Readers of Mr. Chamberlain’s “Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” will remember how much was there made of Kant as the law-giver for all modern thought, or at least as much of it as obeys any true law. In the present work, which Lord Redesdale’s translation has been made into a piece of English literature, Mr. Chamberlain seeks to justify formally the towering position which he assigned to Kant, and to show what it is that Kant has established for all time in the realm of philosophic thought.
    His method of entering on his task is to take a number of the greatest thinkers — Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Descartes, Giordano Bruno, and Plato — and to see how Kant looks when set beside each of these; what they have in common with Kant, where they differ from him, how they supplement, where they contradict. Mr. Chamberlain sets great value on what he calls schematization. To understand anything you must compare it with something else; that something else may be a concrete fact, or it may be — in true philosophic thinking it must be — a schema, an ideal conception which you can apply to facts and which enables them to be coordinated and mastered. So he sets Kant in a constellation of other luminaries, all of which together form a kind of schema of human genius, and shows him in the varying lights reflected from this side and that.
    The result is that we have a book which teems with interest; but it must be said that it presupposes a considerable amount of information on the reader’s part about Goethe, Descartes, Plato, and the rest. Systematic in plan, it is extremely discursive in execution; and we can imagine the reader to whom the name, say, of Plato does not convey a pretty clear idea of a definite system of thought and of a supreme literary achievement feeling that he has not learned much more about Plato from the chapter devoted to him in this book than would a traveler of a country which he had only passed through at night in a thunderstorm. This book also presupposes a faculty for abstract thought, or at least for comprehending it, for relating it with life, which is not a common possession of culture. But this is a book, if ever there was one, which should fire the mind of the reader with the desire to be at home in the region of which it treats. No one could read without catching some glow of the author’s enthusiasm, the fine passage at the close of the chapter on Bruno where he endeavors to make clear the kind of position which Kant holds in the history of human thinking. Let us suppose, he writes, a man born in the valleys of the Maritime Alps. His home is girdled by range on range of snow-clad peaks from which descend all the never-failing waters that turn the mills, irrigate the fields, and supply the homes of the people. The mountains receive these waters from the clouds, but whence do the clouds obtain it in such inexhaustible measure?

Among the dwellers in the valley all sorts of theories are current. The pastor teaches that God in his mercy is forever creating new rain-clouds — especially if his flock are diligent in their attendance at church. The apothecary has made up a highly complicated scientific theory of a catalytic combination of oxygen and hydrogen in the low pressure of the highest regions of the air under the influence of the sun’s rays. The school-master is busy hunting up explanations in the classical authors… meanwhile, our friend actively climbs uphill, is undaunted by failures and fatigue, and at last, thanks to his practice in mountaineering, reaches close to the highest peak. Not more than two or three had got so high before him; but these few, keenly absorbed in their search after causes which seemed plausible to them, had clung to the rocks, and tried to shovel away the snow in order to see what lay underneath. They thought that if they found a spring breaking out of the rocks everything would be explained. They were mere empirics. But he thinks otherwise, and when he has climbed as high as his strength will carry him, he turns round. He turns his back to the brook and the glacier and looks up at the succession of echeloned mountains, and there, further than he had ever allowed his thoughts to range, there in all its glory, there in the golden reflection of the midday sun, lies the immeasurable sea. He sees the rivers hurrying to it from all sides, and he sees the mist rising from its waves, consolidated into clouds, and flying with the evening breeze to the mountains.

That, says Chamberlain, is something like the position of Kant among thinking men. But the metaphor must be a little elaborated. The essential point in Kant is the “turning around as it were on the pivot of the intellect” so as to obtain a sight of that which was hitherto unsuspected. It was, as Kant knew, the Copernican way; Copernicus solved the problem of the heavens simply by looking for the solution in a new direction.

Now at one stroke the whole problem is solved, or rather shewn to be non-existent. The water was returning whence it came, and came from whither it went; it did not spring from the hidden bowels of the earth, nor did it flow into boundless space. At the same time however, there was an end of all hope of an absolute “explanation” such as had flitted before the minds of the simple folk.

