CHAPTER III
THE ART OF THINKING
HERBERT SPENCER pointed out, in his early essay on “The Genesis of Science,” that science arose out of art, and that even yet the distinction is “purely conventional,” for “it is impossible to say when art ends and science begins.” Spencer was here using “art” in the fundamental sense according to which all practice is of the nature of art. Yet it is of interest to find a thinker now commonly regarded as so prosaic asserting a view which to most prosaic people seems fanciful. To the ordinary solid man, to any would-be apostle of common sense, science—and by “science” he usually means applied science—seems the exact opposite of the vagaries and virtuosities that the hard-headed homme moyen sensuel is accustomed to look upon as “art.”
Yet the distinction is modern. In classic times there was no such distinction. The “sciences”—reasonably, as we may now see, and not fancifully as was afterwards supposed—were “the arts of the mind.” In the Middle Ages the same liberal studies—grammar, logic, geometry, music, and the rest—could be spoken of either as “sciences” or as “arts,” and for Roger Bacon, who in the thirteenth century was so genuine a man of science, every branch of study or learning was a “scientia.” I am inclined to think that it was the Mathematical Renaissance of the seventeenth century which introduced the undue emphasis on the distinction between “science” and “art.” “All the sciences are so bound together,” wrote Descartes, the banner-bearer of that Renaissance, in his “Règles pour la Direction de l’Esprit,” “that it is much easier to learn them all at once than to learn one alone by detaching it from the others.” He added that we could not say the same of the arts. Yet we might perhaps say of arts and sciences that we can only understand them all together, and we may certainly say, as Descartes proceeded to say of the sciences alone, that they all emanate from the same focus, however diversely coloured by the media they pass through or the objects they encounter. At that moment, however, it was no doubt practically useful, however theoretically unsound, to overemphasise the distinction between “science,” with its new instrumental precision, and “art.”[26] At the same time the tradition of the old usage was not completely put aside, and a Master of “Arts” remained a master of such sciences as the directors of education succeeded in recognising until the middle of the nineteenth century. By that time the development of the sciences, and especially of the physical sciences, as “the discovery of truth,” led to a renewed emphasis on them which resulted in the practical restriction of the term “art” to what are ordinarily called the fine arts. More formally, science became the study of what were supposed to be demonstrable and systematically classifiable truths regarding the facts of the world; art was separated off as the play of human impulses in making things. Sir Sidney Colvin, in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” after discussing the matter (which Mill had already discussed at length in his “Logic” and decided that the difference is that Science is in the Indicative Mood and Art in the Imperative Mood), concluded that science is “ordered knowledge of natural phenomena and of the relations between them,” or that “Science consists in knowing, Art consists in doing.” Men of science, like Sir E. Ray Lankester, accepted this conclusion. That was as far as it was possible to go in the nineteenth century.
But the years pass, and the progress of science itself, especially the sciences of the mind, has upset this distinction. The analysis of “knowing” showed that it was not such a merely passive and receptive method of recognising “truth” as scientists had innocently supposed. This is probably admitted now by the Realists among philosophers as well as by the Idealists. Dr. Charles Singer, perhaps our most learned historian of science, now defines science, no longer as a body of organized knowledge, but as “the process which makes knowledge,” as “knowledge in the making”; that is to say, “the growing edge between the unknown and the known.”[27] As soon as we thus regard it, as a making process, it becomes one with art. Even physical science is perpetually laying aside the “facts” which it thought it knew, and learning to replace them by other “facts” which it comes to know as more satisfactory in presenting an intelligible view of the world. The analysis of “knowing” shows that this is not only a legitimate but an inevitable process. Such a process is active and creative. It clearly partakes at least as much of the nature of “doing” as of “knowing.” It involves qualities which on another plane, sometimes indeed on the same plane, are essentially those involved in doing. The craftsman who moulds conceptions with his mind cannot be put in a fundamentally different class from the craftsman who moulds conceptions with his hand, any more than the poet can be put in a totally different class from the painter. It is no longer possible to deny that science is of the nature of art.
