This consists in limiting the prescriptions of the law to a few points, for the most part negative, leaving it to the initiative and conscience of individuals to order their life and conversation as they like, provided only they do not interfere with the same freedom in others. In practice liberal countries have never reached this ideal of peaceful anarchy, but have continued to enforce state education, monogamy, the vested rights of property, and sometimes military service. But within whatever limits, liberty is understood to lie in the individual being left alone, so that he may express his personal impulses as he pleases in word and action.
A philosopher can readily see that this liberal ideal implies a certain view about the relations of man in the universe. It implies that the ultimate environment, divine or natural, is either chaotic in itself or undiscoverable by human science, and that human nature, too, is either radically various or only determinable in a few essentials, round which individual variations play ad libitum. For this reason no normal religion, science, art, or way of happiness can be prescribed. These remain always open, even in their foundations, for each man to arrange for himself. The more things are essentially unsettled and optional, the more liberty of this sort there may safely be in the world and the deeper it may run.
Man, however, is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but hates to stand alone in his opinions. And he is so imitative that what he thinks he most wishes to do is whatever he sees other people doing. Hence if compulsory organization disappears a thousand free and private organizations at once take its place. Virginal lived in compulsory unison, having only one unquestioned religion, one style of art, one political order, one common spring of laughter and tears. Liberalism has come to remove the strain and the trammels of these traditions without as yet uprooting the traditions themselves. Most people retain their preliberal heritage and hardly remember that they are legally free to abandon it and to sample any and every other form of life. Liberalism does not go very deep; it is an adventitious principle, a mere loosening of an older structure. For that reason it brings to all who felt cramped and ill-suited such comfort and relief. It offers them an escape from all sorts of accidental tyrannies. It opens to them that sweet, scholarly, tenderly moral, critically superior attitude of mind which Matthew Arnold called culture.
Primitive, dragooned, unanimous ages cannot possess culture. What they possess is what the Germans call a Kultur, some type or other of manners, laws, implements, arts, religion. When these national possessions are perused and relished by some individual who does not take them for granted and who understands and judges them as if from outside, his acquaintance with them becomes an element in his culture; and if he is at home in many such forms of life and thought, his culture is the more perfect. It should ideally be culled from everywhere. Culture is a triumph of the individual over society. It is his way of profiting intellectually by a world he has not helped to make.
Culture requires liberalism for its foundation, and liberalism requires culture for its crown. It is culture that integrates in imagination the activities which liberalism so dangerously disperses in practice. Out of the public disarray of beliefs and efforts it gathers its private collection of curiosities, much as amateurs stock their museums with fragments of ancient works. It possesses a wealth of vicarious experience and historical insight which comforts it for having nothing of its own to contribute to history. The man of culture abounds in discriminating sentiments; he lives under the distant influence of exalted minds; his familiar thoughts at breakfast are intimate appreciations of poetry and art, and if his culture is really mellow, he sometimes smiles a little at his own culture.
Culture came into the modern world with the renaissance, when personal humours and remote inspiration broke in upon the consecrated mediaeval mind. Piety and learning had their intrinsic charms, but, after all, they had been cultivated for the sake of ulterior duties and benefits, and in order to appropriate and hand down the revealed wisdom which opened the way to heaven. Culture, on the contrary, had no ulterior purpose, no forced unity. It was an aroma inhaled by those who walked in the evening in the garden of life. Far from being a means to religion, it threw religion also into the context of human experience, and touched its mysteries and quarrels with judgement and elegance. It liberated the studious mind from obligatory or national discipline, and as far as possible from all bonds of time, place, utility, and co-operation, kindling sympathies by preference with what was most exotic, and compensating the mind for the ignominious necessity of having to be, in practical matters, local and partisan. Culture was courteous, open, unconscious of self; it was the joy of living every life but one's own. And its moral side—for everything has its moral side—lay in the just judgements it fostered, the clear sense it awakened of the different qualities and values of things. The scale of values established by the man of culture might sometimes be fanciful or frivolous, but he was always most scrupulous, according to his lights, in distinguishing the better from the worse. This conscientiousness, after all, is the only form of morality that a liberal society can insist upon.
The days of liberalism are numbered. First the horrors of competition discredited it, and now the trial of war, which it foolishly thought it could elude. The vogue of culture, too, has declined. We see that the man whose success is merely personal—the actor, the sophist, the millionaire, the aesthete—is incurably vulgar. The rightness of liberalism is exactly proportional to the diversity of human nature, to its vague hold on its ideals. Where this vagueness and play of variation stop, and they stop not far below the surface, the sphere of public organization should begin. It is in the subsoil of uniformity, of tradition, of dire necessity that human welfare is rooted, together with wisdom and unaffected art, and the flowers of culture that do not draw their sap from that soil are only paper flowers.
To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together. Liberals believe that free inquiry, free invention, free association, and free trade are sure to produce prosperity. I have no doubt they are right in this; the nineteenth century, that golden age of liberalism, certainly saw a great increase in wealth, in science, and in comforts. What the ancients had before them was a different side of the question; they had no experience of liberalism; they expected to be state-ridden in their religion, their customs, and their military service; even in their personal and family morals they did not begrudge the strictest discipline; their states needed to be intensely unified, being small and in constant danger of total destruction. Under these circumstances it seemed clear to them that prosperity, however it might have been produced, was dangerous to liberty. Prosperity brought power; and when a people exercises control over other peoples its government becomes ponderous even at home; its elaborate machinery cannot be stopped, and can hardly be mended; the imperial people becomes the slave of its commitments. Moreover, prosperity requires inequalities of function and creates inequalities of fortune; and both too much work and too much wealth kill liberty in the individual. They involve subjection to things; and this is contrary to what the ancients, who had the pride of noble animals, called freedom. Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement, and the range of his thoughts.
