Development then has two faces, one to the future and another to the past. And what is called the historical method is apt to emphasise only one of the two aspects, just as, it may be added, practical considerations are often likely to produce an opposite but equally partial bias in favour of the future. The historical method in incapable hands is liable to lead to unprofitable sighs,—not unaccompanied by a certain luxury of tears—over the lowly hole of the pit—it may even be the filth and brutishness, out of which so much of noble humanity (for thither the interest of development always reverts) has been dug; and in empty heads the practical, the vulgarly-utilitarian satisfaction is liable to equally vain fits of self-applause on our magnificent progress. But both the self-depreciation of him who loiters regretfully round the beggarly rudiments, and the self-laudation of glorious 'improvements' looking derisively on less glorious days, are unworthy of the reasonable and scientific spirit. The philosophical method does not allow itself to be imposed upon by the lapse of time, and insists that in a sense the past contained the present—that, as the poet says, the child is father of the man. Not indeed contained in any grosser or more delicate mechanical way. The coming development does not necessarily lie prefigured—if we had the proper microscope to see it—as a germ in thefirst and original state. That may be, or may not be. Yet prefigured it is by the law of its structure, or in the intelligible unity by which only can its existence be understood and construed.
But if this be the method of real development, in the growth of nature, and the progress of history, it is also the method of that supreme product of historical progress, the spirit and system of philosophy. Thought, also, the culminating stage in which the spirit of man becomes conscious of itself and of its universe, will move or grow on the same lines as that of which it is the comprehension and theory. It will begin at the two ends, and each beginning will complete and presuppose the other. Nature will suppose and yet lead up to Spirit or Mind: Spirit or Mind will throw light on the mystery of Nature: Being will point to knowledge or Idea; and Idea show itself the basis of Being. Or, if we consider the triple division of the philosophic system, as it runs in Hegel'sEncyclopaedia, we can see how misleading it may be to take that one order as absolute. To understand it thoroughly we must begin with each of the three in turn: so as thus to realise that each does not except figuratively succeed the other, but that in each an aspect of the whole truth is presented which had been put by the other parts somewhat in the background. In each part there is a definition and a revelation of the Absolute. But each is also, as it were, a projection, a perspective view, a condensed or expanded image of the other. In each the Absolute is one and whole, in some more veiled, more restricted, and more meagre than in others; but the veil, and the restriction, and the emptying, are self-imposed: and for that reason the veil is really transparent, the restriction is negatived, and the emptying is not only a self-humiliating but a self-ennobling irony—the irony of the Absolute.
[1]Of course the term 'equilibrium' may be used loosely to mean a great deal more than this,—how much will depend on the context. These quasi-mathematical analyses have great fascination: their apparent simplicity imposes upon us.
[1]Of course the term 'equilibrium' may be used loosely to mean a great deal more than this,—how much will depend on the context. These quasi-mathematical analyses have great fascination: their apparent simplicity imposes upon us.
[2]The distinction, it will be observed, lies between the method of mathematical physics and that of physics which has learned something from the researches of electricity or chemistry. If the method or principles of chemistry are thus said to be reduced to those of physics, this is because the conceptions of physics have been revolutionised from the side of chemistry, &c., and even of biology. This tendency of modern science is precisely in the line indicated by Schelling and Hegel.
[2]The distinction, it will be observed, lies between the method of mathematical physics and that of physics which has learned something from the researches of electricity or chemistry. If the method or principles of chemistry are thus said to be reduced to those of physics, this is because the conceptions of physics have been revolutionised from the side of chemistry, &c., and even of biology. This tendency of modern science is precisely in the line indicated by Schelling and Hegel.
[3]Problems of Life and Mind, iii. p. 58.
[3]Problems of Life and Mind, iii. p. 58.
[4]Eth.vii. 7 ὁ νοῡς ἀρχὴ: 6. 6 νοῡς ἐστι τῶν ἀρχῶν.
[4]Eth.vii. 7 ὁ νοῡς ἀρχὴ: 6. 6 νοῡς ἐστι τῶν ἀρχῶν.
[5]Statistics only define—and primarily for the imagination—the general laws and principles on which they rest. The clear-cut mathematical form strikes and 'catches on,' where a more universal statement sounds vague and glides off. Hence, as one says, they may proveanything.The fact is, they provenothing.They only illustrate in diagrammatic form the theory which presided at their collection. To emphasise the fundamental nature of ethics for human development you need only say that conduct is three-fourths or (as to some minds the precision rises with the denominator of the fraction 17/20) of human life.
[5]Statistics only define—and primarily for the imagination—the general laws and principles on which they rest. The clear-cut mathematical form strikes and 'catches on,' where a more universal statement sounds vague and glides off. Hence, as one says, they may proveanything.The fact is, they provenothing.They only illustrate in diagrammatic form the theory which presided at their collection. To emphasise the fundamental nature of ethics for human development you need only say that conduct is three-fourths or (as to some minds the precision rises with the denominator of the fraction 17/20) of human life.
[6]The resolute misinterpretation—as it often seems—of the maxim that like is known by like,—is a curious chapter in the history of Logic. All knowledge is based upon,—or, to speak more simply,is—the identity of differents: of differents, which in knowledge are identified,—of identity which in knowledge is put under difference. And yet the ordinary meaningless talk on this matter seems to assimilate knower and known to two separate things (or persons), who casually and, we may add, inexplicably know each other: which is mythology, perhaps, but not epistemology.
[6]The resolute misinterpretation—as it often seems—of the maxim that like is known by like,—is a curious chapter in the history of Logic. All knowledge is based upon,—or, to speak more simply,is—the identity of differents: of differents, which in knowledge are identified,—of identity which in knowledge is put under difference. And yet the ordinary meaningless talk on this matter seems to assimilate knower and known to two separate things (or persons), who casually and, we may add, inexplicably know each other: which is mythology, perhaps, but not epistemology.
