The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy

Studies in the History of Idealism in England and America

John H. Muirhead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317239727
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Originally published in 1931, Muirhead's study aims to challenge the view that Locke's empiricism is the main philosophical thought to come out of England, suggesting that the Platonic tradition is much more prominent. These views are explored in detail in this text as well as touching on its development in the nineteenth century from Coleridge to Bradley and discussions on Transcendentalism in the United States. This title will be of interest to students of Philosophy.

PART ONE

EARLY IDEALISTIC MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER I

THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS. THE SCHOOL

1. CONTEMPORARY INFLUENCES

It was mentioned in the Preface, as the initial error of the view of British philosophy there criticized, that it ignores the powerful speculative movement that preceded Hobbes in its origin, and, so far as it came later to be influenced by him, took the form of an energetic repudiation of his ideas. It is therefore in the interest of historic justice, as well as of a more balanced estimate of the debt which idealism in England owes to native and foreign influences respectively, to recall, in more detail than has hitherto been done from this point of view, the critical and constructive work of the men who led this reaction.

Whence precisely the particular impulse came that stimulated and inspired them, it is perhaps difficult to say. It is tempting to connect it with the name of Descartes. Cambridge University had the honour of being the first to welcome the new thought. Between Descartes and the Cambridge writers there was a certain identity of aim in that both sought for a basis in reason for man’s moral and religious experience. One of the latter, Henry More, corresponded with Descartes and at one time professed himself his devoted disciple. But we have the evidence of the poet Milton writing in 1644 that tradition at that date still reigned in Cambridge, providing only “an asinine feast of sow-thistles and brambles”, and there is no evidence that Whichcote, the founder of the school, was at all influenced by Descartes.¹ As a body, moreover, as Tulloch has pointed out,² these ardent theologians had little in common with the detached sceptical spirit of the French philosopher. So far from leaving their Christian beliefs outside the sphere of their thought even temporarily, as Descartes sought to do, their whole endeavour was to find the ground for them within it. If it could not fairly be said that they were theologians first and philosophers only secondarily, yet to them philosophy and theology were the same thing, namely, the conceptual expression of the ideas that underlie essential religious experience. Nor was it long before, with all the points of affinity which they found between the Cartesians and themselves, they came to recognize a fundamental difference of tendency. “The Cartesians”, wrote Cudworth, “have an undiscerned tang of the mechanic Atheism hanging about them.” Descartes, he held, had even “outdone” the Atomists in their “mechanizing humour”.¹ Even Henry More lived to repent his early enthusiasm.

For these reasons it seems to be equally misleading to represent Cambridge Platonism, as J. A. Stewart² does, as a correction of Cartesianism by the insertion of certain Platonic elements into a fabric otherwise accepted as in harmony with it. We are on surer ground in seeking for the roots of the movement, on the one hand, in the deep-going connection which has existed from the first between Christian and Platonic thought, and on the other, in the antagonism which the entirely contrary teaching of Hobbes excited in the minds of those who had the intelligence to perceive its real drift.

It is difficult to exaggerate the essential unity of principle and spirit that pervades these two great systems. Both start from the assumption of the affinity between the structure of the world and the mind of man. To Plato it was the same principle that was the source both of the being and the knowledge of the world. “The Platonic theory of knowledge”, writes Professor Perry,³ “was both retained and reinforced by Christianity.” Similarly from the side of practice. A philosophy whose ultimate principle was the Good was committed as deeply as Christianity to the supreme reality of the moral and religious life. To neither could the ultimate opposition be between knowledge and faith. To both the fundamental antithesis was between merely natural knowledge or the unenlightened conscience and the higher light into which the soul might rise by the Grace of God. Platonism might indeed be called the intellectual side of Christianity. Wherever, from the author of the Fourth Gospel to St. Augustine, from St. Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, and from Aquinas to Dean Inge, the spirit of Christian theology has been really alive, it has tended to fall back upon Platonism.