I often wonder, looking at my rich friends, how far their possessions are facilities and how far they are impediments. The telephone, for instance, is a facility if you wish to be in many places at once and to attend to anything that may turn up; it is an impediment if you are happy where you are and in what you are doing. Public motor-vehicles, public libraries, and public attendants (such as waiters in hotels, when they wait) are a convenience, which even the impecunious may enjoy; but private automobiles, private collections of books or pictures, and private servants are, to my thinking, an encumbrance: but then I am an old fogy and almost an ancient philosopher, and I don't count. I prize civilization, being bred in towns and liking to hear and to see what new things people are up to. I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
Perhaps what liberalism aspires to marry with liberty is not so much prosperity as progress. Progress means continued change for the better; and it is obvious that liberty will conduce to progress in all those things, such as writing poetry, which a man can pursue without aid or interference from others: where aid is requisite and interference probable, as in politics, liberty conduces to progress only in so far as people are unanimous, and spontaneously wish to move in the same direction. Now what is the direction of change which seems progress to liberals? A pure liberal might reply, The direction of liberty itself: the ideal is that every man should move in whatever direction he likes, with the aid of such as agree with him, and without interfering with those who disagree. Liberty so conceived would be identical with happiness, with spontaneous life, blamelessly and safely lived; and the impulse of liberalism, to give everybody what he wants, in so far as that is possible, would be identical with simple kindness. Benevolence was one of the chief motives in liberalism in the beginning, and many a liberal is still full of kindness in his private capacity; but politically, as a liberal, he is something more than kind. The direction in which many, or even most, people would like to move fills him with disgust and indignation; he does not at all wish them to be happy, unless they can be happy on his own diet; and being a reformer and a philanthropist, he exerts himself to turn all men into the sort of men he likes, so as to be able to like them. It would be selfish, he thinks, to let people alone. They must be helped, and not merely helped to what they desire—that might really be very bad for them—but helped onwards, upwards, in the right direction. Progress could not be rightly placed in a smaller population, a simpler economy, more moral diversity between nations, and stricter moral discipline in each of them. That would be progress backwards, and if it made people happier, it would not make the liberal so. Progress, if it is to please him, must continue in the direction in which the nineteenth century progressed, towards vast numbers, material complexity, moral uniformity, and economic interdependence. The best little boy, for instance, according to the liberal ideal, desires to be washed, to go to school, to do Swedish exercises, and to learn everything out of books. But perhaps the individual little boy (and according to the liberal philosophy his individuality is sacred, and the only judge of what is good or true for him is his own consciousness) desires to go dirty, to make mud-pies in the street, and to learn everything by experience or by report from older boys. When the philanthropist runs up to the rescue, this little ingrate snivels at him the very principle of liberal liberty, "Let me alone." To inform such an urchin that he does not know what is good for him, that he is a slave to bad habits and devilish instincts, that true freedom for him can only come of correcting himself, until he has learned to find happiness in virtue—plainly that would be to abandon liberalism, and to preach the classical doctrine that the good is not liberty but wisdom. Liberalism was a protest against just such assumptions of authority. It emphatically refused to pursue an eventual stoical freedom, absurdly so called, which was to come when we had given up everything we really wanted—the mock freedom of service. In the presence of the little boy liberal philosophy takes a middle course. It is convinced—though it would not do to tell him so prematurely—that he must be allowed to go dirty for a time, until sufficient experience of filth teaches him how much more comfortable it is to be clean; also that he will go to school of his own accord if the books have pictures enough in them, and if the teacher begins by showing him how to make superior mud-pies. As to morals and religion, the boy and his companions will evolve the appropriate ones in time out of their own experience, and no others would be genuine.
Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs. If you refuse to move in the prescribed direction, you are not simply different, you are arrested and perverse. The savage must not remain a savage, nor the nun a nun, and China must not keep its wall. If the animals remain animals it is somehow through a failure of the will in them, and very sad. Classic liberty, though only a name for stubborn independence, and obedience to one's own nature, was too free, in one way, for the modern liberal. It accepted all sorts of perfections, animal, human, and divine, as final after their kind, each the seat of a sufficient virtue and happiness. It was polytheistic. Between master and slave, between man and woman, it admitted no moral advance or development; they were, or might be, equally perfect. Inequality was honourable; amongst the humblest there could be dignity and sweetness; the higher snobbery would have been absurd, because if you were not content to be what you were now, how could you ever be content with anything? But the transcendental principle of progress is pantheistic. It requires everything to be ill at ease in its own house; no one can be really free or happy but all must be tossed, like herded emigrants, on the same compulsory voyage, to the same unhomely destination. The world came from a nebula, and to a nebula it returns. In the interval, happiness is not to be found in being a fixed star, as bright and pure as possible, even if only for a season; happiness is to flow and dissolve in sympathy with one's higher destiny.
The motion of progress is thus merged with that of universal evolution, dropping the element of liberty and even of improvement. Nevertheless, in the political expression of liberalism, liberty took the first innings. Protestants began by asserting the right of private Judgement in interpreting scripture; transcendentalists ended by asserting the divine right of the individual to impose his own spirit on everything he touched. His duty to himself, which was also his deepest instinct, was to suck in from the widest possible field all that was congenial to him, and to reject, down to his very centre, whatever might thwart or offend. Sometimes he carried his consistency in egotism to the length of denying that anything he could not digest could possibly exist, or that the material world and foreign nations were more than ideal pawns in the game he played with himself for his self-development. Even when not initiated into these transcendental mysteries, he was filled with practical self-trust, the desire to give himself freedom, and the belief that he deserved it. There was no need of exploring anything he was not tempted to explore; he had an equal right to his opinion, whatever the limits of his knowledge; and he should be coerced as little as possible in his action. In specific matters, for the sake of expediency, he might be willing to yield to the majority; but only when his vote had been counted, and as a sort of insurance against being disturbed in his residual liberty.
There was a general conviction behind all these maxims, that tradition corrupts experience. All sensation—which is the test of matters of fact—is somebody's sensation; all reasoning is somebody's reasoning, and vitally persuasive as it first comes; but when transmitted the evidence loses its edge, words drop their full meaning, and inert conventions falsify the insights of those who had instituted them. Therefore, reform, revision, restatement are perpetually required: any individual, according to this view, who honestly corrected tradition was sure to improve upon it. Whatsoever was not the fresh handiwork of the soul and true to its present demand was bad for that soul. A man without traditions, if he could only be materially well equipped, would be purer, more rational, more virtuous than if he had been an heir to anything. Weh dir, dass du ein Enkel bist! Blessed are the orphans for they shall deserve to have children; blessed the American! Philosophy should be transcendental, history romantic and focussed in one's own country, politics democratic, and art individual and above convention. Variety in religious dogma would only prove the truth—that is, the inwardness—of inspiration.
Yet if this transcendental freedom had been the whole of liberalism, would not the animals, such of them at least as are not gregarious, have been the most perfect liberals? Are they not ruled wholly from within? Do they not enjoy complete freedom of conscience and of expression? Does Mrs. Grundy interfere with their spontaneous actions? Are they ever compelled to fight except by their own impulse and in their private interest? Yet it was not the ideal of liberalism to return to nature; far from it. It admonished the dogs not to bark and bite, even if, in the words of the sacred poet, "it is their nature to." Dogs, according to transcendental philosophy, ought to improve their nature, and to behave better. A chief part of the liberal inspiration was the love of peace, safety, comfort, and general information; it aimed at stable wealth, it insisted on education, it venerated culture. It was wholly out of sympathy with the wilder instincts of man, with the love of foraging, of hunting, of fighting, of plotting, of carousing, or of doing penance. It had an acute, a sickening horror of suffering; to be cruel was devilish and to be hardened to pain was brutal. I am afraid liberalism was hopelessly pre-Nietzschean; it was Victorian; it was tame. In inviting every man to be free and autonomous it assumed that, once free, he would wish to be rich, to be educated, and to be demure. How could he possibly fail to covet a way of life which, in the eyes of liberals, was so obviously the best? It must have been a painful surprise to them, and most inexplicable, that hardly anybody who has had a taste of the liberal system has ever liked it.
