Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/115

102 CKITICAL NOTICES I thought. And in this period, as M. Eenouvier fully admits, the pre- dominating speculative tendency was pantheistic. The pantheistic doctrine which was predominant in the earliest Greek speculations, which has found its most rigorous expression in Spinoza, and which is equally the doctrine of Hegel and of the contemporary philosophy that claims to be based on physical science, is, when quite consistently developed, a doctrine of the Thing or permanent substance of which all personality is a pass- ing mode, as opposed to the Idea or phenomenon which has no reality except as part of a consciousness ; of the Infinite as opposed to the Finite ; of Evolution as opposed to Creation ; of Necessity as opposed to Liberty ; of Happiness as opposed to Duty ; and of Evidence as opposed to Belief. This sixth anti- nomy was the last to receive clear expression. Till Kant, with hardly any exception, the only positions as to the criterion of cer- titude were those of "evidence" and "scepticism". This last doctrine left the practical choice to be determined, not, as it must be according to the true doctrine of belief, by reasons which although not purely intellectual are valid for all men, but by cus- tom and authority. According to the temperament of the sceptic the attitude finally assumed may be to take typical examples either that of Montaigne or of Pascal. Once the doctrine of a belief determined by active as well as passive factors of the per- sonality and finally not on intellectual but on moral grounds, in its distinction equally from sceptical suspension of judgment and from a supposed "evidence or "vision" that gives assent in spite of the will, has been clearly disengaged, all the other theses and antitheses are seen to depend on the position taken up with regard to this antinomy. Hitherto they have always, even in the most rigorous systems, been combined with more or less incon- sequence. Till quite recent times Idealism, for example, had not received accurate expression ; there always remained a mixture of realism, of the doctrine of the Thing or " subject " as it is in itself apart from consciousness. And the progress to true idealism has been accomplished chiefly by means of the works of the modern empirical school, more favourable to the intellectualist doctrine than to the doctrine of belief, and by mediaeval Nominal- ism, the scholastic form of empiricism. Again, the doctrine of " the realised infinite " has always formed part of Christian theo- logy, having got there by a confusion of the idea of infinity in the sense of moral perfection with the infinite of quantity in space and time. Yet logically this leads to the pantheistic doctrine of the infinite and eternal substance, and to the denial of an abso- lute beginning of action, that is, of real creation and of free-will. By another inconsequence, the ethical doctrine of the Stoics and of Spinoza was a doctrine of Duty, an " ethics of Eeason," essen- tially identical with the Kantian ethics, and not a doctrine of happiness such as ought to have followed from their system of pantheistic evolution. The definite statement of the antinomy