THINKING

AN INTRODUCTION TO ITS HISTORY AND SCIENCE

FRED CASEY

THE LIBRARY OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

GIFT OF

Hilde Dietzgen Charlton In Memory of Her Mother

THINKING

THINKING

AN INTRODUCTION TO

ITS HISTORY AND SCIENCE

BY

FRED CASEY

1922. THE LABOUR PUBLISHING COMPANY LTD,

6, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C.i

PREFACE

It i> hoped that this little sketch of the story of thinking will be of service to those who have neither the time to study or money to purchase the more extensive and expensive wor

Beyond the manner of presentation, the ch . diagrams and a few opinions at the end of each part, the writer can lay no claim to originality, and since this is obvious, no attempt has been made to give the sources of quotations, as such would only burden the book with references of no practical value to those for whom it is intended. Some of the sources of information taken generally are indicated in the bibliography.

• A print of two charts illustrating the development of the main lines of thought of the principal thinkers from Thales to Marx and Bergson with their names, dates and the chief characteristics of their thinking, for use in connection with Chapters I — VIII, can be obtained from The Plebs Book Department. 162a. Buckingham Palace Road, London S.W.1 Price 1 -. post free 1 2.

CONTENTS

PART I.

THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. CHAP. PACE

I Introduction 1 1

II Rise of Greek Philosophy .

III Decadence of Greek Philosophy . 41

IV Philosophy in the Middle Agi . si V Philosophy from Descartes to Kant . 65

VI The Philosophy of Immamti. Kant . 7s VII Idealism from Kant to Bergson . VIII Materialism from Roger Bacon to Marx ioi

PART II. LOGIC, OR THE SCIENCE OF UNDERSTANDING.

IX Logic Applied to the General Nam of Thought (Mind) and of Thin (Matter) . . . . . .121

X Logic Applied to Physical Sen . 138

XI Logic Applied to MENTAL and Moral

Problems . . . . • .15- XII Various Examples of Applied Logic . 17"

Bibliography

Index

PART I THE HIS! i >RY I IF PHILOSi >I'H\

THINKING

ITS

HISTORY and SCIEN( I

PART /. The History of Philosophy.

CHAPTER I*

Introduction

Has the render ever (old a lie? If 50, was if to tell that lie. or better, could it ever he right to lie' It is easy to say people ought not to tell lie-, but when deciding about oneself it becomes a most un- comfortable question; we will therefore change the subject by asking a few others of varying character.

What is Irue democracy?

Would the practice of humanitarian principl. good for society ?

Ts education good for the working class?

If socialism is bound to come, of what use air social science classes ?

Has man a free will ?

Why do we say that living things have life?

Why is evil desirable?

Does machine production benefit society?

Ts happiness as an end in view morally JUStil

Would it be right for socialists • the

property of capitalists, or. is it r i L,r 1 1 1 to -teal -

* See footnote to Preface.

12 THINKING

Is it desirable that all people should have good health ?

Are strikes unreasonable?

Are majorities always right ?

Should workers serve on trade union executives ?

The essential character of all these questions— of every question in fact — is contained in the one question what is truth ? What is the truth concerning this ? What is the truth concerning that ? In various ways this great master question has occupied the attention of human beings ever since their brains began to think. In the following chapters it will be our business to briefly review the development of the enquiry. In the last chapter we shall attempt answers to the questions already posed, whilst in the present one we shall prepare our minds for what is to follow, but will first take a look at some fallacious methods employed in endeavouring to arrive at truth.

In places where there is sawdust on the floor and where men go to drink beer, budding politicians can often be heard loudly asking " What did Gladstone say in 1864?" In more refined circles it takes the form of " What did Herbert Spencer say in his 'First Principles'?" In ultra religious circles it is "What did Christ say?" And in some socialist circles "What did Marx say?" Not one of the three latter is any more intellectual than the politician of the " sawdust school," for if a man cannot demonstrate the truth of his propositions " off his own bat," then his appeal to authority is nothing but a demonstration of his own ignorance. Of course the above contains no prejudice against merely quoting a source of information so long as it is not taken as proved without further consideration. Another form of this argument occurs when some person appeals for the acceptance of what he calls his views, on the ground that they are held by millions of people and therefore they are likely to be right. And still another form exists in cases where men claim knowledge because of the length of time they have held certain views, as, for example, in many socialist clubs

I HIV: :

when- men can be heard that th<

members for twelve ■

know what socialism is. whereupon 01

years and a hall and ti i equent i

their view9 accepted becau e

better."

Another attempted way ol arriving at truti take an example from tne is to go round to the churches of dil dons, pick out the best from their d and add them together in a new combinati "mixed pickles." But, how does a man knov the best t The same kind ol i

political schools of thought.

Then there arc people who Ba> tl we do we ought at leasl he broadminded ju

though it were po--il.lt' • sdminded about

propositions as that two and two make four I:

question ^roadmindedness i-, a- a matter

superfine name for ignorance a do no-

action because they suspend judgment, s,, n •

being broadminded amount- to them acting wit!

knowled

A species of broadmindedness more pan relating to the question of whether there a God, appears under the nai from the inconsistency of contemplating the same time two possibilities each of which tradicts the other, in | any chance act as though " in reality proves them to be materialisl believe there is no God, though in the face of the dominant respectability of pre-ent ■' .'. too cowardly to admit it.

Then again, some people rel) upon comn just as if common sense w a- bound to be ritfhl quite re^ardle-- of the fact that in different different aspects of common .ail

Returning to the question of truth

UggeSt that all pei truth,*' for if they did not know when they were i

14 THINKING

they could never tell when they were wrong; so no great harm will be done by applying a test. If every reader will put the above questions to a dozen friends, separately, he will not get exactly the same answers to every question from every person. Under such circum- stances how will he know which is right ? for evidently two different answers to the same question cannot both be true. This leaves us just where we were. We are still seeking truth, as the old Greeks were two thousand six hundred years ago. Truth is only another name for knowledge, or wisdom, and the Greek word for wise is " sophos."

Now, how much of this wisdom do we possess, how much do we really know ? We are all acquainted with the old saying " seeing is believing," so let us tackle the problem from that standpoint. Take a piece of board, two feet square and half an inch thick, say a small drawing-board; if this is held at arm's length it gives us the impression of a square, but if we turn it part way round, like a half-open door, we see an oblong; if wre continue turning it goes narrower, until it gives us the impression of a straight line half an inch wide. What shape is it? Square, of course, because we saw it that way first. But suppose we had seen it the other way first, would it in that case not be square ? Moreover, if a lighted spirit lamp be placed between us and the board, but low down so that it heats the air between ourselves and the board, the straight edges of the board appear as wavy lines. Again, if we see it through a child's telescope, with the small lens nearest the board, it will appear to be smaller. Or a person troubled with astigmatism (a faulty curvature of the lens of the eye) may see it with some edges blurred, or out of focus, whilst others are sharp. The shape of the board, then, depends upon its position in relation to ourselves, our eyes, and the condition of the air or other medium through which we see it; and since this shape varies with different persons, or with variations in the combination of other factors, how can we say which is the true shape?

Or consider its colour. Let us agree that the board

1 HINK1

nice light brown « shadow is cast on some , darker shade than the will have no colour at all; so 1. i IS its true COloui

Ah, well; it seeing i> not beli< should give us a better foundation

the board hard 01

our fingers but soft it we feel with

chisel, bo in itsell we cannol

ts it heavy? It is heavy to i luld hut

a strong man. [s it solid? It is sohd ii

our fingers though it hut it cannot

given sufficient time, water would pass tin

therefore we cannol say whether the b

heavy or truly -olid, lor meieU feeling at ii

no clue.

The foregoing, of course, <h I problems by any means. As anol might ask how can three individuals be time one individual: How can ma say that an individual man is such hecai; ot mankind, then mankind i> the unit and individual man is a part of that unit, cons< part is only a traction and not a o I Again, the universe remain- I it is constantly changing ; how can that t be said that the universe doe- chang< are changing, what possibility ts there QJ all.' And yet. there must be truth could only find it; at least so it seemed to t:.-- Greeks who were the first I tematically with such questions. 1; did not possess truth, hut they were longifl they " loved truth for its own sake," and irrespective of consequence-. 1 he) lovers of truth, and the < ireek word foi lovil '• philos," wherefore putting " pi together we see how the men wl. truth, were " lovers of wisdom "

In those days a philosopher

16 THINKING

truth in any field of enquiry, astronomy, mathematics, logic, ethics; though as time went on certain branches of knowledge became specialised, as, for example, theology, and later different sciences, such as chemistry, geology, botany, astronomy, mathematics, physics, psychology, and many others, so that in modern times philosophy is left with such questions as the relation of the one to the many, the essential or underlying natures of matter, of mind and of life; the existence of God, the question of free will, the question of a future life, the relation between mind and matter, or as it is called, between " thinking" and " being," and it will be our business in succeeding chapters to follow, in outline, the development of the enquiry from its beginning in the Greek colony in Asia Minor, approximately six hundred years before Christ, up to the present time, and to show the positive results achieved; but since thinking cannot be understood without reference to the material conditions governing the lives of the thinkers during any given period, it will be useful, briefly, to review the material conditions that preceded and ultimately made possible that branch of thinking we now know as philosophy.

In the illimitable space we call the sky there are thousands of enormous masses of matter greater than our earth flying about at speeds of anything approaching twenty miles a second. They are cold and dark, but when two of these meet they smash each other into atoms, and their motion is converted into a frightful heat. They become a vast white-hot cloud or nebula of fine particles, millions of miles in extent. This nebula begins to contract, and part of the heat is given off; but the contraction, by the friction of the particles, causes a still greater heat in the interior, so that as the body becomes more condensed it assumes a character that we might faintly imagine by thinking of a mass of molten iron, though immensely more so. Such intense heat breaks up even the atoms into their basic " strain centres " or electrons. With the uneven condensation of such an irregularly shaped body it begins to turn round, and as it increases the spinning

THINKING 17

motion, it throws off great portions of itself. It is supposed that our sun was at one time a body of this kind, and that our earth is one of the portions thrown pinning into space. The earth then was originally a ball of nery matter, and its Btory from that time is essentially one of cooling, and the consequences fol- lowing from that cooling.

As the heat passed away through space, the different systems of electrons settled into their peculiar atoms, such as oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, etc.. which act and re-act on one another, and which existed a^ gases forming an atmosphere round the central molten mass. In time the melted matter cooled so much that it formed a skin or crust on the outside. With further cooling the oxygen and hydrogen combined to form water which as it rained down on the central mass was rapidly driven off in the form of steam, only to con- dense and come clown again to repeat the proce- s, 1 process which, of course, hastened the cooling of the general body, and resulted in forming an ocean surrounding the greater part of the globe. So now there were three layers of matter surrounding the molten centre — a crust of rock, a layer of water and an atmosphere of gases.

But the centre had not gone to sleep; the titanic inside forces were in opposition to the contracting crust of rock, and as the crust cracked, large masses of it were thrust upward out of the water. This naturally redistributed the pressure on the centre, and since the oxygen and hydrogen that formed the water was now taken out of the atmosphere, the atmosphere lost its former enormous pressure (estimated at 5,000 lbs. to the square inch), consequently such land as there was above water tended to increase until it formed a huge continent surrounding the northern hemisphere. Tor- rents of rain wore the high parts of the land away, and .in tons of sediment settled on the lower levels and on the floor of the ocean this increased pressure made large tracks of land sink while it forced others higher out of the water, and in some cases actually bent the surface upward in huge wrinkles, thus forming chains

B

18 THINKING

of mountains. In this way that part of the northern land that is now the bed of the Atlantic Ocean was forced under water, and similarly were stretches of land from Africa to Brazil and from Africa to Australia also lost, while Africa and South America took their present form. The re-distribution of land and water, the purifying of the atmosphere through the plants consuming the carbon dioxide, the forming of great lakes and the forcing of great tracts of land up into the colder atmosphere, all tended to bring about important climatic changes resulting in immense sheets of ice which, as they shifted, scarred and tore the surface of the land, and, as they melted, formed rivers, channels and lakes. All these changes had a great deal to do with the forms of living things that for thousands of rears had dwelt on the earth, so we must now go back to follow their evolution.

Just as it is normal under certain conditions for gunpowder to explode, or a match to burn, so is it normal for matter in certain other combinations to exhibit the phenomena we call life. Accordingly life is not a thing, but a function. " When did living things first appear? Where did they come from? What was their character? Frankly, we do not know." The many different combinations of matter had been evolving from the time of the firemist, or nebula, so there is evidently no point at which we could say when a certain combination was living. We therefore arbitrarily select the point when minute specks of the combination called protoplasm (the known physical basis of all living things) were formed, and lived individual lives millions of years ago in the original ocean. These specks of jelly, about one-thousandth of an inch in diameter, were the parent stock from which both plants and animals developed. Among very low organisms it is exceedingly difficult to tell which are plants and which are animals, the points being much disputed, but it is usual to call them plants if they take their food from the chemicals of the air, water, or land, and convert these into protoplasm, and to call them animals if they take ready-made proto-

THINKING 19

plasm as their food, that is, if they live on plants or other animals.

If the organism feeds on air, water, etc., it has no need to move or to develop organs of sense, except to a very limited extent, so it becomes rooted and stays where it is; but the organism that lives on other organisms must go and find them, or follow them, or at least develop limbs for catching them as they come near, and so it develops the necessary organs of sense which enable it to respond to its environment ; accord- ingly we got the two divisions of living things, plants and animals. Plants passed through various stages, from the green matter that we see clinging to a rainspout, through sea-weeds, ferns, flowers with sex organs, and an immense variety up to the monster trees of the Coal Age (estimated at from twenty to twenty-eight million years ago). In the sea, animals existed at this time in great numbers and variety, as the result of an evolution from the lower forms. There were amceboids, or single-celled animals, then clusters of cells that double in on themselves, forming stomachs. Higher in the scale some cells specialise as germ or sex cells, and some become especially sensitive; the latter are gathered together in the head and ultimately become brains that are connected with the organs of sense; the digestive cells line the stomach, while other cells develop the functions of locomotion, excretion, etc. Some animals, such as sponges, corals, etc., attached themselves to the floor of the ocean and developed suckers or arms for catching unwary swimmers; others swam about in search of food, preying on one another, and it is the evolution of the latter branch through the forms of fishes, reptiles, birds and mammals that lead up to man.

Long before the Coal Age, animals up to the level of the fish had existed in the sea, but there were no land animals such as we know, because they could not have existed until the plants had freed the atmosphere from carbon dioxide — a food for plants but a poison for air-breathing animals. As the struggle for life

20 THINKING

became more intense with every increase in numbers, and particularly as the re-formation of the land had resulted in enclosed lakes from which there was no escape to the open sea, the hunted ones made their escape by taking" to the land, the swimming" bags of the fishes being converted into lungs and their fins into feet. These amphibia later became reptiles of enor- mous size, though with exceedingly small brains. Ultimately the giants perished through lack of food when parts of the earth became very cold and ice- bound; again it was a question of escape to warmer climes, and it was the swifter, most intelligent, warm- blooded and smaller animals (those requiring least food) that survived. Once again, for escape as numbers increased, the web-footed leaping lizards took, as it were, to swimming in the air, and so developed into birds, while another type of reptile developed mammary glands by which the young could be fed from the mother after birth. This latter evolution is supposed to have taken place on the now lost continent between Africa and Brazil. These part-reptile part- mammal creatures had a coat of hair to keep them warm, and four-chambered hearts to supply richer and warmer blood to their bodies; due to this, and the anxieties of existence, they developed a brain capacity beyond what had been before. There were many species of them, all belonging to the lowest class of mammals, and they gradually overran the earth, so that from one or other all the present-day varied types of animals have been evolved. One of the latter types, the lemur, about the size of a cat, and assumed to have been evolved on the lost Afro-Asian continent, is supposed to be the common ancestor of monkeys, apes and men. The fore feet of lemurs developed into hands with which they climbed into the trees where they lived. It is supposed that this development of hands afforded scope for the development of brains, since it enabled their possessors to undertake many activities denied to other animals; and it is further conjectured that tree climbing led eventually to an upright posture as found in man. Man has therefore

THINKING 21

been evolved from the lemur, through an ape Stage, though not from any existing ape: the apes are his ■ins, that is all.

The home of the ape-men, probably a million years was south of Asia; from that time onwards the story is one of increasing intelligence or capacity <>i brain functioning, and increasing ability in the making of tools. They lived in caves or trees, with no language or religion, no knowledge of how they came to be horn, nor any knowledge of what we mean by death. They u^cd sharp flints as choppers; they discovered the use of tire probably from the sparks of iron ore ; they began to live in communities for purposo of defence, and gradually emerged from their state of savagery into the barbarian stage. During this sta.^e, religious practices came into being, also the spoken langu written language began with drawings on the borders of caves and on rocks. Religious practice through ignorance regarding natural forces, such as thunder, lightning, germinal forces, and so on: abstract things, such as Springtime, came to be personified and reckoned as gods. Understanding death as merely a longer duration of sleep, they had no idea of anything but life, consequently with them dead men had simply urone to live in the immortal regions, and from dream.s they got their ideas of the immortal interior. A combination of religious belief and spoken language produced the later mythologies and legends of . devils, immortal life, heaven, virgin births, and so on. All this time the development of tools was having its effect in so far as with newer and better tools it was possible to accumulate a store of food, which rendered it unnecessary to wander about in search of it; hut, to pass from barbarism to civilisation, with an ordered and centralised government, needed something besides mere hand tools. Peace, in which to develop social organisation, along with a continuous supply of food in one locality, are the two primary essentials for civilisation, and we have now to see the reasons why the first civilisation took place in Egypt.

Since animals live on plants or other animals, their

22 THINKING

basic food is vegetable. Vegetation depends upon the presence of moisture, ultimately rain, and a given rainfall depends upon the direction of moisture-carrying wind, which again depends on many geographical factors, such as the existence of mountains. A con- tinued supply of food depended accordingly on a certain combination of material conditions. Where those conditions enabled barbarians to get the neces- saries of life with a lesser expenditure of energy than formerly, energy was saved for other purposes: in this lies the essential character of progress. Now those tribes that lived in places accessible to other tribes, and which were therefore open to attack, had to expend a great deal of energy in defence; accord- ingly, those who were naturally protected by the sea, deserts, mountain ranges, and so on, stood the best chance of becoming civilised, and nowhere were those conditions so complete as in Egypt along the valley of the Nile, which is protected on the east and west by deserts, partly so on the south, and by the sea on the north. The warm winds from the west bring their moisture from the Atlantic across the great Sahara desert ; they are turned upward by the high lands south of Egypt, whereupon they lose their grip of the moisture, which rains down on the gathering grounds of the river Nile, in central Africa and Abyssinia. South of Assuam there is a great tract of sandstone which, being comparatively soft, has been worn by the river into very deep gorges from which the water cannot spread, consequently nothing will grow for any distance on either side; but north of Assuam the base is hard limestone, in which the river has first worn a valley approximately ten miles wide, and has covered this with soil brought down with the floods from the Abyssinian mountains. These floods occur periodic- ally, which circumstance constitutes another important factor in our story of civilising conditions, for in tropical countries one day is very like another the whole year round, so there is no necessity to provide for the future, but outside the tropics there are seasonal changes, more and more severe with approach to

TIIINKINC 23

temperate regions, and the>c changes necessitate provision for the bad periods, but such provision cannot be satisfactorily carried oul without some centre of authority. Here accordingly were the kind of soH, the

moisture, the peaceful conditions, and the necessity of making provision for the future which implii

centralised directive administration, which conditions, taken altogether, are necessary for barbarians to develop into civilised men. The development took a very long time, in all probability some thousands of years before the period of those whom we call the Ancient Egyptians, and the latter date from about 4500 B.<

The next most likely set of conditions existed in Mesopotamia, between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, with Babylon as the centre; but without outlining them here, it will be sufficient for our purpose to point out that those two peoples were kept apart by the Syrian desert. The Babylonians were subject to invasions of Semitic tribes which from time to time surged out of Arabia, a high land with a singularly pure air, whose inhabitants bred in numbers out of all proportion to the means of feeding them, so they went out in great hordes to the lands " flowing with milk and honey," and became more or less absorbed and civilised. But while the two principal civilisations were, in the beginning, kept apart by the Syrian desert, a few- thousand years of tool development wrought a change; they had tamed and domesticated animals for working and for transport, invented new weapons in response to the wandering Semitic invaders, they could produce more wealth of certain kinds than they needed for their own use, and could afford to trade with it, they could produce an abundant supply of food that could be carried on pack animals; with all this, travel, trading and war, on an ever increasing scale, became possible. But the Syrian desert was still impassable for regular intercourse, therefore the easiest way was what became the urreat north road from Egypt across the Sinai desert, up through Syria, round the top of the great desert, and down the Euphrates valley. Over

24 THINKING

these roads many wars were fought, the Jews in Palestine ultimately getting crushed and scattered.