What about liberty in love? If there is one ingenuous and winged creature among the immortals, it is Eros; the freer and more innocent love is, the more it will flutter, the farther it will range, and the higher it will soar. But at the touch of matter, of conditions, of consequences, how all its freedom shrivels, or turns into tragedy! What prohibitions, what hypocrisies, what responsibilities, what sorrows! The progress of civilization compels love to respect the limits set to it by earlier vows, by age, sex, class, race, religion, blood relationship, and even fictitious relationship; bounds of which the impertinent Eros himself knows nothing. Society smothers the imp altogether in the long christening-clothes of domestic affection and religious duty. What was once a sensuous intoxication, a mystic rapture, an enchanted friendship, becomes all a question of money, of habit, of children. British liberalism has been particularly cruel to love; in the Victorian era all its amiable impulses were reputed indecent, until a marriage certificate suddenly rendered them godly, though still unmentionable. And what liberty does even the latest radicalism offer to the heart? Liberty to be divorced; divorced at great expense, with shabby perjuries and public scandal, probably in order to be at once married again, until the next divorce. Was it not franker and nobler to leave love, as in Spain, to the poets; to let the stripling play the guitar as much as he liked in the moonlight, exchange passionate glances, whisper daily at the lattice, and then, dressing the bride in black, to dismiss free fancy at the church door, saying: Henceforth let thy names be charity and fidelity and obedience?
It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy; but liberalism may bring large opportunities for achievement in a man's outward life. It intensifies—because it renders attainable—the lure of public distinction, of luxury, of love surrounded by refined pleasures. The liberal state stimulates the imagination of an ambitious man to the highest degree. Those who have a good start in the universal competition, or sharp wits, or audacity, will find plenty of prizes awaiting them. With the pride of wealth, when it is great, there comes the pride of munificence; in the suburbs of wealth there is culture, and in its service there is science. When science can minister to wealth and intelligence to dominion, both can be carried on the shoulders of the plutocracy which dominates the liberal state; and they can fill it with innumerable comforts and marvellous inventions. At the same time, nothing will hinder the weaker members of rich families from becoming clergymen or even scholars or artists; or they may range over the five continents, hunt whatever wild beasts remain in the jungle, and write books about savages.
Whether these prizes offered by liberal society are worth winning, I cannot say from experience, never having desired them; but the aspects of modern life which any one may observe, and the analytic picture of it which the novelists supply, are not very attractive. Wealth is always, even when most secure, full of itch and fear; worry about health, children, religion, marriage, servants; and the awful question of where to live, when one may live anywhere, and yet all seems to depend on the choice. For the politician, politics are less important than his private affairs, and less interesting than bridge; and he has always a party, or a wicked opposition, on which to throw the blame if his careless measures turn out badly. No one in office can be a true statesman, because a true statesman is consistent, and public opinion will never long support any consistent course. What the successful man in modern society really most cares about is love; love for him is a curious mixture of sensuality, vanity, and friendship; it lights up all the world of his thought and action with its secret and unsteady flame. Even when mutual and legal, it seems to be three-quarters anxiety and sorrow; for if nothing worse happens to lovers, they grow old. I hear no laughter among the rich which is not forced and nervous. I find no sense of moral security amongst them, no happy freedom, no mastery over anything. Yet this is the very cream of liberal life, the brilliant success for the sake of which Christendom was overturned, and the dull peasantry elevated into factory-hands, shopkeepers, and chauffeurs. When the lists are open to all, and the one aim of life is to live as much as possible like the rich, the majority must needs be discouraged. The same task is proposed to unequal strengths, and the competition emphasizes the inequality. There was more encouragement for mediocre people when happiness was set before them in mediocrity, or in excellence in some special craft. Now the mass, hopelessly out of the running in the race for wealth, falls out and drifts into squalor. Since there is liberty, the listless man will work as little and drink as much as he can; he will crawl into whatever tenement he can get cheapest, seek the society in which least effort is demanded and least shame is felt, have as many children as improvidence sends him, let himself out, at a pinch, for whatever service and whatever wages he can obtain, drift into some syndicated servitude or some great migration, or sink in solitude into the deepest misery. He then becomes a denizen of those slimy quarters, under the shadow of railway bridges, breweries, and gas-works, where the blear lights of a public-house peer through the rain at every corner, and offer him the one joy remaining in life; for joy is not to be mentioned in the same breath as the female prowling by the door, hardly less befuddled and bedraggled than the lurching idlers whom she endeavours to entice; but perhaps God does not see all this, because a pall hangs over it perpetually of impenetrable smoke. The liberal system, which sought to raise the individual, has degraded the masses; and this on so vast a scale and to so pitiable a degree, that the other element in liberalism, philanthropic zeal, has come again to the fore. Liberty go hang, say the new radicals; let us save the people. Liberal legislation, which was to have reduced government to the minimum of police control, now has undertaken public education, social reform, and even the management of industry.
This happy people can read. It supports a press conforming to the tastes of the common man, or rather to such tastes as common men can have in common; for the best in each is not diffused enough to be catered for in public. Moreover, this press is audaciously managed by some adventitious power, which guides it for its own purposes, commercial or sectarian. Superstitions old and new thrive in this infected atmosphere; they are now all treated with a curious respect, as if nobody could have anything to object to them. It is all a scramble of prejudices and rumours; whatever first catches the ear becomes a nucleus for all further presumptions and sympathies. Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of all propagandas—those insults to human nature—is carried on by the most expert psychological methods, which the art of advertising has discovered; for instance, by always repeating a lie, when it has been exposed, instead of retracting it. The world at large is deafened; but each propaganda makes its little knot of proselytes, and inspires them with a new readiness to persecute and to suffer in the sacred cause. The only question is, which propaganda can first materially reach the greatest number of persons, and can most efficaciously quench all the others. At present, it looks as if the German, the Catholic, and the communist propaganda had the best chances; but these three are divergent essentially (though against a common enemy they may work for a while together, as they did during this war), and they appeal to different weaknesses of human nature; they are alike, however, in being equally illiberal, equally "rücksichtlos" and "böse"? equally regardless of the harm they may do, and accounting it all an added glory, like baiting the devil. By giving a free rein to such propagandas, and by disgusting the people with too much optimism, toleration, and neutrality, liberalism has introduced a new reign of unqualified ill-will. Hatred and wilfulness are everywhere; nations and classes are called to life on purpose to embody them; they are summoned by their leaders to shake off the lethargy of contentment and to become conscious of their existence and of their terrible wrongs. These propagandas have taken shape in the blue sky of liberalism, like so many summer clouds; they seem airships sailing under a flag of truce; but they are engines of war, and on the first occasion they will hoist their true colours, and break the peace which allowed them to cruise over us so leisurely. Each will try to establish its universal ascendancy by force, in contempt of personal freedom, or the voice of majorities. It will rely, against the apathy and vagueness of the million, on concentrated zeal in its adepts. Minorities everywhere have their way; and majorities, grown familiar with projects that at first shocked them, decide one fine morning that there may be no harm in them after all, and follow like sheep. Every trade, sect, private company, and aspiring nation, finding some one to lead it, asserts itself "ruthlessly" against every other. Incipient formations in the body politic, cutting across and subverting its old constitution, eat one another up, like different species of animals; and the combat can never cease except some day, perhaps, for lack of combatants. Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age against a new crop of rebels.
