History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [365]
In Locke's own day, his chief philosophical opponents were the Cartesians and Leibniz. Quite illogically, the victory of Locke's philosophy in England and France was largely due to the prestige of Newton. Descartes' authority as a philosopher was enhanced, in his own day, by his work in mathematics and natural philosophy. But his doctrine of vortices was definitely inferior to Newton's law of gravitation as an explanation of the solar system. The victory of the Newtonian cosmogony diminished men's respect for Descartes and increased their respect for England. Both these causes inclined men favourably towards Locke. In eighteenth-century France, where the intellectuals were in rebellion against an antiquated, corrupt, and effete despotism, they regarded England as the home of freedom, and were predisposed in favour of Locke's philosophy by his political doctrines. In the last times before the Revolution, Locke's influence in France was reinforced by that of Hume, who lived for a time in France and was personally acquainted with many of the leading savants.
The chief transmitter of English influence to France was Voltaire.
In England, the philosophical followers of Locke, until the French Revolution, took no interest in his political doctrines. Berkeley was a bishop not much interested in politics; Hume was a Tory who followed the lead of Bolingbroke. England was politically quiescent in their time, and a philosopher could be content to theorize without troubling himself about the state of the world. The French Revolution changed this, and forced the best minds into opposition to the status quo. Nevertheless, the tradition in pure philosophy remained unbroken. Shelley's Necessity of Atheism, for which he was expelled from Oxford, is full of Locke's influence.1
Until the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, it might have seemed as if the older philosophical tradition of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz were being definitely overcome by the newer empirical method. This newer method, however, had never prevailed in German universities, and after 1792 it was held responsible for the horrors of the Revolution. Recanting revolutionaries such as Coleridge found in Kant an intellectual support for their opposition to French atheism. The Germans, in their resistance to the French, were glad to have a German philosophy to uphold them. Even the French, after the fall of Napoleon, were glad of any weapon against Jacobinism. All these factors favoured Kant.
Kant, like Darwin, gave rise to a movement which he would have detested. Kant was a liberal, a democrat, a pacifist, but those who professed to develop his philosophy were none of these things. Or, if they still called themselves Liberals, they were Liberals of a new species. Since Rousseau and Kant, there have been two schools of Liberalism, which may be distinguished as the hard-headed and the soft-hearted. The hard-headed developed, through Bentham, Ricardo, and Marx, by logical stages into Stalin; the soft-hearted, by other logical stages, through Fichte, Byron, Carlyle, and Nietzsche, into Hitler. That statement, of course, is too schematic to be quite true, but it may serve as a map and a mnemonic. The stages in the evolution of ideas have had almost the quality of the Hegelian dialectic: doctrines have developed, by steps that each seem natural, into their opposites. But the developments have not been due solely to the inherent movement of ideas; they have been governed, throughout, by external circumstances and the reflection of these circumstances in human emotions. That this is the case may be made evident by one outstanding fact: that the ideas of liberalism have undergone no part of this development in America, where they remain to this day as in Locke.
Leaving politics on one side, let us examine the differences between the two schools of philosophy, which