Publisher's Synopsis
From the Introduction.
One of the greatest antitheses in the whole history of philosophy is one which is fundamental to a dilemma strikingly brought out in Fichte's "Vocation of Man." The thorough-going scientific and rationalistic treatment of human life as a part of the cosmos, as one link in the chain of absolute necessity and causality, living a life totally amenable even to mathematical treatment, is indeed satisfying to one's intellect; but how our personality, our inner heart life, does cry out for a radically different viewpoint, one which gives a truer picture of life as we actively and intimately, live it! The antithesis, I say, permeates the whole story of man's mental development. The Platonic message which holds the essence of things to be their meanings, their future and higher significances, as over against a Democritean theory of the world as describable primarily in terms of physical constitution; the analytic description of man's mental life in terms of motion by a Hobbes, as over against a Humian recognition of philosophy as after all secondary to the daily life of human beings-as human; the Kantian antithesis of pure and practical reason; and even the broad distinction between ancient and modern science as holding, the former to a qualitative diversity of existence in the interest of ideals, the latter to a homogeneity in the interest of manipulation: -these are but examples of the opposition of motives permeating the history of thought from the early Greeks to to-day. It is the opposition of head and heart.
Modern thought may be characterized as developing these two interests and points of view in striking forms. On the one hand is the scientific interest, from Galileo, Hobbes, and Descartes, on down to our specialized and highly technical sciences of the present. On the other hand, a romantic tendency seems irrepressible, and we have throughout waves of idealism of this, that, and the other kind. In this perspective the philosophic situation of the present takes on partial meaning. The scientific advance of the last decades has formed a happy and important picture; while the philosophic thought that has been supposedly directed to a realization, a justification, and a systematic treatment of man's more intimate affective and volitional life, has slowly settled into hardened rationalistic systems that know not life and revel in logistic realms of thought which offer in the final outcome little more than husks to the hungry.