But there were also other tribes from farther north and east, Assyrians, Medes and Persians, who fought and traded in these parts, so that the whole region now known as the Near East became the centre of conflicting civilisations whose trade was constantly being pushed north-west into Asia Minor and along its southern shore. Meanwhile the Phoenicians who lived along the coast of Western Syria, with ideas of river boats originally brought from the Euphrates, had tackled the problem of the sea and had traded along the north of Africa to Carthage and other places ; they came in conflict with Greeks, who were also a seafaring people. Persia had in the later times become the dominant power of the then civilised world; she had already colonised a great part of Asia Minor and developed trade all along its southern shore, as well as in the ^gean Sea; she represented the East pushing out to conquer the West. But the Greeks had also done some colonising in Asia Minor; they were war- like on sea as well as on land, and had ideas of the conquest of Persia; they represented the West out to conquer the East, and naturally the conflict in war followed the paths of the conflict in trade because there lay the roads for men to travel ; consequently it is along those paths we should expect to find the greatest conflict of ideas or thinking. Along those trading routes were, for those times, great cities, one of which, called Miletus, was situated at the mouth of the river Meander, in the south-west of Asia Minor, and here lived Thales, who came of a high Phoenician family, and who is regarded as the earliest of Greek philosophers ; he might be represented as the western spear-head of the scientific thinking of his day, piercing the thousands of years' old religious traditions of the east.

Abstract. From even such an exceedingly general outline as the present, a thoughtful reader will be able to gather that just as life is a function of certain combinations of naturally evolved matter, so is

THINKING 2.5

thinking a function of naturally evolved special parts of that matter— organs of sense and brains; thereafter thinking depends upon the material relations between animals and the resl of nature. Accordingly, since men, the animals with hands, possess the capacity for making tools by which they modify the relations between themselves and nature, they consequently by those means modify their thinking, for in pro- portion as better tools led to increased production and consequent trading, so did trading develop a wider type of society, and so were strangers thrown more and more into contact with each other. With regard to religious thought, not only they but their different gods also came into conflict; this, along with other factors, led eventually towards the idea of onr God. We have seen that animals, apart from man. evolve along biological lines, but the factor of tool development necessitates changes in man's soeial relations so that man evolves sociologically. The changes in social relations reflect themselves in thinking and appear as customs, laws, religions, philosophies and sciences. Trading, for example, required standards of measure- ment in exchanging quantities of goods (arithmetic i, also methods of measuring land and roads (geometry), the navigation of the sea, and dozens of other things; but just as changing material conditions led their thinking in a scientific direction, so did this thinking come in conflict with the unscientific superstitions and religious explanations of all things supposed to have been got direct from the gods. All things were recognised to be constantly changing, but since they did not come from nothing, or pass into nothing, it was thought that some one substance must be the base of all things, and it is the merit of the ancient philosophers to have begun the search for that one thing which remained permanent through all its changing forms, or in other words, to have begun the search for universal rock-bottom truth.

CHAPTER II Rise of Greek Philosophy

Newer tools brought trading. Trading brought war in which prisoners were made into slaves. From being the common property of a tribe, the tools became the private property of individuals, and, through the private ownership of the products, led to the forming of social classes with different inner classes and castes, the whole divided broadly into masters and slaves. This had happened long prior to the rise of Greece, therefore the glories of Greek architecture, literature, statecraft, philosophy, etc., were the outcome of a mode of production where slaves performed the work; nor could they have come into being without slavery. Of course, when speaking of the Ancient Greeks we never mean the slaves, without whose work the culture could never have taken place, nevertheless it is true that philosophers could not live on mere learning, they must have been provided for by somebody, so evidently chattel slavery was the economic basis of a great social advance; it produced its particular types of thinking, and so far as philosophy is concerned we must now consider the chief doctrines of the exponents of that thinking.

As indicated in the last chapter, the beginning of philosophical enquiry is associated with the name of THALES (born about 636 B.C., of Miletus) who imagined the one universal substance to be water — the blood of animals is watery, plants cannot exist without water, even " dry " land contains a per- centage of water, and so on. He was a philosopher because he sought essential truth; this is his merit, his

26

THINKING

actual work otherwise was of no use. lie was a

naturalist because he turned to natural substances in bis investigations.

ANAXIMENES (c. 560-480 B.C.. of Miletus) thought he had found the universal essence in air our souls were composed of air or spirit. Therefore from a natural and sensuous thing be derived the infinite: water was for him limited, it was too coarse, but in air, which we feel though do not see. we have a liner thing that pervades all things (ether).

ANAXIMANDER (born about 610 B.C.. of Miletus) declared that an unlimited and infinite substance was the essence of all things, but did not say what it was; he did not define it as any one thing, such as air or water, but merely spoke of it as the principle of all change, of all becoming and passing away; it was " that " out of which worlds and gods arise and into wdiich they ultimately return. It was immortal, had no beginning and would never pass away; it therefore contained everything within it, or rather Was every- thing in continuity.

MKRACLITUS (576-480 B.C., of Ephcsus, a city a little north of Miletus) thought the moving spirit of all things was fire (not flame — more properly heat, the principle of fire), but since fire or heat was constantly changing there was not even one thing in the universe that did not change; this was, of course, rather awkward for those who wanted to find something permanent.

PYTHAGORAS (6th century B.C., of Samos, an island off the coast of Asia Minor, not far from Miletus and Ephesus. afterwards settled at Crotona in S. Italy) conceived the essential nature of things to be number. The universe is " one," but so is every single part " one." Combinations of parts, no matter how many, become " one," for example, the number of pages in a book, or the number of vibrations in a musical note and the number of beats in its duration; " one " is the beginning of all things, the starting point in all calculations. Had he used this idea symbolically, as arithmetic is used to-day, it would

28 THINKING

have been intelligible, but according to G. H. Lewes, on the authority of Aristotle, he went on to suppose that number was the essence of things.

Pythagoras was the founder of mathematics, the discoverer of proportion in musical harmony, and the founder of a religious sect in Crotona where he taught the immortality and transmigration of souls.

ANAXAGORAS (500-418 B.C., of Clazomenae in Lydia, the centre of S.W. Asia Minor; afterwards went to Athens) taught that everything existed from eternity, but that things were separate and not in continuity as with Anaximander. They were originally all mixed up, but have been and are continually being sorted out, as time goes on, by intelligence which sees in them their distinct and useful qualities; wherefore since useful things can not be such without, apparently, an intelligent appreciation of them, we see the essential nature of all things to be due to Mind or Intelligence. In this way he reduced the many kinds of things (they had all existed through all time) serving different purposes, and usually referred to as " the wonderful order in the universe," to the one primary motion or cause (not a moral guidance). " The Infinite Intelli- gence was the architect of the Infinite Matter." Mind was the one moving spirit that fashioned or arranged the many material phenomena, but, as other philo- sophers complained, he did not show the connection between the one and the many, or, we might say, did not explain the nature of the one by reference to the different purposes served by the many, a doctrine known as " teleology."

PARMENIDES (born c. 536 B.C., of Elea, now called Velia, in S. Italy) made a decided distinction between thoughts obtained through reason and those obtained through the senses. Since the senses showed him a world wherein all was change, thoughts got in that way could at best be only opinions, because we never could say " for certain." But in addition to those he had certain convictions that he felt were true ; the latter thoughts, which according to him were produced by " reason alone," led him to the con-

Til IX KING 29

elusion that in truth nothing changed, for all the seeming change was only illusion

ZENO (c. 490-435 B.C., "I 1 lea, and afterwards Athens), a pupil of Parmenides, in defending his masters apparent contradictions, invented the method of argument known as "dialectics," which consi-ts in showing the error in a .statement by reducing it to absurdity through questioning and cross-questioning, with the object of ultimately arriving at truth. lie propounded several puzzles, of which the following may be taken as a type: a stone when thrown a distance conies at the cud to a state of rest, hut hefore it reaches the end it has to pass the middle; as this middle is the cud of a shorter distance, the stone is at rest there also, and similarly since every point is an end. whether it is called middle or not, the stone is really at rest all the time, although it seemed to move. By such arguments Xeno attempted to prove that motion could not take place, so, amongst all the change going on in the universe, both he and his master taught that nothing changed, for motion was impossible.

At this time, and for a considerable period after- wards, Athens was the " hub of the universe," and the chief city in Greece. Greece was not a country governed from one centre, as England is governed from London, hut was composed of separate city States, each with its own government and laws to suit itself. As .already mentioned, the tireeks had colonised parts of S.W. Asia Minor, whose coastdand was called Ionia. The philosophers belonging to this region form the Ionian school; those coming from Miletus being sometimes spoken of as the Milesian school. The reader will remember that these philo- sophers had sought truth in natural objects, such as water, air, etc: they were, therefore, naturalists or physicists. Southern Italy had also been colonised, and its philosophers of course form the Italian school, one portion ol which is referred to as the Bleatic, because its chief representatives were natives of Idea. Bui while the loiiians were physicists, the Italians (Pytha-

30 THINKING

goras, Parmenides, Zeno, etc.) had developed along" abstract lines, and had sought truth by mathematical and dialectical reasoning, that is, by leaving nature alone and relying entirely on their minds. The beginning of this abstract inquiry might be traced back to the " Mind " of Anaxagoras, or even to the " Infinite " of Anaximander. There were therefore two types of thinking in the physicists on the one hand, and the mathematicians or dialecticians on the other. Athens was, of course, the great centre of attraction for all Greeks, and when, in course of time, Zeno arrived there, the dialectical line of enquiry came into conflict with the physical. This conflict resulted in establishing dialectics as the correct method to be used in philosophic enquiry, which means that philosophers must turn away from nature and solve their problems by argument, that is, by thought alone; it also led to the creation of the Sophists and Sceptics.

The Sophists were, as their name implies, men of knowledge, or at least they were regarded as such by those who paid to learn from them. They travelled from city to city teaching for a living, but they were dialecticians who could prove anything to be right if it suited them, just as a barrister might with superior argument plead successfully for the life of a murderer. Travelling about, they found in different cities different laws in relation to different conditions; what was right in one place was wrong in another. To them there was no absolute truth, so it was no use attempting to teach definite systems of knowledge; they taught accordingly the art of rhetoric in pleading any cause, but particularly in politics and law, because there being no real truth, one opinion is as good as another, and those persons are likely to come best off who most cleverly understand and use the art of persuasion. They were the Relativists of their time, but this relativity must not be identified with modern relativity, it was only " the protest of baffled minds." The Sophists came to be regarded as dishonest reasoners who knew they could prove nothing but were all along pretending to do so. The Sceptics were at least

THINKING 31

honest, they knew they could prove nothing and said so, nevertheless this put them in a worse position than

the Sophists, if. indeed, it could be called a position, for no thinking man can rest content with nothing; they were the Agnostics of their time, their numbers developed as time went on, so that eventually they practically killed philosophy in Greece. We shall refer to them later.

It is said that Greek philosophy, properly speaking, begins with SOCRATES <4<";.-,o<) BO, of Athene, inasmuch as he, the son of a sculptor, who frequented any place where men gathered together, there to argue with anybody who would, so developed the art of dialectics as to make of it a new method of enquiry in philosophy. He was very severe on the Sophists who had no basis of truth, and by his merciless questioning brought out the idea that if one thing was right under some conditions, another thing under Others, and so on, this could only be on the assumption that there was a " right " that remained permanently right independently of how men thought, and consequently it was the business of a philosopher to employ dialectics in order to discover the essential and permanent natures of such things as Tightness, justice, honesty, bravery, love, etc., and to define those natures in such a way that they might be generally understood and accepted as moral standards for all men; first define and then deduce, in this we can see the beginning of logical system.

This concept, of the permanence of a certain inner nature which could not be grasped by the senses hut by the understanding alone, although only applied to morality by Socrates, was afterwards more widely applied by Plato and became the keynote of his whole teaching. Meanwhile it was the first step towards elaborating ethics as a science, so we see one branch of philosophy gradually turning away from the problem of the nature of existence to that of conduct, or what should men do in order to do right, or again, what should be the aim in life. From this side of Socrates' teaching flow two schools of thought the Cyrenaic,

32 THINKING

so named from Cyrene, the native place of Aristippus its chief exponent, and the Cynic with Antisthenes as its leader.

ARISTIPPUS (430-360 B.C., of Cyrene in Africa) was influenced by the Sophists as to the impossibility of arriving at the truth of anything, because since each person judges according to his impressions, no one can be trusted to judge correctly; but he was also influenced by Socrates, who had dwelt much on the permanent nature of The Good. Aristippus thought the greatest good was to be found in pleasure, but for the attainment of constant pleasure one must not overdo the thing, therefore a moderate pleasure was the best aim in life.

ANTISTHENES (c. 445-370 B.C., of Athens) studied under the Sophists, and even established a school, but afterwards took both himself and his students to learn from Socrates. He became captivated by the idea of the moral perfection of man; this impulse he got from Socrates, but never took to the method of Socrates, and consequently was one-sided.

In his pursuit of moral perfection he adopted the simple life, but carried it to extremes. He made a god of poverty, and ostentatiously paraded it. He was a man of gloomy temper and snarling ways, and it is said that the name Cynic (the Greek name for dog) was given to him and his followers because they lived the lives of dogs. According to him the best aim in life was to attain the virtues of moral perfection by casting away all the comforts of easy living that might interfere with the development of our moral natures, and his followers went to such an extent as to ignore not only life's comforts, but even its ordinary decencies. Diogenes, who lived and died in the streets, was probably the best known member of this school.

The other side of Socrates' teaching was the more truly philosophic in that it clung to the search for that permanent something which abides through all the changes of its parts. This line of thought, as already indicated, was taken up and developed by PLATO (427-346 B.C., of Athens).

THINKING 33

Aiistocles, surnamed Plato (the broad-browcd or broad-shouldered), was of an illustrious line; on the

maternal side he was connected with Solon (c. 638- c. 558 B.C.), the great Greek statesman, and. as with

many great names, he was the subject of fable; for instance, he was said to be the child of Apollo and a virgin. Well educated, and skilled in gymnastics, he competed in the great games. He learned dialectics from Socrates, but was previously acquainted with Cratylus who, as a follower of Heraclitns, taught that all things changed therefore no truth could be stated. Plato found no satisfaction in this, although it was true that all things that appeared tu his senses did indeed change.

In the teaching of Anaxagoras he found the idea of a universal mind; in that of Parmenides the idea of a permanent and unchanging universe; from the fol- lowers of Pythagoras he learned of the immortality of souls; but it was from Socrates he got the chief cine to his doctrine. Socrates had taught the permanent moral natures of Tightness, justice, honesty, and the like. Plato carried this farther and imagined real permanent natures of all other things, both abstract and concrete, such as straightness, equality, men, animals, etc. All the individuals of any one species were, so to speak, more or less perfect, though perish- able, copies or imitations of their genus or essential natures. For the purpose of explaining, we might imagine the permanent nature of man to be a pattern from which individual men were made, or, that individual men partook more or less of the perfection of the pattern which existed in reality on its own account. With Plato this general nature or pattern was not a mere thought, it existed whether we wen- aware of it or not, it could not be seen with the eyes, nor indeed grasped by any of the senses, it could only be understood. Each separate species had its own general nature, which Plato called its Form or Idea; in those days the word " idea " did not mean a thought in the mind as it does with us. With a further extension he conceived all the different Forms to be

o

THINKING 35

parts of one universal Form, the Supreme Mind or Intelligence — the Soul of the World. Fig. i may serve to make this clear. This Soul of the World, or Universal Intelligence pervading the world, was thai permanent truth which was the goal of philosophy, it was the one in relation to the many.

Since only what satisfies the intelligence can be regarded as real, and since only philosophers who possess a high degree of intelligence can apprehend reality, so, in Plato's opinion, ought the rulers of communities to be philosophers, and so was he led to write the " Republic," a Utopia in which he outlined the training necessary to provide the State with such rulers.

"He had a small house and garden a mile or so from Athens, and near the Academy, or garden adjoining the sacred precincts of Hecademus. Here there were shady walks, and a gymnasium, where he founded his school of philosophy, which for centuries was known as the Academy," and it was here that Aristotle, one of the greatest thinkers of Cjreece, studied as a young man.

ARISTOTLE (384-322 B.C., of Stagira, on the west coast of what is now the Gulf of Contezza, in northern ( ireece) was the son of a physician who died leaving him at the age of seventeen his own master, young, ardent, ambitious and rich, lie was slender in person, had delicate health, hut was an astonishing brain worker, lie went to Athens, where he remained about twenty years, studying, and writing on a vast number of subjects — Ethics, Rhetoric, Logic, Poetic>, Zoology, Comparative Anatomy, Psychology, Physics, Astro nomy, etc., so there can be no attempl made to do justice to his work in such a brief outline as the present, lie was disliked by certain political leaders, who accused him of blasphemy, inasmuch as he had paid homage to mortals by raising statues in memory of his friend Hermias and to his wile Pythias. He escaped from Athens and retired to Chalcis, but after Plato died, returned to find Xenocrates teaching in the Academy, so obtained permission to teach morning and evening in

36 THINKING

the Peripatos or shady walks of the Lyceum, the finest of Athens' gymnasia.

He studied philosophy under Plato, but complained that his master did not give a satisfactory account of the connection between the imperishable Forms and their perishable representations, or, as it is put, between " the one and the many." Believing with Plato that eternal Forms existed, he differed, in thinking that those Forms did not exist apart from their copies, but rather that they actually dwelt in the perishable bodies of the things to which they gave that Form, and that the conception of their separate existence was nothing but a mental abstraction; to give an instance, manliness was not a something existing apart from men, but was the common nature or Soul that dwelt in all men taken together; men therefore were mixtures of soul and body or mind and matter. But so also had all other species their common nature, Soul or Form, that dwelt in the perishable material bodies of the individuals of each species. The Supreme Mind or God was pure Form without matter, it was complete perfection, separate from the world, and taking no notice of worldly imperfection; but on the other hand, the more or less imperfect Forms of the worldly species were striving to attain the perfection of God, and the desire for that perfection was the source of all motion. A knowledge of this, it was supposed, would enable us to understand what man should do to attain this final end. For that purpose Aristotle tried to establish a science of ethics and with regard to society, a science of politics. Since the more knowledge men possessed, the greater the advantage they would have in striving towards perfection, they should not ignore worldly things altogether, but strive to understand those also; in conformity with the latter teaching he did much work in mapping out the limits of the various sciences, and gave a newer form and content to the general science of logic, the science that underlies all sciences; but he did not, as is popularly supposed, either invent logic, or even give it its name, nevertheless, much of what he did in the domain of logic appears in our text-books

THINKING 37

to-day, though it required a different economic ground work to show its faults; in those days it must have ;eemed perfect. We now go back fifty or sixty years to the definite

materialist doctrine of l>KM< CRITUS ( 400— 370 !'..< '..

of Abdera in Thrace, on the £gean Sea), who said there is nothing that is true, or, what is true does not appear to us, for the reason that while sensations are hue as far as they go, yet they are only sensations, and consequently cannot constitute the true nature of the objects that cause the sensations. The universe, he thought, consisted of an immense number of material atoms, combined in different ways to produce the different things which lie called Forms (of course very different from Plato's), such as sweetness, heat, colour and so on. Each Form gave rise to our sensations by throwing off, as it wire, a layer of atoms arranged according to its own peculiar combination, a material image of itself, which image was projected on our organs of sense. This was an early attempt at psychology. The atoms he thought were too small ever to become known by the senses, and could he under- stood only by the faculty of Reflection; they needed no Creator, for they had always existed, and by their own inherent movements had collided and combined to produce the many different bodies of which our senses are aware. Democritus therefore had no divine principle in his philosophy as had Plato and Aristotle.

