Page images
PDF
EPUB

1894.

Kant's Idea of a Universal History.

quences which war at last entails upon any nation even through the midst of peace, she drives nations to all sorts of experiments and expedients; and finally after infinite devastations, ruin, and universal exhaustion of energy, to one which reason should have suggested without the cost of so sad an experience; viz. to quit the barbarous condition of lawless power, and to enter into a federal league of nations, in which even the weakest member looks for its rights and for protection-not to its own power, or its own adjudication, but to this great confederation (Fœdus Amphictyonum), to the united power, and the adjudication of the collective will. Visionary as this idea may seem, and as such laughed at in the Abbé de St. Pierre and in Rousseau (possibly because they deemed it too near to its accomplishment), it is notwithstanding the inevitable* resource and mode of escape under that pressure of evil which nations reciprocally inflict; and, hard as it may be to realise such an idea, states must of necessity be driven at last to the very same resolution to which the savage man of nature was driven with equal reluctance-viz. to sacrifice brutal liberty, and to seek peace and security in a civil constitution founded upon law. All wars therefore are so many tentative essays (not in the intention of man, but in the intention of nature) to bring about new relations of states, and by revolutions and dismemberments to form new political bodies: these again, either from internal defects or external attacks, cannot support themselves, but must undergo similar revolutions; until at last, partly by the best possible arrangement of civil government within and partly by common concert and legal compact without, a condition is attained which, like a well-ordered commonwealth, can maintain itself in the way of an automaton.

Now, whether (in the first place) it is to be anticipated from an epicurean concourse of efficient causes that states, like atoms, by accidental

shocking together, should go through
all sorts of new combinations to be
again dissolved by the fortuitous
impulse of fresh shocks, until at
length by pure accident some combi-
nation emerges capable of support-
:-or whether
ing itself (a case of luck that could
hardly be looked for):-
(in the second place) we should ra-
ther assume that nature is in this
instance pursuing her regular course
of raising our species gradually from
the lower steps of animal existence to
the very highest of a human exist-
ence, and that not by any direct in-
terposition in our favor but through
man's own spontaneous and artificial
efforts (spontaneous, but yet extort-
ed from him by his situation), and
in this apparently wild arrangement
of things is developing with perfect
regularity the original tendencies she
:-or whether (in the
has implanted :-
third place) it is more reasonable to
believe that out of all this action and
re-action of the human species upon
itself nothing in the shape of a wise
result will ever issue; that it will
continue to be as it has been; and
therefore that it cannot be known be-
forehand but that the discord, which
is so natural to our species, will
finally prepare for us a hell of evils
under the most moral condition of
society such as may swallow up this
very moral condition itself and all
previous advance in culture by a re-
flux of the original barbaric spirit of
desolation (a fate, by the way, against
which it is impossible to be secured
under the government of blind chance,
with which liberty uncontroled by
law is identical, unless by under-
laying this chance with a secret
nexus of wisdom):-to all this the
answer turns upon the following
question; whether it be reasonable
to assume a final purpose of all na-
tural processes and arrangements in
the parts, and yet a want of purpose
in the whole? What therefore the
objectless condition of savage life
effected in the end, viz. that it check-
ed the developement of the natural
tendencies in the human species, but
then, by the very evils it thus caused,

During the two last centuries (i. e. from the date of the scheme for organizing Christendom for some common purpose, no matter what, by the first of the Bourbons, Henry IV. of France, down to the late congresses at Aix la Chapelle and Verona) the human species have been making their first rude essays-putting forth their feelers as it were towards such an idea.-Translator.

drove man into a state where those tendencies could unfold and mature themselves—namely, the state of civilization; that same service is performed for states by the barbaric freedom in which they are now existing-viz. that, by causing the dedication of all national energies and resources to war-by the desolations of war-and still more by causing the necessity of standing continually in a state of preparation for war, it checks the full developement of the natural tendencies in its progress; but on the other hand by these very evils and their consequences, it compels our species at last to discover some law of counterbalance to the principle of antagonism between nations, and in order to give effect to this law to introduce a federation of states and consequently a cosmopolitical condition of security (or police) corresponding to that municipal security which arises out of internal police. This federation will itself not be exempt from danger, else the powers of the human race would go to sleep; it will be sufficient that it contain a principle for restoring the equilibrium between its own action and re-action, and thus checking the two functions from destroying each other. Before this last step is taken, human nature-then about half way advanced in its progress-is in the deepest abyss of evils under the deceitful semblance of external prosperity; and Rousseau was not so much in the wrong when he preferred the condition of the savage to that of the civilized man at the point where he has reached but is hesitating to take the final step of his ascent. We are at this time in a high degree of culture as to arts and sciences. We are civilized to superfluity in what regards the graces and decorums of life. But, to entitle us to consider ourselves moralized, much is still wanting. Yet the idea of morality belongs even to that of culture; but the use of this idea, as it comes forward in mere civilization, is restrained to its influence on manners as seen in the principle of honor-in respectability of deportment, &c. Nothing indeed of a true moral influence can be expected so long as states direct all their energies to idle plans of aggrandizement by force, and thus incessantly check the slow

motions by which the intellect of the species is unfolding and forming itself, to say nothing of their shrinking from all positive aid to those motions. But all good, that is not engrafted upon moral good, is mere show and hollow speciousness-the dust and ashes of morality. And in this delusive condition will the human race linger, until it shall have toiled upwards in the way I have mentioned from its present chaotic abyss of political relations.

