THE

BIBLIOTHECA SACRA.

ARTICLE I.

THE COMING AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY.

BY THE REV, NATHAN E. WOOD, D. D., BROOKLYN, NEW YORK.

FOR some time past there has been an earnest cry in certain quarters for a new and distinctively American philosophy. This voice is indeed that of a John the Baptist in the wilderness, but nevertheless it is the voice of a herald who has power to discern the signs of the times. The chief crier may not perchance live to see the kingdom of this new philosophy ushered in, but unquestionably his soul is prophetic, and foresees truly that such a new American philosophy will be established. It cannot be much longer delayed. The signs point to an early arrival. Some of us believe that we are already in the twilight of its dawn, and that we shall live to see the full day break.

But patience is needed. The inquisitive intellectual eagerness of our time is bringing to light many new factors in these problems. New, perplexing, and uncatalogued facts are almost daily set in array before us. In truth, the fact-diggers are immensely industrious at the present time and are heaping up unclassified material in endless profusion. Physiological psychology has added a wealth of facts of which our fathers knew nothing. The

department of psychological logic has been explored again, and some new facts have been added to the general store. Evolution as a method has shown how to reach some valuable results and from a new direction. Some powerfully synthetic mind will yet arise to declare the place and significance of all this unorganized material, and set in order what is as yet undistributed chaos.

Many considerations unite to verify the conviction that we are to have such an American philosophy. It will be our task to indicate some of these considerations and then to point out some of the main lines along which this philosophy will, in all probability, be constructed, together with a brief statement of its bearings upon the questions of ethics, theism, and of revelation. It is an exceedingly significant fact that no system of philosophy, either ancient or modern, which has been matured and has held sway in Europe, has ever become so naturalized in America as to seem indigenous. Nearly all systems have been transplanted to this continent, at one time or another, but they have always remained exotic. They have never become acclimated. No one of them has received any general acceptance.

New England seemed at one time about to bow at the shrine of sensationalism, but good Bishop Berkeley arrived just in time to prevent her from quite getting on her knees; yet even he with all the charms of idealism about him could not keep her from starting something of a flirtation with transcendentalism. But still she did not really surrender her heart. She has in later times been giving coy glances at Hegelianism, but it will amount to nothing more than glances. It will never reach the marriage altar. It cannot. Inheritance, heredity, environment, the facts, are all against such a wedlock. Pennsylvania almost a century ago gave a few eager and frantic embraces to the theories of the French encyclopedists, only to find them airy nothings with no substance of eternal truth or fact in them. The attempt in recent years to make us be

lieve that Scotland had given us the final thought upon this problem, and that Sir William Hamilton was henceforth to be our philosophical mentor, is ending like all the other attempts to put us in foreign leading-strings; we will have little or none of it.

No; America, assign whatever reason you will, will never be satisfied until she has produced a philosophy of her own. For this purpose we hold certain unusual advantages. We can study the philosophic systems of the past with the smallest possible bias growing out of inherited faiths. No people has a finer opportunity, in the way of heredity and environment, for the impartial study and investigation of the history of philosophies. Neither we nor our fathers have ever been in bondage to any philosophy. Moreover, the eminently practical quality of the American mind will prevent its losing itself in the merely speculative, or so thrusting its head into the clouds as to deny that it has a footing and a home on the material earth. The American mind is eminently cosmopolitan. It is not speculative nor dreamy like the German. It is not flippant nor leapingly vivacious like the French. It is not insular nor tradition-bound like the English. The diverse strains of blood in our national veins have given us a peculiar life, in which Saxon, Teutonic, Celtic, and Gallic qualities commingle. Our national environment has added an indefinable something beside all these. The business of conquering from nature this vast continent and the subtle influences of our political institutions, have given the American mind a severely practical cast. This will be a quality of supreme value in philosophical inquiry.

Furthermore, this new philosophy must be formulated by a mind which is native in America. Even so venerated and admirable a thinker as Dr. McCosh cannot forget that he is a foreigner. The flavor of Scottish thought and training is apparent. Try as he will to be an American of the Americans, you still taste in his writings the

barley-cake and the oat-porridge. He cannot resist the instinct of the foreigner to say things which will please the Americans. This is the distinct ear-mark of foreign heredity and training. These are, perhaps, small matters, but they are sufficient to keep any man out of perfect touch with American thought in its finer qualities. If the history of a century of American thinking teaches anything, it teaches that the philosophy which would attain general acceptance among us must be wrought out, not by a foreign mind, but by one which is wholly native and indigenous.

We believe, then, that America must produce and formulate a philosophy of her own, and that this philosophy will be more practical than speculative, more cosmopolitan than local, and more universal than continental. The history of past thought will aid in correcting the aberrations of present thinking, and the melancholy illustrations from some of the philosophies of the Old World will not lose their instructional value upon the New.

And now as to the lines along which this predestined new philosophy shall be constructed, every thinker in philosophy must confront and give decisive answer upon two great questions:

I. THE METHOD OF PROCEDURE.

The new philosophy will include at least three methods. of procedure: (1) the inductive, (2) the logical, (3) the intuitional. Each of these three methods will have its own peculiar evidential value. They will be mutually corroborative, and their aggregated conclusions will be irrefragable. Answering to these three methods or by means of these three methods, we should find at least three co-ordinated grounds for the validity of our knowledge. These grounds should be (1) results of induction, (2) the idea of law, (3) the general intuitions.

Right methods of procedure in philosophical inquiry are indispensable. They are, however, only means to an

end. They are not ends in and of themselves, and even the rightness of them must be judged by the results which they produce. A history of methods in philosophical inquiry would have great instructional value to all thinkers. It would hold lessons of warning as well as of encouragement and wisdom. It is true that method is greatly in danger of making the mind procrustean in its habits of inquiry. If the facts do not conform, so much the worse for the facts, comes at length to be its dictum. Moreover, most thinkers confine themselves rigidly to a single method. All facts, whether material or psychical, must be interrogated by the same questions and be subjected to the same tests. Diversity in the nature of facts is no ground for allowing diversity in methods of inquiry. But, now, while the iron horse must keep to its parallel tracks, the real horse must have some liberty of action: the former gains in power and swiftness, but loses in range and freedom; the latter loses in power, but gains immensely in range of vision and breadth of freedom.

In the coming American philosophy we shall not be shut in to a single method of intellectual procedure. The inductive method within its sphere will investigate, and combine what facts belong legitimately to it; the logical method will have a range of facts all its own; while the intuitional method will traverse regions of fact and truth where either of the other methods could in the nature of the case have no vocation. The new philosophy may devise other methods, but it will certainly use these, both singly and in co-operation.

The history of philosophy abounds with illustrations of the use of a single method, and with the resulting narrowness of inquiry and meagreness of result. No one would deny that Locke did royal service to philosophy, nor would any one doubt the imperishable name which Kant has won for himself as one of the immortals among the world's thinkers. Their service consists not in the fact that each of them contributed a system of philosophy