The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

Mathematics, at least, is saved from the dissolvent scepticism of David Hume. Can all the sciences be similarly saved? Yes, if their basic principle, the law of causality—that a given cause must always be followed by a given effect—can be shown, like space and time, to be so inherent in all the processes of understanding that no future experience can be conceived that would violate or escape it. Is causality, too, à priori, an indispensable prerequisite and condition of all thought?

And first to the naming and analysis of those elements in our thought which are not so much given to the mind by perception as given to perception by the mind; those levers which raise the “perceptual” knowledge of objects into the “conceptual” knowledge of relationships, sequences, and laws;

mind is the coördination of experience.

Sensation is unorganized stimulus, perception is organized sensation, conception is organized perception, science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life: each is a greater degree of order, and sequence, and unity. Whence this order, this sequence, this unity? Not from the things themselves; for they are known to us only by sensations that come through a thousand channels at once in disorderly multitude; it is our purpose that put order and sequence and unity upon this importunate lawlessness; it is ourselves, our personalities, our minds, that bring light upon these seas.

Locke was wrong when he said, “There is nothing in the intellect except what was first in the senses”; Leibnitz was right when he added,—“nothing, except the intellect itself.” “Perceptions without conceptions,” says Kant, “are blind.” If perceptions wove themselves automatically into ordered thought, if mind were not an active effort hammering out order from chaos, how could the same experience leave one man mediocre, and in a more active and tireless soul be raised to the light of wisdom and the beautiful logic of truth?

The world, then, has order, not of itself, but because the thought that knows the world is itself an ordering, the first stage in that classification of experie...

in effect, as Hegel was to say, the laws of logic and the laws of nature are one, and logic and metaphysics merge. The generalized principles of science are necessary because they are ultimately laws of thought that are involved and presupposed in every experience, past, present, and to come. Science is absolute, and truth is everlasting.

Nevertheless, this certainty, this absoluteness, of the highest generalizations of logic and science, is, paradoxically, limited and relative: limited strictly to the field of actual experience, and relative strictly to our human mode of experience. For if our analysis has been correct, the world as we know it is a construction, a finished product, almost—one might say—a manufactured article, to which the mind contributes as much by its moulding forms as the thing contributes by its stimuli.

Not that Kant ever doubts the existence of “matter” and the external world; but he adds that we know nothing certain about them except that they exist.

things. “Kant’s greatest merit,” says Schopenhauer, “is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself.”205

It is the cruel function of “transcendental dialectic” to examine the validity of these attempts of reason to escape from the enclosing circle of sensation and appearance into the unknowable world of things “in themselves.” Antinomies are the insoluble dilemmas born of a science that tries to overleap experience. So, for example, when knowledge attempts to decide whether the world is finite or infinite in space, thought rebels against either supposition: beyond any limit, we are driven to conceive something further, endlessly; and yet infinity is itself inconceivable. Again: did the world have a beginning in time?

Or has that chain of causes which science studies, a beginning, a First Cause? Yes, for an endless chain is inconceivable; no, for a first cause uncaused is inconceivable as well. Is there any exit from these blind alleys of thought? There is, says Kant, if we remember that space, time and cause are modes of perception and conception, which must enter into all our experience, since they are the web and structure of experience; these dilemmas arise from supposing that space, time and cause are external things independent of perception. We shall never have any experience which we shall not interpret in terms of space and time and cause; but we shall never have any philosophy if we forget that these are not things, but modes of interpretation and understanding.

we cannot apply these conceptions to the noumenal (or merely inferred and conjectural) world. Religion cannot be proved by theoretical reason.

It had destroyed the naïve world of science, and limited it, if not in degree, certainly in scope,—and to a world confessedly of mere surface and appearance, beyond which it could issue only in farcical “antinomies”; so science was “saved”!

The most eloquent and incisive portions of the book had argued that the objects of faith—a free and immortal soul, a benevolent creator—could never be proved by reason; so religion was “saved”!

No wonder the priests of Germany protested madly against this salvation, and revenged themselves by cal...

And no wonder that Heine compared the little professor of Königsberg with the terrible Robespierre; the latter had merely killed a king, and a few thousand Frenchmen—which a German might forgive; but Kant, said Heine, had killed God, had undermined the most precious arguments of theology. “What a sharp contrast between the outer life of this man, and his destructive, world-convulsing thoughts! Had the citizens of Königsberg surmised the whole significance ...

If religion cannot be based on science and theology, on what then? On morals.

We must find a universal and necessary ethic; à priori principles of morals as absolute and certain as mathematics. We must show that “pure reason can be practical; i.e., can of itself determine the will independently of anything empirical,”207 that the moral sense is innate, and not derived from experience. The moral imperative which we need as the basis of religion must be an absolute, a categorical, imperative.

We know, not by reasoning, but by vivid and immediate feelings, that we must avoid behavior which, if adopted by all men, would render social life impossible.

How could this sense of right survive if it were not that in our hearts we feel this life to be only a part of life, this earthly dream only an embryonic prelude to a new birth, a new awakening; if we did not vaguely know that in that later and longer life the balance will be redressed, and not one cup of water given generously but shall be returned a hundredfold?

This again is no proof by “reason”; the moral sense, which has to do with the world of our actions, must have priority over that theoretical logic, which was developed only to deal with sense-phenomena. Our reason leaves us free to believe that behind the thing-in-itself there is a just God; our moral sense commands us to believe it. Rousseau was right: above the logic of the head is the feeling in the heart. Pascal was right: the heart has reasons of its own, which the head can never understand.

But it was not so; on the contrary, this bold denial of “rational” theology, this frank reduction of religion to moral faith and hope, aroused all the orthodox of Germany to protests.

