No More Learning

The Practical Philosophy of Kant partly the complement, partly the antithesis of his theoretical philosophy. his theory of knowledge he had aimed at proving that cognition governed by the a priori forms existing the understanding,
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independently of experience, but for that very reason limited the action of the mind in cognition to merely the formal work-
ing-up of given conceptions. Similarly, in order that the law of moral action may possess unconditional and universal vali
dity, it must, in Kant's view, be independent of experience, and belong to the reason a priori, i. e. , must be autonomous ; it is as much the province of Reason as Practical to lay down laws for action, as of the Speculative Reason to do this for cognition ; but at the same time, if this practical law is to be a priori, it must be limited to the. form of action merely, and must not include any object of desire since the will can be influenced by an object of desire, only by the expectation of pleasure, a motive which acts differently in different individuals, and belongs to the lower sense-faculty of desire and hence can never claim universal or unconditional validity. All material principles, whatever their contents, are, according to Kant, equally eudaemonistic; they depend upon self-love, or the lower faculty of desire, and have only a subjective and empiri cally conditioned validity ; they are therefore merely pruden tial maxims, not pure laws of reason. The autonomous law, characteristic of reason, must accordingly relate solely to the general form of action, without the slightest admixture of material motives, which would only sully its purity ; its com
? mand as the " Categorical Imperative " is :
Act so that the rule governing thy will may also always serve as the principle
of a universal legislation.
Thus far Kant's doctrine of the legislation of the practical
reason seems to form a complete parallel to that of the specu lative reason ; but as soon as we look more closely at the rela tion of form and contents, an essential distinction becomes apparent. In the sphere of knowledge, form and contents, in spite of their different origin, are in no way really opposed, but only exist for, and with each other ; we are compelled to bring every object of sense-experience under the a priori forms of intuition and of thought, and our sense-perceptions, instead of being antagonistic to these forms, can only be apprehended by their means. It is quite otherwise in the sphere of action. The moral law is indeed the form of a
priori validity, which we can and ought to apply as a criterion to every object of sense-desire -- i. e. , to our empirical inclina tions and actions ; but we are by no means compelled to do this ; we are able to follow the natural inclinations
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the contents of our sense-experience, which so little submit without resistance to this a priori form, that, Kant's view, they are invariably opposed to the law of reason, and so produce a never-ending struggle between duty and inclination.
Hence the moral law the form which, on the one hand, has need of the contents supplied by the empirical desires, since without them would not reach action at all, and so the law find no application but, on the other hand, this form also represented as involved in ceaseless opposition and conflict with their contents. This conception plainly unrealisable we cannot see how moral law without contents, and simply
by
to all empirical inclinations could ever become a motive of action, or how definite obligatory actions could be deduced from it. is, no doubt, true that there often a conflict between duty and inclination, and that in this conflict the claims of duty are the higher, and the only absolute ones
the great merit of Kant's moral philosophy to have brought out this truth with all possible emphasis. But equally certain that the letter of his theory untenable. His mistake lay thinking that the law of reason must be made purely formal to have unconditional validity, and in attributing all actual motives of action, all inclinations, to sense-desire, thus representing them as hostile to reason. In this way his moral system acquired a harsh, ascetic character, exceeding in rigour even that of the Stoics. The ground of this was
opposed
? the same both cases the absolute dualism between reason and sensation, between man as an "intelligible" being, endowed with freedom and reason, and man as a being of sense endowed with natural desire. If the two are so com
essentially
as abstract anti-natural Idealism, which still influenced Kant, maintained, we cannot understand how the commands of reason could ever coincide with man's actual wishes and actions. In order that anything may be a motive,
must be possible object of desire the moral law accor dingly can be a higher motive than single accidental inclina tions only by including a higher object, which, as uncondition ally valuable, superior to all merely conditional ends. however, the moral law includes a concrete end, no longer purely formal no longer opposed to all inclinations, but can itself become the object of reasonable inclination in that case there no longer the absolute dualism, asserted by Kant, between man as desiring and man as thinking, and finally,
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there is from the first an inner connection between the sense- world of experience and the "intelligible world," which warrants the hope of the synthesis of both in human action and cog nition.
