Herbert Ernest Cushman

“ The universe has been enthroned; man has become its serf. Human effort has become slave to its own progress. Work has been apotheosized—work in the outer world, work with the hands. Inventions in material things have multiplied. The nineteenth century has been the period of steam, of electricity, of machinery, of factories, of the enormous increase in the number and size of cities, of the minute division of labor. Social and economic rather than metaphysical problems have commanded attention. Not another and ideal world, but this present world, is the one in which the modern man has lived. ”

“ The existence of one thing is not to be explained by the existence of another, but by the existence of me, an Ego. Phenomena are little steps toward great ends. When I rethink the world I see no causal relationship, but the teleological means for the achievement of purposes by striving souls. History and nature—these are the material created by human beings for their own activity. We not only create our human drama, but we create also the stage upon which it is performed. Being is not the cause of Doing, but Being is created for the sake of Doing. ”

“ Thought is the great cosmic undercurrent that includes all things in its sweep. Indeed, the universe cannot be conceived as a unity unless the universe is conceived as a cosmic consciousness or reason. The true study of the nature of the world is cosmic logic, and philosophy becomes in Hegel’s hands panlogism,—universal logic. Kant restricted the categories of thought to the human understanding; Hegel universalizes them and they become categories of the cosmos. For if the reality of the world is conscious reason, the categories are not only the forms of thought, but also the modes of being. ”

“ To be free from the passions and the finite things of the world we must understand their nature; for to understand a thing is to be delivered from it. An illusion is not an illusion when we know it to be such. To see that all the passions, sensations, imaginations, and all the other modes of thought are human limitations, is to dwell within the reason. Spinoza’s freedom is not, as will be seen, freedom in the ordinary psychological meaning of the term, but is the metaphysical freedom of being identical with the deity and determined by no finite thing. Freedom is rational knowledge. ”

“ But morality, religion, and government cannot get their authority from ideas inborn in the mind. All are the outgrowths of experience. The moral law, for example, is a law of nature, although at the same time it is a law of God. It arises from experience, and at the same time it has its root in God. To obey it is to be happy, to disobey it is to be unhappy. The revelation of religion, too, may transcend experience, but it must not contradict experience. In both religion and morality the individual must be the final judge, for he is the arbiter of his own happiness. ”

“ Goethe differed from Spinoza’s pantheism in his own way; for Goethe conceived man to have an independent function in the infinite. Man makes his contribution to history and does not merely passively appropriate the products of the world around himself. Man reacts upon the world, he resists it, and becomes alive to the joy of it.
To Goethe the world had a soul, because the world gives clearness to the human soul. Nature shows how closely she is related to us by disclosing to us her inmost soul. Here in Goethe is a mysticism in modern garb, an artistic view of life. ”

“ The physical universe had undergone a wonderful transformation for man. Our nineteenth century has often been looked upon as a period of extraordinary discoveries; but no discoveries have ever so revolutionized the human mind as those enumerated above as “the external causes of the fall of the society of the Middle Ages.” Think how new that old world must have seemed to the common people who had supposed it to be flat, as well as to the scientists who had hypothetically supposed it to be solid—how new it must have seemed when they found that it had been actually circumnavigated! ”

“ The human reason is just this: it is human. It stands midway between divine intuition and animal sensation. Man is free, but free under his own limitations. “If by this inquiry it may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things beyond its comprehension—we should then not be so forward, out of affection for universal knowledge, to perplex ourselves and others with disputes about things, to which our understandings are not suited and of which we have not any notions at all.” ”

“ Will is common to all and is the only reality. Differences are illusions, and the reason which exists only in man is one of those differences.
The World as Will and the World as Idea do not stand in the relation of cause and effect, but the World as Idea is the objectification of the World as Will. Will is to phenomena what essence is to expression. Will is the freedom that is within all things; and yet all things are determined when they have the form of ideas. There is only one Will, and so the world is in reality a unity. ”

