Chapter 7

[1]Schelling,Werke, iii. 13. (References always to the first series.)

[2]Schelling,Werke,ii. 409.

[3]Schelling,Werke, ii. 500.

[4]Ibid. ii. 350.

[5]Compare vol. ii. 360 and 429.

[6]See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 424.

[7]'Every inquiry into the influence of general nature on living beings,' says Treviranus, 'must start from the principle that all living forms are products of physical influences which still go on at the present time and are altered only in degree and direction.'

[8]Schelling,Werke, iii. 63.

[9]Hegel,Encyclopaedie,§ 249.

[10]See e. g. Professor Michael Fosters article on Physiology in theEncyclopaedia Britannica.

[11]Schelling, iii. 352, 386.

[12]Ibid. iii. 427.

[13]Schelling, iii. 397.

[14]Schelling, iii. 600.

[15]Ibid. iii. 603.

[16]Schelling, iii. 628.

Thus far Schelling (aetat. 25) had gone in 1800. Two sides of philosophy had been alternately presented as complementary to each other; and now the task lay before him to publish the System itself which formed the basis of those complementary views. To that task Schelling set himself in 1801 (in his Journal for Speculative Physics): but theDarstellung meines Systemsremained a torso. The Absolute was abruptly 'shot from the pistol': but little followed save a restatement in new terms of the Philosophy of Nature. Meanwhile Hegel, who had inherited some little means by his father's death, began to think that the hour had struck for his entrance into the literary and philosophical arena, and wrote in the end of 1800 to Schelling asking his aid in finding a suitable place and desirable surroundings from which to launch himself into action. What answer or advice he received is unknown: at any rate in the early days of 1801 he took up his quarters at Jena, and in the autumn he gave his first lectures at the University. Gossip suggested that Schelling, left alone (since Fichte's departure) to sustain the onset of respectability and orthodoxy upon the extravagances of the new Transcendentalism, had summoned his countryman and old friend to bear a part in the fray. And the rumourseemed to receive corroboration. The two friends issued conjointly aCritical Journal of Philosophy,which ran through two years. So closely were the two editors associated that in one article it seems as if the younger had supplied his more fluent pen to expound the ideas of his senior.

The influence of Hegel is to be seen in theBruno,or on the Divine and Natural Principle of Things, published in 1802. It is a dialogue, in form closely modelled after theTimaeusof Plato, dealing with the old theme of the relation of art (poesy) and philosophy, and with the eternal creation of the universe. It presents philosophy as a higher than Art; for while Art achieves only an individual truth and beauty, philosophy cognises truth and beauty in its essence and actuality (an und für sich). Philosophy itself Bruno (the chief speaker of the dialogue) does not profess to set forth, but 'only the ground and soil on which it must be built up and carried out': and that soil is 'the Idea of something in which all antitheses are not so much combined, as rather one, and not so much superseded, as rather not at all parted,'—'a unity, in which unity and antithesis, the self-similar with the dissimilar, are one[1].' From such a standpoint it is not wonderful that 'in the finite understanding (Verstand,) compared with the supreme Idea and the way in which all things are in it, everything seems reversed, and as if standing on its head, exactly like the things we see mirrored on the surface of water[2].'

This supreme Unity is essentially a trinity: an Eternal, embracing infinite and finite; an eternal and invisible father of all things, who, never issuing forth from his eternity, comprehends infinite and finite in oneand the same act of divine knowledge. The infinite, again, is the Spirit, who is the unity of all things; while the finite, though potentially equal to the infinite[3], is by its own will a God suffering and made subject to the conditions of time[4]. This trinity in unity (which is the Absolute) is by logic—a mere science of understanding—rent asunder: and the one Subject-object of philosophy becomes for reflection and understanding the three independent objects which such a 'logical' philosophy calls respectively the Soul (erewhile the infinite), the world (once the finite), and God (the eternal unity). 'Opposing and separating the world of intelligence from the world of nature, men have learned to see nature outside God, and God outside nature, and withdrawing nature from the holy necessity, have subordinated it to the unholy which they name mechanical, while by the same act they have made the ideal world the scene of a lawless liberty. At the same time as they defined nature as a merely passive entity, they supposed they had gained the right of defining God, whom they elevated above nature, as pure activity, utter "actuosity," as if the one of these concepts did not stand and fall with the other, and none had truth by itself[5].'

