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BERNARD BOSANQUET

(1848-)

ROF. BERNARD BOSANQUET, president of the London School of Ethics, and a celebrated essayist on ethical subjects, was born in 1848. His father, Rev. R. W. Bosanquet, of Rock Hall, Alnwick, educated him at Harrow and at Oxford. Between 1871 and 1881, he delivered at University College, Oxford, a series of lectures which gave him an international reputation, and he has since increased it by his published essays and addresses. He has been active in University Extension work in London, but he is now living in retirement in Surry. He is past president of the Aristotelean Society of Great Britain. An original thinker of remarkable strength, he knows how to express himself with a clearness which reveals the fundamental simplicity of what are generally considered the most difficult subjects.

THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF ANOTHER WORLD

"With such barren forms of thought, that are always in a world beyond, philosophy has nothing to do. Its object is always something concrete, and in the highest sense present."- Hegel's "Logic,» Wallace's translation, p. 150.

I

T WILL Surprise many readers to be told that the words which I have quoted above embody the very essence of Hegelian thought. The Infinite, the supra-sensuous, the Divine, are so connected in our minds with futile rackings of the imagination about remote matters which only distract us from our duties, that a philosophy which designates its problems by such terms. as these seems self-condemned as cloudy and inane. But, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Hegel is faithful to the present and the concrete. In the study of his philosophy we are always dealing with human experience. "My stress lay," says Mr. Browning, "on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study." For "a soul" read "the mind," and you have the subject-matter to which Hegel's eighteen closeprinted volumes are devoted. The present remarks are meant to

insist on this neglected point of view. I wish to point out in two or three salient instances the transformation undergone by speculative notions when sedulously applied to life, and restrained from generating an empty "beyond," or other world, between which and our present life and knowledge there is a great gulf fixed. That the world of mind, or the world above sense, exists as an actual and organized whole, is a truth most easily realized in the study of the beautiful. And to grasp this principle as Hegel applies it is nothing less than to acquire a new contact with spiritual life. The spiritual world which is present, actual, and concrete, contains much besides beauty. But to apprehend one element of such a whole must of course demand a long step towards apprehending the rest. It is for this reason that I propose to explain, by prominent examples, the conception of a spiritual world which is present and actual, in order to make more conceivable Hegel's views on the particular sphere of art. So closely connected, indeed, are all the embodiments of mind, his «< Philosophy of Fine Art" may be said to contain the essence of his entire system.

We know to our cost the popular conception of the suprasensuous world. Whatever that world is, it is, as commonly thought of, not here and not now. That is to say, if here and now, it is so by a sort of miracle, at which we are called upon to wonder, as when angels are said to be near us, or the dead to know what we do. Again, it is a counterpart of our present world, and rather imperceptible to our senses, than in its nature beyond contact with sense as such. It is peopled by persons who live eternally, which means through endless ages, and to whose actual communion with us, as also to our own with God, we look forward in the future. It even, perhaps, contains a supra-sensuous original corresponding to every thing and movement in this world of ours. And it does not necessarily deepen our conception of life, but only reduplicates it.

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Such a world, whatever we may think about its actual existence, is not the "other world" of philosophy. The things not seen of Plato or of Hegel are not a double or a projection of the existing world. Plato, indeed, wavered between the two conceptions in a way that should have warned his interpreters of the divergence in his track of thought. But in Hegel, at least, there is no ambiguity. The world of spirits with him is no world of ghosts. When we study the embodiments of mind or

spirit in his pages, and read of law, property, and national unity of fine art, the religious community, and the intellect that has attained scientific self-consciousness, we may miss our other world with its obscure "beyond," but we at any rate feel ourselves to be dealing with something real, and with the deepest concerns of life. We may deny to such matters the titles which philosophy bestows upon them; we may say that this is no "other world," no realm of spirits, nothing infinite or divine; but this matters little so long as we know what we are talking about, and are talking about the best we know. And what we discuss when Hegel is our guide will always be some great achievement or essential attribute of the human mind. He never asks, Is it?" but always, "What is it?" and therefore has instruction, drawn from experience, even for those to whom the titles of his: inquiries seem fraudulent or bombastic.

These few remarks are not directed to maintaining any thesis about the reality of nature and of sense. Their object is to enforce a distinction which falls within the world which we know, and not between the world we know and another which we do not know. The distinction is real, and governs life. I am not denying any other distinction, but I am insisting on this. No really great philosopher, nor religious teacher,— neither Plato, nor Kant, nor Saint Paul,- can be understood, unless we grasp this antithesis in the right way. All of these teachers have pointed men to another world. All of them, perhaps, were led at times. by the very force and reality of their own thought into the fatal separation that cancels his meaning. So strong was their sense of the gulf between the trifles and the realities of life, that they gave occasion to the indolent imagination-in themselves and in others- to transmute this gulf from a measure of moral effort into an inaccessibility that defies apprehension. But their pur

pose was to overcome this inaccessibility, not to heighten it.

