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Reason Romanticism Revolution 1 R E A S O N ROMANTICISM AND REVOLUTION VOLUME ONE M. N. ROY RENAISSANCE PUBLISHERS LTD. 15, BANKIM CHATTERJI STREET, CALCUTTA-12. Copy Right Reserved FIRST PUBLISHED : AUGUST 1952 PUBLISHED BY SIBNARAYAN RAY ON BEHALF OF RENAISSANCE PUBLISHERS LIMITED, 15 BANKIM CHATTERJI STREET, CALCUTTA 12. PRINTED IN INDIA BY B. N. BOSE AT THE BOSE PRESS, 30 BROJO MITTER LANE, CAL. PUBLISHED BY SIBNARAYANPUBLISHED RAY BYON SIBNARAYAN BEHALF RAY ON BEHALF OF RENAISSANCE PUBLISHERSOF RENAISSANCE LIMITED, PUBLISHERS 15 LIMITED, 15 BANKIM CHATTERJI STREET,BANKIM CALCUTTA CHATTERJI 12. STREET, CALCUTTA 12. PRINTED IN INDIA BY B.PRINTED N. BOSE IN AT INDIA THE BYBOSE B. N. BOSE AT THE BOSE PRESS, 30 BROJO MITTERPRESS, LANE, 30 CAL. BROJO MITTER LANE, CAL. PREFACE THE cultural and moral crisis of modern civilisation is compelling sensitive and thoughtful men throughout the world to turn towards its humanist tradition. The movement for a humanist revival grows stronger every day. It is being increasingly realised that the baffling problems of our time call for a sober rationalist approach. The restoration of moral values in public life is the crying demand. There is no doubt about the sincerity of the agonised cry for a better and harmonious life on this earth. Yet, it seems to be a cry in the wilderness. The cause of this distressing experience is the negative consequence of modern scepticism. The critical thought of the nineteenth century challenged the pretension of the rounded- up system of classical philosophy which claimed to have discovered ultimate truth in the light of " right reason." The rejection of a priori speculative philosophical system set human spirit free from the bondage of the venerable belief that the solution of all the problems of life could be deduced from abstract first principles. But at the same time, it sowed the seeds of the moral and cultural crisis of our time. The baby was thrown out with the bath-water. With the rejection of the metaphysical concept of " right reason ", rationalism became meaningless; it was replaced by all sorts of mystic urges, such as intuition, elan vital, entelechy, as the basic guiding principle of life. If empiricism deposed reason from the seat of the supreme judge, pragmatism subordinated moral values to practical considerations. This book is an attempt to rescue rationalism and ethics from the devastating consequences of scepticism. In the light of modern "scientific knowledge, it is discovered that man's rationality is a biological property. Reason is not a metaphysical category. Moral values are placed on a firm foundation when they are referred back to the innate rationality of man. They need no other sanction than conscience, which is not the voice of God, but results from rationality. The discovery of the physical basis of reason and the rationalist secular sanction of morality frees Humanism from the mystic connotation traditionally associated with it. The a priori systems of speculative philosophy belong to the past. But a comprehensive philosophy is indispensable to guide human life. A rationalist social philosophy must be deduced from a scientific interpretation of Humanism. On the basis of a humanist interpretation of cultural history, this work endeavours to outline a comprehensive philosophy which links up social and political practice with a scientific metaphysics of rationality and ethics. THE GREAT REVOLUTION—II DEHRADUN, August 15th, 1952. M. N. ROY CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE ONE INTRODUCTION ..1 TWO HUMAN NATURE .. 17 THREE THE LAW-GOVERNED UNIVERSE .. 33 FOUR THE REVOLT OF MAN .. .. 59 FIVE REVOLT OF THE ANGELS ..103 SIX THE NATURAL LAW ..132 SEVEN BIRTH OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY ..161 EIGHT THE NEW SCIENCE .. 197 NINE THE ENLIGHTENMENT .. .. 224 TEN THE GREAT REVOLUTION—I ..254 ELEVEN THE GREAT REVOLUTION—II ..279 PUBLISHERS NOTE The Index and Bibliography of the whole book will appear at the end of the Second Volume. PUBLISHERS NOTE The Index and Bibliography of the whole book will appear at the end of the Second Volume. 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION HEGEL said that the history of philosophy was the history of the world. Having learned from him, Marx corrected the master and declared that the history of civilisation was the history of class struggle. A whole century has passed since these apparently contradictory doctrines of historiology were expounded. The contradiction is apparent, because both Hegel and Marx regarded history as an organic evolutionary process of becoming unfolded by its own dynamics. Because the contradiction is apparent, even now the controversy is not settled, dispassionate thinkers finding it difficult to choose one or the other view. Michelet advanced yet another dynamic doctrine of historiology, a generation before Marx and independent of Hegel, which seemed to combine the two apparently conflicting views. Feeling dissatisfied with