Our Boston Literary Letter

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OUR BOSTON LITERARY LETTER.

PHILOSOPHY, ANTIQUITIES AND HISTORY.

Prof Morris's Philosophical Series—Prof Watson on Kant—Dr Harris and His Quarterly—Goldwin Smith—Walt Whitman's New Book.

From Our Special Correspondent.  
  BOSTON, Tuesday, November 8.  
 

It is the era of the philosophers once more, if we may judge fram​ the revival of the literature of philosophy all over the western world, not only in Germany, but in England, and not only in England but in America, and not only in St Louis but in Chicago. In that city they have had a Philosophical society for some years, and now Griggs & Co, the principal Chicago publishers, announce for next year a series of ten or twelve volumes of "German Philosophical Classics for English Readers and Students," founded on the works of Leibunitz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which will furnish in effect a history of the most conspicuous and permanently influential movement in the history of German thought. Its object is to render reasonably accessible to the intelligent English reader a knowledge of German philosophy in its reader a knowledge of German philosophy in its leading outlines, and at the same time to give the special student a valuable introduction to more comprehensive studies in the same line. The series will be edited by Prof George S. Morris, who teaches logic, ethics and the history of philosophy at the university of Michigan and lectures also at the John Hopkins university in Baltimore and the school of philosophy in Concord. The writers of the different volumes are also many of them professors who have lectured at Concord. For example, a volume is promised on "Kant's Critique," by Prof Morris; on "Kant's Ethics," by President Porter of Yale; on Kant's Critique of Judgment" (æsthetics and natural theology), by Prof Robert Adamson of Manchester, Eng.; on "Schelling's Transcendental Idealism," by Prof John Watson, of Kingston, Ont.; on "Hegel's Logic," by Dr W. T. Harris of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy; and on "Hegel's Æsthetics," by Dr Kidney of the Episcopal divinity school at Faribault, Minn. There are other volumes proposed, without the authors' names,—on Fichte's "Science of Knowledge," Hagel's "Philosophy of History" and "Philosophy of Religion," and on Leibnitz. This is a very striking list of authors and of topics, and five out of the six authors named have given lectures at the Concord school. Most of them will also lecture there next summer.

Prof Morris in his initial volume, to be published early in the spring of 1882, will cover in part the same ground occupied by Prof Watson of Canada in his elaborate work," Kant and His English Critics," published by Macmillan last summer, and ably reviewed by Dr Harris in the last number of his journal. This review is mainly a brief statement of what the volume contains, but in it Dr Harris says concisely what will more and more be seen as true, that "the philosophy of ethics is the only positive result of the Kantian system." Of course this great thinker's work had other results, but rather as an overthrow of some unsound position, or a defense against a sound position unwisely attacked. Thus Dr Harris also says: "The views of Kant are in themselves of the greatest interest; but as related to the subjective idealists, as well as to the evolutionists, they are a sufficient fortress." Prof Watson takes a somewhat more laudatory view of what Kant accomplished than Dr Harris does, but agrees with him in his opinion of slight effect produced on Kant's work by what the evolutionists have discovered or asserted. Prof Watson says in speaking of the ground taken by Lewes in regard to inherited experience: "An organic structure is inherited, but experience is nothing, apart from self-consciousness, and self-consciousness is not banded down from one being to another. The organism indeed transmitted but experience is not transmitted; it is appropriated in virtue of intelligence." In regard to the general positions taken by Herbert Spencer, Prof Watson, like Dr Harris in times past, has some very searching and indeed quite destructive criticism; and at the outset he makes this keen comparison between the method of Kant and that of Spencer: "The method of Mr Spencer, unlike that of Kant, is a method of abstraction, although at times the opposite method of determination is followed. The contrast between Kant and Mr Spencer in this respect is, that while the former only drops into the method of abstraction from want of a sufficiently firm grasp of his own principles, the latter deliberately adopts the method of abstraction and is only inadvertently betrayed into making use of the method of determination." In other passages Prof Watson alludes to the imperfection of Kant's processes, as contrasted with the greatness of the thought of which his dry system was the vehicle, and particularly in chapter V, where in considering space and time, he says: "Kant here, as always, is greater than he was himself aware of;and that seems to me criticism of a very unsympathetic and uninstructive sort which closely scans the mere outward form of his theory, and fails to see behind the form an idea rich in suggestiveness and far-reaching in its issues."