The hardest of all lessons in interpretation is to believe that great men mean what they say. We are below their level, and what they actually say seems impossible to us, till we have adulterated it to suit our own imbecility. Especially when they speak of the highest realities we attach our notion of reality to what they pronounce to be real. And thus we baffle every attempt to deepen our ideas of the world in which we live. The work of intelligence is hard; that of the senuous fancy is easy; and SO we substitute the latter for the former. We are told, for

instance, by Plato, that goodness, beauty, and truth are realities, but not visible or tangible. Instead of responding to the call so made on our intelligence by scrutinizing the nature and conditions. of these intellectual facts,-though we know well how tardily they are produced by the culture of the ages, we apply forthwith our idea of reality as something separate in space and time, and so "refute » Plato with ease, and remain as wise as we were before. And it is true that Plato, handling ideas of vast import with the mind and language of his day, sometimes by a similar error refutes himself. He makes, for instance, the disembodied soul see the invisible ideas. Thus he travesties his things of the mind as though they were things of sense, only not of our sense thereby destroying the deeper difference of kind that alone enables them to find a place in our world. That his doctrine of ideas was really rooted, not in mysticism, but in scientific enthusiasm, is a truth that is veiled from us partly by his inconsistencies, but far more by our own erroneous preconceptions.

There is, however, a genuine distinction between "this" world and the "other" world, which is merely parodied by the vulgar antitheses between natural and supernatural, finite and infinite, phenomenal and noumenal. We sometimes hear it said, "The world is quite changed to me since I knew such a person," or “studied such a subject," or "had suggested to me such an idea.” The expression may be literally true; and we do not commonly exaggerate, but vastly underrate its import. We read, for instance, in a good authority, "These twenty kinds of birds (which Virgil mentions) do not correspond so much to our species as to our genera; for the Greeks and Romans, I need hardly say, had only very rough-and-ready methods of classification, just as is the case with uneducated people at the present day." Any one may verify the same fact as regards the observation of flowers. Every yellow ranunculus is called a "buttercup," every large white umbellifer a "hemlock." These, with hundreds of other differences of perception, affect the surroundings in which men consciously live, at least as much as a considerable degree of deafness or blindness. It is no metaphor, but literal fact, to say that man's whole environment is transformed by the training even of his mere apprehension of natural objects. But there is more in the matter than this. Without going into metaphysics, which I wish to avoid, I cannot, indeed, maintain that mind. "makes" natural objects, although by enabling us to perceive

them, it unquestionably makes our immediate conscious world. My individual consciousness does not make or create the differences between the species of ranunculus, although it does create my knowledge of them. But when we come to speak of the world of morals, or art, or politics, we may venture much further in our assertions. The actual facts of this world do directly arise out of and are causally sustained by conscious intelligence; and these facts form the world above sense. The unity of a Christian church or congregation is a governing fact of life; so is that of a family or a nation; so, we may hope, will that of humanity come to be. What is this unity? Is it visible and tangible, like the unity of a human body? No, the unity is "ideal"; that is, it exists in the medium of thought only; it is made up of certain sentiments, purposes, and ideas. What, even of an army? Here, too, an ideal unity is the mainspring of action. Without mutual intelligence and reciprocal reliance you may have a mob, but you cannot have an army. But all these conditions exist and can exist in the mind only. An army, qua army is not a mere fact of sense; for not only does it need mind to perceive it,-a heap of sand does that, but it also needs mind to make it.

The world of these governing facts of life is the world of the things not seen, the object of reason, the world of the truly infinite and divine. It is, of course, a false antithesis to contrast seeing with the bodily eye and seeing with the mind's eye. The seeing eye is always the mind's eye. The distinction between sense and spirit or intellect is a distinction within the mind, just as is Saint Paul's opposition between the spirit and the flesh. Nevertheless the mind that only sees color sense or sense-perception-is different from the mind that sees beauty, the self-conscious spirit. The latter includes the former, but the former does not include the latter. To the one the color is the ultimate fact; to the other it is an element in a thing of beauty. This relation prevails throughout between the world of sense and the world above sense. The "things not seen," philosophically speaking, are no world of existences or of intelligences co-ordinate with and severed from this present world. They are a value, an import, a significance, superadded to the phenomenal world, which may thus be said, though with some risk of misunderstanding, to be degraded into a symbol. The house, the cathedral, the judge's robe, the general's uniform, are ultimate

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