MR. COURTNEY'S STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY.* Or the nine essays which
make up this volume, two have already been published, while the others have appeared for the first time. The book may, however, more conveniently be considered in the light of the distinction made on the title-page. Two essays are • Studies in Philosophy, Ancient and Modern. By W. L. Courtney, M.A. London : ftivingtons. devoted to subjects which are ancient, and seven consider problems of modern philosophy. The essays on " Parmenides " and on " Epicurus " are of a high order, and afford a good example of Mr. Courtney's power of sympathetic insight and critical construction. They are so good, that we are contented with saying so, and we only add our desire that Mr. Courtney would give us more work of the same kind. We need, notwith- standing all that has been done in the interpretation of ancient thought, to have the thoughts and systems of ancient thinkers as they thought them, unmixed and uncoloured by modern speculation. These two essays show that Mr. Courtney has made an unusually near approach to this desirable consummation.
The seven essays on modern subjects are as follow :—" The Failure of Berkeley's Idealism," "A Chapter in the History of the word ' Cause,' " "The New Psychology," "The New Ethics," "Back to Kant," "Kant as a Logician and as a Moralist," and "A Philosophy of Religion." We have given the names of the essays, as it is very difficult for a critic to give a true account or an adequate estimate of the contents of a volume like this. A book which has an inner unity of construction may be fitly criticised by laying hold of that principle,—holding it up to the light, and bringing its validity to the test of a stringent criti- cism. But separate essays must be dealt with in a separate manner. More particularly is this the case where the essays are themselves critical. No doubt, it will help one even here to know what is Mr. Courtney's point of view, and from what ppsition he looks at the problems here discussed. There is no difficulty in ascertaining Mr. Courtney's philosophical attitude. In the preface, he says,—" The one common feature which runs through them is intended to be a vindication of the Kantian stand-point, as against popular English philosophy on the one side, and the later German metaphysics on the other." Mr. Courtney is, however, Kantian with a difference. He takes, as a valid and permanent contribution to 'philosophy, only a small part of Kant's work. He throws overboard as valueless the categories, and their deduction and their schematisation, to- gether with the critique of the practical reason. At all events, if he is compelled to choose between the logic and the ethics, he has no hesitation in rejecting the ethics. So, when Mr. Courtney says " Back to Kant," he must be understood to mean back to the Kant which survives after having been subjected to the criticism of Mr. Courtney. This Kant is different from the Kant of Dr. Stirling or the Kant of Profes- sor Caird. If we unite the negative criticisms made from dif- ferent points of view on one or other parts of the system of Kant, it is surprising to find how little remains of it. This treat- ment Kant has received not from professed .opponents of his teaching, but from professed followers, who look on his work as the turning-point of modern philosophy. On all hands, we find apologies for the master. He erred, we are told, in not being critical enough. He left an element of dogmatism in the very centre of the critical philosophy, dogmatically assumed the distinction between the mind and the world, and supposed that the knowing faculty is roused to exercise by objects which affect our senses. To eliminate this "surd" has been the object of the speculation which may be called Hegelian, the sum of which is that the distinctions of matter and form, of world and mind, are only shifting distinctions, relative to the point of view from which they are contemplated, and to a true theory of knowledge the mind and the world are; in a sense, con- vertible terms. Criticisms of Kant from this point of view are many and various. Mr. Courtney looks in this direction with a certain wistful desire to find the system true. Of Hegelianism he- says :—" These are hard sayings, and it is not within the capacity of the present writer to accept them as saving truths, or stigma- tise them as mystical errors." He gets eloquent, however, in the exposition of them. In his criticism of Principal Caird's Introduction, to the Philosophy of Religion, his attitude is that of one who is fascinated by the attractions of the theory so gracefully propounded by the learned Principal. He yields himself to the fascination, is drawn on, until he finds himself almost false to his Kantian allegiance, and recovers himself with a start, to mutter that he is still a Kantian. He makes room for one paragraph from the essay on the "Philosophy of Religion :"—" As a Philosophy of Religion, these transcen- dental doctrines are exposed to all the usual difficulties which beset the attempt to make a speculative theory of the divine. One such difficulty is always near the surface: it is to combine in an harmonious whole the historical element of Christianity with the philosophical. Is Christianity a revealed religion? If
so, there must be allowed to have occurred once, under conditions of time and space, a serious interruption of the natural history of man's spirit. Is religion explicable as a perfectly normal product of human feelings,—a product which has a history, a development, an evolution P Then the Christian religion must have its place among the incidents of man's natural progress, and the supernatural revelation must disappear. Which alter- native mast we adopt ? There can be no doubt which of the two has found most favour with the philosophers, with all their apparatus of heredity, and descent, and organic develop- ment. The natural history of religions has been everything ; the supernatural origin of Christianity has been nothing. The historical elements have been quietly ignored, or referred to antecedent spiritual conditions ; the philosophical elements have everywhere received due emphasis and elucidation. But according to the interpretation of Principal Caird, we are told that ' the idea of organic development is in no way inconsistent with the claim of Christianity to be regarded as a religion of supernatural or divine origin.' It is as though a man should believe in the Ascidian origin of human beings, and yet believe them to have been divinely created on the sixth day. One can- not pin one's faith equally to the development of species and the Book of Genesis." (pp. 200-1.) On the whole, :then, Mr. Courtney finds that the Hegelian dialectic makes too great a demand on his powers of belief ; though he has yielded to it more than he seems to know, and we know not how soon he may cross the borderland which separates the Kantian from the Hegelian.
