Germanphilosophy 002600 MBP

193 B 6G~06i9Q
60-06190
193
Geman pMlosophy and politics

ID 01 DE7tfifiD 1
_
APR
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
AND POLITICS
BY
JOHN DEWEY
Professor of Philosophy in Colombia
University
WSW YOEZ
HENHY HOLT AND COMPANY
CoFTBiaHT, 1915,
BY
H3BNRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PREFACE
The will of John Calvin McNair established a
Foundation at the University of North Carolina
upon which public lectures are to be given from

time to time to the members of the University.
This book contains three lectures which were given
in February of this year upon this Foundation. It
is a pleasure to acknowledge the many courtesies
enjoyed during my brief stay at Chapel Hill, the
seat of the University.
J. D.
Columbia University,
New York City, April, 1915.
CONTENTS
?A6B
I GERMAN PHILOSOPHY : THETwoWoELDS 3
II GEBMAH MORAL AKD POLITICAL PHI-

LOSOPHY 47
III THE GEBMAFIC PHILOSOPHY OP HISTOEY 91
INDEX ..... 133

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND
POLITICS
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY: THE TWO
WORLDS
THE nature of the Influence of genera! Ideas
upon practical affairs Is a troubled question.

Mind dislikes to find itself a pilgrim In an alien
world. A discovery that the belief in the influ-
ence of thought upon, action Is an illusion would
leave men profoundly saddened with themselves
and with the world. Were It not that the doctrine
forbids any discovery Influencing affairs since the
discovery would be an Idea we should say that
the discovery of the wholly ex post facto and idle
character of ideas would profoundly Influence sub-
sequent affairs. The strange thing Is that when

men had least control over nature and their own
affairs, they were most sure of the efficacy of
thought. The doctrine that nature does nothing

in vain, that It Is directed by purpose, was not
engrafted by scholasticism upon science; It formu-
lates an instinctive tendency. And if the doctrine
a
4 THE TWO WORLDS
It
be fallacious, Its pathos has a noble quality.
testifies to the longing of human thought for a
world of its own texture. Yet just in the degree
In which men, by means of inventions and political
arrangements, have found ways of making their

thoughts effective, they have come to question
whether any thinking Is efficacious. Our notions
in physical science tend to reduce mind to a bare
spectator of a machine-like nature grinding its
unrelenting way. The vogue of evolutionary ideas
has led many to regard intelligence as a deposit

from history, not as a force In Its making. We look
backward rather than forward; and when we look
forward we seem to see but a further unrolling
of a panorama long ago rolled up on a cosmic
reel. Even Bergson, who, to a casual reader, ap-
pears to reveal vast unexplored vistas of genuinely
novel possibilities, turns out, upon careful study,
to regard intellect (everything which in the past

has gone by the name of observation and reflec-
tion) as but an evolutionary deposit whose im-
portance is confined to the conservation of a life
already achieved, and bids us trust to instinct, or

something akin to instinct, for the future : as If
there were hope and consolation in bidding us trust

THE TWO WORLDS 5
to that which, in any case, we cannot intelligently

direct or control.
I do not see that the school of

history which
finds Bergson mystic and romantic, which prides
itself upon its hard-headed and scientific character,
comes out at a different place. I refer to the doc-
trine of the economic

interpretation of history in
its extreme form which, so its adherents tell us,
is its only logical form. It is easy to follow them

when they tell us that past historians have ig-
nored the great part played by economic forces,
and that descriptions and explanations have been
correspondingly superficial. When one reflects
that the great problems of the present day are

those attending economic reorganization, one
might even take the doctrine as a half-hearted con-

fession that historians are really engaged in con-
struing the past in terms of the problems and

interests of an impending future, instead of re-
porting a past in order to discover some mathe-

matical curve which future events are bound to
describe. But no; our strictly scientific economic
interpreters will have it that economic farces pre-

sent an inevitable evolution, of which state and
church, art and literature, science and philosophy

6 THE TWO WOBLDS
are by-products. It Is useless to suggest that
while modern industry has given an immense stim-

ulus to scientific inquiry, yet nevertheless the in-
dustrial revolution of the eighteenth century
comes after the scientific revolution of the seven-
teenth. The dogma forbids any connection.

But when we note that Marx gave it away that
his materialistic interpretation of history was but
the Hegelian idealistic dialectic turned upside
down, we may grow wary. it, Is after

all, history
we are dealing with or another philosophy of his-

the great im-
tory? And when we discover that
portance of the doctrine is urged upon us, when
we find that we are told that the general recog-
nition of its truth helps us out of our present
troubles and indicates a path for future effort, we

writers do not seem
positively take heart. These
to mean just what they say. Like the rest of us,
they are human, and infected with a belief

that
ideas, even highly abstract theories, are of efficacy
in the conduct of human affairs influencing the
history which is yet to be.
I have, however, no intention of entering upon

this controversy, much less of trying to settle it.
THE TWO WORLDS 7
These remarks are but preliminary to a considera-
tion of some of the practical affiliations of
por-
tions of
the modern history of philosophical
thought with practical social affairs. And if I set

forth my own position in the controversy in ques-
tion, the statement is frankly
a personal one, in-
tended to make known the prepossessions with
which I approach the discussion of the political
bearings of one phase of modern philosophy. I

do not believe, then, that pure ideas, or pure
thought, ever exercised any influence upon human

action. I believe that very much of what has
been presented as philosophic reflection is in effect
simply an idealization, for the sake of emotional

satisfaction, of the brutely given state of affairs,
and not a genuine discovery of the practical
is
influence of ideas. In other words, I believe it

to be esthetic in type even when sadly lacking in
esthetic form. And I believe it is easy to exag-

gerate the practical influence of even jthe more
vital and genuine ideas of which I am about to
speak.
But I also believe that there are mo such things
as pure ideas or pure reason- Every living
thought represents a gesture made toward tibe
8 THE TWO WORLDS
world, an attitude taken to some practical situa-
tion in which we are implicated. Most of these
state of
gestures are ephemeral; they reveal the
him who makes them rather than effect a significant
alteration of conditions. But at some times they
are congenial to a situation in which men in masses
are acting and suffering. They supply a model

for the attitudes of others ; they condense into a
dramatic type of action. They then form what
we call the " great " systems of thought. Not all
ideas perish with the momentary response. They
are voiced and others hear; they are written and
others read. Education, formal and informal, em-
bodies them not so much in other men's minds as
in their permanent dispositions of action. They
are in the blood, and afford sustenance to conduct ;
they are in the muscles and men strike or retire.
Even emotional and esthetic systems may breed

a disposition toward the world and take overt
effect. The reactions thus engendered are, indeed,
superficial as compared with those in which more
primitive instincts are embodied. The business of
eating and drinking, buying and selling, marry-
ing and being given in marriage, making war and

peace, gets somehow carried on along with any ancE
THE TWO WOELDS 9
every system of ideas which the world has known.

But how, and when and where and for what men
do even these things is
tremendously affected by
the abstract ideas which get into circulation.
I take it that I may seem to be engaged in an
emphatic urging of the obvious. However it may

be with a few specialized schools of men, almost
everybody takes it as a matter of course that ideas
influence action and help determine the subsequent

course of events. Yet there is a purpose in this
insistence. Most persons draw the line at a certain
kind of general ideas. They are especially prone
to regard the ideas which constitute
philosophic
theories as practically innocuous as more or less
amiable speculations significant at the most for

moments of leisure, in moments of relief from pre-
occupation with affairs. Above all, men take the
particular general ideas which happen to affect

their own conduct of life as normal and inevitable.
Pray what other ideas would any sensible man

have? They forget the extent to which these ideas
originated as parts of a remote and technical
theoretical system, which by multitudes of non-
reflective channels has infiltrated into their habits
10 THE TWO WORLDS
of Imagination and behavior. An expert Intel-
lectual anatomist, my friends, might dissect you
and find Platonic and Aristotelian tissues, organs
from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas,.
Locke and Descartes, in the make-up of the
ideas by which you are habitually swayed, and
find, indeed, that they and other thinkers of whose
names you have never heard constitute a larger

than does the Calvin
part of your mental structure
or Kant, Darwin or Spencer, Hegel or Emerson,
Bergson or Browning to whom you yield conscious
allegiance.
re-
Philosophers themselves are naturally chiefly
sponsible for the ordinary estimate of
their own
influence, or lack of influence. They have been
taken mostly at their own word as to what they
were doing, and what for the most part they have
pretended to do is radically different from what
they have actually done. They are quite negligible
as seers and reporters of ultimate reality^ or the
essential natures of things. And it is in this
aspect that they have mostly fancied seeing them-

selves. Their actual office has been quite other.
They have told about nature and life and society

in terms of collective human desire and aspiration
THE TWO WORLDS II
as these were determined by contemporary dif-
ficulties and struggles,

I have spoken thus far as if the influence of
general ideas upon action were likely to be bene-
ficial. It goes against the grain to attribute evil
to the workings of intelligence. But we might

as well face the dilemma. What is called pure
thought, thought freed from the empirical contin-
gencies of life, would, even if it existed, be irrel-
evant to the guidance of action. For the latter
always operates amid the circumstance of contin-

gencies. And thinking which is colored by time
and place must always be of a mixed quality. In
part, it will detect and hold fast to more perma-
nent tendencies and arrangements ; in part, it will
take the limitations of its own period as neces-
sary and universal even as intrinsically desir-

able.
The traits which give thinking effectiveness for

the good give it also potency for harm. A phys-
ical catastrophe, an earthquake or conflagration,
acts only where it happens. While its effects en-
dure, it passes away. But it is of the nature of

ideas to be abstract: that is to say, severed from
the circumstances of their origin, and through
13 THE TWO WORLDS
embodiment in language capable of operating in
remote climes and alien situations. Time heals
physical ravages, but may only accentuate the

it
evils of an intellectual catastrophe for by no
lesser name can we call a systematic intellectual
error. To one who is professionally preoccupied

with philosophy there is much in its history which
is profoundly depressing. He sees ideas which
were not only natural but useful in their native
time and place, figuring in foreign contexts so

as to formulate defects as virtues and to give
rational sanction to brute facts, and to oppose
alleged eternal truths to progress. He sees move-
ments which might have passed away with change
of circumstance as casually as they arose, acquire
persistence and dignity because thought has taken

cognizance of them and given them intellectual
names. The witness of history is that to think
in general and abstract terms dangerous; it
is
elevates ideas beyond the situations in which they

were born and charges them with we know not what
menace for the future. And in the past the danger
has been the greater because philosophers have
so largely purported to be concerned not with con-
temporary problems of living, but with essen-

THE TWO WORLDS U
tial Truth and Reality viewed under the form of
eternity.
In bringing these general considerations to a
close, I face an embarrassment. I must choose

some particular period of intellectual history for
more concrete illustration of the mutual relation-
ship of philosophy and practical social affairs

which latter, for the sake of brevity, I term
Politics. One is tempted to choose Plato. For
in spite of the mystic and transcendental coloring
of his thought, it was he who defined philosophy as
the science of the State, or the most complete and
organized whole known to man; it is no accident

that his chief work is termed the " Republic.** In
modern we are struck by the fact that Eng-
times,
lish philosophy from Bacon to John Stuart Mill

has been cultivated by men of affairs rather than
by profes'sors, and with a direct outlook upon so-
cial interests. In Prance, the great period of phi-
losophy, the period of les pJufosophes, was the time

in which were forged the ideas which connect in
particular with the French Revolution and in gen-

eral with the conceptions- which spread so rapidly
through the civilized world, of the indefinite per-
fectibility of humanity, the rights of man, and the *

U THE TWO WORLDS
based
promotion of a society as wide as humanity,
upon allegiance to reason.
Somewhat arbitrarily I have, however, selected
some aspects of classic German thought for my

illustrative material. Partly, I suppose, because
piqued by the apparent challenge which

one is its
highly technical, professorial and predominantly

a character offers to the proposition that
priori
there is close connection between abstract thought
and the tendencies of collective life. More to the
point, probably, is the fact that the heroic age

of German thought lies almost within the last cen-
tury, while the creative period of continental

thought lies largely in the eighteenth century, and
that of British thought still earlier. It was Taine,
the Frenchman, who said that all the leading ideas
day were produced in Germany be-

of the present
tween 1780 and 1830. Above all, the Germans,

as we say, have philosophy in their blood. Such
phrases generally mean something not about
hereditary qualities, but about the social condi-

tions under which ideas propagate and circulate.
Now Germany is the modern state which pro-
vides the greatest facilities for general ideas to
take effect through social inculcation. Its sys-

THE TWO WOELDS 15
tern of education is adapted to that end.
Higher schools and universities in Germany are

really, not just nominally, under the control
of the state and part of the state life. In
spite of freedom of academic instruction when

once a teacher is installed in office, the political
authorities have always taken a hand, at critical
junctures , in determining the selection of teachers

in subjects that had a direct bearing upon
political policies. Moreover, one of the chief func-
tions of the universities is the preparation of
future state officials. Legislative activity is dis-
tinctly subordinate to that of administration con-

ducted by a trained civil service, or, if you please,
bureaucracy. Membership in this bureaucracy is
dependent upon university training. Philosophy,

both directly and indirectly, plays an unusually
large r61e in the training. The faculty of law does

not chiefly aim at the preparation of practicing
lawyers. Philosophies of jurisprudence are essen-

tial parts of the law teaching ; and every one of the
classic philosophers took a hand in writing a phi-
losophy of Law and of the State. Moreover, in

the theological faculties, which are also organic
parts of state-controlled institutions, the theology

16 THE TWO WOELDS
and higher criticism of Protestant Germany have
been developed, and developed also in close con-
nection with systems like those of
philosophical
Kant, Schleiermacher and Hegel. In short, the
educational and administrative agencies of Ger-

which
many provide ready-made channels through
philosophic ideas may flow on their way to prac-
tical affairs.
Political public opinion hardly exists in Ger-
many in the sense in which it obtains in France,
Great Britain or this country. So far as it ex-
ists, the universities may be said to be its chief
organs. They, rather than the

newspapers,
crystallize it and give it articulate expression. In-

stead of expressing surprise at the characteristic
utterances of university men with reference to the
great war, we should then rather turn to the past

history in which the ideas now uttered were gen-
erated.
In an account of German Intellectual history
sufficiently extensive we should have to go back

at least to Luther. Fortunately, for our pur-
poses,what he actually did and taught is not so
important as the more recent tradition concerning
his peculiarly Germanic status and office. All
THE TWO WORLDS 17
peoples are proud of all their great men. Germany

is proud of Luther as its greatest national hero.
But while most nations are proud of their great
men, Germany is proud of itself rather for pro-
ducing Luther. It finds him as a Germanic prod-

uct quite natural nay, inevitable. A belief in
the universal character of his genius thus nat-
urally is converted into a belief of the essentially

universal quality of the people who produced
him.
Heine was not disposed by birth or tempera-
ment to overestimate the significance of Luther.
But here is what he said:
" Luther not only the greatest but the most

is
German man in our history. He possessed. . .
qualities that we seldom see associated nay, that

we usually find in the most hostile antagonism.
He was at once a dreamy mystic and a practical
man of action. . . . He was both a cold scholastic
word-sifter and an inspired God-drunk prophet.
. . . He was full of the awful reverence of God,
full of self-sacrificing devotion to the Holy Spirit,
he could lose himself entirely in pure spirituality.
Yet he was fully acquainted with the glories of
this earth ; he knew how estimable they are ; it was
his lips that uttered the famous maxim
18 THE TWO WORLDS
" *
Who loves not woman, wine and song,
9
Remains a fool his whole Hfe long.
He was a complete man, I might say an absolute

man, in whom there was no discord between matter
and spirit. To call him a spiritualist would be
as erroneous as to call him a sensualist. . . .
Eternal praise to the man whom we have to thank
for the deliverance of our most precious posses-
And again speaking of Luther's work:
"Thus was established in Germany spiritual

freedom, or as it is called, freedom of thought.
Thought became a right and the decisions of rea-
3*
son legitimate.
The specific correctness of the above is of slight
importance as compared with the universality of

the tradition which made these ideas peculiarly
Germanic, and Luther, therefore, a genuine na-

tional hero and type.
It is, however, with Kant that I commence. In

Protestant Germany his name is almost always
associated with that of Luther. That he brought
to consciousness the true meaning of the Lutheran
THE TWO WORLDS 19
reformation Is a commonplace of the German his-

torian. One can hardly convey a sense of the
unique position he occupies in the German thought
of the last two generations. It is not that every
philosopher is a Kantian, or that the professed

Kantians stick literally to his text. Far from it.
But Kant must always be reckoned with. No posi-
tion unlike his should be taken up till Kant has
been reverently disposed of, and the new position
evaluated in his terms. To scoff at him is fair
sacrilege. In a genuine sense, he marks the end

of the older age. He is the transition to distinc-
tively modern thought.