[7]Bacon: 'In Praise of Knowledge' (a mere leaflet of much significance towards estimating his true grandeur). On theConjugiumofMensandUniversusseeNovum Organum, distrib. op.
[7]Bacon: 'In Praise of Knowledge' (a mere leaflet of much significance towards estimating his true grandeur). On theConjugiumofMensandUniversusseeNovum Organum, distrib. op.
[8]The saidmeresame is not really the same at all. Nobody in his senses predicates sameness except where he also sees differences: or, the term always implies relation.
[8]The saidmeresame is not really the same at all. Nobody in his senses predicates sameness except where he also sees differences: or, the term always implies relation.
The difference between the conceptions of reality held by Aristotle and Plato respectively is that where Plato said Being, Essence or Substance (οὐσία), Aristotle said Activity (ἐνέργεια). To be is to act, to be active. To the outsider—the plain man of philosophic legend, it seems at first that a thing mustbebefore it cando: that you must have an agent before you get an action. And, in a way, Aristotle admits this not quite satisfactory criticism. Every activity presupposes, he allows, a power to act, a potentiality: every actual presupposes an implicit or a mere possibility. Existence seems, as it were, to be doubled; or the mere surface-being is turned into a subject which has a predicate. But if the existence is to be real, it has to include both elements, and with the latter or the actuality, as its crown. Nor is this all. The possibility which issues forth in action may be fairly called self-realisation. That is to say: A—the hypothetical agent—acts, does something: and in so doing, seems to go forth and beyond itself, to externalise itself. Or, A is acted upon, and thus seems to be diminished. But what it externalises, or puts forth, is after all what itis: it puts forth itself: and, on the other hand, if it be a patient, it is no less an agent and self-limitative. What athing really is, is what itmakesitself be: what it allows itself to be made, that it really is. Yet further, if the word self-realisation be taken in its fullness of meaning,—if there be really aself,and it be realised, then this self-realisation, which is the truth or more developed conception of being, seems to imply or postulate in it a self-consciousness, an awareness of the process of completed being,—completed in its return from utterance of possibility to self-fruition or in its re-assumption of itself.
To us, of course, as beings aware of what we do and achieve, this is simple enough: but it is also true ofthings,that we only understand them, in so far as we put them in, or invest them with, the same activity and apperception of activity as we are familiar with in our own experience. The veriest materialist cannot help speaking of things as agents, as behaving, as having a function. He would, no doubt, if he were to be cross-examined, refuse to identify himself with the primitive anthropomorphism, or at least zoömorphism of the natural man who sees the river run and the clouds sweep the sky; and he would probably mutter something referring to people who cannot see when they ride a metaphor to death. Still less, perhaps, would he be inclined to adopt the spiritualistic or animistic hypothesis of philosophising physicists, like Fechner, who would accredit even the plants at our feet, and the stars in the sky, with souls, or soul-like centres of their life. But, however he may shrink from what we may call the ontological consequences of his language, there is no doubt that for him the meaning of the world, its reality and truth, is obtained by an interpretation in terms which, rigidly employed, imply their environment by a self-consciousness to which they are relative. Take from him the tacit assumption (which he often finds it difficult to realise just because it is the foundationof all his language) that reality is in the last resort a self-conscious reality, and his words become meaningless, or what he might think worse, metaphorical.
To Bacon, who, though not without a strong speculative impulse, approached philosophic dicta from the standpoint of an average intelligent Englishman (and it is on that account that his remarks are often so instructive), it seemed a grave fault of the Stagirite to define the soul, that 'most noble substance,' by words of the second intention. Without substance—a solid something as basis of act and event—the reality of the soul seemed likely to fare badly. Behind consciousness he, like many others, felt there must be a something of which consciousness is the state, act, or predicate and attribute. The thinking must come from a thinker. There must be a permanent subject of thought—a persistent substance which does not disappear when thinking for the nonce stops. And thinking is according to common experience very liable to stops and interruptions. Both Bacon and Locke felt that without this refuge to fall back upon, personal identity was in a bad way, or personality itself little better than a delusion. And therefore when Aristotle, and his modern followers, treated soul and mind as essentially definable by the terms activity, self-realisation, it has been freely urged against them that they are tampering with the pearl of great price which all our hopes and aspirations fondly guard.
And this is a subject on which there is inevitably a good deal of misunderstanding. And the misunderstanding will probably last so long as one set of writers flaunts over it that blessed word Personality as a holy, a sacrosanct thing, like the visionary cross with its inscriptionIn hoc signo vinces: and as another set treats it as a mere fetish, under which is hidden nothingbetter than stock or stone, or a heap of old bones. Perhaps some concessions might well be made on both sides. And the first of them would be to try to come to some clearer understanding what the term in question means. And, on that point, if we follow the example of Aristotle and examine popular usage, to see if it can help us to any consistent use of the term, we shall find that by personal as opposed to real we mean something peculiarly attached to the individual, of which he cannot divest himself as of other outward things, though it also is an outward thing[1]The person in this narrowest sense means the body; and if the epithet is further extended it still expresses what is directly manipulated through the members of the living agent, and is more or less closely attached to it. Yet if it means the body, we must be careful to add that it is the body, regarded not as such but as the representative, the outward manifestation, the inseparable sign or symbol of a spirit, an intelligence and a will. The person is the visible or tangible phenomenon of something inward,—the phase or function by which an individual agent takes his place in the common world of human intercourse and interaction—his peculiar and definite part in the general or universal world and field.
