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History of Philosophy
Age of Enlightenment - Retrospect
by Turner, William (S.T.D.)
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The period from Descartes to Hume was dominated by
the influence of Cartesian thought, and more particularly by the
doctrine of the antithesis of mind and matter. It was the attempt to
solve the problem of this antithesis that gave rise to the pantheistic
monism of Spinoza, to the materialistic monism of the thoroughgoing
empiricists, to the idealistic monism of Berkeley, to the partially
idealistic monadism of Leibniz, and to the pan-phenomenalism of Hume,
which, -- most astounding solution of all -- solves the problem of the
antithesis by denying the substantial nature of both mind and matter.
Here the first act ends. Kant next appears, and, appalled at the sight
of the ruin which Hume has wrought, fearing for the spirituality of the
soul, the freedom of the will, the existence of God, and the obligation
of the moral law, opens a new scene by proposing once more the
question, What are the conditions of knowledge? and prepares the way
for the philosophy of the nineteenth century by his attempt at constructive
synthesis on the basis of moral consciousness.
We cannot fail to remark, also, in the development of philosophy from
Descartes to Kant, a struggle between the purely scientific view and
the aesthetic religious view of the world. Wherever empiricism held
full sway, there the scientific view prevailed, and enlightenment, as
it was called, was sought, rather than a deeper sense of the aesthetic
and spiritual significance of things. Wherever, on the contrary, the
idealistic movement prevailed, there greater value was attached to the
spiritual and aesthetic solution than to the scientific solution of the
problems of philosophy. But in spite of idealistic reactions, the
principles of deism continued to pervade English thought, the
illumination continued to flourish in France and Germany, and
Empiricism culminated in the philosophy of Hume, which expresses the
last and most violent form of antagonism between the scientific and the
religious aesthetic view of life. It was left for Kant to undo the work
of the Illuminati and of Hume, and to lay the foundation for the
constructive systems which were to give to the religious and aesthetic
interests of human life a place beside the merely scientific elements
of thought in a complete synthesis of philosophical knowledge.
Finally, we must observe in the eighteenth century a gradual increase
in the importance attached to the study of man in his social and
political relations, and the growth and development of the idea of an
antithesis between the individual and the state. But while Rousseau was
giving expression to the doctrine of individualism in its most
extreme form, Herder, by his doctrine of the organic union of the human
race, was preparing the way for the political philosophy of the
nineteenth century. For the new century was to discard the notion of
antithesis between the individual and the state, and, adopting an
organic instead of a mechanical concept of society, was to substitute
for the individualism of the eighteenth century a
collectivism, which not only the great speculative systems such as Hegel's, but all
the other important movements of the nineteenth century -- the
evolution hypothesis, the rise of romanticism in literature, the Oxford
movement, and the great industrial and commercial centralization of
recent years -- were to exemplify and confirm in theory or in
practice.
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