ABSOLUTE IDEALISM

Sec. Absolute idealism is the most elaborately constructive of all the historical types of philosophy. Though it may have overlooked elementary truths, and have sought to combine irreconcilable principles, it cannot be charged with lack of sophistication or subtlety. Its great virtue is its recognition of problems its exceeding circumspection; while its great promise is due to its comprehensiveness its generous provision for all interests and points of view. But its very breadth and complexity render this philosophy peculiarly liable to the equivocal use of conceptions. This may be readily understood from the nature of the central doctrine of absolute idealism. According to this doctrine it is proposed to define the universe as an absolute spirit; or a being infinite, ultimate, eternal, and self-sufficient, like the being of Plato and Spinoza, but possessing at the same time the distinguishing properties of spirit. Such conceptions as self-consciousness, will, knowledge, and moral goodness are carried over from the realm of human endeavor and social relations to the unitary and all-inclusive reality. Now it has been objected that this procedure is either meaningless, in that it so applies the term spirit as to contradict its meaning; or prejudicial to spiritual interests, in that it neutralizes the properties of spirit through so extending their use. Thus one may contend that to affirm that the universe as a whole is spirit is meaningless, since moral goodness requires special conditions and relations that cannot be attributed to the universe as a whole; or one may contend that such doctrine is prejudicial to moral interests because by attributing spiritual perfection to the totality of being it discredits all moral loyalties and antagonisms. The difficulties that lie in the way of absolute idealism are due, then, to the complexity of its synthesis, to its complementary recognition of differences and resolution of them into unity. But this synthesis is due to the urgency of certain great problems which the first or realistic expression of the absolutist motive left undiscovered and unsolved.

Sec. It is natural to approach so deliberate and calculating a philosophy from the stand-point of the problems which it proposes to solve. One of these is the epistemological problem of the relation between the state of knowledge and its object. Naturalism and absolute realism side with common-sense in its assumption that although the real object is essential to the valid state of knowledge, its being known is not essential to the real object. Subjectivism, on the other hand, maintains that being is essentially the content of a knowing state, or an activity of the knower himself. Absolute idealism proposes to accept the general epistemological principle of subjectivism; but to satisfy the realistic demand for a standard, compelling object, by setting up an absolute knower, with whom all valid knowledge must be in agreement. This epistemological statement of absolute idealism is its most mature phase; and the culminating phase, in which it shows unmistakable signs of passing over into another doctrine. We must look for its pristine inspiration in its solution of another fundamental problem: that of the relation between the absolute and the empirical. Like absolute realism, this philosophy regards the universe as a unitary and internally necessary being, and undertakes to hold that being accountable for every item of experience. But we have found that absolute realism is beset with the difficulty of thus accounting for the fragmentariness and isolation of the individual. The contention that the universe must really be a rational or perfect unity is disputed by the evident multiplicity, irrelevance, and imperfection in the foreground of experience. The inference to perfection and the confession of imperfection seem equally unavoidable. Rational necessities and empirical facts are out of joint.

Sec. Even Plato had been conscious of a certain responsibility for matters of fact. Inasmuch as he attached the predicate of reality to the absolute perfection, he made that being the only source to which they could be referred. Perhaps, then, he suggests, they are due to the very bounteousness of God.

“He was good, and no goodness can ever have any jealousy of
anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all
things should be as like himself as possible."

Plotinus, in whom Platonism is leavened by the spirit of an age which is convinced of sin, and which is therefore more keenly aware of the positive existence of the imperfect, follows out this suggestion. Creation is “emanation” the overflow of God’s excess of goodness. But one does not readily understand how goodness, desiring all things to be like itself, should thereupon create evil even to make it good. The Aristotelian philosophy, with its conception of the gradation of substances, would seem to be better equipped to meet the difficulty. A development requires stages; and every finite thing may thus be perfect in its way and perfect in its place, while in the absolute truth or God there is realized the meaning of the whole order. But if so, there is evidently something that escapes God, to wit, the meaningless and unfitness, the error and evil, of the stages in their successive isolation. Nor is it of any avail to insist (as did Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza alike) that these are only privation, and therefore not to be counted in the sum of reality. For privation is itself an experience, with a great variety of implications, moral and psychological; and these cannot be attributed to God or deduced from him, in consideration of his absolute perfection.

The task of the new absolutism is now in clear view. The perfect must be amended to admit the imperfect. The absolute significance must be so construed as to provide for the evident facts; for the unmeaning things and changes of the natural order; for ignorance, sin, despair, and every human deficiency. The new philosophy is to solve this problem by defining a spiritual absolute, and by so construing the life or dynamics of spirit, as to demonstrate the necessity of the very imperfection and opposition which is so baffling to the realist.