The problem therefore of philosophy is on one hand to 'find the expression for an activity which is as reposeful as the deepest repose, for a rest which is as active asthe highest activity[6].' On the other hand; 'to find the point of unity is not the greatest thing, but from it also to develop its opposite, this is the proper and deepest secret of art[7].' The world as it first presents itself labours under a radical antithesis: it offers a double face, body and soul, finite and infinite. But to an absolute philosophy, or that high idealism which sees all things in the light of the Eternal, the two sides are not so separate as they first appeared. Each is also the whole and one, but under a phase, a 'Differenz' a preponderating aspect which disguises the essential identity of both. Behind mind, as it were, looms body: through body shines mind. The ideal is but a co-aspect with the real. The difference of nature and spirit presupposes and leads back to the indifference of the Absolute One. 'Wherever in a thing soul and body are equated, in that thing is an imprint of the Idea, and as the Idea in the Absolute is also itself being and essence, so in that thing, its copy, the form is also the substance and the substance the form[8].'

'Thus,' so Bruno concludes, 'we shall, first in the absolute equality of essence and form, know how both finite and infinite stream forth from its heart, and how the one is necessarily and for ever with the other, and comprehend how that simple ray, which issues from the Absolute and is the very Absolute, appears parted into difference and indifference, finite and infinite. We shall precisely define the mode of parting and of unity for each point of the universe, and prosecute the universe to that place where that absolute point of unity appears parted into two relative unities. We shall recognise in the one the source whence springs the real and naturals world; in the other, of the ideal and divine world.With the former we shall celebrate the incarnation of God from all eternity; with the latter the necessary deification of man. And while we move freely and without resistance up and down on this spiritual ladder, we shall, now, as we descend, see the unity of the divine and natural principle parted, now, as we ascend and again dissolve everything into one, see nature in God and God in nature[9].' Such was the programme which Schelling offered. Hegel accepting it,—or perhaps helping to frame it—made two not unimportant changes. He attempted in hisPhenomenologyto lead up step by step to, and so warrant, that strange position of idealism u which claims to be the image of the Absolute. He tried in hisLogicto give for this point of view a systematic basis and a filling out of the bare Idea of a Unity, neither objective nor subjective, neither form nor substance, neither real nor ideal, but including and absorbing these. He tried, in short, to trace in the Absolute itself the inherent difference which issued in two different worlds, and to show its unity and identity there.

ASystemof philosophy, and a philosophy of theAbsolute!The project to the sober judgment of common sense stands self-condemned, palpably beyond the tether of humanity. For if there be anything agreed upon, it is that the knowledge of finite beings like us can never be more than a—comparatively poor—collection of fragments, and can never reach to that which—and such is the supposed character of the Absolute—is utterly un-related, rank non-relativity. But in the first place, let us not be the slaves of words, and let us not be terrified by unfamiliar terms. After all, a System is only our old friend the unity of knowledge, and the Absolute is not something let quite loose, but theconsummation and inter-connexion of all ties. It is no doubt an audacious enterprise to set forth on the quest of the unity of knowledge, and the completion of all definition and characterisation. But, on the other hand, it may perhaps claim to be more truly modest than the self-complacent modesty of its critics. For ordinary belief and knowledge rest upon presuppositions which they dare not or will not subject to revision. They too are sure that things on the whole, or that the system of things, or that nature and history, are a realm of uniformity, subject to unvarying law, in thorough interdependence. They are good enough, occasionally, to urge that they hold these beliefs on the warranty of experience, and not as, what they are pleased to call, intuitions,a prioriideas, and what not. But to base a truth on experience is a loose manner of talking: not one whit better than the alleged Indian foundation of the earth on the elephant, and the elephant erected on the tortoise. For by Experience it means experiences; and these rest one upon another, one upon another, till at length, if this be all that holds them together, the last hangs unsupported, (and with its superincumbent load), ready to drop in the abyss of Nought.

