CHAPTER IV.. The German Idealists

THE GERMAN IDEALISTS

FICHTE, SCHELLING, HEGEL, SCHOPENHAUER, HERBART.

The Critical Philosophy won its first success in Germany less as a new epistemology than as what, in fact, its author meant it to be, a rehabilitation of religious belief. The limits of Reason had been drawn so closely only to make room for Faith. But the current of Rationalism was running too strongly to be so summarily stopped; and so with Kant's ablest successors faith is altogether abandoned, while the claims of reason are pushed relentlessly through. Among these more logical thinkers the first is J. G. Fichte (1762-1814). In him--for the third time in modern history, for the first and last time in Germany--the hero as philosopher finds a worthy representative. Born in Silesia, like Kant of humble parentage, and bred in circumstances of more oppressive poverty, he also received a severely religious and moral training as a preparation for the pastoral office. The bounty of an aristocratic patron gave him an excellent public-school education; but as a university student, first at Jena and then at Leipzig, he had to earn a scanty living by private tuition, finally abandoning his destined career to accept a post in a Swiss family at Zurich. There, as the result of an attachment in which the love was nearly all on the lady's side, he became engaged to a niece of the poet Klopstock, and after a long delay, caused by money {102} difficulties, was enabled to marry her. In the meantime he had become a convert to Kant's philosophy, winning the admiration of the old master himself by a Critique of all Revelation, written in four weeks. Published anonymously by an oversight, it was generally attributed to Kant himself, and, on the real authorship becoming known, won for Fichte an extraordinary Professorate of Philosophy at Jena, where his success as a lecturer and writer gave him for a time the leadership in German speculation (1794-1799). An untoward incident brought this stage of his career to an end. Writing in a philosophical review, he defined God as "the moral order of the universe." Dr. Temple long afterwards used much the same phrase when Bishop of Exeter, finding it, presumably, compatible with official Theism; but such was not the impression created in Saxony. A cry of atheism arose, much to the disgust of Fichte, whose position would have been better described as pantheistic. But what incensed him most was the suspicion of an attempt to interfere with the liberty of academic teaching. With his usual impetuosity he talked about resigning his chair--with a hint that others would follow his example--were the authorities at Weimar to permit such an outrage. Goethe, who was then Minister, observed that no Government could allow itself to be threatened, and Fichte was at once relieved of his post. Settling at Berlin, he became Professor of Philosophy in the new University founded after the French conquest of Prussia, having previously done much to revive the national spirit by his Addresses to the German Nation (1807-1808). These were in appearance the programme of a new educational Utopia; but their real purpose was so evident that the speaker lived in daily expectation of being summoned {103} before a French court-martial and shot. Unlike his countrymen, Goethe, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, Fichte passionately resented the Napoleonic despotism, throwing himself heart and soul into the great uprising by which it was finally overthrown. Although his wish to accompany the victorious army as field preacher could not be gratified, the campaign of 1813 still claimed him as one of its victims. After nursing his heroic wife to recovery from a hospital fever caught in attendance on the sick and wounded at Berlin, he took the infection from her and died early in 1814, soon after hearing that Bluecher had crossed the Rhine.

G. H. Lewes, in a well-known story, has made himself and his readers merry over a German savant who undertakes to evolve the idea of a camel out of the depths of his moral consciousness. The phrase is commonly quoted as "inner consciousness," but this takes away its whole point. For the original satirist, who, I think, was not Lewes, but Heine, had in view the philosophy of Fichte. It need hardly be said that German savants are as careful observers and diligent collectors of facts as any others; and Fichte in particular trusted solely to experience for the knowledge of natural phenomena. But even as regards his general philosophy the place it gives to morality has been misconceived even by his closest students. With him goodwill really plays a less important part than with Kant, being not an end in itself, but a means towards an end. And what that end is his teaching makes quite clear.