It may be convenient at this point to give the gist of the Sceptics' argument. The most notable among them was PYRRHO (date unknown of Elis), who main- tained that the only knowledge we had was that of sensation, but, we could not get at truth through our senses, because we could not say for certain that t hex- represented objects outside US, and since Reason of necessity had only sensations to reason about, then Reason was just as powerless; so no positive statement could be made about anything, for nothing could be proved or disproved.

It remains for us to notice two schools, the Epicurean and the Stoic, each a mixture of certain lines of thought

38 THINKING

already noticed. The Epicurean takes its name from EPICURUS (342 — 272 B.C., of Samos), whose teaching was a further development of that of the Cyrenaic school of pleasure, though it was not so extreme as has been believed. Their psychology and physics they derived from Democritus, which means they believed in a permanent material world wherein sensation was due to the flow of material atoms. With this, it follows they did not recognise any divine principle, and accordingly quarrelled severely with the Stoics, from whom much of their misrepresentation as being sensualist has come. Since they rejected the divine principle in Platonic and Aristotelian systems their ethics rest upon their own Reason, combined with Free Will. So, the atomic or purely material basis of Democritus was the ground work of their sensations, and agreeable and disagreeable sensations were the bases of moralities, therefore whatever was pleasant became the rightful object of existence.

ZENO (360 — 270 B.C., of Citium, a small city in Cyprus), the representative stoic, began his philoso- phical career by joining the Cynics, but their manners were too gross and indecent. He studied in, and learned from, other schools, particularly the Platonic, and finally opened a school of his own in the Stoa, or Porch, from which it got the name of the Stoic. At Zeno's time Greece, honeycombed with sophistry, scepticism, indifference, sensuality and Epicurean softness, was fast going to pieces. Zeno tried to save his people by an appeal to their manliness, and by an attempt to re-establish morality on a basis that would be sound because independent of human frailty.

The Sceptics said that truth could not be attained because sensation, which could not be trusted, was all there was to work with. The Stoics replied that some sensations must be true if some are false, for it is impossible to have error without truth, and that Reason distinguishes between them by sifting the clear evidence from the unclear, or that which in reality is not evidence; this amounted to the statement that " evidence needs no proof." In nature they saw two elements, the

I 1 1 INK IXC. 39

matter, and God or the Reason which governs nutter. They did not believe in free will, hut in a destiny arranged by God, who was the only Reason in the world. Their morality was a rigid suppression of sensuous enjoyment, a doctrine fundamentally the saun- as the Cynics', hut purified of much of the grossi This hardening of the mind and cultivation of fortitude under severe strain, even unto death, were the characteristics which made their teaching acceptable to the conquering Romans, hecause it had much in common with the latter's own harder nature. Since the Sceptics had reduced knowledge to the limits of sensation, and since the Stoics could not believe this hut could find no satisfactory answer, they fell back on faith in that Reason which to them was Cod directing the world; so we see philosophy as philosophy at the end of its tether for the time Being; it sank hack into faith, lost its pride and became an aid to religion.

Abstract. — The early philosophers turned away from supernatural myths to the study of nature in the search for essential truth or underlying unity of all things, but not finding this in material objects, turned to the study of Mind and Thinking. They discovered or invented logic, a method of thinking which enabled them to arrange their thoughts and to make distinctions between universals and particulars, the one and the many. But this only increased their difficulties because it divided the universe into Mind and Matter without in any way explaining the obvious connection between the two, while it destroyed their confidence in finding truth by the aid of sense perception.

The result manifested itself in two main lines of thought, on the one hand Scepticism, wherein nothing could he known, and on the other Morality, the Stoic branch of which relied for its essential truth on faith in the supernatural: the relatively unthinking people simply took life as it came and in the ordinary common- sense manner wandered on from day to day. There- fore philosophy started by throwing faith overb only after two and a half centuries to return to it. The positive result achieved was the evolution of their

40 THINKING

method of enquiry, the logic referred to above; but this did not attain scientific value until it had been consider- ably modified in much later times, nor was there any real science of thinking until our own times. Mean- while we must witness the rise of Christianity, and the combination of philosophy and religion.

CHAPTER III

Decadence of Greek Philosophy

We have said that philosophy returned to faith, though if we look closely we shall see that, apart from the Ionian school, some germs of faith had been running through it all the time; nor could it very well have been otherwise, for whenever people take up a new study they cannot help being influenced by their previous thinking, therefore they of necessity approach it with a certain degree of bias. Of course philosophers are just the people who are supposed to have no bias, a mistaken view which was shown very plainly in the Italian school, in the interest they took in individual souls and their transmigration. But taken on the whole, Greek philosophy was fairly free from religious trammels, for there was no powerful priesthood, or sacred book, nor did the philosophers interest them- selves overmuch in their popular pagan gods. It is true Anaxagoras had been banished for blaspheming the sun and moon by saying they were made of the same sort of matter as the earth ; Socrates had been executed because of his rationalist tendencies, and Aristotle had been indicted for impiety; but in all these cases there were powerful political motives, the religious one being only a cloak. Such conflict as there was between philosophy and religion, particularly in their later developments, arose from the fact that they were both concerned with the same problems, namely, those concerning the nature of that ultimate reality which both have called God. Consequently, given a certain degree of social develop Blent, neither could exist without the other, and in this chapter we shall be occupied in tracing the main

41

42 THINKING

converging lines of religious and philosophic thought.

Barbarian ignorance of natural phenomena such as thunder, storms, floods, germination, birth (concep- tion), death, etc., was the basis on which arose religious practices and as society developed according to changing economic conditions, there came into being social classes of different grades, one of which was the priestly caste beginning with such rude forms as, for example, the medicine men of the uncivilised American Indians. These men became the doctors and historians of the tribe, and necessarily such learning as there was, apart from technicalities of fishing, hunting, etc., became their particular stock-in-trade. In time they became the especial guardians of all sacred traditions and ritual, and in such a superstitious age were regarded as sacred and holy men, fit to teach and direct the people, for they only were in touch with the gods. Each tribe had its own god, consequently, as their small worlds opened out through trade and conquest, the conflict of different gods ended in the triumph of the idea of there being only one God. But in proportion as this idea gained ground, so did the local character of the tribal god disappear, his place being taken by a God who no longer dwelt in one's own village but away somewhere, always away; he was an unapproachable God except through the medium of the priests and prophets.

In India, out of a personified nature worship arose Vedism, the early faith of Hindu-Aryans, and from this came Brahmanism. Brahma was the Creator, and was a unitarian God. Brahmanism was taught by a priestly caste, but later developed into Hinduism, with a trinity and a splitting up of worship. In Persia, Zoroaster, about 800 B.C., taught one God with a personal divinity; while in Syria the wandering Semitic tribes from the South and East, who became the Jewish nation, and who had the tribal religions of Moses and other prophets, eventually developed the idea of the one God of Israel.

Throughout the growth of the idea of one God, and as the village or tribal god vanished into the misty

THINKING 43

n • of the »ky, the question of the relation of God to man. and the character of the link or mediator,

between them necessarily became of more importance. Here we see our old philosophical friend, the question of the one and the many, mind and matter, • rod and the world. Since the Jews lived right across the great north road from Egypt to Assyria, with Palestine as their centre, they were open to attack from all sides, and as their tribal gods had vanished and could no longer help them, their prophets foretold that the Great < rod Jehovah would send a Messiah, who would deliver them "from their troubles; then, as we all know, Christ was born, and after a short life claimed to he that very Messiah, the link between heaven and earth. The Christian religion gradually spread along the northern shores of Africa and across the Mediterranean to Italy, ultimately to become, in the form of the Catholic Church, the dominant religion of the Holy Roman Empire.

We must now go back about three centuries and call to mind that after the death of Aristotle, Greece began to fall to pieces. The only philosophy that held the field, apart from Aristotelian Science was Stoicism. As Greece was gradually subdued by the Romans, Greek culture naturally suffered considerably, and many of the philosophers fled across the Mediterranean to Egypt. Their Stoic doctrine was largely Platonic, but later underwent a change, dividing broadly into two main streams, one becoming Christian, the other anti- ( Christian. The anti-Christian embodied characteristics that differed from those of Plato's time; we therefore distinguish between the old Platonic school and the New Platonists, or Neoplatonists, who took their rise about the time of Christ, and who opposed Christianity- Just as the meeting of Ionian and Italian philosophers in Athens produced dialectics, and ultimately the science of logic, so did the meeting of Stoic philosophers, or their disciples, with the early Christians, lead to Christian Theology; though we have here to do not so much with Greeks, as with men of other nationalities who had been influenced by Greek culture.

44 THINKING

Since our work in the main is to follow philosophy, evidently it is not our business to discuss theology except in so far as its development takes into account questions of a philosphical character, such as the freedom of the will, the relation between men and God, or between the many and the one. In doing this we must bear in mind that philosophy had developed two broad lines; first, Scepticism, which of course had nothing to do with religion, because it did not accept anything as being known to be true; and second, Morality, which was represented by Epicureans on the one hand and Stoics on the other. Epicureans, as we have seen, did not believe in any divine principle, while the Stoics did, as of course did Christians. Epicureanism entailed the belief in a free will, which was in accord with Christianity, though its belief in atomism with no divine principle was the very reverse. It was therefore the Stoics who were the most philosophically inclined to accept Christian principles. But the Stoics pinned their faith to " destiny," and accordingly did not believe in the freedom of the will, and unless this principle is accepted the Christian doctrine of atonement is useless, for if responsibility for one's acts is not recognised and accepted, atonement for sin has no meaning. Therefore those of the Stoics and others who refused to come to terms with Christianity, developed a religious belief of a mystical character; these were the Neoplatonists; we will return to them later.

The question of free will, which, by the way, " philosophers " have not yet settled, led to a discussion which ended in the general acceptance of the Christian position (though even in the Church there was much disagreement, as, for example, between Augustine and Pelagius in the beginning of the fifth century), which is that God is the source of all that is good, that man has a free will to chose either good or evil, but when he choses to do what he knows to be right, at that moment God gives him the Grace to carry out his intention. It was therefore not in his own strength that a Christian fulfilled the moral law, but by the Grace of God. To

THINKING 45

win this Grace one must have faith in God and be a member of God's Holy (wholly or unci Church. The Christian counted himself a child of God by right oi

initiation through baptism, which could apply to all men

willing to become members of the oik- Holy Church, whereas the lew was a child of God only by right ol

nationality, and the Stoic by individual right. There- fore the possibility of applying the Christian principle of

initiation to all mankind, along with the feeling we all have of acting freely, and the feeling that we must take the consequences of our acts, won recognition in Roman times, the more so because it was allied with the hardness of the Stoic temper, though not in such an extreme form as early Stoicism.

From the philosophic .standpoint, however, it was more particularly the principle of having a mediator between the one and the many that formed the link between Platonic philosophy and Christian faith, and this mediator was Jesus Christ, who was at one and the same time both Cod and man, and was, moreover, the only mediator.

There were other partially christianised systems of religion that, largely influenced by their many former and not entirely disregarded pagan gods, indulged their fancy with long chains of mediators or divine beings of different grades, and this tendency reacted on Christianity in the institution of saints and angels; though these have never by the authorities of the Church been identified with the Divine nature, for Christ alone was both Cod and man.

We have seen that Christians believed first, that God was One; second, that His character was exemplified in the life of Christ; and third, that personal intercourse with Cod or Jesus was to be attained by loving service to other men, for " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" (Matt, xxv., 40). This kind of religious belief gave rise to the philosophical question, what is there in the nature of God and of man and of the mediator between them which allows of such inter- course, or, what is the unity amidsl all this multiplicity,

46 THINKING

or, to put it another way, how can God the Father, God the Son, and the universal Spirit that dwells in the faithful, or God the Holy Ghost, be three (a Trinity) and at the same time one (a Unity) ? The view taken by Christian theologians is that these three distinct elements, each of which is God, find their unity in Love, wherein all believers, even the most lowly, may be united with God the Father through Jesus Christ, who establishes the connection of the Supreme Godhead with the material world. So we see that one branch of Stoic philosophy became absorbed by, and subordinated to, Christian Theology, and as far as Europe was concerned remained in that humble position throughout the Middle Ages.

Let us now go back to the other branch of the Stoics and those who still thought after the manner of the older schools, who became anti-Christian — the Neopla- tonists. Here again we see a conflux of two streams, but this time it is between Platonic philosophy and eastern religious thought of the theosophical brand which came from farther East than the seat of Christianity. The Neoplatonists, in working out the idea of mediation, sought rather to keep the Godhead separate from the material world, while Christians had sought to definitely connect them in the person of Jesus Christ. Christians brought God down into the world, Neoplatonists made the world strive towards God.

Philosophy, we remember, had been exiled from Greece. In its old home Scepticism had killed it. " It had started with the doubt of the child, had asked its questions, attempted answers, and had finished with the doubt of old age; " all it had left behind of permanent value was a partly developed method of thinking — Aristotelian logic. But if it found no worshippers in Greece, it was welcomed in Egypt, where the doctrines were new and therefore interesting. In Alexandria several schools were formed, and here took place the early struggles between Neoplatonist and Christian. This city, lying in the track of a later sea trading route between East and West, was naturally a great centre of commerce, and in science came to rival Athens. All

THINKING 47

those people who Sought a refuge from Scepticism,

together might he called the Alexandrian school, while the Neoplatonists constituted the most illustrious section of that movement; in following them we shall see the final act in the drama of Greek Philosophy.

Greek ideas of course had taken root in Alexandria long before Christ, but Neoplatonism proper began with a Jew named PHILO (born c. 20 B.C., of Alexandria), who represented a mixture of Greek- dialectics and Eastern mysticism. He had learned dialectics from the works of Plato and others, but the New Academicians (almost complete sceptics, who taught long after Plato in Plato's old school, the Academy), Arcesilaus and Carneades, had taught him to apply the method sceptically. In the spirit of these men he distrusted all knowledge gained by the senses, and since Reason, reasoned on the basis of such knowledge, then Reason itself could not get at truth. But besides Greek dialectics of that kind he possessed a large measure of Oriental mysticism, which led him to say that though the Senses and Reason were powerless, and thus far he was a philosopher, there was still the faculty of Faith, and this, the gift of God, was real Science or Knowledge; his philosophy then became theology. With Philo, God was the one Unity; his nature could never be known, but we knew of his existence in the " The Word." This " Word " had a twofold character, it was first, God's thought (mind), and second, God's thought carried out or expressed in the existing world as we know it (matter). We have already seen the subordination of one branch of philosophy to Christianity; we now see the other trying to establish a rival theology and to found a Church. As regards Epicureanism, this had long ago become indifferent, a sort of common-sense scepticism.

Following Philo came PLOTINUS (c. 203—262 A.D., an Egyptian), the greatest of the Neoplatonists, who thought with Plato that nothing but universals ( Forms) could be true (see Fig. 1). We knew phenomena through our senses, and the universals we knew through our intelligence acting in relation to sense perceptions, but.

48 THINKING

since that ended the reasoning process, how were we to know God ? Plotinus answered, that since Reason could go no farther, we could only know God when in a state of ecstacy, wherein Reason plays no part, for Reason, if it could know the infinite would have to be the Infinite; therefore we could only know God by being God, and in a state of ecstacy or rapture we became part of, or rather absorbed in God, and only in this way could we come to know God. God stood revealed to us only because we had become One with Him. This state of rapture, he thought, might be gained in some natures by Music (including poetry, beauty, rythm and such like); other natures, such as those of philosophers, were ravished through the contemplation of Unity and Proportion (the wonderful order in the universe) ; others again, by the pursuit of moral perfection executed in the sphere of love and prayer. Ecstacy was not the connection between the one and the many, the passage from one state to the other was made without such a mundane and even vulgar nuisance as a connection, for such would have defiled the pure essence of God.

The Alexandrian Trinity (some say the Christian idea of the Trinity was an imitation of the Alexandrian, others say the reverse) consisted of three persons; the third, or most inferior grade, was the soul or cause of all the activity and life in worldly things ; the second was the Intelligence or universal Being (universals); the first was not Being of any kind, but simply Unity. Since Unity was not Being, it was something that could never be conceived in thought; it was not nothing, but " that zvhich thought, that zvhich existed. " In like manner the circus clown says the world rests on a rock, and that on another rock, and that on the bottom; but this bottom is unexplainable, mysterious; and the Alexandrian Unity had the same mysterious character. So we see that what remained of Platonic philosophy lost itself in mysticism — the mysticism of the supernatural. (Let the reader reserve his laugh until he has " done his bit " to free the modern world from the same sort of thing; for there are plenty of mystics living to-day whose breasts swell with ecstatic fervour while thev listen to sermons,

THINKING 49

march to "glory," or, drunk with breath-arresting asthetics, pay court in a hundred other ways to " the

beautiful.")

With regard to the creation of the world. Christiana said that God created it out of nothing, for, being all powerful, one thing was as easy as another. The Alexandrian dialecticians maintained that out of nothing nothing could come; they therefore accounted for the world of many things by saying the many were simply emanations of Clod's will, that is, the many consisted of I iod's acts, not his substance.

From Alexandria, Plotinus went to Rome, and was there associated with Porphyry and Iamblicus. In Rome the Alexandrian school became a sort of Church, and disputed with Christianity for world empire. Christianity ascended the throne in the person of Constantine. Afterwards Neoplatonism was repre- sented there by Julian; but Christianity did not depend upon support from Emperors, and continued to flourish after it lost Constantine, whereas when the Neopla- tonists lost Julian thev lost power and influence. Their last fight for philosophic life took place with PROCLUS (412 — 485 A.D., of Xanthus, Asia Minor, afterwards Alexandria and Athens) as leader. He took Plato as an idol. The inscription, " Know thyself," on the temple at Delphi, Socrates had taken as an exhortation to ethical study. Plato had taken it to mean that in knowing one's self, that is, in knowing one's mind, one would become acquainted with the eternal Forms. But Proclus thought that in knowing ourselves we really know the divine One, of whom oneself is but a ray of that Unity. With Proclus metaphysics is the only possible science; it descends to us from above, and is more perfect than that which is the result of investiga- tion. " Invention is the energy of the soul. " " Omnes Scientia vera est a Deo " (All true knowledge comes from God).

Proclus, the last genius of Xeoplatonism. had tried to give it new life, but had failed, and under Justinian the Alexandrian school became extinct. With this we may say that Greek philosophy came to an end in its original

D

50 THINKING

home, for with the sack of Rome in the fifth century, by barbarians from the North, and the general subjugation of the Pagan civilisations of southern Europe, learning in these regions suffered shipwreck; libraries were destroyed, and the main portion of Aristotelian philosophy and science migrated mainly to Syria, Arabia and Persia. Meanwhile in Europe, as already stated, a modified Platonic philosophy became the handmaid of Roman Catholicism, and continued in that character through the Dark Ages.

