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theory of the world.
Windelband - History of Philosophy
In contrast with this the German Popular Philos ophy prided itself upon its absence of system ; as developed by Mendelssohn it would refrain from all subtleties as to that which cannot be experienced, and employ itself the more with that which is useful for men.
And, lastly, we find a fine example of harmony with this temper in Kant's Dreams of a Ghost-Seer, where he lashes the architects of various artificial worlds of thought with sharp irony, and pours out copious scorn upon metaphysical endeavour with a gallows-humour which touches his own inclination in a most sensitive point.
Among the German poets Wieland is in this same spirit the witty anti-metaphysician.
8. A very peculiar turn was taken by positivism, finally, in the later doctrine of Condillac. In him converge the lines of the French and the English Enlightenment, and he finds a positivistic synthesis of sensualism and rationalism, which may be regarded as the most perfect expression of modern terminism. His Logic l and his post humous Langue des Calculs developed this doctrine. It is built up essentially upon a theory of " signs " (signes). 2 Human ideas are all of them sensations, or transformations of such, and for these no especial powers of the soul are needed. 3 All knowledge consists in the consciousness of the relations of ideas, and the fundamental relation is that of equality. The business of thinking is only to bring out the relations of equality between ideas. 4 This is done by analysing the complexes of ideas into their constituent elements and then putting them together again: dicomposition des pMno- menes and composition des idles. The isolation of the constituent elements which is requisite for this can, however, be effected only with the aid of signs or language. All language is a method for the analysis of phenomena, and every such method is a "language. " The different kinds of signs give different "dialects" of the human language: as such Condillac distinguishes five, — the fingers (ges tures), sound-language, numbers, letters, and the signs of the infini tesimal calculus. Logic, as the universal grammar of all these
* This Condillac maintains against Locke, and indeed already in his TraiU des Sensations, and his school do the same against the Scots.
4 In these determinations lie suggestions from Hobbes as well as from Hume.
1 A text-book for " Polish professors. "
J After the Langue des Calculs became known, the Institute of Paris and the Berlin Academy gave out, almost at the same time, the theory of signs as the subject for. their prizes. At both places a great number of elaborations were presented, mostly of very inferior value.
Chap. 1, § 34. ] Knowledge of the Outer World : Condtllae. 479
languages, determines, therefore, mathematics also, and indeed the higher as well as the elementary, as special cases.
All science thus contains only transformations. The thing to be done is always to make out that the unknown, which one is seeking, is really something already known; that to find the equation which shall put the unknown x equal to composition of ideas
just for this end that the structures of perception must be
It evident that this but a new generalising mode of expression for Galileo's doctrine of the method of resolution and composition; but rises here upon purely sensualistic basis denies the constructive element which Hobbes
had so sharply emphasised and makes of thinking reckoning with only given quantities. In doing this rejects all thought of relation of these data to metaphysical reality, and sees in scientific knowledge only a structure built up of equations between contents of ideas in accordance with the principle mime est mtme. The human world of ideas completely isolated within itself, and truth cunsists only in the equations that can be expressed within this world by " signs. "
9. Indifferent as this Ideology professed to be metaphysically, its sensualistic basis, nevertheless, involved a materialistic metaphysics. Even though nothing was to be said as to the reality corresponding to sensations, there still remained in the background the popular idea that sensations are produced by bodies. On this account the cautious restraint that belonged to these positivistic consequences of sensualism needed only to be neglected to convert the anthropo logical materialism, which had developed in the psychological theories, into metaphysical and dogmatic materialism. And so Lamettrie spoke out with coquettish recklessness what many others
did not dare to confess to themselves, to say nothing of confessing or defending openly.
But other lines of thought in natural science, independently of ideology, were also driving toward materialism. Lamettrie had very rightly seen that the principle of the mechanical explanation
of Nature would ultimately tolerate nothing in addition to matter moved by its own forces long before Laplace gave the well-known answer that he did not need the " hypothesis of the deity " French natural philosophy had attained this standpoint. That the world of gravitation lives in itself was Newton's opinion also; but he believed that the first impulse for its motions must be sought in an action of God. Kant went step farther when he cried in his Natural History of the Heavens, "Give me matter, and will build
yoa a world. " He pledged himself to explain the whole universe
previously decomposed.
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480 Tlie Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Part \
of the fixed stars after the analogy of the planetary system,1 and traced the origination of the individual heavenly bodies out of a fiery-fluid primitive condition solely to the opposed working of tbi two fundamental forces of matter, attraction and repulsion. But Kant was convinced that the explanation which is sufficient for solar systems shatters when applied to the blade of grass and the caterpillar ; the organism seems to him to be a miracle ( Wunder) in the world of mechanics.
The French philosophy of Nature sought to overcome this obstacle also, and to put the problem of organisation out of the world. Among the countless atom-complexes, it taught, there are also those which
the capacity of preserving and propagating themselves. Buffon, who pronounced and carried through with full energy this frequently expressed thought, gave to such atom-complexes the name organic molecules, and by assuming this conception all organic life might be regarded in principle as an activity of such molecules, which develops according to mechanical laws, in contact with the external world. 8 This had been already done by Spinoza, of whose theory of Nature Buffon frequently reminds us ; the latter, also, speaks of God and " Nature " as synonyms. This naturalism found in mechanics, accordingly, the common principle for all corporeal occurrence. But if now ideology taught that ideas and their transformations should be regarded as functions of organisms, if it no longer was regarded as impossible, but more and more seemed probable, that the thing which thinks is the same that is extended and moves, if Hartley and Priestley in England and Lamettrie in France showed that a change in consciousness is a function of the nervous system, — it was but a step from this to teach that ideas with all their transformations form only a special case of the mechanical activity of matter, only a particular kind of its forms of motion. While Voltaire had expressed the opinion that motion and sensation
might perhaps be attributes of the same unknown substance, this hylozoism changed suddenly into decided materialism as soon as the dependence of the psychical upon the physical was given the new interpretation of a likeness in kind between the two, and it is often only by soft and fine shades of expression that the one is
>The suggestion for this brilliant astro-physical hypothesis, to which Lam bert also came very near in his Kosmologischen Briefen, and which was devel oped later in a similar manner by Laplace, was due perhaps to a remark by
Buffon. Cf. O. Liebmann, Zur Analysis der Wirklichleeit, 2d ed. , p. 376.
2 This principle of Buffon was further developed later by Lamarck (Philoso-
phie Zoologique, Paris, 1809), who attempted to explain the transformation of organisms from the lower to the higher forms by a mechanical influence of the outer world, by adaptation to the environment-
possess
Chap. 1, { 34. ] Knowledge of the Outer World : Materialism. 481
converted into the other. This transition is presented in the writings of Robinet. He gives a metaphysical flight to the philos ophy of Nature. Finding support in the development system of the Leibnizian Monadology, he regards the graded scale of things as an infinite multiplicity of forms of existence, in which the two factors of corporeality and psychical function are mixed in all the different relations possible, so that the more the nature of a particular thing unfolds in the one direction, the less is its activity in the other. This holds true, also, according to Robinet, in the case of the vital movements of individual creatures ; the force which they use men tally is lost physically, and conversely. Regarded as a whole, however, the psychical life appears as a special form which the fundamental material activity of things is able to assume, to be later translated back again into its original form. Robinet thus regards ideas and activities of the will as mechanical transformations of the nervous activity which can be changed back again into that. Noth ing takes place psychically which was not predisposed in the physi cal form ; and the body, accordingly, receives in psychical impulses only the reaction of its own motion.
In the Systeme de la Nature materialism appears at last undis guised as a purely dogmatic metaphysics. It introduces itself with the Epicurean motive of wishing to free man from fear of the super- sensuous. It shall be shown that the supersensuous is only the invisible form of activity of the sensuous. No one has ever been able to think out anything of a supersensuous character that was not a faded after-image of the material. He who talks of idea and will, of soul and God, thinks of nervous activity, of his body and the world over again in an abstract form. For the rest, this " Bible of Materialism" presents no new doctrines or arguments in its pain fully instructive and systematically tedious exposition : yet a certain weight in its conception taken as a whole, a greatness of stroke in drawing the lines of its Weltanschauung, a harsh earnestness of pre sentation, is not to be mistaken. This is no longer a piquant play
of thoughts, but a heavy armed attack upon all belief in the imma terial world.
10. In spite of psycho-genetic opposition, the problem of knowl edge as conceived by the supporters of " innate ideas " was not all too unlike the view which obtained with the sensualists. The dual- istic presupposition assumed by both classes made it difficult for the latter to understand the conformity which the ideas called out in the mind by bodies bear to the bodies themselves. But it seemed almost more difficult still to understand that the mind should cog nise a world independent of by means of the development of the
it,
482 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Part V.
thought-forms which are grounded in its own nature. And yet exactly this is an assumption so deeply rooted in human thought, that it passes for the most part as self-evident and a matter of course, not only for the naive consciousness, but also for philo sophical reflection. It was the mission of the Terminism, whose after-workings were active in modern philosophy, to shake this fun damental dogmatic conviction, and push forward for consideration the question as to the ground of that conformity between necessity of thought, on the one hand, and reality on the other. Even Des cartes had found it necessary to support the knowing power of the lumen naturale by the veroxitas dei, and thereby had shown the only way which the metaphysical solution of the problem could take.
To be sure, where that philosophical impulse was lacking which directs its 0aiyia£«v — its wonder — upon just that which is appar ently self-evident and a matter of course, the difficulty just men tioned weighed less heavily. This was the case with Wolff, in spite of all his power of logical clearness and systematic care, and with the Scots, in spite of all their fineness of psychological analysis. The former proceeds to deduce, more yeometrico, an extensive ontol ogy, and a metaphysics with its parts relating to God, to the world, and to the soul, all from the most general formal laws of logic, — from the principle of contradiction and that of sufficient reason (and this second principle is even to be reduced to the first). Wolff, indeed, stands so completely within the bounds of this logical schematism that the question never seems to occur to him at all, whether his whole undertaking — namely, that of spinning "a sci ence of all that is possible, in so far as it is possible " out of logical propositions — is authorised in the nature of the case. This problem was concealed for him the more as he confirmed every rational science by an empirical science [e. g. Rational by Empirical Psychol ogy, etc. ], — an agreement, indeed, which was possible only because his a priori construction of metaphysical disciplines borrowed from
experience step by step, though the loan was unnoticed. Neverthe less, this system, which was blessed with so many disciples, had the great didactic value of setting up and naturalising strictness in thought, clearness of conceptions, and thoroughness in proof, as the supreme rules for science, and the pedantry which unavoidably stole in with these found a sufficient counterpoise in other intellectual forces.
The Scottish philosophy contented itself with seeking out the principles of sound common sense. Every sensation is the sign — Reid too, thinks as terministically as this — of the presence of an object; thinking guarantees the reality of the subject; whatever
Chap. 1, § 34. ] Knowledge of the Outer World : Leibniz. 483
actually comes into being must have a cause, etc. Such principles are absolutely certain; to deny them or even to doubt them is absurd. This is especially true, also, of the principle that what the understanding recognises clearly and distinctly is necessarily so.