Kant's first critics put their finger on the weak point of his system, the thing in itself. So, assuming it to be discarded, Fichte set to work on new lines, the lines of pure idealism. But, though an idealist, he is not, any more than Berkeley, a solipsist. The celebrated {104} antithesis of the ego and the non-ego dates from him, and strikes the keynote of his whole system. It might be thought that, as compared with the old realism, this was a distinction without a difference. But that is not so; for, according to Fichte, the non-ego is subjective in its origin, and that is where he departs widely from Berkeley's theological idealism. Not that I create the not-myself; I assume it as the condition of my self-consciousness--a remarkable feat of logic, but after all not more wonderful than that space and time should result from the activity of the outer and inner senses. This figment of my imagination is anyhow solid enough to beget a new feeling of resistance and recoil, throwing the self back on itself, and bringing with it the interpretation of that external impact by the category of causation, of its own activity as substance, and of the whole deal between the ego and the non-ego as interaction or reciprocity. In this way the first triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is obtained; and from this, by a vast expenditure of ingenuity, the whole array of Kant's forms, categories, and faculties is evolved as a coherent system of scientific thought in obedience to a single principle--the self-realisation of the ego, alternatively admitting and transcending a limit to its activity.

It will be easily understood that this self-realising ego is neither Fichte's nor anyone else's self, but a universal principle, fundamentally the same in all. One is reminded of Descartes's self-thinking thought by which the reality of the universe was guaranteed; but between the two there is this vast difference, that the Frenchman's ego resembles a box containing a variety of independent ideas, to be separately handled and examined; the German's is a box enclosing a coiled-up spring by {105} the expansion of which all the wheels of the philosophical machine are made go round. From the action of the not-self on the self results the whole of nature as we conceive it; from the reaction of the self on the not-self, the whole mentality and morality of man--morality being understood to include the domestic, social, political, educational, and industrial organisation of life. The final cause, the impelling ideal of existence, is the self-realisation of the ego, the entire absorption into its personal energy of the non-ego, of nature, to be effected by perfect knowledge of how the physical universe is constituted issuing in perfect subjugation of its forces to the human will. But such a realisation of the Absolute Ego would mean its annihilation, for, as we have seen, the antithesis between objective and subjective is the very condition of consciousness that without which it could neither begin nor continue to exist. Therefore the process must go on for ever, and this necessity guarantees the eternal duration of the human race--not, as Kant had dreamed, of the individual soul, since for Fichte the Categorical Imperative demands a consummation widely different from that combination of virtue with happiness which had satisfied his master. And the agency by which it is being effected through infinite time is not a personal God, but that moral order of the world which Fichte regarded as the only true object of religious feeling. As for human immortality, he seems to have first accepted, but afterwards rejected it in favour of a mystical union with the divine.

It has been said that morality was not with Fichte what it had been with Kant--the highest good. Nevertheless, as a means towards the final synthesis, morality interested him intensely, and his best work has been {106} done in ethics. As a condition of self-realisation the primal ego becomes personified in a multitude of free individualities. Just as in Stoicism, each individual is conceived as having a special office to perform in the world-process, and the State exists--ideally speaking--in order to guarantee the necessary independence of all its citizens. For this purpose everyone must have the right to work and the right to a living wage. Thus Fichte appears as the first theorist of State Socialism in the history of German thought. Probably the example of the Greek Stoics with their communistic utopias acting on a kindred spirit, rather than any prophetic vision of the coming century, is to be credited for this remarkable anticipation.

SCHELLING.

German philosophy is prolific of self-contradictions; and so far the most flagrant example has been offered by Fichte's Theory of Knowledge, starting as it does with the idea of an impersonal ego, developing through a process in which this selfless self demands its own negation at every step, and determined by the prospect of a catastrophe that would be the annihilation of consciousness itself. In fact, there seemed no need to wait until time had run out; the self, or, as it was now called, the subject, had absorbed all reality, only to find that the material universe, reconstituted as the object of knowledge, was an indispensable condition of its existence. And meanwhile the physical sciences, more particularly those concerned with inorganic nature, were entering on a series of triumphs unparalleled since the days of Newton. Philosophy must come to terms with these or cease to exist.

