History of Modern Philosophy From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time by Richard Falckenberg - HTML preview

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1868; Max Schasler, 1871; Ed. von Hartmann (since Kant), 1886; Heinrich

von Stein, _Die Entstehung der neueren Aesthetik_

(1886); [Bosanquet, _A

History of Aesthetic_, 1892.--TR.]. Further, Fr. Alb.

Lange, _Geschichte

des Materialismus_, 1866; 4th ed., 1882; [English translation by E.C.

Thomas, 3 vols., 1878-81.--TR.]; Jul. Baumann, _Die Lehren von Raum, Zeit

und Mathematik in der neueren Philosophie_, 1868-69; Edm. König, _Die

Entwickelung des Causalproblems von Cartesius bis Kant_, 1888, _seit

Kant_, 1890; Kurd Lasswitz, _Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis

Newton_, 2 vols., 1890; Ed. Grimm, _Zur Geschichte des Erkenntnissproblems,

von Bacon zu Hume_, 1890. The following works are to be recommended on the

period of transition: Moritz Carrière, _Die philosophische Weltanschauung

der Reformationszeit_, 1847; 2d ed., 1887; and Jacob Burckhardt, _Kultur

der Renaissance in Italien_, 4th ed., 1886. Reference may also be made to

A. Trendelenburg, _Historische Beiträge zur Philosophie_, 3 vols., 1846-67;

Rudolph Eucken, _Geschichte und Kritik der Grundbegriffe der Gegenwart_,

1878; [English translation by M. Stuart Phelps, 1880.--

TR.]; the same,

_Geschichte der philosophischen Terminologie_, 1879; the same, _Beiträge

zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie_, 1886 (including a valuable

paper on parties and party names in philosophy); the same, _Die

Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker_, 1890; Ludwig Noack,

_Philosophiegeschichtliches Lexicon_, 1879; Ed. Zeller, _Vorträge und

Abhandlungen_, three series, 1865-84; Chr. von Sigwart, _Kleine Schriften_,

2 vols., 1881; 2d ed., 1889. R. Seydel's _Religion und Philosophie_, 1887,

contains papers on Luther, Schleiermacher, Schelling, Weisse, Fechner,

Lotze, Hartmann, Darwinism, etc., which are well worth reading.

Among the smaller compends Schwegler's (1848; recent editions revised

and supplemented by R. Koeber) remains still the least bad [English

translations by Seelye and Smith, revised edition with additions, New York,

1880; and J.H. Stirling, with annotations, 7th ed., 1879.--TR.]. The meager

sketches by Deter, Koeber, Kirchner, Kuhn, Rabus, Vogel, and others are

useful for review at least. Fritz Schultze's _Stammbaum der Philosophie_,

1890, gives skillfully constructed tabular outlines, but, unfortunately, in

a badly chosen form.

CHAPTER I.

THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION: FROM NICOLAS OF CUSA TO

DESCARTES.

The essays at philosophy which made their appearance between the middle of

the fifteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth, exhibit mediaeval

and modern characteristics in such remarkable intermixture that they can

be assigned exclusively to neither of these two periods.

There are eager

longings, lofty demands, magnificent plans, and promising outlooks in

abundance, but a lack of power to endure, a lack of calmness and maturity;

while the shackles against which the leading minds revolt still bind too

firmly both the leaders and those to whom they speak.

Only here and there

are the fetters loosened and thrown off; if the hands are successfully

freed, the clanking chains still hamper the feet. It is a time just suited

for original thinkers, a remarkable number of whom in fact make their

appearance, side by side or in close succession.