Abstract. — With the Stoics, philosophy returned to faith. One portion of it became a sort of works manager to Christian Faith, while the other trickled out in mysticism. The only positive result was the evolution of a partial method of logical thinking that required further perfecting; in this lay the progress. Apart somewhat from the above we have seen the bases of two great lines of what became traditional thought — the Pagan and the Christian. The Pagan thinking, symbolised under the name of Aristotelianism, included the physical science of the times, while Christian thought appeared as the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.

CHAPTER IV

Philosophy in the Middle Ages

As the destruction of the Roman Empire had made learning and the pursuit of knowledge on the former

scale impossible, through libraries being scattered, endowments of centres of learning being confiscated, and so on; teachers and scholars not under the auspices of the Church had to seek a living elsewhere. They went to Asia, whilst Christian theologians and teachers remained in Europe. We shall now follow those two branches of thought to show bow they ultimately unite in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and also the consequent conflict of their separate influences during the Renaissance.

The philosophy of Christianity was mainly Platonic, but tbe Church possessed a little Aristotelian influence, principally in the domain of science, more particularly in the science of logic. When the shipwreck of learning took place, by far the greater portion of Aristotle's works were lost, or rather lost to Europe; but one of the barbarian chieftains, Theodoric, himself not a scholar, appointed as his ministers Cassiodorus and Boetbius, two of the most learned men at bis disp who were to save what they could from tbe wreck. Cassiodorus (born about 480) founded monasteries, wherein monks were to preserve such books as they bad. and were to study them. Tin's bad a greal influence in determining the available order ami extent of study throughout the Middle Ages, because it brought about the fact that during that period learning was under tbe control of the faithful, which meant under the control

51

52 THINKING

of the Catholic Church. Boethius (c. 470 — 524) occupied himself very largely in translating" from Greek to Latin works of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes and Porphyry. Porphyry, we remember, was the friend of Plotinus, a Neoplatonist and opponent of Christianity, but he had written an introduction to Aristotle's logic. This book, being only an introduc- tion, was necessarily very elementary, but of logic they had very little else from the ninth to the twelfth century. Logic is concerned with making distinctions between different things, or between different parts of a thing, that they may be better understood through the different things or parts being arranged or classified. Porphyry's book dealt with minor and relatively unimportant distinctions between Genera, Species, Differences, Properties and Accidents; these were known as the five predicables, and were supposed to represent the different classes or grades of qualities possessed by things; for example, taking the word "animal" as the Genus, this Genus includes many Species of animals, such as fish, the horse or man. But man possesses many qualities called Differences, by which he differs from all other species, such as the power of articulate speech. He also possesses other qualities called Properties, not so sharply defined as differences, but yet possessed by the whole species, for instance, a relative capacity for argument. And finally, by accident as it were, men may or may not be tall, ugly, fair or thickskinned, etc. ; such qualities, which do not apply to the whole class are termed Accidents. Porphyry's elementary logic, although it called atten- tion to the relation between Genera and Species, yet did not attempt the solution, for that question was too big for such a small work, being in fact the root question in philosophy — the one and the many, mind and matter, God and the world, the Trinity, etc. ; nor did it receive any particular attention throughout the Dark Ages, a period consisting of from four to five centuries, during which no great thinkers came to light ; but it became the central point of discussion during the Scholastic period, which occupied from about the ninth to the fifteenth

THINKING 53

century, for in the ninth century an intellectual fermenl began, which developed in itensity as time u enl on.

The scholars of those times, or the Schoolmen as they are called, had received their training in the form <>i Christian tradition, and to question the roots of that teaching was no light task, the more so since they them- selves were men of faith. Nevertheless, they began to ask awkward questions concerning Genera and Species, and even .attempted answers. This gave rise to a discussion between what were called the Nominalists and the Realists. AXSKI.M (1033 — [109, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1003 till his death), whose doctrine came ultimately from Plato, was a realist who believed that universals (see Fig. 1) had a real existence; ROSCELLINUS, his contemporary, took (partly from Aristotle) the opposite view, that only individuals (the Med copies of the universals) really existed, and that universals were no more than names, that is, that they existed only nominally. The latter view, of course, denies the Oneness of the three Gods— the doctrine of the Trinity. The discussion lasted for centuries; meanwhile the scholastics practised the art of argument and sharpened their wits by means of elementary logic to such an extent that many of them, such as Roscellinus and PETER ABEL ART) (1079 — 1142, of Palais, near Nantes, later a theologian of Notre Dame, Paris) were becoming heretics. They were substituting reason for faith, and that could not be tolerated by the Fathers of the Church at any cost. The whole period was one of confused thinking and hair splitting arguments, so much so that the Schoolmen, with their characteristic doubt, resembled the Sophists of Socrates' time. There was accordingly a philosophical disruption taking place, which might (so it appears on the surface) possibly have been kept under by the rulers of the Church, had it not been that in the twelfth century many of the lost works of Aristotle at last made their way into Europe. This recovery led to important philosophical developments, and as a prelude to a discussion of these we now go back to the dispersal

54 THINKING

of those works to briefly follow their course from Greece to Asia and back to Europe.

The last of the Greek philosophers had been driven by Justinian (483 — 565, Emperor of Constantinople and Rome) to find refuge in Asia, and were welcomed in Persia, but particularly in Bagdad. They took with them the works of Aristotle, and the philosophy contained in them became the basis of that which is called Arabian. It is not Arabian, however, but Greek, Jewish and Persian. Arabian philosophy represented a small section of a great Mohammedan movement, and at bottom constituted a reaction against Islam. Islamism is a wide-spread religion founded by Mahomet (or Mohammed, 571—632), who imagined himself the apostle of God; its centre was Mecca, in Arabia. After the death of Mahomet it spread north-east to Samarkand and Bokhara (North of Afghanistan), north to Armenia and Turkey, and north-west along the northern shores of Africa to Morocco, and to Cordova in Andalusia (southern Spain). The reaction to which we have referred arose in those distant parts of the Arabian Empire.

The Arabs were illiterate, but as they spread, they endeavoured to glorify their dynasty with Letters, and found many Greeks, Jews and Christians willing to give them Arabian and Syriac translations of Athenian and Alexandrian writers. Thus it came about that Aristotle was presented under the guise of Arabian philosophy, and was also mixed up with Alexandrian science. Europe then is indebted to the Arabs for the preservation of those Greek writings that had such an influence during the period immediately preceding the Renaissance.

While learning in Christian Europe in the tenth century was decadent, Andalusia under Mohammedan rule was the centre of light, and from Cordova, the above mentioned city, came Averroes (c. 1126 — 1198). who was born there. He translated, and commented on, Aristotle's teaching, and his writings constituted one of the principal media by which Arab culture spread slowly through Europe. We have already seen that

THINKING

disputes were going on in Parisian theological quai

and that the Church of Koine had found it difficult to keep heresy in check; but when the later worl Aristotle were introduced, which seemed to offer an explanation of almost everything, the disputes were furious and deep. Aristotle had taught that the world was eternal, had not been created, and would not end; he had also taught that individual souls (though not the soul of the species) were mortal, thus denying the Christian doctrine of immortality; in fact this question of what constituted an individual as distinct from a universal was always obtruding. These doctrines were, moreover, supported by a more advanced logic than had been at the disposal of the men of Abelard's time. They were, of course, directly opposed to Christian teaching, so, to get such questions settled became a very urgent matter." THOMAS AQUINAS (1226— 1274, of Aquino, Italy), a Dominican, took the affair in hand and tried to reconcile Aristotle and the Church. By his working out he arrived at the idea that certain truths might be discovered by man's reason, but there were other truths that could only be known through supernatural revelation, " though he loved Aristotle, he loved the Church more." This ending to the attempt to reconcile the two great lines of traditional thought — the Pagan and the Christian, or logic (reason) and faith, only meant that what could not be logically explained by reason in such a manner that it would satisfy faith, must be left to faith. However, there were other thinkers who were not satisfied, because both traditions were dogmatic, both had been regarded as infallible, and both were concerned with the question of essential truth, yet embodied different and apparently irreconcilable con- clusions, so what could be made of it all? DUNS SCOTUS (c. 1274 — 1308, British), a Franciscan, tried to reconcile Nominalism and Realism, even as Aquinas had tried, though he quarrelled with the latter on some points, being more inclined to give prominence to the reality of the individual, in so far as he thought that the individual nature was a higher perfection of the universal nature; in other words, he had a strong

56 THINKING

leaning towards Nominalism. WILLIAM of OCCAM (died 1350, of Ockham, in Surrey), another Franciscan, went much farther towards Nominalism, the growth of which, since it cut out the reality of universals, represented a desire to escape from both Christian and Classical tradition. On the other hand, WILLIAM of CHAMPEAUX was an out and out realist. There were indeed some who thought of a double standard of truth — that a thing might be true in philosophy but not in theology, and vice versa, however, this need not be discussed, as it was evidently quite unsatisfactory and left no particular historic mark. It should go without saying that Faith neither had or has any need to reason or to argue, and we can see clearly how in doing so it began its own undoing, for the fight between Reason and Faith led to greater freedom in thinking, and, taken on the whole, it became impossible any longer to reconcile philosophy and theology; but to under- stand the utter confusion of thought prevailing with gradually increasing intensity throughout the Scholastic period, and which culminated in the breakdown of both Classical and Christian tradition, we shall have to look at the material development underlying it.

In pre-Christian and early Christian times Greece and Rome were founded on wealth produced by chattel slaves. In its early days Christianity had a hard fight, but had become well established by the fifth century, at which period pagan Rome became subject to northern invaders. The object of conquest was, of course, that the conquered might pay tribute, but tribute involved the labour of the slaves, therefore extermination would not have served the purpose of the conquerors; instead, many of the new rulers or kings became converted to Christianity, and so ruled their subjects through concessions to the Pope, who held Spiritual Power over the mass of the people; many even received their coronation at his hands in spiritual righteousness. But the kings did not forget to fight among themselves for the purpose of extending their domains and acquiring wealth and power. For this purpose, as time went on,

Till Ml 57

required ever greater and greatei numbei fighting men and trusted leaders. The leaders re< ■ in payment grants of land, subject to a promise to fi^ht for the kings when necessary. Bui land without laboui was no use, and as the land was granted on condition- of armed service on the kings' behalf, so also was the labour that worked the land. And so it came about that where former masters actually owned slaves in the way they owned cattle, afterwards the slaves were nol owned in person, but were attached to the land, and should a lord be deposed in favour of another, the slaves or serfs stayed where they were under the new master. Since the system of landholding was founded on military service, or fighting, it is spoken of as Feudalism. There existed, then, a Spiritual Power and a Military Power, both of which required monetary support. The Church claimed tithes (the tenth part of a man's income) for its clergy, who had to remit a portion to Rome. Evidently what found its way to Rome could not go into the pockets of the kings, and naturally Church and kings quarrelled about " their rights," the Church enforcing its views by thre.r. excommunication; and excommunication was never a small affair to a good Catholic, for " what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul ? "

Occasionally Rome claimed extraordinary tributes, and for both ordinary and extraordinary, employe' Italian merchants to collect the dues in the form of merchandise, mainly wool, to have it dyed and woven, to sell it and forward the proceeds, less a commission, to Rome. These merchants became the Florentine bankers. At the same time, there were many wandering Jewish merchants and trader- also amassing mi i with which they could accommodate needy kings and nobles. Incidentally, we might point to the cultural influence of these traders, who knew the different languages of the people with whom they did busil and who were therefore a great factor in the spread of learning in art, in literature, in science, in law. in comparative religion, in the keeping of accounts, and.

58 THINKING

therefore, in stewardship and the management of estates, etc. As a blow against the rising power of money, the Church condemned usury, so in virtue of that condemnation, the nobles could satisfy at one and the same time both their spiritual conscience and their material well being, by refusing to pay interest on borrowed money. Therefore, while the nobility quarrelled with the Church, both were interested in opposing the monetary power as power in the hands of the trading or merchant class, while requiring it as power for themselves.

Students of economic history are well aware that the rise of the merchant class was the result of continued improvement in tools a,nd general modes of producing zvealth, which caused a greater and greater output, requiring extensive travel to secure markets and materials; all tending to the formation of different groups, with different interests, which reflected them- selves in correspondingly different modes of thought expressed in the form of different political interests. Politically, England, France, Holland, and Spain became nations with national interests opposed to each other, and to the restraints of the international Church, while within those nations were groups with particular interests opposed to the Church on the one hand and the kings and nobles on the other. These groups were the merchants, who required workers freed from the feudal nobility, that is, freed from the land so that they might be freely exploited through working for wages; they wanted also to be free from the necessity of paying tribute to Rome, and from many of the ordinances emanating from there. They rebelled against the laws of kings and the laws of the Church, and at the end of the fifteenth century they had reached the stage at which they were willing to pay the price of excommunication from the Catholic Church, because by that time their philosophical representatives had discovered a new way to heaven via the Reformation.

It may help us to understand the confusion that prevailed in philosophy during the scholastic period if we remember that for some centuries certain nobles

THINKING SO

could at fain more power and influence by supporting the king, others by supporting the ( Ihurch, mainly indii < ctl) through supporting some other king, while the trading class had been gradually rising; and that the sona ol

these people, or poor students for whom they found money, had gone to the schools and carried with them the mental reflection of the material interests of which ever class or group they represented. The new theological and anti-theological mentality of the opponents of the Church, apparently unconnected with material interests, was simply the indirect rationalisa tion of those interests, and was accordingly governed by the general material conditions of the period. Viewed in this light, the philosophic confusion appears to be merely the abstract general reflex of the material or economic confusion between the older and the newer tools or modes of wealth production, which produced the merchants, the breakdown of manorial economy, and the rise of the monetary system, and which brought in its train new social relations requiring- corres- pondingly new ideas of justice and right. We may also add to these the individual or personal desires of the disputants, an example of which may be found in Martin Luther (1483— 1546), wdiosc famous doctrine, " man is justified by faith alone," typified the desire to please oneself about ordinances, penances, celibacy, etc. All those things together formed the groundwork of the Reformation, for in order to do what they felt they must, if their interests were to be served, and which, therefore, seemed to them to be right, it was necessary to attack what, to them, was an intolerable religious authority; but, being godly men, they were not prepared to overthrow religion altogether, so what else could they do but find fault with the existing religious doctrine and reform it? The Reformation was merely the out- ward result of their spiritual justification for doing what economic forces had driven them to do. It marked tin- downfall of Papal supremacy in many European countries. Christian tradition had received a blow from which it never recovered, and in consequence Philosophy had much more freedom, not because the

60 THINKING

new churches were more tolerant, but because the weight of ancient authority was gone. From that time to the present Christianity has split itself into an ever- increasing mass of contending ruins — the debris of a faded mentality. The Catholic Church does, indeed, maintain consistency amid its absurdity, but the rest are absurd without even being consistent.

Now how was it with the other tradition — that of Aristotle ? In 1453, a century before the death of Luther, the Turks captured Constantinople; this made an end of the Holy Roman Empire, but it also caused Greek scholars to flee into Italy, and thus brought the Greek versions of Aristotle within reach of French and German students. They had now no need to rely on Arabian and Latin translations, the works of Plato and Aristotle could be read in the original, and so was classical antiquity seen more clearly. Aristotle had taught that the sun moved round the earth, and that it was made of a material different from that of the earth; that the earth was still and flat; also several other doctrines which, to the men of the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, seemed equally absurd. But why had these doctrines become absurd ? To see this we must glance at the scientific attainments of the age.

In the Middle Ages the investigation of natural phenomena had been neglected. There had, indeed, been a few alchemists who aimed at making base metals into gold, but in the thirteenth century the beginnings of positive science may be seen in the ideas of Albertus Magnus (1193 — 1280), a Dominican, and ROGER BACON (1214— 1294), a Franciscan. Roger Bacon, a monk of Oxford, thought that Aristotle's logic, which took some statement as being true and then made deduc- tions from it, was insufficient unless the statement or premise from which the deductions were made had first been established by the inductive method of observation and experiment. This amounts to saying that deduction is all right in its place, but its place is after its premises have been established by reason first examining natural phenomena, observing what takes place, and then

THINKING t.i

experimenting to verify the result, that is, to sec if the same result will always follow from the same material combinations. This method of searching for truth is not based on reason only, but rather Is reason itself

based upon actual experiment with natural phenomena; m attacked religion because it put experiment before authority, and it attacked philosophy because it put experiment before logic, so where previously there had been a split between Theology (faith) and Philosophy (reason or logic), there now came a split between Philosophy and Science (experiment and verification) concerning the proper method to use in searching for truth. Roger Bacon and " the Blessed Albert," through their knowledge of nature, were regarded as conjurors in the popular mind, but as dangerous thinkers by their theological superiors. The inductive method was employed with wider scope three centuries after R. Bacon by FRANCIS BACON (1561—162I London, for a time Lord Chancellor), who is known as the father of English materialism, though it must he remembered that these early materialists were not so complete as they have been represented, their idea was that by employing the inductive method of research they might gain a better and more complete knowledge ol Cod's purposes through understanding Cod's works in nature. Bacon's method of starting from experienced facts, both positive and negative, was not followed entirely by succeeding students, nevertheless, it has had a powerful influence; nor did he succeed in giving to the world a complete philosophy of the whole range ol natural phenomena, attempted in later days by C< >MTK (1798 — 1857, of Montpellier, later Paris), and still later by HERBERT SPENCER | [820—1903, of Derby); we shall see the reason in Part II. So much for the method of science, now — a few facts. At the end of the fifteenth century Copernicus, a Polish mathematician, hail taught, with great success, the older idea that not the earth but the sun was the centre of our planetary system, and that the earth was round and continually moving, thus giving the lie to Aristotle. Columbus had taken the rotundity as a fact in an endeavour to

62 THINKING

avoid Arab plunderers on the route to India, and had discovered America in 1492. Vesalius, at no great distance in the sixteenth century, had laid the basis of modern anatomy, which again gave the lie to Aristotelian speculations. William Gilbert, a little later, founded the science of terrestrial magnetism, which explained much that had hitherto been mysterious. Hans Lippershey, in 1608, invented the telescope, which was perfected by Galileo, who succeeded, by means of it, in spoiling quite a number of ancient astronomical ideas; he also discovered the isochronism of the pendulum, and the laws of falling bodies, proving the previous reasoning on those points to be definitely wrong. Kepler, about the end of the sixteenth century, formulated the laws of motion. Under the weight of all this, what could happen to Aristotelian tradition but that it should fall into the dust of a memory ? If we ask why it was that Aristotle should have made such serious mistakes, we may answer in a sentence, that in Aristotle's time the tools had not been in existence, which alone could bring about the newer understanding.

We are now in a position to see how material develop- ment undermined both Christian and Pagan traditions. Philosophy had split into science on the one hand, and a philosophy that was independent of theology on the other; it left the supreme mind of God to theology, and proceeded to an examination of the human mind. Theology began to crack up in the interests of a multiplication of religious forms, but its exponents did not give up without a fight, they developed very vicious tendencies before settling down to emulate the Lamb of God. This latter may be seen in the incident of Giordano Bruno, who, on the strength of the Copernican theory of the sun being the centre of our planetary system, had become a heresiarch by saying that certain statements in the Bible were wrong. For this the Inquisition, in 1600, had him tied to a stake in Rome and publicly burnt alive. And we may also, perhaps, be in a better position for understanding that much quoted, but little understood, passage by Karl

THINKING

Marx — " In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organisation necessary following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch."

