Classic Poem

Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its
conditions?--Giordano Bruno--Literary Aristocracy, or the existence of
a tacit compact among the learned as a privileged order--The Author's
obligations to the Mystics--to Immanuel Kant--The difference between the
letter and the spirit of Kant's writings, and a vindication of prudence
in the teaching of Philosophy--Fichte's attempt to complete the Critical
system--Its partial success and ultimate failure--Obligations to
Schelling; and among English writers to Saumarez.


After I had successively studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley,
Leibnitz, and Hartley, and could find in none of them an abiding place
for my reason, I began to ask myself; is a system of philosophy; as
different from mere history and historic classification, possible? If
possible, what are its necessary conditions? I was for a while disposed
to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit that the sole
practicable employment for the human mind was to observe, to collect,
and to classify. But I soon felt, that human nature itself fought up
against this wilful resignation of intellect; and as soon did I find,
that the scheme, taken with all its consequences and cleared of all
inconsistencies, was not less impracticable than contranatural. Assume
in its full extent the position, nihil in intellectu quod non prius
in sensu, assume it without Leibnitz's qualifying praeter ipsum
intellectum, and in the same sense, in which the position was understood
by Hartley and Condillac: and then what Hume had demonstratively deduced
from this concession concerning cause and effect, will apply with equal
and crushing force to all the other eleven categorical forms, and
the logical functions corresponding to them. How can we make bricks
without straw;--or build without cement? We learn all things indeed by
occasion of experience; but the very facts so learned force us inward on
the antecedents, that must be presupposed in order to render experience
itself possible. The first book of Locke's Essay, (if the supposed
error, which it labours to subvert, be not a mere thing of straw, an
absurdity which, no man ever did, or indeed ever could, believe,) is
formed on a sophisma heterozaetaeseos, and involves the old mistake of
Cum hoc: ergo, propter hoc.

The term, Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after
the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being. This again is no way
conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate, that both are ab initio,
identical and coinherent; that intelligence and being are reciprocally
each other's substrate. I presumed that this was a possible conception,
(i.e. that it involved no logical inconsonance,) from the length of time
during which the scholastic definition of the Supreme Being, as actus
purissimus sine ulla potentialitate, was received in the schools of
Theology, both by the Pontifician and the Reformed divines. The early
study of Plato and Plotinus, with the commentaries and the THEOLOGIA
PLATONICA of the illustrious Florentine; of Proclus, and Gemistius
Pletho; and at a later period of the De Immenso et Innumerabili and the
"De la causa, principio et uno," of the philosopher of Nola, who could
boast of a Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville among his patrons, and
whom the idolaters of Rome burnt as an atheist in the year 1600; had all
contributed to prepare my mind for the reception and welcoming of the
Cogito quia Sum, et Sum quia Cogito; a philosophy of seeming hardihood,
but certainly the most ancient, and therefore presumptively the most
natural.

Why need I be afraid? Say rather how dare I be ashamed of the Teutonic
theosophist, Jacob Behmen? Many, indeed, and gross were his delusions;
and such as furnish frequent and ample occasion for the triumph of
the learned over the poor ignorant shoemaker, who had dared think for
himself. But while we remember that these delusions were such, as might
be anticipated from his utter want of all intellectual discipline, and
from his ignorance of rational psychology, let it not be forgotten that
the latter defect he had in common with the most learned theologians
of his age. Neither with books, nor with book-learned men was he
conversant. A meek and shy quietest, his intellectual powers were never
stimulated into feverous energy by crowds of proselytes, or by the
ambition of proselyting. Jacob Behmen was an enthusiast, in
the strictest sense, as not merely distinguished, but as
contra-distinguished, from a fanatic. While I in part translate the
following observations from a contemporary writer of the Continent, let
me be permitted to premise, that I might have transcribed the substance
from memoranda of my own, which were written many years before his
pamphlet was given to the world; and that I prefer another's words to my
own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication; but still
more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence only was
possible.

Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy, during the last
two or three centuries, cannot but admit that there appears to have
existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to
pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science. The privilege of
free thought, so highly extolled, has at no time been held valid in
actual practice, except within this limit; and not a single stride
beyond it has ever been ventured without bringing obloquy on the
transgressor. The few men of genius among the learned class, who
actually did overstep this boundary, anxiously avoided the appearance of
having so done. Therefore the true depth of science, and the penetration
to the inmost centre, from which all the lines of knowledge diverge to
their ever distant circumference, was abandoned to the illiterate and
the simple, whom unstilled yearning, and an original ebulliency of
spirit, had urged to the investigation of the indwelling and living
ground of all things. These, then, because their names had never been
enrolled in the guilds of the learned, were persecuted by the registered
livery-men as interlopers on their rights and privileges. All without
distinction were branded as fanatics and phantasts; not only those,
whose wild and exorbitant imaginations had actually engendered only
extravagant and grotesque phantasms, and whose productions were, for the
most part, poor copies and gross caricatures of genuine inspiration; but
the truly inspired likewise, the originals themselves. And this for no
other reason, but because they were the unlearned, men of humble
and obscure occupations. When, and from whom among the literati by
profession, have we ever heard the divine doxology repeated, I thank
thee, O Father! Lord of Heaven and Earth! because thou hast hid these
things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes
. No; the haughty priests of learning not only banished from the
schools and marts of science all who had dared draw living waters from
the fountain, but drove them out of the very Temple, which mean time the
buyers, and sellers, and money-changers were suffered to make a den of
thieves.

And yet it would not be easy to discover any substantial ground for
this contemptuous pride in those literati, who have most distinguished
themselves by their scorn of Behmen, Thaulerus, George Fox, and others;
unless it be, that they could write orthographically, make smooth
periods, and had the fashions of authorship almost literally at their
fingers' ends, while the latter, in simplicity of soul, made their words
immediate echoes of their feelings. Hence the frequency of those
phrases among them, which have been mistaken for pretences to immediate
inspiration; as for instance, "It was delivered unto me; "--"I strove
not to speak;"-"I said, I will be silent;"--"But the word was in my
heart as a burning fire;"--"and I could not forbear." Hence too the
unwillingness to give offence; hence the foresight, and the dread of the
clamours, which would be raised against them, so frequently avowed in
the writings of these men, and expressed, as was natural, in the words
of the only book, with which they were familiar. "Woe is me that I
am become a man of strife, and a man of contention,--I love peace: the
souls of men are dear unto me: yet because I seek for light every one
of them doth curse me!" O! it requires deeper feeling, and a stronger
imagination, than belong to most of those, to whom reasoning and fluent
expression have been as a trade learnt in boyhood, to conceive with what
might, with what inward strivings and commotion, the perception of a
new and vital truth takes possession of an uneducated man of genius.
His meditations are almost inevitably employed on the eternal, or the
everlasting; for "the world is not his friend, nor the world's law."
Need we then be surprised, that, under an excitement at once so strong
and so unusual, the man's body should sympathize with the struggles of
his mind; or that he should at times be so far deluded, as to mistake
the tumultuous sensations of his nerves, and the co-existing spectres of
his fancy, as parts or symbols of the truths which were opening on
him? It has indeed been plausibly observed, that in order to derive any
advantage, or to collect any intelligible meaning, from the writings
of these ignorant Mystics, the reader must bring with him a spirit and
judgment superior to that of the writers themselves:

And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek?

--a sophism, which I fully agree with Warburton, is unworthy of Milton;
how much more so of the awful Person, in whose mouth he has placed it?
One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own experience,
that there exist folios on the human understanding, and the nature
of man, which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and
celebrity, if in the whole huge volume there could be found as much
fulness of heart and intellect, as burst forth in many a simple page of
George Fox, Jacob Behmen, and even of Behmen's commentator, the pious
and fervid William Law.