In Kant himself we find several hints of this correction of the purely formal and dualistic character of his moral philosophy ; and these hints only need working out in order to render the rational principle of this philosophy supreme in the sphere of ethics. Kant was at bottom really held back here only by the same want of courage in working out his speculative principle as is traceable in his theory of know ledge ; the hindrance there was the influence of the scepti cism of Hume, here it was the dread of sullying the purity of idealistic ethical principles, by a compromise with empirical principles. His demand of a purely formal ethical principle was violated by Kant himself even in the definition of moral philosophy as the science of the ends of pure reason, and by the deduction of the supreme, unconditionally desirable end from the dignity of man as a rational being ; whence he derived the formula of his First Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics : " Act so as to use humanity, both in thine own person and in the person of every other man, always as an end, never solely as a means. " To treat humanity in each
individual as an end in itself, clearly means the recognition of a general end of humanity, and making its realisation in each man our object. Thus the moral law acquires as its contents a definite material end, from which the particular moral ends also may be deduced. This deduction can, how ever, only be made by means of empirical observation, both of the capacities and faculties involved in the natures of man, and of their employment and development as gathered from history. From the admission of this empirical observation Kant was deterred for the reasons given above, and was thus prevented from utilising in science this pregnant formula. In his theory of virtue he did, indeed, try to deduce the neces sity of our own personal perfection and of the happiness of others as the two main divisions of the virtues. But it is clear that he could not do this consistently with his own premises. as he elsewhere never tired of insisting, any appeal to empirical motives derived from the desire for happi ness a pollution of morality, difficult to see how to seek the happiness of others can be reasonably made a duty
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for happiness in no respect a desirable moral end, the happiness of others can no more than our own be such an end while, conversely, the happiness of others to be sought, not easy to see why our own should not be so also, more especially in view of the Kantian principle of the universal applicability of the moral rule -- " what right for the one must also be fair for the other. " When we add that Kant, in the explanatory justification of his principle, has already emphasised the evil effects which every one would feel his selfish conduct were made into a universal
prin ciple, we can hardly dissent from those who consider that in working out his moral system he did not remain true to the
rigour of his primary principle, but fell back into that utili tarianism which he so greatly abhors. This inconsistency was only the natural result of the excessive rigour with which he insisted on his a priori principle, until became a system of forms without contents, the defects of which necessitated a recourse to alien points of view.
Kant exhibits, however, surprising points of agreement, not only with the strictly philosophical, but also with the theological utilitarianism of his time. In the Critique Pure Reason he had shown that the ideas of Freedom, Immor tality (soul), and God could not be objects of theoretical knowledge, inasmuch as insoluble contradictions arise when ever a proof of them attempted. But what denied to the speculative, can, he maintains, be grasped by the practical reason. Though to the former the world of noumena lying behind phenomena closed, to the latter directly re vealed in the moral law, which makes man a citizen of the "intelligible world" of freedom. From this position the above ideas may be established as " Postulates," i. e. , as pre suppositions which we feel compelled to make, not in order to enlarge our knowledge, but order to render possible the realisation of the moral law. In the first place, we thus gain the postulate of freedom as the basis of the reality of moral law, just as this law the basis of the cognisability of freedom for, inasmuch as we ought to do the good, follows that we can do it. Nevertheless the moral law
obstructed by the motives of sense-desire. These obstructions
able and bound to overcome more and more but can never do this so completely that the law will be fully realised in finite time hence its realisation demands the infinite
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duration of the individual, or immortality. Finally, reason as a legislative faculty demands the realisation of an absolute
or supreme good, which must embrace both perfect virtue and a corresponding state of happiness, and happiness not included in virtue, but dependent upon natural conditions beyond our control. Hence arises the demand for a supreme Cause, capable of bringing nature into harmony with the moral law of rational beings, or of connecting happiness with the virtue that deserves it ; in other words, the supreme good proposed by reason demands the existence of God as the condition of its possibility. Thus the transcendental ideas are the objects of a " moral faith " rooted in reason. It is true that by this faith the speculative reason receives no addition to its knowledge, but by its critical precautions it can render at least the negative service of keeping these ideas free from
anthropomorphic impurities and superstitious abuse. It has indeed always been with good reason maintained that this mode of establishing belief in the existence of God can with difficulty be harmonized with the main principle of Kant's ethics. If the moral law is throughout to have nothing to do with sense-desire or happiness, it is hard to see how, on the other hand, happiness can be pronounced an integral part of the supreme good aimed at by reason and a divine cause be demanded to produce The affinity of this train of thought to theological utilitarianism so obvious, that many have not unreasonably seen in a retrogression on the part of Kant to the eudaemonistic point of view of the popular philosophy,1 and that Kant's philosophical successors pre ferred to work out his speculative principle to its logical results without his theological postulates.
Still, fully justified as these objections to the literal form of Kant's postulate undoubtedly are, we cannot deny that underneath lay a true idea, which appears in purer form in the Critique of Judgment. Kant here tries to find some connecting link between the intelligible and sensible worlds, between freedom and nature, in the idea of a teleology common to both. In order to explain nature we find our
Jacobi, Fichte, Herder, Schleiermacher, unanimously rejected Kant's line of argument, sometimes in very strong terms. Of more recent authors, compare the criticisms of Dilthey (Leben Schleiermachcrs, 127, seq. ), Bieder- mann (Deutschland im 18 Jahrh. , II. 902), Wundt (Et/iik, 319, seq. ).