Abstract from the Beginning. — In the first chapter we saw that animal evolution resulted in the develop ment or organs of sense, nerves and brains, and that social evolution gave rise to an interpretation of the mysterious, expressed in religious practices and mythology founded on faith. In the second, that Greek philosophers threw over tale-telling, studied nature, developed philosophy, dialectics, logic and material science; that logic led to scepticism, the decadence of philosophy and a return to faith. In the third, that one line of philosophy became extinct in ecstatic mysticism, while the other became the servant of Christianity, the remainder of Pagan culture coming through mainly in the form of Aristotelian science. And in the present chapter we get the two long lines of Pagan and Christian tradition where, in the twelfth century conflict of the two, Pagan logic does much to smash Christian tradition, science helps to perform the same operation on Pagan tradition, while underneath all are the material developments that prepare the ground and ultimately give rise to the modern scientific method of enquiry which produces verifiable results, thereby knocking both traditions to pieces. The Church and the Bible had been infallible, but were found to be not so. Aristotle had been infallible, but the new scientific method of enquiry, plus the new tools and instruments, had shown that not only was the intellectual world moving, but also the very ground under their feet, while the sun that moved daily across the sky was all the time standing still. Old methods of wealth production, with their attendant old philosophical speculations and old religions, all had gone to pieces, their places being taken by new methods and tools, reflected in new conceptions oi literature, art, science, religion, law and philosophy; it was the period of re-birth — the Renaissance.

64 THINKING

Was it any wonder that the Frenchman, Rene Descartes, should decide never to believe anything again until he had first tested it by the utmost doubt at his command ?

CHAPTER V

Philosophy from Descartes to Kant

In passing to modern philosophy, which began in the seventeenth century, it is important to remember that its exponents were not only mathematicians, but were

also much influenced by the results of positive science, though they did not, nor do their followers to-day, apply the scientific method in their philosophical specula- tions. So once more do we see that the tools and instruments by which the scientific results are attained have an indirect expression in philosophical thinking.

Seventeenth century philosophy may be said to have begun on the materialist side with Francis Bacon, and on the idealist side with DESCARTES (1596 — 1650, of La Haye, in Touraine, later Paris; in Latin called Cartesius), who cast all notions of ancient philosophy on the scrap heap in order to make a new start; though neither Bacon or Descartes were purely materialist or purely idealist. Descartes began his enquiry by systematically doubting everything, with, however, one exception, for he found he could not doubt that he was thinking. In the very act of thinking of himself as a thinking being, he connected thinking, with himself as the thinker, and realised that as a thinker he was far from being perfect ; but since he could not imagine his imperfect self except by comparing it with something perfect (for the imperfect could only be conceived a^ being a lower degree of, or a declination from the idea of complete perfection), he concluded that complete perfection must exist somewhere. In the same way he found from the fact that he himself was finite, that there must be infinity ; and again, .since a perfect being that did

e 05

66 THINKING

not exist, except in thought, would be a contradiction, for the reason that if it lacked reality it would be imperfect, that being must be real; from all of which he deduced the existence of a real and infinitely perfect being or God (though not in the Christian sense). This is known as the " ontological argument " for the existence of God, and had been presented about five and a half centuries before by Anselm, without, however, attracting attention, because the Schoolmen had never doubted the existence of something. This real and infinitely perfect being, Descartes thought, if perfect must be truthful, and since perfection in the highest degree must be the source of all the lower degrees it followed that man's ideas about the world, if true, were derived from God.

At this point we might mention that Plato had used the word " Idea " to indicate a thing that really existed as an eternal and permanent nature, whether we thought of it or not, and that later, Augustine had taught that such eternal natures might be regarded as thoughts in the mind of God ; but by the sixteenth century the latter notion had been extended to mean thoughts in the human mind also ; accordingly we now use the word " idea" to mean a thought in the human mind.

Now how did Descartes distinguish between true and false ideas? Here again his Ontology served him. because, he argued, if God is perfect and truthful, and if man's knowledge of the world is got from his knowledge of God, then his knowledge of the world must also be true, and the world must be a real world provided such knowledge is clear and distinct, that is, not mixed up with doubtful speculations, for God, being truth, could not deceive him in any way. Clear and distinct notions were accordingly true but, which were they? With Descartes they were those of mathematics and mechanics, or extension and motion. For example, we cannot conceive of a body without some kind of shape that occupies space, or is extended in space. And since all bodies occupying space are capable of being separated into parts, modified or

THINKING

re-joined in various ways, all taking place tlr. motion, and as mathematical and mechanical notions arc the same wherever we meet them, they arc the only clear and distinct notions, for all other ideas, such as colour, warmth, etc., are perceived differently b) different people. In this way the decks were cleared for a mechanical conception of the physical uni . TH( '.MAS HOBBES(i588 [679, of Malmesbury, Wilt- shire; later Oxford and Paris), who was in touch with Descartes, even thought that consciousness was a kind of motion, but Descartes held the idea that conscious- ness had no shape, did not occupy space and could not be conceived of as being" mathematical; therefore, not being a body, it could not have motion or have anything to do with motion in the physical sense. Accordingly he spoke of bodies or matter, and consciousness or mind, as being substances exactly opposite to other, for we could only conceive of them as each being different and independent of the other. Mind and matter, between which lies the greatest distinction in all philosophy, were therefore by him considered to be separate, and this, of course, raised once more the eternal question of the connection between the two. ilow, for example, could the mind by thinking of a certain action make the material body perform that action as, when asking a friend at table to pass the salt, he does so? In dealing with the latter problem Descartes, following mechanical principles, supposed that the heart distilled from the finest particles of the blood, a very fine fluid which was driven to the pineal gland in the brain and there converted by that gland into nervous energy, which passed along the nerves to the muscles, thereby giving rise to motion; and as regards the connection between mind and matter, he sup] that the soul or mind of man directed that motion. though it did not produce it. This, it will be seen, did not explain how the direction took place, therefore his explanation was no explanation at all, and the problem remained unsolved.

I lie theory of Occasionalism taught by some Cartesians (followers of Descartes) was that no .

68 THINKING

action ever took place, but both mind and matter were actuated separately by God, and that on the occasion of a man thinking to move his arm God caused the arm to move. In short, that God caused parallel actions of mind and matter.

NICOLE MALEBRANCHE (1638— 1715, of Paris) held the idea that there were not three terms — God, mind and matter, but only two — God (the only mind) and matter (the world); and that when human beings formed clear and distinct mental pictures of the world around them, those thoughts were really parts of God's thinking.

SPINOZA (1632 — 1677, of Amsterdam), a Jew, began as a Cartesian, with accepting the separation of mind and matter, but, through working at the problem of their interdependence, afterwards developed the Pan- theistic view. With him there was but one substance in the universe, and that was God. What we called " matter " was one part of God, and what we called " mind " was the other part, or, in other words, mind and matter were but two attributes of God. This concept was a philosophical reflex of the times in which mathematicians and physicists were establishing the universal laws of motion and gravity as being common to all things, regardless of species or particular individuals, whether animals, men or machines. Now the root question in philosophy is that of the unity among individuals — how can many individuals be at the same time one:'' Spinoza certainly made an attempt at unity by making all three (God, matter and mind) into one, but he only did so at the expense of the other end of the question, that is, by destroying the idea of individuality. It also destroyed the freedom of the will and all Christian and Jewish notions of God; for the latter he was excommunicated from the Jewish fraternity.

However, LEIBNITZ (1646 — 1716, of Leipzig) returned to the problem of individuality, and asked, once more, what is an individual? He held that an individual must be a unit in itself, that is, not capable of being divided into parts; but as

THINKING

every particle of matter could be 10 divided to

infinity, real " unities " or " monads," as be called

them, could never he found in material bodies, but only in souls, which have no parts, lie further imagined that parts of the universe, other than man, might have souls, though of a lower order than that of man. and only to that extent could material things have reality. Such unities, or monads, were the only things that really existed, all else was illusion; they existed as individuals apart from each other; the apparent inter- communication between them was not really such, it resembled Occasionalism, and consisted of a "pre- established harmony " arranged by God, who is the " final cause " of all.

So it would appear that from Descartes' time, mind and matter gradually got more clearly separated, and the problem of truth gradually became the problem of how do human beings perform their thinking ? Towards the solution of the latter question, JOHN LOCKE (1632 — 1704, of Wrington, Somersetshire, later Oxford and London), in 1690, contributed an " Essay concerning Human Understanding." lie agreed with Descartes that matter and mind owe their being to God, for the simple reason that something cannot come from nothing, and, therefore, something there must always have been that possessed " power " and " knowledge." But he differed from Descartes in that he was not so sure that mind and matter were completely separated, because God might have given matter the power to think (Duns Scotus had the same thought about four centuries earlier). That thought may excite motion he considered as undeniable, though incomprehensible. He agreed that minds were affected by external stimuli, but, and this was his chief contribution, he believed th.it there were no " innate " ideas— (ideas born in the mind or created by the mind without aid from outside): he thought that every idea must be the result of some experience, and that experience was of two kinds- sensation and reflection. The experience iluc to sensa- tion was that got from outside the mind through the organs of sense, while that due to reflection was the

70 THINKING

result of the mind reflecting " on its own operations within itself," that is, experiencing its own thoughts, _

Leibnitz, in criticising Locke, pointed out that with regard to reflection, what was reflected upon must be in the mind before it could be experienced, and such a thing could not be if there were no innate ideas, for as far as the saying goes, "that there is nothing in the understanding that was not first in the senses," one exception must be made — the understanding itself. With regard to sensation, he asked how could Locke prove that the objects which caused us to have sensations did actually exist outside us ? And how did we get the idea of " cause," since nobody could ever experience a cause by itself, apart from the other factors involved; or how did we get the idea of bodies existing on their own apart from anybody thinking about them, seeing that experience of them was lacking?

Although Locke could not prove the existence of a real material world outside the mind, yet he agreed with the thinkers of his day in taking a real mathematical and mechanical world for granted ; he further thought that the bodies composing that world had primary qualities, such as solidity, extension, shape, motion, rest, number, etc. (all such as are mathematical or mechanical), and that these gave rise to secondary qualities, such as colour, sound, taste, etc., but that the latter were not real on their own account ; and he had to explain in some way or other how ideas of such unreal things could arise from sensation, since that which affects the senses must at least be real. He imagined that the ideas of secondary qualities were due to the senses being affected by minute and insensible parts of bodies (primary), which parts themselves bore no resemblance to the secondary qualities, but nevertheless produced the effects of colour, warmth, and so on.

We may see how he came by the latter notion if we bear in mind that Bacon had revived the idea of atoms, after the manner of Democritus, and had been followed in that by many other students in the field of natural science. The theories based on atoms offered a better groundwork for an explanation of natural processes,

THINKING 71

though at the same time they tended to do away with

the apparent solid reality of matter. So just as material science had, during tin- Renaissance] tended to do

with theological explanations and the Supreme Mind, so did atomistic chemistry tend to undermine the real*

matter itself, inasmuch as one could think of matter being split up to infinity so that it could not he sense perceived in any way.

Locke, as stated, had availed himself of the atomists1 way of looking at things, in order to account for ideas of secondary qualities on the basis of sensation. If we remember that, and also that the age was becoming materialistic, we shall be in a better position to under- stand why George Berkeley, a bishop, interested in upholding the idea of spirituality, supported Locke's teaching that knowledge is due to sensation, but attacked his distinction between primary and secondary qualities. The reason was because he thought Locke's materialist and mechanistic arguments would, if carried to their logical conclusion, result in smashing the very materialism they were intended to support.

BERKELEY (1685— 1753, of Dysert, Kilkenny- Bishop of Cloyne, in Ireland) allowed that knowledge was derived from ideas of sensation, which idea . course, were in the mind, but did not see the necessity for anything outside the mind; in fact, did not see how we could form a conception of any such thing, because what was perceived was an idea in the mind, and an idea was something different from the supposed object outside. Nor could such an object, assuming there to be one, think like our own minds, for it was precisely on that basis that we distinguished between mind and matter. Whatever could the object be? Locke had said that it was something solid, heavy, etc, but not coloured or heated; these secondary qualities being no more than effects produced on the senses. But how, Berkeley asked, could Locke know this? How could he tell that ideas of primary qualities resembled objects while those of secondary qualities did not, when the only contact with the outside source of ideas was by means of the ideas themselves? Again, if the nature of any outside

J2 THINKING

object was different from the nature of an idea (matter different from mind), and ideas alone could be per- ceived, how could an idea resemble it? And if it did, how could we imagine it apart from the secondary qualities of warmth, colour, etc., which Locke had said it did not really possess ?

Berkeley concluded that outside objects did not exist. In reply to Dr. Johnson's kicking a stone by way of refuting that conclusion, he admitted everything to which the senses bore witness, but denied that anything existed apart from the actual sense perceptions; for the very being or existence of all things that were perceived lay in them being perceived. He therefore denied the existence of matter. Asked what became of matter when it was not being perceived, he replied, it did not exist; because the idea of existence always meant existence as an object of perception. To think of an object unperceived was really thinking of it being perceived, without the notion of a person perceiving it.

Now, such ideas as the last, which are framed at will, namely, all kinds of suppositions, he called " ideas of imagination." But ideas that did not depend upon our willing, for example, those of gravity causing bodies to fall or fire causing a burn, and so on, he called " ideas of sense"; and as we could not produce such ideas at will, and as matter did not exist, and therefore could not produce them for us, ideas of sense, he thought, could only be produced by a Spirit of a higher order than ourselves (in so far as we produced ideas of imagination we were spirits of a low order), who arranged what we call the laws of nature (cause and effect, etc.), and although it was impossible to discover any necessary connection between those laws, nevertheless without that supposition we should be in utter confusion; so he considered it reasonable to think that the Great Spirit arranged the connection which, as we came to under- stand it through experience, might be regarded as the language by which the Spirit communicated with us. This was pure idealism.

Following Berkeley came DAVID HUME (171 1— 1776, of Edinburgh), who, while in France in 1739, wrote

THINK INC

a "Treatise of Human Nature." Hume said, ju Berkeley treated matter as being nothing but percep- tions, so ought we to treat Berkeley's Spirit also as non-existent except in our perceptions, for we knew no more of it apart from perceptions than we knew m matter apart from perceptions. To say, as Berkeley did, that proof of the existence of a superior Spirit was to be found in the connection between perceptions of cause and effect (the beautiful order in the universe) only begged the question, for that so-called connection was merely a habit of mind, the result of noticing that certain kinds of perceptions always followed certain other kinds; for even if certain ones did always follow certain others, Hume thought this might just happen so, the happening in no way proving the connection. Since Hume's time the question of whether one thing causes another, or whether the two just happen so without being connected, has been known as the problem of causality. So Hume was a complete sceptic — no innate ideas, no mind or Spirit, no soul, no external world or matter, nothing but perceptions which nobody understood. Hume's fellow Scotsmen could not stand that, so took to expounding the " principles of common sense"; but their work merits very little notice in an outline, where much detail must of necessity be missed.

With the ship of philosophy in such a parlous state, Immanuel Kant took the helm and sought to pilot it into safe harbour. In effect, he said, away with the lot of you, what we ought to do is to give up arriving at dogmatic positions, everyone of which seems to be knocked over by the next philosopher that happen^ t'> come along; we ought to pay no attention to the truth of the universe, the object of our study, until we first understand the tool we are using— our reason; he there fore turned away from the study of the universe itself, in order to study those faculties of reason which are employed in studying that universe.

Abstract. — After ancient ideas had failed to give satisfaction, Descartes said, away with all dogma. He began with doubt but ended with dogma. He saw that

74 THINKING

thought existed, and from that deduced the reality of God, of the human mind and of matter. Spinoza did away with the separate mind and matter, retained God, the unity, but sacrificed individuality. Leibnitz restored individuality of mind, but not of matter. Locke restored individuality of both. Berkeley destroyed not only the individuality of parts of matter, but the whole of matter, and retained Spirit. Hume destroyed both Spirit and matter, leaving only " perceptions," but knew nothing definite about them; while the Scotch philosophers, out of breath, returned to the "principles of common sense." Through all this may be seen the gradual forming, in a broad sense, of the two modern schools — the idealists and the materialists, while the problem to be solved became definitely that of how we do our thinking, the solution of which was attempted by Kant.

CHAPTER VI The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant

[MMANUEL KANT (1724—1804, of Konisberg) was the first of those ( ierman philosophers who have been called great. Though born in 1724. he did not publish his first philosophical work till 1781 ; his philosophy is accordingly late eighteenth century. In this chapter we outline his three chief works — the three Critiques.

When Hume had reduced the dogmas of previous philosophers to scepticism, and had denied the cornier tion between cause and effect bv saving that causes did not exist except in our minds, Kant thought it high time to cease dogmatising. He therefore attempted a critical enquiry into the nature of our reasoning faculty, for the purpose of finding out how far our reason was capable of forming correct ideas.

It was Hume's problem of causality that led Kant to his basic conception, which is that just as the movement of the sun in the heavens is only an apparent motion due to our way of looking at it, so are the positions and shapes of bodies in space, and the succession of events as they follow in time, only appearances due to the peculiar nature of ouf perceiving faculties.

Hume had followed Locke in supposing there were no innate ideas, that is, that the mind could produce no ideas at all without the aid of experience, but Kant thought the mind could produce such ideas, for example, those of the mathematical kind, which cannot be experienced for the simple reason that no such exactness can be found in nature: therefore, according to him, mathematical truths must be produced a priori,

75

76 THINKING

which means without experience, or prior to experience. But since all knowledge, of whatever kind, must be knowledge of something that is extended in space (that has some sort of shape, and is therefore geometrical), or knowledge of some event in time (which involves the use of numbers in calculation), all knowledge must, to that extent, be mathematical; so it follows that all knowledge of the universe, or of its separate parts, must be made up of two portions, the a priori ideas or mathematical parts contributed by the mind itself without the aid of experience, in addition to a posteriori ideas, namely, those contributed through the experience of our organs of sense.

Such knowledge is wholly in the mind, but not in Berkeley's sense, because Kant held the view that ideas in the mind were merely the mental pictures of how things appeared to us, that is, they were only appearances or phenomena, and since there could be no appearance without something to appear, there must, he thought, be a world of things outside our minds with which we could never come face to face, nor could we ever come face to face with our minds themselves, we only knew the a priori ideas contained in them or produced by them. Therefore the world of things including our minds, though only in so far as our experience could take us, was something real " in itself," this he called a noumenon; but we could never know that "thing in itself," for we could never get in touch with anything beyond inside sense perceptions of the things that were outside us (things in themselves), in addition to the purely mental concepts of space and time relating to those perceptions (and therefore limited by them), namely, the mathematical parts of knowledge which were produced by the mind itself. Accordingly all understanding consists of the union of two kinds of experienced phenomena, one supplied by sense percep- tion, the other by the mind prior to its being experienced.

Those parts of understanding supplied by the mind Kant called "constitutive" notions, or categories, because they arranged the sense perceptions into

THINKING 77

different categories or classes of knowledge, for without such arrangement the sense perceptions would not constitute knowledge. Were there no facult understanding, perception could make nothing of what

was perceived, while, on the other hand, understanding, without sense perceptions, would have nothin understand. The sense perceptions wen- the variable elements, while the constitutives or categories were the constant elements (akin to Plato's Forms), and were classed under four heads — Quality, Quantity, Relation and Modality; these were the pure forms or "notions of the understanding." For example, take the notion of cause, which comes under the head of Relation, and imagine that the senses supply the mind with the perception of a blow being struck with a hammer, and another perception of the sound which follows; there is no separate perception of the blow causing the sound, the mind supplies the latter part of the idea, and thereby establishes a relation between the two perceptions, enabling them to be understood. The notion of Relation may, of course, be applied to thousands of different and variable combinations of perceptions, itself remaining the constant or invariable element enabling us to understand those different combinations. In this way Kant unified under one head or category numerous dissimilar elements.

