By Dr. Rudolf Otto. Translated by J. Arthur Thomson and Margaret R. Thomson. Edited with an Introduction by Rev. W. D. Morrison, LL.D. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; London: Williams & Norgate. 1907.1
Dr. Otto is introduced by his English editor to his new audience as “a thinker who possesses the rare merit of combining a high philosophic discipline with an accurate and comprehensive knowledge of the science of organic nature.” The appearance of the name of Prof. Thomson on the title-page of the book as translator, may be taken as an additional guarantee of the scientific competency of the author. The book itself fully meets the expectations so aroused. We do not, indeed, share the author’s philosophical standpoint; and still less can we homologate the theological conceptions which may occasionally be read between the lines. But there can be no question that the book is ably thought and attractively written; or that its author is exceptionally well informed in the current scientific discussion of Germany, and is exceptionally well equipped to expound it alike in its details and in its general drift. As a result we have in the book an admirable survey of recent German speculation on the origin and nature of the world and man, and a strong and convincing defense of the right of religion in the face of modern thought.
Dr. Otto calls his book “Naturalism and Religion,” and explains its purpose as “in the first place, to define the relation, or rather the antithesis, between the two; and, secondly, to endeavour to reconcile the contradictions, and to vindicate against the counterclaims of naturalism, the validity and freedom of the religious outlook” (p. 1). Or, as he somewhat more crisply expresses it at a later point, “to define our attitude to naturalism, and to maintain in the teeth of naturalism the validity and freedom of the religious conception of the world” (p. 278). The real subject of the book is, therefore, Naturalism; and its real purpose is to assert over against Naturalism the right of religion. Its primary purpose, in other words, is polemic rather than constructive. It is less concerned with the positive exposition and development of the religious conception of the world than with the vindication of the right of a religious conception of the world. Of course Dr. Otto has not written so much without suggesting what, in his view, the religious conception of the world includes. He has even formally outlined and briefly expounded and even argued its elements. But neither the strength nor the mass of the book is given to it, but is expended rather on a careful critical survey of current forms of Naturalism, with a view to exhibiting its essential failure. From our point of view the value of the book is immensely increased by this circumstance. For Dr. Otto’s philosophical and even theological conceptions would necessarily dominate his positive construction of the world-view to which he would give the name of religious. And, as we have already explained, we do not particularly care for Dr. Otto’s philosophical or theological views. But in his exposition and criticism of Naturalistic theories he is moving on ground common to all who would cherish a religious world-view of any sort. And here we can follow his lucid expositions and his trenchant criticisms with unalloyed satisfaction.
Dr. Otto’s philosophical standpoint is that of a convinced Kantian idealism, or perhaps we ought rather to say he is a disciple of that mixed product of Kant and Jacobi, Jacob Friedrich Fries, who has lately been disinterred in Germany and given at least some semblance of renewed vitality. Although he doubtless transcends Fries’s anti-teleological view of nature, some slight echo of it may perhaps be detected in his willingness to admit that a direct study of nature will not yield a teleological view of it. The Friesian leaven is more in evidence, however, in his view of religion as rooted primarily in a sense of mystery, upon which he then engrafts, to be sure, the sense of dependence in which religion centers, and the conception of teleology in which, we may say, it culminates. The peculiar extension he gives to the implications of the feeling of dependence, by which he derives from it the assurance not only that man, the subject of this ineradicable and surely not misleading feeling, is a contingent being, but that so is the whole world itself, has, perhaps, its roots in the same idealism. The external world which is our creation, can scarcely be less dependent than the beings whose creation it is. One gets the impression that Dr. Otto’s objection to Naturalism turns less on the obliteration by Naturalism of the distinction between matter and mind, than on Naturalism’s attempt to work this obliteration the wrong way about. The external world from which Naturalism would explain mind, he would rather explain from mind. And so it comes about that as the argument runs on it seems almost to become rather a plea for spiritualism than for what we commonly speak of as a religious interpretation of the world. Its thesis almost appears to be summed up in the striking and strikingly true remark (p. 283) that “mental science, from logic and epistemology up to and including the moral and æsthetic sciences, proves by its very existence, and by the fact that it can not be reduced to terms of natural science, that spirit can neither be derived from nor analysed into anything else.” At this point, however, we are a little puzzled by the rushing in of another current of Dr. Otto’s thought, which almost sweeps away this spirit, the substantial existence of which he seems to have so firmly established. We must not talk, it seems, of its “substantial nature” (p. 330)—that is “a matter of entire indifference” (p. 331); what concerns us is only its “incomparable value” (p. 331). “What lives in us … is not a finished and spiritual being … but something that only develops and becomes actual very gradually” (p. 298). Whence it comes … who can tell? Or whither it goes? All we know of it is, lo! it is here. And, that it is the manifestation of something that is. “There is no practical meaning in discussing its ‘origin’ or its ‘passing away,’ as we do with regard to the corporeal. Under certain corporeal conditions it is there, it simply appears. But it does not arise out of them. And as it is not nothing, but an actual and effectual reality, it can neither have come out of nothing nor disappear into nothing again. It appears out of the absolutely transcendental, associates itself with corporeal processes, determines these and is determined by them, and in its own time passes back from this world of appearance to the transcendental again” (p. 358). Is this only another way of saying that “the soul that rises with us, our life’s star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar”? Or does it, as we much doubt, mean much more than this? Decidedly Dr. Otto’s philosophy needs watching. And we may be glad it does not form the staple of his book but only lies in its background.