Delhi university library

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tog long in a world of intellectual darkness to be able to move unblinkered in the sudden light of day. A process of gradual education In^ scientific principles is ffierefore requirecT: the growth of reason and the_advance of truth, while in themselves sufficient to conquer the forces of prejudice and ignorance, cannot occur until enlightened men are found ready to devote their whole lives to the task of educating the vast benighted mass of mankind.

But here a new obstacle arises: whereas the original cause of human misery, neglect of reason and intellectual indolence, was not deliberately brought about, there exists in our own day and has existed for many centuries past, a class of men who, perceiving that their own power rests on ignorance which blinds men to its injustice, promote it by every invention and means in their power. By nature all men are rational, and all rational beings have equal rights before the natural law of reason. But the ruling classes, the princes, the nobility, the priests, the generals, realize only too well that the spread of reason would soon open the eyes of the peoples of the world to the colossal fraud by which in the name of such hollow figments as the sanctity of the church, the divine right of kings, the claims of national pride or possession, they are forced to give up their natural claims, and labour uncomplainingly for the maintenance of a small class which has no shadow of right to exact such privilege. It is therefore in the direct personal interest of the upper class in the social hierarchy to thwart the growth of natural knowledge, wherever it threatens to expose the arbitrary character of its authority, and in its plare to substitute a dogmatic code, a row of unintelligible mysteries expressed in high-sounding phrases with I which to confuse the feeble intelligences of their

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unhappy subjects, and keep them. in a .state., of blind obedience. Even though some among the ruling class may be genuinely self-deceived and come themselves to believe in their own inventions, some there must be who know that only by systematic deception, propped up by the occasional use of violence, could so corrupt and unnatural an order be preserved. It is the first duty, therefore, of an enlightened ruler to break the power of the privileged classes, and to allow natural reason with which all men are endowed to re-assert itself; and since reason can never be opposed to reason, all private and public conflict is ultimately due to some irrational element, some simple failure to perceive how an harmonious adjustment of apparently opposed interests may be made.

Reason is always right. To every question there is only one true answer which with sufficient assiduity can be infallibly discovered, and this applies no less to questions of ethics or politics, of personal and social life, than to the problems of physics or mathematics. Once found, the putting of a solution into practice is a matter of mere technical skill; but the traditional enemies of progress must first be removed, and men taught the importance of acting in all questions on the advice of disinterested scientific experts, whose knowledge is founded on reason and experience. Once this has been achieved, the path is clear to the millennium. ^/But the influence of environment is no less important than that of education. If you would wish to foretell the course of a man’s life, you must consider such factors as the character of the region in which he lives, its climate, the fertility of its soil, its distance from the sea, in addition to his physical characteristics and the

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nature of his daily occupation. Man is an object in nature, and the human soul, like material substance, is swayed by no supernatural influences and possesses no occult properties; its entire behaviour can be adequately accounted for by means of ordinary verifiable physical hypotheses. The French materialist, La Mettrie, developed this empiricism to its fullest limits in a celebrated treatise, L’Homme Machine, which caused an immense scandal at the time of its publication. His views were shared in various degrees by the editors of the Encyclopaedia, Diderot and d’Alembert, by Holbach, Helvetius and Condillac, who, whatever their other differences, were agreed that man’s principal difference from the plants and lower animals lies in his possession of self-consciousness, that is awareness of certain of his own processes, inTlis'capacity to use reason and imagination, to conceive ideal purposes and to attach moral values to this or that activity or characteristic in accordance with its tendency to forward or retard the ends which he desired to realize. A serious paradox which this view involved was the conflict between free-will on the one hand, and complete determination by character and environment on the other; which was the old conflict between free-will and divine foreknowledge in a new form, with Nature in the place of God. Spinoza had observed that if a stone falling through the air could think, it might well imagine that it had freely chosen its own path, being unaware of the external causes such as the aim and force of the throw'er and the natural medium which determine its fall. Similarly, it is only his ignorance of the natural causes of his behaviour which makes man suppose himself in some fashion different from the falling stone: omniscience

