The Philosophy of the Last Three Centuries

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a) The Seventeenth Century

The period of transition ended with the 16 century. In the 17, there appeared more or less rounded systems of non-Scholastic and anti-Scholastic philosophy. The most notable philosophers of this time were Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Rene Descartes. A common note in the philosophies of these three, a note common to all the philosophies of the last three centuries and right down to our own day, is the confusing of the realms of sense-knowledge and intellectual knowledge. Bacon, Locke, and Descartes are at one in another point: the mistaken effort to remodel and rebuild the whole structure of philosophy. Now, the man who is confused on the proper spheres of sensation and intellection, and who, notwithstanding, blandly assumes that he knows enough to discard as useless all the achievements of his predecessors, is not only guilty of mountainous pride; he is deliberately destructive of that bond of continuity and endurance which is at once the test and the guarantee of true philosophy.

We shall here make a short and sketchy study of the chief doctrines of Bacon, Locke, and Descartes, and we shall glance briefly at the teachings of four other 17 century philosophers, Hobbes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz.

J. Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans (1561— 1626) was a native of London; he was educated at Cambridge. He was a lawyer, a politician, a statesman of sorts, and a philosopher. Such are the parts which history assigns him. Rumor imputes to him two others: that of a dipper into public funds for personal profit, and that of the writing of the plays commonly ascribed to Shakespeare. We are interested in Bacon solely as philosopher.

Bacon’s Instauratio Magna or Great Reconstruction was a book which proposed to rebuild the entire edifice of philosophy. Bacon would first clear away, then build. To clear away, he would have man banish prejudices (that is, pre-judgments, long accepted notions) because these are merely idols in the temple of the mind. There are four types of such idols. First, there are idols of the den, which are prejudices that come of one’s own natural bent or bias and of one’s own dullness. Secondly, there are idols of the tribe, or prejudices inherited, or born of early environment and education. Thirdly, there are idols of the market-place, or prejudices acquired from the spirit of the times or from local influences. Fourthly, there are idols of the theatre, or prejudices that come of reading and esteeming the pre- Baconian philosophers, especially the old Scholastics.

The clearing away process demanded by Bacon recalls the Socratic “confession of ignorance,” but any resemblance in the two processes is superficial Socrates was essentially a humble man; his clearing away of the self-esteem of the pupil was a lesson in the docility required for learning anything. All sound teachers commend the process. Huxley, who failed to follow his own prescription, enunciated it well when he said that a sincere student or scientist must “sit down before fact like a little child.” But Bacon was, whether consciously or unconsciously, a proud man; his clearing away of “idols” was a snub to all thinkers who had lived before his time. Socrates said in effect, “Let us labor to rid our minds of faulty notions, especially the notion that we are wise and well informed.” Bacon said in effect, “Now I’ll take charge. Please rid your minds of the things I dislike very much.”

Having cleared out the idols, Bacon would build. He would use the one and only scientific method, that is induction. He held deductive reasoning useless; he rejected metaphysics. The first thing of all that the builder must do is the arranging of subjects of study, the “line-up” of sciences. The Scholastics, following Aristotle, had made this subordinate scientiarum an objective thing; they were guided by the objects studied; in this they were

13a THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 133 realistic and sane. Bacon made his arrangement of sciences subjective ; he based it upon the powers or faculties of the investigator : memory, imagination, reason.

Having made out the list or schedule of sciences, Bacon would attack each with the most careful observation and experiment. He would draw up lists, and follow tables of (a) essence or presence, (b) deviation or absence-in-proximity, (c) comparison, and (d) absence or rejection. If, for example, the investigator were trying to find the nature of heat, he would list all objects and activities in which heat is always present (Table of Presence) ; then he would make a list of things that lack heat but appear to bear in themselves no opposition to it (Table of Deviation or Absence-in- Proximity) ; next he would list heat-bearing things to show variations in degree (Table of Comparison) ; finally, he would list things incompatible with heat (Table of Absence or Rejection). Out of such slow and elaborate effort the investigator would learn at last the true cause of heat, and through its cause he would arrive at a knowledge of its nature.

Bacon was neither a great philosopher nor a notable scientist; he was a literary theorist about philosophy and science. His ambitious and impossible intention of making philosophy over foredoomed him to futility and failure. Three particular weaknesses marked his effort: first, a false subordinatio scientiarum; second, an inordinate stressing of induction; third, a constant confusion of sentient with intellectual knowledge. The second and third of these points still endure in modern philosophy, and they rob it of effectiveness and solid achievement. Bacon has gone into history as the originator of modern empiricism, that is, the system of those who place all faith in observation and experiment, playing up the role of the senses and minimizing the place of reasoning in the attaining of truth. Empiricism is sometimes called (with partial accuracy) by the name of sensism.

2. John Locke (1632-1704) was another notable exponent of empiricism. He was a native of Wrington in Somersetshire, Eng- land, and was educated at Oxford, His most notable piece of writing is An Essay Concerning the Human Understanding.

Locke had the characteristics of most of the articulate university men of his day: a petulant rejection of Scholasticism without understanding it; a self-confident notion of doing philosophy all over again from the ground up; a readiness to speak with an air of finality upon subjects imperfectly mastered.

Now, the desire to see philosophical doctrines so clearly expressed and proved that none may doubt them is human and natural and even admirable. But the assumption that all philosophy can be reduced to the clarity of A-B-Cis fantastic. And the further assumption that all philosophers of past times have been woolly-minded blunderers is ignorance and intolerable “cheek.” The old impatience, the old want of humility, which brought in Humanism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and all the other thin veneerings which have tried to pass for truth are evident in Locke as they are evident in Bacon, Descartes, and nearly all non-Scholastic philosophers from the 14 century to the present moment.

