CHAPTER IV.

THE STANDPOINT OF THE IDEAL.

MATERIALISM is the first, the lowest, but also comparatively the firmest stage in philosophy. Starting immediately from natural knowledge, it becomes a system by looking beyond the limits of this knowledge. The necessity that rules in the sphere of the natural sciences lends to the system which is most immediately based upon them a considerable degree of the uniformity and certainty of its separate parts. A reflexion of this certainty and necessity falls also upon the system as such, but this reflexion is deceptive. Precisely what makes Materialism a system, the fundamental hypothesis which elevates the particular branches of natural knowledge by a common bond into a whole, is not only its most uncertain part, but is, in fact, untenable before a deeper-going criticism. But exactly the same relation is repeated in the particular sciences upon which Materialism is based, and therefore, too, in all the separate parts of the system. The certainty of these parts is, rightly considered, nothing but the certainty of the facts of the science, and this is always greatest for the immediately given particular. The unity which makes the facts into a science and the sciences into a system is a product of free synthesis, and springs therefore from the same source as the creation of the ideal. While, however, this deals quite freely with the materials, synthesis in the province of science has only the freedom of its origin from the speculative mind of man. It is, on

the other hand, tied to the task of establishing the utmost possible harmony between the necessary factors of knowledge, which are independent of our will. As the artisan, in the case of an invention, is tied to its purpose, while at the same time the idea of it springs freely from his mind, so every true scientific induction is at once the accomplishment of a given task and a product of the speculative mind.

Materialism more than any other system keeps to reality, i.e., to the sum total of the necessary phenomena given to us by the compulsion of sense. But a reality such as man imagines to himself, and as he yearns after when this imagination is dispelled, an existence absolutely fixed and independent of us while it is yet known by us-such a reality does not exist and cannot exist, because the synthetic creative factor of our knowledge extends, in fact, into the very first sense-impressions and even into the elements of logic. 40 The world is not only idea, but also our idea; a product of the organisation of the species in the universal and necessary characteristics of all experi

of the individual in the synthesis that deals freely with the object. We may also say that the reality is the phenomenon for the species, while the delusive appearance, on the contrary, is a phenomenon for the individual, which only becomes an error by reality, i.e., existence for the species, being ascribed to it.

But the task of producing harmony among phenomena and of linking the manifold that is given to us into unity belongs not merely to the synthetic factors of experience,

40 That to the principle A = A strictly understood reality nowhere corresponds, A. Spir has recently energetically insisted on and made it the basis of a philosophical system of his own. All the difficulties involved in this fact may, however, be much more easily disposed of in another way. The principle A = A is indeed the basis of all knowledge, yet is not itself knowledge, but an act of

the mind, an act of primitive synthesis by which there is posited as the necessary starting-point of all thinking an equality or a persistence which are found in nature only relatively and approximately, but never absolutely and completely. The principle A=A accordingly indicates at the very threshold of logic the relativity and ideality of all our knowledge.

but also to those of speculation. Here, however, the connecting organisation of the species leaves us in the lurch: the individual speculates in his own fashion, and the! product of this speculation acquires importance for the species, or rather for the nation and contemporaries, only in so far as the individual creating it is endowed with rich and normal talents and is typical in his modes of thought, while by his intellectual energy he is called to be a leader.

The conceptional poesy of speculation is, however, not even so completely free; it still strives, like empirical research, after a unitary exhibition of data in their connexion, but it lacks the guiding compulsion of the principles of experience. Only in poesy, in the narrower sense of the word, in poetry, is the ground of reality consciously abandoned. In speculation form has the preponderance over matter; in poetry it is completely dominant. The poet creates in the free play of his spirit a world to his own. liking, in order to impress more vividly upon the easily manageable material a form which has its own intrinsic value and its importance independently of the problems of knowledge.

From the lowest stages of synthesis, in which the individual still appears completely bound by the characteristics of the species, up to its creative dominance in poetry, the essence of this act is always directed to the production of unity, of harmony, of perfect form. The same principle which rules absolutely in the sphere of the beautiful, in art and poetry, appears in the sphere of conduct as the true ethical norm which underlies all the other principles of morality, and in the sphere of knowledge as the shaping, form-giving factor in our picture of the world.

Although, therefore, the very picture of the world which the senses give us is involuntarily formed upon the ideal within us, yet the whole world of reality, as compared with the free creations of art, appears inharmonious and full of perversities. Here lies the source of all Optimism and

VOL. III.

Y

Pessimism. Without comparison we should not be able to form a judgment as to the quality of the world. But when from some elevated point we regard a landscape our whole nature is attuned to ascribe to it beauty and perfection. We must first destroy the powerful unity of this picture by analysis, in order to remember that in those huts, peacefully resting on the mountain slope, there dwell careworn men; that behind that little sheltered window perhaps some sufferer is enduring the most terrible torments; that beneath the murmuring summits of the distant forest birds of prey are rending their quivering prey; that in the silvery waves of the river a thousand tiny creatures, scarcely born to life, are finding a cruel death. To our sweeping glance the withered branches of the trees, the blighted cornfields, the sun-scorched meadows, are only shadows in a picture which delights our eye and cheers our heart.

Thus the world appears to the optimistic philosopher. He praises the harmony which he himself has introduced into it. As compared with him, the Pessimist a thousand times is right; and yet there could be no Pessimism at all without the natural ideal of the world which we carry within us. It is only contrast with this that makes reality bad.

The more freely synthesis exerts its function, the more æsthetic becomes the image of the world, the more ethical is its reaction upon our activity in the world. Not only poetry, but speculation too, however it may appear to be directed to knowledge only, has essentially æsthetic, and, through the attractive force of the beautiful, also ethical intent. In this sense we might indeed say, with Strauss, that every genuine philosophy is necessarily optimistic. But philosophy is more than mere imaginative speculation; it embraces also logic, criticism, the theory of knowledge.

We may call those functions of the senses and of the combining intelligence, which produce reality in us, individually low as compared with the lofty flight of the

spirit in freely creative art; but as a whole, and in their combination, they may not be subordinated to any other mental activity. Little as our reality may be a reality after our own hearts, it is nevertheless the firm basis of our whole intellectual existence. The individual grows up from the soil of the species, and general and necessary knowledge forms the only safe basis for the elevation of the individual to an æsthetic apprehension of the world. If this basis is disregarded, speculation too can no longer be typical, no longer be full of significance; it loses itself in fantasies, in subjective caprice and puerile frivolity. But, above all, is the most genuine possible conception of reality the whole basis of daily life, the necessary condition of human intercourse. The community of the species in knowledge is at the same time the law of all interchange of ideas. But it is even more than this: it is also the only way to the mastery of nature and its forces.

However much the modifying influence of the psychical synthesis reaches down to our most elementary ideas of things, of an object, yet we have the conviction that something lies at the bottom of these ideas and of the world arising from them that does not spring from ourselves. This conviction rests essentially upon the fact that we discover between things not merely a connexion, which might indeed be just the plan upon which we have conceived them, but also a co-operation, which goes on irrespective of our thought, and which acts upon us ourselves and subjects us to its laws. This strange element, this 'non-ego,' of course only becomes again 'object' for our thought by being conceived by each individual in the universal and necessary forms of knowledge of the species; yet it does not therefore consist merely of these forms of knowledge. We have before us in the laws of nature not merely laws of our knowledge, but also evidences of something else, of a power that now compels us and now is dominated by us. In our com