That last sentence is in the highest degree important. Kant never pretended to “explain the Universe”; such explanations, whether theistic or Gnostic or materialist, have only to be pushed to their conclusions to topple into the abyss of unreason. His philosophy might be called a higher Pragmatism. He gives us a hold upon things, a standpoint from which to think and to act with an energy untroubled on the one hand by the Hirngespinnste of abstract thinking divorced from reality, and on the other by the tyranny of blind material forces. On one side he rooted all knowledge in experience, on the other he showed how all experience is conditioned by the schemata which we ourselves supply for it, and which alone enable us to make anything of it either for material or for ethical ends. “Man,” as Chamberlain puts it, “legislates for Nature.”

It is in Plato that the author finds the true forerunner of Kant; and the chapter on this thinker is (to the qualified reader) the most richly interesting in the two volumes. Plato’s doctrine of Ideas is here treated in a fashion which ought to defend it from the host of shallow objections which have been brought against it from the time of Aristotle down to Zeller. He shows that the loose and shifting expressions in which Plato has been charged with clothing his doctrine do not arise from a lack of clear vision. Exactly the same charge with exactly the same foundation has been made against Kant himself. Each of these thinkers — if we may put the matter in our own words, which are not Mr. Chamberlain’s — was intent upon a reality, each of them strove to bring his readers face to face with that reality, each of them, with a sovereign indifference to meticulous criticism, tried different avenues of approach — each meant to satisfy the searcher with that reality, not with a clever formula. The Platonic Ideas are very much the same things as the Kantian categories. They organize the world of sense. We should have welcomed here some discussion of Schopenhauer’s conception of the Platonic Ideas as the object of art, but art, except perhaps in the case of music, does not appear to interest Mr. Chamberlain very much, at least, in spite of the devotion of a chapter to Leonardo, we hear little from him about this branch of spiritual activity. On the other hand, the ethical element in Kant’s teaching is again and again insisted upon, and is developed in various applications to the life of our day. The assertion of man’s freedom, of man’s sovereignty and responsibility, is regarded as in some sense Kant’s crowning achievement. Kant altogether repudiates the idea that we should study the question, “What is a man?” merely by investigating his comparative anatomy; rather are man’s real essence and importance to be found “in his dealings whereby he reveals his character.” Here is Kant’s great message for our time — a time, the author says, which ought to make any man who understands its menace “tremble to the marrow of his bones.” North European culture is threatened, and what weapons have we wherewith to face the enemy?

In a country like Germany, where famous specialists possess each such enormous influence, the unhappy dilettantism of these people who have left their retorts and microscopes, in order to develop systems of philosophy in the course of a night, is apt to grow into a cultural danger. So it is here. Kant was a pioneer of freedom; his life-work of criticism is such a fruitful destroyer of all superstitions that Rome herself trembles before this man. But now our freedom, our innermost freedom, the release from the delusions of many thousand years, is once more being cruelly threatened; the enemy is under arms all along the line. We Teutons have not only subjected the whole surface of the planet to our commerce, but have determined to rise to new ideals, worthy of free men, to ideals purged of Judaism and Egyptology: but how are we to conquer if, to the religious fables of antiquity, and the grandiose thought-structures of the clerical philosophers, we have nothing better to oppose than the poor stammerings of the Ostwalds and Haeckels?

Though we wholly believe that Mr. Chamberlain has the root of the matter in him, there is no doubt that his impassioned style sometimes leads him into exaggerations. We cannot always follow his frequent denunciations of Monism, the less as he appears himself to be a kind of Monist. Occasionally he falls into flat absurdity, as, for instance, when he permits himself to talk of the “soul-less yellow race“, the race of Laotse, of Komio, of Ashikaga art! But the supreme example is to be found in a reference to the anthropologist E. D. Cope, of whom it is written that “he had seen enormously, perhaps more than any other living man of his craft, and he, as a free American, pondered without prejudice on what he had seen.” Surely the words we have italicized are schematization run mad! Mr. Chamberlain may think that Americans ought to be more “free” than other people in their intellectual activity; we do not see why, but certainly it is not a fact that they are so, rather the contrary. We must not conclude our very inadequate account of it without a reference to the merits of this translation of Lord Redesdale, who also contributes an interesting introduction. The book teems with references to almost every field of human thought — science, history, philosophy, literature — and must have demanded throughout the most painstaking observance of delicate shades of meaning. These have been rendered, so far as we have been able to test them, with faultless accuracy, yet in a style full of individuality and animation. 

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Last update: March 6th, 2005