self enter the promised land; he even shrank from the vision of it which rose, at moments, before his inspired gaze. But, in spite of all his inconsistencies and all his fears, his faith in human reason was so great, his belief in the duty of following nature was so strong, that later enquirers might well be proud to reckon him among their ranks. I have done with this subject-that of the French Revolution-perhaps for ever,' he wrote at the close of the Thoughts on French Affairs. It has given me many anxious moments for the two last years. If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it, the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope, will forward it; and then they, who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.' Burke was prepared to sacrifice the apparent work of a lifetime in the cause of truth. And his humility had its reward. He saw farther than any of his contemporaries. He ranged himself, it is true, without hesitation among the uncompromising champions of the past. He declared. inexpiable war against its uncompromising foes. But he had something of the temper, he had some earnest of the ideas, which, when once the smoke and roar of the battle were spent, would go to blend the unreasonable stubbornness of the past, and the no less unreasonable destructiveness of the present, in a wider, a more reasonable, and perhaps a more enduring, whole. 1 Works, i. 580. CHAPTER II KANT IT was in Rousseau's works that the theory of Contract, or of individual Rights, appeared for the last time as a vital principle; and in the French Revolution that for the last time it wielded a fruitful influence. Since the explosion of 1789 that doctrine has indeed lingered on in the writings of some theorists; it has even asserted itself fitfully in the passing movements of the day. But the virtue is gone out of it. Nor, except in the form of Nihilism, is it likely again to play a dominant part in the history of the world. For the last century the clearest thinkers have based their arguments, the most powerful workers have based their action, upon a theory which starts rather from the Community than from the Individual. In the following chapters I propose to trace the stages by which this result has gradually been worked out; the stages by which the theory of individual Rights has gradually been replaced by the theory of collective duties. The theory of individual Rights-and of that theory the doctrine of a Social Contract is but a particular form-broke down in two points. It had no basis in the records of the past, and it failed to account for the most obvious facts in the experience of the present. It was unhistorical, and it was unphilosophical. The task of any theory which should propose to take its place was thus clearly marked out in advance. It must contain nothing inconsistent with that increasing knowledge of primitive custom, which is among the chief intellectual conquests of the last century; and it must explain such elementary facts as the sovereignty of the Community, its right to tax and its right to punish offences. These are the very barest requirements of any theory which, at the present day, can claim to stand for a moment. And, by the men of whom we are now to speak, these requirements were respected almost from the first. But, in the attempt to satisfy the most modest needs of the case, successive thinkers, as will be seen, have been led to extend their aim a great deal further; to include in their premisses much that had hitherto been regarded as lying altogether apart from political enquiry; and, in consequence, to modify largely not only the scope but the nature and quality of their conclusions. This change of front-a change obviously of the last importance-will be found to depend on the admission of two cardinal principles. The thinkers of the last century have recognised that it is impossible to divorce Politics from Morals; and they have recognised the necessity of studying both Politics and Morals in the light of their historical development. It was only by slow stages that so great a revolution in Political Philosophy was fully accomplished. The earlier stages of the controversy turned mainly on the connection between Politics and Morals. It was not till the spirit of patriotism was roused from its long sleep by the tyranny of Napoleon and the mean arts of the Holy Alliance that the appeal to History, and the consequent recognition of nationality as an essential element in the life of the man and the citizen, could be made with any chance of general acceptance. The first blow in this, as in all other fields of modern Philosophy, was struck by Kant. And it is noticeable that the two treatisesZum ewigen Frieden and Die Rechtslehre-which form his only contribution to the subject, were the last important work of his memorable life. None of the works by which Kant is now known appeared till he was near sixty: the Rechtslehre not until he was well over seventy.1 Published in 1797, it bears on it, both in general scope and in details, the influence of the French Revolution. That influence, as has more than once been pointed out, is apparent, whether by action or by reaction, in the whole work of this extraordinary man. In one sense, that is the secret of his immense importance. There is probably no writer who so completely reflects both the immediate aims and the ultimate tendencies, often so curiously different from the immediate aims, of the moral and intellectual movement which culminated in the French Revolution. In Kant, as in the Revolution, we may discern two opposite tendencies. On the one hand, he is destructive; der alles Zermalmende, as Heine called him; the great iconoclast. This side of Kant's genius appears most prominently in the rigid limits which 1 Kant was born in 1724 and died in 1804. The Kritik der