Sec. Absolute idealism, which is essentially a modern doctrine, does not begin with rhapsodies, but with a very sober analysis of familiar truths, conducted by the most sober of all philosophers, Immanuel Kant. This philosopher lived in Konigsberg, Germany, at the close of the eighteenth century. He is related to absolute idealism much as Socrates is related to Platonism: he was not himself speculative, but employed a critical method which was transformed by his followers into a metaphysical construction. It is essential to the understanding both of Kant and of his more speculative successors, to observe that he begins with the recognition of certain non-philosophical truths those of natural science and the moral consciousness. He accepts the order of nature formulated in the Newtonian dynamics, and the moral order acknowledged in the common human conviction of duty. And he is interested in discovering the ground upon which these common affirmations rest, the structure which virtually supports them as types of knowledge. But a general importance attaches to the analysis because these two types of knowledge (together with the aesthetic judgment, which is similarly analyzed) are regarded by Kant as coextensive with experience itself. The very least experience that can be reported upon at all is an experience of nature or duty, and as such will be informed with their characteristic principles. Let us consider the former type. The simplest instance of nature is the experience of the single perceived object. In the first place, such an object will be perceived as in space and time. These Kant calls the forms of intuition. An object cannot even be presented or given without them. But, furthermore, it will be regarded as substance, that is, as having a substratum that persists through changes of position or quality. It will also be regarded as causally dependent upon other objects like itself. Causality, substance, and like principles to the number of twelve, Kant calls the categories of the understanding. Both intuition and understanding are indispensable to the experience of any object whatsoever. They may be said to condition the object in general. Their principles condition the process of making something out of the manifold of sensation. But similarly, every moral experience recognizes what Kant calls the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is the law of reasonableness or impartiality in conduct, requiring the individual to act on a maxim which he can “will to be law universal.” No state of desire or situation calling for action means anything morally except in the light of this obligation. Thus certain principles of thought and action are said to be implicit in all experience. They are universal and necessary in the sense that they are discovered as the conditions not of any particular experience, but of experience in general. This implicit or virtual presence in experience in general, Kant calls their transcendental character, and the process of explicating them is his famous Transcendental Deduction.

Sec. The restriction which Kant puts upon his method is quite essential to its meaning. I deduce the categories, for example, just in so far as I find them to be necessary to perception. Without them my perception is blind, I make nothing of it; with them my experience becomes systematic and rational. But categories which I so deduce must be forever limited to the rôle for which they are defined. Categories without perceptions are “empty”; they have validity solely with reference to the experience which they set in order. Indeed, I cannot even complete that order. The orderly arrangement of parts of experience suggests, and suggests irresistibly, a perfect system. I can even define the ideas and ideals through which such a perfect system might be realized. But I cannot in the Kantian sense attach reality to it because it is not indispensable to experience. It must remain an ideal which regulates my thinking of such parts of it as fall within the range of my perception; or it may through my moral nature become the realm of my living and an object of faith. In short, Kant’s is essentially a “critical philosophy,” a logical and analytical study of the special terms and relations of human knowledge. He denies the validity of these terms and relations beyond this realm. His critiques are an inventory of the conditions, principles, and prospects of that cognition which, although not alone ideally conceivable, is alone possible.

Sec. With the successors of Kant, as with the successors of Socrates, a criticism becomes a system of metaphysics. This transformation is effected in the post-Kantians by a generalization of the human cognitive consciousness. According to Kant’s analysis it contains a manifold of sense which must be organized by categories in obedience to the ideal of a rational universe. The whole enterprise, with its problems given in perception, its instruments available in the activities of the understanding, and its ideals revealed in the reason, is an organic spiritual unity, manifesting itself in the self-consciousness of the thinker. Now in absolute idealism this very enterprise of knowledge, made universal and called the absolute spirit or mind, is taken to be the ultimate reality. And here at length would seem to be afforded the conception of a being to which the problematic and the rational, the data and the principles, the natural and the ideal, are alike indispensable. We are now to seek the real not in the ideal itself, but in that spiritual unity in which appearance is the incentive to truth, and natural imperfection the spring to goodness. This may be translated into the language which Plato uses in the “Symposium,” when Diotima is revealing to Socrates the meaning of love. The new reality will be not the loved one, but love itself.

“What then is Love? Is he mortal?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal,
but is a mean between them.”

“What is he then, Diotima?”

“He is a great spirit, and like all that is spiritual he is
intermediate between the divine and the mortal."

Reality is no longer the God who mingles not with men, but that power which, as Diotima further says, “interprets and conveys to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and rewards of the gods.”

In speaking for such an idealism, Emerson says:

“Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry. . . . The mid-world is best."

The new reality is this highway of the spirit, the very course and raceway of self-consciousness. It is traversed in the movement and self-correction of thought, in the interest in ideals, or in the submission of the will to the control of the moral law.

Sec. It is the last of these phases of self-consciousness that Fichte, who was Kant’s immediate successor, regards as of paramount importance. As Platonism began with the ideal of the good or the object of life, so the new idealism begins with the conviction of duty, or the story of life. Being is the living moral nature compelled to build itself a natural order wherein it may obey the moral law, and to divide itself into a community of moral selves through which the moral virtues may be realized. Nature and society flow from the conception of an absolute moral activity, or ego. Such an ego could not be pure and isolated and yet be moral. The evidence of this is the common moral consciousness. My duty compels me to act upon the not-self or environment, and to respect and cooperate with other selves. Fichte’s absolute is this moral consciousness universalized and made eternal. Moral value being its fundamental principle the universe must on that very account embrace both nature, or moral indifference, and humanity, or moral limitation.

