necessities in a reasonable universe. Rational system is the
first and last word in this philosophy. The element of givenness,
dominant in empiricism, and partially surviving through
intuitionalism even into Kant, is sublimated in Hegel's thinking.
Everything is to be exhibited, in outline or in essence, as the
working of necessary truth. You need not wish anything in
the universe to be other than it is; as well grumble at once
that two and two do not make five![1] Hegel will allow no
dualism of fact and principles. Nothing is bare fact. Philosophy
will show you that everything has to be so and so. The
effect of this point of view in regard to moral perceptions is that
they represent an important relative truth, but that philosophy
“passes” beyond them “into a higher region, where imputation
of guilt is” absolutely “meaningless”[2]—jenseits des Guten
und Bösen. More peculiarly his own is Hegel's great doctrine
of contradiction, whereby opposing views of truth
rank as stages in one progressive definition. We
may explain this to ourselves as an extraordinarily
method.
vehement recoil from Kant's deification of formal
logic with its principle of “analytic” tautology. As a result,
Hegel's system undertakes to show candid minds that incompatible
assertions not only may but must both be true.[3]
Through this unexpected and obscure principle of “dialectic”[4]
Hegel claimed to fulfil his programme of interpreting everything
as manifest necessary truth of ideal relationship. It all must
be so and you see it must.
Hegel wrote extensively upon religion, especially in his Philosophy of Religion. Yet it remains doubtful whether he was a theist with large pantheistic elements—such as every ues on speculative mind will be likely to incorporate in theism—or a pantheist rejecting theism altogether. We may regard his ambitious programme as the last logical development of idealism and indeed of philosophy itself. If perfect knowledge be possible for us, it must take the form of such a system as Hegel offers. If the world exists purely to be known, and if every other working of reason comes into consideration qua incomplete knowledge, Hegel is right with his sweeping intellectualism. Or at least he has rightly seen what are the assertions to aim at; it is difficult to accept the principle or method upon which his answer to the riddle proceeds, the dialectic method. Perhaps it was necessary for human thought to try how far it would carry out this programme. And yet perhaps full success was neither possible nor desirable. If such are our conclusions, we return to a possible basis for theism not very far removed from that of intuitionalism. Certainly history shows that theism has generally been associated with some reduced or limited form of philosophy, usually with the intuitionalist scheme. It is not the first runnings of the stream of religious thinking which have given the world its theistic philosophies. Theism is an afterthought the reply to doubt-the attempted reflective justification of what announced itself at first as a prophetic certainty. But no more is theism the first runnings of the stream of philosophy. It is philosophy harnessed to a practical and religious interest. It is philosophy called into court to answer selected questions. Theism then has its most habitual affinities with intuitionalism, but may fall under any one of our philosophical or quasi philosophical types. We have distinguished three types or tendencies: empiricism, intuitionalism, idealism. They deal respectively with what is-partly with what is and partly with what must be—with what must be. They are based on facts upon facts in'the light of principles—upon principles purely and ultimately upon one principle. They claim probability moral certainty-mathematical certainty. They incline to the Design Argument and Analogy-to the Cosmological argument (with other elements in a subordinate place) and proof by inference-to the Ontological argument. This last and boldest argument is a system of idealistic philosophy in a nutshell. When such a system is worked out in full detail, it essays or ought to essay a proof of the following points: (1) God or the Absolute necessarily exists; (2) He necessarily is what He is; (3) He or it necessarily manifests itself in the finite, (4) and necessarily manifests itself in just this finite which we know from experience. If philosophy is able to fill up that programme, it justifies itself; it raises all belief to necessary truth; and whether its teaching be theistic or pantheistic, pantheism or theism, whichever turns out victorious, must henceforth rank as a demonstrated certainty.
Again, these contrasted philosophies throw light upon the meaning of a posteriori and a priori in Kant and subsequent writers.[5] To empiricism, all is a posteriori. To intuitionalism, half is a posteriori and half a priori. To idealism, all is a priori. Not that a posteriori is denied, or that idealism even in Hegel tries to evolve reality out of the philosopher's inner consciousness. Mere given fact may be the starting-point; but it is sublimated. We see by degrees—in general outline or upon general principles[6]—that what is is no other than what must be.
There is another conception of necessity which has established itself in the history of science and philosophy. We may call it mechanical necessity. If this conception is regarded as full and absolute truth, it involves materialism. When we recollect the empiricist starting-point of science, it is curious to observe with what vehemence the average man of science now rejects free will. To him, it cannot be true. William James stood almost alone in being prepared to go anywhere at the bidding of apparent facts, unconcerned about rational probabilities. On this ground James is a libertarian. The fact appears to be so; he reports it. Similarly, James is willing to believe in many universes nebeneinander or durcheinander but not ineinander. Dualism, pluralism, manifold parallel inconsistency may belong to the nature of fact. Does our intelligence demand unity? That may be a mere subjective fancy. Even polytheism[7] or something indistinguishable from it, is suggested to this doggedly empiricist mind by the Varieties of Religious Experience; they are all good to those to whom they appeal; and what right have we to talk of objective standards?[8] Ordinary “inductive” empiricism shows that it has travelled far from this unprejudiced credulity when it asserts its hard determinism uniform law, never broken, never capable of being broken. But what is mechanical necessity, if we admit that in some sense it exists? It is a relative necessity. The present and the future have to be what the past and the absent make them. Past events, “happening” to be what they were, have fixed subsequent processes to their channels. But you can never, at any one point, say, from the scientific or mechanical or materialistic standpoint, this “had to be.”[9] The relative necessity never passes into an absolute one. A different primitive “collocation” as T. Chalmers[10] put it, would have yielded, by the same process of natural law as ours, quite a different universe from ours.”[11] T. H. Huxley admitted that this contention could not be ruled out as impossible. Again, in the scheme of mechanism, everything is determined by everything else—in
- ↑ “It may be asked, Why can God not create a triangle whose three angles shall not be equal to two right angles? T 0 abstraction and ignorance everything is possible." From notes of a class lecture by Dr E. Caird.
- ↑ F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, p. 4.
- ↑ J. E. MacTaggart (Studies in Hegelian Dialectic) contends that direct contradiction is confined to the elementary portions of Hegel's Logic: but he does not deny its existence there, though his interpretation, could one accept it, softens the paradox.
- ↑ Used by Kant sceptically of the limitations of reason, dialectic in Hegel becomes constructive; and scepticism itself becomes a stage in knowledge.
- ↑ (1) Aristotle and the school men meant by a proof a priori reasoning from cause to effect. (2) Kant is often supposed to mean by a priori—see Hamilton’s Reid, p. 762—“innate” as opposed to “acquired from experience.” (3) If we accept the suggestion offered above—that a priori in Kant and later thinkers =necessary-we place ourselves on the track which leads from intuitionalism to some form of idealism.
- ↑ Why only in such general terms? But this limitation is always taken for granted.
- ↑ It does not seem as if James's “Pragmatism” could lend itself to anything so concrete as a theistic conclusion.
- ↑ A very different thinker, Dr J. E. MacTaggart, works round from idealism to an eternal quasi polytheistic society of equal souls.
- ↑ H. Spencer's “instability of the homogeneous” is perhaps an attempt to perform the impossible (First Principles, chap. xix.).
- ↑ Quoted in J. S. Mill’s Logic, and with fuller sympathy in W. S. Jevons’s Principles of Science.
- ↑ God has ordered the original “collocation”—a new statement of the argument which traces Design in nature.