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selves compelled to combine the pr1nciple of teleology with the mechanical principle or causality for in organic nature we see that the parts are determined by their relation to the whole, are means to the inner end of the organism. To the question, how the teleological explanation can be harmonised
with that of causality, Kant's answer
that the conception of ends in nature
to add to our knowledge of facts, but
principle for our reflective judgment
the structure of our subjective understanding merely that we cannot help regarding nature as governed by final causes. But Kant cannot rest in this sceptical subjectivity he teaches that the two principles are to be harmonised, they must be combined under one supreme common principle, viz. , in a super-sensible substratum, or actual cause of nature of this cause we must form a corresponding intellectual intuition, that to say, we conceive as not merely causal, but as at the same time the primal intellect, whose thought not like ours discursive, but necessarily intuitive (thinking the whole simultaneously with its parts). true he does, at the same time, again sceptically confess that objectively we can neither assert nor deny the proposition that a Being, acting with view to ends, as the cause of the universe, behind what we rightly call the ends of nature but he considers certain that, we are to form judgments according to the conditions of our reason, we are absolutely compelled to regard a rational Being as the condition of the possibility of ends nature. But the observation of nature's ends not sufficient to enable us to further define this intelligent
First Cause we must under the guidance of teleology go beyond Nature. Nature presents not only individual pro ducts adapted to ends, but forms system of ends which point to a supreme or final end. This final end can only be man, who alone acts with conscious purpose and uses all creatures as means to his ends. But man not a final end, for in so far as man part of Nature, his sensuous, pleasure- seeking ends, are again dependent upon natural conditions, and are no way the object of Nature's special regard. On the contrary, man a final end only as a moral subject, as proposing to himself unconditional ends by his supersensible freedom of volition. His existence involves the supreme end, to which all Nature subordinate as means. from this
in the first instance, not of such value as
only a regulative primarily owing to
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? I'4 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
conception of man's moral nature, as constituting the supreme
end of creation, that the study of Nature's ends must be
supplemented, whereby the greater validity and definiteness of the argument for a supreme First Cause are secured, inas much as we must now think of this supreme Cause not only as Intelligence, and as a legislator for Nature, but also as the supreme Law-giver of a moral kingdom of ends. It is evident that this inductive method of arriving at the idea of God contrasts favourably with that given above ; whilst by the first, God was postulated only for the dubious object of adding
to our autonomous morality, by the latter, His existence is inferred from a comprehensive survey of external and internal experience as the necessary condition of a teleo- logical system of things, uniting the natural and moral worlds as means and end. This is a clear speculative conception, which, shadowed forth by Leibnitz, in various forms runs like a golden thread through the whole of Post-Kantian philo sophy. A corollary of this thought that man, not only as
natural, but also as moral being, dependent upon the Divine Cause of the universe, and that his autonomy must
therefore at the same time be an actual (not merely sub
jectively conceived) theonomy. But of this inference, affecting the very foundations of his philosophy, Kant would know
nothing however obviously suggested by the above line of induction, he refused to recognise through fear of im pairing his idea of freedom and instead of he finally gave to his ethico-theological proof the form in which we find in the Critique the Practical Reason (viz. , that God neces sary for the attainment of happiness, or in order to supple ment our inadequate power over sensible nature), and which
open to the most serious objections. Here again we are expressly reminded that God the object only of moral faith, which must not be confounded with theoretical know ledge, nor made the basis of morality upon which really rests.
Morality becomes religion when what shows to be the
end of man conceived as also the end of the supreme Law
giver and Creator, or God. Religion thus the recognition of all our duties as divine commands. The distinction be tween revealed and natural religion stated by Kant to be, that in the former, must know a thing to be a divine com mand before can recognise as my duty in the latter,
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as my duty before can consider a command If a man holds revealed religion to be necessary,
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he a Supernaturalist unnecessary, a Rationalist impossible, a Naturalist. As a fourth possibility, a religion
might conceivably be objectively natural and yet subjectively revealed this would be the case were such that man might have arrived at by the unaided use of reason, but at a later period hence revelation might be useful, or even necessary for certain times and places, without being per manent guarantee for the truth of the religion. The last Kant's supposition with regard to Christianity, as had been
that of Lessing. But whence comes this, only relative, necessity for revelation And how are its contents to be understood as in unison with reason These questions were discussed by Kant in the works, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1793), and Ueber den Streit der Fakultdten (1798), in a style, whatever our opinion may be in other respects, which at all events far superior in
depth to the Aufkldrung of the popular philosophy.
What made Kant capable of a truer appreciation of the doctrines of Christianity, was his deep moral earnestness. The self-complacent optimism of the philosophy of the
Aufkldrung had lacked the recognition of evil as a serious
power human life, while Kant made the starting-point of
his religious philosophy. He considered as incontestably a fact of experience, that in our race there inherent a " radical evil," or an original tendency to evil, viz. , the pre ponderance of self-love over pure reverence for law. This wrong bias cannot be the result of inheritance from our first parents, since moral qualities cannot be thus transmitted, but
are inseparable from the person. The source of this radical evil, according to Kant, rather to be sought in an " intelli gible act of freedom," which not to be further explained. The question, then, how this evil disposition can be changed into a good one, Kant answers, Not by a gradual reformation, but by a fundamental revolution of the man's whole habit of thought, by a new birth. The problem to awaken in the mind the idea of the moral perfection for which
we are from the first made. For this purpose, nothing more effectual than the contemplation of this idea in an his torical example of of such surpassing moral grandeur as can be beheld Jesus. For this reason, we may look upon
