Educational Philosophy Theory

A sportive friend of mine, a mighty golfer, is fond of saying, "You Radicals want to play the game without the rules." To which I am accustomed mildly to retort, "Not at all; but we think the rules unfair, and so we want to see them altered."

Now life is a very peculiar game, which differs in many important respects even from compulsory football. The Rugby scrimmage is mere child's play by the side of it. There's no possibility of shirking it. A medical certificate won't get you off; whether you like it or not, play you must in your appointed order. We are all unwilling competitors. Nobody asks our naked little souls beforehand whether they would prefer to be born into the game or to remain, unfleshed, in the limbo of non-existence. Willy nilly, every one of us is thrust into the world by an irresponsible act of two previous players; and once there, we must play out the set as best we may to the bitter end, however little we like it or the rules that order it.

That, it must be admitted, makes a grave distinction from the very outset between the game of human life and any other game with which we are commonly acquainted. It also makes it imperative upon the framers of the rules so to frame them that no one player shall have an unfair or unjust advantage over any of the others. And since the penalty of bad play, or bad success in the match, is death, misery, starvation, it behoves the rule-makers to be more scrupulously particular as to fairness and equity than in any other game like cricket or tennis. It behoves them to see that all start fair, and that no hapless beginner is unduly handicapped. To compel men to take part in a match for dear life, whether they wish it or not, and then to insist that some of them shall wield bats and some mere broom-sticks, irrespective of height, weight, age, or bodily infirmity, is surely not fair. It justifies the committee in calling for a revision.

But things are far worse than even that in the game as actually played in Europe. What shall we say of rules which decide dogmatically that one set of players are hereditarily entitled to be always batting, while another set, less lucky, have to field for ever, and to be fined or imprisoned for not catching? What shall we say of rules which give one group a perpetual right to free lunch in the tent, while the remainder have to pick up what they can for themselves by gleaning among the stubble? How justify the principle in accordance with which the captain on one side has an exclusive claim to the common ground of the club, and may charge every player exactly what he likes for the right to play upon it?—especially when the choice lies between playing on such terms, or being cast into the void, yourself and your family. And then to think that the ground thus tabooed by one particular member may be all Sutherlandshire, or, still worse, all Westminster! Decidedly, these rules call for instant revision; and the unprivileged players must be submissive indeed who consent to put up with them.

Friends and fellow-members, let us cry with one voice, "The links for the players!"

Once more, just look at the singular rule in our own All England club, by which certain assorted members possess a hereditary right to veto all decisions of the elective committee, merely because they happen to be their fathers' sons, and the club long ago very foolishly permitted the like privilege to their ancestors! That is an irrational interference with the liberty of the players which hardly anybody nowadays ventures to defend in principle, and which is only upheld in some half-hearted way (save in the case of that fossil anachronism, the Duke of Argyll) by supposed arguments of convenience. It won't last long now; there is talk in the committee of "mending or ending it." It shows the long-suffering nature of the poor blind players at this compulsory game of national football that they should ever for one moment permit so monstrous an assumption—permit the idea that one single player may wield a substantive voice and vote to outweigh tens of thousands of his fellow-members!

These questions of procedure, however, are after all small matters. It is the real hardships of the game that most need to be tackled. Why should one player be born into the sport with a prescriptive right to fill some easy place in the field, while another has to fag on from morning to night in the most uninteresting and fatiguing position? Why should pâté de foie gras and champagne-cup in the tent be so unequally distributed? Why should those who have made fewest runs and done no fielding be admitted to partake of these luxuries, free of charge, while those who have borne the brunt of the fight, those who have suffered from the heat of the day, those who have contributed most to the honour of the victory, are turned loose, unfed, to do as they can for themselves by hook or by crook somehow? These are the questions some of us players are now beginning to ask ourselves; and we don't find them efficiently answered by the bald statement that we "want to play the game without the rules," and that we ought to be precious glad the legislators of the club haven't made them a hundred times harder against us.

No, no; the rules themselves must be altered. Time was, indeed, when people used to think they were made and ordained by divine authority. "Cum privilegio" was the motto of the captains. But we know very well now that every club settles its own standing orders, and that it can alter and modify them as fundamentally as it pleases. Lots of funny old saws are still uttered upon this subject—"There must always be rich and poor;" "You can't interfere with economical laws;" "If you were to divide up everything to-morrow, at the end of a fortnight you'd find the same differences and inequalities as ever." The last-named argument (I believe it considers itself by courtesy an argument) is one which no self-respecting Radical should so much as deign to answer. Nobody that I ever heard of for one moment proposed to "divide up everything," or, for that matter, anything: and the imputation that somebody did or does is a proof either of intentional malevolence or of crass stupidity. Neither should be encouraged; and you encourage them by pretending to take them seriously. It is the initial injustices of the game that we Radicals object to—the injustices which prevent us from all starting fair and having our even chance of picking up a livelihood. We don't want to "divide up everything"—a most futile proceeding; but we do want to untie the legs and release the arms of the handicapped players. To drop metaphor at last, it is the conditions we complain about. Alter the conditions, and there would be no need for division, summary or gradual. The game would work itself out spontaneously without your intervention.

The injustice of the existing set of rules simply appals the Radical. Yet oddly enough, this injustice itself appeals rather to the comparative looker-on than to the heavily-handicapped players in person. They, poor creatures, dragging their log in patience, have grown so accustomed to regarding the world as another man's oyster, that they put up uncomplainingly for the most part with the most patent inequalities. Perhaps 'tis their want of imagination that makes them unable to conceive any other state of things as even possible—like the dog who accepts kicking as the natural fate of doghood. At any rate, you will find, if you look about you, that the chief reformers are not, as a rule, the ill-used classes themselves, but the sensitive and thinking souls who hate and loathe the injustice with which others are treated. Most of the best Radicals I have known were men of gentle birth and breeding. Not all: others, just as earnest, just as eager, just as chivalrous, sprang from the masses. Yet the gently-reared preponderate. It is a common Tory taunt to say that the battle is one between the Haves and the Have-nots. That is by no means true. It is between the selfish Haves, on one side, and the unselfish Haves, who wish to see something done for the Have-nots, on the other. As for the poor Have-nots themselves, they are mostly inarticulate. Indeed, the Tory almost admits as much when he alters his tone and describes the sympathising and active few as "paid agitators."