Understanding might be called reason in an 'unpurc state, that is, mixed up with sense perceptions. To the extent of this combination the external world, or noumenon, including our minds, is real, even though we never can get at it " in itself " ; but if our minds attempt to transcend these limits, where, for the lack of experienced sense perceptions no proper knowledj possible, they go into the realm oi mere ideas without any substantial backing, ideas which do not represent reality; so, there being no sense perceptions to classify, the notions are not constitutive, and not being any longer connected with the physical are accordingly metaphysical. Though in so far as such notions lead us to acquire more experience, and consequent real knowledge, so do they direct or regulate us; but since

5 5

THINKING

these "regulative" notions are wholly detached from experienced sense perceptions] they constitute apart from understanding; in other words, th<

tute " pure reason."

•• Can [que o] Pure Ri vs< »n " (1781 ). as regulative ideas do not go beyond the 1 of a possible experience! they may lead ns to know

ledge whenever the experience should take place, but reason without that experience can never produce real knowledge. It is on this account that nietapi . can never he a science; nevertheless pure reason cannot help speculating metaphysically. That being so, since

constitutive notions of the Understanding have ahead;. unified sense perceptions into different oi unity

(the different categories), pure reason now goes on to imagine, first, a complete unity of all material things, that is, a material universe, though the understanding, for lack of complete experience, an never grasp it ; second, a unity of all thoughts, sensations 1 . etc.,

in short, all mental things, or a soul, though again the understanding- can never grasp it; and third, a still higher unity of the first and the second, the unity of all. which is God.

Owing to its nature, our reason cannot help raising these prohlems, hut also owing to its nature it cannot solve them. They are Kant's three "regulative" Ideas, though this time not like Plato's, because they lack that definite reality. They must not be confused with Ontology, because even though pure reason cannot think otherwise than that such unities exist, this 1-, no proof that they do so exist apart from our thinkil only proves that we think that way. As already said. these ideas are not in the realm of knowl- they

can only be in that of faith, wherein Knnt said we have sufficient grounds for acting as though isted

and that we have immortal souls and free wills; sufficient grounds for treating those ideas as n certainties, though not demonstrated certainties. But since these moral certitudes are expressed in action. reason ceases to be merely theoretical and becomes piactical, so for Kant's explanation of why such

80 THINKING

should be treated as representing something morally certain we must turn to his account of reason as applied in practice.

" Critique of Practical Reason " (1788). Reason as applied to practical affairs means that those affairs are considered and judged, in virtue of which our conduct is directed. Practical reason is, therefore, only another name for the human will in action. Every considered action is taken in reference to some scheme of conduct, in answer to the questions, what shall I do in this case, or in that? With regard to the different individual cases, each has its own reason ; but when it comes to doing one's duty, this applies to all men, even though it be executed individually; and in Kant's opinion this moral obligation to do one's duty is found in the knowledge each one has of what is right, and which requires obedience to what Kant called the " categorical imperative." The latter may be described as the imperious or commanding voice of conscience which commands us to do what we know to be right, irrespective of whether we like to or not.

Now why did philosophers pay so much attention to morality ? When we remember that economic con- ditions prior to the sixteenth century had produced the Reformation and the consequent dethronement of the Catholic Church as the source of direction in moral conduct, and when we also remember that for another two centuries the economic forces had brought into prominence the new manufacturing class, with its own ideas of what was right, as opposed to those of the Nobility, a development that culminated in the French Revolution of 1789, we can easily understand the type of moral reflex which showed itself during this period. Not knowing the roots of moral reflexes, they imagined morality to be wholly a product of the mind, and, having thrown the more extreme theologians with their supreme mind overboard, had necessarily to attack the problem themselves, for it would never do to leave the world without moral guidance. It has even been supposed that the newer type of thinking produced the French Revolution. However that may be, and we

THINKING 8r

shall see later, during the seventeenth and eight centuries there had been a .^reat number of boob

moral philosophy, wherein each writer tried to show the basis of right action. Mobbes had made morality to a threat extent synonymous with obedience to the 1 . the State. Cudworth (1617 — (688) and Clark (l( 1729) said that true morality, like mathematics, independent of the will of either God or man, it was something true in itself. The third Marl of ShaftesbttT) (1671 — 1713) and Francis Hutcheson (1694 — 1747. 1 Scottish professor) thought that morality turned upon our possession of a natural capacity, a sentiment or inward taste that enabled us to discriminate be: good and bad. Hume (171 1—1776) agreed with the two latter that morality depended upon sentiment rather than reason, but added the idea of utility, so that additional satisfaction was derived from having done something useful. Adam Smith (1723 — 1790) thought we ought to do what we would think other people ought to do under similar circumstances in case we were impartial spectators. Joseph Butler (1692 — 175-'. Bishop of Durham) held to the " manifest authority " oi conscience, tempered by a "reasonable self love,' thought that duty to oneself ought to be considered as well as duty to one's neighbour. Butler, along with Richard Price (1723— 1791, a dissenting minister), were more like Kant than the others, in that they made reason rather than sentiment the basis of morality, hut Kant differed more or less from each of the foregoing by insisting on the unconditional aspect ot his " categorical imperative."

As already explained, his " regulative notions " are unconditioned by experience, because we never have such experience, they are imaginary goals of knowledge at which we aim; but he insists that there is a [ difference between the theoretical aspect of those notions and the " categorical imperative " (the voi conscience), which is also unconditioned, because the latter brings us into relation with other human be it is so strong and manifest throughout society that we cannot get away from it; therefore it has a practical

F

82 THINKING

value over and above the merely theoretical aspect of regulative notions, so that to do one's duty irrespective of anything else is the highest of all human aims. Aristotle had said knowledge was the highest goal. Neoplatonists and Scholastics had thought it should be the "beatific vision" (the ultimate union, or at least communion with God). To Spinoza it was an intellectual love of God. But though the tendency in Germany in Kant's time was to look to knowledge as the superior aim, Kant turned away from this because it was only possible for the few, whereas the per- formance of duty was within the reach of all (even the ignorant peasant, whose " duty " was rapidly taking the form of working for the rising capitalist class, because with Kant, " what was right " meant what was right for this class). He stuck to Reason as the basis of morality to such an extent as to imply that one could be sure that duty was the motive, only when that duty was performed in defiance of personal interest and inclina- tion; he also implied that a duty that was at the same time a pleasure could not be performed from a purely right motive. In nothing was he more insistent than that in our moral judgments it was not feeling or emotion, but solely the principle of reason, that was active. Moreover, it was an individual affair, for if a man did not obey his own conscience his acts were not truly moral, and, since it was as a reasoning being that he made his decision, so did it become necessary to treat other people as being also capable of that reason which implies the necessary freedom for its exercise, because in being aware of the moral law, so is every individual aware also that his will seems to be free; for when he knows he ought to do certain things, he has no doubt that he can both " will " them and do them. From this follows, first, the idea of individual freedom; second, that we recognise the equal freedom of other reasoning beings; and third, the idea of a community of such beings bound together by the consciousness of their obligation to keep the same law.

We have now reached the philosophical expression, or reflex, of those material developments (obtaining in

THINKING

other countries besides France) thai brought about the French Revolution, and it should be interesting to

notice also the close parallel between the philosophic and the political forms of thinking arising from the same

conditions.

PHILOSOPHIC. J'< iLl i tCA] .

i. Free will for the individual, I. Liberty. | ;,.,

2. E ree will for others also, 2. Equality. u] tkr t ■

3. Community among such free wills. 3. Fraternity. J "■**"•

So, Kant would argue, the freedom of the will is

implied by morality, and morality appeals to be in ohedience to the imperious command oi reason. Bui since the will precedes action, it cannot be experienced by the senses, only the results can be so experienced; and since there can be no knowledge apart from experience, it follows that we can never be positive that we have free wills while all the time we are compelled to act as though we have. He deal) similarly with Immortality and God, for we are compelled to go on in a seemingly continual advance towards an ideal which we can never imagine ourselves as attaining (the ideal perfection of the Soul), and also we are compelled to imagine a ruler of the world, in whose government <n it morality is the chief consideration. But though there is no proof of either God, Freedom or Immortality, neither is there disproof; they remain objects of faith. The sufficient grounds for belief Kant found in the thought that without such faith our whole moral life would have no meaning. Therefore, the "categorical imperative " in the every-day life of all men, as compared with the pursuit of knowledge by the lew, distinguishes the moral or " practical " side of a " regulative " idea, which compels as i<> obey, from the speculative or " theoretical " side, which merely directs our endeavour to acquire knowledge.

"Critique ok the Faculty of Judgmi __ In

addition to the phenomena already considered, kant dealt with two other kinds— beauty and adaptation, concerning which his thought ran along the following

84 THINKING

lines. When thinking- of the beauty of an object in nature, we cannot avoid considering it as the work of an intelligence, though greater than that of any human being, much in the same way that when admiring a beautiful statue we think of the intelligence of the artist who produced it. Or, with regard to adaptation, v/e may think of the intelligence of the draughtsman who designs a machine, the parts of which are adapted to each other, in virtue of which they all function as one whole; but in considering the human body with its wonderful adaptation of parts, such that no human mechanic could ever devise or even explain satisfactorily on mechanical lines, we again cannot avoid thinking of such an organism as being the work of an intelligence greater than our own. At first sight this looks like Anaxagoras' or Aristotle's "teleology," but it is not, for though we cannot explain such things without the supposition of a superhuman "will," we are not justified in going the length of saying they could not have come into existence without that " will " or "design"; because even though the supposition is necessary, we must not forget that they are only appearances, and consequently we cannot know the cause "in itself," for we never get in touch with it, and so can never claim definite knowledge of it.

Abstract.— Descartes had separated the Supreme Mind from matter and had then built an ontological bridge across the gulf. Kant destroyed that dogmatic bridge, but left a bridge of faith in things that could neither be proved or disproved. For Kant, there is a real mind, which knows only its own appearances, along with the appearances of a world, which also is real, but it can never know either itself or that real world as they are " in themselves." This real mind operates with sense perceptions of phenomena on the one hand, and its own a priori notions which are applicable to those sense perceptions on the other; to this extent it under- stands. Outside this limited experience the mind operates with its own pure reason, which, for the lack of sense-perceived phenomena, can never reach positive knowledge or what he calls understanding. Reason, in

THINKING 85

its pure state, consists of theoretical or metaphj

speculation. Reason, when applied in practit

the form of morality on the one hand, and certain

• 5 of jud "ii the ether ; 11 for both

(free will and an intelligent designer of the univ< being taken on faith, while the basis for faith itself is found in the necessity for men to live a moral life. Kant did not arrive at unity like his pred ; he-

was a dualist, because he believed in a world ol appearances or phenomena, and also in a world or noumenon that lay for ever at the hack of phenomena, and which constituted the " thing in it-elf." Descartes and his followers gradually brought about the modern distinction between mind and matter. Kant n both, but left the problem of their ultimate nature (nonmena) alone. He turned his attention to the faculty of reason (phenomena), which at this point includes understanding, and so opened the way to the problem of thinking or understanding considered apart from the things that had to be thought about or under stood. He did not solve the problem of understanding, but made a remarkable contribution towards formula- ting it correctly. The problem is not how do we understand other things, but how to understand the understanding itself. The latter question settled, the former disappears.

CHAPTER VII Idealism from Kant to Bergson

Prior to Kant's time there had been growing up the doctrine that human reason should be the guide in all matters; that if man would cease to trust in theological dogma and rely on himself he wrould not go astray, for if things are logical to the mind they must be real in nature, and therefore reason must be the faculty by which man discovers truth. This is Rationalism. But Kant gave the deathblow to rationalism by showing that reason by itself could never produce knowledge, because it lacked experience ; and surely this was amply shown in the philosophical strife we have already seen. Kant thereby showed that metaphysics was impossible as a science. On the other hand, particularly in France, there had also been growing up a narrow mechanical materialism, which attempted to explain all mental processes from the interaction of ponderable matter, a doctrine that, of course, left no opening for faith in the supernatural. But Kant refuted this as well, by teaching that reason alone could produce " regulative " notions amounting to moral certainties, namely, those of God, Immortality and Freedom. So faith, with its cardinal principle of freedom, was reinstated. This shows Kant to be the philosopher of the rising manufacturing or middle class, the Liberals or the bourgeoisie, as they are called, who required freedom from the power of the landlord class.

Kant's influence was so great that the philosophy which preceded him fell into the background, at least in Germany, and his doctrine that understanding can never know the " thing in itself," while all the time it is

86

THINKING

limited by it, underlay the work of many who succeeded

him, for example, Comte, who limited human science to exttmal phenomena, and this only within the

system, thus excluding the science of mind — psychology, and the science of the stars- sidereal astronomy. It also underlay the theory of the " rela- tivity of knowledge " taught by Sir \V. Hamilton |

[856, of Glasgow, later Edinburgh University) and H. L. Mansel (1820 — 1871, of Cosgrove, Northampton- shire, Dean of St. Paul's); and in a different way by Herbert Spencer, who insisted on the limitations of knowledge in order to leave no room for faith in super natural revelation. These relativists did not relv so much upon the nature of our thinking faculties, as upon the fact that all knowledge must consist in n relation between a mind which knows and some object which is known; in other words, a " subject " and an " object." Of course, the existence or recognition of this relation does not do away with the question of whether a thing as it appears to us differs from the "thing in itself" apart from our sense perceptions, and Kant was not without opponents concerning his dualism of noumenon and phenomena. One line of thinker*, who developed the more modern forms of idealism, sprang from that side of Kant which dealt with phenomena, and for the present we are concerned with explaining the chief points in that development.

JOHANX GOTLIEB FICHTE (1762—1814, of Rammenau, Jena, and Berlin) thought there was no need to trouble about a "thing in itself.'* In his opinion there was only one thing, rind that was mind, which, so to speak, divided itself into two in order that the subject, the part that knows, might have an object to think about; hut this was not an individual mind, it was the mind of the world, or mind in general. Berkelev thought that so called external objects were only ideas of individual spirits, but Fichte conceived the notion that nit th:t existed consisted of one total mind, which included all the things we know, as well as that which knows them. It was' an "absolute self." But he, like others, iras

88 THINKING

troubled with the question of morality, and concluded that this total mind split itself in two, in order that one part, that which knows, judges and decides, might use the other part, usually called nature, as an obstacle to be overcome so that the first part could demonstrate its moral character by performing the duty of overcoming nature. He also thought that the second part, or nature, acted as a means of communication between individuals, for the total mind included many individual selves, so that each could practice morality in executing duties to others. With Fichte this complete moral order constituted an "absolute self," which might be called God, and to him there was no other God. His " absolute " was the complete unity of so-called matter and so-called mind, and was limited to what was " in relation," that is, as between knower and known, or subject and object; but it was all mind, there was no matter in itself, the part called matter was regarded as subordinate, and only existed for the other part called mind to plav upon.

FRIEDR'ICH WILHELM JOSEPH von SCHEL- LING (1775 — 1854, of Leonberg, in Wiirtemburg, and Universities of Jena, Munich, Berlin, etc.) differed from Fichte in that he thought of an ultimate reality which underlay both mind and so-called matter, though without any definite character of its own; Ave never got face to face with it, but knew of it by a kind of intuition. He further thought that nature was not subordinate to mind, that is, utilised by the mind for itself to practice morality, because the beauty and design to be found in nature indicated that it was something more than a mere object on which to practice. He therefore conceived the existence of an "absolute something," which, though underlying the relation between that which knows and that which is known, was really outside the relation; that it had an independent reality of its own. Where Fichte's "absolute" consisted of the moral order involved in the relation between knower and known, Schilling's was something wider, a weird kind of God lying outside mind and matter, though permeating both.

THINKING

Since mind and matter were both mental, Schedule's WOrk was really an attempt to COnstrtld a trinity with the human mind a> the basis, and arose from the struggle invoked in explaining matter in terms of mind.

Schelling was followed by GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRlCH HEGEL (1770 1831, of Stutl Jena and Berlin), who thought that Schelhng's "absolute" was altogether too vague. It took no notice of the connection between mind and m which comes into play when we are reflecting about so-called material things, which reflection is the common experience of everybody. He thought that in ordinary daily reflection and discussion, men were actually engaged in tracing out the structure of what he called the Absolute Tdca. With Hegel the Absolute is not something in the background, except that part of it that has not yet been discovered; on the contrary, its very being is in the manifestations of the life and movement of mind and so-called matter. This complete and permanent Idea had existed from all eternity and as men struggled with their problems. found themselves in contradictions, discovered new knowledge which! explained or solved the contradic- tions, and in this way kept advancing, so were they ever more and more coming to a knowledge of the complete Idea, the Absolute.

Hegel agreed that the mind in its advancing required a so-called material world with which it could strive, but that material world was with him only another part of the Idea, in other words, it was mental; all the advancing, then, consisted of the Idea gradually unfolding itself, and was, in fact, simply the evolution of the Idea. This evolution, which appeared in our minds as a kind of argument in which conflicting state- ments were ultimately reconciled in a conclusion, was a revival of dialectics. In it our whole life appears to be constantly changing, so that every conclusion in the argument is but a new starting point in another argument that is to end in a still higher conclusion, and so are we ever attaining greater and greater unity, more and more truth.

90 THINKING

But how are we to recognise truth or reality at any given time amid all this change ? Kant had said that the mathematical parts of knowledge existed in the mind, but not in the things. Hegel asked how could that be ? If truth were not in the things, then all our science is illusion; for example, gravity and the laws of motion. Rather is it that the thing which appears is the reality itself appearing and not something else; and further, if this appearance seems to be reasonable or rational, consistent or logical, it must be real, and being real must be rational, for how could we understand what is not real? How shall we know the real and true, except by the fact that it is intelligible, understandable, rational, reasonable, logical, consistent? Hegel's test of truth, therefore, is that which is reasonable and logical to the mind; for example, to test whether or not our writing desks are real we must touch them, because it is reasonable to test such things by the senses, but to test whether the Idea (God) is real or not, it is reason- able to rely on the " ontological argument," but unreasonable to submit such an idea of intelligibility to the senses; therefore, the truth of all things may be brought to light by putting reasonable questions to oneself or to other people, and as different conclusions are arrived at by this reasoning process, so are we tracing out bit by bit the structure of reality, which is God or the Absolute, and there is no other Absolute.

This method of enquiry, as stated, is dialectic, because it takes the form of an argument, whereby we may find truth at any given time amid a constant -flow of historical development. In applying it Hegel had at his command a much wider knowledge of history than had Plato, consequently the dialectic in his hands came to be of great significance as a method of interpreting history; it constituted his great contribution to modern progress in scientific thinking, for by means of it he propounded the nature of the problem to be solved, namely, the discovery of the law underlying the changes which have taken place in history, or, in short, the law of human progress, and also the method of solving it. He fell short, however, in the actual solution.

THINKING 91

Since the dialectic method deals with a constant How from one thing to another, or, rather, the evolution of one thing out of that which preceded it, it must, of course, consider the relation hetwecn opposite tonus of a contradiction. In the realm of morality it takes into account not only Kant's " categorical imperative." or what ought to he, hut also what U when it might seem to contradict what ought to he. For example, starting from the thought that man has a free will, how can we justify the idea of law, which is the negation or contradiction of freedom? First take the idea that a man is free to do what he likes with his property. When this man enters into relations with other similarly free men, each has to recognise the rights of the others, consequently personal freedom, which was real and true originally, gets curtailed by the rise of a reasonable moral law, which, because reasonable, nozv becomes real, while absolute personal freedom becomes unreal or untrue. This greater unity we may assume, in the first place, to take the form of the family, then, with further development, a wider form in social groups of many families, and a still wider form in the State, until, in the end, the mind finds itself in its highest stage, which is realised, not only in the idea of the State, hut also that of the Monarchy; so that as society develops, personal freedom, which at one time was reasonable, and therefore real or true, becomes at a later sta^e unreasonable or unreal, and no longer true. In this way, through reconciling the contradictions by com- bining all the historical factors, Hegel proves that, taken altogether, what is, at any given time, is what ought to he, and if it ought to be, then it is reasonable and accordingly real.

