certainty, as they gain significance, 
 from their application. Thus, the hypothetical doctrine of 
 induction after all only appeals to what is the essential 
 character of knowledge, in induction and deduction alike ; 
 and every syllogism whose conclusion is verified gains cer- 
 tainty for its prem'isses by that verification, as every set of 
 premisses that has stood a series of applications, has some 
 certainty to confer on its further conclusions. 
 
 One word more on verification. The facts by which we 
 test conclusions are not simply given from without. The 
 confirmation of a deductive result by experience means its 
 confirmation by certain determinate standards of measure- 
 ment, and the like, all of which are themselves of scientific 
 origin, and owe their fixed value to some province of system- 
 atised experience which has been brought to bear on them. 
 Where, for instance, is the measure of time, the sine qua non 
 of the most elementary verifications ? How can the earth's 
 rotation be compared with itself, and tested for uniformity ? 
 The only answer is, that a capricious variation of motion is 
 excluded by the congruence of our whole system of recorded 
 niotions, in clocks and in everything else. Such trust do we 
 put in this system as a whole, that we venture to criticise 
 the motion of our chief time-keeper, the earth itself. Such 
 a criticism is implied alike by asserting and by denying that 
 
LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 101 
 
 the time of daily rotation is -uniform. The extraordinary 
 reliability and precision of our measurement of time, for 
 which we have no one absolute standard whatever, is an 
 excellent type of the nature of the system of knowledge. 
 And verification by observation and experience always means 
 a reference to the standards of some such system. This is 
 the best illustration of wha.t we mean when we say, that 
 truth and reality are to be looked for in the whole of expe- 
 rience, taken as a system. 
 
 B. BOSANQUET. 
 
 1^ 
 
102 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD. 
 
 There is no more striking characteristic of recent science 
 and philosophy than the extent to which the historical 
 method has taken the place of the methods of direct obser- 
 vation and reasoning. The comparative method, which has 
 revolutionised natural science, created the science of philo- 
 logy, and is now profoundly modifying scientific psychology, 
 is in essence identical with it ; and it was becoming evident, 
 even before the time of Comte, that it was only through the 
 systematic application of this method that sociology could 
 ever become a science. This historical treatment of the 
 sciences has grown up in the present century side by side 
 with the more scientific treatment of history. The ten- 
 dency in the preceding century had been to look on truth as 
 needing only the application of enlightened reason for its 
 discovery, and to make history a mere recital of erroneous 
 views or meaningless events. But the conception of the 
 f evolution of man by interaction with his environment has 
 filled with life an otherwise aimless record, and shown the 
 meaning and purpose of history b}^ emancipating our views 
 of the past from their bondage to the ideas of the present. 
 And as history has in this way assumed a scientific cha- 
 racter, its scope and application have been extended to all 
 departments of investigation : the sciences have become his- 
 torical. 
 
 But while every science has its history more or less 
 closely connected with it, the historical part is in some 
 cases merely a new department of investigation added on to 
 the old without exerting any modifying effect upon it. This 
 is the case with all those sciences whose subject-matter is 
 definite and unchanging. There is a history of the science 
 of mathematics, for instance, but mathematics itself is quite 
 
THE HISTORICAL METHOD. 103 
 
 independent of that history. In this sense every science has 
 or may have a history. But the historical method cannot 
 
 A be spoken of as used in the science unless the theoretical 
 part is modified by the historical. And it is only in the 
 simplest way, and to a very slight extent, that such modifi- 
 cation can take place here, namely, by pointing- out the lines 
 on which the science has advanced hitherto, and thus suggest- 
 ing the course of subsequent progress. 
 
 In other ca,ses, however, the theoretical part is directly 
 affected by the historical. If the subject-matter of which 
 the science treats has itself undergone an historical develop- 
 ment, the science will largely consist in tracing the begin- 
 ning, successive stages, and ultimate form of the phenomena 
 under investigation. It is through the employment of this 
 genetic method that the natural sciences have ceased to be 
 merely descriptive, and advanced even beyond the stage 
 which seeks to trace mere causal sequences. In technical 
 language, it has led them from the categories of quantity 
 and quality to those of cause and reciprocity. 
 
 But the case may be still more complicated. For we 
 shall find that the categories of cause and reciprocity them- 
 selves are no longer sufficient when we have to deal with 
 self-consciousness and its phenomena. The customs, conduct, 
 
 ^ and relations of which the social sciences treat are in many 
 ways modified by the theories about them held by those 
 whose relations to one another and to circumstances are 
 being traced. Nor can the complex question thus arising 
 as to the part the internal and external factors respectively 
 play in the formation of any given law, custom, political 
 theory, or political constitution be got rid of by the asser- 
 tion that the internal or ideal factor is itself the result of the 
 external or real factor. For, even could this assertion be 
 proved, the facts are so involved as to make the conclusion 
 of no practical use. In the words of Mr. Mill, ' So long a 
 series of actions and reactions between circumstances and 
 man, each successive term being composed of an ever greater 
 number and variety of parts, could not possibly be computed 
 by human faculties from the elementary laws which produce 
 it.' ^ And if we admit as a fact — whatever its explanation 
 may be — that social phenomena are affected by the ideas 
 of men, we are compelled to place the social sciences on a 
 ' Logic, II. 613, 10th ed. 
 
104 ESSAYS IX PHILOSOPHICAL CKITICISM. 
 
 different level from the natural. In the latter we have to 
 trace a sequence or an interaction of factors w^hich are 
 strictly observable and calculable, whereas in the former, 
 the subjective factor modifies its objective environment in 
 a way which cannot be traced by the ordinary methods of 
 natural science. Hence the application of the historical 
 method to the social sciences has a difficulty of its own, and 
 the historical prediction which Oomte claims for sociology 
 can only belong to it to a very limited extent.' 
 
 But a further and still more important distinction re- 
 quires to be made. Hitherto we have spoken only of special 
 sciences. But the application of the historical method really 
 involves two questions of different kinds : a scientific ques- 
 tion which takes many forms according to the nature of the 
 science discussed, and which must be decided for each science 
 on its merits, and a philosophical question, which is one and 
 an ultimate question as to the final method of philosophy. 
 In the former case the question is simply as to the way 
 in which ordinary scientific methods are to be used in 
 certain departments of investigation. When, for example, 
 the question is put as to whether political economy is 
 or is not an historical science to be treated by the historical 
 method, we have obviously to deal simply with a ques- 
 tion of logical procedure to be settled by the nature of 
 the subject-matter and the kind of evidence it admits of. 
 But when the question comes to be one as to the ultimate 
 nature and significance of our intellectual and moral ideas, 
 the discussion must evidently be raised to a different plat- 
 form ; for the categories quite properly assumed in any in- 
 vestigation of the special sciences cannot be taken for 
 granted in that science which professes to be final and self- 
 explicative. The question here is thei'efore not as to the 
 way we are to set about inquiring into this or that special 
 department of investigation, but as to the ultimate method 
 of philosophy —whether it is to be realistic and historical, or 
 idealistic and speculative. 
 
 For the historical method is in this case but a branch of 
 the realistic or experiential method. And this, indeed, is 
 the sense in which the term is often used when applied to 
 the special sciences as well as to philosophy. Not only must 
 we distinguish various forms of the historical method accord- 
 
 ' Positive Philosophy, Miss Martineau's translation, It. \%\. 
 
pNl7ERSI 
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD. V^T^ '''2' 
 
 ing to the subject matter to which it is applied : the terfer -"^ 
 itself has a double meaning. As generally used it connotes " 
 two essential characteristics. In the first place, it seeks to 
 arrive at its conclusions by tracing an evolution in time, and 
 it thus takes the name ' historical ' in the strict sense. But 
 it is also in most cases equally characteristic of it that it is 
 realistic not idealistic : it traces a development of circum- 
 stances and external conditions, not one of thoughts or 
 ideas, or the latter only by means of the former. In 
 ethics it seeks to show how our present moral customs have 
 been gradually arrived at by the development of previous 
 social conditions, and how moral beliefs and laws then and 
 now have been formed by these. In jurisprudence it exhibits 
 the process by which present legal institutions have been 
 produced by the past history and needs of the people ; in 
 political economy, how the industrial condition of the 
 country is at each epoch the result of preceding states, 
 economic laws being but the expression of that condition. 
 Through all these various phases the social organism is re- 
 presented as having grown up in time by a natural process 
 of evolution from its rude and simple beginning to its 
 present complex state, with all the delicate adj ustmen t ol parts ^ 
 that state involves. And for the spring or pulse of this his- 
 torical movement we are referred to no ideal end or final 
 cause gradually realising itself in life, but to outward cir- 
 cumstances, and the selection and development of the organ- 
 isms that can best adapt themselves to the external order. 
 
 The criticism of the historical method thus really involves 
 two questions : (I) Are we, in the various departments to which 
 it is applied, to look for our scientific theories to the order 
 of things and their sequence in time rather than to the 
 logical order of thought which our perception of tilings may 
 be shown to imply ? that is, is our method to be realistic ? 
 (2) Are our theories to be formed from an observation of the 
 past history and progress of social and other human con- 
 ditions rather than from a study of their present position? 
 that is, is the method to be historical in the stricter sense 
 of the term ? For the most part, it is the second of these 
 questions that has to be examined in considering the method 
 of the special social sciences, while the former question has 
 still to be asked of the ' first philosophy.' In the former 
 case, since experience is assumed and left to philosophy to be 
 
106 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CPtlTICISM. 
 
 accounted for, it is obvious that the adoption of an ex- 
 periential method creates no difficulty of its own, and the 
 question of method may therefore be thus put : granting that 
 it is to be experiential, is it to be from the facts of history 
 or from those of present experience that we are to start ? 
 Even thus, indeed, this question is often mixed up in a per- 
 plexing way with the other. For the problems belonging to 
 the social sciences run into, or at any rate, have not yet been 
 definitely marked off from those belonging to the ' first 
 philosophy.' It is difficult, for example, to say even in 
 general, in what respects ethics is a part of philosophy, and 
 in what respects it is to be treated as one of the social 
 sciences, and it is still more difficult to draw the line in the 
 detailed discussion of ethical questions. A similar difficulty 
 meets us in the sciences of law and politics, while empirical 
 psychology has only begun to be separated from the theory 
 of knowledge. There is thus a danger — not always obviated 
 — of our assuming the applicability of a realistic method to 
 questions to which it may turn out to be inappropriate. It 
 is difficult always to bear in mind — though the truth of the 
 proposition cannot be denied — that the method suitable 
 to one class of questions may imply a constant petitio 
 ]princi]pii if applied to other questions which yet stand in 
 close connection with the former. For in the case of 
 philosophy proper we cannot take for granted that our 
 method is to be experiential, seeing that the first business 
 of philosophy is to give a reasoned account or justification 
 of experience itself. The question of the applicability 
 of the historical method to philosophy may be thus said 
 to resolve itself into the question, how the adoption of the 
 historical method in place of that of direct observation 
 or reasoning alters the fundamental dispute which exists 
 between philosophic systems according as their methods are 
 realistic or speculative, or whether it affects that dispute at 
 all? 
 
 By the realistic school the historical method is regarded 
 as a bond connecting all the special departments of investi- 
 gation with the ultimate and co-ordinating science called 
 philosophy. Tt enables us to rise to the ideal of a system of 
 knowledge interconnected in all its parts, and one alike in 
 its highest generalisations and in the method by which 
 these generalisations are reached. A new aspect, it is con- 
 
I 
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD. 107 
 
 tended, is thus assumed bj the old controversy between 
 realism and idealism, and a decision arrived at in favour of 
 the realistic view of things. The extent to which this con- 
 tention is justified will become more apparent when the 
 character of the historical method has been made plain by- 
 noticing its application to the mental and social sciences. 
 It is to the controversy on the method of jurisprudence 
 carried on towards the beginning of the present century that 
 we must turn for the fullest account of the meaning and 
 use of the historical method afterwards applied by Comte 
 to social science generally.' Theoretically, the modern 
 historical method of jurisprudence was a protest against; 
 the theory of a law of nature which, descending from the 
 Roman jurists, was indiscriminately applied to legal topics 
 by the theorists of the eighteenth century. But it had also 
 a practical origin in the resistance made by the States of 
 Germany to the imposition of the Code Napoleon and the 
 controversy that arose among German jurists as to the codi- 
 fication of their law. It was in these circumstances that, in 
 1814, Savigny published his pamphlet 'On the Vocation of 
 our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence.' He objected to 
 the proposed codification, because it w'buld not really further 
 the national unity it aimed at, and contended that the cause 
 of the evil resulting from conflicting systems, was not in 
 the laws, but in the people themselves, who were therefore 
 not qualified to frame a code. Unity, he thought, might be 
 best attained, not by a code, but by ' an organically pro- 
 gressive jurisprudence common to the whole nation.' ^ 
 
 In speaking of ' an organically progressive jurisprudence,' 
 Savigny seems to have two things chiefly in view. In the 
 first place, he means that law is not something arbitrarily 
 imposed by an external ruler, but a living embodiment of 
 the spirit of the people. ' This organic connection of law 
 with the being and character of the people,' he says,^ ' is 
 also manifested in the progress of the times, and herein it is 
 
 ' Montesquieu seems to be regarded of co-existent and consecutive social 
 
 by Comte {Positive Philosophy, II. states ' — an assertion which seems jus- 
 
 66, ff.) as the founder of the historical titled of the greater part of the Esprit 
 
 method, and Sir Henry Maine speaks des Lois, though scarcely of such a dis- 
 
 of his work in similar terms (cf. Ancient cussion as that in Book XXVIIL, with 
 
 Law, p. 86, 8th ed.). On the other which may be compared the remarks on 
 
 hand, Professor Flint holds {Philosophy method in Book XXIX. chap. xi. 
 of History, p. 97) that Montesquieu « p-^^ Beruf unserir Zeit, p. 161, 
 
 made no systematic use of ' the expedient 2nd ed. 
 of historical philosophy, the comparison ' 3id. p. 1 1 . 
 
108 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 to be compared to language. For law, as for language, 
 there is no moment of absolute cessation. . . . Law 
 grows with the growth and strengthens with the strength 
 of the people, and at last dies away as the nation loses its 
 individuality.' In the second place, Savigny holds that the 
 historical method, by tracing laws to their source, will 
 * discover an organic principle whereby that which still has 
 life will separate itself from that which is already dead and 
 belongs only to history.'^ In this way the historical study 
 of law and custom will show us when any particular legal 
 institutions are the product of conditions which the nation 
 has outgrown, and may thus become a method of ascertain- 
 ing when laws have outlived the circumstances under which 
 they were appropriate. Beyond this Savigny does not go. 
 He does not seem to look on the historical method as com- 
 petent to settle the distinctively theoretical questions of 
 jurisprudence, and, in his ' System of Modern Eoman Law,' 
 published in 1840, he goes so far as to say that ' the reasons 
 which first gave rise to the name of an historical school have 
 as good as disappeared with the prevailing errors which it 
 was then necessary to attack.' ^ Nor does Sir Henry Maine, 
 with whose name historical jurisprudence is chiefly asso- 
 ciated in this country, expressly apply the historical method 
 to the solution of other than historical questions, though he 
 is so far from agreeing with the opinion just quoted from 
 Savigny, that he looks upon the ' philosophy of politics, art, 
 education, ethics, and social relation which was constructed 
 on the basis of a state of nature ' as * still the- great an- 
 tagonist of the historical method.' ^ Yet, even Sir Henry 
 Maine him&elf is more successful in vindicating the claims 
 of the historical method against old abstractions than in 
 making clear the extent of its applicability. The ' law of 
 nature' of the dogmatical jurists was merely an unreal fig- 
 ment of the understanding got by stripping actual laws of 
 their distinctive content, just as the * state of nature ' to 
 which Rousseau advocated a return, was not so much a 
 positive notion as a mere negative of civilisation. And we 
 are therefore not at liberty to assume that Sir Henry Maine, 
 in opposing the historical method to the * law of nature ' 
 
 ' Vom Beruf,\\.s.'w.,Y>- 117 ; c{. Von ' System drs henflgen H'6tvi$chev 
 
 Maurer, Einleitunq zvr Geschichte der Bechts, I. p. xvi. 
 Mark-, Hof; Dnrf-. und Sfarlf.Verfn.<- » .4vnn>f Lrnr. p. 91. 
 
 funff (1854), p. iv. 
 
THE HISTORICAL METHOD. 109 
 
 intends it to do the work of theoretical jurisprudence, or would 
 even exclude from that function the law of nature when more 
 correctly interpreted. ' Nature,' properly conceived, is a con- 
 crete not an abstract conception, does not exclude history 
 but necessarily includes it, being itself an evolution in time 
 towards ever-increasing complexity. The fault of the old 
 theorists was not in taking nature as their standard, but 
 in identifying that nature with the simple beginnings of 
 history to the exclusion of its complex and co-ordinated 
 results, and in constructing its initial stage by a fiction of 
 the imagination instead of arriving at it by historical re- 
 search. 
 
 The historical study of law has been so rich in positive 
 results as to divert attention from its possible limits, and to 
 create the impression that this method covers the whole 
 field of legal science. Yet it would seem that eyen its most 
 important results are closely connected with questions the 
 decision of which lies beyond its range. That law had its ' 
 origin in status and not in contract — that it began with 
 custom only afterwards formulated into command — is a / 
 conclusion of modern jurists which has shed a new light on 
 legal hisbory. But it is an historical conclusion which does 
 not do away with the necessity of clearly distinguishing 
 between legal ideas and legal customs and leaving room 
 for their possible divergence. In any community in which 
 there is no divergence between these, there is at the same 
 time no scope for progress; while in any community in 
 ^which they do diverge from one another, either custom 
 mds to mould the ideas into conformity with it, or the 
 ideas to reform and modify custom, or both forces act 
 together. It is in this way that change and progress 
 become possible. Primitive societies and undeveloped races 
 are more prone to be governed by external circumstances 
 than to reflect upon their nature and tendencies, and hence 
 their ideas of legal relations are for the most part the mere 
 reflection of customs inherited from a previous generation or 
 necessitated by outward events. In this lies the explanation 
 of the fact which historical investigation has established, 
 that law arose from status. But in developed and civilised 
 communities, where men have learned the lesson of reflection, 
 the tendency is in the opposite direction : custom has to 
 justify itself before the bar of reason, and conduct comes to 
 
110 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 be guided by a definite conception of its end, instead of by a 
 vEigue belief that it is usual. Thus ideas begin to have a 
 power over custom corresponding to that which custom 
 previously had over ideas. Herein partly lies the rationale 
 of the theory that law began with contract, a theory 
 developed by the unhistorical reflection of Hobbes and 
 Locke and Rousseau. As an account of the origin of law 
 this theory seems to us now almost ludicrously wrong. Yet, 
 apart from its historical inaccuracy, it had hold of an im- 
 portant element of truth — the truth that reflection upon 
 action and a conception of its end produce modifications 
 upon conduct and upon the customs in which conduct tends 
 to become fossilised. 
 
 From the varying elements of which advanced societies 
 are composed, it follows that a broad distinction must be 
 drawn between the legal ideas of the educated and expert 
 on the one hand and those of the community generally on 
 the other. Thus when Savigny speaks of law as expressing 
 the common consciousness of the community, he must be 
 understood as referring only to its essential elements, not 
 certainly to the finer details which are the work of pro- 
 fessional jurists. Savigny indeed says that in this — which 
 he calls the technical as distinguished from the political 
 element of law — these experts ' represent the community.' • 
 But they represent it not by expressing its ideas, but by 
 expressing their own at its command and within certain 
 limits. The ideas of the community at large only extend to 
 certain leading principles, the development of which is left 
 to experts, while there is often a considerable want of 
 harmony between the ideas of the expert and those which 
 find favour amongst the rest of the community. Now, even 
 supposing that the floating legal ideas of the community are 
 the mere reflex of existing legal customs and institutions, 
 the same does not hold true of the ideas of the thoughtful 
 and the expert. I do not think indeed that any such sharp 
 distinction can be drawn between one class and another as 
 to justify us in saying that the ideas of the one are entirely 
 moulded by outward circumstances, those of the other in- 
 dependent of them. Rather it would seem that the share 
 the external factor plays in their formation differs only in 
 degree between the opinions of the expert and those of the 
 
 ' Vom Bertif, u.s.w., p. 12. 
 
THE HISTORICAL METHOD. Ill 
 
 vulgar. But even though the ideas of the vulgar be entirely 
 moulded in this external way, it is obvious that the ideas of 
 the expert are not so formed ; for while his surroundings in 
 the way of legal institutions and customs are for the most 
 part the same as those of the ordinary man, his legal con- 
 ceptions are different. Can then the method of historical 
 realism give a sufficient account of the formation of legal 
 ideas or conceptions such as those of the jurists and legis- 
 lators who modify law? This, it should be noticed, is a 
 question which concerns not merely the history of legal 
 ideas, but also the history of legal "customs. For these 
 ideas, however arrived at, tend to form new legal institutions 
 and modify old ones. The question of the formation of 
 these legal ideas thus becomes a crucial one for the historical 
 method. Of course it may be said that as it is a * deficient 
 imagination ' which is largely the cause of slavish adherence 
 to custom,^ so the formation of conceptions which pass 
 beyond the actual to the ideal is the result of an efficient 
 imagination. But while this answer may be true so far as 
 it goes, it is certainly insufficient. The conditions implied 
 in forming conceptions by the scientific imagination still 
 remain to be investigated. And it is this analysis of the 
 process by which these conceptions or ideals are formed 
 •which is one of the chief problems to be dealt with in con- 
 sidering the claims of historical realism to be the ultimate 
 philosophical method. The question thus leads bej^ond the 
 mere application of the historical method to jurisprudence 
 or other social sciences, and can only be properly discussed 
 when the conditions implied by its use in philosophy have 
 been first of all investigated. 
 
 The application of the historical method to jurisprudence 1 
 has had a result reaching far beyond the limits of the science 
 immediately affected by it. Its historical treatment made 
 law cease to be looked on either on the one hand as a system 
 of arbitrary enactments, or on the other hand as approxima- 
 tions to a natural code common to mankind at every stage 
 of development and only obscured by human institutions. 
 Laws and the customs they sanction were seen to be an '^ 
 expression of the national life, the result of its past evo- 
 lution, indicative of its present position, and modified at 
 each stage of its progress. In this way jurisprudence 
 
 ^ Compare Mies Simcox's striking esfay on Naiurol Lnw. p. 22. 
 
112 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 came to be regarded as a part of that comprehensive science 
 that treats of social relations ; and, in the positive philosophy, 
 sociology, as an historical science, had its definite place 
 assigned to it in the circle of knovsrledge. 
 
 The preceding account of the historical treatment of 
 jurisprudence has shown us the grounds on which the ap- 
 plication of the historical method to the social sciences 
 generally is to be discussed. We have seen that the intro- 
 duction of the new method was partly a protest against the 
 imaginative constructions of history that formed such 
 theories as that of the social contract, and partly also sup- 
 ported by the positive assertion that present facts and 
 circumstances can only be properly understood by studying 
 the process by which they have come to be what they are. 
 In both these claims the new method is justified. It is 
 indeed a matter for separate discussion how far we must 
 inquire into the history of each difi'erent class of social facts 
 and relations before lajing down the laws of their present 
 action, though there can, of course, be no question that it is 
 absolutely necessary to do so before speaking of what they 
 were in the past. But we have also seen that the claims of 
 the historical method do not stop here. Perhaps the only 
 branch of the social sciences in which these claims may be 
 said to extend no further is political economy, the reason for 
 this being that the scope of this science is now generally recog- 
 nised to be much narrower than it was looked upon as being 
 in the days of Adam Smith. But in those questions of 
 statecraft which were formerly mixed up with it, and in 
 theoretical politics and jurisprudence, the historical method 
 has a further application, or at any rate makes a more 
 comprehensive claim, which it is harder exactly to determine. 
 The reason of this difficulty is that we here pass beyond 
 actual events past or present, and approach the philosophic 
 confines of these sciences, thus raising the whole question as 
 to the significance of the historical method in philosophy. 
 For both in jurisprudence and in politics we have certain 
 ideals which we wish to realise, though our efforts to attain 
 them are necessarily limited and conditioned at once by 
 their own nature and by the material we have to manipulate 
 and to elevate to the ideal. In such sciences the material we 
 have to deal with is the actual legal and political relations 
 of the nation in connection with the whole character of the 
 
THE fflSTORICAL METHOD. 113 
 
 people and their historical position. In all such cases, 
 therefore, our attempts to realise the ideal must be con- 
 ditioned by the position and character of the people as de- 
 termined b}^ their historical antecedents. So far as practical, 
 these ideals are dependent on the actual state of affairs, but 
 in their nature as ideals they pass above and beyond it. 
 Hence arises the question as to the manner of their formation 
 and the possible functions of the historical method in this 
 reference as well as in the former. 
 
 Again, in psychology and in morals the same question 
 meets us, and here in an even more fundamental form, 
 applying to the bases of the s-ciences not merely to their 
 further limits. . Anthropology may show us how the pre- 
 sent mental and moral condition of men is the result of 
 an historical evolution. But are not cognitive categories, 
 however crudely held and ill-applied, presupposed in the 
 germinal knowledge of man? are not ethical ideals, how- 
 ever indistinctly conceived and blindly followed, implied in the 
 rudimentary moral activity of the lowest races ? The ques- 
 tion thus comes to be whether the historical method which 
 exhibits the development of knowledge and morality can 
 also account for their existence. Does the process history 
 presents us with itself afford sufficient explanation of all the 
 facts to be explained? What, in fine, is historical expla- 
 nation worth when quest is made for the meaning of the 
 whole of things ? 
 
 The most attractive thing about historical realism is that 
 it is a unity, an organic system. The ordinary scientific but 
 unhistorical realism of an earlier date was without any such 
 bond of unity. It conjured indeed with the term experience, 
 but only with the term ; experience itself was for it a mere 
 haphazard external somewhat, standing in no necessary re- 
 lation to consciousness. For knowledge, for morality, for 
 sesthetic and religious ideals, we were referred to experience : 
 they arose there ; it accounted for them ; each individual, 
 coming in contact with nearly the same set of external 
 circumstances, received much the same kind of mental 
 filling-in in the way of knowledge, morality, &c. But in 
 this way the different parts of his experience were only 
 externally connected with one another, his experience only 
 arbitrarily connected with that of other individuals. The 
 historical method has brought unity and life into these dis- 
 
114 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 'jecta membra. The principle of hereditary transmission has 
 enabled it to connect the experience of each individual man, 
 as an organic part, with that of the race. And when expe- 
 rience is thus no longer broken with every individual, but 
 maintains its continuity through an indefinitely long period 
 of time, we are able to see how its different parts are not the 
 mere chance associates of a complex aggregate, but members 
 of an organised system in which there is no part but is 
 connected with the whole, and through the whole with every 
 other part. 
 
 Eealism has thus become pre-eminently a system, in 
 which an attempt is made to explain the totality of things, 
 and to explain them by the same method of historical evo- 
 lution, beginning with the simplest elements and working 
 upwards to the most complex results. The physical, the 
 chemical, the organic, the sensitive, and the self-conscious are 
 thus regarded as so many stages in the development of the 
 universe, in which there is no absolute break between the 
 different members, and in which — if the theory is to be 
 fully made out — each member gives birth to, and, along 
 with surrounding modifying circumstances, contains in itself 
 an explanation of that which succeeds it. As we pass from 
 one division to another we are indeed obliged to make use of 
 different and additional categories for the explanation of our 
 facts. But from the standpoint of historical realism it 
 must be held that, although we rise from the categories of 
 quantity and quality with simple causal connection, or at 
 most reciprocity, to design and life, and from life which is 
 merely sensitive and animal, to that which is conscious of 
 itself, yet each step of the process originates in and arises 
 from what precedes, and we are never guilty of leaping from 
 terra firma into the empty air of speculation. If the specu- 
 lative school begin with self-consciousness which they hold 
 to account for all the categories, but to be itself accounted 
 for by none, the historical school look upon it as but the 
 latest and most complex product of time. Their chief work- 
 ing category is that of causality, and all the others are 
 explained as but more complex and closely interwoven cases 
 of the causal connection. They perhaps concede that, in 
 our present limited knowledge, there ■ is still a hiatus in 
 experience between the inanimate and the living, and again 
 between the merely animate and the self-conscious. But the 
 
THE HISTORICAL METHOD. 115 
 
 contention is that we can brinor the two sides so close togfether 
 as to see that the gulf is not impassable, and that it only- 
 needs proper material and a link of connection to enable us 
 to throw a bridge across. The category of design, for 
 example, has been thought to be explained without the 
 assistance of conscious or intelligent purpose, simply by the 
 organisms whose undesigned modifications make them 
 the fittest to live, surviving in the struggle for existence, 
 and transmitting to descendants the qualities which enabled 
 them to wage successful war against the hostile forces in 
 nature. In a similar way it is contended that even self- 
 consciousness may be an historical result of the unconscious. 
 And just as the reduction of the category of design to that 
 of causality is no reason why we should not make use of the 
 former in science (remembering always that it is not an 
 ultimate category), so self-consciousness itself — no longer 
 regarded as the source of the categories — will have its place 
 in the systematic theory of things, but for its ultimate 
 explanation must be traced to its historical source in the 
 unconscious. 
 
 The point of greatest difficulty for this theory is the 
 passage from the unconscious to consciousness. For even 
 the theory of historical evolution — superior as it is in unity 
 of conception and in philosophic breadth to any other real- 
 istic theory — ignores the very question with which philo- 
 sophy begins, the nature of knowledge. So long as it 
 remains on purely objective ground the value of historical 
 realism must be tested by the ordinary scientific canons. It 
 is only a science, though a science of the most generalised 
 kind. But when it attempts to make the transition from 
 the object known to the knowing subject, it forgets the 
 obvious fact that this subject of knowledge has been all 
 along assumed, and that it can be no longer safely ignored now 
 that it is being turned from objects back upon itself. At 
 this point, at any rate, the question must be raised as to 
 what is implied by the subject having knowledge, and a 
 transition must therefore be made from objective science to 
 the theory of knowledge. So long as we kept to the sciences 
 it was not necessary to refer to this fact of knowledge, for 
 the sciences do not profess to justify their own existence. 
 But the explanations of philosophy are only philosophical 
 explanations in so far as they are ultimate ; and it therefore 
 
116 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 belongs to philosophy to inquire into the nature and con- 
 ditions of that knowledge which all particular sciences 
 assuiue. 
 
 It thus becomes evident that to identify this question 
 with some special point of psychological or moral analysis is 
 to mistake its central meaning. The question is not, for 
 example, the same as, however closely it may be connected 
 with, the question whether perceptions of space and time 
 can be shown to have grown up in the human mind through 
 the accumulated experiences of many ages, or whether sym- 
 pathetic feelings and moral ideas can be shown to have their 
 roots in early social institutions. The question is much 
 wider and more fundamental than these, for it involves the 
 justification not of any special doctrines merely but of a 
 point of view. The fact that Kant's analysis of space and 
 time was placed at the opening of his great work has led to 
 the critical importance of that analysis being greatly over- 
 estimated, and the central point of the ' Critique ' — the neces- 
 sity of a reference to self- consciousness for all knowledge — 
 being sometimes overlooked. The arguments by which Kant 
 supported his view of space and time are entirely of a 
 special kind, and their sufficiency and correctness have little 
 or no bearing on the rest of his theory. What it was essen- 
 tial for him to show, and what he really showed, Avas that 
 experience implied the conceptions which it was made to 
 account for by the individualistic empiricists of his day, and 
 which it is now made to account for by the historical realists 
 of our day. His contention was that thought or self-con- 
 sciousness makes experience, not experience thought, whether 
 the experience referred to be limited to the brief span of an 
 individual life or extended to the indefinite duration of the 
 race. In short, the detailed analysis of space and time 
 given in the * Transcendental ^Esthetic,' is only an outwork 
 of the system. What is fundamental in the discussion is 
 the doctrine that these perceptions are not generated by 
 unrelated feelings but require a mental construction, and 
 can only be unified through the synthetic action of the self- 
 conscious subject. Kant himself no doubt laid greater stress 
 on his special arguments than he would have done had 
 the * Esthetic ' been written after instead of before the 
 * Analytic' And it is thus not to be wondered at that the 
 analysis of space with which Mr. Spencer, on the basis of 
 
THE HISTORICAL METHOD. 117 
 
 the modern evolutionist philosophy, attempts to supersede 
 the Kantian analysis, should be put forward by him as an 
 integral part of a theory which tries to account by a natural 
 process of development for knowledge and the self-conscious- 
 ness which Kant regards as its supreme condition. Mr. 
 Spencer's discussion of the subject is also one of the best 
 examples of the method of accounting for knowledge by 
 showing its genesis. And as it is further a typical case of 
 the application of historical treatment to a question con- 
 nected both with the theory of knowledge and with the 
 analysis of mental states, it may repay a fuller considera- 
 tion. Mr. Spencer has, of course, this advantage over Kant's 
 earlier opponents, that he has an unlimited time at his com- 
 mand in which the results of individual experience can be 
 consolidated and transmitted. But however long a period 
 of time may be granted him, however many generations the 
 evolution of the nervous structure may have occupied, the 
 difficulty of passing from the perception of that which for 
 the perceiving subject is non-spatial to that which is for it 
 spatial must still be met at some point or other. Even 
 granting a sufficiently developed nervous structure, the per- 
 ception of space implies the reference to things outside one 
 of the sensations to which tbis structure is organic, and the 
 crucial difficulty — the conversion of the non-spatial into the 
 spatial — is only apparently surmounted in an analysis w^hich 
 presupposes that the distinction between various parts of 
 our organism is already a distinction for the percipient sub- 
 ject before there is any spatial perception, and then evolves 
 the perception of space from the consciousness of this dis- 
 tinction. Yet it is evident as soon as stated that, so far 
 from originating the perception of space, this known dis- 
 tinction of organic parts really presupposes it.^ This diffi- 
 culty seems to be obscured rather than overcome by Mr. 
 Spencer's method of treatment, in which the perception of 
 (extended) matter is discussed before that of space or exten- 
 sion, while the admission is made that, on his theory, the 
 perception of space implies that of motion — a perception left 
 to be explained subsequently,^ but afterwards found to be 
 not what we ordinarily call the perception of motion, but 
 simply the ' muscular sensations ' ^ which are said to accom- 
 
 ' a. Principles of Psychology, 3rd ^ Principles of Psychology, 11. 176, 
 
 ed., §§ 327, 239 ; vol', ii. p. 168 ff. ; vol. » Ihid. II. 218. 
 
 i. p. 549. 
 
118 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 pany (the cbjective fact of) motion, and from wMch the 
 (subjective) perception of motion is said to be built up. The 
 perception of space on the evolution-theory is thus reduced 
 to the same terms as in individualistic psychology: a series 
 of touches concomitant with a series of muscular feelings, 
 and recognised as similar to a number of simultaneous 
 touches.^ The resultant association of the series of muscular 
 feelings with these simultaneous feelings of touch is thus 
 made to constitute our germinal perception both of space 
 'and motion. By speaking of these simultaneous sensations 
 of touch as ' a series of co-existent positions,' the genesis of 
 the perception of space appears easy enough. But when we 
 keep them strictly to what they are — a number of sensations 
 which require to be successively attended to in order to be 
 brought into distinct consciousness — and then associate them 
 simply with another series of sensations which physiology 
 has since taught us to call muscular, the transition to the 
 spatial still remains to be made. Once given his ' notion of 
 relative position ' in space, Mr. Spencer's evolution-theory en- 
 ables him to show how the definite conception of space as we 
 novr have it has been built up by the experiences of previous 
 individuals being handed down in the form of modified struc- 
 ture to their descendants ; but it has not in any way solved 
 the difficulty of showing how sensations which ex hypothed 
 are not in space can yield the spatial perception. 
 
 It is on this account that Lotze's hypothesis of 'local 
 signs ' as the original elements of the space-perception has 
 been admitted with such great unanimity by recent scientific 
 psychologists. The adoption of this hypothesis does not 
 indeed necessarily imply an acceptance of the Kantian view 
 that space is an innate form of intuition, but it is an acknow- 
 ledgment that it cannot be built up merely from passive 
 
 * Tyschology, II. 224 : ' What it Spencer would admit, is either in space 
 
 now concerns us to notice is this : — or time. If, then, tha ' co-existent posi- 
 
 that as the series of tactual feelings A tions ' in which the ' simultaneous tac- 
 
 to Z, known as having sequent positions tual feelings ' are presented, are spatial 
 
 in consciousness, is found to he equiva- positions, the presentation of space is 
 
 lent to the accompanying series of mus- already there, and does not need to be 
 
 cular feelings \ and as it is also found to got at by any combination of ' equivalent ' 
 
 he equivalent to the simvUaneous tactual feelings, or series of feelings. If, on 
 
 feelings A to Z, which are presented in CO- the other hand, the * co-existent posi- 
 
 existent positions ; it follows that these tions ' in which the ' simultaneous tac- 
 
 two last are found to he equivrdents to tual feelings' are presented, are posi- 
 
 eaoh other.' I cannot help thinking that tions in time, the statement simply 
 
 the phraseology of this important pas- means that the simultaneous feelings 
 
 sage is n^isleading. 'Position,' Mr. are — simultaneous. 
 
PTHE HISTORICAL METHOD. 119 
 
 and muscular sensations, but necessitates a further con- 
 dition. This condition is the assumption of an element of 
 distinction between the sensations coming from different 
 sensory circles of the skin, or different fibres of the retina — 
 an element which prevents the coalescence of the qualita- 
 tively similar sensations originating at different quarters, 
 and is thus in germ that out-of-one-another-ness which we 
 call space. According to Lotze himself, this condition would 
 be inoperative did there not first of all exist in the mind an 
 original and innate tendency to form the perception of space. ^ 
 But even those investigators who do not admit this innate 
 mental tendency, have adopted his suggestion of local signs 
 as the element which gives distinction to sensations quali- 
 tatively alike ; so that modern scientific psychology, if no 
 longer content with Kant's analysis of the spatial perception, 
 is yet far from endorsing the derivative view he was opposing. 
 It must be allowed to psychology to analyse, so far as analys- 
 able, the perception of space, like any other mental state. 
 But historical psychology has been no more successful than 
 individualistic psychology was in resolving this perception 
 into elements of mere tactual and muscular feeling. For the 
 germinal perception from which our present complex per- 
 ception is built up is found to have already implied a dif- 
 ferentiation of sensational elements which are not qualita- 
 tively distinguishable. How this germinal perception has 
 been worked up into the various forms in which it now 
 appears can be traced by the evolution-theory in a way 
 which the older psychology could not rival. But the ex- 
 tended time which that theory puts at our disposal does not 
 make it any the easier to pass from mere sensation to the 
 perception of spatial distinction. 
 
 The failure of the empirical analysis of space, even 
 when aided by the doctrine of heredity, is due to no mere 
 temporary defect of psychological analysis, but to its attempt- 
 ing the impossible feat of getting out of unrelated sensations 
 a relation which mere sensation could never generate, since it 
 implies the distinguishing and relating function of the con- 
 scious subject. The so-called historical basis of ethics is 
 open to a similar objection. The theory which traces the 
 growth of the moral feelings and the widening of moral 
 ideals has still left undiscussed the conditions of moral 
 
 ' Grundcilge der Psyohologie, p. 30. 
 
120 ESSAYS IN PIIILOSOrmCAL CRITICISM. 
 
 action, has given no solution of the question, What is im- 
 plied in that identification of self with an end or course of 
 action, on which morality is based ? No competent inquirer 
 is likely to deny nowadays that moral ends and the feelings 
 accompanying moral action have differed in different races and 
 participated in the general development of mankind. And 
 in drawing attention to the share morality has had in this 
 development, the historical school has undoubtedly done 
 good service. But we go beyond our record when we assert 
 that moral action has been developed out of merely natural 
 action. The action to which alone moral value can be 
 ascribed is that which is consciously determined, in which 
 an end is seen and pursued. Morality is thus, we may almost 
 say, a kind of knowledge, or rather both knowledge and 
 morality are kinds of consciousness. In this respect, as well 
 as in its more obvious meaning, Spinoza's doctrine of the 
 equivalence of action and intellectual cognition ^ holds true : 
 we act only so far as we know ; otherwise the action is not 
 really ours. If knowledge implies an activity of the subject 
 in receiving and relating the data of sense, so does con- 
 scious action imply a distinction and selection of the end 
 pursued. Hence, the first point which a complete evolution- 
 ethics has to explain seems to have been practically over- 
 looked; no account has been given by this theory of the dis- 
 tinction between merely natural actions and those which as 
 self-determined can have moral predicates ascribed to them. 
 It lies with the historical method alone to trace the 
 growth of altruistic and other moral feelings, and to exhibit 
 the development of ethical ends in connection with that of 
 social and political institutions. But there are two ques- 
 tions which it fails to touch, or at any rate to decide. The 
 first of these is the point just mentioned, the differentia- 
 tion of moral or consciously determined action from that 
 ' which is merely natural or determined b}' conditions in- 
 dependent of consciousness. This may be called the fun- 
 damental question of ethics. And as the historical method 
 has failed to touch it, so neither in the second place has 
 it shoTvn its competency to decide what may be called the 
 final question of ethics, to decide, namely, between various 
 ethical ends, and to determine that which ' ought ' to be 
 followed. It is one thing to trace the modifications which 
 
 ' Eth, iv. 24 : ' Nos eatenus tantumniodo agimus, qnatenus intelligimus.' 
 
p 
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD. 121 
 
 moral ideals have undergone, and the results in conduct of 
 these various modifications ; it is quite another thing to pass 
 from this merely historical ground of what has been, and to 
 set up an ideal for present action and future striving. 
 
 We are thus brought back in ethics to the point where 
 the historical method of jurisprudence left us in uncertainty. 
 How do we form the ideals which regulate scientific progress 
 or govern practical conduct? To this question, there would 
 seem to be two imperfect answers. According to one of 
 these the ideals are presented to us in history and fact, and 
 we have neither need nor right to go beyond experience in 
 framing them. It is some such answer as this, I think, that 
 is given by those who hold that the historical method is 
 able to decide what have been called the final philosophical 
 questions into which we are led. But it is a matter of no 
 little diificulty to give an exact statement of this vicAV, chiefly 
 because, so far as I am aware, those who seem to adopt it as 
 a consequence of the historical method have never fully 
 worked it out or even defined it with sufficient clearness. It 
 i? only when the claim thus made for the historical method 
 shall have been put forward with greater precision and sup- 
 ported by appropriate argument, that it will be possible 
 fully to estimate its value. At present it is hard to tell 
 whether it is meant {a ) that the historical evolution of out- 
 ward circumstances and institutions contains in itself a suffi- 
 cient explanation of all theories as to the end of conduct, or 
 (6) that the development of opinion is such that each succes- 
 sive view is determined and fully accounted for by those which 
 preceded it, or (c) simply that we must be guided by history 
 and fact in the formation of our ideals. The first view seems 
 to be a moderate expression of the opinion not seldom met 
 with, that we had better give up altogether the inquiry after 
 an ' ought,' and rest contented with the ' is ' and the ' was.' But 
 this is merely cutting the Gordian knot the historical method 
 itself has tied. The test of this method as the final method 
 of philosophy is its competency to determine ends or ideals, 
 and for solution of the question we are told that ends cannot 
 be determined. This answer can, however, only be taken 
 as a frank acknowledgment of the limits of the historical 
 nip.thod, hardly as a proof that what it does not extend to is 
 therefore unattainable by any other means. Rather, having 
 already seen that this method implies conditions which it 
 
122 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 cannot itself account for, we need not be surprised at its 
 leading up to questions that lie beyond it, though they do 
 nofc lie outside the field of consciousness. To say (a) that 
 opinion follows external circumstances, is to make an asser- 
 tion founded only on the broad correspondence existing 
 between the twOj a correspondence which may be equally 
 well or better accounted for by the supposition, not that one 
 is cause alone, and the other effect alone, but that their 
 mutual action has a tendency to bring one into harmony with 
 the other : so far as experience goes it shows us opinions 
 modifying circumstances as often as modified by them. Again, 
 the assertion (b) that each new opinion follows from those 
 which preceded it either leaves no room for the mutual 
 influence of opinion and outward customs or institutions, 
 or, if it does admit both factors, neither of them altogether 
 independent of, and neither of them altogether dependent 
 upon, the other, this is an admission that the mental ele- 
 ment in the evolution both modifies and is modified by its 
 surroundings. It may of course be said that it is just this 
 interaction of organism and environment which the historical 
 method has commonly to trace in natural science. But the 
 difference is that our internal factor here is not an organism 
 like a plant or an animal, but self-consciousness and the 
 mental states which follow from or depend upon it. And if, 
 as in a previous part of this paper I have attempted to show, 
 self-consciousness stands apart from historical evolution, and 
 can only be evolved from it when it has been already assumed 
 in it, it follows that the ideals we form are in part at least 
 dependent on a source which stands above the merely tem- 
 poral succession traced by the historical method. It is 
 indeed still possible for us to assert (c) that history and fact 
 must be our guides in the formation of these ideals, but sup- 
 posing this proved, it only shows that their material content 
 must be got from external events and institutions, while the 
 various elements composing this content will still be selected 
 and unified under the guidance of an idea supplied by the 
 self-conscious subject. It is the use of these regulative ideas 
 which makes it possible for the scientific imagination to frame 
 conceptions which pass beyond actual experience. 
 
 The other theory referred to as imperfect recognises, but 
 in a one-sided way, the truth that the formation of these 
 ideals passes beyond actual events, though not beyond the 
 
THE HISTORICAL METHOD. 123 
 
 range of consciousness. According to this theory our ideals 
 are formed independently of facts or experience, and the aim 
 of morality, of politics, and of law is said to be the realisa- 
 tion of some such abstract principle as that of equality, justice, 
 liberty, or it may be happiness. It was as a protest against 
 this abstract way of looking at practical ideals that the 
 historical method came into prominence, and by a natural ' 
 revulsion tended to ally itself with a one-sided empiricism. 
 Ideals of this sort, separated from experience, and often un- 
 connected with the spirit of the time, have more frequently 
 hindered progress than furthered it. As Bluntschli justly 
 remarks, ^ ' Napoleon was not far wrong when he said " the 
 metaphysicians, the ideologists, have ruined France." For 
 the " ideological " conception of liberty and equality left 
 the land in ruins and drenched it with blood. So, too, the 
 doctrinaire elaboration of the monarchical principle repressed 
 political freedom in Germany and impeded the development 
 of its power, while the abstract principle of nationality has / 
 been so applied as to endanger the peace of Europe. The 
 truest and most fruitful ideas become pernicious when 
 " ideologically " conceived and developed with narrow fana- 
 ticism.' 
 