Following the lead of Prof Caird, whose exposition of Kant is also published by Macmillan, Prof Watson finds himself at variance with another Scotch metaphysician or two - notably J. Hutchinson Stirling and Mr Balfour; and therefore his work is largely polemical; contending as he does against Spencer and Lewes, on one side, and against Balfour, Sedgwick and Stirling on the other. Perhaps it would be more exact to put Stirling by himself, for he is in fact, unique in philosophy, and like that Scotch woman who, being congratulated on the harmony of theological opinion between herself and her husband, (who had separated from the very last form of Scotch separatism,) replied, "I'm no sae sure aboot John." The Scotch mind is essentially controversial and this is seen in Prof Watson; but on the other hand nothing more conduces to clearness than to have an able antagonist whose position you must not only meet but state. Hence the great value of Prof Watson's book for what it professes to be, a "comparison of critical and empirical philosophy"—the latter term well expressing the general drift of the English mind in metaphysics. It is a book of subtile distinctions, of clear and unsparing insights, but it is critical rather than conclusive, and hardly suggests, as Kant's work always does, an unformulated something, greater and more inclusive than what can be drawn down into categories and set up in cock-fighting autonomies. This is natural enough in a first work, such as this volume is,—to be followed, as we hope, by other studies in philosophy, for the author is still young, and has but newly entered upon his task as an interpreter of philosophy.

Dr Harris, on the contrary, has been now for many years engaged in this work,—the first number of his "Journal of speculative Philosophy" having been published at St Louis in 1867, soon after the rejection of an article of his on Herbert Spencer by the North American Review, at the suggestion of the late Chauncey Wright; who after reading the manuscript in the summer of 186[torn away] gave dogmatic judgment upon it as follows: "Utterly without method, the article is very deficient in mere literary excellences, and, though freer than is usual with transcendentalists from astonishing expressions, it lacks at the same time the genuine transcendental merit of suggestiveness. It is the mere dry husk of Hagelianism,—dogmatic, without the only merit of dogmatism, distinctness of definition." med.00579.002.jpg To this verdict, for which there was some slight occasion (if the cradle is to be regarded as of more value than the baby), Mr Wright added certain scornful expressions implying that his valuable time had been taken up to not purpose in reading the manuscript. Dr Harris did what Dr Franklin did on a certain historical occasion,—he folded up this suit of intellectual garments in which he had been insulted, laid it away until the independence of his school of thought had been declared and admitted even by the North American Review, and then published the rejected article in his own journal, years afterward, at a time when it was read with respect all over the world, and even in Harvard college itself. What is more to the purpose, the rejection of his article led him at once to project and establish his journal, now nearly 15 years old, and far the best publication of the kind that has ever appeared in America if not in the world. Practically it illustrates the Kantian discovery that time and space are but forms of thought,—for its quarterly numbers appear without regard to the almanac,—that for April having just been published in October, and the July number, containing some of the Saratoga and Concord Kant lectures of last summer, being still in press. The last or April numbers opens with one of Dr Harris's frequent refutations of agnosticism, which, like the "invincible ignorance" in which it glories, must be constantly refuted in order to withstand it. Darkness, however, can be refuted by sunlight better than by any syllogism, however convincing. The most novel and interesting long article in the number is Mrs Talbot's felicitous translation of Dr William Preyer's "Psychogenesis," which is a long word signifying the birth or rather the development of a soul in young children. The author is one of the few scientific observers of the habits of young infants in respect to mental manifestation,—a subject which the American social science association has undertaken to investigate at the suggestion of Mrs Talbot. This paper states the case well and gives some facts not generally known concerning young children,—as for instance that they are all deaf when first born. The most suggestive chapter in the number is Mr Channing's "Sentences in Prose and Verse," many of which are original and others found in rare books. Of Mr Channing's own, I conclude, are these prose sentences:—