In this is formulated the general principle of a philosophical atti tude which is called dogmatism (after Kant), unconditional confi dence in the agreement of thought with reality. The above examples of the particular principles show how eclectically this common sense sought to gather its fundamental truths from the different systems of philosophy. In this respect the " gesunde Menschen verstand "
[sound common sense] of the German popular philosophers was entirely in accord with it. Mendelssohn, like Reid, was of the opinion that all extremes in philosophy were errors, and that the truth lay in the mean position : every radical view has a germ of truth which has been forced artificially to a one-sided and diseased development A sound, healthy thinking (Nicolai, especially, lays weight on this predicate) does justice to all the different motives and so finds as its philosophy — the opinion of the average man.
11. In the mind of Leibniz the problem was solved by the hypothesis of the pre-established harmony. The monad knows the world because it is the world: the content which it represents is from the beginning the universe, and the law of the monad's activity is the law of the world. On account of its " having no windows " it has no experience at all in the proper sense: nevertheless the possibility of knowing the world is so established in its very essence that all its states must be regarded as just such a knowledge. There is, accordingly, no difference between intellect and sensibility, either
as regards the objects to which they refer, or as regards the way in which consciousness relates itself to these objects : the only differ ence is that sensibility cognises the indistinct phenomenal form, while intellect cognises the true essence of things. From a scientific point of view, therefore, knowledge by the senses was treated partly as the imperfect, preliminary stage, partly as the indistinct anti-type for the intellect's insight : the " historical " sciences were regarded either as preparations for the philosophical, or as lower appendages.
From this relation a ]>eculiar consequence resulted. The sensuous niode of representation, too, has a certain peculiar perfection of its own, which differs from the clearness and distinctness of intellectual knowledge in apprehending the phenomenal form of its object with out any consciousness of grounds or reasons : and in this perfection, characteristic of sensuous knowledge, Leibniz , had set the feeling oj
> Cf. esp. Princ. dt la Sat. etdela Grace, 17.
484 The Enlightenment: Theoretical Quettiont. [Part V.
the beautiful. When, now, one of Wolff's disciples, Alexander Baum-
in whom the architectonic impulse toward systeinatisation was developed to a particularly high degree, wished to place by the side of logic as the science of the perfect use of the intellect, a corre sponding science of the perfection of sensation, an aesthetics, this dis cipline took on the form of a science of the beautiful. 1 Thus aesthetics,* as a branch of philosophical knowledge, grew up, not out of interest in its subject-matter, but with a decided depreciation of it ; and as a " step-sister " [lit. posthumous : nachgeborene Schwester'] of logic she was treated by the latter with very little understanding for her own peculiar nature, and with a cool intellectual pedantry. Moreover, this last-named rationalist, who followed Leibniz in regarding the actual world as the best, and therefore, as the most beautiful among all possible worlds, could set up no other principle for the theory of art than the sensualistic one of imitating Nature, and developed this principle essentially into a tedious poetics. But in spite of this, it remains Baumgarten's great service to have treated the beautiful again, and for the first time in modern philosophy, in a systematic way from the general conceptions of philosophy, and by so doing to have founded a discipline that was destined to play so important a part in the further development of philosophy, especially in that of Germany.
12. The Leibnizo-Wolffian conception of the relation between sense and understanding, and especially the geometrical viethod introduced for rational knowledge, encountered numerous opponents in the German philosophy of the eighteenth century, whose opposi tion proceeded not only from the incitements of English and French sensualism and empiricism, but from independent investigations as to the methodical and epistemological relation between mathematics and
philosophy.
In this latter line Rudiger, and, stimulated by him, Crusius, con
tended most successfully against the Wolffian doctrine. In oppos; tion to Wolff's definition of philosophy as the science of the possible, Rudiger asserted that its task is to know the actual. Mathematics, and, therefore, also a philosophy which imitates the methods of mathematics, have to do only with the possible, with the contradic- tionless agreement of ideas with one another ; a true philosophy needs the real relation of its conceptions to the actual, and such a
gotten,
1 Cf. H. Lotze, Gesch. der Aesthetik in Deutschland (Munich, 1868).
2 The name " aesthetics " was then adopted at a later time by Kant, after some resistance at first, for the designation of the philosophical doctrine of the beautiful and of art, and from him passed over to Schiller, and through the latter' s writings into general use.
Chat. 1, § 34. ] Knowledge of the Outer World: Kant. 485
relation is to be gained only by perception. Crusius made this point of view his own ; and although he thought in a less sensual ist ic manner than his predecessor, he yet criticised in a quite similar manner from that point of view the effort of the geometrical method to know reality by employing only logical forms. He rejected the ontological proof for the existence of God, since out of conceptions alone existence can never be inferred ; existence (as Kant expressed it) cannot be dug out of ideas. In the same line, also, was the exact distinguishing between the real relation of causes and effects and the logical relation of ground and consequent, which Crusius urged in his treatment of the principle of ground or reason. For his own part he used this difference between real and ideal grounds
to oppose the Leibnizo-Wolffian determinism, and especially to set up the Scotist conception of the unrestricted free will of the Creator, in opposition to the Thomist conception of the relation between the divine will and the divine intellect, which the rational ists maintained. The turning away from natural religion, which lay in all these inferences, made the stricter Protestant orthodoxy favourably disposed toward the doctrine of Crusius.
The investigation as to the fundamental difference in method between philosophy and mathematics, that cut deepest and was most important in results, was that undertaken by Kant, whose writings very early refer to Crusius. But in his prize treatise On the Clearness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals he brings a decisive statement. The two sciences are related as opj>o- site in every respect Philosophy is an analytic science of concep tions, mathematics a synthetic science of magnitudes: the former receives its conceptions, the latter constructs its magnitudes ; the former seeks definitions, the latter sets out from definitions; the former needs experience, the latter does not ; the former rests upon the activity of the understanding, the latter upon that of the sensibil ity. Philosophy, therefore, in order to know the real, must proceed irtetically : it must not try to imitate the constructive method of mathematics.
With this fundamental insight into the sensuous character of the cognitive foundations of mathematics, Kant exploded the system of the geometrical method. For, according to his view, sensibility and understanding can no longer be distinguished as lower and higher grades of clearness and distinctness in knowledge. Mathematics proves that sensuous knowledge can be very clear and distinct, and many a system of metaphysics proves that intellectual knowledge may be very obscure and confused. The old distinction must there fore be exchanged for another, and Kant attempts a substitute by
486 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Pakt V:
defining sensibility as the faculty of receptivity, understanding as that of spontaneity. He does this in his Inaugural Dissertation, and upon this builds a new system of epistemology,' leaning upon the psychological principle of virtual innateness (cf. § 33, 12).
The main outlines of the system are the following : the Forms of the sensibility are space and time ; those of the understanding are the most general conceptions. Out of reflection upon the one class arises mathematics ; upon the other class, metaphysics; — both a priori sciences of unconditional certainty. But Forms of (receptive) sen sibility give only the necessary knowledge of the appearance of things in the human mind (mundus sensibilis phaznomenon) ; the Forms of the understanding, on the contrary, give adequate knowl edge of the true essential nature of things (mundus intelUgibilis nou-
That these Forms of the understanding are able to do this is due to the fact, that the understanding, as well as things them
selves, has its origin in the divine mind; that we, therefore, means of see things to certain extent " in God. "
35. Natural Religion.
The epistemological motives which ruled the eighteenth century were not in general favourable to metaphysics in spite of this, they brought their sceptical and positivistic tendency to complete expression in but few instances, this was due to the religious inter est which expected from philosophy decision as to its problems. The religious unrest and wars from which Germany, France, and England had suffered, and the quarreling over dogmas which had been connected with them, had been followed already in the seven teenth century by feeling of surfeit and disgust for the distinc tions in creeds the " wretched century of strife," as Herder called
longed for peace. In England the temper of the Latttudinarians extended itself, and on the continent efforts toward union were taken up again and again in spite of 'frequent failure. Bossuet and Spinola on one side, and Leibniz on the other, worked long in this direction the latter projected systema theologicum, which should contain the fundamental doctrines of Christianity common to all three Confes sions, and when the negotiations with the Catholics no longer
menon).
The system of the Inaugural Dissertation only one stage in Kant's development he gave up again forthwith hence belongs in his pre-critical time and in this period.
This doctrine, presented with an appeal to Malebranche (Sectio IV. ), accordingly just the system of the pre-established harmony between knowledge and reality which Kant later rejected so energetically (Letter to M. Herz, Feb. 21, 1772).
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Chap. 1, § 35. ] Natural Religion : Locke, Deism. 487
offered any hope, he attempted, at least, to employ his relations to the courts of Hanover and Berlin to bring about a union between the Lutherans and the Reformed body, — this, too, indeed without any immediate result.
Locke, on the other hand, in his three Letters concerning Tolera- tion, brought together the thoughts of the toleration movement into the theory of the " free church in the free state," — into the demand that the modern state, raised above all Church tutelage, should tol erate and protect every religious belief as personal opinion, and every religious society as a free association, in so far as it does not threaten to disturb political order.
But the more the union was thwarted by the resistance of theo logians, the more nourishment came to the life of the Mystic sects, whose supra-confessional tendencies were in harmony with the efforts toward union, and which spread in the eighteenth century with a multitude of interesting manifestations. The Pietism founded by Spener and Francke kept nearest to the Church life, and was there fore most successful. This, nevertheless, allows a certain indif ference toward dogmatic faith to appear, but in compensation lays all the more weight upon the increase of personal piety and upon the purity and religious colouring of conduct.
1. In connection with all these movements stands the tendency of the"Enlightenment philosophy toward establishing the universal, " true Christianity by means of philosophy. True Christianity is in this sense identified with the religion of reason, or natural religion, and is to be dissolved out from the different forms of positive, historical Christianity. At first, such a universal Christianity was still allowed the character of a revealed religion, but the complete agreement of this revelation with reason was maintained. This was the position taken by Locke and Leibniz, and also by the latter's disciple, Wolff. They conceive the relation between natural and revealed religion quite in accordance with the example of Albert and Thomas (cf. p. 321) : revelation is above reason, but in harmony with reason ; it is the necessary supplement to natural knowledge. That is revealed which the reason cannot find out of itself, but can understand as in harmony with itself after the revela tion has taken place.
Proceeding from this idea, the Socinians had already taken a step further. They, too, recognised very vigorously the necessity of revelation ; but they emphasised, on the other hand, that nothing can be revealed that does not prove accessible to rational knowledge. Hence only what is rational in the religious documents is to regarded as revealed truth ; i. e. reason decides what shall ! »<• held
488 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Question*. [Part V.
be revelation. From this standpoint the Socinians separated the Trinity and the Incarnation from the content of revelation, and in general transferred revelation from the realm of theoretical truths to an entirely different field. They comprehend religion under the characteristic of law, and this constitutes their peculiar position. What God reveals to man is not a metaphysics, but a law. This he did in Moses, and so in Christ he gave a new law. But if religion objectively is law-giving, subjectively it is fulfilling the law, — not an acceptance of theoretical doctrines, nor even merely a moral disposition, but subjection to the law revealed by God and a keeping of all its prescriptions. This alone has been made by God the condition of eternal blessedness — a juridical conception of religion, which, with its resort to the principle of the boundless authority of what is determined by divine power, seems to contain strongly Scotist elements.