One shrinks at the attempt to compress even his
leading ideas into an hour. Fortunately for me,

few who read my attempt will have sufficient
acquaintance with the tomes of Kantian in-
terpretation and exposition to appreciate the full

enormity of my offense. For I cannot avoid the
effort to seize from out his highly technical writ-
ings a single idea and to label that his germinal

idea. For only way can we get a clew to
in this
those general ideas with which Germany char-
acteristically prefers to connect the aspirations

and convictions that animate its deeds.
20 THE TWO WORLDS
Adventuring without further preface Into this
field, I find that Kant's decisive contribution is the
idea of a dual legislation of reason by which are
marked off two distinct realms that of science

and that of morals. Each of these two realms has
its own final and authoritative constitution: On
one hand, there is the world of sense, the world
of phenomena in space and time in which science

is at home ; on the other hand, is the supersensible,
the noumenal world, the world of moral duty and
moral freedom.
Every cultivated man is familiar with the con-
flict of science and religion, brute fact and ideal
purpose, what is and what ought to be, necessity

and freedom. In the domain of science causal de-
pendence is sovereign; while freedom is lord of
moral action. It is the proud boast of those who

are Kantian in spirit that Kant discovered laws
deep in the very nature of things and of human

experience whose recognition puts an end forever
to all possibility of conflict.
In principle, the discovery is as simple as its
application is far-reaching. Both science and

moral obligation exist. Analysis shows that each
is based upon laws supplied by one and the same
THE TWO WORLDS 21
reason (of which, as he Is fond of saying, reason

is the legislator) ; but laws of such a nature that
their respective jurisdictions can never compete.
The material for the legislation of reason in the

natural world is sense. In this sensible world of
space and time, causal necessity reigns : such is the

decree of reason itself. Every attempt to find
freedom, to locate ideals, to draw support for
man's moral aspirations in nature, is predoomed to
failure. The effort of reason to do these things is
contrary to the very nature of reason itself: it
is self-contradictory, suicidal.
When one considers the extent in which religion
has been bound up with belief in miracles, or de-
partures from the order of nature ; when one notes

how support for morals has been sought in natural
law; how morals have been tied up with man's
natural tendencies to seek happiness and with
consequences in the way of reward of virtue and
punishment of vice ; how history has been explained

as a play of moral forces in short, the extent to
which both the grounds and the sanctions for
morality have been sought within the time and

space world, one realizes the scope of the revolu-
tion wrought by Kant, provided his philosophy be
22 THE TWO WOELBS
true. Add to this the fact that men in the past
have not taken seriously the idea that every exist-

ence in space, every event in time, is connected by
bonds of causal necessity with other existences and
events, and consequently have had no motive for

the systematic pursuit of science. How is the late
appearance of science in human history to be ac-

counted for? How are we to understand the com-
paratively slight influence which science still has
upon the conduct of life?Men, when they have not

consciously looked upon nature as a scene of ca-
price, have failed to bring home to themselves that

nature is a scene of the legislative activity of rea-
son in the material of sense. This fact the Kantian
philosophy brings home to man once for all; it
brings it home not as a pious wish, nor as a pre-

carious hope confirmed empirically here and there
by victories won by a Galileo or a Newton, but as
an indubitable fact necessary to the existence of
any cognitive experience at all. The reign of law

in nature is the work of the same reason which
proceeds empirically and haltingly to the discov-

ery of law here and there. Thus the acceptance
of the Kantian philosophy not only frees man at
a single stroke from superstition, sentimentalism
THE TWO WORLDS 23
and moral and theological romanticism, but gives

at the same stroke authorization and stimulation
to the detailed efforts of man to wrest from nature
her secrets of causal law. What sparse groups of
men of natural science had been doing for the
three preceding centuries, Kant proclaimed to be
the manifestation of the essential constitution
of man as a knowing being. For those who accept
the Kantian philosophy, itf is accordingly the
magna charta of scientific work: the adequate
formulation of the constitution which directs and
justifies their scientific inquiries. It is a truism

to say that among the Germans as nowhere else has
developed a positive reverence for science. In what

other land does one find in the organic law men-
tion of Science, and read in its constitution an
" Science and
express pro<vision that its teaching
are free'*?
But this expresses only half of Kant's work.
Reason is itself supersensible. Giving law to the
material of sense and so constituting nature, It
is in itself above sense and nature, as a sovereign

is above his subjects. Hie supersensible world is
thus a more congenial field for its legislative activ-
ity than the physical world of space and time.

m THE TWO WORLDS
But is
any such field open to human experience?
Has not Kant himself closed and locked the gates
in his assertion that the entire operation of man's
knowing powers is confined to the realm of sense
in which causal necessity dominates? Yes, as far

as knowledge is concerned. No, as far as moral
obligation is concerned. The fact of duty, the
existence of a categorical command to act thus and
so, no matter what the pressure of physical sur-
roundings or the incitation of animal inclinations,

is as much a fact as the existence of knowledge
of the physical world. Such a command cannot
proceed from nature. What is cannot introduce

man to what ought to be, and thus impose its
own opposite upon him. Nature only enmeshes
men in its relentless machine-like movement. The
very existence of a command in man to act for
the sake of what ought to be no matter what
actually is is thus of itself final proof of the
operation of supersensible reason within- human

experience: not, indeed, within theoretical or cog-
nitive experience, but within moral experience.
The moral law, the law of obligation, thus pro-
ceeds from a source in man above reason. It is
token of his membership as a moral being in a

THE TWO WORLDS 25
kingdom of absolute ends above nature. But it
Is also directed to something in man which Is
equally above nature: It appeals to and demands

freedom. Reason is
Incapable of anything so irra-
tional, so self-contradictory, as Imposing a law
of action to which no faculty of action corre-
sponds. The freedom of the moral will Is the

answer to the unqualified demand of duty. It Is
not open to man to accept or reject this truth as
he may see fit. It Is a principle of reason which
Is involved in every exercise of reason. In denying
it In name, man none the less acknowledges It In
fact. Only men already sophisticated by vice who

are seeking an excuse for their viciousness ever
try to deny, even In words, the response which

freedom makes to the voice of duty. Since, how-
ever, freedom is an absolute stranger to the natural
and sensible world, man's possession of moral free-
dom is the final sign and seal of his membership
in a supersensible world. The existence of an

ideal or spiritual realm with Its own laws Is thus
certified to by the fact of man's own citizenship

within it. But, once more, this citizenship and
this certification are solely moral Scientific or in-
tellectual warrant for it Is impossible or self-

26 THE TWO WORLDS
contradictory, for science works by the law of
causal necessity with respect to what is, igno-
rant of any law of freedom referring to what
should be.
With the doors to the supersensible world now
open, it is but a short step to religion. Of the
negative traits of true religion we may be sure

in advance. It will not be based upon intellectual
grounds. Proofs of the existence of God, of the

creation of nature, of the existence of an imma-
terial soul from the standpoint of knowledge are
all of them impossible. They transgress the limits
of knowledge, since that is confined to the sensible
world of time and space. Neither will true reli-
gion be based upon historic facts such as those

of Jewish history or the life of Jesus or the author-
ity of a historic institution like a church. For

all historic facts as such fall within the realm of
time which is sensibly conditioned. From the
points of view of natural theology and historic
religions Kant was greeted by his contemporaries

as the a all-shattering." Quite otherwise is it,
however, as to moral proofs of religious ideas and
ideals. In Kant's own words : " I have found it
necessary to deny knowledge of God, freedom and

THE TWO WORLDS 27
Immorlality in order to find a place for faith

**-
faith being a moral act*
Then he proceeds to reinterpret in terms of the

sensuous natural principle and the ideal rational
principle the main doctrines of Lutheran Prot-

estantism. The doctrines of incarnation* original
sin, atonement, justification by faith and sanctifi-
cation, while baseless literally and historically* are
symbols of the dual nature of man, as phenomenal

and noumenai And while Kant scourges ecclesi-
astical religions so far as they have relied upon

ceremonies and external authority, upon external
rewards and punishments, yet he ascribes transi-
tional value tothem in that they have symbolized
ultimate moral truths. Although dogmas are but
the external vesture of inner truths, yet it may
be good for us " to continue to pay reverence to
the outward vesture since that has served to bring
to general acceptance a doctrine which really rests
upon an authority within the soul of man, and

w
which, therefore, needs no miracle to commend it.
It is a precarious undertaking to single out

same one German philosophy
tiling in m of typical
importance in understanding German national life.
Yet I am committed to the venture. My coavic-

28 THE TWO WORLDS
tion is that we have its root idea in the doctrine of
Kant concerning the two realms, one outer, phys-
icaland necessary, the other inner, ideal and free.

To this we must add that, in spite of their sep-
arateness and independence, the primacy always
lies with the inner. As compared with this, the
philosophy of a Nietzsche, to which so many resort

at the present time for explanation of what seems
to them otherwise inexplicable, is but a superficial
and transitory wave of opinion. Surely the chief
mark of distinctively German civilization is its
combination of self-conscious idealism with unsur-
passed technical efficiency and organization in the

varied fields of action. If this is not a realization
in fact of what is found in Kant, I am totally at
loss for a name by which to characterize it. I do
not mean that conscious adherence to the
philoso-
phy of Kant has been the cause of the marvelous
advances made in Germany in the natural sciences
and in the systematic
application of the fruits of
intelligence to industry, trade, commerce, military
affairs, education* civic administration and indus-
trial organization.Such a claim would be absurd.
But I do mean, primarily, that Kant detected and
formulated the direction in which the German
THE TWO WORLDS 9
genius was moving, so that his philosophy is of

immense prophetic significance; and, secondarily,
that his formulation has furnished a banner and a
conscious creed which in solid and definite fashion
has intensified and deepened the work actually un-

dertaken.
In bringing to an imaginative synthesis what
might have remained an immense diversity

of enterprises, Kantianism has helped formulate
a sense of a national mission and destiny. Over
and above this, his formulation and its influence
aids us to understand why the German conscious-
ness has never been swamped by its technical ef-
ficiency and devotion, but has remained self-
consciously, not to say self-righteously, idealistic,

Such a work as Germany has undertaken might
well seem calculated to generate attachment to a
positivistic or even materialistic philosophy and

to a utilitarian ethics. But no; the teaching of
Kapt had put mechanism forever in its subordinate
place at the very time it inculcated devotion to
mechanism in its place. Above and beyond as an

end, for the sake of which all technical achieve-
ments, promotion of health, wealth and happi-

all
ness, exist, lies the realm of inner freedom, of the

SO THE TWO WORLDS
ideal and the supersensible. The more the Ger-
mans accomplish in the way of material conquest,
the more they are conscious of fulfilling an ideal
mission; every external conquest affords the
greater warrant for dwelling in an inner region

where mechanism does not intrude. Thus it turns
out that while the Germans have been, to employ
a catchword of recent thought, the most technically
pragmatic of all peoples in their actual conduct

of affairs, there is no people so hostile to the spirit
of a pragmatic philosophy.
The combination of devotion to mechanism and
organization in outward affairs and of loyalty to

freedom and consciousness in the inner realm has
its obvious attractions. Realized in the common
temper of a people it might well seem invincible.
Ended is the paralysis of action arising from the

split between science and useful achievements on
one side and spiritual and ideal aspirations on
the other. Each feeds and reinforces the other.
Freedom of soul and subordination of action dwell
in harmony. Obedience, definite subjection and
control, detailed organization is the lesson en-
forced by the rule of causal necessity in the outer
World of space and time in which action takes
THE TWO WORLDS 31
place. Unlimited freedom, the heightening of con-

sciousness for its own sake, sheer reveling in noble
ideals, the law of the inner world. What more can

mortal man ask?
It would not be difficult, I imagine, to fill the
three hours devoted to these lectures with quota-
tions from representative German authors to the
effect thatsupreme regard for the inner meaning
of things, reverence for inner truth in disregard
of external consequences of advantage or disad-
vantage, is the distinguishing mark of the German

spirit as against, say, the externality of the Latin
spirit or the utilitarianism of Anglo-Saxondom.

I content myself with one quotation, a quota-
tion which also indicates the same inclina-
tion to treat historic facts as symbolic of great
truths which is found in Kant's treatment of

church dogmas. Speaking of the Germanic lan-
guages, an historian of German civilization says:
a While aU other
Indo-European languages al-
low a wide liberty in placing the accent and make
external considerations, such as the quantity of
the syllables and euphony, of deciding influence,
the Germanic tribes show a remarkable and inten-
tional transition to an internal principle of ac-
32 THE TWO WORLDS
centuatlon. . . . Of all related peoples the Ger-
manic alone puts the accent on the root syllable
of the word, that is, on the part that gives it its
meaning. There is hardly an ethnological fact

extant which gives so much food for thought as
this. What leads these people to give up a habit
which must have been so old that it had become
instinctive, and to evolve out of their own minds
a principle which indicates a power of discrimina-
tion far in advance of anything we are used to
attribute to the lower stages of civilization? Cir-
cumstances of which we are not. now aware must
have compelled them to distinguish the inner es-
sence of things from their external form, and must
have taught them to appreciate the former as of
higher, indeed as of sole, importance. It is this
accentuation of the real' substance of things, the
ever-powerful desire to discover this real substance,

and the ever-present impulse to give expression
to this inner reality which has become the con-
trolling trait of the Germanic soul. Hence the

conviction gained by countless unfruitful efforts,
that reason alone will never get at the true founda-
tion of things ; hence the thoroughness of German
science; hence a great many of the qualities that
explain Germanic successes and failures; hence,
perhaps, a certain stubbornness and obstinacy, the
unwillingness to give up a conviction once formed;
hence the tendency tq mysticism; hence that con-
THE TWO WORLDS $3
tinuous struggle which marks the history of Ger-

man art, the struggle to give to the contents
powerful and adequate expression, and to satisfy
at the same time the requirements of esthetic ele-
gance and beauty, a struggle in which the victory
-
is ever on the side of truth,
it be homely,
though
over beauty of form whenever it appears deceitful ;
hence the part played by music as the only ex-
pression of those imponderable vibrations of the
soul for which language seems to have no words ;
hence the faith of the German in his mission among
the nations as a bringer of truthj as a recognizer
of the real value of things as against the hollow
shell of beautiful form, as the doer of right deeds
for their own sake and not for any reward beyond
the natural outcome of the deed itself."
The division established between the outer
realm, in which of course acts fall, and the inner

realm of consciousness explains what is otherwise
so paradoxical to a foreigner in German writings :
The constant assertion that Germany brought to

the world the conscious recognition of the prin-
ciple of freedom coupled with the assertion of the

relative Incompetency of the German folk em
masse for political self-direction. To one sat-

urated by the English tradition which , identifies
** THE TWO WOBLDS
?
freedom with power to act upon one s ideas, to
make of
purposes effective in regulation
one's
public affairs, the combination seems self-con-
tradictory. To the German it is natural. Read-

ers who have been led by newspaper quotations
to regard Bernhardi as preaching simply a gospel
of superior force will find in his writings a con-
tinual assertion that the German spirit is the spirit
of freedom, of complete intellectual self-determina-

"
tion; that the Germans have always been the
standard bearers of free thought/* We find him
supporting his teachings not by appeal to
Nietzsche, but by the Kantian distinction between

