Page images
PDF
EPUB

His doctrine would have

call,* in Professor Bowne's treatise. been a great deal clearer and more consistent had he been explicit on this point; but, in his positive discussion of the interaction of soul and body, where we should have expected considerable emphasis on the free causal states volitionally interpolated in the mental series, to which the body must respond in its own parallelism, we have only the repetition of the bald statement that the concomitance is the only interaction there is and that its determining ground must be sought in the plan and agency of the Infinite. The plan and agency of the Infinite as the determining ground of the concomitancy apparently exclude the plan and agency of the human spirit as a determining ground; if so, the teaching seems to us to be positively erroneous, and goes far toward the explanation of an important defect in Professor Bowne's philosophy, to which we shall at once advert.

What we are now concerned with is something of much deeper import than the interaction of soul and body, though immediately connected with that fact. It turns out that Professor Bowne's "ontological reality" of the human spirit still leaves it floundering helplessly in the same class with things. It has escaped phenomenality by the skin of its teeth, if it has escaped. Its interaction appears to be on his account wholly phenomenal, and we strongly suspect that in this region is to be founed the ground of Professor Bowne's inability or unwillingness to deal with a metaphysical problem more urgently demanding solution than any which his brilliant analysis has so successfully vanquished. We hasten to add that we are not prepared to enter into a contract to specify offhand the ele ments or even minutely to define the necessary limits of the solution. In his old edition Professor Bowne declared that every speculator is obliged by good taste and good faith to accept the existence of other persons like himself. But he immediately proceeds to show that there is no sound metaphysical warrant in his system for this conclusion. Since the Infinite mediates all interactions of the finite, including persons, all our states or affections are directly from the Infinite. These states of ours being given in their present variety and order,

*The volume has no index.

we construct a world of persons on the same principles we use in constructing a world of things. If the world of persons should disappear, then we should continue to have the same apparent interaction with persons, provided the Infinite had any interest in continuing to produce in us the appropriate states, and there would be no metaphysical method of detecting the deception. According to Professor Bowne, the true reason for admitting the existence of persons other than ourselves is found neither in psychology nor in metaphysics, but only in ethics. But the new edition contains no such declaration as this. So far as a careful reading has revealed, the problem is not stated and its solution appears to be wholly declined. Thinking that the discussion might have been transferred to the Theory of Thought and Knowledge, we turned to that volume-which is also without an index-but the only allusion we could discover is the assertion that the idealism founded on analysis of the knowing process alone necessarily falls into solipsism. The implication is that the idealism founded on the metaphysics of the object of knowledge does not lapse into solipsism or solitary egoism. This implication, as well as the omission of the ethical solution propounded in the earlier edition, involves the renunciation of the old view; but if Professor Bowne has substituted a metaphysical solution of this most urgent problem in his system we have failed to note it.

In October, 1882, Professor J. P. Gordy published in the Methodist Quarterly Review a luminous and sympathetic exposition and review of the first edition of Bowne's Metaphysics, at the close of which he appended a number of criticisms which, with a single exception, seem to us to have no force or relevancy. It involves a fatal inconsistency in Professor Bowne's philosophy, if we assume the existence of other persons on ethical grounds, and not because their existence explains certain otherwise inexplicable phenomena of our consciousness. As a matter of fact Professor Bowne, in his earlier edition, squarely admits that their existence is not necessary to furnish this explanation. To hold to the existence of other persons thus involves the sacrifice of the fundamental principle of the system that the essence of being is

action, that being and action are inseparable, that to be is to act, and that the inactive is the nonexistent. That which does nothing, produces no phenomena in our consciousness, is nothing for us. The alternative is plain. Either the whole system must be given up as untrue, because it leads to the bottomless absurdity of solipsism, or the ontological reality which is granted to persons involves an essentially different interaction of persons with other persons—and hence certainly with the body, and, indeed, with the whole physical system, at least indirectly, so far as it may be necessary to the accomplishment of this end-from that interaction which suffices to bind things together in an orderly whole. For us long study of Lotze and Bowne, as well as some familiarity with the general course of philosophy, has made the first branch of the alternative impossible; there is nothing for it but to adopt the second.

