PHILOSOPHY

philosophy is the branch of knowledge which aims at ascertaining the ultimate character of reality. in this it differs from science, which, observing and experimenting within the field of experience, seeks to exhibit the results so ascertained in the form of general principles. science investigates the structure of experience, but does not, broadly speaking, try to get behind it. philosophy, so far as its metaphys- ical aspect is concerned, asks what experience means and what are its foundations. the distinction has been made more sharp by the emergence of the theory of knowledge which inquires what is signified by being for mind, as contrasted with the object world being assumed to be self-subsistent, without reference to any function of knowledge in its constitution. ‘the latter is the subject of ontology. the former claims that ontology is no more than a branch to be included properly as a phase in the wider theory of knowledge which is sometimes called epistemology. the emergence of the theory of knowledge as such has become definite as metaphysics has been developed. this development culminated in the teaching of kant at the end of the 18th century. kant insisted that, when its true nature was ascertained, knowl- edge must be recognised—firstly, as more than a property of the individual self which we find in the object world of experience; secondly, as having its foundations in a synthetic unity of activity which, as the condition under which alone experience was possi- ble, could never be presented as an object within it; and, thirdly, as the activity of thought, identical in all individuals, because foundational of both their experience and themselves, which must be recognised if we were to hope to account for an objective uni- verse identical and one and the same for all individuals. these individuals were objects in experience, as well as subjects in knowledge, and as such objects were moulded by their stations and conditions in nature. but they were in their more general character the manifestation of the synthetic activity which, as the foundation of mind and perception, was present in all of them. earlier systems.—the sharp distinction, made by kant for the first time clearly, was not equally apparent in the old indian or greck philosophy. in the earlier philosophies men were less troubled by the difference supposed to exist between knowing and being. ‘the great systems of indian philosophy show little consciousness of this, which has been the prominent difficulty for modern and western metaphysics. this is not altogether to the discredit of the older systems. indian and greek thought as we find the latter in plato and aristotle and in plotinus, are almost equally free from the perplexity that has been caused by an undue insistence on that divergence of knowing from being which modern metaphysics has made prominent. indeed, even descartes, spinoza and leibnitz were hardly more troubled over this divergence than were their predecessors in the older meta- physics. kant’s position.—but the psychological tendency of modern times, and the constant turning to experience, made the problem more acute. how could the mind, as an object in experience, be regarded as creative of its object world? this was the problem to which the philosophy of kant addressed itself, and he solved it by making the distinction above indicated between the two aspects of mind, as an object in nature and as, at the same time, inherently creative. for him mind created its objects by operat- ing under the forms of space and time on a raw and unformed material, and such as the senses might in themselves afford, and shaping it in the process into a formed world. it might be that the ultimate source of this raw material was mind itself in its initial aspect, or it might be that the raw material was 116 supplied aliunde. into this question kant declined to enter. the structure of experience was such that the question could not be solved. , hegel and others.—altter the time of kant great divergence of view became apparent on this problem. schopenhauer, early in the last century, found in wul the explanation of kant’s “* thing in itself ’’? and the source not only of mind but of the raw material. bergson, later on, found that source in his ‘ duree,” time not yet spatialised, which was the ultimate form of reality, an activity which lay deeper down than either mind or its objects. but in the early part of the roth century, the doctrine of kant was expanded in a wholly different direction. it was held that kant had taken a view too narrow of the nature of knowledge, even as he had stated it in the principle of its foundational syn- thetic unity. for fichte, schelling and hegel knowledge meant and covered much more. it was not by them confined by kant’s list of categories deduced from the abstract principles of the judgments of formal logic. in hegel, especially, the start was made from our experience, and knowledge was treated as foundational to the whole of this and as including even the distinctions made within feeling and volition. it is not surprising that, in an age when nothing was deemed to have been sufficiently worked out unless it could be exhibited in the form of a complete system, the ideal of knowledge thus arrived at should have been sought to be