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would quickly dispel this vain delusion, even though the feeling of freedom to which it gives rise may itself persist, having lost its power to deceive. So far as extreme empiricism is concerned, this deterministic doctrine is entirely consistent with optimistic rationalism: but it carries the very opposite implications with regard to the possibility of reform in human affairs. For if men are made saints or criminals solely by the movement of matter in space, the educators are as rigorously determined to act as they do, as those whom it is their duty to educate. Everything occurs as it does as a result of unalterable processes of nature; and no improvement can be effected by the free decisions of individuals, however wise, however benevolent and powerful, since they, no more than any other entity, can alter natural necessity. This celebrated crux, stripped of its old theological dress, emerged even more sharply in its secular form; it presented equal difficulties to both sides, but became obscured by the larger issues at stake. Atheists, sceptics, materialists, rationalists, utilitarians, belonged to one camp; theists, metaphysicians, supporters and apologists of the existing order to the other; the rift between enlightenment and clericalism was so great, and the war between them so savage, that doctrinal difficulties within each camp passed relatively unperceived.

It is the first of the two theses that became the fundamental doctrine of the radical intellectuals of the next century. They emphasized the natural goodness of men unspoiled by a bad or ignorant government, and emphasized the immense power of rational education to rescue the masses of mankind from their present miseries, to institute a juster and more scientific distribution n

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of the world’s goods, and so to lead humanity to the limits of attainable happiness. The imagination of the eighteenth century was dominated by the phenomenal strides made by the mathematical and physical sciences during the previous century, and it was a natural step to apply the method which had proved so successful in the hands of Kepler and Galileo, Descartes and Newton, to the interpretation of social phenomena and to the conduct of life. If any single individual may be said to have created this movement,-it is unquestionably Voltaire. If he was not its originator, he was its greatest and most celebrated protagonist for more than half a century. His books, his pamphlets, his mere existence did incomparably more to destroy the hold of absolutism and Catholicism than any other single factor. Nor did his death arrest his influence. Freedom of thought was identified with his name: its battles were fought under his banner: no popular revolution from his day to ours has failed to draw some of its most effective weapons from that inexhaustible armoury which two centuries have not rendered obsolete. But if Voltaire created the religion of man, Rousseau was the greatest of its prophets. .He was a preacher and a propagandist of genius, and gave it a new eloquence and ardour, a richer, vaguer and more emotionally charged language, which profoundly affected the writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century. Indeed, he may be said to have created the new modes of thought and of feeling, a wholly new idiom, which was adopted as their natural vehicle of self-expression by the artistic and social rebels of the nineteenth century, the first generation of romantics who sought inspiration in the revolutionary history and

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literature of France and in her name raised the banner of revolt in their own backward lands.

One of the most fervent and certainly the most effective among the advocates of this doctrine in England was the idealistic Welsh manufacturer, Robert Owen. His creed was summarized in the sentence inscribed at the head of his journal, The New Moral World-. ‘Any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even the world at large, by the application of proper means, which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.’ He had triumphantly demonstrated the truth of his theory by extablishing model conditions in his own cotton mills in New Lanark, limiting working hours, and creating provision for health and a savings fund. By this means he increased the productivity of his factory and raised immensely the sLandard of living of his workers, and what was even more impressive to the outside world, trebled his own fortune. New Lanark became a centre of pilgrimage for kings and statesmen, and, as the first successful experiment in peaceful cooperation between labour and capital, had a considerable influence on the history both of socialism and of the working class. His later attempts at practical reform were less successful. t0\vcn, who died in deep old age in the middle of the nineteenth century, was the last survivor of the classical period of rationalism, and, his faith unshaken by repeated failures, until the end of his life believed in the omnipotence of education and the perfectibility of man^-'

The effect which the victorious advance of the new

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ideas had upon European culture is hardly inferior to that of the Italian Renaissance The spirit offree mquir\ into personal and social issues, of calling all things m question before the bar of reason, acquired a formal discipline and an increasingl> enthusiastic acceptance in wide sections of society Intellectual courage, and cv cn more, intellectual disinterestedness, became fashionable virtues 'Voltaire and Rousseau were universallv feted and admired, Hume was magnificently received in Paris This was the climate of opinion which formed the character of the revolutionaries of 1789, a severe and heroic generation which fields to none m the clearness and purity of its convictions, in the robust and unsentimental intelligence of its humanism—above all in its absolute moral and intellectual integrity securelv founded upon the belief that the truth must ultimatelv prevail because it is the truth, a belief which vears cf exile and persecution did not weaken Their moral ana political ideas, and their words of praise and blame have long since become the common inheritance of democrats of all shades and hues, socialists and Liberals utilitarians and believers m natural rights, speak their language and profess their faith, not so nalvelv, nor with such utter confidence, but also less eloquentlv, less simply and less convincingly.