Locke had doubtlessly in mind the recasting of philosophy, for he was not wholly pleased with Bacon’s plan. Still, he seems to have had no detailed plan of his own. Indeed, he did not feel the need of any plan. He was convinced that, once the human mind had learned to grasp things clearly, once it knew its own powers and recognized its true limitations, once it was sure of the nature and extent of its knowledge, the developing of philosophy would be a sheerly natural growth. Thus, Locke’s special interest was the critical question, and he wrote of it in his famous Essay.

Keen as he was on clarity of knowledge, Locke did not escape the fatal confounding of sense-knowledge with intellectual knowledge. And so he proceeded to make confusion more confounded, so that one may take not only different, but opposite, doctrines from the premises his theories afford. Follow him in one set of principles and develop these to the end; you find yourself in ideal-

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ism, the dream-philosophy which turns reality into shadow. Follow him in another set of thoughts, and you will be involved in sensism and positivism which takes the reality around us as the only thing there is, and denies value to the intellect and to reasoning (even to the reasoning by which you have reached this dull conclusion).

This impossible agglomeration of conflicting theories was proposed, explicitly or implicitly, by a man of undoubted mental gifts who was thwarted at the outset by his muddling of the basic question of all philosophy, the critical question. It is pathetic to realize that he knew it was the basic question. Inevitably, Locke went wrong in his ethical doctrine, especially in point of the norm or rule of morality; for out of a man’s philosophy of reality and knowledge comes his theory of morals, and Locke’s philosophy of reality and knowledge was wrong philosophy. Locke admitted the existence of a divine law, but it plays little part in his practical conclusions. His moral theory comes to this: our deliberate conduct is good and praiseworthy if it conforms to public opinion of what such conduct should be; otherwise it is evil and blameworthy. This is not only a cheap and futile theory, but it is impossible to apply, for public opinion is the most fluid and changeable of things, and what is a virtue at one moment might well be a vice at another. This theory of moral relativism is utterly false and destructive.

Locke is remembered for his distinguishing of primary and secondary sense-qualities in bodily things. In his study upon the nature of knowledge, he had constantly to face such questions as: are sense-objects really what they appear to be; is the grass really green; is the whirling wheel actually in motion; is the stone truly solid? Locke decided that there are certain qualities common to all bodies (impenetrability, extension, shape, rest, motion) and these are primary qualities which exist as objective things. He said that there are also other qualities not found in all bodies alike (color, sound, taste, odor, temperature, resistance) and these are secondary qualities which are largely subjective, that is, not so much objective things as the perceivings or feelings of the person who senses them. Locke’s distinction of sense-qualities as primary and secondary may serve us as a mere convenient list. But his theory of their objective reality cannot stand. For we are wholly unaware of the primary qualities except through the medium of the secondary. And if the secondary be unreliable (being largely subjective) we have no reason to put any trust in the actuality of the primary qualities. Locke’s theory on sense-qualities points the way to the self-contradiction of complete skepticism.

One thing Locke did in a masterly way. He refuted innatism, the theory that our knowledge is inborn, and that it advances in us, not by the acquiring of anything from without, but by its inward growth or development. Apart from his refutation of innatism, Locke’s contribution to philosophy is negligible; indeed he is a confusing and a destructive force.

j. Rene Descartes (1596-1650) has been called the father of modern philosophy, a title which would have more meaning if “modern philosophy” had any sort of consistency or would stand still long enough to be identified. For all that, the title is justified. For “modern philosophy,” although it is composed of wildly variant theories, is one in its tentativeness, its hesitancy, its dubious tenure. And the man who injected the note of doubt as a positive element into human thinking was a delicate little French mathematician named Rene Descartes. Descartes,—whose Latinized name Cartesius explains the fact that his theories are called the Cartesian philosophy,—will be gratefully remembered by all schoolboys as the inventor of analytical geometry.

Descartes had a great mind, but he had the mental shortcomings of his time: the contempt for old Scholasticism (which he took no trouble to understand) ; the lack of careful distinguishing between the essentially different types of human knowledge, that of sense and that of intellect; and, above all, the consuming

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 137 desire “to shatter philosophy to bits and then remold it nearer to the heart’s desire.”

Descartes was a mathematician. He wished to make philosophy a kind of mathematical science; at least, he wished to express it with mathematical clarity. As geometry begins with self-evident truths called axioms, philosophy must begin with some basic truth which is so evident, so inevitable, that it cannot be doubted even by a fictitious doubt of the mind. Descartes found that we may doubt, or pretend to doubt, everything except ourselves doubting. In other words, I can doubt everything by an effort of mind; but I cannot doubt that I am making an effort of mind. That I exist as a thinking individual is the primal and indubitable truth. Descartes formulated it thus: “Cogito ergo sum” (Je pense done je suis; I think therefore I am). But the ergo (or the done or the therefore) has not the implication of a reasoned conclusion. No, the two facts of existence and thought are simultaneously and inevitably recognized. Upon the fact of the thinking existence, as upon the one fundamental certitude, all philosophy must be built up.