In the criticism of the New Psychology and the New Ethics, Mr. Courtney has been able to assume a freer attitude. The new psychology is that of Mr. G. H. Lewes, while the new• ethics is that of Mr. Herbert Spencer. The advance which these thinkers have made on the old methods and results of psychology, is fully recognised by Mr. Courtney. They have- applied the methods of the natural sciences to the study of man, and have, as a consequence, been able to admit facts which were strenuously denied by their predecessors. Biology plays a great part in the new psychology. Full justice is done to the merits of Mr. Lewes as a worker in psychology, even when Mr. Court- ney cannot agree with his conclusions. Here, for instance, is an admirable statement of the fundamental difference which has always divided the schools :—" The battle of the psycho- logies rages fiercest round the so-called Forms of Mind. Kant's analysis of experience seems to reveal certain archetypal forms of intelligence, which are presupposed in all possible human knowledge, which are given to experience, and not abstracted from experience. To say as much as this seemed to the opposing school a revival of the doctrine of Innate Ideas, clothed in a clever, but superficial disguise. It involved the impossibility of explaining knowledge without the assumptions of certain activi- ties of thought which, if true, would be fatal not only to such sensationalism as that of Hume and Mill, but also to any material evolution of human intelligence, whether professed by a Darwin or a Herbert Spencer: What, then, was the answer of the Evolutionists ? Simply that the so- called mental forms were themselves the product of evo- lution. . That which would explain the gradual birth of Humanity out of Ascidians, could also explain the genesis of certain mental capacities and aptitudes out of the accu- mulated experiences of generations of men. Thus, the Kantian forms might indeed be a priori to any given indi- vidual, but they were none the less a posteriori to the race." (pp. 108-9.) To admit, as Mr. Lewes and Mr. Spencer have been constrained to do, that mental forms are a priori in any sense, is a new departure. They have not been able to explain how accumulation of experience can transform its nature, or how a posteriori experience can become a priori forma of thought. Is it possible to get more out of a thing than was somehow put• into it at first, or at some stage of the process ? Is not the distinction drawn between the experience of the race and the experience of the individual altogether untenable ? This is, however, only one form of the fallacy which passes for truth in many quarters. Evolutionists assume that, if they have time enough, and if the process be slow and gradual enough, anything may become anything else. No. rational account is given of the process, or of the gradual steps by which the change was accomplished, nor under what compulsion or by what guidance the result was pro- duced. The only explanation we get is, " It happened so." Nor has any reason been forthcoming yet why the highest
rational animal should be a biped, and not a quadruped; should be a land animal, and not one free both of land and sea. Evolution can only say what Mr. Grant Allen says of the elongation of the receptacle in the strawberry,—it was a freak of Nature. We conclude by quoting the last paragraph of the essay on the'' New Ethics "-
" It is not easy to picture the mental and social lives of men as the mere development of the physical life, when they appear to be so clearly contradictory of it, and so obviously to curtail, circumscribe, and overpower the privileges of animality. Nor, again, is it at once apparent how Mr. Herbert Spencer can possibly allow that Absolute Ethics precede Relative Ethics ; that the ideal truths come first, ex- cept on the supposition, which is fatal to the scientific evolutionist, that the end is really implicit in the process ; that the evolution requires, so to speak, a prior involution ; and that, therefore, there is a hysteron proteron, as in Scientific Psychology, so in Scientific Ethics. But it is undeniable that, in some senses, the newer version of morality speaks smooth things to our ears, things easy to be understood by our common clay. Let as, then, in clear recognition that a long life means not only a happy one, but a moral one, pull down our private barns and build larger, social co-operative ones ; and let us say to the tribal soul that it has many goods laid up for many years, that it may eat, drink, and be both selfishly and altruistically merry,—unless, indeed, we have not yet banished the haunting suspicion that some- where, or somehow, or somewben, either from Nature or fate, or fortune or God—there may be borne in upon us the intolerable irony -of -that voice,—' Then fool." (pp. 133.4.)
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