reinen Vernunft was published in 1781, his two works on the Practical Reason respectively in 1785 and 1788, the Kritik aer Urtheilskraft (mainly dealing with the Philosophy of Art) in 1790, his work on Natural Religion in 1793, and the two treatises on Politics respectively in 1795 and 1797. The object of Zum ewigen Frieden is mainly practical, to plead for the abolition of war; but incidentally it touches the theory of Political Philosophy. VOL. II F he places upon human reason, in the impassable barrier which he sets up between the world of appearances and the world of thought, and in his refusal to admit man, as a speculative being, beyond the world of appearance. At one stroke he sweeps away the whole web of theological deductions which had been spun by the dogmatic' philosophers of the eighteenth century. As Professor Wallace has said, his work, on this side, is a scientific rendering of the sarcasms scattered over the Candide of Voltaire. The German philosopher did thoroughly, and with systematic demonstration, what Voltaire did with literary graces. The German made a theory and a system of what (in Voltaire) was only a sally of criticism.'1 Speculation, in Kant, is bidden, like the hero of Voltaire's romance, to put away its fine theories and to cultivate its garden.' That, on one side, is the moral of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. It was the moral also, in one aspect, of the French Revolution. On the other hand, Kant has always—and with justice—been regarded as the father, in modern times, of idealist Philosophy. This element of his system, as is well known, comes to the surface mainly in his ethical writings. There, as Heine wittily said, the God whom he had banished from the world of speculation reappears with plenary inspiration over the world of action. The originative power, which Kant had withdrawn from reason as such, he restored to reason in the form of will. Now the admission of a creative faculty, involving the idea of God, in the will obviously threw an entirely fresh light upon what Kant had said about the essentially uncreative character of speculation. And it was the task in some degree of Kant's later writings, still more, however, the task of his successors, to reconcile the discrepancy between the two parts of his system; and to do so, not by levelling Kant's ethical theory down to his theory of knowledge, but by recasting his conception of Reason so as to bring it into line with his doctrine of the Will. Thus, with all the limitations which he was careful to fix around it, the main upshot of Kant's doctrine was undoubtedly to recognise in human thought a dignity and creative power which 1 Prolegomena to The Logic of Hegel, p. lii. Compare Hegel's own estimate: Kant und nach ihm Fichte dasjenige was Voltaire, dem von der Frömmelei in die Empirie des gemeinen Lebens herabgezogenen Optimismus, sich auf eben den Standpunkt der Empirie stehend und also ganz konsequent "ad hominem" entgegensetzte, in philosophische Form brachten und systematisch erwiesen; wodurch denn jene Konsequenz ganz und gar verloren geht und die relative Wahrheit des Empirischen gegen Empirisches zu einer absoluten werden soll' (Hegel's Werke, i. pp. 143, 144). a long line of thinkers, from Bacon and Hobbes down to Helvétius and Holbach, had emphatically denied it. And here too, in construction no less than in demolition, Kant may be said to reflect, though in a far nobler form, the tendencies of the French Revolution. Irreligious in appearance-irreligious, largely, in conscious aims the Revolution, in spirit and in ultimate results, was fundamentally religious. The dominant party in the Convention was concerned, though in a blundering and often a grotesque way, not to destroy religion but to build it up on a firmer and a wider basis. And the general effect of the Revolution, both on those who welcomed it and on those who condemned it, was undoubtedly to deepen men's sense of reverence and to make a return either to the unthinking superstition or to the unthinking materialism of the eighteenth century well-nigh impossible. The self-respect of men was raised by the great passions-great, both for good and evilwhich the Revolution called out; and with respect for themselves came also reverence for God. Danton and Marat might not be entirely admirable; but they at least suggested a more serious view of life, and a nobler conception of human character, than the Bubb Doddingtons and the Du Barris of the preceding generation. Thus there are two points in which we are entitled to mark special affinity between the doctrines of Kant and the principles which inspired, or the effects which sprang from, the Revolution. On the one hand, Kant's contention that, in speculation, the idea of God is purely negative-in his own words, that its proper use is not constructive but regulative-may fairly be called the counterpart of what Voltaire, and in some measure Rousseau also, had taught of the Supreme Being. To the German thinker, as to his French contemporaries, the conception of God was, on this side, little better than a blank. On the other hand, it was in the creative energy of the Will that the Revolution, like Kant, found both its true self and the God who, in speculation, had vanished almost to a shadow. The Revolution was the most signal act of will which had been seen in Europe since the Reformation. When France in wrath her giant limbs upreared, who could resist the conviction that there was something in the will of man which had not been accounted for by the subtleties of Hume or by the laborious commonplaces of Helvétius and Bentham? To understand what that 'something' precisely is, to discover what ideas of human Right and the divine nature it involves—this may be described as the task laid on Philosophy from Kant onwards to the present day. |