Further, however little

these are able to satisfy the demand for permanent results, they ever

arouse our interest anew by the boldness and depth of their brilliant

ideas, which alternate with quaint fancies or are pervaded by them; by the

youthful courage with which they attacked great questions; and not least

by the hard fate which rewarded their efforts with misinterpretation,

persecution, and death at the stake. We must quickly pass over the broad

threshold between modern philosophy and Scholastic philosophy, which is

bounded by the year 1450, in which Nicolas of Cusa wrote his chief

work, the _Idiota_, and 1644, when Descartes began the new era with

his _Principia Philosophiae_; and can touch, in passing, only the most

important factors. We shall begin our account of this transition period

with Nicolas, and end it with the Englishmen, Bacon, Hobbes, and Lord

Herbert of Cherbury. Between these we shall arrange the various figures

of the Philosophical Renaissance (in the broad sense) in six groups:

the Restorers of the Ancient Systems and their Opponents; the Italian

Philosophers of Nature; the Political and Legal Philosophers; the Skeptics;

the Mystics; the Founders of the Exact Investigation of Nature. In Italy

the new spiritual birth shows an aesthetic, scientific, and humanistic

tendency; in Germany it is pre-eminently religious emancipation--in the

Reformation.

%1. Nicolas of Cusa.%

Nicolas[1] was born in 1401, at Cues (Cusa) on the Moselle near Treves.

He early ran away from his stern father, a boatman and vine-dresser named

Chrypps (or Krebs), and was brought up by the Brothers of the Common Life

at Deventer. In Padua he studied law, mathematics, and philosophy, but the

loss of his first case at Mayence so disgusted him with his profession that

he turned to theology, and became a distinguished preacher. He took part

in the Council of Basle, was sent by Pope Eugen IV. as an ambassador to

Constantinople and to the Reichstag at Frankfort; was made Cardinal in

1448, and Bishop of Brixen in 1450. His feudal lord, the Count of Tyrol,

Archduke Sigismund, refused him recognition on account of certain quarrels

in which they had become engaged, and for a time held him prisoner.

Previous to this he had undertaken journeys to Germany and the Netherlands

on missionary business. During a second sojourn in Italy death overtook

him, in the year 1464, at Todi in Umbria. The first volume of the Paris

edition of his collected works (1514) contains the most important of his

philosophical writings; the second, among others, mathematical essays and

ten books of selections from his sermons; the third, the extended work, _De

Concordantia Catholica_, which he had completed at Basle. In 1440 (having

already written on the Reform of the Calendar) he began his imposing series

of philosophical writings with the _De Docta Ignorantia_, to which the

_De Conjecturis_ was added in the following year. These were succeeded by

smaller treatises entitled _De Quaerendo Deum, De Dato Patris Luminum, De

Filiatione Dei, De Genesi_, and a defense of the _De Docta Ignorantia_. His

most important work is the third of the four dialogues of the _Idiota_ ("On

the Mind"), 1450. He clothes in continually changing forms the one supreme

truth on which all depends, and which cannot be expressed in intelligible

language but only comprehended by living intuition. In many different ways

he endeavors to lead the reader on to a vision of the inexpressible, or

to draw him up to it, and to develop fruitfully the principle of the

coincidence of opposites, which had dawned upon him on his return journey

from Constantinople (_De Visione Dei, Dialogus de Possest, De Beryllo,

De Ludo Globi, De Venatione Sapientiae, De Apice Theoriae, Compendium_).

Sometimes he uses dialectical reasoning; sometimes he soars in mystical

exaltation; sometimes he writes with a simplicity level to the common mind,

and in connection with that which lies at hand; sometimes, with the most

comprehensive brevity. Besides these his philosophico-religious works

are of great value, _De Pace Fidei, De Cribratione Alchorani_. Liberal

Catholics reverence him as one of the deepest thinkers of the Church; but

the fame of Giordano Bruno, a more brilliant but much less original figure,

has hitherto stood in the way of the general recognition of his great

importance for modern philosophy.

[Footnote 1: R. Zimmermann, _Nikolaus Cusanus als Vorläufer Leibnizens_, in

vol. viii. of the _Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Klasse

der Akademie der Wissenschaften_, Vienna, 1852, p. 306

seq. R. Falckenberg,

_Grundzüge der Philosophie des Nikolaus Cusanus mit besonderer

Berücksichtigung der Lehre vom Erkennen_, Breslau, 1880.

R. Eucken,

_Beiträge zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie_, Heidelberg, 1886, p. 6

seq.; Joh. Uebinger, _Die Gotteslehre des Nikolaus Cusanus_, Münster,

1888. Scharpff, _Des Nikolaus von Cusa wichtigste Schriften in deutscher

Uebersetzung, Freiburg i. Br_., 1862.]