The task of reconciliation was first attempted by {107} F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854), a Suabian, and the first South German who made a name in pure philosophy. Educated at the University of Tuebingen, at an early age he covered an encyclopaedic range of studies and began authorship at nineteen, gaining a professorship at Jena four years later. Wandering about from one university to another, and putting forward new opinions as often as he changed his residence, the young adventurer ceased to publish after 1813, and remained silent till in 1841 he came forward at Berlin as the champion of a reactionary current, practically renouncing the naturalistic pantheism by which his early reputation had been made. But he utterly failed in the attempt, which was finally abandoned in the fifth year from its inception. Lewes, who saw Schelling in his old age, describes him as remarkably like Socrates; his admirers called him a modern Plato; but he had nothing of the deep moral earnestness that characterised either, nor indeed was morality needed for the work that he actually did. This, to use the phrase of his fellow-student Hegel, consisted in raising philosophy to its absolute standpoint, in passing from the subjective moralism of the eighteenth century to the all-comprehensive systematisation of the nineteenth.

Schelling began as a disciple of Fichte, but he came simultaneously under the influence of Spinoza, whose fame had been incessantly spreading through the last generation in Germany, with some reinforcement from the revived name of Bruno. Their teaching served to make the latent pantheism of Fichte more explicit, while the great contemporary discoveries gave a new interest to the study of nature, which Fichte, unlike Kant, had put in the background, strictly subordinating it to the moral service of man. Had he cared to evolve {108} the idea of a camel from his moral consciousness, the operation would not have demanded several years, but only a few minutes' thought. As thus: the moral development of humanity needed the co-operation of such a race as the Semites. To form their character a long residence in the Arabian deserts was needed. But for such nomads an auxiliary animal would be needed with long legs and neck, a stomach for storing water, hump, etc.--Q. E. D. Schelling also began by explaining the material world as a preparation for the spiritual; only he did not employ the method of teleological adaptation, but a method of rather fanciful analogy. As the evolution of self-conscious reason had proceeded by a triple movement of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, so a parallel process had to be discovered in the advance towards a consciousness supposed to be exhibited in organic and inorganic nature.

The fundamental idea of natural philosophy is polarity--opposite forces combining to neutralise one another and then parting to be reunited at a higher stage of evolution. Thus attraction and repulsion--represented as space and time--by their synthesis compose matter; magnetism and electricity produce chemical affinity; life results from a triad of inorganic forces; in life itself productivity and irritability give birth to sensibility. The order of the terms made little, if any, difference. When long afterwards iron was magnetised by the electric current, Schelling claimed for himself the credit of anticipating this discovery, although he had placed magnetism before electricity.

The next step was to construct a philosophy of history. This, with much else, is included under the name of A System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) in the most finished of Schelling's literary compositions. {109} History, according to the view here unfolded, is the gradual self-revelation of God, or the Absolute, in whom Nature and Spirit are united and identified, who never is nor can be, but always is to be. Meanwhile the supreme ideal is not that ever-increasing mastery of nature by man which Fichte contemplated, but their reconciliation as achieved by Art. For just as natural philosophy carried an element of consciousness into the material universe, so aestheticism recognises a corresponding element of unconscious creation in the supreme works of artistic genius where spirit reaches its highest and best. Here Schelling appears as the philosopher of Romanticism, a movement that characterised German thought from 1795 to 1805, and is known to ourselves by the faded and feeble image of it exhibited in a certain section of English society nearly a century later. Beginning with a more cultivated intelligence of Hellenic antiquity, this movement rapidly grew into a new appreciation of medieval culture, falsely supposed to have given more scope to individuality than modern civilisation, and then into a search for ever-varying sources of excitement or distraction in the whole history, art, and literature of past or present times, religion being at last singled out as the vitalising principle of all.