This 'transcendental,' 'absolutist,' 'a priori' philosophy, which stands so strange and menacing on the threshold of the nineteenth century, is after all only, as Kant sometimes called it, an essay to comprehend and see the true measures and dimensions of this much-quoted Experience. All knowledge restsin(noton) the unity of Experience. All the several experiences rest in the totality of one experience,—ultimate, all-embracing, absolute, infinite, unconditioned; universal and yet individual, necessary and yet free,—eternal, and yet filling all the nooks of time,—ideal, and yet themother of all reality,—unextended, and yet spread through the spaces of the universe. Call it, if you like, the experience of the race, but remember that that apparently more realistic and scientific phrase connotes neither more nor less (if rightly understood) than normal, ideal, universal, infinite, absolute experience. This is the Unconditioned, which is the basis and the builder of all conditions: the Absolute, which is the home and the parent of all relations. Experience is no doubt yours and mine, but it is also much more than either yours or mine. He who builds on and in Experience, builds on and in the Absolute, intheSystem—a system which is not merelyhis.In his every utterance he claims to speak as the mouth-piece of the Absolute, the Unconditioned; his words expect and require assent, belief, acceptance;—they are candidates (not necessarily, or always successful) for the rank of universal and necessary truth: they are dogmatic assertions, and even in their humblest tones, none the less infected with the fervour of certainty. For, indeed, otherwise, it would be a shame and an insult to let them cross the lips.

It is the aim of the Absolutea prioriphilosophy to raise this certainty to truth: or, as one may rather say, to reduce this certainty to its kernel of truth. It seeks to determine the limits—notofthis absolute and basic experience (for it has no external limits)—butinthis experience: the anatomy and physiology of the Absolute,—the correlations and inclusions, the distinctions and syntheses in the unconditioned field. It examines thefoundationof all knowledge. But—if this be the phrase—we must be on our guard against a misapprehension of its terms. The foundations are also knowledge: they areinall knowledge and experience, its synthetic link and its analytic distinctions. We mustnot shrink from paradoxes in expression. The house of knowledge, the world of experience, is as self-centred and self-sustaining, and even more so, than the planetary system. It is a totality in which each part hangs upon and helps to hold up the others, but which needs no external help, resting and yet moving, self-poised and free.

We may be spared, therefore, verbal criticism on the Absolute and Unconditioned. The Absolute, and Infinite, and Eternal is no mere negation:—the only pure negation is NOT, and even that has a flaw in its claim. It is perfectly true—and it can only be babes and sucklings that need to be reminded of the fact—that none of us realises and attains thene plus ultraof knowledge and that all our systems have their day,—have their day and cease to be. 'The coasts of the Happy Isles of philosophy where we would fain arrive are covered only with fragments of shattered ships, and we behold no intact vessel in their bays[10].' So too the whole earth is full of graves; and yet humanity lives on, charged with the attainments of the past and full of the promise of the future. Let us by all means be critical and not dogmatic: let us never entirely forget that each utterance, each science, each system of ours falls short of what it wanted to be, and for a moment at least thought it was. But let us not carry our critical abstinence into dogmatic non-intervention: or, if so, let us silently accept the great renunciation of all utterance henceforth. System we all presuppose in our words and deeds, and should be much hurt if our defect in it were seriously alleged: the Absolute we all rest in, though amid so many self-imposed and other distractions we feel and see it not. The philosopherproposes for his task—or rather the philosopher is one on whom this task forces itself as for him the one thing inevitable—to determine what is that system and what that Absolute, or, if the phrase be preferred, the philosopher traces to its unity, and retraces into its differences that Experience—that felt, known, and willed synthesis of Reality,—that realised ideal world—on which and in which we live and move. He does not make the system, nor does he set up the Absolute. He only tries to discover the system, and to construe the Absolute.