The last named of these writers ⁴ has sought to trace this tradition itself to the new spiritual enlightenment “that came to all the civilized peoples of the earth in the millennium before the Christian era”. Delivered from the primitive worship of outward things of nature, the mind of man sought refuge from the flux of appearances in an unseen reality underlying them, with which it could enter into communion because this reality was none other than its own deeper self. Beginning in Asia, this mystical faith swept over Greece and Southern Italy in the form of Orphism and Pythagoreanism. It found an intelligent sympathizer in Socrates, and under his inspiration reached its highest expression in the Dialogues of Plato. Revived in a form more suited to “the poignant longing” of the time in the Neo-Platonism of the Roman Empire, it passed into the theology of the Christian Church. Dean Inge is not himself prepared to accept Bruno Bauer’s dictum that “Christianity is a Graeco-Roman phenomenon in a Jewish mask”; nor even Havet’s view that “Christianity though Jewish in form is Hellenic at bottom”. But in the central Pauline and Johannine conceptions of the eternal Christ and of Love as “the great hierophant of the divine mysteries” he finds a closer affinity to Plato’s Idea of the Good and the teaching of the Phcedrus than to anything that is to be found in the “Palestinian tradition”.

It is not, therefore, surprising that at a time when the Platonic revival was spreading from Italy over Europe, and among such men as Cambridge was then producing, there should have been a movement of independent, if somewhat uncritical, study of Plato. Coleridge said of them that they were “Plotinists rather than Platonists”, and Professor Stewart¹ has pointed out the mingling of the Christian religion and the Platonic Philosophy in “the doctrine and experience of ecstasy”. But it is an exaggeration to say, as Stewart does, that they put this doctrine in the very centre of their philosophy. The theory of knowledge which is central in Cudworth is essentially Platonic, and even with respect to the “experience”, John Smith, perhaps the most really representative of them all, is ready to declare that a true Christian “is more for a solid peace and a settled calm of spirit than for high raptures and feelings of joy or extraordinary manifestations of God in him”.²

But their Platonism might have taken no organized aggressive form nor been known outside their lecture rooms had it not been for the challenge to the whole basis on which both Christianity and Platonism stood, that came from the new thought on the nature of the physical world, as interpreted by such writers as Gassendi, and the application of it to the origin of law and morality by Hobbes. While it took some time to discern the “tang of mechanic atheism” in Descartes, the danger that threatened not only the Christian but all religion, and the morality which was believed to be bound up with it from this source, was obvious from the first. To any who believed, as did these inheritors of the best traditions not only of Puritanism but of English liberty, that the authority of law and government rested in their intrinsic justice and the response to them of man’s reason and conscience, nothing could be more antipathetic than a theory which taught that nothing was good or bad in itself, and that the only right in the end was might. It was the vigour with which, as against this attack upon them, the principles underlying the Platonico-Christian scheme of thought were reasserted (unsystematically in the teaching of the whole school, with an attempt at system, however ponderous and overlaid with erudition, on the part of at least one member of it), at a time when it may be said to have been the sole witness to them, that gives philosophical significance to the work of the Cambridge men.

We are not here concerned with the differences of style, personality, method of approach, or details of doctrine in separate individuals,¹ but first with the main features of the singularly attractive theology which in the light of their central principles they succeeded in sketching out and which remains to this day the highest expression of Christian theology in England; and secondly with the extent to which the thought of the more speculative of them broke through any mere dogmatic limits and can be credited with a real addition to idealistic philosophy.

2. COMMON FEATURES OF THE SCHOOL

Though, as already said, it is a mistake to represent mystic ecstasy as the centre of its teaching, it is true that the main interest of the school was religious. Its philosophy, however much it might extend to include a theory of knowledge and of nature, was a “philosophy of religion”.² It differed from the dogmatic system of the times, first in the interpretation it gave of what was quintessential in religious experience; secondly, in the direction in which the foundation of belief in God as the object of religious experience was to be sought; thirdly, and as a corollary, in the view of the relation between reason and faith.

