Читать книгу The Mystical Element of Religion - Friedrich von Hügel - Страница 31

And yet how unjust would he be who failed to recognize, in the case of Spinoza especially, the noble, and at bottom deeply religious, motives and aspirations underlying such excesses; or the new problems and necessities, the permanent growth and gain, which this long process of human thought has brought to Religion itself, especially in indirect and unintentional ways!

For as to the motives, it ought not to be difficult to any one who knows human history and human nature, to see how the all but complete estrangement from Nature and Physical Fact which, from Socrates onwards, with the but very partial exception of Aristotle, had, for well-nigh two thousand years, preceded this reaction; how the treatment of Matter and the Visible as more or less synonymous with Non-Being and Irrationality, as a veil or even a wall, as a mere accident or even a positive snare, lying everywhere between us and Reality, could not fail to require and produce a swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. And the feeling and the perception of how superficial and unreal, how oppressively confined, how intolerably fixed and ultimate, how arrogant and cold and fruitless, such persistent neglect of the Data of Sense had somehow, at last, rendered philosophy, gave now polemical edge to men’s zealous study and discovery of this world. This study was perceived, even by the shallower thinkers, to be fair and rational and fruitful in itself; and it was found, by some few deep spirits, to be a strangely potent means of purifying, enlarging, “deprovincializing” man himself. The severe discipline of a rigorous study of man’s lowly, physical conditions and environment, things hitherto so despised by him, was now at last to purify him of his own childish immediacy of claim. The pettily selfish, shouting Individual was to pass through the broad, still, purgatorial waters of a temporary submergence under the conceptions, as vivid as though they were direct experiences, of ruthless Law, of Mechanism, of the Thing; so as to pass out, purified and enlarged, a Person, expressive of the Universal and Objective, of Order and of Law.

It is especially in Spinoza that this deeper, universally human and ethical, indeed we can say religious, implication and ideal of the rigorously scientific spirit is present in all its noble intuition and aspiration, and that at the same time, alas, this deep truth is forced into a ruinously inappropriate method and formulation. For the original end of the entire quest, an end which is still emotionally dominant and which furnishes the hidden dialectic of the whole,—Man, his nobility and interior purification and beatitude,—has here, intellectually, become but a means; Man, in the real logic of this system, is, hopelessly and finally, but a wheel in the huge mechanism of that natura naturata which Spinoza’s own richness and nobility of character transcends with potent inconsistency. And this very system, which is so nobly human and Christian in its ethical tone and in its demand of a Conversion of the whole man, in its requiring man to lose and sacrifice his petty self that he may gain his true self and become a genuine constituent of the Universe and Thought of God, is also the very one which, by its ruthless Naturalism and Determinism of Doctrine and its universally Mathematical and Quantitative form and method, logically eliminates all such qualitative differentiation and conversion as impossible and futile.

The prima facie view of life as it presents itself to the clarifying, Scientific Intellect, namely the omnipresence of the determinist mechanism, has never been more impressively felt and pictured than by Spinoza; the dispositions and happiness of the purified, disinterested soul have rarely been experienced and described with more touching elevation and power. But there is no real transition, indeed no possibility of such, in his system, from that first aspect to this latter state; for that first aspect, that apparent determinism, is for his logic not merely apparent or secondary, but the very truth of truths, the very core and end of things.

And this bondage of mind to matter, this enslavement of the master to the servant, this narrow, doctrinaire intellectualism and determinism, is more hidden than cured in Leibniz, who, if he brings the immense improvement because enrichment of a keen sense and love of the Historical, loses, on the other hand, Spinoza’s grandly Conversional tone and temper. A cheerful, easy, eminently sane but quite inadequate bustle of manifold interests; a ready, pleasant optimism; an endless laboriousness of the reasoning faculty; all this, even though carried out on a scale unique since the days of Aristotle, is necessarily unequal to face and bear “the burthen of all this unintelligible world.”

And yet here, in him who may not unfitly be called the last of the Dogmatic Rationalists and Optimists, we have already those great perceptions which were destined more and more to burst the bonds of this cold, clear, complete, confining outlook. For one thing, as already stated, there is, alongside the love of the Material and Mathematical, an almost equal love of the Historical and Human. There is, for another thing, the deep consciousness of the Individuality and Interiority of all real existences,—all that is at all, has an inside to it. And, finally, in further enforcement of this latter doctrine, there is the fruitful conception of Subconscious States of feeling and of mind in all living things.

Yet it is only in Kant that,—with all his obscurities and numberless demonstrable inconsistencies, with all his saddening impoverishment of the outlook in many ways,—we get, little conscious as he himself is of such a service, the deep modern explanation of the ancient pre-scientific neglect and suspicion of natural research. Here we are led to see that the strictly Scientific view of Nature is necessarily quantitative, but that the strictly Ethical, Spiritual view of man is as necessarily qualitative; that the analysis of all natural phenomena but leads to judgments as to what is, whereas the requirements of human action lead to judgments of what ought to be. Here the weak point lies in the contrast, established by him and pushed to the degree of mutual exclusion, between Reason and Will. For the contrast which we find in actual life is really between the deeper reason, ever closely accompanied by deep emotion, this reason and emotion occasioning, and strengthened by, the action of the whole man,—and all this is not directly transferable; and the more superficial reasoning, having with it little or no emotion,—the action of but one human faculty,—and this action is readily transferable.