If the concession of ontological reality to persons is more than verbal it must be identical in kind, though of course not in degree, with the ontological reality of the Infinite; and, apart from the orderly energizing of the Infinite according to law which constitutes the constant world of things, theyGod and man-must sustain similar relations to that world of things existing in its orderliness. Man, within the limits of his dependence on the Infinite, must be truly a creative first cause whose orderly intelligence and efficient will produce otherwise nonexistent phenomena first in his own body, phenomenal like other matter though it be, next in the fixed and actual order of the external phenomenal world, and finally in the consciousness of his fellows, through the mediation of their bodies-thus, finally certifying to them his existence as a rational and causal being, that is, a person. When a rational person like Professor Bowne, for example, writes a book-a treatise on metaphysics, let us say-he conveys to a reader of that book-to the writer of this paper it may be-not only a phenomenal manifestation of the thinghood of the book in the black characters upon the paper, but a rational manifestation of his personality, because the phenomena are the bearers of a message, invisible, indeed, but with a meaning in it which evinces the very organism of reason itself. Of this mes

sage neither the world nor the Infinite is the author, but Professor Bowne, without whose agency it could never have projected itself into our consciousness. Within that orderly and rational sphere of phenomenal manifestation which we call the universe, as summing up the many in the one, and as the ceaseless energizing of the Infinite according to law, there are smaller but definitely marked circles of phenomenal manifestation as architecture, manufactures, spoken and written language-which harmonize, indeed, with the whole of which they form a part, but which evince also in themselves an independent organism of reason and a source of power or efficiency directed by reason; and at the center of each of these minor circles there is a person, a human spirit. "No man hath seen God at any time," nor hath any man looked upon his fellow. But the evidence for the existence of man, as we must put it in this connection, is of the same kind and, as far as we can see, of the same cogency of the evidence for the existence of God. As against the atheist and materialist we must add that the argument for the existence of God is of the same kind and the same cogency as the argument for the existence of man.

It is hardly possible to specify further within the space at our disposal the elements of the solution of the problem of finite personality, or even to unfold all its difficulties, some of which might give us serious trouble. Nor have we meant to feign an insight we do not possess. All we have undertaken is to indicate the broad outlines, both of the problem and of its solution. We cannot close this paper, however, without expressing our lasting obligations to Professor Bowne for his light and leading these many years; and this imperfect paper may end with the modest concluding sentence of his latest book, "So it seems to me; and I have set it down in the hope that so it may seem to others also."

fro. J Tigert.

ART. V.-LAO-TSZE AND HIS SYSTEM-A STUDY IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY.

NOTHING can be much more contemptible than the childish faith in charms, elixirs, exorcisms, magic arts, dreams of alchemy, and other superstitious follies held by the Chinese Taoists. Yet they pretend to trace their origin to one of the deepest and most spiritual thinkers of the human race. This man, Lâo-tsze, is an extremely noteworthy and significant phenomenon. Neither comparative philosophy nor comparative theology can pass him by. It is not too much to say, with Strauss and Torney, that, outside the great stream of revealed truth which took its rise with Abraham, no ancient system surpasses his in sublimity and depth of the knowledge of God, or in inwardness and ethical earnestness.

As to his life little is known. In this he is widely contrasted with Confucius. Of all that befell this revered sage of China we have minute accounts. We are taken into his study, his dining room, even into his bedchamber. His appearance is as familiar to us as that of Socrates or Shakespeare. We know how he dressed, how he acted at funerals, how he behaved to his superiors and inferiors, how he gave and received presents, how he conducted himself in thunderstorms, and what he ate with his rice. But no such intimacy is allowed us with Lâo-tsze. Legend has, of course, been busy with his memory. As if anxious not to be outdone by the Buddhists in their exaltation of Sakya-muni, Tâoist writers declare Lâo-tsze to have been a great spiritual being, the embodiment of Tâo, dwelling in an abode of matchless purity; without beginning and without cause; the ancestor of the original breath; without light, form, sound, voice; the basis of the fruitful earth and of the shining heaven, having neither ancestors nor descendants; so ruling heaven and earth as to bring about in stupendous cycles the production and decay of all created forms. Before his coming into this soiled and wretched world as Lâo-tsze he had been incarnate no less than eleven times. Other legend peddlers state that his mother at the sight of a falling star conceived him without a father; that he was not born, however, until

« PreviousContinue »