exhibited as a sys- tem of an absolute kind, in which god and all forms of apparent externality to thought not less should be displayed in a fully systematised and detailed form as the substance of an entirety in which knowledge as foundational was what could not be tran- scended. such a conclusion was of course a great advance on that of the cautious kant, but it accorded with the tendencies of what kant had taught. the absolute —after hegel’s time the doctrine of the absolute so conceived passed out of fashion in germany, but in other forms it was taken up in great britain by such teachers as t. h. green and edward caird, who gave it a restricted shape but one which was still in substance hegelian. they were succeeded as leaders of thought by f. if. bradley and bernard bosanquet, but these struck out a different conclusion. there was for them an absolute, but the form of knowledge, always relational, was insuflicient for its rendering. there was an alternative form in which they themselves sought to render it, that of a kind of knowledge in which relational thought and bare feeling were both transcended, and which culminated logically in an absolute of a new kind within which both fell. their teaching, issuing as it did in fresh doctrines of logic and psychology, exercised much influence, but did not create any large or definite school of adherents. in the united states the german doctrine of absolute idealism was taken up by such writers as royce and creighton, but its progress was deflected by the seminal teaching of william james and others, who ceased torely on thought as the exclusive instrument, and called people back to the function of feeling in constituting experience. on this basis pragmatism and new realism—which does not shrink from finding in the objects of our experiences the presence even of universals—have made much progress, espe- cially in america. mopern developments the outcome of these somewhat divergent movements is that it is difficult to lay down generally the position of philosophy to-day. there is no single tendency to be found in it, and all that is clear is that psychology is receiving much more attention than it did in the roth century. on the other hand, the influence of objective idealism is still strong, and there is perhaps less of a tendency to throw it into antithesis to psychological work than was formerly the case. the influence of the new developments of physical science which are characteristic of the present century are exercising much influence, but, so far as can be seen, an influence which is not destructive of the new point of view which has grown out of kant’s teaching as to the importance of the part played by knowledge in the constitution of experience. in germany itself this is also the philosophy case. writers like cassirer and ihusserl lay stress on it, and there appears to be a diminishing interest in the alternative special departure from kant which schopenhauer founded, and to which bergson has given a new development in a different shape. herbart, lotze, vaihinger, mach, riehl, avenarius, lange and others in central europe, show a tendency to recur to actual experience, and to treat the ideals which are sought for its foun- dations as belonging to a region of working hypotheses, but hypo- theses merely. the impulse has often been toward the identi- fication of truth with mental occurrences, what is sometimes called psychologism. “ back to kant ’? means the repudiation of the effort to connect the ideals of kant’s successors with what we actually find in our experience. in great britain it is more difficult to sum up the position definitely. ‘there is still a great deal of the idealism, in the wider sense of the word, which refuses to be content with that to which kant restricted himself. to call british idealism hegelian would be wrong, for there is little interest in what hegel felt himself bound to, the construction of a theory of the nature of what is absolute. bradley was the last writer to lay stress on such a necessity. still there is a good deal of writing in which the posi- tivism of kant has been laid aside. on the other hand, there is probably a large number of british students of philosophy who have wholly rejected the mandate of idealism as such, and have deliberately elected to confine themselves to the investigation of the structure of actual human experience. this problem is not the same problem as the other, but, in restricting themselves, these thinkers (and the same thing is true of thinkers in the united states and france) have taken the view that the appar- . ently certain results which the progress of science and especially - of psychology afford are giving them fresh ground on which to build up epistemology. in logic as well as in psychology this tendency is apparent. it is not possible to forecast the future. so much work is being done, and so many fresh views are being brought forward, that the only thing that is certain is that modern movements, especially in this country, are not likely to stand still or to remain where they are. not only science but literature also is reacting on philosophy, and the future will not disclose what are still its secrets. philosophy and ethics —the development of the ethical side of philosophy has naturally been profoundly influenced