PHILOSOPHY AND MODERN LIFE.

The following inaugural address was delivered by Professor Anderson at the first meeting of the Sydney University Philosophical Society recently :—

. . . . For philosophy, whatever else if is, is a criticism of life, or rather of the conceptions underlying life. It is a continuous sifting and testing of the principles which guide the ordinary man to his foolishness as well as in his wisdom. I admit that to learn the truth about man and life we have to live among men, and make ourselves acquainted with what man has actually done, in history, literature, politics and art; but the key to the proper interpretation of these is to be found only in the scientific habit of mind which it is the business of a fine education to communicate. You are aware that there is a view of philosophy which makes it merely a mental gymnastic, or identifies it with the windy metaphysic of a bygone age, the interminable hair-splitting and word quibbling which amused a long line of past generations. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that metaphysic was like log-splitting— " when you have split one log you have simply two more to split." And I suppose that human beings will always find a kind of satisfaction in explaining what they do not understand by means of something they understand still less. As long as they continue to do so the modern spirit must be content to suffer Christian science and metaphysical healing with the same humorous resignation with which it regards the fortune-teller the palmist, and the Christian Israelite. Nor need modern philosophy be held responsible for the arrant nonsense of previous philosophers any more than modern medicine should be made responsible for the charlatanism of medieval empirics, or modern science for the futile theories and unverified hypotheses that so often blocked its path. When we say that the business of philosophy is to communicate the scientific habit of mind we are making a claim often regarded as the special monopoly of the natural or physical sciences. Well, I object to monopolies in any sphere, thought or life. In the realm of knowledge we cannot set one branch over another as having for all minds an exclusive pre-eminence as means of discipline or culture. The pursuit of one particular subject may certainly give a man the scientific spirit or habit, but very often it does nothing of the kind and a man may be an excellent chemist or physicist, and at the same time give no proof outside his special subject that he possesses the supreme gift of the scientific student—the flexible, disciplined, and balanced mind. Happily for the progress of knowledge the physical sciences are now so closely interrelated through their common principles and methods and the great unifying conceptions which bind them together that the dangers and defects of specialisation are growing less and less. Without unduly exalting the claims of philosophy, we may at least demand recognition of the part it plays, not in opposition to but in conjunction with the physical sciences in fitting the modern man for the work of the modern world. Science and philosophy are twin spirits that respond to each other in hurt or in health. Neither can progress without drawing on the other's store. The great results of scientific discovery have inevitably altered the views of man with regard to his own nature, his relations to his fellows, and to his environment. Our philosophies are different from those of our ancestors, because Copernicus and Newton and Darwin have spoken ; but, on the other hand, the conceptions which underlie scientific method and the principles or categories which are applied with success in the different special sciences are themselves objects of thought, and as such subject to progressive development. With each new unifying conception suggested or developed by philosophic criticism a new era may begin for a particular science or group of sciences, or a new pathway may be opened for the practical activities of man. The great events of the world, it has been said, take place in the intellect. History has shown that the great revolutions in human affairs have taken place not as the indirect result of slow and gradual accumulation of minute changes or facts, but as the outcome of some idea or principle which transformed the world men lived in and their ways of regarding it. If it is the special business of philosophy to understand such conceptions, to criticise and correlate, to justify or condemn them, it to easy to see how science and philosophy are both necessary as ministering spirits to the growth of man's knowledge of himself and of the universe. Philosophy is science ever turning back upon itself, to take stock of its possessions, and criticise its own assumptions. If from this point of view philosophy seems merely regressive and critical in its operations, from another such regressive criticism is the necessary preliminary to a new view of the world and a new construction of knowledge. For the idea or principle descends from the speculative to the practical sphere. It passes from the students' chamber and from the schools, into the world's crowded market-places. Every great philosophic idea is not merely comprehensive of the past and of the present, it is prophetic of the future. As Tennyson writes of knowledge,—

On her forehead sits a fire,
She sets her forward countenance,
And leaps into the future chance.

The idea becomes a weapon to smite, and a war-cry to inspire. When the tumult and the shouting are over, and once more a survey is made of gains and losses, men look around to find—

Large elements in order brought,
And tracts of calm from tempest made,
And world wide fluctuation swayed,
In vassal tides that follow thought.

