MR. MAURICE'S HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY.*
SECOND NOTICE.
WE have said that Mr. Maurice appreciates philosophy considered as a kind of famine of the soul for some spring of infinite rest and life, and also as a social and political motive-power for the reconstruction or purification of the social organization, far more highly than he seems to appreciate it as a mere scientific curiosity searching for the pheno- menal laws of the human mind; and that, on this account, lie somewhat neglects even the greater psychologists, who seem to be searching less after the roots, than after the superficial order, of mental phenomena. We think that he has in consequence somewhat injured the latter part o( his book as a. picture of the more important tendencies of moral investigation, and diminished the ethical yield of a really great work. It is true that to him "philosophy" has always retained its original sense, the " love of wisdom," and that in tracking laws of abstraction or association through the marvellous feats of modern hypothesis, or analyzing the consitnents of right and wrong, or even winding through the labyrinths of the necessitarian controversy in its most modern shape, there may seem little express love of wisdom. Mr. Maurice says that "thinking about thoughts.. had had been. a process exhausted by the schoolmen, and likely to come to little good, though he makes a special apology for the utility and necessity of its revival by Locke and' his followers from a. rather different starting- point. We think, however, that this apology, which is fine and convincing, ought to have determined Mr. Maurice to give a dis- tinct history of the efforts made by Locke and his followers to ac- count for the genesis of thought, of desire, of volition, of conscience, faith, and the social system from their two great data, the "Law of Association," and pleasurable or painful Sensation. These specula- tions were at least as truly philosophic as many of those of the more dogmatic schoolmen, and are almost essential for understanding exactly where more spiritual assumptions were forced upon men who would not ignore the most conspicuous facts of their own life. The book need not have been much, if any, larger than it is, had the due prominence been given to that oppressive psychology of " Associa- tion" which in this era it actually assumed, and the successive failures been chronicled in the attempt to manufacture, from the lower ground, human reason, sentiment, will, duty, and trust : just as in the previous periods the successive failures in the attempt to deduce these solely from the analysis of man's highest thoughts had already been chronicled. It is true enough that any complete account of the foremost thinkers of this period would have far transcended the limits of such a history as this, but there would have been no difficulty in doing for the empirical theory of the understanding, of the desires and affections, of the will and of the conscience, exactly what Mr. Maurice has- done so effectively for the theory of society, in his masterly commentary on the Encyclopaedists and Rousseau, that is, to mark the exact break-downs in the attempt to construct Man out. of five senses and a "law of association."
Just as the most dogmatic type of the scholastic thinkers maybe said to have attempted the impossible task of explaining a living world by the mere hollow forms of a recipient intelligence, so the most dogmatic of the empirical thinkers attempted the conversely impossible task of explaining that recipient intelligence out of the constant ictits of external life upon it. The former wanted' to account for the web of life by displaying a warp but no woof, the latter by manipulating a woof without any warp, and both without a living influx of life from above. Nothing could have been more instructive than to exhibit the great thinkers in each branch of the empirical philo- sophy—intellectual, sentimental, aesthetic, moral, social, spiritual— standing before the creations of their own ingenuity, questioning themselves whether their philosophy does or does not correspond with the facts of'human nature, sometimes satisfied, sometimes hesi- tating, putting in a new contrivance here and there where the circu- lating system of pleasures and pains looks least like the actual life- blood of humanity, and ending with a half sigh after all at the im- perfect success of their own attempt. Thus Locke's struggles with his own theory of human and personal identity, his story of the con- versational parrot which showed the full reason of a man, and his question whether it would be called a man or a parrot, his dissatis- faction with the only theory of personal identity possible for him—the theory that it consisted solely in a continuous chain of conscious- nesses—are most significant tokens of the point where the povertyof the empirical philosophy culminates in conspicuous falsehood. Tor example : after a long and confused discussion, in which the intel- lectual veracity of the man struggles hard with the pride of the thinker, Locke ends, "I agree the more probable opinion is, that this consciousness is annexed to, and the affection of, an individual imma- terial substance,"—though his system finds little room for such an "opinion,"—and he himself would prefer to rely on a mere flowing stream of consciousness, as actually constituting personality.
It is the great superiority of Locke above his followers—which Mr. Maurice scarcely points out—that the master constantly strikes hard against these fatal rocks for the empirical system, never ignores them, and generally sees that they are more or less dangerous
* Modern Philosophy: or, a Treatise on Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy from the 14114 Century to the French Revolution, with a Glimpse into the 19th Century. By the Rev. J. D. Maurice, M.A. Griffin.
to it. For example again, in an instructive continuation of a passage on " power," quoted by Mr. Maurice, Locke confesses that to him the best notion of power seems to be derived from the internal control of our own will over our own thoughts and actions,— and this in the course of the very chapter in which he supposes him- self to disprove that the will possesses any such proper control at all. Now it is in these great, and in a certain sense, noble inconsis- tencies with his own theory that Locke not only marks for us the intellectual veracity of his own mind, but foreshadows the actual campaigns by which the short-comings of his own philosophy were to be tested and established in the future. We doubt if in this respect Mr. Maurice has done justice to the strong thinker who was so much greater than the long train of his disciples. At all events, with a very small expenditure of additionatpower, our author might have marked more clearly the exact points at which the fundamental exclusions of the empirical hypothesis expanded into such contradictions of intel- lectual experience as one system-maker after another in vain sought to reduce or evade.
