A Pluralistic Universe | Page 6

says, has long assumed in Germany the character of being an
esoteric and occult science. There is a genuine fear of popularity. Simplicity of statement
is deemed synonymous with hollowness and shallowness. He recalls an old professor
saying to him once: 'Yes, we philosophers, whenever we wish, can go so far that in a
couple of sentences we can put ourselves where nobody can follow us.' The professor
said this with conscious pride, but he ought to have been ashamed of it. Great as
technique is, results are greater. To teach philosophy so that the pupils' interest in
technique exceeds that in results is surely a vicious aberration. It is bad form, not good
form, in a discipline of such universal human interest. Moreover, technique for technique,
doesn't David Hume's technique set, after all, the kind of pattern most difficult to follow?
Isn't it the most admirable? The english mind, thank heaven, and the french mind, are still
kept, by their aversion to crude technique and barbarism, closer to truth's natural
probabilities. Their literatures show fewer obvious falsities and monstrosities than that of
Germany. Think of the german literature of aesthetics, with the preposterousness of such
an unaesthetic personage as Immanuel Kant enthroned in its centre! Think of german
books on _religions-philosophie_, with the heart's battles translated into conceptual
jargon and made dialectic. The most persistent setter of questions, feeler of objections,
insister on satisfactions, is the religious life. Yet all its troubles can be treated with
absurdly little technicality. The wonder is that, with their way of working philosophy,
individual Germans should preserve any spontaneity of mind at all. That they still
manifest freshness and originality in so eminent a degree, proves the indestructible
richness of the german cerebral endowment.
Let me repeat once more that a man's vision is the great fact about him. Who cares for
Carlyle's reasons, or Schopenhauer's, or Spencer's? A philosophy is the expression of a
man's intimate character, and all definitions of the universe are but the deliberately
adopted reactions of human characters upon it. In the recent book from which I quoted
the words of Professor Paulsen, a book of successive chapters by various living german
philosophers,[4] we pass from one idiosyncratic personal atmosphere into another almost
as if we were turning over a photograph album.
If we take the whole history of philosophy, the systems reduce themselves to a few main
types which, under all the technical verbiage in which the ingenious intellect of man
envelops them, are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the
whole drift of life, forced on one by one's total character and experience, and on the
whole _preferred_--there is no other truthful word--as one's best working attitude.
Cynical characters take one general attitude, sympathetic characters another. But no

general attitude is possible towards the world as a whole, until the intellect has developed
considerable generalizing power and learned to take pleasure in synthetic formulas. The
thought of very primitive men has hardly any tincture of philosophy. Nature can have
little unity for savages. It is a Walpurgis-nacht procession, a checkered play of light and
shadow, a medley of impish and elfish friendly and inimical powers. 'Close to nature'
though they live, they are anything but Wordsworthians. If a bit of cosmic emotion ever
thrills them, it is likely to be at midnight, when the camp smoke rises straight to the
wicked full moon in the zenith, and the forest is all whispering with witchery and danger.
The eeriness of the world, the mischief and the manyness, the littleness of the forces, the
magical surprises, the unaccountability of every agent, these surely are the characters
most impressive at that stage of culture, these communicate the thrills of curiosity and the
earliest intellectual stirrings. Tempests and conflagrations, pestilences and earthquakes,
reveal supramundane powers, and instigate religious terror rather than philosophy. Nature,
more demonic than divine, is above all things multifarious. So many creatures that feed
or threaten, that help or crush, so many beings to hate or love, to understand or start
at--which is on top and which subordinate? Who can tell? They are co-ordinate, rather,
and to adapt ourselves to them singly, to 'square' the dangerous powers and keep the
others friendly, regardless of consistency or unity, is the chief problem. The symbol of
nature at this stage, as Paulsen well says, is the sphinx, under whose nourishing breasts
the tearing claws are visible.
But in due course of time the intellect awoke, with its passion for generalizing,
simplifying, and subordinating, and then began those divergences of conception which all
later experience seems rather to have deepened than to have effaced, because objective
nature has contributed to both sides impartially, and has let the thinkers emphasize
different parts of her, and pile