Sec. But the Romanticists, who followed close upon Fichte, were dissatisfied with so hard and exclusive a conception of spiritual being. Life, they said, is not all duty. Indeed, the true spiritual life is quite other, not harsh and constrained, but free and spontaneous a wealth of feeling playing about a constantly shifting centre. Spirit is not consecutive and law-abiding, but capricious and wanton, seeking the beautiful in no orderly progression, but in a refined and versatile sensibility. If this be the nature of spirit, and if spirit be the nature of reality, then he is most wise who is most rich in sentiment. The Romanticists were the exponents of an absolute sentimentalism. And they did not prove it, but like good sentimentalists they felt it.

Sec. Hegel, the master of the new idealism, set himself the task of construing spirit in terms as consecutive as those of Fichte, and as comprehensive as those of the Romanticists. Like Plato, he found in dialectic the supreme manifestation of the spiritual life. There is a certain flow of ideas which determines the meaning of experience, and is the truth of truths. But the mark of the new prophet is this: the flow of ideas itself is a process of self-correction due to a sense of error. Thus bare sensation is abstract and bare thought is abstract. The real, however, is not merely the concrete in which they are united, but the very process in the course of which through knowledge of abstraction thought arrives at the concrete. The principle of negation is the very life of thought, and it is the life of thought, rather than the outcome of thought, which is reality. The most general form of the dialectical process contains three moments: the moment of thesis, in which affirmation is made; the moment of antithesis, in which the opposite asserts itself; and the moment of synthesis, in which a reconciliation is effected in a new thesis. Thus thought is the progressive overcoming of contradiction; not the state of freedom from contradiction, but the act of escaping it. Such processes are more familiar in the moral life. Morality consists, so even common-sense asserts, in the overcoming of evil. Character is the resistance of temptation; goodness, a growth in grace through discipline. Of such, for Hegel, is the very kingdom of heaven. It is the task of the philosopher, a task to which Hegel applies himself most assiduously, to analyze the battle and the victory upon which spiritual being nourishes itself. And since the deeper processes are those of thought, the Hegelian philosophy centres in an ordering of notions, a demonstration of that necessary progression of thought which, in its whole dynamical logical history, constitutes the absolute idea.

Sec. The Hegelian philosophy, with its emphasis upon difference, antagonism, and development, is peculiarly qualified to be a philosophy of nature and history. Those principles of spiritual development which logic defines are conceived as incarnate in the evolution of the world. Nature, as the very antithesis to spirit, is now understood to be the foil of spirit. In nature spirit alienates itself in order to return enriched. The stages of nature are the preparation for the reviving of a spirituality that has been deliberately forfeited. The Romanticists, whether philosophers like Schelling or poets like Goethe and Wordsworth, were led by their feeling for the beauty of nature to attribute to it a much deeper and more direct spiritual significance. But Hegel and the Romanticists alike are truly expressed in Emerson’s belief that the spiritual interpretation of nature is the “true science.”

“The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow of space was strown with these flowers we call suns and moons and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought."

The new awakening of spirit which is for Hegel the consummation of the natural evolution, begins with the individual or subjective spirit, and develops into the social or objective spirit, which is morality and history. History is a veritable dialectic of nations, in the course of which the consciousness of individual liberty is developed, and coordinated with the unity of the state. The highest stage of spirit incarnate is that of absolute spirit, embracing art, religion, and philosophy. In art the absolute idea obtains expression in sensuous existence, more perfectly in classical than in the symbolic art of the Orient, but most perfectly in the romantic art of the modern period. In religion the absolute idea is expressed in the imagination through worship. In Oriental pantheism, the individual is overwhelmed by his sense of the universal; in Greek religion, God is but a higher man; while in Christianity God and man are perfectly united in Christ. Finally, in philosophy the absolute idea reaches its highest possible expression in articulate thought.

Sec. Such is absolute idealism approached from the stand-point of antecedent metaphysics. It is the most elaborate and subtle provision for antagonistic differences within unity that the speculative mind of man has as yet been able to make. It is the last and most thorough attempt to resolve individual and universal, temporal and eternal, natural and ideal, good and evil, into an absolute unity in which the universal, eternal, ideal, and good shall dominate, and in which all terms shall be related with such necessity as obtains in the definitions and theorems of geometry. There is to be some absolute meaning which is rational to the uttermost and the necessary ground of all the incidents of existence. Thought could undertake no more ambitious and exacting task. Nor is it evident after all that absolute idealism enjoys any better success in this task than absolute realism. The difference between them becomes much less marked when we reflect that the former, like the latter, must reserve the predicate of being for the unity of the whole. Even though evil and contradiction belong to the essence of things, move in the secret heart of a spiritual universe, the reality is not these in their severalty, but that life within which they fall, the story within which they “earn a place.” And if absolute idealism has defined a new perfection, it has at the same time defined a new imperfection. The perfection is rich in contrast, and thus inclusive of both the lights and shades of experience; but the perfection belongs only to the composition of these elements within a single view. It is not necessary to such perfection that the evil should ever be viewed in isolation. The idealist employs the analogy of the drama or the picture whose very significance requires the balance of opposing forces; or the analogy of the symphony in which a higher musical quality is realized through the resolution of discord into harmony. But none of these unities requires any element whatsoever that does not partake of its beauty. It is quite irrelevant to the drama that the hero should himself have his own view of events with no understanding of their dramatic value, as it is irrelevant to the picture that an unbalanced fragment of it should dwell apart, or to the symphony that the discord should be heard without the harmony. One may multiply without end the internal differences and antagonisms that contribute to the internal meaning, and be as far as ever from understanding the external detachment of experiences that are not rational or good in themselves. And it is precisely this kind of fact that precipitates the whole problem. We do not judge of sin and error from experiences in which they conduct to goodness and truth, but from experiences in which they are stark and unresolved.