2. If, however, the criterion of revelation is ultimately to lie solely in the rationality of the same, the completely consistent result of this theory is, that historical revelation should be set aside as superfluous, and natural religion alone retained. This was done by the English Deists; and Toland is their leader in so far as he first undertook to strip Christianity, ue. the universal religion of reason, of all mysteries, and reduce as regards the knowledge which contains, to the truths of the "natural light," i. e.
to philosophical theory of the world. But the content which the Enlightenment philosophy sought to give to this, its religion of Nature, had two sources, — theoretical and practical reason. As regards the first, Deism contains a metaphysics based upon natural philosophy in the second aspect involves theory of the world from the point of view of moral philosophy. In this way the natural religion of the Enlightenment was involved in the movement of theoretical, and also in that of practical problems these its two elements stood in close connection, but found each
particular development, so that they could diverge and become mutually
isolated. The relation between these two constituents was as determining in its influence for the history of natural religion as
was the common relation which they sustained to the religions.
The complete union of the two elements found in the most important thinker of this movement, Shaftesbury. The centre oi his doctrine and of his own nature formed by what he himself called enthusiasm, — enthusiasm for all that true, good, and beau tiful, the elevation of the soul above itself to more universal values, the living out of the whole peculiar power of the individual by the
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Chap. 1, § 33. ] Natural Religion : Toland, Shaftesbury. 489
devotion to something higher. Nor is religion anything else : a life of increased and enhanced personality, a knowing one's self to be one with the great connected all of reality. But this noble pas sion, like every other, grows from admiration and strong emotion to love. The source of religion therefore, objectively as well as subjectively, the harmony and beauty and perfection of the universe the unavoidable impression received from this perfection awakens enthusiasm. With a warm heart Shaftsbury portrays the order of things, the purposiveness of their inter-play, the beauty of their formation, the harmony of their life, and shows that there noth ing in itself evil — nothing which entirely misses its mark. What ever appears an evil in one system of individuals, proves itself in another, or in a higher connection, to be still good, as a necessary member in the purposeful structure of the whole. All imperfection of the particular vanishes in the perfection of the universe every discord lost in the harmony of the world.
This universal optimism, whose theodicy in its conceptions com pletely Neo-Platonic in character, knows therefore but one proof for the existence of God, the physico-theological. Nature bears everywhere the marks of the artist, who has unfolded the loveli
ness of his own nature in the charm of phenomena with the highest intelligence and sensitiveness. Beauty the fundamental concep tion of this Weltanschauung. Its admiration of the universe essentially aesthetic, and the taste of the cultivated man is, for Shaftsbury, the basis of both religious and moral feeling. For this reason his teleology also the tasteful one of artistic apprehen
sion like Giordano Bruno he seeks the purposiveness of the uni verse in the harmonious beauty of each of its individual structures. All that petty and utilitarian in teleological thought here stripped off, and a wave of poetic world-glorification that carries all before goes through Shaftesbury's writings. It was on this account that they worked so powerfully upon the German poets, upon Herder,' and upon Schiller. 1
3. Few, indeed, of the philosophers of the Enlightenment stand upon this height Voltaire and Diderot* allowed themselves at first to be swept along to such an enthusiastic view of the world. Maupertuis and Robinet had also something of the universalistic tendency in Germany, Reimarus in his reflections concerning the mechanical instincts of animals, shows at least sensibility for the artistically delicate detailed work of Nature and for the internal
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490 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Pakt V .
end which she realises in her organic structures. But the great mass of the philosophical writers of the eighteenth century is so controlled by the anthropological interest and the practical aims of philosophy that it investigates rather the uses which the arrangement of the universe and the activities of its parts yield for the wants of man; and if those of higher temper have in view principally the furthering and perfecting of the moral nature, they still do not despise the point of view of usefulness and every-day " happiness. "
Thus aesthetic teleology is cut off by the Stoic doctrine of utility, and the technical analogy, with which men like Leibniz, Newton, and Clarke had thought of the subordination of mechanism to teleol ogy, could not but be favourable to this utilitarian conception. For the purposiveness of machines consists just in yielding an advan tage, just in the fact that their product is something else, something in addition to their own working. And this analogy was quite welcome also to the "Enlighteners," who frequently praised the harmony of their philosophy with natural science ; they employed this mode of view as against the conception of miracle found in positive religion. Beimarus, too, held that only bunglers need to
assist their machines afterwards, and that it is unworthy of perfect intelligence to come into such a position. But if it was asked what the end of the world-machine the answer of the Enlightenment was, the happiness of man, or perhaps at most, that of created beings in general. This trade in the small wares of usefulness (Niitzlich- keitskrtimerei) was carried out in the most tasteless manner in the German Enlightenment. Wolffs empirical teleology (Designs Natural Things) excites one's mirth by the petty points of view which he assigns to the creative intelligence, and the Popular Phil osophers vied with each other in portraying in broad and pleasing pictures the neat and comfortable way in which this universe fitted up for the homo sapiens, and how well one may live in
he bears himself well.
A nobler thought, even at that time, was that of Kant, when in
his Natural History of the Heavens he adopted the Leibnizo-New- tonian conception, but left behind all that talk about the use of the world for man, and directed his look toward the perfection which displays itself in the infinite multiplicity of the heavenly bodies, and in the harmony of their systematic constitution; and with him, by the side of the happiness of creatures, appears always their ethical perfecting and elevation. But he, too, esteems the physico- theological proof for the existence of God as that which the most
This term points back into the seventeenth century, and seems to have
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Chap. 1, § 35. ] Natural Religion: Kant, Leibniz. 491
impressive for man, though he grants strict cogency as little to this as to the cosmological and ontological. The popular philosophy, on the contrary, had its favourite just in this proof, and it forms a gen eral characteristic of natural religion.
4. The presupposition of this course of thought was the convic tion that the world is really so perfect and purposive as to support the proof in question. Believing souls brought this conviction with them, and the literature of the eighteenth century proves that it was assumed without question in wide circles as a valid premise of the argument; sceptical minds demanded that this also should be dem onstrated, and so roused the problems of theodicy. In most cases the Enlightenment philosophy resorted here to the same (ancient) arguments which Shaftesbury brought into the field, but the scep tical-orthodox method, of pointing to the limited nature of human knowledge and to the darkness in the ways of Providence, was not despised.
A new turn was given to theodicy by Leibniz. He had been brought by Bayle's incisive criticism to the necessity of adding experimental proof to his system of Monadology by showing the perfection of the universe. Setting in motion to this end the high est conceptions of his metaphysics, he attempted to show that the actual presence of evil in the world does not make out a case against its having originated from an all-good and all-powerful creative activity. Physical evil, he maintains, is a necessary consequence of moral evil in the ethical world order ; it is the natural punish ment of sin. Moral evil, however, has its ground in the finiteness and limitation of creatures, and this latter is metaphysical evil. As a finite thing the monad has obscure and confused sensuous repre sentations or ideas, and from these follow necessarily the obscure and confused sensuous impulses, which are the motives to sin. The problem of theodicy is thus reduced to the question, Why did God create or permit metaphysical evil ?
The answer to this question is very simple. Finiteness belongs to the conception of a created being; limitation is the essential nature of all creatures. It is a logical necessity that a world can exist only out of finite beings which reciprocally limit each other and are determined by their creator himself. Hut finite beings are imperfect A world that should consist of nothing but perfect beirgs is a contradiction in terms. And since it is also an "eter nal," that is, a conceptional or rational truth, that out of metaphysi
ariM-n from the Xeo-Platonlc circle* In England. Samuel Parker published in 1000 TriUamtna Phytko-thfologica it Dro, and William Drrham, in 1713, a Pkytico-Ultology .
492 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Part V.
cal evil follows first moral and further physical evil, that out of finiteness follows sin, aud out of sin sorrow, it is then a logical necessity that a world without evil is unthinkable. However much, therefore, the goodness of God might desire to avoid evil, the divine wisdom, the "region des verites iternelles," makes a world without evil an impossibility. Metaphysical truths are independ ent of the divine will ; the latter in its creative activity is bound to them.
But, on the other hand, the goodness, which belongs to the con ception of God as truly as does his wisdom, is a guarantee that the evils are as few as possible. The world is contingent, i. e. it may be thought as being other than it is. There is an infinite number of possible worlds, none of them entirely without evil, but some affected with much more numerous and heavy evils than others. If now from among all these possible worlds, which God's wisdom spread out before him, he created this actual world, it can only have been the choice of the best that guided him in so doing; he has made real the one which contains the least and the fewest evils. The contingency of the world consists in the fact that it exists, not with metaphysical necessity, but through a choice exercised among many possibilities ; and since this choice proceeds from the all-good
will of God, it is unthinkable that the world is any other than the best. Theodicy cannot proceed to deny the evil in the world, for evil belongs to the very idea of the world ; but it can prove that this world contains as little evil as is in any way possible in accordance with metaphysical law. God's goodness would gladly have pro duced a world without evil, but his wisdom permitted him only the best among possible worlds.
Hence arises the common expression, optimism. Whether this experimental proof of the physico-theological view of the world succeeds, may be left undecided. The eighteenth century con ceived of the matter as though it was the essential aim of Leibniz to prove that the world is the most perfect that can be thought; that he did this only under the presupposition of the metaphysical necessity of evil, was, in characteristic fashion, scarcely noted in the literature of that time, which itself was through and through "optimistic " in its thought. In a historical aspect the most note worthy thing in this theodicy is the peculiar mixture of Thomist and Scotist metaphysics. The world is such as it is only because God has so willed it ; by virtue of his omnipotence he might have chosen another ; but in the choice of the possibilities before him the divine will is bound to the divine intellect as the "eternal truths. " Above all reality hovers the fate prescribed by logic.
Chap. 1, § 35. ] Natural Religion : Voltaire, Diderot. 498
5. In the forms hitherto developed the teachers of natural religion believed that they could attain along the physico-theological path to the conception of the deity as creative intelligence, and for this phase of the development the name Deism is customarily employed. The conception of God as personality, which survived in this pro
cedure as the last remnant from positive religion, offered a hold for the moral side also of natural religion, and in turn found in that its support. But where only the theoretical element was pursued, nat ural religion found itself involved in the course of development taken by naturalistic metaphysics, and found in this finally its downfall. 'Poland already gave a completely pantheistic turn to the admiration of Nature, which for him constituted the essential con tent of religious feeling, and with the hylozoism which developed among the French natural scientists (cf. § 34, 9) the transcendence of God, as well as his personality, was at an end ; and when then the complete dominance of the mechanical explanation of Nature was proclaimed, when the organic world also was recognised as in principle the product of the universal mechanism of Nature, the physico-theological proof lost its power over the mind. In addition to this the premises of the argument were questioned. The Lisbon earthquake (1755) which shocked all Europe made many waver in their ideas of the perfection and adaptedness of the world's ar rangement; the indifference with which Nature destroys human life and all its content of ends and worth seemed to sj>eak much more for a blind necessity in all that takes place than for a teleological disposition of the world-process. Voltaire, in whom this revolution in point of view became complete, began in Candide to make sport of the " best of possible worlds," and the element of natural philos ophy in natural religion crumbled to pieces.
The Systhne de la Nature drew the last consequences with its atheism and materialism. All adaptation, all order of Nature, is only a phenomenon in the human mind. Nature itself knows only the necessity of atomic motion, and in it there are no worth-determina tions, which are dependent upon ends or norms of value. Nature's conformity to law is active with the same rigour in those things which appear to us aimless or unpurposive, irregular or anomalous, as in the things which we judge with reference to their agreement with our designs or customs, and approve as purposeful. The wise man should make this indifference of Sature his own ; he should see through the relativity of all conceptions of ends; there is no real
norm or order. This principle was applied by Diderot to (esthetics. The correctness of Suture is accordingly the only thing that art should display, the only thing that it should grasp and give back ;
494 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Question*. [Pakt V
beauty is one of those valuations which have no objective validity. Materialism knows only an art void of ideals, only the indifferent copy of any reality whatever.