Personality thus mingles or unifies in it an universal and an individual aspect or element: it hints that the universal work always has in reality an individually-determinate tone,—that nothing in the world, even if it be called the same, is really and actively the same.Si duo idem faciunt, non est idem quod faciunt.Thus,what separates personality from individuality is simply that in the narrower or abstracter use of the latter term there is an absence of the due subordination of all individuality to universality, and of all universality to individuality. Personality, in short, is an individuality which is not a mere freak, not merely different from other things, but also in itself charged with a universal meaning or function. Yet even this is not enough to describe it. It is the individuality of an intelligence: the flesh and blood, and, in a secondary degree, the outward things, stamped with intelligence. Every member of a kind, every natural existence, has this double character; this convergence or union of universal and individual. In being this individual object, it is at the same time a universal, andvice versa.But in the attribution of personality there is involved something beyond what is common to all creatures. And that something, we may first of all say, is this. Whereas in the case of otherthingsthe individuality is distinctly subordinate, and each is reckoned primarily by its kind, in the case ofpersonswe can almost declare that the universality is subordinate to the individuality. This union of individuality and universality in a single manifestation, with the implication that the individuality is the essential and permanent element to which the universality is almost in the nature of an accident, is what forms the cardinal point in Personality. And one can understand, when the distinction is thus put, the obvious and palpable antagonism in which the view stands to the central principles of Spinoza[2]We speak of a man as a Personality when we wish to note the fact that he is no mere manufactured article, the representative of a common type, with nothing to choose between him and a thousand others, but that he is, as it were, one of a thousand, one 'Whom nature printed and then broke the type,' that he has in the highest sense 'distinction,' the nobility of nature's own patent. Other things exist, so to speak, for the sake of their kind, and for the sake of other things; a person, in the strictest sense, is never a mere means to something beyond, but always at the same time an end in itself or himself. Other things are mere examples in illustration of a law that rides superior to them and overrules them: the person is a law unto himself. He has the royal and divine right of creating law—of starting by his exception a new law which shall henceforth be a canon and a standard. For in such a personality when he claims his full rights there is the visible immanence of the divine and universal—or there is the visible unity of the eternal and the temporal. He rules as the natural king, the great ruler whose judgment and authority are better than the complex code of common laws: he guides as the artistic genius who sees truth steadily in a single intuition and in that single picture sees it whole[3].
But when we ask if such a personality is found in the field of actual experience and history, there arises adivergence of opinions. It is at any rate matter of common experience that there is a good deal of unjustified identification of the self with the universal—identification in which the universal suffers violence and is taken by force. There are only too often cases where the personal interest is allowed to disguise itself under a semblance of zeal for the common good, and that even without conscious intent or act of deception. No good and noble deed, Hegel has said, can ever be done without faith in its goodness, and zeal for its attainment: without a holy passion and fervour of devotion, which exceeds the cold service of duty rendered for duty's sake[4]. But it is equally true and equally to be remembered that this interference of personal passion and disinterested interest has defaced the noblest causes and made flow endless torrents of fanaticism and persecution. A personality in which the universal was perfectly incarnated in the individual would be in truth a God amongst men. And it is probably a more likely occurrence that where the individual as such arrogates to himself the privilege of the universal, there should be seen not the deeds of the god, but the ebullitions of the beast that is in man.
A personality, then, in popular language, and perhaps also in popular philosophy, is the living and conscious individual in whom general forces, truths, or ideas become real, active, efficient forces, truths, and ideas. And the importance of the conception resides in the safeguard thus supposed to arise, which will prevent the realities of the world from being dissipatedaway into the endless and restless flux of the terms of thought,
'La bufera infernal che mai non resta.'
To such a common frame of mind ideas, truths, forces are vacant, ghostly forms, devoid of true life and reality: to get such they need blood and flesh to clothe them, to give them substance and power. Now Hegel, no less than those who offer this criticism, regards ideas (in the ordinary sense of that term), truths and forces, also as abstractions which need something to make them powers in the real world of nature and the ideal world of mind. Hegel, like Schelling, has a sublime contempt for mere universals. But as to the something else, there is a divergence of view. Two well-known answers are given by the popular philosophy known as materialism or spiritualism: two systems which are probably not so wide apart as the contrast of their names might imply. According to the former, thinking, ideas, truths, goodness and beauty are special functions (the grosser materialists say secretions) of a special kind of matter—of something which is accessible to ordinary mechanical and chemical tests, but which exhibits also, in certain cases, the exceptional phenomena of consciousness. Here the essential reality is a something, permanent and essentially indestructible,—something which no man has seen, nor indeed can see,—but which is called Matter. The spiritualistic philosopher (as distinguished from theidealist) regards as the essential realities in the universe what he calls spirits. What these are, also, nobody has as yet (any more than in Kant's time[5]) given any very authoritative account, but so far as the quasi-scientific expositions in regard to them throwany general light on the subject, we may say that they suggest only a differently-constituted matter, a matter e. g. of less or more dimensions than that we are most familiar with.
Now the advocate of spiritual reality, who protests most strongly against the injury done to personality by reducing it to something fluid and not fixed, something in process and not in persistent substance, seems mostly to lean to a quasi-spiritualistic hypothesis, or to the—so-called—higher materialism. He is an advocate of what we may describe as the soul-thing, of a permanent, (he would even hold, an absolutely permanent) substance or substratum of psychical reality which, no doubt, exhibits certain properties, but is always more than any one, or any mere series of its phenomena. It has been said, indeed, by one who spoke with authority that he that will save his soul shall lose it, and he that will lose it shall find it. But this has always been a hard saying, which has been as far as possible explained away by exegesis. Yet its moral import is not so very far removed from its philosophical equivalent. The true life is not that of self-seeking pleasure, but the life spent in the service of truth and love, the life dedicated to impersonal interests, and ideal good. So also the reality of the human soul as we first know it lies not in itself, but in its transfiguration, its purification, and liberation to higher forms of being. The Soul, in its first avatar in each of us, is after all of the earth, earthy, unless it continue on that path of growth and development on which it has entered. It is as Aristotle said, and said well, the first actualisation[6]—theproximate ideality of an organic body. In soul organic body carries out its promise: in soul we, the observers, or untrained psychologists, note our first awareness of mental life in its organic environment. But there are other grades, other heights of achievement, yet set before the principle of life, which is more than mere life and mere soul: or soul contains a germ which must bear higher fruit. To be itself, or to become all that it in promise and potency contains, it must dispossess itself of what clings to it and possess itself of what is its own; and so transmute its first phase into one more adequate. The soul is, as Hegel has said, the awakening of mind from the sleep of nature[7]: it is nature gathering itself out of its absorption in its dispersion, the breath of life and feeling striving through the scattered members of the material world, and finding itself at first half-asleep, a pervading, unifying current that flows through and makes continuous the various portions of the universe. It is the earliest real, felt unity in which the logical or synthetic pulse—as yet purely potential in Nature, and only surmised by science—re-appears in the actual concrete world. And as the earliest, it is, like first loves, what one clings to hardest as our prime and fundamentaldifferentia.Here at least we are something—a centre of being, and not a mere centreless expanse of extension: something emerging from the world of silence and of night—something in which each feels
'I am not what I see,And other than the things I touch.'