**
the empirical and rational ego."
It is Berahardi who says :
*c
Two great movements were born from the Ger-
man on which, henceforth, all the
intellectual life,
mteUectnal cmd moral progress of mankind must
rest: The Reformation and the critical philoso-
phy. The Reformation that broke the intellectual
yoke imposed by the Church, which checked all
free progress; and the Critique of Pure Reason
which put a stop to the caprice of philosophic
speculation by defining for the human mind the
limitations of its capacities for knowledge, and at
the same time pointed out the
way in which knowj*
"
-
THE TWO WORLDS S5
edge is really possible. On this substructure was

developed the intellectual life of our time, whose
deepest significance consists in the attempt to

reconcile the result of free inquiry with the reli-
gious needs of the heart, and thus to lay a founda-

tion for the harmonious organization of mankind.
. The German nation not
. .
only laid the founda-
tions of this great struggle for a harmonious devel-
opment of humanity but took the lead in it. We
are thus incurring an obligation for the future
from which we cannot shrink. We must be pre-
pared to be the leader in this campaign which is
being fought for the highest stake that has been
offered to human efforts. . To no nation ex-
. .
cept the German has it been given to enjoy in its

Inner self * that which is given to mankind as a
whole.* ... It is this quality which especially fits
us for leadership in the intellectual domain and

imposes upon m
tlw obligation to maintain that
*
position."
More significant than the words themselves
are their occasion and the occupation of the one

who utters them. Outside of Germany, cavalry
generals who employ philosophy to bring home

practical lessons are, I think, rare. Outside of
* *e
Berahaidi, Germany and the Kexfc War," ppt 73-T&
Italics not in Hie original text.
$6 THE TWO WORLDS
Germany, it would be hard to find an audience
where an appeal for military preparedness would
be reinforced by allusions to the Critique of Pure
Keason.
Yet only by taking such statements seriously
can one understand the temper in which opinion
in Germany meets a national crisis. When the~
philosopher Eucken (who received a Nobel prize
for contributing to the idealistic literature of the
world) justifies the part taken by Germany in a

world war because the Germans alone do not repre-
sent a particularistic and nationalistic spirit, but
u "
embody the universalism of humanity itself, he
utters a conviction bred in German thought by
the ruling interpretation of German philosophic
idealism. By the side of this motif the glorifica-
tion of war as a biologic necessity, forced by in-
crease of population, is a secondary detail, giving
a totally false impression when isolated from its
context. The main thing is that Germany, more

than any other nation, in a sense alone of all na-
tions, embodies the essential principle of humanity :
freedom of spirit, combined with thorough and de-

tailed work in the outer sphere where reigns causal
law, where obedience, discipline and subordina-

THE TWO WOELDS S7
tion are the necessities of successful organization,
It is
perhaps worth while to recaE that Kant Eved,
taught and died in Konigsberg; and that Konigs-
berg was the chief city of east Prussia, an island
still cut off in his early years from western
Prussia, a titular capital for the Prussian kings
where they went for their coronations. His life-
work in philosophy coincides essentially with the
political work of Frederick the Great, the king
who combined a regime of freedom of thought and
complete religious toleration with the most ex-

traordinary display known in history of adminis-
trative and military efficiency. Fortunately for
our present purposes, Kant, in one of his minor
essays, has touched upon this combination and

stated philosophy in terms of his own thought.
its
The essay in question is that entitled a What is

5'
the Enlightenment? His reply in substance is
that it is the coming of age on the part of human-
ity: the transition from a state of minority or
infancy wherein man does not dare to think freely
to that period of majority or maturity in which

mankind dares to use its own power of under-
The growth of this power of free use
standing.
of reason is the sole hope of progress in human
88 THE TWO WOELDS
affairs. External revolutions which are not the
natural expression of an inner or intellectual revo-
lution are of little significance. Genuine growth

is found in the slow growth of science and philoso-
phy and in the gradual diffusion throughout the

mass of the discoveries and conclusions of those
who are superior in intelligence. True freedom
is inner freedom 9 freedom of thought together
with the liberty consequent upon it of teaching and
" is
publication. To check this rational freedom
a sin against the very nature of man, the primary
law of which consists in just the advance in ra-
tional enlightenment.**
In contrast with this realm of inner freedom

stands that of civil and political action, the prin-
ciple of which is obedience or subordination to

constituted authority. Kant illustrates the na-
ture of the twoby the position of a military sub-
ordinate who is given an order to execute which
Ms reason tells him is unwise* His sole duty in
the realm of practice is to obey to do his duty.
But as a member not of the State but of the king-
dom of science, he has the right of free inquiry
and Later he might write upon
publication.
the campaign in which this event took place and
THE TWO WORLDS $9
point out, upon Intellectual grounds, the mistake

involved in the order. No wonder that Kant pro-
claims that the age of the enlightenment is the
age of Frederick the Great. Yet we should do

injustice to Kant if we inferred that he expected
this dualism of spheres of action, with its twofold
moral law of freedom and obedience, to endure

forever. By the exercise of freedom of thought,
and by its publication and the education which

should make its results
permeate the whole state,
the habits of a nation will finally become elevated
to rationality, and the spread of reason will make
it possible for the government to treat men, not as
cogs in a machine, but in accord with the dignity

of rational creatures.
Before leaving this theme, I must point out one
aspect of the work of reason thus far passed over.

Nature, the sensible world of space and time, is,
as a knowable object, constituted by the legisla-

tive work of reason, although constituted out of
a Bon-ratlcmal sensible stuff. This determining
work of reason forms not merely the Idealism of
the Kantiaa philosophy but determin.es its em-
phasis upon the & priori. The fractions of reason
through which nature is rendered a knowable ob-

40 THE TWO WOELDS
ject cannot be derived from experience,
for they
are necessary to the existence of experience. The

details of this a priori apparatus lie far outside
our present concern. Suffice it to say that as
compared with some of his successors, Kant was

an economical soul and got along with only two
a priori forms and twelve a priori categories. The
mental habitudes generated by attachment io a
priori categories cannot however be entirely neg-

lected in even such a cursory discussion as the
present.
If one were to follow the suggestion involved
in the lately quoted passage as to the significant

symbolism of the place of the accent in German
speech, one might discourse upon the deep mean-
ing of the Capitalization of Nouns in the written

form of the German language, together with the
richness of the language in abstract nouns. One
might fancy that the dignity of the common noun
substantive, expressing as it does the universal
or generic, has bred an intellectual deference.
One may fancy a whole nation of readers rever-
ently bowing their heads at each successively cap-
italized word. In such fashion one might arrive

at a picture, not without its truth, of what it
THE TWO WOELDS 41
means to be devoted to a priori rational

princi-
ples.
A
number of times during the course of the
world war I have heard someone remark that
he would not so much rnind what the Germans
did if it were not for the reasons assigned in its
justification. But to rationalize such a tangled
skein as human experience is a difficult task. If

one is in possession of antecedent rational con-
cepts which are legislative for experience, the task

is much simplified. It only remains to subsume
each empirical event under its proper category.

If the outsider does not see the applicability of
the concept to the event, it may be argued that

his blindness shows his ineptness for truly uni-
versal thinking. He is probably a crass empiric

who thinks in terms of material consequences in-
stead of upon the basis of antecedent informing
principles of reason.
Thus it has come about that no moral, social
or political question is adequately discussed in Ger-
many until the matter in hand has teen properly
deduced from an exhaustive determination of its
fundamental Begriff or Wesm. Or if the material
is too obviously empirical to allow of such deduc-

4 THE TWO WOBLDS
tion, it most at least be placed under its
appro-
What a convenience, what
priate rational form.
a resource, nay, what a weapon is the Kaatian
distinction of a priori rational form and a pos-
teriori empirical matter. L&t the latter be as
brutely diversified, as chaotic as you please,
There always exists a form of unity under which

it may be brought. If the empirical facts are
recalcitrant, so much the worse for them. It only
shows how empirical they are. To put them

under
a rational form is but to subdue their irrational

invade their lukewarm
opposition to reason, or to
neutrality. Any violence done them Is more than
indemnified by the favor of bringing them under
the sway of a priori reason, the incarnation of
the Absolute on earth.
Yet there are certain disadvantages attached
to a priori categories. They have a certain rigid-

ity, appalling to those who have not learned to
identify stiffness with force. Empirical matters

are subject to revision. The strongest belief that
claims the support of experience Is subject to
modification when experience testifies against it.
But an a priori conception Is not open to adverse

evidence. There is no court having jurisdiction.
THE TWO WORLDS 48
an unfortunate mortal should happen to

If, then,
be Imposed upon so that he was led to regard a
prejudice or predilection as an a priori truth, con-

trary experience would have a tendency to make
him the more obstinate in his belief. History
proves what a dangerous thing it has been for
men, when they try to impose their will upon

other men, to think of themselves as special in-
struments and organs of Deity. The danger is
equally great when an a priori Reason is substi-
tuted for a Divine Providence. Empirically

grounded truths do not have a wide scope; they
do not inspire such violent loyalty to themselves
as ideas supposed to proceed directly from reason
itself. But they are discussable; they have a
humane and social quality, while truths of pure
reason have a paradoxical way, in the end, of es-
caping from the arbitrament of reasoning. They

evade the logic of experience, only to become, in the
"
phrase of a recent writer, the spoil of a logic
of fanaticism/* Weapons forged in the smithy
of the Absolute become brutal and cruel when
confronted by merely human resistance.
The stiffly constrained character of an a priori
Reason manifests itself in another way. A cate-

44 THE TWO WORLDS
gory of pure reason is suspiciously like a pigeon-
hole. An American writer, speaking before the
present war, remarked with witty exaggeration

"
that Germany is a monstrous set of pigeonholes,
and every mother's son of a German is pigeoned in
Ms respective hole tagged, labeled and ticketed.
Germany is a huge human check-room, and the
government carries the checks in its pocket."

John Locke's deepest objection to the older form
of the a priori philosophy, the doctrine of innate
ideas, was the readiness with which such ideas

become strongholds behind which authority shel-
ters itselffrom questioning. And John Morley

fact
pointed out long ago the undoubted historic
that the whole modern liberal social and political
movement has allied itself with philosophic em-
piricism. It is hard here, as everywhere, to disen-
tangle cause and effect. But one can at least say
with considerable assurance that a hierarchically

ordered and subordered State will feel an affinity
for a philosophy of fixed categories, while a flexible
democratic society will, in its crude empiricism,
exhibit loose ends.
There is a story to the effect that the good

townspeople of Kdnigsberg were accustomed to
THE TWO WORLDS 45
their watches by the time at which Kant passed

upon his walks so uniform was he. Yielding to
the Teutonic temptation to find an inner meaning
in the outer event, one may wonder whether Ger-

man thought has not since Kant's time set its
intellectual and spiritual clocks by the Kantian

standard: the separation of the inner and the
outer, with its lesson of freedom and idealism in
one realm, and of mechanism, efficiency and organ-

ization in the other. A German professor of phi-
losophy has said that while the Latins live in the
present moment, the Germans live in the infinite
and ineffable. His accusation (though I am not

sure he meant it as such) is not completely justi-
fied. But it does seem to be true that the Germans,
more readily than other peoples, can withdraw

themselves from the exigencies and contingencies
of a region of Innerlichkdt which at least
life into
seems boundless and which can rarely be success-

;
fully uttered save through music, and a frail and

tender poetry, sometimes domestic, sometimes
lyric, but always full of mysterious charm. But

technical ideas, ideas about means and instru-
ments, can readily be externalized because the

outer world is in truth their abiding home.
n
GERMAN MORAL AND POLITICAL
PHILOSOPHY
IT is difficult to select sentences from Kant

which are intelligible to those not trained in his
vocabulary, unless the selection

is accompanied by
an almost word-by-word commentary. His writ-
ings have proved an admirable terrain for the dis-

play of German GriindlicJifeeit. But I venture
upon the quotation of one sentence which may
serve the purpose of at once recalling the main
lesson of the previous lecture and famishing a

transition to the theme of the present hour*
**
Even if an immeasurable gulf is fixed between
the sensible realm of the concept of nature and
the supersensible realm of the concept of freedom,
so that it is not possible to go from the first to
the second (at least by means of the theoretical
use of reason) any more than if they were two
separate worlds of which, the first could have no
influence upon the second, yet the second is
47
48 MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
meant to have an influence upon the first. The
concept of freedom is meant to actualize in the
world of sense the purpose proposed by its
laws." . . .
That is, the relation between the world of space
and time where physical causality reigns and the

moral world of freedom and duty is not a sym-
metrical one. The former cannot Intrude into
the latter. But it is the very nature of moral
legislation that it is meant to influence the world

of sense; its object is to realize the purposes of
free rational action within the sense world. This
fact fixes the chief features of Kant's philosophy
of Morals and of the State.
It is a claim of the admirers of Kant that he

first brought to recognition the true and infinite
nature of the principle of Personality. On one

side, the individual is homo phenomenon a part
of the scheme of nature, governed by its laws as
much as any stone or plant. But in virtue of
his citizenship in the kingdom of supersensible

Laws and Ends, he is elevated to true universality.
He is no longer a mere occurrence. He is a Per-
son one in whom the purpose of Humanity is in-
carnate. In English and American writings the

MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 49
terms subjective and subjectivism usually carry
with them a disparaging color. Quite otherwise
1
is it in German literature. This sets the age of

subjectivism, whose commencement, roughly speak-
ing, coincides with the Influence of Kantian
thought, In sharp opposition to the age of individ-
ualism, as well as to a prior period of subordina-
tion to external authority. Individualism means
Isolation; it means external relations of human
beings with one another and with the world; It
looks at things quantitatively, In terms of wholes

and parts. Subjectivism means recognition of the
principle of free personality: the self as creative,
occupied not with an external world which limits it
from without, but, through its own self-conscious-
ness, finding a world within Itself; and having

found the universal within Itself, work to
setting to
recreate Itself In what had been the external world,
and by Its own creative expansion In Industry, art
and politics to transform what had been mere lim-
iting material Into a work of Its own. Free as was
Kant from the sentimental, the mystic and the
romantic phases of this Subjectivism, we shall do
well to bear It In mind in thinking of his ethical
theory. Personality means that man as a rational

being does not receive the end which forms the
law of his action from without, whether from Na-
ture, the State or from God, but from his own

self. Morality is autonomous ; man, humanity, is
an end in itself. Obedience to the self-imposed

law will transform the sensible world (within
which falls all social ties so far as they spring
from natural instinct desire) into a form appro-
priate to universal reason. Thus we may para-

phrase the sentence quoted from Kant.
The gospel of duty has an invigorating ring.
It is easy to present it as the most noble and sub-
lime of all moral doctrines. What is more worthy
of humanity, what better marks the separation of
man from brute, than the will to subordinate selfish
desire and individual inclination to the commands

of stern and lofty duty? And if the idea of com-
mand (which inevitably goes with the notion of
duty) carries a sinister suggestion of legal au-
thority, pains and penalties and of subservience

to an external authority who issues the commands,
Kant seems to have provided a final corrective in
insisting that duty is self-imposed. Moral com-

mands are imposed by the higher, supranatural
self upon the lower empirical self, by the rational
selfupon the self of passions and inclinations.