the conventional views of history, the would-be historian of the French Revolution searched for a new method of writing history as a science. He hit upon the idea that philology, the study of the origin of languages, might yield a clue to the secret of the past history of peoples. The philological approach to the problems of historiology led Michelet to the conclusion that history was mingled with philosophy. In the introduction to his projected, but never finished, Universal History, Michelet wrote in 1830: “With the world began a war, which will end only with the world: the war of man against nature, of spirit against matter, of liberty against fatality. History is nothing other than the record of this interminable struggle.” One hundred years before Michelet's effort to make a new science of history, an obscure teacher of Roman Law at 2 2 REASON, ROMANTICISM AND REVOLUTION Naples, Giambattista Vico, had written a treatise on the Principles of a New Science dealing with the Nature of Nations, through which are shown also New Principles of the Natural Law of Peoples. Michelet discovered a kindred spirit in Vico—a pioneer who had blazed a new trail of historical research. The central theme of Vice's until then little known work is that humanity is its own creation. Insisting upon the method that the facts of known history must be referred back to their primitive origin, in order to be properly appreciated, Vico established what he called “this incontestable truth: the social world is certainly the work of man. ” The corollary to this incontestable truth was “that one can and should find its principles in the modifications of human intelligence itself ”. Young Michelet writing “on the burning pavements of Paris ”, in the midst of the July Revolution of 1830, was struck by Vico's anthropological, philological and sociological approach to the problems of historical research. He was, as he himself declared, “seized by a frenzy caught from Vico, an incredible intoxication with his great historical principles ”. Michelet did not live long enough to write his Universal History to show how history and philosophy had been intertwined through the ages. But he had the occasion to proclaim that “all science is one: language, literature, history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem to be the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system ”. So, the organic view of history is not the result of Marx putting his master on his feet. As a matter of fact, Marx and Engels had read Michelet, and Vico's ideas were also not unknown to them. On the other hand, the “new science ” born at Naples had reached the German seats of learning through Leibniz, Wolff, Herder, Lessing, Goethe and other scholars and philosophers. Not only did Herder 3 INTRODUCTION 3 know of Vico's work before he wrote his Ideas Towards the Philosophy of the History of Mankind; Vico's influence can be detected also in Hegel's philosophy of history. Vico, in his turn, had read Francis Bacon's work. Unkind critics of the time thought that the Scienza Nuova was a plagiarism of Novum Organum. That was, of course, malicious; but it is a fact that Vico's work was cast on the pattern of Bacon's researches. It was from the latter that Vico admittedly got the idea of applying to the study of human history the inductive method which Bacon had recommended for the study of natural history. Grotius had made a philological study of history, of theology and philosophy, in order to discover the universal laws of nations. Having studied his works, Vico conceived of the possibility of applying similar methods for discovering the general laws of history. The dynamics of ideas can be traced all the way back to the great thinkers of the remotest antiquity. Tracing the chain of thought in modern times, one finds Savigny recognising a similarity between Vico's doctrine of historical jurisprudence and his own. The preface to Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history published in 1837 mentions Vico as one of the three, the other two being Herder and Schlegel, who had treated the subject previously. The first German translation of Vico's Universal Law, published in 1884, carried an introduction which pointed out the similarity of Hegel's ideas with the doctrines of the Italian historian expounded more than a hundred years before. Moreover, it is quite possible that Hegel felt Vico's influence through the intermediary of Rousseau, who was at Venice when the finalised version of Scienza Nuova was published there. Judging from his Essay on the Origin of Languages, one can assume that Rousseau had picked up from Vico the idea of the philological approach as the clue to the problems of the origin of society. 4 4 REASON, ROMANTICISM AND REVOLUTION “Marx and Engels seem to have taken from Vico, perhaps in the first place through Michefet, but later at first hand, the formula that' men make their own history', from which their Historical Materialism was developed........
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