And that something we would not lose, at any cost.—But the only way not to lose it, is to use it as a stepping-stoneto higher things. The metaphor, indeed, like metaphors in general, must not be pressed too far. For it is more than a stepping-stone and it is never left behind as a mere dead self: there is
'Nothing of it that doth fadeBut doth suffer a sea-changeInto something rich and strange.'
And that richer result into which it is transformed is the consciousness of a self, and the intelligence which wills and knows.
If it be asked in what respects the result is richer, the answer is as follows. The soul,—this 'first entelechy—is exclusive, and it is immersed in its natural limits of organic life. It has yet to go through the school of self-detachment, the process of 'erecting itself above itself'; and of thus extending its view and its range of control over a wider field of objects. Gradually it attains to the rank of a consciousness before which is unrolled the spectacle of a world of objects set over against it, and even of a world within it; itself as an object deposed to the rank of something to be surveyed. As such, it seems almost to have left all immersion in corporeity completely behind, and to have completely divested itself of any limitation. It floats freely above the real psychical life out of which it emerged—a detached but somewhat shadowy self, not burdened by any restrictions of nature or circumstance. As such a mere Ego, or logical self—as the mere theatre on which the play of ideas takes place, it surveys its real psychical self far below; it finds itself as a strange sort of thing, and saysThis was me(which however is not exactly the same asI am I, I = I). Yet it was a great step to have thus ceased to be absorbed in its qualities, to be the mere breath of life and feeling, stirring in its several affections and modifications.In order to get forward, it was necessary to recoil a little: to save itself—and that must mean to get itself in fuller and richer being—the mind had, as it were, to measure and realise the full depth of its nonentity, and to surrender all that it had hitherto clung to as its own. In an attitude of reflection upon itself it fancies that it is the empty room, thetabula rasa, on which experience is to write itself: but in its secret heart it retains the faith and acts upon it, that it is the power of intelligent and intelligible unity which makes the writing intelligible, if it does not even itself play the writer. What it now seems to find—what fills up its consciousness, presumed empty and merely receptive,—it gradually recognises to be its very and original own. Through labour and experiment it fills up the vacant form (the passive half of itself to which it deposed itself) of consciousness; and thus, as an intelligent self, a true mind, it has for itself and realises as in itself all the life and reality which in its earlier stage of soul it only was and felt itself naturally to be. But on this stage of free intelligence it is no longer bound up with its natural being in such a way as to feel itself a fixed and restricted centre, sunk in the living environment so as to see no further, and to deem itself in its seclusion the permanent reality, the exclusive fact. It is no longer exclusive and self-concentrated, but inclusive and all-embracing. It is no longer a mere consciousness—a mere receptive and synthetic unity of apperception—but a reason and a mind. And a reason and a mind already refuse to be narrowed and confined by the same limits as seem appropriate to the soul. In the province of free self-realised intelligence we at least seem to occupy a ground on which others can equally come,—to have nothing peculiar or merely individual. In Knowledge, which is reasoned perception,and in Will, which is reasoned impulse, there is a king's highway, a public forum, where souls meet and converse and perform a collective work;—and in bothmere, i. e. essentially restricted, individuality is at a discount[8].
Such would be the course of development if we looked at it only in the inwardness or subjectivity of psychical, conscious, and intelligent life. But an analogous or parallel development may be observed if we look at man as an active, i. e. a practical and moral being, a being who makes Nature his own, stamps it with his title of possession, and who gives to his fellowship with other souls an objective, outward existence in the forms and institutions of social life. Here too his first achievement is the affirmation of his individuality, the distinction in outward and tangible shape of the Mine from the Thine: the creation of property, and the projection of himself in a world of mutually-recognised personalities. As the individual soul in the inner life, so the personal being with its property is the solid, insoluble basis of the life in public—the field of social ethics. The same instinct, which in its dread of dissolution clings to the perpetuity of the inner nucleus of soul, upholds the other as containing the stable and eternal security of all social well-being. The immortality of soul in the inner world: the sacro-sanctity of property in the outer. But if these postulates are to be permitted, if individuality and personality are to abide, they must, in the one case as in the other, bow to the law of development, the law of history and of life. They must correct themselves, re-adjust themselves,—include what they excluded, and re-combine their elements, transmute themselves into what wehave, after Hegel, called theirtruth: must redintegrate themselves with suppressed correlatives, and carry out their implications of larger unity. The soul, exclusive and fast-clad in its mere organic vestment, in which it is as yet only the name and form of intellectual life, has first of all to retract itself into the bare abstract consciousness, or mere self, on which the masses of reality stream, to fill its vacant rooms and empty forms up with ideas. So too the person—that close concretion or coalescence of mind with material—that identification of self with its 'clothes,' its property and all it can vulgarly be said toown,is only an aspect of truth which tends to be over-estimated when it is reflected upon, and must notwithstanding be over-ridden and merged. Withdrawing itself from its clothing of earth and water, and even perhaps from its inner mansion of flesh and bone, personality floats in the free air as the impersonal personality of conscience,—the ethereal realm where pure practical reason rules. In that ether where morals reign absolutely is the home of the categorical imperative, of the Stoical law of duty, of the conscience which, here at least, has might as it has right. It too, like its parallel, consciousness, in the inner mental life, has, or seems to have, all its fulfilment from without. As even Kant admits, it is itself a vacant form; yet a form of such influence as to impress on whatever comes within its range an obligation to be universal and to be uniform. Here too, as in the parallel stage, it was of inestimable importance that mind should, in the socio-ethical sphere, see itself supreme in its innermost dignity and personality,—the personality which lies within,—even though that supremacy were at first no better than as a law, a form, a category, recognised as authoritative and imperative. For conscience, like the field of consciousness, is afterall only a quasi-passive self—a remarkable property or endowment, a sort of innate principle or idea by which the mind was seen to be distinguished in a unique way from all things else. To realise once for all the fact that consciousness and conscience form an absolute tribunal from which there can be no appeal: that the 'synthetic unity of apperception' in the theoretical, and the 'autonomy of the rational will' in the practical sphere, are the ultimate and finala priori: this is a great thing to do,—even though it only expands and defines the Cartesian principle of clear and distinct ideas, and will remain as Kant's title of honour in the history of philosophy. He thus fenced off or consecrated the sanctuary of the mental and moral life.