Upon this foundation Descartes proceeds to build accordingly. I think. My thoughts are reduced to elements: ideas and judgments and feelings. Ideas and feelings are what they are; they are true in themselves. But when I make judgment upon thoughts and feelings I may go wrong. I am only safe in judging upon such ideas as I recognize to be wholly objective, not my own making or devising. Now, I find that I have an idea of absolute perfection, of absolute actuality. I could not have made up this idea, for its perfection is beyond my powers. Therefore this idea must have been impressed upon me by the existing reality which is absolute perfection. Such a being exists. Thus am I aware, with full certitude, of the existence of God. Now God, the all-perfect, would not, in fact, be all-perfect if He were in any sense a deceiver. Therefore, He has given me reliable, and not deceiving, knowing-powers. These, of course, are limited, for I am limited myself. My senses and my mind may not present reality to me perfectly, but what they present is reality. Of the bodily world I can be sure, at the least, that it actually exists as an extended or bodily reality.

The human mind, says Descartes, is essentially thought. A bodily being is, in its essence, extension. Plants and brutes are not truly alive; they have no life-principle or soul; they are splendid automata, fine pieces of machinery which the Creator works. Man has the only type of soul there is: it is a thinking, a reasoning soul.

Descartes is wholly wrong, despite the fact that his intellectual powers were splendid. He starts wrong, and the farther he proceeds along the way of his theory, the farther off he veers from the straight line of truth. Such is the tragedy of a logical mind after a false start. Descartes finds the thinking individual the indubitable reality. But is thought more immediate and sure than feeling? Besides, if I am sure only of myself thinking, I can develop no philosophy; for I have no self-evident certitude (in the Cartesian sense) of the value of my thinking. I cannot argue, as does Descartes, that the inevitable thought of an infinite being proves the existence of such a being as the cause of the thought; for, according to Descartes, the principle of causality is subject to doubt. Nor can I argue that God’s existence is proved by my knowing-faculties, and then prove my knowing-faculties reliable because God would not deceive me; this is reasoning in a circle, proving A by Band Bby A.

In nearly every point, the philosophy of Descartes is misleading, and in most points it is plainly false. Yet this philosophy, or welter of theories, has had a tremendous influence upon human thinking for nearly three hundred years.

4. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), English politician and philosopher, was, in the main, a follower of Bacon. He insists on the distinction between sense-knowledge and intellectual knowledge, and then immediately mixes them up confusedly, to the

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 139 extent that he attributes a sort of intellect to brute animals. In political theory, he holds that man is not naturally a social being, but that civil society (i.e., the State) is the result of a social contract or social compact. He teaches State absolutism, and declares that the civil power must regulate all our activities, even those of religion. In his theory of knowledge, Hobbes is a nominalist; in physical philosophy, he is a materialist.

5. Nicholas Malebranche (1638-1715), Parisian philosopher and ecclesiastic, thought it impious to say that a creature is the cause of its activities, since God alone is to be regarded as the source of all action. Creatures furnish the occasion (“the stage setting”) for God to intervene and cause them to act or operate. This quite fanciful and fallacious theory is called occasionalism. Further, Malebranche taught that our knowledge (in its elements, that is, ideas) comes from the inborn idea of God, in the light of which other things are understood. For the logical order (that is, the order of thinking or knowing) must follow the ontological order (that is, the order of things). As God is first in the ontological order, He is first in the logical order. This doctrine is known as ontologism.

6. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), a Dutch Jew, followed Descartes in an attempt to set forth philosophy in a mathematical fashion. His philosophy amounts to pantheism which is involved in his definition of substance as a reality which does not require the idea of any other thing in order to be understood. Spinoza inconsistently insists on the existence of the individual soul and its immortality, together with its obligation to practise virtue. Spinoza is a pathetic figure. Ousted by the Synagogue, unacceptable to the Gentiles, he shrank from public notice and was content with the humble employment of a polisher of lenses, a trade which returned him what sufficed for his simple requirements and gave him many hours of freedom for the study of philosophy. Spinoza has the appeal of a genius misunderstood and maltreated.

He has a particular attraction for the dilettanti and the parlor- philosophers. But with all regard for the man’s sincerity, and with proper commiseration for him as the butt of meanness and persecution_we must recognize his teachings as false and pernicious.

/. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (164&-1716) has been described as “the most extraordinary example of versatile scholarship on record.” He was a mathematician, and the inventor of differential calculus. He was a linguist, a historian, a theologian, a philosopher. Yet for all his splendid mind and great learning, he was wrong in his fundamental philosophical theories. He taught that the world is a composite of material and spiritual things, all of which are made up of unextended elements called monads. Each monad is independent of the others, yet each, by the law of pre-established harmony, reflects in itself all the modifications or changes that occur in every other. Soul and body in man are like two clocks, each keeping perfect time (by the law of pre-established harmony) but without any real influence upon each other. The soul is a monad; it reflects in itself, as do all monads, the entire cosmos, not by the influence of other things upon it, for such influence does not exist, but by being the sufficient setting or occasion for such reflection through the operation of the law of harmony. The soul is unaware of most of the things reflected in it; time and experience, however, bring it a clear and usable knowledge of some of the images, and these are its ideas. Thus Leibniz taught a sort of innatism. God’s pre-established harmony moves man’s will to determinate action, yet in such wise that man remains free (physical premotion).—Leibniz offers cogent proofs for the existence and the perfections of God, arguing from the contingency of the world of creatures to the necessary existence of Self-Subsistent Power and Infinite Intelligence. Leibniz also acknowledges and reshapes the “ontological argument” of St. Anselm, and reasons that if a Self-Subsistent Being is possible, it must be actual. Leibniz holds that God, by reason of His complete and boundless perfection, has made this world the best world possible (cosmological optimism).—Leibniz’s doctrine cm the constitution of the world is called monadology. It is a theory in conflict with both reason and experience Yet it intrigues unwary minds, particularly because the doctrine of pre- established harmony cuts many difficulties from the path of physicist and philosopher. But it is a doctrine of unreality. Monads are unextended, non-bodily, and hence the universe has no true existence as an extended reality; it becomes illusory, a dreamworld. Thus Leibniz is but a step removed from idealism_which denies value to the findings of the senses and reduces the world to a set of mental images. The philosophers of the next generation took that step.

b) The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

The philosophers of the 18 and 19 centuries carried forward, in the main, the theories of Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, and tried to reason the world out of existence. Existence is reduced to thoughts or ideas, to will-force or elan. This is nothing new, nor was it new in the 18 or 19 century. It is the core of the old Eleatic philosophy, and it is latent in every sophist, skeptic, and relativist theory of things and thoughts.

