The Closing Panel of a Trilogy
The sixth volume should be read with the fourth and fifth beside it, because its own preface says why. Copleston had first meant to treat the whole philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in one book, Descartes to Kant; the material would not fit, and he divided it among three volumes — Volume IV on the Continental rationalists, Volume V on British thought from Hobbes to Hume, and this volume on the French and German Enlightenments, the rise of the philosophy of history, and the system of Kant. The original plan survives in one deliberate respect: a single introductory chapter and a single Concluding Review are shared across all three. The introduction stands at the front of Volume IV and is not repeated here; the Concluding Review forms the final chapter of this book, where Copleston weighs, historically and philosophically, the nature, importance and value of the chief styles of philosophizing in the two centuries. The fourth, fifth and sixth volumes therefore form a trilogy meant to be regarded as one whole, and Volume VI is the panel on which that whole is brought to a close.
The French Enlightenment as a Science of Man
The first part opens by refusing an easy reading of the French Enlightenment. It is natural, Copleston grants, to picture the movement primarily through Voltaire’s wit against the Church, or through the materialism of La Mettrie, d’Holbach and Cabanis, and so to cast eighteenth-century French thought as a prolonged attack on throne and altar. Both the religious and the political interpretations have foundations in fact — many of the philosophers did oppose the domination of the Church, and some were dogmatic atheists — but Copleston argues that either, taken alone, gives a thoroughly inadequate picture. Voltaire, after all, desired reforms and freedom of expression rather than democracy, and was no fomenter of revolution. What the exposition draws out instead is a constructive ambition: from the scepticism of Bayle, through Fontenelle and Montesquieu’s study of law, to Maupertuis, Condillac’s account of the human mind, and Helvétius on man, the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, and the natural history of Buffon and Bonnet, the deeper current is the attempt to build a science of man on the ground of experience. The part ends with Rousseau, whose criticism of civilization, account of the origin of inequality, philosophy of feeling, and doctrine of the general will set him partly against his own contemporaries even as he belongs among them.
The German Enlightenment and the Break With It
The second part turns to Germany, where the Enlightenment takes a more academic and systematic form. Copleston traces it from Christian Thomasius through Christian Wolff — whose rationalist system, with its followers and opponents, gave the German universities their philosophical idiom — into the age of Frederick the Great, the “popular philosophers,” the deism of Reimarus, the work of Mendelssohn, and the many-sided achievement of Lessing, together with the period’s attention to psychology and educational theory. But the part’s decisive movement is the break with the Enlightenment itself, carried by Hamann, Herder and Jacobi. Against the confidence that reason, taken as calculative and analytic, could exhaust the real, these thinkers press the claims of feeling, faith, language and living wholeness — Hamann and Jacobi setting immediate conviction against demonstrative reason, Herder opening the sense of organic development that the next part will need. The German Enlightenment is thus shown both at its most orderly and at the point where it begins to generate its own critics, preparing the ground on which Kant and, beyond him, the idealists would build.
The Rise of the Philosophy of History and the Arrival of Kant
The third part gives the philosophy of history a place of its own. Copleston sets Bossuet, whose universal history reads events within a providential design descended from the Greeks and St. Augustine, against Vico, whose New Science discerns intelligible laws in the development of nations, and he follows the theme forward through Montesquieu and along the line from Voltaire and Condorcet to Lessing and Herder, where history becomes the story of the progress or the formation of humanity. This new consciousness of historical development is one of the period’s genuine additions to philosophy, and it prepares the reader for the volume’s destination. The fourth part is given wholly to Kant, and it is the summit toward which the book has climbed: his life and pre-critical writings under the sign of Newtonian physics; the general problem of metaphysics and of a priori knowledge; the Copernican revolution by which the mind supplies the form of what it knows; the analysis of scientific knowledge through space, time, the categories and their schematism, ending in the distinction of phenomena and noumena; the fate of metaphysics under the criticism of the Dialectic; and the turn to morality and religion, where the good will, the categorical imperative, the autonomy of the will and the postulates of practical reason recover, as objects of moral faith, what speculative reason could not prove.
The volume ends where its preface said it must, in the Concluding Review that closes the trilogy. There Copleston looks back across Continental rationalism, British empiricism, the Enlightenment’s science of man, the philosophy of history and Kant, not to summarize them but to weigh the styles of philosophizing themselves. For this library the volume earns its place as the record of a double movement: the Enlightenment’s attempt to make man an object of natural knowledge, and Kant’s counter-stroke fixing the limits of that knowledge and reserving, beyond the knowable phenomenon, a realm of freedom and moral vocation that later psychology would have to reckon with in its own terms.