Metaphysics

Metaphysics, in the older sense the Harvard Classics still remember, is first philosophy: the inquiry into being as such, into substance and its accidents, into the first principles that every other science assumes but does not examine. It is a great idea for these books in an unusual way. Few authors in the collection pursue it directly, and many mention it chiefly to doubt it. Even so, the word recurs across three centuries of essays, treatises, dialogues and poems, and what gathers around it is a long argument about whether there is such a science at all, what it could accomplish, and what harm it does when it leaves its proper place. The standing of metaphysics is itself the most persistent metaphysical question these texts raise.

The traditional conception survives here in a few compressed references. Emerson, writing of Bacon, recalls the *prima philosophia* as a receptacle for the axioms common to all the sciences, a store of principles prior to any particular subject matter¹. A second strand treats metaphysics as the science of immaterial beings. Locke observes that the study of spirits is usually assigned to metaphysics, and he advises that it come before the study of bodies, since a mind fixed too early on matter may find it hard to conceive of anything else². Sir Thomas Browne, from the same habit of mind, reproaches learned men who deny spirits. In doing so, he says, they forget their metaphysics and break the ladder and scale of creatures, the graded order of beings that reaches from the material to the divine³. On this view metaphysics is less a technique of argument than a picture of the whole of reality, arranged by degrees of being.

The moderns keep the claim that metaphysics lies at the foundation, but they mean something more methodical by it. Descartes calls his proofs of God and the soul the foundations of his metaphysic⁴. He presents his first meditations as metaphysical and out of the common way, yet necessary as the ground on which the rest of his philosophy is to be raised⁵. Pascal notices how Descartes took a saying already current and made it the firm principle of a metaphysical system that divides material from spiritual natures⁶. Here a single principle supports a whole system. Berkeley pushes the foundational ambition further. By supposing that there exist only spirits and ideas, Philonous claims to dissolve at a stroke the old puzzles about abstract entity, substantial forms, substance and accident, and the interaction of spirit with matter⁷. The study of spirits, which Locke ranked before the study of bodies, becomes in Berkeley the whole of what there is to study. Against these confident foundations Mill reports Comte’s historical scheme. In it the metaphysical stage of thought is only a middle phase, standing between the theological and the positive and destined to be superseded by the latter⁸. Metaphysics is thus a foundation for Descartes and a scaffold to be taken down for Comte.

Kant gives the collection its most sustained account of what metaphysics is and why it cannot be dispensed with. He divides philosophy into the formal, which is logic, and the material, which deals with definite objects. When the material part is pure rather than empirical it is metaphysic, and it is twofold: a metaphysic of nature and a metaphysic of morals⁹. Kant insists that a pure metaphysic of morals is indispensable. It must be kept separate from empirical psychology, because only such a metaphysic can supply practical principles valid a priori¹⁰. It must be unmixed with anthropology, theology or physics, and it is necessary both for the theory of duty and for its practice¹¹. His analogy is mathematics, which has a pure part whose principles hold a priori and an applied part that brings them to particular cases¹². Morality must therefore first be treated as pure philosophy, and only afterward handed to anthropology for application¹³. Ethics should be founded on metaphysics and only then made popular, never the reverse¹⁴. Popular philosophy proceeds by examples, but metaphysic reaches ideal conceptions where examples fail¹⁵. Kant enters this metaphysic of morals with evident reluctance and marks it off from speculative philosophy¹⁶. He draws a pointed parallel with the critique of pure speculative reason, which in its theoretical use is wholly dialectical¹⁷. The parallel compresses a whole history. Speculative metaphysics, left to itself, falls into contradiction, while practical metaphysics, rightly bounded, grounds the moral law. Kant’s defence of metaphysics is also a confinement of it.

That ambivalence runs through the controversy that occupies most of these passages. Hume calls the question of liberty and necessity the most contentious question in the most contentious science¹⁸, and the epithet fits the science as a whole. Cowley, in a lighter vein, simply doubts whether metaphysics is anything at all¹⁹. Rousseau’s vicar holds that the jargon of metaphysics and abstract ideas has filled philosophy with absurdities and been the source of great errors²⁰. Goethe stages the charge as comedy. Mephistopheles, posing as a professor, tells a student to master in metaphysics whatever transcends the brain, since there a sounding phrase will serve in place of understanding²¹. The most famous condemnation is Hume’s. Any volume of school divinity or metaphysics that contains neither abstract reasoning about quantity and number nor experimental reasoning about matter of fact should be committed to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion²².

Hume, however, is the very author who mounts the most careful defence of metaphysics, and the two positions belong together. He notes that profound reasoning, commonly called metaphysics, is rejected by many, and he sets out to defend it²³. He grants that much of what passes under the name is not science at all but the fruit of human vanity and a shelter for superstition. The remedy he proposes is not to abandon the field: true metaphysics must be cultivated in order to destroy the false²⁴. His instrument is to trace every term back to the impression from which it is derived. A term that yields no impression is exposed as meaningless, and so the jargon that has long infested metaphysical reasoning would be banished²⁵. He turns this test on the ideas of power, force, energy and necessary connexion, which he judges the most obscure in all of metaphysics and most in need of being fixed²⁶. The flames, then, are meant for a particular kind of book. The critique is itself metaphysics, an accurate inquiry into the reach of the understanding undertaken so that the old confusions cannot return.

