CHAPTER IX

Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its

conditions?--Giordano Bruno--Literary Aristocracy, or the existence of

a tacit compact among the learned as a privileged order--The Author’s

obligations to the Mystics--to Immanuel Kant--The difference between the

letter and the spirit of Kant’s writings, and a vindication of prudence

in the teaching of Philosophy--Fichte’s attempt to complete the Critical

system--Its partial success and ultimate failure--Obligations to

Schelling; and among English writers to Saumarez.

After I had successively studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley,

Leibnitz, and Hartley, and could find in none of them an abiding place

for my reason, I began to ask myself; is a system of philosophy; as

different from mere history and historic classification, possible? If

possible, what are its necessary conditions? I was for a while disposed

to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit that the sole

practicable employment for the human mind was to observe, to collect,

and to classify. But I soon felt, that human nature itself fought up

against this wilful resignation of intellect; and as soon did I find,

that the scheme, taken with all its consequences and cleared of all

inconsistencies, was not less impracticable than contranatural. Assume

in its full extent the position, nihil in intellectu quod non prius

in sensu, assume it without Leibnitz’s qualifying praeter ipsum

intellectum, and in the same sense, in which the position was understood

by Hartley and Condillac: and then what Hume had demonstratively deduced

from this concession concerning cause and effect, will apply with equal

and crushing force to all the other eleven categorical forms [27], and

the logical functions corresponding to them. How can we make bricks

without straw;--or build without cement? We learn all things indeed by

occasion of experience; but the very facts so learned force us inward on

the antecedents, that must be presupposed in order to render experience

itself possible. The first book of Locke’s Essay, (if the supposed

error, which it labours to subvert, be not a mere thing of straw, an

absurdity which, no man ever did, or indeed ever could, believe,) is

formed on a sophisma heterozaetaeseos, and involves the old mistake of

Cum hoc: ergo, propter hoc.

The term, Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after

the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being. This again is no way

conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate, that both are ab initio,

identical and coinherent; that intelligence and being are reciprocally

each other’s substrate. I presumed that this was a possible conception,

(i.e. that it involved no logical inconsonance,) from the length of time

during which the scholastic definition of the Supreme Being, as actus

purissimus sine ulla potentialitate, was received in the schools of

Theology, both by the Pontifician and the Reformed divines. The early

study of Plato and Plotinus, with the commentaries and the THEOLOGIA

PLATONICA of the illustrious Florentine; of Proclus, and Gemistius

Pletho; and at a later period of the De Immenso et Innumerabili and the

“De la causa, principio et uno,” of the philosopher of Nola, who could

boast of a Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville among his patrons, and

whom the idolaters of Rome burnt as an atheist in the year 1600; had all

contributed to prepare my mind for the reception and welcoming of the

Cogito quia Sum, et Sum quia Cogito; a philosophy of seeming hardihood,

but certainly the most ancient, and therefore presumptively the most

natural.

Why need I be afraid? Say rather how dare I be ashamed of the Teutonic

theosophist, Jacob Behmen? Many, indeed, and gross were his delusions;

and such as furnish frequent and ample occasion for the triumph of

the learned over the poor ignorant shoemaker, who had dared think for

himself. But while we remember that these delusions were such, as might

be anticipated from his utter want of all intellectual discipline, and

from his ignorance of rational psychology, let it not be forgotten that

the latter defect he had in common with the most learned theologians

of his age. Neither with books, nor with book-learned men was he

conversant. A meek and shy quietest, his intellectual powers were never

stimulated into feverous energy by crowds of proselytes, or by the

ambition of proselyting. Jacob Behmen was an enthusiast, in

the strictest sense, as not merely distinguished, but as

contra-distinguished, from a fanatic. While I in part translate the

following observations from a contemporary writer of the Continent, let

me be permitted to premise, that I might have transcribed the substance

from memoranda of my own, which were written many years before his

pamphlet was given to the world; and that I prefer another’s words to my

own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication; but still

more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence only was

possible.

Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy, during the last

two or three centuries, cannot but admit that there appears to have

existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to

pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science. The privilege of

free thought, so highly extolled, has at no time been held valid in

actual practice, except within this limit; and not a single stride

beyond it has ever been ventured without bringing obloquy on the

transgressor. The few men of genius among the learned class, who

actually did overstep this boundary, anxiously avoided the appearance of

having so done. Therefore the true depth of science, and the penetration

to the inmost centre, from which all the lines of knowledge diverge to

their ever distant circumference, was abandoned to the illiterate and

the simple, whom unstilled yearning, and an original ebulliency of

spirit, had urged to the investigation of the indwelling and living

ground of all things. These, then, because their names had never been

enrolled in the guilds of the learned, were persecuted by the registered

livery-men as interlopers on their rights and privileges. All without

distinction were branded as fanatics and phantasts; not only those,

whose wild and exorbitant imaginations had actually engendered only

extravagant and grotesque phantasms, and whose productions were, for the

most part, poor copies and gross caricatures of genuine inspiration; but

the truly inspired likewise, the originals themselves. And this for no

other reason, but because they were the unlearned, men of humble

and obscure occupations. When, and from whom among the literati by

profession, have we ever heard the divine doxology repeated, I thank

thee, O Father! Lord of Heaven and Earth! because thou hast hid these

things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes

[28]. No; the haughty priests of learning not only banished from the

schools and marts of science all who had dared draw living waters from

the fountain, but drove them out of the very Temple, which mean time the

buyers, and sellers, and money-changers were suffered to make a den of

thieves.

And yet it would not be easy to discover any substantial ground for

this contemptuous pride in those literati, who have most distinguished

themselves by their scorn of Behmen, Thaulerus, George Fox, and others;

unless it be, that they could write orthographically, make smooth

periods, and had the fashions of authorship almost literally at their

fingers’ ends, while the latter, in simplicity of soul, made their words

immediate echoes of their feelings. Hence the frequency of those

phrases among them, which have been mistaken for pretences to immediate

inspiration; as for instance, “It was delivered unto me;”--“I strove

not to speak;”-“I said, I will be silent;”--“But the word was in my

heart as a burning fire;”--“and I could not forbear.” Hence too the

unwillingness to give offence; hence the foresight, and the dread of the

clamours, which would be raised against them, so frequently avowed in

the writings of these men, and expressed, as was natural, in the words

of the only book, with which they were familiar [29]. “Woe is me that I

am become a man of strife, and a man of contention,--I love peace: the

souls of men are dear unto me: yet because I seek for light every one

of them doth curse me!” O! it requires deeper feeling, and a stronger

imagination, than belong to most of those, to whom reasoning and fluent

expression have been as a trade learnt in boyhood, to conceive with what

might, with what inward strivings and commotion, the perception of a

new and vital truth takes possession of an uneducated man of genius.

His meditations are almost inevitably employed on the eternal, or the

everlasting; for “the world is not his friend, nor the world’s law.”

Need we then be surprised, that, under an excitement at once so strong

and so unusual, the man’s body should sympathize with the struggles of

his mind; or that he should at times be so far deluded, as to mistake

the tumultuous sensations of his nerves, and the co-existing spectres of

his fancy, as parts or symbols of the truths which were opening on

him? It has indeed been plausibly observed, that in order to derive any

advantage, or to collect any intelligible meaning, from the writings

of these ignorant Mystics, the reader must bring with him a spirit and

judgment superior to that of the writers themselves:

And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek?

--a sophism, which I fully agree with Warburton, is unworthy of Milton;

how much more so of the awful Person, in whose mouth he has placed it?

One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own experience,

that there exist folios on the human understanding, and the nature

of man, which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and

celebrity, if in the whole huge volume there could be found as much

fulness of heart and intellect, as burst forth in many a simple page of

George Fox, Jacob Behmen, and even of Behmen’s commentator, the pious

and fervid William Law.

The feeling of gratitude, which I cherish toward these men, has caused

me to digress further than I had foreseen or proposed; but to have

passed them over in an historical sketch of my literary life and

opinions, would have seemed to me like the denial of a debt, the

concealment of a boon. For the writings of these Mystics acted in

no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the

outline of any single dogmatic system. They contributed to keep alive

the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working

presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty

partook of death, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter,

into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had

not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or shelter.

If they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet they

were always a pillar of fire throughout the night, during my wanderings

through the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without

crossing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief. That the system is

capable of being converted into an irreligious Pantheism, I well know.

The Ethics of Spinoza, may, or may not, be an instance. But at no time

could I believe, that in itself and essentially it is incompatible with

religion, natural or revealed: and now I am most thoroughly persuaded of

the contrary. The writings of the illustrious sage of Koenigsberg, the

founder of the Critical Philosophy, more than any other work, at once

invigorated and disciplined my understanding. The originality, the

depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety,

yet solidity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine chain

of the logic; and I will venture to add--(paradox as it will appear to

those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant from Reviewers and

Frenchmen)--the clearness and evidence, of the Critique of the Pure

Reason; and Critique of the Judgment; of the Metaphysical Elements

of Natural Philosophy; and of his Religion within the bounds of Pure

Reason, took possession of me as with the giant’s hand. After fifteen

years’ familiarity with them, I still read these and all his other

productions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration. The few

passages that remained obscure to me, after due efforts of thought, (as

the chapter on original apperception,) and the apparent contradictions

which occur, I soon found were hints and insinuations referring to

ideas, which KANT either did not think it prudent to avow, or which he

considered as consistently left behind in a pure analysis, not of human

nature in toto, but of the speculative intellect alone. Here therefore

he was constrained to commence at the point of reflection, or natural

consciousness: while in his moral system he was permitted to assume a

higher ground (the autonomy of the will) as a postulate deducible from

the unconditional command, or (in the technical language of his school)

