space as well as in time; nothing does anything for itself. Yet
again, nature is broken up into co-operating parts; the whole
is the sum of these parts; or, if you prefer to say so, there is
no whole. But, if we should take the view that nature is
infinitely extended—part of the “ Antithesis" in Kant's first
“Antinomy "—relative necessity breaks down on the last
analysis, since boundless nature may overwhelm that sequence
which we thought most securely established. Who can say
what may emerge from an infinite background? We reach
similar conclusions when we recognize that the laws of nature
are general or hypothetical; not in Mill's sense (“ If you had
such a non-existent thing as three perfectly straight lines united
in a triangle ”), but in a sense noted in F. H. Bradley's Logic:
“If” or “As often as you have the cause working unimpeded,
you get the effect.” Pure scientific theory cannot tell you
when you have got such a cause, or whether you ever get it at
all. No law of nature contains in itself a promise that it shall
pass into operation. Its doing so depends upon the totality of
conditions. Materialism supposes that this mechanical order
is the real world and the only real world—mechanical monism.[1]
Intuitionalism supposes that there are two realms—of necessity
and freedom, of nature and will, of matter and mind; contiguous,
independent, yet interacting—dualism. Idealism in
one way or other supposes that mind is more real than matter.
And thus its first programme—All is in accordance with reason—may
pass into the more doubtful programme All isreason, in
one of the two forms (a) nothing exists but mind (e.g. Hegel, as
often interpreted—pantheistically?) or (b) nothing exists but
minds (og. Hegel, as interpreted by Dr MacTaggart). Anyhow,
whatever the method or interpretation is to be, idealism,
even more fully than materialism, is pledged to monism and to
the rejection of dualism. The valid or scientific but metaphysically
untrustworthy knowledge, to which Kant shut us
up, was knowledge of a mechanical universe. His reply to
Hume was this—Mechanical causation is as real as
the unity of consciousness. It is false to suggest that
sequence is a fact and causal Connexion a figment;
apart from causal Connexion, there could be no consciousness
of sequences. Over against this “ valid ” mechanism, in some
truer but vaguer region, Kant placed free will; and so left
things. The English thinkers influenced by Hegel are inclined
to assert mechanism unconditionally, as the very expression of
reason—the only thinkable form of order. Thus libertarian
free will has to disappear from their belief. In this interpretation
of the universe, the difference between mechanical or
relative necessity and absolute or ideal necessity is slurred, or
dogmatically affirmed to be non-existent. It might be suggested
in reply that free will, whether or not it be ultimate truth,
is true to the same degree of analysis as mechanical necessity
itself. Mechanism is that which obeys impulses from outside.
It is profoundly unsatisfactory to regard mechanism as the whole
ultimate truth. For such a role it is in no sense fitted. If it
is ultimate truth in its own region, that region cannot be accepted
as more than half the entire universe of reality (common sense
intuitionalism; dualism). If mechanical determination applies
to the whole universe, it cannot be ultimate truth at all (cf. H.
Lotze; more drastic in Ward's N naturalism and Agnosticism).
Quite a different view of necessity is the moral necessity pointed to by Kant's “ Practical Reason.” And, as the sympathizers with Hegel try to force mechanical necessity into the garb of absolute or ideal necessity, so they seek to show that moral necessity is only an inferior form of absolute or ideal or, we might say, mathematical necessity. Theists, on the other hand, will contend that the distinctiveness of moral necessity is vital to religion. Thus we might restate our grouping of philosophies in terms of the views they take regarding necessity. Theism is directly interested in this, since it affirms the necessity of God's existence. At least, it would be hard to name any school of theists which was content to affirm that there “happened” to be a God.[2] On the other hand, theism does not desire to see necessity or Fate—ranked as superior to the living God.
One great change and only one since Kant's day has affected the outlook upon theistic problems—the increasing belief in evolution. It is a manifest weakness in intuitionalism it finds such difficulty in leaving room for evolutionary change. All men may perhaps be aiming everywhere at the same moral ideal,[3] but it is absurd to say that all men actually formulate the same moral judgments. On the other hand, many evolutionists ignore the certainty that there must be a continuum in any real evolutionary process. In the light of that truth, a reformed intuitionalism might justify itself. But fuller conceptions of evolution raise further difficulties for intuitionalism in its wonted forms. Knowledge cannot be divided into the two components—immediate certainties, precarious inferences. The starting-point is reconsidered, modified, transformed, in the light of subsequent acquisitions. Knowledge grows, not by mechanical addition, but by organic transformation. This may help us to appreciate the meaning of Hegel's Dialectic. His thought then is not wholly paradox, whatever the expression may be. Hegel's system is, in its own way, a great evolutionary philosophy of an ideal type.[4] Evolution, repelled by the older intuitionalism, was thus incorporated in the greatest of all ideal isms. It has also been largely applied to empiricism. Sometimes one questions whether empiricism is really still empiricist; so much of the a priori has come in under the name of evolution (e.g. in Herbert Spencer). But the change, if it has taken place, is unrecognized.
IV. Greek philosophy for our purpose begins with Socrates, who formulated the Design Argument. His ethics have sometimes been regarded as pure utilitarianism (so e.g. H. Schultz); but it is surely significant that the great idealism of Plato was developed from his suggestions. new method of definition which Socrates applied to problems of human conduct was extended by Plato to the whole universe of the knowable. In the light of this, it may be possible (with J. R. Seeley in Ecce Homo) to call Socrates the “creator of science.” The man who inspired Plato deserves that name. Those Ideas according to which all reality is objectively shaped—and therefore too, as a modern would add, subjectively construed—include the idea of the Good, which Plato identifies with God. We might mislead ourselves if we interpreted this expression as referring to moral goodness; on the other hand, Plato more than most of the Greeks thinks of moral virtue as an imitation of God. With all its idealism, Greek thought had difficulty in regarding rational necessity as absolute master of the physical world. Matter was a potentially recalcitrant element. Hence there are tendencies even in Plato to build up the ideal world in sharp contrast to the actual world—to the half interpenetrated or half tamed world of matter. His suggestions as to immortality are affected by this. The body is the soul’s prison. He teaches (whether suggestively, metaphorically or deliberately), pre-existence[5] as well as survival; perhaps he is moved to this by non-Greek influences. Thus at several points Plato reveals germs of dualism and asceticism. Free will had not yet been formulated as a problem. Aristotle has impressed the ordinary mind chiefly by his criticism of Plato's ideal theory; and therefore he is often ranked as the father of empiricists. But those who treat him as the great
- ↑ Ernst Haeckel will not allow us to call his system “ Materialism, ” because he affirms that the rudiments of matter are also rudimentary “mind stuff” (to use W. K. Clifford's term). But in spite of this its materialistic affinities are unmistakable.
- ↑ Still, Lotze's criticism of the cosmological argument reveals his realist side. On the other hand, in discussing the ontological argument, Lotze commits himself to a moral a priori (below, ad fin.).
- ↑ “We are all embarked upon a troublesome world, the children of one Father, striving in many essential points to do and to become the same” (R. L. Stevenson).
- ↑ The idea of evolution in time (physical evolution) was laughed at by Hegel.
- ↑ A belief hinted again at the close of Lessing’s Education of the Human Race; also—more definitely—by J. E. MacTaggart (Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, p. 48; and elsewhere).