 Both the empirical and abstract theories just mentioned 
 may be said to be true in what they afl&rm, false in what 
 they deny. The former theory is right in so far as it asserts 
 that all our ideals to be fruitful must be founded on ex- 
 perience or history. The end we seek must in all cases be, 
 as Aristotle says in his ' Ethics,' dvOpcowivov, a human end, 
 and built on the foundations already laid. In ethics the 
 first duty which lies before the individual is to fill his place 
 as, and to perform the ordinary functions of, a member of 
 the family, of the community, and of the State, and any 
 ideal which conflicts with this is in so far discredited. In 
 politics the first aim is to conserve the constitution of the 
 State and to regulate international relations with respect to 
 its historical place and action, while in legislation regard is 
 had to the continuity of established custom, and each pro- 
 posed change is jealously weighed. But if we are to pass 
 beyond the duty of the good neighbour and honest citizen 
 to higher and more comprehensive ends, if the State is to 
 develop and laws to be improved, we need to pass beyond 
 
 ' Lehre vom modernen Stat, I. 6, 6th ed. (1876). 
 
124 ESSAYS IN PIIILOSOPinCAL CRITICISM. 
 
 liistory. Only through the ideal of a condition better 
 than the present, and still remaining to be realised, have 
 previous improvements been made or is further progress 
 possible. On the one hand, therefore, from the historical 
 side, we must guard against an ideal unsuitable to present 
 circumstances, while on the other hand, the reason that 
 * looks before and after ' passes on towards a unity of 
 knowledge and a perfection of practical ends which ex- 
 perience cannot yield. How these ideals of science and life 
 are formed is a question for philosophy itself, not for 
 methodology. The materials of the ideal may themselves 
 be traceable to experience, but they are formed anew by the 
 reflective reason. Thus the conception of humanity as the 
 end of conduct which forms the high ideal of the positivist 
 philosophy is one which could never have been reached on 
 the merely positivist or historical ground. For it sets up as 
 the moral end a conception which passes far beyond actual 
 experience, which looks upon that which is past as part of a 
 whole along with what has as yet no actual existence. It is 
 only a metaphysical theory which, by virtue of its function 
 of examining the conditions of knowledge and action 
 wherever found, can thus pass both beyond the individual 
 and beyond the race as a mere part of experience. It is 
 true, as Comte remarks,^ that the science of the individual 
 cannot advance to this conception ; and if the science of the 
 individual can be metaphysical, as Comte supposes, this 
 individualistic metaphysic is under the same limitation. 
 But it is only on account of the unity of conception — itself not 
 a product of experience — which underlies Comte's historical 
 method, that even the science of the race can attain to it. 
 Metaphysics, which necessarily transcends the individual in 
 considering the conditions essential to thought and action, 
 is thus able to reach an ideal for knowledge and conduct. 
 It is true, indeed, that in all the practical sciences — in 
 morals, law, and politics — ends of conduct may be conceived 
 and followed which do not rise above empirical ground. 
 But these ideals, through their own limitation, carry in 
 themselves a reference to higher ideals. And it is to the 
 
 * Posit he Philosophy/, 11.509. When ahstract science without necessary re- 
 Mr. Stephen {The Science of Ethics, lation to experience. Only as such is 
 p. 453) asserts that the metaphysician the metaphysic of morals what he calls 
 cannot reach the ' ought,' he seems to it, * a transfigured bit of logic' 
 be looking upon metaphysics as an 
 
THE HISTOmCAL METHOD. 125 
 
 presence and power in human life of these higher ideals — 
 not yielded by experience itself, since they imply a principle 
 of the harmony and tendency of experience — that progress 
 is to be ascribed. 
 
 The examination of the historical method has thus led 
 to the conclusion that its applicability, however wide, is 
 necessarily limited. It implies categories of which it can 
 only trace the historical manifestation, leaving the investi- 
 gation of their logical position and nature to the theory of 
 knowledge or to the theory of action ; and it leads up to 
 problems which pass out of the range of the chronological 
 sequence to which it is restricted. Yet, between these two 
 limits, its application extends to the whole field of develop- 
 ment in time. The result thus arrived at by analysing the 
 nature of the historical method might also be confirmed 
 from another point of view. The logical and ethical postu- 
 lates with which the theory of knowledge and the theory of 
 morality have to do find their realisation in an experience 
 which is in time, and our metaphysics thus needs to be 
 supplemented by an account of the historical process through 
 which these conceptions have been manifested in the human 
 mind and in society. But this speculative justification of 
 the historical method does not seem to be called for now. 
 It would almost appear an impertinence to vindicate a place 
 in philosophy for a line of study which has won its own 
 position by its positive achievements : it seems sufficient at 
 present to have restricted attention to the method itself, 
 showing the range of questions to which it is appropriate, 
 and the limits beyond which it cea.ses to be of any avail. 
 
 W. R. SORLEY. 
 
126 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 V. 
 
 THE RATIONALITY OF HISTORY, 
 
 In Aristotle we find the first attempts at a history of 
 philosophy as an essential part of a philosophical system ; 
 and in him, too, we find some faint recognition of a philo- 
 sophy of history. He gives a historical, instead of a merely 
 logical, account of the origin of political society;' and he 
 seeks to show the inner necessity of the actual order in which 
 the constitutions of Greece succeeded each other.^ But here, 
 as in many things, the wide domain claimed by Aristotle was 
 left unoccupied until after Kant. In the intervening period, 
 such ideas as there are about the philosophy of history must 
 be sought (apart from the isolated speculations of Yico^) 
 among theologians, poets, aud in general literature, rather 
 than among the philosophers. It is the great merit of 
 Hegel — a merit which even those who most disagree with 
 his dialectic cannot dispute — that he has attempted to regain 
 for philosophy the whole province of the work of spirit, and 
 that, above all, he has occupied himself with historj^ in every 
 department. And if philosophy is to be taken seriously as 
 an effort to explain the world of thought, nature and man, 
 it must not shrink from the interpretation of the facts of 
 history. 
 
 While a philosophy of history is necessary if philosophy 
 is to be adequate to its task, it is equally necessary if history 
 is to attain its end. The student of history, if his interest 
 in his subject is anything more than the curiosity of the 
 antiquarian, the zeal of the polemical critic, or the enthu- 
 
 1 Pol. I. 2. plutot de I'expliquer, et de montrer que 
 
 2 Pol. III. 15, §§ 11-13. la Science iwuvelle n'a et6 si n^glig^e 
 ' ' Pendant que la foule suivait ou pendant le dernier siecle, que parce 
 
 combattait la reforme cart6sienne, un qu'elle s'adressait au notre.'— Jules Mi- 
 genie solitaire fondait la philosophie de chelet, Discours sur le systeme et la vie de 
 I'histoire. N' accusons pas I'indifference Vico. 
 des coiitemporaiuB de Vico; essayons 
 
THE RATIONALITY OF HISTORY. 127 
 
 siasm of the rhetorician, is always struggling to win from 
 the particular details of past events some new help for the 
 better understanding of a nation or a period as a whole. 
 Thus, a true historian of Eome should not merely be occupied 
 in fixing the dates of the Agrarian laws or determining the 
 procedure in the senate, nor in overthrowing this or that 
 hypothesis of Niebuhr or this or that assertion of Mommsen, 
 nor in giving picturesque descriptions of battles or elegant 
 reflections on the decay of morals — as* if any of these things, 
 by and for themselves, were his real object : he should always 
 be seeking to grasp better, and put in clearer light, what 
 was the spirit of the Roman people — the same in all its dif- 
 ferent manifestations, in internal struggles, in conquest, in 
 legislation, and what is its significance for the whole human 
 race. Of course, as a scientific inquirer,- the historian has 
 primarily to do with particular facts. Ulterior aims should 
 not interfere with his care a.nd impartiality in getting at 
 these ; but, at the same time, these facts can never be in 
 themselves an end. What the good historian does for a 
 particular period is to arrive at the meaning, or underlying 
 principle, or ' idea,' of that period. Suppose that could be 
 done for all history, we should have a philosophy of history, 
 or at least a certain proof that a philosophy of history was 
 impossible ; for the philosophy of history seeks to discover 
 the 'ideas' of different periods in their relation to one 
 another. 
 
 The philosophy of history can hardly be regarded as 
 identical with universal history. While the philosopher 
 does something less than discover the facts, he must do 
 something more than epitomise them. History is a science. 
 Some ancient writers seem to have regarded it as a branch 
 of rhetoric, aiming rather at flattering national vanity than 
 at the discovery of truth. Even if we feel that history is 
 more a department of literature than chemistry, we yet 
 regard the scientific interest, the desire for truth, as the 
 most essential. Again, history is a science of the higher 
 type. It has not merely to collect and classify phenomena, 
 but to explain them by their causes. The historian is more 
 than the chronicler or annalist. In the great historian must 
 be united the capacity and industry of research, the disci- 
 plined imagination, which will lead him to see events in 
 their connection, and the literary ability of presenting them 
 
128 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 correctly and vividly to the reader. The absence of any of 
 these qualifications detracts from the merits of a historian. 
 Beyond all these we demand some appreciation of the deeper 
 significance of the time and events with which he is occu- 
 pied, in their bearing on the history of mankind as a whole 
 — i.e. the greatest historian must also be something of a 
 philosopher. But this is a demand which, though raised by 
 history as a science, is yet a demand for something more 
 than a science, as such, can satisfy. The philosophy of his- 
 tory is thus distinct from hibtory as a science. The philo- 
 sophy of history would be included in an ideal universal 
 history ; but it is less and more than what we ordinarily mean 
 by history. 
 
 Again, though covering to a great extent the same 
 ground, it is not to be identified with a so-called ' science 
 of history ' or ' sociology,' which, from a collection and com- 
 parison of particular facts, draws generalisations as to the 
 course of human events, and the test of whose perfection 
 would be the power of foretelling political and social 
 changes — a sort of human weather-wisdom. Whether or 
 how far such a science is possible is not our present question. 
 Whether possible or not, it would not be a philosophy of 
 history, which attempts less and more. For (1) philosophy 
 should make no pretence at prophecy. It is concerned, 
 properly, with what is or has been, not with what will be or 
 may be. At the same time it must not be denied that the 
 desire to read the future in the light of a true understanding 
 of the past is irrepressible and not unjustifiable and not 
 wholly irrelevant to the philosophy of history. (2) The 
 philosophy of history is not an inductive science. It is an 
 attempt to construe the phenomena of history a priori. 
 The phrase need not cause alarm or derision. A priori is, 
 perhaps, an unfortunate expression, because it suggests 
 primarily an idea of time ; but it is so much sanctioned by 
 use that it can hardly be avoided. The philosopher can 
 make no pretence to know the Egyptian dynasties without 
 studying the hieroglyphics, or the writers who have studied 
 the hieroglyphics, nor to understand the early history of 
 Eome better than Niebuhr or Mommsen. He must accept 
 the facts as reported by the best authorities available. They 
 are the ' matter ' with which he has to deal. His business 
 is to interpret them in terms of thought — i.e. to show their 
 
rilE RATIONALITY OF HISTORY. 129 
 
 rationality, their significance as part of that one great pro- 
 cess which he as a philosopher, along with most unsophisti- 
 cated persons, assumes history to be. For he who attempts 
 to interpret anything assumes that it has a meaning. 
 
 An illustration will perhaps make clear what is here 
 meant by * philosophical interpretation,' as distinguished 
 from ' scientific explanation.' * Suppose it is said, as it con- 
 stantly is, that the French Revolution is the outcome of the 
 Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, this asser- 
 tion, if understood as implying that the Protestant Reforma- 
 tion was the cause of the Revolution, may justly be combated 
 by the historian. It might very well be said that the 
 Revolution was in great part due to the failure of the 
 Reformation in France. The presence of a strong Protes- 
 tant element would have supplied a liberal, and yet conser- 
 vative, opposition to royal despotism, and a check on the 
 corruptions of the Church. But though the statement may 
 not be true as an expression of a fact of causation (as that 
 is understood in inductive science), it may very well be true 
 as meaning that the principles (of private judgment, indi- 
 vidual freedom, &c.) involved in the Protestant position were 
 carried out to their logical {i.e. abstractly logical, and 
 therefore, in great part, practically illogical) result in the 
 Revolution. 
 
 Using Aristotelian phraseology, we may say that the 
 scientific historian and the sociologist are occupied with the 
 material and efficient causes of events and institutions, while 
 the philosopher or philosophic historian is occupied with 
 their formal a,nd final causes — i.e. with the spirit and mean- 
 ing of them, as shown by the end to which they are tending. 
 The philosophy of history implies a teleological view of 
 phenomena. Thus the philosophic way of regarding history 
 is more akin to the religious and artistic than to the scien- 
 
 * Of course it must be noted that abstract formalism of the logical un- 
 
 we are here using 'sciMitific' in a nar- derstanding. 
 
 row sense, which many scientific his- It is to be regretted that Professor 
 
 torians, and these the very best, would Flint, in his very learned book on the 
 
 be the first to repudiate. The truly history of the PUlosophy of History, 
 
 scientific spirit never does narrow itself ^?f "?^de no distinction between ' scien- 
 
 to that abstract view of causality to fific history 'science of history/ 'phi- 
 
 ,.,,,.-,,. , . . / . losophy of history.' It is true that the 
 
 which the inductive logician seeks to first writer on the philosophy of history 
 
 bind It down. True science, and there- polled it, ' scienza nuova.' But science 
 
 fore true history is always striving to and philosophy have distinct meanings 
 
 become philosophic, i.e. to escape the by which it is best to abide. 
 
130 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 tific (in the narrower sense). The pious mind believes that 
 God is causing all things to work together for His own 
 glory and is bringing good out of evil. ' Surely the wrath 
 of man shall praise Thee.' The poetic soul sees in the tur- 
 moil of the passions and struggles of mankind, in the rise 
 and fall of dynasties and euipires, the elements of a Divine 
 poem — a great tragedy with plot and purpose. And in 
 gloomy periods the cynic or satirist, using a sort of Satanic 
 teleology, can find a tragic-comedy in the ' ups and 
 downs ' of the world, and can mark with Taeitus the ' ]udibria 
 rerum humanarum.' 
 
 If the scientifi.c historian is right in occasionally ignoring 
 final causes in order to avoid prejudgment in his researches, 
 neither the ordinary man who thoughtfully considers public 
 events nor the statesman who helps to make them believes 
 that history moves without a purpose, or that that purpose 
 is wholly unknowable by man. Their belief, which is already 
 a sort of half- conscious and unformulated philosophy of 
 history, is generally a religious or quasi-religious faith in 
 Providence or Destiny. The conclusion that ' all is vanity ' 
 implies more reflection than the unsophisticated, practical 
 man can exert himself to undertake, and is only a passing 
 phase of educated thought. The healthy spirit works not 
 only or always for the satisfaction of immediate personal 
 wants, but also for the future, at least of his kindred, his 
 nation, perhaps of the human race. This implies some 
 belief in a system underlying events. Csesar's trust in his 
 ' fortunes,' Cromwell's ' Providence,' and Napoleon's * des- 
 tiny,' were not merely subtle forms of self-conceit, but im- 
 plied their recognition of a plan of which they were counted 
 worthy to be the instruments. If even the private citizen 
 has his views about the course of events and the mission of 
 his country, to the statesman or public man it is a duty to 
 have such views and to see that they are right. The man 
 or nation who misunderstands or ignores the * spirit of the 
 age ' must pay the penalty of blindness. Charles X., sup- 
 pressing the freedom of the press, has been aptly compared 
 to the peasant who put his hat on the source of the Danube, 
 saying, ' Won't the people at Vienna be astonished ! ' If 
 Metternich were living now he would have to admit that 
 Italy is something more than * a geographical expression.' 
 Diplomatists nowadays can hardly deal with the feeling of 
 
THE RATIONALITY OF HISTORY. 131 
 
 nationality as did those who framed the Holy Alliance. 
 Surely most statesmen believe that some age is to reap fruit 
 from their labours. The only consistent political pessimists 
 are the defenders of despotism or anarchy. 
 
 * Final causes,' like ' a priori,' has an alarming sound ; it 
 suggests those bugbears, the Schoolmen ; and * teleology ' is 
 apt to remind us of Paley's Almighty watchmaker. But, if 
 we are philosophers, a word should not frighten us, even 
 were it as badly made as * Sociology.' Mr. H. Spencer says, 
 * We must interpret the more developed by the less developed.' * 
 This is quite true ; but it is at least equally true that we in- 
 terpret the less developed by the more developed. We ex- 
 plain a thing not only by its origin, but by its end. To 
 understand what anything really is, we must look at it in 
 the completest and most perfect form of it that we can 
 find. The ceremonial usages of early times will not explain 
 adequately the political constitution of a civilised nation ; 
 nor will the marriage customs (euphemistically and pro- 
 leptically so called) of primitive man account satisfactorily 
 for its social structure. Rather these remote ages and rude 
 manners only have their value for the scientific investigator 
 because he looks at them in the light of what they come 
 to be. No anthropophagist savage is himself an anthropolo- 
 gist savant. The later and more complete is latent in the 
 earlier and ruder form, and grows out of it ; but it is latent 
 and is only seen in the light of what it, as yet, is not. We 
 oniy understand the egg by thinking of the chicken. But 
 this is no external and artificial teleology, such as would 
 explain eggs by omelettes. 
 
 All the elements do not make the real thing. The 
 biographer examines the descent, education and surround- 
 ings of a man" of genius ; yet the genius with its originality 
 remains — the man himself, who can only be known by what 
 he did. Similarly we may analyse Greek civilisation into its 
 materials, Phoenician, Egyptian, Phrygian, Lydian, &c. : yet 
 how different do all become when mastered by the Greek 
 spirit ! That we can only understand by looking at its own 
 work. So, again, if Christianity be explained as the result 
 of the meeting of the Hebrew with the Greek spirit in the 
 'medium' of the Roman Empire, 'such a formula, even if 
 complete (which it is not) as an expression of the elements 
 
 » Data of Ethics, p. 7. 
 K 2 
 
132 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 in the origin of Christianity would still be quite inadequate 
 philosophically ; because it says nothing of what Christianity 
 in itself is, i.e., what it is in its perfection, in its end. 
 
 The true meaning of historical actions must be sought to 
 a great extent in their issues, not merely in their antecedents, 
 the motives of their doers. By the philosopher, therefore, 
 who should see things in their totality, the nature of events 
 must be looked at as determined by and revealed in their 
 ends. Of course this does not mean that he should confuse 
 motives with results — a very common fallacy of historians, 
 but that he must look at events as having a farther meaning 
 than could be seen, except very faintly and dimly, by those 
 who were partakers in them. But this implies that he must 
 regard events as parts of a plan which is manifested in them 
 — that history is the work of reason. The philosophy of 
 history is not a method of getting miraculous glimpses into 
 the future, nor does it profess to disclose the past to those 
 who are too lazy to undergo the trouble of historical re- 
 search. It is rather an attempt to read the plan of Provi- 
 dence, to unravel the plot of the great drama that is played 
 throughout the centuries. 
 
 But is such an attempt possible ? That there are real 
 difficulties it would be absurd to deny ; but it is equally 
 absurd to imagine difficulties which do not exist. 
 
 It is said, in the first place, that such an attempt is pre- 
 sumption. This objection is made equally by those who wish 
 to defend theology, and those who wish to defend science 
 against what they regard as the dangerous encroachments of 
 metaphysics. ' God's ways are not as our ways, nor his 
 thoughts as our thoughts.' ' Our human reason is not capable 
 of comprehending the plan of the universe.' ' If history has 
 a meaning at all it can be known only to God. We can only 
 see the acts of individuals.' 
 
 Now, of course the limitation of time — the fact that we 
 can only know a small part of the world's history — that 
 we do not know the beginning of the play very well, and 
 cannot see it out to the last act — is a very real limitation. 
 The objection as coming from those who try to reject 
 alike theology and metaphysics, is intelligible enough, what- 
 ever we may think of its validity; and to the Agnostic we 
 can only answer by making good our profession of knowledge. 
 
THE RATIONALITY OF HISTORY. 133 
 
 and showing that his no-metaphysics is only a bad meta- 
 physics after -all. But one would like to ask those who are 
 always pointing out the difference between human and 
 Divine intelligence, whether they think they exalt the 
 Divine nature by undervaluing what they regard as likest 
 to it, and what they mean by repeating that ' God made man 
 in his own image,' and by calling the guidance of Providence 
 ' wise ' and ' good ' ? If a person professed to believe in a 
 perfectly irrational Deity, then he might be justified in deny- 
 ing that anything of the plan of history could be intelligible 
 to reason. It is possible for the professed believer in an 
 intelligent Deity to deny that a comjplete solution of the 
 mystery of human toil and suffering can be found in this 
 world (however the antithesis of this world and the other be 
 explained), but not to deny that there is any revelation 
 of God in history. That would be giving over the earth 
 to the rule of unreason, it would be making the Prince 
 of Darkness Prince of this World — a creed not quite un- 
 known to mankind,, but which, if really believed, and not 
 merely professed, is a creed of political and social despair. 
 It might befit a Stoic Republican of the Roman Empire or a 
 hermit of the Thebaid, but is not worthy of any good citizen 
 of a free country. But, if it is once admitted that the world 
 is governed by reason, it must be admitted that that rational 
 government must be intelligible to reason : else the talk of 
 rational government is a mere phrase, and might as well 
 mean irrational government. An intelligent Providence can 
 hardly be an unintelligible Providence. 
 
 In any case we are not here concerned with the general 
 question ' Is philosophy at all possible ? ' but, assuming that 
 philosophy is to some extent possible, we have to ask, ' How 
 far is it able to construe the phenomena of history ? ' 
 
 Leaving the strange objection that history is unin- 
 telligible because its plan is Divine, let us consider the 
 converse objection that it is unintelligible because its 
 phenomena are human. ' The sphere of history,' it is said, 
 * is the sphere of human freedom, and is therefore not 
 subject to general laws such as govern nature. Historical 
 events are always in the last resort determined by the 
 volitions of this or that individual, and to try to reduce 
 them to general laws or to find for them a universal formula 
 is to ignore alike the freedom and the individual diversity 
 
1S4 ESSAYS Ix\ PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 of mankind.' This is an objection made against a science 
 of history as well as against a philosophy of history. The 
 answer given by the empirical psychologist is, however, 
 hardly sufficient for an idealist. If — or, rather, so far as — 
 human actions are simply of the same kind with natural 
 phenomena, subject to the same law of cause and effect, 
 they of course admit the same methods of study and can be 
 brought under the same sort of generalisations. The average 
 number of suicides in a country is equally capable of 
 scientific discovery with its average rainfall. But philosophy 
 is not needed to defend the value of statistics. That is 
 obvious enough to the practical man. The absence of in- 
 dividual freedom, in any sense in which it would render im- 
 possible general inductions about human conduct, is known 
 to every enterprising shopkeeper. To the philosopher free- 
 dom means something other than unaccountable caprice, and 
 individuality something more than unlimited unlikeness. 
 
 The antithesis between nature and history is often 
 wrongly stated, as if it were absolute and exclusive. We 
 know from the examples in the elementary books of logic 
 that ' All men are animals,^ and nobody ever thought of 
 opposing to that proposition even a particular negative, 
 though many persons seem to think it very shocking that 
 the same theories should be applied to man and pigeons. 
 But we are also told that 'Man is a rational animal.' Man 
 is a part of nature, but he is not merely a part of nature. 
 He knows that he is such, and therefore he is more than a 
 mere part. He is not either a beast or a god, but a curious 
 complex of the two. It is because and in so far as man is 
 rational that he is free : and in so far as each man acts 
 more under the guidance of reason and less under that of 
 blind, i,e. merely natural, impulse, or passion, he is more of a 
 free agent. But freedom in this sense is the very reverse 
 of unintelligible caprice. Now history is man's constant 
 struggle to rise above merely natural influences — to escape 
 the tyranny of nature and make it his friend and servant. 
 And just because history is this struggle towards rational 
 freedom and not occupied with merely natural causes, while 
 it may be less easily studied than nature by the methods of 
 inductive science, it admits better of philosophical explana- 
 tion. 
 
 Individuality therefore ai^ freedom, so far from being 
 
THE RATIONALITY OF HISTOKV. 135 
 
 incompatible with national and race {i.e. general) develop- 
 ment, are only rendered possible by the latter. As civili- 
 sation grows and becomes more consciou.^ and more rational^ 
 and therefore more capable of being understuv/d as a rationa 
 movement, the individual has a better sphere o realising 
 his true freedom than in the ages of merely natural impulse 
 and unintelligent childish caprice. The savage, roaming 
 solitary like a wild beast in search of prey, is more a mere 
 part of nature and less a free individual than the citizen 
 who lives along with others in a complicated political 
 society whose ends are rational and the development of 
 which it is possible to trace. \ 
 
 If we were not allowed to speak of any other unity than 
 the individual, history would resolve itself into a complicated . <^ 
 tangle of biographies, and would become impossible to study 
 or to write. It is true that historical events can always in 
 theory be traced to an origin in the volitions of individuals ; 
 but these volitions and these individuals can never be 
 understood apart from their antecedents and environment. 
 The individual with his particular volitions cannot indeed 
 be analysed away into the combined influences of nature, 
 race, education, and circumstances, but, apart from these, he 
 is a mere abstraction, about whom we can predicate nothing 
 except negatively — 'He is not anybody or anything else,' 
 Individuals live and act in a physical, political, social, and 
 moral environment which determines altogether the oc- 
 casions and, at least to a great extent, the character of their 
 volitions and actions. 
 
 Man is a part of nature, but he is more. The splendid 
 climate of the Mediterranean has had a great deal to do 
 with the character and work of the historical nations of the 
 old world; but climate alone cannot make a civilisation 
 or preserve it. To geographical are often opposed race- 
 influences, as if our choice lay between one and the other. 
 Both play their part — sometimes the one more than the 
 other — in determining the character and consequent history 
 
 * If this be understood and carried mula of a paper constitution, but that 
 
 out in thought, it should serve to ex- complex reality (including religion, 
 
 plain and reconcile two dicia of Hegel's culture, &c.) which the Greeks meant 
 
 which seem to have caused much by -nShis ; by ' Freedom ' is meant not 
 
 trouble. (1) That history is-the realisa- the negative idea of 'being left alone 
 
 tion of freedom. (2) That the object but the condition and actuality of 
 
 of history is the State. Of course by highest and fullest development. 
 ' State ' is meant not the abstract for- 
 
136 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CEITIOISM. 
 
 of a people. They are the conditions, or, as Aristotle would 
 say, the ' material cause ' of a State. But their importance 
 is greater in the less advanced stages of a people's political 
 development : and they alone are not enough to explain a 
 nation. To understand the spirit of a people we must 
 consider most of all their political constitution and their 
 religion : and to understand these we must know their 
 history. We only know what the spirit of a people (or of 
 an individual) is, when we know what it does. 
 
 In estimating the probable, or explaining the past, 
 conduct of an individual, still more of a number of in- 
 dividuals, it is impossible to leave either country (province, 
 town) or race (tribe, family) out of sight. And to these we 
 must add the particular period of time. There is not only 
 a national feeling, but a ' spirit of the age.' The Crusades — 
 that strangest product of the earthly unworldliness of the 
 Middle Ages — could only have happened when they did. 
 That there is such a. thing as a ' Zeitgeist,' or ' spirit of the 
 age,' no one will deny. The extent of its influence over 
 individuals may be made matter of dispute ; but the con- 
 troversy will really turn upon what is included in the ' Zeit- 
 geist.' It is possible to recognise its character, at least to 
 some extent. To do so is one of the chief aims of the man 
 who thinks. If we were seeking to sum up the public duty 
 of a man (beyond the determinate duties of his position in 
 life) we might do so by saying : ' He must strive in the first 
 place to understand the spirit of his age, and in the second 
 place to improve it.' The attempt to perform the second 
 duty first leads to much well-meaning mischief. Of course 
 the person who understands is often, unfortunately, for that 
 very reason less capable of acting : and by the very fact of 
 his understanding the spirit of his time, it is clear that he 
 has already got beyond it. The spirit of an age (or of an 
 institution) is healthy in proportion as it trains up those 
 who can see beyond it ; for so, and so only, is progress 
 possible. No one living at any given time can fully under- 
 stand that time. Only when an event (or person) has 
 become matter of history can it be fully and fairly ap- 
 preciated. But this limitation does not prevent the clearer 
 heads from seeing the tendencies of their age. Even those 
 who are in the stream and carried with it may have some 
 consciousness of the direction in which they are moving — of 
 
i 
 
 THE RATIONALITY OF HISTORY. 137 
 
 the relation in which they are to their contemporaries, to 
 the past, and to the future. We must not think that people 
 are unconscious of everything which they can find no formula 
 to express. 
 
 These considerations should serve to refute the objection * 
 that we cannot explain history as the development of an 
 idea, unless we can show that people in general are conscious 
 of their stage in that development. (1) We must not limit 
 consciousness by power of expression. (2) We must not 
 suppose an ideal process to be unreal, because not consciously 
 apprehended at the time. The effort and struggle, which 
 issue in some great action, first clearly reveal their meaning 
 to the thinker in after ages ; but are not therefore without 
 a meaning. In religious phrase, the actors, with their 
 passions and aims, are only ' instruments in the hands of 
 Providence ; * and there can be no objection to the phrase, 
 if we avoid the superstition that only the unusual is provi- 
 dential. When some Greeks were defeating Persians at 
 Salamis, and others were defeating Phoenicians in Sicily, 
 these events together were the triumph of European ideas 
 over Eastern. Yet only a few of the Greek leaders appre- 
 ciated the enormous significance, even to their own country, 
 of resistance to Asia : its significance to the world they, of 
 course, could not comprehend. In the English Rebellion of 
 the seventeenth century, the bulk of the Puritan party only 
 wished to substitute a covenanted king or a theocratic re- 
 public for a monarchy of divine right. They wished to be 
 as intolerant of dissent as their antagonists. Only a few, 
 like Milton, understood that they were really fighting the 
 battle of libert3^ 
 
 But it will be said, * The great things of history are done 
 by great men, and it is generally against the spirit of the age 
 and its tendencies that the hero is struggling.' This is true, 
 but we must not be misled by a phrase. (1) One formula 
 will not express the spirit of an age. The period of the high 
 Renaissance is not to be summed up in the elegant Paganism 
 of Pope Leo X. That was only part of the movement that 
 brought mediaeval Europe to an end. If it be said, then, 
 that Luther, as hero of the Reformation, struggled against 
 the spirit of his time — this is only partially true. Other and 
 stronger elements were with him. (2) * Hero ' we can truly 
 
 ' Cf. Lotze, Mikrokosmus, III. p. 39, ff. 
 
138 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 call him who struggles against his age, and perishing, is 
 enrolled in the ' noble army of martyrs ; ' but the great men 
 of whom history, as distinguished from biography, must 
 specially take account, are representative great men. Sa- 
 vonarola, Wycliffe, Huss, may be as interesting personages 
 as Luther, bat they were 'before their time,' and it is in 
 him that the spirit of the age — at least one great element in 
 it — became incarnate ; he is the symbol of a whole move- 
 ment. We call those who die for a cause its martyrs — 
 witnesses, that is, for some truth, which, because it is such, 
 ultimately triumphs. Most sensible people have given up 
 applying the name (unless in inverted commas) to the unsuc- 
 cessful champions of lost or evil causes. Charles I. and 
 Louis XYI. make rather sorry martyrs, now that most 
 persons have ceased to accept as an article of faith the divine 
 right of kings to govern badly. Cato, who chose to remain 
 on the side which the gods had deserted, may move the 
 admiration of the republican formalist, but, apart from any 
 judgment on personal character, he is, what Mommsen calls 
 him, ' a political Don Quixote,' living as much as the Knight 
 of La Mancha in a dream of a dead world, incompetent to 
 understand his time, and unable to help it. Of course what 
 is clear to us, who can look at events in the light of what 
 came of them, could not be fully seen by the clearest vision 
 of the actors in them. Our judgment on a historical action 
 or person is very different from that of a contemporary. It 
 may be right, and his duty, for an individual, judging by 
 what he can see, to resist a movement which to him appeared 
 unjust, and led by wrongdoers, but which has vindicated 
 itself afterwards at * the bar of history.' ' 
 
 Far from ignoring the importance of great men, the 
 philosophy of history might be charged with giving itself 
 over to a blind and immoral hero-worship, exaggerating 
 the significance of a few not altogether admirable individuals 
 and calmly contemplating the sacrifice of the welfare of 
 mankind to the selfish ambition of a Csesar or a Napoleon. 
 But even the ambition of the representative great men of 
 the world can never be adequately explained by calling it 
 ' selfish ; ' or, if we call it ' selfish,' we must imply that the 
 ' self ' has become to a greater or less extent identified with 
 
 ' ' Die Weltgeschichte ist das Welt- signation.' Of. Hegel, Phil, das Bechts, 
 gericht.'— Schiller, in a poem called ' Ke- § 340. 
 
THE RATIONALITY OF HISTORY. 139 
 
 the wishes of many others. One might call both Pericles 
 and Alcibiades ambitious; but the ambition of Alcibiades 
 was merely selfish, whereas that of Pericles was identified 
 with the ambition of the Athenian people. 
 
 ' World-historical individuals are those in whose aims a 
 general principle lies ; ' but they are not necessarily conscious 
 of that general principle, or are so only to a slight degree. 
 Caesar's success meant the welfare of the provinces as opposed 
 to the selfish interests of the senatorial oligarchy ; but we 
 should be going beyond the facts of history if we made the 
 result of his conduct its motive. His own safety, his private 
 ambition, might be a sufficient motive for his acts. But in 
 these acts there was something more involved. 
 
 When Alexander, Csesar, or Napoleon are called great 
 men it is by no means implied that they are models for 
 ordinary men to imitate. The supposition is really absurd ; 
 but it is made by those who are always protesting against 
 the immorality of hero-worship. Looked at from the stand- 
 point of universal history, even the evil passions of great 
 individuals may have a meaning and a worth. That does 
 not imply that they are to be imitated. The judgment we 
 pronounce on the morality of a man is distinct from that 
 which we pronounce on his historical significance. But does 
 not that mean that we apply different moral standards in 
 judging great men and ordinary men ? There is a tendency 
 to do so, or, at least, to express our judgment as a judgment 
 by a different moral standard, whereas we are really apply- 
 ing not a moral but a historical standard. But is not 
 that to make history immoral, or at least, to remove politics 
 from the sphere of morality ? So far it is true that we do 
 make history non-moral, and that political questions cannot 
 be judged by the standards of personal morality, partly (1) 
 just because they are political questions and not personal, 
 and partly (2) because, in some respects, political morality 
 must stand in the rear of personal morality. (1) The claims 
 of morality are certainly supreme ; but irrelevant moralising 
 produces the most mischievous historical and political judg- 
 ments. Pompey was not therefore preferable to Csesar as 
 a political leader because he was a respectable family man ; 
 he might be considered by his contemporaries a better poli- 
 tician because he was loyal to the constitution ; he can hardly 
 be considered suchby us, because we see the constitution was 
 
140 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 dead and Pompej knew it not, or if he knew it, knew not 
 ■what to do. Charles I. was not therefore a good ruler and 
 Napoleon a bad one, because the one was a good husband 
 and the other not. (2) A higher morality, or at least a 
 higher ideal of morality, is possible to a few individuals in 
 every age than is conceivable or possible in the conduct of 
 public affairs where compromise is unavoidable. Of course, 
 as we said already, historical events may always be traced 
 to volitions of individuals, and therefore, though we say 
 ' good comes out of evil,' this is true only when the pheno- 
 mena are looked at from outside ; volitions which are merely 
 evil can never issue in good ; the passions of great men, 
 when they bring about good results, are not mere evil pas- 
 sions, and great representative men often embody even in 
 their passions the good ideas and good volitions of many 
 forgotten individuals. Similarly, when it is said that the 
 worst results often follow from the best intentions, it is not 
 from the good in men that the evil comes, but from the 
 defects {e.g,, in knowledge, foresight, &c.), that are mixed 
 up with it. People often talk as if a man, even a public 
 character, were sufficiently excused when it is shown that 
 he was mistaken. Modern ethics have been apt to forget the 
 ' intellectual virtues.' 
 
 The objection of immorality takes another and wider 
 form. ' If you justify the conduct of individuals or nations 
 by results, is not that to confuse might and right ? * In a 
 sense it is— and, in a sense, might is right. If individuals 
 or nations are able permanently to succeed in influencing the 
 world, we must regard their conduct as justified by their 
 success. To deny this is to deny the rationality of history 
 altogether — to deny that God reveals himself in history. * If 
 this counsel or work be of God, ye cannot overthrow it.' 
 To convert the proposition is certainly a logical fallacy ; 
 but the permanence and success of any ' counsel or work ' is 
 the test of its divine sanction. When some one indignantly 
 denies that might can ever be right, the might of which he 
 thinks is mere external force. Bayonets can do a great deal 
 in the world ; as Talleyrand observed, ' you can do anything 
 with them, except sit on them ; ' and that is just the im- 
 portant limitation. The might which can turn itself into 
 right must be a spiritual as well as a material force.* 
 
 • Cf. Arist. PoLI.6, S3,... Tp6- irov nvk apirri rvyx<^fovffa x^/^JT^a^ 
 
THE RATIONALITY OF HISTORY. 141 
 
 Alexander's armies overran Asia, but his empire broke into 
 fragments when he died. What really conquered the East 
 was the civilisation that came from Hellas, and especially 
 from the vanquished Athens. Rome's legions defeated the 
 world ; but her law ruled it. 
 
 With the sad spectacle before us of so many fair civili- 
 sations overthrown before rude invaders or perishing through 
 internal strife, of the horrors and crimes which accompany 
 war even when the cause is just, and victory on the side of 
 the higher race, it is, indeed, difficult at all times to hold 
 fast by our faith in the ultimate rationality of history. We 
 are apt to look on the world as the scene of a confused and 
 perhaps picturesque melodrama which may excite the imagi- 
 nation, but can have no deeper significance. For this im- 
 pression the way in which history used to be presented to us 
 in school-books is in part responsible. Battles and royal 
 persons are supposed to be more interesting to the youthful 
 mind, which is passing through the semi-savage state, and 
 occupy a disproportionate space. The less striking work 
 of constitutional growth and industrial progress falls into the 
 background. Even great original historians are partly to 
 blame for the blood-stained appearance of their pages. The 
 events and persons that strike a contemporary are not 
 always those of the most real importance. Some of us would 
 be glad to exchange even Thucydides's account of the Pelo- 
 ponnesian war for a good description of the political, social, 
 and artistic condition of the Athens of Pericles. After all, 
 battles, and massacres, and assassinations, and court in- 
 trigues are only the accidents of a people's life : if they are 
 more, the people's life has hardly begun, or it is already 
 near its close, and it is well for the world that it is so. 
 The order and patient drill which enables an army in the end 
 to conquer, the skill which directs its movements, the enthu- 
 siasm which is with it in victory and in defeat, counts for much 
 more than the blowing of trumpets and the clashing of arms. 
 These are only outward signs. The Roman Senate commend- 
 ing its defeated Consul because he had not despaired of the 
 Republic, had more of the force which can make itself real, 
 because it is spiritual, than the victorious army of Hannibal, 
 
 Koi fiid^io-dai Svuarai fid\i(rra, Kal tanv sufficient external means, is most able 
 
 h.i\ rb Kparovv iv xmipoxv o-fo-^ov to turn itself into force ; and conversely, 
 
 riv6s . . . ; which we may paraphrase, might always implies a superiority in 
 
 ' Spiritual excellence, if provided with some good quality.' 
 
142 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 aimiDg only at conquest, and unsupported by his countrymen. 
 Military success is only the symbol of strength in one of the 
 elements in a people's spirit. It is often, indeed, besides re- 
 ligion, the only element in which, in a rude age, the nation 
 can find expression ; but the order which military training 
 requires is an essential preparation for a higher political life 
 — it is a prerequisite of freedom. Of course what is only a 
 means may be made an end ; what is only a condition re- 
 garded as essential. If so, the nation will surely wear out 
 its energies in external struggles, or decay, because its soul 
 is dead. As Aristotle said of the Spartans, Hhey could 
 fight, but in peace they rusted.' The Turks could take 
 Constantinople and nearly took Vienna > they cannot govern 
 even themselves. 
 
 When the conquests made by civilised nations over bar- 
 barous are traced to lust of gain and brutal force, a truth is 
 stated, but it is only a half-truth. It is not right to explain 
 the Spanish conquests in America (it is as well to take a 
 non-British instance), horribly cruel as they were, as the 
 result simply of evil passions. They implied the victory of 
 the more enterprising, the more civilised, the relatively 
 higher race. If the ' better morality ' of native races be 
 pointed to, it must be remembered fchat their morality is on 
 the whole of a lower type. A simpler state of life is free 
 from many of the vices, but is incapable of most of the 
 virtues, of a more highly developed condition. Even the pre- 
 text of spreading Christianity must not be regarded in such 
 cases as a mere piece of hypocrisy. Whatever be thought 
 of the Christianity spread, or however inapplicable missionary 
 justifications of murder may be now, it was then a quite 
 honest belief, as in the days of the Crusades, that the Cross 
 should conquer by force or fraud. 
 
 The long and wide prevalence of slavery, condemning so 
 great a proportion of mankind to a hopeless and miserable 
 life, corrupting the slave and not less the master, is often 
 brought forward in protest against our pictures of the 
 splendour of the past. But this again is an objection which 
 implies an ignoring of historical perspective. It implies a 
 reading of the moral feelings of a modern citizen of a state 
 which forbids slavery into the mind of the member of a 
 slave-holding community. Slavery was the basis of ancient 
 society. Only on such a basis was Greek and Roman poli- 
 
THE RATIONALITY OF HISTORY. 143 
 
 tical and social life possible. Slavery mitigated the horrors 
 of ancient warfare, which otherwise would have had no 
 check. In Athens, though the slave could never hope to 
 become a citizen, he was generally well treated and regarded 
 as a part of the family. In Italian slavery there were horrors 
 enough, especially as the slave was often more cultured than 
 the master ; but the Greek slaves were not as a rule wasted 
 in the ' ergastula,' and the slave of a Roman might become 
 a Roman himself, and his son sit down at meat with a 
 Csesar. It is often said that Christianity abolished slaver3^ 
 This is true as an interpretation of the facts ; it is not true 
 as a literal expression of them. Among Christian writers 
 the abhorrence of slavery is very recent. On few points 
 have theologians. Catholic and Protestant, been less di- 
 vided than in approving slavery — until after the French 
 Revolution. But none the less the proposition is true, 
 though centuries had to intervene between the implicit 
 acceptance of an idea and its realisation. The equality of 
 men in personal rights was already implicitly contained in 
 the spirit of the religion which proclaimed their equality 
 before Heaven. 
 
 Because the individual, with his special interests, cares, 
 suffering, and destiny is irrelevant to philosophical history, 
 that does not mean that the significance of the individual is 
 overlooked by the philosopher. He is overlooked where he 
 is not the subject studied. The individual, according to o%ir 
 ideas of morality, has a worth independent of his position as 
 a member of a particular family or a particular state. This 
 is just the great step which practical ethics have made in 
 advance of Plato and Aristotle. Whether there is any sense 
 in saying that the individual has a worth independent of 
 humanity may be doubted; but this is a question which may 
 be left for the present. When the philosopher or historian 
 calmly contemplates the sacrifice of individual happiness to 
 what he calls, with most men, the greatness of a nation or a 
 period, he must not therefore be taunted with hardhearted- 
 ness. His * calmness ' comes from his point of view, and that 
 is necessarily removed from the scene of private interests, 
 unless he is to have a distorted image of the significance of 
 events. History is not concerned with the destiny or the 
 happiness of the individual as such. It is therefore no valid 
 objection to a philosophy of history that it does not justify 
 
144 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHTOAL CRITICISM. 
 
 the order of events by showing that the well-being of each 
 individual is thereby attained. Nor, again, is it any argu- 
 ment against our ' justification ' that the life even of nations, 
 after fair promise and brief splendour, has gone down 
 into darkness. Mere duration is no real test of strength or of 
 greatness. Can we say that Athens was a failure ? She failed, 
 it is true, to establish an empire ; she failed to keep alive on 
 her own hearth the fire she had kindled for the world. But 
 many of the very causes of her decay were the conditions of 
 her glory; and she did not fall before she had offered to 
 mankind the gift of her heroism, her art, her literature, and 
 her philosophy. We feel that these are not mere phrases. 
 There is something in a great deed of an individual, or a 
 nation, which is independent of the permanence of its ex- 
 ternal results. Permanence may only mean stagnation. 
 When a people has fulfilled its ' mission,' by realising its por- 
 tion of the potentialities of the human spirit, its powers are 
 often exhausted, and it sinks quite as much through internal 
 weakness as through the strength of its destroyer. But the 
 political fall of a people is often the very means by which 
 the best portion of its spirit can become the possession of 
 the world — at least of the succeeding world-historical 
 people. The Hebrew race made their highest contributions 
 (which who can fully estimate 9) to the religion of mankind, 
 after the overthrow of their political independence. Their 
 captivity and suffering taught them more than the old 
 glories of their monarchy. Hellenic civilisation spread over 
 the world through the Macedonian conquests, which had 
 first destroyed Hellenic freedom. The Romans in order to 
 rule had themselves to lose their liberty, and the great fabric 
 of their law was raised on the ruins of their political consti- 
 tution. Yet Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans have surely 
 done more and failed less than the Chinese, with their 
 torpid civilisation, or the wandering tribes of the desert, who 
 have never fallen because they never rose. 
 