For myself, however, I am a born Conservative. I hate to see any old custom or practice changed; unless, indeed, it is either foolish or wicked—like most existing ones.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) marks the beginning of a turning point in philosophy. He was born in Königsberg, Prussia, where he spent most of his life. A liberal in politics, he was influenced by the ideas of Rousseau, and sympathised with the French Revolution, at least in the early stages. The other great influence on his thought was science, which at the time was making spectacular advances. Kant himself made an important contribution to science, particularly in his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755). In this, where he put forward the nebular hypothesis for the formation of the solar system, later developed by Laplace, and now generally accepted.

When Kant began his intellectual activity, German philosophy had reached a dead end. The brilliant flashes of inspiration that characterised the thought of Leibniz did not really add up to a coherent school of philosophy. After his death, Christian Wolff tried to turn it into a system, but succeeded only in vulgarising it. In Wolff’s hands, Leibniz’s profound intuitions about the world became transformed into the most arid formalism. Kant was repelled by this metaphysical speculation, which attempted to solve the mysteries of the universe, not by looking at nature, but by endless abstract reasoning. Meanwhile, in the real world, a new spirit was stirring. The natural sciences were developing fast, especially in Britain and France. Even in sleepy Germany, where the Thirsty Years’ War had paralysed progress, there was a renewal of culture in the Aufkl÷rung, the German equivalent of the French Enlightenment. Kant was the true child of his times.

His most important work, the Critique of Pure Reason, was first published in 1781, when he was 57 years old, although it was subsequently revised in the second edition in 1787. In this work, Kant attempts to resolve the problem of knowledge, which had caused a crisis in philosophy, the clearest expression of which was the subjective idealism of Berkeley and the scepticism of Hume. Kant’s declared aim was to finish off the old metaphysics which "appears to furnish an arena specially adapted for the display of skill or the exercise of strength in mock-contests—a field in which no combatant ever yet succeeded in gaining an inch of ground, in which, at least, no victory was ever yet crowned with permanent possession." (Op. cit., p.11.)

The great successes of natural science, especially in Britain, meant that knowledge could not be confined to mere abstract speculation, which sucked its theories out of its thumb. Determined to break with this "metaphysics," Kant decided that it was necessary to go back to fundamentals. He decided to tackle the thorny question of how true knowledge was to be obtained. On the one hand, the striking advances of natural science pointed the way forward. All those questions about the nature of the universe and man’s place in it could not be solved by abstract speculation, but only by observation and experiment.

The task of the sciences is not merely to collect a heap of facts. It is to obtain a rational insight into the workings of nature. For this, mere generalisations are insufficient. Thinking must not be passive but active, as Kant understood. It is not an accident that the title of his greatest work refers to Reason (Vernunft), which he clearly distinguishes from mere Understanding (Verstand). But are the forms of reason adequate to comprehend reality? Kant subjected these logical forms to a searching criticism, and showed that the traditional logic falls into a state of contradiction (antimony). Kant showed that it was possible to derived diametrically opposite conclusions from the same propositions. But in Kant, this contradiction remains unresolved.

Britain is now the centre of civilisation. Will it always be so? Is our commercial supremacy decaying or not? Have we begun to reach the period of inevitable decline? Or is decline indeed inevitable at all? Might a nation go on being great for ever? If so, are we that nation? If not, have we yet arrived at the moment when retrogression becomes a foregone conclusion? These are momentous questions. Dare I try, under the mimosas on the terrace, to resolve them?

Most people have talked of late as though the palmy days of England were fairly over. The down grade lies now before us. But, then, so far as I can judge, most people have talked so ever since the morning when Hengist and Horsa, Limited, landed from their three keels in the Isle of Thanet. Gildas is the oldest historian of these islands, and his work consists entirely of a good old Tory lament in the Ashmead-Bartlett strain upon the degeneracy of the times and the proximate ruin of the British people. Gildas wrote some fourteen hundred years ago or thereabouts—and the country is not yet quite visibly ruined. On the contrary, it seems to the impartial eye a more eligible place of residence to-day than in the stirring times of the Saxon invasion. Hence, for the last two or three centuries, I have learned to discount these recurrent Jeremiads of Toryism, and to judge the question of our decadence or progress by a more rational standard.

There is only one such rational standard; and that is, to discover the causes and conditions of our commercial prosperity, and then to inquire whether those causes and conditions are being largely altered or modified by the evolution of new phases. If they are, England must begin to decline; if they are not, her day is not yet come. Home Rule she will survive; even the Eight Hours bogey, we may presume, will not finally dispose of her.

Now, the centre of civilisation is not a fixed point. It has varied from time to time, and may yet vary. In the very earliest historical period, there was hardly such a thing as a centre of civilisation at all. There were civilisations in Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Etruria; discrete civilisations of the river valleys, mostly, which scarcely came into contact with one another in their first beginnings; any more than our own came into contact once with the civilisations of China, of Japan, of Peru, of Mexico. As yet there was no world-commerce, no mutual communication of empire with empire. It was in the Ægean and the eastern basin of the Mediterranean that navigation first reached the point where great commercial ports and free intercourse became possible. The Phoenicians, and later the Greeks, were the pioneers of the new era. Tyre, Athens, Miletus, Rhodes, occupied the centre of the nascent world, and bound together Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, Sicily, and Italy in one mercantile system. A little later, Hellas itself enlarged, so as to include Syracuse, Byzantium, Alexandria, Cyrene, Cumae, Neapolis, Massilia. The inland sea became "a Greek lake." But as navigation thus slowly widened to the western Mediterranean basin, the centre of commerce had to shift perforce from Hellas to the mid-point of the new area. Two powerful trading towns occupied such a mid-point in the Mediterranean—Rome and Carthage; and they were driven to fight out the supremacy of the world (the world as it then existed) between them. With the Roman Empire, the circle extended so as to take in the Atlantic coasts, Gaul, Spain, and Britain, which then, however, lay not at the centre but on the circumference of civilisation. During the Middle Ages, when navigation began to embrace the great open sea as well as the Mediterranean, a double centre sprang up: the Italian Republics, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, were still the chief carriers; but the towns of Flanders, Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp began to compete with them, and the Atlantic states, France, England, the Low Countries, rose into importance. By and by, as time goes on, the discoveries of Columbus and of Vasco di Gama open out new tracks. Suddenly commerce is revolutionised. France, England, Spain, become nearer to America and India than Italy; so Italy declines; while the Atlantic states usurp the first place as the centres of civilisation.