In view of such considerations many idealists have been willing to confess their inability to solve this problem. To quote a recent expositor of Hegel,

“We need not, after all, be surprised at the apparently insoluble problem which confronts us. For the question has developed into the old difficulty of the origin of evil, which has always baffled both theologians and philosophers. An idealism which declares that the universe is in reality perfect, can find, as most forms of popular idealism do, an escape from the difficulties of the existence of evil, by declaring that the universe is as yet only growing towards its ideal perfection. But this refuge disappears with the reality of time, and we are left with an awkward difference between what philosophy tells us must be, and what our life tells us actually is."

If the philosophy of eternal perfection persists in its fundamental doctrine in spite of this irreconcilable conflict with life, it is because it is believed that that doctrine must be true. Let us turn, then, to its more constructive and compelling argument.

Sec. The proof of absolute idealism is supposed by the majority of its exponents to follow from the problem of epistemology, and more particularly from the manifest dependence of truth upon the knowing mind. In its initial phase absolute idealism is indistinguishable from subjectivism. Like that philosophy it finds that the object of knowledge is inseparable from the state of knowledge throughout the whole range of experience. Since the knower can never escape himself, it may be set down as an elementary fact that reality (at any rate whatever reality can be known or even talked about) owes its being to mind.

Thus Green, the English neo-Hegelian, maintains that “an object which no consciousness presented to itself would not be an object at all,” and wonders that this principle is not generally taken for granted and made the starting-point for philosophy. However, unless the very term “object” is intended to imply presence to a subject, this principle is by no means self-evident, and must be traced to its sources.

We have already followed the fortunes of that empirical subjectivism which issues from the relativity of perception. At the very dawn of philosophy it was observed that what is seen, heard, or otherwise experienced through the senses, depends not only upon the use of sense-organs, but upon the special point of view occupied by each individual sentient being. It was therefore concluded that the perceptual world belonged to the human knower with his limitations and perspective, rather than to being itself. It was this epistemological principle upon which Berkeley founded his empirical idealism. Believing knowledge to consist essentially in perception, and believing perception to be subjective, he had to choose between the relegation of being to a region inaccessible to knowledge, and the definition of being in terms of subjectivity. To avoid scepticism he accepted the latter alternative. But among the Greeks with whom this theory of perception originated, it drew its meaning in large part from the distinction between perception and reason. Thus we read in Plato’s “Sophist”:

“And you would allow that we participate in generation with the body, and by perception; but we participate with the soul by thought in true essence, and essence you would affirm to be always the same and immutable, whereas generation varies."

It is conceived that although in perception man is condemned to a knowledge conditioned by the affections and station of his body, he may nevertheless escape himself and lay hold on the “true essence” of things, by virtue of thought. In other words, knowledge, in contradistinction to “opinion,” is not made by the subject, but is the soul’s participation in the eternal natures of things. In the moment of insight the varying course of the individual thinker coincides with the unvarying truth; but in that moment the individual thinker is ennobled through being assimilated to the truth, while the truth is no more, no less, the truth than before.

Sec. In absolute idealism, the principle of subjectivism is extended to reason itself. This extension seems to have been originally due to moral and religious interests. From the moral stand-point the contemplation of the truth is a state, and the highest state of the individual life. The religious interest unifies the individual life and directs attention to its spiritual development. Among the Greeks of the middle period life was as yet viewed objectively as the fulfilment of capacities, and knowledge was regarded as perfection of function, the exercise of the highest of human prerogatives. But as moral and religious interests became more absorbing, the individual lived more and more in his own self-consciousness. Even before the Christian era the Greek philosophers themselves were preoccupied with the task of winning a state of inner serenity. Thus the Stoics and Epicureans came to look upon knowledge as a means to the attainment of an inner freedom from distress and bondage to the world. In other words, the very reason was regarded as an activity of the self, and its fruits were valued for their enhancement of the welfare of the self. And if this be true of the Stoics and the Epicureans, it is still more clearly true of the neo-Platonists of the Christian era, who mediate between the ancient and mediaeval worlds.