For myself, even if I could live to see it, I should not be afraid of the future domination, whatever it may be. One has to live in some age, under some fashion; I have found, in different times and places, the liberal, the Catholic, and the German air quite possible to breathe; nor, I am sure, would communism be without its advantages to a free mind, and its splendid emotions. Fanatics, as Tacitus said of the Jews or Christians, are consumed with hatred of the human race, which offends them; yet they are themselves human; and nature in them takes its revenge, and something reasonable and sweet bubbles up out of the very fountain of their madness. Once established in the world the new dispensation forms a ruling caste, a conventional morality, a standard of honour; safety and happiness soften the heart of the tyrant. Aristocracy knows how to kiss the ruddy cheeks of its tenants' children; and before mounting its thoroughbred horse at the park gates, it pats him with a gloved hand, and gives him a lump of sugar; nor does it forget to ask the groom, with a kindly interest, when he is setting out for the war. Poor flunkey! The demagogues will tell him he is a fool, to let himself be dragooned into a regiment, and marched off to endure untold privations, death, or ghastly wounds, all for some fantastic reason which is nothing to him. It is a hard fate; but can this world promise anybody anything better? For the moment he will have a smart uniform; beers and lasses will be obtainable; many comrades will march by his side; and he may return, if he is lucky, to work again in his master's stables, lounge at the public-house, and bounce his children on his knee amongst the hollyhocks before his cottage. Would the demagogues give him better prospects, or prove better masters? Would he be happier with no masters at all? Consider the demagogues themselves, and their history. They found themselves in the extreme of misery; but even this is a sort of distinction, and marks off a new species, seizing new weapons in the struggle for existence. The scum of the earth gathers itself together, becomes a criminal or a revolutionary society, finds some visionary or some cosmopolitan agitator to lead it, establishes its own code of ethics, imposes the desperate discipline of outlaws upon its members, and prepares to rend the free society that allowed it to exist. It is astonishing with what docility masses of Englishmen, supposed to be jealous of their personal liberty, will obey such a revolutionary junta, that taxes and commands them, and decrees when they shall starve and when they shall fight. I suspect that the working-people of the towns no longer have what was called the British character. Their forced unanimity in action and passion is like that of the ages of faith; its inspiration, like that of early Christianity, comes from a few apostles, perhaps foreign Jews, men who in the beginning had visions of some millennium; and the cohesion of the faithful is maintained afterwards by preaching, by custom, by persecution, and by murder. Yet it is intelligible that the most earnest liberals, who in so far as they were advocates of liberty fostered these conspiracies, in so far as they are philanthropists should applaud them, and feel the need of this new tyranny. They save liberal principles by saying that they applaud it only provisionally as a necessary means of freeing the people. But of freeing the people from what? From the consequences of freedom.
England has been curiously served by her philosophers. Personally and in their first intention they have usually been sturdy Britons; but their scope has seldom been equal to their sagacity in particular matters, they have not divined the ultimate drift of their ideas, and they have often ended by adopting, a little blankly and doggedly, some foreign or fantastic system, apparently most inexpressive of John Bull. Nevertheless the exotic tendency in so many British philosophers, as in so many disaffected British poets, is itself a mark of the British character. The crust of convention has solidified too soon, and the suppressed fires issue in little erratic streams that seem of an alien substance. In speculation as in other things the Englishman trusts his inner man; his impulse is to soliloquize even in science. At the same time his inner man dislikes to be too articulate; he is soon at a stand in direct self-expression; and as a poet may take to describing nature or Italian passions, so a philosopher may pick up some alien doctrine that comes to hand, and that seems friendly to his mind; not understanding it very well, perhaps, in its native quality, but making it a living companion in his own lucubrations, and a symbol for what remains hidden but revered in his breast. In this way the Bible or Plato may serve him to found sects upon exclusively expressing his own feelings; or remaining a plain Englishman to all practical purposes, he may become, for his greater private satisfaction, a revolutionary atheist, a spiritualist, a Catholic, or a Buddhist. In such strange allegiances something may be due to wayward learning, or to genuine plasticity of mind and power to feel as very different souls have felt in other climes; but a part is unmistakable helplessness and dire need, and a part, perhaps, affectation.
When his own resources fail, however, the most obvious easement and support for the English inner man are the classical and Anglican traditions he has been bred in, when these are not too nicely defined nor too slavishly followed. Most characteristic is John Bull the theologian, instinct with heresy and practising compromise; but the rationalistic John Bull is very like him in his alternative way of securing the same supreme object of thinking what he likes to think. In both cases he embraces his opinions much more because they are wholesome and important than because they are certain or clear. Opinions, he feels, should be summary and safe; they should express the lessons of experience.
As he conceives it at first, experience does not merely exist, it teaches. In a sporadic fashion it yields sound satisfactions, clear warnings, plain facts. It admonishes him to trust his senses, the reports of reputable travellers and naturalists, Christianity, and the British constitution, all when duly revised; and on the other hand to shun popery, scholastic quibbles, absolutism, and revolution. But evidently experience could never teach him these things if his inner man did not contribute its decided cravings and aversions. His inner man detests dictation and loves opportunity; in ideas it prefers timeliness to finality. Therefore, when his philosophers come upon the scene they cannot appeal to him by coercive proofs, nor by the impressive architecture of their systems, nor by disentangling and setting clearly before him any ultimate ideal. To win his ear they must rather drive his current convictions home, nearer to their source in himself; they must invite him to concentrate his empiricism. For instance, he trusts his senses; and the philosophers can deeply interest him if they ask him what, precisely, his senses vouch for. Is it external things? But can he actually see anything except colours, or touch anything except resistances? Can he feel anything except his own sensations? By appealing to his honesty, the sophists catch him in a trap, and he changes his mind in trying to utter it. It will appear presently, as he pursues his inquiry, that he has no knowledge of those external things and events which he had been so sure of; they were mere empty notions, and his genuine experience contained nothing but the pulses of his inner life, changes in his ideas and vital temperature, which an accurate autobiography might record. And the more scrupulously he considers these pulses of his inner life the less and less will he find in them. He and his whole experience will soon be reduced to a series of sensations in single file, with nothing behind them. In reality even this is too much. Although the inertia of psychological conventions and the romantic habit of self-consciousness have kept him from perceiving it, even to this day, yet the fact that a sensation is occurring is not revealed by that sensation itself; no date, place, or relation to a mind is included in its deliverance, and no relation to anything before or beyond; so that the bare datum of sensation is an aesthetic being, not a mental one; an ideal term, not an event; a universal essence, not a particular fact; and immersion in sense or in absolute immediate experience, when animal faith and intelligence are taken away from it, would remove from us every vestige of the notion that anything exists or that anything happens. But without pushing analysis so far, the empirical philosophers left John Bull, when he listened to them, singularly bereft of those comfortable impedimenta with which he had expected to travel through life—without a body, without an environment, without a ground, or any natural perfection or destiny, for his moral being. He had loved exploration, and had looked forward with the flush of confidence to the knowledge and power which his discoveries would bring him; but now he saw that all discoveries were incalculable, arbitrary, and provisional, since they were not truly discoveries, but only developments.