PROPOSITION THE EIGHTH.

The history of the human species as a whole may be regarded as the unravelling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a perfect state of civil constitution for society in its internal relations (and, as the condition of that, by the last proposition in its external relations also) as the sole state of society in which the tendencies of human nature can be all and fully developed.-This proposition is an inference from the preceding. A question arises upon it-whether experience has yet observed any traces of such an unravelling in history. I answer-some little: for the whole period (to speak astronomically) of this unravelling is probably too vast to admit of our collecting even the form of its orbit or the relation of the parts to the whole from the small fraction of it which man has yet left behind him; just as little as it is possible from the astronomical observations hitherto made to determine the course which our sun together with his whole system of planets pursues amongst the heavenly host; although upon universal grounds derived from the systematic frame of the universe, as well as upon the little stock of observation as yet accumulated, enough is known to warrant us in asserting that there is such a course. Meantime our human nature obliges us to take an interest even in the remotest epoch to which our species is destined, provided we can anticipate it with certainty. So much the less can we be indifferent to it, inasmuch as it appears within our power by intellectual arrangements to contribute something towards the acceleration of the species in its advance to this great epoch. On this account the faintest traces of any approximation in such a direc

tion become of importance to us. At present all states are so artificially inter-connected, that no one can possibly become stationary in its internal culture without retrograding in power and influence with respect to all the rest; and thus if not the progress yet the non-declension of this purpose of nature is sufficiently secured through the ambition of nations. Moreover, civil liberty cannot at this day any longer be arrested in its progress but that all the sources of livelihood, and more immediately trade, must betray a close sympathy with it, and sicken as that sickens; and hence a decay of the state in its external relations. Gradually too this liberty extends itself. If the citizen be hindered from pursuing his interest in any way most agreeable to himself, provided only it can coexist with the liberty of others, in that case the vivacious life of general business is palsied, and in connexion with that again the powers of the whole. Hence it arises that all personal restriction, whether as to commission or omission, is more and more withdrawn; religious liberty is established; and thus by little and little, with occasional interruptions, arises Illumination; a blessing which the human race must win even from the self-interested purposes of its rulers, if they comprehend what is for their own advantage. Now this illumination, and with it a certain degree of cordial interest which the enlightened man cannot forbear taking in all the good which he perfectly comprehends, must by degrees mount upwards even to the throne, and exert an influence on the principles of government. At present, for example, our governments have no money disposable for national education, because the estimates for the next war have absorbed the whole by anticipation the first act therefore, by which the state will express its interest in the advancing spirit of the

:

*

age, will be by withdrawing its opposition at least to the feeble and tardy exertions of the people in this direction. Finally, war itself becomes gradually not only so artificial a process, so uncertain in its issue, but also in the after-pains of inextinguishable national debts (a contrivance of modern times) so anxious and burthen some; and, at the same time, the influence which any convulsions of one state exert upon every other state is so remarkable in our quarter of the globe-linked as it is in all parts by the systematic intercourse of trade, that at length, those governments, which have no immediate participation in the war, under a sense of their own danger, offer themselves as mediators-though as yet without any authentic sanction of law, and thus prepare all things from afar for the formation of a great primary state-body, or cosmopolitic Areopagus, such as is wholly unprecedented in all preceding ages. Although this body at present exists only in rude outline, yet already a stirring is beginning to be perceptible in all its limbs-each of which is interested in the maintenance of the whole; even now there is enough to justify a hope that, after many revolutions and re-modellings of states, the supreme purpose of nature will be accomplished in the establishment of a cosmopolitic state as the bosom in which all the original tendencies of the human species are to be developed.

PROPOSITION THE NINTH.

A philosophical attempt to compose a universal history † in the sense of a cosmopolitical history upon a plan tending to unfold the purpose of nature in a perfect civil union of the human species (instead of the present imperfect union) is to be regarded as possible, and as capable even of helping forward this very purpose of nature.-At first sight it is certainly a strange and apparently an

* "No money disposable," &c. The reader must remember that this was written in Germany in the year 1784, and in the midst of petty courts (which are generally the most profligate). In England, and even elsewhere, there is now the dawn of a better system. Translator.

+ The reader must remember what Kant means by a universal history : in the common sense, as the history of the whole world in its separate divisions, such a history exists already in many shapes that perhaps could not be essentially improved. But in Kant's sense, as a history of the whole as a whole, no essay has been made towards it.

