History of Modern Philosophy | Page 7

History
to facilitate, becomes a pressing duty. To study the history of
philosophy since Descartes is to study the pre-conditions of
contemporary philosophy.
We begin with an outline sketch of the general characteristics of
modern philosophy. These may be most conveniently described by
comparing them with the characteristics of ancient and of mediaeval
philosophy. The character of ancient philosophy or Greek
philosophy,--for they are practically the same,--is predominantly
aesthetic. The Greek holds beauty and truth closely akin and
inseparable; "cosmos" is his common expression for the world and for
ornament. The universe is for him a harmony, an organism, a work of
art, before which he stands in admiration and reverential awe. In quiet
contemplation, as with the eye of a connoisseur, he looks upon the
world or the individual object as a well-ordered whole, more disposed
to enjoy the congruity of its parts than to study out its ultimate elements.
He prefers contemplation to analysis, his thought is plastic, not
anatomical. He finds the nature of the object in its form; and ends give
him the key to the comprehension of events. Discovering human
elements everywhere, he is always ready with judgments of worth--the
stars move in circles because circular motion is the most perfect; the
right is better than left, upper finer than lower, that which precedes
more beautiful than that which follows. Thinkers in whom this
aesthetic reverence is weaker than the analytic impulse--especially
Democritus--seem half modern rather than Greek. By the side of the

Greek philosophy, in its sacred festal garb, stands the modern in secular
workday dress, in the laborer's blouse, with the merciless chisel of
analysis in its hand. This does not seek beauty, but only the naked truth,
no matter what it be. It holds it impossible to satisfy at once the
understanding and taste; nay, nakedness, ugliness, and offensiveness
seem to it to testify for, rather than against, the genuineness of truth. In
its anxiety not to read human elements into nature, it goes so far as
completely to read spirit out of nature. The world is not a living whole,
but a machine; not a work of art which is to be viewed in its totality and
enjoyed with reverence, but a clock-movement to be taken apart in
order to be understood. Nowhere are there ends in the world, but
everywhere mechanical causes. The character of modern thought would
appear to a Greek returned to earth very sober, unsplendid, undevout,
and intrusive. And, in fact, modern philosophy has a considerable
amount of prose about it, is not easily impressed, accepts no limitations
from feeling, and holds nothing too sacred to be attacked with the
weapon of analytic thought. And yet it combines penetration with
intrusiveness; acuteness, coolness, and logical courage with its
soberness. Never before has the demand for unprejudiced thought and
certain knowledge been made with equal earnestness. This interest in
knowledge for its own sake developed so suddenly and with such
strength that, in presumptuous gladness, men believed that no previous
age had rightly understood what truth and love for truth are. The natural
consequence was a general overestimation of cognition at the expense
of all other mental activities. Even among the Greek thinkers, thought
was held by the majority to be the noblest and most divine function.
But their intellectualism was checked by the aesthetic and
eudaemonistic element, and preserved from the one-sidedness which it
manifests in the modern period, because of the lack of an effective
counterpoise. However eloquently Bacon commends the advantages to
be derived from the conquest of nature, he still understands inquiry for
inquiry's sake, and honors it as supreme; even the ethelistic
philosophers, Fichte and Schopenhauer, pay their tribute to the
prejudice in favor of intellectualism. The fact that the modern period
can show no one philosophic writer of the literary rank of Plato, even
though it includes such masters of style as Fichte, Schelling,
Schopenhauer, and Lotze, not to speak of lesser names, is an external

proof of how noticeably the aesthetic impulse has given way to one
purely intellectual.
When we turn to the character of mediaeval thinking; we find, instead
of the aesthetic views of antiquity and the purely scientific tendency of
the modern era, a distinctively religious spirit. Faith prescribes the
objects and the limitations of knowledge; everything is referred to the
hereafter, thought becomes prayer. Men speculate concerning the
attributes of God, on the number and rank of the angels, on the
immortality of man--all purely transcendental subjects. Side by side
with these, it is true, the world receives loving attention, but always as
the lower story merely,[1] above which, with its own laws, rises the
true fatherland, the kingdom of grace. The most subtle acuteness is
employed in the service of dogma, with the task of fathoming the how