 History, because it describes the character and writes the 
 life of a people, presupposes that a people has a unity, we 
 mio-ht almost say a personality, and is not a mere aggregate 
 of individuals. Universal history, and therefore a philosophy 
 of history, presupposes that there is a unity of mankind, that 
 the human race can be looked at as not merely an aggregate 
 of peoples : it presupposes that humanity has a history. But 
 
THE RATIONALITY OF HISTORY. 145 
 
 if we look at the actual history of the world, and at the 
 attempts to show its rationality, we find that only a very 
 few of the peoples who have lived and live on the earth are 
 taken account of. The savage races, and the vast periods 
 during which what are now civilised races were in the 
 savage condition, seem to be ignored altogether. And 
 among the civilised or semi- civilised peoples there seems to 
 be an arbitrary selection. Thus, akin to the objection that 
 philosophy of history ignores individual interests and rights 
 is the objection that it ignores periods and races. An ab- 
 stract justice might indeed require that all individuals should 
 be taken account of, or, if we have given up the individuals, 
 and admitted that not they but peoples are the object of 
 history, that all peoples should be recognised. But this is a 
 demand which — quite apart from philosophy — no scientific 
 historian, no practical politician, for a moment concedes. 
 Within each people the politician concerns himself with those 
 only who are representative; in the world, with those races 
 that are prominent. We talk, intelligibly enough, though 
 not with abstract correctness, of * the whole world,' when we 
 mean only civilised nations, and perhaps only a few persons 
 in them. We regard these persons as speaking for the 
 others, these nations as representing the true interests of the 
 others. So, too, the historian must perpetually make selec- 
 tion ; otherwise he is giving us a mere collection of materials 
 for history. He must pick out certain events and persons as 
 historical, -i.e., as historically important, and the rest he 
 must reject as unhistorical. To do this well is no easy 
 matter. Yet not merely as literary artist, but as scientific 
 historian, he is obliged to select. What is true of particular 
 portions of time is true of the world's existence generally. 
 There are unhistorical races and unhistorical periods. 
 
 Of course the historian finds himself met by the practical 
 limit that he can say nothing about times about which 
 nothing is known. When a people has left no record of 
 itself, then it cannot, even in its best minds, be said properly 
 to have attained to any true consciousness of itself as having 
 a history at all (of course, even this would be very much less 
 than a consciousness of the meaning of its history for the 
 world) . A tribe may have defeated and dispossessed another 
 tribe ; but unless it has expressed itself in some way, by 
 some definit/e religious belief, by something we can call a 
 
 L 
 
]46 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 constitution, by poetry, by buildings, by institutions which 
 have influenced some portion of the world, it can hardly be 
 said to have a history. Something, perhaps, of its dim 
 spiritual life may be gathered from its language ; but, if that 
 be all, it is relatively an unhistorical people. 
 
 But it may be said ' the Greeks had no written history, 
 no definite chronology even, long after they must have been 
 in a more advanced stage of political and intellectual 
 development than many other peoples.' As if the ' Iliad ' and 
 the ' Odyssey ' ^ were not better memorials of a people's life 
 than genealogies of kings and lists of priests ! 
 
 Where a race has left memorials, and these have to a 
 great extent since perished or become unintelligible, it is of 
 course more difficult to estimate its historical significance. 
 Thus opinions will differ very much about the Etruscans, 
 and their place in European history. But even if we knew 
 as much about the Etruscans as about the Greeks, it would 
 not make them of equal historical importance. The Byzan- 
 tine Empire has more historians than the age of Pericles, 
 yet no one would compare the significance of the two 
 periods. 
 
 All this is recognised by history as a science, and need 
 cause no trouble to philosophy. That some people are 
 ' elect ' to carry on the civilisation of the world, and that 
 others are unable to assert themselves and are rejected, is an 
 indisputable fact. The same is true of individuals within 
 any nation. Only those who do assert themselves and make 
 good their claims to be leaders of men can be regarded as 
 historically important. The villager might have been 
 a Milton or a Hampden ; but history cannot deal with what 
 might have been. The civilisation of Mexico or Peru may 
 interest the antiquarian, but is hardly a part of universal 
 history. 
 
 Why this should be so is a question of the same kind 
 with the question raised by the waste which appears in 
 Nature — questions which are partly the result of abstraction, 
 
 ' Vico devotes the third book of his this sense he calls Homer ' the first 
 
 Scienza Nuova to the ' discovery of the historian of the Gentile world,' and his 
 
 true Homer.' The Iliad and Odyssey poems • the great treasures for the anti- 
 
 (anticipating Wolf) he regards as not the quities of Greece.' The Scienza Nuova 
 
 work of one man, but as the product of appeared first in 1725. How many 
 
 the Greek race through several cen- elegant comparisons of Homer and 
 
 turies, and in different places; and Virgil were made afrer that date! 
 
THE RATIONALITY OF IIISTOR 
 
 yNl7ERSIT 
 
 partly of impatience, partly perhaps unanswerable, 
 rate we must judge the plan of the world— if it has a plan — 
 by its successes and not by its failures. And when we are 
 looking at things fairly, and not in some cynical mood, we 
 do judge everything by the highest type of it. We do not 
 suppose every Athenian to have been a Pericles or a Phidias, 
 every old Florentine a Dante or a Giotto, yet we take these 
 great men as the types of their people. And so it is in 
 universal history.^ 
 
 It is quite obvious that the civilisations of Greece and 
 Rome to which we can directly trace the civilisation of 
 modern Europe must be taken account of when we are 
 trying to find what history means for us. It is more difiicult 
 to see how China and India are to be dealt with. There we 
 have two remarkable civilisations of a high, if not the 
 highest type, still continuing to exist, not far enough below 
 European culture to perish before it, not near enough, and 
 too old, to submit easily to its ways. Both countries have 
 abundant history, in the sense of written records, and 3"et 
 both must be regarded as relatively unhistorical. In the re- 
 lation of Egypt and Persia to Greece, of Greece to Eome, of 
 Rome to the nations of modern Europe, we see a continuity 
 and a succession which we do not find in the remoter East 
 They have handed on to one another the lamp of civilisation ; 
 Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome have perished, but each in 
 dying has given life to its successor. China and India 
 neither die nor live. 
 
 The part of Hegel's ' Philosophy of History ' which is 
 most unsatisfactory is that which deals with the Asiatic 
 countries. In the relation of China, India, Persia, he is 
 unable to find a real historical connection. For this he sub- 
 stitutes a geographical succession. The sun rises in the 
 east and moves westward ; so does the history of the world. 
 That there is a general truth in this we cannot deny, but the 
 geographical succession of India to China is a very in- 
 
 ' To the objection that the phi^o- objection is in part the first objection 
 
 Bophy of history takes account of only (see p. 132) in a new form; partly the 
 
 a small portion of the human race may result of an exaggerated admiration of 
 
 be added the more sweeping objection, mere space parallel to the admiration 
 
 that even if we did take account of the of mere time, which leads to the objec- 
 
 whole inhabitants of our earth, that is tion we have discussed. If there are 
 
 only a small part of the universe, and inhabitants in Mars, they cannot be 
 
 that we cannot therefore read a Divine supposed to interest us. 
 plan %^ith so small knowledge. This 
 
148 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISxM. 
 
 adequate counterpart to that of Italy to Greece, where the 
 real historical relation is so much more important than the 
 geographical. Then what is to be made of Egypt, with a 
 civilisation older than India ? ^ 
 
 The succession in time seems more easily intelligible and 
 interpretable than the succession in geographical position, 
 but is not without its difficulties. The development which 
 philosophy seeks to find in the world is primarily a develop- 
 ment of thou ght. Aristotle had already recognised the distinc- 
 tion between a prior in thought or nature, and a prior in time, 
 and he generally regards these as in antithesis to each other. 
 Thus the State, in thought or nature, precedes the family, but 
 the family in time precedes the State. But we cannot rest 
 satisfied with the mere antithesis, because we soon find many 
 cases where the logical and historical developments fall 
 together, especially if our development in thought is from the 
 more simple to the more complex, and not vice versa. 
 
 (1) In the unfolding of ideas in time we must not expect 
 to find the regularity and symmetry of a logical system. 
 The division of history by centuries is illogically symmetrical. 
 In the life of the individual we count the time by days and 
 years ; but everyone feels that more is often lived through in 
 an hour than in years. And so it is in the life of the race. 
 Sometimes a year counts for more to the philosophic 
 historian than a century, so crowded is it with significance : 
 on the other hand he must avoid impatience at slow progress. 
 ^One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a 
 thousand years as one day.' 
 
 (2) When we talk of the * spirit of a generation,' or 
 the ' leading ideas of a period,' we are selecting only what is 
 
 > It may be objected that no ac- of empire takes its way' (Berkeley), 
 
 count is taken of one of the greatest the American can certainly feel that to 
 
 nations of the world — the United States him belongs the future. Whether the 
 
 of America. Put to this we can answer Slavonic races of Eastern Europe have 
 
 that as yet it is too new ; in spite of its an equally great future before them is 
 
 immense achievements in the material more doubtful. In any case America 
 
 elements of civilisation, it has contri- and Russia are not old enough to belong 
 
 buted little as yet, except a few eccentric to philosophic history. All study of 
 
 religions and some startling experiments their development is too much that of 
 
 in literature, to the spiritual existence contemporaries. 
 
 of mankind. It is performing a gigantic Those who wish to see a history of 
 
 political and social task; but the task the future written from a philosophic 
 
 is notnearly completed. Its population point of view will find such in the end 
 
 is constantly increasing by immigration, of C. L. Michelet's Fhilosophie der 
 
 and its best culture is still an echo of GescMchU : but one would hardly like 
 
 the ' old world.' Yet, even apart from to stake the credit of the method on 
 
 the doctrine that ' westward the course the success of his prophecies. 
 
THE RATIONALITY OF HISTORY. 149 
 
 most typical of the time. At any given date one portion of 
 mankind will be far in advance of another ; and, within any 
 given nation, while a few chosen spirits may be in advance, 
 the great mass of the people may be a long way behind 
 what we yet quite rightly regard as the stage of the nation's 
 progress — meaning that of the bulk of its representative 
 members. Thus we might say that England had got beyond 
 the proverbial stage of morality, in spite of the admirers of 
 Martin Tupper. Again (without raising any question of 
 
 * higher' or ' lower,' the only point being ' farther '), we can 
 call the style of one building later than that of another, 
 although it may have been built at an earlier period, mean- 
 ing that it belongs to a later stage of architectural develop- 
 ment. Gothic architecture had a short life in Italy, and a 
 very long one in England, and so a Florentine palace of the 
 fifteenth century may be later than an English college of 
 the sixteenth. The philosophic historian of any special 
 period or nation feels this, and thus is often obliged in his 
 narrative of events to depart from the strict order of their 
 occurrence by which the mere chronicler or annalist is bound 
 to abide. This necessity is still more pressing when an 
 attempt is made to view the history of the world as a whole. 
 We must not look for a symmetry and a uniformity which is 
 alien to the complex material with which we have to deal. 
 Nor must the philosophy of history be blamed if it fails to 
 make the order of ideas exactly fit the order of time. 
 
 So far as we have gone we have formally only discussed 
 the 'possibility of a philosophy of history. But a great deal 
 has already been necessarily anticipated which properly 
 belongs to the discussion of its character. . Thus our treat- 
 ment of the latter may be brief. ' Everyone,' as Hegel says, 
 
 * brings his own categories with him.' No one who thinks 
 about the past or about his own time, can avoid having some 
 philosophy of history of his own, more or less unconsciously 
 held, more or less based on knowledge or prejudice. We 
 can distinguish six main ways in which history may be and 
 has been regarded. 
 
 1. Even he who denies that in history we can find any- 
 thing beyond Chance, has made of chance a conception by 
 which to explain to himself the phenomena. The denial of 
 a plan in history is as much an interpretation of the facts by 
 
150 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 an intellectual conception as the assertion of a plan. The 
 only true sceptical attitude would be to refuse either to 
 assert or deny a plan. 
 
 2. The religious recognition of a diyine Providence, gnid- 
 h\g human events, implies the introduction of a teleological 
 conception into the material. But the religious recognition 
 generally refuses to go into any detail, or it does so only in 
 some special instances, and not in others. This is to make 
 Providence either irrational or partial. 
 
 3. It may be, and has been said that the world, in a 
 sense, is not ruled by God. ' In history we have a Decadence 
 from early innocence. The rule of God can only be restored 
 by the overthrow of the dominion of man.' If this only meant 
 that the evil in the world should perish before the good 
 in the world, no objection need be taken ; but as the ' evil ' 
 is usually made by the defenders of this view equivalent to 
 the State, and the ' good ' to the Church, we are brought 
 face to face with an absolute dualism which cannot so easily 
 be accepted by either the statesman or the philosopher. Of 
 course this reading of history does find in it a restoration, 
 and therefore a progress, but its keynote is ' a regret that 
 there should be such a thing as history at all,' ^ and this is 
 an implicit denial that history is rational. This mediaeval 
 way of regarding political institutions and worldly progress 
 as in themselves antagonistic to the kingdom of God, is an 
 anachronism now. It is the philosophising of romanticism 
 which is really a protest against reason, and it can only be 
 carried on at the cost of perpetual inconsistencies. 
 
 No vision of childhood is so surely refuted by science as 
 the dream of a golden age. All historical and anthropolo- 
 gical research proves that, in Grote's famous phrase, it is ' a 
 past that never was a present.' When the savage is talked 
 of as ' degraded,' this only means that he falls below our 
 ideal of what man ought to be, not that he has necessarily 
 sunk from some better condition. There are indeed cases 
 of real degradation and retrogression, but these are excep- 
 tional, and do not represent the normal condition of things. 
 We know of a pre-poRtical age : we can speak of the ' age 
 before morality ' : and that is the only age of innocence — 
 the innocence of the infant or the beast. Yet to put our 
 
 ' Gans, in Pref, to latedit. of Kegel's Pkilosojphi/ of History, criticising F. v. 
 Schlegel. 
 
THE KATIONALITY OF HISTORY. 151 
 
 ideals in the past is a natural habit of mind, and often a 
 convenient way of speaking. Eeformers profess to restore 
 primitive purity, and innovations are introduced with the 
 seeming sanction of antiquity. This idea of a purer religion 
 and a better life in ancient times has stimulated research 
 into the early condition of society, much as the hope of 
 reaching the half-fabulous countries of the remote East 
 described by Marco Polo, led Columbus across the Atlantic 
 to discover a new world. 
 
 4. In extreme antithesis to this last view is the ' ratio- 
 nalistic ' tendency and wish to see in history a continuous 
 Progress. The attempt to make this real has led to ' pro- 
 gress ' being narrowed down to intellectual advance. Even 
 if we accept this, it cannot be strictly maintained that the 
 sum of knowledge has always grown. And we should be 
 obliged to regard the first fourteen centuries of our era as a 
 period of nearly entire loss to mankind. 
 
 5. A consideration of the fluctuations in civilisation led 
 to the wide prevalence of the idea of Cycles ; ^ an idea which 
 commended itself- also by reconciling filial piety to past 
 ages with a recognition of the fact of progress. But it is an 
 idea which implies an unhistorical and unscientific way of 
 looking at history. History seems to repeat itself: Out it 
 never really does. It repeats itself always with a difference. 
 A philosophic, i.e. a not-abstract, way of regarding history 
 has done a great deal towards dispelling the fallacies of 
 historic parallels. 
 
 6. And thus we come to the recognition in history of a 
 Progress by antithesis. Progress cannot mean merely ' going 
 forward,' for that might be in a wrong direction. Again, 
 to explain progress (or development) as ' differentiation of 
 function,' is right but inadequate, as it gives only a negative 
 characteristic. If we see in history a progress, we must 
 explain it by what man comes to he, and not merely by what 
 he ceases to be. We may call it the struggle for freedom 
 (in no merely negative sense), the liberation of man from the 
 domination of nature and fate. Or we may say that it is 
 humanity making itself, or coming to a consciousness of it- 
 
 ' An idea shared by Vico, but which is no literal return in the sense in which 
 
 can certainly not be used to sum up bis Plato and Aristotle speak of a cycle iu 
 
 philosophy of history. The return of events, 
 his ' divine ago ' in the Middle Agea 
 
J 52 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 self — that is implied in freedom; or we may call it the 
 
 * education of the human race.' None of these formulse need 
 exclude the other ; each is inadequate.. But in any case we 
 must recoo^nise that the movement is not uniform : it is a 
 struggle, with loss and gain. What is a blessing to one age 
 may, for that very reason, be a curse to the next ; and, on 
 the other hand, those who have advanced less far may, for 
 that very reason, be able to go on afterwards beyond those 
 who had outstripped them. Some elements of the spiritual 
 life of man are realised by one period or nation ; but just 
 because they are some elements only, they are realised in a 
 one-sided and exaggerated, and therefore self-destructive 
 way. The next step is, therefore, in a contrary direction. 
 Then comes an attempt to bring the two sides together. 
 But because spirit is infinite and its temporal manifestation 
 finite, this must always prove incomplete; and thus the 
 world must proceed again through a new antithesis to a 
 new reconciliation. In the concrete world of human action 
 
 * the straight line is not always the shortest distance between 
 two points.' ^ We get from one point to another through 
 a third. 
 
 It must not be thought that the number * three ' is 
 adopted for any magical or superstitious reason. It is in- 
 evitable when we have to express a rational process. If a 
 syllogism be formulated in less than three propositions, 
 something is suppressed; if in more (as in the Indian logic), 
 something is I'epeated. Whenever there is real inference, 
 real movement forward, we must pass from one to another 
 through a third. This is not, as Mill says, a mere marching 
 up hill and down again — at least it is marching down on 
 the farther side. Unless we are content with a theory of 
 the universe of being and knowing which makes it a mere 
 aggregate of particulars, we must admit that we can only 
 pass from particular to particular through a universal. And, 
 if the process we are dealing with be a real progress, we 
 shall certainly expect to find that we are passing from 
 abstract universal and particular to a more concrete form 
 which is at once universal and particular.* 
 
 ' Lessinp, Erziehung des Menschen- (multiplicity), concrete unity, i.e. a 
 
 geschlechts, § 91. unity of the manifold, a living unity : 
 
 2 Of course there is no special virtue and this is often tlie best formula. It 
 
 in the terminology. The three stages recalls Aristotle's €?5o$: uArj : tWiJi'oXoi'. 
 may be called abstract unity, difference 
 
THE RATIONALITY OF HISTORY. 153 
 
 People have a suspicion of such formulse, because they 
 think that thereby facts are ignored or perverted. And the 
 suspicion is wholesome, because this is often the case. Only 
 let us be sure whether it is the case with this formula of 
 idealism, if we apply it wisely ; and whether it is not far 
 more the case with the apparently simpler, because more 
 abstract, formulae of the understanding which are constantly 
 being applied by empiricism. 
 
 That our formula can only be applied with great limi- 
 tations in history must be at once conceded. As Aristotle 
 says, the exactness of our method must always be propor- 
 tioned to the subject matter. Therefore, in the first place, 
 we must not expect a logical formula to fit exactly the com- 
 plex material of human affairs ; secondly, we can see the 
 process of thought most clearly in those countries and periods 
 which have attained more of self-consciousness, more of free- 
 dom, i.e. in which nature counts for less and spirit for more — 
 perhaps hardly at all among African savages, dimly in the 
 Oriental nations, more clearly in Greek and Roman history, 
 less clearly again in the Middle Ages. We cannot add, ' most 
 clearly in modern history,' for here another difiiculty meets 
 us — we are too much immersed in the events themselves to 
 see clearly their full meaning : we cannot see the forest for 
 the trees. Again, in any given period, the presence of reason 
 is most manifest in the development of those elements which, 
 are more spiritual, less in those which are more ^ natural ' or 
 more dependent on matter. Thus we should look rather 
 to the history of a people's philosophy (if they have any), 
 religion, art, and institutions, than to their external growth, 
 which depends more on external circumstances than on the 
 spirit of the people themselves. The development of the 
 national spirit, especially in early races, is generally best 
 traced in the history of religion. At a time when political 
 ideas have scarcely dawned, when what we call political 
 history is chiefly a personal struggle of kings and nobles, 
 in their religion, with which the beginnings of art and litera- 
 ture are closely connected, we can find the spirit of the 
 people. 
 
 We must constantly recognise the exceeding complexity 
 of human characters and actions, and not regard one inter- 
 pretation as excluding the possibility of several or many 
 others. In seeking to read the meaning of history we are 
 
154 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICxlL CRITICISxAI. 
 
 obliged to make formulae which, just because thej are for- 
 mulae, must be abstract, and therefore we must constantly 
 recur to the realm of particular events to correct their ab- 
 stractness. The philosophic study of history, as of everything 
 else, is thus a constant struggle neither to ignore facts for 
 formulse, nor to lose sight of reason among a mere chaos of 
 particulars which need a formula to explain and hold them 
 together. We may be sure that we are misapplying a for- 
 mula if we are interpreting complex material in only one way. 
 The great epochs of history, if we study them fairly, present 
 at least a double aspect. Thus, if we regard the Greeks in 
 their relation to the preceding world-historical people the 
 Persians, and to the succeeding people the Romans, they 
 represent the element of difPerence, of the manifold, not only 
 in their political character, but in the rich diversity of their 
 culture. On the other hand, if we oppose them to the 
 mediseval or modern world, they represent the wholeness of 
 spirit — spirit at ojie with nature, and therefore at one with 
 itself. Yet, while each of these expressions has a general 
 truth, we feel in presence of the Greeks the inadequacy of 
 any formula to their significance in the life of mankind. 
 But after all, when we speak of Hellenic civilisation, it is 
 chiefly Ionian, and especially Athenian, civilisation that we 
 mean. We rightly judge them by their highest type : and 
 it is only in the intellectual Ionian races that the Greek 
 spirit becomes conscious of itself, and finds its full expres- 
 sion in literature and art. Yet again, we must not narrow 
 our view to Athens, for Sparta represents more fully than 
 Athens the strength of the civic bond, though Athens shows 
 the highest intensity of city life. Again, what is most 
 characteristic of Greek religion, the worship of Apollo, 
 belongs specially to the Dorian races. Indeed, the better 
 position of women at Sparta than at Athens might be urged 
 in favour of the claims of the former to represent the hig^her 
 type ; but this is only one illustration of what we find every- 
 where, that progress is not in a straight line, and advance 
 in one direction generally implies a certain one-sidedness 
 and neglect of other elements. Athenian philosophers looked 
 with longing on the better discipline of Sparta ; but their 
 master, Socrates, whom Athens put to death, could not 
 possibly have been produced in Sparta. The Hellenic spirit 
 realised itself more freely through having many channels. 
 
THE ILVnONALITY OF HISTORY. 155 
 
 especially the two, Ionian and Dorian. But this very 
 severance — this antagonism between Ionian and Dorian, 
 brought about its political ruin. The political disunion 
 of Greece was the external cause of its fall; the internal 
 * break up' of the wholeness of Hellenic thought may be 
 traced in Athenian philosophy. In Plato's 'RepubHc' we 
 find a picture, not only of what the Greek State (espe- 
 cially in Sparta) tended to be, but of the stages through 
 which Greek thought (especially in Athens) tended to pass. 
 The old Cephalus and his son Polemarchus represent the 
 conventional unreflecting morality of old days. Thra- 
 symachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus in different forms typify 
 the critical and rationalistic spirit of the Sophists.- Socrates 
 attempts to reconcile the ' reason ' of the second with the 
 ' custom ' of the first stage. The ideal State is intended 
 to be the rule of reason made customary. But this recon- 
 ciliation was attained by the Greeks only in thought ; in 
 their practical life they did not get beyond the antithesis of 
 a disciplined Sparta without philosophy, and a philosophic 
 Athens without discipline. Later Greek philosophies were 
 compelled to seek a home for morality independently of the 
 shattered fabric of the State, and they sought to find it in 
 the larger but vaguer unity of a brotherhood of mankind. 
 
 To pass from Greece to Rome is to turn from poetry to 
 prose, n we try to express the Roman spirit in one formula 
 we can find no better word than Hegel's 'abstract' — of 
 course not in any sense which would suggest 'intellectual' 
 as opposed to ' practical,' but in the meaning of ' narrow,' 
 ' one-sided.' With a true instinct Hegel rejects Niebuhr's 
 fiction of an early Roman ' epos ' : the Roman legends are 
 not material for poetry, however suitable for rhetoric. Her 
 deities are not brilliantly human like the Greek, but cold 
 abstractions of moral qualities. Though Venus Cloacina 
 appears not to mean ' our Lady of Drains,' but ' the purifier of 
 marriage,' this, if a more moral, is certainly a less artistic 
 conception than Aphrodite rising from the sea-foam. Rome's 
 own national poet recognises that art is not her sphere, but 
 conquest and legislation. The Roman was no mere con- 
 queror : Gives vocavit quos domuit — ' She made her subjects 
 her citizens.' Her colonists were not, like those of Greece, 
 the founders of new political units, which might come to 
 rival the mother city, but the outposts of her empire. The 
 
156 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISxM. 
 
 Greeks were scattered over islands and the shores of many 
 lands, united, but separated by the sea. Rome was the 
 centre of a network of great military roads. 
 
 But Eome, in bringing different nations and races under 
 her uniform law, broke up the old unities. And in her own 
 history we have a similar twofold aspect — in extending her^ 
 self over the earth she lost her own liberty, and the unity of 
 her empire proved a dead lifeless unity, which gave a long 
 peace to the world, but allowed its energies to decay. We 
 must not look on the uninteresting Roman Empire as a 
 period in which nothing was done for mankind. It was not 
 a time only of corruption, but of preparation for a new move- 
 ment. The Athenian had his activities exercised in the 
 struggles of the Agora. The citizen of the Roman Empire 
 had no political career : he was thrown back on his own self, 
 to find there the emptiness of this world, contenting himself 
 with it as a sensualist, or fortifying his soul against it as a 
 Stoic, or seeking escape from it as a mystic. The Roman 
 Empire which gave the ' form ' of legal personality to its 
 subjects, but could give no satisfactory ' content,' was thus 
 the ' material cause ' of Christianity. 
 
 To the Greek and Roman religion had been a part of the 
 State. Christianity, finding the State such as it was, held 
 aloof from it. And thus began the antithesis between 
 Church and State, which even when they are united, remain 
 distinct spheres. This antithesis gives their chief charac- 
 teristic to the Middle Ages. There are now two ideals 
 before men, and these are at war with one another. In their 
 extreme forms they take the shape of the chivalric and the 
 monastic ideals. No period has been judged so differently. 
 To some the Middle Ages have appeared as *the ages of 
 faith,' in bright contrast to the preceding corruption of the 
 Roman world and the scepticism of Hellenic culture on the 
 one hand, and on the other to the succeeding sensualism of 
 the Renaissance and the rationalism of the Revolutionary 
 epoch ; to others as a picturesque and romantic dreamland, 
 dispelled by the hard realism of modern life ; to others as a 
 time of barbarous ignorance, superstition, and cruelty — a dark 
 night from which the Renaissance was a welcome deliverance. 
 The diversity of judgment only shows that the phenomena 
 are too manifold to be summed up in one formula. If we 
 contrast the Middle Ages with the ancient world (especially 
 
THE RATIONALITY OF HISTORY. 167 
 
 with what is most typical in it — the Greek world) they 
 represent a period of alienation of the human spirit from its 
 surroundings — a period of discontent — a negative period. 
 On the other hand, contrasted either with the wreck of the 
 Roman Empire, or with the age of criticism which follows, 
 they are a ' positive * period — a period in which the life of 
 man was regulated by an established and accepted order of 
 things, in which nothing was left to subjective caprice. 
 
 So, too, if we contrast the Renaissance with the Middle 
 Ages it is a reconciliation, or rather an attempt at recon- 
 ciliation, between the old and the new — an attempt to join 
 * Christ and the Muses.' ^ Looked at in the light of svhat 
 follows, the Renaissance is the beginning of a revolt, the 
 proclamation of a humanist ideal which has not yet been 
 reconciled with the ecclesiastical ideal of the Middle Ages. 
 
 To interpret our own time is the hardest task of all. It 
 is impossible to avoid the influence of our wishes. Hegel 
 has not escaped this difficulty and may easily be charged 
 with unfairness. His national feelings lead him to exagge- 
 rate the Teutonic in comparison with the other elements in 
 the formation of the mediaeval and modern world ; he even 
 puts himself to the trouble of defending the Lutheran 
 against the Calvinist view of the Eucharist, and he speaks 
 as if all political wisdom were summed up in the Prussian 
 monarchy as he knew it. He has fallen into the temptation 
 of * finality.' But his own method is independent of his 
 particular applications of it. His recognition that the free- 
 dom of all is the mission of the modern world should pre- 
 vent contentment with a narrow bureaucracy. And surely 
 representative government, especially representative demo- 
 cracy, against which he shows a decided prejudice, is in its 
 ideal the truest reconciliation we yet know of the rights of 
 the many with the wisdom of the few, the best realisation of 
 a ' concrete ' freedom as opposed to the abstract freedom of 
 immediate democracy which issues only in such instruments 
 of tyranny as the ' plebiscite.' In reference to present and 
 practical questions Hegel's method has received very diffe- 
 rent applications. It has been used by defenders of the 
 RomB,n Church, and out of his school have come most of the 
 
 ' In its architecture— often the best form classical forms with the fantastic 
 index to the spirit of an era — we have variety of the Gothic spirit, 
 the attempt to unite the reserved, uni- 
 
158 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 intellectual leaders of socialism.^ The number of its sects 
 does not prove the truth of a religious system nor of a philo- 
 sophical, but is no argument against it; while the incapacity of 
 admitting of more than one application is a sure proof of the 
 narrowness of a formula and a sign of its want of vitality. 
 
 The idea is certainly * in the air ' that we have reached a 
 time whose principal end should be positive construction 
 rather than destructive criticism. This idea is often made 
 to sanction reaction in politics and religion. Such an inter- 
 pretation ignores the fact, that a return to the past is strictly 
 impossible ; ' restoration is always revolution ' ; and that, in 
 real progress, the third or reconciling stage, though it looks 
 most opposed to the second or critical, must take up the 
 truth of the second into it as well as that of the first. Diffe- 
 rent views will unavoidably be held about the character and 
 issues of the democratic tendency whose existence no one 
 can deny ; different views about the economic future of 
 society, though most people feel that ' Laissez-faire ' is not 
 the final word to express the relation of the State to its 
 members;^ the conflict raised in most European countries by 
 an irreconcilable Ultramontanism, may make the immediate 
 future of religion seem very uncertain, and the destiny of 
 Protestantism must depend on the victory of letter or spirit. 
 In external politics, the coexistence of separate and inde- 
 pendent nations will be more generally accepted, though 
 opinions will differ whether the abstract conception of a 
 * balance of power,' which has caused more strife than it has 
 prevented, is still the only link between them, or whether 
 the feeling that there is an international morality may some 
 day render possible the fact of an international law. In any 
 case we must recognise that the civilisation of the world is 
 not now entrusted, as of old, to one keeper only ; and history 
 should teach us that no nation has the right to saj, ' Surely 
 we are the people : and wisdom will die with us.' 
 
 D. G. ElTCHIE. 
 
 ' InJjaiSsaWe's Arbeiterprogrammw'iW State agency, 
 be found a brilliant application of the * No one who eaxefully studies the 
 
 Hegelian method to economic history. change in English Liberalism in recent 
 
 Yet Lassalle also has fallen under the years can doubt that it has ceased to 
 
 temptation of finality. He expects his make the negative formula ' freedom of 
 
 third period, which is to reconcile the contract ' its ultimatum. See a lecture 
 
 fixity (Status) of the old world with the by the late Professor Green, 'Liberal 
 
 freedom (Contract) of the new, to follow Legislation and Freedom of Contract.', 
 
 quite soon and quite suddenly through Oxford, 1881. 
 
159 
 
 VI. 
 
 ON TEE PHILOSOPHY OF ART. 
 
 Plato in the 'Protagoras' makes Socrates sajtliat conversa- 
 tion about poetry and the meaning of poetry should be left 
 to people who have not completed their education and are 
 not able to converse freely. The vulgar like to dispute 
 about the interpretation of the sayings of poets, who cannot 
 come into the company to answer for themselves ; men who 
 have been well schooled prefer, in their conversation, to go on 
 without the help or the distraction of poetry, ' each one in the 
 company taking his turn to speak and listen in due order, 
 even though they be drinking deep.' To turn conversa- 
 tion into a wrangle about the interpretation of poetical 
 passages is hardly less a sign of want of education than to 
 bring in flute-players in order to save the banqueters from 
 the sound of their own voices. Socrates, before making this 
 contemptuous speech, had criticised and explained a passage 
 of Simonides in a way that shows how possible it is for a 
 critic to maintain his freedom and speak his own mind while 
 professing to draw out the hidden meaning of his author ; 
 how the sermon may be made a different thing from the 
 text. The whole passage is characteristic of an age which 
 has grown too old for poetry, which is determined to work 
 out its own problems with its own understanding, not 
 expecting much help nor fearing much hindrance from the 
 wisdom of bygone ages. The belief that is the centre of all 
 Plato's theories of art is expressed here. Stated rudely, the 
 belief is this, that art has lost its authority, that the poets 
 and their followers are well-meaning men who would have 
 to-day rule itself by yesterday's wisdom, whereas to-day has 
 its own light to which yesterday's light is an impertinence. 
 Enlightened men speak the thoughts that are in them, free 
 from bondage to the letter of ancient wisdom ; the philoso- 
 
100 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 pher knows clearly what the poets knew vaguely and con- 
 fusedly. Plato's various theories of art are all expansions of 
 this speech in the ' Protagoras.' At the worst, art is a false 
 semblance ; at the best it is an education. The philosopher 
 knows what beauty is better than they do who listen to the 
 singers in the market-place. There cannot but be a quarrel 
 between poetry and philosophy ; poetry is weak, imperfect, 
 and ignorant, pretends to be strong and all-seeing. Philo- 
 sophy secures its own position by showing how poetry in its 
 proper place may be the servant of trnth, and how dangerous 
 to truth it may be in its light-minded pretence of omniscience. 
 This dissatisfaction with art is not mere puritanic bitter- 
 ness, not the caprice of a sectarian who sets himself against 
 the common belief of the world. Plato is speaking for his 
 age, not against it. He has no innate spite against art, he 
 has the sincerest reverence for it, yet he cannot choose but 
 bring it down from its height, because the age for which he 
 is speaking knows that there are results to be gained which 
 <;annot be gained in the old ways, that the philosophers are 
 working towards new ends of which the poets and image- 
 makers have never dreamt. This is the way in which the 
 attitude of Plato towards art becomes intelligible. It seemed 
 to him that art with all its excellences was not enough for 
 the needs of a new age, and that it should not be allowed to 
 claim more than its fair share of respect from men who were 
 in search of truth, who were minded to try what they could 
 make out for themselves, 'speaking and listening among 
 themselves ' without superstition or bondage to idols. Yet 
 no one more than Plato recognised the value of poetry, of 
 imagination, in the progress of the mind towards pure truth. 
 He did not contradict himself in so doing. He denied that 
 poetry was the whole of wisdom ; he did not deny that it 
 was the beginning of wisdom. It is the positive side of his 
 theorising about art which has been best remembered. The 
 polemic against the teaching of the poets was forgotten. 
 The belief that the beauty of sensible things is in some 
 way the image of an unseen beauty remained as an element 
 of many later philosophies, the creed of not a few poets. 
 There is something in it which wins an assent that is not 
 altogether founded on a critical investigation. The theory 
 that the youth are to dwell in a place of pleasant sights and 
 sounds, and to grow up unconsciously into the image of 
 
ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART. 161 
 
 reason, that when reason comes they may welcome it as not 
 alien — all this is heard at first as a story which ought to be 
 true, which overcomes prejudice at the outset. The difficulty 
 is to fix the details of the story. The listener wants to know 
 more about the beauty and more about the reason, and to 
 know where, if anywhere, there is anything like this progress 
 from the half-conscious life among beautiful things to the 
 awakened life in reason. 
 
 This theory in the ' Republic,' and the similar theories in 
 the ' Symposium ' and the ' Phoedrus,' are the first attempts 
 at a philosophy of beauty. They describe in dark language 
 a relation of the manifold beautiful things to the one un- 
 changeable idea of beauty, and describe the progress of the 
 soul from the beauty of the manifold things of sense to the 
 unity of reason or of the idea of beauty. If there be such a 
 progress, it is obviously in it that the secret of beauty lies. 
 But how are we to conceive this progress ? what is the idea 
 in which it ends ? The education which begins in art and 
 ends in philosophy, how does this resemble or differ from 
 other progresses of mind ; for example, the progress of any 
 mind, however ill educated or uneducated, from the unreal 
 world of childhood to the more or less real world of common 
 sense, or the historical progress of nations from myths to 
 rationalism. Everyone knows that there are some progresses 
 in which the mind rejects old fancies for new truths, turning 
 in revolt against its old self ; are there others, like this one 
 of the ' Republic ' or this one of the ' Symposium,' in which 
 the old unreal things which are passed by are not falsehoods 
 but images of the truth ? And supposing that art stands in 
 some such relation as this to philosophy, will it not be of 
 some importance to know what is to become of the images 
 when the reality is attained to, of the pleasant places of art 
 when philosophy is perfected, of the manifold shapes of 
 beauty when the one idea of beauty is revealed ? Are they 
 to be rejected as Socrates rejected the wisdom of the elder 
 moralists, as Plato rejected the art which was an imitation ? 
 Plato's own attitude towards art is a continual wavering 
 between two opinions, which are both based on the one sure 
 opinion that the poets do not at any rate contain all wisdom. 
 Admitting this sure opinion, there are still two alternatives 
 to Plato ; sometimes he is for expelling the poets altogether; 
 sometimes he speaks more gently of them, as servants of the 
 
 H 
 
162 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 Divine Wisdom, who say more than they know, more than 
 sane men are able to say. The difficulty which he finds in 
 explaining art, and the poet's character, and the beauty of 
 sensible things, arises from his opposition to them. He is 
 the first philosopher to attempt to make a philosophy of art, 
 and the sum of that philosophy is that art and philosophy 
 are different. It is the imperfection of art, the imperfection of 
 visible beauty, which he emphasises. To be content with art 
 is a fatal mistake; it is to prefer opinion to knowledge. 
 Thus Plato's philosophy of art was 'almost wholly negative. 
 It could not help being negative to begin with, could not 
 help asserting its superiority as critic over the matter criti- 
 cised. The first thing of importance to be said about art 
 is that there is a science which goes beyond it ; and Plato 
 said this, and described in many ways the movement of the 
 mind from the scattered things of sense to the unity which 
 they reflect. But he never succeeded in teaching anyone 
 that science of unity ; what he taught was that science of 
 the unity was to be sought after. And so long as this science 
 was unattained, the unity, the universal, was simply an 
 abstraction of which the only thing that could be said was 
 that it is a negation of the many, of the particulars — in- 
 cluding them in some way, but in some undefined, unknown 
 way — including them as a limit outside of them. Plato 
 recognised that the relation of the many to the one was not 
 explained simply by being stated ; he recognised that the 
 many were not a mere negation of the one — that wrong 
 opinion was possible — that knowledge of the inexact line 
 and the inexact circle have their place in the world for those 
 who wish to find their road home.^ He apprehended that 
 the ideal was not always the truth. The criticism of 
 Simonides in the ' Protagoras ' succeeds in showing that the 
 ideal is often much respected by bad men who find their 
 actual circumstances irksome : that the duty of a man often 
 compels him to leave the ideal alone and be loyal to his 
 kinsfolk, accepting the particular circumstances in which he 
 is placed. This apprehension of the value of particular 
 things is never elaborated by Plato into part of the science 
 of the universal; so that at the end there is little more 
 said than that there is one idea, and that there is a progress 
 <of the mind from particulars to this universal through 
 
 ' PIdlehus, 62 B. Compare irphs rh avdpwireveaOai. 
 
ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART. 163 
 
 successive stages of subordinate universals. So the end 
 of his philosophy of art is that there is one idea of beauty, 
 eternal, the same with itself, not in any likeness of any- 
 thing in heaven or earth, and that the earthly beauty is 
 a stage on the- way to this. That is the end, that is the 
 philosophy of earthly beauty — that it is nothing in compari- 
 son with the one idea of beauty, that it passes away as the 
 thought goes beyond it to reach the idea of beauty. Plato 
 praises art, regarding it as a step on the way to true know- 
 ledge, and blames it, regarding it as without life in itself, as 
 without any principle in it which can give it permanency or 
 authority ; but whether he praise it or blame it his view of 
 it is always this, that it is valueless in comparison with 
 philosophy. At its best it is a makeshift, at its worst it is a 
 makeshift pretending to be the chief good. This theory of 
 art is unsatisfactory because of its meagreness, its abstrac- 
 tion, but it is necessarily the first philosophy of art. The 
 first point in the creation of a philosophy of art is the separa- 
 tion of art and philosophy — the hostility of philosophy to 
 art. Philosophy comes in a time succeeding the time of the 
 flourishing of art, and to justify its own existence has to 
 prove that art is not the whole of wisdom, not the summit 
 of man's history. Philosophies of art, to begin with, are 
 either puritanic sXayxpL of art, proving that art is vanity, or 
 theories of the fitness of things according to which fitness 
 art leads the way to true knowledge, to enlightenment. The 
 view of art as an education is the natural one for enlighten- 
 ment to adopt. It has an appearance of justice, because it 
 admits the value of art, and it does justice to enlightenment 
 itself by making it the end to which art is an instrument. 
 There is and must be an enmity of philosophy towards art, 
 because it is in opposition to the past, which art represents, 
 that philosophy arises. Criticism is enmity, to begin with. 
 The first step towards reconciliation of this enmity is to 
 show that the matter criticised is not really hostile, but 
 really exists for the sake of the critic. It is this step which 
 is taken by any theory which regards art as an education— 
 as existing for the sake of something higher, namely en- 
 lightenment, accurate and self-conscious insight. This 
 reconciliation is imperfect because art, the subject criti- 
 cised, the instrument existing for the sake of the end, 
 which is enlightenment, maintains its separate existence 
 in spite of the critic, pursues its own ends without regard to 
 
 M 2 
 
164 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 the existence of any enmity against itself, or to any disput- 
 ing in the Schools about the end of art. 
 
 Ella s' e beata e cio non ode. 
 
 The theory that art is an education does not make art 
 much easier to be understood. That art exists for the sake 
 of something else may be a fact about it, but does not 
 reveal anything of the laws of art itself, of the end which 
 it realises for those unfortunate people who have not yet 
 passed beyond the stage of art. That is to say, that how- 
 ever true it may be that art is an education, or a step to 
 something higher, it is still impossible to explain art fully 
 by reference to the something higher, because for the artist 
 art is not this education, not this step, but an end in itself. 
 And it is a reasonable claim that art should be considered as 
 an end in itself — as an activity following its own laws. If 
 it be not this, then the opinion is wrong. But wrong opinion 
 is not nothing. Wrong opinion is as complicated as right 
 opinion, is as much a positive fact as right opinion. So in 
 this case, art, as it is for the artist, is not explained by the 
 statement that art is not the goal of the mind, that it is not 
 an end in itself. If art be an education leading to philo- 
 sophy, and the philosophy to which it leads be worth any- 
 thing, then it ought to be possible for philosophy to regard 
 art not merely as an incident in the development of philo- 
 sophy, but as a form of activity with its own laws and its 
 own history. Art may be a king to whom it has been given 
 to be the nursing father of philosophy, but in his own king- 
 dom that title is not ascribed to the king openly, and it is in 
 no case the whole truth of the kingship. 
 
 The theory that art is an education is of very doubtful 
 value if taken by itself. Art is certainly an education for 
 the artist : with other men it is less certainly an education. 
 And it is seldom an education whose pupils can boast that 
 they have done with it. It is true that there are cases of 
 great artists withdrawing themselves for a time from art 
 into the sphere of pure thought, making art for a time 
 external to them in place of being the spirit of their life and 
 work. But these periods of abstraction lead not always to 
 a renunciation of art, and sometimes lead to a higher kind of 
 art, to perfection in art, so that regarding the lives, of indi- 
 vidual artists it is impossible to arrive at any certain for- 
 
ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART. 165 
 
 inula. Sometimes it seems that art is the porch of philo- 
 sophy, sometimes that philosophy is for the individual artist 
 only a passing phase in his life, a centre of indifference, not 
 fruitless, but leading to the production of different beauty, 
 from the incorporeal beauty which Plato wrote of in the 
 ' Symposium.' 
 
 Dante describes a change in his life which is like that 
 which Plato related of the favoured children of his ' Eepublic' 
 Dante tells in the ' Convito ' how, after the death of 
 Beatrice, when the fantastic world of his youth was broken in 
 pieces, he went to philosophy (in Boethius and others) for 
 consolation. There, he says, seeking silver he found gold ; 
 he found not only remedy for his grief, but clear knowledge, 
 whereas his mind before had seen many things but only as 
 in dreams, which things were written of in the ' Vita Nuova.' ^ 
 This confession of Dante about himself and the way in 
 which he came to the knowledge of philosophy is of some 
 value. It describes a progress of the mind in a way which 
 may enable us to understand what is meant by saying that 
 those who are brought up among fair sights and sounds will 
 find when reason comes to them that it is no unfamiliar 
 thing. But the parallel does not hold absolutely. It is 
 dangerous to force the resemblance between the prophetic 
 utterance of Plato and the actual life of the man who was 
 not suffered to become a guardian of his earthly city. The 
 world of imagination in which Dante spent his youth 
 was a world in which poetry was not a natural growth, but 
 in great part philosophy disguised — idealism and symbolism 
 which owed a good deal to the Schools. And the progress 
 of Dante did not end with his entry into the Schools. The 
 clear vision in which Dante ended his progress was not a 
 vision of abstract ideas, or not of them only. The ' Vita 
 Nuova ' is more removed from actual life than the 'Paradise: ' 
 the vision of the Highest is at the same time the vision of 
 the narrow streets where the unrighteous dwell, the Monna 
 Berta and Ser Martino who pass infallible judgments upon 
 sinners. Dante at one time, he tells us, read till he grew 
 nearly blind, trying to unravel the mystery of First Matter ; 
 but he did not end in these abstractions. He gathers together 
 into one vision all things and all men that he had ever seen or 
 
 ' Convito, II. 13. ' Per lo quale ingegno molte cose quasi come sc^ando gia 
 vedea.' 
 
