Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/256

 238 Later Philosophy and reason lead to atomism or materialism, pantheism, and theism respectively. With the simplicity that comes from undiluted sincerity, Harris repeats this argument over and over again, finding in it the clue to fruitful insight in all fields of human interest. It is ll the weapon with which he refutes all empiricism, which bases J truth on the knowledge of particulars. All such philosophy, he says, stops at the stage of understanding and fails to note that a particular fact possesses whatever unity or character it has only in virtue of some universal. Time, space, and causaHty cannot, therefore, be derived from particular experiences, but are, as Kant maintained, the a priori conditions of all experience. In social philosophy Harris follows Hegel rather closely with a characteristic New England emphasis on the freedom of the I will. Thus the state is "a social unit in which the individual I exists not for himself, but for the use of that unit"; but social •order is not to be secured by external authority, but by free choice. Like his master, Hegel, Harris inteUectualizes religion and art, the function of both being to reveal ultimate or philo- sophic truth, religion in the form of dogmatic faith, art by sen- suous representation which "piques the soul to ascend out of the stage of sense perception into reflection and free thought." Like all HegeHans and most believers in the adequacy of one system, Harris frequently thinks he has gained insight when he has translated a fact into his own terminology'; and the allegoric method of interpreting works of art and great literary masterpieces, notably Dante's Divine Comedy and Goethe's Faust, easily lent itself to that result. Still the general result of Harris's theoretic as well as his practical activity was undoubtedly to broaden the basis and subject matter of Ameri- can philosophy. His Journal of Speculative Philosophy (1867- 1 93) the first journal in the English language devoted exclusively ' to philosophy, made the thought of Plato and Aristotle as well as that of the German philosophers accessible to American j readers. When it was objected that America needed something jmore original, he justly replied that an originality which 'cherished its own idiosyncrasies was despicable. His convic- ' Harris, for instance, believed that he found a new insight into the nature of light when he characterized it as "a point making itself valid outside of itself. " See a similar account of gravity, in Psychologic Foundations of Education, p. 22.