We shall discuss very briefly the doctrines of Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Comte, Spencer, James, and Bergson, with incidental mention of Fichte, von Schelling, Mill, and Dewey. We shall notice the revival of Scholasticism.

1. George Berkeley ( 1685-1753 ), Kilkenny bom, and Protestant Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, was idealist in philosophy, but not in such matter of fact things as money. He worked hard to secure a grant from the English Government for the purpose of founding in Bermuda a great college to train missionaries for the conversion of America. Indeed, he had the promise of £20,000, and, on the strength of it, he went to Rhode Island to secure the interest and help of New Englanders. But the politicians failed him; the promised money was not voted. Perhaps his experience with practical politics helped turn him into an utter idealist,— but no, attractive as the thought remains, it cannot be so; for Berkeley’s significant writing was all done by 1715, and he did not visit America until 1728. His chief philosophical work was a treatise on The Principles of Human Understanding. Notice how steadily the basic question,—that is, the critical question,— held the attention of all philosophers during the centuries of the early modern era. And still that question was not sanely treated nor brought to full answer. Despite their constant cry for clarity in knowledge, the philosophers of this time succeeded only in making knowledge more misty and valueless.

Berkeley goes confidently to work to explain the human mind and its relation to reality. He says that if anything exists at all, it exists as knowable, and there exists a mind capable of knowing it Further, each man’s knowing is what gives him the world he knows. The very being of things is, for each person who knows them, the perceiving of them: esse est per dpi, “to exist is to be perceived.” Now, there is ultimate reality in the Divine Mind. Each human mind somehow shares the creative perceiving of the Divine Mind. Thus while Berkeley is idealist, he is not utter subjectivist. He once wrote, “I question not the existence of anything we perceive by our senses.” But he should have added that “existence” means to him “existence in the mind,” and basically in the Divine Mind.

2. David Hume (1711-1776), native of Edinburgh and a product of its university, denied the existence of all substantial reality, material or spiritual. In his Treatise on Human Nature he declares that man’s mind is only a collection of perceptions. These perceptions are either impressions or ideas. Impressions are sensations of pleasure, pain, awareness of qualities and relations. Ideas are but the faintly remembered images of impressions formerly experienced. This vague philosophy has a very modern sound: a collection of impressions collected nowhere;

3. Over in Germany, in his native city of Koenigsberg, a professor named Immanuel Kant (1724—1804) read Hume’s arguments with dismay, and finally tossed them aside with contempt as “dogmatic dreams.” Hume takes away all grounds of certitude ; the best a man might have of him is a thin probability, and this, as Kant noticed, is not usable knowledge at all. What a man needs, said Kant, and what he can have is truly scientific knowl edge, that is, knowledge that is universally and necessarily true and reliable. The experiences of the senses is individual, and, no matter how consistently and for how long a time the senses find a fact solid, there is always the possibility that the next experience will show it to vary. So far Kant agrees with Hume: sense- experience cannot give the mind more than probability. But, said Kant, there is another element in knowledge, an a priori and subjective element which is anterior to sense-experience and in no wise dependent on it. This is the element which enables us to have true and certain knowledge and to add item to item with complete security in building up the edifice of science.

We pause here to settle the meaning of important terms. Knowledge that we obtain through experience is a posteriori knowledge, that is, it comes after experience and is dependent upon it Now, as we have seen, it is Aristotelian and Scholastic doctrine that all human knowledge is of this type; no knowledge is bom in us; no item of knowledge exists in man except such as has been acquired. Kant, however, insisted on the existence of certain “forms” or items of knowledge (space and time, certain regulative judgments, and certain master-ideas) as inborn and a priori. Of course, there is a legitimate use of the terms a priori and a posteriori (literally “from beforehand” and “from afterwards” ) in describing types of argument But there is no legitimate use of a priori as a term descriptive of knowledge itself. Kant uses the term so, and he follows the despised Hume so far as to make the knowledge described by this term a very part of the mind of man, an element of its being and not merely an element of its equipment.