German philosophy Is attached to antitheses and
their reconciliation in a higher synthesis. The
Kantian principle of Duty is a striking case of
the reconciliation of the seemingly conflicting
ideas of freedom and authority.
Unfortunately, however, the balance cannot be
maintained in practice. Kant*s faithful logic
compels him to insist that the concept of duty is
empty and formal. It tells men that to do their
duty is their supreme law of action, but is silent
as to what men's duties specifically are. Kant*

moreover, insists, as he is in logic bound to do,
that the motive which measures duty is wholly
inner ; it is purely a matter of inner consciousness.
To admit that consequences can be taken into ac-
count in deciding what duty is in a particular case
would be to make concessions to the empirical and
sensible world which are fatal to the scheme. The
combination of these two features of pure
intemality and pure formalism leads, in a
world where men's acts take place wholly in the
external and empirical region, to serious conse-
quences.
The dangerous character of these consequences
may perhaps be best gathered indirectly by means
of a quotation.
66
While the French people in savage revolt
against spiritual and secular despotism had broken
their chains and proclaimed their rights, another
quite different revolution was working in Prussia

the revolution of duty. The assertion of the
rights of the individual leads ultimately to indi-
vidual irresponsibility and to a repudiation of the
State. Immanuel Kant, the founder of the critical
philosophy, taught, in opposition to this view, the

gospel of moral duty, and Scharnhorst grasped
the idea of universal military service. By calling
upon which individual to sacrifice property and

life for the good of the community, he gave the
clearest expression to the idea of the State, and
created a sound basis on which the claims to indi-
vidual rights might rest." *
The sudden jump, by means of only a comma,

from the gospel of moral duty to universal mili-
tary service is much more logical than the shock
which it gives to an American reader would indi-
cate. I do not mean, of course, that Kant's
teaching was the cause of Prussia's adoption of

universal military service and of the thorough-
* "
Bemhardi, Germany and the Next War," pp. 63-64.
going subordination of individual happiness and

liberty of action to that capitalized entity, the
State. But I do mean that when the practical
political situation called for universal military
service in order to support and expand the exist-
ing state, the gospel of a Duty devoid of con-
tent naturally lent itself to the consecration and
idealization of such specific duties as the existing
national order might prescribe. The sense of
duty must gets its subject-matter somewhere, and

unless subjectivism was to revert to anarchic or
romantic individualism (which is hardly in the
spirit of obedience to authoritative law)

its appro-
lies in the commands of a
priate subject-matter
superior. Concretely what the State commands
is the congenial outer filling of a purely inner
sense of duty. That the despotism of Frederick
the Great and of the Hohenzollems who remained

true to his policy was at least that hitherto un-
known thing, an enlightened despotism,
made the
identification easier. Individuals have at all times,
in epochs of stress, offered their supreme sacrifice
to their country's good. In Germany this sacri-
fice in times of peace as well as of war has been
by an inner mystic sense

systematically reinforced
of a Duty elevating men to the plane of the uni-
versal and eternal.
In short, the sublime gospel of duty has its de-
fects. Outside of the theological and the Kantian

moral traditions, men have generally agreed that
duties are relative to ends. Not the obligation,
but some purpose, some good, which the fulfill-
ment of duty realizes, is the principle of morals.
The business of reason is to see that the end, the
good, for which one acts is a reasonable one

that is to say, as wide and as equitable in its
working out as the situation permits. Morals

which are based upon consideration of good and
evil consequences not only allow, but imperiously
demand the exercise of a discriminating intelli-
gence. A gospel of duty separated from empirical

purposes and results tends to gag intelligence. It
substitutes for the work of reason displayed in
a wide and distributed survey of consequences in

order to determine where duty lies an inner con-
sciousness, empty of content, which clothes with
the form of rationality the demands of existing
social authorities. A consciousness which is
not based upon and checked by consideration of

actual results upon human welfare is none
the less socially because labeled

Irresponsible
Beason.
Professor Eudken represents a type of idealistic
philosophy which is hardly acceptable to strict

Kantians. Yet only where the fundamental Kant-
ian ideas were current would such ethical ideas as
the following flourish:
"When justice is considered as a mere means

of securing man's welfare, and is treated accord-
ingly whether it be the welfare of individuals or
of society as a whole makes no essential difference
it loses all its characteristic features. No
longer can compel us to see life from its own
it
standpoint; no longer can it change the existing

condition of things; no longer can It sway our
hearts with the force of a primitive passion, and
oppose to all consideration of consequences an
irresistible spiritual
compulsion. It degenerates
rather into the complaisant servant of utility; it
adopts herself to her demands, and in so doing
suffers inward annihilation. It can maintain itself
only when it comes as a unique revelation of the

Spiritual Life within our human world, as a lofty
Presence transcending all considerations of ex-
5* *
pediency.
* **
Eueken, The Messing and V&Iise f LH/ 1
ty Gibson, p 104*
Such writing is capable of arousing emotional
reverberations in the breasts of many persons.
But they are emotions which, if
given headway,
smother intelligence, and undermine its responsi-
bility for promoting the actual goods of life. If
justice loses all its characteristic features when

"
regarded as a means (the word "mere inserted
" "
before means speaks volumes ) of the welfare
of society as a whole, then there is no objective
and responsible criterion for justice at alL A
justice which, irrespective of the determination
of social well-being, proclaims itself as an irre-
sistible spiritual impulsion possessed! of the
force of a primitive passion, is nothing but

a primitive passion clothed with a spiritual title
so that it is
protected from having to render an
account of itself. During an ordinary course of
things, it passes for but an emotional indulgence ;
in a time of stress and strain, it exhibits itself
as surrender of intelligence to passion.
The passage (from Bernhardi) quoted earlier

puts the German principle of duty in opposition
to the French principle of rights a favorite con-
trast in German thought. Men like Jeremy Ben-
tham also found the Revolutionary Rights of Man
doctrinaire and conducing to tyranny rather than

to freedom. These Rights were a priori, like Duty,
being derived from the supposed nature or essence

of man, instead of being adopted as
empirical ex-
pedients to further progress and happiness. But
the conception of duty is one-sided, expressing
command on one side and obedience on the other,
while rights are at least reciprocal. Rights are
social and sociable in accord with the spirit of
French philosophy. Put in a less abstract form

than the revolutionary theory stated them, they
are things to be discussed and measured. They
admit of more and less, of compromise and ad-
justment. So also does the characteristic moral

contribution of English thought intelligent self-
interest. This is hardly an ultimate idea. But
at least it evokes a picture of merchants bargain-
ing, while the categorical imperative calls up the
drill sergeant. Trafficking ethics, in which each
gives up something which he wants to get some-
thing which he wants more, is not the noblest kind

of morals, but at least it is socially responsible
as far as
" Give so that be given
it goes. it may
" has at least some
to you in return tendency to
bring men together; it promotes agreement. It
requires deliberation and discussion. This is
just what the authoritative voice of a superior

will not tolerate; it is the one unforgiveable
sin.
The morals of bargaining, exchange, the mutual
satisfaction of wants may be outlived in some

remote future, but up to the present they
play an important part in life. To me there is
something uncanny in the scorn which German

ethics, in behalf of an unsullied moral idealism,
pours upon a theory which takes cognizance of

practical motives. In a highly esthetic people
one might understand the display of contempt.
But when an aggressive and commercial nation
carries on commerce and war simply from
the motive of obedience to duty> there awakened is
an unpleasant suspicion of a suppressed " psychic

" Man does not
complex." When Nietzsche says,
desire happiness; only the Englishman does that,**
we laugh at the fair hit. But persons who pro-

fess no regard for happiness as a test of action
have an unfortunate way of living up to their
principle by making others tmhappy. I should

entertain some suspicion of the complete sincerity
of those who profess disregard for their own hap-

piness, but I should be quite certain of their sin-
cerity when It comes to a question of my hap-

piness.
Within the Kantian philosophy of morals there
is an idea which conducts necessarily to a philoso-
phy of society and the State. Leibniz was the
great German source of the philosophy of the en-
lightenment. Harmony was the dominant thought

of this philosophy; the harmony of nature with
itself and with harmony of nature

intelligence ; the
with the moral ends of humanity. Although Kant
was a true son of the enlightenment, his doctrine of
the radically dual nature of the legislation of Rea-
son put an end to its complacent optimism. Ac-

'
cording to Kant* morality is in no way a work of

nature. It is the achievement of the self-conscious
reason of man through conquest of nature. The
ideal of a final harmony remains, but it is an ideal
to be won through a battle with the natural forces
of man. His breach with the enlightenment is
nowhere as marked as in his denial that man is by

nature good. On the contrary, man is by nature
evil that is, his philosophical rendering of the
doctrine of original sin. Not that the passions,
appetites and senses are of themselves evil, but they

tend to usurp the sovereignty of duty as the mo-
tivating force of human action. Hence morality

Is a ceaseless battle to transform all the natural
desires of man into willing servants of the law
and purpose of reason.

Even the kindly and sociable instincts of man,
in which so many have sought the basis of both
morality and organized society, fall under Kant's

condemnation. As natural desires, they aspire to
an illegitimate control in man's motives. They are

parts of human self-love: the unlawful tendency
to make happiness the controlling purpose of ac-
tion. The natural relations of man to man are

those of an unsocial sociableness. On the one
hand, men are forced together by natural ties.
Only in social relations can individuals develop
their capacities. But no sooner do they come

together than disintegrating tendencies set in.
Union with his fellows give a stimulus to vanity,

avarice and gaining power over others traits
which cannot show in themselves in individuals

when they are isolated. This mutual antagonism
is, however, more of a force in evolving man from
savagery to civilization than are the kindly and

sociable instincts.
"Without these unlovely qualities which set

man over against man in strife, individuals would
have lived on in perfect harmony, contentment and
mutual love, with all their distinctive abilities
latent and undeveloped."
In short, they would have remained in Rous-

seau's paradise of a state of nature, and
"
perhaps Rousseau was right when he preferred
the savage state to the state of civiEzation
pro-
vided we leave out of account the last stage to
which our species is yet destined to rise.**
But since the condition of civilization is but an
intermediary between the natural state and the

truly or rational moral condition to which Fian
is to rise, Rousseau was wrong.
" Thanks then be to nature for the unsociable-
ness, the spiteful competition of vanity, the in-

satiate desires for power and gain.**
These quotations, selected from Kant's little

" Idea for a Universal '
essay on an History/* are

precious for understanding two of the most char-
acteristic traits of subsequent German thought,
the distinctions mad? tetween gopety u4 the
State and between Civilization and Culture, Much
of the trouble which has been experienced in re-
use of JTaZffir might have been
spect to the recent
allayed,by a knowledge that Kultwr has little in
common with the English word "culture" save
a likeness in sound. Kyltur is sharply antithetical

to civilization in its meaning. Civilization is a
natural and largely unconscious or involuntary
growth. It is, so to speak, a by-product of the
engendered when people live close together.
It is external, in short. Culture, on the other,
is deliberate and conscious. It is a fruit not of
men's natural motives, but of natural motives

which have been transformed by the inner spirit.
Kant made the distinction when he said that Rous-
seau was not so far wrong ia preferring savagery

to civilization, since civilization meant simply
social decencies and elegancies and outward pro-
prieties, while morality,

that is, the rule of the
end of Reason, is necessary to culture. And the

a culture " becomes
real significance of the term
more obvious when he adds that it involves the
slow toil of education of the Inner Life, and that

the attainment of culture on the part of an indi-
vidual depends upon long effort by the com-

MOBAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 6$
munity to which he belongs. It Is not primarily

an Individual trait or possession, but a conquest of
the community won through devotion to " duty."
In recent German literature, Culture has been
given a more sharply technical distinc-

even
tion from Civilization and one which
emphasizes
even more its collective and nationalistic char-
acter. Civilization as external and uncontrolled
by self-conscious purpose includes such things as
language in Its more spontaneous colloquial ex-
pression, trade, conventional manners or etiquette s
and the police activities of government. Kutiur
comprises language used for purposes of higher

literature; commerce pursued not as means of
enriching individuals but as a condition of the de-
velopment of national life; art, phllosopliy (espe-
cially in that untranslatable thing, the " Welt-
Anschauung **) ; science, religion, and the activities
of the state in the nurture and expansion of the
other forms of national genius* that is, its activi-
ties In education and the army. The legislation

of Bismarck with reference to certain Boman
Catholic orders nicknamed Kultur-kampf, for
Is
It was conceived as embodying a struggle between

two radically different philosophies of life* the Ho-
64 MGHAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
man, or Italian, and the true Germanic, not simply
as a measure of political expediency. Thus it is
that a trading and military post like Kiao-Chou

" monument of Teu-
is officially spoken of as a
tonic Kultur The war now raging is conceived
of as an outer manifestation of a great spiritual

what really at stake the
struggle^ in which is is
supreme value of the Germanic attitude in phi-

the
losophy science and social questions generally s
s
a German habits of and think-

specifically feeling
ing."
Very similar motives are at work in the dis-

tinction between society and the State which is 5
almost a commonplace of German thought. In
English and American writings the State is al-

most always used to denote society in its more
organized aspects, or it may be identified with
government as a special agency operating for the

collective interests of men in association. But in
German literature society is a technical term and

means something empirical and, so to speak, ex-
ternal; while the State, if not avowedly something
mystic and transcendental, is at least a moral
entity, the creation of self-conscious reason operat-
ing in behalf of the spiritual and ideal interests

MOBAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 65
of its members. Its function is cultural, educa-
tive. Even when it intervenes in material interests*

as it does in regulating lawsuits, poor laws,
pro-
tective tariffs, etc., etc., its action has
ultimately
an ethical significance : its purpose is the further-
ing of an ideal community. The same thing is

to be said of wars when they are really national
wars, and not merely dynastic or accidental.
Society is an expression of man*s egoistic na-

ture; his natural seeking for personal advantage
and profit. Its typical manifestation is in com-
petitive economic struggle and in the struggle for
honor and recognized social status. These have

their proper place ; but with respect even to them
it is the duty of the State to intervene so that
the struggle may contribute to ideal ends which

alone are universal. Hence the significance of
the force or power of the State. Unlike other
forms of force, it has a sort of sacred import, for
it represents force consecrated to the assertion
and expansion of final goods which are spiritual,
moral, rational. These absolute ends can be
maintained only in struggle against man's individ-
ualistic ends. Conquest through conflict is the
law of morals everywhere.

In Kant we fine! only the beginnings of this
political philosophy. He Is still held back by the
individualism of the eighteenth century. Every-

thing legal and political is conceived by him as
external and hence outside the strictly moral realm
of inner motivation. Yet he is not content to leave

the State and its law as a wholly unmoral matter.
The natural motives of man are, according to
Kant (evidently following Hobbes), love of
powers love of gain? love of glory. These motives

are egoistic; they issue in strife in the war of
all against alL While such a state of affairs does
not and cannot invade the inner realm of duty,

the realm of the moral motive* it evidently pre-
sents a regime in which the conquest of the world
of sense by the law of reason cannot be effected.
Man in Ms rational or universal capacity must,
therefore* will an outward order of

'
harmony in
which it is at least possible for acts dictated by
rational freedom to get a footing. Such an outer
order is the State. Its province is not to promote
moral freedom directly only the moral will can
do that. But its business is to hinder the hin-
drances to freedom: to establish a social condi-
tion of outward order in which truly moral
acts may gradually evolve a kingdom of human-

ity. Thus while the State does not have a
directly moral scope of action (since the coer-

cion of motive a moral absurdity), it does
Is
have a moral basis and an ultimate moral func-

tion.
" 9
It is the law of reason, holy and Inviolable/
which impels man to the institution of the State,
not natural sociability* much less considerations of
expediency* And so necessary is the State to hu-
manity's realization of Its moral purpose that

there can be no right of revolution. The over-
throw and execution of the sovereign (Kant evi-

dently had the French Revolution and Louis XVI
In mind) is an immortal and Inexpiable sin like
ftc
the sin against the Holy Ghost spoken of by
theologians, which can never be forgiven In this

world or in the next/*
Kant was enough of a child of the eighteenth
century to be cosmopolitan, not nationalistic, in

his feeling. Since humanity as a whole, In Its
universality, alone truly corresponds to

the uni-
versality of reason, Be upheld the Ideal of an ulti-

mate republican federation of states; he was one
of the first to proclaim the possibility of endnr-
ing peace among nations on the basis of such a
federated union of mankind.