166 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 heard of, and in the vision of them he finds his wisdom — of 
 them and of the unseen ruler, in whose mind all things are 
 determined, the meanest chances of earth no less than the 
 highest self-proven truths. Such art as this is not to be 
 explained by the ready formula that fair sights and sounds 
 are good for weak minds that have hope of becoming 
 stronger. We can understand how the youth of Dante was 
 educated by the world of symbolism and mysticism in which 
 he lived, by the pure enthusiasm of the poets : we can under- 
 stand how this corresponds in some measure to the place of 
 beauty in which Plato's fosterlings were to be trained. We 
 can understand how the abstractions of philosophy were 
 welcomed as expressing what had before been dreamt of. 
 We can understand also in part how the abstractions were 
 discovered to be abstractions — how the memory of visible 
 things and the knowledge of them in their particularity, as 
 having value of their own, became the end of his philosophy. 
 We can see that however true it may be that art is an 
 education, it does not necessarily mean that it is an educa- 
 tion for some end different from art. All artists are educated 
 in this way, in this half-conscious apprehension of beauty. 
 The history of almost every great artist tells how his life begins 
 in vague enjoyment of beautiful surroundings : he lives in 
 a world of beauty, of which he is part and which he only 
 half understands. He conforms to the fashion of the world 
 in which he lives : his early works are no better than those 
 of his fellows, not at least in the opinion of his own age. 
 As he grows older he asserts his freedom : he works no 
 longer as a mere natural outgrowth from his nation and his 
 time, but as a free man walking his own way in the world, 
 seeing things as they are, valuing them for himself, not as 
 others have valued them before. Chaucer in his later life 
 is not merely part of the pageantry of the English court : 
 he is a spectator, not merely a singing man in the show. 
 He is more immediately part of the hfe of the time when he 
 is with the English army in France, learning to rhyme 
 fashionably about cruelty and pity. He has made his place 
 for himself, gained for himself his freedom, when he sets 
 down his own view of his age in the prologue to the Canter- 
 bury Tales. He is not less but more an Englishman of the 
 fourteenth century because he belongs to his age, not 
 simply as the trees that grew and blossomed according to the 
 
I 
 
 ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART. 167 
 
 fashion of these years, but as a free man who, while not 
 ashamed of being a child of time, does not hold that 
 ' thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool.' He is not 
 the less the brother of the Englishmen his contemporaries 
 because he in a manner withdrew from them for a time, and 
 set down their outward appearance in his book. But he did 
 withdraw from them, he did refuse to be bound by laws of 
 art which were not true for him, to see things with other 
 men's eyes. In this refusal is the end of his apprentice- 
 ship. 
 
 The creative memory of the artist is as different as ab- 
 stract philosophy from ordinary experience which grows 
 unconsciously. There is a difference between the uncon- 
 scious manner in which beauty of art or nature influences 
 the mind of the pupil, and the manner in which the perfect 
 artist works in full consciousness of the end at which he is 
 aiming and the means by which he is to attain it, if not 
 always with perfect consciousness or developed curiosity con- 
 cerning the sources of his power. 
 
 The problem for the philosophy of art is thus not merely 
 ' how is philosophy to indicate its claim to supersede art, as 
 being perfect science of that which art feels after blindly ? ' 
 but ' what is the kind of end which the artist attains ? how 
 are we to analyse the relation of works of art to the mind ? ' 
 
 Art and science are very much alike at the beginning. 1 
 Science does not know anything about things at the begin- 
 ning; it simply perceives things — or rather, simple perception, 
 to perceive things clearly, is the ideal which early science 
 aims at — which it does not always attain. It is here that 
 art begins its services to mankind. The bone knives found 
 in the caves of the Dordogne show that the artists who en- 
 graved them saw reindeer clearly, and were ingenuously 
 interested in them, having reached a stage of civilisation 
 and wealth in which they were not simply ravenous for rein- 
 deer, but could afford to contemplate them with self- [ 
 restraint, like gentlemen. Their contemplative leisure 
 employed the keen eyesight, no longer that of a beast of 
 prey, and the interest, no longer of the stomach, in engraving 
 a clear outline of the interesting animal on the handles of 
 their hunting knives. Other early engravings show how the 
 mammoth might be made, by untrembling hands, into a 
 lasting ornament. The idols that stand in the porch of the 
 
168 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 British Museum show that some long-forgotten dwellers in 
 the Easter Islands grew one day to be securi adversus deos, 
 and employed their security in making images of the beings 
 they worshipped, in order to know what sort of beings they 
 were. When it is said that the makers of such images had 
 reached a certain degree of civilisation, it is not meant 
 merely that they had attained some technical skill in shaping 
 materials, but that they had so far raised themselves above 
 the level of the beasts, so far withdrawn themselves from 
 sensation and appetite, as to be able to make permanent for 
 themselves the objects of their interest and their worship. 
 This defining of the perceived or imagined object is the 
 great triumph of early art, and it is at the same time the 
 beginning of science, of clear knowledge. Thus early art is 
 sometimes extremely realistic, and seems to accompany 
 wonderful powers of perception — of combining various par- 
 ticulars in one intuition. The Esquimaux, who draw the 
 things they see with some skill, are said sometimes to show 
 a talent for remembering locality, the relative positions of 
 places, so as to be able to make fairly accurate charts of a 
 coast after a short acquaintance with it. The artistic faculty 
 of clear apprehension of details here has to do duty for 
 science. 
 
 How does completed science differ from completed art ? 
 For science the particular visible object is unimportant, or 
 important only as an example of a general law, or as mate- 
 rial for an experiment to lead to the knowledge of a general 
 law, or as a member of a species, interesting and intelligible, 
 not in itself but as a member of the species — the species 
 itself being interesting and intelligible only as having a 
 definite place in the universe, as standing in a definite re- 
 lation to other things. Things are interesting to science 
 not for what they are, but for what they are not, that is, for 
 the other things to which they are related, or still more, for 
 the relation — for the general formula of relations which sums 
 up the truth about the particular things. Science is thus 
 an endless process. It is perpetually busied with certain 
 things of the outward world, but interested in them only as 
 they point to other things. The particular things with 
 which science deals are instruments, not ends in themselves. 
 The particular member of a species is of little more import- 
 ance to science than the particular chalk triangle drawn on 
 
ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART. 169 
 
 a particular slate. The triangle is merely a perceptible 
 repetition of one type, the truth about which type is quite 
 independeat of the particular chailk triangle. The particular 
 member of a species has no importance, unless it has some 
 individual peculiarities which make it different from its 
 species, in which case it may be important as one of a new 
 species. But in no case has it any importance in itself. It 
 has importance either as being an example of a species in 
 which the characteristics of the species may be known and 
 demonstrated ; or as a link in a chain of causation, and it 
 is the chain, not the link, which is important. Even indi- 
 viduals, having from one point of view value in and for them- 
 selves, may for science be simply instruments and specimens 
 to demonstrate the working of a law, or particular phe- 
 nomena, whose importance is not in themselves but in their 
 causes or effects. Mahomet or Columbus may be considered 
 by scientific history not as individuals interesting in them- 
 selves, but as single terms in a series. History is not inter- 
 ested in any single event, or in any individual man, but in 
 the relations of men and of events. 
 
 In art the case is altogether different. There the par- 
 ticular thing exists with a being of its own, as a thing which 
 can suffer nothing else to stand in the place of it, as some- 
 thing which cannot be exhausted by any formula or ex- 
 pressed in words, as something whose relation to other 
 things, to causes or effects or laws, is altogether a subordi- 
 nate matter — not the true essence, but an accident which not 
 even inadequately can express the nature of the thing. Both 
 art and science have for their end to make things clear to 
 the mind. But science makes things clear by perpetual 
 reference to other things. Its activity is an endless process; 
 its kingdom of light is rounded by the darkness of the un- 
 known on which it encroaches, but which it can never con- 
 quer. Art does not make things clear to the understanding 
 which asks the reasons of things and their connection with 
 other things. Its creations do not prove anything; they 
 have no reference to things beyond themselves, they add 
 nothing to knowledge, they do not throw light upon the 
 natures of things, they are themselves clear and definite 
 objects, that is all. The things which art makes are inter- 
 esting to the mind with an interest quite different from 
 that which belongs to the demonstrations of science. Science 
 
170 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 throws light on a portion of the object world ; clearing it up, 
 showing the secret of it, the unapparent law of its being ; 
 using particular perceptible things as instruments to demon- 
 strate the law. Art makes a thing which is not an instru- 
 ment by which to demonstrate the general law of a class of 
 objects, but is free, serving no law but its own, revealing 
 itself, and nothing but itself, to the mind. Science is face 
 to face with an object world, which is a system of related 
 classes of things, and explains certain classes of those things, 
 regarding each thing as an example of a class, and each class 
 as explicable by formulas more or less fixed. Art makes 
 new things, whose value is that they explain themselves in 
 a way with which science is unacquainted. Art satisfies 
 the mind not by affording it new examples for experiment, 
 from which to arrive at new tmths of the objective world, 
 but by presenting to it objects which have that freedom from 
 dependence on other things and other laws, that unity in 
 themselves, which is wanting in all the objects of science — 
 in the object world which for science is never a whole com- 
 plete in all its parts, and is one world only ex hypothesis The 
 work of art is an object which is onl}^ partially or acciden- 
 tally subject to the laws of the object world ; which is in 
 the world but not of it. A statue is a perceived object, a 
 particular thing in the object world, but it is not to be ex- 
 plained scientifically, like other objects, like natural things, 
 as a member of a species, as standing in particular relations 
 to the universe. It is not to be explained by reference to 
 other things ; its nature is that it explains itself. It is not 
 a problem to be solved ; or rather it is both problem and 
 solution, both the secret and the revelation of the secret. 
 This does not mean that works of art are exempt from the 
 law by which the universe is one and all the parts of it 
 correlated ; this is not to say that there can be no science of 
 art things, or that they can be understood apart from their 
 history. But all histories or explanations are inadequate — 
 not as in other cases because the relations of any one thing 
 to the rest of the universe are inexhaustible — but because 
 they regard works of art only as phenomena to be explained, 
 and forget the main point, that they are phenomena which 
 explain themselves. 
 
 The work of art is separate from the world in which it 
 exists. It is a contradiction to any theory which would 
 
ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART. 171 
 
 regard each thing as a point in an endless series of relations. 
 The work of art is a thing which will not be explained, like 
 other things, bj a natural history or a statement of its 
 relations to other things. It is in one sense finite, because 
 it has had a history, because it stands in relation to other 
 things that are finite. In another sense it is not a finite 
 thing, because its nature will not yield itself to analysis ; it 
 cannot be dissected. There is a point at which its history 
 ceases, and only then does it exist ; before that it is not. It 
 is a commonplace that the beauty of things adds nothing to 
 the matter of knowledge. Works of art add nothing to 
 knowledge except themselves. It is their essence that they 
 should be known. The mind which perceives them appre- 
 hends them not as new phenomena which are to have their 
 place assigned them, after due consideration, in relation to 
 other objects in the complicated world. The mind ap- 
 prehends them at once as things which have no other nature 
 than to be apprehended. They are not things which are 
 to be brought into harmony with the mind by having their 
 relations with other things and the universe explained. They 
 are things which have no necessary relation except to the 
 mind ; which are from the first akin to the mind and formed 
 for it, so that being seen they are intelligible. They are not 
 any more intelligible in themselves for any trouble that science 
 may take to get beyond them and inside them, to find out 
 the machinery and the secret of them. Science and history 
 may discover a great deal about them, but they remain in- 
 telligible in their own way, indifferent to science and history. 
 Their way of being intelligible is not altered by science ; 
 science may, indeed, modify the individual's appreciation of 
 works of art or of art effect, but it does not put its expla- 
 nation in place of the works of art. The student of the 
 science of art hears his lecture (from the Pythagoreans or 
 others), and does not forget his lecture when listening to 
 music; but however the lecture may improve or interfere 
 with his individual appreciation of the music, it does not 
 alter the mode in which the music is apprehended by him. 
 The value of the music to the hearer, be it great or small, is 
 a different thing from its value to the student of physics. 
 And its being heard — its being apprehended in this way — is 
 the whole history, the whole life of the piece of music. The 
 things of the object world, the things with which science is 
 
172 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 busied, have histories of their own, and make a demand 
 upon science that their histories shall be discovered and 
 made clear to the understanding ; that something shall be 
 predicated of* them. The work of art makes no such de- 
 mand. It declares of itself what it is, and refuses to be 
 compared with other things ; refuses to have anything pre- 
 dicated of it which can imply that it is different from what 
 it appears. It is above the world of movement. The one 
 relation which is necessary to it is the relation to the mind 
 that apprehends it. 
 
 The relations of objective things can never be summed 
 up. The progress of science is an endless progress. Works 
 of art as things of the objective world are not exempt from 
 this law ; it is impossible to know everything about them, 
 as it is impossible to know everything about anything. But 
 considered in themselves they are exempt from this law, 
 because at the first view of them they are apprehended, 
 not as appearances with an unknown reality behind them, 
 but as appearances whose reality is in their appearance ; 
 not as problematic things, but as the solution of a pro- 
 blem; not as the starting-points of an inquiry, but as 
 unities whose freedom is unimpaired by external or acci- 
 dental relations. 
 
 From one point of view they are unreal and dead, be- 
 cause they have no share in the give and take of the universe. 
 They are removed from all possibility of change, except the 
 change of material decay and the passing into oblivion. 
 This is one aspect of works of art. In another aspect this 
 apparent deadness becomes a life higher than any life of 
 natural things. The changelessness of the works of art is 
 not death. They are unchanging because they are worlds 
 in themselves, their various parts correspond to the various 
 stages of existence in the object world, and the parts of the 
 work of art are apprehended at once in the apprehension of 
 the completed work, as the various stages of existence 
 would be apprehended if the endless progress of science were 
 to come to an end, and the universe be grasped in one in- 
 tuition. The work of art is formally a solution of this con- 
 tradiction between the abstract unity of science and the 
 endless process towards it — it does not really do anything to 
 make this contradiction less of a contradiction in the objec- 
 tive world, but it gives an example to show that it is not a 
 
ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART. 173 
 
 contradiction in which the mind is in all cases forced to lose 
 itself. The work of art is a proof that completed knowledge 
 — knowledge which does not imply an endless process — is 
 possible to the mind. The freedom gained by art is an 
 earnest of freedom ; a proof that freedom is not a mere ideal. 
 
 In all knowledge of the objective world there is a con- 
 tradiction between the two elements of knowledge, the 
 particular and the universal. The particular thing, with its 
 differences, is known only in relation to that which is per- 
 manent and unchangeable, and one. At first neither of the 
 sides has much meaning, but with the progress of know- 
 ledge both sides increase in meaning ; the manifold is seen 
 to be an ordered world, the unity is not an abstraction but 
 the regulating principle in the manifold. The progress of 
 science is, however, subject to this contradiction, which for 
 science is insuperable, that as it is impossible to exhaust the 
 manifold of the object world, it is impossible ever to attain 
 complete knowledge of the unity as it is shown in the mani- 
 fold. Science has to go on accomplishing its impossibilities, 
 increasing the sum of knowledge, without drawing any 
 nearer the end of the unknown. Art is the first attempt to 
 find a cure for this. It is a mode in which the mind can 
 make part of the objective world intelligible to itself with- 
 out being troubled by continual reference to other parts of 
 the objective world beyond the limits it has chosen. It is a 
 return of the mind to itself from seeking fact after fact and 
 law after law in the objective world ; a recognition that the 
 mind itself is an end to itself, and its own law. 
 
 A moral act is analogous to a creation of art in this 
 way, that it is a denial of the necessity which belongs to the 
 objective world and its laws. It differs from the creation of 
 art in this way, that it has to lose itself apparently in the 
 objective world again. It is an act done to carry out 
 principles that are universally true, but as a matter of fact 
 its importance is limited. It is a phenomenon whose true 
 nature is not wholly apparent. The freedom asserted is 
 the freedom of the individual, and that freedom is inward. 
 The freedom gained in the work of art is apparent and 
 universal, it remains to be beheld by all men. The moral 
 act, like the work of art, is individual; nothing else can 
 be put in its place, and in that particular phenomenon 
 the universal reason expresses itself. But not, as in the 
 
174 ESSAYS m PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 work of art, for the sake of the expression, for the 
 sake of contemplation, not in order to raise the particular 
 phenomenon, the particular matter, above the complication 
 of the outward necessity, but in obedience to an inner law 
 which does not outwardly contradict the necessity. A moral 
 act, like any other event, is subject to the laws of objective 
 relation, to the necessities of time, of cause and eflPect. It 
 is outwardly finite and passes away disregarded. Only in 
 the character of the man who does the act is it that the act 
 acquires its freedom, only he knows the value of it. Morality 
 progresses, like science, not by withdrawing itself from the 
 necessity of the objective world, but by accepting that neces- 
 sity in order to conquer it point by point. The man who is 
 working out his moral freedom has to accept all the shocks 
 of events that come upon him in the form of necessity, in 
 order to give them their moral meaning ; and the acts by 
 which he asserts his moral freedom have the appearance of 
 natural events. Hence his progress is endless, because the 
 objective world with which he connects himself is an endless 
 series ; hence he has to be content to be free without appear- 
 ing free. His acts are not done for the sake of appearance 
 but for the sake of reahty. They differ from the ordinary 
 events of the objective world in that they are not to be under- 
 stood b}'- reference to the external events with which they are 
 connected. Their true meaning is in themselves, and in this 
 they resemble works of art. They differ from works of art 
 in that their appearance is not their reality. They appear 
 to be nothing but events in a necessary sequence of causes 
 and effects, but their true meaning is not to be exhausted 
 by exhausting all external influences inside or outside the 
 body of the man who has done the acts. Their true mean- 
 ing can be gained only by knowledge of the character which 
 is the author of them. The moral character cannot ex- 
 press itself otherwise than in particular acts, as the artist's 
 ideal beauty cannot appear except in particular creations. 
 But the particular acts that express the moral character do 
 not fully express it ; no moral act is wholly free ; whereas 
 the particular beautiful creations which exist only for the 
 sake of appearance do fully express what they are. 
 
 The world of morality is the same world as that of 
 science — the world of finite things and particular events — 
 and morality like science is in opposition to it. The opinion 
 
ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART. 175 
 
 with which science begins is that truth is not apparent ; 
 that things as perceived are known only partially, that the 
 relations of things to one another and to the universe are 
 secret, and have to be discovered. Science is in opposition ! 
 to the apparent universe — the disconnected world of particular I 
 things — and its progress is to bring to light more and more 
 the real connection of things. But it can never accomplish 
 its progress. It goes on in faith that nowhere will anything 
 be found to contradict its conception of the unity of the 
 universe, but it can never succeed in proving this in detail, 
 in showing the place of each thing in the universe. Morality 
 also begins in a contradiction between reality and appear- 
 ance, but the progress of morality is not, like that of science, 
 to start from the appearance and reach the hidden reality. 
 It starts from reality, from the self which is reality to itself, 
 but which at first has no connection with the objective world 
 except the pure negative consciousness of freedom from sub- 
 jection to the objective world. The progress of morality is ' 
 to make that apparent which is real, to live in the objective 
 world a life whose law is not discoverable among the laws 
 of the objective world, but only in the self which is a law to 
 itself. Morality begins in pure theory. It is pure self-con- 
 sciousness and nothing more, the negation of all that is 
 outward — the pure negative ' I am not subject to necessity.' 
 But this inward unity which is proof against all the shocks 
 of time, which is not subject to the objective necessity of 
 particular finite events, is so far in contradiction with itself 
 that it is merely inward and therefore finite, limited by those 
 very finite events whose value it theoretically denies. The 
 self-consciousness would believe itself to be absolute in itself, 
 but it finds that it is absolute only so long as it does nothing. 
 Its freedom is not freedom to do anything, it is mere 
 negation. Then begins the endless progress of morality ; it 
 is forced outward into the objective world to make that 
 freedom apparent which to the self-conscious subject is the 
 reality of realities. The presupposition of morality is that 
 there is a freedom superior to the incomprehensible necessity 
 of events, and that that freedom must make itself the law of 
 outward things, taking up intoitselfthenecessity of outward 
 things, and becoming the only true explanation of actions 
 which apparently are subject to the ordinary necessities of 
 the objective world. Like science morality conquers point 
 
176 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 by point, and like science its progress is endless. The nature 
 of its conquest is this, that the particular acts which are 
 called moral are not to be explained simply by reference to 
 other particular events in an objective world, which is one 
 world ex hypothesi, but must be explained by reference to a 
 unity which is not hypothetical, namely the free individual 
 whose conscious self is not an event nor a particular link in 
 the chain of causation. 
 
 There is this resemblance between science and morality, 
 that in both cases reality remains reality, behind the appear- 
 ance, and appearance remains appearance, hiding the reality. 
 The ordinary perception of things remains one thing, and 
 the scientific explanation of things another. The moral act 
 does not outwardly show its real nature, it appears simply as 
 an event. The moral value of an act cannot be proved to a 
 man who is content with discovering an apparent motive of 
 self-interest. 
 
 Art resembles both science and morality in that it is a 
 conquest of nature. It differs from them both, first, because 
 it is not an endless process ; secondly, because its product is 
 the unity of reality and appearance. The freedom that it 
 gains is complete because it has not to refer to anything 
 beyond itself, to any horizon beyond which all is unknown, 
 or any ought-to-be which is not yet realised. In art the 
 opposition between the one and the many, between the law 
 and its manifestation, between the subject and the object, is 
 overcome. It is overcome not by simple abolition of the 
 distinction between them, but by so uniting them that each 
 receives the meaning of the other. In art the subject does 
 not express itself in its limitation, in its abstraction, assert- 
 ing abstractly its superiority to nature and to natural con- 
 ditions. This assertion of freedom is pure emptiness, a 
 beginning of movement, a point, not a universe. In art the 
 subject goes out into the objective world, and redeems part 
 of that world from bondage to natural laws, makes it the 
 revelation of freedom. The subject is no longer a self- 
 conscious atom separated from the world, anxiously craving 
 for increase in its knowledge of an inexhaustible manifold 
 universe ; it has learned from morality that the unity of the 
 universe is not to be sought in the objective world and its 
 laws, because the self is higher than those laws. Neither is 
 it bound by the prejudices of morality which would place the 
 
ON THE PIJILOSOniY OF ART. 177 
 
 completion of freedom in an unapproachable future. Art is 
 the vindication of present freedom. Moral freedom may be 
 always limited on its phenomenal side by particular con- 
 tingfencies ; there is always an apparent contradiction between 
 what a man appears and what he ought to be ; his best actions 
 ' are not done without a motive,' or ' are not unmixed good,' 
 or ' are exceedingly v^ell intended.' But the works of art 
 are perfect, they express what they are intended to express. 
 They are not simply the acts of an individual, w^hich may be 
 interpreted as good or bad according to the intention of the 
 individual. They are not particular things with an un- 
 known essence behind them. They are particular things 
 which are to be interpreted or apprehended for what they 
 are. They are particular things whose meaning is universal, y 
 yet w^hose meaning is nothing apart from the particularity. 
 Existing in the world of finitude they have nothing to do 
 with it. They exist only for the mind. They are things 
 which are not things, because in them particularity does not 
 mean separation of reality and appearance, as it does with 
 all other things. 
 
 Art is not to be explained by the categories which are 
 applicable to finite things. Art is not to be explained, e.g., 
 by any physiological or psychological inquiries about the 
 physical conditions of sesthetic perception. All such inquiries, 
 however successful, can only result in what, as far as art is 
 concerned, is meaningless abstraction, because they explain 
 something which is totally different from the work of art, 
 namely its conditions — things which have to be hefore tlie 
 work of art can be apprehended. But they can tell nothing 
 about the work of art as apprehended, because of this self- 
 sufficingness of art which will not allow any analysis to ex- 
 plain its works without making them something different 
 from what they really are. 
 
 Art is not to be explained by including it in the subject 
 matter of ethics, by treating it as a stage in the education of 
 the individual, or as the storehouse of the ideals of virtue, 
 because the moral worth of art is accidental to it, it is not 
 the servant of practical life, no pedagogue to show men the 
 way to a better life ; it stands beyond morality, lias over- 
 come the contradiction which morality is overcoming. 
 
 Then is art not to be explained in any way? to be left 
 untroubled in its own kingdom ? Perhaps not if there be 
 
 N 
 
178 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CEITICISM. * 
 
 other methods of explanation than the methods of natural 
 history or phj^sical science. The works of art are to be left 
 to be appreciated one by one, simply to fulfil their own end 
 without question, only if the unity and the freedom which 
 belong to art are the highest attainable by the mind. But 
 there is a finitude in the works of art which is a challenge 
 to the reason, though not the same finitude as that of the 
 natural things which science explains. Its finitude is not 
 that it is an unexplained thing, but that it is an insufficient 
 explanation, a partial revelation. It is infinite because it is 
 raised above the flux of things, free from the darkness and 
 incomprehensibility which is the curse of finite things con- 
 sidered in themselves ; free from the infinite multiplicity of 
 reference to all other atoms in the universe which is char- 
 acteristic of the particular things of the outward world. It 
 is finite because the mind goes beyond it, because it is not 
 the highest mode in which thought reveals itself to itself. 
 Art is subject not to the criticisms of science, but to the 
 thought which has thought itself for an object, which 
 criticises the methods of science as it criticises sensation and 
 perception, and morality, and all the ways in which mind 
 exerts itself. 
 
 Art is higher than science in this way, that it is not 
 limited by an objective world which is superior to it, which 
 defies all efforts to exhaust it. Art can boast of conquests 
 which are absolute, can point to finished work which it is 
 impossible to mend, which contains in itself no seed of 
 decay. 
 
 It conquers by taking that very particularity which forms 
 the limitation of science and making it universal, making 
 it a thing of infinite value, a thing which the mind accepts 
 as in itself intelligible. Any account of the world which 
 rests satisfied with the mechanical categories of science thus 
 shatters itself against the creations of art and is condemned 
 by them as inadequate. But this conquest of art over the 
 limitations of science is purchased at some cost : the par- 
 ticularity of the work of art, which is quite different from the 
 particularity of natural things, still remains as a limitation, 
 it is a limit beyond which lies, not the objective world, but 
 the intellectual world to which the work of art belongs. The 
 science of that world is not an endless process, but the 
 activity of thought which has come to know that the unity 
 
ON TIIE PHILOSOPHY OF ART. 179 
 
 which is the presupposition of science is thought^ that the 
 moral ideal of freedom is thought, and that it is thought 
 which in the work of art finds its own image* 
 
 The philosophy of art must necessarily be less abstract 
 than pure metaphysics or ethics, because it is not like 
 them a criticism or a statement of universal conditions; 
 it does not simply state what is true of all art, as meta- 
 physics or ethics state what is true of all experience and 
 of all morality. The philosophy of art cannot speak, or 
 not for long, of the sublime and the beautiful in the ab- 
 stract. It must recognise what is particular and appa- 
 rently contingent and inexplicable in the creations of art. 
 It must recognise that they are necessarily connected each 
 with its own particular time. Metaphysics and ethics 
 may look on experience and morality abstractly, apart 
 from any reference to the history of man, considering the 
 elements in them that are one and the same in all minds. 
 The philosophy of art must be a philosophy of history as well. 
 Its end is not to state abstractly what the elements in art- 
 creation or aesthetic apprehension are, which are the same in 
 all cases. It recognises that what is important in creations of 
 art is not their identity but their difference, their individu- 
 ality, not their conformity to any type or standard. Part of 
 their individuality is their relation to particular times and 
 seasons in the actual history of the world. The problem of 
 the philosophy of art is to make the history of art intelligible 
 — not simply a series of biographies or catalogues, of artists 
 or their works, but a history showing the place of art in the 
 development of the human reason. It is not a light task, 
 but it is not an impossibility. It is simply a working out of 
 the problem which finds many occasions to present itself 
 nowadays. ' What is meant by saying that the art of a 
 people or a century enables us to understand the people or 
 the century? ' What is there in art which makes it a kind 
 of explanation of things apparently so different from itself? 
 Is it anything but an amiable illusion to suppose that Greek 
 art has more than an external relation to Greek history ? or 
 that anything can be inferred from the history of art about 
 the progress of humanity as a whole ? The philosophy of 
 art will have to show whether the creations of art are to 
 be regarded as fortuitous appearances, inexplicable — as they 
 
 N 2 
 
180 ESSAYS IN PIIILOSOPIIICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 certainly are — by any of the ordinary methods of science, or 
 whether they are to find their place in the history, not of 
 events, but of the achievements of reason in this actual 
 world. If it is possible to show that all the changes in man's 
 ways of regarding the universe are not accidental, but ne- 
 cessities of thought, then there will be a philosophy of art. 
 All the various kinds of ai-t, and all the artists, and all the 
 works of art will then become intelligible — not as pheno- 
 mena in relation to other phenomena (in which case the}^ 
 are unintelligible) ^ but as comprehended in a system of 
 knowledge, which is not the science of an objective world, 
 but the science of all that the mind knows about itself. This 
 science would include not only abstract metaphysics and ethics, 
 as sciences of what is necessary in knowledge and morality, 
 but also a philosophy of the progress of thought in time. 
 Part of this philosophy will be the philosophy of art, for art 
 has made good its right to be considered as belonging to the 
 world of thought, not to the natural world, and yet its con- 
 nection with particular periods in history is something 
 which cannot be abstracted from. If the science of thought 
 is to be purely abstract, then there is no place for the 
 philosophy of art. But neither will there be room for the 
 consideration of religion, or of the history of philosophy or 
 of political science, because all these things imply reference 
 to the concrete facts of time. This science of the development 
 of thought will not be empirical, but a priori (if there be any 
 meaning in a priori) because it begins not like ordinary 
 science with a suspicion that there is unity somewhere, an 
 unexplained presupposition that the universe which it ex- 
 plains is one universe, but with the clear knowledge that 
 thought is the unity of the universe, and that the apparent 
 going out of thought to an object apparently external to 
 thought is only appearance. 
 
 Such a philosophy of art will get rid of some annoying 
 questions. It will get rid of the question about the relation 
 of art to morality. It will show that art has not to do either 
 with the furthering or the hindering of the individual's moral 
 progress. There are at least three possible cases in which 
 a,rt may appear to have an immoral influence. Two of 
 these are clearly cases where it is ignorance of art that 
 really is the misleading power. Art brings with it the 
 possibility of bad art : but this can hardly be made a 
 
 I 
 
ON THE nilLOSOPIlY OF ART. ]81 
 
 ground of accusation against it ; in any case, ignorance 
 or contempt of art will not make bad art less harmful. 
 Or works of art which are pure and great in themselves 
 may be turned to evil, because art as an image of human 
 life includes the element of evil in it — it represents evil on 
 the stage, or in poems. But any bad influence it may 
 exert in this way is plainly accidental — not to be considered 
 except by the pathologist of human nature. Or, thirdly, 
 art though served with unselfishness and sincerity may be 
 unfitted to be the sole end of any one man's life. It may 
 be that the practical life is not sacrificed to the theoretic or 
 the artistic life without retribution. This is not a simple 
 question, but whatever ethics, or casuistry, or any other 
 science may say to it, it is certain that art itself, and the 
 philosophy of art, will make no claim on anyone to become 
 less than other men before he can become an artist. What 
 is it that makes a man moral? Not his actions, but his 
 habitual view of things and events, and men, and himself — 
 his living memory which makes him true to himself and to 
 all his neighbours. The selfish man's memory is one to 
 which the artisbic or imaginative representation of things is 
 utterly repugnant. He remembers only what has served or 
 what has baffled him, and values the particulars of his expe- 
 rience only in reference to his own selfish ends. The un- 
 selfish memory remembers things and men as the artist 
 remembers them. It values the things of experience accord- 
 ing as they are good or bad ; that is, according as they fulfil 
 their proper end or not — not using any abstract standard of 
 good or bad, but Plato's science of inexact things, which 
 enables a man to find his way home, using imagination, for 
 which each particular thing has an interest of its own, apart 
 from any question of its use, apart from all abstract pre- 
 conceptions of what ought to be. Art is the wide world's^ 
 memory of things, and any man may make his own memory 
 a sharer in its wisdom on one condition — that he shall not 
 hate or love anything that is revealed to him there according 
 as it thwarts or furthers his selfish purposes, but according 
 to its own virtues or vices. The artistic imagination is 
 part of the highest morality, because it gets rid of the last 
 selfishness of all — the Stoic selfishness which is proud of its 
 superiority to external things. 
 
 The philosophy of art has no other aim than to bring 
 
182 ESSAYS IN PIIILOSOPIIICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 together as far as possible into one view all that there is 
 in the world's memory— to make a history in which the 
 characters shall speak for themselves, become themselves 
 the interpreters of the history. It will regard the artists 
 as helping to create the mind of the ages in which they 
 live- vthe mind is only what it knows and worships^ and the 
 artists are the means by which the different nations and 
 ages come to have characters of their own. 
 
 The philosophy of art finds periods of ambition, of 
 achievement, of criticism and barrenness, just as the bio- 
 grapher of any one artist distinguishes the periods in his 
 life — the periods of youth and imitation, of manhood and 
 originality, or the period of inspiration and the period of 
 faultlessness, or otherwise. Only to the biographer the 
 succession of phases in the life of his hero is more or less a 
 matter of contingency — the philosophy of art finds the 
 periods succeeding one another according to the necessity 
 of thought. It does this because it has room enough to 
 work in. The biographer finds his labour ended by the 
 death of the man he is writing about, or perhaps the decay 
 of his powers ; but where it is the art of the world which 
 is studied there is less of such interruption to inquiry. 
 Decay of art can be explained because it is seen what suc- 
 ceeds it — what new form of intelligence takes the place 
 of art, as Greek philosophy grew strong when Greek art 
 began to decline from its supremacy. It can compare Greek 
 art and Christian art, not as two independent phenomena, 
 but as two different forms of judgment, where the first form 
 is necessarily first and progress toward the second is in- 
 evitable. 
 
 To do this it has to consider not only art but religion 
 and the history of philosophy, and show how the art of an 
 age is related to the other forms of intellectual activity in 
 that age, and how all even in their opposition are expressions 
 of one spirit. The history of Greek philosophy notes, as 
 the characteristic of Greek philosophy, that it does not 
 centre on the conception of the self with his consciousness 
 and knowledge, opposed to an external real world, that it 
 accepts at first the unity of thought and being and confuses 
 clear conception with science. Greek art and Greek religion 
 are found to be also on this level of thought. The gods 
 are to be worshipped; there is no disputing about the 
 
ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART. 183 
 
 evidences of their existence : they are accepted because they 
 are beautiful, more beautiful than any actual thing : the 
 thought of the worshipper is satisfied with the mere idea of 
 the god : he does not ask for any proofs of the being of 
 Apollo or Athena. Greek art is the most perfect of all art, 
 because it appeals least of all to the understanding which 
 looks for the meaning of things. Greek sculpture is not 
 symbolic of anything. It sets up the god before the 
 worshipper — for his contemplation, not to excite his 
 curiosity. The Greek gods in sculpture are beautiful as 
 they are : they do not show their power in any matter-of- 
 fact way. That they are benefactors of mankind in any 
 way is kept in the background, and is in no case a necessary 
 part of their character. They are revered not as helpers, 
 but as impersonations of what is most admirable in man. 
 They are most strong and most beautiful, but they take 
 little part in the earthly contests of men. Greek art is a 
 progress from this high ideal of pure beauty to less pure, 
 more complicated forms. The tragedy is an effort to solve 
 the contradiction implicit in sculpture — namely the contra- 
 diction between the Olympian power and the Olympian 
 weakness, between the freedom of the ideal and its incapacity 
 to influence action. The drama shows the gods and heroes 
 retaining their worshipfulness, their divinity, and their 
 heroism even in the entanglement of circumstances. The 
 end of tragedy comes when it is no longer the spectacle of 
 the action as a whole that claims the attention, but the 
 feelings or the inner life of the hero. Then the passions 
 are not purified as they were by the tragic pity and terror 
 that had no weakness in them. The pathetic tragedy 
 against which Plato wrote is part of the same movement of 
 thought with the rise of the sophistic teaching. It is the 
 return of mind into itself, making a universe for itself out 
 of its own accidents. The true remedy for this is comedy, 
 which is a revolt against pathos, and also a reaction against 
 the elder tragedy because it finds that anything may be 
 true of the gods and heroes to a mind robust enough of 
 imagination. Comedy is not the private fantasy of a mind 
 which would like to upset the universe. It is unsparing 
 laughter at everything, even at itself. It confesses that 
 it is not its business to preserve the heroic aspect of heroes 
 or the divine aspect of the gods. It cannot keep anything 
 
184 ESSAYS IX rniLOSoriiiCAL criticism. 
 
 ill order. But it will waken up the sleepers who were too 
 fond of their own dreams ; it will show them all the baseness 
 and meanness they had shut their eyes to, and at the same 
 time the beauty of a new heaven, with the clouds in it, and 
 the deathless race of birds, and of a new earth with cool 
 green places in it, and the voice of fro^s to reprove the 
 faint-hearted. Aristophanes is not the destroyer : he is the 
 maker of a new world of art. Sculpture had made gods 
 who were beautiful but motionless, ineffectual. Tragedy 
 made the gods and heroes act in their proper characters, 
 and gradually came to forget the unity of the drama and to 
 make interesting the sorrows — not the misfortunes, but the 
 lamentations — of the hero. Then comedy found work to do. 
 The pathetic tragedy had destroyed the old world of tragedy. 
 Comedy could not bring back the old simple manner of 
 regarding things, but it could show at least that there were 
 other things in the world than weeping heroes. It showed 
 that there were all sorts of things in the world and pointed 
 them out, pretending not to know anythirg about the way 
 they should be ari^nged, and finding nothing surprising in 
 the co-existence of beauty and infamy. The progress of 
 Greek art is a progress from contemplation, like that of 
 Xenophanes when he found the secret of the universe by 
 looking into the open heaven, to dramatic interest. It is a 
 progress from simplicity to complication, from rest to move- 
 ment, from the samehess of the statue to the contradiction 
 of comedy. In one sense it was a decline of art. The 
 statue is a pure work of art ; the drama cannot avoid raising 
 more questions than it can answer. But in another way 
 it w^as progress. It was the invention of new beauty : the 
 beauty of movement, of action. Thought could not rest 
 without trying to include all things in art. The progress 
 was from the pure beauty of the ideal, in sculpture, to the 
 perplexed beauty of the actual world as it appears, aU in 
 confusion, in Aristophanes. It is the movement from 
 abstract to positive thought in the sphere of art. 
 
 There is an analogous progress in all art: a progress 
 from the art which is akin to religion to the art which is 
 akin to science. Icelandic poetry begins with cosmogonies 
 and theogonies. When the character of the gods is be- 
 coming settled they are represented in action and adventure. 
 Worship of the gods is not in itself a full satisfaction of the 
 
ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART. 185 
 
 niiiid : it must see characters in movement : circumstance 
 and chance must try their utmost against the hero. Then 
 the god and the hero are found to be not very different from 
 ordinary men : to have no different kind of courage from 
 ordinary men. Then it is the actual life of men that is 
 interesting, and with an interest far exceeding that of the 
 stories of the gods. In this kind of art all things are 
 interesting that are true — the horses and the ships and the 
 hay-fields, and the children that play at being men, as w^ell 
 as the wisdom of Njal or the high courage of Gunnar. 
 
 In the Christian art of Europe there is the same pro- 
 gress, only there is this difference, that the religious art 
 which comes first is not like that of Greece or Scandinavia. 
 The Greek poets and sculptors made the gods they wor- 
 shipped, because what was clearly seen was reckoned true. 
 Christianity belongs to a new age which has learned some 
 things from Stoics and Sceptics — the difference between 
 reality and appearance, and the oppc»sition of the thinking 
 subject to the objective world. The distinguishing mark of 
 Christianity is that it is true in the strict historic sense. It 
 is not a matter of imagination but of evidence. Hegel 
 says that there could be no battle between Christ and the 
 old gods, because they belonged to quite different spheres 
 of th ought. The Greek gods were nowhere but in the 
 imagination. This makes a difference between Christian 
 and Greek art from the outset. Art was all-important to 
 Greek religion, for the god who was not clearly imagined 
 was nothing. In the art of Christianity there is no need, 
 no possibility that the image should accurately represent the 
 reality. They are incommensurate from the first. The 
 Byzantine image is not the god to be worshipped, but a 
 symbol. Religion goes beyond art and remains beyond it, a 
 different kind of life for ever. The progress of Christian 
 art is as in Greek art towards a complete conquest of the 
 universe — to find beauty not in gods and heroes only, but 
 in all levels of existence. It does this, however, always 
 with the consciousness that its effort is doomed to fail, that 
 it is less than the reality, that it is in the unseen and the 
 spiritual that the chief beauty dwells, inexpressible by art. 
 This very sense of deficiency, however, leads it to be per- 
 severing beyond ail Greek art in presentation of reality, and 
 of any atom of reality that can be made to have any artistic 
 
186 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 interest at all. And the ' sootlifastness ' of a story comes 
 to be part of its charm and its claim to immortality, as the 
 Scottish poet thought.' So Giotto painted fewer pictures 
 for devotion and more for the intelligence, setting down 
 things in their reality. So Dante portrayed each man he 
 met in Hell, Purgatory, or Paradise without regard to any- 
 thing but the nature of the man before him : not being 
 interested in anything more than in the true nature of the 
 man, to whom the doom passed on him is an external thing. 
 There was a separation imminent between religion and art 
 when it was possible to treat calmly of low human things 
 unblinded by the light of theology. There was no dis- 
 appearance of religion. The Norse religion grew weak in 
 proportion as Norse culture and art and knowledge of 
 humanity grew. But the Christian religion was stronger 
 than this : it could not pass away into art. There was a 
 separation for a time of spiritual religion from art, as there 
 was a separation of philosophy from both. Art was left 
 to go its own way. It ceased, as philosophy ceased, to be 
 merely the interpreter of Christian tradition. It expressed 
 in its own way, as philosophy expressed in its own way, the 
 idea of Christianity, that it is the individual subject which 
 is of infinite value. The music which is the creation of the 
 modern world expresses that which is inexpressible in all 
 other arts — the mind's freedom from the contingency of the 
 outward world and obedience to its own law. 
 
 W. P. Kee. 
 
 1 Barboiir, Bruce, at the beginning. 
 
187 
 
 VII. 
 
 THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. 
 
 English ethical philosophy is no longer purely individual- 
 istic. Hume pursued the principles of individualism to their 
 logical conclusion, and refuted it as a theory of knowledge 
 by revealing the absolute scepticism which it involves. The 
 question which lies at the basis of the * Critique of Pure 
 Reason * shows that Kant considered Hume's work final, and 
 individualism an exhausted vein of thought. History also 
 corroborated the destructive teachings of Hume when indi- 
 vidualism received its practical refutation in the French 
 Revolution. Both theoretically and practically the disinte- 
 grating movement of thought completed its work and ex- 
 hausted itself at the close of the last century. It isolated 
 the individual from his physical and spiritual surroundings, 
 and then found that he was only the shadow of a false philo- 
 sophy. The present age is abandoning the philosophy which 
 regarded mind as a thinking thing acting m vacuo, it has 
 lost faith in moral Melchisedecs, and it demands from all the 
 genealogy of their habits of thought and action. The pro- 
 blems of individualism are losing their interest, and fresh 
 problems, which lay beyond the horizon of the past age, 
 have by the silent progress of thought come into the fore- 
 front of our own. The educated attention of the present is 
 directed to the relations of individuals rather than to indi- 
 viduals themselves : and these relations are regarded, in a 
 more or less uncertain sense, as essential to, if not con- 
 stitutive of, individuals. Modern speculation is, in a word, 
 reconstructive in its tendency. It endeavours to free itself 
 of its inherited atomism, and fit the individual into his sur- 
 roundings. Theories of society are supplanting theories of 
 the individual ; and when the individual is made the subject 
 
188 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 of investigation lie is found, at the worst, to be altruistic as 
 well as egoistic. 
 
 But although English philosophy is moving away from 
 the problems and practical issues of individualism, it is still, 
 in a great degree, ruled by its presuppositions. Such writers 
 as Mr. Spencer still speculate on its principles, although the 
 thoughts which give them power are alien to it. Like the 
 servants of the wounded Ahab, they stay their master in his 
 chariot till the eve. The interest and worth of the ethical 
 speculations of Mr. Spencer arise from the use which he 
 makes of the conceptions of evolution and organism ; but 
 no torture of individualism can cause it to yield these con- 
 ceptions. They have been adopted out of the current thought 
 of the age on scientific subjects, and then superimposed on 
 an alien philosophy. Having proved themselves useful in 
 the field of biology to a degree which it is difficult to over- 
 estimate, they have been immediately applied to that of 
 ethics. Nor do these ideas receive a new meaning from 
 their new application, but they retain in the new context the 
 significance that they had in the old. Now the ideas that 
 are true and relevant in one sphere can be applied to another 
 and different sphere only in the way of analogy and meta- 
 phor ; and we believe that Mr. Spencer's ethical teachings 
 as a whole consist on the one hand of an inherited Hedonism, 
 and on the other of elaborate analogies drawn between the 
 physical structures and habits of animals and the mental 
 structure and ethical habits of men. 
 
 Such at all events is his doctrine of the organic structure 
 of society. The living body is regarded as the type of an 
 organic existence, and society is regarded as organic in so 
 far, and in so far only, as it is like a living body. A quota- 
 tion from his answer to the question, ' What is a society ? ' 
 will establish our assertion. ' But now, regarding a society 
 as a thing, what kind of thing must we call it ? . . . There 
 are two great classes of aggregates with which the social 
 aggregate may be compared — the inorganic and the organic. 
 Are the attributes of a society, considered apart from its 
 living units, in any way like those of a not-living body ? or 
 are they in any way like those of a living body ? or are they 
 entirely unlike those of both ? 
 
 ' The first of these questions needs only to be asked to be 
 answered in the negative. A whole of which the parts are 
 
THE SOCIAL ORGANISiAL 189 
 
 alive, cannot, in its general characters, be like lifeless whole. 
 The second question, not to be thus promptly answered, is 
 to be answered in the affirmative. The reasons for asserting 
 that the permanent relations among the parts of a society 
 are analogous to the permanent relations among the parts of 
 a living body, we have now to consider.' ^ 
 
 In his next chapter accordingly, Mr. Spencer finds these 
 analogies in great abundance and displays them with great 
 ingenuity. Society grows like a living body; it goes through 
 processes of difPerentiation and integration like a living body ; 
 it adapts itself to its environment like a living body ; it has 
 alimentary, distributive, and regulative structures like a living 
 body ; it is now starved and now overfed like a living body ; 
 it has up-line and down-line railways like the double set of 
 tubes in a living body. In this strain he has proceeded far, 
 but there is no reason in the nature of things why he should 
 not have proceeded further ; for ingenuity has a greater 
 hand than truth in the production of analogies, and there 
 are no two objects in the universe absolutely different from 
 each other. 
 