6. While the foundations of Deism based on natural philosophy were thus crumbling from within, its epistemological basis began also to waver ; for all attacks upon the possibility of a metaphysics struck also at that of a natural religion, which indeed in its contents exhibited but a survival of religious metaphysics. In this respect the Baconian system was the most dangerous foe of the deistic doc trine. It allowed religion to stand only as revelation and combated the possibility of knowing its doctrines by the aid of reason, or even of merely bringing them into accord with reason. No one supported this standpoint more energetically than Pierre Bayle. He worked systematically to show that all dogmatic doctrines were contrary to reason ; he laid bare their contradictions with penetrating keenness ; he sought to prove that they were absurd for the natural reason. But he uncovered, also, the weak points in Deism ; he denied the cogency of the philosophical arguments for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and took special occasion in connection with the problems of theodicy to prove the inadequacy of the " nat ural light " : even in controversy with Leibniz he was not worsted. Religion is, therefore, possible for him only as positive revelation in contradiction with philosophical knowledge. He defends with all keenness the twofold truth. And therefore, although perhaps for himself he might have credit for a faith contrary to reason, — his writings and especially the articles of his much read Dictionnaire were not less dangerous to the theoretical doctrines of positive relig ion than to those of Deism.
Finally Hume, also, on epistemological grounds dissolved the union which the other English empiricists and nominalists, and indeed, even the materialists, like Hartley and Priestley, sought to maintain with natural religion. If there is no metaphysics of things at all, philosophical religion falls also. Hume, indeed (as Cleanthes in the dialogue), acknowledges in the spirit of his practical prob- abilism that the world on the whole makes the incontestable
impres sion of purposiveness and rational order, and finds, therefore, that that belief, on which all our experience rests, is applicable also to the (physico-theological) assumption of a unity in creation and in the direction of the whole. But from the standpoint of science (as Philo) he cannot regard this belief as capable of being estab
lished by reason. In particular he asserts, in accordance with the principles of the theory of probability, that it is quite explicable, even on the hypothesis of a purely mechanical theory, that amid
Chap. 1, § 35. ] Natural Religion : Bayle, Hume. 495
the countless combinations of atoms, one which was durable, pur posive, and well ordered should at last come about and become fixed. So the case remains with a problematical decision. Natural religion is a reasonable mode of view for the practical man, but it should not profess to be a scientific doctrine.
7. The more the metaphysical factor in Deism retreated for these or other reasons, the more the " true Christianity," which Deism professed to be, became restricted to a moral conviction. This had been already prepared by Herbert of Cherbury, who stood farther
removed from natural philosophy, and had been quite definitely expressed by Spinoza. According to this view the essence of religion consists in moral action, and the religious life has for its true content, deliberation upon duty, and the seriousness of a con duct of life determined by this. This in itself alone gave but very pale and vanishing lines for a Weltanschauung. There remained an indefinite idea of an all-good God, who created man for happiness, who should be worshipped by a virtuous life, and who will exercise an equalising justice in an eternal life, so that such virtue will receive the reward which is lacking to it here. No one will fail to notice the pure, noble thought which lived in this moralising Deism, or the high value which belongs to it historically, because in opposi tion to the one-sidedness and strife of confessional zeal it brought the ideals of toleration and philanthropy, respect for the purely human appreciation of the ethical disposition, and modesty in per sonal opinion, to a position of honour in literature and social life.
But, on the other hand, it is also true that there has never been a more meagre form of religious life than this. Its religion has no taste of earth, and with the mysteries which the Enlightenment would not tolerate, understanding for the depths of religious life was lost also. There is nothing more of anxiety for the soul's salva tion, of the struggle for redemption, of the ardent feeling of deliver ance. Deism, therefore, failed in vital religious power; it was an artificial product of cultured society, and when the German En- lighteners wrote books to preach the deistic morals to children, they only proved how little they understood of real religion.
Among the grfat mass of tue supporters of this standpoint in the "popular philosophy" all possible degrees of uncertainty prevail as to how far those moral remnants of the religious view of the world are still capable of a theoretical grounding, and how far they are to be regarded as merely constituents of the ethical conscious ness. Full clearness on this point rules in Voltaire's later thought. Here he has been so far seized upon by Bayle's scepticism as to acknowledge no longer any metaphysical authorisation : the deity
496 Th>. Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Past V.
and immortality are now for him only valid as postulates of the moral feel* »g ; faith in them is regarded as only the condition for moral action. If this belief should perish, the motives for honest conduct, and thus the foundations of social order, would, he thinks, perish with it: n Dieu n'existait pa*, U famdrait Frnrenter.
8. Different as are these individual forms in which natural relig ion developed, they all agree on one point. — in their depreciatory criticism of positive religions. Only that is regarded as true in these religions, in which they all agree with each other and with natural religion ; all that is taught beyond this, with an appeal to a special revelation, the deists turn from the door, and it was pre cisely in this respect that they called themselves free thinker*. The claims made by the revelational doctrine encountered, therefore, an especially vigorous contradiction. Collins refuted the proof from prophecy, Woolston the proof from miracles, — both by seeking to give for the corresponding accounts in the religious documents a natural explanation so far as possible. This attempt, which aimed not to involve in doubt the credibility of the biblical narratives, but to explain them by purely natural causes, frequently in a very fan tastic fashion and excluding all that is mysterious and supernatural,
has been characterised and employed in Germany especially as rationalistic interpretation. It was here, too, that Beimarus, in his Schutzschrift, proceeded in the sharpest manner against the possi bility of revelation, which he declared to be superfluous, unthinkable, and untrue. Others directed their criticism against individual doc trines of dogmatics. Diderot attacked the moral attributes in the Christian conception of God, and Voltaire exercised his wit in un sparing derision of the dogmas and ceremonies of all religions and Confessions.
But in his case also there was at bottom the earnest thought, that all these additions of the positive religions were so many obscurations and corruptions of the true religion, for which, like the other deists, he felt called to contend. They were filled with the conviction that natural religion is an inheritance of all men, a conviction set within the nature of man himself, and that it was, therefore, the original state of the religious life. From this point of view all positive religions appear as depraved forms which have entered in the course of history, and a progress in the history of religion consists, therefore, in every case in nothing but a return to the primitive, pure, and uncorrupted religion. Hence according to Tindal the true Christianity, which coincides with Deism, is as old as creation. Jesus did not bring a revelation, he only rehabili tated the true worship of God in the face of the decay of the
CHxr. 1, § 35. ] Natural Religion : Deittt, Hume. 497
ancient religions ; but the Christian churches have again corrupted his work, and free-thinking desires to return to him. So, too, Letting distinguished between Christianity and the religion of Christ.
If now it was asked, what were the causes that brought about this distortion of true religion, the Enlighteners were entirely devoid of any historical comprehension for these : what they held to be false seemed to them possible only through voluntary inven tion. They were so strongly convinced of the evidence that their Deism was the only true system, that all other teachings seemed to them explicable only by lying and deceit, and that the proclaimers of these seemed to have acted only in their own interests. It is then the general doctrine of the deists that the historical basis of positive religions is invention and deceit. Even Shaftesbury knew no other way of explaining how enthusiasm, which constitutes true religion, could be distorted to the fanaticism of superstition. The
hatred of priests felt by the Enlighteners was most sharply ex pressed on this point also in the Sckutzachrift of Reimarus.
9. Such incapacity to do justice to the historical nature of posi tive religions agreed well with the universal lack in historical sense and understanding which was peculiar to the whole philosophy of the Enlightenment. This had its ground in the fact that modern
This was done first and with clearest consciousness by David Hume. While he found that religion cannot be based upon demon strative rational knowledge, he showed also that the question as to the origin of religion in the human mind must be completely separated from the speculative investigation. This new question he treated solely in accordance with psychological principles, as a '* Natural History of Religion. " He shows how in the primitive apprehension of Nature and in the feelings of fear and hope, of terror and of blessing, which are associated with and in the com parison of the course of Nature with the vicissitudes of human life, there lay the incitements to the formation of ideas of higher beings, and to worship designed to appease or to flatter. The natural, primitive form of religion is, therefore, polytheism, which thinks and treat* these higher jwwers in completely anthropomorphic manner. But the manifold forms assumed by myth fuse in accord ance with the laws of the association of ideas myths pass over into each other, and ultimately the whole body of religious ideas becomes condensed into the belief in single divine being, to whom the pur poseful order of the universe due, — faith, to be sure, which
thought had made its growth, hand in hand with natural
in investigating that which is either timelessly or always valid. Only in a few instances was this ban broken through.
science,
a is
a
;
a
it,
The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Paw V.
cannot preserve itself in a pare form, bat is associated in various wars with its original presuppositions. The history of religion is tine gradual transformation of polytheism into monotheism, and its result coincides with that theological tow of the world which Home had developed as the view of the intelligent man, not, indeed, capable of scientific proof, but bound up with the natural feeling of belief.
This mode of apprehending the subject from the point of view of
and the history of civilisation was reinforced by that from the point of view of philology and the history of literature, which found expression in the historical biblical criticism founded by Salomon Sender. This began to carry out the thought formulated by Spinoza,1 that the biblical books must be treated just as other writings as regards their theoretical contents, their origin, and their history; that they must be understood from the point of view of their time and the character of their authors. Semler directed par ticular attention to the point that the different parties of the early Christians find expression in the books of the New Testament. While it may be that the hypotheses to which he came in this respect have been left behind by later science, it is nevertheless true that a scientific way out of the radicalism into which the deistic movement had run was here shown, and Sender therefore raised his voice against the spokesmen of the Enlightenment.
Leasing took part in these questions from still another side. He was certainly not the man to make his conviction bend to a tenet; he saw through and rejected, as few others, the limitation which will find its sole truth in that which has been transmitted histori cally ; but he guarded himself well from playing the judge, who now, after thousands of years, shall decide as to the genuine ness of the three rings. But it is not merely this that separates him from the great mass of the Enlighteners ; he is himself a deep, religious nature, and, like Herder,1 sees in religion a living relation of man to God, and God to man. Hence religion is not possible with out revelation, and the history of religions is the series of the revelar tions of God, is the education of the human race by God. Lessing assumes the well-planned succession of these revelations to be such,
• In what degree Spinoza's writings were known to the religious Enlighteners in Germany appears, among other things, from the interesting fact that Lorenz Schmidt, the leader of the Wertheim translation of the Bible, is the anonymous editor of a book in which, under the mask of a "Refutation of the Doctrine of Spinoza by the Famous Philosopher Christian Wolff," an excellent translation of Spinoza'. s Bthict is offered, and Anally only a few paragraphs from Wolff's German writings are appended (printed Frankfort and Leips. 1744).
• Cf. Herder's treatise on the Aelteite Urkunde dea Menschengeschlecht*.
psychology
Chap. 1, § 35. ] Natural Religion : Letting, Herder. 499
that the deeper meaning of each is unfolded more clearly and dis tinctly in that which follows. So even the New Testament, the second elementary book, over which the more advanced scholar now " stamps and glows," gives us a premonition of an eternal gospel. In carrying out this thought of Origen's,1 Lessing indicates in but a tentative manner indefinite lines which lie in the direction of a mystico-speculative interpretation of dogmas.
1 Education of the Human Racr, § 72 S.
CHAPTER II.