The counter-attack came with the turn of the centurv It grew on German sod, but soon spread over the whole civilized world, checking the advance of empiricism from the west, and puttmg in its place a profoundly metaphysical view of nature and of the mdiv idual the effects of which are with us still, and growing in

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strength and influence. Germany, spiritually and materially crippled by the Thirty Years’ War, was, at the end of a long and sterile period, beginning to produce once more, towards the end of the eighteenth century, an indigenous culture of its own, influenced by, but fundamentally independent of, the French models which all Europe vied in imitating. Both in philosophy and in criticism the Germans began to produce works which were in form clumsier, but more ardently felt, more vehemently expressed, and more disquieting than anything written in France outside the pages of Rousseau; the French saw in this rich disarray only a grotesque travesty of their own limpid style and exquisite symmetry. The Napoleonic Wars which added to the Germans’ wounded intellectual pride the humiliation of military defeat, made the rift still wider, and the strong patriotic reaction which_began during these wars and rose to a wild flood of national feeling after Napoleon’s defeat, became_ identified with the new,. so-called romantic philosophy _of Kant’s successors, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which thus obtained national significance and became broadened and popularized into an almost official German faith. Against the scientific empiricism of the French and English, the Germans put forward the metaphysical historicism of Herder and of Hegel. Founded on the criticism of its rivals, it offered a bold alternative, the influence of which altered the history of civilization in Europe and left an ineffaceable impression on its imagination and modes of feeling.

The classical philosophers of the eighteenth century had asked: Given that man is neither more nor less than an object in nature, what are the laws which govern his behaviour? If it is possible to discover by empirical

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means under what conditions bodies fall, planets rotate, trees grow, ice turns into water and water into steam, it must be no less possible to find out under what conditions men are caused to eat, drink, sleep, love, hate, fight one another, constitute themselves into families, tribes, nations, and again into monarchies, oligarchies, democracies. Until this is discovered by a Newton or a Galileo, no true science of society can come into being. This radical empiricism appeared to Hegel to embody a scientific dogmatism even more disastrous than the theology which it wished to displace, involving the fallacy that only methods successful in the natural sciences can be valid in every other department of experience. He was sceptical of the new method even in the case of the material world, and quite groundlessly suspected natural scientists of arbitrarily selecting the phenomena which they discussed and no less arbitrarily limiting themselves to certain kinds of evidence alone. But if his attitude towards empiricism in the sciences was unsympathetic, he spoke with even greater violence of its ruinous consequences when applied to the subject of human history. If history were written in accordance with scientific rules, as the word was understood by Voltaire or by Hume, a monstrous distortion of the facts would result, which the best historians of the past, Hume and Voltaite themselves, indeed, when they were not theorizing but writing history, had unconsciously avoided by a sure historical intuition. He conceived of history as it were in two dimensions: the horizontal, in which the phenomena of different spheres of activity, occurring among different peoples belonging to the same stage of development, are seen to be broadly interconnected in some unitary pattern, which gives each period its own

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individual, immediately recognizable character; and the vertical dimension, in which the same cross-section of events is viewed as part of a temporal succession, as a necessary stage in a developing process, in some sense contained by its predecessor in time, which is itself seen already to embody, although in a less developed state, those very tendencies and forces whose full emergence makes the later age that which it ultimately comes to be. Hence every age, if it is tn he genninely undrrsinnH must he /-nnclrtered in relation not to the

past alone; for it contains within its womb seeds of the future, Joreshadowing the contour of what is yet to come; and this relation, no historian, however scrupulous, however anxious to avoid straying beyond the bare evidence of the facts, can allow himself to ignore. Only so can he represent in correct perspective the elements which compose the period with which he is dealing, distinguishing the significant from the trivial, the central, determining characteristics of an age from those accidental, adventitious elements in it, which might have happened anywhere and at any time, and consequently have no deep roots in its particular past, and no appreciable effects on its particular future.