Human knowledge and the relation of God to the world are the two poles of

the Cusan's system. He distinguishes four stages of knowledge. Lowest of

all stands sense (together with imagination), which yields only confused

images; next above, the understanding (_ratio_), whose functions comprise

analysis, the positing of time and space, numerical operations, and

denomination, and which keeps the opposites distinct under the law of

contradiction; third, the speculative reason (_intellectus_), which finds

the opposites reconcilable; and highest of all the mystical, supra-rational

intuition (_visio sine comprehensione, intuitio, unio, filiatio_),

for which the opposites coincide in the infinite unity.

The intuitive

culmination of knowledge, in which the soul is united with God,--since

here even the antithesis of subject and object disappears,--is but seldom

attained; and it is difficult to keep out the disturbing symbols and images

of sense, which mingle themselves in the intuition. But it is just this

insight into the incomprehensibility of the infinite which gives us a true

knowledge of God; this is the meaning of the "learned ignorance," the

_docta ignorantia_. The distinctions between these several stages of

cognition are not, however, to be understood in any rigid sense, for

each higher function comprehends the lower, and is active therein. The

understanding can discriminate only when it is furnished by sensation with

images of that which is to be discriminated, the reason can combine only

when the understanding has supplied the results of analysis as material for

combination; while, on the other hand, it is the understanding which is

present in sense as consciousness, and the reason whose unity guides

the understanding in its work of separation. Thus the several modes of

cognition do not stand for independent fundamental faculties, but for

connected modifications of one fundamental power which work together and

mutually imply one another. The position that an intellectual function of

attention and discrimination is active in sensuous perception, is a view

entirely foreign to mediaeval modes of thought; for the Scholastics were

accustomed to make sharp divisions between the cognitive faculties, on the

principle that particulars are felt through sense and universals thought

through the understanding. The idea on which Nicolas bases his argument for

immortality has also an entirely modern sound: viz., that space and time

are products of the understanding, and, therefore, can have no power over

the spirit which produces them; for the author is higher and mightier than

the product.

The confession that all our knowledge is conjecture does not simply mean

that absolute and exact truth remains concealed from us; but is intended at

the same time to encourage us to draw as near as possible to the eternal

verity by ever truer conjectures. There are degrees of truth, and our

surmises are neither absolutely true nor entirely false.

Conjecture becomes

error only when, forgetting the inadequacy of human knowledge, we rest

content with it as a final solution; the Socratic maxim,

"I know that I

am ignorant," should not lead to despairing resignation but to courageous

further inquiry. The duty of speculation is to penetrate deeper and deeper

into the secrets of the divine, even though the ultimate revelation will

not be given us until the hereafter. The fittest instrument of speculation

is furnished by mathematics, in its conception of the infinite and the

wonders of numerical relations: as on the infinite sphere center and

circumference coincide, so God's essence is exalted above all opposites;

and as the other numbers are unfolded from the unit, so the finite proceeds

by explication from the infinite. A controlling significance in the serial

construction of the world is ascribed to the ten, as the sum of the first

four numbers--as reason, understanding, imagination, and sensibility are

related in human cognition, so God, spirit, soul, and body, or infinity,

thought, life, and being are related in the objective sphere; so, further,

the absolute necessity of God, the concrete necessity of the universe,

the actuality of individuals, and the possibility of matter. Beside the

quaternary the tern also exercises its power--the world divides into the

stages of eternity, imperishability, and the temporal world of sense,

or truth, probability, and confusion. The divine trinity is reflected

everywhere: in the world as creator, created, and love; in the mind as

creative force, concept, and will. The triunity of God is very variously

explained--as the subject, object, and act of cognition; as creative

spirit, wisdom, and goodness; as being, power, and deed; and, preferably,

as unity, equality, and the combination of the two.