 'Do you see that cloud, that's almost in shape like 
 a camel P ' 'By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.' 
 ' Methijiks, it is like a weasel.' ' It is backed like a weasel.' 
 ' Or, like a whale ? ' ' Very like a whale.' 
 
 In his 'Qualifications and Summary' (Vol. I. p. 614), 
 however, Mr. Spencer says that he has ' used the analogies 
 elaborated but as a scaffolding to help in building up a 
 coherent body of sociological inductions.' ' Let us,' he con- 
 tinues, ' take away the scaffolding ; the inductions will stand 
 by themselves.' But an examination will show that the 
 scaffolding has been built into his edifice, and that the struc- 
 ture tumbles down with its removal. Or, dropping metaphor, 
 the moment that society ceases to be like a ' living body ' it 
 ceases to be organic. Abandoned by the ' living body ' which 
 guides him, Mr. Spencer stumbles into individualism. Fail- 
 ing to detect a social sensorium by the method which 
 revealed the social stomach and nervous system, Mr. Spencer 
 acknowledges that there is an ' extreme unlikeness,' a ' funda- 
 mental difference,' between the social organism and the in- 
 dividual organism. ' The parts of an animal form a concrete 
 whole ; but the parts of a society form a whole that is 
 
 ' Sociology, Vol. I. p. 466. 
 
190 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 discrete.' * Now, no one can deny the discrete character of 
 society; and it will always remain true 'that the living 
 units composing it are not in contact, but more or less 
 widely dispersed.' But if society is an organic whole this 
 discreteness must be overcome, and unity must assert itself 
 through and amidst the differences. In other words, the 
 notions that society is ' discrete ' and that it is a ' whole ' 
 cannot be immediately combined in this way ; and discrete- 
 ness cannot be the permanent characteristic of that which 
 is organic. But waiving this objection for the present, it is 
 fit least evident that the notion of discreteness is fatal to the 
 organism of a living body. Hence society is inorganic be- 
 cause discrete ; or, the living body is inorganic because con- 
 crete ; or the living body is not the type and test of that 
 which is organic. 
 
 Mr. Spencer silently admits the first of these suppositions, 
 and treats society in this particular as if it were inorganic. 
 ' In the one ' (the individual organism) he says, ' conscious- 
 ness is concentrated in a small part of the aggregate. In 
 the other it is diffused throughout the aggregate. . . . As, 
 then, there is no social sensorium, it results that the welfare 
 of the aggregate, considered apart from that of the units, is 
 not an end to be sought. The society exists for the benefit 
 of its members ; not its members for the benefit of society.' ^ 
 
 Before attempting to show that Mr. Spencer in this pas- 
 sage treats society as if it were nothing more than an 
 aggregate, and from an individualistic point of view, it will 
 be well to note that ' the welfare of the aggTCgate considered 
 apart from that of the units ' is a welfare which no one can 
 contend for or conceive. Verily, ' the claims of the body 
 politic are nothing in themselves, and become something only 
 in so far as they embody the claims of its component in- 
 dividuals.' No one can deny that society apait from in- 
 dividuals is nothing ; but this does not mean that the in- 
 dividual, as an individual, is everything. It is true that 
 society is nothing apart from individuals; but, if society is 
 organic, it is equally true that individuals apart from society 
 are nothing. Society must exist for the benefit of its com- 
 ponent parts, and the component parts must also exist for 
 the benefit of society. Nay, more, if society is an organism, 
 then it is impossible to separate the welfare of tne whole 
 
 » Sociology, I. 475. '^ Sociologij, I. 479. 
 
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. 191 
 
 from the welfare of the members, or the welfare of the 
 members from the welfare of the whole. To separate the 
 one from the other is to give independent existence to unreal 
 abstractions and to empty the notion of organic unity of its 
 distinctive content. 
 
 Mr. Spencer denies society as an end and makes it a means 
 by which the welfare of individuals is secured ; the last and 
 the only end is the welfare of the individuals composing it. 
 But means and end, first of all, exist apart from each other 
 — the former has an existence and a meaning in itself, and 
 the la.tter has also an existence and meaning in itself and 
 for itself; and, secondly, the meaning of the former is can- 
 celled in that of the latter. The means, say, of the ethical 
 elevation of the life of the nineteenth century is the teach- 
 ing of Mr. Spencer ; that teaching then must first of all be, 
 independently of the attainment of its end. If, on the 
 other hand, it attains the end for which it exists, then it is 
 dispensed with, lost in the end, and will be thrown aside 
 as a husk when it has been absorbed into the characters 
 of nineteenth-century Englishmen. Society, if it is a means 
 for individuals, must in the first place exist outside and 
 independently of its individuals, just as this pen exists apart 
 from the ink which flows through it. But society, as Mr. 
 Spencer admits, does not, and never has existed apart from 
 the individuals composing it, and was, therefore, never mere 
 means, but always means + something more. Again, if it 
 is mere means, then, like all other means, it must perish in 
 the attainment of its end; every society, therefore, that 
 secures the welfare of its members perishes in the very 
 act. But, as a matter of fact, it is the society which 
 fails to secure the welfare of its members that is disin- 
 tegrated, and not that which succeeds in doing so. The 
 ideal of a progressive society which is mere means is 
 the absolute disintegration of itself and the production of 
 isolated, mutually independent individuals; and Mr. Spencer's 
 chapter on ' Society is an Organism ' should, consistently 
 with this view, show how, as the world moves, the unity of 
 society becomes more and more disintegrated and dissipated. 
 Moreover, an individual who regards society as mere means, 
 regards the individuals constituting society as mere means — 
 unless society be something apart from them, which neither 
 Mr. Spencer nor anyone else admits ; and, if every individual 
 
192 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CHITICISM. 
 
 regards his neighbours as means, then the rank and de- 
 structive individualism which, in the French Revolution, rent 
 asunder every political and social bond, is the theoretic ideal ; 
 and the world is making for the state of nature in which 
 its wise men will be running wild in the woods, and, as 
 Yoltaire suggests, ' running on all fours.' 
 
 The conception of means and end is, however, not ap- 
 plicable to an organism. It is because that conception breaks 
 down into diffei'ence, and, instead of expressing the intimacy 
 and complexity of the relations of whole and members, holds 
 them apart at arm's length, that the conception of organic 
 unity becomes necessary. In the presence of even the lowest 
 life, the scientific point of view must be abandoned for the 
 philosophic. 
 
 The perfection of organic well-being is that the collec- 
 tive activities seem to be one. The physical organism into 
 which no alien ingredient, material, chemical, electric, or 
 nervous, has penetrated, * has no system ' ; its life is ' a beam 
 of perfect white light, itself unseen, because it is of that 
 perfect whiteness, and no irregular obsti-uction has yet 
 broken it into colours.' Its energy is one and indivisible; 
 at no time can we say ' here is the activity of the member, 
 there that of the whole ' ; for the activity of the member is 
 that of the whole, and that of the whole is the activity of 
 the members. The unity, because it is an organic unity, 
 must not only persist under the differences, but it must dif- 
 ferentiate itself, flow out into the parts, and again integrate 
 the differences and flow back through the parts into unity. 
 Here there is none of the self- seeking of means and end. 
 No member secures its welfare at the expense of the whole : 
 indeed it has no welfare except that which is also the v^el- 
 fare of the concrete organism. 
 
 If society therefore is an organism, it exists not only as 
 end but also as means. The life that animates the individual is 
 that of the social whole as much as it is his own. His purpose 
 is not his own particular welfare, nor is it the particular wel- 
 fare of his neighbours ; but it is the welfare of the social whole 
 to which they all belong and which lives in them. The 
 notion of organic unity involves that the individual, cut away 
 from society, becomes a severed limb, a lifeless, meaningless 
 mass ; that without the purposes of society he has no pur- 
 poses at all, and cannot even be egoistic : and that the life 
 
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. 193 
 
 which he perverts to selfish ends is not merely his own but 
 that of the moral organism which lives in him. 
 
 The hi^ht that led astray 
 Was light from heaven, 
 
 and heaven holds him responsible; for, although he went 
 astray, 'twas light from heaven. 
 
 The real meaning of the doctrine that society is an 
 organism is, that an individual has no life except that which 
 is social, and that he cannot realise his own purposes except in 
 realising the larger purposes of society. No concatenation 
 of parts, no contiguity in space, no joints and ligatures, can 
 bind members into an organism. The bond must be inward, 
 not outward ; it must be essential, not accidental ; it must be 
 such, in a word, that the parts fall asunder into meaningless 
 abstractions when the bond is broken. Whatever the diffi- 
 culties may be in finding the unity of the social organism, 
 if we hold by the doctrine and make it more than a metaphor, 
 we must recognise that society and individuals actually form 
 such a whole, and that apart from each other they are both 
 nothing but names ; and we must cease to speak of individuals 
 as if they ever could exist apart from society, or could-aittain 
 their purposes except by becoming its organs and carrying 
 out its purposes. It seems to me that the first and last duty 
 of man is to know and to do those things which the social 
 community of which he is a member calls upon him to do. 
 His mission is prescribed to him by the position in society 
 into which he is born and educated, and his welfare depends 
 upon its performance. Hamlet did not create his duties : 
 the time was already out of joint, and he was born to set it 
 right. The demand was not made by himself nor by any 
 other individual, but by the ethical organism of which he was 
 a member, by the spirit of the age whose instrument he was. 
 Nor is this the case with princes alone. Everyone, however 
 humble, finds his duties in the social organism. Let society 
 be dumb, let it cease to prescribe duties and have purposes 
 of its own, and every individual component must hold his 
 hands idle. The interests which men have differ widely in 
 extent, but the interests of all are the interests of the 
 station or circle which constitutes their society, and all do 
 their duties to themselves if they give themselves up to 
 these interests and constitute themselves consciously into 
 organs of their ' universal.' We have very different views 
 
 o 
 
194 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 about the extent of the ethical horizon, and our sky is often 
 so low that we strike it with our sublime heads, but still the 
 large heavens shelter us all. The humblest breast rises and 
 falls with the breath of the universal, and our ethical salva- 
 tion consists in being its willing organs. The heart beats, 
 the brain operates, the hand works, through the power and 
 for the sake of the whole ; and the highest moral ambition 
 consists in sacrificing particular ends and realising those 
 of the social organism. The social ends comprise the highest 
 ends of all men, for the ends of all are but the product of 
 the organic life which differentiates itself in the individuals 
 and returns through them enriched. But Mr. Spencer's 
 social organism is not this; it is rather a resultant, a 
 mechanical and temporal equipoise produced by the opposi- 
 tion and collision of individuals, each of whom seeks his own 
 welfare and not that of society. Tf society has no purposes, 
 if there are nothing but ends of individuals, it is difficult to 
 see how the organism is, after all, anything better than an 
 aggregate. The social whole is unable to gather itself 
 back 0U+ of its discreteness, and it is inorganic because it is 
 ' fundamentally ' unlike a ' living body.' 
 
 Must we then give up the doctrine of the organic nature 
 of society ? Does the organic idea as well as the organic 
 metaphor break down before the discreteness of society ? 
 Or may it not be proved that society is more concrete as 
 well as more discrete than any physical type of organism ; 
 that it is more concrete because it is more discrete ; and 
 that its self-integration is more intense because its self- 
 differentiation is more complete? In a word, may not 
 society be unlike a living body because it is more organic, 
 and not because it is less so ? I think it may, and must 
 endeavour to prove it. We cannot here attempt to trace 
 the ororanic idea in its successive manifestations from the 
 vegetable and animal organism up to humanity. It may be 
 at present sufficient to assert that it is first manifested in a 
 living body, and not in a dead body : and that it is the life — 
 whether that be, as Mr. Spencer teaches, a power to adapt 
 itself to its environment or not — and not the tissues and 
 nervous currents, which bind the parts into a unity. Tissues 
 and currents can only consist of contiguous atoms : their 
 parts, however thinned and etherealised, lie outside of each 
 other. Tissues and currents are only parts of an organism. 
 
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. 195 
 
 but by means of sensation they are retracted out of their 
 outwardness and become organs. I know that my hand is 
 a part of my physical organism, not primarily because I 
 know that it is connected to it by nervous currents, but 
 because it is a source of pain or pleasure to me. Sensation 
 abolishes difference. As long as it lasts organ and organ- 
 ism are not distinguishable, but the whole organism in 
 its concrete existence is present in all its sensations. It 
 is not the palate that feels pleasure or the ear that feels 
 pain, but it is the organism as a unit that feels the pleasure 
 and the pain. Although sensation, however, gathers up the 
 parts into an intense unity, it does not gather them into a 
 permanent unity. Sensation is itself fleeting ; and when it 
 vanishes, the organism falls back into difference and its parts 
 are indifferent to it. Sensations may appear in quick succes- 
 sion, like the atoms of a fluid, but nevertheless they can but 
 repeat the same tale, assert the unity of the organism and then 
 deny it in disappearing. Sensations overcome the outwardness 
 of space, and are themselves overcome by the discreteness of 
 time. But when sensations are related to the ego, when 
 they are known as in me, or as mine, then they attain fixity 
 and permanence. They are no longer a mere manifold 
 capahle of being arranged by the intelligence ; they are not 
 merely expressed by inarticulate cries ; but can be spoken 
 of and described as pleasant or painful, sweet or bitter. In 
 a word, they are thoughts, integral parts of my intellectual 
 possessions that will to some degree modify m}^ future. The 
 unity of the organism, which was not present in the physi- 
 cal structure, and which was only temporarily manifest in 
 sensation, becomes in consciousness a permanent fact. In a 
 more accurate way, and by entirely repudiating this dualism 
 of sense and thought, it might be said that the thought 
 which exists as sensation does not come to itself in sensation, 
 does not overcome its own difference by knowing itself, as 
 it does in self-conscious existence. The life of an animal is 
 not a complete unity because it is not a unity for the animal 
 itself. The animal, or at any rate the being which is only 
 sensitive, is not a permanent object to itself; it cannot return 
 upon its sensations and weld them into a single, united ex- 
 perience. It cannot overcome the difference of time. It lives 
 in the moment, and it cannot constitute the past into the 
 possibility of its future, or the future into the motive of the 
 
 o 2 
 
196 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 present. In truth it has no past, present, or future, but an 
 undistinguished, ever-recurring now. To an observer the 
 life of an animal may present a rude outline of the complex 
 organism of his own life, for consistent processes are carried 
 on through long periods of time by the animal. Means are 
 subordinated to ends, proximate ends to further ends, and 
 the whole to an ultimate and all-embracing end. Nor are 
 such concatenations as we find in the actions of a bird in 
 building its nest and in producing and protecting its young 
 accidental or meaningless. They suggest a life ruled by an 
 end. But it is difficult to believe that the animal itself 
 grasps this end. The unerring and direct character of its 
 actions precludes such a notion. The end is nature's and 
 not the animal's. The animal's function is to obey laws 
 which it cannot disobey, to realise purposes which it has 
 not understood, to be an instrument in the hand of a power 
 which has purposes and which attains these purposes thi-ough 
 the actions of the animal. It is, however, a matter for 
 science, and not for philosophy, to determine what animal 
 first realises the meaning of its own life; where the line 
 between consciousness and self-consciousness is drawn is 
 perfectly indifferent, at least to idealism ; and all that we 
 need insist upon here is that the animal which is incapable of 
 grasping its own end is an instrument, and not an organism 
 in the true sense of the word. The necessity of the actions 
 of such a living body lies outside of itself. But the necessity 
 of a thing is its deepest meaning, and the instrument can 
 only be adequately explained in the end for which it exists. 
 Hence the significance, the meaning, of the animal's life not 
 only lies beyond its own grasp, but can only be found in the 
 whole of which the animal is a part. The naturalist knows 
 the animal when he recognises it as a manifestation of some 
 of the laws of nature, and looks at it from the point of view 
 of the species. In other words, it is the wisdom of nature 
 that he detects maintaining itself as an unbroken unity 
 amidst all the differences of the sensitive and atomic life 
 of the animal ; and it is by no means the wisdom of the 
 animal itself. The meaning of the life of the animal, the 
 thought, which it is, and on account of which it is in- 
 telligible, does not come back to itself; and hence it is not 
 completely organic. 
 
 But in the intellectual and practical life of man thought 
 is at home with itself. The meaning of a man's life is within 
 
 
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. 197 
 
 his own grasp. He can stand above his environment, look 
 before and after, recognise the forces which play around 
 him, and by recognising them overcome them. Like every 
 other animal, he has to assert himself against the complex 
 powers of his environment, which tend to dissipate his life 
 into the self-external atomism of inorganic existence. But, 
 unlike other animals, he can detach himself from his en- 
 vironment — i.e, know himself as existing apart from it. He 
 can understand his environment, and by understanding it he 
 can take its necessity into himself; or, in other words, he 
 can impress the environment with the stamp of his own 
 intelligence and elevate the natural into the spiritual. The 
 struggle between man and his surroundings is unequal, and 
 must end in the victory of spirit. For the conditions imposed 
 upon a man by his environment are nothing to him until 
 they have penetrated into his consciousness, and when they 
 have done that they have subjected themselves to a power 
 which has transmuted them. They are no longer mere 
 conditions but thoughts — parts of the possession of the 
 power which understands them. Into the ' crystal sphere ' 
 of the intelligence nothing can enter except by giving up 
 its opposition and submitting to become a part of that 
 sphere. In fact, the struggle between the self-conscious 
 being and his environment must not be compared to the 
 collision of two balls, or the clash of two forces in the same 
 plane. Man is not a particular amongst particulars. 
 Thought does not cease to be where the physical world 
 begins, but it overlaps it and brings it back interpreted 
 into itself. Man, as a rational being, is his own limit. 
 Whatever the necessity may be which encircles his life, it 
 cannot affect his character until he has put his signature to 
 it, adopted it, and made it his motive. But if it is his 
 motive it is in him, not around him or above : it is his own 
 necessity and nob an alien one. It is not our intention to 
 minimise the significance of that necessity the voice of 
 which we hear, if we are considerate, long before time has 
 furrowed our faces, saying with omnipotent authority, ' This 
 way shalt thou go, not that.' But yet the necessity has no 
 ethical character until I have given it meaning. The 
 humblest can use the words of Cscsar and say — 
 
 We were two lions litter'd in one day, 
 And I the elder and more terrible. 
 
 My poverty, my wealth, my health, my sickness, seem 
 
108 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 almost everything to me ; but they are not everything ; 
 that which is greatest, after all, is that power which I 
 have of constituting my poverty, my wealth, my health, 
 and my sickness, into my bane or my blessing, my good 
 or my evil. It is I, in the end, who give my surroundings 
 significance. 
 
 This doctrine, old as the record of the choice of the for- 
 bidden fruit, is the Alpha and Omega of ethics. Man is self- 
 conscious, man is free, man is his own limit, his own neces- 
 sity, his own fate ; this is the last foundation of every theory 
 of ethics which has any meaning. For if this is not true, 
 if man serves purposes which he can neither reject nor 
 accept, if he is the slave of his conditions, then ethics 
 will be a science which treats of the conditions of actions 
 and not the science of human life. Ethics should then be 
 laid aside with astrology, as a science of that which is not ; a 
 plaything of the world's infancy, unworthy of the attention 
 of a scientific age. Science should turn away from man, 
 and endeavour only to understand the huge mechanism with 
 which the human cog or crank moves, it should reveal the 
 absurdity of practical hortative ethics,, and teach that good 
 and evil are but names of phenomena that appear in man, and 
 emanate out of his conditions. Freedom, self-consciousness, 
 the organic completeness of man, -is the fact with which 
 ethics begins and ends ; and we cannot begin lower, as Mr. 
 Spencer does, unless we believe that animals, too, are moral 
 and immoral, are ends in themselves, and therefore not to be 
 used as instruments by man. But the necessity to live will be a 
 sufficient practical defence against this side of Mr. Spencer's 
 ' data of ethics ; ' for we cannot afford to recognise the life 
 of every creeping thing as of infinite value in itself. In the 
 sphere of nature we shall still seek for utility ; we shall still 
 recognise that the end for which the life that is not self- 
 conscious exists lies beyond that life, and protect the life 
 by using it with reference to its end. 
 
 But on the other hand freedom cannot be disproved, be- 
 cause it is impossible for intelligence to disprove itself by 
 making itself a mere instrument. It is intelligence that 
 guides the disproof as well as the proof ; the disproof is only 
 a new manifestation of the existence and energy of intelli- 
 gence. Eeason cannot commit suicide although man can, 
 and absolute scepticism is impossible. 'It is a medicine 
 which removes itself as w^U as the disease.' Every effort 
 
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. 199 
 
 made by theoretical and practical reason is but a reassertion 
 of its own infinitude ; it is not the establishment, but the 
 removal, of a limit; it is a process by which something 
 which was not for the individual is brought within and 
 made a part of his intellectual or moral being. 
 
 In this sense Mr. Spencer's view of society as a ' discrete ' 
 whole is true ; for every individual is his own limit, a com- 
 plete organism, with his meaning in himself. The discrete- 
 ness, however, is far deeper than anything which finds 
 expression in Mr. Spencer's writings. For the social 
 organism is not only * sensitive ' in every part, but it is self- 
 conscious in every part. Individuals are not merely * not in 
 contact,' but they are ethically isolated in so far as everyone 
 is always his own end. Good and evil are farther from each 
 other than the east and west ; and a ruptured society is not 
 so easily put together as a broken pot. The forces that hold 
 men asunder have a stronger repellent power than anything 
 material. Hence, if society is organic, it must conquer 
 difference in its strongest citadel, and conquer it too by 
 ethical means. No theory of the organism of society can 
 avail, if in its ardour to reconstruct society it does violence 
 to the individual's independence and compromises his right 
 to seek his own welfare. Man must be fitted into his sur- 
 roundings, and made the means of the good of society without 
 compromising his right to realise his own purposes. It is not 
 enough to emphasise his environment, and make him, as Mr. 
 Spencer does, a mere vane which turns round when the wind 
 shifts ; for, unless freedom is a myth and ethics a scientific 
 superstition, life is more than a process of self-adaptation. It 
 adapts the environment to itself as well as itself to its environ- 
 ment, and this is a side which Darwinian development, in 
 all its applications, tends to minimise. For the environment 
 which this age is never weary of emphasising, and which 
 individualism of necessity neglects, is after all but the raw 
 material of the life, and only capable of being converted into 
 physical or intellectual wealth by the energy of that life. 
 Whatever be the influence of an individual's surroundings, 
 however deeply he is indebted to the past for what he is at 
 present, true as it must be that he is in some sense the heir 
 of the experience of the ages, it is also true that the expe- 
 rience of the ages must receive the stamp of the individual's 
 own character, and thereby assume a meaning and form 
 which could not be inherited. 
 
200 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 The doctrine that society is an organism must take up 
 the good that was in individualism into itself. No theory of 
 ethics can afford to cast away the absolute liberty and infi- 
 nite worth of the individual. Freedom has been bought at 
 too great a price to be bartered away. It is the product of 
 the toil of modern history from the time when Christ taught 
 the equality and brotherhood of mankind, to the time when 
 liberty, equality, and fraternity were abstractly realised in 
 the French Revolution. Before the individual's growing 
 consciousness of freedom, the Eoman Empire, the Eoman 
 Church, and the terrors of a monotheistic God had to retire. 
 The world at length has been educated into an uncompro- 
 mising consciousness of its right to freedom, and the indi- 
 vidual is now bidden see to himself. This freedom manifested 
 itself in France as a freedom from restraint. It assumed a 
 hostile attitude to the institutions of the time, swept away 
 the accumulated wisdom of the past, and reduced the State 
 into a carte hlancke. Freedom has the same power in it 
 still; it is omnipotent when opposed to restraint, simply 
 because spirit is stronger than nature. But yet this freedom 
 is itself the only permanent bond of society. In the right of 
 the individual to seek his own welfare lies the possibility of 
 his seeking the welfare of the social organism. Or, to speak 
 from the social point of view, society not only goes out into 
 difference, and invests its component individuals with abso- 
 lute rights, but gathers itself into a unity through that 
 freedom which is at first repellent, and converts the rights 
 of the individual into duties, and his self-seeking into a means 
 of realising the general good. Out of the dust and powder 
 of individuality it creates a nation which is one because its 
 members are free, and whose members are free because they 
 live its life in their own. The organism of society is only 
 possible because its components are themselves organic. The 
 bond of the social organism, that which is its self -differen- 
 tiating, self-integrating life, is freedom. 
 
 How then is the freedom of the individual consistent 
 with and constitutive of the organism of society is the ques- 
 tion that now remains. At first there seems to be a contra- 
 diction between the individual's right to realise himself, and 
 his duty to realise the purposes of society. When the indi- 
 vidual first becomes conscious of his freedom, and recognises 
 that he is to walk in the light of his own spirit, he assumes 
 
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. 201 
 
 a negative attitude towards all that seems to limit this 
 
 freedom. The State with its laws, Society with its habits, 
 
 the Church with its dogmas, present themselves to him as 
 
 restraints. It is therefore his highest duty to himself to 
 
 oppose them ; for neither Church, nor Society, nor State can 
 
 dictate to a free man, and the only categorical imperative to 
 
 \ him is that of freedom. Every action is dead unless it is born 
 
 \ of freedom, the rights of subjectivity are the highest, and man 
 
 Wnnot be compelled to contradict that which is his spiritual 
 
 life. This, the inviolable character of a free man, was the good 
 
 which worked amidst the ruins of the French Revolution. 
 
 But a deeper consciousness of freedom reveals the abstract- 
 ness and unreality of subjective liberty. The freedom of in- 
 difference has received its quietus from Kant, and it is on 
 all sides theoretically recognised that freedom from limit is 
 freedom m vacuo, incapable of movement from the sheer 
 absence of resistance. An individual who is free in this 
 sense repudiates all that comes from without to determine 
 his actions. He can act just as he chooses. He may go 
 here, or there, or nowhere ; he may do this, or that, or 
 nothing. He recognises no demands that arise from his 
 environment ; they are not duties ; and the ' ought ' is nothing 
 more than inherited habit clad in the terrors of inherited 
 superstition. His actions must flow from the abundance of 
 his own heart, and not be wrung out of him by the pressure 
 of law and duty. His freedom has superannuated him. He 
 finds all his motives in himself. But then comes the question, 
 what motives can he find in himself? Is the demand that 
 he find his motives in himself not equivalent to a demand 
 that he should lift himself up by his own waistband ? A 
 motive is a reason for action of some sort. This reason or 
 motive is there, independent of and outside the individual. It 
 is that which he reaches after, and seeks to bring into him- 
 self through his action. Were the end or motive already in 
 him there would be no action. An action arises from a con- 
 sciousness of limit, and a consciousness of something beyond 
 the limit. Every action seeks after some ideal which is in 
 the future, and the ideal, whether it be true or false, a self 
 or a state of self, is ever outside the present self. Man 
 cannot then find a motive in himself. Subjective freedom, 
 freedom from all limit, is therefore nothing more than 
 absolute incapacity to act at all. 
 
202 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPIUCAL CEITICISM. 
 
 Both, philosophy and history indicate that the first escape 
 from this bare and motionless freedom is into caprice. As a 
 matter of fact, the individual who repudiates all outward 
 restraint gives himself np to the satisfaction of his own 
 desires, and Hedonism in some of its forms has ever been 
 the prevalent theory of ethics to a people freed from external 
 limit. Hedonism flourished when the paternal Greek States 
 ceased to engross the citizen, when the Roman Empire 
 became indifferent to the individuals that lived within it, and 
 when the terrors of a monarchical God and the restraints 
 of Puritanism lost their hold on English minds. But the 
 escape into the pursuit of pleasure is only an escape into the 
 tyranny and monotony of passion and caprice. To pursue 
 pleasure is to pursue pleasant sensations ; and sensations are 
 particular not only in the sense that they are the individual's 
 own, but in the sense that they are fleeting, and have a 
 semblance of permanence only when they are repeated. 
 This pure Hedonism we cannot here criticise, further than 
 to endeavour in a few words to show that because its ideal is 
 particular it has no ethical character. In the first place, the 
 individual is the sole judge of that which gives him pleasure, 
 for his sensations are his own and incommunicable. He can 
 induce his neighbour to read a book or taste a wine which 
 gives pleasure to himself, he can lay before him the conditions 
 of his own pleasure ; but he cannot communicate the pleasure 
 to his neighbour, for the pleasure involves the relation of the 
 conditions to the neighbour's feelings. His neighbour can 
 turn upon him and say, ' This wine, or this book, gives me no 
 pleasure ; ' and there is no room for argument. Each indi- ' 
 vidual is the measure of all things, and he is the measure of 
 all things because he is a sensitive being. Hence Hedonism 
 can afford no universal law. The well-worn ' profligate ' has 
 every right, on this view, to prefer the future pain and dis- 
 content of self-indulgence and self-degradation to the present 
 pain of self-restraint. He may be pitied in his disappoint- 
 ment, but he has not acted immorally, for he sought his 
 pleasure and endeavoured to realise the ethical ideal. 
 
 In the second place. Hedonism can afford no imperative ; 
 there is no ' must ' or ' ought ' in the system. This follows im- 
 mediately from the fact that Hedonism has no universal. 
 The only apparent imperative is, that the individual ought to 
 seek his own pleasure. But this ' ought ' is not objective 
 
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. 203 
 
 simply because a state of the individual's own feelings is the 
 ideal, and ' state of feelings ' is entirely within. The impera- 
 tive springs from the particular self, and the particular self 
 may at any moment turn round upon the ought, and say, *I 
 ought not.' But if there is no imperative binding on the 
 individual, then ethics is a mere matter of choice ; and no 
 free action is not a matter of choice. The drunkard chooses 
 to be drunk rather than sober, the suicide chooses strangling 
 rather than life, and Hedonism turns round and says, 
 * You are both right, for you choose.' 
 
 In the third place. Hedonism can, strictly speaking, afford 
 no ideal. It levels all actions, as already suggested. And, 
 moreover, that which is sought after is a state of feelings, and 
 not a self. The same self is projected into a different and 
 future state ; and this state cannot penetrate into the self 
 without escaping out of the sphere of feeling into that of con- 
 sciousness. Feeling, in other words, cannot attain any fixity ; 
 and perhaps the best refutation of Hedonism is the fact that 
 iu order to attain this ideal feeling we must forget it, as Mr. 
 Mill admits. But if this be true, if the ideal must not be 
 my conscious ideal, it cannot be an ideal at all. In order to 
 live a life of pleasure, it is better to confine one's self to the 
 moment and forget the future. Pleasure must not be the 
 ideal because we cannot attain it by seeking it ; and Hedonism 
 admits of no other ideal. The truth of this contention is 
 attested by the repeated attempts of a ' man of pleasure ' to 
 find his ideal in that which has disa,ppointed him. After 
 the satisfaction of that false appetite which comes from the 
 projection of the infinitude of thought into a finite and par- 
 ticular object, comes the consciousness of failure. The ideal 
 was false ; he is where he was before. He has not accom- 
 plished that progress which an ideal involves. Hence comes 
 the monotonous repetition of the same act and enslavement 
 to a single passion. Life of pleasure is mere tautology ; a,nd 
 the ideal is the ' bad infinite ' which- is both attained and 
 missed in every pleasure-seeking action. The ideal is the 
 same self, and is therefore necessarily attained, but it is a 
 different state of the self, and therefore passes away in the 
 act of attainment. Hence, if Hedonism affords no ideal, 
 the individual must confine himself to the present, and this 
 is what practice teaches as well as theory. But life on these 
 conditions would be disintegrated into a sensitive existence. 
 
204 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CPITICISM. 
 
 where everything is well in so far as there is neither past 
 nor future. Well might one say to the Hedonist, — 
 
 ' Still thou art blest, compared wi' me, 
 The present only toucheth thee, 
 But, oh ! I backward cast my ee ■ 
 
 On prospects drear, 
 And forward though I canna see, 
 
 I guess and fear.' 
 
 Hedonism is an attempt to find the individuaPs motives 
 in the individual's particular self. Its instruments are 
 external, for pleasure is sought in a relation to objects, but 
 its ideal, if we still call it so, is subjective. Hedonism seeks 
 after no higher and larger self, but for a new state of the 
 present self; whereas the very nisus of ethical action comes 
 from the fact that morality is a sphere of comparison, and 
 that the individual, holding his present self in the face of the 
 self that he wishes to be, seeks to be another. Every effort 
 of ethical life is an effort after regeneration. The ideal 
 which the good man seeks to attain is one in which he would 
 merge and forget the present self; and, compared with that, 
 the * state of feelings ' is insignificant. 
 
 If, then, the individual cannot find the good in himself, 
 where is he to seek it ? The very assertion of the right of 
 subjectivity has given rise to the need of escaping from it. 
 Freedom from the restraint of duty has proved to be self- 
 destructive. He who severs himself from his surroundings, 
 and lives entirely in and for himself, contradicts his freedom. 
 As a matter of fact man cannot absolutely do so. We have 
 never known an intelligent being who has lived entirely 
 apart from society; for an absolutely bad individual is an 
 ethical impossibility. We can no more imagine an individual 
 ' who has not suckled at the breast of the universal ethos,' who 
 has not lived in a spiritual environment and converted (or 
 perverted) that environment into his own nature, than we 
 can conceive an oak tree which has grown where there is 
 neither earth nor water nor air, without light and without 
 darkness. In the environment he finds the raw material of 
 his character ; and there, too, he must find the standard of 
 his action. 
 
 But what is that standard ? Where can he find a good that 
 is universal and imperative, and lifts him above the slavery 
 of capricious subjectivity ? Are we to find the law of conduct 
 
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. 205 
 
 in a universal will which is opposed to the wills of all in- 
 dividuals as such ? 
 
 In the first place, it is to be noticed that the good cannot, 
 as Mr. Spencer contends, be evolved out of the struggles of in- 
 dividuals against their natural environment. The only motive 
 that can come into play in such a struggle is that of the pre- 
 servation of self as a particular existence. It is only in the 
 presence of another self-conscious being, recognised as such 
 and not reduced into a thing, that the individual finds it 
 necessary to regulate his conduct according to a law other 
 than his own caprice. It is in the collision of wills, as 
 Rousseau teaches, that evil arises ; and, we may add, there 
 too does good. It is the collision of wills that first reveals 
 the need and existence of a Universal will ; a Universal will 
 which stands equally above all individuals, and is, so far, 
 the escape of all out of the caprice of subjectivity. But 
 the Good will must be a universal in another sense also. 
 It must be a permanent ideal, one that can always be realised 
 by all without contradiction. 
 
 Nor has the individual the choice of obeying or not 
 obeying it. The Good will confronts him with an imperative ; 
 it is armed with an ought from which there is no appeal. 
 For if he is allowed a choice, morality is again subjected to 
 caprice, and the individual lapses into that subjectivity from 
 which he seeks to be free. 
 
 Lastly, the Good will is to be realised for its own sake. 
 Obedience to it from desire to attain such a further good 
 as that of the pleasure of virtuous conduct is obedience to 
 pleasure and not to the will : the Universal will is but 
 means that happen to be necessary. But the law must be 
 obeyed for its own sake, not from the contemplation of 
 further good, nor from particular impulse, habit, or senti- 
 ment. The Good will must alone fill the mind, and the 
 maxim of action will be to obey the law for the sake of the 
 law. Thus escape from subjectivity is apparently found in a 
 Universal, Objective, Imperative will. But is it an escape ? 
 Our criticism of this law must be shorter even than our 
 statement. This universal law is formal in the sense that it 
 has no content and can suggest none, and yet is indifferent 
 to any content. Nothing can be got out of it, and every- 
 thing can be put under it. It demands that man should act 
 from contemplation of duty ; but its duty is duty in general. 
 
206 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 and man must act in particular ways and perform particular 
 definite duties. 
 
 It is objective ; but it is objective only because it is not 
 subjective. It is an eternal not-self, and as a pure not-self 
 it is nothing to tbe individual. It so immediately suggests 
 despair that it crushes effort. It is a universal which cannot 
 be either realised in a particular action or by a particular 
 being. It is universal and objective, but it is also alien. It 
 is the demand of an alien law, and springs from an alien 
 authority. But the true ethical ideal is a self as well as a 
 not-self. It is the individual's future self, it is that which he 
 conceives himself able to work into his own character, and 
 what he wishes to he. By attaining it he attains his true 
 self ; apart from the attainment he ought to he, but is not. 
 And here is the source of the categorical imperative. The 
 good is my true self ; and it is imperative because I must be 
 real. It is an ethical necessity, deeper than the physical 
 necessity, which compels me to maintain my existence. 
 Lastly, the universal is not, until it is realised in the indi- 
 vidual's life. Prior to that it is only an ' ought,' a mere 
 conception, a picture flang out by a well-intentioned indivi- 
 dual on the canvas of the future. And unless the ' ought ' 
 is, it has no power over and no claim on the individual. 
 The ethical ideal must not only be itself real, but it must be 
 that which makes the individual real. 
 
 Thus the categorical imperative corrects the errors of 
 subjectivity, but it falls itself into the opposite errors. The 
 one ideal is a mere seyn, the other is a mere sollen ; the one 
 is subjective only, the other is objective only ; the one is a 
 mere particular, the other is a bare universal. Both are 
 abstract, they each stand in need of the other. The ideal 
 for the individual must be also real ; the objective not-self 
 must also be the individual's self, realisable though not 
 realised ; the universal must be also particular, and live in 
 its own details. In a word, the good must be an organism 
 really existing in the world and yet an ideal for every 
 individual. 
 
 Such an ideal is found in the social organism, or rather 
 in the moral organism which is embodied in the various 
 forms of society. In it all the demands of what we may 
 call subjectivity and objectivity are met. It is on the one 
 hand not a mere ' ought,' but really exists in the world. It 
 
^UNIVERSITY 
 
 THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. 
 
 is that to which the family, the social communitiesT" 
 the State owe their strength and their stability. They are, 
 because their laws are ; and their laws are ethical facts. A 
 family that departs from the ethical law of love, a commer- 
 cial community which violates its law of measured rectitude, 
 and a State which seeks no longer to advance the complex 
 rights of the freedom of its components, already totter to 
 their ruin. They cease to be, when that which ' ought ' to 
 be no longer is. But, on the other hand, the ideal is not a 
 mere seyn, like subjectivity. It is a law, an ideal, a sollen 
 for the individual. The task of his life is to answer the 
 demands of his station and to perform duties which he has 
 not chosen, but finds imposed upon him by his social en- 
 vironment. 
 
 Moreover, the moral organism is not a formal universal 
 without content, but is diflPerentiated into laws and institu- 
 tions which direct the conduct of individuals in the details of 
 daily life. Nor is this ideal indifferent and alien to the 
 individual. He himself gives voice to and interprets his 
 social environment, and in that sense creates his ideal. He 
 recognises the tasks which he finds in the sphere into which 
 he has been educated as his duties, and therefore as the law 
 of his action and his ideal self. And by this means he gives 
 force to the social imperative. He knows himself to be 
 moral only when he finds that he has duties, and he knows 
 his duties and has duties only when he knows himself to be 
 free ; and he is free because there is a social imperative. 
 
 Thus subjective and objective, the self and the not-self, 
 the particular and the universal, the individual and society, 
 interpenetrate and become an organic whole. Society exists 
 only in the individual, and the individual exists only in 
 society. Apart from society the individual cannot realise his 
 freedom ; neither his own particular self nor the Universal 
 will could afford him a single motive. The individual is free 
 only because he finds his duties in society, and his duties are 
 his ethical life. And, on the other hand, it is the freedom 
 of the components of a society that gives the society real and 
 permanent existence. It is because the State is a higher 
 realisation of freedom that it has greater permanence than 
 the family. The unity of the family, which is thought in 
 the latent state of feeling, i.e. love, is broken against the 
 growth of its components into maturity and independence. 
 
203 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 and is always in danger from its property ; but the unity of 
 the State, which is self-conscious, where every individual is 
 his own master and carries his own responsibilities within 
 himj this unity, like self-consciousness itself, is a unity that 
 has overcome its differences and cannot be broken by them. 
 The freedom of its components is the force of attraction that 
 binds its members together. A State of slaves, for instance, 
 is impossible. A slave has no rights, and therefore has no 
 duties. In the eye of his master he is a thing, and a thing 
 is not consulted and persuaded, hut forced. The claims that 
 are made on the slave are such that he will contend against, 
 and if possible repudiate. And a State of slaves would be 
 nothing but a sphere where force holds force in check. But 
 such a State never existed ; for no State can be alien to the 
 individuals that compose it. A constitution which is either 
 too good or too bad for a people cannot be held together. 
 A people must feel itself in the constitution, find it to be its 
 law of social life ; that is, its necessity, its law of conduct 
 must not be an alien necessity, but a necessity which the 
 people has taken into itself and which therefore constitutes 
 its freedom. The individual then finds his freedom in society, 
 and society is possible only because its members are free. 
 
 It is on these accounts that society is an organism. Not 
 because it is like an animal, and because the individual com- 
 ponents are like joints and limbs ; but because the individual 
 realises himself as an ethical being in society, and society 
 realises itself in the individual. The individual is free 
 because he is a member of society, and society realises its 
 aims in the freedom of the individuals. Freedom is the life 
 which forms the unity of the moral organism. The State, 
 for instance, endows its individuals with freedom, and tliereby 
 creates an ethical claim on their services. It points out duties 
 by means of its laws, and the duties have moral force because 
 the laws are recognised by the individuals as their own laws, 
 their own guide of conduct, their own ideal self, and not a 
 foreign necessity. Freedom, the unity, the life, differentiates 
 itself ; it flows out into the individual in the form of rights, 
 and returns to itself through its members in the form of 
 services and duties. 
 
 The social organism is thus a concrete, Hving, self-inte- 
 grating, self-differentiating whole, apart from which neither 
 the universal — the abstract society, nor the particular — the 
 
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. 209 
 
 abstract individual, can be. Isolated from each other they 
 are but names ; sunder their relations and thej cease to 
 exist. They exist in and through each other, and are con- 
 stituted by their relation. 
 
 If this be true, then we can no longer speak of individual 
 aims and individual welfare, apart from social aims and social 
 welfare, any more than we can speak of social aims that are 
 not also aims of individuals. The welfare of the individual 
 is in the performance of his duty (whatever that be) and his 
 duty is nothing other than the demand of his environment, 
 the welfare of his sphere. From this point of view it be- 
 comes unnecessary to effect a ^ compromise ' or to ' conciliate ' 
 egoism and altruism — the last effort of inconsistent Hedonism 
 to extend its narrow teachings so as to correspond with the 
 facts of ethical life.^ We have already endeavoured to show 
 that egoism — pure subjectivity — is an impossible and self- 
 contradictory aim. It remains to show that altruism is as 
 one-sided as egoism; and that a man who, if he could, 
 lived for the sake of others only, is as immoral as he who, if 
 he could, lived solely for himself and in himself. Altruism 
 is in fact the opposite abstraction to egoism. It is its logical 
 other, just as the ' enthusiasm of humanity ' of the Comtist, 
 which tends to extinguish the individual for the sake of the 
 general good,^ is the logical counterpart of the teachings of 
 Rousseau, which abolished the general good for the sake of the 
 individual. The latter neglects the fact that the individual's 
 life is universal, the former that the universal is particular, 
 and that the purposes of humanity are those of the indi- 
 viduals composing it. Rousseau would not wash the feet of 
 his neighbour. Comte would wash ' not his feet only but 
 his hands and his head,' and drown himself in addition. 
 Altruism as opposed to egoism is the realisation of the aims 
 of another as opposed to the realisation of one's own aims. 
 But morality from beginning to end is seZ/-realisation. He 
 who has made the welfare of the race his aim, has done so, 
 not from a generous choice, but because he regards the pur- 
 suit of this welfare as his imperative duty. The welfare of 
 the race is his own ideal ; what he must realise in order to 
 be what he ought to be. The welfare of the race is his own 
 welfare, which he must seek because he must be himself. 
 
 ' Spencer's Data of Ethics, chapters ' See Corate's Doctrine of Immor^ 
 
 13 and 14. talif^. 
 
 P 
 
210 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 Cromwell, Luther, Mohammed, were heroes, not because 
 they did something over and above what they ought to have 
 done, but because their ideal self was co-extensive with the 
 larger self of their world. ' Ich Jcann nichts anders/ was the 
 voice of each. A necessity had been laid on them as on 
 Paul to 'preach their gospel.' They were compelled by 
 their conception of their duty to rise above the pursuits of 
 mere individual or family welfare — to transcend the ordinary 
 limits of the ethical efforts of ordinary individuals. Their 
 large purposes were what they owed to themselves just as 
 much as to their world. They were instruments in the hand 
 of a divine power ; for the good that is in the world called 
 upon them with the stern imperative of duty. This impera- 
 tive duty had become so truly their own, that they were its 
 conscious willing instruments. It was their enthusiasm, it 
 had penetrated their whole being, it was their whole being for 
 it had absorbed them. The conflict between the particular 
 and the universal self had ended in the victory of the latter, 
 not by crushing tlie former but by penetrating it, and elevat- 
 ing even feeling into a power which worked for the good 
 that had become their ideal. 
 
 Thus the largest altruism is after all but an earnest 
 struggle for one's own ethical life. Altruism and egoism 
 are but abstract theories that can attain meaning only when 
 they are taken up into an organism in which altruism exists 
 through egoism, and egoism through altruism. They are 
 not 'compromised' or 'reconciled,' but lost in that which takes 
 both into itself. The progress of humanity is not from 
 egoism to altruism, but from an egoism which is from the 
 first altruistic to an altruism which must ever remain 
 egoistic. The growth of character is intensive as well as 
 extensive, and intensive because extensive. If I have larger 
 interests, I have a larger and deeper self. The life which 
 seeks the welfare of the community as well as that of the 
 family, of the State as well as of the community, and of 
 humanity as well as the State, is a life that has brought 
 their interests within itself and cannot realise itself except 
 in them. Morality is not a generous knight-errantry which 
 has to seek for wrongs to rectify. It ever finds the wrongs 
 within itself; its earnest and engrossing business is to per- 
 form the duties that are its own and obey its own impera- 
 tive. Morality is not a mere flow from the superabundance 
 
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. 211 
 
 of a generous heart. ' It is a necessity which is not chosen 
 but chooses.' It is not an ill-regalated generosity which is 
 weakness rather than strength, which ruins its agent and 
 pauperises its object; but it is a universal imperative, 
 immovable and stern and eternal. 
 