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him as if the ideal of goodness had been presented in him in flesh and blood, though we have not on that account any reason to regard him as other than a man born in the course of nature. The question, too, whether his historical per
to the eternal ideal, is one which we neither can nor need answer ; for, in any case, the real object of our religious faith is not this historic man, but the ideal of a humanity well-pleasing to God ; and since this
ideal is not our own creation, but given us in our super sensible nature, it may be conceived as the Son of God come down from heaven. Whoever believes in this ideal Son of God, to whom Jesus holds the relation of the representative example -- that whoever receives into his heart the moral idea of a humanity pleasing to God, and lets govern his life-- may believe that he justified in the eyes of the Searcher of
Hearts, since the fundamental Tightness of his disposition covers the imperfection of the details of his life. Nor need he have any anxiety with regard to the guilt of the past for
although the conception of the vicarious suffering of Christ as a satisfaction for sinners taken literally, untrue, inasmuch as such a substitution cannot take place the sphere of morality, still the conception may be regarded as the sym bolical expression of the true idea, that in the daily pain of self-discipline, obedience, and patience, the new man in us suffers as were vicariously for the old. Kant thus interprets the Church's doctrine of the Atonement, as once for all made by Christ, on the lines of Protestant mysticism, treating as a continual ethical process the heart of the religious man -- an interpretation, the germs of which may be traced to the Apostle Paul. But while the Christian doctrine of salvation thus becomes an inward subjective experience of the heart,
by no means Kant's intention to depreciate, from an abstract subjective point of view, the importance of the community. He sees very clearly that the supremacy of the good principle
in the individual can only be assured when maintained in the community around him. But this can be accomplished only by the establishment and spread of society having the laws of virtue both as its basis and its end. Such an ethical community, or " Kingdom of God," distinguished from all civil States, by being founded, not upon the laws of civil justice, but upon the laws of personal virtue, and by having for its sovereign, not human potentate, but the Searcher of Hearts
sonality altogether corresponded
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and again by not being limited to definite nation or country, but embracing in principle the whole of mankind. Moreover, this ideal ethical community by no means identical with historic ecclesiastical communities, for while can be based upon the faith of the reason alone, which open to all alike, the ecclesiastical societies are founded upon positive creeds, which everywhere take different forms.
Having thus stated his view of religion, as may be ascertained within the limits of reason, Kant proceeds to the critical investigation of the historical, or "statutory" forms of religion. He here shows that he fully shared the unhis- torical way of looking at things characteristic of the age of the Aufkldrung. The only explanation of the rise of the positive religions he can give the false notion of mankind, that God demands special acts of ceremonial worship in addition to the worship of a morally good life. This was the origin of statutory religious regulations, which may for a time, in proportion to their association with moral ideas, be useful and even necessary as the means of inaugurating purely moral
? but in the end become hindrances to progress, and are therefore destined gradually to give place to the pure religion of reason. In Kant's view, the abolition of
this servile belief, with the establishment of the sole authority of moral faith, was inaugurated by Jesus but the real purpose of Jesus was often misunderstood in the Church, and what he originally intended to be simply preparatory means, was later times made fundamental whence arose much bigotry and fanaticism. was not until his own time, Kant thinks, that the light at length fully shone forth after centuries of darkness and he interprets the Christian hope of a final consummation, when God shall be all in all, of this develop ment, then actually begun, of the true faith of reason out of the wrappings of the historic faith. the duty of religious teachers, Kant declared, to help on this development means of the interpretation of the Bible and fresh inter pretation of the dogmas of the Church. At the end, he turns to the criticism of special points, in which he thought the danger of fanatical religious error and false worship
religious teaching,
serious. The notion of divine "operations of grace " he classes among those incomprehensible ideas of which reason disputes neither the possibility, nor the reality, nor even the necessity, but of which can make no use
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either in speculation, owing to the impossibility of determin ing their characteristics, or in practice, since we can do nothing to produce them. Elsewhere, however, he indicates in what sense he is willing to accept the idea of divine grace, viz.
, if it is understood to mean the supersensible principle of good existing in our moral nature, which may be regarded as a divinely imparted impulse towards the good, the capacity for which has not been produced by our own effort, and which can be thought of as grace. Similarly he distinguishes in the means of grace between the true moral kernel and the ruder husk. Prayer, regarded as a formal act of worship and the statement of our wishes to a Being who needs no such state ment, he considers a vain superstition and fetishism ; but as the expression of our heart's desire to be well-pleasing to God,
it is a valuable means of quickening good dispositions, and especially as public prayer is an effective ethical observance, calculated to awaken moral impulses in the members of a community. In the same way, Baptism and the Lord's Supper may be looked upon as ethical observances for the public confession and quickening of the feelings of duty and brotherly love in a community ; but to regard them as means of grace in the sense that by these ceremonies the divine favour might be flattered and won, would be a heathenish superstition, and could only lead to contempt for virtue and the greater influence of the priesthood as the dispensers of
grace.
In these utterances we cannot but recognise the lofty
moral earnestness which was the soul of the Kantian philosophy and the main cause of its great and salutary effect upon its time. But the same defects are here observable as mark his moral philosophy : the onesidedness and inflexibility of his speculative principle prevented him from being just to those sides of man's nature which, while different from the intellect, are not wholly irrational, and must on no account be simply assigned to the lower sense-nature. I refer to the emotions and the imagination. The religious life originates and specially manifests itself in these very faculties of the soul as its domain ; and we can therefore readily understand why Kant could not take an impartial view of its natural and characteristic phenomena. He was still held back by the abstract intellectualism which was a universal failing of the Aufkldrung. To correct this error and supply what was
? ? ? ? "Ch- Q KANT.