Here was an odd transformation. The self-educated merchants and indignant reformers who, thumping their desks dogmatically, had appealed so roundly to the evidence of their senses, little expected that their philosophy was directed to turning them in the end into inarticulate sensualists, rapt in omphalic contemplation of their states of mind. Some academic idealists, disliking this result, which cast a slur on the pre-eminence of spirituality and learning, and yet not being willing or able to give up the method by which that result had been reached, sought to push the inquiry further, and to come out of the wood on quite the other side. My sensations, they said, since I can now survey the whole series they form, must all exist together in my present apprehension; and as I cannot know them except in this single and present glance, they never can have existed out of it; so that I am not really a series of sensations, but only the idea that I am a series of sensations; in other words, I have become a single sensation instead of many. To make this clearer the same philosophers added that this single sensation or thought, which is what I really am, is also God. Experience now turned out not to be anything that goes on or happens or is endured; it is the theme of an immutable divine contemplation and divine satisfaction. I am God in so far as I think and approve; but the chequered experience which I supposed myself to be undergoing is merely imputed to myself by God and me in our thinking.
This second conclusion, like the first, has its value for some temperaments. It brings suddenly before us, as if it were an accomplished fact, the innate ideal of the intellect: to see the changing aspects of all things from above, in their true eternal relations. But this ideal, too, is utterly disparate from that practical experience and prevision which John Bull prizes so highly and thinks he possesses; indeed, the sublimity of this view lies precisely in its tendency to freeze and submerge all experience, transmuting hard facts and anxious events into painted ships upon a painted ocean, and for our stumbling and unfinished progress substituting a bound volume of travels.
What false step could bring British philosophy, in its gropings, to conclusions so un-English that even those who feel compelled to propose them do so shamefacedly, with many euphemisms and convenient confusions, or even fail altogether to understand the tremendous paradoxes they are repeating? It was a false step at which Hobbes halted, which Locke took unsuspectingly, and which sent Berkeley and Hume head over heels: the assumption that facts are known immediately. In reality none of the facts which the sturdy Briton feels that he knows—and they are the true facts of nature and of moral life—would be known to him if he were without tentative intelligence and instinctive animal faith; indeed, without these the senses would have no virtue and would inform us of nothing; and cows would not see grass nor horses hay, but only green or yellow patches, like rapt empirical philosophers. When Hobbes said that no discourse whatsoever can end in absolute knowledge of fact, he uttered a great truth, but he implied a great error, since he implied that sense—meaning the senseless sensations of idiots—could give such knowledge; whereas the absolute datum in sense is just as ideal, and just as little a fact, as the deliverance of the most theoretical discourse; and absolute knowledge—if we call such apprehension knowledge—can seize only some aesthetic or logical term, without any given date, place, or connection in experience. Empiricism in the end must substitute these ideal essences, on the ground that they are the only data, for the facts of nature—facts which animal reactions and the beliefs expressing them are requisite to discover, and which science defines by the cumulative use of reason. In making this substitution empiricism passes against its will into sensualism or idealism. Then John Bull and his philosophers part company: he sticks manfully to his confused conventional opinions, which after all give him a very tolerable knowledge of the facts; while they go digging for an absolute knowledge of fact, which is impossible, in an intuitive cloudland where there are only aesthetic essences. Hence the bankruptcy of their enterprise. Immediate data are the counters of experience, but they are the money of empiricism.
To many an Englishman the human head seems too luxuriant. With its quantities of superfluous words and ideas, it grows periodically hot and messy, and needs a thorough cropping and scrubbing. To this end, William of Occam long ago invented his razor: entia non multiplicanda praeter necessitatem; a maxim calculated to shave the British inner man clean, and make a roundhead of him, not to say a blockhead. That everything is "nothing but" something else, probably inferior to it, became in time a sort of refrain in his politics and philosophy. He saw that reflection was constantly embroidering on the facts; but did he suppose that the pattern of things was really simpler than that of ideas, or did he feel that, however elaborate things might be, thought at least might be simple? At any rate, he aimed instinctively at economy of terms, retrenchment in belief, reduction of theory to the irreducible minimum. If theory was not useful, what was the use of it? And certainly all that can be said for some theories is that perhaps they are useful; and when ideas are merely useful, being worthless in themselves and absorbing human caloric, the less we require of them the better. Thought might then be merely a means to a life without thought, and belief a door to a heaven where no beliefs were expected; all speech might be like the curt words one says to the waiter, in the hope of presently dining in silence; and all looking might be looking out, as in crossing a crowded street, ending in the blessed peace of not having to look any more.
Occam's razor has gradually shorn British and German philosophy of the notions of substance and cause, matter and God, truth and the soul. Sometimes these terms were declared to stand for nothing whatever, because (as in the case of matter and substance) if I reduced myself to a state of artificial stupidity I might for a moment stop short of the conception of them. More often (as in the case of the soul) the term was declared to stand for something real, which, however, was "nothing but" something else. Of course, all words and thoughts stand for something else; and the question is only whether we can find another word or thought that will express the reality better. Thus, if I said that the soul was "nothing but" a series of sensations, I should soon have to add that this series, to make up a soul, must arise in the same animal body, and must be capable of being eventually surveyed and recalled together; while I should have to assign to some other obscure agency those unconscious vital functions which were formerly attributed to the soul in forming and governing the body, and breeding the passions; functions without which my series of sensations would hardly be what it is. I am not confident that all this laboured psychology makes things much clearer in the end, or does not multiply entities without necessity; since where I had simply spoken of the soul, I should now have to speak of sensations, series, possibility, synthesis, personal identity, the transcendental unity of apperception, and the unconscious mind. Something is doubtless gained by coining these modern and questionable expressions, since they indicate true complexities in the facts, while a poetic term like "soul" covers them only by pointing the finger of childish wonder at them, without analysis. Nature is far more complicated than any language or philosophy, and the more these refine, the closer they can fit. The anxiety of the honest Occam to stick to the facts, and pare his thoughts to the quick, had this justification in it, that sometimes our images and distinctions are misplaced. Grammar, usurping the rôle of physics, created metaphysics, the trouble with which is not at all that it multiplies entities, since no metaphysician can invent anything that did not lie from all eternity in the realm of essence, like the plot of unwritten novels, waiting for some one with wit enough to think of it. The trouble is rather that the metaphysician probably gives his favourite essences the wrong status. These beings may well be absent from the time and place to which he hastily assigns them; they may even be incongruous altogether with what happens to exist anywhere. What happens to exist is perhaps what he thinks he is describing, or what, like Occam, he would like to describe if he could; but he is probably not able. Yet that doesn't matter so much as he imagines. What happens to exist can take very good care of itself, and is quite indifferent to what people think of it; and as for us, if we possess such cursory knowledge of the nearer parts of existence as is sufficient for our safety, there is no reason why we should attend to it too minutely: there's metal more attractive in discourse and in fiction. Mind, as Hobbes said, is fancy, and it is the things of fancy that greet us first and reward us best. They are far from being more absurd than the facts. In themselves, all things are equally unnecessary and equally possible; for their own part, all are equally ready to be thought of or even to be born. It is only the routine of nature or the sluggish human imagination that refuses to admit most of them, as country people refuse to admit that foreign languages or manners might do as well as their own.