It may be said that the best of philosophers can do no more than give usaSystem andanAbsolute. Undoubtedly that is so. Each philosophy is from one point of view a strictly individualist performance. It is not, in one way,theAbsolute truth, which it promises or hopes to disclose. The truth is seen through one being's eyes; and his 'measure,' as Protagoras might have said, is upon it. Yet it is stilltheAbsolute, as seen through those eyes; it is still in a marvellous measure that truth, that absolute truth, 'which the actual generations garble.' For both the artist and the philosopher, if they create, only re-create or imitate; if they are makers, they are still more seers: and their power of 'imitation' and of 'vision' rests on their capacity to de-individualise themselves of their eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, and to bring out only that in them which is the common truth of all essential thought and vision. In proportion as they purge themselves of thisevilsubjectivity are they true artists and philosophers. They are both—and so, too, is the religious genius—idealists: but the test of the value of their idealism is its power of including and synthetising reality. That is their verification: that, and not their concord with this or that opinion, this or that theory ofindividuals or of groups. Not that the views either of groups or individuals are unimportant. But often they are but frozen lumps in the stream, temporary islands which have lost their fluidity, and which imagine themselves continental and permanent.

Truth, then, reasoned truth, harmonious experience, absolute system, is the theme of philosophy. Or, in Hegelian language, its theme is the Truth, and that Truth, God. Not alum, an aggregate, or even what is ordinarily styled a system, of truths: but the one and yet diverse pulse of truth, which beats through all: the supreme point of view in which all the parts and differences, occasionally standing out as if independent, sink into their due relation and are seen in their right proportion.

[1]Schelling, iv. 231, 235, 236.

[2]Ibid. 244.

[3]'In things thou seest nought but the misplaced images of that absolute unity; and even in knowledge, so far as it is a relative unity, thou seest nought but an image—only drawn amiss in another direction—of that absolute cognition, in which being is as little determined by thought as thought by being.'

[4]Schelling, iv. 252. See further, iv. 327: 'The pure subject, that absolute knowledge, the absolute Ego, the form of all forms, is the only-begotten Son of the Absolute, equally eternal with him, not diverse from his Essence, but one with it.'

[5]Schelling, iv. 306. Cp. for actuosity, notes in vol. ii. 396. Spinoza, Cogit. Met. ii. 11, speaks of the actuosa essentia of God.

[6]Schelling, iv. 305.

[7]Ibid. iv. 328.

[8]Ibid. iv. 306.

[9]Schelling, iv. 328.

[10]Hegel, Werke, i. 166.

The eighteenth century—it has been often said—was a rationalising, unhistorical, age: and, in contrast, the nineteenth has been declared to bepar excellencethe founder and the patron of the historical method. In the one, the tendency governing the main movement of European civilisation was towards cosmopolitan and universal enlightenment. A common ideal, and, because common, necessarily rather general and abstract, perhaps even somewhat vulgarly utilitarian, pervaded Western Europe, and threw its influence for good and evil on literature and art, on religion and polity. It grew out of a revulsion, in many ways natural, from the religious extravagances of the century-and-a-half preceding, which had led prudent thinkers to reduce religion to a 'reasonable' minimum, and to reject all things that savoured of or suggested enthusiasm, fanaticism, and superstition. In politics the same one type or system of government and laws was aimed at, more or less, in all advancing states. National peculiarities and patriotism were looked at askance, as unworthy of the free 'humanity' which was set forward as the end of all training. To simplify, to level, to render intelligible, and self-consistent was the task of enlightenment indealing with all institutions. To remove all anomalies and inequalities, to give security for liberty and to facilitate the right to pursue happiness[1], was the chief watchword of this movement. Its questions were—Is religion, Is art and science, Is political organisation, a source of happiness? Are poetry, and a belief in divine things, and abstruse knowledge, upon the whole for human advantage and benefit? Only such civilisation can be justified as, taken all in all, is a blessing; if not (cried some) we may as well cling to the happiness of the barbarian.