To answer the basic question, “What can I know with scientific certitude?” Kant wrote his book The Critique of Pure Rea son. In this work, Kant assigns to man a threefold knowing- power: sensibility, intellect, reason. Knowable things, on the other hand, are of two classes: appearances of things or phenomena, and essences of things or noumena.—Man, by sensibility (that is, by his senses) takes in the phenomena of the world about him. Somehow, we know not how, the phenomena set his sense-power to work; we dare not say that the senses perceive even the phenomena as these exist in nature; we may only say that somehow phenomena stir the senses to act Now the formal constituent the essential element, of the sensing-power or sensibility (that is, its character or “shape” ) is the twofold determinant of space-and-time. Man has sense-experiences “here” and “now,” and he recalls them as “there” and “then.” But this conditioning of phenomena by space and time is man’s own contribution to the knowledge-act. Space and time in no wise represent things, nor are they things; they are the inborn a priori element

1 4 4 of the sensing-power. Just as a curiously shaped bottle will take in liquid or powder and conform the mass of the substance taken in to its own shape, so the sensing-power, which has the shape of space-and-time, takes in the action of phenomena on the senses and shapes these phenomena accordingly. The result (that is, phenomena-conditioned-by-space-and-time) is called empirical intuition.—Now, just as phenomena stir the sensibility to act, so the finished products of sensation (that is, empirical intuitions) stir the next knowing power, the intellect, to act. The intellect takes in the empirical intuitions and conforms them to its shape, its own inborn a priori forms. These forms are four sets of triple judgments, called the twelve categories. These are like grooves or moulds into which the molten metal of empirical intuitions is poured, and the resultant piece of knowledge is, in each case, a judgment. The four master categories (each of which has three branches) are: quantity, quality, relation, and modality. Thus the judgment “A comes from Bas effect from cause” is not the objective knowing by the mind of a state of fact; it is merely the result of the action of intellect turning the sense-findings (or empirical intuitions) of A and Bthrough the groove (or category) of relation, and through that branch of relation called cause-effect. —Once more, just as the finished products of sensibility (that is, empirical intuitions) stir the intellect to the act of judging, so the judgments of the intellect stir the reason to its action. The innate a priori shape of reason is determined by three master- ideas: the idea of the self, the idea of the not-self, the idea of the super-self. In other words, the three regulative ideas of reason are the ideas of self, the world, and God. The judgments of intellect are poured through the threefold mould of reason, and the result is reasoned knowledge.

Now, the essential thing about knowledge, when we attempt to fix its value on the score of truth and certitude, centers in judg ments. After all, reason merely handles judgments and learns from them. Upon judgments we must fix our attention. There are two types of judgment, a priori and a posteriori. Looked at in another way, there are two other types: synthetic and analytic. We already know the meaning of a priori and a posteriori, and indeed, according to Kant, all judgments are a priori. We must look at the other terms. A judgment is rightly called synthetic when it is “put together,” for that is precisely what the word synthetic means. If I make the judgment, “John is sick,” I have a synthetic judgment; the predicate does not necessarily belong to the subject, but I put it with the subject because I have learned from John or from his doctor that it happens to belong there. But if I make the judgment, “A circle is round,” I have an analytic judgment; for by analyzing the subject, by studying it and knowing just what it is, I learn that the predicate used belongs there, since a circle to be a circle must be round.

Kant held that the only judgment which can give absolute certitude must be a priori, since, indeed, he admits no other type. But, he maintains, an a priori judgment that is analytic marks no advance in knowledge. To build up science, there must be growth, development, advancement. Hence there must be syn thetic judgments which are also a priori. The synthetic a priori judgment may be called the heart of Kant’s philosophy. And we may say now in passing that the synthetic a priori judgment is a contradiction in terms and in thought; it is an impossibility. The examples offered by Kant are either (in our terminology) a posteriori judgments, or they are analytic judgments. For instance, Kant says that the judgment “five plus seven equals twelve” is a synthetic a priori judgment. It is nothing of the kind. It is a simple analytic judgment Replace the words or the figures for five and seven and twelve by an equivalent number of dots or strokes; you will have exactly the same thing on either side of the equals-mark. The judgment is as plainly analytic as “A is A.”

Let us cast back a moment, and make a summing up of the Kantian theory of human knowing: Phenomena of bodily things somehow stir man’s sensibility to action, and sense takes in phenomena in its own way, shaping and conditioning them by its i 46 c o u r s e o f p h ilo s o p h y t o o u r time s innate forms of space-and-time, thus producing empirical intuitions. The empirical intuitions somehow stir man’s intellect to take them in and run them through its forms or categories, thus producing judgments, the truly certain and valuable judgment always being synthetic a priori. Finally, the judgments of intellect somehow stir the reason to take them in and view them in the light of its regulative ideas of self, the world, and God. Notice that the sole point of connection of man’s knowledge with reality outside the mind is the vague influence of phenomena on the sensing-power. From that point on, the whole process of knowing, and its products, are man’s own. Here is idealism, here is subjectivism with a vengeance. And Kant plainly asserts that the noumena or essences of things cannot be known by man. The phenomenon is not strictly knowable, but it moves the senses to act; the noumenon is not knowable at all. The noumenon (Das Ding an sich) lies outside the reach of mortal man.

So Kant is as subjectivistic as Hume ever dared be. And yet this is the man who threw Hume’s book aside with the sneer, “Dogmatic dreams!” What singular smugness could have made Kant suppose that he was dealing with the problem of knowledge critically and not dogmatically? Yet he calls his system “transcendental criticism.”

Since we cannot know noumena, the science of metaphysics, the very heart of philosophy as the Greeks and Scholastics understand it, becomes illusory and impossible. Is it not strange that a man of Kant’s undoubted intellectual gifts did not notice here an absurd contradiction? Why, he has just finished explaining to us, in great detail, the whole nature of the human mind; and now he concludes that we cannot know the nature of anything! And his reasoning,—more than “slightly foxed” as the booksellers say,—about the character of the mind, and about the nature of phenomena and noumena, is actually interwoven with terms and thoughts metaphysical; yet he says that metaphysics is illusory and impossible!

