English philosophers and schools of philosophy / by James Seth.

  • James Seth
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: English philosophers and schools of philosophy / by James Seth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    rightly said that the English estimate of knowledge is utilitarian, although Bacon’s insistence upon the utility of knowledge in his famous dicta that 4 knowledge is power,’ and that its end is 4 the improvement of man’s estate,’ certainly suggest such an estimate. It is rather that the intellectual interest, as such, is subordinated to the moral, the theoretical to the practical; that the supreme interest is the conduct of life rather than what Locke calls 4 the conduct of the understanding.’ Perhaps the actual state of the case may be best brought out by comparing the English with the Greek estimate of the comparative values of theory and practice, of the life of thought and that of action. The Greeks always saw in philosophy the true 4 way of life,1 and the Socratic identi¬ fication of virtue with knowledge was only the explicit statement of the conviction, which inspired all their philo¬ sophical activity, that without theoretic understanding the practice of virtue must be blind and uncertain. But the Greek admiration of 4 theorv ’ went further than this interpretation of virtue as the expression of knowledge. For Plato the life of ideal virtue is that of philosophic, as contrasted with civic excellence, and for Aristotle the entire life of practical activity and moral excellence is instrumental to the higher life of theoretic activity and intellectual excellence. The English mind is practical in the sense that for it the supremely important thing is action ; and not only does it place action above thought, but it is apt to depreciate the practical importance of knowledge, and to conclude that the limitations of human knowledge point to practice rather than speculation as the real destiny of man, and that for the practical conduct of life, faith is a better guide than rational insight, and probability serves where certainty is not to be reached. The attitude thus described is not, of course, peculiar to English philosophy. It is the characteristic attitude of Kant, who in this as in other respects may be said to combine the qualities of English with those of Conti¬ nental philosophy. As he refuses to leave the solid ground of experience, and repudiates the ‘rational dogmatism’