That these are important questions, and that the purposes above-mentioned are in many ways good, is clear. But before we can answer the questions, or decide as to the feasibility of the aims, there are some things to be brought and to be kept in view. And these things were not as a rule brought and kept in view. It was assumed that the standard of adjudication was found in the averagely educated and generally cultured individual among the class of more or less 'advanced thinkers' who asked the questions and set up the aims. That class, already denationalised by function, forming a commonwealth or rather a friendly fraternity throughout the capitals of Europe, had cut itself off from the narrower and the deeper sympathies of the national life. Forming a sort of mean or middle stratum in the social organisation, they tended to ignore or despise equally the depths below them and the heights above. They took themselves as the types of humanity, and whattheirunderstandings found acceptable they dubbed rational: all else was a survivalfrom the ages of darkness. They forgot utterly that they were only a part, a class, a member in the social body: and that they could only be and do what they were and did, because what they were not and did not do was otherwise supplied. It takes all sorts of people to make a world: but each class—and the order of literature and intelligence is no exception—tends to set itself up as the corner-stone (if not something more) of the social edifice. What is more: in such a loose aggregate as the intelligent upper-middle class, the individual tends more and more to count as something, detached and by himself, to be an equal and free unit of judgment and choice, to be emancipated from all the bonds which hold in close affinity members of a group whose functions are unlike each other's, and yet decidedly complementary. Such a class, again—though there are of course conspicuous exceptions—is, by the stress of special interests, removed from direct contact with nature and reality, and lives what in the main may be styled an artificial life.

When such a class asked what were the benefits of art or religion, it thought first of itself; and it looked upon art and religion—and the same would be true of philosophy and science, or of political sanctions—asmerelyobjective and outward entities, foreign to the individual, yet by some mechanical influences brought into connexion with him,—as one might apply to him a drug or a viand. But clearly to a person of practical aims, bent on conveying information and enlightenment, bent on making all men as like each other as possible in the medium range of cultivation which he thinks desirable, the utility of some of these things is questionable and limited. It is only a little modicum of religion, of art and of science, which can be justified by its obvious pleasure-giving power; and it is easy to point the thesisagainst enthusiasm in these regions, by reference to the disastrous wars fanned by religion, to the license that has followed the steps of art, and to the lives wasted in the zeal for increasing knowledge. In his ideal of human life such a practical reformer will tend to suppress all that bears too clear a trace of natural, infra-rational, non-intelligent kindred,—all that ties us too closely to mother earth and universal nature.

But if this was the dominant tone of the literary teachers who had chief audience from the public ear, there was no lack of dissentient voices who appealed to nature, who loved the past, who set sentiment and imagination above intellect, and who never bowed the knee to the great idols of enlightened middle-class utilitarianism. Even in the leaders of the enlightening host—amongst the chiefs of theAufklärung—there is a breadth and a depth of human interest which sets them far above their average followers, and which should prevent us from joining without discrimination in the depreciatory judgments so often passed on the eighteenth century. The pioneers in the great emancipatory movement of modern times should not be allowed to suffer from the exaggerations and haste of their more vulgar imitators—still less refused the meed of gratitude we owe them. But when their ideas were violently translated into reality, when the levelling, unshackling process was set at work by vulgar hands, the shortcomings of their theories were made to show even greater than they were: and inevitable reaction set in. Even the revolutionist himself has come to admit that fraternity at that time came badly off in comparison with liberty and equality[2]. But these drawbacks were accentuated when the cosmopolitan reform-movement, by its haste and intolerance, awakened the spirit of national jealousy.The deeper instincts of life rose in protest against the supposed superiority of intellect: the heart claimed its rights against the head: the man of nature and feeling was roused up to meet the man of reasoning and criticism. The spirit of war evoked those energies of human nature—some of them not its least valuable—which had slumbered in times of easy-going peace. The days of adversity and humiliation taught men that the march of literary culture is not the all-in-all of life and history.

It was made apparent, practically at least, that intelligence, with its hard and fast formulae, its logical principles, its keen analysis, was not deep enough or wide enough to justify its claim to the august title of reason. To be reasonable implies a more comprehensive, patient, many-sided observation than is necessary to prove the claim to mere intelligence. To be intelligent is to seize the right means to execute a given or accepted end—it is to be quick and correct in the practice of life, to carry out in detail what has been determined on in general. Understanding plays upon the surface of life and deals with the momentary case: and its greatest praise is to be fleet in the application of principles, apt to detect the point on which to direct action, correct in its estimate of means to ends. Clearsighted, prudent, and direct, it is the supreme virtue in a given sphere: but the sphere must be given, and its end constituted in the measured round of practical life, its system complete: or, understanding is bewildered before a hopeless puzzle. Understanding is—the improvident cynic might say—a certain animal-like sagacity—(such cynical philosophers were perhaps Hobbes and Schopenhauer[3])—a mere power of carrying out agiven rule in a new but similar case, and of doing so, perhaps, through a long chain of intermediate links and means.