If God or nature had used Occam's razor and had hesitated to multiply beings without necessity, where should we be? Far from practising economy, nature is prevented from overflowing into every sort of flourish and excrescence only by the local paucity of matter, or the pre-emption of it by other forms; because forms, once embodied in matter, acquire all its inertia, and grow dreadfully stubborn and egotistical. Scrimpy philosophers little know whose stewards they are when they complain of lavishness in nature, or her lordly way of living; her substance cannot be spent, nor its transformations exhausted. In sheer play, and without being able to help it, she will suddenly create organization, or memory, or intelligence, or any of those little vortices called passions, persons, or nations, which sustain themselves for a moment, hypostatizing their frail unity into some moral being—an interest or a soul. And as we are superfluous in the midst of nature, so is the best part of ourselves superfluous in us. Poetry, music and pictures, inspired and shaded by human emotion, are surely better worth having than the inarticulate experience they spring from. Even in our apprehension of the material world, the best part is the adaptation of it to our position and faculties, since this is what introduces boundaries, perspectives, comparison and beauty. It is only what exists materially that exists without excuse, whereas what the mind creates has some vital justification, and may serve to justify the rest. Hence the utility of Occam's razor itself, which may help us to arrive at a strict and spare account of what the world would be without us: a somewhat ironical speculation which is the subtlest product and last luxury of the scientific mind. Meantime the sensuous and rhetorical trappings of human knowledge, from which exact science abstracts, by no means disappear; they remain to enrich the sphere of language and fancy, to which judicious people always felt that they belonged; and this intellectual or literary realm is no less actual and interesting than any other, being a part of the moral radiation and exuberance of a living world.
Experience is a fine word, but what does it mean? It seems to carry with it a mixed sense of mastery and disappointment, suggesting knowledge of a sort with despair of better knowledge. Is it such contact with events as nobody can avoid, shocks and pressure endured from circumstances and from the routine of the world? But a cricket-ball has no experience, although it comes in contact with many hands, receives hard knocks, and plays its part in the vicissitudes of a protracted game. There are men in much the same case; they travel, they undergo an illness or a conversion, and after a little everything in them is exactly as it was before; ράθος with them is not ράθος; their natures are so faithful to the a priori and so elastic that they rebound from the evidence of sense and the buffets of fortune like a rubber bag full of wind; they pass through life with round eyes open, and a perpetual instinctive babble, and yet in the moral sense of the word they have no experience, not being mindful enough to acquire any. It would seem that to gather anything we must first pause, and that before we can have experience we must have minds.
Yet if we said that experience arose by the operation of mind, would not all the operations of mind be equally experience? Has not a maniac probably more and more vivid experience than a man of the world? Doubtless when people call their fancies or thoughts experience, they mean to imply that they have an external source, as "religious experience" is assumed to manifest divine intervention, and "psychical experience" to prove the self-existence of departed spirits. But these assumptions are not empirical; and evidently the religious or psychical experience itself, whatever its cause, is the only empirical fact in the case. Those who appeal to the lessons of experience are not empiricists, for these are lessons that only reason can learn. Experience, as practical people understand it, is not every sort of consciousness or memory, but only such as is addressed to the facts of nature and controlled by the influence of those facts; material contact or derivation is essential to it. Experience is both physical and mental, the intellectual fruit of a material intercourse. It presupposes animal bodies in contact with things, and it presupposes intelligent minds in those bodies, keeping count of the shocks received, understanding their causes, and expecting their recurrence as it will actually take place. To these naturalistic convictions all those ought to have clung who valued experience as a witness rather than as a sensation; without animals in a natural environment experience, as contrasted with fancy or intuition, can neither be nor be conceived. It means so much of knowledge and readiness as is fetched from contact with events by a teachable and intelligent creature; it is a fund of wisdom gathered by living in familiar intercourse with things.
But such assumptions are an offence to the expert empiricist. The moment he comes upon the scene we feel that all we thought experience had taught us is going to be disproved. "Do you admit," he begins by asking, "that nothing can be more real than experience?" We do admit it. "And can you ever know anything that is not experience?" Perhaps not; and yet would experience be very distinct or very significant if it was experience of nothing? "Of nothing, indeed," he retorts, withering us with a scornful glance and the consciousness of his masked batteries; "as if experience itself was nothing! Experience is everything; and when you have experience of experience what more could you ask for, even if you were Doctor Faustus in person? What spurious little non-empirical particle is this of of yours? And what illegitimate ghost is this something else that experience should be of? Can you, without confessing to an adulterous intercourse with what is not experience, explain these natural but disreputable members of your intellectual family?" We cannot explain them, and we blush. Yet why should experience arise at all if there is no occasion for it? "Occasion!" cries the empiricist; "another illegal figment, the old notion of cause! Is it not notorious that causation is nothing but the habit which some parts of experience have of following upon others? How then should the whole of it follow upon any part? Experience cannot spring from anything, it cannot express anything, and it cannot know anything, because experience is all there is."
Here is a considerable retrenchment in the scope of our philosophy: no material world, no soul, and (in the proper sense of the words) no God and no knowledge. Retrenchment, however, is often a sign of wisdom, and the retrenching empiricist deserves to be followed, like the retrenching hermit, into his psychological wilderness, not with a vow never to return to the world, for that would be precipitate, but in the hope of sounding, in one direction, the depths of spiritual discipline and disillusion. And the empirical eremite can taste rare pleasures. All things, for him, become the appanage of the inner man; and we need not wonder that the pensive Englishman is ready to be empirical in this sense and to become an idealist. The lessons of experience, if he was forced to take them seriously, might tend to dethrone his inner man and lead him to materialism; but fortunately the lessons of experience, for an empiricist, can be nothing but little epicycles within it, or cross-references to its literal text; they cannot spoil its intimate and romantic nature, which is to be no end of pulsations and no end of pictures. How dead would anything external or permanent be, even if we thought we could find it! How abstract would be anything common to all times and places, how terrible a mocking truth that should overarch them for ever!
It is true that the romantic empiricist is not very radical; he commonly stops short of any doubts on the validity of memory, with all the yarns it spins; his past adventures and his growth are too fascinating for him to doubt their reality. Sometimes he even trusts a superstitious prophecy, under the name of logical evolution, foretelling what his destiny is somehow compelled to be. At other times he prefers to leave the future ambiguous, so that the next step may lead him anywhere, perhaps to heaven, provided it is understood that his career, even there, is always to remain an unfinished voyage in an uncharted sea. In strictness, however, he has no right to this fond interest in himself. If he became a perfect empiricist he would trust experience only if it taught him absolutely nothing, even about his own past. This is hard for the flesh, and it may not be fair to ask an empiricist to be heroic in the interests of logic; but if he could screw his courage up for the plunge, his spirit might find itself perfectly at home in the new situation. What he might have been or might have thought, he would dismiss as a dead issue; he would watch only his present life as it flowed, and he would love exclusively what he was becoming. There is a sense of safety in being and not thinking which probably all the animals know, and there is a mystical happiness in accepting existence without understanding it; but the sense of safety does not render the animals really safe, and the price they pay for living in the moment is that they carry nothing over from one moment to another except bare existence itself. The disadvantage of radical empiricism is that it shuts out experience.
