enlightenment, that the only reliable method of discovery or interpretation was that of the triumphant mechanical sciences. The French philosopher may have exaggerated the virtue, and the German romantics
the absurdity, of the application of the criteria of the natural sciences
to human affairs. But, whatever else it may have done, the romantic
reaction against the claims of scienti fic materialism did set up permanent doubts about the competence of the sciences of manpsychology, sociology, anthropology, physiology-to take over, and put an end to the scandalous chaos of, such human activities as history,
or the arts, or religious, philosophical, social, and political thought. As
Bayle and Voltaire had mocked the theological reactionaries of their
time, so the romantics derided the dogmatic materialists of the school
of Condillac and Holbach; and their favourite field of battle was that
of aesthetic experience.
If you wanted to know what it was that made a work of art; if
you wanted to know, for example, why particular colours and forms
produced a particular piece of painting or sculpture; why particular
styles of writing or collocations of words produced particularly strong
or memorable effects upon particular human beings in specific states
of awareness; or why certain musical sounds, when they were juxtaposed, were sometimes called shallow and at other times profound, or lyrical, or vulgar, or morally noble or degraded or characteristic of
this or that national or individual trait; then no general hypothesis of
the kind adopted in physics, no general description or classification
or subsumption under scientific laws of the behaviour of sound, or
of patches of paint, or of black marks on paper, or the utterances of
human beings, would begin to suffice to answer these questions.
What were the non-scientific modes of explanation which could
explain life, thought, art, religion, as the sciences could not? The
romantic metaphysicians returned to ways of knowing which they
attributed to the Platonic tradition; spiritual insight, 'intuitive' knowledge of connections incapable of scientific analysis. Schelling (whose views on the working of the artistic imagination, and in particular
about the nature of genius, are, for all their obscurity, arrestingly
original and imaginative) spoke in terms of a universal mystical
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vision. He saw the universe as a single spirit, a great, animate organism,
a soul or self, evolving from one spiritual stage into another. Individual
human beings were, as it were, 'finite centres', 'aspects', 'moments',
of this enormous cosmic entity-the 'living whole', the world soul,
the transcendental Spirit or Idea, descriptions of which almost recall
the fantasies of early gnosticism. Indeed the sceptical Swiss historian,
Jakob Burckhardt, said that when he listened to Schelling he began
to see creatures with many arms and feet advancing upon him. The
conclusions drawn from this apocalyptic vision are less eccentric. The
finite centres-the individual human beings-understand each other,
their surroundings and themselves, the past and to some degree the
present and the future too, but not in the same sort of way in which
they communicate with one another. When, for example, I maintain
that I understand another human being- that I am sympathetic to
him, follow, 'enter into' the workings of his mind, and that I am
for this reason particularly well qualified to form a j udgement of his
character-of his 'inner' self- 1 am claiming to be doing something
which cannot be reduced to, on the one hand, a set of systematically
classified operations and, on the other, a method of deriving further
information from them which, once discovered, could be reduced to
a technique, and taught to, and applied more or less mechanically by,
a receptive pupil. Understanding men or ideas or movements, or the
outlooks of individuals or groups, is not reducible to a sociological
classification into types of behaviour with predictions based on scientific experiment and carefully tabulated statistics of observations.
There is no substitute for sympathy, understanding, insight, 'wisdom'.
Similarly, Schelling taught that if you wanted to know what it
was, for example, that made a work of art beautiful, or what it was
that gave its own unique character to a historical period, it was
necessary to employ methods different from those of experiment,
classification, induction, deduction, or the other techniques of the
natural sciences. According to this doctrine, if you wished to understand what, for example, had brought about the vast spiritual upheaval of the French Revolution, or why Goethe's Faust was a profounder
work than the tragedies of Voltaire, then to apply the methods of
the kind of psychology and sociology adumbrated by, say, Condillac
or Condorcet would not prove rewarding. Unless you had a capacity
for imaginative insight-for understanding the 'inner', the mental and
emotional-the 'spiritual' -life of individuals, societies, historical
periods, the 'inner purposes' or 'essences' of institutions, nations,
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churches, you would for ever remain unable to explain why certain
combinations form 'unities', whereas others do not: why particular
sounds or words or acts are relevant to, fit with, certain other elements
in the 'whole', while others fail to do so. And this no matter whether
you are 'explaining' the character of a man, the rise of a movement
or a party, the process of artistic creation, the characteristics of an
age, or of a school of thought, or of a mystical view of reality. Nor is
this, according to the view I am discussing, an accident. For reality
is not merely organic but unitary: which is a way of saying that its
ingredients are not merely connected by causal relationships-they do
not merely form a pattern or harmony so that each element is seen
to be 'necessitated' by the disposition of all other elements-but each
'reRects' or 'expresses' the others; for there is a single 'Spirit' or 'Idea'
or 'Absolute' of which all that exists is a unique aspect, or an articulation-and the more of an aspect, the more vividly articulated, the
'deeper', the 'more real' it is. A philosophy is 'true' in the proportion
in which it expresses the phase which the Absolute or the Idea has
reached at each stage of development. A poet possesses genius, a
statesman greatness, to the degree to which they are inspired by, and
express, the 'spirit' of their milieu-state, culture, nation-which is
itself an 'incarnation' of the self-realisation of the spirit of the universe
conceived pantheistically as a kind of ubiquitous divinity. And a work
of art is dead or artificial or trivial if it is a mere accident in this development. Art, philosophy, religion are so many efforts on the part of finite creatures to catch and articulate an 'echo' of the cosmic harmony.
Man is finite, and his vision will always be fragmentary; the 'deeper'
the individual, the larger and richer the fragment. Hence the lofty
contempt which such thinkers express for the 'merely' empirical or