But there are more things in heaven and earth than are heard of in the philosophy of the logical intellect. Thesubtilitas naturae[4]far surpasses the refinements of the practical intellect: and if the latter is ever to overcome or be equal to the former, it must, so to speak, wait patiently upon it, as a handmaiden upon the hands of her mistress. Such a trained and disciplined intellect which has conquered nature by obedience is what the philosophers at the beginning of this century calledreason[5]. It is in life as much as in our mind. It comes not by self-assertion, by the attempt to force our ends and views on nature, but by feeling and thinking ourselves in and along with nature. Or, briefly, it breaks down the middle wall of partition by which man had treated nature as a mere world ofobjects—things to be used and to minister to his pleasure—but always alien to him, always mere matter to be manipulatedab extra.Yet even to get full use and enjoyment out of a thing it is well to be in closer community with it, and on terms of friendly acquaintance. The function of this fuller reason cannot be performed without something analogous to sympathy and imagination. Sympathy, which realises the inner unity of the so-called 'thing' with ourselves: imagination, which sets it in the full circumstances of those relationships which the practical intelligence is inclined to abstract from and to neglect. Yet only somethinganalogousto sympathy and imagination: if, as may well be the case, we attach to these terms any association of irregular or mere emotional operation. The imaginationin question is the 'scientific' imagination—the power of wide large vision which sets the object fully in reality, and is not content with a mere name or abstract face of a fact—a name which represents a fact no doubt, but represents it, as many such 'agents' or deputies do, in a hard and wooden spirit. The sympathy in question is the transcending of the antithesis between subjective and objective; not a fantastic or fortuitous choice of one or a few out of many on whom to lavish locked-up stores of affection, but the full recognition of unity as pervading differences, and reducing them to no more than aspects in correlation.

What has been said of sympathy and imagination, as the allies and ministers of reason, might be extended and applied to humour, to wit, to irony. These also it may be said—and with the same qualifications—are essential to a philosopher in the highest sense. The humour, viz., which strides over the barriers set up by institution and convention between the high and the humble, and sees man's superficial distinctions overpowered by a half-grim, half-jubilantAnanke,—which notes how human proposal is overcome, not without grace, by divine and natural disposal, how the deep inner identity in all estates breaks triumphantly through the fences of custom and deliberate intention. The wit, which upsets the hardened fixity of classes and groups, flits from one to another, shows glimpses of affinity between remote provinces of idea, and all this, without laboured and artificial search for analogies, though to the slower-following practical mind, hampered by its solid limits, these leaps from province to province seem paradoxical and whimsical. The irony, which notes the tragicomedy of life under its apparent regularity of prose,—which detects the vanity of all efforts to check the flux of vitality and make the volatile permanent; whichcontrasts the apparent with the real, the obviously and officiously meant with the truly desired and willed, and shows how diplomatically-close design is dissipated in a jest, or the soul bent on many years of enjoyment is plunged into torment. Thus, in a way, imagination, sympathy, wit, humour, irony and paradox are elements that go to the making of a philosopher: but in the serenity of reasoned wisdom they lose their frolicsome and fantastic mood, and fill their minor place with sober cheer. Wedded to the lord of wisdom, the Muse of poesy and wit loses her sprightly laugh and her dancing step, becoming a subdued, yet gracious matron, who, with her offspring, sheds gleams of brightness and warmth and colour in the somewhat austere household. Yet still the free maiden of poesy, in the open fields where the shadow of reflective thought has not yet fallen, has the greater charm; and a certain jealousy not unfrequently reigns between the married sister and the virgin yet untamed.