Our own age brings fresh seas into the circle once more. It is no longer the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, or the Indian Ocean that alone count; the Pacific also begins to be considered. China, Japan, the Cape; Chili, Peru, the Argentine; California, British Columbia, Australia, New Zealand; all of them are parts of the system of to-day; civilisation is world-wide.

Has this change of area altered the central position of England? Not at all, save to strengthen it. If you look at the hemisphere of greatest land, you will see that England occupies its exact middle. Insular herself, and therefore all made up of ports, she is nearer all ports in the world than any other country is or ever can be. I don't say that this insures for her perpetual dominion, such as Virgil prophesied for the Roman Empire; but I do say it makes her a hard country to beat in commercial competition. It accounts for Liverpool, London, Glasgow, Newcastle; it even accounts in a way for Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Sheffield. England now stands at the mathematical centre of the practical world, and unless some Big Thing occurs to displace her, she must continue to stand there. It takes a great deal to upset the balance of an entire planet.

Is anything now displacing her? Well, there is the fact that railways are making land-carriage to-day more important relatively to water-carriage than at any previous period. That may, perhaps, in time shift the centre of the world from an island like England to the middle of a great land area, like Chicago or Moscow. And, no doubt, if ever the centre shifts at all, it will shift towards Western America, or rather the prairie region. But, just at present, what are the greatest commercial towns of the world? All ports to a man. And the day when it will be otherwise, if ever, seems still far distant. Look at the newest countries. What are their great focal points? Every one of them ports. Melbourne and Sydney; Rio, Buenos Ayres, and Valparaiso; Cape Town, San Francisco, Bombay, Calcutta, Yokohama. Chicago itself, the most vital and the quickest grower among modern towns, owes half its importance to the fact that there water-carriage down the Great Lakes begins; though it owes the other half, I admit, to the converse fact that all the great trans-continental railways have to bend south at that point to avoid Lake Michigan. Still, on the whole, I think, as long as conditions remain what they are, the commercial supremacy of England is in no immediate danger. It is these great permanent geographical factors that make or mar a country, not Eight Hours Bills or petty social reconstructions. Said the Lord Mayor of London to petulant King James, when he proposed to remove the Court to Oxford, "May it please your Majesty not to take away the Thames also."

"But our competitors? We are being driven out of our markets." Oh, yes, if that's all you mean, I don't suppose we shall always be able in everything to keep up our exclusive position. Our neighbours, who (bar the advantage of insularity, which means a coast and a port always close at hand) seem nearly as well situated as we are for access to the world-markets, are beginning to wake up and take a slice of the cake from us. Germany is manufacturing; Belgium is smelting; Antwerp is exporting; America is occupying her own markets. But that's a very different thing indeed from national decadence. We may have to compete a little harder with our rivals, that's all. The Boom may be over; but the Thames remains: the geographical facts are still unaltered. And notice that all the time while there's been this vague talk about "bad times"—income-tax has been steadily increasing, London has been steadily growing, every outer and visible sign of commercial prosperity has been steadily spreading. Have our watering-places shrunk? Have our buildings been getting smaller and less luxurious? If Antwerp has grown, how about Hull and Cardiff? "Well, perhaps the past is all right; but consider the future! Eight hours are going to drive capital out of the country!" Rubbish! I'm not a political economist, thank God; I never sank quite so low as that. And I'm not speaking for or against Eight Hours: I'm only discounting some verbose nonsense. But I know enough to see that the capital of a country can no more be exported than the land or the houses. Can you drive away the London and North-Western Railway? Can you drive away the factories of Manchester, the mines of the Black Country, the canals, the buildings, the machinery, the docks, the plant, the apparatus? Impossible, on the very face of it! Most of the capital of a country is fixed in its soil, and can't be uprooted. People fall into this error about driving away capital because they know you can sell particular railway shares or a particular factory and leave the country with the proceeds, provided somebody else is willing to buy; but you can't sell all the railways and all the factories in a lump, and clear out with the capital. No, no; England stands where she does, because God put her there; and until He invents a new order of things (which may, of course, happen any day—as, for example, if aerial navigation came in) she must continue, in spite of minor changes, to maintain in the main her present position.

But a truce to these frivolities! The little Italian boy next door calls me to play ball with him, with a green lemon from the garden. Vengo, Luigi, vengo! I return at once to the realities of life, and dismiss such shadows.

Between Hegel and Marx stands the tragic figure of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). After the death of Hegel, the Hegelian philosophy entered into a phase of rapid degeneration. The Hegelian school split into two wings—the right and left. The Hegelian right produced not one figure worthy of mention. The Hegelian left or Young Hegelians represented the radical wing of Hegel’s followers. Active in the 1830s and 1840s, they interpreted Hegel’s ideas in the spirit of German liberalism. Their main emphasis was on the criticism of Christianity.

In 1835 David Strauss, a left Hegelian, published his book Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus), a critical analysis of the Bible, in which Jesus is portrait as an ordinary historical personality. Later Bruno Bauer argued that religion was a false consciousness, and that the person of Jesus was a fiction. Although they made some advances, their general approach remained idealist, and therefore was condemned to sterility. One of the main concerns was the question of how false consciousness arises in society and becomes a power over the minds of men.