The threatened domination of Europe bj Na-
poleon following on the wars waged by republican
France put an end, however, to cosmopolitanism.
Since Germany was the greatest sufferer from
these wars, and since it was obvious that the lack

of national unity* the division of Germany into
a multitude of petty states, was the great soorce of

her weakness; since was equally obvious that
it
Prussia, the one strong and centralized power
amoBg the German states, was the only thing

which saved them all from national extinction,
subsequent political philosophy in Germany res-
cued the idea of the State from the^ somewhat
ambiguous moral position in which Kant had left

it. Since a state which is an absolute moral neces-
sity and whose actions are nevertheless lacking in

inherent moral quality is an anomaly, the doctrine
almost calls for a theory which shall make the

State the supreme moral entity.
Fichte marks the beginning of the transforma-
tion; and, in his writings, it is easy to detect a

marked difference of attitude toward the national-
istic state before and after 1806, when in the battle
of Jena Germany went down to inglorious defeat,

From the time of Fichte, the German philosophy
of the State blends with its philosophy of his-
tory, so that my reservation of the latter topic for
the next section is somewhat arbitrary, and I shall
not try rigidly to maintain the division of themes.
I have already mentioned the fact that Kant
relaxes the separation of the moral realm of free-
dom from the sensuous realm of nature sufficiently
to assert that the former is to influence the
latter and finally to subjugate it. By means of

the little crack thus introduced into nature^ Fichte
rewrites the Kantian philosophy* The world of
sense must be regarded from the very start as

material which the free, rational, moral Ego has
created in order to have material for its own ade-
quate realization of will. Fichte had a longing
for an absolute unity which did not afflict Kant,
to whom, save for the concession just referred to,
a complete separation of the two operations of

legislative reason sufficed. Fichte was also an
ardently soul, whose very temperament as-
sured him of the subordination of theoretical
knowledge to moral action.

It would be as difficult to give, in short space,
an adequate sketch of Fichte's philosophy as of
Kant's. To him, however, reason was the expres-
sion of the wiD, not (as with Kant) the will an
" Im
application of reason
to action. Anfang
war die That" Is good Fichteanlsm. While
Kant continued the usual significance of the term

Reason (with only such modifications as the ra-
tionalism of his century had made current), Fichte
began the transformation which consummated

in
later German idealism. If the world of nature
and of human an expression of reason?

relations is
then reason must be the sort of thing, and have

the sort of attributes by means of which the world
may be construed, no matter how far away this
conception of reason takes us from the

usual
meaning of the term. To Fichte the formula
which best described such aspects of the world and

of life as he was interested in was effort at self-
realization through struggle with difficulties and
overcoming opposition. Hence his formula for

a "
'reason was a Will which, having posited itself,
"posited" its antithesis in order, through

further action subjugating this opposite, to con-
quer its own freedom.

The doctrine of the primacy of the Deed, and
of the Duty to achieve freedom through moral self-
assertion against obstacles (which, after all* are

there only to further this self-assertion) was one
which could, with more or less plausibility, be de-
rived from Kant. More to our present point^ it
was a doctrine which could be preached with noble

moral fervor in connection with the difficulties and
needs of a divided and conquered Germany. Fichte

saw himself as the continuator of the work of
a science of knowl-
Luther and Kant. His final
edge" brought the German people alone of the

peoples of the world into the possession of the idea
and Hence the peculiar
ideal of absolute freedom.
destiny of the German scholar and the German

State. It was the doty and mission of German
science and philosophy to contribute to the cause

of the spiritual emancipation of humanity. Kant
had already taught that the acts of men were to
become gradually permeated by a spirit of ration-
ality til there should be an equation of inner
freedom of mind and outer freedom of action.
Fichte's doctrine demanded an acceleration of the
process. Men who have attained to -a conscious-
ness of the absolute freedom and self-activity must
necessarily desire to see around them

similar free
beings. The scholar who is truly a scholar not
merely knows, but he knows the nature of knowl-

edge its place and function as a manifestation
of the Absolute. Hence he
a peculiar sense,
is, in
the direct manifestation of God in the world the
true priest. And his priestly function consists
in bringing other men to recognize moral free-
dom in its creative operation. Such is the
dignity of education as conducted by those who

have attained true philosophic insight.
Fichte made a specific application of this idea
to his own country and time. The humiliating

condition of contemporary Germany was due to
the prevalence of egoism, selfishness and particular-
ism: to the fact that men had lowered themselves
to the plane of sensuous life. The fall was the
worse because the Germans, more than any other
people, were by nature and history conscious of

the ideal and spiritual principle, the principle of
freedom, lying at the very basis of all things. The

key to the political regeneration t
of Germany
was^to be.foizndLin a moral and spiritual regen-

"
eration effected by means of education. Hie

key* amid political division* to political unity was
to be sought in devotion to moral
unity. In this
u Addresses to the
spirit Piclite preached his Ger-
man Nation." In this spirit he collaborated In
the foundation of the University of Berlin* and
zealously promoted all the educational reforms in-
troduced by Stein and Humboldt into Prussian

*
The conception of the State as an essential
moral Being charged with an indispensable moral

function lay close to these ideas. Education is
the means of the advancement of humanity toward
realization of its divine perfection. Education is
the work of the State. The syllogism completes

itself. But in order that the State may carry on
its educational or moral mission it must not only
possess organization and commensurate power, but
it must also control the conditions which secure
the possibility offered to the individuals composing^
it. To adopt Aristotle's phrase, men must

before they can live nobly. The primary condi-
tion of a secure life is that everyone be able to
live by his own labor. Without this, moral self-
determination is a mockery. '-The business of the

State, outside of its educational mission, is con-
cerned with property, and this business means in-
suring property to everyone ms well as protecting

Mm in what he already possesses^ Moreover, prop-
74 MORAL AXD POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
erty Is not mere physical possession. It has a
profound moral significance, for it means the sub-
jugation of physical things to will. It is a neces-
sary part of the realization of moral personality :
the conquest of the non-ego by the ego. Since
property does not mean mere appropriation, but is
a right recognized and validated by society itself,
property has a social basis and aim. It is an
expression not of individual egotism bet of the uni-

versal will. ( f
Hence it is essential to the very idea
of property and of the State that all the members

of society have an equal opportunity for prop-
erty, ";
Hence it is the duty of the State to secure
to its every member the right to work and the

reward of his work.
The outcome, as expressed in his essay on " The
Closed Industrial State," is State Socialism, based
on moral and idealistic grounds, not on economic
considerations. /, In order that men may have a
real opportunity to develop their moral person-
alities, their right to labor and to adequate living,
in return for their labor must be assured. This
cannot happen in a competitive society. Industry
must be completely regulated by the State if these
indispensable rights to labor and resulting com-
fort and security of life as means to moral voli-
tion are to be achieved. But & state engaged in
unrestricted foreign trade will leave its working-

men at the mercy of foreign conditions. It must
therefore regulate or even eliminate foreign com-
merce so far as is
necessary to secure its own citi-
r*""
zens. >
The ultimate goal is a universal state as
wide as humanity, and a state In which each in-
dividual will act freely, without state-secured
rights and state-imposed obligations. But before ;
this cosmopolitan and philosophically anarchic
condition can be reached, we must pass through
a period of the nationalistic closed state. Thus

at the end a wide gulf separates Fichte from Kant.
The moral individualism of the latter has become
an ethical socialism. and by means of a

Only in
circle of egos or personalities does a human being
attain the moral reason and freedom which Kant
bestowed upon him as his birthright. Only

through the educational activities of the State and
its complete regulation of the industrial activities
of members does the potential moral freedom of
Its
individuals become an established reality*
,
-
If "I have devoted so mudb space to Fichte It
is not because of Ms direct influence upon

affairs or even upon thought. He did not found
a schooL His system was at once too personal
and too formal Nevertheless, he expressed Ideas
which, removed from their special context in his
system, were taken up into the thought of culti-
vated Germany. Heine, speaking of the vogue of
systems of thought, says with profound truth that

44
nations have an instinctive presentiment of what
15
they require to fulfill their mission.
And Fichte's thought Infiltrated through many

crevices. Rodbertus and Lasalle, the socialists,
were, for example, profoundly affected by him.

When the latter was prosecuted in a criminal suit
for his u Programme of

Workingmen," his reply
was that his programme was a distinctively philo-
sophic utterance* and hence protected by the con-

stitutional provision for freedom of science and its
teaching. And this is his philosophy of the

State:
\ "The State the unity and cooperation of

is
individuals in a moral whole. The ultimate

. .
and intrinsic end of the State is, therefore, to

further the positive unfolding, the progressive de-
velopment of human life. Its function is to work

out the true end of man; that is to say, the full
degree of culture of which human nature Is capa-

ble."
And he quotes with approval the words:
a The
concept of the State must be broadened
so as to make the State the contrivance whereby
all human virtue is to be realized to the fulL" 1
^
And if he differs from Fichte, it is bet in the
assertion that since the laboring class is the one
to whom the need most directly appeals, it is work-
ingmen who must take the lead in the development

of the true functions of the State.
Pantheism is a philosophic nickname which

should be sparingly employed; so also should the
term Monism, To caH Fichte^s system an ethical
pantheism and monism is not to say much that is
enlightening. But with free interpretation the
designation may be highly significant in refer-

ence to the spiritual temper of the Germany of
the first part of the nineteenth century. For it
gives a key to the presentiment of what Germany

needed to fulfill its mission.
It is a commonplace of German historians that

its unity and expansion to a great slate powerful
externally* prosperous
was wrought,
internally,
unlike that of any other people, from within out-

" our national
ward. In Lange's words, develop-
ment started from the most and approxi-
ideal
mated more and more to the real." Hegel and

Heine agree that In Germany the French Revo-
lution and the Napoleonic career were paralleled
by a philosophic revolution and an intellectual
empire. You recall the bitter word that, when
Napoleon was finally conquered and Europe par-

titioned, to Germany was assigned the kingdom of
the clouds. But this aerial and tenuous kingdom
became a mighty power, working with and in the

statesmen of Prussia and the scholars of Germany
to found a kingdom on the solid earth. Spiritual
and ideal Germany made common cause with
realistic and practical Prussia, As says Von
"
Sjbel, the historian of the Founding of the Ger-
man Empire : "
a own
Germany had been ruined through its
disintegration and had dragged Prussia with it

into the abyss. It was well known that the wild
fancies of the Conqueror hovered about the utter
annihilation of Prussia ; if this should take place,
then east as well as west of the Elbe, not only
MOfiAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 79
political independence, but every trace of a Ger-

man spirit, the German language and customs,
German art and learning everything would be
wiped out by the foreigners. But this fatal
danger was perceived just at the time when every-
body had been looking up to Kant and Schiller,
had been admiring' Faust, the world-embracing
masterpiece of Goethe's, and had recognized that
Alexander von Humboldt's cosmological studies
and Niebulir*s " Roman History " had created
a new era in European science and learning. In
such intellectual attainments the Germans felt that
they were far superior to the vanquisher of the
world and his great nation; and so the political
interests of Prussia and the salvation of the Ger-
man nationality exactly coincided. Schleier-
macher*s patriotic sermons, Pichte's stirring- ad-
dresses to the German people, Htimboldt's glorious
founding of the Berlin University, served to aug-

ment the power of Prussia, while
resisting
Schamhorst's recruits and militia were devoted
to the defense of German honor and German CES-
toms. Everyone felt that German nationality
was lost if Prussia did not come to its rescue, and
that, too, there was no safety possible for Prussia
unless allGermany was free.
u What a remarkable providence it was that
brought together, as in the Middle Ages, on this
ancient colonial ground, a throng of the most
energetic men from all districts of Germany. For
neither Stein nor Ms follower, Hardenberg, nor
the generals, Seharahorst, Bluecher and Gneisenau,
nor the authors, Niebuhr, Fichte and K. F.
Eichorn, nor many others who might be men-
tioned, were born in Prussia; yet because their
thoughts centered in Germany, they had become
loyal Prussians. The name Germany had been
blotted from the political map of Europe, but
never had so many hearts thrilled at the thought
of being German.
u Thus on the most eastern frontier of German
life, in the midst of troubles which seemed hope-
less, the idea of German unity, which had lain

dormant for centuries, now sprang up in a new
birth. At first thisidea was held exclusively by
the great men of the times and remained the in-
valuable possession of the cultivated classes ; but
once started it spread far and wide among the
younger generation, . . . But it was easier to de-
feat the mighty Napoleon than to bend the Ger-
man sentiments of dualism and individualism to
the spirit of national unity/*
What I have called the ethical pantheism and

monistic idealism of Fichte (a type of philosophy
reigning almost unchallenged in Germany till al-
most the middle of the century) was an effective

weapon in fighting and winning this more difficult

battle. In his volume on the " Romantic School
in Germany/* Brandes quotes from the diarj of
Hoffman a passage written in 1809.
**
Seized bj a strange fancy at the ball on the
6th, I imagine myself looking at my own Ego
through a kaleidoscope. All the forms moving
around me are Egos and annoy me by what they
do and leave undone.' 5
It is a temptation to
find in this passage a
symbol both of German philosophy and of the

temper of Germany at the time. Its outer de-
feats, its weakness in the world of action, had
developed an exasperated introspection. This

outer weakness^ coinciding* as Von Sybel points
out, with the bloom of Germany in art, philosophy,
history, philology and philosophy, made the Ego

of Germany the noblest contemporary object of
contemplation, yet one surrounded with other

national Egos who offended by what they did
and what they did not do. Patriotism, national
feeling, national consciousness are common enough

facts. But nowhere save in Germany, in the ear-
lier nineteenth century, faaYe these sentiments and

impulses been transformed by deliberate nurture
into a mystic cult. This was the time when the
idea of the Vottes-seele, the Volks-geist, was born ;
and the idea lost no time In becoming a fact. Not

merely poetry was affected by it, but philology,
history and jurisprudence. The so-called historic
school is its offspring. The science of social psy-
chology derives from it at one remove. The soul,
a body ? and (quite in accord with

however,, needed
German idealism) it formed a body for itself the

German State as a unified Empire.
While the idealistic period came first, it is im-
portant to bear in mind the kind of idealism it
was. At this point the pantheistic allusion be-
comes significant. The idealism In question was
not an idealism of another world but of fhu

world, and especially of the State. The embodi-
ment of the divine and absolute will and ideal is
the existing world of nature and of men. Espe-

cially is the human ego the authorized and cre-
ative agent of absolute purpose. The significance

of German philosophy was precisely to make
men aware of their nature and destiny as the
direct and active representatives of absolute and
creative purpose.
If I again quote Heine, it is because, with his
contempt for technical philosophy, he had an inti-

mate sense of its human meaning. Of German
pantheistic idealism, he wrote in 1883 while It was
still in its prime ;
**
God is identical with the world. . . . But he
manifests himself most gloriously in man, who
feels and thinks at the same time, who is capable
of distinguishing his own individuality from ob-

jective whose intellect already bears
nature,
within the ideas that present themselves to
itself
Mm in the phenomenal world. In Deity

reaches self-consciousness, and this self-conscious-
ness again reveals through man.
God But this
revelation does not take place in and through
individual man, but in and through collective hu-
manity . . which comprehends and represents
.
in idea and in reality the whole God-universe, . . .
It is an error to suppose that this religion leads
men to indifference. On the contrary, the con-

sciousness of his divinity will inspire man with
enthusiasm for its manifestation, and from this
moment the really noble achievements of true hero-

ism glorify the earth/*
In one respect* Heine was a false prophet, He

thought that this philosophy would in the
accrue to the profit of the radical, the republican
and revolutionary party in Germany. The his-
tory of German liberalism is a complicated matter.
Suffice it in general to say that the honey the

libertarians hived was appropriated in the end by
the party of authority. In Heine's assurance
that these ideas would in due time issue in action
he was profoundly right. His essay closes with
burning words, from which I extract the fol-
lowing :
**
It seems to me that a methodical people, such
as we, must begin with the reformation? must then
occupy ourselves with systems of philosophy, and

only after their completion pass to the political
revolution. . . . Then will appear Kantians, as
little tolerant of piety in the world of deeds as
in the world of ideas, who will mercilessly upturn
with sword and axe the soil of our European life
to extirpate the last remnants of the past. Then
will come upon the scene armed Fichteans, whose
fanaticism of will is to be restrained neither by
fear nor self-interest, for they live in the spirit.
. . . Most of aH to be feared would be the phi-
losophers of nature,* were they actively to min-
*
He refers to the followers of Schellin& who as matter
of fact had little Togue. But his words, may not unjustly
be transferred to the naturalistic schools* which have since
affected German thought.
gle. . . . For if the hand of the Kantian strikes

with strong unerring blow ; if the Pichtean cour-
ageously defies every danger, since for him danger
has in reality no existence; the Philosopher of
Nature will be terrible in that he has allied him-
self with the
primitive powers of nature, in that
he can conjure up the demoniac forces of old
German pantheism; and having done so, aroused
in Mm that ancient Germanic eagerness which
combats for the joy of the combat itself, . , .
Smile not at my counsel as at the counsel of a

dreamer. . The thought precedes the deed as
. .
the lightning the thunder. . The hour will. .
come. As on the steps of an amphitheater, the

nations will group themselves around Germany to
witness the terrible combat,"
In my preoccupation with Heine, I seem to have

wandered somewhat from our immediate topic: the
connection, of the idealistic philosophy with the
development and organization of the national

state of Germany. Bat the necessity of the or-
ganized State to care for the moral interests of

mankind was an inherent part of FIchte*s thought*
At first* state was a matter of Indifference.
In fact his sympathies were largely French

republican. Before Jena* he writes:
**
What isthe Ballon for a truly civilized Chris-
tian European? IB a general way, Europe itself.
More particularly at any time the State which is
at the head of civilization. . . . With this cos-
mopolitan sense, we can be tranquil before the

5
vicissitudes and catastrophes of history.*
In 1807 he writes:
a The distinction between Prussia and the rest
ofGermany external, arbitrary and fortuitous.

is
The distinction between Germany and the rest of

9
Europe is founded in nature.*
The seeming gulf between the two ideas is easily

bridged. The " Addresses on the Fundamental
" had
Features of the Present Age taught that the
*
end of humanity on earth t

is the establishment
of a kingdom in which all relations of humanity

are determined with ^freedom or according to Rea-
son according to Reason as conceived by the
*4
Fichtean formula. In l|is Addresses to the
9
German Nation/ in 1807-08, the unique mission
of Germany in the establishment of this kingdom

isurged as a motive for securing national unity
and the overthrow of % the conqueror. The Ger-
mans are the sole people who recognize the prin-
eiples of spiritual freedom, of freedom won fay
action in accord with reason. Faithfulness to this

**
mission will elevate the German name to that of
the most glorious among all the peoples^ making

this Nation the regenerator and restorer of the
world." He personifies their ancestors speaking
to and a We in our time
them* saying :
saved Germany from the Roman World Empire. 55
But "yours is the greater fortune. You
may establish once for all the Kingdom of
the Spirit and of Reason* bringing to naught

5*
corporeal might as the ruling thing in the world.