by the changes on the metaphysical side. the early moral philosophy of india was closely bound up with the religious outlook. the attempt to penetrate to the character of the ultimately real carried with it the sense of the obligation to renounce external goods and not less the interests of the individual self. the prin- ciple of renunciation in this way came to be the basis of indian ethical thought in various forms. in ancient greece, great as was the influence of plato, the most distinctive and influential teaching of ethics was that of aristotle. his influence has en- dured through the middle ages right down to our own times. he directed his investigation of the principles which regulate human conduct to the chief good. this he found to consist, not in pleasure, but in happiness. this is the activity of the highest part of man’s nature. it is the activity of reason, which is the highest human faculty aiming at no end beyond itself. it bids us seek, not extremes, but the mean as that in which the self at its best can be active undisturbed. aristotle worked out his ethical system from a survey of human nature in all its practical forms. kant, however, reshaped this conception. for him the deter- mining motive power was to be sought in ideals, ideals which could never be presented as phases in actual human experience, but which moulded it. the conceptions of god, of freedom, and of immortality were for kant of this order, and they were the foundations of ethical obligation. this sharp separation of knowl- edge from the content of experience led him to formulate the rule for conduct in a somewhat abstract form, the obligation to act always on maxims which applied universally and without reference to particular circumstances. his successors, and par- ticularly fichte and hegel, found this, as we should expect from phonetics their metaphysical tendencies, too abstract as a guide for hu- manity. they introduced the conception, intermediate between that of positive law on the one hand and of pure ideals on the other, of “ sittlichkeit,” the obligation inspired by society in its members of what may be called “‘ good form ” or the “ right thing to do.” this new idea has exercised great influence in various forms. it is nearer to what aristotle taught than to the doctrine of kant. it has enabled moralists to avoid the narrow- ness of utilitarianism on the one hand and of pure idealism on the other, and it has imparted a new significance to society as an ethical influence. the ethical philosophy of to-day is of very varied orders. but prominent throughout is the idea of values as a basis for morals. that quality should be unchallengeable as a guide to conduct is no new notion, but it is one that in a variety of forms has gained increasing importance in recent ethics. french and italian developments.—in an article confined to prominent features in the history of philosophy it is not practi- cable to follow out the secondary developments of the history of thought. such developments have importance both in france and in italy. in france there were three influences, which led to corresponding schools. there was that of the physicists and physiologists initiated by cabanis and continued by pinel and a group of paris physicians. then there was a psychological school in which maine de biran, writing in the beginning of the roth century, was a pio- neer. this school insists through him that we have immediate experience of the self and of a not-self. on this experience a metaphysical system is built based on a direct awareness, such as bergson a century later set up as the foundation of his duree. in course of time the school founded by maine de biran came under the influence of the scottish spirit in philosophy, that of reid and dugald stewart, who had broken away from the prin- ciples of kant. cousin was the most prominent of this french section. comte exercised much influence of a scientific tendency, and, after an interval, the school of bergson attained to great prominence not only in france but outside it. in italy the move- ment has been in the direction of an intellectualist idealism. the influence of hegelianism is marked, but in the hands of thinkers like croce and gentile the doctrine has assumed a form of its own. see aesthetics; anthropology; biology; ethics; locic; psychology; scepticism; etc. brbliography.—general: l. t. hobhouse, development and pur- pose (1913); o. kiilpe, the philosophy of the present in germany (1913); i]. hoffding, 1 history of modern philosophy (1915); modern philosophers (1915); j. burnet, greek philosophy, part 1 (1920); early greek philosophy (1920); g. de ruggiero, modern philosophy (1921); j. a. gunn, modern french philosophy (1922); r. steiner, the philosophy of spiritual activity (1922); w. r. inge, the philos- ophy of plotinus (1923); o. kiilpe, introduction to philosophy (1923); g. santayana, the life of reason (1923); j. 11. muirhead, ed. con- temporary british philosophy (1924). metaphysics: f. h. bradley, ssays on truth and reality (1914); c. d. broad, perception, physics, and reality (1914); i. driesch, the problem of individuality (1914); the history and theory of vitalism (1914); w. r. b. gibson, rudolf eucken’s philosophy of life (1915); l. t. hobhouse, 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