And also these picturesque verses:— "How strangely fair On round still star! which looks half-suffering from, And half-rejoicing in, its own strong tire; Making itself a lonelihood of light." "Friendship hath passed me like a ship at sea." "The lakelet now, no longer vexed with gusts, Replaces on her breast the pictured moon, Pearled round with stars." Dr Harris's journal appears to be the only publication now for which Mr Channing writes, and his sententious passages contrast strangely with other contents of these abstruse pages.

Goldwin Smith's "Lectures and Essays" are distinctly historical or biographical, with the exception of a few on economical or religious questions, and are written with that east and beauty of style which we long ago learned to admire in this author. The papers in the volume were chiefly written in Canada since Mr Smith has lived there, and several of them first appeared in the Canadian newspapers and magazines or in the New York Nation. They were collected into a book in Canada, but subsequently taken by the publishing house of Macmillan under its broad wing and issued in New York and London, though not printed so as Macmillan's books usually are, either in respect to type or paper. The subjects of the essays are very various—the greatness of Rome, the greatness of England (of course), that final contest between Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein, the life of Gen Wolfe, of Abraham Lincoln, of King Alfred, of Milton, of Falkland, of Jane Austen, of Keble, of Thomas Brassey—the prospect of "Communism," the "Ascent of Man," etc. This miscellaneous range gives him opportunity to speak of Cæsar and Pompey, Cicero and Cato (there is no mention of Hadrian's villa); of Alfred and Cromwell, of the Puritans generally, and of a great many other persons and things, all which he does well, without so much that is controversial as Prof Watson introduces, but with many a gird of mild retort upon his political opponents or literary antipathies in England and America. Some of his anecdotes are new, or at least forgotten, which amounts to the same thing. In the essay called "The Proposed Substitute for Religion," he cites the reply of Talleyrand when the French directory was in existence, to that director who had invented the new religion of theo-philanthropy. Finding that it did not go down very well, he asked the advice of Talleyrand. "I am not surprised" said the former bishop of Autn, "at the difficulty you experience. But since you ask me what to do, I recommend you to be crucified, and to rise again on the third day." No doubt this was sound advice, if the poor Frenchman could have acted on it. At the marriage of a German prince with an English princess, when the bridegroom said, "With all my worldly goods I thee endow," a voice from the circle of royal dukes responded, "The boots you stand in are not paid for." The essay on Lincoln is a review of the first volume of Lamon's Life of Lincoln, that phœnix among biographies,— "Like that self-begotten bird In the Arabian woods embost, That no second knows nor third And lay ere while a holocaust,"— which had too much truth in it, needful and needless, to make it profitable to publish another volume. Mr Smith seems to take rather a disparaging view of Lincoln, natural enough in an educated Englishman, but not becoming in a historian,—for Lincoln was one of the world-historical characters. His estimate of Cromwell is more just, and among other things he says: "Put Cromwell high or low, in the time of kings or out of it, he is hopelessly incongruous, incommensurable and out of place. He is, in fact, the man of the new world; his institutions, in the main, embody the organic principles of new world society; at Washington, not at Westminster, should be his statue." This is "a good notion," as Cromwell used to say, and some state that is "short on't," for heroes of its own,—Nebraska or Oregon, for example—might contribute a statue of Cromwell to the Capitol gallery.

John D. Champlin's "Young Folks' History of the War for the Union," published by Henry Holt & Co, is a big book full of facts and anecdotes, reasonably exact in its history, but shocking in its wood-cuts, especially its portraits of our worthies. The American features are not all that the æsthetic fancy craves, but they are not so hopelessly lost to all symmetry and dignity of expression as these cuts would imply. Calhoun, for example, though not a beautiful person, was a man that drew the attention of other men, and even Clay was not so ugly, with his enormous mouth and hollow cheeks as the common portraits make him out,— while Webster was a princely looking person. But in Mr Champlin's pages these three share a common fate and all look like scarecrows; while John Brown's grand, bearded face, here resembles nothing so much as one of those which boys carve out of a pumpkin or a block of wood. Yet the book itself is entertaining and will give boys a good conception of what their fathers fought for on each side; for it does justice to the South has well as to the North. The account of Abraham Lincoln is pleasing and contains many of his good sayings.