The conception of growth by which the acorn is said potentially to contain the oak, and can be adequately described only in terms of such development, is a doctrine as old as Aristotle and indeed older. In the Renaissance it came to light once more and was developed to its fullest extent by Leibnitz, who taught that the universe was compounded of a plurality of independent individual substances, each of which is to be conceived as composed of its own whole past and its own whole future. Nothing was accidental; no object could be

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described as the empiricists wished to describe it, namely as a succession of continuous or discontinuous phenomena or states, connected at best only by the external relation of mechanical causation. The only true definition of an object was in terms which explained why it necessarily developed as it did in terms of its individual history, as a growing entity, each stage of which was, in the words of Leibnitz, ‘charge du passe et gros de I’avenir’. Leibnitz made no detailed attempt to apply this metaphysical doctrine to historical events, and yet that seemed to Hegel to be the sphere to which it best applied. For unless some relation other than that of scientific causation be postulated, it seems impossible to account for, even to express, the entirely individual character of a particular personality or period of history, the individual essence of a particular work of art or of science, each of whose characteristics may indeed closely resemble something which has occurred before or after it, but whose totality is in some sense unique, and exists only once; and cannot therefore be accounted for by a scientific method whose successful application depends upon the occurrence of the precise opposite, namely, that the same phenomenon, the same combination of characteristics should repeat itself, regularly recur, again and again.

The new method was first triumphantly applied by Herder, who, under the influence perhaps of the growth of national and racial self-consciousness in Europe, and moved by hatred of the levelling cosmopolitanism and universalism of the prevailing French philosophy, applied'the concept of organic development (as it later came to be called) to the history of entire cultures and nations as well as individuals. Indeed, he represented

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it as more fundamental in the case of the former, since individuals can only properly be viewed as occurring at a particular stage of the development of a society, which, in the thought and action of its greatest sons, reaches its most typical expression. He immersed himself therefore in the study of national German culture, its barbarian beginnings, its philology and archaeology, its medieval history and institutions, its traditional folklore and antiquities. From this he attempted to draw a portrait of the living German spirit, as a formative force responsible for the unity of its own peculiar national development, which cannot be accounted for by the crudely empirical relation of mere loose before-and-afterness in time, by which the uniform, monotonous history of mechanically caused events, the rotation of the crops or the yearly revolutions of the earth, may perhaps be satisfactorily explained.

Hegel developed this still more widely and ambitiously. He taught that the explanation offered by French materialism afforded at best a hypothesis for explaining some static but no dynamic phenomena, differences but not change. Given such and such material conditions, it may be possible to predict that the men born in them will develop certain characteristics, directly attributable to physical causes and to the education given to them by previous generations, themselves affected by the same conditions. But even if this is so, how much does it really tell us? The physical conditions of Italy, for example, were much the same in the first as they were in the eighth and fifteenth centuries, and yet the ancient Romans differ widely from their Italian descendants, and the men of the Renaissance showed certain marked

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characteristics, which Italy in decline was losing or had totally lost. It cannot therefore be these relatively invariant conditions, with which alone the natural scientists are competent to deal, that are responsible for the phenomena of historical change, for progress and reaction, glory and decline. Some dynamic factor must be postulated to account both for change as such and for the single, clearly perceptible, direction which it has. Such change is plainly not repetitive : each age inherits something new from its predecessors, in virtue of which it differs from every preceding period; the principle of development excludes the principle of uniform repetition which is the foundation on which Galileo and Newton built. If history possesses laws, these laws must evidently be different in kind from what has passed for the only possible pattern of scientific law so far : and since everything that is, persists, and has some history, the laws of history must for that very reason be identical with the laws of being of everything that exists.

Where is this principle of historical motion to be found? It is a confession of human failure, of the defeat of reason, to declare that this dynamic principle is that notorious object of the empiricist’s gibes, a mysterious and occult power which men cannot expect even to detect. It would be strange if that which governs our normal lives were not more present to us, a more familiar experience than any other that we have. For we need only take our own lives as the microcosm and pattern of the universe. We speak familiarly enough of the character, or of the temper, of a man as accounting for his acts and thoughts, not as some independent thing totally distinct from them, but as the common pattern which they express: and the better