the categorical imperative, of the conscience. He had been in imminent

danger of persecution during the reign of the late king of Prussia, that

strange compound of lawless debauchery and priest-ridden superstition:

and it is probable that he had little inclination, in his old age,

to act over again the fortunes, and hair-breadth escapes of Wolf. The

expulsion of the first among Kant’s disciples, who attempted to complete

his system, from the University of Jena, with the confiscation and

prohibition of the obnoxious work by the joint efforts of the courts of

Saxony and Hanover, supplied experimental proof, that the venerable

old man’s caution was not groundless. In spite therefore of his own

declarations, I could never believe, that it was possible for him to

have meant no more by his Noumenon, or Thing in itself, than his mere

words express; or that in his own conception he confined the whole

plastic power to the forms of the intellect, leaving for the external

cause, for the materiale of our sensations, a matter without form, which

is doubtless inconceivable. I entertained doubts likewise, whether, in

his own mind, he even laid all the stress, which he appears to do, on

the moral postulates.

An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by

a symbol; and, except in geometry, all symbols of necessity involve an

apparent contradiction. Phonaese synetoisin: and for those who could

not pierce through this symbolic husk, his writings were not intended.

Questions which cannot be fully answered without exposing the respondent

to personal danger, are not entitled to a fair answer; and yet to say

this openly, would in many cases furnish the very advantage which the

adversary is insidiously seeking after. Veracity does not consist

in saying, but in the intention of communicating, truth; and the

philosopher who cannot utter the whole truth without conveying

falsehood, and at the same time, perhaps, exciting the most malignant

passions, is constrained to express himself either mythically or

equivocally. When Kant therefore was importuned to settle the disputes

of his commentators himself, by declaring what he meant, how could

he decline the honours of martyrdom with less offence, than by simply

replying, “I meant what I said, and at the age of near fourscore, I have

something else, and more important to do, than to write a commentary on

my own works.”

Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, or Lore of Ultimate Science, was to add the

key-stone of the arch: and by commencing with an act, instead of a thing

or substance, Fichte assuredly gave the first mortal blow to Spinozism,

as taught by Spinoza himself; and supplied the idea of a system truly

metaphysical, and of a metaphysique truly systematic: (i.e. having

its spring and principle within itself). But this fundamental idea he

overbuilt with a heavy mass of mere notions, and psychological acts

of arbitrary reflection. Thus his theory degenerated into a crude [30]

egoismus, a boastful and hyperstoic hostility to Nature, as lifeless,

godless, and altogether unholy: while his religion consisted in the

assumption of a mere Ordo ordinans, which we were permitted exoterice

to call GOD; and his ethics in an ascetic, and almost monkish,

mortification of the natural passions and desires. In Schelling’s

Natur-Philosophie, and the System des transcendentalen Idealismus, I

first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for

myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do.

I have introduced this statement, as appropriate to the narrative

nature of this sketch; yet rather in reference to the work which I have

announced in a preceding page, than to my present subject. It would be

but a mere act of justice to myself, were I to warn my future readers,

than an identity of thought, or even similarity of phrase, will not be

at all times a certain proof that the passage has been borrowed from

Schelling, or that the conceptions were originally learnt from him. In

this instance, as in the dramatic lectures of Schlegel to which I have

before alluded, from the same motive of self-defence against the charge

of plagiarism, many of the most striking resemblances, indeed all the

main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before

I had ever seen a single page of the German Philosopher; and I might

indeed affirm with truth, before the more important works of Schelling

had been written, or at least made public. Nor is this coincidence

at all to be wondered at. We had studied in the same school; been

disciplined by the same preparatory philosophy, namely, the writings

of Kant; we had both equal obligations to the polar logic and dynamic

philosophy of Giordano Bruno; and Schelling has lately, and, as of

recent acquisition, avowed that same affectionate reverence for the

labours of Behmen, and other mystics, which I had formed at a much

earlier period. The coincidence of Schelling’s system with certain

general ideas of Behmen, he declares to have been mere coincidence;

while my obligations have been more direct. He needs give to Behmen only

feelings of sympathy; while I owe him a debt of gratitude. God forbid!

that I should be suspected of a wish to enter into a rivalry with

Schelling for the honours so unequivocally his right, not only as a

great and original genius, but as the founder of the Philosophy of

Nature, and as the most successful improver of the Dynamic System [31]

which, begun by Bruno, was re-introduced (in a more philosophical form,

and freed from all its impurities and visionary accompaniments) by Kant;

in whom it was the native and necessary growth of his own system. Kant’s

followers, however, on whom (for the greater part) their master’s cloak

had fallen without, or with a very scanty portion of, his spirit, had

adopted his dynamic ideas, only as a more refined species of mechanics.