And this antithesis of the Germanic and the
Roman principles has become a commonplace in
the German, imagination. Moreover, for Germany
to win is no selfish gain. It is an advantage to all
nations. "The great promise of a kingdom of

right reason and truth on earth must not become a
aln and empty phantom the present iron age is
;
but a transition to a better estate." Hence the

**
concluding words: There is no middle road: If
you sink* so sinks humanity entire with you, with-
out bope of future restoration/*
The are plain.
premises of the historic syllogism
First, the German Luther who saYed for
the principle of spiritual freedom against Latin
externalism ; then Kant and Fichte, who wrought

out the principle into a final philosophy of science,
morals and the State; as conclusion, the German
nation organized in order to win the world to rec-
ognition of the principle, and thereby to establish

the rule of freedom and science in humanity as a
whole. The Germans are patient; they have a
long memory. Ideas produced when Germany was

divided and broken were retained and cherished
after it became a unified State of supreme military

power, and one yielding to no other people in
industrial and commercial prosperity. "In the
grosser sense of the words, Germany has not held

that might makes right. But it has been in-
structed by a long line of philosophers that it is
the business of ideal right to gather might to itself
in order that it may cease to be merely ideal The

State represents exactly this incarnation of ideal
law and right in effective might. The military
arm Is part of this moral embodiment. Let senti-
mentalists sing the praises of an ideal to which
no actual force corresponds. Prussian faith in

the reality and enforcement among men of the
ideal is of a more solid character. As past history
Is the record of the gradual realization In the Ger-
manic State of the divine idea, future history
must uphold and expand what has been accom-
plished. Diplomacy is the veiled display of law
clothed with force in behalf of this realization,
and war is its overt manifestation. That war

demands self-sacrifice is but the more convincing
proof of its profound morality. It is the final
seal of devotion to the extension of the kingdom of

the Absolute on earth.
For the philosophy stands or falls with the con-

ception of an Absolute. Whether a philosophy
of absolutes is theoretically sound or unsound is
none of my present concern. But that philosoph-
ical absolutism may be practically as dangerous as

matter of fact political absolutism history testi-
fies. The situation puts in relief what finally is
at issue between a theory which is pinned to a

belief in an Absolute beyond history and behind
experience, and one which is frankly experimental

For any philosophy which is not consistently ex-
perimental will always traffic in absolutes no

matter in how disguised a form. In German po-
litical philosophy 9 the traffic is Without mast-

Ill
THE GERMANIC PHILOSOPHY OF

HISTORY
THE unity of the German people longed for and
dreamed of after 1807 became an established fact
through the war of 1870 with France. It is easy
to assign symbolic significance to this fact. Ever
since the time of the French Revolution if not be-
fore German thought has taken shape in conflict
with ideas that were characteristically French and
in sharp and conscious antithesis to them. Rous-
seau's deification of Nature was the occasion for
the development of the conception of Culture.
His condemnation of science and art as socially
corrupting and socially divisive worked across the
Rhine to produce the notion that science and
art are the forces which moralize and unify hu-
manity. The cosmopolitanism of the French En-

lightenment transformed, by German thinkers
into a self-conscious assertion of nationalism.
The abstract Rights of Man of the French Revo-
fl
92 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
lution were set in antithesis to the principle of
the rights of the citizen secured to him solely by

the power of the politically organized nation. The
deliberate breach of the revolutionary philosophy
with the past, the attempt (foreshadowed in the
philosophy of Descartes) to make a tabula ram

of the fortuitous assemblage of traditions and
institutions which history offers, in order to sub-
stitute a social structure built upon Reason, was
envisaged as the fans et origo of all evil. That
history is itself incarnate reason; that history is
infinitely more rational than the formal abstract-

ing and generalizing reason of individuals; that
individual mind becomes rational only through the
absorption and assimilation of the universal rea-

son embodied in historic institutions and historic
development, became the articles of faith of the

German intellectual creed. It is hardly an exag-
geration to say that for almost a century the

characteristic philosophy of Germany has been a
philosophy of history even when not such in ap-
parent form.
Yet the meaning of this appeal to history is lost
unless we bear in mind that the Enlightenment
after all transmitted to Germany, from medieval

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 5
thought, its foundation principle. The appeal was

not from reason to experience* but from analytic
"
thought (henceforth condemned to be merely Un-
n cc
derstanding Verstand") to an absolute and
universal Reason (Vernunft) partially revealed In
nature and more adequately manifested In human

history as an organic process. Recourse to his-
tory was required because not of any empirical

lessons it has to teach, nor yet because history be-
queathes to us stubborn institutions which must

be reckoned with, but because history is the
dynamic and evolving realization of immanent

reason. The contrast of the German attitude with
that of Edmund Burke is instructive. The latter
had the same profound hostility to cutting loose

from the past. But Ms objection was not that
the past is an embodiment of transcendent reason,
are an
a inheritance ** be-
but that its institutions
" collected wisdom " of
queathed to us from the
our forefathers. The continuity of political life
centers not about an inner evolving Idea but 5
abomt
a onr hearths* our sepulchers and our al-
tars,** He has the same suspicion of abstract
rights of man. But his appeal is to experience
Since
a circnm-
and to practical consequences.
stances give In reality to every principle its dis-
5
tinguishing color and discriminating effect/ there
"
is no soundness in any principle when it stands
stripped of every relation in ail the nakedness and

solitude of metaphysical abstraction."
According to the German view, the English pro-

tested because of interference with empirically
established rights and privileges ; the Germans*
because they perceived in the Revolution a radical

error as to the nature and work of reason. In
point of fact, the Germans never made that break

with tradition, political or religious, of which the
French Revolution is an emphatic symbol. I have
already referred to Kant's disposition to regard

church dogmas (of which, as dogmas, he disap-
proved) as vehicles of eternal spiritual truths

husks to preserve an inner grain. All of the
great German idealists gave further expression to

this disposition. To Hegel, for example, the sub-
stance of the doctrines of Protestant Christianity
is identical with the truths of absolute philosophy*
except that in religion they are expressed in a

form not adequate to their meaning, the form,
namely, of imaginative thought in which most men
Eve* The disposition to philosophise Christianity
is too widely shown In Germany to be dismissed

as a cowardly desire at accommodation with
things
established. It shows rather an intellectual pietv
among a people where freedom of thought and

conscience had been achieved without a violent
political upheaval. Hegel the char-

acteristic weakness of Romance thought was an
inner split, an inability to reconcile the spiritual
and absolute essence of reality with which religion

deals with the detailed work of in
intelligence
science and
politics. The Germans, on the con-
" were
trary, predestined to be the bearers of the
Christian principle and to carry out the Idea as
the absolutely Rational end. 91 They accomplished
this, not by a flight away from the secular world,
but by realizing that the Christian principle is
in itself that of the unity of the subjective and
the objective, the spiritual and the worldly. The

"
spirit finds the goal of its struggle, its harmony,
in that very sphere which it made the object of its
resistance,- it finds that secular pursuits are a

" a discovery surely* which
spiritual occupation ; 9
unites simplicity with comprehensiveness one

which does not lead to criticism of the secular pur-
suits carried on. Whatever is to be said of this
96 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTOBY
as philosophy, it expresses, in a way, the quality
of German and thought. More than other
life
countries* Germany has had the fortune to pre-

serve as food for its imaginative life and as emo-
tional sanction the great ideas of the past. It
has carried over their reinforcement into the pur-

suit of science and into politics into the very
things which in other countries, notably in the

Latin countries, have been used as weapons of
attack upon tradition.
Political development tells a somewhat similar
tale. The painful transition from feudalism to

the modern era was, for the most part, accom-
plished recently in Germany, and accomplished
under the guidance of established political au-
thorities instead of by revolt against them.
Under and mainly at their ini-
their supervision,
tiative, Germany has passed in less than a century
to the regime of modern capitalistic competitive
enterprise, moderated by the State, out of the do-

minion of those local and guild restrictions which
so long held economic activity in corporate bonds.
The governing powers themselves secured to
members of the State what seems, at least
to Germans, to be a satisfying degree of po-

litical freedom. Along with this absence of Internal

disturbance and revolution, we must put the fact
that every step in the development of Germany
as a unified political power has been effected
by
war with some of the neighbors by which it is
hemmed in. There stands the unfolding sequence :
1815 (not to go back to Frederick the Great),

1864 5 1866* 1870. And the significant thing
these wars is not that external territory
annexed as their consequence, but the rebound
of external struggle upon the achieving of in-
ternal unity. No wonder the German imagination
has been impressed with the idea of an organic
evolution from within, which takes the form of a
unity achieved through conflict and the conquest

of an opposing principle.
Such scattering comments as these prove noth-

ing. But they suggest why German thought has
been peculiarly sensitive to the idea of historic
continuity; why it has been prone to seek for

an original implicit essence which has progressively
unfolded itself in a single development. It w0uld
take much more than an hour to give even a super-
ficial account of the growth of the historical sci-
ences and historic methods of Germany during

the first half of the eighteenth century. It would
involve an account of the creation of philology,
and the philological methods which go by the

name of higher criticism; of their extension to
archeology; of the historic schools of jurispru-

dence and political economy, as well as of the
ways in which such men as Niebuhr, Mommsen

and Ranke remade the methods of studying the
past. I can only say here that Germany devel-
oped such an effective historical technique that

even mediocre men achieved respectable results;
and, much more significantly, that when Taine
made the remark (quoted earlier) that we owe to
the Germany of the half century before 1880 all
our distinctively modern ideas, his remarks apply

above all to the disciplines concerned with the his-
torical development of mankind.
The bases of this philosophy are already before

us. Even in Kant we find the idea of a single
continuous development of humanity, as a progress

from a reign of natural instinct to a final freedom
won through adherence to the law of reason.
Fichte sketched the stages already traversed on

this road and located the point at which mankind
now stands* In his later writings, the significance
of history as the realization of the absolute pur-
pose Is
increasingly emphasized. History is the
continuous life of a divine Ego by which it realizes
in fact what it is in idea or destiny. Its
are successive stages in the founding of the King-
dom of God on earth. It it only is the revela-
tion of the Absolute, Along with this growing

deification of history is the increased significance
attached to nationalism in and the Ger-

man nation in particular. The State is the con-
crete individual interposed between generic hu-
manity and particular beings. In his words, the
national folk is the channel of divine life as it
poors into particular finite human beings. He

:
says
" While
cosmopolitanism is the dominant will
that the purpose of the existence of humanity
be actually realized in humanity, patriotism is
the will that this end be first realized in the par-
ticular nation to which we ourselves belong, and
that this achievement spread over the entire
Since the State is an organ of divinity,, patri-
otism is religion. As the Germans .are the

only truly religious people, they alone are truly
capable of patriotism. Other peoples are products
of external causes ; they have no self-formed Self,
but only an acquired self due to general conven-

tion. In Germany there is a self which is self-
wrought and self-owned. The very fact that Ger-
many for centuries has had no external unity
proves that Its selfhood is metaphysical, not a
gift of circumstance. This conception of the

German mission has been combined with a kind
of anthropological metaphysics which has become
the rage in Germany. The Germans alone of all
existing European nations are a pure race. They

alone have preserved unalloyed the original divine
deposit. Language is the expression of the na-
tional soul, and only the Germans have kept their

native speech in its purity. la like vein, Hegel
attributes the inner disharmony characteristic of
Romance peoples to the fact that they are of

mixed Germanic and Latin blood. A purely arti-
ficial cult of race has so flourished in Germany

that many social movements like anti-Semitism
and some of Germany's political ambitions can-

not be understood apart from the mystic identi-
fication of Kace, Culture and the State. In the
light of actual science, this is so mythological that
the remark of an American periodical that race

means a number of people reading the same
newspapers Is sober scientific fact compared

with It.*
At the beginning of history Flchte placed an

"
Urcolk. His account of it seems an attempt
to rationalize at one stroke the legends of the
Golden Age ? the Biblical account of before

**
the Fall and Rousseau's primitive state of na-
9*
ture. The Urrolk lived in a paradise of Inao-
cence, a paradise without knowledge^ labor or art.

*
Chamberlain, for example, holds that Jesus mast hare
been of Teutonic birth a perfect logical conclusion from
the received philosophy of the State and religion. Quite
aware that there is much Slav Wood In northern Germany
and Romance blood in southern Germany^ lie that
while with other peoples crossing produces a rmee s
the potency of the German blood Is such that cross-breeding
strengtheos it. While at one time lie explains the historic
strength of the Jew on the ground that lie kept his
race pure, another place he allows his indignation at the
Jews to lead Mm to include them the most mongrel
of all peoples. To one thing lie remains consistent: By the
very essence of race? the Semites represent a metaphysical
principle inherently hostile to the grand Germanic principle.
It ptrliaps absurd to dignify the of this
garrulous writer, but according to all report the volumes

a The Foundations of the
in which such expressions occur,
Nineteenth Century/* has had august approval and much
vogue.
The philosophy which demands such a Folk is com-
paratively simple* Except as a manifestation of

Absolute Reason* humanity could not exist at all.
Yet in the first stage of the manifestation. Reason

could not have been appropriated by the self-
conscious effort of man. It existed without con-
sciousness of itself, for it was given, not, like all
true self-consciousness, won by morally creative
struggle. Rational in substance, in form It was

but feeling or instinct. In a sense, all subsequent
history is but a return to this primitive condition.
But " humanity must make the journey on its own

feet ; by its own strength it must bring itself back
to that state in which it was once without its own

cooperating labor. ... If humanity does not re-
create its own true being, it has no real life."