The many and visible results of science have sometimes been quoted as a reproach to philosophy, which seems in comparison to be stationary and unprogressive. The charge is in some measure due to a misreading of history and to a misunderstanding of the function of philosophy. The progress of science and philosophy may be compared (to borrow an image from Mrs Ward) to the movement of the minute hand and the hour hand of the clock. We are not sensible of the movement of the latter, it seems stationary and silent. And so philosophy often appears to be making no progress while science, with meticulous precision, ticks off its gains. But when the minute hand has come full circle it is philosophy which strikes the hour. The ideas and results of the age that has passed are gathered up in one comprehensive generalisation, and a new epoch in the world's history has begun. If we were to disregard the arbitrary divisions of time and seek for the real beginnings of the epoch covered in part by the century which has just told its numbered tale of years, we should have to go farther back than the invention of the steam engine and the age of Napoleon. We are living at present on ideas which we owe in great measure to Kant and Rousseau. We are only occasionally conscious of the fact that the French Revolution is in the bones and blood of modern civilisation and that the claim which Rousseau made for the rights of the individual lies behind the upward striving of the human will, which has burst through the fetters of precedent and authority. The old order has changed, never to return. We have come a long way, for example from the time when it was declared (in England, 1680) that "to publish any newspaper whatever was illegal, and showed a manifest intent to the breach of the peace. " On the other hand, if Rousseau presented modern humanity with a gospel of rights, Kant was no less emphatic on the reality of the gospel of duty, and on the reality of a moral order of the universe as the object of man's life and faith. Well, we have heard of these conceptions, right and duty, before, and it may therefore seem to some that the world has made little progress since early Christians had all things in common, and Epicureanism and Stoicism set over against each other the ever-opposing claims of inclination and duty. Our social ethics is a thing of shreds and patches, a medley of elements drawn from inconsistent creeds, and one large section of human life remains apparently unaffected by the change which the French Revolution brought for good or ill. We are still confronted with an ecclesiastical doctrine of doles and devotion and a democratic doctrine of "I'm as good as you are !" Yet no one can read the history of the nineteenth century without seeing how essentially false is the opposition which Newman manufactures between authority and liberalism, although it may serve to describe a temporary conflict of the forces of reaction and progress. The nineteenth century, the century of realism, has been an age largely constructive in moral, social, and political effort, an effort reinforced at every step by the influence of philosophical criticism and inspiration. To take one illustration from a special sphere. The science of economics, as the first half of the century understood it, originated in the ideas of a Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith. The idea of liberty or negative freedom was then taken over by his successors, and worked out into a science of political economy which became more abstract with each generation and less in accord with the facts of experience on their living fulness. The conceptions on which the science was based had to be re-criticised and economics brought into relation with the larger laws of social and political life. It is only now at the beginning of a new century that economics is entering on the third stage of its career, expounded and transformed through the better understanding of the ideas which at once give it its strength and mark out its limitations. The pressure of practical needs which gave birth to trade-unionism, and finally forced statesmen to abandon a policy of laissez-faire, was aided by a long line of thinkers of the schools and prophets of the market-place, who freed men's minds from the thraldom of phrases like "natural law" and "inalienable right."