To Hegel the continual change which has taken place throughout history, and is still taking place, is not hint; less than the dialectic being acted. It is the Idea unfolding itself in its march towards its complete unfolding — the Absolute Idea, and only in such a way could the unfolding take place. (This talking of an absolute end alongside perpetual ehangc is a contradic- tion that is unreconcilable.) It appears as a conflict

92 THINKING

between the wills of different men or groups of men who argue or contend for their particular parts of reality. They each get their corners rubbed off, and out of the contradictory parts comes a reconciliation which is seen by most people to be reasonable, it is therefore real because it is intelligible, logical or consistent. However, later, new contradictions arise, followed by different reconciliations, and of course a different reality; so the older reality is no longer reasonable and becomes unreal, its place being occupied by the newly and more widely reasonable. It must be remembered that all this takes place in the mind, the so-called material world is only a sort of image in the mind of that part of the Absolute Idea which appears as nature in order that the complete mind shall carry out its destiny. Therefore, reality or truth is constantly chang- ing, what is true at one time is untrue at another, because mind has advanced in the meantime and dis- covered an additional part of absolute truth which modifies the previous reality and therefore negates it; a still further advance would in like manner negate the previous negation, and so on and on continually until the complete Idea has been unfolded, but meanwhile what is at any given moment is what ought to be. Is it any wonder the tyrannical Prussian Government of Hegel's day welcomed such a comforting philosophy?

Just as Kant's doctrine of freedom was the philosophy of the middle class since it voiced their need for " liberty, equality and fraternity," so, thirty years later, Hegel's doctrine that " what is, is what ought to be " was simply a philosophical expression of the same material conditions when the middle class had got what they wanted and were crying halt; but to get the full force of this it is necessary to remember that prior to the French Revolution of 1789, the Liberals, or manufactur- ing element, needed freedom from the restrictions imposed on them by the landed nobility, though they were not powerful enough to get it without the aid of the lower class of working people. At the time of the Revolution the two classes (middle class and working class) had carried all before them, the working class

Tin X K I 93

thought they had conquered liberty, and so they had,

hut not for themselves, for as soon as the nobility were

overthrown and their power broken, the middle

had got all the freedom they required and had no wish

to share it with the working class. They, the middle class, were to be the new master class, it was therefore dangerous to allow liberty to the working class whom they were to exploit. The march towards liberty had gone far enough for them, so they called a halt and eventually restored the Monarchy, though in a limited form. Hegel's doctrine, then, was a mental refle the period of restoration, while that of Kant represented the period of attack. Kant's was a war cry for freedom, Hegel's was a hymn of thanksgiving that things had reached a settled state. But here came the contradiction that ruined Hegel's philosophy, for his method was dialectic (changing), his system static (settled).

I tegel's philosophy had a short but brilliant run. His followers ultimately split into two camps. The right wing clung to the static side, believing that " wh is what ought to be "; this, we have seen, was pleasing to the Prussian Government. But that same Govern- ment's " unjust " taxation, harsh laws and refusal to allow to the German middle class any democratic voice in government, led to the formation of the left wing, known as the Young Hegelians. The left wing accepted the dialectical part of Hegel but rejected the static, and in the hands of Marx and Engels, who sprang from the Young Hegelians, and later, Dietzgen, the dialectical view led for the first time to scientific results in thinking, because it constituted the method employed, or rather the view taken, in building up the science of society.

Meanwhile there were wars, misery and seemingly nothing but angry contention. When all the philosophers one after the other had tried to solve the question of what was moral, right, just, etc., it appeared that things were worse than ever. This was the state of affairs that gained a hearing for ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER (1788— 1860, of Dantzig, Berlin and Frankfort (in .Main), who, like He k his

94 THINKING

root notion of the human will from Kant. But while Hegel thought the will was merely the means by which the mind struggled with nature and found out the real good in the Idea, Schopenhauer thought it was the only thing that existed; but, in order to express itself, it divided itself into " will " (the reality that strives to attain its desires) on the one hand, and " knowledge " (its own creation) on the other. The will, he thought, employed knowledge for the mere purpose of expressing its own desire as " the will to live." But he further thought the will was essentially bad) and the only good that came out of all the striving was that the reason ultimately became aware that complete satisfac- tion cannot be attained, and therefore the best thing to do is to give up striving, to renounce all interest in any satisfaction to be got in life, and to calmly await death. It reminds one of certain aspects of Buddhism and Theosophy.

However, the material conditions still continued to throw up their mental reflexes. After the German and French Revolutions of 1848 and 1852, capital was producing wealth, vice and luxury at the top of society, and poverty, vice and misery at the bottom; little men here and tnere were struggling to become capitalists, small capitalists struggling to become greater capitalists while the great ones had already entered on the struggle to determine which particular group should become world dominant; it was more than ever the era of competitive struggle resulting from the enormously-increased machine production and the consequent cross investments of capital tending towards the unification of ownership of tools and materials. The better tools caused an overproduction of certain classes of goods and led to fierce international competition for markets. All this fierce struggle was expressed philosophically by FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844 — 1900, of Rocken and Basel) who imagined that those who resigned themselves to their fate deserved nothing better, for the human "will to live," if rightly understood, was not a bad thing, but, on the contrary, the best thing we possessed; and far

THINKING

from despondently waiting for death, we ought to be continually working with might and main to develop those dominant qualities whereby In the struggle existence more vigorous races would be produced, men

who would be as far above the men of today as the latter are ahove the beasts; this became known as the

doctrine of the Superman. Here, again, the advance oi science was reflected in philosophy, for in 1859 Darwin had published the results of his biological researches in

which he expounded his doctrine of the " origin ol species " by "natural selection " and "the survival ol the fittest."

I luring the century preceding Nietzsche's philosophy, Kant and his German followers, as already stated, had treated the mind as capable of producing ideas without the aid of the senses, but it took a long time for this to affect English thought. Englishmen for a couple o! centuries had been materialists, developing in the main along the lines laid down by Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, namely, that truth was to In- sought by Studying nature, and that ideas could not be produced except by means of sensation. They sought to account for ideas by the same method as that used in explaining nature, and treated ideas as being made up, so 1 < * speak, of mental atoms. They tried to explain mental work as the "association of ideas," and sought to find the la.. that association. For example, Hume explained the notion of a cause as being composed of, or built up from, often repeated associations of a particular kind. These men were known as the " LMI'IKICAL PSYCHOLOGISTS" and include David llartly (1705 — 1757. of Halifax 1, lames Mill (1773 [836,

01 Xorthwater Bridge, in Forfarshire, later London 1, John Stuart Mill (1806 [873, of London, son of lames Mill), and Alexander Bain 1 [818 [QM, Prof, of I at Aberdeen). Between Hartly and I. Mill there \tere Thomas Reid (1710- 1796, oi St radian, Kincardine- shire; succeeded Adam Smith in Glasgow as Moral Philosopher) and Dugald Stewart (175$— 1828, of Edinburgh), who founded the Scottish school, of which Sir \V. Hamilton was a leading light; the general

96 THINKING

feature of this school was a confidence in common- sense and intuitive convictions, which made them opponents of all forms of philosophic scepticism.

If we remember that philosophers had thrown theological direction in moral matters overboard and were still searching for the origin of morality in the human mind, we shall see it to be only natural that those who tried to explain all forms of thought as being due to sensation should attempt to explain morality as arising from a combination of the feelings of pleasure and pain; and in this way arose the school of Utili- tarianism represented by JEREMY BENTHAM (1747 —1832, of London) and JOHN S. MILL. When asked to explain the idea of " virture for its own sake" on the basis of utilitarianism, they thought it arose from the " association of ideas " wherein a man who had learned by experience that he got most pleasure by being virtuous, gradually got into the habit of being virtuous, so that the practice of virtue, which originally had been only a means of attaining pleasure, eventually came to be the end in view. However, this is a view developed from the standpoint of an individual, it does not explain that conviction which most people have of there being a "right" which is right for everybody; nor does it explain the so-called universal mathematical truths. Herbert Spencer suggested that the latter ideas might be accounted for by assuming that our ancestors had had the experience necessary to form the ideas, and that our inherent convictions had been handed down to us through heredity; but this was no explanation, for whichever way we look at it, no amount of individual experience, however far back, could account for what is absolutely and universally true, because no individual could ever experience something that is universal.

By degrees, however, English sensationalism came to be influenced by German idealism. THOMAS HILL GREEN (1836— 1882, of Birkin, in Yorkshire, and Oxford University), who pointed out that Hume had long ago reduced the sensation theory to scepticism, was a student of Kant and Hegel; he called attention to

THINKING 97

the fact that the objects of natural science which

outside the mind could not be reduced to a combination of feelings; nor could a common or universal " good " or "happiness" or "right" be understood by indi- viduals as being composed of their feelings in total since their feelings were only momentary. Therefore, he argued, there must be, in addition to the objects outside the mind, a permanent mind to remember those feelings, and also, this mind must be capable of knowing what is always and everywhere true, it must be a univi mind, or God, of which individual minds were so-called reproductions. Others, not taking into consideration that the mind is always engaged in seeking unity, thought the universal mind was nothing but an abstraction, so they held that only individual minds need be considered. WILLIAM JAMES (1N42— 1910, Prof, of Phil, at Harvard) taught a theory known as " pragmatism," based on the independence of individual minds and their ability to arrive at truth by finding out what is practicable in relation to individual interests. Altogether, an idealist strain gradually permeated English materialism, but in the latter part of the nine- teenth century there were reversions which showed themselves in what has been called " realism," though with a different meaning as compared with the realism of the Scholastics.

Realism, a reflex of German materialism, is really a dualism of matter and force, of which we shall see more in the next chapter. This dualism, added to the doctrine of evolution, found expression in HKkBERT SPENCER'S "Synthetic Philosophy," wherein he attempted to show by the " persistence of force" the evolution from atoms to societies. The concept of biological evolution when applied t < » society, treats society as a biological organism and directs philosophic thought towards the study of the biological principle of " life," as expressed in the evolution of society; the ever-present " urge " which drives society onward. George Bernard Shaw calls this "urge" the "life force." Since this active living principle appears to operate whether we are conscious

G

98 THINKING

of it or not, there arise the questions of its relation to consciousness on the one hand and to mere mechanism on the other; these questions lie at the root of modern psychology, they are the two parts of our old question as to the connection between mind and matter, because " life " is here treated as an entity expressing itself partly in mind and partly in matter. As far as philosophy is concerned, the whole thing put simply means that philosophers have definitely dropped the word " God " and substituted that of " Life," but they are still where they were.

On the idealist side, the final outburst, up to date, comes from HENRI BERGSON (Prof, at the College of France). With Bergson, truth is the life which pervades the universe, or, rather, which is the universe. It consists of that general consciousness or intuition, of which instinct (as in bees and ants) is a more highly- concentrated form, while intellect (as in man), which has evolved along a different line, is the most highly concentrated. Its essence is an eternally-changing now, an absolute time duration which we apprehend in intuition. This intuitive duration is identical with being or existence, for we know intuitively that we are living and this life or reality is nothing but movement, a move- ment of pure time. Matter is an illusion produced by part of the total movement taking place in a reverse direction to other currents, thus giving to these time currents the appearance of material objects. Material objects are, therefore, nothing but the obstacles that each current presents to the other just at the points where the now is becoming the future. This conception, of matter being, by illusion, the materialised impact of two time currents, is a reflex of the electron theory, wherein matter is materialised energy resulting from the impact of two electric forces that reduce each other to inertia, the electron, the base of ponderable matter, being the point of electrical inertia. In Bergson's working out, the different parts of consciousness act upon and therefore condition each other; so, considered as parts, are not free, but, when taken altogether are conditioned only by their own internal character, and

THINKINi

consequently have a freedom. This freedom holds alike for a whole individual or the whole of life. There! when we acl intuitively (is a whole we act fr< ich an

act is a creative act and it i> such acts thai constitute the evolutionary process. Creative evolution is ac the free surging onward of some part of univei sal "life or Spirit overcoming some other part. B does

not offer a reconciliation of mind and matter, but rather a new view wherein the question of dualism arise, since they are both one life pi oce - -. 1 1 i followers call this reality " mind," not because it is ethereal as contrasted with gross matter, but because it is the active, living, intelligent principle of existence. In expounding this philosophy, Bergson becomes the modern mystic, his intuitive surging creation being a close parallel to the ecstacy of Plotinus.

Excluding minor differences, it should be plain that modern philosophy runs very nearly the same course as ancient philosophy; for when the Milesians with " open " minds started investigations which gav< to problems of ultimate reality, philosophy developed its " great men," its sophists and sceptics, its dialectics, its atoms, its questions of morality wherein Epicureans based conduct upon pleasure, the Sceptics upon the common-sense of their day, the Stoics sinking bark into faith while the Neoplatonists fizzled out in a state of ecstatic supernatural mysticism ; and - similar manner did modern philosophy begin with Descartes' investigations based on doubt, followed by the permanent natures of God, the scepticism of Hume, the materialism based on atomic science, the utilitarianism of Mill based on pleasure, the prior return to faith by Kant, the dialectics of Hegel, only in the end to fizzle out in the idealistic mysticism of the natural, as in Bergson and Shaw. And so must it always be, that those who start from mind without authority, end in mysticism; while those who start from mind along with authority, end in faith.

Mas it been without results? No, not quite. Kant cleared the problem by showing it to be one of thinking, Hegel applied the dialectic method to a wide know led c

ioo THINKING

of history, but to see how this in the hands of Marx led to the solution of the problem of thinking, it will be necessary to go back to the seventeenth century in order to follow modern philosophy through the development of its materialist aspects.

( II AM kk \ II! Materialism from Roger Bacon to Marx

(Although some of the following points have already been mentioned in connection with other phases of the story, they are repeated in this chapter for the sake of completeness. )

Philosophic materialism originally presented itself in the form of natural philosophy, which later tame to be called natural science. Positive science, in so far as any beginning can be assigned to it. appeared with ROGER BACON (1214 — 1294). It ha^ been assigned to R. Bacon, notwithstanding that there had been many natural philosophers before him, because prior to his time it had been the custom in solving problems to rely for results on a process of deductive reasoning, after the manner of Aristotle. Deduction consists in taking some statement as being true and then deducing conclusions from it, but R. Bacon thought that such a method was not sufficient in itself and that we ought to take great care in establishing the firsl statement, or premise, for if that were false so would the conclusion be false however perfect our logic. His method was, therefore, to base all his firsl statements on obst facts, about which he formed opinions, then by deduction argued what oughl to follow and finally t< his conclusions by experimenting t<> see it those con elusions did actually follow. This method we see at a glance to be the correct one because it tests Hie results obtained, which, if found not to agree with the first opinion, leads to a modification of that opinion. It consists of observation and experiment, is called the inductive method, and, along with the material investigated, forms the groundwork of all science.

101

102 THINKING

DUNS SCOTUS (1274— 1308), the British School- man and contemporary of R. Bacon, asked "Is it not possible for matter to think?" In this he made theology preach materialism by supposing that God could have produced such a miracle had he wished. He was, we remember, partly a nominalist, and nominalism which arose from natural philosophy was the first form of materialism.

Three centuries later FRANCIS BACON (1561— - 1626) applied the inductive method more widely in natural philosophy, so that, although not the originator of the method, as is sometimes said, he was, neverthe- less, the starting point of English materialism. He sought by observation and experiment in relation to natural objects to explain the works of God. Bacon, therefore, never escaped from theistic prejudice, even though he thought that all knowledge was based on the experience of the senses. His basis was accordingly matter, but his conclusions were vitiated by a theological bias.

HOBBES (1588 — 1679) continued the development by reducing Bacon's teaching to something like a system. He was not disinclined to the thought of an eternal power that one might call God if it suited, but could conceive no knowledge of that God except what came to us by our senses in contact with material things; accordingly, we could know nothing about the existence of God, apart from material things. He believed that anything real must occupy space, and consequently be mathematical; also, that all changes imply motion, and must accordingly be mechanical; these two ideas were the clear and distinct notions of his contemporary, Descartes. That any other attributes of bodies, such as colour, warmth, etc., could be real he would not allow. Therefore, with him as with Descartes, the physical universe could be explained on mechanical lines. In the realm of morality, since all knowledge is due to sensation, all moral distinctions were traced to self interest. In so far as Hobbes made material the source of the idea of God, so did he shatter the theism of Bacon, without, however, furnishing the

i mi:, i

proof of Bacon's principle that knowledge from

sensation.

It was JOIIX LOCKE (1632 17041 (more fully treated in the fifth chapter as a background to Iiork<lcv and Hume) who supplied the beginning of that proof. lie supported the idea of sensation being tin- basis of knowledge, by his theory that understanding was wholly dependent on experience, but that experience v.., two kinds — sensation and reflection; the reflection taking place in relation to what was in t lie mind as the result of sense perception (Leibnitz and Berkeley, as we have seen, criticised this position from the idealistic standpoint, see pp. 70-2). His doctrine still retained traces of theology to the extent of a belief in a Creator, since something could not come from nothing; but the.se were eventually dissipated by a succession of brilliant scientist — philosophers who gradually got rid of the Supreme Mind, though to this day they are confused with respect to the problem of the human mind. However, the basic thought of the sensational school remained in England, and with succeeding generations of discovery, invention and studv, developed into the modern science and modern rationalism that may be typified by such names as Darwin, Huxley and Spencer. The philosophic characteristic of these thinkers has been referred to as " realism," which, as opposed to idealism of the Kantian and Hegelian types, means that external objects have a real existence; it is a product of the later nineteenth century science, whose findings were in conflict with the remains of supernaturalism, which, from the rationalists' standpoint, had to be fought, and is really a dualism of matter and force, or, in other words, it is a materialist doctrine that zcas never fully worked out. The English branch of it was in opposi- tion to German idealism, which permeated English thought through the work of students of Kant and Hegel, but it received much support from German materialism. Therefore, since the time of Locke, the development of materialism represents a long fight between supernatural religion and idealist philosophy, on the one side, and natural science on the other, so,

104 THINKING

although it is not our purpose to follow the develop- ment of science from the standpoint of science, nevertheless, since scientific achievements have had a great effect on both religion and philosophy, they cannot be disregarded.

Before the time of Locke, Copernicus (1473— 1543) had laid the base of modern astronomy with his heliocentric theory, which contradicted previous religious teaching. Vesalius (1514 — 1564) had made a start in the direction of modern anatomy. Gilbert (1540 — 1603) had discovered the principles of terrestrial magnetism. Lippershey's telescope had appeared in 1608. Galeleo (1564 — 1642) had contributed the principles of falling bodies, etc. Kepler (1571 — 1630) had added the laws of motion. At about Locke's time Harvey (1578 — 1657) discovered the circulation of the blood, which considerably modified previous physiology. Boyle (1627 — 1691) discovered the atomic laws, which constituted the basis of modern chemistry, and which, as applied to natural processes, ruined much of the teaching of the Church. Newton (1642 — 1721) gave us the spectroscope, the planetary laws of motion, and the universal law of gravitation. Hutton (1726 — 1797) worked out a systematic foundation of geology (1795), which contradicted previous ideas of the creation and the age of the earth. Kant in 1757 and Laplace in 1796 formulated the nebular theory, with a similar result. Priestley (1733 — 1804) had many discoveries in gases to his credit, and in combination with Scheele discovered oxygen, which was finally established by Lavoisier (1743 — 1794). Cuvier (1769 — 1832) founded the science of comparative anatomy. Karl von Baer (1792 — 1876) discovered the mammalian ovum — the basis of compara- tive embryology, which, more than any other science, established man's relationship to the animal world. Wohler (1802 — 1882) in 1828 dealt a great blow to religious belief by producing urea synthetically; this was thought to be a compound peculiar to animal life, and as such part of the handiwork of God. But probably the greatest blow of all was given by Darwin (1809 — 1882), who in 1859 published his theory of the " Origin of

THINKING 105

Species." Of course one could enumerate exampl much greater length, l>ut sufficient 1ms been said t"

indicate the trend of thought that undermined belief in the supernatural.