Singularly enough, Fichte accepted the Transcendental Idealism as an orthodox exposition of his own philosophy. But its composition seems to have given Schelling the consciousness of his own independence. Soon afterwards he defined the new position as a philosophy of Identity or of Indifference. Nature and Spirit, like Spinoza's Thought and Extension, were all the same and all one--that is to say, in their totality or in the Absolute. For, considered as appearances, {110} they might present quantitative differences determined by the varying preponderance of the objective or of the subjective side. In this way Schelling found himself able to repeat his fanciful construction of the forces and forms of nature in successive triads under new names. The essential departure from Fichte, who repudiated the Philosophy of Identity with undisguised contempt, was that it practically repudiated the idea of an eternal progress in man's ever-growing mastery of nature. But, in spite of all disclaimers, the master silently followed his former disciple's evolution in the direction of a pantheistic monism. His later writings represent God no longer as the moral order of the world, but, like Spinoza, as the world's eternal Being, of which man's knowledge is the reflected image. Finally, both philosophers accepted the Christian doctrines of the Fall, the Incarnation, and the Trinity as mythical symbols of an eternal process in which God, after becoming alienated from himself in the material universe, returns to himself in man's consciousness of identity with the Absolute. Instead of the rather abrupt method of position, negation, and re-affirmation known as Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis, we have here the more fluid process of a spiral movement, departing from and returning to itself. And this was to be the very mainspring of the system that next comes up for consideration.

HEGEL.

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{112} G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), in the opinion of some good judges Germany's greatest philosopher, was, like Schelling, a Suabian, and intimately associated with his younger contemporary, first at Tuebingen and afterwards at Jena, where the two friends jointly conducted a philosophical review. But they gradually drifted apart. Hegel was not a romanticist, but a classic; not a naturalist, but a humanist. Largely influenced by Greek thought and Greek literature, for which he continued to be an enthusiast through life, he readily accepted, as against Kant and Fichte, the change from a purely subjective to an objective point of view. But, although he gave some attention to physical science, Hegel was less interested in it than his colleague, with whose crude and fanciful metaphysics he also failed to sympathise. With the publication of Hegel's first important work, the Phenomenology of Mind (1807), things came to a breach; for its preface amounts to a declaration of war against the philosophy of Romanticism. Schelling himself is not named; but there is no mistaking the object of certain picturesque references to "exploding the Absolute on us," and "the darkness in which every cow is black." Next year Hegel became what we should call headmaster of a public school at Nuremberg, filling that post for eight years, during which his greatest work, the System of Logic, in three volumes, was composed and published. He then obtained a chair of philosophy at Heidelberg, passing thence to Berlin in 1818, where he taught until his death by cholera in 1831. David Strauss, who saw the revered teacher a few days before the fatal seizure, describes him first as he appeared in the lecture-room, "looking ever so old, bent and coughing"; then in his home, "looking ten years younger, with clear blue eyes, and showing the most beautiful white teeth when he smiled." He had published a summary of his whole system, under the name of an Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, in 1817, and a Philosophy of Law--which is really a treatise on Government--in 1821. His {113} sympathies were with bureaucratic absolutism in a modernised form, with Napoleon against the German patriots, with the restored Prussian Government against the new Liberalism, with English Toryism against the Whigs of the Reform Bill, and finally with the admirers of war against the friends of peace.

Hegel's collected works, published after his death, fill over twenty good-sized volumes. Besides the treatises already mentioned, they include his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the Philosophy of History, the Philosophy of Religion, Aesthetics, etc., made up with much literary skill from the Professor's own notes and from the reports of his hearers. The most permanently valuable of these is the Aesthetics; but any student desirous of getting a notion of Hegelianism at first hand had better begin with the Philosophy of History, of which there is a good and cheap English translation in one of Bohn's Libraries. Some general points of view serving to connect the system with its predecessors are all that room can be found for here.