But though poetry and the allied arts of words were very helpful to philosophy—witness the services which, though in widely different ways, Goethe and Schiller rendered to the higher thinking of Germany—even more stimulative and fruitful was the research into nature and history. Natureandhistory: but they lie closer together than the conjunction suggests. It is true that in recent times we have been forcibly taught to separate civil from natural history, if we have not even been further taught that the latter is an improper application of the term. But when Aristotle said that 'Poetry is more philosophical than History' he was probably not restricting his remark to the story of nations and states; even as when Bacon set history as the field of memory beside the fields of imagination and reasoning, he was not solely referring to the recordsof the human past. The distinction between natural and civil history is no doubt for practical education a distinction of supreme importance. But it is so, because in this scholastic phase the conception of both, under these comprehensive names, was superficial and abstract. Natural history meant only the classificatory description of animals, plants, and minerals: civil history the tale composed to string together the succession of human actions on the public and national field of life.

We have seen in an earlier chapter the advances which Lessing, Kant, and above all Herder, made in this direction[6]. Emphasising in their several ways the great dictum of Spinoza that human passions, and the whole scheme of human life, areres naturales, quae communes naturae leges sequuntur, they gave to history a higher, more philosophical, more scientific scope than what the name used to connote. Neither in Spinoza himself, nor in these his followers, did this insistence on the unity of nature at all lead them to neglect the difference—almost equivalent, it may be said, in the end to anImperium in imperio—by which rational man marks himself off to a special kindred with the divine[7]. We have seen too what Schelling did to show that history, if in one aspect it be the product of free human volitions, is, in another and as he thought a superior aspect, the realm subject to a divine or natural necessity. The whole tendency of this epoch of thought—the tendency which entitles it above all to the name of speculative—is its impulse to over-ride this distinction between Nature and History; to over-ride it, however, not in the sense of simply ignoring or denying it, but of carrying it up into aunity which would do justice to both, without exclusively favouring either, and hardly without clipping both of any extravagant claims. The distinction remains,—no longer an abrupt division, but now tempered and mellowed by the presence of a paramount unity. Nature now has a real history: no longer a mere factitious aggregate of classified facts, it is the phenomenon of a 'latent process,' due to a 'latent schematism,' and a 'form' or principle of organisation. Classification does not cease: but it ceases to be an end in itself, and becomes only subordinate or auxiliary to a higher scientific end. The main theme is to construe the complete cycle of life-change and the complete organisation of life-state from the evidence pieced out and put together from the various orders, classes, and species of living creatures. And on the other side the mere tale or narrative of history, with its gossip of personalities, and its accidents of war and intrigue, tends to become insignificant in the presence of the great popular life, in its deep and subtle connexion with agencies of nature hitherto unsurmised, in its dependence upon necessities and uniformities which envelope or rather permeate and constitute the human will. It is not indeed that the force of great personalities has come to be treated as a quantity we may neglect. The force of the great leader, of the genius, of the hero, is not less admirable to the wise philosophical historian to-day than it ever was to his story-telling predecessor. But he flatters himself that he understands better, and can better take account of, the conditions which make the genius and the hero possible. Achilles still counts for more than a thousand common soldiers, and Homer himself is not merely the composite image by which a long tradition has fused into a dim pictorial unity the countless bards who sang for ages on the isles ofGreece and the coasts of Ionia. Yet we feel sure that Achilles did what he did, because of the race he sprang from, the inspiration he felt around him, the companionship in body and spirit of his peers. We feel that the hero derives his strength from earth and air, from the spiritual and material substance in which he draws his breath. True, we cannot explain him, as if he and his heroisms were a mere product of mathematical and mechanical forces. But where we once recognise that behind the single visible deed and agent there is a spiritual nature—an underlying agency—which, unperceived, keeps the hearth-fire of public life burning in the celestial temple of Vesta, we can at least see that though genius is a marvel and a mystery, yet it is according to law, and no mere will-o'-the-wisp.