(a) Religion was indeed to them, as to the neo-Platonist, “a flight of the alone to the Alone”. But the Alone, while never conceived of in any narrow anthropological way, was not left in the vague as a “splendid kind of nothing”.¹

After the manner of the Fourth Gospel, which was the source of so much of their inspiration, God was conceived of as the unity of love and knowledge. “Wherever it (true religion) finds beauty, harmony, goodness, love, ingenuousness, wisdom, holiness, justice, and the like, it is ready to say here and there is God; wheresoever any such shine out, a holy mind climbs up by these sunbeams and raises itself up to God.” “God is not better defined to us by our understandings than by our wills and affections; He is not only the eternal reason, but He is also that unstained beauty and supreme good to which our wills are perpetually aspiring.”² Heaven and Hell are not things or places without us but states of our own souls: the one consisting of “a true conjunction of the mind with God in a secret feeling of His goodness”; the other of an evil spirit arising “from the bottom of our own soul”. More desirable than to hear a voice from heaven giving assurance of salvation is “to find a revelation of all from within rising up from the centre of a man’s own soul in the real and internal impressions of a godlike nature upon his own spirit”.³

(b) It is thus from no external witness but from the nature of the soul and its experiences that we can learn of the existence and nature and operation of God. “The spirit of man”, they were fond of quoting, “is the candle of the Lord.” “Nullus spiritus,” wrote Henry More, “nullus deus.” “Though the whole of this visible universe be whispering out the notions of a Deity, yet we cannot understand it without some interpreter within.” ⁴ It is this that makes it so important, the author declares in the same passage, to inquire “what that knowledge of a Deity is, into which a due converse with our own naked understandings will lead us”.

(c) Leaving this for the moment and confining ourselves to the general doctrine, what, we may ask, by the aid of this interpreter within, may be discovered in the whispers of the world without? Granted we cannot find God in the world unless we find Him in our own souls, can we really find Him if we do? It was a fundamental part of these men’s teaching that we can. Though the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, yet is its light a derivative one. “All created excellency shines with borrowed beams.”¹

The ideas of the reason (Culverwel mentions especially that of Obligation) imply the actual reality of a reason transcending ours, and therewith a belief in a Providence in Nature and History. There was no point in which they believed themselves more in harmony with the great Christian as well as the great philosophic tradition than in holding that “nature is that regular line which the wisdom of God Himself has drawn in being, whereas that which they called fortune is nothing but a line fuller of windings and varieties; and as nature was a fixed and ordinary kind of providence, so fortune was nothing but a more abstruse and mysterious and occult kind of providence”.² “It is not worth the while to live in a world devoid of God and of Providence”, John Smith was fond of quoting from Marcus Aurelius. He seemed even to regard it as possible for human wisdom, looking from the beginning to the end of things, to behold them all, in spite of apparent digressions, “acting that part which the Supreme Mind and Wisdom that governs all things hath appointed them”.³

From all this two things followed as corollaries, the one fundamental to morality, the other to religion.

It followed in the first place that there could be no antagonism between freedom and determination. Man is free because he has the power not merely of choosing—this is merely the condition of real liberty—but of determining himself by his idea of good; he is more fully free according to the fullness of the good with which he identifies himself and the fullness of his knowledge of it. The discussion of freedom is apt with them, as Tulloch says, to be mixed up with the question of the nature of will in God, but this was only because it was seen how closely the questions were connected; and there are passages in which the vital element in human freedom is stated as well as anywhere else in the whole literature of philosophy. “When we converse with our own souls” writes John Smith,¹ “we find the spring of all liberty to be nothing else but reason; and therefore no unreasonable creature can partake of it; and that it is not so much any indifference in our wills of determining without reason, much less against it, as the liberal election of and complacency in that which our understandings propound to us as most expedient; and our liberty most appears when our will most of all congratulates the results of our own judgments. And therefore the more the results of our judgments tend to our indifference, the more we find ou...