So it is that in the fundamental sense, and even, it will have to be added, in a sense that comprehends the extravagancies of wild variations from the norm, we have to recognise that the true man of science is an artist. Like the lunatic, the lover, the poet (as a great physician, Sir William Osler, has said), the student is “of imagination all compact.” It was by his “wonderful imagination,” it has been well pointed out, that Newton was constantly discovering new tracks and new processes in the region of the unknown. The extraordinary various life-work of Helmholtz, who initiated the valuation of beauty on a physiological basis, scientifically precise as it was, had, as Einstein has remarked, an æsthetic colouring. “There is no such thing as an unimaginative scientific man,” a distinguished professor of mechanics and mathematics declared some years ago, and if we are careful to remember that not every man who believes that his life is devoted to science is really a “scientific man,” that statement is literally true.[28] It is not only true of the scientific man in the special sense; it is also true of the philosopher. In every philosopher’s work, a philosophic writer has remarked, “the construction of a complete system of conceptions is not carried out simply in the interests of knowledge. Its underlying motive is æsthetic. It is the work of a creative artist.”[29] The intellectual lives of a Plato or a Dante, Professor Graham Wallas from a different standpoint has remarked, “were largely guided and sustained by their delight in the sheer beauty of the rhythmic relation between law and instance, species and individual, or cause and effect.”[30]
That remark, with its reference to the laws and rhythm in the universe, calls to mind the great initiator, so far as our knowledge extends back, of scientific research in our European world. Pythagoras is a dim figure, and there is no need here to insist unduly on his significance. But there is not the slightest doubt about the nature of that significance in its bearing on the point before us. Dim and legendary as he now appears to us, Pythagoras was no doubt a real person, born in the sixth century before Christ, at Samos, and by his association with that great shipping centre doubtless enabled to voyage afar and glean the wisdom of the ancient world. In antiquity he was regarded, Cicero remarks, as the inventor of philosophy, and still to-day he is estimated to be one of the most original figures, not only of Greece, but the world. He is a figure full of interest from many points of view, however veiled in mist, but he only concerns us here because he represents the beginning of what we call “science”—that is to say, measurable knowledge at its growing point—and because he definitely represents it as arising out of what we all conventionally recognise as “art,” and as, indeed, associated with the spirit of art, even its most fantastic forms, all the way. Pythagoras was a passionate lover of music, and it was thus that he came to make the enormously fruitful discovery that pitch of sound depends upon the length of the vibrating chord. Therein it became clear that law and spatial quantity ruled even in fields which had seemed most independent of quantitative order. The beginning of the great science of mechanics was firmly set up. The discovery was no accident. Even his rather hostile contemporary Heraclitus said of Pythagoras that he had “practised research and inquiry beyond all other men.” He was certainly a brilliant mathematician; he was, also, not only an astronomer, but the first, so far as we know, to recognise that the earth is a sphere,—so setting up the ladder which was to reach at last to the Copernican conception,—while his followers took the further step of affirming that the earth was not the centre of our cosmic system, but concentrically related. So that Pythagoras may not only be called the Father of Philosophy, but, with better right the Father of Science in the modern exact sense. Yet he remained fundamentally an artist even in the conventional sense. His free play of imagination and emotion, his delight in the ravishing charm of beauty and of harmony, however it may sometimes have led him astray,—and introduced the reverence for Number which so long entwined fancy too closely with science,—yet, as Gomperz puts it, gave soaring wings to the power of his severe reason.[31]
One other great dim figure of early European antiquity shares with Pythagoras the philosophic dominance over our world, and that is the Platonic Socrates, or, as we might perhaps say, the Socratic Plato. And here, too, we are in the presence of a philosopher, if not a scientist, who was a supreme artist. Here again, also, we encounter a legendary figure concealing a more or less real human person. But there is a difference. While all are agreed that, in Pythagoras we have a great and brilliant figure dimly seen, there are many who consider that in Socrates we have a small and dim figure grown great and brilliant in the Platonic medium through which alone he has been really influential in our world, for without Plato the name of Socrates would have scarcely been mentioned. The problem of the Pythagorean legend may be said to be settled. But the problem of the Socratic legend is still under discussion. We cannot, moreover, quite put it aside as merely of academic interest, for its solution, if ever reached, would touch that great vital problem of art in the actual world with which we are here throughout concerned.