19
lacking was the work of that party which had already protested, on the lines of Rousseau, against this worship of the intellect, and had proclaimed the rights of nature, of the heart, of the unfettered imagination, and of passionate enthusiasm. The party consisted of those allies in the " Storm and Stress " movement whose youthful excesses of enthusiasm were so modified and transformed in Herder and Goethe as to become a new and richer ideal of humanity.
Moreover, Kant's religious philosophy was unsatisfactory on account of the indefiniteness and uncertainty of its attitude towards the decisive question of man's relation to God. If religion consists, as it teaches, in regarding our duties as divine commands, the question at once arises, whether this is a purely subjective conception, or whether it is based upon an objective truth. In the former case, we have the anthropo logical theory of religion, since developed by Feuerbach and recent Positivism and Agnosticism ; in the latter, there arises the further question, How can we arrive at a knowledge of the divine will ? Now, the idea of revelation remains in Kant a non liquet ; he concedes its possibility, perhaps even its necessity, and yet really leaves no room for it. If it is ad mitted, in the sense of an external announcement on the part of God, as the theological Kantians wished, the fate of Kant's fundamental principle of the autonomy of reason is at once sealed. on the other hand, the divine revelation con
ceived as taking place within the human spirit, as in post- Kantian speculation, cannot reasonably be limited to the
and denied to the theoretical reason the human spirit must then be conceived as standing generally as such so close a relation to the divine that the eternal nature of the divine Reason must express and reveal itself the regular course of the mind's own activity. But this carries us not only beyond the dualism of Kant's theory of knowledge, but also beyond the moral abstraction of his merely rational faith, and we are brought to an evolutionary idealism, as conceived by Herder and Hegel, which the manifold moral and religious ideals of mankind take their place as integral mem bers in the process of the development of divine revelation.
Thus, in the Kantian philosophy there lay side by side the germs of various tendencies of thought, which afterwards took widely different directions. And was precisely this wealth of suggestions, which might be developed into totally distinct
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lines of thought, which constituted the vast importance of his philosophy for his age, at the same time rendering the preser vation of its original form impossible. While no thinker of the time remained uninfluenced by not one adopted its entirety and was precisely its most distinguished disciples who advanced the furthest beyond and by developing its principles and correcting its imperfections gained fruitful points of view very helpful to profounder understanding of religion.
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HERDER.
In the year 1784 appeared the beginning of Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of History, which, together with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, gives utterance, as Julian Schmidt justly considers, to the most important intellectual drift of the
century. In this book meet, as in a focus, the combined
results of Herder's various philosophical labours, labours which
opened up new and magnificent points of view especially in those branches of study which were depreciated by Kant, viz. , the emotional side of the life of the human soul and the
? of mankind under the combined action of natural and spiritual forces in history. In England Shaftes bury's philosophy of the moral sense had been the counterpart
of Hume's intellectual scepticism, and in France Rousseau's Gospel of Nature, that of Voltaire's Enlightenment ; in the
same way in Germany Kant's analyzing thought was supple mented by the synthetic intuitions of Herder, and subjective idealism, with its limitation to the analysis of the conscious ness of the subject, by historical realism, with its eager atten tion to the laws of human nature in the whole course of history. Each of these modes of thought is evidently the complement of the other ; and the right combination and fusion of the two was the problem bequeathed by the 18th century, then clos ing, to the philosophy of the 19th, a problem the solution of which is still far from completed. In order to understand what is really new in the thought of the 19th century, we must look at it as the synthesis of these two contrary tendencies, which occupied the second half of the 18th century.
A concise account of Herder's position it is not easy to give, for two reasons ; firstly, because his style has more of the poetical, emotional, and rhetorical element than the clearness and precision of science ; and secondly, because his views, especially on religious questions, underwent repeated modifi
development
? ? ? 2 2 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
cations in the course of his literary labours. One unvarying
drift does indeed pervade all these variations -- a protest
against the arrogance and poverty of the popular Aufkldrung, which would let nothing pass but what was amenable to the calculations of the common understanding, and, without any sense for appreciating the productive forces and manifold phenomena of human history, sought to force all truth into the meagre moulds of its abstract intellectual conception. As a true disciple of Hamann and Rousseau, Herder abhorred this arid, levelling rationalism ; he sought to understand the unity of all the powers of man's soul and the special nature of his habits of feeling ; hence what interested him in poetry and
was not the abstract rule, the artificial form of the schools, the doctrines of the Church, but the living feelings as they found natural expression in the songs of the people and the poetical picture-language of the oldest religious records. As in poetry he preferred the primitive strength and beauty of the songs of the people to the classicality of the schools, so
in religion he set the strength and beauty of the Bible above the dogmatism of the Churches ; for this very reason it was to him insufferable to see the Rationalists trying to thrust their rigid intellectuality into the Bible, and by their artificial inter pretations dilute and dissipate both its religious strength and its poetic charm. Herder throughout remained perfectly true to himself in rejecting the Rationalists' arbitrary and unnatural treatment of the language of the Bible, and in demanding of the reader a loving sympathy with the special characteristics of the Biblical writers, so as to catch their enthusiasm and
reproduce their poetical picture-language. He thereby ren dered lasting service, striking the most decisive blow at the subjective arbitrariness of the Rationalistic methods of inter pretation, and preparing the way for the really scientific, objective, and historical methods of Biblical study followed in our own time.