PRACTICAL
Thx natural religion of the eighteenth century sought in morals the support which a metaphysics of the natural-science sort could not permanently afford it.
8. A very peculiar turn was taken by positivism, finally, in the later doctrine of Condillac. In him converge the lines of the French and the English Enlightenment, and he finds a positivistic synthesis of sensualism and rationalism, which may be regarded as the most perfect expression of modern terminism. His Logic l and his post humous Langue des Calculs developed this doctrine. It is built up essentially upon a theory of " signs " (signes). 2 Human ideas are all of them sensations, or transformations of such, and for these no especial powers of the soul are needed. 3 All knowledge consists in the consciousness of the relations of ideas, and the fundamental relation is that of equality. The business of thinking is only to bring out the relations of equality between ideas. 4 This is done by analysing the complexes of ideas into their constituent elements and then putting them together again: dicomposition des pMno- menes and composition des idles. The isolation of the constituent elements which is requisite for this can, however, be effected only with the aid of signs or language. All language is a method for the analysis of phenomena, and every such method is a "language. " The different kinds of signs give different "dialects" of the human language: as such Condillac distinguishes five, — the fingers (ges tures), sound-language, numbers, letters, and the signs of the infini tesimal calculus. Logic, as the universal grammar of all these
* This Condillac maintains against Locke, and indeed already in his TraiU des Sensations, and his school do the same against the Scots.
4 In these determinations lie suggestions from Hobbes as well as from Hume.
1 A text-book for " Polish professors. "
J After the Langue des Calculs became known, the Institute of Paris and the Berlin Academy gave out, almost at the same time, the theory of signs as the subject for. their prizes. At both places a great number of elaborations were presented, mostly of very inferior value.
Chap. 1, § 34. ] Knowledge of the Outer World : Condtllae. 479
languages, determines, therefore, mathematics also, and indeed the higher as well as the elementary, as special cases.
All science thus contains only transformations. The thing to be done is always to make out that the unknown, which one is seeking, is really something already known; that to find the equation which shall put the unknown x equal to composition of ideas
just for this end that the structures of perception must be
It evident that this but a new generalising mode of expression for Galileo's doctrine of the method of resolution and composition; but rises here upon purely sensualistic basis denies the constructive element which Hobbes
had so sharply emphasised and makes of thinking reckoning with only given quantities. In doing this rejects all thought of relation of these data to metaphysical reality, and sees in scientific knowledge only a structure built up of equations between contents of ideas in accordance with the principle mime est mtme. The human world of ideas completely isolated within itself, and truth cunsists only in the equations that can be expressed within this world by " signs. "
9. Indifferent as this Ideology professed to be metaphysically, its sensualistic basis, nevertheless, involved a materialistic metaphysics. Even though nothing was to be said as to the reality corresponding to sensations, there still remained in the background the popular idea that sensations are produced by bodies. On this account the cautious restraint that belonged to these positivistic consequences of sensualism needed only to be neglected to convert the anthropo logical materialism, which had developed in the psychological theories, into metaphysical and dogmatic materialism. And so Lamettrie spoke out with coquettish recklessness what many others
did not dare to confess to themselves, to say nothing of confessing or defending openly.
But other lines of thought in natural science, independently of ideology, were also driving toward materialism. Lamettrie had very rightly seen that the principle of the mechanical explanation
of Nature would ultimately tolerate nothing in addition to matter moved by its own forces long before Laplace gave the well-known answer that he did not need the " hypothesis of the deity " French natural philosophy had attained this standpoint. That the world of gravitation lives in itself was Newton's opinion also; but he believed that the first impulse for its motions must be sought in an action of God. Kant went step farther when he cried in his Natural History of the Heavens, "Give me matter, and will build
yoa a world. " He pledged himself to explain the whole universe
previously decomposed.
I
le
is
a
is
:
is
it
a
it le
it
a
a
; it
a
: a it
is
is,
480 Tlie Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Part \
of the fixed stars after the analogy of the planetary system,1 and traced the origination of the individual heavenly bodies out of a fiery-fluid primitive condition solely to the opposed working of tbi two fundamental forces of matter, attraction and repulsion. But Kant was convinced that the explanation which is sufficient for solar systems shatters when applied to the blade of grass and the caterpillar ; the organism seems to him to be a miracle ( Wunder) in the world of mechanics.
The French philosophy of Nature sought to overcome this obstacle also, and to put the problem of organisation out of the world. Among the countless atom-complexes, it taught, there are also those which
the capacity of preserving and propagating themselves. Buffon, who pronounced and carried through with full energy this frequently expressed thought, gave to such atom-complexes the name organic molecules, and by assuming this conception all organic life might be regarded in principle as an activity of such molecules, which develops according to mechanical laws, in contact with the external world. 8 This had been already done by Spinoza, of whose theory of Nature Buffon frequently reminds us ; the latter, also, speaks of God and " Nature " as synonyms. This naturalism found in mechanics, accordingly, the common principle for all corporeal occurrence. But if now ideology taught that ideas and their transformations should be regarded as functions of organisms, if it no longer was regarded as impossible, but more and more seemed probable, that the thing which thinks is the same that is extended and moves, if Hartley and Priestley in England and Lamettrie in France showed that a change in consciousness is a function of the nervous system, — it was but a step from this to teach that ideas with all their transformations form only a special case of the mechanical activity of matter, only a particular kind of its forms of motion. While Voltaire had expressed the opinion that motion and sensation
might perhaps be attributes of the same unknown substance, this hylozoism changed suddenly into decided materialism as soon as the dependence of the psychical upon the physical was given the new interpretation of a likeness in kind between the two, and it is often only by soft and fine shades of expression that the one is
>The suggestion for this brilliant astro-physical hypothesis, to which Lam bert also came very near in his Kosmologischen Briefen, and which was devel oped later in a similar manner by Laplace, was due perhaps to a remark by
Buffon. Cf. O. Liebmann, Zur Analysis der Wirklichleeit, 2d ed. , p. 376.
2 This principle of Buffon was further developed later by Lamarck (Philoso-
phie Zoologique, Paris, 1809), who attempted to explain the transformation of organisms from the lower to the higher forms by a mechanical influence of the outer world, by adaptation to the environment-
possess
Chap. 1, { 34. ] Knowledge of the Outer World : Materialism. 481
converted into the other. This transition is presented in the writings of Robinet. He gives a metaphysical flight to the philos ophy of Nature. Finding support in the development system of the Leibnizian Monadology, he regards the graded scale of things as an infinite multiplicity of forms of existence, in which the two factors of corporeality and psychical function are mixed in all the different relations possible, so that the more the nature of a particular thing unfolds in the one direction, the less is its activity in the other. This holds true, also, according to Robinet, in the case of the vital movements of individual creatures ; the force which they use men tally is lost physically, and conversely. Regarded as a whole, however, the psychical life appears as a special form which the fundamental material activity of things is able to assume, to be later translated back again into its original form. Robinet thus regards ideas and activities of the will as mechanical transformations of the nervous activity which can be changed back again into that. Noth ing takes place psychically which was not predisposed in the physi cal form ; and the body, accordingly, receives in psychical impulses only the reaction of its own motion.
In the Systeme de la Nature materialism appears at last undis guised as a purely dogmatic metaphysics. It introduces itself with the Epicurean motive of wishing to free man from fear of the super- sensuous. It shall be shown that the supersensuous is only the invisible form of activity of the sensuous. No one has ever been able to think out anything of a supersensuous character that was not a faded after-image of the material. He who talks of idea and will, of soul and God, thinks of nervous activity, of his body and the world over again in an abstract form. For the rest, this " Bible of Materialism" presents no new doctrines or arguments in its pain fully instructive and systematically tedious exposition : yet a certain weight in its conception taken as a whole, a greatness of stroke in drawing the lines of its Weltanschauung, a harsh earnestness of pre sentation, is not to be mistaken. This is no longer a piquant play
of thoughts, but a heavy armed attack upon all belief in the imma terial world.
10. In spite of psycho-genetic opposition, the problem of knowl edge as conceived by the supporters of " innate ideas " was not all too unlike the view which obtained with the sensualists. The dual- istic presupposition assumed by both classes made it difficult for the latter to understand the conformity which the ideas called out in the mind by bodies bear to the bodies themselves. But it seemed almost more difficult still to understand that the mind should cog nise a world independent of by means of the development of the
it,
482 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Part V.
thought-forms which are grounded in its own nature. And yet exactly this is an assumption so deeply rooted in human thought, that it passes for the most part as self-evident and a matter of course, not only for the naive consciousness, but also for philo sophical reflection. It was the mission of the Terminism, whose after-workings were active in modern philosophy, to shake this fun damental dogmatic conviction, and push forward for consideration the question as to the ground of that conformity between necessity of thought, on the one hand, and reality on the other. Even Des cartes had found it necessary to support the knowing power of the lumen naturale by the veroxitas dei, and thereby had shown the only way which the metaphysical solution of the problem could take.
To be sure, where that philosophical impulse was lacking which directs its 0aiyia£«v — its wonder — upon just that which is appar ently self-evident and a matter of course, the difficulty just men tioned weighed less heavily. This was the case with Wolff, in spite of all his power of logical clearness and systematic care, and with the Scots, in spite of all their fineness of psychological analysis. The former proceeds to deduce, more yeometrico, an extensive ontol ogy, and a metaphysics with its parts relating to God, to the world, and to the soul, all from the most general formal laws of logic, — from the principle of contradiction and that of sufficient reason (and this second principle is even to be reduced to the first). Wolff, indeed, stands so completely within the bounds of this logical schematism that the question never seems to occur to him at all, whether his whole undertaking — namely, that of spinning "a sci ence of all that is possible, in so far as it is possible " out of logical propositions — is authorised in the nature of the case. This problem was concealed for him the more as he confirmed every rational science by an empirical science [e. g. Rational by Empirical Psychol ogy, etc. ], — an agreement, indeed, which was possible only because his a priori construction of metaphysical disciplines borrowed from
experience step by step, though the loan was unnoticed. Neverthe less, this system, which was blessed with so many disciples, had the great didactic value of setting up and naturalising strictness in thought, clearness of conceptions, and thoroughness in proof, as the supreme rules for science, and the pedantry which unavoidably stole in with these found a sufficient counterpoise in other intellectual forces.
The Scottish philosophy contented itself with seeking out the principles of sound common sense. Every sensation is the sign — Reid too, thinks as terministically as this — of the presence of an object; thinking guarantees the reality of the subject; whatever
Chap. 1, § 34. ] Knowledge of the Outer World : Leibniz. 483
actually comes into being must have a cause, etc. Such principles are absolutely certain; to deny them or even to doubt them is absurd. This is especially true, also, of the principle that what the understanding recognises clearly and distinctly is necessarily so.
In this is formulated the general principle of a philosophical atti tude which is called dogmatism (after Kant), unconditional confi dence in the agreement of thought with reality. The above examples of the particular principles show how eclectically this common sense sought to gather its fundamental truths from the different systems of philosophy. In this respect the " gesunde Menschen verstand "
[sound common sense] of the German popular philosophers was entirely in accord with it. Mendelssohn, like Reid, was of the opinion that all extremes in philosophy were errors, and that the truth lay in the mean position : every radical view has a germ of truth which has been forced artificially to a one-sided and diseased development A sound, healthy thinking (Nicolai, especially, lays weight on this predicate) does justice to all the different motives and so finds as its philosophy — the opinion of the average man.