 There is still one point which our limits will allow us to 
 touch upon. The great difficulty of recognising the organic 
 character of society, according to Mr. Spencer, conies from 
 the fact that it has no individual consciousness. Its life, 
 which, if it is an organism, ought to be one in the deepest 
 sense, seems to be broken up amongst the individuals which 
 compose it. 'Consciousness is diffused throughout the 
 aggregate. . . . There is no social sensorium.' ^ ' The 
 parts of a society form a whole that is discrete . . . the 
 living units composing it are free, not in contact, and 
 more or less widely dispersed.' ^ We think Mr. Spencer's 
 attempt to re-create the social unity by means of ' emotional 
 language, and by the language, oral and written, of the 
 intellect,' inadequate and superficial, though we cannot 
 here fully discuss it. For what is community of lan- 
 guage apart from the deeper community of thought which it 
 expresses? Is there such power in words, and will the 
 universal brotherhood come by the adoption of one lan- 
 guage? Even ' patriotic feeling ' often asserts itself against 
 a common language, and patriotic feeling roused into 
 national excitement such as broke the strength of Napoleon 
 in Spain is not an adequate bond of society. Language is a 
 bond only where there is a deeper bond of common interests, 
 and these interests are ultimately ethical, if they are per- 
 manent. Language is often one of the evidences of the 
 unity of a social life, but it is not the unity itself. 
 
 Where, then, is the unity, the individual self -conscious- 
 ness of the social organism ? The directest answer is to say 
 that there exists no such thing as individual self-conscious- 
 ness. To seek it is to lapse back into that view which 
 regards the individual as existing apart from the universal, 
 and the universal apart from the individual. It is to neglect 
 the fact that the individual is conscious of himself only 
 because he has distinguished himself from his environment. 
 But this distinction is impossible except in so far as he 
 knows both in some degree. The division of the self and 
 
 > Spencer's Sociology, I. p. 479. ' Ibid. I. p. 475. 
 
 F 2 
 
212 ESSAYS IN PIIILOSOPmCAL CRITICISM. 
 
 not-seli is one of the facts I am certain of; the distinction 
 is one of my ideas and is within me. Consciousness reaches 
 under both factors ; the individual overlaps his other ; the 
 notself is his not-self. 
 
 It is true that we cannot find a social sensorium or 
 social pineal gland, and say of its self-consciousness, Lo 
 here ! or Lo there ! But still the social organism is self- 
 conscious, for it is conscious of itself in every self-con- 
 scious being. To say that I know myself in society is 
 exactly equivalent to saying that society knows itself in 
 me. In knowledge the universal and particular come to- 
 gether. But to illustrate. We have seen that the in- 
 dividual finds his duties confronting him in the social 
 community of which he is a member. He finds them be- 
 cause they are there, ready to hand, awaiting his perfor- 
 mance. But on the other hand they became duties only 
 through his interpretation of them. They are duties only 
 because he first recognises them and then adopts them. 
 Or, to take another example, an artist finds an idea in a pic- 
 ture because it is there : and his neighbour, if he has a cul- 
 tivated taste, will also find it there. The idea is in the 
 picture for everyone. But, on the other hand, the idea comes 
 into actual existence only when it is interpreted. The pic- 
 ture becomes something more than a mass of colours only 
 when the idea is lifted out of the dead material by the power 
 of an artistic intelligence. We can either say that the 
 artist finds meaning in the picture, or that the picture reveals 
 itself to the artist. We can either say that the scientific 
 man discovers the thoughts of nature, or that the thoughts 
 of nature reveal themselves to the scientific man. The idea 
 of the transmutation of forces is that of the scientific man, 
 but it is his only because it is nature's also. The true, atti- 
 tude of science is to abandon preconceived opinions, submit 
 itself to nature, put itself in its path and on its lines, and 
 wait for the interpretation which it gives of itself. The 
 continued eff'ort of experiment is an efi*ort of the individual 
 to place himself in such an attitude that he can hear nature 
 speak. Experiment, in a word, is the abstraction of foreign 
 elements, the help which the scientific man gives to nature, 
 that its many sounds may be disentangled, and that its 
 v^oice may be articulate. In science, in art, in ethics and 
 theology, the individual must stoop to conquer ; make him- 
 
THE SOCIAL OIIGANISM. 213 
 
 self the vehicle of the universal, and thereby both understand 
 the universal and make it articulate. 
 
 As a literary half-poetic, half-mystic truth, it has long 
 been recognised that a great man is the voice of his age, the 
 articulate expression of its otherwise inarticulate forced. 
 This we would prove as a hard fact ; that every individual, 
 however humble, is, in his own little way, the exponent as 
 well as the product of his time. Apart from the individual 
 the social forces and duties are not actually there : it is he 
 that gives them voice and utterance ; it is in him that 
 they attain external and definite existence. The necessity 
 of a time that fails to find voice in the life of an individual 
 or people that understand it is a blind and monstrous force, 
 and not an ethical necessity. As in the French Revolution, 
 it works fortuitously, confounding and crushing together the 
 good and the evil. But the individual who recognises the 
 necessity labouring beneath the contingencies of his time 
 lifts it from a natural into an ethical existence, makes it 
 first an object of thought and then an ideal of conduct. 
 Society, in a word, finds its meaning, comes to self- conscious- 
 ness in him. It is thus in some degree that society comes to 
 self- consciousness and attains its purposes in the self-con- 
 sciousness and purposes of every individual. The social 
 organism is an organism of organisms. The life of the 
 whole is the life of every part. *Nor is it torn amongst them 
 into shreds and patches. The reason that is in the world 
 in all its wealth and greatness is the legitimate inheritance 
 of everyone, and this inheritance is an ethical inheritance, 
 where there is no mutual exclusion. It is the kingdom of 
 heaven upon earth where all are kings because all are 
 subjects. 
 
 Henry Jones. 
 
214 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CEITICISM. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXI8TENGE,^BINTS FOR A 
 PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMICS. 
 
 ' Of all tlie quacks that ever quacked, political economists 
 are the loudest. Instead of telling what is meant by one's 
 country, by what causes men are happy, moral, religious, or 
 the contrary, they tell us how flannel jackets are exchanged 
 for pork hams, and speak much about the land last taken 
 into cultivation.' 
 
 It is half a century since those words were written ; and 
 many things have happened since then. Political econo- 
 mists no longer thank heaven for their superior wisdom. 
 They know their place, and are beginning to discover that 
 the laird of Craigenputtock was right, that the burning 
 questions of their future will be, not the sale of hams and 
 jackets, but the cure of souls, and all the border questions 
 of economics and politics, — that, indeed, their study will not 
 have its perfect work till it leads them even beyond politics 
 into social philosophy. The political effects of an industrial 
 movement may be more important than the economical ; 
 but the society in which both are set is more important than 
 either. The charming mottoes of political agitators must 
 not distract our attention from a struggle less lively than 
 theirs, the struggle of the most unhappy members of a 
 moderately happy community for bare life. ' The struggle 
 for existence ' is no charming motto. It is a mere memo- 
 randum or placard of ill-favoured facts, not well forgotten 
 but not gladly remembered. It points the fancy to a region 
 where fancy seldom goes of her own accord — the abodes of 
 the 30,000 distressed needlewomen and their less apocryphal 
 brothers and sisters in suffering, who are even weaker limbs 
 of the body politic than the wasteful idlers at the other 
 extremity. Whoso, however, would not willingly stop at 
 
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 215 
 
 the Lamentations of Jeremiah, but would continue his read- 
 ing into the Acts of the Apostles, must look at the social 
 surroundings and political position of the strugglers, as well 
 as their obvious misery and moral helplessness. How far 
 are the noble purposes of the strong hindered by the woes 
 of the weak ? Do the efforts of the poor, in the first place 
 to avoid starvation, and in the second place to become rich, 
 form a permanent feature in civilised life, essential to the 
 very idea of the modern State, and therefore indispensable 
 to human progress? This question is common ground to 
 philosophy and economics ; and it is one of the questions 
 which a Philosophy of Economics must face and answer. 
 
 Its interest for philosophy needs no proof. To the phi- 
 losopher nothing human is foreign. His chief end is to stand 
 on a sort of Pisgah hill and, viewing all the world at large, 
 to see what is the place of man in it, what his work is, what 
 is the goal of his social progress, and what he means by his 
 civilisation. The political economist, on the other hand, 
 studying the causes of wealth and poverty, finds them in close 
 connection with society and government, and therefore cannot 
 help considering, in some measure, how far the mutual in- 
 fluence of economical and political facts may extend. The 
 philosopher, however, must do more than this ; and he 
 has not simply the same work to do more thoroughly, he 
 has a distinct task of his own, beginning sooner and ending 
 later than the work of the ordinary economist. He begins 
 sooner, for he is not content to take the plant as it stands ; 
 he examines its soil and climate, air and food. On the 
 other hand, he ends later than the economist, for he takes 
 up the remote bearings of economical facts at the far-off 
 point where they pass into cosmopolitan politics and religion. 
 In short, he needs to furnish at once the prologue and the 
 epilogue to economics — the former perhaps the easier task, for 
 the materials are, in a sense, finished and ready to hand, — 
 the latter perhaps too hard for him till the industrial 
 revolution is fully ripe. In either case, the philosophical 
 student attacks a subject which the ordinary economist 
 judiciously lets alone, as beyond both his time and his pur- 
 poses. 
 
 There are many sages on both sides of the North Sea and 
 Atlantic who would make merry over any attempt to adjust 
 the relations of political economy to philosophy. The one 
 
216 ESSAYS IN PIIILOSOrillCAL CRITICISM. 
 
 they would say, is not yet a science ; the other can never 
 be. Though they have tender scruples about indicting a 
 ^hole nation for anything whatsoever, they indict a whole 
 universe for unintelligibility ; they pronounce philosophy an 
 impossibilit}^ ; and they tolerate no evolution except of the 
 earth, earthy. Darwin may steal a horse, while Idealists 
 may not look over a hedge. It is not great presumption to 
 disregard such obstructionists, and, taking economists as they 
 are, and philosophers as they might be, to consider how much 
 light they can throw on common sense and on one another. 
 
 The questions of political economy, as they have actually 
 been discussed by the most diverse economists for 150 years, 
 are all branches of one common topic, the causes of national 
 wealth and national poverty ; and, tacitly if not avowedly, 
 all economists understand by wealth the abundance, and by 
 poverty the scarcity, of the good things of this life, the out- 
 ward tangible means of satisfying the wants of man. In 
 the third place, the commercial ambition spoken of in the 
 ' Wealth of Nations ' as the constant desire of every man to 
 better his own condition, a desire which is with him from 
 the cradle to the grave, may no doubt be considered by 
 economists in various ways. It may be looked on as a bless- 
 ing, or it may be regarded as a misfortune. It may be con- 
 sidered abstractly by itself as a ruling or over-ruling motive, 
 ' whereby a man's conduct can be j)redicted with the greatest 
 nicety ; ' or it may be considered simply as one co-ordinate 
 motive out of many, in a combination that baffles not only 
 prediction but analysis. But, whether set on a throne by 
 itself or herded with a crowd of serving-men, this desire for 
 gain is never, at least, entirely ignored by any treatise that 
 \ calls itself economical. One other feature all economists 
 Ihave in common — they have always regarded their own study 
 
 I as dealing with a part, not with the whole of human nature. 
 Even the orthodox among them, who regard commercial 
 ambition as the strongest of all the motives of an average 
 modern human being, admit that he has other and weaker 
 ones, though they cancel each other. The acknowledged 
 position, therefore, of political economy among scientific 
 studies is a standing invitation to some larger study to 
 round off its work for it, and bring the whole man into view. 
 Whether this will be done by a Sociology which includes 
 all the moral and anthropological sciences, but goes no 
 
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 217 
 
 furtlier than man — or by a philosophy which does not stop 
 at man, but goes on to the world, — in either case all economi- 
 cal facts will get a new bearing. The ' struggle for exist- 
 ence,' for example, is an economical fact that, reaches far 
 beyond economy, and is a crucial problem for the philosophy 
 of man. What part does it play, not merely in industry, but 
 in civilisation ? Is it one of the indispensable features of a 
 modern State? Must all human societies be made perfect 
 through this suffering, and is this suffering to go on after 
 the perfection is secured ? 
 
 It would not be possible, in a few pages, to do more 
 than draw the outlines of a possible answer to this question. 
 It is well, in the first place, to note that the phrase ' struggle 
 for existence ' is by no means free from ambiguity. We must 
 not allow its great biological prestige to win it any uncriti- 
 cal indulgence in a region that is above biology. There is, 
 undoubtedly, a sense in which the ' struggle for existence ' 
 is the essential condition of all progress ; — there is another 
 sense in which the same statement is entirely false. It is 
 false if ' existence ' means bare life. Starvation is no 
 stimulus. The mere struggle for a bare existence, the effort 
 to save oneselFfrom extinction, never leads to progress, 
 either in a society or in an individual. This may seem a 
 paradox. Did not poverty convert Scott into a novelist, and 
 Horace into a poet? Was it not the struggle for room and 
 food that sent the Cimbri and Toutones, Goths and Yandals, 
 to the sunny South? No; penury less often fires than 
 freezes the genial current, and neither ' Waverley ' nor 
 the Ode to Pyrrha was written for mere bread. Even the 
 English nation made no progress so long as self-defence 
 absorbed her every energy. Wherever there is progress, 
 there is something more spiritual at work than frantic efforts 
 after self-preservation ; and that is ideals, or at least ideas. 
 If we throw a man into deep water and leave him there, his 
 terrified struggling will not teach him to swim, though it 
 may enable him to clutch the bank. The effort to make 
 both ends meet, and the consciousness that even half a 
 day's holiday would defeat the purpose, does not stimulate 
 a man ; it enervates a man, whether in Labrador or in Drury 
 Lane. He may become perfect through, that is to say, in 
 the teeth of this suffering, but not by means of it. When 
 people are told not to trust to the Poor Laws or to their 
 
218 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 neiglibours to save them from destitution, this does not mean 
 that if they are once thoroughly destitute they will have 
 the smallest power to save themselves. It is a common 
 saying that those nearest pauperism take least pains to 
 avoid it. The destitute man may never happen to become a 
 pauper, and the habitual pauper may never allow himself to 
 become destitute ; bnfc the wings are as effectually clipped by 
 the destitution as by the indolence. Carry depression beyond 
 a certain point, and it kills the power of effort by killhig all 
 hope ; and the point is reached, if ever anywhere short of 
 death, at the moment when the struggle of the human being 
 becomes an endeavour to gain not an abundance of life but 
 an escape from death. 
 
 There are many examples of this at home. Novelists 
 have spoken of England as two nations, but there is a miser- 
 able third, and the third is to the first and second as the less 
 civilised nations of the world- without are to the more 
 civilised. If we choose, however, we may detach the truth 
 from ourselves, and make our neighbours' niisfortunes rather 
 .than our own, picturesque. The noble Ked Man is a con- 
 jspicuous example of a ' struggle for existence ' that has led 
 |to no progress whatever. There is less and less of him 
 Ueft now, and what is left does not feel any charm in its 
 situation. Its romance exists only for us, though, if we 
 have a heart, its miseries will exist for ns also. The Red 
 Man suffers much from famine, war, and disease. His wife 
 and children run the gauntlet of tribal customs, compared 
 with which the Lancashire boot discipline is a holiday 
 pastime. It is small wonder that in his physique he is 
 the very picture of a man ; no weak child could ever have 
 survived the woes of his upbringing, and there is no native 
 recording angel to chronicle the pangs of his dead brothers 
 and sisters. He has survived for the novelist, while they 
 have simply added a few thousands to the great unnum- 
 bered multitude of out-trodden lives, the unfit that did not 
 survive. Destitution may lead to such happy inventions as 
 cannibalism, which at once increases food and lessens popu- 
 lation, and it may account for the proverbial cunning and 
 the cowardly strategy of many savages. But (1) this means 
 1/ no progress so long as the status quo is not altered, and so 
 long as the wolf of starvation is still at the door. Progress 
 is ' something more, a bringer of new things,' built on the 
 
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 219 
 
 foundation of the old ; it is not a defence of my bare life, but 
 a clothing of the bareness and a cultivation of the barren- 
 ness. Moreover (2) it is not safe to argue as if the same 
 environments had the same effect on all living creatures, 
 even of the same genus. Difficulties which in one case 
 generate talents and provoke a spirited reaction, in another 
 case meet a merely passive resistance, and cause a fading of 
 the old faculties rather than a creation of nevr. It has even 
 been argued that the new faculties which the difficulties 
 generate are purely fictitious, being useless except to cope 
 with their parent difficulties. They must however be natural 
 or they could not be acquired — ' nature ' meaning as much the 
 state into which we come as the state in which we are born, 
 and our faculties being all alike developed by objects and 
 obstacles. But it is at least true that the difficulties some- 
 times fail to generate the faculties. What is physiologically 
 the same vital force meets the same obstacles with very 
 different results in different tribes of men. The difficulties 
 of the European have made him progress ; the difficulties 
 of the native American have killed him. We may of course 
 elect for the theory which explains these anomalies by 
 original and inherent differences of race. But this is to fall 
 comfortably back on a pillow for the laziness of thought ; it 
 is to give up the problem of race, and thereby of all progress, 
 for we know no races of men that have not been altered by 
 history, and, if we knew the whole history of a race, we should 
 probably know why it differed from its neighbours. There is 
 no reason to suppose that, where starvation does not stimulate, 
 race blocks the way. It seems better to assume an original 
 identity of race for the whole of humanity, and to suppose 
 it altered by circumstances as the world goes on — among 
 the circumstances being new laws and new ideas. Instead 
 of beginning in the poorest places, where it had not much 
 earth, progress would more probably begin in the favoured 
 places that yielded a moderate abundance of food without 
 excessive labour. Hunger would drive the sons of men Cain- 
 like over the face of the earth, tiU they found out all the 
 most fertile and convenient spots upon it ; and then being 
 at a measurable distance from famine, they would collect 
 their wits a little and exercise their invention. The ' eternal 
 question of a livelihood ' would no longer keep them at ' a 
 level from which no ideal is visible.' Climate and soil do 
 
220 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 not indeed grow ideas as they grow grass, but they enable 
 men to follow occupations that conduce to the growth of ideas. 
 Once in being, the ideas may be transplanted and made full 
 of growing, like man himself, in any part of the globe. 
 
 It is, therefore, the early steps that cost. When a man 
 has once known what comfort is, he will probably work hard 
 to keep it ; but if he is like a mere animal, with no idea of 
 abundance, or ideal of any kind to work for, then he will do 
 no work of supererogation, none that does more than keep 
 him alive. The fear of starvation is not merely in its degree, 
 but in its kind, entirely alien to that happy discontent which 
 never ' is ' but always ' to be ' blest. To be capable of pro- 
 gress is to have gained a purely human idea, the idea of 
 comfort, the idea of a sum total of good things, which can 
 be indefinitely increased to keep up with increasing wants. 
 It is to eat of the tree which gives knowledge of good and 
 evil. Now, whether men get this notion from ' natural 
 impulse,' or from the teachings of other men, it is in any 
 case the creature of leisure rather than of care. Some 
 one has remarked that it was when our first parents had 
 plenty of time to look about them in paradise, that they 
 began to think about the forbidden fruit ; it would not have 
 occurred to them if they needed to work all day long for a 
 livelihood. It was not because the French people were 
 more miserable than their neighbours that they accomplished 
 the Great Revolution, but largely because they were less 
 miserable; they were not too oppressed to have time for 
 thinking. It was not because the North American colonies 
 were treated more tyrannically by the mother country than 
 the colonies of other nations by theirs that they lost loyalty 
 and declared themselves independent ; history says they were 
 better treated. Political oppression and religious persecu- 
 tion, to be quite successful, must be quite thorough. Half- 
 hearted cruelty is usually unsuccessful, for it allows the victim 
 enough strength to resist ; he is too unhappy not to lay 
 greedy hold on any scheme for escaping ; he is not so un- 
 hapxDy as to be unable to move at all. 
 
 What leads to progress, then, it appears, is ideas; it is 
 some end or ^im, to be defined not negatively, as escape 
 from pain, but positively, as the gain of some good thing. 
 Indeed, the history of every civilised nation may, under this 
 aspect, be divided into two stages, the one in which the 
 
THE STUUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 221 
 
 moving force is self-defence, the other in which it is self- 
 development ; and the strata of any civilised society, at any 
 given time, may be divided into two, the lowest stratum, 
 m which the struggle for existence means a struggle for 
 bare life, and all the strata above it, in which the 'struggle 
 for existence' means tbe struggle for well-being, gain, or 
 gloiy. The modern notion of a State demands a free 
 course for the second struggle, but not for the first. In 
 other words, laissez faire is to prevail high up rather than 
 low down the ranks. There is, perhaps, no full proof of this 
 apart from metaphysics ; but the view is involved in the 
 mere description of a modern State, and, if we durst 
 make the slightly hazardous assumption that whatever is 
 modern is right, then it would be as in certain geometrical 
 propositions, where the proof of the problems is the drawing 
 of the figures. To understand the meaning of ' State ' is 
 first and chiefly to understand what we mean by ' our country' 
 and * our nation.' 
 
 Clothes do not make a gentleman ; and numbers do not 
 make a nation. The name of Nation, says the distinguished 
 author of a recent pamphlet on this subject, is not to be 
 given to a people because of their multitude, or because they 
 are of one race, or of one language, or of one religion ; nor 
 even because they have common material interests, or a 
 country plainly marked off from others by geographical 
 boundaries or strategical features. National unity is some- 
 thing more intangible than these; it is a community of 
 feeling, a partnership in past traditions, present privileges, 
 and future hopes. This is true ; but if material or commer- 
 cial interests are not the main bond they have at least some 
 inferior binding force of their own ; and it may even be held 
 that, as the struggle for existence is allowed to prevail most 
 in the higher strata of a good State, and least in the lowest 
 so commerce may safely have greater sway in the most 
 developed, and least in the least developed of modern States. 
 It is no doubt true that material interests, though they can 
 produce a commercial treaty, a customs union, or a joint 
 control, cannot produce a nation. Nations are not joint-stock 
 companies for co-operative trading, and even England is not 
 a nation of shopkeepers. This may be our goal in the 
 twentieth or thirtieth , century ; it was certainly not our 
 starting-point in the sixth or eleventh. Men did not first 
 
222 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 desire comforts and then say, Go to, let us form a club to 
 provide them. On the contrary, their social life preceded 
 the very idea of comforts, and gave them their very notions 
 of enjoyment, for all human enjoyment is social. It is 
 hard then to understand how anyone can represent the 
 struggle for good living (to say nothing of the struggle for 
 bare life) as either the first beginning or the chief end of 
 the State. It is, however, the first to Plato, and the second 
 to the Manchester School of Politics. 
 
 Extreme partisans of these schools will perhaps think 
 them too incongruous to be contrasted. But they are not 
 utterly alien. According to the airy sketch in the ' Republic,' 
 States come into being because men find it better to divide 
 labour and exchange the things made by it, than to work 
 separately each man for himself. Cobden's nineteenth- 
 century Essays and Speeches tell us that, by that large 
 division of labour which is called Free Trade, all nations will 
 eventually be drawn together into unity of spirit, bonds of 
 peace, and even righteousness of life. To the one, commerce 
 is the origin of cities. States, and nations, to the other it is 
 the origin of an international union of all men that makes 
 the world into one city. The historical context makes these 
 theories the more singular. Plato writes from one of a 
 galaxy of little States, too little to be nations, and at a time 
 when the Roman power, too great to be a nation, was not 
 yet ready to swallow up the little Greek States, but was 
 waiting for Macedon to do its work. There have been few 
 periods in history when commercial considerations could 
 enter less into politics, and kinship was still in theory the 
 only firm tie between two States. Yet Plato, with his 
 propensity to feign incidents for the needs of his Dia- 
 logues, makes believe that the body politic is born of the 
 struggle to satisfy physical wants. He cares much less about 
 prosaic accuracy than about the fitness of his narrations to 
 illustrate his philosophy; and accordingly, in his account 
 of the genesis of the State, he means to do little more 
 than show, in parable, the correspondence between the 
 rule of ethics, ' Do that duty which lies nearest to thee,' 
 and the rule of politics, ' Unto everyone his work.' In 
 Plato, however, the struggle for existence among the 
 fortuitously concurring atoms ends almost as soon as it 
 has begun ; in the upper circles of the State it does not 
 
TPIE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 223 
 
 go on at all. His selection is not natural but artificial, 
 not worked out by the atoms themselves, but performed 
 for tliem by the rulers. Of course, in Greece as it then 
 was, the ' struggle ' of the lower, so far as they were 
 slaves, had no place in the body politic ; it was over before 
 they enhered it ; and, so far as they were not slaves, it was 
 at least not the struggle of an industrious class against an 
 idle, still less the competition of the industrious among one 
 another ; it was rather the struggle of one idle class against 
 a still idler. Single States, like Phoenicia and Carthage, had 
 no doubt owed much to trade and colonisation ; but the 
 power of purely commercial considerations to alter the 
 balance of parties, to give a character to public policy, and 
 to deform, reform, and transform legislation, had never 
 been fully known. Greek political philosophers instinctively 
 felt that commerce meant competition, and competition fric- 
 tion, restlessness, and perhaps anarchy. If men ran to and 
 fro to buy and sell, the knowledge of good and evil would be 
 increased at the expense of wisdom and steadiness. In modern 
 times, however, fondness for travel has not in our country 
 produced political unsteadineits ; and on the other hand the 
 French, who are not, notoriously, stable in government, are 
 the most home-loving of modern nations. Though all progress 
 is said to be Greek in its origin, the sort of progress that 
 England has made in the last hundred years, every step 
 of it resting on industry, must seek another genealogy. 
 There is in fact one feature in the modern State which was 
 ignored in the ancient, the liberty of the individual. There 
 were, no doubt, theorists then, as now, who wished to dis- 
 pense with States altogether. Aristippus wished to be a 
 citizen of the whole world by being a citizen of no particular 
 part of it ; he wished, Irish fashion, to be at home every- 
 where by being at home nowhere. But no ancient theorist 
 that was anxious to save his ideal commonwealth from self- 
 destruction would have provided in it an * open career ' 
 for all men of all classes, and complete freedom of trade at 
 home and abroad. He would have thought it an attempt 
 to combine cosmos with chaos. 
 
 Nevertheless, in the modern notion of freedom, this 
 chaos plays a great part. We do not regard the State as an 
 accidental collection of individuals ; it is no more accidental 
 than the collection of a syllogism from the premisses or 
 
224 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 the development of the flower from the leaf. But we have 
 learned to draw a distinction between things political and 
 things social. We have acquired ' a horror of losing our 
 individuality.' Our notion of the State nowadays would 
 probably include the life of the family and the free enter- 
 prise of individuals outside of the family— with something 
 else over and above, to crown the whole and do for the citizen 
 what he can neither get done for him at home nor do for 
 himself out of doors. Our test of political progress will be 
 like Mr. Ruskin's test of a good picture. The best picture 
 is that which suggests the greatest number of the greatest 
 ideas; and the best State is that which developes the 
 greatest number of the best qualities of its people, — perhaps 
 both of them particular cases of the general rule that that 
 theory is truest which explains most difficulties, and that 
 truest of all which seems to increase in its powers of ex- 
 planation the more widely it is applied. But, howsoever 
 known and tested, our ideal State must provide that free 
 scope for individuality which is the most modern feature of 
 modern politics. Perhaps it is dearly bought. The price 
 we pay for popular government is the possibility of occa- 
 sional disorder. The price we pay for our Protestantism is 
 the possibility of error and ' variations.' The price we pay 
 for our Free Trade is the possibility of gluts and panics. 
 But, still, freedom in our soul's just estimation is prized 
 ^.bove all price. 
 
 Some of the eccentric philosophers who expect as much 
 good sense in human history as in the movements of the 
 ' flies, worms, and snails ' so extolled by Dr. Watts and the 
 entomologists, have described history itself as ' man's progress 
 in Freedom.' Does this mean that every movement is an 
 emancipation movement, and every society a Liberation 
 Society? If this were all, then the meaning of freedom 
 would be more intelligible than the value of it. But it is 
 not half the truth. Whether or not there is an unconscious 
 logic in all human action, there is at least an unconscious 
 ethics, an unwritten body of morality, in the language 
 and the actions of a people. It contains their standard of 
 right and wrong, and their ideal of a good life, sometimes 
 practised and always respected ; and, if we consult this 
 oracle properly, it will give us the outlines of a definite 
 theory of freedom, which only the indefinite future can fill 
 
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 225 
 
 in to the full, but which the present Avill find a useful 
 chart. 
 
 To modern notions, then, society is made for man, not 
 man for society. The whole exists for the good of all 
 the parts without exception, and not simply, as utilitarians 
 would have it, for the good of the greatest number. Our 
 communities have grown up in strange ways and fulfilled 
 many alien ends ; but now at least they shall exist for the 
 sa,ke of the individuals in it. The chief end of society is 
 not production or acquisition, or any other separate act or 
 state of man — but man himself and his most human nature. 
 The most successful and prosperous society, therefore, will be 
 that in which the citizens are making the most of their powers. 
 This does not mean that it will be a large training school for 
 adults, supplying gymnastic exercises for all the mental and 
 bodily faculties of each individual. A uniform develop- 
 ment of all the faculties seems the more impossible the 
 more we understand the largeness of the world. Alike to 
 idealism, materialism, and common sense, there is no mean- 
 ing in a ' faculty ' out of relation to an ' object ' ; they 
 were married in heaven, and go mad, or at least make non- 
 sense, when parted on earth. In the second place, there is 
 no apparent limit to a faculty and its objects ; any road 
 leads to the end of the world, and any study leads to 
 infinity. If education, therefore, meant the equal improve- 
 ment of all the faculties, it would make us try to follow all the 
 roads at once ; and ' we cannot, therefore we ought not.' To 
 attempt to develope all our powers, or even as many of them 
 as possible, would perhaps end in a high average ; but it 
 would bring down the best, as well as raise up the lowest ; 
 and would injure the most human feature of human labour, 
 its originality and independence. If we are to ' do the duty 
 which lies nearest to us,' we are also to ' know ourselves, and 
 what we can work at.' The man who devotes himself to 
 those, of the things then needful for his time and country, 
 which he can do best, is not far from the chief end of man. 
 
 That he has at least average worldly opportunities, * as is 
 said in the Ethics,' and is not struggling for bare livelihood, 
 follows from the very terms of the commandment. The 
 weak and starving are not likely to be able to choose what 
 they can work at, and are still less likely to be able to do 
 the work when chosen. The struggle for mere being would 
 
 Q 
 
226 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 from diildhood exclude tliem from the struggle for well- 
 being. Not only would the weakest go to the wall, but 
 many who might have become strong would be kept weak. 
 But in these latter days society knows the value of human 
 life, and wishes, with Christianity, that ' all men should be 
 saved,' and that ' all the Lord's people should be prophets.' 
 Where Darwinism was wont to rule absolutely, it may not 
 now rule at all. Public welfare demands that the border strife 
 should be checked and its victims tended. A modern State 
 need not pass a Poor Law, but it needs to see that the poor 
 are cared for. It will make elementary instruction compul- 
 sory, not from any desire to respite the upper classes by 
 educating their masters, but from a belief that a people is 
 not free and united till all of its members are placed in 
 possession of their powers and made equal in opportunity. 
 
 Such a view of liberty, however, implies much more than 
 a policy of abstention. The common as distinguished from 
 the common-sense conception of Uberty is the right to do as I 
 please ; but this kind of autocracy is only good for a man if he 
 at once abdicates in favour of constitutional government, and 
 suits himself to his circumstances, in order to improve both 
 himself and them. Else his liberty will be a cloak of mali- 
 ciousness, a wayward, unchastened self-will which ' profits no 
 one, not even himself; ' and to give effect to that kind of 
 liberty in the border regions of society will be to make the 
 equilibrium of opposing forces more brutal than it is, to 
 make the ills of the poor more cureless, and to withhold 
 from them the better liberty, the power to use their powers, 
 at the price of the barren privilege of being let alone. 
 Modern society is beginning to recognise the distinction 
 between these two kinds of liberty ; and, instead of letting 
 the struggle for existence rage itself out in the lower 
 strata, takes every possible pains to end it. It recognises the 
 claims of weakness even more than the claims of strength, 
 knowing that old strength can see to itself, while young 
 strength, no less than young weakness, may be powerless 
 without its Greatheart. It honours all men, and its schools 
 and hospitals and charities are designed to raise the lowest 
 of them to the true level of their manhood and give to all 
 alike the open career. Like a wise parent, society will keep 
 a tight hold on its children in their tender years ; and it 
 will gradually relax its hold as they grow mature and strong 
 enough to take care of themselves. 
 
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 227 
 
 Some such idea of liberty is contained in the language 
 and laws of all modern civilisation. Nevertheless there is 
 an impression, too v^idely-spread to be entirely false, that, 
 even if freedom be not waywardness, it is not without it. 
 There is a feeling that freedom must include the negative 
 element, ' the glorious liberty of being independent,' as well 
 as the positive element of * doing one's best.' It must in- 
 clude a right as well as a duty, and even a right that is not 
 to be identified with any ascertainable duty. It may be 
 that, s'uh specie etemitatis, or from the point of view of Om- 
 niscience, duty and right always coincide ; some philosophers 
 say it is ever so. Still the point of view of Omniscience is 
 not attainable for most mortals ; and they will think a little 
 before they allow that there is no right that is not a duty 
 and no duty that is not a right, and that too, ' in one and 
 the same respect.' If the dogma were sound it would be 
 hard to comprehend the claims of individuality. Why do 
 we give scope to individuality nowadays, not only in freedom 
 of speech and of writing, but in choice of a profession, in 
 wideness of speculation, in defiance of conventionality and 
 fashion, and in all matters w^here there is any orthodoxy, 
 whether in art, religion, science, education, or dress? In 
 spite of the refinements of philosophers, this toleration 
 means that society grants to its individual members a 
 number of rights that are not duties, or at least not in one 
 and the same respect. Trade is a good example. Perhaps 
 it is always a man's duty to devote himself to the trade or 
 profession for which he is best suited, always supposing that 
 society has fulfilled her own duty and seen to it that he is 
 in the position to make any choice at all. Here then his 
 duty and his right are on all fours. But is it his duty as 
 well as his right to make new ways where no ways were, or 
 to invent the oil lamp in place of the tallow candle, gaslight 
 in place of oil, and the electric light in place of all ? It is 
 perhaps his duty, because ' it is his nature to' invent. But, 
 unless from the point of view of Omniscience, we cannot tell 
 that he ' ought ' to have turned his inventiveness into one 
 particular branch of discovery more than another; his 
 powers seem to his fellows as well capable of serving him 
 and them in one way as in another. Almost every great 
 inventor has been guided to his chief field of invention by 
 what is called chance ; and it is, at any rate, not by any clear 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 ESSAYS m philosophical criticism. 
 
 law to liis fellows ascertainable or any fixed rule by bis 
 fellows prescribable. Not even Mr. Wilberforce himself 
 could have known that the path of duty would lead him 
 through philanthropy to the oil trade. He had a ' right ' to 
 take one out of perhaps twenty courses, and even to his 
 conscientious mind it may have been much clearer what he 
 ought not to do than what he ought to do. Popular morality 
 allows a man to amass a fortune and spend it well, and to 
 stop short of a fortune and live a simple life. It cannot 
 pronounce which of them is his duty, and it grants that 
 both are within his 'right.' They are 'within his right' 
 indeed in two senses ; the law allows them, and the public 
 conscience does not forbid. The general rule has come to 
 be that full-grown men are left to choose their own careers, 
 and the country gains more from their possible waywardness 
 than if it interfered with their ' struggles ' and insisted on 
 choosing their weapons for them. In all circles except the 
 lowest the rule must be ' hands off.' It is a postulate of the 
 modern notion of liberty. 
 
 Here, however, we wake up the Old Quarrel between the 
 economists and the philanthropists. A man's legal right, it 
 is said, can be morally wrong ; an economical good may be 
 a moral evil. To do justice to this quarrel we need to 
 remember that it arose, ran its course, and really became 
 obsolete, at a time when both economists and philanthropists 
 were too proud to understand each other. Whether in the 
 Palestine of Isaiah, the Rome of the Gracchi, the merry 
 England of Sir Thomas More, or the modern England of 
 the younger Pitt, every great economical change has gone 
 along with suffering, hard dealing, public indignation, and, 
 as a rule, useless remedial measures. It is hard to say on 
 whose side history has declared herself, for if the failure 
 of the laws be a point against the philanthropists, the in- 
 variable public indignation is a point in their favour. 
 History, as usual, gives us the premisses and leaves us to 
 draw our own conclusions. The difficulty is not to be 
 solved by dates and records ; it is a case of conscience. 
 The question is, whether the man who dares to add field to 
 field, or to feed sheep instead of human beings, or to use a 
 machine instead of a man, can be morally wrong and eco- 
 nomically right. The philanthropists have a certain furtive 
 pleasure in the contradiction; few things would so dis- 
 
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 229 
 
 concert them as the discovery that political economy is at 
 peace with the ten commandments. The economists are 
 more conciliatory, some even seemin<^ to contend that eco- 
 nomical rightness would of itself produce moral rightness, 
 and so prevent the contradiction altogether. Interference 
 by the State or even voluntary refraining on the part of the 
 innovators will not, they think, in the long run benefit the 
 sufferers nearly so much as a courageous perseverance in 
 the straight road to wealth. 
 
 It is not too much to say that the average Englishman is 
 a philanthropist in his words and an economist in his deeds. 
 This does not mean that he is generous in theory and 
 selfish in practice, but only that he has a half- understood 
 feeling that all is not generosity, neither is all selfishness 
 that seems so, and he has learned to distinguish State from 
 Society. He understands better than his fathers what are 
 the real limits that fence in the citizen engaging in trade, 
 and in what way society can best lay hold of him and his 
 customers, so as to ensure the maximum of gain and the 
 minimum of loss from the proceedings of both of them. The 
 same considerations apply to a professional, artistic, or any 
 other career. It is only most useful to apply them to trade, 
 because, on the whole, at the present day, trade is the most 
 conspicuous agency in moulding nations and men into new 
 shapes ; and it is the best instance of the ambiguity of the 
 word ' selfish ' and of the thoroughly social character of the 
 most ' selfish' endeavours. 
 
 ' The American,' says his best critic, ' throws himself one 
 moment into politics, as if the State was all in all to him ; 
 and the next he devotes himself to his private business as if 
 he were alone in the world.' How is the alternation possible ? 
 Can a man be quite social and quite selfish by turns ? Can 
 he keep opposite qualities in separate pigeon-holes out of 
 contact with each other ? Of course there are no spiritual 
 pigeon-holes. To take up business, the generous man does 
 not lay aside his generosity. It is a question, however, 
 whether the apparently unsocial feelings, often associated 
 with the motto ' business is business,' are really so unsocial 
 as they seem, and whether the contents of the mythical 
 pigeon-holes are not inextricably shaken together. There is 
 a ne plus ultra of cold-hearted avarice, who is often pilloried 
 in literary sermons as the ideal Wise Man of political 
 
230 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CPJTICISM. 
 
 economy. The magazine writer would miss him if he were 
 gone; but, if truth is to conquer fiction, his place will 
 know him no more. It is easier to ask whether Macrowdy 
 has 'left off' grinding the faces of the poor than to prove 
 that he ever did so. Cruelty and coldness are often, no 
 doubt, practised by commercial men ; but they are not 
 entirely unknown in other walks of life, and the topical man 
 of business has no greater affinity for them than the states- 
 man, the theologian, or the justice of the peace. Eicardo is 
 perhaps the only economist whose works lend colour to the 
 opposite view. The occasional hardness of tone in the 
 * Wealth of Nations ' is largely due to the author's fondness 
 for stating one side at a time, lawyer fashion ; and it is not 
 difficult to show that his selfish pedlar principle of turning 
 a penny where a penny is to be got has much in it besides 
 selfishness. He often, it is true, identifies himself with 
 the pedlar. He says that the lifelong human desire of 
 bettering one's own condition usually takes a commercial 
 form, and through commerce benefits society far better than 
 any laws ; gain is the chief motive of all improvements, and 
 by pursuing his own interest a man usually does more good 
 to his neighbours than if he deliberately intended their 
 good. ' I have never known much good done by those who 
 affected to trade for the public good,' advertising elixirs of 
 life and sales at enormous sacrifice. If a man makes no 
 such pretensions, but simply seeks his own gain, then he is 
 'led by an invisible hand' to promote the gain of other 
 people. The moral is, leave trade and traders perfectly free. 
 ' All restraints therefore being taken away, the simple 
 system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord ; ' 
 and both the making of wealth and the sharing of it wiU be 
 at their best. 
 
 It is the penalty of comprehensiveness to give temptation 
 to the eclectic ; and Adam Smith does not escape the 
 penalty. Writers have taken hold of his sentences about 
 'natural liberty' and 'freedom of trade,' and they have 
 founded on them the doctrine of ' laissez faire,^ or ' hands off.' 
 Writers have pointed out that a little anarchy is better for 
 trade than a great deal of interference : the Hanseatic and 
 Italian towns in their palmiest days were not conspicuous for 
 good government, and much good government can go with 
 bad trade. We have theorists accordingly who recommend 
 
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 231 
 
 administrative Nihilism, or anarchy '^ks the constable, by 
 which they mean no more government than is required to 
 keep thieves in order and preserve to every man the fruits of 
 his labour. We ought not to have even a Post Office by law 
 established, but trust to the tender mercies of individual 
 enterprise, disciplined by the fear of competition. We are 
 never to do for a man what he can possibly do for himself; 
 all are to fend for themselves ; and division of labour, that 
 great spontaneous organiser of industrial forces, will work 
 out in good time the salvation of society. 
 
 There are many cheap and obvious objections to this 
 laissez faire theory. Logically, we ought not on these 
 principles even to use the policeman or the judge ; it would 
 make us more independent, to trust in our own muscle 
 and brain against our neighbour's force and fraud. This 
 would be a kind of Darwinism in politics; and the issue, 
 whatever it was, would not be a State. Individualists, as 
 a rule, do not go so far. They do not yet believe with the 
 eighteenth century that the fulness of time will dispense 
 with all government, all offences disappearing of their own 
 accord on the advent of human perfection. But Adam 
 Smith does not even go so far as our present individual- 
 ists. Every scientific doctrine of laissez faire must trace its 
 genealogy to him ; and yet he claimed no small field for 
 the action of the State. The State, to his mind, was profit- 
 able for defence, justice, and public works. He was so far 
 from believing in the infallible power of individualism to 
 cure its own wounds, that he advocated an Education Act 
 expressly to save the working man from being degraded by 
 the division of labour. In other words he did not regard 
 the ' struggle for existence ' as a panacea when we are at 
 the bottom of the scale, but only when we are in the upper 
 parts of it, where it becomes the hopeful desire of bettering 
 one's own condition. A totally uneducated man is very 
 unlikely to conceive the idea of bettering his own condition ; 
 and yet otherwise he has not entered on the full heritage 
 of his manhood. Therefore it is that for one man to die 
 ignorant who is capable of learning is the most tragic of all 
 facts, and therefore it is that a man's education is not the 
 private interest of his parents, but the public concern of 
 all citizens. ' Natural liberty,' in short, as it is conceived 
 by the father of political economy, is rather the positive 
 
232 ESSAYS IN PIIILOSOPHrCAL CRITICISM. 
 
 power to use powers than tlie negative absence of restraint ; 
 it is not without law, still less without society. Eousseau's 
 famous exordium, ' Man is born free, and he is everywhere 
 in chains,' might in this light be interpreted quite literally, 
 to signify that the citizen of a civilised State is not free 
 from society but free in society, ndt free from the laws, but 
 free because of them, for they enable him to work out the 
 aiins and interests of a reasonable being. So understood, 
 the laws of the State are not the limits of the citizen so 
 much as his* opportunities, not his enemies but his friends ; 
 and the State itself possesses a positive function towards 
 him, fulfilling his ends, not a mere overruling or repres- 
 sive function, reining in his aberrations. The general life 
 of the body politic would then be no mystical fiction, but the 
 most substantial and vital of secular realities ; and it would 
 be as true now as it was twenty centuries ago, that the 
 greatest service a father can do to his son is to make him 
 citizen of a good State. 
 
 The laissGz /aire of the Manchester School of Politics 
 is, on the whole, in harmony with this view of the State. It 
 proceeds always on a basis of law. Its unlimited competi- 
 tion is the competition of law-obeying citizens. The Man- 
 chester politicians believe that society has now developed so 
 completely out of status to contract, or in plain English out 
 of custom to bargain, that bargain is now the only proper 
 regime for Englishmen. But it is not bargain in vacuo ; it 
 is bargain under the conditions of English law; it is the 
 acquisition, use, and transfer of property under the condi- 
 tions of English law. Even if the whole Manchester pro- 
 gramme were passed and all special interference with trade 
 were abolished, there would still be the restriction of the 
 laws. Open competition does not mean a game without 
 rules, but a game in which all may take part if they submit 
 to the conditions of it, the conditions being in this case 
 the etiquette of trade and the law of the land. The etiquette 
 of trade may leave much room for private interpretation, 
 but it sensibly tones down the roughness of competition. 
 It is better to be defeated by an army than by a mob ; it 
 is better to be knocked about by a good fencer than by a 
 bad ; and it is better to struggle for existence with chival- 
 rous opponents who observe the rules of the game and secure 
 their end with the least possible suffering to all parties, 
 
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTEIS'CE. 233 
 
 than with those who have no ties and recognise no limit but 
 their own self-will. In the second place, to strive lawfully 
 means to obey the law of the land, the entire digested and 
 undigested mass of statute and case law which English- 
 men believe to be, in some mysterious way, essential to their 
 security and bound in the bundle of their civilisation. These 
 facts, however, are as easily turned against the one side as 
 against the other in the old quarrel. The philanthropist 
 may see in them a precedent for interference ; trade has never 
 been free. The economist may see a presumption against 
 any interference ; trade has never been lawless. He might 
 add that, besides the gross and palpable fetters of law, there 
 are other less tangible bonds whose subtle grip is never eluded, 
 and which may be called the social sentiments. 
 