Strauss explained this by the traditional persistence of mythological ideas. Bauer traced the source of this phenomenon to the alienation of the products of individual "self-consciousness." Max Stirner’s ideas anticipated anarchism. However, their extreme individualism, according to which the motive force of history was the "critically thinking individual," reduced all their revolutionary threads to empty phrases. They regarded the masses as the "enemy of the spirit" and progress, and had no notion of real social or economic development. However, the bankruptcy of the Hegelian left was finally exposed in the writing of Ludwig Feuerbach and the demolition was completed by Marx and Engels in their earliest joint writings—The Holy Family and The German Ideology.

A key role in the transition from Hegelianism to materialist dialectics was played by Feuerbach. To his own age, he seemed like Promicious, the Titan who dared to steal fire from the gods and give it to humans. The appearance of his book, The Essence of Christianity in 1841, had revolutionary consequences. Specially great was his impact on the young Marx and Engels. Engels later wrote: "Enthusiasm was general and we all became Feuerbachians at once." Feuerbach was a materialist. Born at Landshut in Bavaria, he started to study theology in Heidelberg, but within a year abandoned it, and, at the age of 20, went to Berlin to study philosophy under Hegel.

The young Feuerbach immediately fell under the spell of the great man, and become and ardent Hegelian. He later became a professor of philosophy at Erlangen. Although he was identified with the Hegelian left, Feuerbach was dissatisfied with its empty and abstract idealism, and set out to make a thorough criticism of Hegel’s philosophy from the standpoint of materialism. His writings, specially The Essence of Christianity, contain valuable insights, specially on the subject of alienation and the connection between idealism and religion. He was extremely critical of the idealist nature of Hegelian dialectics. His criticism had a revolutionary impact, and helped to shape the ideas of Marx and Engels. Unfortunately, Feuerbach ultimately failed to live up to his promise. His main mistake was, to use the German expression, to throw the baby out with the bath water. In rejecting Hegel’s philosophy he also rejected its rational core—dialectics. This explains the one-sided character of Feuerbach’s materialism, which caused its downfall.

At the centre of Feuerbach’s philosophy is man. But Feuerbach takes man, not as a social being but as an abstract individual. He regards religion as the alienation of man, in which human traits are made objective and treated as a supernatural being. It is as if man suffers from a kind of split personality, and contemplates his own essence in God. Despite its limitations, The Essence of Christianity still retains considerable interest, for its brilliant insights into the social and historical roots of religion. Ultimately, however, his conclusions are extremely weak. His only alternative to the domination of religion is education, morality, love, and even a new religion.

Marx and Engels were disappointed by Feuerbach’s reluctance to draw all the conclusions from his own ideas. Feuerbach was persecuted savagely by the authorities, dismissed from the university in 1830, he spent his last years a tragic and virtually forgotten figure in an obscure village. The revolution of 1848 consigned the ideas of Feuerbach and the Hegelian left to oblivion. Ideas which had seemed radical before now appeared irrelevant. Only the revolutionary programme of Marx and Engels stood the test of fire.

Feuerbach did not understand the revolution, and remain aloof from the new movement founded by Marx and Engels, although at the end of his life he joined the German Social Democratic Party. Feuerbach’s most important role was to act as a catalyst for the new movement. Somebody once remarked that the saddest phrase in any language is "might have been." This is more true of Feuerbach than any other philosopher. Having spent the greater part of his life in the wilderness, in the end, his destiny, like a philosophical John the Baptist, was to prepare the way for others.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
(William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, 1)

The monist views of Spinoza were challenged by his great contemporary, Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), yet another encyclopaedic mind. Leibniz was a mathematician, physicist, geologist, biologist, diplomat, librarian, and historian. He invented the infinitesimal calculus, although Newton claimed to have done this earlier. In physics, he anticipated the law of preservation of energy. He is also considered to have been the founder of mathematical logic, although he did not publish his work on this subject.

An objective idealist, Leibniz nevertheless developed dialectics. In his Philosophical Notebooks, Lenin wrote that "Leibniz through theology arrived at the principle of the inseparable (and universal, absolute) connection of matter and motion." Marx also expressed his admiration for Leibniz (see Letter to Engels, 10 May 1870). The basis of Spinoza’s philosophy was the single universal substance. Leibniz also starts from the notion of substance but defines it differently. He sees it like living activity, internal motion, and energy. The fundamental difference with Spinoza is that, where he stressed the singleness of being, Leibniz lays all the emphasis on the multiplicity of the universe. For him, the entire universe is composed of an infinite number of substances which he calls "monads." The monads of Leibniz are similar to the idea of atoms. Whilst in Paris, Leibniz met and was influenced by the materialist Gassendi who had revived interest in the atomistic philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. For Leibniz, everything is made of monads, including ourselves. However, there are some peculiarities in this theory. To begin with, no monad is like another. Each is its own special world, impenetrable from without. Leibniz thought that no two things in the world were the same. Each monad (and there are infinite number of them) is also a microcosm, which reflects the universe at large. It is a kind of embryo of the totality of things. Thus, the particular contains the universal.

The entire universe is only the sum total of the monads. Everything is an aggregate of monads, even the human soul. Moreover, these monads are not dead matter, but centres of living activity, in constant movement and mutation. In many respects, this picture is a striking anticipation of the modern atomistic view of the universe. Probably, Leibniz got his idea from observations through a microscope. Thus, he compares bodies to a fish-pond in which the smallest drop of water is full of teeming life, although it cannot be said that the pond itself lives. Feuerbach compared Spinoza’s philosophy to a telescope which makes objects visible to the human eye that are otherwise invisible because their remoteness, whereas that of Leibniz is like a microscope which makes objects visible that are unnoticeable because of their minuteness and fineness. The monad is like an individual cell which contains all the information required to construct an entire body. In the same way, Marx, in Capital, derives all the contradictions of capitalism from a single cell, the commodity.

Despite its idealistic form, there is here the germ of a profound idea and a dialectical concept of nature, based on movement, infinite connections, change and evolution from a lower to a higher stage. For example, he distinguishes between different levels of monads, from the lowest rank, analogous to the stage of inorganic nature, in which the life of the monads expresses itself only in the form of motion. There are higher stages, analogous to plants, animals, which culminates in the human soul. "Here is dialectics of a kind," commented Lenin, "and very profound, despite the idealism and clericalism." (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, p. 383.) What role does God have in relation to the monads? Not very much, it seems. Leibniz makes God the "sufficient reason" of all the monads. Feuerbach considered him to be only half a Christian, atheist, or a cross between a Christian and a naturalist. As Schwegler remarks: "It was a hard matter for Leibniz to bring—without abandoning the presuppositions of both—his monadology and his Theism into unison." (History of Philosophy, p. 198.)