As compared with Kant, Hegel is distinguished above all by his complete abjuration of the agnostic standpoint in epistemology. "The universe is penetrable to thought": an unknowable thing in itself does not exist. Indeed, the intelligible reality of things is just what we know best; the unaccountable residuum, if any, lurks in the details of their appearance. So also in Greek philosophy Hegel holds that the truth was not in the ideal world of Plato, but in the self-realising Forms of Aristotle. As against Fichte, Hegel will not allow that the reconciliation of the subjective with the objective is an infinitely "far-off divine event"; on the contrary, it is a process being continually realised by ourselves and all about us. In his homely expression, the very {114} animals as they eat turn their food into consciousness, in utter disregard of prejudice. But Fichte's condemnation of Schelling's Indifferentism is quite right. The Absolute is Mind. Nature exists only as the lower stage, whence Spirit emerges to contradict, to confront, and to explain her as the necessary preparation for his supreme self-assertion. And Fichte was right in working out his system by the dialectical method of contradiction and solution, as against the dogmatism that summarily decrees the Absolute, without taking the trouble to reason it out, in imitation of the plan pursued by the universe in becoming conscious of itself.

The most portentous thing about Hegel's philosophy is this notion of the world's having, so to speak, argued itself into existence. To rationalise the sum of being, to explain, without assumptions, why there should be anything, and then why it should be as we know it, had been a problem suggested by Plato and solved rather summarily by Spinoza's challenge to conceive Infinite Power as non-existing. Hegel is more patient and ingenious; but, after all, his superiority merely consists in spinning the web of arbitrary dialectic so fine that we can hardly see the thread. The root-idea is to identify, or rather to confuse, causal evolution with logic. The chain of causes and effects that constitutes the universe is made out to be one with the series of reasons and consequents by which the conclusion is demonstrated. As usual, the equation is effected by a transference of terms from each side to the other. The categories and processes of logic are credited with a life and movement that belongs only to the human reasoner operating with them. And the moving, interacting masses of which the material universe consists are represented as parties to a dialectical {115} discussion in which one denies what the other asserts until it is discovered, on lifting the argument to a higher plane, that after all they are agreed. Nor is this all. The world as we know it is composed of co-existent elements grouped together or distinguished according to their resemblances and differences as so many natural kinds; and of successive events linked together as causes and effects. But while there is no general law of coexistence except such as may be derived from the collocation of the previously existing elements whence they are derived, there is a law of causal succession--namely, this, that the quantities of mass and energy involved are conserved without loss or gain through all time. Now, Hegel's way of rationalising or, in plainer words, accounting for the coexistent elements and their qualities, is to bring them under a supposed law of complementary opposition, revived from Heracleitus, according to which everything necessarily involves the existence, both in thought and reality, of its contradictory. And the same principle is applied to causal succession--a proceeding which would be fatal to the scientific law of conservation.

There is another way of rationalising experience--namely, the theological hypothesis of a supreme intelligence by which the world was created and is governed with a view to the attainment of some ultimate good. And there is a sort of teleology in Hegel evidently inspired by his religious education. But the two do not mean the same thing. For he places conscious reason not at the beginning but at the end of evolution. The rationality of things is immanent, not transcendent. Purposes somehow work retrospectively so as to determine the course of events towards a good end. That end is self-consciousness--not yours or mine, but the {116} world-spirit's consciousness and possession of itself. And this is reached in four ways: in Art by intuition, in Religion by representation, in Philosophy by conception, in History and Politics by the realisation of righteousness through the agency of the modern State.

Hegel looked on this world and this life of ours as the only world and the only life. When Heine pointed to the starry skies he told the young poet that the stars were a brilliant leprosy on the face of the heavens, and met the appeal for future compensation with the sarcastic observation: "So you expect a trinkgeld for nursing your sick mother and for not poisoning your brother!"