It was formerly a matter of some surprise to me that there should be so many Hegelians in England, and in such places of influence. I could imagine how the system might have taken root in circles where the classic tradition was absent or enfeebled—in America, in Scotland, among the Dissenters or Jews in England itself; but how could Oxford and Cambridge fail to see in that system the trail of the serpent? How could they mistake it for a Christian or for a spiritual philosophy? It is indeed, in form, an encyclopaedic system, and in that sense suitable to universities; and it deifies knowledge such as an encyclopaedia can give, turning it into the sum total of reality, so that it flatters the self-sufficiency of pedants, or that of any reflective mind. But in Oxford and Cambridge knowledge is not everything; they are more and less than universities; the learning they cultivate is selective and pursued in the service of aristocratic liberty. I should not expect them to care much for a philosophy that was not poetic and devout. I sometimes fancy how the genuine Oxonians must have smiled to hear T. H. Green, in the early days of transcendentalism, talking about his spiritual principle in nature. By spiritual he meant mind-made; he thought the world, remaining just as it is, could suddenly be proved to be spiritual if you could show that a mental synthesis was requisite to hold it together. But what possible advantage is it to the world to be held together by a mental synthesis, rather than by space or time or the truth of its constitution? A synthesis of worthless facts does not render them severally better, nor itself a good. A spirit whose essential function was to create relations would be merely a generative principle, as the spider is to its web; it would be no better than its work, unless perhaps it was spiritual enough to grow weary of that vain labour. Spiritual, for those who retain the language of Christendom, signifies free from the world and from the flesh, and addressed to the eternal and to the beautiful.
Everything, however, has its explanation, and in the matter of English Hegelism I think I begin to see it. In the first place, I was rashly identifying England with a figment of my dreams, with which I was in love: I saw in my mind's eye a manly and single-minded England, free, candid, poetical, akin to feudal France, beauty-loving like old Italy, the Benjamin of the Roman family of nations, adding to the dignity and disinterestedness of the Castilian character only a certain blond charm, a certain infusion of northern purity, and of sympathy with the wild and rural voices of nature. In this England, in which there was something Spartan and archaically Greek, the men were like Hippolytus and the women like Antigone. Naturally it was unintelligible to me that the system of Hegel should take root in such a nation. Persons with a ripe moral tradition are not attracted by sophistry. No argument, however specious, will convince them that the experience of man on earth makes up the whole universe, or the chief part of it; much less will they allow fortune, under the pompous name of evolution, to dictate to them their moral allegiance. The chief force of the Hegelian system for those who are not metaphysicians lies in the criterion of progress which it imposes. This criterion is not beauty in art, nor truth in philosophy, nor justice in society, nor happiness in the individual life: the criterion is simply the direction which the actual movement happens to be taking. Hegel endeavours to show in what way forms are inevitably passing into one another. Thus his ethics begs defence of history, and his history calls for aid on metaphysics. And what metaphysics? A logic of moral fashions. Now it seemed to me axiomatic that eager co-operation with whatever is going on, or is bound to win, would be repulsive to a man of honour. Nor could I conceive a true Englishman taking kindly even to the grand side of this system, which to me personally is rather attractive, I mean to its satirical elevation. The English mind is tender and temperate: it deprecates scorn. But Hegel, in his scathing moods, is comparable to Heraclitus; he mocks every opinion with an opinion which refutes it, and every life with another life which kills it. He has the wisdom of the serpent; but unlike Heraclitus, whose fabled tears were warm, he has the heart of the serpent too. He despises finitude because it is weak, as if an infinity of pervasive weakness were strong, or a perpetual flux a victory for anything. Laughing, I can't help thinking, up his sleeve, he suggests that this flux itself is a victory for the spirit, meaning by spirit the law by which he supposes that this flux is controlled. But this is sheer mockery: the only moral victory is that achieved, under favourable conditions, by some living spirit, glad to be expressed or to have been expressed in some perfect form. The finite only is good: the infinite tides are worth exactly what they cast up. There is a bitter idolatry of fate in this system which might seem splendid to a barbarian; but how, I asked myself, can it be anything but horrible to a cultivated conscience, or to a pupil of the Greeks?
In the real England the character I dreamt of exists, but very much mixed, and overbalanced by its contrary. Many have the minds of true gentlemen, poetically detached from fortune, and seeing in temporal things only their eternal beauties. Yet if this type of English character had been general, England could never have become Puritan, nor bred so many prosperous merchants and manufacturers, nor sent such shoals of emigrants to the colonies; it would hardly have revelled as it does in political debates and elections, and in societies for the prevention and promotion of everything. In the real England there is a strong if not dominant admixture of worldliness. How ponderous these Lord Mayors, these pillars of chapels, these bishops, these politicians, these solemn snobs! How tight-shut, how moralistic, how overbearing these intellectuals with a mission! All these important people are eaten up with zeal, and given over to rearranging the world, and yet without the least idea of what they would change it into in the end, or to what purpose. Being so much in earnest, they are convinced that they must be living on the highest principles: what, then, is more intelligible than that they should welcome a philosophy which assures them that such is the case? They are well pleased to hear, on the highest metaphysical authority, that the first duty of a rich man is to grow richer, and of a settled man to redouble in loyalty to his wife, his community, his party, and his business. The Protestant reformers told them so formerly in biblical language; the Protestant philosophers tell them so now in the language of Hegel.