So far, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. It will be noticed that the doctrine contained in this work opens the way to complete skepticism, and therewith it opens the way to a denial of moral obligation and of purpose in human existence. For if nothing can be known with certitude, as skepticism maintains, then there are no certainties in the realm of morals, religion, or social duties; then there is no certainty that man is made for a purpose at all, or even that man exists. Whether Kant noticed this fact, and, as a Lutheran, deplored it, or whether (as has been said) his Emperor summoned him and demanded that he furnish a philosophical basis for morals and religion, cannot be said, But Kant wrote a second book to supply the defects mentioned. He said that pure reason is not enough for man; he must live by practical reason as well. In his first book, Kant sought the answer to the question, “What can man know with certitude ?” The answer was, “He can have true certitude by his synthetic a priori judg ments” But this is mere statement. The real answer to which Kant’s work inclines the thinking mind is, “Man can know nothing with certitude.” Kant’s second book, The Critique of Practi cal Reason, answered the question, “Are there certitudes, outside the reach of pure reason, that I must recognize and act upon?” Kant answers with an emphatic, “There are.” These truths are known with certitude by practical reason. First, a man is aware of duty. He knows with clear certitude that murder and stealing are wrong, and that he has the indispensable duty of avoiding such things. He knows that there are certain loyalties which indicate things that he is in duty bound to observe and do. By his practical reason, man is aware of the inner command, “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not.” This command is categorical, that is, it is unconditional; it is not, “Do this, if you please,” “Avoid that when convenient” ; it is a matter of simple “Do” and “Avoid.” Kant calls this inner voice The Categorical Imperative. A Christian would call it conscience, and would explain that it is the voice of reason (the same reason with which we work out a theorem in geometry) pronouncing on the agreement or disagreement of a situation (here and now to be decided) with the i 4 8 c o u r s e o f p h ilo s o p h y t o o u r time s norm or law of morality. Kant’s Categorical Imperative is like conscience in its clear decision and unequivocal command; it is entirely unlike conscience in its blindly unreasoning assumption of authority.

First, then, man’s awareness of duty is a certitude; it is a certitude because of The Categorical Imperative. Now, this Categorical Imperative is a law. But a law must come from a law-maker. Neither I myself have set up my Categorical Imperative (for it often orders me to do what I should like to avoid, and to shun what I would willingly do) nor has it come from any earthly king, court, or senate, for it speaks with an authority that is absolute and not one supported by temporal sanctions of fine or imprisonment. It is a supreme law; it is an absolute law. It must come then from the Supreme and Absolute Being. That is, it must come from God. Therefore, God exists.—Further, the Categorical Imperative makes a man aware, not only of duty, but of the fact that he must freely embrace the performance of duty. He is aware that he can disregard, although he cannot be ignorant of, this law of conduct. In a word, he is aware, and with true certitude, that he is a free and responsible being.—Again, man, a free and responsible being, is aware that by freely acting in accordance with the commands of the Categorical Imperative he perfects himself. And he is aware that this self-perfecting may go on through the longest life without reaching the limits of its capability. Therefore, he concludes, he can go on becoming more and more perfect forever. In other words, man is aware of endless existence before him ; he knows he has an immortal sold. Thus out of the cunning device of The Categorical Imperative Kant draws the doctrines that satisfy his Lutheranism (or his Emperor), although his basic philosophy of “transcendental criticism” knows nothing of these doctrines. He sets forth, in orthodox fashion, the practical truths of the existence of God, the fact of moral duty, the immortality of the soul, the freedom of the human will.

Kant wrote a third book, The Critique of the Faculty of Aes~ thetic Judgment in which he brings out the attractiveness of moral goodness in a manner more striking than that of The Critique of Practical Reason.

Despite errors, absurdities, and contradictions, Kant’s philosophy,—notably that of The Critique of Pure Reason,—has exercised a tremendous influence upon human thinking for a century and a half. It exhibits the roots of those weaknesses we have come to regard as characteristic of what is loosely called “the German philosophy.” It refuses to face reality (witness the wholly subjectivistic character of knowledge) ; it unduly stresses the ego (witness the inner and autonomous character of knowledge and morality) ; it proclaims the perfectibility of the will, upon which the followers of Kant were soon to harp most strongly—and from Nietzsche to Hitler we are to hear of “the will to power,” the will which makes “the superman” and “the master race.”

A final word on Kant In offering and defending his low estimate of pure reason as incapable of achieving certitude (apart from the mysterious judgments which are synthetic a priori) Kant appeals to his so-called “antimonies” or “contradictions.” He holds that when pure reason tries to apply the categories in the abstract realm of logical inference (whereas its business is to pour findings through fixed moulds) it gets beyond itself and comes a cropper. It finds that it can prove, with equal facility, things directly opposed. Thus, he says, it can prove that space is finite, and also infinite; it can prove matter divisible and indivisible ; it can prove human freedom existent and non-existent; it can prove that God is necessary and also non-necessary. In all this, and in the examples offered in proof of it, Kant is entirely gratuitous and sophistical. Besides, he stands self-condemned in using logical reasoning to establish the fact that logical reasoning is useless. We merely mention the “antimonies” because we discern in them an element of materialism in the heart of an idealistic theory. This materialism was to appear in full form in later philosophies which took inspiration, at least in part, from the doctrines of Immanuel Kant

4. Two followers of Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762- 1814) and Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling (1775-1854) taught that the mysterious noumenon of Kant is the projection of an Absolute Ego. This Ego sets up Self as against the background of Not-Self and then realizes that after all Self and Not-Self are truly One. Technically, we have the thesis, the antithesis and the synthesis of the Absolute Ego. The final synthesis in which the Ego “composits the Self and the Not-Self is the developing and perfecting of WHI .—But by far the most important among the immediate followers of Kant was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). To Hegel the synthesizing element which merges Self and Not-Self is universal awareness, absolute reason. Individual men have reason, but the human reason is but a gleam of the Absolute Light The world is merely phenomenal,it is an external expression of Absolute Reason; it is a series of flashes and shadows cast by the Cosmic Light of Reason. Towards the perfect harmony of Absolute Reason everything (as history proves) works upward, not sweepingly, but step by step, each more perfectly harmonizing and purifying than the preceding. In the civil State, this drive towards Reason shows itself under the aspect of Will._As one nation conquers another, and then is conquered in turn, we note the purifying and harmonizing drive towards Reason. Such successive steps towards the ideal were, first, the oriental State, then the Roman State, and, last and best expression of progress, the German State. Progress must go by conflict and through the conquest of contradictions.

5. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is a name popularly known as almost synonymous with “pessimism.” He denied the existence of happiness for man, and felt that the best man could hope for was an occasional relief from pain: “life is a path of red- hot coals, with a cool spot here and there.” Schopenhauer declared that will is the very essence of things. This will is not a force guided by intelligence or reason; it is a blind, irresistible drive. It is not a striving for something as a goal; it is a drive that exists for itself. This is a world-will. It is manifest everywhere, in the force of gravitation and in the most sublime tendencies of men towards their ideals. The apparent world is phe nomenal; it is our conception of things; it is idea which we explain sufficiently for our needs as space, time, causality. But there is a real world too, a noumenal world, which is not idea but w ill. The world-will is active in us; it is very hard upon us; it makes us strive ceaselessly for what we can never find, that is, peace, rest, and enduring satisfaction. Thus it is a source of pain. Man may find a partial and temporary relief from this pain by contemplating works of a rt But a more lasting relief comes from resisting will; from the effort to kill within oneself the desire for continued life, health, property, comfort, friends; from refusing the work of seeking to attain such goals as eternal rest, heaven, moral ideals.—Schopenhauer is of the later German school in his doctrine of all embracing will, but he is alone among German philosophers in ascribing to the efforts of universal will no goal, no good, no improvement

6_._ Schopenhauer was saddened by the pain that men must endure through the harsh and profitless drive of world-will. But Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) was gladdened by it. For, said Nietzsche, the pain and strife of existence are meant to harden us, to strengthen us, to develop us so that we may ultimately produce superman. We should therefore be ruthless, hard, unsympathetic; we should refuse to indulge self or others; we should sternly cultivate the will to power. Christianity, said Nietzsche, with its doctrines of obedience, resignation, loving kindness, is not the guide we require; it proclaims a slave moral ity. We need no God, no supernatural aim. The aim of true ethics is the development of the great, the strong, the ruthless blond beast, the superman.—We need not pause upon the absurdity of this doctrine of Nietzsche, which, as Chesterton points out, i_not a philosophy of strong muscles but of weak nerves. Indeed,

Nietzsche was himself a man of such weak nerves as to be hardly sane. It is interesting to note that the philosophy of ruthless will to power still finds expression in the ideals and the warlike actions of many of Nietzsche’s countrymen.

7. The ethics of Nietzsche are a crude and brutal naturalism, that is, a theory that man needs no power but his own, and no aim beyond this world. Naturalism is one form of materialism which denies or disregards everything spiritual and supernatural Naturalistic ethics appear in the mistaken philosophies of all ages, proclaiming men naturally good, naturally directed upwards and onwards, and urging that he be left unhindered and undirected so that through fullest self-expression he may come to perfection. The Christian remembers, however, that man’s nature is a fallen nature, and that, since the Fall, no man can be merely natural and remain decent. A man, says Chesterton, must be supernatural or he will be unnatural. Nietzsche set up a naturalistic doctrine in crude and harsh terms. The same type of doctrine was presented more subtly by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), and Herbert Spencer (1820-

1 9 0 3).

Comte says that man has passed naturally through three intellectual stages: the theological stage in which he referred power and control to Deity; the metaphysical stage in which he sought to understand things in the general abstractions of philosophy; and finally the true and perfect positive stage in which he finds all knowledge in the mathematical and experimental sciences, chief of which is sociology, the science of humanity. Humanity is the only God.

Mill declares that man must be guided in his actions by utility. Actions are good or evil in so far as they preserve us from pain or subject us to pain (moral utilitarianism). Utility or usefulness is not to be judged selfishly; it is to be sought in the greatest pleasure of the greatest number of men. We learn, for the most part, by the method of “trial and error” in what courses of action such utility is to be found.

Spencer discards the “trial and error” method. He says we must study nature and adjust ourselves to it so that we may act for the greatest pleasure of the greatest number. We are helped in our effort by natural evolution which tends to level out differences among men. All nature is marked by a steady progress “from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous” and we must not get ahead of this process or we shall have trouble and pain and the world will be filled with unrest Nor must we be eager for absolute truth either in science or in religion. Truth is for us always relative, for the ultimate always eludes our grasp. Science must be content with the positive data which fall under observation of the senses (sensism and positivism), and religion (or theology) must be content to make rules for practical conduct, leaving aside all doctrinal or dogmatic statements about the Great Unknown (agnosticism).—Spencer is full of self- contradiction. He professes to know the absolute truth that absolute truth is unknowable. He is dogmatic in his assertion that dogmatic assertion is unseemly. He limits science to positive sense-data, and this very theory is not capable of either expression or proof in terms of sense-data, and hence is, by his own standard, a wholly unscientific theory. His doctrine of natural evolution is a hypothesis which he proposes as absolute truth. Indeed, Spencer makes mankind a single organism which is growing steadily more diversified and perfect by the process of evolution.

