PHILOSOPHY
34
PHILOSOPHY
and universal character of the mind's concepts. It
vainly denies the super-experiential value of the first
logical principles in which the scientific life of the
mind is rooted; nor will it ever succeed in showing
that the certitude of such a judgment as 2+2=4
increases with our repeated additions of numbers of
oxen or of coins. In morals, where it would reduce
precepts and judgments to sociological data formed
in the collective conscience and varying with the
period and the environment, Positivism stumbles
against the judgments of value, and the supersensible
ideas of obligation, moral good, and law, recorded
in ever)' human conscience and unvarying in their
essential data.
(2) Kantianism had been forgotten in Germany for some thirty years (1S30-60); Vogt, Btichner, and Moleschott had won for Materialism an ephemeral vogue; but Materialism was swept away by a strong Kantian reaction. This reversion towards Kant {RUckkehr zu Kant) begins to be traceable in 1860 (notably as a result of Lange's "Historj- of Mate- rialism"), and the influence of Kantian doctrines may be said to permeate the whole contemporary German philosophy (Otto Liebmann, von Hartmann, Paulsen, Rehmie, Dilthey, Xatorp, Eucken, the Immanentists, and the Empirico-criticists). French neo-Criticism, represented by Renouvier, was con- nected chiefly with Kant's second "Critique" and introduced a specific Voluntarism. Vacherot, SecT6- tan, Lachelier, Boutroux, Fouillee, and Bergson are all more or less under tribute to Kantianism. Ra- vaisson proclaims himself a follower of Maine de Biran. Kantianism has taken its place in the state programme of education and Paul Janet, who, with F. Bouillier and Caro, was among the last legatees of Cousin's Spiritualism, appears, in his "Testament philosophique", affecting a Monism with a Kantian inspiration. All those who. with Kant and the Posi- tivists, proclaim the "bankruptcy of science" look for the basis of our certitude in an imperative demand of the will. This Voluntarism, also called Pragmatism (William James), and, quite recently. Humanism (Schiller at Oxford), is inadequate to the establish- ment of the theoretic moral and social sciences upon an unshakable base: sooner or later, reflection will ask what this need of Uving and of willing is worth, and then the intelligence will return to its position as the supreme arbiter of certitude.
From Germany and France Kantianism has spread everj-where. In England it has called into activity the Critical Idealism associated with T. H. Green and Bradley. Hodgson, on the contrarj-, returns to Real- ism. S. Laurie may be placed between Green and Martineau. Emerson, Harris, Everett, and Royce spread Idealistic Criticism in America; Shad- worth Hodgson, on the other hand, and Adamson tend to return to Realism, whilst James Ward emphasizes the function of the will.
(3) Monism. — With a great many Kantians, a stratum of Monistic ideas is superimposed on Criti- cism, tlie thing in itself being considered numerically one. The same tendencies are observable among Positivist Evolutionists like Clifford and Romanes, or G. T. Ladd.
(4) Xeo-%SchoIasticism, the revival of which dates from the last third of the nineteenth centurj' (Libera- tore, Taparelli, Cornoldi, and others), and which received a powerful impulse under Leo XIII, is tending more and more to become the philosophy of Catholics. It replaces Ontologism, Traditionalism, Gunther's Dualism, and Cartesian Spiritualism, which had manifestly become insufficient. Its syntheses, re- newed and completed, can be set up in opposition to Positivism and Kantianism, and even its adversaries no longer dream of denying the worth of its doctrines. The bearings of neo-.Scholasticism have been treated elsewhere (see Xeo-Schol,\sticism).
VII. Is Progress i.\ Philosophy Indefinite or is
THERE A Philosophi.\ Perennis? — Considering the
historic succession of systems and the evolution of
doctrines from the remotest ages of India down to our
own times, and standing face to face with the progress
achieved by contemporary scientific philosophy, must
we not infer the indefinite progress of philosophic
thought? Many have allowed themselves to be led
away by this ideal dream. Historic Idealism (Karl
Marx) regards philosophy as a product fatally en-
gendered by pre-e.xisting causes in our physical and
social environment. Auguste Comte's "law of the
three states", Herbert Spencer's Evolutionism,
Hegel's "indefinite becoming of the soul", sweep
philosophy along in an ascending current toward an
ideal perfection, the realization of which no one can
foresee. For all these thinkers, philosophy is vari-
able and relative: therein lies their serious error.
Indefinite progress, condemned by history in many
fields, is untenable in the history of philosophy.
Such a notion is evidently refuted by the appearance
of thinkers like Aristotle and Plato three centuries
before Christ, for these men, who for ages have domi-
nated, and still dominate, human thought, would
be anachronisms, since they would be inferior to
the thinkers of our own time. And no one would
venture to assert this. History shows, indeed, that
there are adaptations of a synthesis to its environ-
ment, and that every age has its own a.^pirat ions and
its special way of looking at problems and their
solutions; but it also presents unmistakable evidence
of incessant new beginnings, of rhythmic oscillations
from one pole of thought to the other. If Kant found
an original formula of Subjectivism and the reirie
Innerlichkeil, it would be a mistake to think that Kant
had no inteilectual ancestors: he had them in the
earliest historic ages of philosophy: M. Deussen has
found in the Vedic hymn of the t'panishads the dis-
tinction between noumenon and phenomenon, and
writes, on the theory of Ma)-S, "Kants Grunddogma,
so alt wie die Philosophic" ("Die Philos. des Upani-
shad's", Leipzig, 1S99, p. 204).
It is false to say that all truth is relative to a given time and latitude, and that philosophy is the product of economic conditions in a ceaseless course of evo- lution, as historical Materialism holds. Side by side with these things, which are subject to change and belong to one particular condition of the life of man- kind, there is a soul of truth circulating in everj' sys- tem, a mere fragment of that complete and unchange- able truth which haunts the himian mind in its most disinterested investigations. Amid the oscillations of historic systems there is room for a pJiilosophia perennis — as it were a purest atmosphere of truth, enveloping the ages, its clearness somehow felt in spite of cloud and mist. "The truth P\'thagoras sought after, and Plato, and Aristotle, is the same that Augustine and Aquinas pursued. So far as it is developed in history, truth is the daughter of dme; so far as it bears within itself a content in- dependent of time, and therefore of history, it is the daughter of eternity" [Willmann, "Gesch. d. Idealismus", II (Brunswick, 1896), 550; cf. Commer "Die immerwahrende Philosophic" (Vienna, 1899)]. This does not mean that essential and permanent verities do not adapt themselves to the intellectual life of each epoch. Absolute immobility in philos- ophy, no less than absolute relativity, is contrary to nature and to history. It leads to decadence and death. It is in this sense that we must interpret the adage: Vita in molu.
VIII. Philosophy .-^nd the Sciences.- — Aristotle of old laid the foundation of a philosoi)hy supported by observation and experience. We need only glance through the list of his works to see that astronomy, mineralogy, physics and chemistry, liiology, zoology-, furnished him with examples and bases for his theories