The same scientific development had its influence in philosophy, which wo have seen reflected in the realism of the nineteenth century; but this realistic thought is itself undergoing a change consequent upon further scientific development. Most thinking in connection with the various sciences has long been freed from the supernatural, nevertheless until quite recently it stuck at trying" to prove that mind is a mere product of ponderable matter. Later students are taking up the attitude that mind can never be material, that it indeed is not even physical, but that mind and matter are two different orders of being, running parallel to each other. The latter idea, which has received support from the electron theory, arises as a contradictory reflex from the idea that matter is nothing but materialised energy; so, they argue, if thought IS energised matter then it should be measurable in terms of "work"' done, just as are other forms of energy; and, since it is not measurable they conclude that it is not physical. Such a mode of reasoning, however, is a long way from proof, its weakness lying in the fact that, if it were true, nothing could be called physical until it had been measured; for example, the scent of a flower is admittedly physical, yet it cannot be said to be capable of measurement. It will be seen, therefore, that while these people are presumably scientific in their own fields of enquiry, they appear to be just as ignorant as many others when dealing with the problem of the mind, the obvious reason being that they employ the scientific method in their own special work, while outside that sphere they remain mere speculative wondcrers. \\ t shall see more of this in Part II. of our enquiry: for the present we must return to the sensational school of Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, and follow it in its migration to France.

France in the eighteenth century was in a stat< feudalism, with, first, a superior territorial clergy:

106 THINKING

second, the nobility; and third, the small landholders, who were striving to become what is now called the middle class (the serf or common labourer was "no class " at all). The small landholders were oppressed; there was economic servitude for the masses, combined with a corrupt State reeking- with debauchery and general mental demoralisation. This was the field in which English materialism took root and registered its protest against the tyranny and corruption alike in morals, religion and State; in fact against all existing forms of authoritative restraint. The lower orders had lost all patience, for in addition to the corruption just mentioned, 'he new machinery being introduced from England was developing in the industrial areas a proletariat on the one hand and an industrial capitalist class on the other. In earlier times the Renaissance had been influential in producing a mental reaction against traditional thought, and in the period we are treating a development of that reaction was exemplified in the writings of men such as Rousseau and Voltaire; the rising movement also developed a school of materialist-atheists who, because they were engaged in producing a great Encyclopaedia, came to be known as the Encyclopaedists. Among these were several men of note — Diderot (the editor), D'Alembert, Montesqieu, Mirabeau and Baron D'Holbach, the last of whom, under the name of Miraband, wrote a work entitled " The System of Nature." This work is representative of French materialism; it attempts an explanation of the whole of nature, including man and his mind, on strictly mechanical lines. We may here see why Engels calls Bacon, Hobbes and Locke the fathers of eighteenth century materialists.

The argument running through "The System of Nature " starts from the assumption that everything that is, is natural, and is perpetually changing, the changes being due to motion. Therefore, everything in the universe is some combination or other of ponderable matter and motion. Mind is a product of so much brain matter, and takes effect according to the material constitution of any particular brain plus its

THINKU ir7

subsequent experience. In addition to the motion oi bodies, such as vehicles, the moving oi a table, which can be seen and which excites no particular attention, there is much motion that cannot be

What we call tbc Soul is really motion of the latter kind, but man not understanding it has presupposed a self- moving Soid of a supernatural order of being. There

are no innate ideas, because the intellectual faculties depend upon sen.se perceptions, though thoughl itself being motion may be the object of thought, just as a given direction of motion may be changed by a ; acting in a different direction.

Morality arises from tbc difference in the constitu tions of different individuals. Since individuals vary according" to tbeir material or bodily constitution in addition to tbeir experiences, and since each tri> that which pleases him according to bis constitution, there arises a diversity of interests. In the conflict of interests, those individuals who have a knowledge <i nature's laws and are therefore reasoning beings, come to see that the greatest amount of good accrues to the individual only when the wishes of other individuals are taken into account; and so arise the laws of morals, the general love of man for man, justice in politics and law, etc.

I >f course, such doctrines were opposed to tyrannical churches, governments and ( iod. They constituted the rationalisation of the material interests of the middle class, and accordingly appeared as the consciously worked out mental stock-in-trade of the revolutionists of 1789, who, in place of the former morality of Church. State and feudal nobility, set up the moral standards of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, based upon human reason. The laws underlying reason in the human mind were supposed to be eternal in the eternal matter and motion. With these one-sided materialists, matter was primary, while thought, being a mere product of brain substance plus experience, was secondary.

This teaching, though it does away with the Supreme mind of God as the source of morality, neverti remains very much at sea when trying to extract moral

108 THINKING

notions from the human mind, for after treating mind as an effect of matter, it elevates it to the control of matter by the fact that some men by the aid of their reason first find out the natural laws, which are deemed to be eternal, and then impose those laws on other men who, for lack of this knowledge, are deemed unreason- able. And. of course, " it stands to reason " that if natural laws are eternal, so will men who understand those laws be able to arrive at " eternally " correct systems of morality, politics, laws and truth. It all amounts to this, that they had elevated their own reason over that of their opponents, but did not know what to do with it when they had got it. They had scornfully cast on one side the transcendental speculations about the Supreme mind with its eternal moralities of Church and State, only in the end to develop motions of "eternal'" love, freedom, equality, justice, etc., as a result of worshipping the human mind, and to this extent they remained idealists, though otherwise doing much good work on the philosophic materialist field. While Kant hailed the Revolution and freedom, he nevertheless, as stated in the last chapter, refuted these rationalist materialists on the philosophical field, thereby leaving room for faith in the supernatural, and thus safeguarding the basis of the authority of the middle class over the working class.

We have now to notice how materialism broke out in Germany in the nineteenth century; the story is much the same. With Austria's defeat by Napoleon at Austerlitz (1805) and Prussia's similar fate at Jena (1806), the dying embers of the Holy Roman Empire, whose flame had gone out at Constantinople in 1453, parted with their last curl of smoke. This resulted in a number of small German States acknowledging Napoleon as their protector. After the fall of Napoleon the princes of those States agreed to unite in a confederation, and in each State a constitutional government was to be set up; this was echoing the results of the French Revolution, for that nearly went too far on the side of the proletariat, so in Germany the middle class tried to get a voice in the government,

THINKING

without revolution. Prussia and Austria, how< were opposed to popular representation. The Pru Government was oppressive and unjust from the stand

point of the middle class; it believed in its eternal rights and did not see why it should give its people a We have seen that it found justification in He statement, " all that is reasonable is real, ami all that is real is reasonable," and. accordingly, " what is, is what ought to Ik- " ; so l legel was in favour w ith tin.- Pm Government, hut this Government was not in favour

with those people who wanted a voice in BUCh public affairs as taxation, and who did not believe that the laws

then existing were " what ought to he," consequently, since the Government persistently dilly-dallied with the question of popular representation, a revolution became

necessary.

The whole affair, arising from the economic needs of the times, was, of course, political, hut open opposition to the Prussian Government was dangerous worl the prologue to the German revolution of [848 1 which found its immediate incentive in the French revolution of 1848), wherein the German middle class conquered " liberty," took the form of philosophical arguments in the press, which quite naturally criticised Hegel's idealism and the prevalent religion. At first the new- philosophers fell back on French materialism in their tight against positive religion, which fight was also indirectly a political one, so it was not surprising that their philosophy contained the same essential glorifica- tion of the human mind after having dispensed with the Almighty one; this may be seen in the work of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 — 1872, of Landshut, Erlanden and Bruckberg), who put human love as the guide in place of reason. Later ones, including Carl vogt (1817 1895, of Giessen, German biologist), facob Mjoleschotte (1822— 1893, Dutch physiologist, of Bois-le-Duc, settled in Italy), and Ludwig Buchner < [824 1899, "'. Darm- stadt and Tubingen, physician'), were more like the modern English rationalists of the Herbert Spencer type, and believed in nothing but matter and fo Haeckel (1834— 1919, of Potsdam and Jena, biolo

no THINKING

even thought he had discovered the Soul cells. Though considerably more advanced from the stand- point of science, yet, from the standpoint of philosophy, the nineteenth century materialists (excepting those of the proletarian movement) were crude and mechanical, like those of the eighteenth century, in that ponderable matter was their base; so it is not necessary to work through their arguments, since they follow the same main lines and may be read in " Force and Matter " — an English translation (1864) of Biichner's " Kraft und

Stoff "(1855).

At this point we must turn to the beginnings of proletarian science. The originators of proletarian social science (so called because it is not accepted by the university representatives of the capitalist class, but which, nevertheless, is nothing short of the science of society) sprang from Hegel's left wing, the " Young Hegelians." They were materialists, though in a different sense from those just treated. FEUER- BACH, KARL MARX (1818— 1883, of Treves, Cologne, Paris and London) and FRIEDRICH ENGELS (1820 — 1895, °f Barmen, Paris, London and Manchester) were of this school ; but Feuerbach belonged partly to the crude mechanicalists described by Engels as the " metaphysical materialists," because when they had finished with mechanical explana- tions they fell back on "pure" reason, though in Feuerbach's case it took the form of sentiment. If we remember that Hegel, though an idealist, was a dialectician, and that this was his chief contribu- tion to philosophy, we shall see why Feuerbach, who broke through Hegel's " system " but retained the dialectic " method " of explaining all things as evolving out of other things, became a materialist dialectician. He believed that the evolution of society had in the past been along materialist lines, but he never could cut quite clear from the mechanical mode of thinking, and so, to escape the consequences, finally fell into the trap of an eternal human love as the directive force for the future. In this he was just like the other materialists, who prated of " pure " reason, that is, he was an idealist

THINK I' in

with regard to the future. Nevertheless, he <li<l work, ami stands at the beginning of socialist pnilo sophy; he is the halfway house from Hegel's dialectic idealism to Marx and Engels' dialectic materialism, from which arises scientific socialism; Marx and Ei are accordingly the real pioneers in Bocial

During the nineteenth century the work of H< gave increased momentum to the study of history, Marx, one of the students, took the dialectic method from him, I >nt applied it from the standpoinl of materialism. Marx sought to show the law of .social

progress worked out in materialist dialectic-, and one of his great discoveries was that history from early communism had been a series of struggles between

different classes. From special studies of those

Struggles, plus the economic and social institutions ot their periods, he arrived at his concept oi " historical materialism," which is, that the economic mode of production (which means the way in which people their living), determines the general form of society, and the general mental attitude of any given period.

It determines the kind of slavery, the kind of trade. the conflicting interests of different -roups and then- consequent political struggles. As a result of these Struggles, the conquerers express their interests in various kinds of laws and of governments; meanwhile justifying themselves by claiming sanction from on High through different forms of religion and philo- sophy, while on the other hand those who are in opposition contend for an opposite view. Consequently, if the opposition should represent the economic interests of a rising class, it has necessarily to attack the existing political, legal, religious and philosophical institutions. This accounts for all rising movements being irreligious from the standpoint of those already in power, while developing a religion that serves their own purp it also accounts for the final rising movement, namely, that of the working class being non-religious. Literature also does but express the thought of its period, therefore, taken altogether, the political, l< religious, philosophical and literary aspects ol thinl

ii2 THINKING

ultimately arise from and necessarily correspond to given modes of producing- wealth; as the mode changes so does the thinking; and in the end the changes depend upon the evolution of tools or methods which enable wealth to be produced with a less expenditure of energy than formerly — in this lies the essence of progress. The evolution of Society expresses the evolution of tools. This doctrine constitutes what is known as the " Materialistic Conception of History."

But the study of modes of production, apart from the purely technical side, expresses itself theoretically in the science of economics, wherein Marx discovered " the twofold nature of labour." This idea lies at the root of his theory of value. These generalisations could not have been discovered before, because a scientific theory of value necessarily concerns commodity production, and could not be thoroughly worked out until such production had reached an advanced stage, for not until the system of paying wages had separated more sharply the middle class from the working class, could it be clearly seen that the worker sells his labour power, that is, his strength or ability (physical and mental) to perform labour, but not the labour itself. Once the latter idea became clear the secret of the source of profit was out, and then a great many other things became clear. Marx' contributions to social science are the materialistic conception of history, and a well worked out theory of surplus value (profit in general).

After being exiled from the continent, Marx settled in England, where he had the chance of studying capital in its original home. In this work he was assisted by Engels, and between them they formulated the general proposition just outlined (Engels gives the greater part of the credit to Marx). They did this in the ordinary scientific manner, by first collecting historical material, forming a general opinion regarding it, deducing what ought to take place if their general opinion were correct, and finally noting the general agreement between their arguments and observed facts. By this method they arrived at their great generalisation which, though given at the end of the fourth chapter, will bear

THINKING n ;

repeating — "In every historical epoch the prevailing modi- <>i economic production and exchange, and Un- social organisation necessarily following from it. form the basis upon which is built up and from which alone can be explained the- political and intellectual history ol that epoch." But, though Marx and Engels supplied the general theory it remained for JOSEPH DIETZ< (1828 -1888, a working tanner born at Blankenberg) to work out the more detailed aspects of the mental reflex . this he did by showing the identity of mental work with the rest of nature. Dietzgen's work will he treated in Part II. of this book, so we leave it for the present, but before closing our historical survey, it may he advisable to refer to some curious products of bourgeois (middle class) idealism in relation to the misery id' the proletariat (working class).

As the modern working class was evolved by capitalist development, and the resultant luxury on the one hand and misery on the other became more marked, there were not wanting "high souled " people to point out the " injustice " of such a state of things, and to suggest "remedies"; they thought it was only necessary to think of some scheme of betterment and then to appl) it; these people are usually called Utopians.

From early times there had been Utopias (impractic- able dreams of a better society) of different kinds, such as Plato's "Republic," Aristotle's "Politics,' the levelling tendencies of Christianity in the Roman Period with SS. Augustine, Basil and Benedict's " rules of life," including personal poverty, obedience to the laws of God, chastity, etc., and excluding any material considerations that would interfere with the contempla- tion of (iod; the whole pointing to a community ol hit crests. Even in Feudal times there was a soil "t community in land, there were landholders hut not land- owners; each landholder held of somebody higher in the social scale, and these ultimately of the King> i"'- Church), who held it in trust for all his subjects. Through the Middle Ages there were CommunitK the monastic orders of Dominicans and Franciscans; the latter attacked not only the wealthy but even the

11

H4 THINKING

Pope on the question of the rights of private ownership of property. In 1381 John Ball, of Kent, quoting an earlier writer, asked " When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? "

But before this time these mediaeval ideas of communism were being attacked, for Aquinas had begun in contradistinction to others of his order (Dominican) to defend private property; his teaching on this point may be summarised in the sentence : "A distinction of property is decidedly in accord with a peaceful social life." With him Nature makes no division of property, common property was sufficient before the Fall of man, but the Fall, and the consequent wickedness of man, introduced the supremacy of might, which makes the hope of peaceful intercourse to lie in agreement regard- ing division of property. Therefore, in the interests of peace (!) private property is justified, notwithstanding that "by nature all things are in common." Such teaching admits of either view, and both sides may quote him in support, but, in certain cases, he reserves the right of God, expressed through the Church or through the State, to decide either way. Here we have the eternal rights of the Church, ultimately from God.

In law, as distinct from religion, the ethics of property holding took a different turn and expressed themselves in antagonism to the supremacy of the Church. Feudal landholding, from the King downward, consisted of a series of contracts between man and man, and for the adjustment of grievances there existed the courts baron and customary, the sokes of privileged townships and the courts Christian (clerical criminal courts). There were quarrels between King, Barons and Church, for power in law, which ended in the King's favour. Here we have the supreme authority of the King as the eternal right. After this, came reform movements ending in constitutional governments based on the eternal rights of the people as being superior to either King or Church, so the common good became divine, but only to the extent of the middle class.

Then came the Industrial Revolution about 1760, with a new mode of production (the factory system), bringing

THINKIN< us

with it a mosl shocking development of the already existing proletariat, and in tin- early nineti titury

there began modern Utopian Socialism both in France and in England, in which the greater c(>ntni<')> ^mnl was demanded in the name of the eternal principles of humanity; numerous " schemes " were propounded, and numerous sections of the working class are still playing the same game. In France, Saint-Simon thought thai an aristocracy of ability should be the rul< urier

proposed the organisation of society into small com- munities each 01 four hundred families living on a square league of land; Louis Blanc worked for a State organisation of industry and Government workshops; I'roudhon tried to introduce into political economy the eternal principles of " justice " and " liberty " by means of a fanciful arrangement of the method of exchange. In England it took the form of Chartism, based upon the eternal rights of the people. Robert ( >wen tried the experiment oi industry run on communal line>. but when he attacked religion his socialism was called atheism. As opposed to this there arose an enthusiastic band oi Christian socialists finding their inspiration in the Sermon on the Mount; they included Maurice, Kin and Ludlow. There was also the Anarchist school with ideas based on the eternal and immutable laws ol nature, they therefore recognised no law of man man, nor any God; among these maj be mentioned Stirner, Bakunine, and, later, though in a small way. Paraf J aval, while Tolstoy was one of a different type, who denied the law of man but affirmed the law of I rod. Along with the above, Ruskin may be taken as typifying those who worship " the beautiful " as one means towards social regeneration.

I Mi the industrial field the proletariat have orgai in trade unions which again e\pre>s an abstract eternal justice in the form oi "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work"; while on the political field the) have organised political parties who seek to apply " hlW tarian " principles in government, or to e humanitarian reforms in different aspects of social life.

n6 THINKING

It will be found that at the root of the activities of all the foregoing-, whether they be Christian or anti- Christian, Theists or Atheists, there exists a,n idealist philosophy expressed in the first case as based upon the eternal truths of God, and in the second case upon the eternal principles of human love, or reason, from which arise eternal justice, eternal right, eternal freedom, equality and fraternity and many other eternal sentimentalities. They even go so far as claiming to be advanced in their thinking, while, as we shall see in Part II., their idealism is all along preventing them from seeing the limits to practicability.

In closing this Introduction to the History of Thinking, if we may dignify such a small and rough work with that title, we may remember the evolution of brains, the production of religion and mythology through ignorance of nature; that the Ionian philosophers turned to nature and found nothing but change; later ones turned to examine thinking and threw nature on one side, thus casting out just the material needed, although as yet it was too early in the economic development of the world to solve such a problem. They thought they had discovered the permanent principle in mind, but their own logic reduced their systems to scepticism and faith. Faith lived on for many centuries with philosophy as a kitchen help until a revival of logic led the said kitchen help to demand more and more days " off," and finally to give a couple of centuries' notice of leaving. Philosophy ultimately freed itself from theology or nearly so, but by that time a new method of investigating all sorts of questions had sprung up, the inductive, or scientific method, that brought in its train a positive science which likewise freed itself from philosophy. In science, men are agreed as to the accuracy of the laws discovered after they have passed the experimental stage, and by means of those laws can predict results (though it must be remembered that changing conditions bring new laws). But, notwithstanding the successes of science in fields other than mental, philosophy imagined thought was produced by pure neason, though no two

THINKING ir7

philosophers could evi r agree, and they have rem

in that unscientific State to this day. Meanwhile, Kant

turned his attention to examining reason. From hi> time materialism and idealism became more decidedly separated but ultimately got reconciled by I

though towards the end of the nineteenth century the cry " Back to Kant " had been raised as a iralve

against the rising materialism. Dietzgen, for the first time in the history of the world, made thinking into a

science, and consequently philosophy, as such, comes to an end except for some mystic rags with which a few grown-up children love to play.