Leibniz’s theory of knowledge is in opposition to the empiricism of Locke from the standpoint of objective idealism. Leibniz may be considered the father of German idealism. He is best known for his famous doctrine of "the best of all possible worlds," according to which it is impossible that it should be any more perfect world than that which exists. This must have been a comforting thought for the wealthy aristocrats for whom Leibniz worked. But from a philosophical standpoint, their satisfaction would not really be justified. For Leibniz, there are an infinite number of possible worlds, but only one has been chosen by God. In other words, the world we live in at this particular moment is the "best" one because it is the only one. However, the same Leibniz writes in his Monadology number 22:

"Every present state of a simple substance is the natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future." (Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Writings, p. 256.) Leibniz’s dialectical philosophy, which echoes Heraclitus and anticipates Hegel, was far from defending the idea of an unchanging status quo, "because all bodies are in a state of perpetual flux like rivers, and the parts are continually entering in or passing out." (Leibniz, Ibid, p. 267.)

Every American woman is by birth a duchess.

There, you see, I have taken you in. When you saw the heading, "American Duchesses," you thought I was going to purvey some piquant scandal about high-placed ladies; and you straightway began to read my essay. That shows I rightly interpreted your human nature. There's a deal of human nature flying about unrecognised. Yet when I said duchesses, I actually meant it. For the American woman is the only real aristocrat now living in America.

These remarks are forced upon me by a brilliant afternoon on the Promenade des Anglais. All Nice is there, in its cosmopolitan butterfly variety, flaunting itself in the sun in the very ugly dresses now in fashion. I don't know why, but the mode of the moment consists in making everything as exaggerated as possible, and sedulously hiding the natural contours of the human figure. But let that pass; the day is too fine for a man to be critical. The band is playing Mascagni's last in the Jardin Public; the carriages are drawn up beside the palms and judas-trees that fringe the Paillon; the sous-officiers are strolling along the wall with their red caps stuck jauntily just a trifle on one side, as though to mow down nursemaids were the one legitimate occupation of the brav' militaire. And among them all, proud, tall, disdainful, glide the American duchesses, cold, critical, high-toned, yet ready to strike up, should opportunity serve, appropriate acquaintance with their natural equals, the dukes of Europe.

"And the American dukes?"—There aren't any. "But these ladies' husbands and fathers and brothers?"—Oh, they're business men, working hard for the duchesses in Wall Street, or on 'Change in Chicago. And that's why I say quite seriously the American woman is the only real aristocrat now living in America. Everybody who has seen much of Americans must have noticed for himself how really superior American women are, on the average, to the men of their kind. I don't mean merely that they are better dressed, and better groomed, and better got up, and better mannered than their brothers. I mean that they have a real superiority in the things worth having—the things that are more excellent—in education, culture, knowledge, taste, good feeling. And the reason is not far to seek. They represent the only leisured class in America. They are the one set of people from Maine to California who have time to read, to think, to travel, to look at good pictures, to hear good music, to mix with society that can improve and elevate them. They have read Daudet; they have seen the Vatican. The women thus form a natural aristocracy—the only aristocracy the country possesses.

I am aware that in saying this I take my life in my hands. I shall be prepared to defend myself from the infuriated Westerner with the usual argument, which I shall carry about loaded in all its chambers in my right-hand pocket. I am also aware that less infuriated Easterners, choosing their own more familiar weapon, will inundate my leisure with sardonic inquiries whether I don't consider Oliver Wendell Holmes or Charles Eliot Norton (thus named in full) the equal in culture of the average American woman. Well, I frankly admit these cases and thousands like them; indeed I have had the good fortune to number among my personal acquaintances many American gentlemen whose chivalrous breeding would have been conspicuous (if you will believe it) even at Marlborough House. I will also allow that in New York, in Boston, and less abundantly in other big towns of America, men of leisure, men of culture, and men of thought are to be found, as wide-minded and as gentle-natured as this race of ours makes them. But that doesn't alter the general fact that, taking them in the lump, American men stand a step or two lower in the scale of humanity than American women. One need hardly ask why. It is because the men are almost all immersed and absorbed in business, while the women are fine ladies who stop at home, and read, and see, and interest themselves widely in numberless directions.

The consequence is that nowhere, as a rule, does the gulf between the sexes yawn so wide as in America. One can often observe it in the brothers and sisters of the same family. And it runs in the opposite direction from the gulf in Europe. With us, as a rule, the men are better educated, and more likely to have read and seen and thought widely, than the women. In America, the men are generally so steeped in affairs as to be materialised and encysted; they take for the most part a hard-headed, solid-silver view of everything, and are but little influenced by abstract conceptions. Their horizon is bounded by the rim of the dollar. Nay, owing to the eager desire to get a good start by beginning life early, their education itself is generally cut short at a younger age than their sisters'; so that, even at the outset, the girls have often a decided superiority in knowledge and culture. Amanda reads Paul Bourget and John Oliver Hobbes; she has some slight tincture of Latin, Greek, and German; while Cyrus knows nothing but English and arithmetic, the quotations for prime pork and the state of the market for Futures. Add to this that the women are more sensitive, more delicate, more naturally refined, as well as unspoilt by the trading spirit, and you get the real reasons for the marked and, in some ways, unusual superiority of the American woman.