11. In the mind of Leibniz the problem was solved by the hypothesis of the pre-established harmony. The monad knows the world because it is the world: the content which it represents is from the beginning the universe, and the law of the monad's activity is the law of the world. On account of its " having no windows " it has no experience at all in the proper sense: nevertheless the possibility of knowing the world is so established in its very essence that all its states must be regarded as just such a knowledge. There is, accordingly, no difference between intellect and sensibility, either
as regards the objects to which they refer, or as regards the way in which consciousness relates itself to these objects : the only differ ence is that sensibility cognises the indistinct phenomenal form, while intellect cognises the true essence of things. From a scientific point of view, therefore, knowledge by the senses was treated partly as the imperfect, preliminary stage, partly as the indistinct anti-type for the intellect's insight : the " historical " sciences were regarded either as preparations for the philosophical, or as lower appendages.
From this relation a ]>eculiar consequence resulted. The sensuous niode of representation, too, has a certain peculiar perfection of its own, which differs from the clearness and distinctness of intellectual knowledge in apprehending the phenomenal form of its object with out any consciousness of grounds or reasons : and in this perfection, characteristic of sensuous knowledge, Leibniz , had set the feeling oj
> Cf. esp. Princ. dt la Sat. etdela Grace, 17.
484 The Enlightenment: Theoretical Quettiont. [Part V.
the beautiful. When, now, one of Wolff's disciples, Alexander Baum-
in whom the architectonic impulse toward systeinatisation was developed to a particularly high degree, wished to place by the side of logic as the science of the perfect use of the intellect, a corre sponding science of the perfection of sensation, an aesthetics, this dis cipline took on the form of a science of the beautiful. 1 Thus aesthetics,* as a branch of philosophical knowledge, grew up, not out of interest in its subject-matter, but with a decided depreciation of it ; and as a " step-sister " [lit. posthumous : nachgeborene Schwester'] of logic she was treated by the latter with very little understanding for her own peculiar nature, and with a cool intellectual pedantry. Moreover, this last-named rationalist, who followed Leibniz in regarding the actual world as the best, and therefore, as the most beautiful among all possible worlds, could set up no other principle for the theory of art than the sensualistic one of imitating Nature, and developed this principle essentially into a tedious poetics. But in spite of this, it remains Baumgarten's great service to have treated the beautiful again, and for the first time in modern philosophy, in a systematic way from the general conceptions of philosophy, and by so doing to have founded a discipline that was destined to play so important a part in the further development of philosophy, especially in that of Germany.
12. The Leibnizo-Wolffian conception of the relation between sense and understanding, and especially the geometrical viethod introduced for rational knowledge, encountered numerous opponents in the German philosophy of the eighteenth century, whose opposi tion proceeded not only from the incitements of English and French sensualism and empiricism, but from independent investigations as to the methodical and epistemological relation between mathematics and
philosophy.
In this latter line Rudiger, and, stimulated by him, Crusius, con
tended most successfully against the Wolffian doctrine. In oppos; tion to Wolff's definition of philosophy as the science of the possible, Rudiger asserted that its task is to know the actual. Mathematics, and, therefore, also a philosophy which imitates the methods of mathematics, have to do only with the possible, with the contradic- tionless agreement of ideas with one another ; a true philosophy needs the real relation of its conceptions to the actual, and such a
gotten,
1 Cf. H. Lotze, Gesch. der Aesthetik in Deutschland (Munich, 1868).
2 The name " aesthetics " was then adopted at a later time by Kant, after some resistance at first, for the designation of the philosophical doctrine of the beautiful and of art, and from him passed over to Schiller, and through the latter' s writings into general use.
Chat. 1, § 34. ] Knowledge of the Outer World: Kant. 485
relation is to be gained only by perception. Crusius made this point of view his own ; and although he thought in a less sensual ist ic manner than his predecessor, he yet criticised in a quite similar manner from that point of view the effort of the geometrical method to know reality by employing only logical forms. He rejected the ontological proof for the existence of God, since out of conceptions alone existence can never be inferred ; existence (as Kant expressed it) cannot be dug out of ideas. In the same line, also, was the exact distinguishing between the real relation of causes and effects and the logical relation of ground and consequent, which Crusius urged in his treatment of the principle of ground or reason. For his own part he used this difference between real and ideal grounds
to oppose the Leibnizo-Wolffian determinism, and especially to set up the Scotist conception of the unrestricted free will of the Creator, in opposition to the Thomist conception of the relation between the divine will and the divine intellect, which the rational ists maintained. The turning away from natural religion, which lay in all these inferences, made the stricter Protestant orthodoxy favourably disposed toward the doctrine of Crusius.
The investigation as to the fundamental difference in method between philosophy and mathematics, that cut deepest and was most important in results, was that undertaken by Kant, whose writings very early refer to Crusius. But in his prize treatise On the Clearness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals he brings a decisive statement. The two sciences are related as opj>o- site in every respect Philosophy is an analytic science of concep tions, mathematics a synthetic science of magnitudes: the former receives its conceptions, the latter constructs its magnitudes ; the former seeks definitions, the latter sets out from definitions; the former needs experience, the latter does not ; the former rests upon the activity of the understanding, the latter upon that of the sensibil ity. Philosophy, therefore, in order to know the real, must proceed irtetically : it must not try to imitate the constructive method of mathematics.
With this fundamental insight into the sensuous character of the cognitive foundations of mathematics, Kant exploded the system of the geometrical method. For, according to his view, sensibility and understanding can no longer be distinguished as lower and higher grades of clearness and distinctness in knowledge. Mathematics proves that sensuous knowledge can be very clear and distinct, and many a system of metaphysics proves that intellectual knowledge may be very obscure and confused. The old distinction must there fore be exchanged for another, and Kant attempts a substitute by
486 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Pakt V:
defining sensibility as the faculty of receptivity, understanding as that of spontaneity. He does this in his Inaugural Dissertation, and upon this builds a new system of epistemology,' leaning upon the psychological principle of virtual innateness (cf. § 33, 12).
The main outlines of the system are the following : the Forms of the sensibility are space and time ; those of the understanding are the most general conceptions. Out of reflection upon the one class arises mathematics ; upon the other class, metaphysics; — both a priori sciences of unconditional certainty. But Forms of (receptive) sen sibility give only the necessary knowledge of the appearance of things in the human mind (mundus sensibilis phaznomenon) ; the Forms of the understanding, on the contrary, give adequate knowl edge of the true essential nature of things (mundus intelUgibilis nou-
That these Forms of the understanding are able to do this is due to the fact, that the understanding, as well as things them
selves, has its origin in the divine mind; that we, therefore, means of see things to certain extent " in God. "
35. Natural Religion.
The epistemological motives which ruled the eighteenth century were not in general favourable to metaphysics in spite of this, they brought their sceptical and positivistic tendency to complete expression in but few instances, this was due to the religious inter est which expected from philosophy decision as to its problems. The religious unrest and wars from which Germany, France, and England had suffered, and the quarreling over dogmas which had been connected with them, had been followed already in the seven teenth century by feeling of surfeit and disgust for the distinc tions in creeds the " wretched century of strife," as Herder called
longed for peace. In England the temper of the Latttudinarians extended itself, and on the continent efforts toward union were taken up again and again in spite of 'frequent failure. Bossuet and Spinola on one side, and Leibniz on the other, worked long in this direction the latter projected systema theologicum, which should contain the fundamental doctrines of Christianity common to all three Confes sions, and when the negotiations with the Catholics no longer
menon).
The system of the Inaugural Dissertation only one stage in Kant's development he gave up again forthwith hence belongs in his pre-critical time and in this period.
This doctrine, presented with an appeal to Malebranche (Sectio IV. ), accordingly just the system of the pre-established harmony between knowledge and reality which Kant later rejected so energetically (Letter to M. Herz, Feb. 21, 1772).
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Chap. 1, § 35. ] Natural Religion : Locke, Deism. 487
offered any hope, he attempted, at least, to employ his relations to the courts of Hanover and Berlin to bring about a union between the Lutherans and the Reformed body, — this, too, indeed without any immediate result.
Locke, on the other hand, in his three Letters concerning Tolera- tion, brought together the thoughts of the toleration movement into the theory of the " free church in the free state," — into the demand that the modern state, raised above all Church tutelage, should tol erate and protect every religious belief as personal opinion, and every religious society as a free association, in so far as it does not threaten to disturb political order.
But the more the union was thwarted by the resistance of theo logians, the more nourishment came to the life of the Mystic sects, whose supra-confessional tendencies were in harmony with the efforts toward union, and which spread in the eighteenth century with a multitude of interesting manifestations. The Pietism founded by Spener and Francke kept nearest to the Church life, and was there fore most successful. This, nevertheless, allows a certain indif ference toward dogmatic faith to appear, but in compensation lays all the more weight upon the increase of personal piety and upon the purity and religious colouring of conduct.
1. In connection with all these movements stands the tendency of the"Enlightenment philosophy toward establishing the universal, " true Christianity by means of philosophy. True Christianity is in this sense identified with the religion of reason, or natural religion, and is to be dissolved out from the different forms of positive, historical Christianity. At first, such a universal Christianity was still allowed the character of a revealed religion, but the complete agreement of this revelation with reason was maintained. This was the position taken by Locke and Leibniz, and also by the latter's disciple, Wolff. They conceive the relation between natural and revealed religion quite in accordance with the example of Albert and Thomas (cf. p. 321) : revelation is above reason, but in harmony with reason ; it is the necessary supplement to natural knowledge. That is revealed which the reason cannot find out of itself, but can understand as in harmony with itself after the revela tion has taken place.
Proceeding from this idea, the Socinians had already taken a step further. They, too, recognised very vigorously the necessity of revelation ; but they emphasised, on the other hand, that nothing can be revealed that does not prove accessible to rational knowledge. Hence only what is rational in the religious documents is to regarded as revealed truth ; i. e. reason decides what shall ! »<• held
488 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Question*. [Part V.
be revelation. From this standpoint the Socinians separated the Trinity and the Incarnation from the content of revelation, and in general transferred revelation from the realm of theoretical truths to an entirely different field. They comprehend religion under the characteristic of law, and this constitutes their peculiar position. What God reveals to man is not a metaphysics, but a law. This he did in Moses, and so in Christ he gave a new law. But if religion objectively is law-giving, subjectively it is fulfilling the law, — not an acceptance of theoretical doctrines, nor even merely a moral disposition, but subjection to the law revealed by God and a keeping of all its prescriptions. This alone has been made by God the condition of eternal blessedness — a juridical conception of religion, which, with its resort to the principle of the boundless authority of what is determined by divine power, seems to contain strongly Scotist elements.
2. If, however, the criterion of revelation is ultimately to lie solely in the rationality of the same, the completely consistent result of this theory is, that historical revelation should be set aside as superfluous, and natural religion alone retained. This was done by the English Deists; and Toland is their leader in so far as he first undertook to strip Christianity, ue. the universal religion of reason, of all mysteries, and reduce as regards the knowledge which contains, to the truths of the "natural light," i. e.
to philosophical theory of the world. But the content which the Enlightenment philosophy sought to give to this, its religion of Nature, had two sources, — theoretical and practical reason. As regards the first, Deism contains a metaphysics based upon natural philosophy in the second aspect involves theory of the world from the point of view of moral philosophy. In this way the natural religion of the Enlightenment was involved in the movement of theoretical, and also in that of practical problems these its two elements stood in close connection, but found each
particular development, so that they could diverge and become mutually
isolated. The relation between these two constituents was as determining in its influence for the history of natural religion as
was the common relation which they sustained to the religions.