God is related to the world as unity, identity, _complicatio_, to

otherness, diversity, _explicatio_, as necessity to contingency, as

completed actuality to mere possibility; yet, in such a way that the

otherness participates in the unity, and receives its reality from this,

and the unity does not have the otherness confronting it, outside it. God

is triune only as the Creator of the world, and in relation to it; in

himself he is absolute unity and infinity, to which nothing disparate

stands opposed, which is just as much all things as not all things, and

which, as the Areopagite had taught of old, is better comprehended by

negations than by affirmations. To deny that he is light, truth, spirit,

is more true than to affirm it, for he is infinitely greater than anything

which can be expressed in words; he is the Unutterable, the Unknowable,

the supremely one and the supremely absolute. In the world, each thing has

things greater and smaller by its side, but God is the absolutely greatest

and smallest; in accordance with the principle of the _coincidentia

oppositorum_, the absolute _maximum_ and the absolute _minimum_ coincide.

That which in the world exists as concretely determinate and particular,

is in God in a simple and universal way; and that which here is present

as incompleted striving, and as possibility realizing itself by gradual

development, is in God completed activity. He is the realization of all

possibility, the Can-be or Can-is (_possest_); and since this absolute

actuality is the presupposition and cause of all finite ability and action,

it may be unconditionally designated ability (_posse ipsum_), in antithesis

to all determinate manifestations of force; namely, to all ability to be,

live, feel, think, and will.

However much these definitions, conceived in harmony with the dualistic

view of Christianity, accentuate the antithesis between God and the world,

this is elsewhere much softened, nay directly denied, in favor of a

pantheistic view which points forward to the modern period. Side by side

with the assertion that there is no proportion whatever between the

infinite and the finite, the following naïvely presents itself, in open

contradiction to the former: God excels the reason just as much as

the latter is superior to the understanding, and the understanding to

sensibility, or he is related to thought as thought to life, and life to

being. Nay, Nicolas makes even bolder statements than these, when he calls

the universe a sensuous and mutable God, man a human God or a humanly

contracted infinity, the creation a created God or a limited infinity; thus

hinting that God and the world are at bottom essentially alike, differing

only in the form of their existence, that it is one and the same being

and action which manifests itself absolutely in God, relatively and in a

limited way in the system of creation. It was chiefly three modern ideas

which led the Cusan on from dualism to pantheism--the boundlessness of the

universe, the connection of all being, and the all-comprehensive richness

of individuality. Endlessness belongs to the universe as well as to God,

only its endlessness is not an absolute one, beyond space and time, but

weakened and concrete, namely unlimited extension in space and unending

duration in time. Similarly, the universe is unity, yet not a unity

absolutely above multiplicity and diversity, but one which is divided into

many members and obscured thereby. Even the individual is infinite in a

certain sense; for, in its own way, it bears in itself all that is, it

mirrors the whole world from its limited point of view, is an abridged,

compressed representation of the universe. As the members of the body, the

eye, the arm, the foot, interact in the closest possible way, and no one

of them can dispense with the rest, so each thing is connected with each,

different from it and yet in harmony with it, so each contains all the

others and is contained by them. All is in all, for all is in the universe

and in God, as the universe and God in all. In a still higher degree man is

a microcosm (_parvus mundus_), a mirror of the All, since he not merely,

like other beings, actually has in himself all that exists, but also has

a knowledge of this richness, is capable of developing it into conscious

images of things. And it is just this which constitutes the perfection of

the whole and of the parts, that the higher is in the lower, the cause in

the effect, the genus in the individual, the soul in the body, reason

in the senses, and conversely. To perfect, is simply to make active a

potential possession, to unfold capacities and to elevate the unconscious

into consciousness. Here we have the germ of the philosophy of Bruno and of

Leibnitz.

