recall from its beginnings in France, England and Germany, in order to understand modern idealism. The assertion of absolute substance by Spinoza incited Schelling and Hegel. The analysis of bodies into immaterial elements by Leibnitz incited Lotze. The Spinozistic parallelism of extension and thought, and the Leibnitzian parallelism of bodily motion and mental action, incited Schelling and Fechner. Berkeley and Hume produced the English idealism of Mill and Spencer, with their successors, and occasioned the German idealism of Kant. Kant’s a priori synthesis of sensations into experience lies at the root of all German idealism. But Fichte was the most fertile of all. He carried metaphysical idealism to its height, by not only resolving the bodily into the mental, but also elevating the action of mind into absolute mental construction; not inferring things in themselves beyond, but originating things from within, mind itself. By changing the meaning of “noumenon” from the thing apprehended (νοούμενον) to the thought (νόημα), and in the hypothesis of a common consciousness, he started the view that a thing is not yours or my thought, but a common thought of all mankind, and led to the wider view of Schelling and Hegel that the world is an absolute thought of infinite mind. In making the essence of mind activity and construction, in destroying the separation of theoretical and practical reason, in asserting that mind thinks things as means to ends of the will, he prepared the way for Schopenhauer and other voluntarists. In making the essence of the Absolute not mere reason, but will, action and life, he anticipated Lotze. In reducing the thing in itself to a thought he projected the neo-Kantism of Lange and Cohen. In the doctrine—no object, no subject—no subject, no object—that is, in the utter identification of things with objects of subjects, he anticipated not only Schelling and Hegel, but also Schuppe and Wundt with their congeners. In expanding Kant’s act of synthesis till it absorbed the inner sense and the innermost soul, he started the modern paradox that soul is not substance, but subject or activity, a paradox which has been gradually handed down from Schelling and Hegel to Fechner, and from Fechner to Paulsen and Wundt. Meanwhile, through holding with Kant that man is not God, but a free spirit, whose destiny it is to use his intelligence as a means to his duty, he is still the resort of many who vindicate man’s independence, freedom, conscience, and power of using nature for his moral purposes, e.g. of Eucken and Münsterberg (qq.v.). Kant and Fichte together became the most potent philosophic influences on European thought in the 19th century, because their emphasis was on man. They made man believe in himself and his mission. They fostered liberty and reform, and even radicalism. They almost avenged man on the astronomers, who had shown that the world is not made for earth, and therefore not for man. Kant half asserted, and Fichte wholly, that Nature is man’s own construction. The Kritik and the Wissenschaftslehre belonged to the revolutionary epoch of the “Rights of Man,” and produced as great a revolution in thought as the French Revolution did in fact. Instead of the old belief that God made the world for man, philosophers began to fall into the pleasing dream, I am everything, and everything is I—and even I am God.
4.—Noumenal Idealism in Germany
Noumenal idealism is the metaphysics of those who suppose that all known things are indeed mental, but not all are phenomenal in the Kantian sense, because a noumenon is knowable so long as by a noumenon we mean some mental being or other which we somehow can discover beyond phenomena. The noumenal idealists of Germany assumed, like all psychological idealists, the unproved hypothesis that there is no sense of body, but there is a sense of sensations; and they usually accepted Kant’s point, that to get from such sensations to knowledge there is a synthesis contributing mental elements beyond the mental data of sense. They saw also the logic of Kant’s deduction, that all we can know from such mental data and mental categories must also be mental. This was the starting-point of their metaphysical idealism. But they disagreed with Kant, and agreed with Fichte about things in themselves or noumena, and contended that the mental things we know are not mere phenomena of sense, but noumena, precisely because noumena are as mental as phenomena, and therefore can be known from similar data: this was the central point of their noumenal idealism. They rightly revolted against the inconsistencies of Kant’s third and fourth positions about the existence of unknown but postulated things in themselves, hidden from theoretical, but revealed to practical, reason. In a way they returned to the wider opinions of Aristotle, which had come down to Descartes and Locke, that reason in going beyond sense knows more things than phenomena; yet they would not hear of external bodies, or of bodies at all. No realists, they came nearer to Spinozistic pantheism and to Leibnitzian monadism, but only on their idealistic side; for they would not allow that extension and body are different from thinking and mind. Their real founder was Fichte, on account of his definite reduction of the noumenal to a mental world. This was indeed the very point—the knowability of a noumenal mental world. At the same time it soon appeared that they could not agree among themselves when they came to ask what it is, but in attempting to define it seem to have gone through the whole gamut of mind. Schelling and Hegel thought it was infinite reason; Schopenhauer, unconscious will; Hartmann, unconscious intelligence and will; Lotze, the activity or life of the divine spirit; Fechner, followed by Paulsen, a world of spiritual actualities comprised in the one spiritual actuality, God, in whom we live and move and have our being.
1. Of these noumenal idealisms the earliest in time and the nearest to Fichte’s philosophy was the panlogism, begun by Schelling (1775–1854), completed by his disciple Hegel (1770–1831), and then modified by the master himself. Starting from Fichte’s “Wissenschaftslehre,” Schelling accepted the whole process of mental construction, and the Schelling. deduction that noumena are knowable products of universal reason, the Absolute Ego. But from the first he was bolder than Fichte, and had no doubt that the Absolute is God. God, as he thought, is universal reason, and Nature a product of universal reason, a direct manifestation, not of man, but of God. How is this Absolute known? According to Schelling it is known by intellectual intuition. Kant had attributed to God, in distinction from man’s understanding, an intellectual intuition of things. Fichte had attributed to man an intellectual intuition of himself as the Absolute Ego. Schelling attributes to man an intellectual intuition of the Absolute God; and as there is, according to him, but one universal reason, the common intelligence of God and man, this intellectual intuition at once gives man an immediate knowledge of God, and identifies man with God himself.
On Schelling’s idealistic pantheism, or the hypothesis that there is nothing but one absolute reason identifying the opposites of subjectivity and objectivity, Hegel based his panlogism. But, while he fully recognized his indebtedness to his master, he differed from him profoundly in one fundamental respect. He rightly objected that the system Hegel. was wanting in logical proof. He rightly, therefore, rejected the supposed intellectual intuition of the Absolute. He rightly contended that, if we are to know anything beyond sense, we must know it by a process of logical reason. But, unfortunately, he did not mean the logical inferences described in the Organon and the Novum organum. He meant a new “speculative” method, dialectic, founded on an assumption which he had already learnt from Schelling, namely, that things which are different but similar can have the same attribute, and therefore be also the same. With this powerful instrument of dialectic in hand, he attempted to show how absolute reason differentiates itself into subjective and objective, ideal and real, and yet is the identity of both—an identity of opposites, as Schelling had said. By the same dialectic Hegel was able to justify the gradual transformation of transcendental into noumenal idealism by Fichte and Schelling. If things different but similar have the same attributes, and are thereby the same, then in the first place the Kantian categories, though thoughts of mental origin and therefore confined to mind, are nevertheless applicable