The complete union of the two elements found in the most important thinker of this movement, Shaftesbury. The centre oi his doctrine and of his own nature formed by what he himself called enthusiasm, — enthusiasm for all that true, good, and beau tiful, the elevation of the soul above itself to more universal values, the living out of the whole peculiar power of the individual by the
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Chap. 1, § 33. ] Natural Religion : Toland, Shaftesbury. 489
devotion to something higher. Nor is religion anything else : a life of increased and enhanced personality, a knowing one's self to be one with the great connected all of reality. But this noble pas sion, like every other, grows from admiration and strong emotion to love. The source of religion therefore, objectively as well as subjectively, the harmony and beauty and perfection of the universe the unavoidable impression received from this perfection awakens enthusiasm. With a warm heart Shaftsbury portrays the order of things, the purposiveness of their inter-play, the beauty of their formation, the harmony of their life, and shows that there noth ing in itself evil — nothing which entirely misses its mark. What ever appears an evil in one system of individuals, proves itself in another, or in a higher connection, to be still good, as a necessary member in the purposeful structure of the whole. All imperfection of the particular vanishes in the perfection of the universe every discord lost in the harmony of the world.
This universal optimism, whose theodicy in its conceptions com pletely Neo-Platonic in character, knows therefore but one proof for the existence of God, the physico-theological. Nature bears everywhere the marks of the artist, who has unfolded the loveli
ness of his own nature in the charm of phenomena with the highest intelligence and sensitiveness. Beauty the fundamental concep tion of this Weltanschauung. Its admiration of the universe essentially aesthetic, and the taste of the cultivated man is, for Shaftsbury, the basis of both religious and moral feeling. For this reason his teleology also the tasteful one of artistic apprehen
sion like Giordano Bruno he seeks the purposiveness of the uni verse in the harmonious beauty of each of its individual structures. All that petty and utilitarian in teleological thought here stripped off, and a wave of poetic world-glorification that carries all before goes through Shaftesbury's writings. It was on this account that they worked so powerfully upon the German poets, upon Herder,' and upon Schiller. 1
3. Few, indeed, of the philosophers of the Enlightenment stand upon this height Voltaire and Diderot* allowed themselves at first to be swept along to such an enthusiastic view of the world. Maupertuis and Robinet had also something of the universalistic tendency in Germany, Reimarus in his reflections concerning the mechanical instincts of animals, shows at least sensibility for the artistically delicate detailed work of Nature and for the internal
Henler, Vom Erkennen und Emp. Andrn.
Schilkr, PhilUophitehe Briefe (Julliu). Particularly in the Pentie* PhiloiophiQue*.
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490 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Pakt V .
end which she realises in her organic structures. But the great mass of the philosophical writers of the eighteenth century is so controlled by the anthropological interest and the practical aims of philosophy that it investigates rather the uses which the arrangement of the universe and the activities of its parts yield for the wants of man; and if those of higher temper have in view principally the furthering and perfecting of the moral nature, they still do not despise the point of view of usefulness and every-day " happiness. "
Thus aesthetic teleology is cut off by the Stoic doctrine of utility, and the technical analogy, with which men like Leibniz, Newton, and Clarke had thought of the subordination of mechanism to teleol ogy, could not but be favourable to this utilitarian conception. For the purposiveness of machines consists just in yielding an advan tage, just in the fact that their product is something else, something in addition to their own working. And this analogy was quite welcome also to the "Enlighteners," who frequently praised the harmony of their philosophy with natural science ; they employed this mode of view as against the conception of miracle found in positive religion. Beimarus, too, held that only bunglers need to
assist their machines afterwards, and that it is unworthy of perfect intelligence to come into such a position. But if it was asked what the end of the world-machine the answer of the Enlightenment was, the happiness of man, or perhaps at most, that of created beings in general. This trade in the small wares of usefulness (Niitzlich- keitskrtimerei) was carried out in the most tasteless manner in the German Enlightenment. Wolffs empirical teleology (Designs Natural Things) excites one's mirth by the petty points of view which he assigns to the creative intelligence, and the Popular Phil osophers vied with each other in portraying in broad and pleasing pictures the neat and comfortable way in which this universe fitted up for the homo sapiens, and how well one may live in
he bears himself well.
A nobler thought, even at that time, was that of Kant, when in
his Natural History of the Heavens he adopted the Leibnizo-New- tonian conception, but left behind all that talk about the use of the world for man, and directed his look toward the perfection which displays itself in the infinite multiplicity of the heavenly bodies, and in the harmony of their systematic constitution; and with him, by the side of the happiness of creatures, appears always their ethical perfecting and elevation. But he, too, esteems the physico- theological proof for the existence of God as that which the most
This term points back into the seventeenth century, and seems to have
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Chap. 1, § 35. ] Natural Religion: Kant, Leibniz. 491
impressive for man, though he grants strict cogency as little to this as to the cosmological and ontological. The popular philosophy, on the contrary, had its favourite just in this proof, and it forms a gen eral characteristic of natural religion.
4. The presupposition of this course of thought was the convic tion that the world is really so perfect and purposive as to support the proof in question. Believing souls brought this conviction with them, and the literature of the eighteenth century proves that it was assumed without question in wide circles as a valid premise of the argument; sceptical minds demanded that this also should be dem onstrated, and so roused the problems of theodicy. In most cases the Enlightenment philosophy resorted here to the same (ancient) arguments which Shaftesbury brought into the field, but the scep tical-orthodox method, of pointing to the limited nature of human knowledge and to the darkness in the ways of Providence, was not despised.
A new turn was given to theodicy by Leibniz. He had been brought by Bayle's incisive criticism to the necessity of adding experimental proof to his system of Monadology by showing the perfection of the universe. Setting in motion to this end the high est conceptions of his metaphysics, he attempted to show that the actual presence of evil in the world does not make out a case against its having originated from an all-good and all-powerful creative activity. Physical evil, he maintains, is a necessary consequence of moral evil in the ethical world order ; it is the natural punish ment of sin. Moral evil, however, has its ground in the finiteness and limitation of creatures, and this latter is metaphysical evil. As a finite thing the monad has obscure and confused sensuous repre sentations or ideas, and from these follow necessarily the obscure and confused sensuous impulses, which are the motives to sin. The problem of theodicy is thus reduced to the question, Why did God create or permit metaphysical evil ?
The answer to this question is very simple. Finiteness belongs to the conception of a created being; limitation is the essential nature of all creatures. It is a logical necessity that a world can exist only out of finite beings which reciprocally limit each other and are determined by their creator himself. Hut finite beings are imperfect A world that should consist of nothing but perfect beirgs is a contradiction in terms. And since it is also an "eter nal," that is, a conceptional or rational truth, that out of metaphysi
ariM-n from the Xeo-Platonlc circle* In England. Samuel Parker published in 1000 TriUamtna Phytko-thfologica it Dro, and William Drrham, in 1713, a Pkytico-Ultology .
492 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Part V.
cal evil follows first moral and further physical evil, that out of finiteness follows sin, aud out of sin sorrow, it is then a logical necessity that a world without evil is unthinkable. However much, therefore, the goodness of God might desire to avoid evil, the divine wisdom, the "region des verites iternelles," makes a world without evil an impossibility. Metaphysical truths are independ ent of the divine will ; the latter in its creative activity is bound to them.
But, on the other hand, the goodness, which belongs to the con ception of God as truly as does his wisdom, is a guarantee that the evils are as few as possible. The world is contingent, i. e. it may be thought as being other than it is. There is an infinite number of possible worlds, none of them entirely without evil, but some affected with much more numerous and heavy evils than others. If now from among all these possible worlds, which God's wisdom spread out before him, he created this actual world, it can only have been the choice of the best that guided him in so doing; he has made real the one which contains the least and the fewest evils. The contingency of the world consists in the fact that it exists, not with metaphysical necessity, but through a choice exercised among many possibilities ; and since this choice proceeds from the all-good
will of God, it is unthinkable that the world is any other than the best. Theodicy cannot proceed to deny the evil in the world, for evil belongs to the very idea of the world ; but it can prove that this world contains as little evil as is in any way possible in accordance with metaphysical law. God's goodness would gladly have pro duced a world without evil, but his wisdom permitted him only the best among possible worlds.
Hence arises the common expression, optimism. Whether this experimental proof of the physico-theological view of the world succeeds, may be left undecided. The eighteenth century con ceived of the matter as though it was the essential aim of Leibniz to prove that the world is the most perfect that can be thought; that he did this only under the presupposition of the metaphysical necessity of evil, was, in characteristic fashion, scarcely noted in the literature of that time, which itself was through and through "optimistic " in its thought. In a historical aspect the most note worthy thing in this theodicy is the peculiar mixture of Thomist and Scotist metaphysics. The world is such as it is only because God has so willed it ; by virtue of his omnipotence he might have chosen another ; but in the choice of the possibilities before him the divine will is bound to the divine intellect as the "eternal truths. " Above all reality hovers the fate prescribed by logic.
Chap. 1, § 35. ] Natural Religion : Voltaire, Diderot. 498
5. In the forms hitherto developed the teachers of natural religion believed that they could attain along the physico-theological path to the conception of the deity as creative intelligence, and for this phase of the development the name Deism is customarily employed. The conception of God as personality, which survived in this pro
cedure as the last remnant from positive religion, offered a hold for the moral side also of natural religion, and in turn found in that its support. But where only the theoretical element was pursued, nat ural religion found itself involved in the course of development taken by naturalistic metaphysics, and found in this finally its downfall. 'Poland already gave a completely pantheistic turn to the admiration of Nature, which for him constituted the essential con tent of religious feeling, and with the hylozoism which developed among the French natural scientists (cf. § 34, 9) the transcendence of God, as well as his personality, was at an end ; and when then the complete dominance of the mechanical explanation of Nature was proclaimed, when the organic world also was recognised as in principle the product of the universal mechanism of Nature, the physico-theological proof lost its power over the mind. In addition to this the premises of the argument were questioned. The Lisbon earthquake (1755) which shocked all Europe made many waver in their ideas of the perfection and adaptedness of the world's ar rangement; the indifference with which Nature destroys human life and all its content of ends and worth seemed to sj>eak much more for a blind necessity in all that takes place than for a teleological disposition of the world-process. Voltaire, in whom this revolution in point of view became complete, began in Candide to make sport of the " best of possible worlds," and the element of natural philos ophy in natural religion crumbled to pieces.
The Systhne de la Nature drew the last consequences with its atheism and materialism. All adaptation, all order of Nature, is only a phenomenon in the human mind. Nature itself knows only the necessity of atomic motion, and in it there are no worth-determina tions, which are dependent upon ends or norms of value. Nature's conformity to law is active with the same rigour in those things which appear to us aimless or unpurposive, irregular or anomalous, as in the things which we judge with reference to their agreement with our designs or customs, and approve as purposeful. The wise man should make this indifference of Sature his own ; he should see through the relativity of all conceptions of ends; there is no real
norm or order. This principle was applied by Diderot to (esthetics. The correctness of Suture is accordingly the only thing that art should display, the only thing that it should grasp and give back ;
494 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Question*. [Pakt V
beauty is one of those valuations which have no objective validity. Materialism knows only an art void of ideals, only the indifferent copy of any reality whatever.