German historians have justly extolled the ingenuity, the subtlety, the originality, the systematising power--unequalled since Aristotle--and the enormous knowledge of their country's chief idealist. But this, after all, amounts to no more than claiming for Hegel that much of what he said is true and that much is new. The vital question is whether what is new is also true--and this is more than they seem prepared to maintain.

SCHOPENHAUER.

The leaders of the party known in the fourth and fifth decades of the last century as Young Germany, among whom Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was the most brilliant and famous, were more or less associated with the Hegelian school. They were, however, what Hegel was not, political revolutionists with a tendency to Socialism; while their religious rationalism, unlike his, was openly proclaimed. The temporary collapse in 1849 of the movement they initiated brought discredit on idealism as represented by Germany's classic philosophers, which also had been seriously damaged by the luminous criticism of Trendelenburg, the neo-Aristotelian professor at Berlin (1802-1872).

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{118} At this crisis attention was drawn to the long-neglected writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), which then attained a vogue that they never since have lost. The son of a Hamburg banker and of a literary lady whose novels enjoyed some reputation in their day, he was placed from the beginning in a position of greater material and social independence than usually falls to the lot of German thinkers; and to this, combined with the fact that he failed entirely as a university teacher, it is partly due that he wrote about philosophy not like a pedant, but like a man of the world. At the same time the German professors, resenting the intrusion of an outsider on their privileged domain, were strong enough to prevent the reading public from ever hearing of Schopenhauer's existence until an article in the Westminster Review (April, 1853) astonished Germany by the revelation that she possessed a thinker whom the man in the street could understand.

Schopenhauer found his earliest teachers of philosophy in Plato and Kant. He then attended Fichte's lectures at Berlin. At some uncertain date--probably soon after taking his doctor's degree in 1813--at the suggestion of an Orientalist he took up the study of the Vedanta system. All these various influences converged to impress him with the belief that the things of sense are a delusive appearance under which a fundamental reality lies concealed. According to Hegel, the reality is reason; but the Romanticists, with Schelling at their head, never accepted his conclusion, thinking of the absolute rather as a blind, unconscious substance; still less could it please {119} Schopenhauer, who sought for the supreme good under the form of happiness conceived as pleasure unalloyed by pain. A gloomy and desponding temperament combined, as in the case of Byron and Rousseau, with passionately sensuous instincts and anti-social habits, debarred him from attaining it. The loss of a large part of his private fortune, and the world's refusal to recognise his genius, completed what natural temperament had begun; and it only remained for the philosophy of the Upanishads to give a theoretic sanction to the resulting state of mind by teaching that all existence is in itself an evil--a position which placed him in still more thoroughgoing antagonism to Hegel.

It will be remembered that Kant's criticism had denied the human mind all knowledge of things in themselves, and that the post-Kantian systems had been so many efforts to get at the Absolute in its despite. But none had stated the question at issue so clearly as Schopenhauer put it, or answered it in such luminous terms. Like theirs, his solution is idealist; but the idealism is constructed on new lines. If we know nothing else, we know ourselves; only it has to be ascertained what exactly we are. Hegel said that the essence of consciousness is reason, and that reason is the very stuff of which the world is made. No, replies Schopenhauer, that is a one-sided scholastic view. Much the most important part of ourselves is not reason, but that very unreasonable thing called will--that aimless, hopeless, infinite, insatiable craving which is the source of all our activity and of all our misery as well. This is the thing-in-itself, the timeless, inextended entity behind all phenomena, come to the consciousness of itself, but also of its utter futility, in man. {120}

The cosmic will presents itself to us objectively under the form of the great natural forces--gravitation, heat, light, electricity, chemical affinity, etc.; then as the organising power of life in vegetables and animals; finally as human self-consciousness and sociability. These, Schopenhauer says, are what is really meant by the Platonic ideas, and they figure in his philosophy as first differentiations of the primordial will, coming between its absolute unity and the individualised objects and events that fill all space and time. It is the function of architecture, plastic art, painting, and poetry to give each of these dynamic ideas, singly or in combination, its adequate interpretation for the aesthetic sense. One art alone brings us a direct revelation of the real world, and that is music. Musical compositions have the power to express not any mere ideal embodiment of the underlying will, but the will itself in all its majesty and unending tragic despair.

