metaphysic.
29.] Predicates of this kind, taken individually, have but a limited range of meaning, and no one can fail to perceive how inadequate they are, and how far they fall below the fulness of detail which our imaginative thought gives, in the case, for example, of God, Mind, or Nature. Besides, though the fact of their being all predicates of one subject supplies them with a certain connexion, their several meanings keep them apart: and consequently each is brought in as a stranger in relation to the others.
The first of these defects the Orientals sought to remedy, when, for example, they defined God by attributing to Him many names; but still they felt that the number of names would have had to be infinite.
30.] (2) In the second place, the metaphysical systems adopted a wrong criterion. Their objects were no doubt totalities which in their own proper selves belong to reason,—that is, to the organised and systematically-developed universe, of thought. But these totalities—God, the Soul, the World,—were taken by the metaphysician as subjects made and ready, to form the basis for an application of the categories of the understanding. They were assumed from popular conception. Accordingly popular conception was the only canon for settling whether or not the predicates were suitable and sufficient.
31.] The common conceptions of God, the Soul, the World, may be supposed to afford thought a firm and fast footing. They do not really do so. Besides having, a particular and subjective character clinging to them, and thus leaving room for great variety of interpretation, they themselves first of all require a firm and fast definition by thought. This may be seen in any of these propositions where the predicate, or in philosophy the category, is needed to indicate what the subject, or the conception we start with, is.
In such a sentence as 'God is eternal,' we begin with the conception of God, not knowing as yet what he is: to tell us that, is the business of the predicate. In the principles of logic, accordingly, where the terms formulating the subject-matter are those of thought only, it is not merely superfluous to make these categories predicates to propositions in which God, or, still vaguer, the Absolute, is the subject, but it would also have the disadvantage of suggesting another canon than the nature of thought. Besides, the propositional form (and for proposition, it would be more correct to substitute judgment) is not suited to express the concrete—and the true is always concrete—or the speculative. Every judgment is by its form one-sided and, to that extent, false.
This metaphysic was not free or objective thinking. Instead of letting the object freely and spontaneously expound its own characteristics, metaphysic pre-supposed it ready-made. If any one wishes to know what free thought means, he must go to Greek philosophy: for Scholasticism, like these metaphysical systems, accepted its facts, and accepted them as a dogma from the authority of the Church. We moderns, too, by our whole up-bringing, have been initiated into ideas which it is extremely difficult to overstep, on account of their far-reaching significance. But the ancient philosophers were in a different position. They were men who lived wholly in the perceptions of the senses, and who, after their rejection of mythology and its fancies, pre-supposed nothing but the heaven above and the earth around. In these material, non-metaphysical surroundings, thought is free and enjoys its own privacy,—cleared of everything material, and thoroughly at home. This feeling that we are all our own is characteristic of free thought—of that voyage into the open, where nothing is below us or above us, and we stand in solitude with ourselves alone.
32.] (3) In the third place, this system of metaphysic turned into Dogmatism. When our thought never ranges beyond narrow and rigid terms, we are forced to assume that of two opposite assertions, such as were the above propositions, the one must be true and the other false.
Dogmatism may be most simply described as the contrary of Scepticism. The ancient Sceptics gave the name of Dogmatism to every philosophy whatever holding a system of definite doctrine. In this large sense Scepticism may apply the name even to philosophy which is properly Speculative. But in the narrower sense, Dogmatism consists in the tenacity which draws a hard and fast line between certain terms and others opposite to them. We may see this clearly in the strict 'Either—or': for instance, The world is either finite or infinite; but one of these two it must be. The contrary of this rigidity is the characteristic of all Speculative truth. There no such inadequate formulae are allowed, nor can they possibly exhaust it. These formulae Speculative truth holds in union as a totality, whereas, Dogmatism invests them in their isolation with a title to fixity and truth.
It often happens in philosophy that the half-truth takes its place beside the whole truth and assumes on its own account the position of something permanent. But the fact is that the half-truth, instead of being a fixed or self-subsistent principle, is a mere element absolved and included in the whole. The metaphysic of understanding is dogmatic, because it maintains half-truths in their isolation: whereas the idealism of speculative philosophy carries out the principle of totality and shows that it can reach beyond the inadequate formularies of abstract thought. Thus idealism would say:—The soul is neither finite only, nor infinite only; it is really the one just as much as the other, and in that way neither the one nor the other. In other words; such formularies in their isolation are inadmissible, and only come into account as formative elements in a larger notion. Such idealism we see even in the ordinary phases of consciousness. Thus we say of sensible things, that they are changeable: that is, they are, but it is equally true that they are not. We show more obstinacy in dealing with the categories of the understanding. These are terms which we believe to be somewhat firmer—or even absolutely firm and fast. We look upon them as separated from each other by an infinite chasm, so that opposite categories can never get at each other. The battle of reason is the struggle to break up the rigidity to which the understanding has reduced everything.
33.] The first part of this metaphysic in its systematic form is Ontology, or the doctrine of the abstract characteristics of Being. The multitude of these characteristics, and the limits set to their applicability, are not founded upon any principle. They have in consequence to be enumerated as experience and circumstances direct, and the import ascribed to them is founded only upon common sensualised conceptions, upon assertions that particular words are used in a particular sense, and even perhaps upon etymology. If experience pronounces the list to be complete, and if the usage of language, by its agreement, shows the analysis to be correct, the metaphysician is satisfied; and the intrinsic and independent truth and necessity of such characteristics is never made a matter of investigation at all.
To ask if being, existence, finitude, simplicity, complexity, &c. are notions intrinsically and independently true, must surprise those who believe that a question about truth can only concern propositions (as to whether a notion is or is not with truth to be attributed, as the phrase is, to a subject), and that falsehood lies in the contradiction existing between the subject in our ideas, and the notion to be predicated of it. Now as the notion is concrete, it and every character of it in general is essentially a self-contained unity of distinct characteristics. If truth then were nothing more than the absence of contradiction, it would be first of all necessary in the case of every-notion to examine whether it, taken individually, did not contain this sort of intrinsic contradiction.
34.] The second branch of the metaphysical system was Rational Psychology or Pneumatology. It dealt with the metaphysical nature of the Soul,—that is, of the Mind regarded as a thing. It expected to find immortality in a sphere dominated by the laws of composition, time, qualitative change, and quantitative increase or decrease.
The name 'rational,' given to this species of psychology, served to contrast it with empirical modes of observing the phenomena of the soul. Rational psychology viewed the soul in its metaphysical nature, and through the categories supplied by abstract thought. The rationalists endeavoured to ascertain the inner nature of the soul as it is in itself and as it is for thought.—In philosophy at present we hear little of the soul: the favourite term now is mind (spirit). The two are distinct, soul being as it were the middle term between body and spirit, or the bond between the two. The mind, as soul, is immersed in corporeity, and the soul is the animating principle of the body.
The pre-Kantian metaphysic, we say, viewed the soul as a thing. 'Thing' is a very ambiguous word. By a thing, we mean, firstly, an immediate existence, something we represent in sensuous form: and in this meaning the term has