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that within the boundary lines of this position Herder wavered. During the earlier and later periods of his life (in Riga and Weimar respectively), his appreciation of the aesthetic beauty and ideal truth of the Bible never kept him from criticising it in the same fashion as the poetical literature and religious legends of other nations, or from explaining it in accordance with the psychological and historical conditions of its origin ; so that
religion
? ? ? ? Ch. II. ] HERDER.
23
he was compelled not to regard these legends, the rise of which could be historically traced, as direct revelations of God with objective truth. In one of his earliest works, the fragment, Von Entstehung und Fortpflanzung der ersten Re- ligionsbegriffe, he adopts Hume's view, that fear was the mother of religion, and that the earliest religion consisted in the superstitious worship of harmful and beneficent deities, to appease the wrath and win the favour of whom, men felt bound to offer prayers, sacrifices, and ceremonies. When, however,
needs,
mankind had provided for their most pressing they began to speculate about the origin of things,
and to embody their ideas in cosmogonies and genealogies ; thus the first rude religion, the name of which is in almost all languages derived from fear, was followed by a kind of historico-physical philosophy. The question of the origin of the world received a mystical answer ; these primitive legends took a completely national and local form ; they were clothed in the rich figurative language of the senses ; they became mythological poems. It is the work of the science of religion to study the spirit of these mythological poems as charac teristic products of the individual nations. As a contribution to this object, Herder wrote his Archdologie der Hebrder, which combined in a common view his researches in the earliest history of poetry and in the origins of religion. He nowhere speaks in this work of a supernatural revelation ; in
the first chapters of Genesis he sees a national religious poem,
which must be understood, like Homer, in accordance with
its original spirit and meaning without any dogmatic bias. We must transplant ourselves into Eastern habits of thought in order to understand this poetical philosophy of nature ; but light is also thrown upon it by similar imagery in modern poetry, in Ossian, Shakespeare, and Klopstock. To treat this Oriental national poetry as dogma, is contrary to all canons of taste and reason ; it involves a violation of the natural difference in the various mental faculties, mutilates
the intuitive emotions no less than the reason, and confounds
together all classes of philosophy and knowledge. God gives us no revelation concerning natural science or metaphysics, except by means of the power bestowed by Him upon the human mind, of penetrating by its own force ever deeper into the nature of His creation.
While these views are identical with those of Herder's
? ? ? ? 24 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
most mature works, written while in Weimar, they differ appreciably from the position he held during the middle
period of his life (while in Biickeburg). From being the
aesthetic archaeologist of literature he then became more and
more the apologist of the supernatural. In his essay on Die dlteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts, which be longs to this period, he still regards the account of the creation in Genesis as a poem, but now it is a divine, and not a human poem ; it is no longer an Oriental myth, but a divine revelation. He does indeed still lay great stress upon the sense-intuition of nature, that the sight of the dawning day, which was in the prophet's mind but in order that this everyday image might be interpreted as the type of the creation of the world, the prophet must also have heard
the voice of a teacher, which could only have been that of God himself. Thus positive teaching of God found at the beginning of all human history, and remains the super natural spring from which all human wisdom and poetry take their rise. Even language, the natural origin of which
Herder had himself expounded with much penetration, now attributed to direct divine revelation, to definite instruction given by God. This original revelation his view, the fundamental fact, the antithesis, as he vehemently proclaims, of all the artificial ideas and hypothesis of philosophy he himself forgetting, however, that this so-called fundamental fact itself only an hypothesis, and mainly distinguished from others by boldly leaving the paths of sober empirical
investigation to take refuge in the region of miracle, where imagination usurps the place of thought. With this essay on Genesis we may compare a work which appeared soon after Erlduterungen zum neuen Testament aus einer neueroffneten morgenldndischen Quelle, in which the New Testament interpreted by the Zendavesta, Christ and his Apostles, as
Herder assumes, being versed in the wisdom of the Chaldees.
This work, like the last, contains a defence of the
natural element in the Bible on the lines of Lavater main tains that all the miracles, from the miraculous birth of Jesus to his ascension, were facts, though in such a way that everywhere prominence given to the spiritual truth of the narrative. Herder did not reflect that this truth would not be affected the narrative were not actual history, but poetry and legend the spiritual truth and beauty of a story was to
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25
him a direct guarantee of its historical reality, or rather
appeared indistinguishable from it to his poetical imagination, which was then at all events without the checks of the critical
"
Here, as in the old Testament, he has failed to grasp the critical conception intermediate between poetry and faith--
the conception of the myth. "
That in giving the rein absolutely to the anti-rationalistic
or mystical side of his nature, Herder could go so far as to renounce his earlier scientific and critical views, can be easily
explained by his peculiar temperament and the influence of friends, both male and female, while he was at Blickeburg ; and it would be quite wrong to think, with Hettner, of any conscious compromise from impure motives. We may, in fact, say with Haym, that only by this " mystical and enthu siastic method of interpretation," was it possible to regain the lost appreciation of religion as such, of the profoundly inward force of the chief truths of Christianity, and of the original meaning of the ancient words of our faith. Nevertheless, we shall also do well to call to mind, with Julian Schmidt, the old truth that all trifling with words must be avenged. This
of Herder's, in which aesthetic taste combined with the noblest feeling and ideal pathos to drown the calm voice of critical reason, was indubitably the beginning of that irra tional movement which was carried farther by Romanticism and blossomed forth luxuriantly in the reactionary theology of our century. But it is all the more interesting to observe how Herder again rescued himself from this sandbank upon which so many suffered shipwreck, and regained the right track marked out for him by his true genius. It was under the leadership of Lessing and Spinoza that he accomplished this, though the altered surroundings of his position in Weimar materially assisted the change. Herder had been engaged in a friendly correspondence with Lessing for nearly two years; and when, in February 1 78 1 , the news of Les
intellect. As his biographer, Haym, aptly remarks : rightly insists that we ought to read the New Testament in the spirit of the New Testament itself, with a feeling and sense of the greatness of its contents. But the greatness, the deep religious and moral power of these writings, is too much for him ; it carries him away and overpowers him. He loses in consequence all the freedom in regard to these writings which he had allowed himself in regard to poetical works.