If one examines any large standard history of Greece, like Grote’s to mention one of the oldest and best, one is fairly sure to find a long chapter on the life of Socrates. Such a chapter is inserted, without apology, without explanation, without compunction, as a matter of course, in a so-called “history,” and nearly every one, even to-day, still seems to take it as a matter of course. Few seem to possess the critical and analytical mind necessary for the examination of the documents on which the “history” rests. If they approached this chapter in a questioning spirit, they might perhaps discover that it was not until about half a century after the time of the real Socrates that any “historical” evidence for the existence of our legendary Socrates begins to appear.[32] Few people seem to realise that even of Plato himself we know nothing certain that could not be held in a single sentence. The “biographies” of Plato began to be written four hundred years after his death. It should be easy to estimate their value.
There are three elements—one of them immeasurably more important than the other two—of which the composite portrait of our modern Socrates is made up: Xenophon, Plato, the dramatists. To the contribution furnished by the first, not much weight is usually attached. Yet it should really have been regarded as extremely illuminating. It suggests that the subject of “Socrates” was a sort of school exercise, useful practice in rhetoric or in dialectics. The very fact that Xenophon’s Socrates was so reminiscent of his creator ought to have been instructive.[33] It has, however, taken scholars some time to recognise this, and Karl Joël, who spent fifteen of the best years of his life over the Xenophontic Socrates, to discover that the figure was just as much a fiction as the Platonic Socrates, has lately confessed that he thinks those years rather wasted. It might have been clear earlier that what Plato had done was really just the same thing so far as method was concerned, though a totally different thing in result because done by the most richly endowed of poet-philosophers, the most consummate of artists. For that is probably how we ought to regard Plato, and not, like some, as merely a great mystificator. It is true that Plato was the master of irony, and that “irony,” in its fundamental meaning, is, as Gomperz points out, “pleasure in mystifying.” But while Plato’s irony possesses a significance which we must always keep before us, it is yet only one of the elements of his vast and versatile mind.
It is to the third of these sources that some modern investigators are now inclined to attach primary significance. It was on the stage—in the branch of drama that kept more closely in touch with life than that which had fallen into the hands of the prose dialecticians and rhetoricians—that we seem to find the shadow of the real Socrates. But he was not the Socrates of the dramatic dialogues of Plato or even of Xenophon; he was a minor Sophist, an inferior Diogenes, yet a remarkable figure, arresting and disturbing, whose idiosyncrasies were quite perceptible to the crowd. It was an original figure, hardly the embodiment of a turning-point in philosophy, but fruitful of great possibilities, so that we could hardly be surprised if the master of philosophic drama took it over from real life and the stage for his own purposes.
