The End of an Epoch
I
PHILOSOPHY is out of date. We live in an age of science, achievement, advance — of economic and social changes that are staggering when we compare them with the slow mutations and evolutions of custom which have gone before. Reality is so novel and perplexing that we have no time for mere contemplation, so absorbing that we feel no need of filling our minds with the exotic interests of metaphysics. Philosophy, which used to quicken the solid familiar world into a thing of mystery and intellectual challenge, is itself a slow and ever-decreasing force in the fluid, exciting world around us. It is overshadowed by a new knowledge, a new purpose, and if it would survive in our transformed universe it must adapt itself to these. It must outgrow what Comte called ‘ the metaphysical stage,’ and become scientific. It must serve social and tangible ends.
William James, philosopher and science worshiper, startled a solemn generation of academicians with something like a trumpet peal. Out with all this wordy nonsense of idealism, transcendentalism, conceptualism! We do not need any of these grandiose metaphysical constructions. Religion we must have, to keep us sane in a world of bewildering shocks and surprises; ethics, scientific or religious — yes; but metaphysics is of the Devil. Metaphysics must be anathema to the progressive modern mind. Schiller in England and Dewey in America have taken up the cry, and anyone who has read of the vagaries of Cartesians, Kantians, or Hegelians in the entertaining pages of Will Durant is probably quite ready to join in. What do we care about the Transcendental Ego or the Concrete Universal? Why must we believe in anything of this sort? Our protons and electrons may be just as odd, but at least we can use them for scientific purposes; we cannot use Egos, Absolutes, and Ideas in the Mind of God. Those metaphysical entities, recent inventions though they may be, are neither enlightening nor convenient to present-day thought. They are as strange and uncouth in our world as the angels whose digestive and respiratory systems were most minutely discussed by the erudite Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Yet metaphysics is the mainstay of philosophy. Logic is merely a tool; ethics and æsthetics and the ' social sciences’ are derivatives from a more general interpretation of experience. This general interpretation is exactly what we mean by metaphysics. To say that we have outgrown the need of metaphysics is to say that we have no further need of any interpretation — and that is a momentous statement. It means that we are satisfied either with the face values of things or with the unconscious interpretations of common sense, and are prepared to go on without philosophy.
And so, indeed, we are. Even in our centres of learning, the universities, philosophy is not a live and indispcnsablc subject. At best it has taken a modest place with the classics and other relics in the curriculum; at worst it has vanished like the Cheshire Cat, leaving only a dim religious light where once it smiled upon the world. It has become a jejune, polite subject — a show-case antique of the mind.
Has it outlived its usefulness, then, after twenty-five hundred years? Has human thinking outgrown, once and for all, the ‘metaphysical stage’ between primitive superstition and science, and arrived at the latter, so that it can kick away the scaffolding at last?
II
The picture which philosophy presents to us is indeed rather pathetic, but I believe it looks worse at close range than from a distance, and worst of all from our particular angle, for ours is a retrospective view, dull and unexpectant. We stand at the end of a philosophic epoch. We are at the dead point between two intellectual ages.
The growth of ideas is not a steady evolution, but progresses, as has often been remarked, by spectacular outbursts of genius, with long periods of comparative languor between. After centuries of slow growth, a new life suddenly ferments the world; people’s thoughts and feelings are freed from old conventions and habits; a new style of living makes even the immediate past look archaic; all activities are changed, old hopes seem futile and forlorn, new ambitions and promises fill the world with a flare of slightly mad originality. Thus the Athenian age must have crowned a long and gradual change from pastoral life to urbanity; thus the light of Christian thought and emotion dawned on a dragging, jaded world, the corpse of Hellenism; thus the Renaissance transformed the fine-spun learning of centuries — the academic echo of Christianity — into a mere preliminary to a pageant of discoveries, inventions, and creations that made Europe marvel at itself.
It is a striking fact that philosophy is not as swift to feel the impulses of a new age as religion, art, or science. Greek civilization arose quickly, and its phases are somewhat telescoped, yet we can see the discrepancy between the birth of poetry or sculpture or mathematics and the birth of philosophy; Plato and Aristotle mark very nearly the end of the Golden Age. Likewise, Christianity was full-fledged and elaborately organized before Anselm, Thomas, and Duns Scotus articulated its philosophical import. The Renaissance had no philosopher of first magnitude before Descartes. In every case the rise of philosophy is a late development, if not an aftermath, of a great creative age; and the exploitation of philosophical ideas belongs to the quieter centuries that follow. The reason for this is obvious: philosophy is essentially reflective, and must wait the passage of an era before it can interpret the new conceptions that inspired it. Ideas arise in use, and express themselves in practical activity, ingenuity, and artistic insight long before they are recognized as definite new factors in the world. Therefore every period of intellectual history has its fundamental ideas that move and inspire and color its Weltanschauung, and in turn become the central concerns of its philosophy. Great epochs of spiritual productivity are always followed by ages of rational labor.
