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urging of the obvious. However it may be with a few specialized schools of men, almost everybody takes it as a matter of course that ideas influence action and help determine the subsequent course of events. Yet there is a purpose in this insistence. Most persons draw the line at a certain kind of general ideas. They are especially prone to regard the ideas which constitute philosophic theories as practically innocuous—as more or less amiable speculations significant at the most for moments of leisure, in moments of relief from preoccupation with affairs. Above all, men take the particular general ideas which happen to affect their own conduct of life as normal and inevitable. Pray what other ideas would any sensible man have? They forget the extent to which these ideas originated as parts of a remote and technical theoretical system, which by multitudes of non-reflective channels has infiltrated into their habits of imagination and behavior. An expert intellectual anatomist, my friends, might dissect you and find Platonic and Aristotelian tissues, organs from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Locke and Descartes, in the make-up of the ideas by which you are habitually swayed, and find, indeed, that they and other thinkers of whose names you have never heard constitute a larger part of your mental structure than does the Calvin or Kant, Darwin or Spencer, Hegel or Emerson, Bergson or Browning to whom you yield conscious allegiance.
Philosophers themselves are naturally chiefly responsible for the ordinary estimate of their own influence, or lack of influence. They have been taken mostly at their own word as to what they were doing, and what for the most part they have pretended to do is radically different from what they have actually done. They are quite negligible as seers and reporters of ultimate reality, or the essential natures of things. And it is in this aspect that they have mostly fancied seeing themselves. Their actual office has been quite other. They have told about nature and life and society in terms of collective human desire and aspiration as these were determined by contemporary difficulties and struggles.
I have spoken thus far as if the influence of general ideas upon action were likely to be beneficial. It goes against the grain to attribute evil to the workings of intelligence. But we might as well face the dilemma. What is called pure thought, thought freed from the empirical contingencies of life, would, even if it existed, be irrelevant to the guidance of action. For the latter always operates amid the circumstance of contingencies. And thinking which is colored by time and place must always be of a mixed quality. In part, it will detect and hold fast to more permanent tendencies and arrangements; in part, it will take the limitations of its own period as necessary and universal—even as intrinsically desirable.
The traits which give thinking effectiveness for the good give it also potency for harm. A physical catastrophe, an earthquake or conflagration, acts only where it happens. While its effects endure, it passes away. But it is of the nature of ideas to be abstract: that is to say, severed from the circumstances of their origin, and through embodiment in language capable of operating in remote climes and alien situations. Time heals physical ravages, but it may only accentuate the evils of an intellectual catastrophe—for by no lesser name can we call a systematic intellectual error. To one who is professionally preoccupied with philosophy there is much in its history which is profoundly depressing. He sees ideas which were not only natural but useful in their native time and place, figuring in foreign contexts so as to formulate defects as virtues and to give rational sanction to brute facts, and to oppose alleged eternal truths to progress. He sees movements which might have passed away with change of circumstance as casually as they arose, acquire persistence and dignity because thought has taken cognizance of them and given them intellectual names. The witness of history is that to think in general and abstract terms is dangerous; it elevates ideas beyond the situations in which they were born and charges them with we know not what menace for the future. And in the past the danger has been the greater because philosophers have so largely purported to be concerned not with contemporary problems of living, but with essential Truth and Reality viewed under the form of eternity.
In bringing these general considerations to a close, I face an embarrassment. I must choose some particular period of intellectual history for more concrete illustration of the mutual relationship of philosophy and practical social affairs—which latter, for the sake of brevity, I term Politics. One is tempted to choose Plato. For in spite of the mystic and transcendental coloring of his thought, it was he who defined philosophy as the science of the State, or the most complete and organized whole known to man; it is no accident that his chief work is termed the "Republic." In modern times, we are struck by the fact that English philosophy from Bacon to John Stuart Mill has been cultivated by men of affairs rather than by professors, and with a direct outlook upon social interests. In France, the great period of philosophy, the period of les philosophes, was the time in which were forged the ideas which connect in particular with the French Revolution and in general with the conceptions which spread so rapidly through the civilized world, of the indefinite perfectibility of humanity, the rights of man, and the promotion of a society as wide as humanity, based upon allegiance to reason.
Somewhat arbitrarily I have, however, selected some aspects of classic German thought for my illustrative material. Partly, I suppose, because one is piqued by the apparent challenge which its highly technical, professorial and predominantly a priori character offers to the proposition that there is close connection between abstract thought and the tendencies of collective life. More to the point, probably, is the fact that the heroic age of German thought lies almost within the last century, while the creative period of continental thought lies largely in the eighteenth century, and that of British thought still earlier. It was Taine, the Frenchman, who said that all the leading ideas of the present day were produced in Germany between 1780 and 1830. Above all, the Germans, as we say, have philosophy in their blood. Such phrases generally mean something not about hereditary qualities, but about the social conditions under which ideas propagate and circulate.
Now Germany is the modern state which provides the greatest facilities for general ideas to take effect through social inculcation. Its system of education is adapted to that end. Higher schools and universities in Germany are really, not just nominally, under the control of the state and part of the state life. In spite of freedom of academic instruction when once a teacher is installed in office, the political authorities have always taken a hand, at critical junctures, in determining the selection of teachers in subjects that had a direct bearing upon political policies. Moreover, one of the chief functions of the universities is the preparation of future state officials. Legislative activity is distinctly subordinate to that of administration conducted by a trained civil service, or, if you please, bureaucracy. Membership in this bureaucracy is dependent upon university training. Philosophy, both directly and indirectly, plays an unusually large rôle in the training. The faculty of law does not chiefly aim at the preparation of practicing lawyers. Philosophies of jurisprudence are essential parts of the law teaching; and every one of the classic philosophers took a hand in writing a philosophy of Law and of the State. Moreover, in the theological faculties, which are also organic parts of state-controlled institutions, the theology and higher criticism of Protestant Germany have been developed, and developed also in close connection with philosophical systems—like those of Kant, Schleiermacher and Hegel. In short, the educational and administrative agencies of Germany provide ready-made channels through which philosophic ideas may flow on their way to practical affairs.
Political public opinion hardly exists in Germany in the sense in which it obtains in France, Great Britain or this country. So far as it exists, the universities may be said to be its chief organs. They, rather than the newspapers, crystallize it and give it articulate expression. Instead of expressing surprise at the characteristic utterances of university men with reference to the great war, we should then rather turn to the past history in which the ideas now uttered were generated.
In an account of German intellectual history sufficiently extensive we should have to go back at least to Luther. Fortunately, for our purposes, what he actually did and taught is not so important as the more recent tradition concerning his peculiarly Germanic status and office. All peoples are proud of all their great men. Germany is proud of Luther as its greatest national hero. But while most nations are proud of their great men, Germany is proud of itself rather for producing Luther. It finds him as a Germanic product quite natural—nay, inevitable. A belief in the universal character of his genius thus naturally is converted into a belief of the essentially universal quality of the people who produced him.