With exception of one or two fundamental ideas, which cannot be withheld

from Fichte, to Schelling we owe the completion, and the most important

victories, of this revolution in philosophy. To me it will be happiness

and honour enough, should I succeed in rendering the system itself

intelligible to my countrymen, and in the application of it to the most

awful of subjects for the most important of purposes. Whether a work

is the offspring of a man’s own spirit, and the product of original

thinking, will be discovered by those who are its sole legitimate

judges, by better tests than the mere reference to dates. For readers in

general, let whatever shall be found in this or any future work of

mine, that resembles, or coincides with, the doctrines of my German

predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly attributed to him: provided,

that the absence of distinct references to his books, which I could

not at all times make with truth as designating citations or thoughts

actually derived from him; and which, I trust, would, after this general

acknowledgment be superfluous; be not charged on me as an ungenerous

concealment or intentional plagiarism. I have not indeed (eheu! res

angusta domi!) been hitherto able to procure more than two of his

books, viz. the first volume of his collected Tracts, and his System of

Transcendental Idealism; to which, however, I must add a small pamphlet

against Fichte, the spirit of which was to my feelings painfully

incongruous with the principles, and which (with the usual allowance

afforded to an antithesis) displayed the love of wisdom rather than the

wisdom of love. I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not

from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words

are audible and intelligible. “Albeit, I must confess to be half in

doubt, whether I should bring it forth or no, it being so contrary to

the eye of the world, and the world so potent in most men’s hearts, that

I shall endanger either not to be regarded or not to be understood.”

And to conclude the subject of citation, with a cluster of citations,

which as taken from books, not in common use, may contribute to the

reader’s amusement, as a voluntary before a sermon: “Dolet mihi quidem

deliciis literarum inescatos subito jam homines adeo esse, praesertim

qui Christianos se profitentur, et legere nisi quod ad delectationem

facit, sustineant nihil: unde et discipline severiores et philosophia

ipsa jam fere prorsus etiam a doctis negliguntur. Quod quidem propositum

studiorum, nisi mature corrigitur, tam magnum rebus incommodum dabit,

quam dedit barbaries olim. Pertinax res barbaries est, fateor: sed minus

potent tamen, quam illa mollities et persuasa prudentia literarum,

si ratione caret, sapientiae virtutisque specie mortales misere

circumducens. Succedet igitur, ut arbitror, haud ita multo post, pro

rusticana seculi nostri ruditate captatrix illa communi-loquentia robur

animi virilis omne, omnem virtutem masculam, profligatura nisi cavetur.”

A too prophetic remark, which has been in fulfilment from the year

1680, to the present 1815. By persuasa prudentia, Grynaeus means

self-complacent common sense as opposed to science and philosophic

reason.

Est medius ordo, et velut equestris, ingeniorum quidem sagacium, et

commodorum rebus humanis, non tamen in primam magnitudinem patentium.

Eorum hominum, ut sic dicam, major annona est. Sedulum esse, nihil

temere loqui, assuescere labori, et imagine prudentiae et modistiae

tegere angustiores partes captus, dum exercitationem ac usum, quo isti

in civilibus rebus pollent, pro natura et magnitudine ingenii plerique

accipiunt.

“As therefore physicians are many times forced to leave such methods of

curing as themselves know to be the fittest, and being overruled by the

patient’s impatiency, are fain to try the best they can: in like sort,

considering how the case doth stand with this present age, full of

tongue and weak of brain, behold we would (if our subject permitted it)

yield to the stream thereof. That way we would be contented to prove

our thesis, which being the worse in itself, is notwithstanding now by

reason of common imbecility the fitter and likelier to be brooked.”

If this fear could be rationally entertained in the controversial age

of Hooker, under the then robust discipline of the scholastic logic,

pardonably may a writer of the present times anticipate a scanty

audience for abstrusest themes, and truths that can neither be

communicated nor received without effort of thought, as well as patience

of attention.

“Che s’io non erro al calcolar de’ punti,

Par ch’ Asinina Stella a noi predomini,

E’l Somaro e’l Castron si sian congiunti.

Il tempo d’Apuleio piu non si nomini:

Che se allora un sol huom sembrava un Asino,

Mille Asini a’ miei di rassembran huomini!”