8. The sensism and positivism of Spencer, together with the agnostic and relativist theory, were advanced by John Dewey (1859- ), an American philosopher. Dewey thinks that philosophy must concern itself with the discovery of practical rules to keep men in accord with the march of events. Philosophy is but a guide for action. True and false are to be understood in the light of social experience; what has proved beneficial to man is

1 5 4 true and good; what has been found socially harmful is evil and false. This doctrine is usually called pragmatism from the Greek pragma, a deed, work, or action.

9. William James (1842-1910) is usually regarded as “the father of pragmatism.” James teaches that the working or workability of a thing (for man’s benefit or hurt) is the test of its good or evil, its truth or falsity. Besides the test of workability, two others are to be applied: any new idea, to be true, must be in harmony with ideas already tested and proved true; secondly, the new idea must not conflict with accepted ideals, especially those that are religious or moral. James says that man’s mind requires certitude in many matters in which his mental power is not adequate to attain it. Where the mind fails, the will must step in and make a decision. Indeed, a man cannot avoid such intervention of the will. If he says, “I cannot decide; I must remain in doubt,” he is actually willing not to decide; he is, in fact, deciding not to decide. Now, a decision to leave important matters unsettled is less valuable to man, less practical, less useful, less workable, than a straightforward affirmation or denial. Since decision must be made in any case, it is better to have a clear decision than a muddled one. Therefore, a man should have “the will to believe” either one or other of the contradictory answers to important questions. Thus is the will invoked in the philosophic pursuit of truth.

jo. James calls upon the will to help man interpret (indeed to create) truth. But Henri Bergson (1859-1940), a French Jew, calls rather upon man’s feeling. He calls for a sympathetic effort after truth, not a cold analysis. He says that to know truth we must sympathetically enter into things and know them from within. Thus we must seek truth by intuition, by direct, sympathetic, non-rationalized grasp. It is thus that we are aware of self, and of self as part of a living and pulsating nature of things, the inner force of which (or elan vital) is a continuously creative power. Bergson was much influenced by the teachings of Plotinus. In the last years of his life, leaving the sterile philosophy of elan vital, he recognized the truth of the Catholic religion, which he called “the complete fulfillment of Judaism.” Yet he failed to enter the Church, lest his conversion seem one of convenience to escape the hardships of impending anti-Semitism. He asked that a Catholic priest be present to pray at his funeral.

i i . The philosophies of the last three centuries have been, in the main, futile vagaries, born of a fundamental misconception of the nature of human knowledge. The critical question has been the chief point of interest, and out of the mistaken solution of this question have come, as a natural consequence, mistaken doctrines in the realms of cosmology, psychology, and ethics.

The 19 century saw a notable revival, which continues to develop vigorously to the present moment, of the ancient sanity known as the Scholastic philosophy. This noble system which alone has historical and factual claim to the name of the true philosophy suffered an almost total eclipse from the late 14 to the early 19 century. Then Catholic philosophers, strongly sponsored in their efforts by the great Pontiff Pius IX, made their voices heard in the world of thought The Jesuit, Matthew Li- beratore (1810-1872), and Cajetan Sanseverino (1811-1865) did truly significant work for the reviving of Scholasticism. And when Pope Leo X III issued, in 1879, his Encyclical Aetemi Patris which prescribes the teaching of Scholastic and Thomistic philosophy in Catholic colleges and seminaries, the revival quickly assumed full force and form. Among many notable proponents of Scholasticism, from the time of the Encyclical to this present, we may mention Zigliara, Billot, Mercier, Lepider, Garrigou- Lagrange, Gredt, Maritain, DeWulf, Gilson, Nys; and, in our own country, Shahan, Turner, Pace, Poland, Coppens, Brother Chrysostom, Sheen. The Scholasticism of our times is often called Neo-Scholasticism. The name does not mean that the

philosophia perennis is made “new” in itself, but that its wondrous light is employed in studying and interpreting the newest findings of the modern experimental sciences.

EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 157

Summary of the Article

In this Article we have learned something of the philosophers and the philosophies of the last three centuries. The notable names of the 17 century which fell under our observation were Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Hobbes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Those of the 18 and 19 centuries were Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Comte, Spencer, James, Bergson, Fichte, von Schelling, Mill, Dewey, and certain writers and teachers of the revival of Scholasticism.

We have encountered many philosophical terms and phrases, some of which are now familiar, some new. Among these we list for review: empiricism; sensism; positivism; idealism; subjec tivism; materialism; pessimism; naturalism; occasionalism; on- tologism; pragmatism; moral relativism; moral utilitarianism; Bacon’s “idols”; Locke’s primary and secondary sense-qualities; Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum”; State absolutism; Leibnizs “law of pre-established harmony”; monadology; Kant’s “phenomena and noumena,” “categorical imperative,” and “synthetic a priori judgments”; the triad of the Germans, Fichte, von Schelling, Hegel, viz., “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”; “will to power”; elan vital; Neo-Scholasticism.

Philosophy seeks the deepest evidenced knowledge about all things. Its essential questions are seven: what is the right procedure in reasoning ; what gives us certitude that we know truth; what is reality; what is the ultimate truth about this world; about God; about man; what, in view of all this knowledge, is the right way of conducting human life ?

This Part of our treatise studies, rather in outline than in detail, these seven basic questions and their answers. The Chapters are the following:

Chapter i. Chapter ii. Chapter h i. Chapter IV. Chapter V. Chapter VI.

Chapter VII.