“ Is God the creator of the world? No, He is the world. Is God a person? Is He a self-conscious being like ourselves,—an individual? No. The thought-aspect of God includes our thought, but it is the very different infinite thought; the extension-aspect of God includes our body, but it is the very different infinite body. God has soul and body and an infinite number of other aspects. God is—an unchanging, self-dependent being, whose modifications are necessarily determined in their relation to Him and to one another. Spinoza conceived the character of God exactly from the nature of geometry. ”

“ Would reality contain any finite quality such as the world around us contains? Can you say that God has this particular faculty, or is endowed with that concrete attribute? Does God enjoy, love, hate; does He create and destroy? But how can God be the real unity of the world unless He contains in Himself everything in the finite world? We approach here the threshold of the problem of the concrete universal, which has engaged the attention of so much of modern philosophy. A concrete universal is all-inclusive of finite existence, but at the same time is a self-consistent unity. ”

“ It is very clear what the dangers as well as the greatness of this German Romanticism were. The dangers of the movement lay within itself, in its aristocratic exclusiveness, its reluctance to face the forces of evil, its lack of strength and of firmness of character. Yet the age itself may be largely responsible for these. Its strength lay also within, in its deepening of self-consciousness, in its rejuvenating and ennobling the whole expanse of being, in its intellectual conception of man’s most intimate relations to himself, to his companions, and to the world around him. ”

“ If we discover what seems to be inexplicable evil, we must regard it as an incident in the harmony of the whole. The world would be less good without evil. There is no more evil than there ought to be. The world which God conceived to be the best possible—this world—is a world of lights and shades. Evil comes from the free agency of man, and God is not responsible for it. It is better to have evil and free agency than no evil and no free agency. Evil after all is not positive, and is only due to the indistinct ideas of man. ”

“ Kant pointed out that between or beside the realm of subjectivity and that of the things-in-themselves lies the realm of human knowledge, which we in our every-day speech call physical nature, and to which he gave the name “the world of phenomena” or “the world of experience.” The subjective world is apprehended by the individual alone, the world of things-in-themselves is known by no human being, but the world of phenomena is the common object of knowledge of humanity. Phenomena are not things-in-themselves, but things-for-us; they are physical nature, an interrelated totality for us. ”

“ But in Europe Schopenhauer’s doctrine was unique, and he arrived at its construction by stripping mysticism of all its religious elements. Faith and belief are eliminated because they have no reality as their object. Reason produces only a world of illusory ideas; the Will is a reality, but it is a reality which is only a blind urgency—an instinctive blind force. The essence of things is undirected striving. Life is the expression of the absolute unreason of the Will. It is a Will without an object. ”

“ Now we see the importance of Berkeley’s deviation from Locke in his (Berkeley’s) conception of all ideas as passive. All ideas being passive, there must be a cause of them. The only active causes are spirits. I am the cause or perceiver of my own imaginations. I perceive another’s movements and know that another person or spirit must be the cause. When nature speaks in its invariable and purposive harmony, I know that an infinite spirit is the cause. We are indeed living in a society of spirits, who speak to one another in their own language. ”

“ Like all the Romantic philosophy, Goethe’s philosophy was a personal revelation, and not a formulated doctrine for universal application. Like all the Romanticists, Goethe was a highly strung personality, and his philosophy was conceived to be true by himself only for himself. He did not look upon the trivialities and the conventions of life as mere limitations of his personality, but as a fall from truth. Truth is realized by man when he is in vital interchange with the universe. ”

“ The Enlightenment was curious about the interests, the happiness, and the many powers of the individual. Empirical psychologists and brilliant ethical scholars appeared. How much can man know, and what are the limits and extent of his knowledge? The Rationalists of the Renaissance had accepted without question the mediæval teaching that a group of our ideas is innate and therefore God-given. The Middle Ages had been built up on revealed knowledge. But to the thinkers of the Enlightenment the most important ideas—yea, the only ideas of service to us—are those derived from experience. ”

“ The dualism of the classes was always assumed. The few are to be cultured; for them reason is to take the place of dogma. The masses are not amenable to reason, have no capacity for education, and for them religion suffices. To free the individual from terror of the supernatural, to release his morality from Jesuitical dominance, to give him intellectual independence of state and church—this was the working idea of the intellectual Enlightenment. Thought should be free, and the conscience of the individual should be untrammeled, because the reason is a sufficient guide. ”