 It is a significant fact that the book called the ' Moral 
 Sentiments ' was written many years before the ' Wealth of 
 Nations.' There is no doubt that the author meant the two 
 books to be part first and part second of a complete system 
 of sociology. In printing them so far away (in all senses 
 of the word) from one another he was simply following his 
 favourite plan of stating one side at a time. He wished us 
 therefore to supplement the one book by the other ; and, so 
 doing, we shall find that he understands commercial compe- 
 tition, from the very nature of the political society where it 
 takes place, to rest first on positive law, and in the second 
 place on social sentiment. This makes it easier to under- 
 stand how 'the invisible hand ' is able to lead the selfish 
 action of men to the best results. The competitors are 
 fellow-citizens ; they have not only the laws but the feelings 
 of citizenship to diminish the friction of their competition. 
 We have long passed the period when a belief in actual 
 kinship was needed to hold men together under one govern- 
 ment; but States have not yet become matters of mere 
 bargain, or convenient arrangements concluded purely for 
 material interests between people careless of each other's 
 welfare. Such a State would have no stronger bond than a 
 European concert ; and it is not simply the absence of a 
 controlling force that exposes such a concert to possibility 
 of discord ; it is the want, among its members, of that com- 
 mon understanding which enables the members of the same 
 nation (as distinguished from the parties to the same bar- 
 gain) to enter into one another's feelings, and really desire 
 
234 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 one another's welfare, or at least to feel ashamed of not seem- 
 ing to do so. It is the want of the feeling which makes a 
 man say he feels at home with his countrymen and not with 
 foreigners. Countrymen have had the same upbringing; 
 they have shared the same traditions, history, and customs ; 
 they have had a common literature ; they have loved and 
 hated the same men, or, if not, they have agreed to bury 
 schismatic passions, that there might be no schism in the 
 body politic. All true Frenchmen have forgotten Saint Bar- 
 tholomew, and all true Britons Flodden. Patriotism is simply 
 comradeship on a large scale ; it is the feeling that usually 
 exists between old boys of a good school, or old members of 
 a good college. As patriotism must precede cosmopolitan- 
 ism, patriotism itself must be preceded by provinciality, and 
 that by home sickness or the attachment of a man to his little 
 platoon or subdivision. The same series, stated in terms 
 of history, becomes the aphorism, ' Society developes from the 
 family to the tribe — from the tribe to the State.' Expressed 
 in terms of ' the Revolution,' it becomes the paradox, or the 
 axiom, ' Before liberty, fraternity, and before equality, both 
 of them.' From either it follows that the union of men 
 in a State is the effect, not the cause, of their union in 
 a nation or society, from which in turn it follows that the 
 most thorough reform must begin from below with society, 
 not from above with the State, however well the two may 
 help each other. At the same time, every building is some- 
 thing more than its materials; public opinion, defined by 
 laws, has something more in it than public opinion left un- 
 defined. A nation's customs, its long-established use and 
 wont, regulating the distribution of property, whether in 
 land or in goods, lose their mere vegetable nature when 
 definitely set forth in the form of laws. Somebody has said 
 that human laws are to human customs as these are to the 
 instincts of animals. Perhaps they are to each other as 
 word is to feeling. State a custom as a law, and it becomes 
 a general principle, applicable to all cases — not a vague 
 particular feeling, which people obey without reason and 
 may occasionally violate without reproach. Now here it 
 is that the negative functions of the State which relate 
 to Order are connected with the positive that relate to 
 Progress. If in its police or soldiery the State may be 
 regarded simply as a committee of public safety, in its 
 
I 
 
 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 235 
 
 legislation it enters on a path that does not simply return 
 on itself but goes indefinitely forward. Society is never so 
 truly State as when it is converting customs into laws ; and 
 in popular governments legislation and progress generally 
 go together. When a usage becomes the law of the land, 
 it invites criticism of the reason or unreason of it ; and, the 
 more accessible the laws, the oftener it will be asked if there 
 is no fault or flaw anywhere to be found in them. In other 
 words, the laws, that seemed to be intended only to preserve 
 order and define rules that were already in force de facto, 
 lead to progress and the making of new rules. Science 
 may even supersede custom, and may cause legislation to 
 anticipate public opinion instead of following it. It may 
 be that ' the great organiser . of modern States is scientific 
 knowledge ; ' it may be that the philosopher must be king. 
 But in most cases, at least in the present era, the beginning 
 will be from beneath. It will be the ripe growth of ideas 
 that are first local, then general, and lastly universal. All 
 government, we are told, was at first local government, and, 
 if the English parish is a miniature of the English State, 
 it is not because the parish has learned of the State, but 
 because the State has learned of the parish. The mercantile 
 law of England has grown out of the customs of merchants 
 gradually recognised by tribunals and formulated in decisions 
 and laws, the law even now refusing to override an invariable 
 custom. The most important matter is in every case not 
 the law itself, but the popular feeling to which it points, 
 the national idea or ideal of which it is an expression. It 
 is this that gives to all antiquated statutes, whether they 
 relate to game, paupers, or primogeniture, such a melancholy 
 interest. 
 
 The moral is, that a social training in the family and its 
 expansions precedes selfish action in the market and the 
 world. The life of a well-governed family supplies at least 
 half of the whole moral training ; it teaches reverence for 
 what is above, below, and around ; it gives a capacity of 
 deference and co-operation ; and even an ill-governed family 
 may have good traditions of a past generation, giving the 
 ingenuous youth something to aspire after. It is quite 
 true that, to have the whole nature drawn out, and all 
 the powers tested, a man must go out into the world and 
 face its competitive examinations ; he cannot escape the 
 
236 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CPJTICISM. 
 
 ' struggle for existence.' But, at tlie verj first beginnings 
 of his life, the citizen will see more of the union than 
 of the division in society, and these early lessons will not 
 be lost upon him. Here again the argument has a 
 double edge. The philanthropist may say, 'Behold how 
 justified is government in interfering with free competi- 
 tion ; fraternity always came before liberty.' The economist 
 may reply, ' See how little need there is for any interference; 
 liberty was always qualified by fraternity.' 
 
 Psychology, too, may have a word to say on the subject. 
 It may be shown that the desire to better one's condition 
 is not Selfish in the most invidious sense of the word. The 
 feelings of patriotism and love of kindred are usually charac- 
 terised as social feelings, in contrast to commercial ambition 
 which is selfish. No one denies nowadays that honest trading 
 means mutual gain to the traders ; it is neither beggaring 
 my neighbour nor beggaring myself, but serving both. But, 
 though the result is public benefit, the motive was personal 
 or selfish. To the trader ' business is business,' and he is 
 always pictured as refusing to bate a stiver unless it is so 
 nominated in the bond. He is assumed to be as much devoted 
 to his small hungry shivering self, and regardless of others, 
 as Robinson Crusoe alone on the island. But even Crusoe 
 could not be ' himself alone.' He lived in the world of memory ; 
 and all his acts and thoughts had reference to the society 
 of which he was an absent member, and for which he wrote 
 his 'Life and Adventures.' Society refuses to be pitched 
 out with a fork ; Crusoe was quite as selfish in his English 
 home as on the island. Indeed everyone feels, at the very 
 mention of the change of scene, that it was only among his 
 fellow-men that he could have had any opportunity for being 
 either selfish or unselfish, or for having any character at 
 all. There is a sense in which no one, and a sense in which 
 everyone is selfish, and there is a companion paradox — that 
 society does not kill character, it creates it ; if we rub each 
 other's angles down, we draw each other's talents out. But 
 let us ride over the ' first wave ' first. How are we to show 
 that in one sense there is no such thing as selfishness when 
 clever philosophers resolve all sin into it, and have seemed 
 therein to be much better understanded of the people than 
 their tribe usually are? The answer is that their arguments 
 may prove that all sin is selfishness, but not that all selfish- 
 
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 237 
 
 less is sin. The extreme of selfishness is certainly the extreme 
 of sin. The separation of part of the world from the whole 
 is what they mean by metaphysical evil, chaos, or ' objective 
 selfishness ; ' the attempt of any individuals to separate 
 themselves from the whole body of human beings is the 
 essence of moral evil or 'subjective selfishness.' But the 
 perfect isolation of an individual is as impossible as chaos. 
 Either of them would put us to 'permanent intellectual 
 confusion.' The highest degree of moral and metaphysical 
 evil would be reached if every atom, human or otherwise, 
 were to set up for itself, and try to be ' itself alone.' Good- 
 ness, on the other hand, combines freedom and law ; to be a 
 law unto oneself does not mean to defy the rest of the uni- 
 verse. The wicked (according to Plato), try the defiance and 
 find it impossible ; and the righteous will not try it at all. 
 The very worst kind of selfishness recognises the impossi- 
 bility of isolation by making others the means of its ends, 
 and feeding on the spoils of its rivals. It may not be right to 
 derive all a man's moral sentiments solely from his power 
 of putting himself in another man's place ; that may be 
 only one special example of a general power to convert a 
 particular into a genus. But, whatever its origin, its efficacy 
 in this region is undoubted. In the first place ambition 
 courts opposition in order to have the pleasure of over- 
 coming it ; and victory itself is tasteless without the specta- 
 tor's applause and the foe's submission. In the second place, 
 ambition seeks spoils for its friends, relations, or family, 
 who are a great part of its own life. Even when the heart 
 is set on science, travel, art, invention, and all the large 
 interests which our latter-day civilisation has done so much 
 to multiply and make popular, there is always a latent 
 thought of others in the mind of the most single-hearted 
 enthusiast. The savant, if there be such, whose labours 
 are so purely 'objective' that he carries their achieve- 
 ments unrecorded into the grave with him, is chiefly sus- 
 tained by the Pharisaic consciousness of originality. Men 
 may often be destitute of any deliberate intention either to 
 benefit or to injure their fellows ; but do what they please 
 they cannot be neutral. They cannot unspin or unweave 
 themselves, they are threads either of warp or woof. They 
 cannot be singular and separate, either in their ends or in 
 their means. ' No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth 
 
238 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CPJTICISM. 
 
 to himself.' ' A man ' in fact ' is an abstraction, and there 
 is nothing real but humanity.' A man owes his character 
 to his action upon others and their action upon him. The 
 industrial counterpart of these psychological facts, the 
 division of labour, is a commonplace of work-a-day life, and 
 perhaps the only one which gives a show of reason to the 
 anti-jesuitical saying, ' means are more important than ends.' 
 There is no end in life which can be fulfilled by one man 
 without the work of other men past and present, dead and 
 living, practical and intellectual. No man can be a protec- 
 tionist in his own country or among his own kindred; 
 division of labour made perfect by co-operation is the key 
 to the greatest movements of industrial civilisation. There 
 is a famous passage in the ' Wealth of ISTations ' where Adam 
 Smith, perhaps thinking of Eousseau, contrasts the unac- 
 commodated noble savage with the civilised agricultural 
 labourer, and finds that there is a wider distance between 
 humble Hodge and the King of Dahomey, than between King 
 George and humble Hodge. Tlie savage king has perhaps 
 made all his wardrobe himself, down to the very primitive 
 stitchings, if they have any, of his very primitive garments, if 
 they are plural. The English peasant does not let his neigh- 
 bours off so easily. If we take account of all the materials 
 of his jacket alone, and their treatment from first to last, 
 it will take a long time to exhaust the list of trades and 
 traders who have worked for him, from the sailor to the 
 bricklayer, from the chemist to the ironfounder. He has 
 not so much majesty as an African chief; but he has 
 more of the comforts of life which are owing to civilisation. 
 If civilisation gives us only the elements of happiness, and 
 not the happiness itself, still it is something to have the 
 elements ; the happiness may come hereafter. 
 
 Industrial union, therefore, fastens another fetter on the 
 competition of selfish atoms, or at least tones down the 
 effects of their selfishness. When Hegel, who knew little 
 economics beyond the ' Wealth of Nations,' rejoiced in 
 Adam Smith's extension of the reign of law to matters of 
 trade, he was thinking chiefly of the -simple system of natural 
 liberty' and the mutual dependence due to division of labour. 
 Mutual dependence is no doubt not the same thing as the 
 consciousness of it, and the latter can only keep pace Avith 
 the former through the constant reiteration of proofs as well 
 
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 239 
 
 as truths. But both of them bear out the same conclusion ; 
 — it is simply impossible for a man to be so selfish as com- 
 pletely to separate himself from others. Ou the other hand 
 it is impossible for a man to be so unselfish as to give him- 
 self up completely into the hands of others. It is as in 
 the old dispute of private judgment against authority. 
 Even the Catholic exercises the right of private judgment 
 at the moment when he decides that as for him and his 
 house he will serve the Church. It is he and not another 
 who wills the act by which he gives up his will to another. 
 The only person who would have no private judgment would 
 be the man who never sufficiently awoke out of the sleep of 
 custom to have any judgment at all, but lived on as his 
 fathers did before him. So the man who wills to be unselfish 
 does not get rid of self; on that point we are all utilitarians 
 of the old school ; we believe that every action has the self in 
 it. But, as the old school delighted to confound pleasure 
 with good pleasure, an intellectual element with an 
 emotional, so ' common sense ' confounds regenerate with un- 
 regeoerate selfishness ; she shakes her head and says they 
 are all the same, though there are really good and bad sorts, 
 and, whether a man's selfishness is of the one or the other 
 depends on the aims on which his heart is set, and which 
 really give him his character. To a man whose self includes 
 other selves the reproach of selfishness has no sting ; its 
 bite is for the man who has a narrow notion of self, and would 
 like not only gravitation but reform to cease when he goes 
 by. Even the worst men have something social in their 
 notion of self; and the good men have more than a little — 
 they have all the social interests that make life valuable. 
 But, if selfishness is so ambiguous, and if moral character 
 depends on the nature of the interests which almost con- 
 stitute the self, it is useless for moralists to erect self- 
 denial into a cardinal virtue. It is a duty turned inside 
 out ; and their exhortations are only useful when they are 
 immediately followed by a positive description of the end to 
 be sought. We must not quote ' if a man would be my 
 disciple, let him take up his cross,' without adding 'and 
 follow me.' To cast aside every weight becomes a matter of 
 course as soon as we are convinced that we have something 
 to run for. Self-sacrifice is often as canting a phrase in 
 moral lectures as Evolution in scientific, though for very 
 
240 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 different reasons. Abstinence and self-denial mean suffering 
 and evil ; and to defend any practice of them at all we must 
 look at their motives. The great elevating force in the world 
 has been not any abstract idea of self-denial, which might 
 easily become a glorification of suicide, but the expulsive 
 power of a new affection which would have expelled no evil 
 if it had not impelled to some good. It is positive well-doing 
 and the enthusiasm of humanity that are the first and great 
 commandment of Christians. It is not a resolve to avoid 
 sin, but a strong attraction for good persons and causes that 
 makes any sin impossible. It is a positive ideal, not a de-- 
 terrent fear, that will elevate humanity ; and a good spirit 
 will not try so much to cast out the devils, as to make the 
 very devils subject unto him. 
 
 This principle may be applied, amongst other passions, 
 to the love of money. How does it happen that modern 
 economists have, on the whole, been so nearly unanimous in 
 regarding commercial ambition as a good thing for humanity, 
 while ancient morality frowned on it and ancient economists 
 thought it a vice, though a vice that might occasionally 
 become a public benefit ? Simply because the phrase ' love 
 of money ' meant the love of what money brings, and what 
 it brought was even more often evil long ago than it is 
 now. It was never, even to the miser, the childish liking 
 for a glittering metal ; still less can it be so now, when hard 
 coin has been lowered from the absolute into the constitu- 
 tional monarch of the money market. It means the desire 
 of wealth ; wealth means what satisfies wants ; and wants 
 vary with the civilisation of men. The desire to make 
 money may perhaps most commonly be the desire to make 
 others feel our power over them. But it may be the 
 chivalrous desire to have the first place in one's own trade, 
 to build the best ships, to have the best farm. It may be 
 something still further away from actual trade ; a man may 
 only desire a fortune in order to get into Parliament, or to be 
 a great philanthropist, or to promote a religious mission, or 
 to have leisure for writing books. In other words, commer- 
 cial ambition is not itself the universal motor force of modern 
 society, but rather the necessary machinery by which the 
 forces work ; it is not the steam or the work done ; it is only 
 the engine. Strictly speaking, wealth means the abundance 
 of good things, not the tools for exchanging them or the 
 
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 241 
 
 means of getting them ; and men's notions of good tilings 
 vary with their wants, and their wants vary with their 
 country, climate, and history. This is not an accidental 
 variation. No doubt there is a variation of fashions, which 
 means simply the momentary revival of past and dropping 
 of present, without regard to any requirements of new know- 
 ledge or improved taste. But over and- above the mere 
 changes of fashion there is a progressive expansion of wants 
 which takes place in all but the very lowest strata of civi- 
 lised society. The luxuries of one age become the necessaries 
 of the next. The general cheapening of the comforts of life, 
 under a regime of free trade, bring the good things of the 
 rich within reach of the poor. The poor become loth to lose 
 them ; they desire to have a permanently higher rate of 
 wages rather than to multiply their numbers down to the 
 rate at which those worked who had not tasted the new 
 comforts. The physical or animal minimum of wages, which 
 is the object of the struggle for bare existence, is almost a 
 fixed quantity ; its variations are not progressive. But the 
 social minimum, the necessaries of good existence, is in its 
 normal state when it is ever adding to itself. It is good to 
 think that the British workman's savings and spendings 
 alike imply a margin beyond bare necessaries. The ' struggle 
 for existence,' when it means this struggle to retain acquired 
 or social necessaries, is so far from evil that it is perhaps 
 the chief redeeming feature of our civilisation ; and the 
 greatest enemies of the modern State are those of either 
 extreme of political party who would persuade men that 
 such a progress is not contemplated or even admitted by the 
 organisation of our present State. 
 
 A modern writer, who is too wise to be either optimist or 
 pessimist, has made an eloquent protest against the common 
 glorification of industrial progress. He declares that not the 
 progressive but the stationary state of wealth is the best for 
 the spiritual interests and true happiness of humanity. It 
 is not good, he thinks, that luxurious wants should multiply, 
 and that the making of material good things should absorb 
 the best energies of humanity. In this revolt against eco- 
 nomical tradition he was probably guided by the true 
 philosophical instinct which refuses to confound the spiritual 
 infinity of the shoeblack with the boundless greediness of 
 the shoeblack's finite appetites. At the same time it is difficult 
 
 R 
 
242 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 to believe tlie arrest of material progress to be compatible 
 with the continuation of spiritual. A man's knowledge of 
 himself and his knowledge of nature go hand in hand. 
 Moreover, great wealth differs from small wealth far less in the 
 quantity than in the quality of its good things. Material 
 progress does not mean merely an indefinite multiplication 
 of useless enjoyments, but an improvement in the character 
 of the enjoyments themselves, together with such a cheapen- 
 ing of them as brings them within reach of a large circle of 
 people instead of a small. Progress here, as elsewhere, 
 comes from ideas. Ideas of well-being have far more in- 
 fluence in industry than any other cause whatever. 
 
 These are a few of the social prolegomena, without which 
 economical science is abstract and unreal. They have a 
 double bearing. They point to the entire impossibility of 
 the Eicardian regime of rigorous competition ; and, granting 
 the possibility, they would qualify the conclusions of orthodox 
 economics. In the first place it was seen that the ' struggle 
 for existence ' in the lower strata of society is not a political 
 good but a political evil. Starvation is no stimulus, except 
 to wrongdoing; the true stimulus is ideas, and therefore, 
 in the second place, in all strata except the lowest, and in 
 the middle strata most of all, the ' struggle for existence ' 
 means ambition. In the third place, in our time this 
 ambition, whatever its end, depends largely for its means 
 on material wealth. Commercial ambition is therefore the 
 most common variety of the species, and it is the most in- 
 fluential in its social consequences. At the same time, just 
 because the immediate is not the real end of it, it has an in- 
 finite variety of social complexion and moral character, de- 
 pending as these do rather on its real than on its apparent 
 end. In the fourth place, the ' struggle for existence,' in 
 the sense of the unlimited competition of ambitious men 
 of business, is neither so unfeeling nor so unlimited as it 
 seems. Political molecules must have political characteristics ; 
 and commercial competitors are not dots on a slate or atoms 
 in free space, but very concrete and sensitive human beings 
 beset on all sides with limitations. They are limited (a) by 
 the written laws which provide for the safety of the country 
 and the security and freedom of its citizens, (b) by the laws 
 which define into a clear general rule the old usage of their 
 nation concerning the holding and transferring of property, 
 
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 243 
 
 (c) by the old usage itself, by the unwritten laws of etiquette 
 and custom, and by the common feelings, religious and 
 otherwise, of their nationality, (d) by the fact that even the 
 selfish actions of a human being have the stamp of society 
 upon them, and are always less selfish than he intends. The 
 self of a man means the interest he follows : and he cannot 
 pursue even the narrower interests of himself or his smallest 
 circle without unintentionally serving the public, (e) Eco- 
 nomical progress by division of labour and union of labourers 
 confirms this necessity. But {/), if a man would be a good 
 citizen in his own person, if he would strengthen the bonds 
 of the society v/hich has made him what he is, he must have 
 the good will as well as the good deed ; he must know the 
 doctrine as well as do the will. It is not enough to be, he 
 must know, for the life of a people depends far more on its 
 ideas and sentiments than on its social machinery. 
 
 The same positions may be stated in more formal philo- 
 sophical language. The objective idealism of Germany, if 
 it has done nothing else, has loosened the old English belief 
 in the separateness of things distinguishable, a belief which 
 invented many insoluble problems and created many doubts 
 out of certainties. Political economists used to speak as if 
 their method of study must be either inductive or deductive 
 but not both, and as if production and distribution moved on 
 two difl:erent lines because they could be treated in two 
 separate chapters. But, here as elsewhere, and especially 
 on the borders of the social sciences, while we cannot be 
 too careful to distinguish, we cannot be too careful not to 
 separate. The higher the scale of life in the world, the 
 more numerous will be the elements that enter into it, and 
 the more truly they will become at once distinguishable 
 and inseparable. The greater therefore will be the felt im- 
 possibility of describing the living thing by any category 
 which does not share in the living thing's complexity. It 
 follows in the first place, then, that to describe men as 
 ' animals struggling for food ' is no more satisfactory than to 
 describe the United Kingdom as two pieces of land surrounded 
 by water. When men are no more than struggling animals, 
 they are depressed below their humanity and hardly worthy 
 of a description by greater categories. The civil society 
 in which they first become truly human owes some of its 
 materials but none of its distinctive attributes to the merely 
 
 B 2 
 
% 
 
 244 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 animal instincts of struggling men ; a statue does not owe 
 its beauty to the plaster or the marble. In the second 
 place, man's life in civil society cannot be adequately 
 described in terms of his mere repulsion from his fellows 
 or his struggles with them. He is not an atom falling 
 against others in a chance passage through space. He is 
 an individual member of a union of men which was formed 
 by no accident ; he is distinct from the rest but not 
 separable from them, having a character of his own but 
 owing its development to them. In the third place, civil 
 society, which is the sum total of competing individuals, 
 their families, and their associations, is quite distinct from 
 the State, and yet inseparable from it. The State represents 
 not the particular aims of the several parts, but the chief 
 ends of the whole. If the parts depend on society for their 
 character, they depend on the State for their career ; and on 
 the other hand the general life which culminates in the 
 State as its chief organ would be a mere abstraction if it 
 were not consciously present to the thoughts and sentiments 
 of the citizens. It is not enough then to say that the one is 
 universal and the other particular. These categories are 
 nearly as meagre as the one and the many. Even life and 
 animal life fall short of the truth, and we dare not use 
 human life, for it is the thing to be defined. Organism 
 wiU best serve the purpose, if it be clearly understood not 
 to mean the animal union of members in one body bnt 
 the type of an ideal union of members in one life, of 
 which the best known example is not the body but the body 
 politic. For, in the body politic, the general life is from first 
 to last the foundation of all individual energy ; and yet the 
 individual members pay back the debt by a felt sympathy 
 and conscious union with the commonwealth, to which the 
 commonwealth in turn owes all its perennial health and 
 vigour. The citizen owes much to his country ; the country 
 is nothing without its citizens. To make the State all in 
 all with Bismarck, or the individual all in all with Spencer, 
 is to fall into equally false speculation and equally dangerous 
 policy. 
 
 These prolegomena may perhaps point to a partial 
 solution of some social problems, and few problems can 
 hope for more. The philosopher has happily no powers of 
 prediction. He cannot tell what will become of States and 
 
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 246 
 
 nations in the moral and economical millennium, or even 
 sixty years hence, when the earth's inhabitants know each 
 other better and the enthusiasm of humanity has a fairer 
 chance. He only knows that it is the peculiarity of human 
 development to incorporate its conquests, and that nothing 
 good will be lost. The most violent reformations, revolu- 
 tions, and reactions have never done more than seem to 
 break the continuity of progress; and philosophers best 
 anticipate the future when they understand the present. It 
 may be thought that their reach should always exceed their 
 grasp ; but is it not written, in the book of the Fables of 
 ^sop, that in reaching after the future a certain too sanguine 
 aspirant lost his hold of the present, of which alas ! in the 
 end he found it only the reflection '? 
 
 James Bonar. 
 
246 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPmCAL CRITICISM. 
 
 IX. 
 
 PE8SIMI8M AND THE RELIGIOUS 
 
 CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 The presupposition of thought and life in the eighteenth 
 century was the supremacy of the individual. Applied to the 
 prevailing absolutism of the day, this principle proved itself 
 mighty for destruction, and secured the overthrow of the 
 ancien regime in all its forms, in politics, religion, and 
 philosophy. When, however, it came to be employed as an 
 instrument of reconstruction its powerlessness speedily be- 
 came manifest. In the philosophy of Hume the current 
 individualism was gathered up in its full significance, and 
 wrought out to conclusions in which its inability to afford 
 a rational theory of experience or a practical force for 
 life stands well-nigh confessed. In the fate of the French 
 Ee volution, the inherent weakness of the system, thus 
 speculatively expressed, became manifest to the world's 
 perception. The individualism of the last century is be- 
 queathed, accordingly, to the present, as at once an axiom 
 and a problem. On the one hand it is impossible to return 
 to the system which it overthrew; and on the other it is 
 impossible to abide in it, for it has itself been overthrown. 
 That the individual has in himself, apart from all non- 
 essential circumstances, an infinite value — a man's a man 
 for a' that — and has therefore a rightful claim upon the 
 universe for satisfaction, has been wrought into the public 
 opinion of our day. No theory of reform which ignores this 
 element in the social problem can be of any practical worth. 
 Every scheme for the future must give ample scope to the 
 principle which has won for itself inalienable right to 
 recognition. At the same time, the mere assertion of this 
 doctrine is fatal to the interests, and even to the existence of 
 society. When the individual makes his claim to infinite 
 
PESSIMISM AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 247 
 
 satisfaction, he is immediately confronted by another with 
 the same demand, and there ensues an infinite opposition. 
 Each makes an exclusive claim to a central position in the 
 universe ; the very presence of the one to the other involves 
 the necessity of a combat, whose antagonism is as incalcul- 
 able as the greatness of the prize contended for, and which 
 with all its anguish, felt as keenly by the victor as by 
 the vanquished, must endure till both vanish from the scene 
 of conflict. The state of war to which a society conceived 
 as an aggregate of such elements is reduced, is, however, no 
 more than a realisation in outward fact of a conflict which 
 takes place within the individual consciousness. The self 
 claims infinite satisfaction; but, by the very terms of its 
 claim, it shows itself to be merely finite, and therefore in- 
 capable of the satisfaction which it demands. The claim is 
 a mere claim, the formal ascription of absoluteness, infini- 
 tude, freedom, to the subject, without filling these terms 
 with any positive meaning. As infinite and free the self 
 claims the world as its own ; but, since its conception of 
 infinitude and freedom involves no positive relation to the 
 world, it sets itself against the world, is accordingly 
 limited by it, and is therefore not infinite, not free. Nor 
 can any progressive series of victories over the world 
 get rid of the defect of its first start on its career. 
 With a merely abstract claim, every object of desire as it 
 presents itself is external, and therefore a limit. The 
 acquisition of such objects, even in an endless manner, is no 
 nearer approach to the satisfaction craved for than the first 
 most trifling gain. The limit is still there, and the self, 
 whose demand was that nothing should limit it, is no more 
 free than when first it asserted its right to freedom, while it 
 has to suff'er the added pain of weariness. 
 
 This doctrine of the infinitude of the finite self, with all 
 its rightfulness, and self-contradiction, and suffering, has 
 been wrought out during the present century with every 
 variety of practical consequence. Literature has been filled 
 with it. If men do not now retire like Obermann to mourn 
 amid Alpine solitudes, it is chiefly because grief can find no 
 loneliness in a world where conflict and soitow are absolutely 
 universal. Byron might exhibit ' the pageant of his bleed- 
 ing heart through Europe to the ^tolian shore,' without 
 attracting the slightest attention from a world too well 
 
248 ESSAYS IN nilLOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 aware that every heart is bleeding to need any demonstration 
 of the fact. In the sphere of politics there is abundant 
 ground for the very greatest alarm. There is no State in 
 Europe which has not before it a problem that may at any 
 moment find for itself tragic utterance, a problem constituted 
 by the presence of an element which force can never crush, 
 which must continue to assert itself till, by justice done to 
 it, it be lifted beyond the possibility of harmful activity. 
 It is in the domain of mercantile life, however, which now in 
 England is practically co-extensive with the social sphere, 
 that individualism has had its most disintegrating effect. 
 With the magic formula of laissez faire for its motto, it has 
 occupied the whole field of political economy. Even by those 
 who would acknowledge its inadequacy in other departments 
 of life, it has been held to be the sole possibly regnant 
 principle of the' market, till the commercial world, isolated 
 from a realm where higher principles are allowed to prevail, 
 has become practically destitute of them, and conducts its 
 affairs without any reference to them, and too often in direct 
 defiance of them. Markets are becoming daily more crowded, 
 practice more sharp ; amid large sections of the commnnity, 
 embracing multitudes who could not be classed among the 
 poor, the aim of business is being ever more nearly narrowed 
 to the problem of bare existence ; while on every hand there is 
 manifest a dissatisfaction that is abundantly justified by the 
 repeated occurrence of commercial crises. 
 
 When such an experience is seen in its unity and re- 
 ceives a reflective expression, there results pessimism as a 
 philosophical system, which, whatever be the speculative 
 afiiliation of its various forms, is no more than a description 
 of existing facts, and the assertion that these constitute 
 the whole inevitable truth of life. The interest and 
 the strength of pessimistic systems lie, accordingly, in that 
 individualism which is their unquestioned presupposition, and 
 which, if it be granted to them, constitutes a quite impreg- 
 nable position. They make, indeed, the profession which 
 every system that pretends to be philosophical must make, 
 of starting from experience and aiming at nothing more 
 than a comprehension of its meaning, a grasp of its reality, 
 in the unity of some intelligible principle. But the expe- 
 rience from which they start has already been conceived in 
 an individualistic fashion. The facts with which they deal 
 
PESSIMISM AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 249 
 
 are the facts of a world so long dominated by individualism 
 that the latter seems to be part of its original constitution, 
 presenting not theories to be discussed but data to be 
 accepted. Their investigations therefore are predetermined 
 towards individualistic conclusions. Whatever be the line 
 of argument adopted, whatever be the metaphysical school 
 to which allegiance is professed, the result is still the same, 
 and ultimately consists in the explicit statement of the 
 individualism which constituted the starting-point. 
 
 Schopenhauer, for instance, in his elevation of the thing- 
 in-itself, which to Kant had been the unrealisable ideal of pure 
 reason, the unverifiable reality of the practical reason, into 
 the principle of the universe, was simply following the lines 
 upon which the whole movement of thought subsequent to 
 Kant proceeded. His pessimism emerges when he identifies 
 the last manifestation of will with the individual self, and 
 abides by this position, refusing to leave it save by a move- 
 ment which is not a transcendence of the individuality of 
 the self, but an extinction of the self altogether. We may 
 admit with him that every assertion of the individual in his 
 exclusive individuality only increases his misery, that hope 
 lies only in the stoppage of all such assertion, in the prompt 
 cessation of this ' luckless episode in the blissful repose of 
 nothing.' But that the individual can exist only in exclu- 
 sive individuality, that there is no possibility of a life for 
 him in which, through devotion to an end beyond himself, 
 he may achieve the fulness of his own being, is for Schopen- 
 hauer a foregone conclusion, an axiom which he never 
 dreams of proving ; and it is precisely this that is the point 
 at issue. 
 
 Hartmann, in like manner, does no more than participate 
 in the spirit of all post-Kantian development, when he seeks 
 a principle whose unity shall underlie and account for all 
 the differences of the universe. His pessimism, however, 
 arises from his identification of consciousness with exclusive- 
 nesri. The knowledge to which a man awakes in conscious- 
 ness is certainly of himself as confronted by the world, 
 forced to maintain himself against it, to win his satisfaction 
 from it by contest with it. But this, which is undeniably a 
 stage in the history of self-consciousness, is given by Hart- 
 mann as the whole account of it. The final manifestation 
 of the unconscious is, accordingly, a world of mutually ex- 
 
250 ESSAYS IN PmLOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 elusive beings, each to be judged from the standpoint of his 
 mere individuality. Hartmann's proof of pessimism is thus 
 simple and conclusive ; take the happiness of each individual 
 as a test, and forthwith the world stands utterly condemned. 
 Whatever be the sphere in which happiness is sought, 
 whether the present life, the life beyond the grave, or the 
 future of humanity, in all alike it is unattainable, the effort 
 after it fraught with nothing but misery. A pessimistic 
 philosophy is exhibited by Hartmann to be the necessary con- 
 sequence of an individualistic ethic. Conceive of happiness 
 as the satisfaction of the individual in his isolation, and at 
 once the world is seen to be incapable of affording it. The 
 inevitableness of the conclusion may be fully conceded ; the 
 question that remains is the rightfulness of the presupposition. 
 The horrors of pessimism accordingly cannot be used as an 
 argument against it. In its gloomiest statements pessimism 
 is simply developing the consequences of a view of the world 
 that is common to it with many theories which have re- 
 frained from drawing pessimistic conclusions. If human 
 nature be so limited that any passage across its barriers into 
 a wider life beyond, any real identity with interests more 
 than individual, is impossible ; if, being what he is, a man 
 can have no other end than the satisfaction of his exclusive 
 self, and if the whole movement of the world be towards 
 the endless repetition of such isolated points of humanity, 
 no conclusion is possible but misery, the agony of a thinly- 
 disguised anarchic war, the anguish of an infinite disappoint- 
 ment. It is the last and fullest account of the world as it is 
 presented to us by individualism. This is, however, from 
 the other side, the criticism of individualism upon itself; 
 and pessimism is doing for our age what Hume did for his, 
 wrenching the presuppositions of the day from their position 
 of unquestioned acceptance, giving explicit statement to 
 their full significance, and setting them in the light of their 
 legitimate and necessary consequences. Pessimism involves 
 and promulgates, as the only hope for the world, the destruc- 
 tion of every form of life, the cessation of the present 
 development, and the exhaustion of the possibility of any 
 other; but this is just the paradoxical statement of the 
 impossibility of any intelligible or rational experience on the 
 principles by means of which it has reached these results. 
 If this view of the significance of pessimism be correct, 
 
PESSBnSM AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 251 
 
 it evidently admits of no direct reply, a,nd our interest in it 
 does not lie in its confutation. It is not a one-sided state- 
 ment of some of the facts of life, which may be sujB&ciently 
 disposed of by calling attention to others. It is a concep- 
 tion of life as a whole, and can be met by nothing less com- 
 prehensive than itself. The presence of pessimism in modern 
 thought is the demand for the reconstruction of modern life. 
 Its function is to set forth the manifold elements of which 
 the modern world is composed, in all the isolation which 
 individualistic principles have conferred upon them, and by 
 a truthful statement of the consequent conflict, in all its 
 misery and hopelessness, to give utterance to the ultimate 
 need of the age, the need of a principle which shall deliver 
 these elements from the discord of their isolation, and bring 
 them into a harmony of working which shall secure a trium- 
 phant issue. The world which pessimism describes to us is 
 a world in fragments ; its evil is its fragmentary character. 
 Its first necessity therefore is a principle of synthesis, the 
 extent of whose application shall be as wide as the criticism 
 of pessimism, which shall be able to penetrate throughout 
 the whole sphere which individualism has disintegrated, and 
 reconstitute it as an organic unity. With the vindication of 
 such a principle the function of pessimism would be over, 
 for its demand would have been answered ; its truth would 
 cease, for the world would no longer answer to its description. 
 It is through the power of some such principle of syn- 
 thesis that the best ethical results have hitherto been 
 secured. History proves that men have laboured most effec- 
 tively when they have realised their identity with a principle 
 supreme throughout their world, leaving no element in it in 
 isolation, but leading all to the unity of one result. The 
 family has formed the centre of a fair and harmonious ex- 
 istence, with attractive force sufficient to issue in tragic 
 deeds of loyalty ; the State has afforded the sphere of an in- 
 tense and brilliant life, and has claimed and received the 
 passionate service of its citizens ; the Church has its trea- 
 sury of heroic memories, in which even its exiles find a 
 grateful heritage. In this new world, accordingly, where 
 new elements have arisen to give the problem of life a 
 deeper form, deliverance from despair and inspiration of 
 hope can come only through the realisation of a life which 
 shall be the harmony of all its varied elements, so that each 
 
252 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 shall manifest the whole, and m the whole find its place and 
 justification, a life therefore open to man as the source and 
 strength of his activity, the starting-point of his career, and 
 its victorious achievement. 
 
 In the pages that follow we endeavour to gain some 
 outline of the conditions under which such a synthesis is 
 possible, and of the nature of the response which it makes 
 to the problem of pessimism. It will be helpful, however, 
 in our quest for the needed synthesis to begin by a brief 
 study of the synthesis proposed by Positivism. In this way 
 we may have the better hope of being borne through criti- 
 cism to our conclusion. 
 
 The importance of Positivism lies in the fact that it has 
 faced the problem of the day, and in full consciousness of 
 the need of men, has offered itself to them as its complete 
 response. Its founder is emphatically a product of this 
 century, with its strict affiliation to the last and its earnest 
 effort to effect a transition from it. Comte accepts the 
 speculative principles of the individualism of which Hume 
 gave the complete exposition. He holds its theory of know- 
 ledge, and has made its rejection of theology and meta- 
 physics peculiarly his own. He does not, however, belong 
 to the era in which individualism was preached as a gospel. 
 There has intervened the terrible criticism of the French 
 Revolution, and modern thought has begun its onward 
 movement with a strong reaction. In this reaction Comte 
 so far participates as to see clearly the negative character of 
 individualism, its incapacity to afford a basis of moral ex- 
 perience or to inaugurate a process of social organisation. 
 At the same time he well understands the futility of a mere 
 reaction, the impossibility of blotting out an eloquent page 
 of history, and returning to a life that had been left behind 
 for ever. In full accord with the best thought of his day, 
 he points out the priority of society to the individual, w^ho, 
 indeed, apart from his social relations, would be neither 
 self-conscious nor moral. Moral life depends on the attain- 
 ment of a unity, which has been defined for us by an English 
 positivist ' as that state of man's moral, intellectual, and 
 physical functions which allows the greatest sum of resul- 
 tant energy ; in which there is the greatest vigour of each 
 part consistent with the vigour of the whole ; in which all 
 human forces converge freely toward a common end, as few 
 
PESSBnSM AND THE EELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 253 
 
 of them as possible being wasted by mutual antagonism or 
 by misdirection.' ^ He recognises accordingly, as the first 
 necessity of the age, a principle of synthesis whereby ele- 
 ments constantly tending to disintegration may be wrought 
 into the unity of one all-pervasive life. It must confront the 
 individual as a power to which he must submit, bringing into 
 subjection to it every wandering impulse, every selfish aim ; 
 it must come close to him as a personality whom he may 
 love, in communion with whom he may find the satisfaction 
 of his purest and tenderest emotions ; while finally, he must 
 stand free in the presence of it, only, however, that with the 
 more perfect moral effect he may devote himself to it, finding 
 for the first time in its service perfect freedom. 
 
 In reaching such a principle of synthesis, Comte is 
 guided not simply by his desire to transcend the standpoint 
 of an individualistic ethic, but also by his determination to 
 avoid, in obedience to speculative principles which he never 
 questioned, the absolute position of theology or metaphysics. 
 Synthesis is necessary, but it must content itself with the 
 limits of subjectivity. To the required position we are 
 brought by the development of science, which presents, as 
 its culmination, the idea of humanity as ' an organic 
 and self-developing unity.' Although such a position re- 
 frains from making the extravagant and unreal claims of 
 theology, it is only that it may substantiate others more 
 practical. It allows that there is much which man can 
 never know, to which he can never relate himself; but it 
 claims to afford within the boundlessness of the universe a 
 sphere within which man may dwell, and find himself perfectly 
 at home, living a life of perfect harmony in all loveliness and 
 hope. Here all divergent faculties and impulses are disci- 
 plined and orfyanised in reference to one supreme end ; here 
 men are delivered from isolation and are brought into unity 
 with the power to which they owe everything ; here they are 
 redeemed from self-seeking, and their lives become the ex- 
 pression of their gratitude. It is true that beyond the walls 
 of this holy city there lies an alien world, into perfect har- 
 mony with which man can never be brought. But this evil 
 is reduced to a minimum by the beneficent action of hu- 
 manity, and need cast no shadow on the brightness of man's 
 reconciled life. With the surrounding unfriendly element 
 
 » Bridges' Letter to J. S. Mill, p. 32. 
 
254 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOrHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 the individual is never brought into direct conflict ; between 
 him and it there ever intervenes as his substitute and de- 
 liverer the gracious presence of humanity. The hard pres- 
 sure of external fate, as it is transmitted through this 
 medium, becomes ever more modified and transformed till, 
 when at length it does reach the individual, it is scarcely 
 distinguishable from the tender touch of love. True it is, 
 when all is done, the Divine Eedeemer is not omnipotent ; 
 but this, so far from diminishing our reverence, only adds to 
 it the beauty of a compassion that knows nothing of con- 
 tempt. Thus drawing us to itself, this holy and beautiful 
 object of worship fills our whole horizon, constitutes our 
 whole world, affords our complete satisfaction. 
 
 Thus Positivism solves the problem of pessimism by a 
 synthesis which, disclaiming all absolute pretensions, main- 
 tains that it relates organically to one another all elements 
 within its limits, so that within these limits each can find 
 itself secure and live in confidence. To the extent of the 
 domain won by this principle, good is certainly victorious ; 
 for those who live wholly within these bounds, whose lives 
 are completely determined by this principle, evil is no in- 
 vincible foe, and their world is the sphere of their triumph. 
 Before the beauty of the positivist ideal, criticism is silent ; it 
 can concern itself only with the competency of Positivism to 
 vindicate for its ideal the character of possibility. In the first 
 place, therefore, there meets us the notion of humanity as 
 an organic unity, at once the sphere and the principle of 
 moral life ; while in the second place, inasmuch as humanity 
 is confessedly not an ultimate standpoint, there remains the 
 question of the validity of a method which, discerning a 
 goal that is unattainable, can bring us on our way to it pre- 
 cisely thus far and no further. 
 
 I. In the first place, then, it is as an organism, that 
 humanity is proposed as competent to give a synthetic and 
 satisfactory view of life. This position is not reached by 
 any study of the conditions under which experience is 
 possible ; it is simply accepted from science, without any 
 attempt to give a deduction of it, without even the slightest 
 consciousness that such a thing is necessary. Humanity is 
 held to be an organism in the same sense as any physical 
 frame, and is treated, according to this analogy, as though, 
 without any further question, this amounted to a complete 
 
PESSBIISM AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 255 
 
 explanation. Positivism has seized a category which through- 
 out this century has been rising into favour ; and disdaining, 
 as metaphysics, any account of its validity and limits, has 
 treated it as completely independent and self-sufficient. The 
 defects of the positivist synthesis are due to this inability 
 to see the need of justifying the forms of thought which 
 are used, and the consequent confusion between figure of 
 speech and matter of fact, between metaphor and category. 
 When, accordingly, we consider humanity as an organism, 
 we find it regarded in aspects which may have a certain 
 truth in reference to single physical organisms, but which 
 are quite inadequate in reference to experience as a whole. 
 
 (1) Thus we find that humanity stands in the midst of 
 an environment not organically connected with itself. The 
 standpoint of humanity is certainly higher than that of the 
 individual, yet even from this loftier position the world is 
 not seen in its truth, and knowledge still remains at best 
 phenomenal. Between nature and humanity, accordingly, 
 there is still a great gulf fixed. On the one hand, humanity 
 constitutes the sole sphere of human life, and affords within 
 its limits security and scope for self-realisation. On the 
 other, there exists beyond humanity a domain where a 
 power bears sway of which men know nothing, save that its 
 ends are not identical with those of humanity, its actions 
 not always and never necessarily tending to the good of the 
 human race. Thus absolutely beyond their ken, even its 
 hostility incapable of being reduced to some consistent 
 scheme, this power for ever confronts men, unconquered and 
 unconquerable. Optimism prevails throughout the extent of 
 the organism ; the world beyond is left to the condemnation 
 of pessimism. Such a modified optimism, however, cannot 
 be a valid answer to pessimism. The strength of pessim- 
 ism, the presupposition from which its conclusions are inevit- 
 able, is that the individual stands in no necessary relations 
 to his surroundings, is independent of them, and main- 
 tains himself in conflict with them. It matters not how 
 wide a sphere we include within our conception of the 
 individual, nor how much we encroach upon the surrounding 
 space, so long as we admit an absolute division anywhere, 
 we have failed to deliver life from the ceaselessness of war, 
 the certainty of defeat. Whether we define the individual 
 as isolated human being or isolated humanity, we have still 
 
256 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 left a world beyond, unincluded in the life of the individual, 
 definable only by negatives. The distinction which we make 
 between ourselves and it is the enduring token that it is 
 still external to us. The synthesis of humanity, therefore, 
 places the whole domain of nature beyond the sphere of its 
 influence. In this outer world the prevailing principle is 
 one which, compared with the standard that prevails within 
 humanity, can be conceived only as evil, and it is surely 
 not too much to say that the shadow of this condemna- 
 tion must lie even upon the life which has escaped it. But 
 beyond this, the existence of a sphere where alien principles 
 bear sway is a constant menace to the peace of humanity. 
 The walls of the positivist Zion may be strong and high, 
 yet the life that is spent behind them gains its whole 
 character from the foe against whom they have been reared. 
 Thus to bear up for ever against the pressure of an unknown 
 and unknowable force, with no guarantee of victory, in the 
 constant consciousness of the possibility of ruin, would fill 
 life with a doubt and misgiving that would take away all 
 gladness of labour and destroy every germ of hope. No 
 synthesis which is not universal can be an adequate answer 
 to pessimism. Experience is still given up to anarchy and 
 misery if every element in it be not grasped and compre- 
 hended by one all-determining principle. 
 