Sec. It is well known that the early period of Christianity was a period of the most vivid self-consciousness. The individual believed that his natural and social environment was alien to his deeper spiritual interests. He therefore withdrew into himself. He believed himself to have but one duty, the salvation of his soul; and that duty required him to search his innermost springs of action in order to uproot any that might compromise him with the world and turn him from God. The drama of life was enacted within the circle of his own self-consciousness. Citizenship, bodily health, all forms of appreciation and knowledge, were identified in the parts they played here. In short the Christian consciousness, although renunciation was its deepest motive, was reflexive and centripetal to a degree hitherto unknown among the European peoples. And when with St. Augustine theoretical interests once more vigorously asserted themselves, this new emphasis was in the very foreground. St. Augustine wished to begin his system of thought with a first indubitable certainty, and selected neither being nor ideas, but self. St. Augustine’s genius was primarily religious, and the “Confessions,” in which he records the story of his hard winning of peace and right relations with God, is his most intimate book. How faithfully does he represent himself, and the blend of paganism and Christianity which was distinctive of his age, when in his systematic writings he draws upon religion for his knowledge of truth! In all my living, he argues, whether I sin or turn to God, whether I doubt or believe, whether I know or am ignorant, in all I know that I am I. Each and every state of my consciousness is a state of my self, and as such, sure evidence of my self’s existence. If one were to follow St. Augustine’s reflections further, one would find him reasoning from his own finite and evil self to an infinite and perfect Self, which centres like his in the conviction that I am I, but is endowed with all power and all worth. One would find him reflecting upon the possible union with God through the exaltation of the human self-consciousness. But this conception of God as the perfect self is so much a prophecy of things to come, that more than a dozen centuries elapsed before it was explicitly formulated by the post-Kantians. We must follow its more gradual development in the philosophies of Descartes and Kant.

Sec. When at the close of the sixteenth century the Frenchman, René Descartes, sought to construct philosophy anew and upon secure foundations, he too selected as the initial certainty of thought the thinker’s knowledge of himself. This principle now received its classic formulation in the proposition, Cogito ergo sum “I think, hence I am.” The argument does not differ essentially from that of St. Augustine, but it now finds a place in a systematic and critical metaphysics. In that my thinking is certain of itself, says Descartes, in that I know myself before I know aught else, my self can never be dependent for its being upon anything else that I may come to know. A thinking self, with its knowledge and its volition, is quite capable of subsisting of itself. Such is, indeed, not the case with a finite self, for all finitude is significant of limitation, and in recognizing my limitations I postulate the infinite being or God. But the relation of my self to a physical world is quite without necessity. Human nature, with soul and body conjoined, is a combination of two substances, neither of which is a necessary consequence of the other. As a result of this combination the soul is to some extent affected by the body, and the body is to some extent directed by the soul; but the body could conceivably be an automaton, as the soul could conceivably be, and will in another life become, a free spirit. The consequences of this dualism for epistemology are very grave. If knowledge be the activity of a self-subsistent thinking spirit, how can it reveal the nature of an external world? The natural order is now literally “external.” It is true that the whole body of exact science, that mechanical system to which Descartes attached so much importance, falls within the range of the soul’s own thinking. But what assurance is there that it refers to a province of its own a physical world in space? Descartes can only suppose that “clear and distinct” ideas must be trusted as faithful representations. It is true the external world makes its presence known directly, when it breaks in upon the soul in sense-perception. But Descartes’s rationalism and love of mathematics forbade his attaching importance to this criterion. Real nature, that exactly definable and predictable order of moving bodies defined in physics, is not known through sense-perception, but through thought. Its necessities are the necessities of reason. Descartes finds himself, then, in the perplexing position of seeking an internal criterion for an external world. The problem of knowledge so stated sets going the whole epistemological movement of the eighteenth century, from Locke through Berkeley and Hume to Kant. And the issue of this development is the absolute idealism of Kant’s successors.

Sec. Of the English philosophers who prepare the way for the epistemology of Kant, Hume is the most radical and momentous. It was he who roused Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers” to the task of the “Critical Philosophy.” Hume is one of the two possible consequences of Descartes. One who attaches greater importance to the rational necessities of science than to its external reference, is not unwilling that nature should be swallowed up in mind. With Malebranche, Descartes’s immediate successor in France, nature is thus provided for within the archetypal mind of God. With the English philosophers, on the other hand, externality is made the very mark of nature, and as a consequence sense-perception becomes the criterion of scientific truth. This empirical theory of knowledge, inaugurated and developed by Locke and Berkeley, culminates in Hume’s designation of the impression as the distinguishing element of nature, at once making up its content and certifying to its externality. The processes of nature are successions of impressions; and the laws of nature are their uniformities, or the expectations of uniformity which their repetitions engender. Hume does not hesitate to draw the logical conclusion. If the final mark of truth is the presence to sense of the individual element, then science can consist only of items of information and probable generalizations concerning their sequences. The effect is observed to follow upon the cause in fact, but there is no understanding of its necessity; therefore no absolute certainty attaches to the future effects of any cause.