Besides, on its technical side, the Hegelian system has a great strength, and was most apposite in the predicament in which, fifty years ago, philosophy found itself in England. It supplied three illusions which idealism sadly needed if it was to become orthodox and popular: the illusions of profundity, of comprehensiveness, and of finality. It was a philosophy of progress—another claim to popularity in the nineteenth century—not only progress in the world at large, but especially in philosophy itself; and a philosophy of progress cannot ask us to go back, to cry peccavi, and reconsider the false assumptions on which we may have been reasoning for two hundred or for two thousand years. It must accept these assumptions and go on building upon them, always a higher and a higher structure. Now the principal assumption of British philosophy, on which German philosophy itself rests, was that nothing can be experienced except experience itself, and nothing known except knowledge. But the Germans analysed far more accurately than the British had formerly done what the notions of experience and knowledge contain. They demonstrated the unity of glance that is essential to it, and thus refuted (without of course removing) the successive and episodic character of experience, as the honest but unwary empiricists had conceived it. Hume and Mill had remained naturalists in regard to the distribution of those volatile ideas to which they pretended to reduce the world. John Stuart Mill had a deeper and a sweeter mind than his critics; there was something in him akin to Wordsworth or to Matthew Arnold; but his inherited principles were treacherous, and opened the door to just such a concentration of egotism as the Hegelians brought about. Moreover, Hume and Mill had seemed depressing; they perplexed without filling the mind; they made everything that is most familiar and interesting seem strangely hypothetical; whereas in Hegel the pageant of nature and history appeared to be re-formed and to march round and round the stage of the ego under the strongest light to the loudest music. There was a sort of deafening optimism about it; and not only was a convenient school-book universe offered you, warranted complete, but all previous philosophies were succinctly described, refuted, and linked together, in a manner most convenient for tutorial purposes. Of course, the true character and eternal plausibility of each great system were falsified in such a survey; each was attached artificially to what happened to precede and to follow it in time, or in the knowledge of the historian; as if history were a single chain of events, and its march dialectical—a fiction which Hegel did not blush to maintain. An inner instability was thus attributed to each view which came only from the slippery mind of the critic touring amongst them, without the least intention of finding anywhere a home in which to rest. Hegel was not looking for the truth—why dream of truth when you possess learning?—he was writing an apology for opinion. He enjoyed understanding and imagining things plausibly, and had a great intelligence to pour into his constructions; but this very heat of thought fused everything into the mould of his method, and he gave out that he had understood every system much better than those who believed in it, and had been carried by its inner contradictions (which its adepts never saw) to the next convenient position in the development of human fancy, and of his own lectures.
Abstraction, such as withdrawal of the mind from worldly affairs, is condemned by this philosophy: you must glut the brain and heart with everything that exists. An even worse abstraction, for a philosopher, is to detach the object from the subject, and believe it to exist independently. But what is abstraction? Can attention ever render things more discrete than they are in their own nature? Suppose I abstract a coin from another man's pocket: it is easily proved by Hegel's logic that such an abstraction is a mere appearance. Coins cannot exist as coins except as pocketed and owned; at the same time they imply an essential tendency to pass into the pockets of other men: for a coin that could not issue from the pocket would be a coin in name only, and not in function. When it actually passes from one man's pocket into another's, this circumstance, far from justifying us in thinking the coin a separable thing, shows that all men's pockets (when not empty and therefore, in function, not pockets at all) are intrinsically related and, in a higher sense, one and the same purse. Therefore, we may conclude, it was not the sly transference of the coin from my neighbour's pocket into mine that was the wrongful abstraction, but only the false supposition that if the coin was his it was not, by right of eminent domain, mine also. A man, in so far as he is the possessor of coins, is simply a pocket, and all pockets, in so far as there is transferable coin, in them, are one pocket together. In this way we avoid false abstraction by proving that everything is abstract.
Nor is this all; for strange as it may seem, Hegel appeals also to one type of religious people, and seems to them to lift religious faith triumphantly above all possible assaults of fact or of science. Are not all facts mere ideas? And must not all ideas be bred in the mind according to its own free principles of life and effort? Is not all this semblance of externality in things a blessed foil to spiritual activity? Does not this universal mutation pay loud homage to eternal law? Things go by threes: that is the reason why they exist and why they move, and the sovereign good to be attained by their motion. If every truth turns out to be a lie, every lie is a part of some higher truth; if everything becomes unreal, because it passes into something else, this other thing inherits its reality; and if we look at things as a whole instead of seriatim, and spread out our moving film into a panorama, we perceive that everything has implied everything else from the beginning, and formed a part of it; So that only from the point of view of ignorance is anything earlier, or better, or truer than anything else. Here, in the All, we have rest from our labours.
In this way even the slaves of the world at last learn to overcome the world; but it is too late. This All, even if it were open to human survey, would have no value: it defeats each of its constituent lives and is itself responsive to no living desire. The indistinction which the vague idea of it produces in the mind may be soothing to the weary; but better than mystical relief at the end would have been moral freedom in the beginning. That a different life will supersede mine is nothing against my happiness; that time is swallowing me up is nothing against my appropriate eternity. How vain the crabbed hand of the miser stringing his pearls and never looking at them, counting the drops that trickle into his cup and never emptying it, never feeling the intoxication of living now, of telling the truth frankly, and of being happy here I If the devil laughs at me because I am mortal, I laugh at him for imagining that death can trouble me, or any other free spirit, so long as I live, or after I am dead.
This war will kill the belief in progress, and it was high time. Progress is often a fact: granted a definite end to be achieved, we may sometimes observe a continuous approach towards achieving it, as for instance towards cutting off a leg neatly when it has been smashed; and such progress is to be desired in all human arts. But belief in progress, like belief in fate or in the number three, is a sheer superstition, a mad notion that because some idea—here the idea of continuous change for the better—has been realized somewhere, that idea was a power which realized itself there fatally, and which must be secretly realizing itself everywhere else, even where the facts contradict it. Nor is belief in progress identical with belief in Providence, or even compatible with it. Providence would not have begun wrong in order to correct itself; and in works which are essentially progressive, like a story, the beginning is not worse than the end, if the artist is competent.
What true progress is, and how it is usually qualified by all sorts of backsliding and by incompatible movements in contrary directions, is well illustrated by the history of philosophy. There has been progress in it; if we start with the first birth of intelligence and assume that the end pursued is to understand the world, the progress has been immense. We do not understand the world yet; but we have formed many hypotheses about it corroborated by experience, we are in possession of many arts which involve true knowledge, and we have collated and criticized—especially during the last century—a great number of speculations which, though unverified or unverifiable, reveal the problems and the possibilities in the case; so that I think a philosopher in our day has no excuse for being so utterly deceived in various important matters as the best philosophers formerly were through no fault of theirs, because they were misled by a local tradition, and inevitably cut off from the traditions of other ages and races. Nevertheless the progress of philosophy has not been of such a sort that the latest philosophers are the best: it is quite the other way. Philosophy in this respect is like poetry. There is progress in that new poets arise with new gifts, and the fund of transmitted poetry is enriched; but Homer, the first poet amongst the Greeks, was also the best, and so Dante in Italy, and Shakespeare in England. When a civilization and a language take shape they have a wonderful vitality, and their first-fruits are some love-child, some incomparable creature in whom the whole genius of the young race bursts forth uncontaminated and untrammelled. What follows is more valuable in this respect or in that; it renders fitly the partial feelings and varying fashions of a long decadence; but nothing, so long as that language and that tradition last, can ever equal their first exuberance. Philosophy is not so tightly bound as poetry is to language and to local inspiration, but it has largely shared the same vicissitudes; and in each school of philosophy only the inventors and founders are of any consequence; the rest are hacks. Moreover, if we take each school as a whole, and compare it with the others, I think we may repeat the same observation: the first are the best. Those following have made very real improvements; they have discovered truths and methods before unknown; but instead of adding these (as they might have done) to the essential wisdom of their predecessors, they have proceeded like poets, each a new-born child in a magic world, abandoned to his fancy and his personal experience. Bent on some specific reform or wrapped up in some favourite notion, they have denied the obvious because other people had pointed it out; and the later we come down in the history of philosophy the less important philosophy becomes, and the less true in fundamental matters.