“ The early thinkers followed wrong paths, and their results, which we now possess, are vain.
What must be our attitude in the presence of this traditional philosophy? We must dispossess ourselves of the prejudices that have misled the past, for they form the obstacles to our true knowledge of the world. The roots of the errors that have infected philosophy are “fantastic, contentious, and delicate learning.” We must not, indeed, trust to our every-day perceptions; for although science is based on our perceptions, our every-day perceptions are corrupted by our uncritical habits of thought. ”

“ In the first place, consciousness always involves the consciousness of something else. To use Fichte’s technical language, the Ego posits itself (since it is a moral process) and in the same act it posits a non-Ego (which is the necessary object of consciousness) . “The absolute Ego asserts a distinguishable Ego against a distinguishable non-Ego.” It is like a boy who feels the call to become a lawyer. He asserts himself in that call, and at the same time in that assertion he creates his life’s career. His career in the law is his non-Ego. ”

“ The principle of morals is universal in its application to experience, just as the a priori synthesis of knowledge is. However, just at that point the difference is to be seen between the foundation of science and that of morals—between the reason as pure and the reason as practical. Reason in the form of knowledge is restricted to experience; but reason in the form of the will, while applicable to experience, is not restricted to experience. If the understanding is without the content of experience, it is empty and useless. The understanding must always be a synthesis of a manifold. ”

“ In spite of the exaltation of the reason by the modern Enlightenment, is it not secondary to Will?
For behold! Let me look beyond myself. The revelation of the reality within myself illuminates the reality of the outer world. My Will meets resistance in other things. The everlasting striving of the Will appears in all nature. ”

“ The problem always uppermost in Schiller’s mind was the place of art and beauty in the whole system of things. So when he tried to reconcile Kant’s theoretical reason and Kant’s practical reason, he naturally looked to art for such reconciliation. What is there that is both necessary and free? Beauty! “Beauty is freedom in phenomenal appearance.” Æsthetic contemplation apprehends the beautiful object, and yet in so doing it transcends all the trammels and bonds of experience. The artistic ecstasy is freedom in necessity. ”

“ Nevertheless, freedom is ethical also, for it consists in overcoming the passions by reason. Freedom, therefore, has two sides: an escape from the emotions and an escape from obscure ideas—the goal in both cases being the life of reason. To attain freedom is to see the world as God sees it, which is the same as the reason sees it. This is to see each finite thing as eternal. Any concrete thing may be regarded by the human being as a finite and isolated thing out of all relation to other objects; or the same thing may be regarded as a detail of infinity. ”

“ Bacon’s criticism of the past was a trenchant criticism of prevailing philosophy, and amounted to a break with the past. Bacon felt that what passed for science in his day was but a pretence. In the presence of the facts of life traditional science was but empty words. The early thinkers are not the ancients. We are the ancients, for we embody in ourselves all the preceding centuries. Thus does Bacon swing from the mediæval blind acceptance of the past to an equally blind rejection of the past. ”

“ In contrast with Mysticism and Realism, as well as with the doctrine of Fichte and Schelling, Hegel tried to formulate a conception of the universe that would include everything and yet be an organic whole. In what terms can this world of richness and variety, of coördinations and contradictions, be conceived as a single whole? How can it be one and still be many? Hegel saw clearly that this was his problem. The truly absolute must be a unity, and still be absolute.
There are two fundamental principles upon which his doctrine rests: (1) The world must be conceived in terms of consciousness. ”

“ The Cosmic Unity. Hegel insists on the old truth that thought is self-operating within us. Thought belongs to our nature, yet it controls our nature. Thought develops consequences without regard to the will and demands that contradictions shall be solved. It is not correct to say that we think, but rather that thinking goes on within us. Thought is the life of the world. Thought is a process which embraces all things and projects them. Hegel emancipates thought from all the limitations of human minds. He would make thought objective and transform reality into thought. ”