Modern Thinkers and Present Problems

Part 1

MODERN THINKERS AND PRESENT PROBLEMS

AN APPROACH TO MODERN PHILOSOPHY THROUGH ITS HISTORY

BY EDGAR A. SINGER, Jr., Ph.D.

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1923

Copyright, 1923, BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PRINTED IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

These papers, which had been written from time to time and for various occasions, have been brought together without any attempt to make them tell a smooth unbroken story, yet not without regard to their connectedness. They have sometimes served me to bring before the mind of youth certain problems on which philosophers have thought again and again. But if they have had any interest for youth, if they are to have any for maturity, it can only be because the names that stand over the chapters might, if moments had names, be those of moments in each man’s history.

And as such, unless I have altogether failed to make my characters real, these names will be recognized. Who has not sometime been that Bruno who stepped from his Father’s House, where all had revolved so solicitously about himself, to find without the cold stars gazing down on his atomy from their places in endless emptiness?

Who has not come to feel, with Spinoza, those inviolable laws of mechanism which govern the world about him creeping into his own inmost being, threatening there all that he had so simply and yet so dearly clung to as his freedom and autonomy?

How many reflecting in their maturity on the unquestioning faiths of their childhood have thought to bring these to the test of such experience as natural science depends on, only to find, as Hume found, these faiths unconfirmed?

And of those who have lived through this moment of disillusionment, there will always be some who will have come in their own way to the position severe reasoning forced on Kant: The spiritual aspects of reality are not issues of science and intellection, but belong to that other order of truth grasped by the “practical reason.”

Others, meanwhile, will have refused to let their speculation go beyond the insight experience yields, and of these some at least will have found that experience holds out nothing hopeful for now or forever. They will have seen with Schopenhauer into the “deep abyss” and found at the bottom of it only this counsel: Not-being is better than being.

Or if perhaps they have for a moment thought, with Nietzsche, that evolutionary science had brought to view a goal that gave heart to the pitiless struggle of life by holding before it the vision of the “far future man,” they may in the end have come to see beyond this Superman. But to have seen beyond him nothing but the super-superman is to have seen the goal vanish and the heart lose its hope.

And what then? The pages on “Pragmatism” and on “Progress” may offer suggestions of an answer. They are still historical in their spirit, and like those that had gone before them mean to illustrate, not to demonstrate or affirm. They, too, would stand for moments of any thoughtful life and will have done all they were intended to do if they inform such a life with, and give it a sense of attachment to the world that has gone before and is going on ’round.

But if one would at the outset know something of what the writer suspects to be the outcome of ordered and historically guided reflection on these subjects, let him turn to the closing chapter, if not for encouragement then for warning.

* * * * *

Every one will remember the word to his reader with which Montaigne closes the preface to his Essays. ’Tis but of himself he would write and “it is then no reason thou shouldst employ thy time about so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.”

I cannot close my preface without confessing a misgiving that must have beset everyone who ever wrote of the past: that whereas he set out to lose himself in history, he may have found in history nothing but himself. But on the bare chance of this having befallen me, I need not say “farewell” beforehand; for well I know no reader will accompany me far through this past save one who finds himself there too.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600 3

II. Benedict de Spinoza 1632-1677 37

III. A Disciple of Spinoza (An Illustration) 65

IV. David Hume, 1711-1776 97

V. Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804 129

VI. Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860 155

Part 2

VII. Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900 183

VIII. Pragmatism 213

IX. Progress 249

X. Royce on Love and Loyalty 283

XI. Retrospect and Prospect 303

GIORDANO BRUNO

1548-1600

The straightest way to the heart of old matters is an old letter. Here is one written on the twenty-third of May, 1592, by a gentleman of Venice to the Father of the Venetian Inquisition.

“Very Reverend Father and Most-to-be-observed Sir:

“I, Gioanni Mocenigo, son of the Clarissimo Messer Marcoantonio, compelled by my conscience and ordered by my confessor, denounce to Your Very Reverend Paternity Giordano Bruno of Nola, whom I have heard say on various occasions when he was conversing with me in my own house, that Catholics do but blaspheme when they hold the Bread to be transubstantiated into the Flesh; that he is against the Mass; that no religion satisfies him; that Christ was a charlatan who, since he resorted to tricks to fool people, might well enough have foreseen that he would die a criminal’s death; that there is no distinction of Persons in God; ... that the world is eternal and that there are an infinite number of worlds, and that God is continually making an infinity of them because He wants as many as He can have; that Christ performed specious miracles; that he was a magician and the apostles were magicians too.”...

The letter runs on in breathless denunciation, but already one begins to make out the image of Bruno reflected in the average mind of his time. The limited intelligence of Mocenigo has honestly misunderstood some of Bruno’s utterances, his malice has distorted others; but the perversity of the whole is not due to these faults of detail. Lost in this jumble of stock heresies lies hidden a great idea, the greatest perhaps that has ever been contributed by a single mind to the cause of our science. “And he says the world is eternal and that there are an infinity of worlds.” This sentence has brought the old world to an end, has shattered the heavens under which Christendom was then living, yet it falls on the ear of its time with no more meaning or portent than a doubt respecting the doctrine of transubstantiation or the authenticity of miracles. Bruno, throughout the course of his driven life and up to the moment of his tragic death, knew most forms of martyrdom. He bore none of these meekly, for his was a lusty soul that did not love to suffer. But neither the hatred nor the cruelty of his world seems to have hurt him so to the quick as did its stupidity. Doubt him and hate if you will; but value him you must! He was master of a great idea and unacquainted with modesty.

Meanwhile Mocenigo has more to say of this sinner: “He has expressed the intention of making himself the founder of a new sect under the name of the new philosophy. He has said that the Virgin could not have brought a child into the world, and that our Catholic faith is full of blasphemies against the majesty of God; that it would be better to suppress the largesses of wrangling friars because they befoul the world; that they are all asses and that our common opinions are the teaching of asses; that we have no proof that our faith has merit with God; that the simple rule of not doing unto others what we would not have done unto us is sufficient for right living.”... Perhaps I may stop here. Evidently one who could be guilty of all these follies would be ingenious in inventing others, and Mocenigo’s letter may run endlessly on.

While this letter was writing, Bruno lay locked in a room of Mocenigo’s house. “I had thought to learn from him,” Mocenigo explains, “not knowing him to be the wicked man he is, and having noted all these things to lay before your Very Reverend Paternity, and fearing that he would take his departure as he said he wished to do, I have locked him in a room at your disposal. As I think him possessed of the devil, I hope you will decide quickly what is to be done with him....”

* * * * *

It has sometimes been wondered how Bruno came to accept the invitation of Mocenigo to take up his residence in Venice. Italy was for him a place of such peril that it seems incredible he should have ventured to set foot in it. “Tell me one thing more,” concludes a letter written in this same year 1592 by a gentleman of Bologna to a friend in Padua, “tell me one thing more. Giordano Bruno, whom you knew at Wittenberg, the Nolan, is said to be living among you just now at Padua. Is it really so? What sort of man is this that he dares to enter Italy, which he left in exile as he himself used to confess? I wonder, I wonder. I cannot yet believe the rumor, although I have it on good authority. You shall tell me whether it is true.” And history has wondered all the more seeing that Bruno himself had long before prophesied the result. “Torches,” he had written, “fifty or a hundred, will not fail me though the march be at noonday should it be my fate to die in a Catholic country.”

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