Lovejoy's Metaphysical Pathos

Arthur O. Lovejoy deprecates what he calls ‘ metaphysical pathos’.

Another type of factors in the history of ideas may be
described as susceptibilities to diverse kinds of metaphysical pathos. This influential cause in the determination of philosophical fashions and speculative tendencies has been so little considered that I find no recognized name for it, and have been compelled to invent one which is not, perhaps, wholly self-explanatory. ‘Metaphysical pathos’ is exemplified in any description of the nature of things, any characterization of the world to which one belongs, in terms which, like the words of a poem, awaken through their associations, and through a sort of empathy which they engender, a congenial mood or tone of feeling on the part of the philosopher or his readers. For many people — for most of the laity, I suspect — the reading of a philosophical book is usually nothing but a form of aesthetic experience, even in the case of writings which seem destitute of all outward aesthetic charms; voluminous emotional reverberations, of one or another sort, are aroused in the reader without the intervention of any definite imagery. Now of metaphysical pathos there are a good many kinds; and people differ in their degree of susceptibility to any one kind. There is, in the first place, the pathos of sheer obscurity, the loveliness of the incomprehensible, which has, I fear, stood many a philosopher in good stead with his public, even though he was innocent of intending any such effect. The phrase omne ignotum pro mirifico concisely explains a considerable part of the vogue of a number of philosophies, including some which have enjoyed great popular reputation in our own time. The reader doesn’t know exactly what they mean, but they have all the more on that account an air of sublimity; an agreeable feeling at once of awe and of exaltation comes over him as he contemplates thoughts of so immeasurable a profundity — their profundity being convincingly evidenced to him by the fact that he can see no bottom to them. Akin to this is the pathos of the esoteric. How exciting and how welcome is the sense of initiation into hidden mysteries! And how effectively have certain philosophers — notably Schelling and Hegel a century ago, and Bergson in our own generation — satisfied the human craving for this experience, by representing the central insight of their philosophy as a thing to be reached, not through a consecutive progress of thought guided by the ordnary logic available to every man, but through a sudden leap whereby one rises to a. plane of insight wholly different in its principles from the level of the mere understanding. 

(from The Great Chain of Being)

Is all this so bad? After all the gravamen of his charge would apply to himself and his own footnote to Plato not unknown as a psychopomp. The Great Chain of Being is itself a portentous blast on a trumpet and the heavens rolling open and a voice saying ‘This is important, please play attention but I will repeat myself in case you missed it the third time’. I am enjoying it even if his impassive god is a device to underline the antithetical completist god. That god is a deist gentleman enjoying his rustication.