Sec. But what has become of the dream of the mathematical physicist? Is the whole system of Newton, that brilliant triumph of the mechanical method, unfounded and dogmatic? It is the logical instability of this body of knowledge, made manifest in the well-founded scepticism of Hume, that rouses Kant to a re-examination of the whole foundation of natural science. The general outline of his analysis has been developed above. It is of importance here to understand its relations to the problem of Descartes. Contrary to the view of the English philosophers, natural science is, says Kant, the work of the mind. The certainty of the causal relation is due to the human inability to think otherwise. Hume is mistaken in supposing that mere sensation gives us any knowledge of nature. The very least experience of objects involves the employment of principles which are furnished by the mind. Without the employment of such principles, or in bare sensation, there is no intelligible meaning whatsoever. But once admit the employment of such principles and formulate them systematically, and the whole Newtonian order of nature is seen to follow from them. Furthermore, since these principles or categories are the conditions of human experience, are the very instruments of knowledge, they are valid wherever there is any experience or knowledge. There is but one way to make anything at all out of nature, and that is to conceive it as an order of necessary events in space and time. Newtonian science is part of such a general conception, and is therefore necessary if knowledge is to be possible at all, even the least. Thus Kant turns upon Hume, and shuts him up to the choice between the utter abnegation of all knowledge, including the knowledge of his own scepticism, and the acceptance of the whole body of exact science.

But with nature thus conditioned by the necessities of thought, what has become of its externality? That, Kant admits, has indeed vanished. Kant does not attempt, as did Descartes, to hold that the nature which mind constructs and controls, exists also outside of mind. The nature that is known is on that very account phenomenal, anthropocentric created by its cognitive conditions. Descartes was right in maintaining that sense-perception certifies to the existence of a world outside the mind, but mistaken in calling it nature and identifying it with the realm of science. In short, Kant acknowledges the external world, and names it the thing-in-itself; but insists that because it is outside of mind it is outside of knowledge. Thus is the certainty of science saved at the cost of its metaphysical validity. It is necessarily true, but only of a conditioned or dependent world. And in saving science Kant has at the same time prejudiced metaphysics in general. For the human or naturalistic way of knowing is left in sole possession of the field, with the higher interest of reasons in the ultimate nature of being, degraded to the rank of practical faith.

Sec. The transformation of this critical and agnostic doctrine into absolute idealism is inevitable. The metaphysical interest was bound to avail itself of the speculative suggestiveness with which the Kantian philosophy abounds. The transformation turns upon Kant’s assumption that whatever is constructed by the mind is on that account phenomenon or appearance. Kant has carried along the presumption that whatever is act or content of mind is on that account not real object or thing-in-itself. We have seen that this is generally accepted as true of the relativities of sense-perception. But is it true of thought? The post-Kantian idealist maintains that that depends upon the thought. The content of private individual thinking is in so far not real object; but it does not follow that this is true of such thinking as is universally valid. Now Kant has deduced his categories for thought in general. There are no empirical cases of thinking except the human thinkers; but the categories are not the property of any one human individual or any group of such individuals. They are the conditions of experience in general, and of every possibility of experience. The transition to absolute idealism is now readily made. Thought in general becomes the absolute mind, and experience in general its content. The thing-in-itself drops out as having no meaning. The objectivity to which it testified is provided for in the completeness and self-sufficiency which is attributed to the absolute experience. Indeed, an altogether new definition of subjective and objective replaces the old. The subjective is that which is only insufficiently thought, as in the case of relativity and error; the objective is that which is completely thought. Thus the natural order is indeed phenomenal; but only because the principles of science are not the highest principles of thought, and not because nature is the fruit of thought. Thus Hegel expresses his relation to Kant as follows:

“According to Kant, the things that we know about are to us appearances only, and we can never know their essential nature, which belongs to another world, which we cannot approach. . . . The true statement of the case is as follows. The things of which we have direct consciousness are mere phenomena, not for us only, but in their own nature; and the true and proper case of these things, finite as they are, is to have their existence founded not in themselves, but in the universal divine idea. This view of things, it is true, is as idealist as Kant’s, but in contradistinction to the subjective idealism of the Critical Philosophy should be termed Absolute Idealism."

Sec. Absolute idealism is thus reached after a long and devious course of development. But the argument may be stated much more briefly. Plato, it will be remembered, found that experience tends ever to transcend itself. The thinker finds himself compelled to pursue the ideal of immutable and universal truth, and must identify the ultimate being with that ideal. Similarly Hegel says:

“That upward spring of the mind signifies that the being which the world has is only a semblance, no real being, no absolute truth; it signifies that beyond and above that appearance, truth abides in God, so that true being is another name for God."

The further argument of absolute idealism differs from that of Plato in that the dependence of truth upon the mind is accepted as a first principle. The ideal with which experience is informed is now the state of perfect knowledge, rather than the system of absolute truth. The content of the state of perfect knowledge will indeed be the system of absolute truth, but none the less content, precisely as finite knowledge is the content of a finite mind. In pursuing the truth, I who pursue, aim to realize in myself a certain highest state of knowledge. Were I to know all truth I should indeed have ceased to be the finite individual who began the quest, but the evolution would be continuous and the character of self-consciousness would never have been lost. I may say, in short, that God or being, is my perfect cognitive self.

