Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/137

No. 2.] from God to man. Recent Romanticism demands a world in which the human being shall have a fighting chance, in which the cards are not stacked against him from the start, in which things can happen that were not on the bills, which, with effort, he can fashion to his purposes and ideals, in which he can succeed and fail. It wants the world back again as it revealed itself to ordinary unreflecting common sense.

There is much that is good in these new tendencies. For one thing they have put the old classical systems on their mettle and are making them justify their existence.

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es um es zu besitzen.

Without antagonisms, without battles to fight, philosophy easily falls to sleep, sinks into "the deep slumber of a decided opinion." Conflict is better than self-satisfied assurance or indifference. War is the Father of all and the King of all, in the domain of mind as everywhere else, and there is nothing so dead as an accepted creed. "Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post," Mill is right, "as soon as there is no enemy in the field." A philosophy that is done, is a philosophy that is done for.

Des Menschen Thätigkeit kann allzuleicht erschlaffen, Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh'. In addition to the important service which the new thinkers have rendered in helping to rejuvenate philosophy, they have also aided in focusing attention upon points that are apt to be lost sight of. They have again pushed to the front the question of the relation of natural science and philosophy, the whole knowledge-problem, and have emphasized the significance of human values in the scheme of things: questions which call for ever new answers with the progress of human inquiry. They have warned us against mistaking the universal frame-work of reality for reality itself, and have insisted on our keeping close to concrete experience. They protest against a one-sided metaphysic, a metaphysic that fails to do justice to all the varied experiences of mankind and interprets the world in terms of mere aspects of experience, conceiving it as a physical, logical, or teleological machine. They refuse to accept as complete the