Marx and Mazzini, Carlyle and Ruskin, Green and Toynbee, represent some of the diverse attempts during the nineteenth century to bring together the ideas of freedom and duty, and to make them the foundation of a broader science of wealth and a truer philosophy of the State. We are at present trying hard as a people to be at once imperialistic, Christian, and democratic, with what success I hardly venture to describe. But we still wait for that larger reconstruction which will make the State a true Commonwealth, the home of man's delight and not merely the scene of his toil or the source of his income, providing a field for the exercise of his highest gifts and for his services an exceeding great reward. The constructive work of philosophy is often obscured by the fact that its positive results are handed over to this or that special department of knowledge, while philosophy itself pursues its never-ending task of criticism, analysis, and restoration. Thus philosophy has given us during the nineteenth century a renovated ethics, a broader economics, and a wholly reconstructed psychology. It has purged sociology from the narrow and arbitrary generalisations of Buckle and Comte, and at least begun the great task of forming a logic which will be adequate both as theory of knowledge and as an account of the methods of science. Yet rarely does philosophy get its fair share of credit for those results. Between the original work of the great philosophic thinker and the final appearance of his ideas on the mind of the man in the street, generations of patient walkers may be needed. First, some particular science may be transformed by having its basis broadened, or a new science may be born through the creative force of a new conception. I need only refer in passing to the way in which the philosopher Bentham modified the theory and practice of law in England, Europe, and America , and even now many of his ideas await their full assimilation and realisation. When the notions of organic unity and development, in their origin philosophic conceptions, were applied to the human race, the science of history received a new and deeper meaning, and the sciences of languages and sociology from being merely ingenious exercises of the imagination became subjects of real scientific inquiry. We are still working out the implications of Kantian and Hegelian ideas of freedom, and the results are only now appearing in a philosophic theory of the State wide enough to include the facts of society as a moral organism as well as a physical development. Herbert wrote nearly a century ago, yet his thoughts have waited until our own day before having their effect in a re-consideration of the ideas underlying the theory and practice of education. I need not add illustration to illustration. The work begun by the philosophic thinker becomes after many years the subject of second-reading speeches in Parliament, and is served up at breakfast in the leading articles of the daily newspaper. I do not mean to assert that the ideas of the original thinker remain unchanged during the long course of criticism and exposition. They often assume new forms, and take surprising directions in the process of development. A psychological discovery in one century may in the course of another century profoundly modify man's idea of religion or open up a new field in literature and art for the creative activity of his spirit. It is one small consolation to the expounders and critics, who patiently develop the ideas of greater men, that their work, too, is necessary, and has its reward. They may not be able, Prometheus like, to bring down to man the idea which illuminates as by fire. They may not, like Spinoza or Emerson, have the power to touch men's spirits as with a breath from a serener air. "Many are the wand-bearers in the mysteries," as Plato said in the Phædo, " but few there be who are inspired." Yet wisdom is justified of her children, and the most humble student may share in the work of the great spiritual heroes of the race, since they without us may not be made perfect. If we are roused and inspired by their endeavour let us also stand shamed and condemned as we confess how often we fall away from their high examples of coinage and honesty and truth. Novalis has reminded us that "philosophy bakes no bread." It will probably not provide you with an income. It may, however, satisfy certain wants of the mind, and procure certain gifts of the spirit. It is no small advantage to have intellectual interests which enable us to look beyond the needs of the moment, and expand the horizon of our desires. There will always, I hope, be room, even in a democracy, for the student pure and simple, to whom the life of the intellect is its own reward, and who maintains his standard of high thinking and plain living in the midst of the rush for the spoils. But the time has gone when the life of thought seemed to produce a paralysis of the will for action an incapacity for meeting effectively the demands of the passing hour, or a tendency to unfit men for the ordinary struggles of life. When the Duke of Wellington said to certain men, " You are over-educated for your intellect," he was referring to the wrong view of education, which identified knowledge with learning, and education with the heaping up of masses of information, and not with the development of power. The men of thought may not, and need not, be always men of action. It is becoming increasingly true in modern times that the men of action are also the men of thought. In war, in politics, in commerce, the battle is still, as it will ever be, to the swift of purpose and the strong of will. Yet at no previous time of the world's history has the need been more deeply felt of trained and disciplined intelligence. The man of routine of mechanical use and wont, merchant or manufacturer, teacher in the school, or general in the army, the man who substitutes words for insight be he preacher or politician, may still endure for a season, but his season is briefer than it was, and many of the places that knew him and nourished him know him and nourish him no more.

I said that I desired to make no exclusive claim for the study of philosophy as a means of intellectual discipline. The mental sciences are content with a fair field and no favour. But this, at least, may be said, while the mental sciences, in their modern form, provide a training which will develop, in some special sphere, the powers of observation, analysis, and reasoning, the philosophic student must also be able to grasp the meaning and connections of the whole, as well as the parts, the interdependence of the great provinces of knowledge and of life. Philosophy does not merely provide a mental gymnastic; its subject matter is reality, the laws that explain phenomena the moving forces of history, of economic, social, and political life. Milton, in a passage often quoted, tells of certain spirits who, in the temporary absence of other occupation, sat apart upon a hill retired,

And reasoned high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate—
And found no end in wandering lilacs lost.