In the same way we should have wished for some description of the favourite rationale of that growth of disinterested affections out of pleasure, and pain, and association, which culminates in the wonderful theory that the only truly disinterested affections are the silly ones like avarice, which come, at last, to substitute the means (gold) in the place of the various ends for which that means was originally devised. Mr. Maurice's deep insight into the society in which this extraordinary theory took root, and grew, and flourished, and was accepted as a wise and lucid description of human nature, is so clearly indicated in many of his sketches, that we wonder the more that he did not give the history of this supposed discovery, as it de- veloped itself out of the alliance between the selfish system and the psychology of association. In his account of Paley and Bentham he touches only the very surface of the view, and not its root as a serious analysis of human emotions. By missing this he has too, we think, rendered his profoundly interesting sketch of Bishop Butler needlessly defective. For the discussions of that great thinker on the words "interested" and "disinterested," and his analysis of the "particular affections," such as " resentment," seem to us not only some of the deepest, but some of the most charac- teristic lines of his thought—characteristic not only of himself but of his time.
Again, Mr. Maurice dwells very slightly on the ingenious efforts made to build up a moral faculty out of the same meagre materials, the spasmodic attempts to account for the sense of moral obligation. He will not enter on any of those discussions of the relative worth of human motives which have occupied so prominent a place in modern ethics. He gives us a profound hint m his account of Jonathan Edwards, that the true ethics release us not only from the tyranny of evil motives, but from the morbid necessity for analyzing motives at all, by substituting a living and perfect will for motive forces. But though this may be the ultimate conclusion of a true ethical teaching, it is scarcely a sufficient reason for passing so lightly over the chronic argument of Motive versus Consequences, in the fluctuations of which almost all the history of English ethics has grown up. And he has done, we think, less than justice to Adam Smith when he makes his theory of moral sentiments only an excuse for enlarging on the moral results of the great economist's work. We scarcely know any fact more striking in the history of philosophy than that, at a time when utilitarianism, refined or otherwise, had established its ascendancy over the ablest intellects of the day, over Hume and Paley and Bentham, the great economist, who showed his consum- mate skill in tracing out the broad results on human society of a calculating prudence should have deliberately chosen as his moral criterion of human motives, the sympathy of an invisible and to hiss imaginary spectator of the human heart. Is not the very logical weakness and apparently foreign air of his theory one of the most striking testimonies to the sense of want which the utilitarian phi- losophy had created in a strong mind, and to the direction in which he turned in order to escape from the weary balancing either of con- sequences or motives ? An unseen spectator—imaginary of course, says Smith in his dread of superstition—is always conceived by us as hovering over our own nature and that of others—and by his sympathy or antipathy we determine really the standard of right. To us such a philosophy from such a man is a more significant indication of the failure of the empirical theory at its most critical stage, than even Bentham's ever recurring annoyance at those ignorant conceptions of justice which obstructed his penal jurisprudence and rendered it impossible for him to impose, as he wished, the heaviest penalties as counterweights on the commission of those crimes to which the temptation is most common and most overpowering.
If in this latter part of his book Mr. Maurice has scarcely done justice to the critical questions of the modern psychology, his striking account of Rousseau and the antecedents of his philosophy show that where he gets beyond psychology into the theory of society and politics the modern philosophy becomes to him real and vivid apin ; while the fine glimpse he gives us of the mind and thoughts of Kant equally prove that when he gets beyond psychology into those problems of infinite significance which lie at the root of the human reason, the modern metaphysic is even more real to him than the ancient. But with one class of thinkers alone does Mr. Maurice betray a certain want of sympathy—those who begin with sounding their own thoughts and their own minds, and are not led to anything beyond until, after all sort of obscure gropings, they reach the length of their tether, and are forced to choose between treading the same endless circle, or confessing the infinite world beyond. If they choose the latter alternative, then Mr. Maurice begins to understand them, and to enter heartily into their thoughts, but while they are picking their way among the thorny wilderness of human faculties and motives, he simply stands by waiting compassionately for the moment to come when they are wearied with their own riddles. With anything that resembles a hunger of the soul Mr. Maurice has the largest and widest sighted sympathy; but with that intellectual restlessness which precedes the hunger, that sanguine and satisfied self-analysis which feeds upon its own thoughts for a time before it discovers that this is only a kind of moral consump- tiveness which must end in death—he has little preliminary sympathy. There could scarcely be a richer, wider, nobler, or more instructive history of modern metaphysic, properly so called, than this ; but it is for the most part a metaphysic which excludes psychology.
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