 Some vague conviction of this inspires the efforts made 
 by Comte to evade the consequences of the dualism with 
 which he started, or even to surmount it altogether. 
 
 It is a commonplace with him to insist on the fact that 
 the fate which confronts human life is, even in its externality, 
 a benefit to man. If it were not for this external and 
 hostile force, man would never learn the lesson of that 
 subluxation of egoistic instincts which constitutes the 
 triumph of humanity, and which issues in the highest 
 possible results of self-realisation. That development pro- 
 ceeds by way of conflict, is indeed a truth which admits of no 
 question, but it makes impossible the dualisbic position from 
 which Comte has started. That by which an organism 
 developes cannot be merely external to it. There is always a 
 ■noint of view from which the environment is seen to be 
 so related to the organism as to be delivered from any 
 merely alien character. Comte's merit is that he has thus 
 related the individual to humanity ; but the speculative in- 
 
PESSIMISM AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 257 
 
 dividualism from which he never freed himself hinders him 
 from extending this view to the relations of nature and 
 humanity, and allows him to say of humanity what he has 
 denied of the individual, that it can have life and being in the 
 midst of a world to which it stands in no organic relation. 
 It is therefore only in the metaphors of poetry that his 
 synthetic instinct finds satisfaction, and accomplishes wbat 
 his metaphysic had forbidden. The antagonism which 
 nothing can overcome we may wreathe in clouds till it 
 vanishes from our sight. Casting the beauty of humanity's 
 holiness round the outer world, we may join space and the 
 earth to humanity in one threefold object of worship. This 
 certainly is the dream of a synthesis which is completely 
 universal, constitutive of a world the complete reconciliation 
 of whose elements leaves no room for pessimism. It is a 
 dream, however, of which Comte has no right to be the 
 dreamer. He who in the outset condemned the world as 
 alien to humanity, and placed his ban on any study of it 
 which had no bearing on human welfare, has no right in 
 the end to confer upon it divine honours and claim for it our 
 worship, sanctifying the remotest, most minute investiga- 
 tions as religious duties. And at best it is but a dream, 
 which, however beautifully it represent the response to our 
 age's need, is powerless to withstand the attack, or over- 
 come the opposition, of a pessimistic criticism, stout-hearted 
 enough to endure the terror of its own despair. 
 
 (2) Thus also humanity is held to furnish a sufficient 
 principle of life within the organism, while it is admitted 
 that beyond the organism other principles may prevail. The 
 theological synthesis which maintained that God is the end 
 in reference to which human life is to be determined, is 
 un verifiable and unreal. In its stead the relative synthesis 
 of humanity provides an end which, without dogmatising 
 upon problems insoluble by human intellect, is practically 
 sufficient to concentrate upon itself every activity of man, 
 and so to convey to life the unity which is needed to deliver 
 it from despair. 
 
 This is a function, however, to which no principle that is 
 merely relative is adequate. A relative principle is one 
 that, by its own confession, leaves, pressing upon the life 
 which it professes to determine, a world beyond its control. In 
 its relations to this external world, therefore, the life is not 
 
 s 
 
258 ESSAYS IN PIIILOSOPIIICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 determined by this principle, but by others independent of 
 it. Its claim to govern the whole of life is thus reduced to 
 dominion over one of its departments. But a principle which 
 is capable of c'onveying unity to one set of relations, while 
 confessedly abandoning another to other influences, is, even 
 in the sphere to which it confines itself, without warrant for 
 its authority. This difiiculty is not obviated by enlarging 
 the extent of the sphere over which supremacy is claimed 
 for the principle. It may be admitted that humanity is an 
 end far higher than the State, capable of constituting a far 
 wider realm of interest and duties. But so long as it is not 
 absolutely supreme, subduing to itself the whole of life, the 
 dominion to which it does lay claim is baseless. It is but 
 one end, at best supreme in a certain limited sphere. It is 
 thus external to the principles which bear sway where 
 its authority is not acknowledged, and therefore stands 
 with them on a footing of mere equality. By the very 
 conception of humanity as a relative synthesis, we are 
 presented, not with one principle constituting experience 
 into one harmonious whole, but with a group of principles 
 dividing among themselves the territory of human life. 
 There immediately therefore arises the need of a principle 
 superior to them all, in virtue of which this division may 
 be made, which may assign to each its appropriate value 
 and give harmony to their mutual relations. Apart from 
 this, devotion to one would imply antagonism to the others, 
 and would fill life with distraction and weakness rather than 
 peace and strength, while devotion to one rather than to another 
 would lack any rational vindication. It matters not how 
 wide an application is claimed for the principle which is to 
 determine life ; if it be not universal, it is as little worthy of 
 devotion as a religion whose authority is ' relative ' to the 
 Sundays, while the week days are abandoned to other influ- 
 ences, is as little capable of inspiring every energy and bend- 
 ing all to the unity of one result. 
 
 The synthesis of humanity, therefore, brings no solution 
 of that conflict of elements in experience which constitutes 
 the problem of pessimism. By the emphasis which it has 
 laid upon one of these elements, by the claim which it has 
 so ably urged for its recognition, it has rather given a deeper 
 form to that problem. It is not likely that any higher end 
 of action will be discovered than humanity, any fairer ideal 
 
 I 
 
PESSIMISM AND THE EELIGIOUS COXSCIOUSNESS. 259 
 
 depicted than that which is summarised in the command 
 Vivre pour autrui. They are the utmost that science can 
 suggest, that a relative synthesis can effect. If, therefore, 
 they have failed to secure to human life immunity from 
 terror and inspiration of certain hope, the pessimism which 
 returns is the deeper for the heights that have been reached. 
 That ' struggle with the certainty of being beaten,' to which 
 pessimism reduces life, becomes more fearful when on the 
 one side of the conflict there is ranged the whole race of 
 man, in the unity of a single personality. The doom is the 
 more terrible the more concretely it is realised.^ The 
 synthesis which is to meet the necessity of the case must now 
 be more than relative. 
 
 II. In the second place, accordingly, we have to inquire 
 into the feasibility of a method which, claiming to be synthetic, 
 arrests itself at precisely this point short of completeness. 
 The position of Positivism is confessedly a compromise 
 between individualism on the one hand and universalism on 
 the other. In opposition to the extreme doctrines of both these 
 philosophies, it maintains, with respect to the general ques- 
 tion of experience, that in knowledge a synthesis is at work, 
 which is, however, only subjective, and that in thought we 
 occupy the standpoint neither of individual nor of absolute 
 mind, but of the human mind ; with respect to the problem of 
 morality, that our lives may be determined not by merely 
 selfish ends nor yet by an all-comprehensive, all- victorious 
 principle, but b}" a principle valid in its own sphere, although 
 not beyond it, viz., the well-being of man. The question 
 therefore which emerges, concerns not now the sujQ&ciency of 
 humanity as solvent of the moral problem, but the soundness 
 of any compromise, the possibility of moving beyond the 
 standpoint of the individual, while modestly declining that 
 of the universal. The answer to this question can come 
 only in the effort to ascertain under what conditions the 
 transcendence of the individual is in any sense possible. The 
 settlement of how far we may go in this movement is given 
 when we see how the first step in it is taken. 
 
 In the outset it is evident that the quest will be vain 
 unless the starting point be definitely conceived. If the aim 
 be to reach a position above that of the individualism which 
 
 * The pessimism of Hartmann recognises the answer of Positivism, but 
 denies its competency. 
 
 s 2 
 
2G0 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOriirCAL CRITICISM. 
 
 disintegrates experience and makes pessimism inevitable, 
 hope of attaining it can be based only on a thorongli con- 
 ception of what individuality is, a complete realisation of it 
 in its utmost extremity. Apart from this any conclusion 
 would be merely arbitrary, inca,pable of rational vindication, 
 helpless in presence of a consistent criticism. The field of 
 nature does not provide the requisite starting-point. No 
 object in nature is yet completely individual. In no case, 
 from the inorganic mass to the most highly developed 
 organism, is the connection with the physical surroundings 
 broken, or the isolation of complete self-containedness 
 achieved. It is in the sphere of self-consciousness that for 
 the first time we discover that extreme of individuality 
 which is to raise the problem of its transcendence and to 
 make possible the solution. The complete realisation of 
 individuality is to be found in the self, with its infinite con- 
 centration upon one centre, its infinite exclusion of the whole 
 surrounding universe. It is the assertion that I am I, that 
 the self has its whole being within itself. It is, therefore, 
 at the same time the correspondent, negation, that I am not 
 not-I, that the self has no mingling of elements in its constitu- 
 tion, that it is no compounded essence, no constructed fabric. 
 It is the self against the world ; the whole universe, in its 
 utmost nearness as well as in its furthest distance, is excluded 
 from the self; the self is to itself sufficient. Self- conscious- 
 ness therefore involves a consciousness of that which is 
 beyond the self, between which and the self there is a great 
 gulf fixed. There are no degrees in this antagonism. It 
 matters not how familiar an object may be ; as beyond the 
 self it is infinitely apart from it, and raises the problem of 
 the possibility of knowledge in a form as complete as though 
 it had been the strangest, most distant object that could 
 come within the range of the widest experience. The problem 
 is not how transition can be made from the seclusion of 
 the self to knowledge of this or that object, but how such 
 transition is possible at all; and the principle which has 
 effected this in the simplest case has effected it finally. 
 The statement of the problem in this infinite form, however, 
 at once involves the impossibility of individualism as a theory 
 of experience. If the self were a bare identity, which was 
 not conscious of itself as permanent amid a flux of differ- 
 ences, a mere individuality which did not withdraw itself 
 
PESSIMISM AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 261 
 
 from an alien world, consciousness of self would be impossible 
 and the problem of experience could not be raised. If the 
 self were really confined within the limits of its own exclu- 
 siyeness, there would be no world for it to know, and that 
 assertion of itself in infinite differentiation from the world, 
 which is the essence of its self-consciousness, would be 
 rendered impossible. It is only because in self-consciousness 
 the self is not confined to its mere individuality that it can 
 be aware of anything confronting it ; only, therefore, for the 
 same reason, can it be aware of itself as individual. The 
 consciousness which is aware of the self and the object can- 
 not be identical merely with the individual self, but is 
 dependent on and identical with a principle of synthesis 
 which comprehends both in one grasp, and bestows upon 
 both organic relations to one another. Consciousness of 
 individuality, therefore, in its extreme distinction from the 
 external world, is grounded in, and is only possible to, a 
 self-consciousness which is universal, and includes as an 
 element in itself what is beyond the individual. In know- 
 ledge of any object, by the conditions of its possibility we are 
 raised completely from the individual point of view, are 
 placed in a position which is truly central in reference to the 
 universe, are brought into unity with the principle through 
 which we ourselves and the world which confronts us are 
 alike intelligible. 
 
 It is, accordingly, no adequate description of thought to 
 speak of it as a faculty or force, whether of the individual or 
 of the race, whereby objects presented to it are recognised 
 and reduced to some sort of order. An analysis of the 
 conditions of experience which discerns that, if thought and 
 things were really external to one another, knowledge would 
 be impossible, and even the formal activity of thought would 
 cease, conceives of thought as the synthetic principle which 
 constitutes for the individual his consciousness of self, and at 
 the same time gives him a world to know, through an ever- 
 growing acquaintance with which his own self maj' be en- 
 riched. In knowledge, therefore, the individual is not entering 
 upon an endless task, dependent on limited resources. He is 
 in his first recognition of an object lifted finally out of all 
 such isolation and weakness, and brought into unity with the 
 principle which is constitutive of the intelligible world. His 
 chief intellectual virtue is thus submission, the surrender of 
 
262 ESSAYS IN PIlILOSOrillCAL CRITICISM. 
 
 his private subjectivity to the principle through which the 
 world is possible as an object of knowledge, and which also 
 constitutes his true self. By this principle the process of his 
 knowledge is conducted, so that its results are not new 
 masses of facts rescued from a chaos of ignorance, but the 
 growing consciousness and realisation of the riches of a 
 realm in which he finds himself at home. 
 
 Such a view of knowledge and the condition of its pos- 
 sibility takes up into itself and justifies all the definitions 
 which are usually framed with a view to avoiding the claim 
 of absolute validity. That knowledge is relative, for in- 
 stance, is a truth capable of being vindicated only from 
 a point of view which refuses to leave any object unrelated 
 to thought ; to say that knowledge is related to mind, and 
 at the same time to define mind as a sphere which, however 
 extended, is still limited, beyond which objects are known to 
 exist, is a contradiction in terms. In one sense of the word 
 all objects are external to thought, and it shows an inade- 
 quate grasp of the problem to afiirm that some are not. 
 In another no object is thus external. The externality of 
 an object is, indeed, the abstraction of its first presentation 
 to thought, and of this abstraction the process of knowledge 
 is the gradual correction. Every achievement of science 
 is simply the fuller recognition of the thought which is in 
 things, the further determination of matter as not alien to 
 mind, but organically connected with it in the unity of ex- 
 perience. Thought, or self-consciousness, therefore, is the 
 ultimate explanation of the world. No object, even the 
 remotest and most material, is seen in its truth, save in the 
 light of this universally determining principle. Even if 
 thought be regarded as the conclusion of a process of 
 evolution, it is such a conclusion as rises out of the time 
 development, and is the re-interpretation of all that preceded 
 it. It is the full realisation of that which is involved in all the 
 sciences, of which the sciences are the growingly explicit 
 statement. It therefore includes them and reacts upon 
 them, assigning to them their limits, vindicating for them 
 their truth. In the same way knowledge may be described 
 as subjective ; but this can imply no reference to an ideal 
 of knowledge which, by contrast with our own, might be 
 characterised as objective. The subjectivity is not that which 
 a spectator might attribute to one object distinct from others. 
 
PESSIMISM AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 263 
 
 It is that of an individuality completely realised, pressed to 
 its utmost extremity, and therefore grounded in and made 
 possible by a universal consciousness. It is a subjectivity 
 therefore vv^hich belongs not to the knowledge possessed 
 by the individual or the race, but to knowledge as such, and 
 is accordingly objective. The sense in which subjectivity 
 attaches to thought as a defect is as much an abstraction as 
 the externality of the object, and receives in the same process 
 a precisely similar correction. The advance of knowledge 
 is the deliverance of thought from the subjectivity and 
 formality of its first contrast with the world, the exposition 
 of it as it relates itself to, and manifests itself in, the 
 manifold forms of the vrorld's life. The problem of the tran- 
 sition from thought to things thus falls away, for the dualism 
 which gave it significance is seen to rest upon a principle 
 v\rhich includes and determines towards one another both its 
 elements, and has transformed itself into the task of exhibit- 
 ing this principle in the completeness of its synthetic activity, 
 penetrating to every department of knowledge, correcting all 
 partial results by reference to itself. A point of view, there- 
 fore, which is universal and objective, is no more than the 
 completion of the effort to do justice to individuality and 
 subjectivity, the necessary condition of the simplest conscious- 
 ness of self and the simplest knowledge of an object. 
 
 It is the error of Comte that he has not fully realised the 
 extreme of individuality, and has thus missed the universal 
 consciousness which it involved. Instead of this, by a kind 
 of scientific metaphor, he has seized a position midway be- 
 tween these two points, which has all the defects of the 
 one and none of the advantages of the other. He does not 
 see the subjectivity which is involved in all knowledge, and 
 is therefore universal and objective. His synthesis accord- 
 ingly remains subjective in the bad sense of a subjectivity 
 imposed on knowledge, and so casting upon it the shadow of 
 a merely phenomenal character. In like manner, in the 
 moral sphere, he has not gone down into the depths of the 
 individualism which he wished to overcome, and thus his 
 emergence from it is still incomplete. His error may be 
 described, not unjustly, as that of socialism, which sees truly 
 that man realises himself only in society, but takes away all 
 significance from this truth by giving him no self to realise. 
 Deliverance from individualism is impossible if it be not 
 
264 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 thorougligoing. Pessimism will return inevitably, and in 
 more fearful shapes the fairer have been our fancies, unless 
 there be found a principle of synthesis which shall bind 
 not simply man to man, but man to the world and to God, 
 in the closeness of completed reconciliation, in the unity of 
 a life and hope which become fuller and surer through pain 
 and sorrow and death. This century, as well in its historical 
 events as in the teaching of those who, like Oomte, have 
 endeavoured to express the principles which have been at work 
 throughout its course, has taught us the lesson that the con- 
 sequences of individualism can only be avoided by drawing 
 them to their last results by a stricter logic and a more de- 
 structive criticism. Only so can hope arise of reaching a 
 principle capable of delivering experience both in its intel- 
 lectual and moral aspects from the ban of mere subjectivity, 
 and exhibiting it as at once possible and objectively valid. 
 
 In endeavouring, therefore, to do justice to the problem 
 of pessimism, as the only legitimate method of rising above 
 its conclusions, it is necessary in the first place fully to 
 realise that element of the individual which is the presup- 
 position of all pessimistic philosophising. The individual 
 in ethics, accordingly, even as in the problem of experience 
 in general, can be found only in the sphere of self-conscious- 
 ness. It cannot be found in the sensuous consciousness, 
 which is capable of pursuing only the ends presented to it 
 by its instinctive tendencies, and is fully satisfied with the 
 gratification which they afford. This is the consciousness of 
 the animal, which has never broken with the natural sur- 
 roundings of its life, has never thought of them as beyond 
 itself, constituting a sphere in which it may find satisfac- 
 tion and from which it may be repelled. It knows no self 
 apart from nature, finds the perfection of its being in nature, 
 and has never experienced any separation from nature which 
 could give to this union the character of a reconciliation. 
 The light, and the beauty, and the gladness of nature pass 
 into it, and become in it glancing eye, and graceful frame, 
 and exulting motion. For it, therefore, since its whole life 
 lies within nature, there is no standpoint attainable from 
 which nature could be criticised. For it, lhere has emerged 
 no problem in connection with the environment of its life. 
 It has never withdrawn itself from the world in which it 
 lives, so as to estimate its character or pronounce its sen- 
 
PESSIMISM AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 265 
 
 tence. When in nature it fails to find satisfaction, when the 
 summer herbage has vanished and the summer sun has gone, 
 it never dreams of rebellion, never withdraws into any proud 
 isolation, but in many a ' tragedy of copse and hedge-row ' 
 creeps back into the bosom of the mother that cast it forth, 
 to die in a dumbness of pain unbroken by reproach. 
 
 It is the essential characteristic of self-consciousness, on 
 the other hand, that for it this immediate union with nature 
 is impossible. Man, even in the lowest forms of humanity, 
 has made that distinction of himself from the world in which 
 he lives which constitutes the uniqueness of his character. 
 He approaches the world as a domain external to him, which 
 must furnish him with means for the maintenance of his 
 existence and the gratification of his desires. In his first 
 attitude towards the world, accordingly, he is critical of it, 
 and estimates it according to its capacity to meet the 
 demand which he makes upon it. It is a demand, however, 
 to which the world is never adequate. Upon the basis of 
 every satisfaction the demand is made for the same source 
 to supply another, greater still. By the very satisfaction 
 which man gains from the world, he is raised above it, and 
 with the world whose distinction fj*om himself becomes the 
 keener the higher is the gratification which it affords, he 
 can never be content. When full consciousness of this in- 
 adequacy of the world awakes, man realises and enters upon 
 the might of his individuality. There can be for him no 
 tame submission, no painful dragging of wounded limbs to 
 some dark covert. JJe occupies a standing-ground aloof 
 from the world ; from this he can judge the world, and in 
 the exclusiveness and security of his own domain proclaim 
 himself supreme. Here, then, for the first time is there 
 reached the utmost extreme of individuality ; here, for the 
 first time, is there made possible that judgment upon the 
 world which finds in pessimism its fullest emphasis. There 
 is here an infinite antagonism, with the possibility of infinite 
 evil, and a consciousness of it which amounts to infinite de- 
 spair. The self, inviolable and immutable, confronts the 
 world, between them an impassable chasm. No ' relative ' 
 synthesis will suffice to overcome this antagonism. To define 
 the world of human life as Family, or State, or Humanity, 
 and to show that, as a matter of fact, man does realise him- 
 self in it, is to make a mere assertion and to ignore the real 
 
266 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOnilCAL CRITICISM. 
 
 problem. Tlie question is not how a man can so far surpass 
 the limits of his individuality as to identify himself with 
 this or that end beyond himself, and find in devotion to it 
 the highest satisfaction of his nature ; but how is it possible 
 in any degree to cross these limits, to rise out of the ex- 
 clusiveness of self, and to make that the determining 
 principle of life which does not lie within the sphere of 
 the individual subject. It matters not how close the interest 
 may lie, how little it may involve reference to other persons ; 
 as beyond the individual, it is infinitely apart from him, 
 and raises the question of the possibility of his pursuit of it 
 as completely as the loftiest and most disinterested end of 
 action. The problem of morality is identical in its simplest 
 and in its most complex forms, and is in all susceptible 
 of but one solution. The principle which is able to effect in 
 one instance the transition beyond the limits of the in- 
 dividual self is adequate to every form of the same difficulty. 
 The antagonism, overcome once, has been vanquished 
 finally. The realisation of this antagonism in its infinitude, 
 however, makes impossible any consistently individualistic 
 theory of ethics. A consciousness which was strictly con- 
 fined to the limits of individual subjectivity could never 
 conceive of the world as external to itself, a sphere beyond 
 itself in which to act and find satisfaction. It could never 
 make a universal claim upon that world, and consequently 
 could never recognise that inadequacy of the world from 
 which it might learn its own independence and self-suffi- 
 ciency. The recognition of self and of ends to be pursued is 
 impossible for a consciousness which is merely of the indi- 
 vidual self. A consistent individualism makes impossible 
 any consciousness of the world, whether as object of know- 
 ledge or sphere of action; and in the same way, any con- 
 sciousness of self, whether as intelligent being or moral 
 agent. Such a twofold consciousness is constituted only by 
 a principle of synthesis which comprehends both elements, 
 and transforms their apparent antagonism into an organic 
 relationship. The utmost extravagance of self-assertion is 
 possible only for a self-consciousness which includes as an 
 element in itself that which is beyond the individual self. 
 In action, therefore, so far are we from being confined to 
 the merely individual point of view, that it is possible only 
 because we are not thus limited, but are raised to a position 
 
PESSIMISM AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 267 
 
 from which all ends, whether personal or disinterested, are 
 seen to be given through the same principle that is constitu- 
 tive of our separate individuality. In the moment when first 
 we rise out of the life of instinct to pursue an end conceived 
 as external to us, we are united to a principle of universal 
 application, which presents to us the world as the sphere of 
 our self-realisation, and which constitutes in us the self which 
 is to be realised. It is not true that we can follow only the 
 objects presented to us by our own desire, for such pursuit is 
 possible only through the same principle which makes pos- 
 sible for us the most complete self-surrender; and our judg- 
 ment of a man as selfish is valid, because the principle in 
 virtue of w^hich he seeks the satisfaction of his private self 
 is adequate to set before him ends the most unselfish, and to 
 secure for him in their pursuit the completeness of his moral 
 being. As moral, the individual does not stand alone in a 
 world that is foreign to him, possessed of a ' faculty ' by 
 which he may, or may not, maintain himself. He is de- 
 livered, on the contrary, from the weakness and inevitable 
 failure of such a position, and has entered upon a realm 
 which is the manifestation of the principle through which 
 he is self-conscious and moral, so that his action in it is not 
 the haphazard achievement of isolated results, but the 
 growing realisation of a life which is in truth his own. It is 
 therefore only fro.m the point of view of this principle 
 that the world is ethically significant. Only through occu- 
 pation of this position can any estimate of the world be 
 taken or any conclusions expressed concerning it. There is 
 no standing -ground for criticism of the world, save that of 
 the principle through which the world exists as a sphere 
 of action. No element in the world can be accurately 
 defined save through its place in this moral organism ; 
 only when set in this light does it become available as 
 the basis for a valid inference. The sphere of the principle 
 which makes morality possible is universal ; beyond it no 
 problem can arise. The darkest pessimism, as well as the 
 brightest optimism, can legitimately reach its conclusions 
 only through the recognition of the facts before it as they 
 are determined by this universal principle. 
 
 In the light of it, accordingly, evil for the first time 
 becomes a significant conception. An analysis of the con- 
 ditions of morality which discerns that the world and the 
 
268 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPIUCAL CllITICISM. 
 
 individual are organically related to one another, so tliat 
 tlie realisation of the individual in the world is possible only 
 through his surrender to, and identification of himself with, 
 the principle which is constitutive of it, -gives a deeper mean- 
 ing to the antagonism of the individual to the world, and 
 his consequent denunciation of it as evil. That antagonism 
 becomes now the opposition of the self, which asserts itself 
 in its individuality, to the principl^ which is the ground and 
 the truth of its being. The evil, to the experience of which 
 the individual awakes, becomes now the assertion of himself 
 against the principle which, even in the moment of such 
 assertion, he knows to be his true self. Evil is transferred 
 from a supposed external somewhat which he had regarded 
 as hostile to him, and becomes the consequence of a division 
 of his own nature against itself which is his own doing. 
 The conflict which fills life with misery is not that of two 
 separate entities, but of elements related organically to one 
 another in the unity of one self-consciousness. The an- 
 tagonism is recognisable by the self, its conquest is felt to 
 be the first necessity of life, only because in it the self is 
 divided against itself. Evil that w^as merely external could 
 not be felt as such, and could raise no longing for its removal. 
 Evil is accordingly essentially subjective, and can attach 
 only to consciousness of self. The subjectivity, however, 
 is not that of an individual, but of a universal consciousness. 
 It is only a universal consciousness which can concentrate 
 itself upon the extreme point of individuality, and act in 
 defiance of the principle which is the condition of its 
 possibility ; and this, which to it is evil, is, because of its 
 universality, the secret of all evil, the gathering of all evil 
 into this first iniquity. In like manner, therefore, the 
 synthesis in which the elements of this conflict are to be 
 reconciled must be in the fullest sense of the word ' sub- 
 jective.' No synthesis effected beyond the subject can be 
 available for it. It must be accomplished within the sphere 
 to which the antagonism belongs. Since, however, this 
 sphere comprehends the whole moral world, this ' subjective 
 synthesis ' is at the same time objective and universal. The 
 opposition and its pain lie wholly within the self ; but 
 since the self is not individual merely, but constitutive and 
 explanatory of the world, the conquest of its self-con- 
 tradiction is the solution of the problem of evil in all its 
 
PESSBIISM AND THE HELIGIOUS COXSCIOUSNESS. 269 
 
 forms ; its reconciliation with itself involves the harmony of 
 the world. 
 
 It is impossible to do more than indicate the compre- 
 hension of all evil in our consciousness of it. In the first 
 place, there is no evil of which the individual is conscious 
 in his own life which is not due to his own act. The 
 problems in connection with personal responsibility are 
 many, and their difficulty cannot be overrated. There is an 
 unspeakable sadness in tke sight of a human being stained 
 with vices and enduring the penalty of crimes which seem 
 to be the necessary consequences of tendencies which he has 
 inherited by birth, or of circumstances in which he was 
 placed by no will of his. A consistent individualism will 
 maintain that to such an one guilt cannot attach, and the 
 conclusions of pessimism follow at once. Such a view is 
 possible, however, only by regarding the individual as a 
 point. in the series of the world's development. Such a 
 being will indeed be free of guilt, as free as any death- 
 working object in nature, but also as destitute of moral 
 character. The difficulty of attributing responsibility to the 
 individual in face of these external influences can be sur- 
 mounted only by considering that their externality is not 
 their truth. They can be presented to consciousness and 
 can influence the will, only because they are not external, 
 because the individual in recognising them is lifted out of 
 his individuality, and is united to the principle through 
 which the world is for him, by which therefore his action 
 in it may be determined. In action the individual is raised 
 to the position of the principle which is constitutive of the 
 world, and is thus endowed with mastery over it. The evil 
 of his action, therefore, cannot be attributed to any pressure 
 of circumstances ; it is his alone. There is thus also made 
 possible for him that experience of compunction or re- 
 pentance which constitutes the first condition of his conquest 
 of evil and attainment of a higher life. 
 
 In like manner, in the second place, since the self- 
 consciousness of the individual involves his organic relation- 
 ship to his environment, it is impossible to make an absolute 
 distinction between the evil which belongs to it and that 
 which he acknowledges as his. That humanity is an 
 organism apart from which the individual has no existence, 
 is a truth implied in the conditions of the individual's self- 
 
270 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CPvITICISM. 
 
 consciousness. It is impossible to make any exceptions in 
 the completeness of this organic relationship. The part 
 lives in the whole, and in this case, which is an organic 
 unity more perfect than the physical organism, lives the 
 life of the whole. The achievements of humanity are one. 
 In all labour the individual is participating in a common 
 energy, is entering upon and adding to a universal inheri- 
 tance. It would be quite arbitrary, however, to confine 
 this conception of organism to the advantages which are 
 held to accrue without extending it to the disadvantages 
 which are equally involved. The pi ogress of humanity is 
 open to the individual : his function in it is the spur of his 
 endeavour. On the same principles, therefore, he must 
 acknowledge the evil of humanity as his own, must admit 
 that his own enters into it in a more than quantitative sense. 
 On the one hand, his evil is not an attribute of his individual 
 self. His wrongdoing, as it passes from him, becomes an 
 element in a life that is not his merely, but that of the 
 world in which he lives. There is no wrong of which a 
 man may repent in the privacy of his individual reflections, 
 mitigating its enormity by the consideration that it was 
 confined wholly to himself. His membership in humanity 
 cannot be thus evaded. His wrong is his, but, since he is 
 no isolated individual, it extends to all with whom his life 
 is bound up. So also, on the other hand, the evil of 
 humanity centres itself in the individual, so that his reali- 
 sation of it amounts in a very true sense to a consciousness 
 of personal responsibility. His participation in the life of 
 the organism cannot stop short of the evil that attaches to 
 it. To say that he bears the burden of an iniquity in which 
 he had no part, and pays in his own loss the penalty of 
 another's transgression, is no mere metaphor ; it is the 
 expression of an organic relationship which, as in another 
 connection it is admitted and maintained, remains true here 
 also. The bonds which connect him with his fellows cannot 
 be relaxed in favour of his relief from their evil-doing. The 
 shame and misery which they bring to him cannot be 
 alleviated by the conviction of his innocence ; rather must 
 these be deepened with a real sense of his blameworthiness. 
 He cannot descend so far into the evil of humanity as to 
 escape his own. His horror in presence of the foulest wrong 
 is but a deeper realisation of his own guilt. Out of these 
 
PESSIMISM AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 271 
 
 depths alone can there rise for him a ray of hope. Finally, 
 the principle which connects the individual's consciousness 
 of self with his consciousness of that which is external to 
 him, extends also to nature, and includes its evil in the 
 moral judgment. In reference to the connection of man 
 with his natural, as with his social environment, it is im- 
 possible at any point to surrender the organic relationship 
 which is shown, by an analysis of the conditions of experience, 
 to subsist between them. The view which finds in thought 
 or self-consciousness the culmination and explanation of 
 nature, so that of an object unrelated to thought we can 
 have no experience, must be inclusive of all the facts of 
 nature. It is impossible to give a complete explanation of 
 any natural object, apart altogether from the principle 
 through which- it is for us as an object of knowledge. Even 
 where, to all appearance, this is most completely the case, 
 it is but a convenience of scientific method, and is justified 
 by the fact that the sciences necessarily make an abstraction, 
 each of its special department, which must be corrected in 
 the light of the principle that determines their mutual 
 relations. In like manner the evil which we recognise to be 
 in nature gains its character from the principle in virtue of 
 which it is recognisable by us. We can have no experience 
 of an evil in nature wholly external to the principle which, 
 as it constitutes our consciousness of self, so also gives 
 us a world to know. It would not be for us : regarding it 
 we could say nothing, not even in condemnation. It is 
 impossible for us to abandon our position as reflective 
 beings, and occupy that of the merely sensuous conscious- 
 ness. It is impossible therefore for us to know what pain 
 or evil can mean for such a consciousness. Our knowledge 
 of evil is knowledge, and not feeling ; is, therefore, even in 
 its nearest approach to feeling, already determined by our 
 self-consciousness. Our conception of nature's evil is filled 
 with the consciousness of our own, and on this account 
 alone is for us a unity, a comprehensive whole, a world -pain. 
 Evil in us is therefore the key to evil in nature. The 
 self-consciousness which is the explanation of nature is 
 divided against itself, and out of this primeval discord 
 emerges all other pain. Thus also our evil finds in the evil 
 of nature its ' illustrated catalogue.' The sombreness of 
 autumn, the gloom of winter, the tearful gladness of spring. 
 
% 
 
 272 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 the ebbing of bright and graceful life amid moss and fern, 
 the anguish of death, the yet keener anguish of birth — 
 these, and all the infinite sadness of creation, could find no 
 answer in our sympathy if they stood in no living relation 
 to us, if they were, not the projection into space and time of 
 an iniquity whose completeness is to be found in self- 
 consciousness, which is therefore aloof from all spacial and 
 temporal conditions. The principle in virtue of which we 
 know the world and live in it, charges all its evil upon us, 
 lays upon us the judgment of this gigantic wrong. It is 
 neither sentiment nor paradox to say that our sympathy 
 with the pain of nature and our condemnation of it as evil 
 must partake of the nature of repentance. 
 
 The principle which makes evil thus significant, and 
 comprehends every form of it in one consciousness, is, accord- 
 ingly, the only quarter to which we can look for the triumph 
 of good ; and a consideration of the significance which it 
 attaches to evil contains the guarantee of this victory. The 
 only evil which is recognisable as a problem, in which is 
 summarised and interpreted all conceivable evil, is the divi- 
 sion which takes place within the sphere of self-conscious- 
 ness. It is the assertion of the self in its individuality 
 against the principle through which alone, even in such 
 assertion, it has being. Its iudividuality however, is not 
 its truth. So far, indeed, is this from being the case, that 
 the extreme consciousness of individuality, which withdraws 
 into itself from everything which is apart from it, is possible 
 only as grounded in a universal consciousness which includes, 
 as an element in itself, this apparently external world. 
 There is thus possible a surrender of this false independence, 
 and a return of the self out of the individuality which is its 
 evil, and the denial of its true being, into unity with the 
 principle which constitutes for it its truth and life. It is 
 because in its individuality the self contradicts the condi- 
 tions of its own-possibility, that it is aware of evil in itself 
 and in the world. For the same reason, therefore, there is 
 possible for it such an abandonment of its false antagonism, 
 and such an identification of itself with the truth of its 
 own being, as constitute the conquest of evil and the final 
 accomplishment of good. The intense realisation of indi- 
 viduality, and its consequent evil, depends for its possibility 
 on a consciousness of good which is triumphant over them. 
 
PESSLMISM AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 273 
 
 The despair of the individual who finds himself at this 
 extremity of isolation and evil, is rendered possible by, and 
 is indeed the moment of transition to, a good which is for 
 him and for the world already and finally victorious. This 
 consciousness of good, known to religion as ' righteousness,' 
 is not an emotion or virtue of the individual. It is con- 
 sciousness of, and identity with, the principle which is con- 
 stitutive at once of the true self of the individual, and of the 
 world which confronts him as the sphere of his action. To 
 be determined by this principle is therefore to be brought 
 into harmony with that world, to find in it no element hostile 
 to self-realisation. In one word, from the point of view of 
 this identity, the world becomes in its completeness that 
 ' kingdom of ends ' which a just estimate of morality shows 
 to be the condition of its possibility, but which, for any 
 ethic that is not wholly delivered from individualism, is an 
 unrealisable ideal.* A synthesis this which is ' subjective ; ' 
 but inasmuch as the subjectivity is that of a universal self- 
 consciousness, it is at the same time objective, and over- 
 comes in its activity every form of discord. When all forms 
 of evil are comprehended in that evil of self-consciousness, 
 its conquest is seen to be at the same time theirs. When, 
 accordingly, we occupy the standpoint of this accomplished 
 good, which is the basis of our moral experience and the 
 standard of our moral judgments, all conflict with evil gains 
 a transformed significance. It is no longer a meaningless 
 and interminable warfare with an unknown antagonist, but 
 the progressive realisation of a victory which is achieved 
 already. It is thus delivered, even in its most terrible forms, 
 from all possibility of despair, the intensest realisation of it 
 being in fact but the necessary correlate of perfect confi- 
 dence. 
 
 Any view of evil which regards it as the ultimate fact 
 of the universe involves a contradiction ; and a consistent 
 pessimism must be 'speechless.' Evil is either relative to 
 consciousness, or it is not. If the latter, it constitutes no 
 
 ' It is interesting to note the form schen mit Gott ; diese Versohnung als 
 
 which this Kantian conception takes in Zustand ausgesprochen ist das Beich 
 
 a philosophy which claims to be the Gottes, das Ewige als die Heimath fUr 
 
 deyelopmentand vindication of Kantian den Geist, eine Wirklichkeit, in der 
 
 principles: ' Die neue Religion sprich Gottherrscht.' — Hegel, fTer/te, 12. Band, 
 
 sich aus als ein neues Bewusstsejn— S. 288. 
 Bewusstseyn der Versohnung des Men- 
 
274 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CPJTICISM. 
 
 problem ; it is unrecognisable and inconceivable. If the 
 former, the principle which makes it a significant concep- 
 tion is superior to it, and involves its conquest. No criti- 
 cism of the world is sound which is not made from the 
 point of view of that by which it is constituted as an object 
 of knowledge, which is therefore its interpretation. Apart 
 from this, any verdict upon the world can be no more than 
 the expression of individual subjectivity, and as such is 
 meaningless. That judgment of the world, on the contrary, 
 which is based on the principle of which the world is the 
 manifestation, can be none other than the statement of a 
 good already accomplished, the prophecy of a good which, 
 through all conflict, is becoming ever more perfectly 
 achieved. 
 
 It is impossible, in conclusion, to do more than, in a 
 single paragraph, illustrate this victory of good, complete in 
 self-consciousness and progressively realised in time. It is 
 this accomplished good which, in the individual life, is the 
 strength of moral endeavour. Good would be impossible as 
 the result of isolated effort. It can be attained by labour in 
 the world only when the individual has abandoned the 
 unreality of his independence, and submitted himself to the 
 principle which is his true self, through which the world is 
 open to him, which therefore is victorious in it. From the 
 standpoint of this reconciliation with himself and with the law 
 of the universe, evil has for him no more existence ; as a power 
 determining his life, it has been finally vanquished. The 
 conflict with it, therefore, which is conducted amid the tem- 
 poral conditions of experience is no longer a ' struggle with 
 the certainty of being beaten,' but the growing revelation of 
 good, and its growing realisation. It is from this point of 
 view alone that the authority of the moral law can be vindi- 
 cated. It can be recognised as imperative only because it 
 is the expression of the principle which makes obedience to 
 it possible. Morality is thus confessedly not the final rest- 
 ing-place of spirit, but points beyond itself for its justifica- 
 tion. It involves progress — for that which made it possible 
 is not, but is to be realised — and effort, from the humble, 
 glad recognition of ends nobler than those already attained, 
 to the unspeakable agony with which a man tears himself 
 from objects, which had been his whole life and love, to 
 cling, faint but desperate, to the cross that raises him j but 
 
PESSIMISM AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 275 
 
 these, so far from being disproof of the existence or all-con- 
 quering might of the principle implied, are the very tokens 
 of its presence, the guarantee of its final victory. 
 
 The victor}^ of good in the individual is, however, not the 
 experience merely of an individual. It is indeed possible for 
 him only through the surrender of his individuality, and con- 
 sists in his identity with the principle of synthesis to which is 
 due the world in which he lives and acts. In his conscious- 
 ness of good, accordingly, the individual finds himself, no 
 longer one amid a multitude of warring atoms, but member 
 of an infinite organic whole, by the principle constitutive of 
 which the mutual relations of its parts are determined. The 
 good of which the individual is conscious accordingly involves, 
 as the condition of his permanent possession of it, that it be 
 the law of his life in relation to those with whom it brings 
 him into organic connection. As, however, the synthesis 
 of which this law is the expression, is effected not beyond 
 him but in the sphere of self-consciousness, it does not 
 stand over him with an abstract assertion of authority. It 
 awakes within him as a power of love, devoting him to the 
 service of that humanity for whom the good with which he 
 is united is also available. He can labour for his fellow-men 
 only because his deliverance from evil is his union with a 
 principle which makes him a member of the social organism, 
 and of this union that labour is the necessary manifestation. 
 The ' enthusiasm of humanity ' is thus not an * unselfish ' as 
 opposed to a ' self-regarding ' instinct. It is rather the 
 practical expression of the principle which constitutes the 
 true self of the individual, in determination by which the 
 harmony and completeness of his nature is attained. The 
 same principle by which the actions of the individual be- 
 come the realisation of a wider than individual end, en- 
 lightens also his suffering with a transfigured nobleness. 
 It is no longer merely significant of the evil which caused 
 it, and which in it comes to clearer consciousness. It be- 
 comes part of the revelation of the corresponding good, part, 
 therefore, of its achievement for the individual, and for that 
 wider life with which his is inextricably connected. Thus 
 have men in all ages attributed to suffering a certain purify- 
 ing and redemptive efficacy. Deep beneath their complain- 
 ing has lain the conviction that the fullest experience of 
 suffering is explicable by a principle which, as it gives to 
 
 T 2 
 
276 ESSAYS IN riJILOSOPIIICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 suffering its utmost keenness of anguish, so also raises it to 
 the rank of a moment in the being of perfection, the one 
 adequate means to its peace and blessedness. Finally, this 
 consciousness of good extends its victory to the evil of nature. 
 The evil of self-consciousness concentrates in itself every 
 form of evil, even that which is visible in the externality of 
 nature. The conquest of this evil, therefore, includes every 
 evil which is in it explained. The principle which over- 
 comes the division of self-consciousness, and restores it to 
 unity with itself, effects at the same time the reconciliation 
 of all things, * whether they be things on earth or things in 
 heaven.' From this point of view the evil which fills the 
 history of creation with sadness gains a transformed signifi- 
 cance. The pain, of which natural development is the grow- 
 ing experience, deepens in its anguish, till in the evil of man 
 it is closed and interpreted. When, accordingly, this intensest 
 realisation of evil issues in union with accomplished good, 
 the process of pain which led up to it becomes the expec- 
 tancy of this result, a waiting of creation ' for the manifesta- 
 tion of the sons of God.' All recognisable instances of evil 
 in nature find their explanation in the evil of self-conscious- 
 ness. Conceived thus as part of the evil of man they deepen 
 his repentance, and so hasten the moment of transition from 
 the extremity of individuality, and of evil, to union with the 
 principle which makes possible the realisation of such a 
 position, and in the very act effects the deliverance from it. 
 Thus also in the relations of nature to human life in which 
 man is often a sufferer, it is impossible to pronounce upon 
 nature any judgment of condemnation. That evil, too, is 
 part of the discord which lies wholly within self-conscious- 
 ness, and therefore in the light of the reconciliation effected 
 there, the realisation of it may become a means towards the 
 attainment of higher good. Nature is not a hostile power 
 confronting man, harassing and repressing him in many ways, 
 and often inflicting grievous injury upon him. It is part of 
 the manifestation of that principle which constitutes the 
 self-consciousness of man. In his relations to it, accord- 
 ingly, man is not bearing up against an external fatality, 
 but is coming evermore completely to realise the truth of 
 his own being. The opposition, therefore, which in many 
 cases nature presents to his efforts, with the evil conse- 
 quences which this often involves, is due not to nature but 
 
PESSimSM AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 277 
 
 to himself. His conflict with nature is thus the means 
 whereby he is able to realise, and to transcend, the individu- 
 ality which made it inevitable. Dwelling in the midst of 
 nature he is not placed in an alien sphere, but in a realm 
 constituted by the principle which in him is consciousness of 
 self, and so in truth the home of his spirit. In all action in 
 and towards nature, he may be inspired by the confidence 
 that all that nature manifests itself to be, constitutes a stage 
 towards the completeness of his well-being. 
 
 In a word, on a true estimate of the conditions of the 
 possibility of experience, any judgment of the world must be 
 such as may be termed optimistic. It is an optimism, how- 
 ever, which includes, and is based upon, that fact of evil on 
 which pessimism lays so great an emphasis. Pessimism is 
 always strong against any view of the world which, proceed- 
 ing on the same presuppositions, seeks to draw opposite con- 
 clusions. Any empirical view of the universe, any bare enume- 
 ration of its phenomena, necessarily leads to pessimism. If 
 the evil of the world be set over against its good, as a fact 
 co-ordinate with it, a glance is sufficient to show that the 
 evil immeasurably predominates. Deliverance can come only 
 in the effort to do justice to the facts by seeking the expla- 
 nation of their possibility ; and, from the point of view thus 
 attained, the conclusions of pessimism are seen to be im- 
 possible. 
 
 Pessimism has in this century spoken its last word. 
 From it we have learned the anarchy of the world ; but 
 this is, from the other side, the problem of its reconstruc- 
 tion. Positivism has failed as a solution. It remains there- 
 fore to descend still further into the depths of the problem^ 
 and inquire into the conditions of its possibility. By such a 
 method alone can we reach the response to that ultimate 
 need of man which in this age has found its fullest expres- 
 sion. ^-.^S^^'^'^^^^^N^ 
 
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A CATALOGUE OF 
 
 Otlobcr 1884. 
 
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 3d PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C, 
 
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 AGRICULTURE, HORSES, DOGS, 
 and CATTLE. 
 
 Burton's My Home Farm 7 
 
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 Contanst-au's F'rench Dictionaries 8 
 
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 Gwilt's Encyclopaedia of Architecture 11 
 
 Johnston's General Dictionary of Geography . . 13 
 
 Latham's English Dictionaries 14 
 
 Lindley &> Moore's Treasury of Botany 14 
 
 Longman's German Dictionary 14 
 
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 Quain's Dictionary of Medicine 20 
 
 Rich's Dictionary of Antiquities 20 
 
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LONGMANS & CO.'S LIST OF GEI^ERAL AND SCIENTIFIC BOOK^. 
 
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