But when we say that the actions and sayings even of the foremost individuals are to be comprehended only in the light of universal forces and laws, there is an error which is only too ready to substitute itself for the truth. It soon appears for example that, among the general causes which control the development of civilisation and the acts of individuals, the economical condition is of great and prominent effect. And, above all, it is easily measurable, and subject to palpable standards (such as statistics of exports and imports, &c.). It was natural therefore that a school of historico-social philosophers should arise who maintained that the economical state of a given society was the fundamental principle or form of its life, of which all other phases of its civilisation, religious, aesthetic, &c., were only variable dependent functions. This view, which comes out in the socialist theory of Marx, is clearly the exaggeration or abstract statement of a partial truth into a pseudo-complete theory. The truth is one which found expression as early as Plato. It is this: that in theeconomical system of a society we find the first and somewhat external or mechanical suggestion of the organism to which the state is yet to grow. In the economic law of reciprocity there is a 'certain faint image' of the principle of social organisation or political life. But when we go beyond, and interpret this first phase to mean the original foundation, we are stating a figment which has a plausibility only when by the economic state we mean a great deal more than abstractly economic facts include. And this again arises because it is really impossible to carry out thoroughly the abstraction of one aspect of social life from the others. There are no purely economic facts which are independent of other social influences,—of ideals, e. g. moral or aesthetic,—ideals which nobody would call economic, though they never quite part company from economical conditions.

So again there is occasionally a tendency to magnify the influence of what in the narrowest sense may be termed political systems. Forms of government, and titles of sovereignty are regarded as forces to which individuals—even the highest—must bow. But here again the exaggeration of a principle need not tempt us to rush with Tom Paine into the opposite extravagance that government and state-power are superfluities, or quasi-ornamental additions to a social fabric, which can do without them and, like other beasts of low organisation, can, when shorn of them, reproduce them with ease. And thus though we may dissent from the view that laws and constitutions are omnipotent, we may admit that in them the central unity and controlling principle of social life finds its dominant expression in great outlines. We shall not agree with him who said 'Let who will make the laws of a nation if I may make its ballads': because we know that the nationwill in the end have the chief voice in determining what are to be its ballads no less than its laws. We shall not quite accept the dictum that the intellectual class which formulates ideas and sets up programmes of ideals gives the real lead to the process of civilisation; for we shall remember that real ideas are not formed by individuals, but are the slow work of concrete experience in the so-called inorganic masses, finding at length utterance through the lips of those appointed to that end by the natural and divine order. Yet we shall, on the other hand, see that the high things of the world are dependent on the lowly: that a song-maker is sometimes not less potent than a legislature: that pecuniary conditions are effective in the sanctuaries of religion and the high places of art: and that the noblest ideas of great thinkers draw their strength and life through roots that run unseen through very humble ground.

La Raison, says Leibniz,est l'enchainement des vérités.[8]Truth linked into truth, and so made truer: truth, with which all things harmonise and nothing cries dissent: truth, which is neither the prerogative of the meredemos, nor of the intellectual aristocracy, but of that rarer unity which, when they can exercise several and mutually-tendered self-abnegation, is the real spirit of both: truth, thus conceived, is that king of life, that sun of Reason which lighteth every man. Truth—to use again the language of Leibniz,—which is not merely the aggregate of monads,—but the monad of monads, their mutual penetration and corrective completion, in that Idea-reality where they retain their individuality, but retain it in the fullness and fruition of the absolute which each essentially or implicitly is. This kingdom of suffering and yet triumphant truth is the true age ofReason—not outwardly-critical, individualistically-reforming, mere intellectual and abstract intelligence,—but intelligence, charged with emotion, full of reverence, reverent above all to the majesty of that divinity which, much disguised, and weather-beaten, like Glaucus of the sea, resides in common and natural humanity. This is the Reason of German idealism at the commencement of the century. To the clear-cut dogmas of the abstract intellect it savours of mysticism. If it is friendly to distinctions and constantly makes them, it is the pronounced enemy of hard and fast separations. Begin where you like, the reason of things, if you allow it to work, carries you round till you also see identity where you only saw difference, or effects where you only looked for causes. You begin, as the inductive logician, with the belief that the process is from the known to the unknown. You start with your basis of fact, as you called it. The nemesis of things forces you to admit that your facts were partly fictions which waited for the unknown to give them a truer and fuller reality. You talk at first of induction, as if it were a single and simple process, which out of facts builds up generalities and uniformities. You learn as you go on that the only induction that operates, except in cases which have been artificially simplified by supposing half the task done before you apply your experimental methods, is an induction of which the major part is deductive, and where your conclusion will be recurrently made your premiss. Your induction only works on the basis of a hypothesis, and must itself be linked in the 'concatenation of truths,'—a concatenation which is also a criticism and a correction.

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