But it was not enough to set apart the sacred principle, the central hearth-fire of truth and goodness. If at an earlier stage,—earlier, i.e. in this logical analysis,—the formal was wholly sunk in the material, if i. e. the mere series of legal formulae in their hard and brittle outlines were absolutely identified—without doubt or hesitation—with the morally and socially good; the formal side, or mere spirit and will of good, the abstract principle of morality, is now invested with an equally undue prominence. The actual or concrete ethical community—be it family or state, or other social organisation—is animated and maintained by a spirit which transcends and includes alike the outward shell of civil law and the inward law of conscience. For, curiously enough, as it may seem at first, both conscience and civil legislation assume the form of imperative and definite commands—laws political or civil, and laws moral. Both fall therefore into an inflexibility, a rigorous and mechanical hardness in their enouncements. Both worship the lord of what men call logic, i. e. of formal consistency and formal uniformity, toan excess which sometimes issues in fantastic irregularities. Their several maxims of legal conformity and of duty for duty's sake are in first appearance excellent: but a further reflection shows that the Law covers a good many inconsistent or at least unrelated laws within its code, and Duty is often sadly to seek in presence of the collisions between what offer themselves asprima facieduties in any given case. The amplest code of laws that ever existed will always leave lots of loop-holes for negligence and villainy, and would never work for an instant, were it not for ever supplemented by the spirit of faith and love, by social piety and political loyalty, by the thousand ties of sentiment and feeling which really vivify its dry bones. So too the abstractions of the conscientious imperative, of the law of duty, of the moral tribunal, of the man within the breast, and of the dignity and beauty of human nature, would effect nothing unless they could always tacitly count on the support of recognised and authoritative social law and usage. Outward rests upon inward; and rules direct feelings.
Here, again, as in the purely intellectual or cognitive sphere, it is evident that the spirit of man has its source of life neither in its abstract self-hood (in consciousness and conscience) nor in its mere natural environment and organic endowment (in sense-affections, and social law and usage), but in the unity of both,—a unity which transcends either. Both individual and society live and grow, because they are continuous and one: because they presuppose an ideal unity or a living Idea at the root of their being, as their inner and essential guiding-principle, at once constitutive and regulative of their action. The machinery of language supplies to the intellectual sphere a sort of sensible meeting-ground and common field in whichthe development of knowledge becomes possible: and the same purpose is subserved in the social sphere by the machinery of ethical and political forms and institutions. These are the field, the home of freedom, as the other are of knowledge. It is in these collective and objective structures that we get the expression of the law of human development: the visible sign, viz. of the essentially universal nature of the individual. The individual in these attains his relative truth: for they show the weakness of the individuality of the mere individual. They show that his exclusiveness, his quasi-originality, is only an appearance:—confronted, no doubt, by an appearance of an opposite character, as if the originality and the reality lay in the environment and the collective body. They point therefore beyond and behind both foci to a common centre or inclusive unity of life.
But they do not destroy personality and individuality: they only transform it and made it a more adequate and consistent representation of reality, by giving in it a place to factors or 'moments' which, though always effective, were not recognised as constitutive elements, and treated only as externally interfering agencies. It may be a question, of course, how far it is wise to retain the term after its meaning has thus been altered by expansion and redistribution of elements. On the whole it seems impracticable—and it would be undesirable, perhaps, even if it were more feasible—to be too hard and fast in our use of denotations. It is hardly the province of philosophy to coin new terms in which to deposit the results of her researches. A term no doubt—particularly if, as the phrase runs, it be luckily discovered, or judiciously selected—may save the expenditure of thought. But it is hardly the business of philosophy to encourage economy in this direction.Much more is it the perpetual task of philosophy to counteract the ossification that sets in in terms,—to reinterpret the meaning which is absorbed in these 'counters of thought,' and make them once more sterling money for the market of life. What, for instance, is the work of Aristotle's Ethics, but to set free the genii which the black magic of every-day intercourse has incarcerated in the non-significant Greek term Εὐδαιμονία? Like our own Happiness, it flits from lip to lip, little better than a mere name, which is still prized, but—except for a few synonyms that are equally vague with itself—is attached to things which a little reflection shows it cannot truly denote. Aristotle seeks—we may say—to define it. But the phrase 'definition' seems barely applicable to the complex process thus implied,—a process of which definition, as ordinarily understood, is only one small portion. For to define happiness, is to reconstruct the conception. Or, to be more accurate, it is really to construct it or reproduce in consciousness its construction. As it stands, the thing to be defined is a name and a thing, of which certain relations to other things soon begin to show themselves, which is more or less similar to one thing, and more or less to be distinguished from another. To mark it off from these co-terminous things, and to show how they are related to it on different sides,—this would be what we may perhaps call strict, or formal, or nominal, ormeredefinition.