While philosophy compels us to assume a Normal
" the mere fact of their
People who, by existence,
without science and art, found themselves in a
5*
state of perfectly developed reason, there is no
ground for not admitting the existence at the same

time of a timid and rude earth-born savages.**
Thus the original state of humanity would have
been one of the greatest possible inequality, being
divided between the Normal Polk existing as a
manifestation of Reason the wild savage

races of barbarism.
In his later period of inflamed patriotism this

Innocuous speculation grew a sting. He de-
termined that the present age the Europe of the

Enlightenment and the French Revolution is the
age of liberation from the external authority in
which Reason had presented itself in the
**
age. Hence it is inherently negative : an of
absolute indifference toward the Truth, an age

of entire and unrestrained licentiousness." But
the further evolution of the Divine Idea demands
a Folk which has retained the primitive principle

of Reason, which may redeem^ therefore* the
corrupt and rebellious modes of humanity else-
where existing. Since the Germans are this
saving remnant, they are the TJroolk^ the Nor-

mal Nation, of the modem period. From this
point on, idealization of past Germanic
history and appeal to the nation to
its unique caffing by victory over Napoleon

blend.
The Fichteam scaffolding tumbled, but

ideas persisted. I doubt If it is to exag-
gerate tie extent to wbich German history has

been systematically idealized for the last hundred
years. Technically speaking, the Romantic move-
ment may have passed away and an age of scien-
tific history dawned. Actually the detailed facts

have been depicted by use of the palette of Ro-
manticism. Space permits but one Illustration
which would be but a literary curiosity were It
not fairly typical. Tacitus called his account of

the northern barbarians Germania an unfortu-
nate title in view of later developments. The
characteristics assigned by him to the German
tribes are such as any anthropologist could dupli-
cate from any warlike barbaric tribe. Yet over
and over again these traits (which Tacitus Ideal-
ized as Cooper, say. Idealized the North American
Indian traits) are made the basis of the philo-
sophic history of the German people. The Ger-

mans, for example, had that psychological ex-
perience now known as mana, manitou, tabu, etc.
They identified their gods, in Tacitus* phrase,

" that
with, mystery which they perceive by ex-
periencing sacred fear." This turns out to be
the germinal deposit of splritual-mindedness which
later showed itself in Luther and in the peculiar

genius of the Germans for religious experience*
The following words are from no less aa author-

ity than Pflelderer:
**
Cannot we recognize In this point that truly
German characteristic of which
scorns to for sensuous
fix
perception the divine
something which makes itself felt in the depths of
the sensitive soul, which scorns to down the
drag
sublime mystery of the unknowable to the
vulgar
distinctness of earthly things? The fact that the
Germans attached but little importance to reli-
gious ceremonies accords with this view.**
To others, this sense of mystery is a prophetic
anticipation of the Kantian thing-in-itself.

A similar treatment has been accorded to the
personal and voluntary bond by which individuals

attached themselves to a chieftain. Thus early
was marked oat the fidelity or loyalty, Treuc,
which is uniquely Germanic although some war-
like tribes among our Indians carried the system
still further. I can allow myself but one more
example of the way which the philosophic so-

in
phistication of history has worked. No historian

can be unconscious of the extent to which. Eu-
ropean culture has genuinely European

the extent to wMci it derives itself from a common
heritage of the ancient world and the extent to
which intermixtures and borrowings of culture
have gone on ever since. As to Germany, how-
ever$ these obvious facts have to be accommodated

to the doctrine of an original racial deposit stead-
ily evolving from within.

The method is simple. As respects Germany,
these cultural borrowings and crosses represent
the intrinsic universality of its genius. Through
this universality, the German spirit finds itself
at home everywhere. Consequently, it consciously

appropriates and assimilates what other peoples
have produced by a kind of blind unconscious in-
stinct. Thus was German thought which re-

it
vealed the truth of Hellenic culture, and rescued
essential Christianity from its Roma-nized petri-

faction. The principle of Reason which French
enlightenment laid hold of only in its negative and

destructive aspect, the German spirit grasped in
its positive and constructive form.
Shakespeare
happened to be torn in England, but only the
Germans have apprehended him in his spiritual
universality so that he is now more his own than
he is England's and so on. But with respect to
other peoples, similar borrowings reveal
only their
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTOEY 107
lack of inner and essential selfhood. While

is universal because he Is German, Shakespeare is
universal because be is not English*

I have intimated that Fichte's
was limited. But his ideas of the State and

of history were absorbed in the
philosophy of
Hegel, and Hegel for a considerable period abso-
lutely dominated German thinking. To set forth
the of his a **
ground principles absolute
would be only to repeat what already
said. Its chief difference, from Hegd's en-
cyclopedic knowledge, his greater concrete his-
toric interest and more conservative tempera-
his
ment, is his bottomless scorn for an Idea, an Ab-
solute, which merely ought to be and which is only

" The
going to be realised after a period of time.
Actual i* the Rational and the Rational is the
**
Actual and the actual the actuating
force and movement of things. It is
customary to
call him an Idealist. In of much
terms* he is the greatest realist known to phi-
losophy. He might be called a BrutalisL In the
inquiry Bourdon carried 0m in 'Germany a

of the u Ger-
years ago (published under the title
man **) he a with a

German who deplores the tendency of the Germans
to forsake the solid bone of things in behalf of
a romantic shadow. As
against this he appeals
"
to the realistic sense of Hegel, who, In opposi-
tion to the idealism which had lifted Germany on

wings, arrayed and marshaled the maxims of an
unflinching realism. He had formulae for the justi-
fication of facts whatever they might be. That

which is9 he would say, is reason realized. And
what did he teach? That the hour has sounded
for the third act in the drama of humanity, and
that the German opportunity is not far off. . . .
I could show you throughout the nineteenth cen-

tury the torrent of political and social ideas which
had their source here.*'
I have said that the essential points of the
Fichtean philosophy of history were taken up into
the Hegelian system. This assimilation involved,
however, a rectification of an inconsistency be-
tween the earlier and the later moral theories of
Fichte. In his earlier ethical writings, em-
phasis fell upon conscious moral personality
upon the deliberate identification by the individual
will of its career and destiny with the purpose of
tbe Absolute. In his later patriotic philosophy*
he asserts that the organized nation Is the channel
by which a finite ego acquires moral personality

since the nation transmits to individuals the
generic principle of God working in humanity. At

the same time he to the resolute will
consciously chosen self-sacrifice of Individuals to

overthrow the enemy re-establish the Prussian
state. When Hegel writes that victory has
obtained, the war of Independence has suc-
cessfully waged. The necessity of

individual self-assertion given way to the need
of subordinating the individual to the
state in order to check the disintegrating tend-
encies of liberalism.
Haym has said that HegeFs u Philosophy of

Law **
had for its task the exhibition as the per-
fect work of Absolute Reason up to date of the
**
practical and political condition existing In
Prussia In 1821," This was meant as a hostile
attack. But Hegel himself have the
last to object. With Ms scorn for an Ideal so
impotent that its realization
the effort of private selves, an Absolute s0 incon-
sequential that it must wait upon the of
future for manifestation, he in politics

more than elsewhere to the conviction that the
" The task of
actual the rational.
is philosophy
is to comprehend that which is, for that which is,
is Reason.** Alleged philosophies which try to

tell what the State should be or even what a state
ought in the future to come to be, are idle fan-
tasies. Such attempts come too late. Human

wisdom is like the bird of Minerva which takes its
5* *
flight only at the close of day. It comes, after
the issue, to acknowledge what has happened.

**
The State is the rational in itself and for itself.
Its substantial unity Is an absolute end in Itself.
To it belongs supreme right in respect to individ-

uals whose first duty is just to be members of
the State," . . . The State " is the absolute real-
ity and the individual himself has objective exist-
ence, truth and morality only in his capacity as

a member of the State.** It is a commonplace of
idealistic theism that nature is a manifestation of
God. But Hegel says that nature is only an ex-
ternalized, unconscious and so incomplete expres-
sion. The State has more, not less, objective real-
*Marx said of the historic schools of politics, law and

economics that to them, as Jehovah to Moses on Mt. Sinai,
tta ctiYine showed but its posterior side.
Ity than physical nature, for it Is a realization of

Absolute spirit in the realm of consciousness. The
doctrine presents an extreme form of the idea, not
of the divine right of kings, but of the divine right
cc
of States. The inarch of God in history is the
cause of the existence of stales; their foundation

is the power of reason realiilng itself as will.
Every state, whatever it be, participates in the

divine essence. The State is not the work of
human art; only Reason could produce it.** The
State is God on earth.
His depreciation of the individual as an indi-

vidual appears in every theme of his Philosophy
of Right and History, At first sight, Ms theory

of great world heroes inconsistent with Ms
disregard of individuals. While the morality of
.
most men consists simply in into their
own habits the customs already found in the insti-
tutions about them, great initiate new his-

*s
toric epochs. They derive their
their calling not from the regular of
things sanctioned by the order, but from

a concealed fount, from that inner spirit
beneath the surface, which, the
world as a shell, bursts it to pieces." Hie

are thus the exception which proves the rule. They
are world characters; while they seem to be seek-
ing personal interests they are really acting as

organs of a universal will, of God in his further
march. In his identification with the Absolute,

the world-hero can have but one aim to which " he
is devoted regardless of all else. Such men may
even treat other great and sacred interests incon-
siderately. . . . But so mighty a form must tram-

ple down many an innocent flower crush to pieces
many an object in its path.** We are not sur-
prised to see that Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon

are the characters he prefers to cite. One can only
regret that he died before his contemplative piety
could behold Bismarck.
A large part of the intellectual machinery by
which Hegel overcame the remnants of individ-
ualism found in prior philosophy came from the
idea of organic development which had been active
in German, thought since the time of Herder. In

his chief wort (" Ideas for a Philosophy of the
History of Humanity"), written in the closing
decades of the eighteenth century, Herder holds

that history a progressive education of human-
is
ity. This idea, had from Lessing* is combined

with the idea of Leibniz that change is evolution,
by means of an Internal force, of powers originally
Implicit in existence, and with the idea of Spiaoza

of an all-comprehensive substance. This of
organic growth was then applied to

literature and institutions. It rein-
forcement from the rising science of biology.
Long before the days of Darwin or Spencer, the

idea of evolution had a commonplace of Ger-
man thought with respect fo everything concern-
ing the history of humanity. The notion

**
pet in sharp antithesis to the conception of mak-
" or constitu-
ing manufacturing institutions
tions, which was treated as one of the fallacies of
the French philosophy of the Enlightenment.

-
A
combination of this notion of universal organic
growth with the technique of prior may

fairly be said to have determined Hegel's whole
philosophy. While Leibniz and Herder had em-
phasized the notion of harmony as an

factor of the working of organic forces, Hegel
took from Fichte the notion of a unity or syn-

*s
thesis arrived at by positing/* wad overcoming
an opposite. Struggle for existence (or realiza-
** " of German
tion) was thus an organic
1U PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
thinking long before the teaching of Darwin, who,
in fact, is usually treated by German writers as
giving a rather superficial empirical expression

to an idea which they had already grasped in its
niersal speculative form. It is characteristic of
the extent in which Hegel thought in terms of
struggle and overcoming that after stating why

it was as yet impossible to include the Americas
in his philosophy of history, and after saying
that in the future the burden of world history will
reveal itself there* he surmises that it may take the

form of a " contest " between North and South
America. No philosopher has ever thought so
consistently and and
so wholly in terms of strife
"
overcoming as Hegel. When he says the world
M he means
history is the world judgment judg-
ment in the sense of assize, and judgment as
victory of one and defeat of another victory
being thefinal proof that the world spirit has now
passed from one nation to take up its residence in

another. To be defeated in a way which causes
the nation to take a secondary position among

nations is a sign that divine judgment has been
passed upon it. When a recent German writer
argues that for Germany to surrender any terri-

PHILOSOPHY OF 115
tory which it has conquered during the present

war would be sacrilegious, since It would be to
refuse to acknowledge the workings of Goe! in
human history, he quite in the Hegelian

vein.
Although the of
very recent when Hegel wrote, practically
contemporary with his own day, he writes in na-
tionalistic terms the entire history of

The State is the Individual of history ; it is to his-
tory what a given is to biography. History

gives us the progressive realization or evolution of
the Absolute, moving from one National Individual
to another. It is lav s the universal* which
the Slate a State, for law is reason, not as
subjective reflection, but in its as
supreme over and in particulars. On this account,
Hegel's statement thai the principle

of history is the progressive realization of free-
dom does not what an uninstmcted English

reader would naturally it to
is always understood in of Its ex-
pression in history that Thought lias pro-

gressively become conscious of itself; is,
made itself Its own object* Freedom is the

sciousness of freedom. Liberty of action has little
to do with it. Obviously it is only in the German

idealistic system particularly in the system of
Hegel himself that this has fully taken place.
Meantime, when citizens of a state (especially of

the state in which this philosophic insight has been
achieved) take the laws of their state as their own

ends and motives of action, they attain the best
possible substitute for a reason which is its own

object. They appropriate as theirown personal
reason the objective and absolute Reason em-
bodied perforce in law and custom.
After this detour, we are led back to the fact
that the Germans possess the greatest freedom yet
attained by humanity 3 for the Prussian political
organization most fully exemplifies Law, or the

Universal, organizing under and within itself all
particular arrangements of social and personal

life. Some other peoples particularly the Latin
have thought they could make constitutions, or
at least that the form of their constitution was
a matter of choice. But this is merely setting up

the private conceit of individuals against the work
of Absolute Reason, and thus marks the disin-
tegration of a state rather than its existence.

Other peoples have tried to found the government

on the consent of the governed, unwitting of the
fact that it is the government, the specific realiza-
tion of Reason, which makes a state out of what

is otherwise an anarchic mass of individuals. Other
peoples have made a parliament or representative

body the essential thing in government; in philo-
sophic reality this is
only a consultative body*
having as its main function communication between
classes (which are indispensable to an " **
organic
state) and the real government. The chief func-
tion of parliament is to give the opinion of the
social classesan opportunity to feel it is being

considered and to enable the real government to
take advantage of whatever wisdom may chance to
be expressed, Hegel seems quite prophetic when

he says: "By virtue of this participation subjec-
tive liberty and conceit, with their general opinion,

can show themselves palpably efficacious and enjoy
the satisfaction of feeling themselves to count for
something.** Finally, the State becomes wholly

and completely an organized Individual only in its
external relations, its relations to other states. As

Ms philosophy of history ignores the past in seiz-
ing upon the national state as the unit and focus

of history, so it ignores all future possibility of
a genuinely international federation to which iso-

lated nationalism shall be subordinated. Bern-
hard! writes wholly in the Hegelian sense when he

into the
says that to expand the idea of the State
idea of humanity is a Utopian error, for it would
exclude the essential principle of life, struggle.
Philosophical justification of war

follows inevi-
in
tably from a philosophy of history composed
nationalistic terms. is the movement, the
History
march of God on earth through time. Only one
nation at a time can be the latest and hence the
fullest realization of God. The movement of God

in history is thus particularly manifest in those
changes by which unique place passes

from one
nation to another. War is the signally visible
occurrence of such a flight of the divine spirit in

its onward movement. The idea that friendly in-
tercourse among all the peoples of the earth is a
legitimate aim of human effort is in basic con-
tradiction of such, a philosophy. War is explicit
" 5
realization of dialectic/ of the negation by
which a higher synthesis of reason is assured. It
the
" of the divine Idea.*
9
effectively displays irony
It is to national life what the winds are to the sea,
^
preserving mankindfrom the corruption en-
gendered by immobility.
55
War is the most ef-
fective preacher of the vanity of all merely finite
interests ; it puts an end to that selfish egoism of

the individual by which he would claim his life and
5
his property as his own or as his family s. Inter-
national law not properly law; it expresses

is
simply certain usages which are accepted so long

as they do not come Into conflict with the purpose
of a state a purpose which always gives the
supreme law of national life. Particularly against

a
the absolute right of the present bearer of the
world spirit, the spirits of the other nations are
absolutely without right. The latter, just like

the nations whose epochs have passed, count no
5*
longer in universal history. Since they are al-
ready passed over from the standpoint of the

divine idea, war can. do no more than exhibit the
fact that their day has come and gone. World

history is the world's judgment seat.
For a period Hegelian thought was almost su-

preme in Germany. Then its rule passed away
almost as rapidly as it had been achieved. After
various shiftings, the trend of philosophic thought
*
definitely JJack to Kant," Kant's
sobriety, the sharp distinction he drew between
the realm of phenomena and science and the
ideal noumenal world* commended him after the
unbridled pretensions of Hegelian absolutism.
For more than a generation Hegel was spoken of
with almost universal contempt. Nevertheless his
ideas, loosedfrom the technical apparatus with

which he surrounded them, persisted. Upon the
historical disciplines his influence was peculiarly
deep and abiding. He fixed the ideas of Fichte
and fastened them together with the pin of evolu-

tion. Since his day, histories of philosophy, or
religion, or institutions have all been treated as
developments through necessary stages of an inner

implicit idea or purpose according to an indwelling
law. And the idea of a peculiar mission and
destiny of German history has lost nothing in the

operation. Expressions which a bewildered world
has sought since the beginning of the war to ex-
plain through the influence of a Darwinian strug-
gle for existence and survival of the fittest, or

through the influence of a Nietzschean philosophy
of power, have their roots in the classic idealistic
philosophy culminating in Hegel.