To make clear to myself the possible way—I am far from asserting it was the actual way—in which our legendary Socrates arose, I sometimes think of Chidley. Chidley was an Australian Sophist and Cynic, in the good sense of both these words, and without doubt, it seems to me, the most original and remarkable figure that has ever appeared in Australia, of which, however, he was not a native, though he spent nearly his whole life there. He was always poor, and like most philosophers he was born with a morbid nervous disposition, though he acquired a fine and robust frame. He was liable not only to the shock of outward circumstances but of inward impulses; these he had in the past often succumbed to, and only slowly and painfully gained the complete mastery over as he gained possession of his own philosophy. For all his falls, which he felt acutely, as Augustine and Bunyan as well as Rousseau felt such lapses, there was in him a real nobility, an even ascetic firmness and purity of character. I never met him, but I knew him more intimately, perhaps, than those who came in contact with him. For many years I was in touch with him, and his last letter was written shortly before his death; he always felt I ought to be persuaded of the truth he had to reveal and never quite understood my sympathetic attitude of scepticism. He had devoured all the philosophic literature he could lay hold of, but his philosophy—in the Greek sense, as a way of life, and not in our modern sense as a system of notions—was his own: a new vision of Nature’s simplicity and wholeness, only new because it had struck on a new sensibility and sometimes in excessive and fantastic ways, but he held his faith with unbending devotion, and never ceased to believe that all would accept the vision when once they beheld it. So he went about the streets in Sydney, clad (as a concession to public feeling) in bathing drawers, finding anywhere he could the Stoa which might serve for him, to argue and discuss, among all who were willing, with eager faith, keen mind, and pungent speech. A few were won, but most were disturbed and shocked. The police persistently harassed him; they felt bound to interfere with what seemed such an outrage on the prim decency of the streets; and as he quietly persisted in following his own course, and it was hard to bring any serious charge against him, they called in the aid of the doctors, and henceforth he was in and out of the asylum instead of the prison. No one need be blamed; it was nobody’s fault; if a man transgresses the ordinary respectable notions of decency, he must be a criminal, and if he is not a criminal, he must be a lunatic; the social organisation takes no account of philosophers; the philosophic Hipparchia and her husband must not nowadays consummate their marriage in public, and our modern philosophers meekly agree that philosophy is to have nothing to do with a life. Every one in the case seems to have behaved with due conventional propriety, just as every one behaved around the deathbed of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilitch. It was Chidley’s deathbed they were preparing, and he knew it, but he unflinchingly grasped the cup they held out to him and drank it to the dregs. He felt he could do no other. There was no fabled hemlock in it, but it was just as deadly as though it had been accompanied by all the dramatic symbolisation of a formal condemnation to death, such as had really been recorded (Plato well knew) in old Athenian annals. There was no Plato in Sydney. But if there had been, it is hard to conceive any figure more fit for the ends of his transforming art. Through that inspiring medium the plebeian Sophist and Cynic, while yet retaining something of the asperity of his original shape, would have taken on a new glory, his bizarreries would have been spiritualised and his morbidities become the signs of mystic possession, his fate would have appeared as consecrated in form as it genuinely was in substance, he would have been the mouthpiece, not only of the truths he really uttered, but of a divine eloquence on the verge of which he had in real life only trembled, and, like Socrates in the hands of Plato, he would have passed, as all the finest philosophy passes at last, into music.[34] So in the end Chidley would have entered modern history, just as Socrates entered ancient history, the Saint and Martyr of Philosophy.[35]
If it should so be that, as we learn to see him truly, the figure of the real Socrates must diminish in magnitude, then—and that is the point which concerns us here—the glory of the artist who made him what he has become for us is immensely enhanced. No longer the merely apt and brilliant disciple of a great master, he becomes himself master and lord, the radiant creator of the chief figure in European philosophy, the most marvellous artist the world has ever known. So that when we look back at the spiritual history of Europe, it may become possible to say that its two supreme figures, the Martyr of Philosophy and the Martyr of Religion, were both—however real the two human persons out of which they were formed—the work of man’s imagination. For there, on the one hand, we see the most accomplished of European thinkers, and on the other a little band of barbarians, awkwardly using just the same Greek language, working with an unconscious skill which even transcends all that conscious skill could have achieved, yet both bearing immortal witness to the truth that the human soul only lives truly in art and can only be ruled through art. So it is that in art lies the solution of the conflicts of philosophy. There we see Realism, or the discovery of things, one with Idealism, or the creation of things. Art is the embodied harmony of their conflict. That could not be more exquisitely symbolised than by these two supreme figures in the spiritual life of Europe, the Platonic Socrates and the Gospel Jesus, both alike presented to us, it is so significant to observe, as masters of irony.