The argument for absolute idealism is a constructive interpretation of the subjectivistic contention that knowledge can never escape the circle of its own activity and states. To meet the demand for a final and standard truth, a demand which realism meets with its doctrine of a being independent of any mind, this philosophy defines a standard mind. The impossibility of defining objects in terms of relativity to a finite self, conducts dialectically to the conception of the absolute self. The sequel to my error or exclusiveness, is truth or inclusiveness. The outcome of the dialectic is determined by the symmetry of the antithesis. Thus, corrected experience implies a last correcting experience; partial cognition, complete cognition; empirical subject, transcendental subject; finite mind, an absolute mind. The following statement is taken from a contemporary exponent of the philosophy:

“What you and I lack, when we lament our human ignorance, is simply a certain desirable and logically possible state of mind, or type of experience; to wit, a state of mind in which we should wisely be able to say that we had fulfilled in experience what we now have merely in idea, namely, the knowledge, the immediate and felt presence, of what we now call the Absolute Reality. . . . There is an Absolute Experience for which the conception of an absolute reality, i. e., the conception of a system of ideal truth, is fulfilled by the very contents that get presented to this experience. This Absolute Experience is related to our experience as an organic whole to its own fragments. It is an experience which finds fulfilled all that the completest thought can conceive as genuinely possible. Herein lies its definition as an Absolute. For the Absolute Experience, as for ours, there are data, contents, facts. But these data, these contents, express, for the Absolute Experience, its own meaning, its thought, its ideas. Contents beyond these that it possesses, the Absolute Experience knows to be, in genuine truth, impossible. Hence its contents are indeed particular, a selection from the world of bare or merely conceptual possibilities, but they form a self-determined whole, than which nothing completer, more organic, more fulfilled, more transparent, or more complete in meaning, is concretely or genuinely possible. On the other hand, these contents are not foreign to those of our finite experience, but are inclusive of them in the unity of one life."

Sec. As has been already intimated, at the opening of this chapter, the inclusion of the whole of reality within a single self is clearly a questionable proceeding. The need of avoiding the relativism of empirical idealism is evident. But if the very meaning of the self-consciousness be due to a certain selection and exclusion within the general field of experience, it is equally evident that the relativity of self-consciousness can never be overcome through appealing to a higher self. One must appeal from the self to the realm of things as they are. Indeed, although the exponents of this philosophy use the language of spiritualism, and accept the idealistic epistemology, their absolute being tends ever to escape the special characters of the self. And inasmuch as the absolute self is commonly set over against the finite or empirical self, as the standard and test of truth, it is the less distinguishable from the realist’s order of independent beings.

Sec. But however much absolute idealism may tend to abandon its idealism for the sake of its absolutism within the field of metaphysics, such is not the case within the field of ethics and religion. The conception of the self here receives a new emphasis. The same self-consciousness which admits to the highest truth is the evidence of man’s practical dignity. In virtue of his immediate apprehension of the principles of selfhood, and his direct participation in the life of spirit, man may be said to possess the innermost secret of the universe. In order to achieve goodness he must therefore recognize and express himself. The Kantian philosophy is here again the starting-point. It was Kant who first gave adequate expression to the Christian idea of the moral self-consciousness.

“Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name that dost embrace nothing charming or insinuating, but requirest submission, and yet seekest not to move the will by threatening aught that would arouse natural aversion or terror, but merely holdest forth a law which of itself finds entrance into the mind, . . . a law before which all inclinations are dumb, even though they secretly counterwork it; what origin is there worthy of thee, and where is to be found the root of thy noble descent which proudly rejects all kindred with the inclinations . . . ? It can be nothing less than a power which elevates man above himself, . . . a power which connects him with an order of things that only the understanding can conceive, with a world which at the same time commands the whole sensible world, and with it the empirically determinable existence of man in time, as well as the sum total of all ends."

With Kant there can be no morality except conduct be attended by the consciousness of this duty imposed by the higher nature upon the lower. It is this very recognition of a deeper self, of a personality that belongs to the sources and not to the consequences of nature, that constitutes man as a moral being, and only such action as is inspired with a reverence for it can be morally good. Kant does little more than to establish the uncompromising dignity of the moral will. In moral action man submits to a law that issues from himself in virtue of his rational nature. Here he yields nothing, as he owes nothing, to that appetency which binds him to the natural world. As a rational being he himself affirms the very principles which determine the organization of nature. This is his freedom, at once the ground and the implication of his duty. Man is free from nature to serve the higher law of his personality.

Sec. There are two respects in which Kant’s ethics has been regarded as inadequate by those who draw from it their fundamental principles. It is said that Kant is too rigoristic, that he makes too stern a business of morality, in speaking so much of law and so little of love and spontaneity. There are good reasons for this. Kant seeks to isolate the moral consciousness, and dwell upon it in its purity, in order that he may demonstrate its incommensurability with the values of inclination and sensibility. Furthermore, Kant may speak of the principle of the absolute, and recognize the deeper eternal order as a law, but he may not, if he is to be consistent with his own critical principles, affirm the metaphysical being of such an order. With his idealistic followers it is possible to define the spiritual setting of the moral life, but with Kant it is only possible to define the antagonism of principles. Hence the greater optimism of the post-Kantians. They know that the higher law is the reality, and that he who obeys it thus unites himself with the absolute self. That which for Kant is only a resolute obedience to more valid principles, to rationally superior rules for action, is for idealism man’s appropriation of his spiritual birthright. Since the law is the deeper nature, man may respect and obey it as valid, and at the same time act upon it gladly in the sure knowledge that it will enhance his eternal welfare. Indeed, the knowledge that the very universe is founded upon this law will make him less suspicious of nature and less exclusive in his adherence to any single law. He will be more confident of the essential goodness of all manifestations of a universe which he knows to be fundamentally spiritual.