Translator.

extravagant project-to propose a history of man founded on any idea of the course which human affairs would take if adjusted to certain reasonable ends. On such a plan it may be thought that nothing better than a romance could be the result. Yet, if we assume that nature proceeds not without plan and final purpose even in the motions of human free-will, this idea may possibly turn out very useful; and, although we are too short-sighted to look through the secret mechanism of her arrangements, this idea may yet serve as a clue for connecting into something like systematic unity the great abstract of human actions that else seem a chaotic and incoherent aggregate. For, if we take our beginning from the Grecian history as the depository or at least the collateral voucher for all elder or synchronous history; if we pursue down to our own times its influence upon the formation and malformation of the Roman people as a political body that swallowed up the Grecian state, and the influence of Rome upon the barbarians by whom Rome itself was destroyed; and if to all this we add, by way of episode, the political history of every other people so far as it has come to our knowledge through the records of the two enlightened nations above-mentioned; we shall then discover a regular gradation of improvement in civil polity as it has grown up in our quarter of the globe, which quarter is in all probability destined to give laws to all the rest. If further we direct an exclusive attention to the civil constitution, with its laws, and the external relations of the state, in so far as both, by means of the good which they contained, served for a period to raise and to dignify other nations and with them the arts and sciences, yet again by their defects served also to precipitate them into ruin, but so that always some germ of illumination survived which,

being more and more developed by every revolution, prepared continually a still higher step of improvement:

in that case, I believe that a clue will be discovered not only for the unravelling of the intricate web of human affairs and for the guidance of future statesmen in the art of political prophecy (a benefit which has been extracted from history even whilst it was regarded as an incoherent result from a lawless freedom of will), but also such a clue as will open a consolatory prospect into futurity, in which at a remote distance we shall discover the human species seated upon an eminence won by infinite toil where all the germs are unfolded which nature has implanted-and its destination upon this earth accomplished. Such a justification of nature, or rather of providence, is no mean motive for choosing this cosmopolitical station for the survey of history. For what does it avail to praise and to draw forth to view the magnificence and wisdom of the creation in the irrational kingdom of nature, if that part in the great stage of the supreme wisdom, which contains the object of all this mighty display, viz. the history of the human species-is to remain an eternal objection to it, the bare sight of which obliges us to turn away our eyes with displeasure, and (from the despair which it raises of ever discovering in it a perfect and rational purpose) finally leads us to look for such a purpose only in another world?

My object in this essay would be wholly misinterpreted, if it were supposed that under the idea of a cosmopolitical history which to a certain degree has its course determined à priori, I had any wish to discourage the cultivation of empirical history in the ordinary sense: on the contrary, the philosopher must be well versed in history who could execute the plan I have sketched,

* A learned public only, that has endured unbroken from its commencement to our days, can be an authentic witness for ancient history. Beyond that, all is terra incognita; and the history of nations who lived without that circle must start from time to time as they happened to come within it. This took place with the Jewish people about the time of the Ptolemies, and chiefly through the Septuagint translation of the Bible; apart from which, but little credit should be given to their own insulated accounts unsupported by collateral evidence. From this point we may pursue their records upwards, and so of all other nations. The first page in Thucydides, says Hume, is the only lcgitimate commencement of all genuine history.

which is indeed a most extensive
survey of history, only taken from a
new station. However the extreme,
and, simply considered, praiseworthy
circumstantiality, with which the
history of every nation is written in
our times, must naturally suggest a
question of some embarrassment.
In what way our remote posterity
will be able to cope with the enor-
mous accumulation of historical re-
cords which a few centuries will be-
queath to them? There is no doubt
that they will estimate the historical
details of times far removed from
their own, the original monuments of

which will long have perished, simply by the value of that which will then concern themselves-viz. by the good or evil performed by nations and their governments in a cosmopolitical view. To direct the eye upon this point as connected with the ambition of rulers and their servants, in order to guide them to the only means of bequeathing an honorable record of themselves to distant ages; may furnish some small motive (over and above the great one of justifying Providence) for attempting a Philosophic History on the plan I have here explained.

[ocr errors]

MEMENTO MORI,

INSCRIBED ON A TOMBSTONE.

WHEN you look on my grave,

And behold how they wave

The cypress, the yew, and the willow-
You think 'tis the breeze

That gives motion to these,

'Tis the laughter that's shaking my pillow!

I must laugh when I see

A poor insect like thee

Dare to pity the fate thou must own;

Let a few moments slide,

We shall lie side by side,

And crumble to dust, bone for bone!

Go weep thine own doom!

Thou wert born for the tomb,

Thou hast lived, like myself, but to die;

Whilst thou pity'st my lot,

Secure fool! thou'st forgot

Thou art no more immortal than I!

THE LIFE AND REMAINS OF THE REV. EDWARD DANIEL
CLARKE, LLD.*

Of all popular writers, perhaps a
writer of travels is the most popular.
He is at once the historian and the
hero: he addresses us with the frank-
ness of an intimate correspondent,
and appeals directly to our sympathy

with the air of one who knows that it will not be withheld. We give up our faith to him on easy terms. It is the least return we can make for the obligations under which we are laid by one who enables us without

The Life and Remains of the Rev. Edward Daniel Clarke, LLD. Professor of Mineralogy in the University of Cambridge. London, Cowie, 1824.

« PreviousContinue »