There has never again been so great an artist in philosophy, so supreme a dramatist, as Plato. But in later times philosophers themselves have often been willing to admit that even if they were not, like Plato, dramatists, there was poetry and art in their vocation. “One does not see why the sense for Philosophy should be more generally diffused than that for poetry,” remarked Schelling, evidently regarding them as on the same plane. F. A. Lange followed with his memorable “History of Materialism,” in which the conception of philosophy as a poetic art was clearly set forth. “Philosophy is pure art,” says in our own days a distinguished thinker who is in especially close touch with the religious philosophy of the East. “The thinker works with laws of thought and scientific facts in just the same sense as the musical composer with tones. He must find accords, he must think out sequences, he must set the part in a necessary relation to the whole. But for that he needs art.”[36] Bergson regards philosophy as an art, and Croce, the more than rival of Bergson in popular esteem, and with interesting points of contact with the French philosopher, though his standpoint is so different, has repeatedly pointed out—as regards Nietzsche, for instance, and even as regards a philosopher to whom he is so closely related as Hegel—that we may read philosophy for its poetic rather than its historic truth. Croce’s position in this matter is not, indeed, easy to state quite simply. He includes æsthetics in philosophy, but he would not regard philosophy as an art. For him art is the first and lowest stratum in the mind, not in rank, but in order, and on it the other strata are laid and combine with it. Or, as he elsewhere says, “art is the root of our whole theoretic life. Without root there can be neither flower nor fruit.”[37] But for Croce art is not itself flower or fruit. The “Concept” and other abstractions have to be brought in before Croce is satisfied that he has attained reality. It may, perhaps, indeed, be permitted, even to an admirer of the skill with which Croce spreads out such wide expanses of thought, to suggest that, in spite of his anxiety to keep close to the concrete, he is not therein always successful, and that he tends to move in verbal circles, as may perhaps happen to a philosopher who would reduce the philosophy of art to the philosophy of language. But, however that may be, it is a noteworthy fact that the close relationship of art and philosophy is admitted by the two most conspicuous philosophers of to-day, raised to popular eminence in spite of themselves, the Philosopher of Other-worldliness and the Philosopher of This-worldliness.
If we turn to England, we find that, in an age and a land wherein it was not so easy to make the assertion as it has now more generally become, Sir Leslie Stephen, in harmony, whether or not he knew it, with F. A. Lange, wrote to Lord Morley (as he later became) in the last century: “I think that a philosophy is really made more of poetry than of logic; and the real value of both poetry and philosophy is not the pretended reasoning, but the exposition in one form or other of a certain view of life.” It is, we see, just what they have all been saying, and if it is true of men of science and philosophers, who are the typical representatives of human thinking, it is even true of every man on earth who thinks, ever since the day when conscious thinking began. The world is an unrelated mass of impressions, as it first strikes our infant senses, falling at random on the sensory mechanism, and all appearing as it were on the same plane. For an infant the moon is no farther away than his mother’s breast, even though he possesses an inherited mental apparatus fitted to coördinate and distinguish the two. It is only when we begin to think, that we can arrange these unrelated impressions into intelligible groups, and thinking is thus of the nature of art.[38]
All such art, moreover, may yet be said to be an invention of fictions. That great and fundamental truth, which underlies so much modern philosophy, has been expounded in the clearest and most detailed manner by Hans Vaihinger in his “Philosophie des Als Ob.”
HANS VAIHINGER is still little known in England;[39] and that is the more remarkable as he has always been strongly attached to English thought, of which his famous book reveals an intimate knowledge. In early life he had mixed much with English people, for whom he has a deep regard, and learnt to revere, not only Darwin, but Hume and J. S. Mill, who exerted a decisive influence on his own philosophic development. At the beginning of his career he projected a history of English philosophy, but interest in that subject was then so small in Germany that he had regretfully to abandon his scheme, and was drawn instead, through no active effort on his part, to make the study of Kant the by-product of his own more distinctive work, yet it was a fitting study, for in Kant he saw the germs of the doctrine of the “as if,” that is to say, the practical significance of fiction in human life, though that is not the idea traditionally associated with Kant, who, indeed, was not himself clear about it, while his insight was further darkened by his reactionary tendencies; yet Vaihinger found that it really played a large part in Kant’s work and might even be regarded as his special and personal way of regarding things; he was not so much a metaphysician, Vaihinger remarks, as a metaphorician. Yet even in his Kantian studies the English influence was felt, for Vaihinger’s work has here been to take up the Neo-Kantism of F. A. Lange and to develop it in an empirical and positivistic direction.