It was a great age, men will say hereafter, and a grand country that could produce in one generation three figures for posterity to gaze on like John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman,—men unlike each other and unlike all others, such as no other land produced or could produce; embodied heroism, embodied sense and sensibility, embodied imagination. So I view the three men, in the mass of their character,—not considering the loose and trivial details which to many eyes have seemed to be the whole character. If it were possible to see the genius of a great people throwing itself now into this form, now into that,— as the prairie wheat-field takes the quick shape of the passing wind - it would be just to say that we had seen this mystery in the "plain heroic magnitude of mind" with which Brown met death,—the broad and patient wisdom of Lincoln,—and in the immense landscape of Whitman's teeming and unharvested imagination. His "Leaves of Grass," as he has now published them at Osgood's in Boston, complete the vast picture of his mind and bring out not merely the confusion of details, which we could only see at first, by the light of poetic flashes—but the broad unity of the piece. It is as if the ancient seamen had found their ocean-god slumbering along his shores, and upon near view could only see a hand here, an eyebrow there, a floating mass of beard elsewhere, — but when they stood back from the strand, or best if they climbed a hill of prospect, the symmetry and articulation of the mighty frame plainly appeared, and they knew by sight their unconscious divinity, Neptune. There is in Whitman's verse, more than in any other modern poet's, what Keats called "that large utterance of the early gods,"—an indistinct grandeur of expression not yet molded to the melody of Shakespeare, Lucretius, and Æschylus, but like what Keats again called "the overwhelming voice of huge Enceladus":— "Whose ponderous syllables, like sullen waves In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rock Came booming thus,"—, "I announce natural persons to arise, I announce justice triumphant, I announce uncompromising liberty and equality, I announce the justification of candor and the justifi- 
  cation of pride. I announce that the identity of these states is a sin- 
  gle identity only, I announce the Union more and more compact, indis- 
  soluble, I announce splendors and majesties to make all the 
  previous politics of the earth insignificant." It is when he speaks of Lincoln and the civil war that Whitman is least indistinct, and no other of our poets - no nor all of them together - has so well caught and rendered the spirit of that struggle as he has done it. As has been remarked by others no doubt, and more than once, Whitman gives the whole episode of slavery in its relation to the war, in the strange fragment called ETHIOPIA SALUTING THE COLORS. Who are you, dusky woman, so ancient, hardly, 
  human, With your woolly-white and turbaned head, and 
  bare bony feet? Why, rising by the roadside here, do you colors 
  greet? 'Tis while our army lines Carolina's sands and pines, Forth from thy hovel door though Ethiopia com'st to 
  me, As under doughty Sherman I march toward the sea. Me, master, years a hundred since from my parents 
  sundered. A little child they caught me as the savage beast 
  is caught, Then hither me across the sea, the cruel slaver 
  brought. No further does she say, but lingering all the day. Her high borne turbaned head she wags, and rolls 
  her darkling eye, And courtesies to the regiments, the guidons moving 
  by. What is it, fateful woman, so blear, hardly human? Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red 
  and green? Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or 
  have seen?

This new volume of Whitman's contains philosophy, antiquities and history all in one, and is the book of the year in Boston which will bear the most reading and study. The only one to compare with it is another of Osgood's publicans, Mr Cooke's "Ralph Waldo Emerson,"—and the two are curiously related to each other. But for Emerson, Whitman might never have written, or written in another form, and what can be further from the Emersonian mode of writing than these unformed and almost lawless numbers, this broad range over the most prosaic elements of life, as well as those regions of ideal beauty in which the genius of Emerson delights?