mysticism
He
? ? ? ? 2 6 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
sing's death came upon him as a painful shock, he paid a tribute to the memory of his friend, in which in enthusiastic terms he eulogised him as " a noble truth-seeker, truth-finder, and truth-champion," to whose nature no vice was so foreign as cringing hypocrisy, false courtesy, or, above all, that weari some, sleepy rest in half the truth, which from the first eats like rust and canker into men's minds, in all branches of knowledge and inquiry. This was Herder's formal renuncia tion of theological fanaticism of every kind, not excepting that which had disfigured his own writings of the Biickeburg
To the same date belongs the renewal of friendly relations between Herder and Goethe, with its productive mutual stimulus, as well as their study in common of the
philosophy of Spinoza.
Jacobi had hoped to gain Herder as an ally in the cam
paign against Spinozism, having previously made a like attempt with Lessing ; but the disappointment of his hopes was even more decisive in Herder's case than it had been in
period.
? Herder confessed to him, that since he had busied himself with philosophy he had become more and more con vinced of the truth of Lessing's saying, that as a matter of fact no other philosophy than Spinoza's was quite consistent with itself. Not that he could in everything agree with Spinoza, whose ideas were always undeveloped whenever his relations with Descartes were unduly close. But Spinoza did not deserve the traditional prejudice against him, which rested upon a misunderstanding of his philosophy. The first mis take of the opponents of Spinoza, is to suppose he looks on God as a nonentity, an abstract conception. On the contrary, Spinoza's God is the most real and most active unity, who alone says to himself, " I am that I am, and shall be in all
Lessing's.
the changes of my manifestations what I shall be. " " What you people mean by ' existence outside the world ' I do not understand. If God does not exist in the world, everywhere without measure, wholly and individually, he exists nowhere. Outside the world there is no space ; space is an abstraction from experience, and arises when a world arises for us.
Limited personality is not less inapplicable to an infinite Being, personality being to our minds inseparable from limi tation. In God this illusion disappears ; he is the highest, most truly living, and most active One. God is not the world,
and the world is not God ; of this there can be no doubt.
? ? ? Ch II] HERDER. 27
But nothing can be gained, it seems to me, from your extra and supra. When we speak of God, we must forget all our idola of space and time, else our best efforts will be fruitless. " The sense in which he himself wished Spinoza's philosophy to be understood, and in which he could make it his own, was expounded by Herder in a little treatise entitled, Gott: Einige
Gesprliche iiber Spinoza's System (1787). He admits, in the first place, that the ideas inherited from Cartesius, of Sub stance, Attributes, and Modes are unsatisfactory, and that the mathematical method of proof is a mistake. These ideas must have life put into them by Leibnitz's idea of Force. God must therefore be conceived as "the underived, original, and universal force, underlying and including all forces, most active
Being"; attributes, as organic forces in which the Deity manifests himself ; and all things, as the modifications or active expressions, of the divine force. God, as the eternal original Force, possesses not only infinite force of thought, but also of operation ; in him, therefore, existence, operation, and thought, or power, wisdom, and goodness, are indivisibly one. He is therefore as far removed from blind necessity as from any inoperative "deliberation and consultation, caprice, and velleity. " Anthropomorphic conceptions of this kind were, with Leibnitz, merely the popular garb of his Theodicy, but his successors made them of prime importance, and the basis of all those physico- theological systems which resulted there from, which sought to reduce everything to the arbitrary will of God, and to break the golden chain of nature, in order to separate a few phenomena from the rest, and see, at this or that point, an electric flash of arbitrary divine purpose. All these delusions, in relation to which the holy name of God ought not to be misused, are escaped by the modest student of nature, who, though he does not divulge to us particular measures decided on in the council-chambers of the divine Will, observes instead the composition of actual things and the laws implanted in their nature. While apparently forgetting the purposes of God, he seeks and finds God in his totality, in every object and point of creation, i. e. , in everything an essential truth, harmony, and beauty, without which it would not and could not exist. Whoever could show men the laws of nature, how what we see of the so-called animate and in animate creation works, lives, and acts according to an inner
the result of the interaction of forces in definite
? necessity,
? ? -
? 28 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
would promote the noblest admiration, love, and reverence for God, far more than the man who, as knowing the counsels of God, preached that we have feet in order to walk, and eyes in order to see, etc. Every true law of nature discovered would thus be also a discovered rule of the eternal divine Intelligence, whose thought alone can be truth, and whose activity reality.