That, I think, in large part explains the fascination which American women undoubtedly exercise over a considerable class of European men. In the European man the American woman often recognises for the first time the male of her species. Unaccustomed at home to as general a level of culture and feeling as she finds among the educated gentlemen of Europe, she likes their society and makes her preference felt by them. Now man is a vain animal. You are a man yourself, and must recognise at once the truth of the proposition. As soon as he sees a woman likes him, he instantly returns the compliment with interest. In point of fact, he usually falls in love with her. Of course I admit the large number of concomitant circumstances which disturb the problem; I admit on the one hand the tempting shekels of the Californian heiress, and on the other hand the glamour and halo that still surround the British coronet. Nevertheless, after making all deductions for these disturbing factors, I submit there remains a residual phenomenon thus best interpreted. If anybody denies it, I would ask him one question—how does it come that so many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians marry American women, while so few Englishwomen, French women, or Italian women marry American men? Surely the American men have also the shekels; surely it is something even in Oregon or Montana to have inspired an honourable passion in a Lady Elizabeth or a dowager countess. I think the true explanation is that our men are attracted by American women, but our women are not equally attracted by American men, and that the quality of the articles has something to do with it.

The American duchess, I take it, comes over to Europe, and desires incontinently to drag the European duke at the wheels of her chariot. And the European duke is fascinated in turn, partly by this very fact, partly by the undeniable freshness, brightness, and delicate culture of the American woman. For there is no burking the truth that in many respects the American woman carries about her a peculiar charm ungranted as yet to her European sisters. It is the charm of freedom, of ease, of a certain external and skin-deep emancipation—an emancipation which goes but a little way down, yet adds a quaint and piquant grace of manner. What she conspicuously lacks, on the other hand, is essential femininity; by which I don't mean womanliness—of that she has enough and to spare—but the wholesome physical and instinctive qualities which go to make up a sound and well-equipped wife and mother. The lack of these underlying muliebral qualities more than counterbalances to not a few Europeans the undoubted vivacity, originality, and freshness of the American woman. She is a dainty bit of porcelain, unsuited for use; a delicate exotic blossom, for drawing-room decoration, where many would prefer robust fruit-bearing faculties.

I dropped into the Opera House here at Nice the other night, and found they were playing "Carmen"—which is always interesting. Well, you may perhaps remember that when that creature of passion, the gipsy heroine, wishes to gain or retain a man's affections, she throws a rose at him, and then he cannot resist her. That is Mérimée's symbolism. Art is full of these sacrifices of realism to reticence. Outside the opera, it is not with roses that women enslave us. But the American duchess relies entirely upon the use of the rose; and that is just where she fails to interest so many of us in Europe.

And now I think it's almost time for me to go and hunt up the material arguments for that rusty six-shooter.

Benedictus (Baruch) Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632, the son of a Jewish merchant, one of the many who had fled from Portugal and Spain to escape from religious persecution. From his youth, Spinoza showed himself to be a fearless searcher after truth, prepared to defend his views regardless of the consequences to himself. It was intended that he should carry on the family business, but in 1656, despite having been a diligent student of the Bible and the Talmud, he fell foul of the orthodox rabbis. He was offered 1,000 florins a year to keep silent, but refused and was cursed and expelled from the Jewish community for his "wrong opinions" and "horrible heresies." Fearing an attempt on his life, he had to flee from Amsterdam. He took up residence at Rhynsburg near Leyden, where he earned his living polishing lenses, while dedicating his spare time to his philosophical writings.

As an outcast himself, Spinoza became friendly with the members of some of the smaller Protestant sects, related to the Anabaptists, who were themselves the victims of persecution and who were open to discuss new ideas. At this time the ideas of Descartes were the subject of a raging controversy in Holland. In 1656, university professors were required to take an oath that they would not propound Cartesian ideas which caused offence. To the little circle around Spinoza, Descartes was seen as a source of inspiration, as a brave soul who refused to base his opinions on mere tradition, and affirmed that all we know is known by the "natural light" of reason. Descartes was an inspiration to Spinoza, but the latter had too keen an intellect to accept him uncritically.

This was an age of great discoveries. Science was beginning to stretch its wings, and the old Aristotelian world view was being replaced by the new scientific-mechanistic view of nature. Galileo himself had written that he believed that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics. Spinoza’s whole outlook was dominated by a passionate interest in nature and science. He conducted a correspondence with the English chemist Robert Boyle, discussed comets with Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, and comments on Descartes’ laws of motion and the theories of Huygens.

Holland was the freest country in Europe at this time. The Dutch bourgeoisie had succeeded in throwing off the yoke of Spanish domination by a revolutionary struggle in which it leaned for support on the lower middle class and semi-proletarian masses. In 1579, the provinces of the Protestant Netherlands came together to form the Union of Utrecht, out of which the Dutch Republic emerged. Article three of the Union proclaimed religious toleration as a basic principle. However, from the outset this was opposed by the powerful sect of "strict" or "precise" Calvinists, who wanted only one official Church in Holland—their own.

At the Synod of Dordrecht (1618-19) they succeeded in getting Calvinism recognised as the official religion. But the liberal Jan de Wit, who was the leader of the Netherlands from 1653 to 1672, stood firm against religious intolerance. Spinoza did not stand aloof from the political struggle. He set aside work on his Ethics in order to publish a book in defence of the freedom of speech and thought, the Treatise on Theology and Politics, which appeared in 1670. This earned him the bitter enmity of the strict Calvinists, who were scandalised by his attempts to show that the Bible is not to be seen as containing philosophical or scientific truths.

In July 1670 the Synod declared the Treatise an "evil and blasphemous book." An anonymous pamphlet attacking de Wit described the book as "spawned in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil," and that it was "published with the knowledge of Mr. Jan de Wit." In 1672 a French army invaded Holland and de Wit was murdered by a mob in The Hague. For opportunist reasons, William of Orange sided with the Calvinists. Two years later the Treatise was banned. For the rest of his short life, Spinoza was forced to keep his head down. Tragically, his masterpiece, the Ethics, was never published in his lifetime, for fear of the reaction of the Church. It only appeared in 1677, the year the great man died of consumption.

Spinoza was one of those true geniuses who carried out a real revolution in philosophy. Taking as his starting point the philosophy of Descartes, he completely transformed it, and in so doing, laid the basis for a genuinely scientific approach to nature. "It is therefore worthy of note," wrote Hegel, "that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy." (History of Philosophy, Vol. 3, p. 257.) Not only Hegel, but Goethe, Schiller, Marx, and the young Schelling were much influenced by Spinoza. When Einstein was engaged in a philosophical dispute with Niels Bohr over the fundamental problems of quantum mechanics, he wrote that he would rather have "old Spinoza" as a referee instead of Bertrand Russell or Carnap.