6. While the foundations of Deism based on natural philosophy were thus crumbling from within, its epistemological basis began also to waver ; for all attacks upon the possibility of a metaphysics struck also at that of a natural religion, which indeed in its contents exhibited but a survival of religious metaphysics. In this respect the Baconian system was the most dangerous foe of the deistic doc trine. It allowed religion to stand only as revelation and combated the possibility of knowing its doctrines by the aid of reason, or even of merely bringing them into accord with reason. No one supported this standpoint more energetically than Pierre Bayle. He worked systematically to show that all dogmatic doctrines were contrary to reason ; he laid bare their contradictions with penetrating keenness ; he sought to prove that they were absurd for the natural reason. But he uncovered, also, the weak points in Deism ; he denied the cogency of the philosophical arguments for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and took special occasion in connection with the problems of theodicy to prove the inadequacy of the " nat ural light " : even in controversy with Leibniz he was not worsted. Religion is, therefore, possible for him only as positive revelation in contradiction with philosophical knowledge. He defends with all keenness the twofold truth. And therefore, although perhaps for himself he might have credit for a faith contrary to reason, — his writings and especially the articles of his much read Dictionnaire were not less dangerous to the theoretical doctrines of positive relig ion than to those of Deism.
Finally Hume, also, on epistemological grounds dissolved the union which the other English empiricists and nominalists, and indeed, even the materialists, like Hartley and Priestley, sought to maintain with natural religion. If there is no metaphysics of things at all, philosophical religion falls also. Hume, indeed (as Cleanthes in the dialogue), acknowledges in the spirit of his practical prob- abilism that the world on the whole makes the incontestable
impres sion of purposiveness and rational order, and finds, therefore, that that belief, on which all our experience rests, is applicable also to the (physico-theological) assumption of a unity in creation and in the direction of the whole. But from the standpoint of science (as Philo) he cannot regard this belief as capable of being estab
lished by reason. In particular he asserts, in accordance with the principles of the theory of probability, that it is quite explicable, even on the hypothesis of a purely mechanical theory, that amid
Chap. 1, § 35. ] Natural Religion : Bayle, Hume. 495
the countless combinations of atoms, one which was durable, pur posive, and well ordered should at last come about and become fixed. So the case remains with a problematical decision. Natural religion is a reasonable mode of view for the practical man, but it should not profess to be a scientific doctrine.
7. The more the metaphysical factor in Deism retreated for these or other reasons, the more the " true Christianity," which Deism professed to be, became restricted to a moral conviction. This had been already prepared by Herbert of Cherbury, who stood farther
removed from natural philosophy, and had been quite definitely expressed by Spinoza. According to this view the essence of religion consists in moral action, and the religious life has for its true content, deliberation upon duty, and the seriousness of a con duct of life determined by this. This in itself alone gave but very pale and vanishing lines for a Weltanschauung. There remained an indefinite idea of an all-good God, who created man for happiness, who should be worshipped by a virtuous life, and who will exercise an equalising justice in an eternal life, so that such virtue will receive the reward which is lacking to it here. No one will fail to notice the pure, noble thought which lived in this moralising Deism, or the high value which belongs to it historically, because in opposi tion to the one-sidedness and strife of confessional zeal it brought the ideals of toleration and philanthropy, respect for the purely human appreciation of the ethical disposition, and modesty in per sonal opinion, to a position of honour in literature and social life.
But, on the other hand, it is also true that there has never been a more meagre form of religious life than this. Its religion has no taste of earth, and with the mysteries which the Enlightenment would not tolerate, understanding for the depths of religious life was lost also. There is nothing more of anxiety for the soul's salva tion, of the struggle for redemption, of the ardent feeling of deliver ance. Deism, therefore, failed in vital religious power; it was an artificial product of cultured society, and when the German En- lighteners wrote books to preach the deistic morals to children, they only proved how little they understood of real religion.
Among the grfat mass of tue supporters of this standpoint in the "popular philosophy" all possible degrees of uncertainty prevail as to how far those moral remnants of the religious view of the world are still capable of a theoretical grounding, and how far they are to be regarded as merely constituents of the ethical conscious ness. Full clearness on this point rules in Voltaire's later thought. Here he has been so far seized upon by Bayle's scepticism as to acknowledge no longer any metaphysical authorisation : the deity
496 Th>. Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Past V.
and immortality are now for him only valid as postulates of the moral feel* »g ; faith in them is regarded as only the condition for moral action. If this belief should perish, the motives for honest conduct, and thus the foundations of social order, would, he thinks, perish with it: n Dieu n'existait pa*, U famdrait Frnrenter.
8. Different as are these individual forms in which natural relig ion developed, they all agree on one point. — in their depreciatory criticism of positive religions. Only that is regarded as true in these religions, in which they all agree with each other and with natural religion ; all that is taught beyond this, with an appeal to a special revelation, the deists turn from the door, and it was pre cisely in this respect that they called themselves free thinker*. The claims made by the revelational doctrine encountered, therefore, an especially vigorous contradiction. Collins refuted the proof from prophecy, Woolston the proof from miracles, — both by seeking to give for the corresponding accounts in the religious documents a natural explanation so far as possible. This attempt, which aimed not to involve in doubt the credibility of the biblical narratives, but to explain them by purely natural causes, frequently in a very fan tastic fashion and excluding all that is mysterious and supernatural,
has been characterised and employed in Germany especially as rationalistic interpretation. It was here, too, that Beimarus, in his Schutzschrift, proceeded in the sharpest manner against the possi bility of revelation, which he declared to be superfluous, unthinkable, and untrue. Others directed their criticism against individual doc trines of dogmatics. Diderot attacked the moral attributes in the Christian conception of God, and Voltaire exercised his wit in un sparing derision of the dogmas and ceremonies of all religions and Confessions.
But in his case also there was at bottom the earnest thought, that all these additions of the positive religions were so many obscurations and corruptions of the true religion, for which, like the other deists, he felt called to contend. They were filled with the conviction that natural religion is an inheritance of all men, a conviction set within the nature of man himself, and that it was, therefore, the original state of the religious life. From this point of view all positive religions appear as depraved forms which have entered in the course of history, and a progress in the history of religion consists, therefore, in every case in nothing but a return to the primitive, pure, and uncorrupted religion. Hence according to Tindal the true Christianity, which coincides with Deism, is as old as creation. Jesus did not bring a revelation, he only rehabili tated the true worship of God in the face of the decay of the
CHxr. 1, § 35. ] Natural Religion : Deittt, Hume. 497
ancient religions ; but the Christian churches have again corrupted his work, and free-thinking desires to return to him. So, too, Letting distinguished between Christianity and the religion of Christ.
If now it was asked, what were the causes that brought about this distortion of true religion, the Enlighteners were entirely devoid of any historical comprehension for these : what they held to be false seemed to them possible only through voluntary inven tion. They were so strongly convinced of the evidence that their Deism was the only true system, that all other teachings seemed to them explicable only by lying and deceit, and that the proclaimers of these seemed to have acted only in their own interests. It is then the general doctrine of the deists that the historical basis of positive religions is invention and deceit. Even Shaftesbury knew no other way of explaining how enthusiasm, which constitutes true religion, could be distorted to the fanaticism of superstition. The
hatred of priests felt by the Enlighteners was most sharply ex pressed on this point also in the Sckutzachrift of Reimarus.
9. Such incapacity to do justice to the historical nature of posi tive religions agreed well with the universal lack in historical sense and understanding which was peculiar to the whole philosophy of the Enlightenment. This had its ground in the fact that modern
This was done first and with clearest consciousness by David Hume. While he found that religion cannot be based upon demon strative rational knowledge, he showed also that the question as to the origin of religion in the human mind must be completely separated from the speculative investigation. This new question he treated solely in accordance with psychological principles, as a '* Natural History of Religion. " He shows how in the primitive apprehension of Nature and in the feelings of fear and hope, of terror and of blessing, which are associated with and in the com parison of the course of Nature with the vicissitudes of human life, there lay the incitements to the formation of ideas of higher beings, and to worship designed to appease or to flatter. The natural, primitive form of religion is, therefore, polytheism, which thinks and treat* these higher jwwers in completely anthropomorphic manner. But the manifold forms assumed by myth fuse in accord ance with the laws of the association of ideas myths pass over into each other, and ultimately the whole body of religious ideas becomes condensed into the belief in single divine being, to whom the pur poseful order of the universe due, — faith, to be sure, which
thought had made its growth, hand in hand with natural
in investigating that which is either timelessly or always valid. Only in a few instances was this ban broken through.
science,
a is
a
;
a
it,
The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Paw V.
cannot preserve itself in a pare form, bat is associated in various wars with its original presuppositions. The history of religion is tine gradual transformation of polytheism into monotheism, and its result coincides with that theological tow of the world which Home had developed as the view of the intelligent man, not, indeed, capable of scientific proof, but bound up with the natural feeling of belief.
This mode of apprehending the subject from the point of view of
and the history of civilisation was reinforced by that from the point of view of philology and the history of literature, which found expression in the historical biblical criticism founded by Salomon Sender. This began to carry out the thought formulated by Spinoza,1 that the biblical books must be treated just as other writings as regards their theoretical contents, their origin, and their history; that they must be understood from the point of view of their time and the character of their authors. Semler directed par ticular attention to the point that the different parties of the early Christians find expression in the books of the New Testament. While it may be that the hypotheses to which he came in this respect have been left behind by later science, it is nevertheless true that a scientific way out of the radicalism into which the deistic movement had run was here shown, and Sender therefore raised his voice against the spokesmen of the Enlightenment.
Leasing took part in these questions from still another side. He was certainly not the man to make his conviction bend to a tenet; he saw through and rejected, as few others, the limitation which will find its sole truth in that which has been transmitted histori cally ; but he guarded himself well from playing the judge, who now, after thousands of years, shall decide as to the genuine ness of the three rings. But it is not merely this that separates him from the great mass of the Enlighteners ; he is himself a deep, religious nature, and, like Herder,1 sees in religion a living relation of man to God, and God to man. Hence religion is not possible with out revelation, and the history of religions is the series of the revelar tions of God, is the education of the human race by God. Lessing assumes the well-planned succession of these revelations to be such,
• In what degree Spinoza's writings were known to the religious Enlighteners in Germany appears, among other things, from the interesting fact that Lorenz Schmidt, the leader of the Wertheim translation of the Bible, is the anonymous editor of a book in which, under the mask of a "Refutation of the Doctrine of Spinoza by the Famous Philosopher Christian Wolff," an excellent translation of Spinoza'. s Bthict is offered, and Anally only a few paragraphs from Wolff's German writings are appended (printed Frankfort and Leips. 1744).
• Cf. Herder's treatise on the Aelteite Urkunde dea Menschengeschlecht*.
psychology
Chap. 1, § 35. ] Natural Religion : Letting, Herder. 499
that the deeper meaning of each is unfolded more clearly and dis tinctly in that which follows. So even the New Testament, the second elementary book, over which the more advanced scholar now " stamps and glows," gives us a premonition of an eternal gospel. In carrying out this thought of Origen's,1 Lessing indicates in but a tentative manner indefinite lines which lie in the direction of a mystico-speculative interpretation of dogmas.
1 Education of the Human Racr, § 72 S.
CHAPTER II.
PRACTICAL
Thx natural religion of the eighteenth century sought in morals the support which a metaphysics of the natural-science sort could not permanently afford it.