There was evidently something in Vaihinger’s spirit that allied him to the English spirit. We may see that in his portrait; it is not the face of the philosophic dreamer, the scholarly man of the study, but the eager, forceful head of the practical man of action, the daring adventurer, the man who seems made to struggle with the concrete things of the world, the kind of man, that is to say, whom we consider peculiarly English. That, indeed, is the kind of man he would have been; that is the kind of life, a social life full of activity and of sport, that he desired to lead. But it was impossible. An extreme and lifelong short-sightedness proved a handicap of which he has never ceased to be conscious. So it came about that his practical energy was, as it were, sublimated into a philosophy which yet retained the same forceful dynamic quality.
For the rest, his origin, training, and vocation seem all to have been sufficiently German. He came, like many other eminent men, out of a Swabian parsonage, and was himself intended for theology, only branching off into philosophy after his university career was well advanced. At the age of sixteen he was deeply influenced, as so many others have been, by Herder’s “Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit”; that not only harmonised with his own tendency at the time towards a mixed theism and pantheism, but it first planted within him the conception of evolution in human history, proceeding from an animal origin, which became a fundamental element of his mental constitution. When a year later he came across Darwin’s doctrines he felt that he knew them beforehand. These influences were balanced by that of Plato, through whose “Ideas” he caught his first glimpse of an “As-If world.” A little later the strenuous training of one of his teachers in the logical analysis of Latin syntax, especially in the use of the conjunctions, furnished the source from which subsequently he drew that now well-known phrase. It was in these years that he reached the view, which he has since definitely advocated, that philosophy should not be made a separate study, but should become a natural part and corollary of every study, since philosophy cannot be fruitfully regarded as a discipline by itself. Without psychology, especially, he finds that philosophy is merely “a methodic abstraction.” A weighty influence of these days was constituted by the poems and essays of Schiller, a Swabian like himself, and, indeed, associated with the history of his own family. Schiller was not only an inspiring influence, but it was in Schiller’s saying, “Error alone is life, and knowledge is death,” that he found (however unjustifiably) the first expression of his own “fictionalism,” while Schiller’s doctrine of the play impulse as the basis of artistic creation and enjoyment seemed the prophecy of his own later doctrine, for in play he saw later the “as if” as the kernel of æsthetic practice and contemplation.
At the age of eighteen Vaihinger proceeded to the Swabian University of Tübingen and here was free to let his wide-ranging, eager mind follow its own impulses. He revealed a taste for the natural sciences and with this the old Greek nature philosophers, especially Anaximander, for the sake of their anticipations of modern evolutionary doctrines. Aristotle also occupied him, later Spinoza, and, above all, Kant, though it was chiefly the metaphysical antinomies and the practical reason which fascinated him. As ever, it was what made for practice that seemed mostly to concern him. Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, the official German idealists, said nothing to him. He turned from them to Schopenhauer, and thence he drew the pessimisms, the irrationalism, and the voluntarism which became permanent features of his system of thought. The irrationalism, as he himself points out, was completely opposed to all early influences on him, but it lay in his own personal circumstances. The contrast between his temperamental impulse to energetic practical action in every direction, and the reserve, passivity, and isolation which myopia enforced, seemed to him absolutely irrational and sharpened his vision for all the irrationality of existence. So that a philosophy which, like Schopenhauer’s, truthfully recognised and allowed for the irrational element in existence came like a revelation. As to Vaihinger’s pessimism, that, as we might expect, is hardly of what would be generally considered a pessimistic character. It is merely a recognition of the fact that most people are over-sanguine and thereby come to grief, whereas a little touch of pessimism would have preserved them from much misery. Long before the Great War, Vaihinger felt that many Germans were over-sanguine regarding the military power of their Empire, and of Germany’s place in the world, and that such optimism might easily conduce to war and disaster. In 1911 he even planned to publish anonymously in Switzerland a pamphlet entitled “Finis Germaniæ,” with the motto “Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat,” and was only prevented by a sudden development of the eye-trouble. Vaihinger points out that an unjustified optimism had for a long time past led in the politics of Germany—and also, he might have said, of the countries later opposed to her—to lack of foresight, o