Maybe that is why, with his customary arrogance, Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy writes that the whole of Spinoza’s "metaphysic" is "incompatible with modern logic and the scientific method. Facts have to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning; when we successfully infer the future, we do so by means of principles which are not logically necessary, but are suggested by empirical data. And the concept of substance, upon which Spinoza relies, is one which neither science nor philosophy can nowadays accept." (B. Russell, op. cit., p. 560.)

The whole point is that Spinoza, by not restricting himself to the narrow confines of empirical philosophy, was able to transcend the limits of the mechanistic science of the day. While Berkeley and Hume led philosophy into a blind alley (and also science, if it had paid any attention to them, which fortunately it did not), Spinoza brilliantly showed the way forward. In spite of the ridiculous pretensions of Russell and his fellow logical positivists, who—without the slightest basis—put themselves forward as the supreme guardians of an alleged "scientific method" arbitrarily defined by themselves, science proceeds in an entirely different way to that indicated in these lines.

In particular, the role of great hypotheses in pointing scientific research in the right direction has been fundamental. And, by definition, a hypothesis can only be based on a limited number of "facts," and must involve reasoning, and also courage and imagination. How much time and effort would have been saved if scientists had paid attention to Kant’s nebular theory of the origin of the solar system, for example? And how much time is now being wasted in the search for "cold, dark matter," which is based upon no "observed facts" whatever, and which is intended to support a cosmological hypothesis more fantastic than anything Spinoza ever thought of.

"It is to the highest credit of the philosophy of the time that it did not let itself be led astray by the restricted state of contemporary natural knowledge, and that—from Spinoza down to the great French materialists—it insisted on explaining the world from the world itself and left the justification in detail to the natural science of the future." (Engels, The Dialectics of Nature, p. 36.)

Spinoza, by the strength of reason, and with the very limited scientific results available to him, arrived at one of the greatest hypotheses of all time. Breaking with Descartes, with his notion of a body without a soul and a soul without a body, he advanced the idea that body and mind are two attributes of one and the same thing. The universe is not composed of mind and matter, as alleged by Descartes’ dualism. There is only a single Substance, which contains within itself all the attributes of thought and being. It is infinite and eternal, and possesses all the potential to give rise to the abundance of phenomena we see in the universe.

Spinoza gives this Substance the name of "God." But in reality, to make God equal to nature is to abolish God, a fact which was not lost on Spinoza’s enemies, when they accused him of atheism. In Spinoza’s universe, infinite and eternal, and therefore uncreated and unbounded by heaven or hell, there is no room for a separate deity, indeed, no room for anything whatsoever except Substance, which is just another way of saying nature.

Thus, in a strange way, the philosophy of Spinoza, despite its idealist appearance, is the real point of departure for materialism in the dialectical, that is, non-mechanical sense of the word. All that is necessary is to substitute the word "matter" for "God," and we get a perfectly consistent materialist position. As Marx wrote in a letter to Lassalle on May 31st 1858:

"Even in the case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented by him." (MECW, Vol. 40, p. 316.) The great admiration of Marx and Engels for Spinoza was revealed by Plekhanov, who recalls a conversation he had with Engels, then an old man, in 1889: "‘So do you think,’ I asked, ‘old Spinoza was right when he said that thought and extent are nothing but two attributes of one and the same substance?’ ‘Of course,’ Engels replied, ‘old Spinoza was quite right’." (Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. 2, p. 339.)

The existence of the material universe is taken as an axiom. The model for Spinoza was geometry, which sets out with axioms—self-evident assertions which require no proof. Yet the same people who are prepared to accept on trust the axioms of Euclid (which, incidentally, so far from being self-evident truths, are open to serious objections) nevertheless display extreme reluctance to admit the reality of the material world, declaring this to be beyond our knowledge to assert. Yet this same material world is the starting-point of all our experience and knowledge. "God or a substance consisting of attributes each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists," proclaims Spinoza (Spinoza, The Ethics, p. 9). Moreover, matter can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed:

"Matter is the same everywhere, and its parts are not distinguished one from the other except in so far as we conceive matter to be affected in various ways, whence its parts are distinguished one from the other modally but not in reality. E.g., we can conceive water, in so far as it is water, to be divided and its parts separated one from the other: but not in so far as it is corporeal substance, for then it is neither separated nor divided. Again, water, in so far as it is water, can be made and destroyed, but in so far as it is substance it can neither be made or destroyed." (Ibid, p. 16.)

God thus has no existence separate and apart from the material world, which has not been created because it has always existed. He is "free"—to obey the laws of nature, and so on. In other words, "God" is only nature. This Pantheism of Spinoza is really a thinly-disguised materialism. Despite its peculiar form (probably an unsuccessful attempt to ward off accusations of atheism), this is head and shoulders above the mechanistic outlook of contemporary scientists. Instead of the mechanical conception of matter being moved by an external force, here we have matter which moves according to its own inherent laws, it is "its own cause."

Thought can have no existence apart from Substance (matter). It is an attribute of matter organised in a certain way, "consequently thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance, which is comprehended through this and now through that attribute." In other words, thought and matter are "one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways" (ibid., p. 42). This is a real breakthrough. In essence, we have here a correct assessment of the relation between thought and being; not, as in Descartes, a radical separation of the two, but their dialectical unity. Not thought opposed to matter, but matter that thinks. Here Spinoza comes close to an overtly materialist position: "The mind," he says, "has no knowledge of itself save in so far as it perceives the ideas of the modifications of the body" (ibid., p. 59). And again, "For the human body...is affected by external bodies in many ways and disposed to affect external bodies in many ways. But the human mind...must perceive all things which happen in the human body." (Ibid., p.53.)

