The Spirit of Modern Philosophy: An Essay in the Form of Lectures by Josiah Royce

Author:Josiah Royce [Josiah Royce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications, Inc
Published: 2015-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

LECTURE IX.

THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION.

IDEALISM, in several of its most significant phases, has been described in the lectures on the movement from Kant to Hegel. In this lecture I have to discuss another phase of what I have several times called the return to the outer order. In looking back for a moment at certain of the suggestions of the last lecture, I shall not ask you to dwell any more upon Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Of that topic we have had doubtless enough for the present. Coming as we do to a more cheerful chapter of modern philosophy, we want only to remind ourselves, at the outset, of another element in Schopenhauer’s thought, and one which will be of importance for the work that we now have in hand.

Schopenhauer, as you may remember, while he was in his own way an idealist on a Kantian basis, was not, on the whole, what one would call, somewhat technically, a constructive idealist. That is, while he was very positive in saying that the world which we see and feel is just the world of our ideas, and nothing else, he did not follow out the plan of Fichte or of the romanticists by trying to show constructively what sort of a world we are all rationally bound to see. On the contrary, as Schopenhauer holds, the world that we see is at once the world of the self, of the inner life, and is also the world of that capricious will which is the very heart of the inner life. You cannot deduce a “priori anything about the sorts of reality which this world must express and contain. You cannot say, with Fichte, that it must be the world of the moral law, das versinnlichte Material unserer Pflicht. You cannot say, with Schelling, that it must be the world which expresses in symbolic form the life of a rational and gigantic World-Spirit. You must take the world as you find it. You may be sure indeed of its unity, yet this assurance rests only upon your power to prove that all diversity is due to our sense-forms of time and space, and is therefore illusory. But the longing and struggling will cannot be described apart from experience. The philosopher must become a naturalist. He must look upon the world as the spectator looks on during a tragedy which he knows beforehand to be full of action and of suffering, but which he must watch before he can know the plot.

It is this thought of Schopenhauer’s that brings him very near to the position of most students of modern science. Schopenhauer marks then, in the history of thought, the transition from the romantic idealism to the modern realism, the return to the natural order. He is indeed an idealist of a Kantian type. He is philosopher in his sense of the unity of things, in his assurance that all phenomenal plurality is a mere illusion, in his reiteration of the Hindoo That art Thou, and in his Kantian idealism itself.

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