2

vidual" or "complete system"; and Joachim's "systematic coherence," or "completely individual, self-sustained, significant whole." In so far as these formulas purport to define a maximum or ideal unity, I shall discuss them in the next chapter. Suffice it here to point out that the terms are so abstract and colorless, that they do not legitimately affect that issue between spiritualism and materialism, in which idealism appears as one of the principal champions.

This is true whichever of the two following courses is pursued. It is possible, on the one hand, to adopt the categories of science, and superimpose the philosophical category of unity. The world is then simply that kind of systematic unity which the several sciences are progressively revealing, and idealism is no more than a formal endorsement of these sciences. Or, on the other hand, it is possible to pursue the agnostic course, and assert that beyond the reach of our knowledge there are categories which transmute the paradoxes of this world into a “total unity of experience," which "cannot, as such, be directly verified." 3 But such an absolute, concerning which nothing more is known than that it is somehow one, selfconsistent, and all-inclusive, cannot properly be said to be spiritual; indeed, in so far as it signifies specific mental and moral predicates, spirituality must be regarded as one of those "partial aspects" which the absolute transcends. § 7. The doubtful spirituality of a world defined exclusively to suit an intellectual demand constitutes a powerful motive impelling idealism to shift or Ethical its basis from intellectualism to voluntarism. Intellect, so the voluntarist asserts, is only a special activity of consciousness. The general or fundamental activity of consciousness is not intellectual but

Voluntaristic

Idealism

1 E. Caird: "Idealism and the Theory of Knowledge," reprinted from Proceedings of the British Academy of Science, Vol. I, p. 8; T. H. Green: Prolegomena to Ethics, pp. 29, 30; F. H. Bradley: Appearance and Reality, p. 542; H. H. Joachim: The Nature of Truth, pp. 76, 113. Bradley: op. cit., p. 530.

2 Cf. especially, pp. 183-188.

moral. Consciousness owns and employs the categories in the service of its ulterior practical purposes. We are thus led from Hegelianism to Fichteanism. With Fichte, mind was the pure ego, endowed with freedom and activity, and "positing" in obedience to moral necessities, a "limited ego" in opposition to a "limited non-ego"; in other words, dividing itself into the counterpoise of spirit and nature.1

But the same fate which befell the logical metaphysics of Hegel, befell also the ethical metaphysics of Fichte. He did not succeed in moralizing nature any more than Hegel succeeded in rationalizing it. Mechanical science has pursued its own independent course, steadily and irresistibly; and voluntarism like intellectualism has been forced to ratify its conquests. The result is that voluntarism is forced either to limit the scope of its categories to the field of moral science proper, or to divest these categories of their narrower and stricter meaning in order to maintain their limitless scope.

The former alternative is adopted in so far as voluntaristic idealism is simply a protest against attempts to mechanize the sciences of value. When voluntaristic idealism goes beyond this insistence on the autonomy of moral science within its own limited field, and asserts its ultimate priority, it becomes necessary to construe logic also as a normative science. Judgment becomes an act of will, and truth its norm. Reality, being reduced to knowledge by the usual idealistic arguments, is thus made an expression of will. But when the will is thus identified with the will to know, it amounts to no more than the reaffirmation of things as they are. The cognitive or logical will is the will of the passionless sage who has

1 Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (Science of Knowledge) (1794), trans. by A. E. Kroeger, pp. 79 sq.; and Das System der Sittenlehre (Science of Ethics) (1798), trans. by Kroeger, pp. 67 sq.

2 Cf. below, pp. 161-162. For the voluntarism arising from non-idealistic motives, such as 'neo-vitalism,' cf. Bergson, as treated below, pp. 261-264.

renounced every special preference, and schooled himself to an acquiescence in whatever is objective and necessary. As knower, I will that there shall be a world; and having once so willed, I must take it as I find it and yield to its demands. I have not interpreted the world to harmonize it with will, but have emasculated will into an assent to the world as it is.

The fate that befalls a strict voluntarism is thus similar to that which befalls a strict intellectualism. Specific categories drawn from thought or from the moral life, break down when used for the purpose of interpreting nature; and then when the categories are corrected to suit nature, they lose their specifically spiritual character. There is no saving grace in such a philosophy; and it does not constitute a possible resting-place for the idealistic mind."

Neo-Romanticism

§ 8. The romantic alternative alone remains, as apparently the inevitable destiny of idealism. It is generally recognized that contemporary German thought has been repeating the phases through which the Kantian movement originally passed.3 Whether neo-Kantianism, neo-Fichteanism, neo-Hegelianism, and neo-Romanticism have observed the chronological order of their prototypes is doubtful. But the interplay of motives is strikingly similar to that of German thought at the opening of the last century, and in nothing more than in the emergence of romanticism.