This presentation was far superior to the crude conception of mechanical materialism which saw thought as a material substance secreted from the brain, as sweat from the sweat glands. Spinoza, following Descartes, says that thought differs from matter in that it has no extension. It is not a material thing, but the very function of the brain itself, its essential property. Thought is not merely an abstract contemplative activity, but the way in which thinking beings react to their environment at the conscious level. It is not possible to separate thought from all other human activities. Thought, as Spinoza understood, is one of the attributes of highly organised matter, nature that thinks, and not something opposed to nature:

"If this were so, it must seem most odd that consciousness and nature, thinking and being, the laws of thought and the laws of nature, should so closely correspond. But if we then ask what thought and consciousness are and whence they come, we find that they are products of the human brain and that man himself is a product of nature, who has developed in and along with his environment; whence it is self-evident that the products of the human brain, which in the last analysis are also products of nature, do not contradict the rest of nature’s interconnections but correspond to them." (Engels, Anti-D¸hring, p. 44.)

Here thought and matter are different but not mechanically opposed, mutually exclusive opposites. Spinoza understood that matter ("Substance") contains within itself all that is necessary to give rise to thought. Given the right concatenation of factors, organic matter arises out of inorganic matter. And even the most primitive life-forms can evolve to produce thinking beings. There is not, as Descartes thought, an absolute dividing line separating organic from inorganic matter, or man from the animals. In all these ideas, Spinoza showed himself to be far in advance of his times.

Spinoza believed that mastery over nature and the improvement of man were the main purpose of the pursuit of knowledge. In the field of ethics and morality too, he defends very advanced ideas. He correctly understood that morality was relative:

"As for the terms good and bad, they also mean nothing positive in things considered in themselves, nor are they anything else than modes of thought, or notions, which we form from the comparison of things with each other. For one and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent. E.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf. Although this be so, these words must be retained by us." (Spinoza, Ethics, p. 141.)

He rejected the idea of free will, and instead advocated a thoroughly determinist position. There are no "free" actions, in the sense that all actions are caused by something, whether we are aware of it or not. Spinoza was the first one to give a dialectical appraisal of the relation between freedom and necessity, when he pointed out that real freedom consists in the understanding of necessity. True freedom does not consist in denying the existence of the objective laws of nature, but in striving to understand them, in order to gain mastery over them.

He opposed prejudice and superstition wherever he found them, and long before the French Enlightenment, decided to summon all prejudices to the "court of reason." For those who take refuge in the will of God, "the asylum of ignorance," he has nothing but contempt. In the following passage, he was undoubtedly speaking from painful personal experience:

"Thus again, when they see the human body they are amazed, and as they know not the cause of so much art, they conclude that it was made not by mechanical art, but divine or supernatural art, and constructed in such a manner that one part does not injure another. And hence it comes about that someone who wishes to seek out the true causes of miracles, and to understand the things of nature like a man of learning, and not stare at them in amazement like a fool, is widely deemed heretical and impious, and proclaimed such by those whom the mob adore as the interpreters of nature and the Gods." (Ibid., p. 34-5.)

The basic idea of Spinoza’s philosophy is monism—the idea that all things are one. All the myriad forms of existence, the shapes, colours, forms of movement, are only different expressions of the same Substance, which can assume an infinite variety of forms. These accidental, temporary phenomena he calls "modi" (singular, modus). They are the the forms which matter assumes, continually coming into being and disappearing, like the restless waves on a mighty ocean. But these transitory forms of being can have no separate existence, independent from Substance, unbounded and eternal, which, operating according to its own laws, must give rise to an unlimited number of particular, finite forms. These forms, in turn, are not free agents, but subject to natural laws which determine the existence of all things. Through the agency of reason, it is possible to understand these laws and thereby achieve freedom consciously to determine our actions and comprehend our true place in the universe.

This imposing philosophy is in complete accord with the discoveries of modern science. All the endless forms of organic and inorganic matter we see in the universe can be reduced to the same substance—molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles. According to the latest theories, a small number of quarks are put together in different ways to make hundreds of hadrons, which combine to form the nuclei of a hundred or so chemical elements. Together with leptons, they then make up atoms, which then combine to make molecules, out of which everything else is built. The same material substance therefore underlies all the forms of being in the universe. Of course, this picture is much more complicated than the one painted by Spinoza, who had only the scantiest information to go on. A long period of scientific advance was necessary before his picture of the universe could be properly corroborated. But his hypothesis that everything comes from a common substance has been substantially vindicated.

The principle of monism can be interpreted either in a materialist or an idealist sense. Plato and Hegel were also monists, because they considered that the universe and everything in it was ultimately an expression of the "Absolute Idea." Marx and Engels were materialist monists. Spinoza’s case is peculiar. While formally he has to be considered an idealist, there is an element of ambiguity about his Substance which is certainly open to a materialist interpretation. This was quickly grasped by his contemporaries, Jews and Christians alike, who accused him of atheism. All kinds of heinous crimes and immoral ideas were attributed to him. For a long time after his death his name could hardly be mentioned in polite society. The German writer Lessing said that, in his day, a century later, people treated Spinoza "like a dead dog."

Despite all the calumnies, Spinoza’s philosophy stands as a monument to the great and noble spirit that conceived it. His philosophy, which came very close to materialism, inevitably led him to draw the most advanced social conclusions, in contrast to the reactionary misanthropy of Hume and Berkeley. This comes across clearly in the pages of his masterpiece, Ethics:

"Man is a God to man. Yet it rarely happens that men live under the guidance of reason, but among them things are in such a state that they are usually envious of or a nuisance to each other. But nevertheless they are scarcely able to lead a solitary life, so that to many the definition of man as a social animal has been very attractive; and in truth things are so ordered that from the common society of men far more conveniences arise than the contrary. Let satirists therefore laugh to their hearts’ content at human affairs, let theologians revile them, and let the melancholy praise as much as they can the rude and uncultivated life: let them despise men and admire the brutes—despite all this, men will find by experience that they can procure with mutual aid far more easily what they need, and avoid far more easily the perils which beset them on all sides, by united forces: to say nothing of how much better it is, and more worthy of our knowledge, to regard the deeds of men rather than those of the brutes" (Ibid. p, 161-2.)