History of Modern Philosophy | Page 6

machines--by spirits who live these
thoughts, who fill them with personal warmth and passionately defend
them. There is often reason, no doubt, for the complaint that the
personality which has undertaken to develop some great idea is
inadequate to the task, that it carries its subjective defects into the
matter in hand, that it does too much or too little, or the right thing in
the wrong way, so that the spirit of philosophy seems to have erred in
the choice and the preparation of its instrument. But the reverse side of
the picture must also be taken into account. The thinking spirit is more
limited, it is true, than were desirable for the perfect execution of a
definite logical task; but, on the other hand, it is far too rich as well. A
soulless play of concepts would certainly not help the cause, and there
is no disadvantage in the failure of the history of philosophy to proceed
so directly and so scholastically, as, for instance, in the system of Hegel.
A graded series of interconnected general forces mediate between the
logical Idea and the individual thinker--the spirit of the people, of the
age, of the thinker's vocation, of his time of life, which are felt by the
individual as part of himself and whose impulses he unconsciously
obeys. In this way the modifying, furthering, hindering correlation of
higher and lower, of the ruler with his commands and the servant with
his more or less willing obedience, is twice repeated, the situation
being complicated further by the fact that the subject affected by these
historical forces himself helps to make history. The most important
factor in philosophical progress is, of course, the state of inquiry at the

time, the achievements of the thinkers of the immediately preceding
age; and in this relation of a philosopher to his predecessors, again, a
distinction must be made between a logical and a psychological
element. The successor often commences his support, his development,
or his refutation at a point quite unwelcome to the constructive
historian. At all events, if we may judge from the experience of the past,
too much caution cannot be exercised in setting up formal laws for the
development of thought. According to the law of contradiction and
reconciliation, a Schopenhauer must have followed directly after
Leibnitz, to oppose his pessimistic ethelism to the optimistic
intellectualism of the latter; when, in turn, a Schleiermacher, to give an
harmonic resolution of the antithesis into a concrete doctrine of feeling,
would have made a fine third. But it turned out otherwise, and we must
be content.
* * * * *
The estimate of the value of the history of philosophy in general, given
at the start, is the more true of the history of modern philosophy, since
the movement introduced by the latter still goes on unfinished. We are
still at work on the problems which were brought forward by Descartes,
Locke, and Leibnitz, and which Kant gathered up into the critical or
transcendental question. The present continues to be governed by the
ideal of culture which Bacon proposed and Fichte exalted to a higher
level; we all live under the unweakened spell of that view of the world
which was developed in hostile opposition to Scholasticism, and
through the enduring influence of those mighty geographical and
scientific discoveries and religious reforms which marked the entrance
of the modern period. It is true, indeed, that the transition brought about
by Kant's noëtical and ethical revolution was of great
significance,--more significant even than the Socratic period, with
which we are fond of comparing it; much that was new was woven on,
much of the old, weakened, broken, destroyed. And yet, if we take into
account the historical after-influence of Cartesianism, we shall find that
the thread was only knotted and twisted by Kantianism, not cut through.
The continued power of the pre-Kantian modes of thought is shown by
the fact that Spinoza has been revived in Fichte and Schelling, Leibnitz

in Herbart and Hegel, the sensationalism of the French Illuminati in
Feuerbach; and that even materialism, which had been struck down by
the criticism of the reason (one would have thought forever), has again
raised its head. Even that most narrow tendency of the early philosophy
of the modern period, the apotheosis of cognition is,--in spite of the
moralistic counter-movement of Kant and Fichte,--the controlling
motive in the last of the great idealistic systems, while it also continues
to exercise a marvelously powerful influence on the convictions of our
Hegel-weary age, alike within the sphere of philosophy and (still more)
without it. In view of the intimate relations between contemporary
inquiry and the progress of thought since the beginning of the modern
period, acquaintance with the latter, which it is the aim of this