Romanticism may take the agnostic form, and reduce the

1 Cf. Münsterberg. See below, pp. 178-179.

2 Wherever the metaphysical motive is strong, ethical idealism tends to approach romanticism. Thus Münsterberg (op. cit.) stands nearer to romanticism than Windelband and Rickert, as he in turn falls short of the advanced position of Th. Lipps ("Naturphilosophie," in Philosophie im Beginn des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, Festschrift for Kuno Fischer, second edition). The common metaphysical motive in voluntarism and romanticism is significantly expressed by the new idealistic organ, Logos; cf. Vol. I,

1910, p. 1.

• The so-called “review-course" (Repetitionskursus). Cf. Oscar Ewald: "The Present State of Philosophy in Germany," Phil. Review, Vol. XVI, 1907, pp. 238 sq.

various concrete manifestations of spirit to some ineffable life which engulfs and negates them. This was the method of Schopenhauer, and as revived in Hartmann's theory of "the Unconscious," and in the earlier phases of Nietzsche's thought, it plays no inconsiderable part in the present movement. But there is another form of romanticism that is more hospitable as well as more positive in tone. If it is impossible to construe the world in terms of thought, or in terms of moral life, there yet remains a further conception, complete enough to embrace these and every other possible value, the conception of a universal spiritual life ("geistiges Leben"), that shall be infinitely various and infinitely rich. Thus there arises the syncretistic and developmental romanticism, which is the popular movement of the day in German thought.

"I have shown," writes Ewald, "that it is more and more the tendency of the most diverse thinkers to regard the world as a fulness, exhibiting contradictions and antinomies only in the human spirit. In this way one-sided logicism is overthrown. Logic, morality, art, and religion enjoy in their own realms complete sovereignty and cannot be reduced by psychological or empiristic attempts to anything merely relative or temporal. This sphere, however, is not the whole, but only a part of inexhaustible reality." Or, as it is expressed by Dilthey, for whom philosophy is a study of the great interpretations of life ("Weltanschauungslehre") in all their historical variety: "It is not the relativity of every Weltanschauung, that is the final word of the spirit which has passed through them all, but rather the sovereignty of the spirit, as opposed to each and every one of them; and at the same time the positive consciousness that, in the different attitudes of the spirit, the One Reality of the world is given us, the persistent types of Weltanschauung being the expression of the manysidedness of the world." The same philosophy finds an eloquent and influential exponent in Rudolph Eucken, who proclaims the self-sufficiency of the spiritual life

("Selbstständigkeit des Geisteslebens") — of that "cosmic life that forms the essence of things," and is apprehended in a spiritual immediacy.1

Romanticism does not lend itself to vigorous criticism: it is not so much a philosophy as a faith. In romanticism, "the cause of the Spiritual Life is loyally championed by the soul against the pretensions of an alien or at least dissatisfying worldliness." Little attempt is made to free the conception of the 'geistiges Leben' from its indeterminateness and promiscuity; or to defend its priority by orderly argument. Proof is as little congenial as analysis to such a mood of riotous spirituality. The spiritual life is an act to be performed, a privilege to be "freely appropriated," rather than an idea to be defined and established. real motive force "lies in the impulse towards spiritual selfpreservation." It springs from "the desire for a philosophy which seeks to regard reality from the inside and from the point of view of the whole, and which . . . strives to raise the whole of human life to a higher level."2

Its

In other words it becomes in the end a question of the function of philosophy. If philosophy be an attempt to inspire men with noble and elevating sentiments, the romanticists are perpetually right. But if philosophy be the attempt to think clearly and cogently about the world, and lay bare its actualities and necessities for better or for then romanticism is irrelevant. It is not a false philosophy; it is simply not, in the strict theoretical sense, a philosophy at all.3

worse

§ 9. Before concluding, we shall do well to inquire whether this great movement, with all the brilliancy and versatility of mind which it has displayed, has proved its

Ewald: op. cit. (con.), Phil. Review, Vol. XVII, 1908, p. 426; W. Dilthey: "Das Wesen der Philosophie," in Systematische Philosophie (Hinneberg's Kultur der Gegenwart), p. 62; R. Eucken: Life of the Spirit, trans. by F. L. Pogson, p. 327.

Eucken: op. cit., pp. 332, 403; and The Meaning and Value of Life, trans. by L. J. and W. R. B. Gibson, pp. 98, 126.

Cf. above, pp. 29–30, 40–41.