Schopenhauer's theory of knowledge is given in the essay by which he obtained his doctor's degree, On the Four-fold Root of the Sufficient Reason. Notwithstanding this rather alarming title, it is a singularly clear and readable work. The standpoint is a simplification of Kant's Critique. The objects of consciousness offer themselves to the thinking, acting subject as grouped presentations in which there is "nothing sudden, nothing single." (1) When a new object appears to us, it must have a cause, physical, physiological, or psychological; and this we call the reason why it becomes. (2) Objects are referred to concepts of more or less generality, according to the logical rules of definition, classification, and inference; that is the reason of their being known. (3) Objects are mathematically determined by their position relatively to {121} other objects in space and time; that is the reason of their being. (4) Practical objects or ends of action are determined by motives; the motive is the reason why one thing rather than another is done.

The last "sufficient reason" takes us to ethics. Schopenhauer agrees with Kant in holding that actions considered as phenomena are strictly determined by motives, so much so that a complete knowledge of a man's character and environment would enable us to predict his whole course of conduct through life. Nevertheless, each man, as a timeless subject, is and knows himself to be free. To reconcile these apparently conflicting positions we must accept Plato's theory that each individual's whole fate has been determined by an ante-natal or transcendental choice for which he always continues responsible. Nevertheless, cases of religious "conversion" and the like prove that the eternal reality of the Will occasionally asserts itself in radical transformations of character and conduct.

In ethics Schopenhauer distinguishes between two ideals which may be called "relative" and "absolute" good. Relative good agrees with the standard of what in England is known as Universalistic Hedonism--the greatest pleasure combined with the least pain for all sensitive beings, each agent counting for no more than one. Personally passionate, selfish, and brutal, Schopenhauer still had a righteous abhorrence of cruelty to animals; whereas Kant had no such feeling. But positive happiness is a delusion, and no humanity can appreciably diminish the amount of pain produced by vital competition--recognised by our philosopher before Darwin--in the world. Therefore Buddhism is right, and the higher morality bids us extirpate the {122} will-to-live altogether by ascetic practices and meditation on the universal vanity of things. Suicide is not allowed, for while annihilating the intelligence it would not exclude some fresh incarnation of the will. And the last dying wish of Schopenhauer was that the end of this life might be the end of all living for him.

HERBART.

J. F. Herbart (1776-1841) occupies a peculiar position among German idealists. Like the others, he distinguishes between reality and appearance; and, like Schopenhauer in particular, he altogether rejects Hegel's identification of reality with reason. But, alone among post-Kantian metaphysicians, he is a pluralist. According to him, things-in-themselves, the eternal existents underlying all phenomena, are not one, but many. So far his philosophy is a return to the pre-Kantian system of Wolf and Leibniz; but whereas the monads of Leibniz were credited with an inward principle of evolution carrying them for ever onward through an infinite series of progressive changes, Herbart pushes his metaphysical logic to the length of denying all change and all movement to the eternal entities of which reality is made up.

Herbart is entitled to the credit--whatever it may be worth--of devising a system unlike every other in history; for while Hegel has a predecessor in Heracleitus, his rival combines the Eleatic immobilism with a pluralism that is all his own. It is not, however, on these paradoxes that his reputation rests, but on more solid services as a psychologist and an educationalist. Without any acquaintance, as would seem, with the work doing in Britain, Herbart discarded the old faculty psychology, conceiving mentality as made up {123} of "presentations," among which a constant competition for the field of consciousness is going on; and it is to this view that such terms as "inhibition" and "threshold of consciousness" are due. And the enormous prominence now given to the idea of value in ethics may be traced back to the teaching of a thinker whom he greatly influenced, F. E. Beneke (1798-1854).

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