Now whatever be the other uses of such definitions—and they are serviceable at the outgoing in any branch of enquiry,—they are not precisely the work we expect a philosopher to do for us. And assuredly it is not Aristotle who would stop short at that sort of definitions. We find accordingly that for the purpose ofrealising what happiness—the common name for human good—means, he is obliged to bring into the field the whole system of his thought in its cardinal notions of Energy, Soul, &c. Aristotle here as elsewhere retraces the path of thought which carries us from mere, vulgar, inadequately-apprehended happiness (he follows the same process in his treatment of pleasure, friendship &c.—to take only ethical examples) to true, essential and completely-apprehended happiness,—or, to use Hegel's technical phrases, from happiness as it isan-sich(in or at itself) or as it isfür-sich(for or to itself), to happiness as it isan-und-für-sich.In so 'defining' happiness Aristotle is thus obliged to bring in his conceptions of man and of society, of human life and its powers, of natural and acquired faculty, of mind in its relations to nature; and if not to expound, at least to employ, his fundamental categories of philosophical thought. Such a machinery can hardly be called less than a construction, i. e. a re-construction by conscious effort of the latent but actual concatenation of the elements in the fact.
In this case we traverse the distance which separates mere happiness from true happiness, from happiness imperfectly or abstractly conceived to happiness adequately and concretely conceived. Of course when we say real or true happiness, we use these terms as they are used within the ordinary range of human speech. An ultimate and absolute in truth and reality is for us at any given time only a comparatively or relatively ultimate and absolute. It is that which, so far as we can see and think (all philosophising presumably goes on under this stipulation, tacit or express), gives an expression, an interpretation, a meaning and a construction to reality which leaves no feature unrecognised, no contradiction unsolved, no discordunreconciled, which leaves nothing outside and alien to it, and suppresses without acknowledgment nothing that has ever been recognised within it. It is, if you like so to call it, the completest, or (if you are really in earnest with your philosophising and have carried it on to what for you is the end) the complete formula of the Absolute—of that which in a transcendent senseis,isall,is the infinite and eternalone.Yet, after all, it is a formula. But here that undying adversary of all thought steps in and says Amereformula. And to that we must here as elsewhere rejoin: No, not a mere formula. A mere formula would be not even a formula,—a formula only in name—and with no reality which it served to formulate. It is a real and true formula, if it be a formula at all, and not something which merely swaggers about under that title. Nay more, if it be a true and real formula, it is the truth and the reality in its day and generation, until at least a truer truth and a more real reality shall have been discovered. Let us by all means be modest: but there is a false humility which becomes no man and is the guise of hypocrisy or insincere sincerity. Let us—in other words—never assume that 'we are the men, and that wisdom will die with us': but equally let us hold fast the faith of reason that what we know as true and real can never be false, i. e. utterly false, however much it may turn out one day to be surmounted. And, on the other hand, let us equally remember that in the mere and abstract commencement—the unreal and the untrue, as we must perforce style it by contrast with the (pro tempore) truth and reality—there is no utter and sheer error or unreality. It has always been felt to be one of the most loveable sides of Aristotelianism—this recognition of the reasonableness of all actual fact, or of the truth latent inthe honest, though narrow and ill-defined judgments of the mass.
Thus, coming back to personality, let us admit that themerepersonality which at first sight seemed only worth rejecting, is an element, at least, in true personality,—or is a part which, because an organic member and no mere mechanical part, is full of traces and indications which involve and postulate the whole. The true personality and the true individuality of being is something which presupposes for its completeness the social state—the organic community. It is no doubt familiar to us that, according to an old but never quite dormant view, the collective community is but the aggregate or congeries of individuals. But the individuals whose aggregation makes the community are themselves products of the social union. Complete, all-round, harmonious personality, it is sometimes said, is the highest fruit to be yielded by social development. Or, as the last century would have preferred to put it, the main or sole aim of the State is furtherance towards Humanity—to the stature of the perfect man. And these are true sayings,—but perhaps only half true. If all must grow so that one and each may grow, so and not less must each one grow so that the all—the commonwealth of reason and the kingdom of God—may be more and more present, 'may come.' And that kingdom only comes when All is in Each, and Each is in All: and when, without loss or diminution, each is each and all is all. Then and not till then does personality become true and infinite, free and harmonious individuality, which is in the same instant universality. The monad—to use the language of the great Idealist who did not find individuality at all incompatible with universality—never ceases to be a monad: it is eternal and indestructible, an absolute centre of being. The monadin its individual measure 'expresses' or 'envelops' the Infinite or Absolute: it is, i. e. under a subjective limitation, identical with the absolute, a concentration or condensation of it into an impenetrable, i. e. literally an individual, point,—but a point which is in the psychical or intellectual world never entirelycarens recordatione,or oblivious of its essential totality. But if the monad 'expresses' the Absolute, it no less concords or sympathises in harmonious development with all its congeners, the other monads: so that while it neither interferes with them, nor suffers violence from them, it yet exists and acts in an ideal identity, that is, in a real fellowship, with them. Again, the monad has what may be called its side of passivity, but passivity here does not meanmerepassivity, but rather the essential limitation due to its special and peculiar stand-point—a limitation which in the higher orders of being becomes transparent or is transcended. How far Leibniz succeeds in reconciling this apparent contradiction—how far even any one can reveal the mystic indwelling of universal and individual in each other, this is a serious question in its place: but it is only bare justice to Leibniz to say that he at least never failed to emphasise both aspects of reality, and that if one 'moment' is predominant and fundamental in his work it is not the monad, but the Monad of Monads. If necessity be the right word to express the relation of the Universal Law to the individual being and to affirm that the individual is not a loose self-supporting unit (and Leibniz, far from thinking so, always uses in its stead the phraseinclinat, non necessitat[9], to emphasise the immanence of law, or the autonomy of every completed being), then Leibniz is notless, but more necessitarian than Spinoza. His difference from Spinoza, in fact, lies mainly, if not solely, in his clearer recognition of the transcendence, no less than the immanence, of the Absolute, which Spinoza has somewhat veiled under the apparent insignificance of the difference betweennatura naturansandnatura naturata.Yet the Monad of Monads is no supra-mundane, ormerelytranscendent God.