As we have noticed a struggle between two opposite tendencies, one

dualistic and Christian, one pantheistic and modern, in the theology of

Nicolas, so at many other points a conflict between the mediaeval and the

modern view of the world, of which our philosopher is himself unconscious,

becomes evident to the student. It is impossible to follow out the details

of this interesting opposition, so we shall only attempt to distinguish in

a rough way the beginnings of the new from the remnants of the old. Modern

is his interest in the ancient philosophers, of whom Pythagoras, Plato, and

the Neoplatonists especially attract him; modern, again, his interest in

natural science[1] (he teaches not only the boundlessness of the world, but

also the motion of the earth); his high estimation of mathematics, although

he often utilizes this merely in a fanciful symbolism of numbers; his

optimism (the world an image of the divine, everything perfect of its kind,

the bad simply a halt on the way to the good); his intellectualism (knowing

the primal function and chief mission of the spirit; faith an undeveloped

knowledge; volition and emotion, as is self-evident, incidental results of

thought; knowledge a leading back of the creature to God as its source,

hence the counterpart of creation); modern, finally, the form and

application given to the Stoic-Neoplatonic concept of individuality, and

the idealistic view which resolves the objects of thought into products

thereof.[2] This last position, indeed, is limited by the lingering

influence of nominalism, which holds the concepts of the mind to be merely

abstract copies, and not archetypes of things. Moreover, _explicatio,

evolutio_, unfolding, as yet does not always have the meaning of

development to-day, of progressive advance. It denotes, quite neutrally,

the production of a multiplicity from a unity, in which the former has lain

confined, no matter whether this multiplicity and its procession signify

enhancement or attenuation. For the most part, in fact, involution,

_complicatio_ (which, moreover, always means merely a primal, germinal

condition, never, as in Leibnitz, the return thereto) represents the more

perfect condition. The chief examples of the relation of involution and

evolution are the principles in which science is involved and out of which

it is unfolded; the unit, which is related to numbers in a similar way;

the spirit and the cognitive operations; God and his creatures. However

obscure and unskillful this application of the idea of development may

appear, yet it is indisputable that a discovery of great promise has been

made, accompanied by a joyful consciousness of its fruitfulness. Of the

numberless features which point backward to the Middle Ages, only one need

be mentioned, the large space taken up by speculations concerning the

God-man (the whole third book of the _De Docta Ignorantia_), and by those

concerning the angels. Yet even here a change is noticeable, for the

earthly and the divine are brought into most intimate relation, while in

Thomas Aquinas, for instance, they form two entirely separate worlds. In

short, the new view of the world appears in Nicolas still bound on every

hand by mediaeval conceptions. A century and a half passed before the

fetters, grown rusty in the meanwhile, broke under the bolder touch of

Giordano Bruno.

[Footnote 1: The attention of our philosopher was called to the natural

sciences, and thus also to geography, which at this time was springing into

new life, by his friend Paul Toscanelli, the Florentine.

Nicolas was the

first to have the map of Germany engraved (cf. S. Ruge in _Globus_, vol.

lx., No. I, 1891), which, however, was not completed until long after his

death, and issued in 1491.]

[Footnote 2: On the modern elements in his theory of the state and of

right, cf. Gierke, _Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht_, vol. iii. § II,

1881.]

%2. The Revival of Ancient Philosophy and the Opposition to it%.

Italy is the home of the Renaissance and the birthplace of important

new ideas which give the intellectual life of the sixteenth century its

character of brave endeavor after high and distant ends.

The enthusiasm

for ancient literature already aroused by the native poets, Dante (1300),

Petrarch (1341), and Boccaccio (1350), was nourished by the influx of Greek

scholars, part of whom came in pursuance of an invitation to the Council of

Ferrara and Florence (1438) called in behalf of the union of the Churches

(among these were Pletho and his pupil Bessarion; Nicolas Cusanus was one

of the legates invited), while part were fugitives from Constantinople

after its capture by the Turks in 1453. The Platonic Academy, whose

most celebrated member, Marsilius Ficinus, translated Plato and the

Neoplatonists into Latin, was founded in 1440 on the suggestion of Georgius

Gemistus Pletho[1] under the patronage of Cosimo dei Medici. The writings

of Pletho ("On the Distinction between Plato and Aristotle"), of Bessarion

(_Adversus Calumniatorem Platonis_, 1469, in answer to the _Comparatio

Aristotelis et Platonis_, 1464, an attack by the Aristotelian, George of

Trebizond, on Pletho's work), and of Ficinus (_Theologia Platonica_, 1482),

show that the Platonism which they favored was colored by religious,

mystical, and Neoplatonic elements. If for Bessarion and Ficinus, just as

for the Eclectics of the later Academy, there was scarcely any essential

distinction between the teachings of Plato, of Aristotle, and of

Christianity; this confusion of heterogeneous elements was soon carried

much farther, when the two Picos (John