But it has been urged, secondly, that the Kantian ethics is too formal, too little pertinent to the issues of life. Kant’s moral law imposes only obedience to the law, or conduct conceived as suitable to a universal moral community. But what is the nature of such conduct in particular? It may be answered that to maintain the moral self-consciousness, to act dutifully and dutifully only, to be self-reliant and unswerving in the doing of what one ought to do, is to obtain a very specific character. But does this not leave the individual’s conduct to his own interpretation of his duty? It was just this element of individualism which Hegel sought to eliminate through the application of his larger philosophical conception. If that which expresses itself within the individual consciousness as the moral law be indeed the law of that self in which the universe is grounded, it will appear as objective spirit in the evolution of society. For Hegel, then, the most valid standard of goodness is to be found in that customary morality which bespeaks the moral leadings of the general humanity, and in those institutions, such as the family and the state, which are the moral acts of the absolute idea itself. Finally, in the realm of absolute spirit, in art, in revealed religion, and in philosophy, the individual may approach to the self-consciousness which is the perfect truth and goodness in and for itself.

Sec. Where the law of life is the implication in the finite self-consciousness of the eternal and divine self-consciousness, there can be no division between morality and religion, as there can be none between thought and will. Whatever man seeks is in the end God. As the perfect fulfilment of the thinking self, God is the truth; as the perfect fulfilment of the willing self, God is the good. The finite self-consciousness finds facts that are not understood, and so seeks to resolve itself into the perfect self wherein all that is given has meaning. On the other hand, the finite self-consciousness finds ideals that are not realized, and so seeks to resolve itself into that perfect self wherein all that is significant is given. All interests thus converge toward

“some state of conscious spirit in which the opposition of cognition and volition is overcome in which we neither judge our ideas by the world, nor the world by our ideas, but are aware that inner and outer are in such close and necessary harmony that even the thought of possible discord has become impossible. In its unity not only cognition and volition, but feeling also, must be blended and united. In some way or another it must have overcome the rift in discursive knowledge, and the immediate must for it be no longer the alien. It must be as direct as art, as certain and universal as philosophy."

The religious consciousness proper to absolute idealism is both pantheistic and mystical, but with distinction. Platonism is pantheistic in that nature is resolved into God. All that is not perfect is esteemed only for its promise of perfection. And Platonism is mystical in that the purification and universalization of the affections brings one in the end to a perfection that exceeds all modes of thought and speech. With Spinoza, on the other hand, God may be said to be resolved into nature. Nature is made divine, but is none the less nature, for its divinity consists in its absolute necessity. Spinoza’s pantheism passes over into mysticism because the absolute necessity exceeds in both unity and richness the laws known to the human understanding. In absolute idealism, finally, both God and nature are resolved into the self. For that which is divine in experience is self-consciousness, and this is at the same time the ground of nature. Thus in the highest knowledge the self is expanded and enriched without being left behind. The mystical experience proper to this philosophy is the consciousness of identity, together with the sense of universal immanence. The individual self may be directly sensible of the absolute self, for these are one spiritual life. Thus Emerson says:

“It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power upon which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or ’with the flower of the mind’; not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life."

Sec. But the distinguishing flavor and quality of this religion arises from its spiritual hospitality. It is not, like Platonism, a contemplation of the best; nor, like pluralistic idealisms, a moral knight-errantry. It is neither a religion of exclusion, nor a religion of reconstruction, but a profound willingness that things should be as they really are. For this reason its devotees have recognized in Spinoza their true forerunner. But idealism is not Spinozism, though it may contain this as one of its strains. For it is not the worship of necessity, Emerson’s “beautiful necessity, which makes man brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger that is appointed, nor incur one that is not”; but the worship of that which is necessary.

Not only must one understand that every effort, however despairing, is an element of sense in the universal significance;

“that the whole would not be what it is were not precisely this finite purpose left in its own uniqueness to speak precisely its own word a word which no other purpose can speak in the language of the divine will";

but one must have a zest for such participation, and a heart for the divine will which it profits. Indeed, so much is this religion a love of life, that it may, as in the case of the Romanticists, be a love of caprice. Battle and death, pain and joy, error and truth all that belongs to the story of this mortal world, are to be felt as the thrill of health, and relished as the essences of God. Religion is an exuberant spirituality, a fearless sensibility, a knowledge of both good and evil, and a will to serve the good, while exulting that the evil will not yield without a battle.

The possibility of conflict between this method of nature study and the empirical method of science is significantly attested by the circumstance that in the year 1801 Hegel published a paper in which he maintained, on the ground of certain numerical harmonies, that there could be no planet between Mars and Jupiter, while at almost exactly the same time Piazzi discovered Ceres, the first of the asteroids.

This argument is well summarized in Green’s statement that “the existence of one connected world, which is the presupposition of knowledge, implies the action of one self-conditioning and self-determining mind.” Prolegomena to Ethics, .