But if we further ask whether such personality is attainable in the world of experience and describable in terms of thought—whether there be any actual and visible agent possessed of this true personality, as we have agreed to call it, we are in face with a higher stage of the problem of personality. And that question in other words brings us back to where we began. A true and real personality, a complete individuality is something which so transmutes all that we are most accustomed to call by that name that it is hardly any use clinging to it, unless to protest against the danger of mistaking such expansion and transmutation to be only a blank negation. Yet to cling to it too much involves a danger for the true recognition of that transcendent's universality. All human personality, all natural individuality is, as Lotze has eloquently pointed out[10], something which falls far short of what it professes to be. But in the general failure to unite the universal with the particular, or the fact with the idea, there are degrees; and we can at least affirm so much as this that the truest individuality and the most real personality is not that which is least permeated by thought, but that in which thought has had the largest share. Individuality is something more than a mere sum of general qualities;—that is certainly the fact; but it is not less the fact, that for us an individuality and personality is more perfectand true in proportion as more general function and universal character coalesce into harmony and power in it. Assert then the initial presence and virtue of individuality and personality in the human soul: but remember that it has this virtue, not for what it is, but for what it promises and may reasonably be expected to be, and that, to realise the promise, it has to behave inclusively, rather than exclusively, gather up into itself and make its own all content, rather than set itself up in reserve and isolation.
We have seen that the social organisation, animated as it is by the moral idea, is rather the arena on which the true union of mind and matter, of idea and nature, of thought and fact may be worked for, than itself the fruition of such an effort. All-important is the State; all-important the ethical idea which pervades it. But the world of freedom—the ideal world so far made actual—is not what it promised to be. 'Is it not,' said Plato, 'the nature of things that the actual should always lack the perfection of theory?' In the visible world the State, indeed, rules supreme: 'it is,' as Hegel might say in the words of his great predecessor in political theory, 'that Leviathan or mortal God to whom under the immortal God we owe our welfare and safety.' But there is something in the State which the State in its palpable reality cannot adequately express. If it is highest in the hierarchy of this world, the lowest in the ideal kingdom of the Absolute is higher than it. Above the State as the embodiment and the guarantee of the moral life, there is the realm of Art, Religion, and Philosophy. In them man's craving for individuality and personality finds a satisfaction it could never hope for below them: they at least restore the truth and reality of man's life and of the universe in a measure far exceeding what even morality could do.If we ask then what Art, Religion, and Science have to show of Personality or true realised individuality, the answer is briefly as follows. Had it not been that august names have spoken of imitation as the essence of Art-work, we should hardly have deemed it possible that men should speak of Realistic Art. Yet here, as in Religion and in Science, the epithet is introduced to guard against a misconception of the province of Idealism. All Art, all Religion, all Science, are and must be idealistic: but they can never be—as the familiar phrase puts it—merely idealistic, i. e. visionary, fantastic, unreal. All of them, in other words, may be said to show us 'the light that never was on sea or land'—the heavenly city—the eternal truth of things. But they must, on their peril, show it here and now, and not in a pretended or other world. They must—no less than law and morality—work in terrestrial materials, and not with superfine celestialities.Mentem mortalia tangunt.It is out of the oldest and commonest realities of life and death that the poet and the painter make the melodies of heaven sound in our ears, and gladden us with the rays of the empyrean. It is out of the hard rock of the real that the artist's rod must strike the well-spring of the ideal. So too, in like manner, a religion must show the Divine, but show Him immanent: an immanence which, on one hand, shall not drag Godhead down to the level of casual reality, nor on the other set Him far off in lonely transcendence.
The aesthetic faculty, awakened as it is by the natural response of man's perceptions to the harmonies of existence, to the spontaneous coherency of its many parts in a united whole, and stimulated by the creative work of human art, which moulds even the naturally discordant or unconnected into a concordant expression (sometimes it may be, as in handicraft, only to satisfyhuman needs), lifts us above the imperfections and fragmentariness of things, above our selfish interest in them, into a frame of mind where they are seen whole and perfect, and yet one and veritably individual. In its supreme or comprehensive phase it does not deal merely with the beautiful, nor merely with the beautiful and sublime. All true art, whether it awakes awe or admiration, laughter or tears, whether it melts the soul, or steels it to endurance, has a common characteristic; and that is to raise the single instance, the prosaic or commonplace fact, into its universal, eternal, infinite significance. It frees the fact from the limitations which our distractions, our practicality, our temporary hopes and fears, have deeply stamped upon it. It is still, after art has dealt with it, to all appearance a single fact: but it now has the universe behind it and within it. It carries us away from the incompleteness, the pressure of externals, the solicitude for the future and the regrets for the past, into a self-contained, self-satisfying totality, into freedom and leisure, rest which is not stolid, and action which involves no toil. Such a result is partly, as was said, the gift of common nature, which speaks peace, comfort, joy, self-possessed fruition for all her children when their sense is open and free: partly it comes through those select ones among these children who have a larger perception of the meaning and inner truth of her works, and who can by a sensible reconstruction, which if it is fair and successful will only bring out more clearly the unity and harmony which deeper insight detects, help others to see and enjoy what they have felt and rejoiced over. Such are the poets—in the widest sense—the makers, the seers, who in verse, in music, in picture and sculpture—who, in human lives, it may be even in the conduct of their own, show us how divine a thing is nature andhumanity: show us the secret and unheard harmonies that to the full-opened ear absorb and transmute the lower discords of life and vulgar reality. It is they who give immortality and divinity, who make heroes and demigods[11]. Or, if they may not be said to make them, they half-reveal and half-construct the ideal figures which stand high and beneficent in the history of the world. And by those who thus half-construct, and half-reveal, are meant not merely the single artists in whom the process culminates to final outline and publicity, but the many-voiced poesy of the collective human heart which out of its myriad elemental springs constitutes the total figure, the august image of the hero, and the saint, lending him from its plenitude all that his abstract self seemed to want. It is on the tide of national and human enthusiasm that the individual artist is lifted up to realise the full significance of his ideal figure, and his imaginative craft can only be inspired by the vigour and warmth of the collective passion for noble ends and high action.