Kant still remains the philosopher of Germany.
The division of life between the world of sense and

of mechanism and the world of the
supersensible
and purpose, the world of necessity and the world
of freedom, is more congenial than a complete
monism. The attempts of his successors to bridge
the gap and set up a wholly unified philosophy
failed, historically speaking. But, nevertheless,

they contributed an indispensable ingredient to
the contemporary German spirit; they helped
people the Kantian void of the supersensible with
the substantial figures of the State and its His-
torical Evolution and Mission. Kant bequeathed
to the world an intellect devoted to the
congenial
task of discovering causal law in external nature,
and an inner intuition which, in spite of its sublim-
ity, had nothing to look at except the bare form
of an empty law of duty. Kant was kept busy in
proving the existence of this supernal but empty

region. Consequently he was not troubled by
being obliged to engage in the unremunerative task

of spending his time gazing into a blank void. His
successors were not so fortunate. The existence
of this ideal realm in which reason, purpose and
freedom are one was axiomatic to them ; they could
no longer busy themselves with proving its exist-
ence Same of them, called the Romanticists, filled
it with visions, more or less poetic, which frankly

drew their substance from an imagination inflamed
by emotional aspiration in revolt at the limita-
tions of outward action. Others, called the ideal-

istic philosophers, filled in the void, dark because
of excess of light, with less ghostly forms of Law
and the unfolding in History of Absolute Value
and Purpose. The two worlds of Kant were too
far away from each other. The later idealistic
world constructions crumbled; but their debris
supplied material with which to fill in the middle
regions between the Kantian worlds of sense and

of reason. This, I repeat, is their lasting con-
tribution to present German culture. Where

Kantianism has not received a filling in from
the philosophy of history and the State, it
has remained in Germany, as elsewhere, a
critique of the methodology of science; its
importance has been professional rather than

human.
In the first lecture we set out with the sug-
gestion of an inquiry into the influence of general

ideas upon' practical affairs, upon those larger
practical affairs called politics. We appear to

have concluded with a conviction that
(in the
instance before us at least) politics has rather
been the controlling factor in the formation of
philosophic ideas and in deciding their vogue,

Yet we are well within limits when we say that
ideas which were evoked in
correspondence with
concrete social conditions served to articulate and
consolidate the latter* Even if we went so far as

to say that reigning philosophies
simply reflect as
in a mirror contemporary social struggles, we
should have to add "that seeing one's self in a
mirror is a definite practical aid in carrying on
one's undertaking to its completion.
When what a people sees in its intellectual
looking glass is its own organization and its own

an organic instrument of the
historic evolution as
accomplishment of an Absolute Will and Law, the

articulating and consolidating efficacy of the re-
flection is immensely intensified. Outside of Ger-
many, the career of the German idealistic phi-
logophy lias been mainly professional and literary.

It has exercised considerable influence upon the
teaching of philosophy in France, England and
tMs country. Beyond professorial circles, its in-
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
fluence has been considerable In theological direc-
tions. Without doubt, it has modulated for many

to a
persons the transition from a supernatural
spiritual religion ; it has
enabled them to give up
historical and miraculous elements as indifferent
accretions and to retain the moral substance and
emotional values of Christianity. But the Ger-
mans are quite right in feeling

that only in Ger-
is this form of idealistic thinking both in-

many
digenous and widely applied.
A crisis lite 'the present forces upon thoughtful
value for the gen-
persons a consideration of the
,
eral aims of civilization of a philosophy of the

a priori, the Absolute, and of their immanent evo-
lution through the medium of an experience which
as just experience is only a superficial and
negligible vehicle of transcendent Laws and

Ends. It forces a consideration of what type of
general ideas is available for the articulation and
guidance of our own life in case we find ourselves
looking upon the present world scene as an

a priori and an absolutistic philosophy gone into
bankruptcy.
" Americanism "
In Europe, speaking generally f
is a synonym for crude empiricism and a ma-
terialistic utilitarianism. It is no part of my pres-

ent task to try to show how largely this accusation
is due to misunderstanding. It is simpler to
inquire how far the charge points to the problem
which American life, and therefore philosophy in
America, must meet. It is difficult to see how any

a priori philosophy, or any systematic absolut-
ism, is to get a footing among us 9 at least beyond

narrow and professorial circles. Psychologists
talk about learning by the method of trial and
error or success. Our social organization com-

mits us to this philosophy of life. Our working
principle is to try : to find out by trying, and to
measure the worth of the ideas and theories tried
by the success with which they meet the test of
application in practice. Concrete consequences

rather than a priori rules supply our guiding prin-
**
ciples. Hegel found it and absurd to
superficial
" social constitutions ;
regard as objects of choice
**
to him they were necessary structures in the
path of development.*' To us they are the cumu-
lative result of a multitude of daily and ever-
renewed choices.
That such an experimental philosophy of life
means a dangerous experiment goes without say-

ing. It permits, sooner or later it may require,
to submit to
every alleged sacrosanct principle
ordeal by fire to trial by service rendered. From
the standpoint of a pnorum* it is hopelessly

anarchic ; doomed, a priori* to failure. From
it is
its own standpoint, it is itself a theory to be tested

by experience. Now experiments are of all kinds,
blind impulse and

varying from those generated by
formed
appetite to those guided by intelligently
ideas. They are as diverse as the attempt of a
savage to get by sprinkling water ad scat-

.rain
control of electricity
tering thistledown, and that
in the laboratory from which issue wireless teleg-
raphy and rapid traction. Is it not likely that in

this distinction we have the key to the failure or
success of the experimental method generalized
into a philosophy of life, that is to say, of social
matters the only application which procures

complete generalization?
experimental philosophy differs from em-
An
pirical philosophy as empiricism has
been previ-
ously formulated. Historical empiricisms have

teen stated in terms of precedents ; their general-
isations have been summaries of what lias previ-
ously happened. The truth and faMty of these

generalizations depended then upon the accuracy

with which they catalogued, under appropriate
heads, a multiplicity of past occurrences. They

were perforce lacking in directive power except so
far as the future might be a routine repetition of
the past. In an experimental philosophy of life,
the question of the past, of precedents* of origins,
is quite subordinate to prevision, to guidance and

control amid future possibilities. Consequences
rather than antecedents measure the worth of
theories. Any scheme or project may have a fair
hearing provided it promise amelioration in the

future; and no theory or standard is so sacred
that it may be accepted simply on the basis 0f
past performance.
But this difference between a radically experi-
mental philosophy and an empiristic philosophy
only emphasizes the demand for careful and 'com-

prehensive reflection with respect to the ideas
which are to be tested in practice. If an a priori
philosophy has worled at al m Germany it is be-

cause it has been based OB an a priori social con-
stitution that is to say, on a state whose orgaii-
izatioe is such as to determine in advance the main
activities of classes of individuals, and to utilize
their particular activities by linking them iip with
one another in definite ways. It is a commonplace
to say that Germany is a monument to what can
be done by means of conscious method and organ-

ization. An experimental philosophy of life in
order to succeed must not set less store upon

methodic and organized intelligence, but more.
We must learn from Germany what methodic and
organized work means. But instead of confining

intelligence to the technical means of realizing
ends which are predetermined by the State (or by
something called the historic Evolution of the

Idea), intelligence must, with us, devote itself as
well to construction of the ends to be acted upon.
The method of trial and error or success is
not directed by a trained and informed

likely, if
imagination, to score an undue proportion, of fail-

ures. There is no possibility of disguising the
fact that an experimental philosophy of life means
a hit-and-miss philosophy in the end. But it
means missing rather than hitting, if the aiming
is done in a
happy-go-lucky way instead of by
bringing to bear all the resources of inquiry upon
locating the target, constructing propulsive ma-
1
chinery aad figuring out the curve of trajectory.

That this work is, after all, but hypothetical and

tentative till from thought into action
it issue
does not mean that it might as well be random
guesswork; it means that we can do still better
next time if we are sufficiently attentive to the

causes of success and failure this time.
America is too new to afford a foundation for
an a priori philosophy; we have not the requisite
background of law, institutions and achieved social
organization. America is too new to render con-
genial to our imagination an evolutionary phi-
losophy of the German type. For our history is
too obviously future. Our country is too big
and too unformed, however, to enable us to trust
to an empirical philosophy of muddling along,
patching up here and there some old piece

of machinery which has broken down by reason
of its antiquity. We
must have system, con-
structive method, springing from a widely in-
ventive imagination, a method checked up at each

turn by results achieved. We have said long
enough that America means opportunity ; we must

BOW begin to ask : Opportunity for what, and how
shall the opportunity be achieved? I can but think
that the present European situation forces home

ISO PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
upon us the need for constructive planning. I
can but think that while it gives no reason for
supposing that creative power attaches ex o-fficio
to general ideas, it does encourage us to believe
that a philosophy which should articulate and con-

solidate the ideas to which our social practice com-
mits us would clarify and guide our future en-
deavor.
Time permits of but one illustration. The pres-
ent situation presents the spectacle of the break-
down of the whole philosophy of Nationalism,
political, racial and cultural It is by the acci-
dent of position rather than any virtue of our

own that we are not sharers in the present demon-
stration of failure. We have borrowed the older
philosophy of isolated national sovereignty and

have lived upon it in a more or less half-hearted
way. In our internal constitution we are actu-
ally interracial and international. It remains to

see whether we have the courage to face this fact
and the wisdom to think out the plan of action
which it indicates. Arbitration treaties, interna-
tional judicial councils, schemes of international
disarmament, peace funds and peacse movements,

are aH wel in their way. But the ^taxation calk for
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 1*1
more radical thinking than that which terminates

in such proposals. We have to recognize that
furtherance of the depth and width of human in-
tercourse is the measure of civilisation; mud we

have to apply this fact without as well as within
our national life. We must make the accident
of our internal composition into an idea s an
idea upon which we may conduct our foreign as
well as our domestic policy. An international
judicial tribunal will break in. the end upon the

principle of national sovereignty.
We have no right to cast stones at any warring
nation till we have asked ourselves whether we are
willing to forego this principle and to submit af-

fairs which limited imagination and sense have led
us to consider strictly national to an international
legislature. In and of itself, the idea of peace is
a negative idea; it is a police idea. There are
things more important than keeping

one's body
whole and one's property intact. Disturbing the
peace is bad, not because peace is disturbed, but
because the fruitful processes of cooperation in

the great experiment of living together are dis-
turbed. It is futile to work for the negative aid
of peace unless we are committed to the positive

1*2 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
Ideal which It cloaks: Promoting the efficacy of
human intercourse irrespective of class, racial,
geographical and national limits. Any philosophy

which should penetrate and participate our present
social practice would find at work the forces which
unify human intercourse. An intelligent and
courageous philosophy of practice would devise

means by which the operation of these forces
would be extended and assured in the future.
An American philosophy of history must perforce
be a philosophy for its future, a future in which
freedom and fullness of human companionship is
the aim, and intelligent cooperative experimenta-
tion the method.
THE END
INDEX
Absolutism, 89, 112, 115, 124 Germania, 104

America, philosophy in, 123- Germany, 14-16, 28, 29-31, 32-
132 33, 36, 71, 78-81, 84-85, 88,
"Americanism," 124 91-93, 94-98, 106-107
Anti-Semitism, 100-101.
A priori, 39-44, 126, 129 Haym, 107
Authority, 52-54 Hegel, 94-95, 107-120, 125
Heine, 17, 18, 76, 83, 84-85
Benftam, 56 Herder, 112
Bergsor, 4 History, 5-6, 59-67, 98-102,
BernMrdi, 34-35, 52, 118 107-119, 121
Bourdon, 107408 Hoffman, 81
Burke, 93-94
Idealism, 28, 39, 70, 82, 107,
123, 130
Chamberlain, 101 n.
Ideas and action, 3-15, 123-
Cosmopolitanism, 67, 75, 85,
m 132
IndiTiduallsm, 49, 72
Culture, 91
Intelligence, 54-56, 126-128
Descartes, 92
Jena, 68
Despotism enlightened, 53
Dialectic, 70, 118 Kant, 19-40, 47-58, 59-67, 119-
Duty, 24, 50-57 121
Kultor, 62-64
Education, 14, 72, 73
Empiricism, 41, 43, 126-129 Lange, 78
Enlightenment, the, 37-39, 50, Lasalle, 77
92, 103 Law, 20-25, 116
Eucken, 36, 55 Leibniz, 59, 112
Evolution, 112 Luther, 16, 27, 71, 87
e, 68-80, $5-87 Marx, 6, 110 n.

formalism* 51 Mlttarism, 52
Freedom, 18, 25, 30, 33-35, 47,
51, 71, 115. Kapoleon, 67, 78-79
French Eerolutioa, 57, 94, 103 Nationalism, 67, 81, 86, 87,
French ifoffu^it, S2, 91-04, 95, 115
100 Metzaehe, 28, 34, 58
1SS
134 INDEX
82
77, Society, 64-65
, 117 State, 64-65, 66-157, 73-77, 110-
Personality, 48 118
Pfieiderer, 105 Subjectivism, 4&, 81
Philosophy, 7-18, 123-102 Supersensible, 23-25
Property, 74 v. Sybel, 78-80
Psychology, Social, 82
Tacitus, 104
Race, 100-101 Tame, 14
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193 B 6G~06i9Q

Geman pMlosophy and politics

H3BNRY HOLT AND COMPANY

upon which public lectures are to be given from

enjoyed during my brief stay at Chapel Hill, the

seat of the University.

I GERMAN PHILOSOPHY : THETwoWoELDS 3

II GEBMAH MORAL AKD POLITICAL PHI-

III THE GEBMAFIC PHILOSOPHY OP HISTOEY 91

INDEX ..... 133

upon practical affairs Is a troubled question.

sequent affairs. The strange thing Is that when

thought. The doctrine that nature does nothing

arrangements, have found ways of making their

spectator of a machine-like nature grinding its

unrelenting way. The vogue of evolutionary ideas

has led many to regard intelligence as a deposit

to regard intellect (everything which in the past

tion) as but an evolutionary deposit whose im-

portance is confined to the conservation of a life

already achieved, and bids us trust to instinct, or

there were hope and consolation in bidding us trust

to that which, in any case, we cannot intelligently

I do not see that the school of

trine of the economic

is its only logical form. It is easy to follow them

correspondingly superficial. When one reflects

that the great problems of the present day are

might even take the doctrine as a half-hearted con-

struing the past in terms of the problems and

porting a past in order to discover some mathe-

interpreters will have it that economic farces pre-

church, art and literature, science and philosophy

while modern industry has given an immense stim-

dustrial revolution of the eighteenth century

comes after the scientific revolution of the seven-

teenth. The dogma forbids any connection.

the Hegelian idealistic dialectic turned upside

down, we may grow wary. it, Is after

we are dealing with or another philosophy of his-

troubles and indicates a path for future effort, we

they are human, and infected with a belief

ideas, even highly abstract theories, are of efficacy

in the conduct of human affairs influencing the

history which is yet to be.

I have, however, no intention of entering upon

thought with practical social affairs. And if I set

bearings of one phase of modern philosophy. I

thought, ever exercised any influence upon human

simply an idealization, for the sake of emotional

influence of ideas. In other words, I believe it

esthetic form. And I believe it is easy to exag-

alteration of conditions. But at some times they

are congenial to a situation in which men in masses

are acting and suffering. They supply a model

they are in the muscles and men strike or retire.

Even emotional and esthetic systems may breed

superficial as compared with those in which more