Carlyle sees the whole enterprise from a further remove. He calls metaphysics a perennial disease, recurring in alternating phases, one dogmatic and constructive, the other sceptical and inquisitory, and he holds that no theorem of the universe has ever succeeded²⁷. The constructive systems are each a kind of Genesis, an attempt to set out a positive theoretic scheme of all things²⁸. Sceptical metaphysics fares no better, for it labours to draw conviction out of negation. Behind both failures lies a deeper limit: the mind cannot rise above itself and comprehend itself, any more than a man can lift himself by his own effort²⁹. Yet Carlyle does not end in mere dismissal. Metaphysical speculation, he allows, is a necessary evil and the forerunner of good, and he credits German metaphysics with curing the age of Pyrrhonism and materialism³⁰. Where Hume would cure bad metaphysics with good, Carlyle treats the whole activity as a fever that has to run its course before health returns. Kant and Carlyle thus share the conviction that speculation outruns its powers, though Kant answers with a disciplined critique and Carlyle with something closer to resignation.

Some voices decline the question rather than answer it. The Buddha, in the oldest texts on the list, sets aside speculative theories about the world, the soul and the life after death³¹. He declares unprofitable any inquiry into whether the world is eternal or finite, or whether soul and body are one³². His reason is not that such questions are meaningless, as Hume might say, but that they do not conduce to deliverance. Rousseau’s vicar turns away from metaphysical investigations as useless and prefers to help his pupil consult his own heart³³. Leigh Hunt disclaims metaphysics altogether and relies on reflection and experience rather than on the masters of that art³⁴. Across the distance from ancient India to Romantic England, the same gesture appears: the questions are real enough, but a life is better spent elsewhere.

The bearing of metaphysics on practical life divides these authors sharply. Hume holds that metaphysical and religious disputes have no connection with the political interests of society³⁵. Burke thinks the danger lies exactly where Hume sees none. He scorns the subtlety of the revolutionaries’ political metaphysics, which he says is fit only for the schools³⁶. Given a choice, he would rather consult the farmer and the physician than the professor of metaphysics³⁷. His central claim is that rights which are metaphysically true become, in their very abstraction, morally and politically false³⁸. The new schemes of government rest on a great deal of bad metaphysics and take no account of the passions and interests of men³⁹. Turning the old vocabulary against its new users, he says that the legislators attend only to substance and quantity and ignore the other categories that a statesman must weigh⁴⁰. For Burke, abstraction is wrong in politics because circumstance is the very matter of practice, whatever its standing in the schools.

In religion the question becomes whether metaphysical reason can reach what faith or intuition holds. Pascal doubts that it can persuade. The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote from ordinary reasoning and so complicated that they make little impression, and men who are moved by them in the moment doubt them an hour later⁴¹. Emerson finds all metaphysics and philosophy at fault when it tries to explain the source of the soul’s intuition; only its presence can be affirmed⁴². Schiller takes a more discriminating view. Reconciling the two opposite impulses of human nature embarrasses the metaphysician but not the transcendental philosopher⁴³. The metaphysician cannot explain how sensation can limit a free mind, nor where the ideas of necessity and universality come from⁴⁴. Schiller is distinguishing an older metaphysics of substances from a critical philosophy of the conditions of knowing, in a manner that echoes Kant. Carlyle, meanwhile, fears that metaphysics corrodes the faith it would support, and he pictures the Christian religion dissipating into metaphysics like a river vanishing in sand⁴⁵.

Finally, the books pass judgment on metaphysicians themselves. Hazlitt allows only six or seven modern metaphysicians worthy of the name and denies the French any originality in the science⁴⁶. Taine ties the capacity for metaphysics to race. He holds that it flourishes with the figurative conception he attributes to the Aryan mind and is absent among the Semites⁴⁷, a claim that reveals more about nineteenth-century theories of race than about metaphysics. Mill’s autobiography shows metaphysics shaping a single mind. Logic texts gave him scope for original speculation on the principles and distinctions of the schools⁴⁸. Carlyle’s blend of poetry and German metaphysics he found ill suited to a mind trained as his had been⁴⁹. He also commends a book for the light it throws on disputed questions in psychology and metaphysics⁵⁰. Mill’s case suggests that metaphysics, whatever its standing as a science, remained a discipline in which minds were formed and by which they measured one another.

The questions these passages leave open are the ones Hume named when he called this the most contentious science. Is metaphysics a science of being, a critique of the understanding, a historical stage, or a recurring disorder? Can the mind comprehend its own first principles, or does every attempt lift a man by his own weight, as Carlyle has it? Does abstraction belong in conduct, as Kant requires for morals, or does it corrupt conduct, as Burke finds in politics? The collection settles none of these, but it shows the moderns inheriting from Bacon’s first philosophy and Browne’s ladder of creatures a claim to foundations, and spending their best efforts deciding how much of that claim can be kept.