The feeling of gratitude, which I cherish toward these men, has caused
me to digress further than I had foreseen or proposed; but to have
passed them over in an historical sketch of my literary life and
opinions, would have seemed to me like the denial of a debt, the
concealment of a boon. For the writings of these Mystics acted in
no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the
outline of any single dogmatic system. They contributed to keep alive
the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working
presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty
partook of death, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter,
into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had
not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or shelter.
If they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet they
were always a pillar of fire throughout the night, during my wanderings
through the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without
crossing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief. That the system is
capable of being converted into an irreligious Pantheism, I well know.
The Ethics of Spinoza, may, or may not, be an instance. But at no time
could I believe, that in itself and essentially it is incompatible with
religion, natural or revealed: and now I am most thoroughly persuaded of
the contrary. The writings of the illustrious sage of Koenigsberg, the
founder of the Critical Philosophy, more than any other work, at once
invigorated and disciplined my understanding. The originality, the
depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety,
yet solidity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine chain
of the logic; and I will venture to add--(paradox as it will appear to
those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant from Reviewers and
Frenchmen)--the clearness and evidence, of the Critique of the Pure
Reason; and Critique of the Judgment; of the Metaphysical Elements
of Natural Philosophy; and of his Religion within the bounds of Pure
Reason, took possession of me as with the giant's hand. After fifteen
years' familiarity with them, I still read these and all his other
productions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration. The few
passages that remained obscure to me, after due efforts of thought, (as
the chapter on original apperception,) and the apparent contradictions
which occur, I soon found were hints and insinuations referring to
ideas, which KANT either did not think it prudent to avow, or which he
considered as consistently left behind in a pure analysis, not of human
nature in toto, but of the speculative intellect alone. Here therefore
he was constrained to commence at the point of reflection, or natural
consciousness: while in his moral system he was permitted to assume a
higher ground (the autonomy of the will) as a postulate deducible from
the unconditional command, or (in the technical language of his school)
the categorical imperative, of the conscience. He had been in imminent
danger of persecution during the reign of the late king of Prussia, that
strange compound of lawless debauchery and priest-ridden superstition:
and it is probable that he had little inclination, in his old age,
to act over again the fortunes, and hair-breadth escapes of Wolf. The
expulsion of the first among Kant's disciples, who attempted to complete
his system, from the University of Jena, with the confiscation and
prohibition of the obnoxious work by the joint efforts of the courts of
Saxony and Hanover, supplied experimental proof, that the venerable
old man's caution was not groundless. In spite therefore of his own
declarations, I could never believe, that it was possible for him to
have meant no more by his Noumenon, or Thing in itself, than his mere
words express; or that in his own conception he confined the whole
plastic power to the forms of the intellect, leaving for the external
cause, for the materiale of our sensations, a matter without form, which
is doubtless inconceivable. I entertained doubts likewise, whether, in
his own mind, he even laid all the stress, which he appears to do, on
the moral postulates.

An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by
a symbol; and, except in geometry, all symbols of necessity involve an
apparent contradiction. Phonaese synetoisin: and for those who could
not pierce through this symbolic husk, his writings were not intended.
Questions which cannot be fully answered without exposing the respondent
to personal danger, are not entitled to a fair answer; and yet to say
this openly, would in many cases furnish the very advantage which the
adversary is insidiously seeking after. Veracity does not consist
in saying, but in the intention of communicating, truth; and the
philosopher who cannot utter the whole truth without conveying
falsehood, and at the same time, perhaps, exciting the most malignant
passions, is constrained to express himself either mythically or
equivocally. When Kant therefore was importuned to settle the disputes
of his commentators himself, by declaring what he meant, how could
he decline the honours of martyrdom with less offence, than by simply
replying, "I meant what I said, and at the age of near fourscore, I have
something else, and more important to do, than to write a commentary on
my own works."

Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, or Lore of Ultimate Science, was to add the
key-stone of the arch: and by commencing with an act, instead of a thing
or substance, Fichte assuredly gave the first mortal blow to Spinozism,
as taught by Spinoza himself; and supplied the idea of a system truly
metaphysical, and of a metaphysique truly systematic: (i.e. having
its spring and principle within itself). But this fundamental idea he
overbuilt with a heavy mass of mere notions, and psychological acts
of arbitrary reflection. Thus his theory degenerated into a crude
egoismus, a boastful and hyperstoic hostility to Nature, as lifeless,
godless, and altogether unholy: while his r