That he was brave enough appeared in all clarity when he published, at sixty-six, his Critique of Judgment, and, at sixty-nine, his Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason.

He begins by correlating design and beauty; the beautiful, he thinks, is anything which reveals symmetry and unity of structure, as if it had been designed by intelligence. He observes in passing (and Schopenhauer here helped himself to a good deal of his theory of art) that the contemplation of symmetrical design always gives us a disinterested pleasure; and that “an interest in the beauty of nature for its own sake is always a sign of goodness.”

But on the other hand, says Kant, there are also in nature many instances of waste and chaos, of useless repetition and multiplication; nature preserves life, but at the cost of how much suffering and death! The appearance of external design, then, is not a conclusive proof of Providence. The theologians who use the idea so much should abandon it, and the scientists who have abandoned it should use it; it is a magnificent clue, and leads to hundreds of revelations.

For there is design, undoubtedly; but it is internal design, the design of the parts by the whole; and if science will interpret the parts of an organism in terms of their meaning for the whole, it will have an admirable balance for that other heuristic principle—the mechanical conception of life—which also is fruitful for discovery, but which, alone, can never explain the growth of even a blade of grass.

Kant. Since religion must be based not on the logic of theoretical reason but on the practical reason of the moral sense, it follows that any Bible or revelation must be judged by its value for morality, and cannot itself be the judge of a moral code. Churches and dogmas have value only in so far as they assist the moral development of the race. When mere creeds or ceremonies usurp priority over moral excellence as a test of religion, religion has disappeared.

“Christ has brought the kingdom of God nearer to earth; but he has been misunderstood; and in place of God’s kingdom the kingdom of the priest has been established among us.”214 Creed and ritual have again replaced the good life;

and prayer is useless if it aims at a suspension of the natural laws that hold for all experience.

In 1788 Wöllner issued a decree which forbade any teaching, in school or university, that deviated from the orthodox form of Lutheran Protestantism; he established a strict censorship over all forms of publication, and ordered the discharge of every teacher suspected of any heresy. Kant was at first left unmolested, because he was an old man, and—as one royal adviser said—only a few people read him, and these did not understand him.

But the essay on religion was intelligible; and though it rang true with religious fervor, it revealed too strong a strain of Voltaire to pass the new censorship. The Berliner Monatsschrift, which had planned to publish the essay, was ordered to suppress it.

Kant acted now with a vigor and courage hardly credible in a man who had almost completed three score years and ten. He sent the essay to some friends at Jena, and through them had it published by the press of the university there. Jena was outside of Prussia, under the jurisd...

Kant replied that every scholar should have the right to form independent judgments on religious matters, and to make his opinions known; but that during the

reign of the present king he would preserve silence. Some biographers, who can be very brave by proxy, have condemned him for this concession; but let us remember that Kant was seventy, that he was frail in health, and not fit for a fight; and that he had already spoken his message to the world.

If men were entirely social, man would stagnate; a certain alloy of individualism and competition is required to make the human species survive and grow. “Without qualities of an unsocial kind... men might have led an Arcadian shepherd life in complete harmony, contentment, and mutual love; but in that case all their talents would have forever remained hidden in their germ.” (Kant, therefore, was no slavish follower of Rousseau.)

If there is no such progress, the labors of successive civilizations are like those of Sisyphus, who again and again “up the high hill heaved a huge round stone,” only to have it roll back as it was almost at the top. History would be then nothing more than an endless and circuitous folly; “and we might suppose, like the Hindu, that the earth is a place for the expiration of old and forgotten sins.”

Kant attributed this imperialistic greed to the oligarchical constitution of European states; the spoils went to a select few, and remained substantial even after division. If democracy were established, and all shared in political power, the spoils of international robbery would have to be so subdivided as to constitute a resistible temptation.

“The civil constitution of every state shall be republican, and war shall not be declared except by a plebiscite of all the citizens.”

For in this case the ruler, who, as such, is not a mere citizen, but the owner of the state, need not in the least suffer personally by war, nor has he to sacrifice his pleasures of the table or the chase, or his pleasant palaces, court festivals, or the like. He can, therefore, resolve for war from insignificant reasons, as if it were but a hunting expedition; and as regards its propriety, he may leave the justification of it without concern to the diplomatic corps, who are always too ready to give their services for that purpose.” How contemporary truth is!

“Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.”

Kant therefore calls for equality: not of ability, but of opportunity for the development and application of ability; he rejects all prerogatives of birth and class, and traces all hereditary privilege to some violent conquest in the past.

And now how does this complex structure of logic, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, and politics stand today, after the philosophic storms of a century have beaten down upon it? It is pleasant to answer that much of the great edifice remains; and that the “critical philosophy” represents an event of permanent importance in the history of thought. But many details and outworks of the structure have been shaken.

First, then, is space a mere “form of sensibility,” having no objective reality independent of the perceiving mind? Yes and no.

The truth is that Kant was too anxious to prove the subjectivity of space, as a refuge from materialism; he feared the argument that if space is objective and universal, God must exist in space, and be therefore spatial and material.

Recent studies like those of Pearson in England, Mach in Germany, and Henri Poincaré in France, agree rather with Hume than with Kant: all science, even the most rigorous mathematics, is relative in its truth.

The great achievement of Kant is to have shown, once for all, that the external world is known to us only as sensation; and that the mind is no mere helpless tabula rasa, the inactive victim of sensation, but a positive agent, selecting and reconstructing experience as experience arrives.

It is memory that classifies and interprets sensations into perceptions, and perceptions into ideas; but memory is an accretion.

The moral self, the social man, is no “special creation” coming mysteriously from the hand of God, but the late product of a leisurely evolution.

Kant continues Luther and the Stoic Reformation, as Voltaire continues Montaigne and the Epicurean Renaissance.