We thus see that Herder's conception of God is a combina tion of Spinoza's monism with Leibnitz's theism ; Spinoza's substance becomes operative thinking force ; his modes of substance become living forces, resembling Leibnitz's monads, but operative as well as perceptive, whose harmony is there fore no longer, as in Leibnitz, pre-established, but is inherent in the actual interaction of the forces. With Spinoza, Herder rejects the external teleology of particular arbitrary purposes, but with Leibnitz he recognises in necessity according to law the internal adaptation of things to ends, in the laws of nature the thoughts of God, in the golden chain of nature the divine wisdom and goodness. Thus, Spinoza's natural istic mechanical system is transformed into a theistic opti mism, on the lines of Leibnitz and Shaftesbury. These two thinkers are also followed in Herder's ethical demand -- " the attainment of the law of noble and beautiful necessity," and
the performance of duty as if it were not duty but nature, happiness thus being included in virtue. Finally, Herder's doctrine of God comprehends also his doctrine of immor tality and his philosophy of history, becoming a completely optimistic system. If all life is force, death must everywhere be only apparent death, merely the destruction of some ap pearance ; in ceaseless motion and eternal palingenesia, force
and the interaction of forces carry on their work ; but the persistence of force is inconceivable without progress. In the kingdom of God there is no standing still, still less any going back ; it is a necessary law, that chaos should become order, and latent capacities forces in operation.
In these thoughts, which Herder gathered from the three philosophers, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Shaftesbury, as the quintessence of their systems, he found a conception of the world in which he could rest ; and he was strengthened in his belief by the complete and unconditional assent of Goethe.
From the standpoint of these views, shared and continually discussed by the two friends, Herder's principal work, the
organs,
? ? ? ? Ch. II. ] HERDER. 29
Ideen zur Philosophic der Geschichte ( 1 784 - 1 79 1 ), was written. The leading thought of the work that man the connecting link of two worlds. On the one hand, he the child of earth, the highest of its organic products on the other, a citizen of the spiritual world of freedom. The book begins, therefore, with a description of the earth, of its posi tion in the universe, and of the stages of the operations of its organic forces -- from the plant to the animal, from the lower to the higher animals, and finally to man. With all the great differences in these single organisms, nature seems "to have formed them all after one chief type of organization and
man seems to be, as were, the central figure of the animal world, i. e. , the most fully developed form which the essen tial characteristics of all the species around him are exquisitely combined. " His upright carriage man's most distinctive characteristic, upon which depend the dexterity of his hands, his power of language, and also his rationality for his reason
not inborn like our instincts, but the acquired due propor tion between his powers, senses, and instincts. But man
the highest member of progressive series of organic forces, which have constructed the body as their organ, his
development cannot end with his appearance upon the earth for the humanity to which we are destined incompletely realised upon earth, the end for which we exist points to higher forms of development beyond our earthly life under other cosmical conditions, for which we are to prepare our selves by cultivating the spiritual part of our nature, by striving after truth, goodness, and godlike beauty. From
this glance at man's future development, Herder returns to the description of his historical development on earth and the stress which he lays on its dependence upon natural conditions
so marked as to seem, taken by itself, almost pure natural
ism, to which, on the other hand, completely supernaturalistic declarations form a strange contrast. Man stands in a double relation of dependence, on the one hand to nature, and on the other to the culture and traditions of society. But whence came the first germs of the latter Herder cannot find in the natural development of man's rationality a satisfactory answer to this question, but has recourse to an education by higher superhuman influences the Elohim were the instruc tors of man, and from them he received language, the germ of all culture. This transition from natural to super-
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30 BASTS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
natural explanation shows the insufficiency of that one-sided empiricism, which will not, like Kant, regard reason as origi nating action, but only as a passive power of receptivity ; hence it can only explain the first possession and employment
of reason by deriving it from foreign mystical sources.
Herder proceeds to depict the life of the nations in his
tory, and shows how each nation strove to fulfil the common
destiny of man by attaining to humanity and happiness in the special way determined by its natural character and geo graphical position. As to the details we need only draw atten tion to the strangely unfavourable judgment passed upon the Jewish nation, whose religious superiority to other nations is outweighed by its want of political culture and of any real sense of honour and freedom. In the description of the Greeks, on the contrary, prominence is given to the bright points -- their services to art and science and all human culture. So, too, in describing Christianity, Herder does indeed pay a tribute of the warmest admiration to the person of Jesus as the prophet of the truest humanity ; but on the other hand
he lays such great emphasis upon the human errors, abuses,
and corruptions incorporated with the Christian religion ever since its first diffusion, he so decisively condemns the ecclesias-
tical system of dogmas and state Christianity, and in particular takes so adverse a view of the middle ages, as a time of the darkest barbarism and inhumanity, that he almost seems to have adopted in this connection the standpoint of the Auf-
kldrung, which he had before so passionately denounced. The extent to which he still differed from it we shall see later on, when we come to the final account of his religious views ; but it is in any case undeniable that the point of view of the Ideen is not the same as that of his earlier writings. This may be corroborated by a glance at the general principles of his philosophy of history.