Milton was thinking of hell, perhaps also of the puritan divines and the mediæval universities. But the modern student cannot retire from the world to tie distinctions into knots. Philosophy is the attempt to understand in its fulness the concrete life of the world and not a futile dabbling in metaphysic. It is true that there is scarcely a single philosophical question, even the sunniest, which does not ultimately involve a piece of hard metaphysical analyses. But the same may be said of the simplest problems of biology or physics, which have their roots in conceptions of organism, causality and force, or of economics which cannot settle the difficult question of value by merely accounting for the mechanism of exchange. Modern physics, biology, and economics, not to speak of psychology or ethics, are all incomplete without a discussion of those fundamental ideas which at once fix their limits and at the same time relate them as parts of a growing whole of knowledge. Even presidents of the British Association for the Advancement of Science now think it necessary to borrow from Kant some well-worn warning with regard to the essentially hypothetical nature of their concepts and first principles. The mental sciences are just as much in contact with reality, and just as little ideally rounded and complete, as any of the physical sciences. And this leads me, in conclusion, to point out two dangers which especially beset the philosophic student, and from which the student of science, who addresses a special audience and uses a special terminology, is in great measure free. The subjects with which you deal are not merely problems of analysis for the study, and hence their treatment can never be merely academic. The history of philosophy in mediæval, of economics in modern times, has shown the danger of making any department of knowledge the preserve of a school or the victim of an abstract terminology. Ideas certainly cannot remain in the air, they must be crystallised in phrases and formulas. But they need not be hardened and frozen until the life is out of them. They must take shapes that can be handled by ordinary men and women ; forms that are not "too bright and good for human nature's daily food." They must be capable of being expressed in the one language that lasts from century to century—the language of common-sense. It is only thus that the light can become the lightning, that the thought of the philosopher can come into living contact with the needs of humanity, and act as a counterforce to the eternal enemy of the human spirit, the forces that make for repression and obscurantism. In trying to avoid one danger we may fall into another. Philosophy must pass from the study to the street; from a voice crying in the wilderness it must become a force in the forum and the market place. But it does not follow that we should adopt the methods of the market-place and the hustings.

The philosopher must remain a student—be a thinker as well as a talker. The questions with which he deals are those on which the ordinary citizen has a right of forming rational judgments. They are not afar off, but very near to him, and happily he does not require a theory of life to enable him to live, or a theory of ethics to teach him to be good, just as he can digest his food or enjoy his pleasures without waiting for the lessons of physiology or the analysis, of æsthetics. The world is wiser than the individual and arranges his creed and conduct without his consent. He is nursed at the bosom of the cosmos, and by the ethos of his time. It is, however, the task of philosophy to convert unconscious activities into forces of conscious intelligence, and this cannot he done without a hard and often bitter struggle. Opinion is free in philosophy as it is in politics, but in neither sphere is it worth much unless it has been bought with a price. You may , if you choose, surrender your birthright. You may send out your thinking to be " done for you," like clothes to the wash; or you may, with some practice, acquire the art of the man who darkens counsel by words without knowledge, and who, although far from being a fool himself, is yet the cause of much folly in others. It is impossible to over-estimate the value for the student of a systematic training in those subjects which form the propsedeutic to philosophy logic, psychology and the history of philosophical opinion. A knowledge of logic and psychology will help to make the student a skilled workman, and not an amateur bungler, while the systematic study of the history of philosophy will give him an acquaintance with the best that has been thought and done by the great master minds of previous ages. With such a training the student will be saved from many hours of useless speculation. He will not be at the mercy of the latest shibboleth, the slave of one idea, or the man of one book. It is the misfortune and the condemnation of the "man of the world" that he "sits easy on his convictions." The student of philosophy suffers from the opposite temptation. He sometimes rides his theory to death, or clings to his formula or creed when the life has gone out of it, forgetting the great lesson of science that life is greater than theory, and truth wider than any form of sound doctrine. A recent German writer has referred to what he calls the two great curiosa of the nineteenth century, Hegel and Darwin, as variations on the theme "how to lead a generation by the nose." But neither the great idealist of Germany nor the simple-minded English man of science can be made responsible for the brood of fallacies fathered on them by foolish disciples. The Hegelian evolution of the idea, the Darwinian evolution of species, are examples of the phrases that bewitch generations of students to their own undoing. It is too early in the new century to profitably speculate on the course which the time-spirit will take in the years to come. It may be that the century of Realism will be succeeded by the century of idealism. Realism and idealism have not yet kissed each other, although they seem to be less cold in their relations than before. The idealism of the future must at any rate be broad enough to admit all the facts that science is ever weaving in her busy loom. One thing at least we may be sure of. Behind all the differences of theory there is the unity of thee philosophic faith, the conviction that truth and duty are real objects of the human mind and will. Clouds and thick darkness may conceal the secret of the universe, and science and philosophy may for ever fail to grasp the elusive formula of existence. Yet that which befits us as Emerson tells us, is "cheerfulness and courage, and the endeavour to realise our aspirations. Shall not the heart which has received so much trust the Power by which it lives ? "

 The Sydney Morning Herald 27 December 1901, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article14463013