Whenever the implications and possibilities of a particular world view are exhausted, we come to the end of a philosophic epoch, marked by bootless warfare among schools, attempts at synthesis, patchy eclecticism, and academic debate. This ragged fringe of an old philosophy overlaps the next era of growth; Hellenic metaphysics was in the last stages of disintegration all the time that the spirit of the Church was rising, practical, vivid, and militant, to the conquest of Europe. ‘The Consolation of Philosophy,’ as Boethius presents it, appears peculiarly bloodless and out of keeping with those strenuous times. Ancient thought had come to the end of its tether, and already new ideas — of soul, divinity, substance, and what not — were creeping in to reduce the traditional lore to final confusion. In the same way we see the remarkable structure of mediæval philosophy — the rationalization of Christianity — deteriorate into a sterile game of logic, even as the Renaissance is under way. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, miraculous times of genius, witness the senility of Scholasticism and all its relatives. The impetus that Christianity gave is exhausted, the new sources of insight not yet recognized and recorded.
At present we face the closing of another philosophic tradition. The Renaissance gave us what we are still taught, at our universities, to call ‘modern philosophy’: the whole gamut of systems — idealism, empiricism, rationalism, pragmatism — descended from that great intellectual revolution. Problems of body and mind, causality and freedom, sense and reason, appearance and reality, the stock in trade of contemporary metaphysics, arose not by continuous development from mediæval philosophy, but by way of a wide excursion, through channels of scientific and imaginative thought. Our traditional world view, our basic belief, is Copernican — it is experimental, skeptical, self-assertive. The mediæval view was Augustinian — mystical, supramundane, and dogmatic. To us inheritors of the Renaissance those very adjectives sound like a reproach. They express the antithesis of ‘the modern spirit.’
This skeptical spirit, in our esteem the only tradition in good scholarly standing, was first explicitly prescribed for philosophy by René Descartes. From his thinking, which was not so much a burst of individual conception as a brilliant formulation of Renaissance ideas, all our major doctrines are descended. Descartes has very properly been called ‘the father of modern philosophy.’ He was the first systematic thinker who reflected upon the new intellectual attitude which had sprung up in Europe, and stated it in maxims and premises. To him we owe our conceptions of matter and mind as essentially different substances, our notions of self and not-self, our problem of knowledge; his emphasis on the Thinker as the central fact of the universe is the source of idealism; his recognition of the perceptions as ‘ given ’ objects of knowledge gave rise to the empiricist tradition; rationalism is a logical outcome of his faith that Reality cannot deceive the human reason. All our warring metaphysical factions, all our conflicting doctrines, really have a joint origin in the fertile and variegated thought of Descartes. What we commonly call the modern period in philosophy might fairly be designated as the Cartesian age — especially as it is no longer quite modern.
III
The Cartesian age is coming to its close. Our college generations are witnessing that verbal and ineffectual battle of doctrines, that professionalism within the academic sphere and utter indifference outside, which are the marks of senescence in philosophy.
All the famous inventions of reason, which answered burning questions in the days of Leibniz, Kant, or Schopenhauer, are defunct; we have done what we can with those concepts. Idealism, realism, empiricism, and all our other systems are not productive any more; they cast no new light upon the world, but constitute a field of esoteric learning, a possession of the universities.
Ours is an age of activity, a world-transforming age. Philosophy, now the mere echo of another era, looks pale among the revolutionary arts and sciences of such a time. But already the moving forces of the new world are taking conceptual form, and a new philosophy is dawning. What its keynote will be is, of course, obscure; all we know is that it will be unfamiliar, incommensurable with old ideas, and generative of entirely new problems and interests. Also it will probably spring from other than philosophical sources: from the arts, from science, from social experiments — whatever our dominant activity may be. We see its beginning in the new physics. Why does the notion of space-time stir the curiosity of the whole intellectual world? Because it defies all philosophical premises! Einstein is the first great nonCartesian. The doctrine of space-time, whatever its scientific virtues may be, has momentous implications for philosophy: for it kills the traditional conception of matter. Descartes defined matter as res extensa, a substance whose essential property is pure extendedness. For Einstein there is no such thing. Extension as an independent property is meaningless. The world is not a realm of things, but a pattern of events. The old distinction between the passive substance, matter, and the active substance which moves it, mind, falls into ruin at the touch of the new science — if we accept a nonNewtonian physics, we throw the doors open to a non-Cartesian metaphysics. That is why the young generation of philosophers feels so mightily drawn to the Einsteinian theories, and discourses eagerly on the four-dimensional manifold, the quantum theory, the curvature of space, and other subjects chiefly or wholly beyond its ken. We feel the wealth and fertility of new ideas, and realize implicitly rather than explicitly that the old metaphysics we learn and still avow is not the foundation of our own most advanced thinking, not in keeping with our most interesting beliefs, not necessary to our understanding. It is faded and quaint beside the bold, difficult, pragmatic inventions of the laboratory.
Psychology, too, has departed from the Cartesian tradition with considerable uproar and swagger. The doctrine of the conditioned reflex, the erotics of Freud, the recent German Gestalt psychology, have thrown metaphysics off its balance. The whole philosophy of body and mind — interactionism, parallelism, epiphenomenalism, and so forth — becomes void and irrelevant in the light of these new constructions. There is no body-and-soul problem for our psychologists. There are problems of response, expression, understanding — problems of vital function. The material body and the spiritual will, which mechanists and vitalists still endeavor to relate, have ceased to worry students of theoretical psychology.
It is a peculiar paradox that the staleness, the futility, of our philosophy are the most interesting things about it. It means that the present age is one of mental vigor, a constructive, contributive age, which has outgrown the visions of a bygone day and is waking to visions of its own; that obscure intellectual forces are shaping a new act in the history of philosophy, and the curtain is about to rise.