Nowhere it would seem is the ideal of personality and many-sided individuality more adequately realised. Here, at last, the whole truth of life, the indwelling of individual and universal in one body, seems to be realised. But it is realised in an ideal. It is—if we analyse it—a synthesis of three elements; partly in the material reality which serves as bodily vehicle; partly in the conception and technique of the artist; partly in the general mind which inspires both the material and the form with its own larger life. It is—as its name implies—an artificial product—a synthesis of elements which tend to fall apart. Technique varies, conceptions lose their interest, the tone of general culture alters,and materials are dependent on locality. When that happens, the work of art is left high and dry: no longer a living God, but a dead idol, still wondrous, but speaking no more its human language.
So it is with the heroic figures who rise into the purer air of universal history. They also—so far as they live with a personal power—are works of art: works of real-idealism. For all history which deserves the name, and is not mere abstract dry-as-dust chronicle (as to the possibility of which utter aridity there may be legitimate doubts), is a work of fiction or invention, of reconstruction. It seeks to understand its characters. But to understand them it is not (and as historical art cannot be) content with a mere reference to motives acting on them from outside. It seeks to understand them with and in their times—to see in them the full measure of contemporary life and thought which elsewhere has found so meagre expression. Such is the artistic completion of personality in the ideal,—whether in what is called history, or what is called art. It exaggerates a truth, because it loses sight of the background. And that background, which helps to constitute such ideal personality, is no constant element. The centuries and generations as they roll contribute their varying quota to set, as they say, the historical character in its true light, in its fulness and truth of reality. And thus this personality of the great leaders of human life is only an image and a sign—a fruit of development, no bare fact which remains unchanged and always the same. It is rather a personification than a personality. It incarnates the living spirit who is universal and eternal in the limits of a sensuously-defined individual, and indeed incarnates there only so much as the generation it speaks to can see of complete truth. It is only after all a vehicle of truth; thougha nobler vehicle than social and personal ethics can afford.
As it is felt that the treasure of the idea—that the full power of spiritual life—cannot be adequately stored in the earthen vessels of mortality, the consummation of personality is forced to recede into the invisible if it would be still conceived as attainable. 'True personality,' says Lotze, 'is with the Infinite,' What here is fragmentary, is there a rounded total, a perfect unity: He alone is absolutely self-determining, self-explaining: is all that He means to be, and means all that He is. In a sense, philosophy does not hesitate to countersign all this. But, in adopting it, philosophy must reserve the right of noting the danger and the ambiguity of such language. Religion does well, philosophy may say, in thus insisting upon the dependence of all appearance on one Absolute reality; but it is well also not to forget that all appearance is also the appearance of that reality or Absolute. And in so saying, be it added, philosophy assumes no essential superiority to religion. Religion in its fulness, and apart from any theories that may grow up under its wing, is more than theory, more than mere philosophy: it is the consummating unity of life—the enthusiasm and supreme power of life, its consecration and divinisation by its assured immanence in the eternal and universal. It is, in short, as was long ago said of it, the true life, the light which is the light and life of men; and its inspiring principles are faith, hope, and love. But when unassisted religion proceeds to set before itself the meaning and lesson of its life, when it proceeds to formulate a theory of the world and set out a scheme of world-history, it trespasses on the field of knowledge, and is amenable to the criticisms of the reflective spirit—the spirit of philosophy. And that criticism briefly is to theeffect that the religious theory in its ordinary form is an imperfect interpretation of the religious experience. Nor is this to derogate from the prerogative of the friends of God. It is only to criticise the formulae and phrases of dogmatic theology—a theology, however, which is as old as religion itself, and which takes different forms from age to age, and from one level of thought to another, always in its measure translating religious reality, truth, or experience into the categories, naive or artificial, simple or complex, of the science (it may be the pseudo-science) of the time. Philosophy, therefore, is the criticism of the science of God—that is of theology—as it is the criticism of other sciences. For criticism philosophy always is: always the reflection upon fixed dogma, and the discussion of it till it becomes sensible of its defects, and stands upon another and higher plane. And to some it may seem that this is the sole function which philosophy can legitimately undertake. 'Yet,' as Aristotle remarked, 'the good critic must know what he criticises.' He must not merely reflect upon it from outside, but deal with it from the plenitude of experience, from the abundance of the heart. If he be a critic then, he cannot be a mere critic, but also an agent in the work of reconstruction. Or, if we put the thing otherwise; though, as Fichte said (p. 28), philosophy is a different thing from life, the true philosopher can never be a mere philosopher, but must, if he is to reach the height of his vocation, have also entered into the full experience of reality, into the whole truth of life. His philosophy will then not be outside of religion and aesthetic perception. In its comprehension of all grades and forms of reality and truth, goodness, holiness, beauty, will have their place. He also will be among the theologians.
And when the philosopher deals with personality in this high, this supreme sphere, he will submit that the truth of personality is subordinate to the truth of spirituality. He will argue that by sticking too closely and fixedly to personality we are running a risk of bringing down the divine to the level of the human. If, with Dante, he can say that in its very heart the Light Eternal
'Mi parve pinta della nostra effige;'
he will undoubtedly add with Dante
'Oh quanto è corto 'l dire e come fiocoAl mio concetto;'
or, with the first philosophical theologian who interpreted the experience of Christian life, he will rise from the historical Jesus to the inward witness of the Spirit.